* The Latin term used by the chroniclers of Henry I’s reign is “imperium.” The German word – despite its unfortunate connotations – conveys a much better sense of its meaning than any alternative word in English.* Only one man had previously changed his name on being elevated to the Papacy: John II, back in 533. Following Octavian’s initiative, however, the practice became increasingly common, until, by the beginning of the eleventh century, it was the norm.* An alternative version of his death claims that John XII was murdered by the outraged husband.* Mohammed, in a celebrated hadith (The Book on Government, 4681), declared that “the gates of Paradise are under the shadows of the swords”: a sentiment profoundly shocking to Byzantine sensibilities.* Or, as Gabriel put it, “those whom thy right hand possesses out of the prisoners of war whom God has assigned to thee”: Qur’an 33.50.* The origins of the name are notoriously problematic. Some derive it from the Vandals, invaders of the Roman Empire who passed through Spain on their way to North Africa; others from Atlantis, the legendary island written about by Plato, and which was supposed to have been located in the furthest west. The uncertainty persists.
3
…Yielding Place to New
The Beginning of the Birth-pangsEight years before the one-thousandth anniversary of the Incarnation, in 992, an old man robed in black tottered up the gangplank of a ship bound for Jerusalem. Adso, who had long since stepped down from the abbacy of Montier-en-Der, was by now in his eighties, and perilously frail to be making such a voyage. The rigours of life at sea were notorious – and sure enough, no sooner had the voyage begun than the aged monk was sickening. Five days later, and he was dead. Father Adso would never tread the Holy Land.But why, at such a venerable age, had the great scholar been travelling there in the first place? “He will come to Jerusalem”: so Adso had written long previously, in his celebrated discourse on the career of Antichrist. For it was there, on the Mount of Olives, “in the place opposite to where the Lord ascended to heaven,” that the climactic battle against the Son of Perdition would be fought; “and the Lord Jesus will slay him with the breath of his mouth.”1 No mortal could know for certain when this cosmos-changing event was to take place; and Adso, in his concern to emphasise this point, had famously reassured the Queen of the Western Franks that Antichrist would not appear for so long as her husband’s family – the Carolingians, the dynasty of Charlemagne – remained in power. But times had changed. No sooner had Adso completed his letter than fearsome portents of doom had begun to overtake the royal line. In 954, Louis IV, Gerberga’s husband, had clattered out through the gates of Laon, down the hill on which the royal capital stood hunched, and galloped off into the wilds that stretched beyond. There, deep in the woods, he had caught sight of a wolf and set off in hot pursuit – but alas, the creature had proved to be a demon, and the king, thrown from his horse, had suffered crippling injuries. Stretchered to a sickbed, he had soon succumbed to a loathsome disease, which had set his body to rot: “elephantiasis pestis.”2 Death had followed shortly afterwards.
France in the year 1000
A baneful and portentous end. “Cruel and savage, fit only for wild beasts”3: so it was said of the forest in which Louis IV had met with the demonic wolf. The same might well have been said of his violence ravaged kingdom. The only realm still to be ruled by a descendant of Charlemagne was subsiding inexorably into gangsterism. As the authority of the Carolingians faded ever more into shadow, so did the realm they ruled appear ever more threatened with collapse. Of Louis himself it was said that he had owned nothing “but the title of royalty”;4 and yet the succeeding decades had proved his heirs more wraithlike still. “Justice slept in the hearts of kings and princes”;5and increasingly, across all the assorted territories that still professed a shadowy loyalty to the King of the Western Franks, the mystique of Charlemagne’s bloodline had come to seem a phantom thing. So much so, indeed, that in 987, upon the death of Louis V, a feckless fashion obsessive nicknamed by his despairing subjects “the Sluggard,” the great men of West Francia had taken a fateful step. Louis, irresponsible to the last, had died childless; and so it was, at a specially convened council, that the Frankish princes had felt themselves justified in electing one of their own number to the throne.Hugh Capet, the new king, was a man not altogether lacking the stamp of royalty: descended from a long line of war heroes, he was also, on his mother’s side, the grandson of Henry the Fowler.Nevertheless, he was no Carolingian; and the Frankish lords, by electing him, had very pointedly ignored the claims of a rival who was. Louis V’s uncle, an embittered and slippery schemer by the name of Charles, was widely loathed by his peers; but when, in 988, he had pressed his claim to the throne by going to war with Hugh, he had been able to make considerable headway, and even to seize back the royal capital. For three years, a bloody stalemate had prevailed; until, hoist by his own petard, Charles had been betrayed by a schemer even more devious and underhand than himself. Adalbero, the Bishop of Laon, was a man of ineffable hauteur, snake-like intelligence, and “a reputation for virtue,” as one of his fellow bishops phrased it diplomatically, “that was not all it might have been.”