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

loss of life were to be avoided at all costs. So it was, for instance, in southern Italy, where the garrisons were perilously undermanned, that the high command had made little attempt to combat the Saracen incursions, preferring instead to sit them out. To a man such as Otto, and a people such as the Saxons, it was a policy that could not help but appear pusillanimous.

In January 982, when the mailed horsemen of East Francia first crossed into Byzantine territory, they too were met by bolted gates, just as the corsairs had been. Infuriated by the refusal of his fellow Christians to join him in the campaign against the Saracens, their common foe, Otto nevertheless bided his time, giving them every opportunity to submit; but by April his patience was exhausted. News had reached him that in Sicily, long a stronghold of the corsairs, a Saracen prince was mustering a massive expeditionary force against him; and Otto, resolved as he was to confront this menace head on, knew that he would need a secure base in his rear. Accordingly, ‘after a brief but forceful attack’, he seized the port of Taranto from its Byzantine garrison, and formally proclaimed himself, in portentous terms, sole Emperor of Rome. With the city echoing to the sound of warhorses being shod, hauberks being prepared and over two thousand reinforcements clattering • through the streets, Otto’s self-justification for this step could hardly have been more ringing. Constantinople, through her own cowardice and feebleness, had forfeited all rights to the name of Roman. No longer did she deserve to be ranked as the shield of Christendom. The title was now Otto’s alone.

In July, its standards proudly fluttering, the massive task force assembled for the conquest of southern Italy duly advanced against the Saracens, cornered them south of Cotrone by the sea, engaged them in a great and terrible battle – and was annihilated. Most of Otto’s heavy cavalry, the shock force of the Reich, perished amid the carnage. The cream of the nobility too. Otto himself, obliged to borrow a horse from a passing Jew and ride it out into the sea, barely escaped with his life. To compound his humiliation, the ship that rescued him, ‘a galley of marvellous length and speed’, had been dispatched to Italian waters from Constantinople. ‘Let us hope’, the mortified Otto found himself muttering to its captain, ‘that your emperor, my brother, will be a loyal friend to me in my time of need.’ Not that he had any intention of hanging around to find out. Arriving off the coast where Theophanu was waiting for him, he plunged into the sea and swam frantically ashore, there to be reunited with his wife and his few surviving troops: chastened, mightily relieved still to be alive, and dripping wet.

So ended Otto’s attempts to sweep the Saracens into the sea. Rumour would subsequently have it that Theophanu, furious at her husband for his incompetence, had insisted, with a tactless flare-up of patriotism, that her countrymen would never have blundered into such a catastrophe. If true — and Saxon gossip about the empress was often malicious – then she had only put into words what most people in southern Italy were thinking. Not that Byzantine schadenfreude could reign wholly undiluted. Even though the captain of the Saracens, the ‘Emir’, as he was termed, had fallen in the very hour of his great victory, everyone knew that the corsairs would be back, and more bloodily than ever. And so it would prove. Far distant from the beleaguered Italian front, however, in the chanceries of Constantinople, news of Otto’s defeat had confirmed the imperial elite powerfully in their vision of the world. It was a vision in which, unchangingly, there could be room only for two great powers, locked, as they had always been, in a globe-spanning embrace of rivalry, arch-antagonists doomed to their mutual hatred until the very end of time: themselves, of course, and the Saracens. A vision, certainly, which left no room for barbarian emperors from the North.

Otto, doubting the courage and the resolve of Constantinople, had been grievously mistaken. Dutiful son of the Church a Basileus might be, and yet still boast that his spear ‘had never been seen at rest’, that all his life he had ‘kept vigilant, guarding the children of the New Rome’. Nicephorus, so ascetic in the private practice of his faith that he had dreamed of retiring to a monastery, was far from being the only emperor to have stained his weapons with blood. Even as Otto was limping northwards from the toe of Italy, great deeds were being plotted in Constantinople. Against the empire’s enemies in the Balkans, where the frontier remained menacingly unstable, a full-scale strategy of invasion and annexation was being planned, with the goal of permanently securing the northern approaches to the capital, just as Nicephorus had secured the South. Yet imperial policy, even when setting its sights, as ultimately it would, upon the limits of the Danube, never ceased in its essence to be defensive – and fixated on the threat from its deadliest foe of all. Turbulent and dangerous though the northern barbarians – the Bulgars, the Croats and, yes, the Saxons too – were, they appeared, compared with the Saracens, the merest clods, brutish thugs bred of forest, and rock, and mud. Men understood, in Constantinople, a truth as unsettling as it verged on the scandalous: the Saracens, their eternal opposite, were their mirror image too.

Mon semblable, mon frere. Infinitely more than any Christian power, it was the kingdoms of those who most yearned to conquer her, the followers of Mohammed, that offered up to the New Rome the surest reflection of her own splendour and sophistication. Courts bejewelled and silken with luxuries, immense and teeming cities, baths and gushing fountains, bureaucracies and standing armies: the Saracens had them all. The people whom the wretched peasants of Italy knew only as pirates were in truth the possessors of a