The Forge of Christendom (20 page)

Certainly, the nearer the Millennium drew, the more Otto seems to have felt oppressed by a sense of urgency – as though the passing of days itself were a flood stream to be breasted. If it were true that time was indeed running out, then the challenge of securing the Roman Empire was evidently not to be a simple one – not in the face of all that a transcendent and gathering malice appeared to be hurling against him. No matter that the Wends, by the end of 997, had been pacified at last. A fresh and more insidious threat to Otto’s ambitions was already
looming. Alarming news had arrived from the very heart of the great project of
renovatio
: Rome herself. The city’s erstwhile tyrant, John Crescentius, unappeased by the pardon granted him following Otto’s coronation, had made a sudden power grab. Pope Gregory, who had originally pleaded with his cousin to grant Crescentius mercy, had himself been served with exile. As his replacement upon the throne of St. Peter, and the willing stooge of his Roman sponsors, there had emerged blinking into the limelight a most unexpected figure: Otto’s own godfather, one-time tutor and ambassador to Constantinople, John Philagathos. No matter that his attempt to secure a princess from the
Basileus
had ended in failure – the embassy had evidently done nothing to diminish his conceit. Indeed, if anything, it appeared to have boosted it; for Byzantine diplomats, despite their private scorning of Philagathos as “slime, the son of perdition, worthy of every curse, a pile of steaming excrement, obese, a man whose true god protrudes just below his wobbling paunch,”
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had cheerfully puffed him up in his ambitions, keen as they were to see a Greek as the Bishop of Rome. Crescentius too, whose family had long had close affiliations with Constantinople, was widely suspected of being an agent of the
Basileus
. Meanwhile, Philagathos himself, as the countryman of one Roman emperor and the godfather of a second, was sublimely confident of securing the support of both men for his papacy. This was a reasonable enough calculation, perhaps; except that neither he nor any of the conspirators had quite grasped what Otto believed to be at stake.

In February 998, the Holy Lance was planted before the walls of Rome. Behind it there spread the massed ranks of the imperial army, the hardened veterans of a thousand bloody skirmishes in the forests and bogs of the North, a sight fit to strike terror into the heart of any southerner. Philagathos, discovering too late the full, horrendous scale of his misjudgement, had already fled the city. Crescentius, equally appalled by what he had drawn down upon himself, was holed up in his private fortress, in the shadow of St. Peter’s, waiting for the storm to pass. But it did not pass. The emperor and his army remained
implacable. In desperation, after several weeks of the siege, Crescentius disguised himself in a monk’s cowl and slipped out from his stronghold, to throw himself on Otto’s mercy. Coldly, Otto sent him back to his doom. Shortly afterwards, once Easter was past, the deployment of immense siege engines enabled the citadel to be stormed. Crescentius himself, taken prisoner, was briskly decapitated. His headless corpse, so as to warn others against being “deceived by the devil’s wiles,” was first flung into a ditch, and then “hung by the feet from a gibbet, on the highest precipice of the fortress.”
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Yet even his fate was not so salutary as that of the wretched Antipope. Philagathos had been quickly hunted down. Although his life was spared, such were the mutilations inflicted on him that he might well have yearned for execution: for first his eyes were removed, then his nose, and then his lips and tongue. When the hideously disfigured prisoner was finally hauled into the imperial presence, the spectacle of what had been done to his old tutor reduced Otto to appalled silence; but not to clemency. The captors were given rich rewards; while Philagathos himself was handed over to the tender mercies of the man whom he had thought to replace. Pope Gregory, keen to brand his rival an apostate before the public gaze of the entire city, ordered him fitted with a cap of animal skins, and then had him “placed on the back of a donkey, facing towards the tail, as a public crier led him through the various parts of Rome.”
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Finally, to set the seal on his degradation, Philagathos was ceremonially expelled from the priesthood, stripped of his pontifical robes and led away to a monastery, there to count the long days until his death. By such decisive measures, Otto could reflect with grim satisfaction, had the Holy City been preserved against the tide of darkness that had seemed almost ready to swallow it.

Except that there were men of God, even peers of Adalbert, who were not so certain that it had been preserved. While the Roman crowds had cheerfully entertained themselves by kicking the corpse of Crescentius as it was dragged past them, or pelting Philagathos with dung, those whose approval Otto most desperately craved, his spiritual
advisers, were horrified. One of them, a hermit of legendary saintliness by the name of Nilus, had even dared to confront the emperor directly. Despite being in his nineties, and weak from his Lenten fast, he had tottered along to the trial of Philagathos and begged for mercy on behalf of the fallen Anti-pope. When this plea was rejected, he had cursed Otto and Gregory both. “For if you do not forgive him whom God has delivered up into your hands,” Nilus had warned the two cousins, “neither will the heavenly Father forgive you your own sins.”
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Then, ignoring all Otto’s appeals to stay with him and grant him absolution, the aged hermit had turned on his heels and headed away southwards, back to the lonely valley that sheltered his cell.

Otto did not pursue him. After all, a retreat from the world was hardly an option open to a man pledged to the fateful mission of preserving Christendom from Antichrist. If the Roman Empire were indeed to be restored to its vanished potency, then the securing of Rome itself could rank only as a beginning. Though it was bejewelled with churches, the ancient city had to be fitted once more to serve as the capital of an empire. Orders were duly given that the ruins on the Palatine, “that seat and head of all the world,”
⁹⁴
should be cleared of their rubble and rendered habitable again.
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Ceremonial too was upgraded, to match the prestigious new imperial address. No more cracking open of animal bones for Otto; instead, in an echo of the gilded rituals of his mother’s native city, he began to sit at feasts aloof from his henchmen, at a semicircular table, and to be saluted as “the Emperor of Emperors.” Even the titles with which he graced his courtiers in turn – “senator,” “consul,” “prefect of the fleet” – had all been fastidiously pilfered from the lumber box of antiquity. In short, it was a display of pageantry like nothing seen in Rome for many centuries – and those who witnessed it were accordingly dazzled. To the excitable, it seemed almost as though Otto’s work were already done; as though, through the sheer force of his will, he had indeed brought the Roman Empire back to life and restored its greatness to its ancient limits. Both Baghdad, “the empire of iron,”
and Constantinople, “the empire of gold,” were imagined by admirers as bowing in stupefaction before “great Otto.”
⁹⁶
“Rejoice, O Pope,” as one of them put it, “rejoice, O Caesar! Let the Church exult in a fervour of joy, and let joy be great in Rome, let the imperial palace rejoice! With this pope, under this Caesar, the age itself is renewed!”
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But the young Caesar himself was racked by doubts. Visionary he may have been – but he was not naïve. He had patrolled the frontiers of Saxony. He knew perfectly well that Rome, although the heart of Christendom, was not the world. He knew too – for the words of Nilus still sounded in his memory – that all his labours to fortify his empire, all the blood he had spilled and all the brutalities he had committed, might have served only to put his fitness as God’s anointed into doubt. For a year, he continued to ignore the promptings of his conscience. Then, in February 999, and with the anniversary of the Lenten atrocities fast approaching, Pope Gregory fell suddenly sick and died. The cause was malaria – but how was Otto to attribute it to anything save the effect of Nilus’s curse? Abruptly after his cousin’s death, he left Rome and headed southwards. Although he did not neglect the due business of an emperor on the way – taking hostages here, dispensing favours there, exploiting the rivalries of his Italian subjects with his customary dextrousness – he also made sure to perform acts of very public penance. Wherever there was a shrine, he would walk to it barefooted. By the time he found himself approaching Nilus’s cell, it was evident that his contrition had been accepted as truly heartfelt: for the old man, leaving his cave, walked to the side of the road, from where he saluted the emperor fondly. Otto, slipping down from his saddle, knelt in tears before the hermit; and then removed his crown. A portentous gesture: for so it had been prophesied that the last Roman emperor would do, as he knelt upon Golgotha, and thereby usher in the end of days. Nilus paused – and then, demonstrating that he regarded the man before him as guiltless of any presumption, gave him his blessing. Finally, with due reverence, he handed the emperor back his crown.

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.