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

to be her own family had simply never crossed Gerberga’s mind. Now, however, with Otto enthroned as emperor, the master of Rome herself, who was there left to doubt it? Who left to doubt that he and his empire stood as the surest bulwark against those encroaching shadows that had so oppressed Gerberga’s dreams: the shadows of chaos, of evil, of Antichrist?

All his reign, Otto had known it his duty as a Christian king to combat God’s enemies on the fields of battle. His subjects – despite the earnest attempts of missionaries and scholars to persuade them otherwise – had known it too. Deep in their souls, the Saxons had understood, as only a people brought to Christ through conquest could possibly have understood, that the God they worshipped was indeed a god of war. This was a presumption that Otto, with the Bishop of Rome directly under his thumb, was now in a position to propagate in the very capital of Christendom. No matter that it ran directly contrary to the traditional teaching of the Church. The days when Christians from the more ancient heartlands of the faith had condescended to the Saxons as ignorant barbarians were long gone. Who was John XIII to lecture the emperor, his patron and guardian? Indeed, far from Otto being rendered more Roman by his sojourn in the ancient capital, it was the papacy, huddled in his far-spreading shadow, humiliated by its blatant dependency and diminished by ceaseless scandal, that appeared to be adopting the perspective of the Saxons. In 967, John XIII confirmed this impression by formally establishing Magdeburg, that stern and bristling stronghold on the frontier of Christendom, as an archbishopric. Just as the city had long served Saxony as its foremost bulwark against the malice of the pagan Wends, so now was it to serve the Church. By papal fiat, all the Slavs who dwelt beyond the Elbe were pronounced subject to Magdeburg’s new archbishop: ‘both those converted, and those to be converted still’.

So was constituted a fortress of the Christian faith as strong in its proofs of God’s favour as were the eastern marches in their ramparts and their armoured horsemen. This was a destiny for which Otto had long been preparing Magdeburg. As far back as 937, only a year into his reign, he had founded a great monastery there, and, from that moment on, had never ceased to lavish splendid gifts upon it: ‘precious marble, gold and gems’; estates both in Saxony and on the far bank of the Elbe; dues of silver raised as tribute from the Wends. Here, it might have been thought, was a standing provocation: the endowment of such a treasure house in the full view of the malignant heathen. Fortunate, then, and ample evidence of Otto’s careful planning, that the saint to whom it had been dedicated was well qualified to guard his own.

Maurice, the captain of the Theban Legion, had long been a favourite of the Saxons. Typically, they admired him not as the passive martyr who had preferred death to the drawing of his sword in an unjust cause, but rather as ‘Christ’s own soldier’; and in 961, looking to imbue his favoured monastery with a truly celestial impregnability, Otto had ordered the saint’s relics translated there from their former resting place, ‘to the salvation of Saxony’. Just as the emperor himself, long the shield of his kingdom, could now bend his frown upon the East and know that everyone would shrink from it, so had it been charged to St Maurice, that warrior of God, to stand sentinel over the Elbe, dauntless and unflinching, the heavenly warden of the Reich. No wonder that in time, even the Holy Lance should have come to be regarded as his, and its association with Constantine quite forgotten. To the Saxons, Maurice appeared infinitely less distant than did a long-dead Roman emperor. It was only two centuries previously, after all, that their ancestors had been putting their faith in a similarly supernatural being and his spear.

The vision of warfare that the Saxons still clung to, as an undertaking that might indeed be blessed by the heavens, remained from that past; but the pagan kings of old had never been brought to such prosperity by Woden as Otto had attained by the grace of Christ. By the time he died, on 7 May 973, he was famed across the whole of Christendom as a king ‘who had ruled his subjects with a fatherly beneficence, freed them from their enemies, conquered the arrogant foe by force of arms, subjugated Italy, destroyed the sanctuaries of pagan gods among neighbouring peoples, and established churches and orders of clergy everywhere’. Even beyond the frontiers of the Reich, in lands still steeped in heathenism, Otto and his fearsome god, the celestial emperor who had so palpably brought the Saxons all their greatness, were spoken of with awe.

With envy too. It was true that the Wends, with the sullen obduracy of the brutalised, still spurned the faith of their conquerors; but they were coming to seem a mere island of paganism, one lapped by an ever-rising tide of conversions. East of them, for instance, Miesco, the duke of a barbarous people known as the Poles, had been formally baptised in 966. His first church, a chapel built inside the stronghold of Gniezno, had been begun shortly after that. In due course, so enthused was he by his new religion that he would take a Saxon, a former nun, no less, to be his bride. Meanwhile, in the same year as Otto’s death, a bishopric was established south of the Wendish marches, in the young dukedom of Bohemia, led by priests trained at Magdeburg. Even in Hungary, where the war bands shattered at the Lech had for years been licking their wounds and questioning the gods who had so comprehensively failed them, missionaries from Bavaria were reaping a prodigious harvest of souls. It was an age of miracles indeed.

No longer, in