The Book of Ancient Bastards (24 page)

What It Takes to Earn the Title
of “Bulgar Slayer”

( A.D. 958–1025)

Basil was ugly, dirty, coarse, boorish, totally philistine and almost pathologically mean. He was, in short, profoundly un-Byzantine. . . . He cared only for the greatness and prosperity of his Empire. No wonder that in his hands it reached its apogee.”
—John Julius Norwich, Byzantium: The Apogee

The Byzantine Empire, that Greek-speaking successor state of Rome that flourished in the eastern Mediterranean for hundreds of years after the end of Roman power in the west, saw more than its share of imperial bastards, rulers capable of great works and great cruelty, frequently all at the same time. Without question the most remarkable of these was a great military leader who sold his sister to a foreign ruler in exchange for military support, and blinded fifteen thousand captive enemy soldiers all at once, in order to break the resistance of a previously implacable foe.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Basil II, who ruled the empire from the time he was two until his death sixty-five years later.

During his reign, Basil shared his throne with two regents (each of whom married his mother, the dowager empress Theophano) and with his younger brother Constantine VIII. After the death of his final regent, the general John Tzimiskes in A.D. 976, the eighteen-year-old Basil was finished sharing power (his ineffectual younger brother would prove nothing more than a figurehead). For the next forty-nine years, there was no question who called the shots in the empire: Basil.

The learning curve as emperor was steep, and Basil made many costly mistakes early on, including a humiliating defeat by Bulgarian troops that necessitated signing away vast amounts of territory along the Danube River and the payment of a ridiculous amount of tribute. But like all intelligent leaders, the young emperor learned from his mistakes, and he was so disciplined, so single-minded, that he would allow nothing to stand in the way of his bringing the empire’s enemies (both internal and external) to heel.

Fighting a long costly civil war with a number of his nobles in what is now Turkey, Basil eventually defeated them with the help of Vladimir I, the grand prince of Kiev. Vladimir’s price for his military support was steep: he wanted the emperor’s own sister Anna as his bride. Basil eventually sent her off to a tearful wedding to the “northern barbarian,” a ruthless move that saved his empire.

Free at last to deal with the Bulgarians and their tsar, Samuel, who had so humiliated him years before, Basil finally defeated them in a pitched battle at Kleidon, where his army took 15,000 Bulgar captives. Basil’s revenge was devastating: He blinded the captives and sent them back to their tsar.

To this day the Greeks refer to their greatest emperor as “Basil Bulgaroktonos”: “Basil the Bulgar Slayer.” Guess “Bulgar Blinder” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

Actual Bastard?

Basil II might have literally been one of history’s great bastards. Put simply, Basil didn’t look or act much like either of his parents. Where his mother was dark-haired and dark-eyed and his scholarly, intellectual father was tall, thin, and had a long black beard, Basil was of medium height, barrel-chested, blonde, and blue-eyed. There has been much speculation that Basil was actually the product of an adulterous union between his mother and one of the imperial palace’s mercenary Viking guardsmen (known as Varangians).

Screwing His Kingdom Away

( A.D. 941?–959)

Shameful to relate, people say that in his turn [Eadwig] acted wantonly with [Aethelgifu and her daughter Aelfgifu], with disgraceful caresses, without any decency on the part of either. And when at the time appointed by all the leading men of the English he was anointed and consecrated king by popular election, on that day after the kingly anointing at the holy ceremony, the lustful man suddenly jumped up and left the happy banquet and the fitting company of his nobles, for the aforesaid caresses of loose women.
—The Life of St. Dunstan

In A.D. 955, a teenaged pretty-boy inherited the English crown. History is filled with the stories of underaged kings hustled to the throne after the untimely death of their predecessors. What makes the case of young Eadwig remarkable is that on the very day he took the throne he got caught in the middle of a threesome with a cousin and her mother while his coronation feast was still going on in another wing of the castle!

A direct descendant of Alfred the Great, Eadwig was so physically handsome that the common people referred to him as “All-Fair.” A child when his father Edmund I died and still in his teens when he succeeded his uncle Eadred as sovereign, Eadwig was either a foolish, horny teenager or an independent-minded rebel trying to curb the might of a very powerful clergy, or some combination of the two.

Either way, tongues started wagging when Dunstan, the prominent abbot who supposedly caught the king
in flagrante
, was summarily banished, followed closely by a royal wedding between the king and the younger of his two partners.

If Eadwig hoped to silence public opinion by marrying Aelfgifu and exiling Dunstan, he was doomed to disappointment. Within two years, his marriage had been annulled on the grounds that he and his wife were too closely related. The portion of his kingdom north of the Thames River had successfully rebelled, seceded from the kingdom, and selected Eadwig’s younger brother Edgar as its king.

Two years later in A.D. 959 , Eadwig died under mysterious circumstances. He was not yet twenty years old.

The Bastard Versus the Saint

In the case of King Eadwig, everything we know about his conflict with the abbot Dunstan comes down to us from clerical chroniclers. Think it’s possible they had an axe to grind?

So did Eadwig actually do the deed? Abbot Dunstan and another churchman supposedly discovered the king with his pants down when they were sent by the other nobles at the ceremony to bring him back to the feast he had so hastily departed.

According to “B,” the all-but-anonymous priest who wrote about the incident in florid detail, the two clergymen “found the royal crown, which was bound with wondrous metal, gold and silver and gems, and shone with many-coloured luster, carelessly thrown down on the floor, far from [King Eadwig’s] head, and he himself repeatedly wallowing between the two [women] in an evil fashion, as if in a vile sty.” Outraged, the two men insisted the king return with them to the ceremony, eventually dragging Eadwig “from the women by force.”

The Man Who Sold the Papacy

(CA. A.D. 1012–ca.1056)

That wretch, from the beginning of his pontificate to the end of his life, feasted on immorality.
—St. Peter Damian, Liber Gomorrhianus

Who in their right mind gives the sort of wealth and power that goes with being pope to a twenty-year-old and doesn’t expect it to go straight to the kid’s head? Who doesn’t expect someone living the medieval equivalent of a rock-star life to go a bit nuts ?

A bunch of well-bribed Catholic church leaders, that’s who. Because in the case of medieval Pope Benedict IX, this is precisely what happened.

The younger son of a powerful Italian nobleman, Benedict was elected pope in A.D. 1032 after his father bribed the papal electors in order to ensure it.

Daddy’s purchase of the papacy had a profound effect on young Benedict. Cynical and capricious from the start, Benedict’s rule was quickly marked by episodes that illustrated not only his complete disregard for either tradition or propriety but his taste for wretched excess as well.

He earned scorn by selling church offices for hefty bribes (an offense known as “simony”), hosting frequent bisexual orgies, and even going so far as to curse God and toast the Devil at every meal! 

For his part, Benedict doesn’t seem to have given a damn what his critics thought. His power base was among the members of the Roman aristocracy, and as long as they backed him, he felt free to do as he pleased. Turned out he reckoned without the powerful (and fickle) Roman mob, who rioted in A.D. 1036 and ran Il Papa right out of the Eternal City. The uprising was quickly put down and Benedict returned to power, but he never completely regained control of the city.

By the time Benedict’s opponents within the church had succeeded in driving him from Rome a second time in A.D. 1045, Benedict had tired of being pope. So he offered to sell the papacy to his godfather and chief advisor, a well-respected priest named Johannes Gratianus (“John Gratian”) for a ridiculous sum meant to fund a proposed lifestyle change.

Murdering Bastard

Most of Benedict’s opponents considered their reigning head of the church something of a bogeyman, perpetrator of “many vile adulteries and murders.” Desiderius of Monte Cassino, a contemporary of Benedict IX who later reigned as Pope Victor III, wrote that Benedict committed “rapes, murders, and other unspeakable acts.” Benedict’s reign, wrote Desiderius, was “so vile, so foul, so execrable that I shudder to think of it.”

The older man accepted and took the papal name of Gregory VI. The bribe he gave Benedict so completely bankrupted the papal treasury that for months afterward the church was unable to pay its bills. To further complicate matters, Benedict’s foes among the clergy refused to recognize Gregory’s right to the succession, electing one of their number pope as Sylvester III.

So technically Benedict left not one but two popes (well, really a pope and a pretender, or antipope) behind in Rome. Within weeks, he’d run through his new fortune and promptly headed back to Rome, trying to get his old job back. This time his allies deserted him, and Benedict got booted from the city yet again.

By A.D. 1047 , Henry III (the Holy Roman Emperor) had seen enough. With the support of a majority of the church’s bishops, the emperor convened a special church council that settled the question by giving all three men the boot. A year later, Benedict was charged with simony (a charge of which he was clearly guilty). When he refused to appear before the church court that indicted him, Benedict was excommunicated.

At some point during the next decade, the ex-pope had a change of heart and presented himself at the abbey of Santa Maria di Grottaferrata, begging for God’s forgiveness. He spent the remainder of his days as a monk in that abbey, dying there in A.D. 1065.

Repentant bastard.