Increasingly, in the depths of the Frankish countryside, there was no aspect of existence that Christian teaching did not touch. Whether drawing up a charter, or tending a sick cow, or advising on where best to dig a well, rare was the priest who did not serve his flock as the ultimate fount of knowledge. The rhythms of the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed, repeated daily across the Frankish empire and beyond, in the kingdoms of Britain, and Ireland, and Spain, spoke of a Christian people becoming ever more Christian. The turning of the year, the tilling, the sowing, the reaping, and the passage of human life, from birth to death – all now lay in the charge of Christ. As generation succeeded generation, so the teachings of priests to labourers in the fields, and to expectant mothers, and to old men and women on their deathbeds, and to children mouthing their first prayers, came to seem ever more set on foundations that transcended time. Christian order could proclaim itself eternal, and be believed.
Earthly order, meanwhile, was like a rainbow, ‘which adorns the vault of heaven with dazzling colours, and then quickly disappears’. So wrote Sedulius Scottus, an Irish teacher who, some time in the 840s, arrived at the Frankish court. The age was darkening. Charlemagne’s empire, divided among his heirs, had become a thing of shreds and patches. Meanwhile, the borders of the Latin world were everywhere being made to bleed. Saracen pirates, who had long been pillaging the Italian coastline of its riches and seizing human livestock for the slave-markets of Africa, in 846 sailed up the Tiber and sacked St Peter’s itself. In Britain and Ireland, entire kingdoms were overthrown by armies of robbers, wicingas, from across the northern sea: Vikings. In the skies, phantom armies were to be seen clashing amid the clouds, their ranks formed of plumes of fire. ‘Now the earthly kingdom, because it is transitory and fleeting, never reveals the truth, but only some slight semblance of the truth and of the eternal kingdom.’ Sedulius Scottus, writing to Charlemagne’s great-grandson, did not mince his words. ‘Only that kingdom is real which endures forever.’19
Time, then, would be the decisive test of just how firmly the foundations of Christian order had been laid.
Turning Back the Tide
The crisis had long been building. Year after year warbands of pagans had been coming, crossing from the steppes of the Carpathian Basin into Swabia and Bavaria, horsemen possessed of terrifying speed, and the nightmarish ability to fire arrows from the saddle. ‘Of disgusting aspect, with deep-set eyes and short stature’,20 they were darkly rumoured to feed on human blood. They certainly had a talent for battening onto the possessions of Christians. Wherever they went, they left behind them a trail of smoking churches and blackened fields. Various policies had been attempted to stem their onslaughts: carrots, in the form of financial subsidies, and sticks, in the form of strengthened border controls. Nothing seemed to work. Now, for the authorities in eastern Francia, the moment of truth was drawing near. The choice they faced was a stark one: either to secure a definitive solution to the crisis, or else to lose control of their borders altogether.
The storm finally broke in the summer of 955. ‘A multitude of Hungarians, such as no living person can remember having seen in any one region before, invaded the realm of the Bavarians which they devastated and occupied simultaneously from the Danube to the dark forest on the rim of the mountains.’21 It was not only the scale of the invasion force that chilled Christian onlookers, but the evident scope of its preparations. Previously, when the Hungarians had come sweeping out of their steppe-lands, they had done so exclusively on horseback, setting a premium on speed, the better to strip a landscape bare, and then to retreat back to the Danube before the more heavily armoured German cavalry could corner them. Plunder, not territorial acquisitions, had been their goal. Now, though, it seemed that they had a different strategy. Crossing into Bavarian territory, their horsemen rode at a measured pace. Alongside them marched huge columns of infantry. Siege engines creaked and rumbled in their train. This time, the Hungarians had come to conquer.
Early in August, they arrived before the walls of Augsburg. The city, rich and strategically vital though it was, stood perilously exposed. In the hour of its darkest peril, it was Ulrich, the city’s aged and formidably learned bishop, who took command of its defence. While men laboured to shore up the walls, and women walked in procession, raising fearful prayers, the old scholar toured the battlements, inspiring the garrison to trust in Christ. Yet so overwhelming were the forces besieging the city, and so menacing their preparations, that it seemed to many that Augsburg was bound to fall. On 8 August, as the siege engines crawled towards the fortifications, and infantry were driven forwards under the lash, a gateway above the river Lech was breached. Ulrich, ‘wearing only his vestments, protected by neither shield, nor chain mail, nor helmet’,22 rode out to block the Hungarians’ path. Miraculously, despite the hissing of arrows all around him, and the thudding of stones, he succeeded in holding the attackers at bay. The open gate was secured. The Hungarians did not enter the city.
And already, relief was on its way. Otto, a king crowned in the very throne-room of Charlemagne, famed for his piety, his martial valour and the quite spectacular hairiness of his chest, had been brought the news of the invasion in the marches of Saxony. Furiously he rode southwards to confront it. With him he brought three thousand heavily armoured horsemen and the single most precious treasure in his entire realm: the very spear that had pierced the side of Christ. These advantages, in the terrible battle that followed, would gain the relief force a stunning victory against the odds. A great surging cavalry charge crushed the Hungarians; the Christian cavalry, pursuing their foes across the floodplain of the Lech, then hacked and speared them down; of the mighty force that had laid siege to Augsburg almost nothing was left. The Hungarians would later claim that only seven had escaped the slaughter. Such was the glory of it that the exultant victors, standing on the battlefield amid the tangle of corpses and banners, could hail their triumphant king as ‘emperor’. Sure enough, within seven years, Otto was being crowned by the pope in Rome.
A portentous moment. Long before, a bare couple of decades after Charlemagne’s death in 814, a Saxon poet, writing in praise of the god brought by the Franks to his people, had contrasted ‘the bright, infinitely beautiful light’ of Christ with the waxing and waning of mortals. ‘Here in this world, in Middle Earth, they come and go, the old dying and the young succeeding, until they too grow old, and are borne away by fate.’23 The coronation of Otto in the ancient capital of the world bore potent witness to just how unpredictable were the affairs of men. The throne of empire had stood vacant for over half a century. The last descendant of Charlemagne to occupy it had been deposed, blinded and imprisoned back in 905. The Regnum Francorum, the ‘Kingdom of the Franks’, had fractured into a number of realms. Of these, the two largest were on the western and eastern flanks of the one-time Frankish empire: kingdoms that in time would come to be known as France and Germany. The dynasty to which Otto belonged, and which had been elected to the rule of eastern Francia in 919, had no link to Charlemagne’s. Indeed, it was not even Frankish. Otto the Great, the heir of Constantine, the shield of the West, the wielder of the Holy Spear, was sprung from the very people who, less than two centuries before, had been so obdurate in their defiance of Christian arms: the Saxons.