120 Here, of course, between Hugh and his more cynical patron, was revealed a telling divide. To Christians far removed from the peculiar multicultural circumstances of Spain, any notion of maintaining pagans in their faith, merely so that their wealth might be extorted from them more legitimately, was a monstrous one. What was their gold when compared with the potential harvest of their souls? Better by far, in Hugh’s opinion – and in Urban’s – that the flow of treasure from Spain be turned off altogether than that the great cause of cleansing, and purifying, and transforming humanity be compromised. War might be justified – but only if it were in the service of the reform of all the world.Alarmingly, however, and despite the giddy hopes that had been roused by the capture of Toledo, it was already becoming evident, a mere decade on from that great victory, that the winning of Spain for Christ was not going entirely according to plan. Urban, during his stay at Cluny, would have heard, every morning without fail, the same psalm being chanted by the monks: a request to God for the King of León to continue victorious in battle. But God, for whatever reason, seemed for the moment to have stopped listening. The fortunes of war had recently turned against Alfonso. The fractious potentates of al-Andalus, desperate to find some way of reining in his ambitions, had found themselves reduced to taking the same desperate step that already, only a few decades previously had proved so fatal to the Caliphate: inviting in the Berbers. Still, as the King of Seville put it, better to run the risk of ending up a camel-herd than looking after pigs. Sure enough, steeled by their reinforcements from Africa, the princelings of al-Andalus had been able to bring Alfonso, at last, to defeat – and then promptly found their kingdoms being swallowed up by their erstwhile allies. For Alfonso himself, the second development had been scarcely less of a setback than the first. The Berbers, as hardy, ascetic and enthusiastic for jihad as ever, were altogether more formidable opponents than those with whom he had hitherto happily been toying. Although Toledo remained securely his, and although his centre just about held, the onward advance of Christian arms towards Gibraltar had been brought to a sudden and juddering halt. Unsurprisingly, then, back in Cluny, where there was a massive church still standing half completed, the news had been greeted with some alarm.In papal circles as well. To Urban, as it had done previously to Gregory, a concern with the frontiers of Christendom, and the lands that lay beyond them, came instinctively. As how, indeed, could it not have done? Papal authority was nothing, after all, unless it were global. Such, at any rate, over the previous decades, was the presumption that Gregory and his supporters had come increasingly to take for granted. Now, in turn, the sheer scale of what they had dared – and of what they had achieved as well – had fortified Urban in a peculiarly vaunting notion: that the whole world might be his to shape. Not even all the energies he had devoted to smashing the authority of emperor and Anti-pope had served to distract him from keeping a lordly eye on broader horizons. So it was, for instance, back in 1089, that Urban had actively sought to promote colonisation within the ruins of Tarragona, a long-abandoned city just inside al-Andalus itself: for it was his hope to see erected there “a barrier and a bulwark to defend the Christian people.”121 So it was too, at the Council of Piacenza, that he had taken time out from parading Henry’s estranged queen to consult with diplomats from Constantinople. Spain, after all, was not the only front where Christian fortunes were directly menaced. Embattled Alfonso might be, but he was not half so embattled as the Basileus.True, things did not appear quite as terminal for Alexius Comnenus as they had done at the start of his reign. The young emperor, clawing the fortunes of his people back from the very brink, had recovered well from his initial defeat at the hands of Robert Guiscard. Total ruin had been averted. It helped that Guiscard himself had died on campaign back in 1085, a bare two months after Gregory VII; and it had helped that the nomadic Pechenegs, whose talent for spreading mayhem was second to none, had been brought in 1091 to a resounding defeat. Even the Turks, those most menacing adversaries of all, had lately begun to show an encouraging taste for in-fighting. Alexius, tracking developments carefully from beyond the Bosphorus, had been positively itching to capitalise on their squabbling. With Turkish settlers digging in along the length of the Aegean coast, and one warlord even established inside Nicaea, within striking distance of the Queen of Cities herself, he was painfully aware that the opportunity for staging an imperial comeback in the East might soon have passed him by for good. Yet Alexius could not afford to take any risks. The raising of an army large enough to storm Nicaea, let alone attempt the recovery of the lost provinces beyond it, would require the stripping of every last reserve from the rest of the empire. The very survival of Constantinople would then be left hanging in the balance. A second Manzikert, and everything would be lost. And so it was, looking around for reinforcements that might offer him a reasonable prospect of success, while also remaining safely expendable, that Alexius’s gaze had turned towards the West.Where Urban, brooding on the global scale of Christendom’s problems, had his own agenda. To be sure, no less than Alexius, he dreaded that Constantinople might falclass="underline" for he shared in the anguished conviction of the Basileus that the collapse of the eastern front was a mortal danger to the Christian people everywhere. Simultaneously, however, he would not have forgotten what it was that Gregory, twenty years before, had identified in the self-same crisis: the symptoms of a universal disorder, and the stirrings of Antichrist. Clearly, then, although the great labour of reforming the world had already come far, it still had a long way to go. Whether it was to be seen in the trampling down of a Christian frontier by infidel horsemen, or in the pretensions of an excommunicated Caesar, or in the sweaty fumblings of a priest with his concubine, shadow still persisted everywhere across the fallen world.Indeed, if anything, in that summer of 1095, it appeared to be thickening and threatening a truly cosmic darkness – for the universe itself had been taken sick. Back in the spring, even as delegates from the Council of Piacenza were heading homewards, bright stars, “all crowded together and dense, like hail or snowflakes,” had begun to plummet earthwards. “A short while later a fiery way appeared in the heavens; and then after another short period half the sky turned the colour of blood.”122 Meanwhile, in France, along the very roads taken by the Pope, there were marks of famine to be seen everywhere, and reports of strange visions to be heard, and prophecies of fabulous wonders. “And this,” in the opinion of many, “was because already, in every nation, the evangelical trumpet was sounding the coming of the Just Judge.”123Where better, then, amid such feverish expectations, for Urban to pause and take stock of things than in the holy abbey of Cluny? On 25 October, one week after his first sighting of Abbot Hugh’s stupefying church, the Pope formally dedicated its two great altars to the service of God. Simultaneously, in solemn and ringing tones, he confirmed the abbey in its status as a bridgehead of the celestial on earth. Not just the abbey either – for the new altars, awesomely charged with the supernatural as they were, appeared to Urban a source of light fit to radiate far beyond the bounds of the church itself. Far beyond the valley in which they stood as well, far beyond Burgundy, far beyond France. Any assemblage of brick and mortar, in short, provided that it took Cluny as its head and model, could be reckoned to share in the fearsome blaze of its purity. So, at any rate, Urban pronounced – as perhaps, with his responsibilities to the whole of Christendom, he was bound to do. For if, as the Holy Father devoutly believed, Cluny offered to those who approached it a reflection of the heavenly Jerusalem, then why should not all the beleaguered Christian people, no matter where they might be, share in at least some of its power?Yet to cast Cluny in such a role did rather beg a further question: what of the earthly Jerusalem? Abbot Hugh’s church might be gloriously qualified to serve as a light to the world, yet not even the altars of the