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

was also the seat of something miraculous: a refuge from the evils of the times that even the papacy, in naked awe, acclaimed as Christendom’s most impregnable sanctuary, a veritable ‘haven of piety and salvation’. So it was, for instance, that after a particularly maddened soldier was found wandering naked in the woods outside Nantua, a town just to the south of Burgundy, the monks caring for him had no hesitation in sending him northwards to be cured, back on the very road that led to the duchy’s killing fields. An unsettling journey, no doubt, and a dangerous one — but with the promise, at its end, of true asylum.

It was the Almighty Himself, it appeared, who had fitted Cluny for such a role. All around the wide valley on which the abbey stood there stretched wooded hills, sheltering and enclosing it against the outside world – very much like the cloisters of a monastery. It was only a century previously, however, that this resemblance had first been noted: for until then the valley had been a hunting ground, and inordinately prized as such by its original owner, the Duke of Aquitaine. But in 910, William, the holder of that title, had been old and childless – and with murder on his conscience. Accordingly, for the sake of his soul, he had resolved to found an abbey; and the monks to whom he had confided this ambition had immediately pointed out, with a certain grim relish, that the ideal spot for it would be none other than his favourite hunting ground. Any reluctance that William might have felt at the prospect of forfeiting such a prize had been sternly overridden. ‘For you know which will serve you better before God: the baying of hounds or the prayers of monks.’ To that, there had been no possible comeback; and so it was, on 11 September 910, that William had signed away the valley.

One century on, and it was evident to everyone who drew near to Cluny that the Almighty had looked favourably indeed upon the Duke of Aquitaine’s gift. Or to almost everyone, perhaps. A deserter such as the wild man of Nantua, traumatised as he was, and fearful of battlements, would no doubt have found the spectacle of the abbey’s ramparts a most alarming one at first: for flourishing monasteries, it was true, did often wear a menacing aspect. So it was, for instance, at Fleury, a celebrated foundation on the Loire, and Cluny’s only real rival as the pre-eminent monastery in France, that there towered a donjon ‘of squared blocks’ no less imposing than anything raised by Fulk Nerra; while at Cluny itself, its abbot, Father Odilo, was a great enthusiast for replacing wood with stone. Yet no matter how intimidatingly the gateway of the abbey might loom above them, there was nothing beyond it for the poor to fear: no stronghold of robber knights. ‘For I was hungry and you gave me food.’ So Christ Himself had spoken. ‘I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me.’ Daily, therefore, when the starving poor gathered before the gates of Cluny, up to thirty-six pounds of bread would be handed out to them by the brothers of the monastery; and the monks, as they performed their work of charity, would prostrate themselves before each and every recipient of their alms, as though before the Saviour.

Even the abbot himself, one of the greatest men of Christendom, if he were obliged to ride out into the world, would make certain never to turn away anyone ‘from the bosom of his mercy’. The sainted Odo, for instance, had not shrunk from carrying a foul- smelling sack filled with garlic and onions for one weary old man, to the horror of his companion; while Odilo, elected to his post only six years before the Millennium, would pause whenever he saw a corpse by the roadside and have a grave dug for it, then kneel to wrap it with great tenderness in his cloak. For come the Day of Judgement, he knew, his every account would have to be rendered.

And from what lay waiting beyond the Day of Judgement, that moment of supreme and joyous mystery, when the old earth would pass away and the new Jerusalem descend from God ‘as a bride adorned for her husband’, it was the glory of Cluny, more than any other shrine raised by the hands of man, to part the veil. Always the gaze of its brethren was fixed, not on the fallen world, but on the splendours of the next. Indeed, it was their aspiration, a truly awesome one, to transcend their own mortal nature. ‘For if monks are perfect,’ Odo had argued, ‘then they are rendered similar to the blessed angels.’ The wild man of Nantua, led cringing to the gates of Cluny, would surely soon have found his terrors set at ease. Noble though the accents of the monks would have proclaimed them, nobler, often, than many a castellan, in almost every way they would have appeared to the deserter not as potentes at all but as pauperes, just like himself. At Cluny, every brother lived by an ancient and unbending rule, one that had described the practice of humility as a ladder ascending to God; and its most solemn command, ‘the twelfth degree’, was that a monk’s humility should be made manifest to all the world. So it was that, shamingly, he would wear his hair even shorter than a peasant’s, shaved to form a tonsure, in appearance like a crown of thorns; he would dress in a black cowl, drab and unadorned, no better than a workman’s; and at all times he would ‘keep his head bowed, and his eyes fixed upon the ground’. Inviting the wretched deserter from Nantua to sit down by the monastery gateway, the monks charged with his reception would have bowed before him,