The Forge of Christendom

⁶³Meanwhile, in what had once been the very wellspring of pagan wisdom, the lands of the Romans, or Rum, all appeared decay and ignorance. In Constantinople, to be sure, there were still certain texts from antiquity preserved, the writings of ancient philosophers and savants; and some of these, on occasion, might even be dusted down and sent to the various capitals of the Caliphate as gifts. Yet the Rum, to Muslim eyes, appeared unworthy of their peerless heritage. Deep in the countryside beyond Constantinople, one ambassador reported, there stood a temple where the ancient pagans were said to have worshipped the stars, piled so high with manuscripts that it would have taken a thousand camels to carry them away; and all the manuscripts were crumbling into dust. Compared with the rest of Christendom, however, Constantinople appeared a veritable treasure house of learning. No books could be expected of the Saxon king, for instance. Abd al-Rahman, wishing to congratulate Otto I on his victory at the Lech, had sent him, not a rare manuscript, but gifts more calculated to impress a barbarian: “lions and camels, ostriches and apes.”⁶⁴ Indeed, in the whole of western Christendom there were few libraries more than a thousandth of the size of the Caliph’s in Córdoba. So rare were books that the going rate for one on the black market might be a warhorse. Al-Hakam, had this been brought to his attention, would hardly have been surprised. Rather, it would have confirmed him in all his certitudes: that God had turned His back on the Christians; and that the House of Islam would inherit the world for sure. Without learning, after all, what hope for order – and without order, what hope for any empire?Such questions haunted many in Christendom itself. Just as Queen Gerberga, in her desperation to find some pattern in the anarchy of the times, had looked to a famous scholar for answers, so were there famous scholars, oppressed by similar anxieties, who had turned to the books of pagans. The most celebrated of them all was a peasant, as upwardly mobile as he was precocious, by the name of Gerbert; and it was whispered by his detractors that he had actually studied in Córdoba. Whether indeed he had visited the Saracens in their very lair, it was certain that he was familiar with their learning; for Gerbert, despite being a native of the town of Aurillac, in the remotest Auvergne, had completed his education in a monastery in Spain. Here, on the outermost frontier of Christendom, he had mastered branches of knowledge so exotic that later generations would brand him a necromancer: from the strange Indian numerals used by the Saracens to the operation of an abacus. Yet Gerbert was no sorcerer. His passion – one which “boiled within him”⁶⁵ – was for the tracing of God’s order amid seeming chaos. So it was, as a teacher in Reims, that he had constructed out of delicate bronze and iron wires a series of fantastical instruments, designed to demonstrate to his pupils the orderly circling of the planets about the earth, and the turning of the universe on its poles. So it was too, in Rome, amid all the festivities for Otto’s wedding to Theophanu, that Gerbert had distinguished, as though they formed their own “ingenious mechanism,”⁶⁶ the filigrees spun by God to encircle and order time itself. Once there had been a Christian empire that embraced all the world, and brought to humanity the inestimable fruits of order and peace; and so there would be again. This conviction was hardly original to Gerbert; but rarely had it been held by a man of such erudition and brilliance. Born a peasant he may have been; but Gerbert’s genius had served to win him the attention of emperors and kings. Back in 971, in Rome, he had tutored the young Otto II. A decade later, shortly before Otto left on his disastrous invasion of southern Italy, Gerbert had appeared before the imperial court again, this time in a formal debate with the Reich’s most formidable scholar, the head of the cathedral school in Magdeburg – and wiped the floor with him. In 983, with Otto licking his wounds back in Rome, Gerbert was formally appointed to the imperial service. At such a time of crisis for the Reich, the conviction of Christendom’s most famous scholar that a Roman Empire might still be restored was an asset not lightly to be overlooked.Further calamities, however, would soon enough test even Gerbert’s optimism to the limit. In an empire laid claim to by a single ruler, an earthquake in southern Italy might reverberate as far as the forests of the distant North; and sure enough, in the summer of 983, the Wends rose suddenly in revolt, burning the cathedrals raised over their lands by their occupiers, pursuing the Saxons “as though they were deer,”⁶⁷ and ravaging as far as Hamburg. Although Magdeburg itself stood firm amid the firestorm, and the line of the Elbe was eventually stabilised, all that lay beyond it, won with such effort by Otto’s father, was permanently lost. Otto himself, brought the news in Rome, was obliged to abandon his plans for further campaigns against the Saracens, and prepare wearily to head back north: a prospect rendered all the more agonising by the swollen state of his haemorrhoids. Before he could so much as mount his saddle, however, he fell ill with violent diarrhoea; and on 7 December Otto II Augustus, “Emperor of the Romans,” died.Otto’s sudden end left the Reich rudderless. His son and heir, the third Otto in succession, was only three years old. Taken to Aachen, the little boy was consecrated king, just as Charlemagne had been crowned emperor, on Christmas Day, but was then almost immediately abducted. The kidnapper, proving himself very much a chip off the old block, was none other than the son and namesake of Henry, Duke of Bavaria, whose endless machinations had caused so much trouble for Otto I. The second Henry, whose nickname of “the Quarreller” was a fitting measure of the man, had already proved himself inveterately rebellious – but now, sniffing opportunity as a wolf scents blood, he surpassed himself. In 984, on Easter Day, he formally laid claim to the throne. The nobility, torn between their loyalty to Otto III and their dread of being ruled by a child, havered. It appeared that the Reich itself was on the verge of civil war.“Ruined, ruined,” Gerbert wailed. “What hope can there possibly be?”⁶⁸ But he did not despair for long. As Theophanu, having buried her husband in St. Peter’s, hurried northwards to beard the usurper in East Francia, Gerbert was already hard at work, writing to the princes and bishops of the Reich, stiffening them in their loyalty to their rightful king. So effective was his campaign that by the time Theophanu crossed the Alps, in May, Henry the Quarreller found that all his supporters had melted away. A month later, sulkily, he surrendered the infant Otto to his mother, and retired in high dudgeon to Bavaria.Theophanu, “that ever august empress, always to be loved, always to be cherished,”⁶⁹ was appointed regent on behalf of her son. In this role, she proved formidably effective. “Preserving her son’s rulership with a manly watchfulness, she was always benevolent to the just, but terrified and conquered rebels.”⁷⁰ Three years after the crisis of 984, she even obliged a fuming Henry, along with three other German dukes, to serve as waiters at Otto’s table, in full view of the Reich’s nobility, who had all gathered at court for the feast of Easter. Although she died in 991, while her son was still legally a minor, Theophanu had successfully secured the empire for Otto III. In September 994, he was presented with the arms of a warrior, and officially came of age.⁷¹ One year later, and he was leading his men in that traditional rite of passage for a Saxon king, a campaign against the Wends. By 996, the year of his sixteenth birthday, all that remained was to be crowned emperor – and so it was, that very spring, that Otto III announced his departure for Rome.And all this Gerbert had followed with the keenest interest. Although Theophanu, with the ingratitude that was an empress’s proper prerogative, had failed to reward his services with commensurate patronage, the great scholar had not stinted in his loyalty to her or to her son. Mathematician, astronomer and historian, Gerbert could hardly have been oblivious to the date that was approaching. “It seems,” he had pronounced sensationally back in 991, “that Antichrist is at hand.”⁷² He knew as well – for he was a friend of Adso, and owned a copy of the famous letter to Gerberga – that the end of days would be presaged by a great convulsion in the affairs of the Roman Empire. And now, four years before the one-thousandth anniversary of the birth of Christ, a prince with the blood of both West and East in his veins, of the twin halves of the ancient empire, so long divided, to the scandal of Christians everywhere and to the profit of its foes, was travelling to Rome.Well might Gerbert have dreamed of meeting him: for he appreciated better than anyone that it was Otto’s destiny to rule in interesting times.