* The name was reserved by the native citizens of Constantinople for themselves.* Although France officially celebrated the 1500th anniversary of Clovis’s conversion in 1996, a consensus has increasingly formed among historians that 508 is a much likelier date for his baptism than 496.* The first certain use of the document by a pope occurred as late as 1054, but its origin in the events of the second half of the eighth century is almost universally accepted by scholars, with a majority agreeing that it must first have appeared in the 750s or 760s.
2
THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH…
The Thousandth-Year ReichThough Christendom was embattled, not all its frontiers were collapsing. In the marches of Saxony, along the banks of the Elbe, the broad-flowing river which served East Francia as its flank, Christian warriors stood on watchful sentinel, and dreaded no one. The Saxons, as they contemplated the heroic struggle to uphold God’s order, knew themselves in its vanguard. Beyond the Elbe to the east, in sinister groves adorned with idols and animal horns, Slav tribes, known collectively by the Saxons as the “Wends,” still worshipped demons and indulged in their “vain superstitions”;1 but westwards, the very landscape bore witness to the protecting hand of Christ. Wherever the soil was fertile, and the wilderness capable of being tamed, there the marks of His favour thrived: farms, and homesteads, and raw stone churches. Even on the Elbe itself, the border forts were prospering – and this despite the continued enthusiasm of Wendish war bands for crossing it in search of plunder.The linchpin of the defences raised against such raids was the fortress of Magdeburg: originally founded by Charlemagne as a frontier station, where the bags of merchants travelling out of Christendom could be inspected for contraband armour and weapons, it already ranked, by the early tenth century, as the capital of the eastern marches.2 Flush with the profits of trade, and a booming hinterland, it could boast churches, markets and even a “Hof” – a court for the entertainment of Saxony’s duke. Meanwhile, beyond its haughty gatehouses, and the road which led eastwards over the Elbe, the pagans “lived in such brutish poverty that what in Francia would seem an insupportable burden is counted by them almost as a plea sure.”3 As it had been back in the earliest days of the Magdeburg customs post, even a mail shirt was held a wonder by many tribes. Indeed, such was the awe with which helmets and hauberks were regarded by the Wends that armour was likeliest to adorn, not their warriors, but their gods. Deep immured in forest shrines, their idols stood, blank-eyed and menacing, “fearsomely girt in mail.”4
The Saxon Reich
To the Saxons, the folly of this demon-worship was all the more minatory for the fact that they had once shared in it themselves. A people who had learned to rejoice in the felling of trees and the raising of churches on root-cleared plains could not forget that they too, barely a century and a half before, had staged their most sacred rituals in the darkness of oaken glades. The dreadful rumours of what had been practised there still darkened the nightmares of Christian homilists. Prisoners, it was whispered, hung from the boughs of sacred trees, having been pierced through with spears: for the spear had been sacred to Woden, most far-seeing of the gods. To the initiates of this sacrifice, awful privileges had been owed: to those who harvested the blood of the still-writhing victims, and traced it over runes, the wisdom of Woden himself; and to those who consumed their beating hearts, a power over the dead. Charlemagne, storming the strongholds of this monstrous evil, had felt himself obliged to purge it thoroughly with axe and sword. Trees holy to Woden had been hacked down and the branches consigned to fire.The Saxons themselves, as obdurate in their paganism as in their reluctance to accept the Frankish king, Christ’s own anointed, as their new master, had been treated with a matching ferocity. After one particularly savage rebellion, thousands of prisoners had been beheaded in a single dispatch; the populations of entire areas forcibly relocated; death introduced as the penalty for refusing baptism, for clinging to the ancient rites, even for eating meat during Lent. Not since the age of the Caesars had atrocities been committed on quite so imperious a scale – and never before with the goal of imposing the love of Christ.There were many in Charlemagne’s train who had paled at the knowledge. To wage a war of aggression and conquest, even against heathens steeped in the most idolatrous savagery, appeared to them the very opposite of the Christian ideal. “Faith,” as Alcuin had put it anguishedly, “arises from the will, not from compulsion. You can persuade a man to believe, but you cannot force him. You can haul him to the waters of baptism, but not to faith itself.”5 Time, however, had proved this warning wrong. The Saxons, exhausted by their struggle against Charlemagne, had in due course been brought to acknowledge the full scale of their defeat. Woden had failed them. The Christ of the victorious Franks had proved Himself invincible. It could be held no shame to submit to such a god. And so the Saxons had duly submitted. Woden, toppled from his throne, had been banished from Middle Earth. On occasion, it was reported, at nightfall, he and his followers, she-wolves, carrion crows and the spirits of the dead, surrounded by black clouds, would return to intrude upon their ancient dominion, crashing through the woods, riding the icy winds; but there was nothing in such a superstition to impress the Saxon elite. Those on the margins of the retreating wilderness, peasants and pioneers, might sometimes bow their heads before the passage of the demon hunt; but never the aristocracy. They knew perfectly well what they owed to the favour of Christ. No longer wallowing as the Wends still did, in a brutish poverty, they were now the peers of anyone in Christendom – even their former conquerors. “For moulded by the Christian faith into brothers, they had become almost an identical people with the Franks.”6So much so, indeed, that by the early tenth century, and with the realm of East Francia on the brink of seeming collapse, men could even speak of the Duke of Saxony as a possible future king. Henry, head of the Liudolfing clan, fully merited such excited approbation. Since inheriting his title in 912, he had shown himself “a lord rich in wisdom, abounding in severity, and of righteous judgement.”