* Halley’s Comet. It would be seen next in 1066.* The family name ‘Capetian’ actually derived from Hugh Capet himself, but in the interests of clarity, I have chosen to apply it retrospectively to his forefathers as well. Properly, these should be termed “Robertians,” “Robert” being a name that looms large in the early pages of the family’s history.* And yet anachronistic it remains. Tracing the evolution of the phrase “Regnum Francorum,” “the Kingdom of the Franks,” into the modern French word “France” is a notoriously complex business. It was not until the thirteenth century that the formula “Roi de France,” “King of France,” was first used in royal documents, with its implication that there was a territory, rather than simply a people, of which to be the king. Nevertheless, even though the phrase that I have been using, “West Francia,” is nothing but a historian’s convenience, people did have, from the mid-tenth century on, a sense of a West Frankish kingdom that was distinct and independent from what had become the empire to the east. The old sense of Frankish commonality was gone, and in its place were the two distinct entities that would ultimately become France and Germany. Chroniclers at the time of the Millennium may still have employed the phrase “Regnum Francorum,” but what they meant by that was clearly what would later be known as France. It is that, most historians feel, which justifies the use of the word to describe the lands which acknowledged the early Capetians as kings.* “Servus,” even more than “pauper,” is a word with a complex history. Originally, it meant “slave”; and the course of evolution by which it came to mean “serf” remains intensely controversial. At the time of the Millennium, it could still be used with both meanings.
4
Go West
Normandy LandingsRobert Capet was not the only Christian ruler to have identified in Cluny the radiance of an awesome and potent mystery. In 1014, messengers arrived at the abbey from Rome, bringing with them a remarkable gift. The man who had sent it was Henry II: “King of the Germans, Emperor of the Romans, Augustus.”1 It had taken Otto III’s successor more than a decade to be daubed with the imperial chrism, and the Pope, to mark the occasion of the delayed coronation, had presented to Henry a dazzling reminder of what still officially remained his global mission: an orb shaped like an apple, divided into four by precious jewels and surmounted by a golden cross. Dispatched to Cluny, along with the emperor’s coronation robes, his sceptre and his crown, the presence within the abbey walls of this spectacular array of imperial regalia suggested just how far the monastery’s horizons were widening. It certainly required no great penetration to fathom the prophecy encoded within the emperor’s gift. Just as the apple was divided into four quarters, so too, according to the learned, was the globe; and just as a cross surmounted the apple, so had it been foretold that the Cross of Christ was to redeem all the world. Peoples everywhere would be brought to follow it. None, no matter how savage or remote, was to be left behind. Odilo, taking possession of the orb, was so delighted by its message that he ordered it put on display whenever a major festival was celebrated: a reassurance, etched in gold and jewels, that the conversion of the heathen was at hand.Cluny might have been far removed from the wastelands of paganism, yet such were the reservoirs of spiritual power that it had generated, and such the efficacy of all the psalms and anthems sung within its walls, that even those demons skulking beyond the frontiers of Christendom, haunting the foul sump of their own darkness, had been dazzled by the blaze of its holiness. This, at any rate, was what Henry himself was evidently banking on. As a Roman emperor, stationed at the very edge of time, he naturally needed all the supernatural assistance that he could obtain. Like his predecessor, he had no doubt that he had been charged directly by God with the bringing of barbarians to Christ. So it was that he had married his own sister to Stephen, the King of the Hungarians. So it was too that he had lavished endowments upon the Church, with the stated goal of “destroying the paganism of the Slavs.”