The Forge of Christendom (49 page)

Not that anyone would have expected the divine judgement to be delayed for long. Rare was the battle that lasted for more than an hour or so. The moment of crisis, when all would be decided upon a rumour or a sudden flight, was bound to sweep the field soon. And so it almost proved. Most shields were still unriven, most helmets without dents, most blades barely notched, when all of a sudden word began to pass through the Norman ranks that William had fallen. His men were thrown into panic. As they turned and started stumbling and slipping back down the hill, it seemed as though the retreat was on the verge of becoming a rout: for pockets of the English were leaving the shield wall to pursue them. All hung in the balance.

But William, though his horse had been brought down and he himself flung on to the ground, was not dead. Raising both his helmet and his voice, rallying his dispirited men, reminding them that they were warriors still, he succeeded in steeling his buckling line. And now it was the turn of the English to face a seeming breaking point. Those who had been pursuing their retreating adversaries down the hill found themselves suddenly turned upon. Surrounded, they proved easy meat. Hoofs and trampling feet pulped their bodies into the mud. The slope of the hill turned slippery, a shambles of viscera and broken limbs. For a second time, it seemed as though the battle was decided. But just as the Normans had been rallied, so now did the English refuse to flee. Harald’s great banner still fluttered defiantly in the breeze. The shield wall, though sorely depleted, held. The day remained unresolved.

And even as the hours continued to pass, and the sun slowly to set, and the shadows to lengthen over the increasingly corpse-strewn slope of the battlefield, the confusion did not cease. “It was,” as one Norman would express it later in stupefied terms, “an unheard-of kind of combat, with one side launching ceaseless attacks and
manoeuvres, the other standing firmly as though rooted to the ground.”
⁶⁹
Not all the exhaustion of men weighed down by the great weight of their shields and helmets and coats of iron could serve to diminish the desperate savagery of the battle. An hour before sunset, and still William’s men were hurling themselves against the English, their spears splintered, as William’s own was, their swords no less “dyed with brains and blood”
⁷⁰
than their duke’s. Yet still the housecarls stood firm, swinging with their double-headed axes, bludgeoning their assailants, hacking through metal and flesh and bone. Certainly, planted as they were upon their hill, they could not hope to win – but then again, merely to hold their position, to win through to the night, to force a draw, would rank almost as a victory. William, isolated as he was in a hostile county, and with the sea at his back, could not afford a stalemate. Only succeed in standing firm until the coming of dusk, then, and Harald would most likely win the war.

But he did not last the hour. Many stories would later be told about his end; one, the most repeated, had him being hit in the eye by an arrow.
⁷¹
Whether true or not, it is certain that Norman horsemen, trampling Harald down, left him as just one among a heap of corpses piled around the toppled royal banner, just one among the fallen on a day of slaughter fit to put even Stamford Bridge into the shade. As darkness fell, and what was left of the English turned at last and fled into the gathering darkness, to be hunted throughout the night by William’s exultant cavalry, it was the reek of blood and emptied bowels, together with the moans and sobs of the wounded, that bore prime witness to the butchery. Come the morning, however, and daylight unveiled a spectacle of carnage so appalling that even the victors were moved to pity. “Far and wide the earth was covered with the flower of the English nobility and youth, drenched in gore.”
⁷²
So hacked about was Harald’s own body, and so disfigured the face, that it could barely be recognised.

Fit image of the mutilation with which the kingdom itself had been served. True, not all the lords of England had fallen at Hastings; nor had their fight been brought wholly to an end by the slaughter. Yet
with Harald dead, and his brothers fallen beside him, and his most loyal followers too, there was no one left to coordinate the resistance. The Normans, with their predators’ nostrils ever sensitive to the scents of weakness and despair, were hardly the people to let a wounded foe slip free. By Christmas Day, William was sitting in the same abbey where Harald had been crowned at the beginning of the year, to receive a crown of his own. Within the church itself, the moment of his coronation was greeted, as was the English custom, with a great cry of acclamation, a thunderous acknowledgement that the Norman duke now ruled as the anointed heir to Alfred and Edgar and Edward; but outside, in the streets, William’s guards mistook the shouting for a riot, and set about assaulting the locals and torching their houses. It was a brute reminder to the conquered English of the true source of their new king’s legitimacy.

To foreign observers as well, William appeared merely one more in a long line of northern predators, and his winning of a crown a feat of robbery such as any Viking chieftain might have revelled in. “The Duke crossed the cold channel,” as one Dane put it, “and reddened the bright swords.”
⁷³
Yet that was not how William himself saw his great exploit. At the most awe-inspiring moment of his life, as he was crowned on the very anniversary of the birth of Christ, the new king had begun to tremble uncontrollably, betraying for the first and only time in his life, perhaps, a sense of fear and self-doubt. Hearing screams rise from outside the abbey, even as he could feel the chrism impregnating him with its sacral charge, William would surely have dreaded with a sudden certitude that his offences were rank, that God had not blessed him with His favour at all, and that the blood through which he had waded, the filth and horror and stench of it, was charged eternally to his soul. The moment had passed – and William had been left William still. Yet he did not forget the experience. Years later, when a jester saw the king sitting “resplendent in gold and jewels,” and shouted out, “Behold, I see God! behold, I see God!,”
⁷⁴
he had been whipped for his joke. It was not the blasphemy that had caused such grievous offence, but rather the implied mockery of William’s most
profoundly held conceit: that he had been raised to the throne of England by the hand of Providence.

If the Normans, who knew that in truth it was their own sword arms which had won their bastard duke the crown, sometimes found this hard to take, then so did the English. William’s coronation oath, that he would uphold the laws and customs of his new subjects, had been sworn with all due solemnity – and sure enough, for the first few years of his reign, he did indeed attempt to include them as partners within his new regime. But the English earls could never quite forgo a taste for revolt – with the result that, soon enough, an infuriated William was brought to abandon the whole experiment. In its place, he instituted a far more primal and brutal policy. Just as his ancestors had cleansed what would become Normandy of its Frankish aristocracy, so now did William set about the systematic elimination from England of its entire ruling class. The lands of the kingdom – its “
folc and foldan
” – were henceforward to be in the charge of Normans, and no one else. This, however, as a feat of dispossession, owed less to the example of Rollo than to William’s well-honed mastery of the cutting edge. No longer was England to remain isolated from the revolution that had so transformed the princedoms of France. Pevensey and Hastings were destined to prove only the first of the castles raised by the conquerors. The proficiency of William fitz Osbern, in particular, was noted by the English as a grim and fearsome thing: “for he built castles far and wide throughout this country, and distressed the wretched folk, and always after that it grew much worse.”
⁷⁵
Which was putting it mildly: for the task of the Norman lords, set as they were amid a sullen and fractious people, was no different in kind to that of the most upstart castellan in France.

In England, however, it was not just scattered hamlets and villages that needed to be broken, but a whole kingdom. In the winter of 1069, when the inveterately rebellious Northumbrians sought to throw off their new king’s rule, William’s response was to harry the entire earldom. Methods of devastation familiar to the peasantry of France were unleashed across the north of England: granaries were
burned, oxen slaughtered, ploughs destroyed. Rotting corpses were left to litter the road. The scattered survivors were reduced to selling themselves into slavery, or else, if reports are to be believed, to cannibalism. Even enthusiasts for William’s rule confessed themselves appalled. “On many occasions,” wrote one of them, “I have been able to extol him according to his merits, but this – this I dare not praise.”
⁷⁶

And yet, as William might legitimately have pointed out, the practice of ravaging was an ancient one in England. Edgar had done the same – and he was remembered as “the Peaceable.” Hard and ruthless “the Conqueror” might be, but for all that, he was no Harald, given to breaking his promises lightly. The oath he had sworn at his coronation, to uphold the laws of England, was one that he would labour all his life to keep. In his determination to keep together his new realm, its unity, its public order and its peerless administration, William was indeed a king in the most formidable tradition of the
Cerdicingas
. Duke of Normandy too, and favourite of the reformers in the Lateran; he was a ruler of many parts. No statesman of his age was less the prisoner of the past – or more adept at turning it to his own ends. Tradition and innovation: would both continue to be exploited by William with a trail-blazing facility. That his reign was destined to prove one perpetual experiment, an attempt to weave a tapestry from a multiplicity of different strands, whether drawn from England, or Normandy, or Rome, would ultimately serve to render his achievements only the more lasting. He might have been the bastard descendant of pirates – but he would end up master of the most formidable instrument of royal power in the whole of Christendom. He had dared – and he had won.

True, doubts as to the price paid for this victory were never altogether dispelled. “For what has a man profited,” as Abbot Hugh of Cluny wrote pointedly to William, “if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his own soul?”
⁷⁷
Even Hildebrand himself, the very man who had pushed for the Conqueror to be granted a papal banner, appears to have felt a slight measure of queasiness at the sheer scale of the
bloodletting that he had helped to sponsor. In 1070, only a few months after the harrying of Northumbria, a papal legate imposed a public penance on all who had fought at Hastings. Shortly afterwards, in a further show of expiation, the foundations of a new abbey began to be dug on the very site of the fateful battle. The altar, so William had decreed, was to stand precisely where Harald had fallen: a command that required the entire top of the hill to be levelled. Religiosity, arrogance, and a quite awe-inspiring monumentalism: the new monastery combined them all. If it was intended to express contrition, then so too was it designed to overawe. “Even a Greek or Saracen,” claimed one Norman, describing the Conqueror’s prodigious sponsorship of churches, “might find himself impressed.”
⁷⁸
As well he might. The great buildings that William could afford to build, unprecedented engineering experiments raised in stone, were indeed on a scale to compare with anything to be found in Constantinople or Córdoba. So too was the state that he ruled. No matter that he had founded it, like Battle Abbey, upon a field of blood – its foundations were destined to last.

It took a conqueror to seize a kingdom. Kings, however, if they were weak, and especially if they were children, might be captured with altogether greater ease. Even the very highest ranking of them – even future emperors. Eighty years had passed since the abduction of the infant Otto III in 984 – and now, once again, the
Reich
was ruled by a child. Henry IV, son and namesake of the great emperor who had done so much to implant the cause of reform in Rome, had been crowned king back in 1056, when he was only five years old. Self-reliant and sharp-witted he may have been – but not even the most precocious boy could hope to stamp his authority at such a tender age. Just as Duke William, throughout his minority, had found himself powerless to prevent the steady collapse of order within Normandy, so was the infant Henry, for all his talents, bound to remain the toy of those who had the keeping of him. Control the king and take control of the kingdom: so it seemed to the more unscrupulous among the great lords of the
Reich
. Henry, for as long as he remained under age, at any rate, could hardly help but rank as a likely candidate for a kidnapping.

So it was, in the spring of 1062, when the Archbishop of Cologne came gliding down the Rhine in a particularly handsome galley and docked at the island palace of Kaiserswerth, where the court had been celebrating Easter, the king’s guardians should have been fully on their guard. But they were not. A serious lapse: for Henry himself – impulsive, mercurial and twelve years old – was just the boy to jump at the chance of exploring a state-of-the-art showboat. No sooner had he stepped on board, however, than all the oars began to beat, “and he was immediately propelled out into the middle of the river with a quite remarkable speed.”
¹
The young king, despite not being able to swim, boldly jumped overboard: an attempt at escape that would have left him drowned had one of the archbishop’s accomplices not dived in after him, and hauled him back to safety. To captivity as well. Rowed upriver to Cologne, where he discovered that even the Holy Lance, that most awesome of all his possessions, had been filched, Henry found himself the impotent cipher of his abductors: a whole swaggering gang of dukes and prelates. Hardly the experience, in short, to bolster his faith much in either princes or bishops.

Henry IV’s Reich

Yet though the scandal of his abduction had been traumatic for the young king himself, it was even more so for his mother. Agnes of Aquitaine, pious and conscientious, had been ruling on Henry’s behalf ever since her husband’s death: a challenging responsibility for a woman, certainly, but not wholly without precedent, even so. If Theophanu, that formidable and glamorous guardian of the infant Otto III, continued to serve as the most celebrated model of a queenly regent, then she was far from the only one. Great lords, with their predilection for hunting, feuding and fighting, were much given to dying before their heirs had come of age. Grandmothers, widows and aunts: any or all might be called upon to step into the breach. Indeed, at one point, back in 985, there had been so many women in Christendom ruling on behalf of under-age wards that they had all met up at a special summit, to swap dynastic gossip and formulate marriage plans for their charges. Such displays of female influence might have lacked the honest masculine impact of a sword blow or a lance punch, but they could be just as effective. Agnes herself, in the course of her regency, had provided a particularly striking
demonstration of how a woman could succeed where even a mighty warrior had failed: for one of the great things that she had achieved for her son was to secure for him the stalwart backing of a prince who, only a few years previously, had been an inveterate rebel against her husband.

Duke Godfrey, “the Bearded,” as he was known, had presented a double menace to Henry III: both in his own right, as a great landowner in Lorraine, along the western frontier of the
Reich
, and by virtue of a brilliant marriage that had brought him an even more impressive swath of land in northern Italy. Godfrey was the second husband of the raven-haired and beauteous Lady Beatrice: her first, a notably ruthless warlord by the name of Boniface, had hacked out a lordship that included much of Tuscany and extended all the way northwards to the foothills of the Alps. This formidable dowry was rendered all the more alarming, in Henry III’s considered opinion, by the fact that Beatrice was his own cousin, and a descendant of Henry the Fowler, no less. Rather than grant Godfrey the continued possession of such a catch, the emperor had opted instead to invade Tuscany, seize Beatrice and Matilda, her one surviving child by Boniface, and cart both mother and daughter back to a gilded confinement in the Rhineland. Yet Agnes, in the wake of her husband’s death, had sought a different approach. Duke Godfrey himself had been “restored to the king’s grace, and to peace.”
²
His right to Tuscany had been officially acknowledged. Beatrice and the eleven-year-old Matilda had been released. From that moment on, presiding over his Tuscan lordship from his principal stronghold, an ancient, dilapidated, but increasingly vibrant town named Florence, Godfrey had provided Agnes’s regime with its most loyal bulwark. Fitting, then, perhaps, that the dynasty itself should have taken its title, not from Florence, nor from any other lowland town filled with antique ruins and sleek merchants, but rather from an altogether more bristling and impregnable fortress, Count Boniface’s original base, a castle perched high on a remote and mountainous rock: Canossa.

Yet not all the empress’s gambles had paid off to similar effect.

Nearer to home, her policy of building up the power of ambitious princes had tended to result in an ominous fragmenting of the royal power base. Sponsorship did not always result in gratitude. Come the great crisis of Agnes’s regency, and even a prominent kinsman of the infant king, the formidably blue-blooded Duke Rudolf of Swabia, had shown himself perfectly content to turn his back upon the empress – despite the fact that it was she who had originally raised him to the eminence of his dukedom.
³
Other favourites had behaved even more shabbily. Prominent among the lords directly responsible for Henry’s abduction, for instance, had been a second prince who owed a dukedom to the empress: a count from Northeim, in lower Saxony, by the name of Otto, appointed only six months previously to the rule of Bavaria. Justifying their treachery, Duke Otto and his fellow conspirators had shown a particularly fine line in hypocrisy. Agnes, they charged, despite every appearance to the contrary, was in truth a giddy creature of whim and sensuality – so much so that all her rule of the kingdom had been governed by nothing more elevated than “her private passions.”
⁴
A particularly vicious libel: for it had served to cast all the empress’s attempts at diplomacy as the merest feminine teasing and seduction. Such was the kind of mud that any powerful lady might expect to have flung at her – but for the devout Agnes, it was a particular agony. In the wake of her son’s kidnapping, and the signal failure of the great lords of the
Reich
to rally to her support, the empress had been left to wring her hands over the ruin of more than merely her political authority. Something infinitely precious had been dragged through the mire too: her reputation for pious living. A terrible blow – so terrible, indeed, that the despairing Agnes judged that it could only have been a punishment delivered upon her for her sins by the Almighty.

For the next three years, an irresolute and anguished figure, the empress would haunt the scenes of her humiliation, torn between anxiety for her son and “a yearning to renounce the world.”
⁵
For as long as Henry remained legally her charge, she could not bring herself to abandon the court altogether – but then, shortly after Easter in
1065, at a splendid ceremony in Worms, a sword was belted around the young king’s waist, and at last he ranked as a man. Almost his first action after coming of age, a pointed demonstration of muscle flexing, was to dismiss as his principal adviser the same man whose ship had borne him away three years previously: the Archbishop of Cologne. It was gratifying in the extreme for Agnes to witness the disgrace of the man who had brought about her own downfall – but proof as well that Henry no longer had any need of her. So it was, obeying the promptings of her own hag-ridden conscience, that she finally took to the road. “The knowledge of my sins terrifies me,” she had confessed three years earlier, “more than any ghost, more than any vision.”
⁶
That autumn, one among the great multitude of pilgrims seeking to cast aside their old lives, to ready themselves for the hour of judgement, to secure a new beginning, she entered Rome. Humbly, as befitted a penitent, she approached the tombs of the apostles on a broken-down nag, dressed in clothes of the roughest grey sack-cloth, and “clutching not a sceptre but a psalter.”
⁷
Yet in one respect, at least, the empress remained an empress still. Seeking spiritual comfort, she did not bother to scout around for it. Instead, imperious in her very humility, Agnes went directly to St. Peter’s and summoned a cardinal.

And not just any cardinal. In 1065, with the formidable Humbert having died four years earlier, the man chosen by the empress to serve as her confessor ranked as perhaps the most intellectually dazzling of all the leaders of the Roman Church. Originally raised to the cardinalate back in the winter of 1057, at the prompting of the inevitable Hildebrand, Peter Damian had brought qualities to the papal cause that were very much his own. Less steely than the archdeacon, less awesomely focused and competent, he was also far bolder in the flights of his imagination, more creative, more brilliant. Indeed, rare was the innovation so radical that he could not take it to some provocative new extreme. Well, then, might Hildebrand have pushed for his promotion: for Peter, with his genius for thinking the unthinkable, was ideally qualified to serve as the outrider of reform. Sure enough, with papal ministers struggling to convince other churches that the Bishop
of Rome did indeed possess a universal lordship over them, the new cardinal had gone straight for the jugular: anyone who denied it, he had declared flatly, was a heretic.
⁸
A most portentous doctrine: for it had promised to the Pope an authority such as not even a Caesar had presumed to claim. To his ministers too, of course – and they, at any rate, had already shown themselves perfectly happy to muscle in on imperial prerogatives. In 1059, moving to usurp a power that Henry III had always jealously maintained as his own, the cardinals had laid claim to a truly momentous dignity: the right to choose a pope. Peter, letting joyous rip, had responded to this decree with an exuberant immodesty. He and his fellow cardinals, he proclaimed, were nothing less than “the spiritual senators of the universal Church.” Here was a stirring allusion: for once, back in ancient times, it was a Senate formed of the wisest and noblest of the Roman people that had guided its city to the mastery of the world. Now, Peter argued, it was the duty of the cardinals to aim at a yet greater feat of conquest. “For this is the endeavour to which they should devote all their talents: the subjugation of the entire human race to the laws of the one true emperor – Christ.”
⁹

It was just the kind of clarion call that Hildebrand had surely been hoping that Peter would sound. Yet the author himself, for all his outward show of self-confidence, was inwardly racked by anguish and self-doubt. Meeting with Agnes in the candle-washed shadows of St. Peter’s, hearing her confession, encouraging her in her resolve to retire to a convent, he could see in the troubled empress only a reflection of his own inner turmoil. The cardinal too, though a prince of the Church, knew what it was to fear greatness. All the opportunities that high rank had brought him, all the glory, the power, the fame, appeared to him in truth only the most devilish temptations. Upon Hildebrand, indeed, he had bestowed the nickname – not altogether a jesting one – of “my holy Satan.”
¹⁰
Peter could hardly neglect his duties as a cardinal, nor scorn his responsibilities to the Christian people; and yet he dreaded, all the same, what the fruits of such a lordship might be. Deep within his heart, no less devoutly than any
heretic, he believed that it was in wild places without churches and hectoring archdeacons, out in forests, in swamps, in caves, that the surest hope of redemption lay. Arrayed in all the splendid robes of his office, Peter yearned only to be wearing filthy rags. Surrounded by the swirl and clamour of the Roman crowds, he longed for solitude. Pacing palaces, he dreamed of the rocky and unadorned cave in which, before becoming a cardinal, it had been his calling for many years to live. “You purify the hidden places of the soul,” Peter had fondly saluted his cell. “You wash away the squalor of sin. You cause men’s souls to shine with the brightness of an angel.”
¹¹

And once, kneeling on the bare rock of his cave, lost in an ecstasy of tears and prayer, Peter had been granted a glimpse of Christ Himself. Like Adémar, he had witnessed his Saviour “pierced through with nails, and hanging from a cross.”
¹²
Unlike Adémar, however, he had been so close to the terrifying spectacle that he had been able to crane his neck upwards and raise his parted lips to the wounds. To drink the blood of God! There was nothing in all the universe that could possibly taste sweeter. What, in comparison, could the entire fallen world appear except a realm of dust and distraction and shadow? No wonder, then, that Peter, in his yearning to free himself from the bonds of the earthly, should have fretted that all his obligations as a leader of the Christian people, oppressive as they were, might be serving to keep him an exile from the City of God. For he knew, none better, what it was to be an outcast, and deprived of the hope of love.