The Forge of Christendom (33 page)

Canute had gambled much on his attempt to win his prize – and now it was payback time. Many warriors had followed him across the northern seas, “men of metal, menacing with golden face”
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– and their captain, just like any other, needed to be a scatterer of treasure, or nothing at all. In Canute, the larcenous instincts that had long propelled generations of Northmen across the seas were set to attain their apotheosis – for he had his sword at the throat of an entire kingdom. Already, over the course of the unfortunate Ethelred’s reign, ton upon ton of silver had been delivered into the hands of the Danes. Now, with all the honed apparatus of English governance directly in his own hands, there was nothing to stop Canute from imposing a truly swingeing tax. Which was what he duly did: at a rate, in effect, of 100 per cent. It took his agents months to screw out; but by the end of 1018, the kingdom’s entire income for that year had vanished into his treasure chests.

Perhaps, then, many among the English must have wondered, this was how the world was to end: with a tax demand. Even the man who was now Archbishop of York, the brilliant and devoutly orthodox Wulfstan, openly warned that the Danes might prove the shock troops of Antichrist. Already, summoning the English to prepare themselves for the Day of Judgement, he had advocated barefoot displays of penance, the singing of psalms and public prayer; and in 1014, during the dark days that followed Forkbeard’s conquest of the kingdom, he had flatly declared the end time imminent. “For nothing has prospered now for a long while either at home or abroad, but there has been military devastation and hunger, burning and bloodshed.”
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Even pagans, however, as they observed the state of the world, might on occasion fall to pondering what its fracturing portended. One did not have to be a Christian to be conscious of Christian dates. Was it merely coincidence, for instance, that Thorgeir, summoning the Icelanders to decide whether they should abandon their ancient gods, had chosen to do so in the year 1000? What prospect, if the end
were indeed approaching, that any of the heathen gods, even Odin himself, could hope to keep it at bay? Despite the triumph of the Danes in the killing fields of England, many Northmen, suspended between their new faith and their ancient beliefs, were not immune to the anxieties of Wulfstan. “Kin,” wrote one of them, in dread of the end days, “will break the bonds of kin”:

The very sentiments of the archbishop – and composed, it may well be, by a man who had heard him utter them.
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Yet the end of the world sung by the poet was one illumined not by the light of Christ, but by the fiery extinction of the ancient gods, “fire flaring up against fire.”
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No immortality, according to such a vision, awaited those who followed Odin: for he, like the sun itself, was fated to be devoured by a monstrous wolf, while all around him “the brilliant stars are dashed down from the skies.” His death, like the death of all those whom the pagans had foolishly worshipped as deathless, was a certainty. Such was “
Ragnarok
” – the Doom of the Gods.

And Canute, certainly, wanted no part of it: for it was hardly his ambition to play the part of either Odin or Antichrist. Though he might be avaricious and brutal, he was not unthinkingly so. For all the ruthlessness with which he had extorted treasure from the English to pay off his followers, he had no wish for his reign to continue as a wolf-age. So it was that in 1018, even as his tax collectors were bleeding England white, he allowed himself to be persuaded by Wulfstan into swearing that he would uphold all the laws of Edgar and Ethelred: that he would rule, in short, as the heir of the
Cerdicingas
. Living evidence of this, crowned and no less imperious than she had ever been, could already be found at his side: none other than the still-nubile Emma, Ethelred’s widow, and now once again England’s queen. The taking to bed of a rival’s woman was very much in the finest tradition
of Viking manhood; and yet Emma was far too significant a prize to rank as merely a sexual trophy. Canute’s marriage to her had been no show of scorn – indeed, just the opposite. Norman Emma may have been, with a Dane for a mother, and most likely fluent in Danish herself – but it was as a living embodiment of the West Saxon monarchy, of all its traditions and pedigree, that she had her truest value. Better than anyone, she offered an imprimatur of class.

And it was class, in the final equation, not rings of gold, nor dragon-prowed ships, nor the florid praises of poets, that Canute most hankered after. If it was as a Viking warlord that he had conquered England, and transformed all the northern seas into his private lake, then it was as the model of a Christian king that he aimed to rule. So it was, even as he persisted in his empire-building, that he began to pose, in a familiar process of metamorphosis, as a prince of peace. A terrorist who had waded through blood, he permitted Archbishop Wulfstan to write laws in his name that proclaimed the virtues of humility and self-restraint: “For the mightier or of higher rank a man is, so the deeper must he atone for wrong-doing, both to God and to men.”
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A disinheritor of the oldest royal line in Christendom, he became a regular visitor to the nunnery at Wilton, riding there with Emma, dismounting respectfully outside the precincts, praying among the tombs of the women of the House of Wessex. A Northman from the margins of the civilised world, he took time from all his labours and his wars to go on pilgrimage to the capital of the Christian faith, and there, amid the ancient and fabulous splendours of Rome, to kneel before the tomb of St. Peter, and “diligently to seek his special favour before God.”

For to be sure, as Canute himself publicly acknowledged, there was much that needed forgiving – “whether through the intemperance of my youth or through negligence.”
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But he was not in Rome merely to pray. The streets, when Canute arrived there in March 1027, were teeming with the elite of imperial society. Three years earlier, the Emperor Henry II had died, the last of the line of Saxon kings; and now, desperate for the legitimacy that only a pope could grant, his
elected heir, Conrad II, a Frankish lord from the Rhineland, was camped out in the city. Here was an unbeatable opportunity for Canute to play the international statesman – and he seized it with relish. Whether hob-nobbing with Conrad himself, or taking Mass with Abbot Odilo of Cluny, or negotiating with the Holy Father, he revelled with an unabashed glee in his presence on such a stage.

The starriest role of all was granted him on Easter Day, when the new emperor, to the acclamation of princes and bishops drawn from across Christendom, was crowned in St. Peter’s – and Canute was by his side. The occasion was, so it appears, a thoroughly overwrought one. Two archbishops, disputing which of them should lead Conrad into the cathedral, almost fell to blows, while Conrad himself, it is reported, overcome by the significance of the moment, burst suddenly into tears. Yet if there was anyone present in St. Peter’s that day justified in feeling emotional, then surely it was Canute. The glory, after all, was not merely his own, but God’s as well. It was barely a decade previously that Henry II had dispatched his imperial regalia to Cluny, as an expression of his hope that the faith of Christ would expand to the limits of the earth; and now, stood by the side of his successor, in the city of the Caesars, was the great-grandson of a pagan warlord.

Meanwhile, far away across the northern ocean, in lands unknown to Constantine or Charlemagne, below the lava fields of Iceland and beside the fjords of Greenland, the children of pagans were raising churches and calling themselves Christian. Much had changed in the world, and doubtless much would continue to change – for the one-thousandth anniversary of Christ’s Resurrection was only a few years off. And yet, despite the widespread mood of trepidation, and despite all the convulsions, and the bloodshed, and the suffering of the previous decades, perhaps it was becoming legitimate, even in the shadow of the Millennium, to look to the future, not with foreboding, but with hope. To believe that the clouds were lifting. To believe that anything might be possible.

Amid the darkness of the times, the abbey of Cluny radiated a special brilliance. What Christ had said to his apostles, popes would say to Cluny: “You are the light of the world.” (Author photo)

“To thee, O Lord, I lift up my soul.” This phrase from the Psalms, inscribed on the open book held by the priest in this ninth-century ivory, might well have served as the manifesto of the monks of Cluny. The singing of praises to God filled their days to an unprecedented degree: for their ambition was nothing less than to emulate the angelic choirs of heaven. (Fitzwilliam Museum/Bridgeman Art Library)

It was the practice in southern France for churches and monasteries to house the relics of their patron saints within statues made of precious metals and adorned with jewels. Most were seized and melted down during the French Revolution; but this one, from a safely remote pilgrimage centre in the Auvergne, survived. The bones of Saint Faith, a young girl martyred by the Romans, were stored inside the statue’s glittering cranium. (Church of St. Foy, Conques, Lauros/Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library)

A bristling phalanx of Northmen, seaborne and ready for battle. By the time of the Millennium, the piratical spirit of earlier Scandinavian warriors had mutated into something altogether more disciplined, ambitious and menacing. (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris/Bridgeman Art Library)