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

stupefyingly vast and flourishing dominion, stretching in a mighty crescent from the western ocean to the rising of the sun. ‘There are two empires,’ a Patriarch of Constantinople had written early in the tenth century, ‘that of the Saracens and of the Romans, which hold between them the entirety of power in this world, shining like twin torches in the celestial firmament.’ The observation had been made in a letter sent to the fabulous city of Baghdad, where there had sat enthroned in fearful splendour a prince whose claim to the rule of every nation under the sun was made manifest in his very title: that of the ‘Caliph’, or ‘Successor’, to Mohammed. Yet ambitions of global conquest, the Patriarch had argued, if permitted to blaze with an equal ferocity in both Constantinople and Baghdad, would surely expose both to the risk of annihilation. Rather than compete to rule the world, might not the truest course of wisdom be to accept its division into two? The Caliph, committed as he was by his rank to work for the propagation of Mohammed’s faith to the outermost limits of the universe, had given this proposal predictably short shrift; but opinion formers in Constantinople, unperturbed by this rebuff, had continued to push for a policy of detente.

Which they had been able to do, as the decades passed, from a position of gathering strength. Increasingly, with the single exception of the Italian front, the Saracen frontier appeared stable, even pacified. Beyond it, meanwhile, in the heartlands of the Caliphate, all was disintegration. True, a caliph still reigned in Baghdad, but he did so only as the cipher of a Persian warlord, one of numerous adventurers who had begun systematically to carve up the Saracen world between them. Nor was he any longer the only ruler who claimed the rank of Mohammed’s successor. In Egypt, which had been lost to Baghdad back in 969, the master of that most ancient and wealthy of kingdoms also wore the title of ‘Caliph’, claiming as his justification a supposed descent from Mohammed’s daughter, Fatima. Diplomats in Constantinople, well versed in the art of stirring up trouble among their adversaries, had naturally tracked all these developments with relish. To the ‘Fatimid’ Caliph, as an encouragement to him in his ambitions, they had duly sent Zulfiqar, Mohammed’s sword: a splendid gift, to be sure, but a treacherous one as well. After all, with a rival caliph still enthroned in Baghdad, and a host of squabbling emirs beyond their frontiers, it appeared likeliest to be Saraccn vertebrae

 

that would end up cleaved by the Fatimids, not the spines of the Romaioi.

Otto might have doubted the backbone of Constantinople, but the Saracens no longer did. ‘The field is left open to her,’ acknowledged a commentator at the Fatimid court as he mournfully surveyed the spectacle of the splintered Caliphate. ‘She has been able to seize what was previously closed to her, and to nurture ambitions that until recently would have been unthinkable.’ No wonder, then, when set against such a drama, the tectonic grinding of two such ancient and mighty powers, each one the opposite and the semblance of the other, that the pretensions of upstarts such as Otto should have appeared a boorish irrelevance. If indeed, as all the signs seemed to indicate, the end of the world was nearing, then it was the rivalry of Caliph and Basileus that would surely pattern it, just as it had patterned the centuries past. ‘Twin torches’: so the Patriarch had described the Caliphate and the empire of the New Rome. Set against such a blaze, what could Francia be accounted, save a twilit backwater, a doltish wilderness of ignorance and bloodstained shadows?

Eurabia

As Otto stumbled back to Rome with his shattered retinue, he would have found himself passing by ruins familiar to him from his outward journey: looming reminders of the vanished empire whose heir he claimed to be. The menace of these silent temples and amphitheatres would have borne down ominously upon the imperial party. It was not only ghosts that were rumoured to haunt their mouldering stonework. Saracen raiders, always on the lookout for secure strongholds, had long been in the habit of setting up camp within the shells of outsize classical buildings. Well might Italians have come to regard the memorials of their Roman past as things baleful and accursed. Many, abandoning them altogether, had decamped to walled towns up in the hills. Others, rather than endure the dread that the ancient structures inspired, had been known to pull them down. In Naples, for instance, at the start of the tenth century, panic had inspired a veritable frenzy of demolition. Fearful that a Saracen emir of notorious rapacity and sadism might be descending upon their city, the Neapolitans had sought to leave nothing standing for the marauders to occupy. Far along the seafront, celebrated monuments had been sent crashing into the shallows. Most spectacular of all the casualties had been the palace in which the last Roman emperor of the West, some five hundred years previously, had passed his days.

Here, in the pile of rubble left where such a haughty villa had once stood, was dramatic illustration of how profoundly Italy had slumped from her one-time greatness into impotence and poverty. That Saracen war bands preferred to occupy ancient ruins rather than monuments raised in more recent times was sombre evidence of how shrunken the resources available to most Italians had become. It was certainly not in the hope of plundering any great treasure that the corsairs kept returning to their old haunts. For a long while now, across vast swaths of the Italian countryside, the bones had been picked almost clean. Yet what did remain was self-evidently more than lure enough. ‘Behold,’ a pope had mourned, back in the ninth century, ‘the towns, castles and estates perish – stripped of inhabitants’. An exaggeration? Not if stunned reports of the near-industrial scale of the slave trade