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

imagined by admirers as bowing in stupefaction before ‘great Otto’. ‘Rejoice, O Pope,’ as one of them put it, ‘rejoice, O Caesar! Let the Church exult in a fervour of joy, and let joy be great in Rome, let the imperial palace rejoice! With this pope, under this Caesar, the age itself is renewed!’

But the young Caesar himself was racked by doubts. Visionary he may have been – but he was not naive. He had patrolled the frontiers of Saxony. He knew perfectly well that Rome, although the heart of Christendom, was not the world. He knew too – for the words of Nilus still sounded in his memory – that all his labours to fortify his empire, all the blood he had spilled and all the brutalities he had committed, might have served only to put his fitness as God’s anointed into doubt. For a year, he continued to ignore the promptings of his conscience. Then, in February 999, and with the anniversary of the Lenten atrocities fast approaching, Pope Gregory fell suddenly sick and died. The cause was malaria – but how was Otto to attribute it to anything save the effect of Nilus’s curse? Abruptly after his cousin’s death, he left Rome and headed southwards. Although he did not neglect the due business of an emperor on the way—taking hostages here, dispensing favours there, exploiting the rivalries of his Italian subjects with his customary dextrousness — he also made sure to perform acts of very public penance. Wherever there was a shrine, he would walk to it barefooted. By the time he found himself approaching Nilus’s cell, it was evident that his contrition had been accepted as truly heartfelt: for the old man, leaving his cave, walked to the side of the road, from where he saluted the emperor fondly. Otto, slipping down from his saddle, knelt in tears before the hermit; and then removed his crown. A portentous gesture: for so it had been prophesied that the last Roman emperor would do, as he knelt upon Golgotha, and thereby usher in the end of days. Nilus paused — and then, demonstrating that he regarded the man before him as guiltless of any presumption, gave him his blessing. Finally, with due reverence, he handed the emperor back his crown.

Otto, returning to Rome, could do so with his sense of mission powerfully fortified. Even the death of his cousin, which only a few weeks earlier had struck in him a knell of icy foreboding, now appeared the working of Providence. At a fateful moment for him and for all mankind, with the one-thousandth anniversary of the Incarnation only months away, and the great labour of renovatio weighing down implacably upon his shoulders, he had been graced with the opportunity to promote to St Peter’s throne the man best qualified to help him. On 2 April 999, Gerbert of Aurillac, the peasant from the Auvergne, was crowned Pope. The name he took – Sylvester II – signalled unmistakably to all the world how he saw his own role and that of his master. Just as the first Sylvester was supposed to have served Constantine, so would he serve Otto: Pope and emperor together, they would shepherd the Christian people.

And swell their numbers too. Ancient prophecies long current in Italy foretold how at the end of times the last Roman emperor would summon all the pagans in the world to baptism; and now, as the fateful year of the Millennium dawned, a Roman emperor was preparing to do just that. Not at sword point — the example of Adalbert would hardly have licensed forced conversions – but rather in a manner as pacific as it was mystical. So it was, for instance, that the chieftain of the Hungarians, those one-time predator horsemen, was sent a replica of the Holy Lance by Otto, and a diadem by Pope Sylvester, and publicly welcomed, as King Stephen, into the order of Christian royalty. So it was too, in the spring of the millennial year, that the Roman emperor himself, travelling eastwards to where the ancient Caesars had never reached, crossed the border into Poland and processed to Gniezno. Columns of brightly dressed warriors stood massed to greet him as he walked, barefoot once more, to the shrine of St Adalbert. Then, having prayed beside the tomb, Otto rose and set out to complete what his murdered friend had begun. The Polish duke, like the Hungarian prince, was presented with a crown and a copy of the Holy Lance; the fur-clad Boleslav, not to be outdone, reciprocated by giving the emperor one of St Adalbert’s arms. Otto, profoundly moved, burst into tears. ‘And that day the two men were joined together with such bonds of affection that the Emperor called Boleslav his brother, and proclaimed him a friend of the Roman people.’

True, there was in all this a steely measure of calculation. The Poles were valuable allies in the struggle against the Wends. That Otto retained his hard-edged streak of pragmatism was evident from the presence in his train, even as he prayed by Adalbert’s tomb, of hostages from Italy. Yet pragmatism, in the shadow of the end time, could go only so far. Dimensions infinitely beyond that of the earthly present were also in play: the threads of history, woven according to God’s plan throughout the centuries, were on the verge of being gathered up and placed into Otto’s hands. Or so Otto himself appears devoutly to have believed. It is certainly hard to explain otherwise why, after an absence from his homeland of many months, with his nobility fractious and his countrymen resentful of all their emperor’s foreign adventuring, his principal concern should have been to consult, not with the living, but with the dead.

By late April, barely a month after leaving Gniezno, and having toured Saxony at a blistering speed, Otto was in Aachen: site of the tomb of Charlemagne. On Pentecost – the day when the Holy Spirit, descending