The Forge of Christendom (35 page)

At the end of time, it was the Archangel Michael who was destined to slay Antichrist, and to trample down the Devil. This illustration of the saint was drawn in Normandy, at Mont-Saint-Michel: a shrine that encouraged many Normans to regard the Archangel as their particular patron. Tellingly, it was at a second shrine sacred to Saint Michael, on Mount Gargano in Apulia, that Norman pilgrims were first recruited to serve as mercenaries in southern Italy: a fateful development for all concerned. (Bridgeman Art Library)

At the end of time, so St. Paul had taught, Antichrist was destined to appear in Jerusalem, seated upon the mount where Solomon in ancient times had built his temple, “proclaiming himself to be God.”
¹
Yet it was the sublime character of Scripture that its meaning, even when to the unlearned it appeared precise, could be interpreted by the wise on many levels. Much had happened since the apostle had delivered his prophecy. The Temple of the Jews had long since been overthrown and destroyed utterly – even as churches had spread across the world. How, then, was the “temple” in which Antichrist would take his seat best to be understood? “Does it mean the ruins of the Temple built by King Solomon, or might it actually mean a Christian place of worship?”
²
It was this question, put by St. Augustine many centuries before the Millennium, that had haunted Wulfstan in the wake of the St. Brice’s Day massacre, and led him to see, in the rubble of a desecrated church, a possible proof of Antichrist’s imminence. Certainly, whether it was to be on the Temple Mount or within the shell of a Christian shrine, ruins seemed the only fitting backdrop to the throne of the Son of Perdition.

Over time, Wulfstan’s anxieties had begun to fade. The sufferings of
the English had not proved fatal; and Canute, far from pillaging churches, as his ancestors had done, grew famous instead for refurbishing them. Travelling to Rome, he had ostentatiously deposited whole cloakloads of silver on the altars of abbeys; “and indeed whatever altar he passed, be it ever so small, he would give it gifts, and bestow sweet kisses upon it.”
³
Nor was the mania for sponsoring churches by any means confined to kings. In France and Italy especially, wherever a pilgrim such as Canute travelled, he was likely to pass carts weighed down with timber and columns plundered from ancient ruins, and to discover, in village after village, walls of white stone rising up above the shacks. A new church, almost as much as a castle brooding on its hill, was an emphatic marker of the grasping new order of things: for a wealthy castellan, by funding a place of worship, and privatising what had previously been held in common, was effectively branding the worshippers that it served as his property.

Yet the peasants too, robbed of their freedoms and coerced into villages as they invariably had been, had their own stake in seeing a church established in their midst. No demand was more vigorously pressed by enthusiasts for the Peace of God than that the upstart lords and their swaggering, bullying knights accept the inviolability of consecrated ground. To cross into the
cimiterium
, the area surrounding a church where the dead were buried and the living gathered in peace, whether to hold a market, or to hear a law suit, or to celebrate a wedding, was thunderously forbidden to any man bearing arms. Invisible the ramparts of a churchyard might be – and yet every knight who swore an oath of peace was obliged to accept that they rose no less impregnably than those of a donjon. Seen as such, the village church was not the complement of the castle, but rather its mirror image: twin citadels both, one serving to guard the powerful, and the other to shelter the weak; one the lair of warlords and the other a stronghold of God. No wonder, then, that there were many who found in the unprecedented surge of building activity a mark, not of oppression, but of renewal, of promise, of hope. “For it was as if the whole world were shaking itself free, shrugging off the burden of the past, and
cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches.”
⁴
Such was the judgement of Rudolf Glaber, seated in that mightiest of all bastions of holiness, the abbey of Cluny. As a man who had no doubt that demons stalked the earth – and indeed had seen one, blubbery-lipped and hunchbacked, menacing him in his bed – his exultancy came as no surprise. For to behold Christendom clad in a mantle of churches was to know it transformed into one immense
cimiterium
– to know it fortified against Antichrist.

Yet always, no matter how widely the mantle was cast, there remained the leaden possibility that it might not prove enough: that the dark lord might still manifest himself, lit by flaring shadows, and enthroned in awful splendour, amid the wreckage of a Christian shrine. “You see all these, do you not?” Christ Himself had asked His disciples, pointing to the buildings of the Temple. “Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down.”
⁵
And so it had happened; and so, no doubt, before the Day of Judgement, it was fated that the ruin of the Temple would be mirrored by no less monstrous desecrations. In 991, for instance – a perilously close thing – fire had threatened the shrine of St. Peter in Rome; and all the Romans and assembled pilgrims “as one man had given out a terrible scream and turned to rush to confess the Prince of the Apostles, for a long while crying that if he did not watchfully protect his church at this time then many men would fall away from the faith.”
⁶
Sure enough, the flames had at once miraculously retreated and vanished; but the whole scare had nevertheless served as a salutary reminder to the faithful everywhere of the potential vulnerability of even their holiest shrines. Indeed, to an alarming degree, the holier the shrine, the more vulnerable it tended to be. Fire was not the only threat to Christendom’s capital. In 1004, for instance, a fleet of pirates had sailed up the River Arno, sacking Pisa, and temporarily cutting off Rome from the north. The Saracens, unlike the Vikings, still held fast to their defiance of the Christian faith – and to their habit of tracing the frontiers of Christendom with blood.

Nor was St. Peter the only apostle they were able to menace. In the
north-west corner of Spain, set amid the mountain-ringed realm of Galicia, there stood the tomb of a second: St. James. Here was a fabulous claim, it might have been thought: for Santiago, as the Christians of Spain called him, had been executed, on the certain authority of Scripture itself, in the Holy Land. Yet the story that his disciples had sailed with his corpse to the rocky Galician coast, that they had buried him forty miles inland, and that his final resting place had lain forgotten for some 800 years, until at last it had been discovered by an enterprising bishop, appeared proved beyond all shadow of a doubt by the spectacular miracles performed upon his relics.
⁷
The kings of León certainly presumed so: delighted to find themselves with a genuine apostle on their hands, they had duly begun to promote his cult for all they were worth, hailing him as their celestial patron, and raising a splendid basilica over his tomb. Already, by the middle of the tenth century, its fame had spread far beyond the limits of Spain, so that pilgrims from the furthest reaches of Francia, including even counts and bishops, were to be found making the gruelling journey to the distant shrine, “to beg mercy and help from God and Santiago.”
⁸
Increasingly, of all those holy places in Christendom where the earth was held to be touched by heaven, only Rome was illumined by a greater renown.

And then, catastrophe. On 10 August 997, amid the fearsome cacophony of trumpets and pipes that invariably heralded an assault by Saracens, a great army had descended upon the shrine. For a week, the invaders pillaged and burned everything that they could. The cathedral itself they razed to the ground. Its bells, brought crashing down, were loaded on to the shoulders of Christian captives. When the Saracens, content with their work of destruction, withdrew at last, their human pack-animals were compelled to accompany them, sweating and stumbling, all the way to Córdoba. Christian chroniclers, in horror at the humiliation visited upon Santiago, would subsequently claim that the invaders had been struck down by diarrhoea, a godly punishment indeed, and had perished amid the effluvia of their own bowels – but this was mere wishful thinking. Entering Córdoba, the warriors of the Caliphate did so unperturbed by stomach upsets.

Proofs of their triumph were indisputable and manifold. Unloaded into the Great Mosque, the bells from the despoiled cathedral were suspended from the ceiling, to serve the Muslim faithful as lamps, lighting their way to prayers. Of the prisoners of war, some were kept in their chains, and set to labouring on a great extension to the mosque. Others, led to the esplanade that ran beside the River Guadalquivir, were publicly decapitated, and their severed heads paraded through the market place, before being hung from the main gates of the citadel.
⁹

Grisly trophies such as these had long adorned Córdoba. No duty was more incumbent upon a commander of the faithful than that of waging
jihad
, and Abd al-Rahman, by laying claim to the title of Caliph, had pledged himself and his successors to at least the occasional expedition against the infidel. The heads of slaughtered Christians, dispatched from the front line, could serve not only as proof to an admiring people of their master’s victories but as stirring evidence of his piety. “Give firmness to the Believers,” God had instructed His Prophet. “I will instil terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: smite ye above their necks.”
¹⁰
Just as Mohammed himself, in the wake of his first great victory on the battlefield, had been presented by a servant with the severed head of his deadliest enemy, so had the caliphs harvested the heads of Christians – and by doing so proclaimed to the world their fitness to serve as the heirs of the Prophet.

Yet the commander who had led the raid on Santiago was not a caliph. For all that an Umayyad still ruled as the nominal lord of al-Andalus, true power had slipped the dynasty’s grasp. Hisham II, son of the shrewd and cultivated al-Hakam, had shown himself pitifully unworthy of his famous lineage. Succeeding to the throne in 976, at the tender age of fourteen, he had passed the entire span of his reign within the gilded cage of Córdoba’s citadel, the anonymous and indolent victim of his own general uselessness. Effective mastery of the Caliphate had been seized instead by his regent, a celebrated warrior and religious scholar by the name of Ibn Abi Amir, a man as stern and
masterful as Hisham was dissipated, and who had adopted, in 981, the richly merited title of “
al-Mansur
” – “the Victorious One.” Indeed, not since the time of the first coming of the Muslims to Spain had the Christians faced such a dangerous foe. Whereas in the time of Abd al-Rahman they had found it no great challenge to rebuff most of the assaults launched against them, and had even, on one noted occasion, succeeded in capturing the Caliph’s personal Qur’an, it seemed, by the time of the Millennium, that there was no resisting the Saracen firestorm. Santiago was far from the only target of al-Mansur’s fury. Barcelona too had been burned, and the lands of Christian lordships everywhere laid to waste. Even the kingdom of León, the most flourishing and formidable of them all, had been set to totter. As year followed year, and victory for the Saracens followed victory, so many Christians had come to dread whether their faith had a future in Spain at all.

Al-Mansur himself was certainly committed to its overthrow.
Jihad
was in his blood. Granted, his campaigns were not wholly lacking in expediency: for as an effective usurper, the pressure on him to legitimise his regime was greater even than it had been on the caliphs. Nevertheless, although he undoubtedly was a ruthless and calculating political operator, al-Mansur was also something much more: a man who devoutly believed himself the sword and shield of God. The infidels to the north were not the only objects of his righteous scorn. Indeed, even though he claimed descent from an Arab who had participated in the original conquest of Spain, he appears to have viewed the entire character of al-Andalus with a disdain that bordered on contempt. No less than the worthless Caliph immured in his palace, his compatriots struck him as dissipated and lacking in due piety. A man who felt himself called to scour the infidel from Spain could hardly remain oblivious to the canker of moral laxity among his co-religionists. Even in what should have been the great bastions of right thinking in al-Andalus, in the schools where the Qur’an was taught, and in the famous libraries that were the glory of Córdoba, the austere verities of Islam appeared, to him, under constant and insidious threat. So it
was that al-Mansur had scholars suspected of heresy publicly crucified; and so it was too that he did not hesitate to winnow even the celebrated library of al-Hakam of offending volumes, and consign the chaff to a bonfire. By 1002, when he died in the midst of his fifty-second campaign of
jihad
, it appeared that his life’s mission to impose God’s order upon the world had reaped a truly spectacular harvest – in the House of Islam itself no less than in the bloodied House of War.

And so it had – but not in the way that al-Mansur himself had intended. Appearances could be deceptive. In truth, it was not the kingdom of León, nor any of the other Christian lordships left mangled by the long decades of
jihad
, that faced implosion. Rather, it was the Caliphate itself, which had seemed, under the leadership of al-Mansur, raised to such intimidating heights of glory as to put even the furthest reaches of infidel Spain in its shadow, that was teetering on the edge of ruin. Few, in the immediate wake of the great warlord’s death, would have suspected as much; but there were some, even back in the glory days of the Umayyads, who had sensed a rottenness in al-Andalus, and feared where it might end. One of them, ironically enough, had been al-Mansur himself. As a youthful and talented player in the often deadly game of harem politics, he had been granted plentiful opportunities to study at close hand the functioning of al-Hakam’s regime – and to mark just how dependent it had become for its muscle on foreigners. As in the days of Abbot John’s visit to Córdoba, most of these were slaves, transported to al-Andalus from the far-off lands of the Slavs – but some were mercenaries, Muslim Berbers from Morocco. Al-Mansur had come to know the quality of these men well: for early in his career he had served among them in North Africa. Stern in the practice of their religion, and “famed for their exploits, qualities and valour in the face of the Christians,”
¹¹
the Berbers had seemed to the young officer everything that his compatriots were not: warriors ideally suited to keeping an ambitious
jihadi
in power. And so it had proved. Al-Mansur’s reign had witnessed a prodigious influx of Berber war bands into al-Andalus. By the time of his death, they were
to be found billeted across the Caliphate, loathed and feared in equal measure by the natives. Naturally enough, as the tax rate spiralled ever upwards, so the resentment of the Andalusis at being obliged to fund the promotion of immigrants – of savages! – over their own heads had grown increasingly sulphurous. In Córdoba especially, the great maze of streets had begun to seethe with ethnic hatreds. The capital had been transformed into a kindling box.