Millenium (19 page)

Otto, returning to Rome, could do so with his sense of mission powerfully fortified. Even the death of his cousin, which only a few weeks earlier had struck in him a knell of icy foreboding, now appeared the working of Providence. At a fateful moment for him and for all mankind, with the one-thousandth anniversary of the Incarnation only months away, and the great labour of
renovatio
weigh­ing down implacably upon his shoulders, he had been graced with the opportunity to promote to St Peter's throne the man best qualified to help him. On 2 April 999, Gerbert of Aurillac, the peasant from the Auvergne, was crowned Pope. The name he took - Sylvester II - signalled unmistakably to all the world how he saw his own role and that of his master. Just as the first Sylvester was supposed to have served Constantine, so would he serve Otto: Pope and emperor together, they would shepherd the Christian people.

And swell their numbers too. Ancient prophecies long current in Italy foretold how at the end of times the last Roman emperor would summon all the pagans in the world to baptism; and now, as the fate­ful year of the Millennium dawned, a Roman emperor was preparing to do just that. Not at sword point — the example of Adalbert would hardly have licensed forced conversions - but rather in a manner as pacific as it was mystical. So it was, for instance, that the chieftain of the Hungarians, those one-time predator horsemen, was sent a replica of the Holy Lance by Otto, and a diadem by Pope Sylvester, and pub­licly welcomed, as King Stephen, into the order of Christian royalty. So it was too, in the spring of the millennial year, that the Roman emperor himself, travelling eastwards to where the ancient Caesars had never reached, crossed the border into Poland and processed to Gniezno. Columns of brightly dressed warriors stood massed to greet him as he walked, barefoot once more, to the shrine of St Adalbert. Then, having prayed beside the tomb, Otto rose and set out to com­plete what his murdered friend had begun. The Polish duke, like the Hungarian prince, was presented with a crown and a copy of the Holy Lance; the fur-clad Boleslav, not to be outdone, reciprocated by giving the emperor one of St Adalbert's arms. Otto, profoundly moved, burst into tears. 'And that day the two men were joined together with such bonds of affection that the Emperor called Boleslav his brother, and proclaimed him a friend of the Roman people.'
⁹⁸

True, there was in all this a steely measure of calculation. The Poles were valuable allies in the struggle against the Wends. That Otto retained his hard-edged streak of pragmatism was evident from the presence in his train, even as he prayed by Adalbert's tomb, of hostages from Italy. Yet pragmatism, in the shadow of the end time, could go only so far. Dimensions infinitely beyond that of the earthly present were also in play: the threads of history, woven according to God's plan throughout the centuries, were on the verge of being gathered up and placed into Otto's hands. Or so Otto himself appears devoutly to have believed. It is certainly hard to explain otherwise why, after an absence from his homeland of many months, with his nobility frac­tious and his countrymen resentful of all their emperor's foreign adventuring, his principal concern should have been to consult, not with the living, but with the dead.

By late April, barely a month after leaving Gniezno, and having toured Saxony at a blistering speed, Otto was in Aachen: site of the tomb of Charlemagne. On Pentecost - the day when the Holy Spirit, descending upon the earliest disciples, had imbued them with the fire of an unearthly wisdom - he and three companions passed down into the opened crypt. There, within its tenebrous depths, they supposedly found Charlemagne sitting as though asleep, a golden crown on his head, a sceptre in his gloved hands; 'and the fingernails had penetrated through the gloves, and were sticking out'.
⁹⁹
Otto, having first knelt in homage before his great predecessor, next ordered the corpse to be clothed in white robes, those very garments which, at the end of time, in the great battle with Antichrist and all his cohorts, would be worn by 'the armies of heaven'.
¹⁰⁰
Then, re-emerging from the darkness of the underworld into the light of day, he prepared to move on again: not to Saxony, but back to Italy. Well might his countrymen have felt themselves snubbed and undervalued. As one chronicler phrased it with diplomatic understatement: 'the Emperor's doings received a somewhat mixed reaction'.
¹⁰¹

Otto himself was not oblivious to the mutterings. He knew that many of his actions were bound to strike his subjects as bizarre, or even unsettling. That, however, could not be helped. The mission with which he believed himself charged by God was hardly one that he could parade. Already, however, to those in the know, the proofs of its success must have appeared manifest. Day by day, month by month, 'the one thousandth year since the Incarnation was being completed happily'
¹⁰²
- and Antichrist had not appeared. That did not mean, however, that Otto could afford to let slip his guard. Just the opposite. Christ's life had contained many significant moments - and who was to say from which of them the one thousand years, after which Satan was to be loosed from his prison, were properly to be measured? Already, as the new year of 1001 dawned, there came a sobering reminder that the forces of darkness were very far from spent. The Romans, whom their emperor had 'loved and cherished above all',
¹⁰³
were reported to have risen in revolt. Otto immediately hurried to the ancient city. Only a full-scale onslaught by his soldiers, and the unveil­ing of the Holy Lance, 'glinting terribly'
¹⁰⁴
in the hands of the bishop who wielded it, served to quell the insurrection. Despite being stunned by the Romans' ingratitude, and besieged by their repentant tears, Otto did not permit his devotion to the city to override his strategic judge­ment: a full-scale withdrawal was ordered to Ravenna. From here, now menacing his foes, now mollifying them, he continued to display his customary political acuity. Although Rome herself remained too unsettled to serve him as his capital, he knew that she would not defy him for long. In the autumn of 1001, he dispatched orders to East Francia, summoning fresh troops. They were to be with him by late January. Passing the winter in Lombardy, the emperor could rest confident that not only Rome but all of Italy would soon be his.

And perhaps even more as well. Otto's efforts in the millennial year to buttress the Roman Empire had self-evidently been sufficient to keep Antichrist at bay; but there was much still left to be done. All his labours notwithstanding, Christendom remained divided. Accordingly, in the summer of 1001, Otto had dispatched a second embassy to Constantinople, led by a bishop more trustworthy than Philagathos - and this time his demand for a princess had been met.

Indeed, it was reported that she was already on her way, and could be expected, like Otto's reinforcements, come the spring: the two halves of the Roman Empire seemed on the verge of being joined at last. Even that prospect, however, giddy though it was, seems barely to have sat­isfied the young emperor. For what if there were a still greater and yet more terrible destiny awaiting him, one prophesied for many centuries and fated to convulse all the universe? Confirmation of his suspicions, in that year of 1001, seemed to lie right on his doorstep.

Beyond the great palaces and churches of Ravenna, those monu­ments to long-dead Christian emperors, there stretched a pestiferous wasteland of salt marshes and mudflats, all stagnancy and whining insects, unutterably desolate. Not wholly so, however: for occasion­ally, amid the bleakness, there might be glimpsed a makeshift shack. In each one of these, barefoot and unkempt, there lived a hermit; and among them, on a remote and boggy island, was their leader, the most renowned saint in all Italy. The name of Romuald was one to put even Nilus's in the shade. Holiness was manifest in the very appearance of his skin, which had turned hairless and bright green, 'like a newt's', following an extended immersion in a swamp.
¹⁰⁵
On those rare occa­sions when the saint did deign to clean himself, his dirty bathwater, it was reported, could heal the sick. One group of villagers, on discover­ing that he was planning to move on from their neighbourhood, had even plotted to murder him and saw his body up into relics, such was his reputation as a miracle-worker. Spared dismemberment by pre­tending to be mad, Romuald had survived and flourished, to become a living model of sanctity. No wonder, then, that Otto should often have made the journey out into the marshes beyond Ravenna. These trips, however, were not mere spiritual tourism. The emperor, as he pondered the future, had a particular reason to consult with the saint. Both men, despite all the immeasurable differences in their station, were embarked upon a matching quest. Both shared the passionate conviction that the Second Coming was imminent; and both had resolved to meet it by leaving as little as possible for the returning Christ to condemn.

'For who is not terrified,' as one of Romuald's disciples would later put it, 'who is not shaken to his very roots, by that statement of the Lord Himself in the Gospel: "Like lightning flashes from the east as far as the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be."
¹⁰⁶
The way of life established by Romuald at Ravenna was a consciously heroic effort to keep this dread of judgement at bay. An existence of implacable and excruciating deprivation, whether lived in a swamp, or in the depths of a forest, or bricked up in a cell, with nothing for company save for birds and the vermin that swarm and feed on rags: such, argued the saint, was the only serviceable preparation for the end of days. Here was a conviction with which his imperial visitor had evidently expressed great sympathy: for one of Romuald's companions, after Otto had left them for the last time, turned and asked his master in perplexity, 'What has happened to the King's noble resolution, the promise he confided secretly to Christ, to become like one of us?'
¹⁰⁷
But it is evident too that Otto's vow, however he may precisely have phrased it, had been misunderstood. Not for the emperor a shack in a swamp. Instead, he had revealed to Romuald, it was his intention to travel to Jerusalem, and there to lay down 'the badge' of his royalty: his earthly crown.
¹⁰⁸
'For after three years, during which I will set right all that is wrong in my empire, I will abdicate my kingship. And I will offer it instead to one who is better than me.'
¹⁰⁹
Romuald's followers may have failed to grasp whom their visitor had meant by this — but Romuald surely knew.

The king to whom Otto intended to hand his crown was Christ. The world once readied for the hour of judgement, the emperor would climb the hill of Golgotha, and kneel, and commit his soul to God; and thereby usher in the end of days. Romuald, by granting Otto his blessing, had shown that he, like Nilus, approved of this intention. He had shown that he believed himself in the presence of the last Roman emperor.

But all his hopes, and those of Otto himself, were to be dashed. When the emperor, early in 1002, began his advance on Rome, the venerable hermit was by his side. As the expedition headed south­wards, however, a giant dragon was spotted overhead, glittering brightly in the winter sky. Everyone who saw it knew it for a certain portent of doom. Sure enough, soon afterwards, Otto fell sick of malaria - and by late January he was dead. Many plans, many dreams perished with him. The reinforcements summoned from East Francia had been only a single day's march away as their emperor breathed his last. The princess sent from Constantinople to serve as Otto's bride had no sooner landed than she was being sent back home again. The new King of Saxony had no time for fantasies of global rule. For Henry, Duke of Bavaria, son of 'the Quarreller' and grandson of the Henry who had schemed so tirelessly to steal the crown from Otto I, it was sufficient that one of his line had the rule of the
Reich
at last. Not until then would he finally succeed in battling his way south to Rome, and his coronation as emperor; and when he did so, there would be no Pope Sylvester waiting for him there with brilliant talk of
renovatio.

Gerbert, who had loyally followed Otto to Ravenna, had returned to the Lateran following his patron's death; and there, in May 1003, after a miserable year of being bullied by the resurgent Crescentius family, he too had died. It had not taken long for his extraordinary story to be transmuted into myth. That a peasant — still more a non- Italian peasant —should have risen to hold the office of pope appeared to most too remarkable to credit to mere human agency. So it was that Gerbert of Aurillac, 'the philosophical pope',
¹¹⁰
who had devoted the last years of his life to buttressing the Roman Empire, would be remembered, not for all his labours in the cause of learning and of Christendom, but as a thing of Antichrist, a beast, 'risen up from the abyss shortly after the completion of a thousand years'.
¹
"

'Caesar is gone. And with him gone, all future ages arc thrown into confusion.'
¹¹²
This epitaph, composed in the confused months that fol­lowed Otto's death, was not, perhaps, a wholly exaggerated one. A tipping point had indeed been reached: the dream of universal empire as a solution to the world's problems, for all that it might still animate the chanceries of Baghdad and Constantinople, would never again, as a practical policy, serve to motivate a monarch of Latin Christendom.

'Like one of the pagan kings of ancient times, he struggled to resurrect the glories of Rome, that city with its deep-buried foundations — but in vain.'"
¹
So it would be remembered of Otto. None of his successors would follow his example. His dreams had been too dazzling-and his failure too total as well. Although he never did make it to Jerusalem, and although he never did surrender his crown into the hands of Christ, Otto would prove to have died as what he had long imagined himself to be: the last Roman emperor.