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

The way of life established by Romuald at Ravenna was a consciously heroic effort to keep this dread of judgement at bay. An existence of implacable and excruciating deprivation, whether lived in a swamp, or in the depths of a forest, or bricked up in a cell, with nothing for company save for birds and the vermin that swarm and feed on rags: such, argued the saint, was the only serviceable preparation for the end of days. Here was a conviction with which his imperial visitor had evidently expressed great sympathy: for one of Romuald’s companions, after Otto had left them for the last time, turned and asked his master in perplexity, ‘What has happened to the King’s noble resolution, the promise he confided secretly to Christ, to become like one of us?’ But it is evident too that Otto’s vow, however he may precisely have phrased it, had been misunderstood. Not for the emperor a shack in a swamp. Instead, he had revealed to Romuald, it was his intention to travel to Jerusalem, and there to lay down ‘the badge’ of his royalty: his earthly crown. ‘For after three years, during which I will set right all that is wrong in my empire, I will abdicate my kingship. And I will offer it instead to one who is better than me.’ Romuald’s followers may have failed to grasp whom their visitor had meant by this — but Romuald surely knew.

The king to whom Otto intended to hand his crown was Christ. The world once readied for the hour of judgement, the emperor would climb the hill of Golgotha, and kneel, and commit his soul to God; and thereby usher in the end of days. Romuald, by granting Otto his blessing, had shown that he, like Nilus, approved of this intention. He had shown that he believed himself in the presence of the last Roman emperor.

But all his hopes, and those of Otto himself, were to be dashed. When the emperor, early in 1002, began his advance on Rome, the venerable hermit was by his side. As the expedition headed southwards, however, a giant dragon was spotted overhead, glittering brightly in the winter sky. Everyone who saw it knew it for a certain portent of doom. Sure enough, soon afterwards, Otto fell sick of malaria – and by late January he was dead. Many plans, many dreams perished with him. The reinforcements summoned from East Francia had been only a single day’s march away as their emperor breathed his last. The princess sent from Constantinople to serve as Otto’s bride had no sooner landed than she was being sent back home again. The new King of Saxony had no time for fantasies of global rule. For Henry, Duke of Bavaria, son of ‘the Quarreller’ and grandson of the Henry who had schemed so tirelessly to steal the crown from Otto I, it was sufficient that one of his line had the rule of the Reich at last. Not until then would he finally succeed in battling his way south to Rome, and his coronation as emperor; and when he did so, there would be no Pope Sylvester waiting for him there with brilliant talk of renovatio.

Gerbert, who had loyally followed Otto to Ravenna, had returned to the Lateran following his patron’s death; and there, in May 1003, after a miserable year of being bullied by the resurgent Crescentius family, he too had died. It had not taken long for his extraordinary story to be transmuted into myth. That a peasant -- still more a non- Italian peasant --should have risen to hold the office of pope appeared to most too remarkable to credit to mere human agency. So it was that Gerbert of Aurillac, ‘the philosophical pope’, who had devoted the last years of his life to buttressing the Roman Empire, would be remembered, not for all his labours in the cause of learning and of Christendom, but as a thing of Antichrist, a beast, ‘risen up from the abyss shortly after the completion of a thousand years’.”

‘Caesar is gone. And with him gone, all future ages arc thrown into confusion.’ This epitaph, composed in the confused months that followed Otto’s death, was not, perhaps, a wholly exaggerated one. A tipping point had indeed been reached: the dream of universal empire as a solution to the world’s problems, for all that it might still animate the chanceries of Baghdad and Constantinople, would never again, as a practical policy, serve to motivate a monarch of Latin Christendom.

‘Like one of the pagan kings of ancient times, he struggled to resurrect the glories of Rome, that city with its deep-buried foundations — but in vain.’” So it would be remembered of Otto. None of his successors would follow his example. His dreams had been too dazzling-and his failure too total as well. Although he never did make it to Jerusalem, and although he never did surrender his crown into the hands of Christ, Otto would prove to have died as what he had long imagined himself to be: the last Roman emperor.

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... YIELDING PLACE TO NEW

The Beginning of the Birth-pangs

Eight years before the one-thousandth anniversary of the Incarnation, in 992, an old man robed in black tottered up the gangplank of a ship bound for Jerusalem. Adso, who had long since stepped down from the abbacy of Montier-en-Der, was by now in his eighties, and perilously frail to be making such a voyage. The rigours of life at sea were notorious – and sure enough, no sooner had the voyage begun than the aged monk was sickening. Five days later, and he was dead. Father Adso would never tread the Holy Land.

But why, at such a venerable age, had the great scholar been travelling there in the first place? ‘He will come to Jerusalem’: so Adso had written long previously, in his celebrated discourse on the career of Antichrist. For it was there, on the Mount of Olives, ‘in