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

that Otto should have found himself peculiarly obsessed by Rome. In the fabulous juxtaposition that it presented of the vaunting and the humble, the martial and the pacific, the mortal and the eternal, the city must have appeared to him like a mirror held up to his soul. Lingering there after his coronation, he could admire details on antique columns which portrayed the slaughter of barbarians by stern-faced emperors; just as he could attend, ‘day and night’, to a very different lesson, one taught him by a monk who was famous, notorious even, for his scorning of worldly titles, an admonishment that Otto should ‘regard himself not as one of the great, not as a Caesar, but as a mortal man, and therefore destined, all his great beauty notwithstanding, to end up as ashes, rottenness, and food for worms’.

The name of this spiritual pundit was Adalbert. Though he was cloistered in a Roman monastery, across the valley from the ruins on the Palatine, far distant from the marches of the Reich, he was nevertheless profoundly sensitive to the pressures weighing on Otto’s shoulders. This was because, to a degree, he had shared in them himself – and buckled beneath them too. Born in Bohemia of aristocratic parents, educated in Magdeburg, appointed by Otto II to the bishopric of Prague, Adalbert properly ranked as one of the great men of the Reich. Far from revelling in his high office, however, he had grown so troubled by the compromises required of him that it was said he had forgotten, such was his unhappiness, how to laugh. Run out of town after his attempts to halt the slave trade had threatened the income of the local duke, Adalbert ‘had laid the dignity of his bishop’s office aside, and become a humble brother’. Yet even as ‘merely one among many’, he had continued to stand out from the crowd. Take off dirty shoes at his monastery, for instance, and Adalbert would immediately swoop to clean them: a display of humility striking enough in any monk, let alone one who still ranked officially as a prince of the Church. Other bishops, needless to say, were appalled by such eccentricities; but Otto, who had been brought up to admire holy men, and actively to seek them out, preferred to regard it as the mark of saintliness. Adalbert, who had only to pray and the croaking of frogs in the Roman marshes would mysteriously be silenced, was evidently a man with a formidable talent for instilling serenity in the troubled – and Otto was certainly troubled. With news reaching him in the summer of996 that the banks of the Elbe were once again ablaze, Adalbert seemed to offer him what he most craved: a way through the darkness ahead. Otto was not the only man, amid the stifling summer heat of Rome, to have his thoughts fixed on the wilds of the East. Adalbert too was planning to leave for there. He would travel, though, not in the pomp of his ecclesiastical vestments, but in his tattered habit; not as a prince, but as a humble missionary. Yes, he insisted, it was indeed possible for the pagans to be brought to see the City of God – and it did not have to be done at the point of a sword.

The following spring, by the side of an icy lake, a bare day’s journey beyond the borders of Poland and the protection of Boleslav, its Christian duke, Adalbert was hacked to death. His killers were Prussians, a heathen and turbulent people, much given to tattooing themselves and downing pints of blood, who had scorned the missionary’s preaching as the sinister work of a ‘German god’. Otto, brought the news in Aachen, was predictably distraught. Yet even as he mourned his loss, miraculous things were already being reported of Adalbert’s death. An angel, it was said, sweeping down from heaven, had caught the martyr’s head as it was sent flying through the air by a Prussian axe, and later, reuniting it with the decapitated trunk, had left the corpse to be found on the far side of the lake. From there, it had been tenderly transported by two of Adalbert’s disciples back across the border, to safety, and the awestruck reverence of the Poles. Boleslav, delighted to find himself with such a potent relic in his possession, had promptly sealed his ownership of the martyr’s body by entombing it at Gniezno, the capital that he had inherited from his father, Duke Miesco. To his subjects, a people who only four decades previously had been quite as heathen as the Prussians, the shrine raised over Adalbert appeared an awesome and a wondrous thing, a beacon of blazing holiness, a joining of earth to heaven. It had needed no burning of villages to ensure this, no mass gibbets, no planting of Saxon garrisons. In death, if not in life, Adalbert had fulfilled his dearest wish. He had indeed helped to purge heathenism from the eastern wilds – and the only blood shed had been his own. A new people had been confirmed in their membership of Christendom. The Poles had been secured for Christ.

And for Otto as well! So he certainly trusted. Despite the loss of Adalbert, and despite the continued violence along the frontier with the Wends, the emperor’s sense of mission and self-confidence remained undimmed. Indeed, if anything, it was coming to shine more radiantly still. Adalbert was not the only inspirational figure to have entered Otto’s orbit the previous year. Gerbert too had been in Rome in the wake of the coronation. Struggling, as he had been doing ever since his brush-off by Theophanu, to secure an office worthy of his talents, he had travelled there originally to petition the Pope; but soon enough, having turned the full glare of his charisma on to Otto, had found himself being employed as the emperor’s secretary. Although this role had lasted only a few weeks, until Otto’s departure from