The Forge of Christendom (13 page)

Not that the new regime in Constantinople was the only enemy facing her husband in his ambition to lay claim to Italy – let alone the world beyond. As Otto and his horsemen clattered southwards that autumn, they knew that there lurked ahead of them a danger far deadlier and more immediate than the garrisons of the New Rome. Marks of it were everywhere. By the roadside, ancient towns stood abandoned and crumbling, while in the distance new settlements clung nervously to hilltops, hunched against the horizon, and ringed about by walls. Alongside the coast, and especially the banks of estuaries, the desolation grew even more menacing. There, as the Saxons watered their horses, they found no vineyards, or villages, or fields, but only desolation – and over it all a stillness like that of a rifled grave. Terror, in southern Italy, came surest by the sea.

Italy in the reign of Otto II

Indeed, what the tattoo of thundering hoofs had once sounded out to those in the path of the Hungarians, the glimpse of triangular sails on the Mediterranean signalled to those who lived anywhere south of the Alps. The pirates, although they had originally spread from Africa, were certainly not confined to the lower reaches of Christendom. Some, sailing into the waters off Marseille, had secured a base for themselves on Frankish soil, at a village named Garde-Freinet, securely situated on a cliff top, and surrounded by bristling cacti, “so that if any man stumbled against one of them it would cut clean through him like a sword.”
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Others took to the Alps, where they infested the mountain passes. Others, in the most shocking and impious predation of all, had established their vipers’ nest beside the mouth of the River Garigliano – less than a hundred miles south of Rome itself. The Holy City, its surrounds laid to waste by decades of plundering, had found itself being throttled. Even the horses in the papal stables had begun to starve. A succession of popes had begged, cajoled and exhorted their neighbours to flush out the corsairs. Finally, in 915, after decades of papal hectoring, and an unprecedented alliance of assorted Italian powers, the lair had been swept clean at last. The Holy Father himself, in his excitement at having helped to forge such a victory, had charged the enemy twice. Heaven’s forgiveness of this offence, witnessed by the startling but widely attested appearance of Saints Peter and Paul in the battle line, had provided a fitting measure of the crisis.

Now, however, the corsairs were returning to their former haunts. The shadow of peril was deepening and lengthening northwards once again. Otto’s determination to confront it even through the rigours
of a winter campaign was a reflection less of bravado than alarm. Pledged as he was to the defence of Rome, he knew that the Holy City was the prize of which the pirates had been dreaming for more than a century. Why, back in 846, they had even dared to sail up the Tiber, and sack St. Peter’s itself. Stripping the shrine bare of all its treasures, they had ritually desecrated its altar, to the scandal of the faithful everywhere, and flung a spear at an icon of Christ. Blood, it was said, had immediately begun to flow from the wound; but the pirates had only jeered, and boasted that they had made the god of the Christians bleed.

It was a terrifying prospect, then, that the descendants of such men might sweep into Rome again. Who precisely were they, these blasphemers, who had dared to scoff at Christ Himself? Pagans, self-evidently; but there were few, even among their victims, who cared to know anything more than that. It was not the superstitions of the corsairs that made them hated, but rather their cruelty, their savagery, their greed. Why should any Christian care what such monsters might believe? True, the odd dark rumour had arisen: that the origins of the corsairs lay in the aptly merciless sands of Arabia; that they prostrated themselves in prayer before idols; that the greatest of their gods was named “Mahound.” Also dimly recalled was the manner in which their ancestors had once ranged far beyond the bounds of the Mediterranean, burning and looting deep into Francia, indeed, as far north as Poitiers; and that only their defeat there in a great battle, at the hands of Charlemagne’s grandfather, had served to roll them back.

All that, however, had long since faded from the memories of most Christians; and if those in the eye of the storm generally responded to their tormentors with an indomitable lack of curiosity, then those far away in Francia enjoyed an even profounder ignorance. Certainly, to those riding in Otto’s train, the enemy ahead of them would hardly have appeared an exceptional one. A relish for violence and plunder was, in the opinion of the Saxons, the mark of pagans everywhere. Both the Wends and the Hungarians had preyed on the fold of
Christendom; and both of them had been mightily repulsed. Why, then, should the emperor’s current enemies not be crushed in a similar manner? Indeed, there seemed little to suggest that they and their kinsmen, the race of pagans known by the learned as “Saracens,” might be an enemy of Christendom like no other.

Theophanu, however, riding by her husband’s side, would have offered Otto an altogether more chilling perspective. In Constantinople, even young girls in their nurseries had heard of the Saracens, and learned to shiver at their name. During all her long reign as the Queen of Cities, the New Rome had faced many terrible enemies; but none so terrible as those which, like lightning from a clear blue sky, had blazed out of the Arabian desert more than three centuries previously, and in the course of a bare few decades conquered for themselves the fairest portion of the Christian world. From Carthage in the West, where St. Augustine had once studied, to Jerusalem in the East, with its incomparably holy shrines, all had been lost to the empire of the New Rome. Twice the Saracens had sought to capture Constantinople herself, their armies massed jackal-like on the shore of Europe, their ships crowding the Bosphorus. Twice, by the grace of the Virgin, protectress of the Holy City, they had been repulsed. The empire had been held together.

Still, though, the flood tides had continued to lap at its ramparts. In southern Anatolia, along the margins of a dominion much shrunken from its former greatness, raiding parties of infidel fighters – “
mujahidin
,” as they termed themselves – had yearly stained the mountain passes with blood, until Nicephorus, “the pale death of the Saracens,”
³⁰
had at last, and with a mighty effort, succeeded in pushing back the frontier. Even now, with the empire at its largest extent in centuries, the soldiers of the New Rome could not afford to relax their guard. Just as they knew Constantinople to be the bulwark of Christendom, so too did their enemies. The West, which imagined the Saracens pagans like any other pagans, was deluding itself. These were no pagans. These were something infinitely more menacing. That Constantinople remained, as she had always been, the prize most hungered
after by the Saracens reflected a sense of mission on their part that no pagan would ever have understood: the belief that all the universe would one day submit to their faith.

Where had it come from, this presumptuous and terrifying heresy? “Many false prophets will arise,” Christ had warned his disciples, “and lead many astray”
³¹
– and so it had proved. “Mahound,” whom scholars in the West took for an idol, had in truth, their Byzantine counterparts knew, been something quite different: the founder of the Saracens’ pestiferous superstition, and a veritable “forerunner of Antichrist.”
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Through his life and teachings, he had provided his followers with their surest model of behaviour, a model that all in Constantinople found so abhorrent as to seem diabolical. Christ, seized by His enemies, had ordered Peter to put away his sword; but Mahound – or Mohammed, as the Saracens called their prophet – had gloried in war and conquest.

Startling evidence of this bellicosity had been obtained by Nicephorus, in the course of his victorious campaigns, when he had captured a fortress containing a truly fearsome relic: a sword that the Saracens claimed had belonged to their prophet himself. “
Zulfiqar
,” they called it; “the Cleaver of Vertebrae.” Fitting weapon for a man who had, if the Saracens’ own boasts were to be believed, fought in battles, staged mass executions and even commissioned murder squads.
³³
“Do prophets come with sword and chariot?” So the Byzantines, from the very onset of the Saracens’ assaults upon them, had asked in revulsion. That Mohammed had indeed been “an impostor,” and his heresy an affliction sent by God as punishment for their sins, appeared to them beyond all doubt. “There is no truth to be found in the so-called prophet. There is only the shedding of blood.”
³⁴

It was true that the Saracens were not alone in believing that instruments of war might be cherished of God. Otto, as he advanced into enemy territory, had the Holy Lance go before him. The more barbarian he, the Byzantines might well have retorted. No matter that they had been obliged for centuries to fight against enemies pledged to the capture of their holy city and the utter prostration of their faith,
they had still, throughout it all, clung with a heroic obstinacy to the conviction that war was evil – indeed, “the worst of all evils.”
³⁵
That this sat awkwardly with the venerable claims of the New Rome to universal rule was something that most in Constantinople were content, by and large, to overlook. Gazing into the murky depths of human nature, and drawing on the teachings of the Fathers of their Church, they had judged that a lust for conquest could not help but corrupt the soul. What surer proof of this was there than the Saracens themselves, in whom violence and sanctimony appeared blended to such deadly effect? “Fight those who believe not in God,”
³⁶
Mohammed had commanded his followers: an injunction that, to the Byzantines who had for so long borne its brunt, appeared nothing but the most vicious hypocrisy, merely “a licence to loot in religion’s name.”
³⁷
Especially repugnant to them was the claim, which for centuries had inspired the Saracen faithful on their larcenous raids, that any warrior who fell far from his own country, in the struggle to spread the dominion of his faith, might be reckoned a martyr, his sins forgiven, his soul translated to paradise. When Nicephorus, who had lived altogether too long “in the shadows of swords,”
*
had made the shocking demand of his bishops that they sanction a matching doctrine, one that would grant to any soldier who died in defence of the Christian empire a martyr’s crown, they had recoiled in the utmost horror. The Church’s ruling on the matter, they had pointed out with icy finality, was clear. Any soldier who shed blood, even in defence of his fellow Christians, existed in a state of sin: only three years of the strictest penance could serve to purge him of the offence. Trust to Providence, the Church advised, rather than to the swords of sinful men. God’s hand would achieve all. In due course – and perhaps sooner rather than later, if the forecasts of the world’s imminent end were to be believed – global dominion would be restored to Constantinople. In the meantime,
however, it was the duty of the empire’s leaders to man the ramparts, to patrol the frontiers and always “to prefer peace above all else, and refrain from war.”
³⁸

Small wonder, then, that the instincts of the Byzantine military, to a quite striking degree, should have inclined to the defensive. Better the negotiations of diplomats, the payment of bribes and tributes, even the exercise of treachery, than open combat. Battle and the loss of life were to be avoided at all costs. So it was, for instance, in southern Italy, where the garrisons were perilously undermanned, that the high command had made little attempt to combat the Saracen incursions, preferring instead to sit them out. To a man such as Otto, and a people such as the Saxons, it was a policy that could not help but appear pusillanimous.

In January 982, when the mailed horsemen of East Francia first crossed into Byzantine territory, they too were met by bolted gates, just as the corsairs had been. Infuriated by the refusal of his fellow Christians to join him in the campaign against the Saracens, their common foe, Otto nevertheless bided his time, giving them every opportunity to submit; but by April his patience was exhausted. News had reached him that in Sicily, long a stronghold of the corsairs, a Saracen prince was mustering a massive expeditionary force against him; and Otto, resolved as he was to confront this menace head on, knew that he would need a secure base in his rear. Accordingly, “after a brief but forceful attack,”
³⁹
he seized the port of Taranto from its Byzantine garrison, and formally proclaimed himself, in portentous terms, sole Emperor of Rome. With the city echoing to the sound of warhorses being shod, hauberks being prepared and over two thousand reinforcements clattering through the streets, Otto’s self-justification for this step could hardly have been more ringing. Constantinople, through her own cowardice and feebleness, had forfeited all rights to the name of Roman. No longer did she deserve to be ranked as the shield of Christendom. The title was now Otto’s alone.