The Good, the Bad and the Unready (27 page)

By any standards Catherine was an extraordinary woman. In addition to her administrative reform and military success, she expanded her nation by more than 200,000 square miles and vastly increased international trade and communications. She promoted Russian culture; she was a great collector of books (a correspondent of both Voltaire and Diderot, she wrote several plays herself); she was a patron of the arts; she founded schools. And yet her greatness was stained by stories of a prodigal and licentious private life. Her supposedly gargantuan sexual appetite was legendary. With her degenerate husband ‘Peter the Mad’ dead, Catherine apparently amused herself with a steady stream of lovers, mostlyyoung army officers. All her potential bedfellows were screened by her personal physician and then road-tested by two of her ladies-in-waiting to ensure that their empress would be satisfied. On her death, scandal-mongers spread the false rumour that she had perished when a horse was lowered on her too suddenly while she was trying to have sex with it. Mud sticks, however, and while Catherine made it known that she would like to be called ‘the Little Mother of All the Russians’, she was commonly dubbed ‘the Modern Messalina’ after Valeria Messal-ina, the lascivious empress of ancient Rome.

Catherine should be celebrated, however, if for no other reason than for one particular act of great courage. In 1768 Russia was reeling from an epidemic of smallpox and the empress summoned an English doctor named Thomas Dinsdale to oversee a programme of inoculation. The vaccine was still at an experimental stage, and Russia was nervous. Catherine, however, set an example to her people by being one of the first to have the injection.

 
Charles the
Great

Charlemagne, Charles I, king of the Franks and Lombards and Holy Roman Emperor, c.742–814

At the zenith of his power in the early ninth century, Charles ruled all the Christian lands of Western Europe except Britain and the southern parts of Italy and Sicily. A stunning expansion of Frankish political sway through military conquest was not his only achievement by a long chalk, however. Charlemagne (from the Latin ‘Carolus Magnus’) also brought about a cultural revival in his empire: his court at Aachen developed into a crucible of European arts and intellectual discourse that rivalled anything the Byzantines could muster.

Physically he took after his mother Bertha
BIGFOOT
rather than his father Pepin the
SHORT
, towering over his contemporaries, therefore, both literally and metaphorically. Ever since his tomb was opened in 1861 we have known that his contemporary biographer Einhard was not using poetic licence when he wrote that the emperor was ‘seven times the length of his feet’ (he was actually just under six foot four), and so we can accept with a degree of confidence his further descriptions of Charles’s fair hair, his laughing and animated face with a rather big nose, his surprisingly high-pitched voice and his pot belly. We can also be fairly sure that he was a gregarious man, never happier than when among friends, in the din of the hunt or noisily bathing his children in the palace.

Charles thought of himself above all as a Christian, and his greatest desire was to be counted among ‘the Just’. To this end he went to church several times a day, drank in moderation (something of a rarity in those times), made several pilgrimages to Rome and spent his last days correcting holy books of any mistakes he found. He was also apparently a devoted father, although supporters of his son Pepin the
HUNCHBACK
, whom he dispatched to a monastery, might wish to disagree.

Charles was indeed extraordinary – a charismatic, convivial and cultured man whose military campaigns (always accompanied
by his pet elephant) and internal reforms almost single-handedly paved the way for the mighty Holy Roman Empire. It seems churlish to point out any faults, but it was said that he had an uncontrollable sexual appetite and an unhealthy passion for roast game.

Clovis the
Great

Clovis I, Merovingian king, c.466–511

Clovis inherited the kingdom of his father, Childeric I, in 481 and soon settled down to a life of conquest. He toppled the Germanic peoples east of the Rhine, and his victory over Syagrius, the self-styled ‘king of the Romans’, united northern Gaul under Frankish thrall. The burgeoning little town of Paris, meanwhile, became the capital of his empire.

Twelve years into his reign, Clovis the pagan king married a princess named Clotilda, the Christian niece of King Gundobad of Burgundy. Clovis was happy for their children to be baptized but, try as Clotilda might, was completely uninterested in converting to his wife’s faith; that is, until a few years later in 496 when, on the brink of defeat by a Germanic tribe, Clovis turned his eyes heavenward and prayed to Clotilda’s deity. According to the
Chronicle of St Denis
, he bargained with God that he would ‘pledge you perpetual service unto your faith, if only you give me now the victory over my enemies’. The very moment these words were said, Clovis’s soldiers were apparently filled with burning valour, putting such fear into their enemies that they turned tail and fled the battlefield. The following Christmas Day Clovis, along with 3,000 of his troops, was baptized, during which ceremony, we are told, a white dove appeared out of nowhere, handily carrying a vial of sweet-smelling holy oil in its beak.

Despite his newly found faith, Clovis had a somewhat maverick approach to the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Gregory of Tours writes that, promising untold power and wealth, Clovis persuaded one Prince Chloderic to murder his father, King
‘Sigibert the Lame’. That achieved, Clovis ordered the death of Chloderic himself, and the luckless prince tumbled into the open grave that had been prepared for his father. Later, among many other decidedly gruesome and unchristian deeds, he commanded that a prisoner called Chararic should find God by having his hair cut short and being ordained a priest. Chararic burst into tears at this ‘humiliation’, and so Clovis promptly had his head chopped off.

After her husband’s death in 511, Queen Clotilda spent her life caring for the poor and perpetuating the memory of her ‘great’, if morally dubious, partner.

Constantine the
Great

Constantine I, emperor of Rome, c.280–337

In 312, on the eve of a battle with his imperial rival Maxentius at Milvian Bridge near Rome, Constantine had a vision. The Christian apologist Lactantius writes that the emperor looked at the setting sun, saw a cross emblazoned on it, and then apparently saw or heard the Greek phrase ‘
’, meaning ‘With this sign, you shall conquer.’ Constantine, who was a pagan, had the Christian symbol inscribed on his soldiers’ shields overnight, and won a great victory the next day. He was now sole emperor of the West.

Constantine attributed his success to the God of the Christians, and through the Edict of Milan of 313 declared that Christian worship was now to be tolerated throughout the empire. But not everybody was happy that this minor religion was receiving such favouritism. Seven years later Licinius, the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, openly rejected the edict and started persecuting those of the Christian faith. This led to a civil war between the two emperors which Constantine won, his forces fired up with Christian zeal. He was now the sole emperor of the entire Roman Empire.

In 324 the great Constantine relocated his imperial headquarters to Byzantium, humbly renaming it ‘Nova Roma’ or ‘New Rome’ (it was not until after his death that it was given
the title ‘Constantinople’). From here he reformed the imperial currency and passed a wealth of new laws, which included the following:

The following year Constantine presided at the First Ecumenical Council of the Church in the palace at Nicaea. This produced what has become known as the Nicene Creed, still at the heart of Christian doctrine today.

Through his military prowess, political acumen and enthusiastic religious conviction Constantine the Great laid the foundations for a strong empire and created a solid platform for post-classical European civilization. As was the norm, he waited until his dying hours to be baptized.

Cyrus the
Great

Cyrus II, Persian ruler, c.585–c.529 BC

According to Herodotus, Astyages, the king of the Medes, gave his daughter in marriage to Cambyses, a prince in what was then a small and rather insignificant territory called Persia. The couple produced a baby whom they named Cyrus, meaning ‘like the sun’. But then Astyages had a dream. He dreamed that Cyrus would one day conquer Media, and so he gave orders for the child to be murdered. The courtier who had been assigned the job, however, smuggled Cyrus out of the palace at Persis and arranged for a shepherd to raise him.