The Forge of Christendom (16 page)

Otto II and Theophanu: Saxon Caesar and Byzantine princess. Their marriage in St. Peter’s was the most glamorous that Rome had staged for many centuries. As sophisticated as she was imperious, Theophanu would illumine her husband’s reign with a rare star quality. (Author photo)

Among the Byzantines, distaste for the spilling of blood on battlefields was paralleled by a no less fervent conviction that Constantinople should rule the world. Despite widespread unease back in the capital, a succession of tenth-century emperors threw themselves with gusto into the task of pushing back the imperial frontiers. As the Millennium approached, the empire of the New Rome appeared more formidable than it had done for centuries. (Vatican Museum)

With its Roman brickwork, its Visigothic arches, and its pillars plundered from a demolished cathedral, the Great Mosque of Córdoba was no less triumphantly Islamic for its wholesale cannibalisation of infidel traditions. As Mohammed himself had put it: “God desires that if you do something you perfect it.” (
Commons.wikimedia.org
)

Otto III: the robes of a Caesar, the posture of Christ in heaven. Four women, representing Rome, France, Germany, and the lands of the Slavs, bring the Emperor gifts, while his attendants watch on, each with the hint of a smile. But no smile lightens the expression of Otto. Enthroned in majesty he may be, yet he has the look of a man burdened by the fearful conviction that he is ruling at the end of time. (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek/SuperStock)

Astounding as Gerbert’s achievements appeared to his contemporaries, they appeared something altogether more sinister to subsequent generations. Surely, it was presumed, only the blackest magic could have brought a peasant to sit on Saint Peter’s throne? Here, in a fifteenth century illustration, Gerbert sports a sinister 5 o’clock shadow while beaming complacently at the Devil. (Wikipedia)

There was no one in the France of the Millennium more proficient in the revolutionary new art of castle building than Fulk Nerra, “the Black,” Count of Anjou. His princedom was studded with fortifications—with some, like this keep at Loches, so cutting-edge as to be constructed entirely out of stone. By 1035, it reached thirty-six metres high. (Author photo)

If forests were places to be feared as the haunts of wolves and demons, then so also could they provide peasants with ready storehouses: ones that did not depend on the ploughing and harvesting of fields. Here, in an English work calendar from the early eleventh century, hogs are shown sniffing the September air for the scent of acorns. (British Library)

Of all a peasant’s possessions, the most precious were his oxen. Keep them, and he would preserve his freedom. Lose them, and he was almost guaranteed to lose his freedom as well. (British Library)

If castles were one mark of the gathering tide of social upheaval that afflicted many regions in France in the approach to the Millennium, then so too were the gangs of mail-clad thugs employed to garrison them. Cnichts, they were called in English, or “knights”: a novel and menacing order.

Indeed, without
dhimmi
taxes, it might prove hard to pay for an army at all. This was why, in a seeming paradox, it was those states with the largest number of Christians that could most readily afford
jihad
. In Sicily, for instance, which had finally been secured for Islam only in 902, the emirs regarded their vast population of infidel subjects with a cagey ambivalence. Devout Muslims that they were, and naturally mistrustful of those who did not share their faith, they were regular sponsors of new mosques and mass circumcisions across the Christian heartlands; but they also had to reckon with the need to husband their tax base. By the time of the expedition against Otto II, the Muslim
population of Sicily was nudging perhaps a third of the island’s total, and it appeared that the perfect balance of manpower and revenue had been attained. Bureaucracy had fused with banditry to forge a state that was lethally primed for war. The corpses left on the beach by Cotrone had borne sufficient witness to that.

Yet the notion that tax collectors might present quite as grave a threat to Christendom as corsairs was profoundly alien to the Saxons. Otto, master of a far-spreading dominion though he was, had no great reservoir of bureaucrats on which to call, no elaborate system for keeping track of his subjects, not even a capital. Indeed, to those Muslim leaders who deigned so much as to note its existence, the
Reich
appeared barely to qualify as a functioning state at all. One of them, addressing an envoy sent to his court by Otto I, had been open in his scorn. “Why does your king not concentrate power in his own hands?” the ambassador had been asked in withering tones. “Why does he allow his subjects to have such a share of it? He doles out the various regions of his empire among them, expecting in that way to win their loyalty and submission, but he is deluding himself. For all he fosters is rebellion and pride!”
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Here had spoken a man whose own sense of what was due to him had never needed the slightest boosting. Abd al-Rahman bin Mohammed bin Abd Allah, not content with the rank of emir that he had inherited from his grandfather, had even laid claim to that very ultimate in honorifics, the title of Caliph. No less than his peers in Baghdad and Egypt, Abd al-Rahman had made sure to justify his pretensions to global dominion with a truly spectacular display of wealth and power. Otto’s ambassador, an abbot from the Rhineland by the name of John, had certainly never seen anything to compare. The Caliph’s palace, he reported years later in still breathless tones, stretched for miles. Everywhere he had looked, there were soldiers standing to menacing attention, or riding on horseback, staging intimidating manoeuvres, “filling our party with consternation, such was their arrogance and swagger.” Even the dustiest gatehouse had been adorned “with carpets and precious fabrics.”
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