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

moment of his death, an excommunicant’s flesh would start to reek terribly of excrement, so that consecrated ground would refuse to receive his corpse, but would instead vomit it up in a furious spasm, to serve as food for wild beasts. What greater contrast with the relics of the saints, fragrant still within their bejewelled reliquaries, could possibly have been imagined?

It would have been no wonder, then, as the horsemen swore their oaths, if all their hopes of redemption had been shadowed by a certain sense of foreboding. Most castellans were not oblivious to the terrible yearning of their victims for a new age, one in which ‘the spear would rejoice to become a scythe, and the sword become a ploughshare’. Standing as they were in the shadow of the Millennium, they could not even discount the possibility that Christ Himself, ablaze with fearsome glory, might soon be returning to usher in a reign of peace and justice, and to consign the wicked to eternal fire. Who, after all, looking around the fields in which the Peace of God had been proclaimed, where glittering reliquaries stood massed in an impregnable battle line, could doubt that the reign of saints was indeed at hand? Which, in turn, served to prompt one obvious question: on whose side, that of the demons or of the warriors of heaven, did the castellans and their knights wish to range themselves?

In 1016, outside the Burgundian town of Verdun-sur-le-Doubs, a great cavalcade of horsemen clattered along the local roads and lanes on the way to swear a fresh oath of peace. They had been summoned by the local bishop; but the true inspiration, just as he had been at Anse, was Odilo of Cluny. It might have seemed, in the intervening two decades, that nothing much had changed in France. Violence was still general across the south. So too were the anguish and the misery of the poor. No less than in the decades before the Millennium, it appeared that the moment of which St Odo had warned his successors, when time itself would be fulfilled, and ‘the King of Evil enter in triumph into the world’, might be imminent. No matter that the anniversary of the Incarnation had passed – the yet more fateful anniversary of Christ’s ascension into heaven was still to come. Hugh of Chalons, the bishop who had summoned the knights to Verdun, would certainly not have been oblivious to the swirl of apocalyptic speculations. The seat of his bishopric was Auxerre: still, as it had been back in the time of the Hungarian invasions, a famous centre for the study of the end of days. It was at Auxerre, for instance, some ten years previously, that one scholar had publicly identified the monks of Cluny with the 144,000 harpists who were destined, according to the Book of Revelation, to ‘sing a new song’ at the hour of judgement, and to ‘follow the Lamb wherever he goes’. Now, by summoning his council at Verdun, Bishop Hugh was hoping to follow the example of Odilo. As well he might have done — for Cluny, at any rate, had gone from strength to strength. Popes and kings alike had ringingly affirmed its independence. Monasteries across France — including in Auxerre — had formally submitted to the authority of its abbot.

Yet the most remarkable of all the displays of Odilo’s leadership — and the most suggestive too — had been over men who were not even tonsured. Since the Millennium, the violence that had for so long tormented the neighbourhood of his monastery had begun finally to be tamed. The local knights, inspired to share in something at least of the heroic disciplines of Cluny, had been recruited by Odilo to take their place beside the monks, to range themselves on an invisible battlefield thronged by angels and warrior saints. Such, at any rate, was the ideal. Another way of putting it was to say that Odilo, looking to rein in the criminal gangs massed against him, had succeeded in persuading them to abandon their careers of violence in exchange for his blessing and a degree of legitimacy. Certainly, however his achievements were spun, they were palpable in the valley where the famous monastery stood. A brutal convulsion in society had been successfully negotiated. Peace had been brought to the fields—and respectability to the neighbouring castles. The tide of violence, at last, had begun to recede from Cluny.

Demonstration of a potent truth indeed: that the very measures taken to buttress humanity against the looming onslaught of Antichrist, and to prepare the world for its fiery end, might serve as well to secure a new beginning, and a new model of society. Odilo was not the only leader of the peace movement to flirt with this paradox. So it was, for instance, at Verdun, that Bishop Hugh cast the horsemen assembled there both as ‘knights of Christ’, sworn upon the relics of saints to serve as shock troops of the heavenly, and as the agents of an ambitious programme to restore the rule of law. Where the harm, after all, in hedging a bet? Perhaps the world would end; perhaps it would not. Either way, the duty of the Church to labour in the cause of peace was hardly lessened.

Not that mixed motives were confined to abbots or bishops. The knights also had calculations to make. The pledges that they were obliged to give at Verdun were indisputably stern ones. All their favourite pastimes appeared to have been proscribed. No longer were they to amuse themselves by assaulting the defenceless; by rounding up livestock; by attacking churches; by setting fire to harvests and barns. Yet forbearance might bring its own rewards – and not in heaven alone. Upstarts as many of the horsemen were, they knew that it was no small matter to be blessed in public by a bishop. Knighthood, once it had been sanctified by oaths sworn upon holy relics, could hardly be dismissed as