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

Meanwhile, in what had once been the very wellspring of pagan wisdom, the lands of the Romans, or Rum, all appeared decay and ignorance. In Constantinople, to be sure, there were still certain texts from antiquity preserved, the writings of ancient philosophers and savants; and some of these, on occasion, might even be dusted down and sent to the various capitals of the Caliphate as gifts. Yet the Rum, to Muslim eyes, appeared unworthy of their peerless heritage. Deep in the countryside beyond Constantinople, one ambassador reported, there stood a temple where the ancient pagans were said to have worshipped the stars, piled so high with manuscripts that it would have taken a thousand camels to carry them away; and all the manuscripts were crumbling into dust. Compared with the rest of Christendom, however, Constantinople appeared a veritable treasure house of learning. No books could be expected of the Saxon king, for instance. Abd al- Rahman, wishing to congratulate Otto I on his victory at the Lech, had sent him, not a rare manuscript, but gifts more calculated to impress a barbarian: ‘lions and camels, ostriches and apes’. Indeed, in the whole of western Christendom there were few libraries more than a thousandth of the size of the Caliph’s in Cordoba. So rare were books that the going rate for one on the black market might be a warhorse. Al-Hakam, had this been brought to his attention, would hardly have been surprised. Rather, it would have confirmed him in all his certitudes: that God had turned His back on the Christians; and that the House of Islam would inherit the world for sure. Without learning, after all, what hope for order—and without order, what hope for any empire?

Such questions haunted many in Christendom itself. Just as Queen Gerberga, in her desperation to find some pattern in the anarchy of the times, had looked to a famous scholar for answers, so were there famous scholars, oppressed by similar anxieties, who had turned to the books of pagans. The most celebrated of them all was a peasant, as upwardly mobile as he was precocious, by the name of Gerbert; and it was whispered by his detractors that he had actually studied in Cordoba. Whether indeed he had visited the Saracens in their very lair, it was certain that he was familiar with their learning; for Gerbert, despite being a native of the town of Aurillac, in the remotest Auvergne, had completed his education in a monastery in Spain. Here, on the outermost frontier of Christendom, he had mastered branches of knowledge so exotic that later generations would brand him a necromancer: from the strange Indian numerals used by the Saracens to the operation of an abacus. Yet Gerbert was no sorcerer. His passion – one which ‘boiled within him’ — was for the tracing of God’s order amid seeming chaos. So it was, as a teacher in Reims, that he had constructed out of delicate bronze and iron wires a series of fantastical instruments, designed to demonstrate to his pupils the orderly circling of the planets about the earth, and the turning of the universe on its poles. So it was too, in Rome, amid all the festivities for Otto’s wedding to Theophanu, that Gerbert had distinguished, as though they formed their own ‘ingenious mechanism’, the filigrees spun by God to encircle and order time itself. Once there had been a Christian empire that embraced all the world, and brought to humanity the inestimable fruits of order and peace; and so there would be again. This conviction was hardly original to Gerbert; but rarely had it been held by a man of such erudition and brilliance. Born a peasant he may have been; but Gerbert’s genius had served to win him the attention of emperors and kings. Back in 971, in Rome, he had tutored the young Otto II. A decade later, shortly before Otto left on his disastrous invasion of southern Italy, Gerbert had appeared before the imperial court again, this time in a formal debate with the Reich’s most formidable scholar, the head of the cathedral school in Magdeburg – and wiped the floor with him. In 983, with Otto licking his wounds back in Rome, Gerbert was formally appointed to the imperial service. At such a time of crisis for the Reich, the conviction of Christendom’s most famous scholar that a Roman Empire might still be restored was an asset not lightly to be overlooked.

Further calamities, however, would soon enough test even Gerbert’s optimism to the limit. In an empire laid claim to by a single ruler, an earthquake in southern Italy might reverberate as far as the forests of the distant North; and sure enough, in the summer of 983, the Wends rose suddenly in revolt, burning the cathedrals raised over their lands by their occupiers, pursuing the Saxons ‘as though they were deer’, and ravaging as far as Hamburg. Although Magdeburg itself stood firm amid the firestorm, and the line of the Elbe was eventually stabilised, all that lay beyond it, won with such effort by Otto’s father, was permanently lost. Otto himself, brought the news in Rome, was obliged to abandon his plans for further campaigns against the Saracens, and prepare wearily to head back north: a prospect rendered all the more agonising by the swollen state of his haemorrhoids. Before he could so much as mount his saddle, however, he fell ill with violent diarrhoea; and on 7 December Otto II Augustus, ‘Emperor of the Romans’, died.

Otto’s sudden end left the Reich rudderless. His son and heir, the third Otto in succession, was only three years old. Taken to Aachen, the little boy was consecrated king, just as Charlemagne had been crowned emperor, on Christmas Day, but was then almost immediately abducted. The kidnapper, proving himself very much a chip off the old block, was none other than the son and namesake of Henry, Duke of