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

treasures. Everywhere, repositories of an awesome supernatural power, churches stood guard over them, their stonework suffused with the charisma of the departed saints themselves. Many shrines, like St Peter’s itself, were of a venerable antiquity; but from others there came hammering or the smell of drying plaster. Even amid her decay, Rome was forever renewing herself. “Daily, rising up out of the ruins of shattered walls and decayed temples, we see the fresh stonework of churches and monasteries.’ Here, then, perhaps, in the Holy City, lay a vision of how the world itself might be renewed.

Otto, certainly, was of a mind to think so. Still only fifteen when he first arrived in Rome, the emperor was as precocious as he was visionary, a young man of already luminous ambition. He was well schooled in all the attributes expected of a Saxon king, and his mother had sought to stamp him with something of Constantinople too. As his tutor—and godfather – she had duly appointed a Greek from southern Italy, one John Philagathos, an abbot who combined formidable learning with a ferocious self-assurance. Byzantine education was famously stern: its goal was to instil in children nothing less than the demeanour of saints. Theophanu, in her choice of teacher, had shown her customary eye for scholarly talent. The young emperor, though celebrated for his charm, had grown to manhood distinguished as well by a profound solemnity; a sense of the great and terrible charge which had been laid upon him since his earliest years. No less than any Basileus, Otto believed in the Roman Empire as the chosen agent of God’s will. It was a Roman emperor, after all, at the end of days, who was destined to obtain for Christ and His Church all the limits of the world – and who was to say, the times being what they were, that the end of days was not at hand?

Well might Otto have fixed his gaze beyond the horizons of Saxony. Already, looking to seal his rank as a prince of East as well as West, he had dispatched his old tutor, John Philagathos, to Constantinople, with instructions to arrange a marriage for him with the daughter of the Basileus. Meanwhile, in Rome itself, the papacy was being broken to his will. To a degree that even his father or his grandfather would have found startling, Otto regarded the Pope as his subordinate, to be nominated as he saw fit. Not even the customary fig leaf of an election was to be permitted the papal see. When news had reached Otto, as he was heading to Rome, that the reigning Pope was dead of a sudden fever, he had recognised in this accident the certain hand of God. At once, he had moved to foist his own candidate on the Holy City: not a Roman, not even an Italian, but a twenty-four-year-old Saxon, his cousin Bruno.

Early in May 996, the first German ever to sit on the throne of St Peter was duly consecrated as Pope Gregory V. Rome’s traditional power brokers, stunned by the sheer audacity of Otto’s manoeuvre, had found themselves impotent to counter it. The most feared of their number, a hardened strongman by the name of John Crescentius, was reduced to begging the young emperor not to send him into exile. Imperiously, and before the full gaze of Rome, Otto graced him with his mercy. No one was to be left in any doubt that the city – and indeed all of Christendom – now had an emperor who was Roman in more than name. On 21 May, Ascension Day, Otto was formally crowned in St Peter’s, ‘to the plaudits of all Europe’. His cousin, having first anointed him, then delivered a sword into his hand. On to the new emperor’s finger was slipped a ring: symbol of his union with the Christian people. From his shoulders there hung a cloak, and on it, ‘marked out in gold’, were scenes from the Book of Revelation: St John’s vision of the end of the world.

None, perhaps, should have been surprised at the speed and daring that had brought Otto to this spectacular coronation. Young he might have been – but he had already been well instructed in the demands of power upon a king. He had seen the villages of his own people burned and corpse-strewn, and he had torched the villages of the Wends in turn; he had ridden across blood-soaked fields, and trampled his slaughtered foes underfoot. Such was the doom of sinful man, on Middle Earth: to suffer and wither and die. Yet Otto, crashing through the Wendish forests with his loricati, had also stared into a profounder darkness. Trees were already reclaiming the churches planted there by the Saxons. Walls were crumbling away which had once sheltered the body and blood of Christ. The Wends, unlike the Saxons themselves, had refused to accept the Prince of Peace at the point of a conqueror’s sword. What, then, confronted by such obduracy, was Otto to do? He knew that above the fallen world, invisible but effulgent, its radiance brighter than even the most interminable pagan forest was steeped in darkness, there soared the City of God – and that it was his duty, as a Roman emperor, to bring the heathen to acknowledge its glory. Yet he could never forget either, even as he looked to shape Christendom and the realms beyond it to God’s purpose, what Christ Himself had taught His followers: to love their enemies, to turn their cheeks, to sheathe their swords. Otto, as sensitive to his own moral failings as he was insistent upon his godlike dignity as a Caesar, never ceased to be tormented by the resulting tension. ‘Outwardly he assumed a cheerful expression; but within his conscience groaned under the weight of many misdeeds from which, in the silence of night, he continually sought to cleanse himself through vigils, earnest prayers, and rivers of tears.’

Perhaps it was hardly surprising, then,