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

with the emperor’s coronation robes, his sceptre and his crown, the presence within the abbey walls of this spectacular array of imperial regalia suggested just how far the monastery’s horizons were widening. It certainly required no great penetration to fathom the prophecy encoded within the emperor’s gift, just as the apple was divided into four quarters, so too, according to the learned, was the globe; and just as a cross surmounted the apple, so had it been foretold that the Cross of Christ was to redeem all the world. Peoples everywhere would be brought to follow it.

None, no matter how savage or remote, was to be left behind. Odilo, taking possession of the orb, was so delighted by its message that he ordered it put on display whenever a major festival was celebrated: a reassurance, etched in gold and jewels, that the conversion of the heathen was at hand.

Cluny might have been far removed from the wastelands of paganism, yet such were the reservoirs of spiritual power that it had generated, and such the efficacy of all the psalms and anthems sung within its walls, that even those demons skulking beyond the frontiers of Christendom, haunting the foul sump of their own darkness, had been dazzled by the blaze of its holiness. This, at any rate, was what Henry himself was evidently banking on. As a Roman emperor, stationed at the very edge of time, he naturally needed all the supernatural assistance that he could obtain. Like his predecessor, he had no doubt that he had been charged directly by God with the bringing of barbarians to Christ. So it was that he had married his own sister to Stephen, the King of the Hungarians. So it was too that he had lavished endowments upon the Church, with the stated goal of’destroying the paganism of the Slavs’. Nevertheless, the trampling down of demons was not Henry’s only responsibility. As a Caesar, it was his duty as well to keep the Roman Empire together. Sometimes, regrettably, this might require him to dirty his hands. One problem, festering beyond the eastern frontiers of the Reich, was a particular irritant. Boleslav, the same Duke of Poland who had been awarded the title of ‘friend of the Roman people’ by Otto III, had recently begun to prove himself a good deal less than amiable. Henry, resolved to slap down the high-aiming Pole, had been obliged to scout around for allies. In due course, and to the horror of Christians everywhere, he had settled upon the most monstrous choice imaginable.

In 1003, on Easter Day, the holiest festival of the year, Christendom’s greatest king had signed a formal treaty of friendship with the Wends: a people who still unashamedly worshipped idols, offered up human sacrifices, and decided policy by putting questions to a horse. Even with the backing of his new allies, however, Henry had been unable to land a killer blow on Boleslav. The hostilities had continued to smoulder. In 1015, one year after Henry’s coronation in Rome, they burst into flames again. As the newly anointed emperor rode to war against the Duke of Christian Poland, the Holy Lance borne ahead of him, and anthems sounding in his ears, so were the Wends, marching beneath the banners of their goddess, still massed in all their unregenerate paganism at his side.

A scandal, certainly. And yet, for all Henry’s undoubted equivocations, the dream of St Adalbert – that the wilds of the heathen East might be tamed and transformed into a garden of the City of God – still endured. Even in lands far removed from the front line of the Reich, Christians were moved and haunted by its implications. ‘The gospel must be proclaimed throughout the whole world,’ demanded one English bishop in urgent tones, ‘and it must be done before the world’s end. So books tell us – and afterward the end will be as soon as God wishes.’ Missionaries, risking death no less boldly than Adalbert himself had done, duly continued to follow in the martyr’s footsteps, tramping over dusty plains, through dripping forests, along the banks of ice-locked rivers. The most brilliant of them all, a Saxon monk by the name of Bruno, even managed to end up murdered precisely as his master had done, beheaded beside a lake by a war band of angry Prussians; but only after he had spent years preaching to other tribes, from the Balkans to the Baltic, no less’ menacing than his killers. Indeed, following several months of sermons, he had even succeeded in converting thirty Pechenegs: nomads who haunted the steppes above the Black Sea, and who were notoriously the most savage people in the world.

Certainly, to Bruno’s countrymen, secure behind the ramparts of the Reich, the names of the various barbarians whom he had laboured to win for Christ — the Pechenegs and Prussians, the Lithuanians and Swedes — appeared suggestive of a truly abhorrent savagery. Sinister temples ‘entirely decked out in gold’; altars splashed with blood; groves hung with the rotting corpses of humans, horses and dogs: such were the nightmare visions that haunted the Saxons, whenever they sought to imagine what horrors might be lurking on the margins of the world. Yet the exploits of men such as Bruno suggested that the optimism of St Adalbert remained well founded: that there was nowhere so steeped in darkness that it might not be penetrated by the light of Christ, nor any soul so fierce that it might not ultimately be won for Christendom.

Indeed, there were some Saxons who went so far as to ponder whether the heathen, once safely converted, might not actually have some lessons to pass on to them in turn. The savagery that came naturally to barbarians did certainly appear to lend itself to ‘the strict enforcement of the law of God’. So reflected Thietmar, a friend of Bruno from childhood, and bishop of that same frontier town of Merseburg which Henry the Fowler, almost a century before, had garrisoned