The Forge of Christendom (11 page)

No more than a small bodyguard of Saxon horsemen could be spared for the desperate expedition to Bavaria. There were other duchies that sent no contingents at all. Of those princes who did answer Otto’s summons, there were many who had been in open revolt against him only the previous summer. And yet still, with perhaps some three thousand warriors in his train, Swabians, Franconians and Bavarians as well as Saxons, and the Holy Lance borne proudly aloft, Otto did ride to war; and on 9 August, as he advanced southwards along the bank of the River Lech, a tributary of the Danube, he saw on the horizon ahead of him black smoke, and caught on the breeze a smell of death.

A few miles distant lay the city of Augsburg. There, in the fields before its eastern gate, the cathedral garrison had been desperately attempting to stave off the Hungarians’ assault, while behind them men laboured to repair the crumbling ramparts, and women walked in procession, raising up tearful prayers. That the Almighty had heard these, and in the very nick of time too, even as the siege engines of the Hungarians were crawling towards the walls, was confirmed for the Augsburgers when the great pagan host, pausing in its assault, broke up abruptly and started streaming northwards. News that the King of East Francia had come against them did not, as it would once have done, prompt the Hungarians to turn tail and seek to elude him; instead, reassured that Otto was indeed grievously outnumbered, they prepared themselves to wipe him out. Twilight was already darkening over the Lech as they closed in on the tiny royal army. Halting for the night by the side of the river, they fed their horses, made sure of their bow strings and waited with a fierce expectancy for the dawn.

Otto’s warriors, meanwhile, having spent the day in prayer and fasting, were looking forward to the morning with no less confidence. At sunrise, they swore solemn oaths of fellowship to one another, and then began their advance along the western bank, their heavy mail shirts glinting, their banners fluttering, their warhorses trampling down the dew-wet grass. It was Otto’s intention to take the Hungarians by surprise; and yet, as had happened to him many years previously, in the war against his brother, it was he and his men who were ambushed first. The enemy, as lethally mobile as ever, emerged seemingly from nowhere, and fell upon their rearguard; three of the seven divisions under Otto’s command were routed; only desperate resistance by a fourth, the Franconian, prevented the fighting from being over almost before it had begun. The king, granted a crucial breathing space by the valour of the Franks, frantically marshalled what remained of his host into the semblance of a battle line; and then, above the hissing of arrows, the screaming of the wounded and the keening “
hiu-hiu
” of the Hungarians, he cried out to his men, calling on them in the name of God to unsheathe their “invincible swords.” “For
who are we, to submit to such an enemy? We, who should blush at the very idea! We, who are the lords of almost all of Europe!”
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So it was, at the great tipping point of his reign, that Otto spoke not as a Saxon, not even as King of East Francia, but as the defender of all Christendom; and it was as a Christian that he now urged his followers into battle. Wheeling his horse round to face the enemy, he reached for the Holy Lance; and then, answering the harsh ululations of the Hungarians with a proud war cry of his own, he led the charge. Behind and all around him, the hoofs of their great warhorses making the field of the Lech to shake, there galloped his cavalry, the
loricati
, the men of iron: a strike force of killers long forged for such a moment. Although their numbers were sorely diminished even from the host that had left camp at dawn, there was to be no withstanding Otto’s warriors that day. With a surging crash, the steel-armoured tide flooded over the hordes of the enemy, hacking and spearing and trampling them down; for against the
loricati
, trapped at close quarters, the unarmoured Hungarians found themselves defenceless.

The slaughter was prodigious; and of those who attempted to flee, many were drowned in the waters of the Lech, others cornered in villages where they had sought refuge and burned to death, while others still were hunted down like wild beasts. It was this harrying of the defeated, even more than the Battle of the Lech itself, that proved the true calamity for the Hungarians; and Otto, as harsh towards his pagan enemies as he was magnanimous towards Christian rebels, set the seal on his triumph with an act of calculated savagery. Against every usage and custom of war, he chose not to ransom the Hungarian princes who had fallen into his hands. Instead – one last gift to his brother as he lay on his deathbed – Otto ordered them sent to Regensburg. There, strung up from the public gallows, the warlords who had thought to subdue all Bavaria and far beyond were left to twist and rot.

Otto, even as the corpses of his deadliest enemies were being picked clean by carrion birds, was already heading north, to confront Stoinef, the Wendish warlord, and a second great host of pagans. It was late in
the campaigning season by the time he arrived back in Saxony, amid “wild dancing and celebration”;
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and not until 16 October did he at last bring Stoinef to battle. No less than it had been at the Lech, however, Otto’s ultimate triumph was as brutal as it was complete. The paganism that for so long had menaced the borders of the
Reich
suffered a second decapitation. Otto, as if to demonstrate this in the most literal manner possible, ordered the beheading of all his Wendish prisoners of war, while the head of Stoinef himself, who had fallen in the battle, was sawn off and mounted on a pole. Only towards Wichmann and Ekbert, the two Saxon brothers who had so grievously betrayed him, did Otto display his more habitual magnanimity, permitting them to return from the exile into which they had fled after Stoinef’s defeat, and restoring to them their lands; but they were his countrymen – and Christians.

Mercy, that virtue proper to any lord, was not to be wasted on the barren soil of pagans’ hearts. East Francia had suffered too long and too bloodily at the hands of the Hungarians for her king to countenance any notion of toleration or compromise now. With barbarians so insensate in their savagery that they dared to trample upon the laws of the Almighty, there could be no accommodation: so Otto devoutly believed. Cutting the pagans down, he had done so as God’s champion. That this was no arrogant self-deception on his part appeared, after the
annus mirabilis
of 955, beyond dispute. For the first time in almost a century, the eastern ramparts of Christendom stood secure. A new march, constituted on Otto’s direct orders, would hence forward serve to keep the
Reich
from all further Hungarian incursions: “the Eastern Command,” as it was known, or “
Ostarrichi
” – “Austria.” Not since the conquest of Saxony had there been such a victory won for Christ. Not since Charlemagne had there been so puissant a Christian king.

No wonder that the men who had followed Otto to the Lech should have hailed him, in the aftermath of the great battle, as “
imperator
”: a Latin title of portentous ambiguity. Once, in the fabulously distant past of Rome, the word had been used to acclaim a victorious
general; but it had also, over the centuries, come to possess a far more fateful meaning – “emperor.” In the West, the holders of that title had long been withering away in dignity – until, by 924, there had been no one to lay claim to it at all. Such a vacancy, to a man such as Otto, could hardly help but present a glittering opportunity. Already, back in 951, he had ventured over the Alps in an attempt to secure an imperial coronation for himself, until the crisis back in Bavaria had obliged him to abandon the effort. Even four years later, when there was no one who could justly dispute the merit of his claims, the rivalries of Rome’s fractious princelings, as limited in their achievements as Otto was famed for his, threatened to render any expedition to the city quixotic. Like hungry dogs tossed shreds of meat, the various factions scrapping it out in Italy served to diminish the value of the very prizes over which they fought – and it was the papacy, that supreme prize, which had come to seem the most diminished of all.

In 955, five months after the Battle of the Lech, open scandal made explicit what had long been evident: the subordination of the Holy See to the ambitions of a single clan. For decades, the Theophylacts, Rome’s most powerful family, had been securing the election of assorted supine puppets to the Lateran; now they went one better, and elevated one of their own. Octavian, who had succeeded to the leadership of the Theophylacts only the year previously, was hardly a man cut out for a papal career. Notorious, even by the standards of the Roman aristocracy, for his promiscuity and partying, he made little effort to disguise his boredom with anything that smacked of the spiritual. He was also barely sixteen. Not even a change of name to the more satisfyingly apostolic “John” could dampen the gossip that was soon swirling around the teenage Holy Father.
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It was claimed that he had converted an entire wing of the Lateran into a brothel; that when
he was not blinding or castrating priests, he was ordaining them in his hunting stables; that he was in the habit of offering up drunken toasts to Satan. A pope capable of such blasphemies was hardly likely to prove accommodating to a mere earthly king. Saviour of Christen dom or no, Otto and his imperial ambitions cut little ice with John XII.

It did not take long, however, for the papal tearaway to be tripped up by his own ambitions. Otto, well practised in the art of leaving his adversaries to fall flat on their faces, watched patiently from beyond the Alps as John, proving himself as ill-disciplined in the field of diplomacy as in every other sphere, steadily affronted his neighbours. By 960, he found himself menaced on all sides by predatory princes. After an abortive attempt to meet them in battle – yet another scandal to set alongside all the others – he found himself with little option but to do as Stephen II and Leo III had done before him: look north for a protector. Late that year, a frantic embassy was dispatched to East Francia; and Otto, needing no further encouragement, swung immediately into action. By the following year, he had secured both Lombardy for himself and the papal patrimony for John; and in February 962, having arrived in Rome at last, he exacted his price. The Pope, lowering the imperial diadem on to Otto’s head, confirmed him in the title that his warriors had first bestowed upon him seven years previously, beside the Lech. All was now official. There ruled, once again, an emperor in the West.

But what precisely, in an age far removed from that of Charlemagne, let alone that of the ancient Caesars, did being an emperor mean? John, and Rome’s other clan leaders too, had cheerfully presumed that the title would prove an empty one: an optimistic notion, and one of which Otto was quick to disabuse them. When John, attempting to pull rank, sought to make his customary trouble, the new emperor briskly convened a synod amid the awful splendour of St. Peter’s, and had the Pope arraigned on multiple charges of moral turpitude. It did not take long for the accused, palpably guilty as he was, to be convicted, deposed and replaced with a candidate more amenable to Otto’s wishes; but John, citing the ancient principle that
no earthly power could judge the Bishop of Rome, refused to accept the verdict. The result was an outrage: two competing popes. Not even John’s death a year later from a stroke, the result of overly strenuous grapplings with a married woman, served to ease the tribulations of the Holy See.
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Otto, leaving no one in any doubt as to what he judged his prerogatives to be, continued with his policy of crushing all hints of papal independence. One pope, Benedict V, merely for the sin of having been elected without imperial approval, had his staff ceremonially broken over his head, before being exiled for life to Hamburg; his successor, John XIII, installed and maintained in office at the point of Otto’s sword, scrabbled with unsurprising servility to do his master’s every bidding. A humiliation for the papacy, naturally – but re sounding splendidly to the emperor’s already refulgent prestige.

Sure and just indeed, the Saxons might have reflected, were the workings of Providence. Less than two centuries it had taken the Almighty to raise them from their condition of utter ruin to one in which they stood as the very shapers of Christendom. Few had seen it coming – not even among the ranks of the Saxon royal family itself. Gerberga, the Queen of West Francia, writing in her despair to Adso of Montier-en-Der, had done so barely a decade before the Battle of the Lech: a victory won by a man who was not merely her compatriot, but her elder brother. That the heirs to the dignity of the Roman Empire might prove to be her own family had simply never crossed Gerberga’s mind. Now, however, with Otto enthroned as emperor, the master of Rome herself, who was there left to doubt it? Who left to doubt that he and his empire stood as the surest bulwark against those encroaching shadows that had so oppressed Gerberga’s dreams: the shadows of chaos, of evil, of Antichrist?

All his reign, Otto had known it his duty as a Christian king to combat God’s enemies on the fields of battle. His subjects – despite the earnest attempts of missionaries and scholars to persuade them
otherwise – had known it too. Deep in their souls, the Saxons had understood, as only a people brought to Christ through conquest could possibly have understood, that the God they worshipped was indeed a god of war. This was a presumption that Otto, with the Bishop of Rome directly under his thumb, was now in a position to propagate in the very capital of Christendom. No matter that it ran directly contrary to the traditional teaching of the Church. The days when Christians from the more ancient heartlands of the faith had condescended to the Saxons as ignorant barbarians were long gone. Who was John XIII to lecture the emperor, his patron and guardian? Indeed, far from Otto being rendered more Roman by his sojourn in the ancient capital, it was the papacy, huddled in his far-spreading shadow, humiliated by its blatant dependency and diminished by ceaseless scandal, that appeared to be adopting the perspective of the Saxons. In 967, John XIII confirmed this impression by formally establishing Magdeburg, that stern and bristling stronghold on the frontier of Christendom, as an archbishopric. Just as the city had long served Saxony as its foremost bulwark against the malice of the pagan Wends, so now was it to serve the Church. By papal fiat, all the Slavs who dwelt beyond the Elbe were pronounced subject to Magdeburg’s new archbishop: “both those converted, and those to be converted still.”
¹⁶