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

Italy, Gerbert had had no intention of letting his opportunity slip. By October, he had successfully insinuated himself back into the emperor’s company. That autumn, both he and Adalbert had spent over a month closeted with Otto, ‘day and night’, as Gerbert later proudly boasted. It was never divulged which topic had proved so fascinating as to keep Christendom’s greatest ruler distracted from affairs of state for such an unusual length of time with two clerics; but events would soon serve to offer a hint.

In the summer of997, Otto formally issued Gerbert with what the great scholar had long craved: a command to serve him as his mentor. ‘Demonstrate your distaste’, went the order, ‘for Saxon parochialism’ - and Gerbert obliged with relish. Even as Otto laboured late into the campaigning season to secure the frontier of his homeland, his new counsellor was steeling him in a sense of the global role that it was his to play. ‘For you are Caesar Augustus,’ Gerbert reminded him exuberantly: ‘Emperor of the Romans, sprung from the noblest blood of the Greeks’, the master of Italy, of Germany, and, yes, of ‘the brave lands of the Slavs* as well. ‘The Roman Empire - it is ours, ours!’

So it was that Christendom’s most enduring spectre was summoned from its grave once again, and saluted as though it might be flesh and blood. Gerbert, as practical-minded as he was polymathic, could not have been oblivious to the tension between all his exultant sloganeering and the chaos that was the true state of the world. Neither – for he had spent the entire year of 997 bludgeoning the Wends out of Saxony – could Otto. Yet the bleeding state of things, far from tempering the bold talk of restoring a universal order, seems only to have made it more grandiloquent. In 998, the ambition would appear inscribed on Otto’s seal, pledging him, every time that he stamped a document, to the ‘renovalio’ – the renewal – of the Roman Empire. A quixotic fantasy? So it might have seemed. No hint was offered, either by Gerbert or by Otto himself, as to what a programme of renovatio might actually mean – still less how it was to be achieved. Yet this silence, far from expressing any lack of purpose, almost certainly veiled the very opposite: a consciousness of mysteries too earth-shaking and arcane to be spoken of publicly, of a mission literally cosmic in its implications, and of a duty shaped by the patterns of the revolving centuries.

At Magdeburg, when first summoned there by Otto, Gerbert had dazzled the assembled courtiers by demonstrating to them that it was possible, with the proper learning, and a fantastical instrument named the astrolabe, to track and measure the stars. Ancient sages had known this, and Saracen astronomers too; but never before had it been demonstrated with such brilliance by a Christian philosopher. God’s creation, it appeared, might indeed be apprehended through a grasp of mathematics: ‘for numbers both encode the origins of the universe’, as Gerbert had put it, ‘and serve to explain its functioning’. What significance, then, in the lengthening shadow of the Millennium, that year which ‘surpasses and transcends all other years’, did he identify in the magical number 1000? Infuriatingly, intriguingly, we have no certain answer. Not a single mention of it appears in all the surviving writings of Christendom’s greatest and most enquiring mathematician: a silence so profound, in the circumstances, as to be deafening. Formidable scholar that he was, and devout Christian, Gerbert would have been well aware of Augustine’s teachings on the end days. He would have known how sternly it had been forbidden to speculate as to their possible timing. Did he, as a consequence, scorn to pay any attention to the imminence of the Millennium? Or did he, encouraged by his imperial patron, secretly dare to follow the more dangerous course, and consider that perhaps Augustine had been wrong, and that the one thousand years spoken of by St John, after which evil was to triumph across the world, might, just might, have been meant literally? After all, if anyone had the sanction to engage in such perilous enquiries, then surely it was Otto III, the Roman emperor whose dominion was the single bulwark capable of being raised against the coming of Antichrist, and whose fate it was to be ruling with the one- thousandth anniversary of the Incarnation just a couple of years away?

Certainly, the nearer the Millennium drew, the more Otto seems to have felt oppressed by a sense of urgency – as though the passing of days itself were a flood stream to be breasted. If it were true that time was indeed running out, then the challenge of securing the Roman Empire was evidently not to be a simple one – not in the face of all that a transcendent and gathering malice appeared to be hurling against him. No matter that the Wends, by the end of997, had been pacified at last. A fresh and more insidious threat to Otto’s ambitions was already looming. Alarming news had arrived from the very heart of the great project of renovatio: Rome herself. The city’s erstwhile tyrant, John Crescentius, unappeased by the pardon granted him following Otto’s coronation, had made a sudden power grab. Pope Gregory, who had originally pleaded with his cousin to grant Crescentius mercy, had himself been served with exile. As his replacement upon the throne of St Peter, and the willing stooge of his Roman sponsors, there had emerged blinking into the limelight a most unexpected figure: Otto’s own godfather, one-time tutor and ambassador to Constantinople, John Philagathos. No matter that his attempt to secure a princess from the Basileus had ended in failure – the embassy had evidently done nothing to diminish his conceit. Indeed, if anything, it appeared to have boosted it; for Byzantine diplomats, despite their private scorning of Philagathos as ‘slime, the son of perdition, worthy of every curse,