The Forge of Christendom

Everybody Wants to Rule the WorldIn Constantinople, however, they had their doubts. There, like autumn leaves borne on the chill winds of the Bosporus, anxieties swirled and gusted through the streets of the great city. Innumerable proofs of a looming convulsion in human affairs had begun to afflict the venerable empire. Earthquakes and thunderbolts, torrential rains and fearsome signs lighting up the sky; all, to those who tracked them, appeared to foretell “that the expected Second Coming of the Saviour and God is near, at the very gates.”²¹More unsettling than any of these wonders, however, were reports of what in East Francia had prompted only relief and rejoicing: the rout of pagan armies. For so long had the citizens of Constantinople been habituated to defeat, and to the dull slog of staving off their empire’s total ruin, that they had quite forgotten their ancient habits of victory. The reign of their city’s founder, who had been the master of Christendom in fact as well as name, now seemed incalculably remote from them. They had come to regard the monuments of Constantine and his successors, all the haughty statues and triumphal arches that still adorned the New Rome, as the repositories of eerie portents, profoundly alien to themselves. In the weathered frieze work of such trophies, in the scenes of battle, and fettered captives, and emperors riding in glory, they identified messages bequeathed to them by ancient necromancers: prophecies set in stone, foretelling how the world would end.²² Now, with prisoners and treasures once again being paraded through Constantinople, “in so great a quantity as to resemble an abundantly flowing river,”²³ the gawping citizens felt a sense of dread as well as pride. Surely, with the frontiers of their empire everywhere expanding, the days of the fabled last Roman emperor, who was destined to rule the whole world, were near at hand? Learned scholars, performing abstruse calculations, confirmed that his coming was indeed only decades away.²⁴ And after him, and his death upon Golgotha, the reign of Antichrist.Small wonder, then, that the citizens of Constantinople should have regarded with some ambivalence a programme of imperial expansion that threatened such a climax. Nor did it help that they were being bled white to fund it. The larger the army, and the lengthier the campaigning on distant frontiers, the higher their taxes. It was no coincidence that the most proficient of their warrior emperors, the aptly named Nicephorus, or “Victory Bearer,” should also have been the most widely hated. A battle-hardened ascetic from the empire’s eastern front, capable of drilling a pike through the front of an armoured enemy and out the other side, and with the appearance, so it was reported,²⁵ of a wildly bristling pig, he had paraded a hair-shirted distaste for the sensibilities of the metropolis. The same man who, on the frontiers of the empire, had busied himself with the capture of “more than a hundred towns and fortresses,”²⁶ had also, back in Constantinople, transformed his palace into an army camp, throwing up imposing battlements to screen himself from his subjects, and hunkering down behind them. A fruitless precaution, however – for his enemies had lurked everywhere.In 969, his own nephew, an ambitious young officer by the name of John Tzimiskes, had put himself at the head of a plot to usurp the throne. Shortly before Christmas, he and an assassination squad had rowed across the Bosphorus to where the walls of the palace met the sea. There, dangling from an upper balcony, they had found a basket, lowered in anticipation of their arrival. Men would later say that it was the empress herself, enraptured by Tzimiskes’s inexhaustible aptitude for sexual gymnastics, who had betrayed her husband with this fatal act of treachery; for she was known to have been as vicious as she was insatiable. Whatever the truth of the rumour, however, it is certain that Tzimiskes and his accomplices, stealing into the emperor’s private chapel, had there found their victim wrapped in a bearskin, snoring gently on the floor. A hail of knives had done their work. Nicephorus’s head, severed to provide a token of Tzimiskes’s accession, had been brandished from a palace window. The people of Constantinople, revelling in the excitement of regime change, had cheered the murderers, and the dispatch of the greatest conqueror to have graced their empire’s throne for three long centuries and more.In the West too, at the Saxon court, news of the coup had been greeted with delight. No surprise, perhaps, that Otto and Nicephorus, both of them peerless warriors, both of them claimants to the title of emperor, should have regarded the pretensions of the other with resentment. In 968, hostilities between Christendom’s two greatest monarchs had come to a head: Otto, attempting to annex southern Italy, had invaded the territories there still ruled from Constantinople; shortly afterwards, finding his campaign bogged down, and resolved to redeem the situation through a display of quite breathtaking nerve, he had sent an ambassador to the imperial capital and demanded a princess for his younger son and namesake, Prince Otto. This was a gambit that Nicephorus, unsurprisingly, had dismissed with furious snorts of scorn; but Tzimiskes, a well-honed athlete much given to vaulting over horses, had shown himself more willing to take a leap into the dark. The youthful Otto may have been barbarian – yet he was not a wholly worthless catch. Liudolf, the rebellious crown prince, had died back in 957 – leaving Otto as his father’s only heir. Whoever married him, so Tzimiskes had calculated, was likely to end up Empress of the West. A tempting prospect – even by the standards of Constantinople. So it was that in 972 a young girl of perhaps twelve or thirteen, adorned in the heavy robes of an authentic Byzantine princess, weighed down with gold and precious stones, and accompanied by an intimidating train of flunkeys, treasure chests and changes of wardrobe, had been dispatched to Rome. Her name was Theophanu; and both the elder and the younger Otto had been dazzled by the show of her arrival. The marriage contract, inscribed on parchment painted to look like purple silk, had licensed the most splendid wedding in Saxon history. St. Peter’s had provided the venue; the Pope himself had officiated; the very union of East and West had seemed achieved as the squat and ginger-haired groom was joined to his willowy bride.Only in the complaints of a few curmudgeons, muttered behind the emperor’s back, had the awkward truth been whispered: Theophanu was not, as everyone at the Saxon court had initially been led to believe, Tzimiskes’s daughter at all, but his niece. Some had even suggested that she be returned to Constantinople as damaged goods. Otto I had refused. It had not taken him long to appreciate the pearl he had obtained in his new daughter-in-law. By the time of his death, barely a year after his son’s wedding, Theophanu was already casting the spell of her star quality over East Francia. Indeed, so protean were her abilities that the Saxons could not even agree as to what they were. Some praised their empress for her modesty, “which is, of course, a rare thing in a Greek”;

²⁷ others for the very opposite, an eloquence which they felt might easily shade into “insolent prattling.”²⁸ All, however, were agreed on her talent for forging the kind of political friendships that were so essential in the Reich, fractured as it was, and fractious too. On her own, Theophanu could hardly hope to mitigate the more turbid characteristics of her husband’s court, and yet her very presence at the side of Otto II, elegant, silken and bejewelled, served as a constant reminder of a very different style of monarchy: a touch, in the heart of Saxony, of the ineffable glamour of the New Rome.For Theophanu herself, the experience of life in the West, where displays of riotous merriment were held to impair the kingly dignity not a jot, would certainly have provided a most striking contrast with the decorousness she had left behind. The court of the Basileus, its conceit burnished by its antiquity, persisted in its sublime ambition to hold a mirror up to heaven. The emperor himself, elevated and aloof, presided over his table as the image of Christ; the empress by his side as the Virgin Mary; even the eunuchs, sexless go-betweens, flitted around in the manner of angels. Back in the West, where one of the distinctive marks of royal table manners was held to be the ferocious cracking open of animal bones for their marrow, such role playing would have been regarded as so stiff and chill as to be grotesque; and yet Otto II, under Theophanu’s influence, showed himself not immune to its appeal. So it was, for instance, in the years following his accession, that he and his wife paraded their devotion to the Virgin with a quite exceptional show of piety – even as the Virgin herself, not previously famed in the West for having dripped with priceless jewellery, began to be portrayed across the Reich in the manner of a Byzantine empress. The glory of this, even as it dignified Theophanu, naturally redounded upon Otto as well – and hinted at the aspirations that were starting to gnaw at him.For less than a decade into his reign, and East Francia was already coming to seem altogether too cabined a stage for his dreams. Whether it was the whisperings of his empress that had seduced him or the impetuosity of his own desires, Otto, bold and wilful, appeared no longer content with the sway of his native land. In the winter of 980, he and Theophanu left Saxony for Italy. By the spring, they were in Rome. Here, in the months that followed, Otto drew up plans to subdue the whole peninsula. A primordial fantasy, one that had haunted many generations of princes, was once again stirring from its troubled sleep. The dream of an empire without limits, of a universal dominion – of a Rome reborn.Yet it remained the nature of this phantasm to mock all who sought to embrace it. Beyond the southernmost limit of Otto’s Italian kingdom, as tantalising as any mirage, there stretched regions that in ancient times had been both the playground and the breadbasket of the Caesars. Ruins from this fabulous past – palaces and temples, theatres and baths – still dominated the landscape, their hulking stonework defying the passage of the centuries, whether looming up from the curve of the Bay of Naples or frowning down upon the winding, inland roads. All their massy grandeur, however, served only to emphasise their abandonment – and the desolation of the badlands in which they now stood. It was barely a decade previously, after all, that southern Italy had been a war zone, fought over by the rival empires of East and West; and now, in the summer of 981, Otto II was minded to make it so again. The bonds of alliance woven by his marriage to Theophanu had already snapped: for in Constantinople John Tzimiskes was dead – poisoned by a eunuch, it was claimed – and Theophanu herself, implacably hostile to the dynasty that had replaced her uncle’s, clearly believed the rumour true. In September, when the Saxon emperor, riding at the head of a great force of iron-sheathed loricati, advanced southwards out of Rome, his queen was by his side. That it was Otto’s intention to lay claim to the entire inheritance of the ancient empire, in defiance of the new regime in Constantinople, Theophanu knew and surely approved. Empress of the West, perhaps she dared to imagine herself raised to rule the East as well.Not that the new regime in Constantinople was the only enemy facing her husband in his ambition to lay claim to Italy – let alone the world beyond. As Otto and his horsemen clattered southwards that autumn, they knew that there lurked ahead of them a danger far deadlier and more immediate than the garrisons of the New Rome. Marks of it were everywhere. By the roadside, ancient towns stood abandoned and crumbling, while in the distance new settlements clung nervously to hilltops, hunched against the horizon, and ringed about by walls. Alongside the coast, and especially the banks of estuaries, the desolation grew even more menacing. There, as the Saxons watered their horses, they found no vineyards, or villages, or fields, but only desolation – and over it all a stillness like that of a rifled grave. Terror, in southern Italy, came surest by the sea.