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

things which they appeared to foretell was in turn to be interpreted as heralding Antichrist, there was no scholar bold enough to say; but there were some, in their answers, who did presume to offer hints. One, in a letter to King Robert, went so far as to echo the words of Christ Himself, when He had sat on the Mount of Olives and been asked about the ending of the world. ‘Nation will rise against nation,’ the Lord had answered, ‘and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All this is but the beginning of the birth-pangs.’”

Food for thought indeed. Not that the scholars who wrote to the king were calling on him to despair. Blood-curdling though their jeremiads might he, they were practical men, and they trusted Robert, as God’s anointed, to respond with practical measures. That, after all, in a fallen world, was what kings were for: to tame disorder, no matter where and how it threatened. The king himself was quite agreed. Just as solemnly as the Carolingians had done, Robert interpreted lawlessness among his subjects as a menace to the harmony of the very universe. Devotedly, he had been raised by his father to yield to no one in the grandiose quality of his self-esteem. In 981, seven years before his election to the throne, Hugh Capet had been granted an audience with Otto II in Rome; and the trauma of that experience, a mingling of awe and humiliation, had steeled in him a resolve never again to be upstaged by anyone. Because Otto, perfectly aware that his guest did not speak Latin, had insisted on speaking exclusively in that language, Hugh had provided for his son the finest teacher in all Christendom: Gerbert himself. Then, only five months after his own coronation, he had insisted that Robert be crowned joint king – like Charlemagne, on Christmas Day. As a daughter-in-law he had even sought – in vain – to procure a Byzantine princess. Had Hugh’s ambitions for his son been the sole determinant of power, then Robert would have been a very great king indeed.

But image, although important to be sure, could take the new regime only so far. For all the exuberance with which Hugh and Robert laid claim to the awesome traditions descended from Charlemagne, the unsettling truth was that the inheritance they had come into was one of impotence and crisis too. No less than the Carolingians, the Capetian kings were obliged to operate from a power base cruelly inadequate to their ambitions. Great and intimidating had Hugh seemed as a prince among other princes: the ‘Dux Francorum’, the ‘Duke of the Franks’. Seated upon the throne, however, he had soon begun to appear much shrunken. Royal weight-throwing did not come cheap – and Hugh had only marginally more resources available to him than his hapless predecessors had done. His estates, which had appeared so extensive when he ruled them as a duke, appeared a good deal less so now that they were required to bankroll him as a king. Running as they did only from Paris to Orleans, the leverage that they brought him over the great principalities of the south was precisely zero, with the result that he was first ignored there, and then, as the years passed, increasingly forgotten. Even in the more northerly dominions, where he inevitably loomed much larger, Hugh’s former peers could not quite shake off the habit of regarding him as a player not so very different from themselves. Indeed, all his regal pretensions, far from instilling in his subjects a due sense of deference, tended instead to provoke only hilarity and taunts. ‘Who made you a count?’ Hugh once snifHly demanded of a magnate from Aquitaine. Back, swift and cutting, came the inevitable reply: ‘Who made you a king?’

Still, then, unstaunched by the enthronement of the upstart Capetians, authority continued to ebb away from the crown. It was not only the kings themselves who found this disorienting. Fractious or predatory a Frankish nobleman might be — but he was still likely to cherish memories of the gilded days of Charlemagne, when the counts and bishops of the kingdom, having travelled amid magnificent pomp to attend upon the king, would share with him in the great feasts of Easter or Christmas or Pentecost, and deliberate over the affairs of the world. Indeed, for generations of noblemen, the royal court had been the only stage of choice. There were few who would have relished being confined to a merely local power base. To moulder far from the king had traditionally been regarded as the very mark of cloddish failure. Even under the Capetians, the presence of great lords and prelates at the royal court was not unknown. Watching the Count of Flanders, say, or the Archbishop of Reims, or the Bishop of Laon, taking council with the king a spectator might have been tempted to imagine that nothing much had changed. Yet remorselessly, over the course of the calamitous tenth century, things had changed; and with consequences for Frankish society that would prove, in the long run, momentous indeed.

It was the Capetians themselves – ironically enough – who had most potently blazed a trail. Long before Hugh’s elevation to the throne, his predecessors had set about forging themselves into a novel kind of dynasty, and their many holdings into a novel kind of inheritance. Gradually, painfully, but in the end decisively, they had ended up reconfiguring their very notion of what a family might be. No longer, as the Franks had done since time immemorial, did they take for granted the benefits of belonging to a vast and teeming clan: for these, amid the convulsions of the age, no longer appeared quite so certain as anciently they had done. Weight of numbers, after all, had not done much for the heirs of Charlemagne. Quick-fire breeding, far from preserving their imperial patrimony intact, had served in the end only to