Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

into his hands the Holy Lance, if not the Almighty Himself? A cloistered virtue, at such a moment, could hardly be relied upon for the saving of Christendom.

Anno Domini 934, and the storm broke at last. The Hungarians had chosen their moment well. Feuding among members of the Liudolfing clan, kept in check since the defeat of Henry’s revolt, had recently erupted into flames once again. The principal agitator against Otto this time, however, was not his brother, but Liudolf, his eldest son – and the rebellion was directed as much against the Duke of Bavaria as against the king. Liudolf, resentful of his elders, and quite as impatient as his uncle had ever been for power, had secured allies for himself as far afield as Italy, and with these had succeeded in capturing Kegensburg, the site of Henry’s palace and treasury, and convulsing all of Bavaria. Henry himself, humiliated and fast sickening, had found himself impotent to retrieve the situation.

Simultaneously, on the borders of Saxony itself, where Otto’s iron rule had brought his subjects there a measure of peace, the Wends were displaying an alarming upsurge of enthusiasm for their traditional pastimes: the slaughter of garrisons, the abduction of women, the lighting up of the Elbe by fire. Depredations such as these, which Otto had trusted stamped out for ever, spoke to a beleaguered East Francia of a peril even more menacing than the seemingly bottomless capacity of barbarism to renew itself; for the Wendish leader, a warlord of bloody reputation by the name ofStoinef, had recruited as his lieutenants two Saxon renegades. Wichmann and Ekbert were brothers: prominent noblemen, offshoots of the royal line, men who should properly have been fighting at the side of their lord. Darkness, it appeared, might shadow the souls of Christians as well as pagans. Evil might rise from within as well as without the realm of an anointed king.

Yet Otto did not despair. Rather, as was ever his habit in moments of crisis, he laid on a spectacular masterclass in the art of turning weakness into strength. Neglecting for the moment the Wendish threat to his own duchy, he marched instead for Bavaria, where he loudly accused his son of being in league with the Hungarians. The charge, true or not, had an immediate and devastating effect on Liudolfs fortunes. As the Hungarians withdrew from the Reich with their customary trains of looted treasure and stumbling captives, the revolt against Otto imploded. With summer fading into autumn,

Liudolf himself was brought to surrender. With winter melting into spring, the last outposts of the revolt followed him in submitting to their lawful duke. In April, Regensburg was finally restored to a now grievously ill Henry, and Bavaria could stand united once again.

And not a moment too soon. That summer of 955, even as eastern Saxony burned, grim news was brought to Otto from his dying brother. The Hungarians, swarming across the frontier, had returned to the Reich -- and in numbers never seen before. The unprecedented scale of the invasion force, not to mention the presence in its train of siege engines, suggested a chilling possibility: that the Hungarians, after decades of contenting themselves with hit-and-run raids against Bavaria, had resolved at last upon its outright conquest. And yet, as Otto’s entire reign had demonstrated, in peril might lie opportunity- and in the very ambitions of his enemies their potential ruin. Always, for as long as the Hungarians had been preying upon Christendom, they had delighted in outpacing the cumbersome armies of the Germans; but now at last, it seemed, they might be tempted into open battle. News that warfare on Saxony’s frontier with the Wends was reaching an unprecedented pitch of ferocity would certainly have been brought to their leaders; and they had clearly calculated that Otto, if he did dare to confront them, would be able to summon only a fraction of the potential manpower of East Francia to his banner. And so it proved.

No more than a small bodyguard of Saxon horsemen could be spared for the desperate expedition to Bavaria. There were other duchies that sent no contingents at all. Of those princes who did answer Otto’s summons, there were many who had been in open revolt against him only the previous summer. And yet still, with perhaps some three thousand warriors in his train, Swabians, Franconians and Bavarians as well as Saxons, and the Holy Lance borne proudly aloft, Otto did ride to war; and on 9 August, as he advanced southwards along the bank of the River Lech, a tributary of the Danube, he saw on the horizon ahead of him black smoke, and caught on the breeze a smell of death.

A few miles distant lay the city of Augsburg. There, in the fields before its eastern gate, the cathedral garrison had been desperately attempting to stave off the Hungarians’ assault, while behind them men laboured to repair the crumbling ramparts, and women walked in procession, raising up tearful prayers. That the Almighty had heard these, and in the very nick of time too, even as the siege engines of the Hungarians were crawling towards the walls, was confirmed for the Augsburgers when the great pagan host, pausing in its assault, broke up abruptly and started streaming northwards. News that the King of East Francia had come against them did not, as it would once have done, prompt the Hungarians to turn tail and seek to elude him; instead, reassured that Otto was indeed grievously outnumbered, they prepared themselves to wipe him out. Twilight was already darkening over the Lech as they closed in on the tiny royal army. Halting for the night by the side of the river, they fed their horses, made sure of their bow strings and waited with a fierce expectancy for the dawn.

Otto’s warriors, meanwhile, having spent the day in prayer and fasting, were looking forward to the morning with no less confidence. At sunrise, they swore solemn oaths of fellowship to