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

Such a vacancy, to a man such as Otto, could hardly help but present a glittering opportunity. Already, back in 951, he had ventured over the Alps in an attempt to secure an imperial coronation for himself, until the crisis back in Bavaria had obliged him to abandon the effort. Even four years later, when there was no one who could justly dispute the merit of his claims, the rivalries of Rome’s fractious princelings, as limited in their achievements as Otto was famed for his, threatened to render any expedition to the city quixotic. Like hungry dogs tossed shreds of meat, the various factions scrapping it out in Italy served to diminish the value of the very prizes over which they fought – and it was the papacy, that supreme prize, which had come to seem the most diminished of all.

In 955, five months after the Battle of the Lech, open scandal made explicit what had long been evident: the subordination of the Holy See to the ambitions of a single clan. For decades, the Theophylacts, Rome’s most powerful family, had been securing the election of assorted supine puppets to the Lateran; now they went one better, and elevated one of their own. Octavian, who had succeeded to the leadership of the Theophylacts only the year previously, was hardly a man cut out for a papal career. Notorious, even by the standards of the Roman aristocracy, for his promiscuity and partying, he made little effort to disguise his boredom with anything that smacked of the spiritual. He was also barely sixteen. Not even a change of name to the more satisfyingly apostolic ‘John’ could dampen the gossip that was soon swirling around the teenage Holy Father.* It was claimed that he had converted an entire wing of the Lateran into a brothel; that when he was not blinding or castrating priests, he was ordaining them in his hunting stables; that he was in the habit of offering up drunken toasts to Satan.

Only one man had previously changcd his name on being elevated to the Papacy: John II, back in 533. Following Octavian’s initiative, however, the practice became increasingly common, until, by the beginning of the eleventh century, it was the norm.

A pope capable of such blasphemies was hardly likely to prove accommodating to a mere earthly king. Saviour of Christendom or no, Otto and his imperial ambitions cut little ice with John XII.

It did not take long, however, for the papal tearaway to be tripped up by his own ambitions. Otto, well practised in the art of leaving his adversaries to fall flat on their faces, watched patiently from beyond the Alps as John, proving himself as ill-disciplined in the field of diplomacy as in every other sphere, steadily affronted his neighbours. By 960, he found himself menaced on all sides by predatory princes. After an abortive attempt to meet them in battle – yet another scandal to set alongside all the others—he found himself with little option but to do as Stephen II and Leo III had done before him: look north for a protector. Late that year, a frantic embassy was dispatched to East Francia; and Otto, needing no further encouragement, swung immediately into action. By the following year, he had secured both Lombardy for himself and the papal patrimony for John; and in February 962, having arrived in Rome at last, he exacted his price. The Pope, lowering the imperial diadem on to Otto’s head, confirmed him in the title that his warriors had first bestowed upon him seven years previously, beside the Lech. All was now official. There ruled, once again, an emperor in the West.

But what precisely, in an age far removed from that of Charlemagne, let alone that of the ancient Caesars, did being an emperor mean? John, and Rome’s other clan leaders too, had cheerfully presumed that the title would prove an empty one: an optimistic notion, and one of which Otto was quick to disabuse them. When John, attempting to pull rank, sought to make his customary trouble, the new emperor briskly convened a synod amid the awful splendour of St Peter’s, and had the Pope arraigned on multiple charges of moral turpitude. It did not take long for the accused, palpably guilty as he was, to be convicted, deposed and replaced with a candidate more amenable to Otto’s wishes; but John, citing the ancient principle that no earthly power could judge the Bishop of Rome, refused to accept the verdict. The result was an outrage: two competing popes. Not even John’s death a year later from a stroke, the result of overly strenuous grapplings with a married woman, served to ease the tribulations of the Holy See. Otto, leaving no one in any doubt as to what he judged his prerogatives to be, continued with his policy of crushing all hints of papal independence. One pope, Benedict V, merely for the sin of having been elected without imperial approval, had his staff ceremonially broken over his head, before being exiled for life to Hamburg; his successor, John XIII, installed and maintained in office at the point of Otto’s sword, scrabbled with unsurprising servility to do his master’s every bidding. A humiliation for the papacy, naturally – but resounded splendidly to the emperor’s already refulgent prestige.

Sure and just indeed, the Saxons might have reflected, were the workings of Providence. Less than two centuries it had taken the Almighty to raise them from their condition of utter ruin to one in which they stood as the very shapers of Christendom. Few had seen it coming – not even among the ranks of the Saxon royal family itself. Gerberga, the Queen of West Francia, writing in her despair to Adso of Montier-en-Der, had done so barely a decade before the Battle of the Lech: a victory won by a man who was not merely her compatriot, but her elder brother. That the heirs to the dignity of the Roman Empire might prove