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

of Constantinople. So it was that in 972 a young girl of perhaps twelve or thirteen, adorned in the heavy robes of an authentic Byzantine princess, weighed down with gold and precious stones, and accompanied by an intimidating train of flunkeys, treasure chests and changes of wardrobe, had been dispatched to Rome. Her name was Theophanu; and both the elder and the younger Otto had been dazzled by the show of her arrival. The marriage contract, inscribed on parchment painted to look like purple silk, had licensed the most splendid wedding in Saxon history. St Peter’s had provided the venue; the Pope himself had officiated; the very union of East and West had seemed achieved as the squat and ginger-haired groom was joined to his willowy bride.

Only in the complaints of a few curmudgeons, muttered behind the emperor’s back, had the awkward truth been whispered: Theophanu was not, as everyone at the Saxon court had initially been led to believe, Tzimiskes’s daughter at all, but his niece. Some had even suggested that she be returned to Constantinople as damaged goods. Otto I had refused. It had not taken him long to appreciate the pearl he had obtained in his new daughter-in-law. By the time of his death, barely a year after his son’s wedding, Theophanu was already casting the spell of her star quality over East Francia. Indeed, so protean were her abilities that the Saxons could not even agree as to what they were. Some praised their empress for her modesty, ‘which is, of course, a rare thing in a Greek’; others for the very opposite, an eloquence which they felt might easily shade into ‘insolent prattling’. All, however, were agreed on her talent for forging the kind of political friendships that were so essential in the Reich, fractured as it was, and fractious too. On her own, Theophanu could hardly hope to mitigate the more turbid characteristics of her husband’s court, and yet her very presence at the side of Otto n, elegant, silken and bejewelled, served as a constant reminder of a very different style of monarchy: a touch, in the heart of Saxony, of the ineffable glamour of the New Rome.

For Theophanu herself, the experience of life in the West, where displays of riotous merriment were held to impair the kingly dignity not a jot, would certainly have provided a most striking contrast with the decorousness she had left behind. The court of the Basileus, its conceit burnished by its antiquity, persisted in its sublime ambition to hold a mirror up to heaven. The emperor himself, elevated and aloof, presided over his table as the image of Christ; the empress by his side as the Virgin Mary; even the eunuchs, sexless go-betweens, flitted around in the manner of angels. Back in the West, where one of the distinctive marks of royal table manners was held to be the ferocious cracking open of animal bones for their marrow, such role playing would have been regarded as so stiff and chill as to be grotesque; and yet Otto II, under Theophanu’s influence, showed himself not immune to its appeal. So it was, for instance, in the years following his accession, that he and his wife paraded their devotion to the Virgin with a quite exceptional show of piety—even as the Virgin herself, not previously famed in the West for having dripped with priceless jewellery, began to be portrayed across the Reich in the manner of a Byzantine empress. The glory of this, even as it dignified Theophanu, naturally redounded upon Otto as well—and hinted at the aspirations that were starting to gnaw at him.

For less than a decade into his reign, and East Francia was already coming to seem altogether too cabined a stage for his dreams. Whether it was the whisperings of his empress that had seduced him or the impetuosity of his own desires, Otto, bold and wilful, appeared no longer content with the sway of his native land. In the winter of 980, he and Theophanu left Saxony for Italy. By the spring, they were in Rome. Here, in the months that followed, Otto drew up plans to subdue the whole peninsula. A primordial fantasy, one that had haunted many generations of princes, was once again stirring from its troubled sleep. The dream of an empire without limits, of a universal dominion — of a Rome reborn.

Yet it remained the nature of this phantasm to mock all who sought to embrace it. Beyond the southernmost limit of Otto’s Italian kingdom, as tantalising as any mirage, there stretched regions that in ancient times had been both the playground and the breadbasket of the Caesars. Ruins from this fabulous past - palaces and temples, theatres and baths - still dominated the landscape, their hulking stonework defying the passage of the centuries, whether looming up from the curve of the Bay of Naples or frowning down upon the winding, inland roads. All their massy grandeur, however, served only to emphasise their abandonment -- and the desolation of the badlands in which they now stood. It was barely a decade previously, after all, that southern Italy had been a war zone, fought over by the rival empires of East and West; and now, in the summer of 981, Otto II was minded to make it so again. The bonds of alliance woven by his marriage to Theophanu had already snapped: for in Constantinople John Tzimiskes was dead - poisoned by a eunuch, it was claimed - and Theophanu herself, implacably hostile to the dynasty that had replaced her uncle’s, clearly believed the rumour true. In September, when the Saxon emperor, riding at the head of a great force of iron- sheathed loricati, advanced southwards out of Rome, his queen was by his side. That it was Otto’s intention to lay claim to the entire inheritance of the ancient empire, in defiance of the new regime in Constantinople, Theophanu knew and surely approved. Empress of the West, perhaps