The marble coronation throne at Aachen cathedral. Dating back to the time of Charlemagne, it was where Otto I, in 936, sat to be crowned. “Drive away the enemies of Christ,” he was solemnly instructed by the officiating archbishop. “Establish an enduring peace for Christians everywhere.” Words that Otto would never forget. (Author photo)
In 962, Otto I travelled to Rome for a second coronation: this time as emperor. Once again, after a vacancy of almost sixty years, the throne of the Roman Empire in the West had an occupant. From that moment on, whenever Otto’s documents needed to be stamped, it would be done with an authentically imperial seal.
Otto II and Theophanu: Saxon Caesar and Byzantine princess. Their marriage in St. Peter’s was the most glamorous that Rome had staged for many centuries. As sophisticated as she was imperious, Theophanu would illumine her husband’s reign with a rare star quality. (Author photo)
Among the Byzantines, distaste for the spilling of blood on battlefields was paralleled by a no less fervent conviction that Constantinople should rule the world. Despite widespread unease back in the capital, a succession of tenth-century emperors threw themselves with gusto into the task of pushing back the imperial frontiers. As the Millennium approached, the empire of the New Rome appeared more formidable than it had done for centuries. (Vatican Museum)
With its Roman brickwork, its Visigothic arches, and its pillars plundered from a demolished cathedral, the Great Mosque of Córdoba was no less triumphantly Islamic for its wholesale cannibalisation of infidel traditions. As Mohammed himself had put it: “God desires that if you do something you perfect it.” (Commons.wikimedia.org)
Otto III: the robes of a Caesar, the posture of Christ in heaven. Four women, representing Rome, France, Germany, and the lands of the Slavs, bring the Emperor gifts, while his attendants watch on, each with the hint of a smile. But no smile lightens the expression of Otto. Enthroned in majesty he may be, yet he has the look of a man burdened by the fearful conviction that he is ruling at the end of time. (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek/SuperStock)
Astounding as Gerbert’s achievements appeared to his contemporaries, they appeared something altogether more sinister to subsequent generations. Surely, it was presumed, only the blackest magic could have brought a peasant to sit on Saint Peter’s throne? Here, in a fifteenth century illustration, Gerbert sports a sinister 5 o’clock shadow while beaming complacently at the Devil. (Wikipedia)
There was no one in the France of the Millennium more proficient in the revolutionary new art of castle building than Fulk Nerra, “the Black,” Count of Anjou. His princedom was studded with fortifications—with some, like this keep at Loches, so cutting-edge as to be constructed entirely out of stone. By 1035, it reached thirty-six metres high. (Author photo)
If forests were places to be feared as the haunts of wolves and demons, then so also could they provide peasants with ready storehouses: ones that did not depend on the ploughing and harvesting of fields. Here, in an English work calendar from the early eleventh century, hogs are shown sniffing the September air for the scent of acorns. (British Library)
Of all a peasant’s possessions, the most precious were his oxen. Keep them, and he would preserve his freedom. Lose them, and he was almost guaranteed to lose his freedom as well. (British Library)
If castles were one mark of the gathering tide of social upheaval that afflicted many regions in France in the approach to the Millennium, then so too were the gangs of mail-clad thugs employed to garrison them. Cnichts, they were called in English, or “knights”: a novel and menacing order.
Indeed, without dhimmi taxes, it might prove hard to pay for an army at all. This was why, in a seeming paradox, it was those states with the largest number of Christians that could most readily afford jihad. In Sicily, for instance, which had finally been secured for Islam only in 902, the emirs regarded their vast population of infidel subjects with a cagey ambivalence. Devout Muslims that they were, and naturally mistrustful of those who did not share their faith, they were regular sponsors of new mosques and mass circumcisions across the Christian heartlands; but they also had to reckon with the need to husband their tax base. By the time of the expedition against Otto II, the Muslim population of Sicily was nudging perhaps a third of the island’s total, and it appeared that the perfect balance of manpower and revenue had been attained. Bureaucracy had fused with banditry to forge a state that was lethally primed for war. The corpses left on the beach by Cotrone had borne sufficient witness to that.Yet the notion that tax collectors might present quite as grave a threat to Christendom as corsairs was profoundly alien to the Saxons. Otto, master of a far-spreading dominion though he was, had no great reservoir of bureaucrats on which to call, no elaborate system for keeping track of his subjects, not even a capital. Indeed, to those Muslim leaders who deigned so much as to note its existence, the Reich appeared barely to qualify as a functioning state at all. One of them, addressing an envoy sent to his court by Otto I, had been open in his scorn. “Why does your king not concentrate power in his own hands?” the ambassador had been asked in withering tones. “Why does he allow his subjects to have such a share of it? He doles out the various regions of his empire among them, expecting in that way to win their loyalty and submission, but he is deluding himself. For all he fosters is rebellion and pride!”53Here had spoken a man whose own sense of what was due to him had never needed the slightest boosting. Abd al-Rahman bin Mohammed bin Abd Allah, not content with the rank of emir that he had inherited from his grandfather, had even laid claim to that very ultimate in honorifics, the title of Caliph. No less than his peers in Baghdad and Egypt, Abd al-Rahman had made sure to justify his pretensions to global dominion with a truly spectacular display of wealth and power. Otto’s ambassador, an abbot from the Rhineland by the name of John, had certainly never seen anything to compare. The Caliph’s palace, he reported years later in still breathless tones, stretched for miles. Everywhere he had looked, there were soldiers standing to menacing attention, or riding on horseback, staging intimidating manoeuvres, “filling our party with consternation, such was their arrogance and swagger.” Even the dustiest gatehouse had been adorned “with carpets and precious fabrics.”54It was all in startling contrast with the décor of a monastery; but even those visitors who were not Frankish abbots might well be stupefied. Abd al-Rahman had regarded it as below his dignity to deal in anything but the most extravagant superlatives. Twelve thousand loaves of bread, it was claimed, were required to feed his fish alone. Indoors, away from the draped courtyards, the flower-scented lawns and the moated zoo, silks blended with stucco, precious metals with patterned tiles. At the very heart of the fabulous complex, in the great reception hall, there stood a pool of mercury, capable, when stirred, of sending shivers of reflected sunlight dancing across the marble walls; while above it, suspended from the gold and silver roof, there hung a giant pearl.All this splendour, however, had provided merely the setting for the palace’s truest jewel. Alone on a cushion-laden dais, “like a god accessible to none or very few,”55 there had reclined the Caliph, Abd al-Rahman himself. Dumpy he may have been, and prone to melancholy, confiding to his diary that in all the forty-nine years of his reign, he had known only fourteen days of happiness – and yet he and his family, the Umayyads, provided a living link to Islam’s most heroic age. Like the Fatimids, they could trace their bloodline back to the time of the Prophet. Unlike the Fatimids, they could also lay claim to an even more exclusive status: that of Islam’s first-ever dynasty of caliphs. From their capital of Damascus, in Syria, they had witnessed Muslim armies besiege Constantinople, cross the Indus and raid deep into Francia. For almost a century, from 661 to 750, they had been the most powerful family on earth. Abd al-Rahman, in short, had pedigree.Yet though the Umayyads’ blood undoubtedly was blue, so also, by the tenth century, were their eyes. Their skin was pale; Abd al-Rahman himself, concerned to appear properly a son of the desert, had been obliged to dye his beard black. Much had befallen the Umayyads over the previous two centuries. Toppled from power in 750 by the dynasty that would subsequently transfer the capital of the Caliphate to Baghdad, most had been systematically eliminated, often amid grotesque brutalities: the tongue of the ruling Caliph, for instance, had been hacked out and fed to a cat. Indeed, of all the Umayyad princes, only one had succeeded in escaping the bloodbath – and he had done so by fleeing to the far ends of the earth. Never again would the Umayyads return to their beloved capital.Over the centuries, to be sure, they had done their best to assuage their abiding sense of homesickness. Abd al-Rahman’s entire palace, so commanding, so sumptuous, so exquisite, appeared to visitors from Damascus like a fantasy conjured up from their city’s golden age. Raised as it had been upon tiers carved out of the gently sloping foothill of a mountain, it was possible to look out from one of its many levels and see, in the valley below, a landscape that likewise appeared transplanted from the Umayyads’ much-missed homeland: a vision of almond blossom, date palms and pomegranate trees. Travel beyond the palace and scenes even more evocative of Syria might be found, plains adorned with glittering fretworks of irrigation, fed by the groaning of immense hydraulic wheels, and nourishing fields of fantastical plants: figs and oranges, rice and sugar cane. Yet these were not Syrian fields. Damascus was more than two thousand miles away. Abd al-Rahman’s palace stood not in the Near East but in that abode of exile that was the furthest west, on the very edge of the world – in Spain.