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

short, was it Christendom that lay under siege. No longer was it East Francia that had to fear for its borders. No longer, after the reign of Otto the Great, who had redeemed both his own kingdom and the Roman Empire from the very brink of destruction, did the world’s end appear quite so sure and imminent.

Everybody Wants to Rule the World

In Constantinople, however, they had their doubts. There, like autumn leaves borne on the chill winds of the Bosporus, anxieties swirled and gusted through the streets of the great city. Innumerable proofs of a looming convulsion in human affairs had begun to afflict the venerable empire. Earthquakes and thunderbolts, torrential rains and fearsome signs lighting up the sky; all, to those who tracked them, appeared to foretell ‘that the expected Second Coming of the Saviour and God is near, at the very gates’.

More unsettling than any of these wonders, however, were reports of what in East Francia had prompted only relief and rejoicing: the rout of pagan armies. For so long had the citizens of Constantinople been habituated to defeat, and to the dull slog of staving off their empire’s total ruin, that they had quite forgotten their ancient habits of victory. The reign of their city’s founder, who had been the master of Christendom in fact as well as name, now seemed incalculably remote from them. They had come to regard the monuments of Constantine and his successors, all the haughty statues and triumphal arches that still adorned the New Rome, as the repositories of eerie portents, profoundly alien to themselves. In the weathered frieze- work of such trophies, in the scenes of battle, and fettered captives, and emperors riding in glory, they identified messages bequeathed to them by ancient necromancers: prophecies set in stone, foretelling how the world would end. Now, with prisoners and treasures once again being paraded through Constantinople, ‘in so great a quantity as to resemble an abundantly flowing river’, the gawping citizens felt a sense of dread as well as pride. Surely, with the frontiers of their empire everywhere expanding, the days of the fabled last Roman emperor, who was destined to rule the whole world, were near at hand? Learned scholars, performing abstruse calculations, confirmed that his coming was indeed only decades away. And after him, and his death upon Golgotha, the reign of Antichrist.

Small wonder, then, that the citizens of Constantinople should have regarded with some ambivalence a programme of imperial expansion that threatened such a climax. Nor did it help that they were being bled white to fund it. The larger the army, and the lengthier the campaigning on distant frontiers, the higher their taxes. It was no coincidence that the most proficient of their warrior emperors, the aptly named Nicephorus, or ‘Victory Bearer’, should also have been the most widely hated. A battle-hardened ascetic from the empire’s eastern front, capable of drilling a pike through the front of an armoured enemy and out the other side, and with the appearance, so it was reported, of a wildly bristling pig, he had paraded a hair-shirted distaste for the sensibilities of the metropolis. The same man who, on the frontiers of the empire, had busied himself with the capture of ‘more than a hundred towns and fortresses’, had also, back in Constantinople, transformed his palace into an army camp, throwing up imposing battlements to screen himself from his subjects, and hunkering down behind them. A fruitless precaution, however-for his enemies had lurked everywhere.

In 969, his own nephew, an ambitious young officer by the name of John Tzimiskes, had put himself at the head of a plot to usurp the throne. Shortly before Christmas, he and an assassination squad had rowed across the Bosphorus to where the walls of the palace met the sea. There, dangling from an upper balcony, they had found a basket, lowered in anticipation of their arrival. Men would later say that it was the empress herself, enraptured by Tzimiskes’s inexhaustible aptitude for sexual gymnastics, who had betrayed her husband with this fatal act of treachery; for she was known to have been as vicious as she was insatiable. Whatever the truth of the rumour, however, it is certain that Tzimiskes and his accomplices, stealing into the emperor’s private chapel, had there found their victim wrapped in a bearskin, snoring gently on the floor. A hail of knives had done their work. Nicephorus’s head, severed to provide a token of Tzimiskes’s accession, had been brandished from a palace window. The people of Constantinople, revelling in the excitement of regime change, had cheered the murderers, and the dispatch of the greatest conqueror to have graced their empire’s throne for three long centuries and more.

In the West too, at the Saxon court, news of the coup had been greeted with delight. No surprise, perhaps, that Otto and Nicephorus, both of them peerless warriors, both of them claimants to the title of emperor, should have regarded the pretensions of the other with resentment. In 968, hostilities between Christendom’s two greatest monarchs had come to a head: Otto, attempting to annex southern Italy, had invaded the territories there still ruled from Constantinople; shortly afterwards, finding his campaign bogged down, and resolved to redeem the situation through a display of quite breathtaking nerve, he had sent an ambassador to the imperial capital and demanded a princess for his younger son and namesake, Prince Otto. This was a gambit that Nicephorus, unsurprisingly, had dismissed with furious snorts of scorn; but Tzimiskes, a well-honed athlete much given to vaulting over horses, had shown himself more willing to take a leap into the dark. The youthful Otto may have been barbarian – yet he was not a wholly worthless catch. Liudolf, the rebellious crown prince, had died back in 957 – leaving Otto as his father’s only heir. Whoever married him, so Tzimiskes had calculated, was likely to end up Empress of the West. A tempting prospect — even by the standards