Millennium

by Holland, Tom

  The following spring, by the side of an icy lake, a bare day’s journey beyond the borders of Poland and the protection of Boleslav, its Christian duke, Adalbert was hacked to death. His killers were Prussians, a heathen and turbulent people, much given to tattooing themselves and downing pints of blood, who had scorned the missionary’s preaching as the sinister work of a ‘German god’. Otto, brought the news in Aachen, was predictably distraught. Yet even as he mourned his loss, miraculous things were already being reported of Adalbert’s death. An angel, it was said, sweeping down from heaven, had caught the martyr’s head as it was sent flying through the air by a Prussian axe, and later, reuniting it with the decapitated trunk, had left the corpse to be found on the far side of the lake. From there, it had been tenderly transported by two of Adalbert’s disciples back across the border, to safety, and the awestruck reverence of the Poles. Boleslav, delighted to find himself with such a potent relic in his possession, had promptly sealed his ownership of the martyr’s body by entombing it at Gniezno, the capital that he had inherited from his father, Duke Miesco. To his subjects, a people who only four decades previously had been quite as heathen as the Prussians, the shrine raised over Adalbert appeared an awesome and a wondrous thing, a beacon of blazing holiness, a joining of earth to heaven. It had needed no burning of villages to ensure this, no mass gibbets, no planting of Saxon garrisons. In death, if not in life, Adalbert had fulfilled his dearest wish. He had indeed helped to purge heathenism from the eastern wilds – and the only blood shed had been his own. A new people had been confirmed in their membership of Christendom. The Poles had been secured for Christ.

  And for Otto as well! So he certainly trusted. Despite the loss of Adalbert, and despite the continued violence along the frontier with the Wends, the emperor’s sense of mission and self-confidence remained undimmed. Indeed, if anything, it was coming to shine more radiantly still. Adalbert was not the only inspirational figure to have entered Otto’s orbit the previous year. Gerbert too had been in Rome in the wake of the coronation. Struggling, as he had been doing ever since his brush-off by Theophanu, to secure an office worthy of his talents, he had travelled there originally to petition the Pope; but soon enough, having turned the full glare of his charisma on to Otto, had found himself being employed as the emperor’s secretary. Although this role had lasted only a few weeks, until Otto’s departure from Italy, Gerbert had had no intention of letting his opportunity slip. By October, he had successfully insinuated himself back into the emperor’s company. That autumn, both he and Adalbert had spent over a month closeted with Otto, ‘day and night’, as Gerbert later proudly boasted. It was never divulged which topic had proved so fascinating as to keep Christendom’s greatest ruler distracted from affairs of state for such an unusual length of time with two clerics; but events would soon serve to offer a hint.

  In the summer of997, Otto formally issued Gerbert with what the great scholar had long craved: a command to serve him as his mentor. ‘Demonstrate your distaste’, went the order, ‘for Saxon parochialism’ - and Gerbert obliged with relish. Even as Otto laboured late into the campaigning season to secure the frontier of his homeland, his new counsellor was steeling him in a sense of the global role that it was his to play. ‘For you are Caesar Augustus,’ Gerbert reminded him exuberantly: ‘Emperor of the Romans, sprung from the noblest blood of the Greeks’, the master of Italy, of Germany, and, yes, of ‘the brave lands of the Slavs* as well. ‘The Roman Empire - it is ours, ours!’

  So it was that Christendom’s most enduring spectre was summoned from its grave once again, and saluted as though it might be flesh and blood. Gerbert, as practical-minded as he was polymathic, could not have been oblivious to the tension between all his exultant sloganeering and the chaos that was the true state of the world. Neither – for he had spent the entire year of 997 bludgeoning the Wends out of Saxony – could Otto. Yet the bleeding state of things, far from tempering the bold talk of restoring a universal order, seems only to have made it more grandiloquent. In 998, the ambition would appear inscribed on Otto’s seal, pledging him, every time that he stamped a document, to the ‘renovalio’ – the renewal – of the Roman Empire. A quixotic fantasy? So it might have seemed. No hint was offered, either by Gerbert or by Otto himself, as to what a programme of renovatio might actually mean – still less how it was to be achieved. Yet this silence, far from expressing any lack of purpose, almost certainly veiled the very opposite: a consciousness of mysteries too earth-shaking and arcane to be spoken of publicly, of a mission literally cosmic in its implications, and of a duty shaped by the patterns of the revolving centuries.

  At Magdeburg, when first summoned there by Otto, Gerbert had dazzled the assembled courtiers by demonstrating to them that it was possible, with the proper learning, and a fantastical instrument named the astrolabe, to track and measure the stars. Ancient sages had known this, and Saracen astronomers too; but never before had it been demonstrated with such brilliance by a Christian philosopher. God’s creation, it appeared, might indeed be apprehended through a grasp of mathematics: ‘for numbers both encode the origins of the universe’, as Gerbert had put it, ‘and serve to explain its functioning’. What significance, then, in the lengthening shadow of the Millennium, that year which ‘surpasses and transcends all other years’, did he identify in the magical number 1000? Infuriatingly, intriguingly, we have no certain answer. Not a single mention of it appears in all the surviving writings of Christendom’s greatest and most enquiring mathematician: a silence so profound, in the circumstances, as to be deafening. Formidable scholar that he was, and devout Christian, Gerbert would have been well aware of Augustine’s teachings on the end days. He would have known how sternly it had been forbidden to speculate as to their possible timing. Did he, as a consequence, scorn to pay any attention to the imminence of the Millennium? Or did he, encouraged by his imperial patron, secretly dare to follow the more dangerous course, and consider that perhaps Augustine had been wrong, and that the one thousand years spoken of by St John, after which evil was to triumph across the world, might, just might, have been meant literally? After all, if anyone had the sanction to engage in such perilous enquiries, then surely it was Otto III, the Roman emperor whose dominion was the single bulwark capable of being raised against the coming of Antichrist, and whose fate it was to be ruling with the one- thousandth anniversary of the Incarnation just a couple of years away?

  Certainly, the nearer the Millennium drew, the more Otto seems to have felt oppressed by a sense of urgency – as though the passing of days itself were a flood stream to be breasted. If it were true that time was indeed running out, then the challenge of securing the Roman Empire was evidently not to be a simple one – not in the face of all that a transcendent and gathering malice appeared to be hurling against him. No matter that the Wends, by the end of997, had been pacified at last. A fresh and more insidious threat to Otto’s ambitions was already looming. Alarming news had arrived from the very heart of the great project of renovatio: Rome herself. The city’s erstwhile tyrant, John Crescentius, unappeased by the pardon granted him following Otto’s coronation, had made a sudden power grab. Pope Gregory, who had originally pleaded with his cousin to grant Crescentius mercy, had himself been served with exile. As his replacement upon the throne of St Peter, and the willing stooge of his Roman sponsors, there had emerged blinking into the limelight a most unexpected figure: Otto’s own godfather, one-time tutor and ambassador to Constantinople, John Philagathos. No matter that his attempt to secure a princess from the Basileus had ended in failure – the embassy had evidently done nothing to diminish his conceit. Indeed, if anything, it appeared to have boosted it; for Byzantine diplomats, despite their private scorning of Philagathos as ‘slime, the son of perdition, worthy of every curse, a pile of steaming excrement, obese, a man whose true god protrudes just below his wobbling paunch’, had cheerfully puffed him up in his ambitions, keen as they were to see a Greek as the Bishop of Rome. Crescentius
too, whose family had long had close affiliations with Constantinople, was widely suspected of being an agent of the Basileus. Meanwhile, Philagathos himself, as the countryman of one Roman emperor and the godfather of a second, was sublimely confident of securing the support of both men for his papacy. This was a reasonable enough calculation, perhaps; except that neither he nor any of the conspirators had quite grasped what Otto believed to be at stake.

  In February 998, the Holy Lance was planted before the walls of Rome. Behind it there spread the massed ranks of the imperial army, the hardened veterans of a thousand bloody skirmishes in the forests and bogs of the North, a sight fit to strike terror into the heart of any southerner. Philagathos, discovering too late the full, horrendous scale of his misjudgement, had already fled the city. Crescentius, equally appalled by what he had drawn down upon himself, was holed up in his private fortress, in the shadow of St Peter’s, waiting for the storm to pass. But it did not pass. The emperor and his army remained implacable. In desperation, after several weeks of the siege, Crescentius disguised himself in a monk’s cowl and slipped out from his stronghold, to throw himself on Otto’s mercy. Coldly, Otto sent him back to his doom. Shortly afterwards, once Easter was past, the deployment of immense siege engines enabled the citadel to be stormed. Crescentius himself, taken prisoner, was briskly decapitated. His headless corpse, so as to warn others against being ‘deceived by the devil’s wiles’, was first flung into a ditch, and then ‘hung by the feet from a gibbet, on the highest precipice of the fortress’.

  Yet even his fate was not so salutary as that of the wretched Anti-pope. Philagathos had been quickly hunted down. Although his life was spared, such were the mutilations inflicted on him that he might well have yearned for execution: for first his eyes were removed, then his nose, and then his lips and tongue. When the hideously disfigured prisoner was finally hauled into the imperial presence, the spectacle of what had been done to his old tutor reduced Otto to appalled silence; but not to clemency. The captors were given rich rewards; while Philagathos himself was handed over to the tender mercies of the man whom he had thought to replace. Pope Gregory, keen to brand his rival an apostate before the public gaze of the entire city, ordered him fitted with a cap of animal skins, and then had him ‘placed on the hack of a donkey, facing towards the tail, as a public crier led him through the various parts of Rome’. Finally, to set the seal on his degradation, Philagathos was ceremonially expelled from the priesthood, stripped of his pontifical robes and led away to a monastery, there to count the long days until his death. By such decisive measures, Otto could reflect with grim satisfaction, had the Holy City been preserved against the tide of darkness that had seemed almost ready to swallow it.

  Except that there were men of God, even peers of Adalbert, who were not so certain that it had been preserved. While the Roman crowds had cheerfully entertained themselves by kicking the corpse of Crescentius as it was dragged past them, or pelting Philagathos with dung, those whose approval Otto most desperately craved, his spiritual advisers, were horrified. One of them, a hermit of legendary saintliness by the name of Nilus, had even dared to confront the emperor directly. Despite being in his nineties, and weak from his Lenten fast, he had tottered along to the trial of Philagathos and begged for mercy on behalf of the fallen Anti-pope. When this plea was rejected, he had cursed Otto and Gregory both. ‘For if you do not forgive him whom God has delivered up into your hands,’ Nilus had warned the two cousins, ‘neither will the heavenly Father forgive you your own sins.’ Then, ignoring all Otto’s appeals to stay with him and grant him absolution, the aged hermit had turned on his heels and headed away southwards, back to the lonely valley that sheltered his cell.

  Otto did not pursue him. After all, a retreat from the world was hardly an option open to a man pledged to the fateful mission of preserving Christendom from Antichrist. If the Roman Empire were indeed to be restored to its vanished potency, then the securing of Rome itself could rank only as a beginning. Though it was bejewelled with churches, the ancient city had to be fitted once more to serve as the capital of an empire. Orders were duly given that the ruins on the Palatine, ‘that seat and head of all the world’, should be cleared of their rubble and rendered habitable again. Ceremonial too was upgraded, to match the prestigious new imperial address. No more cracking open of animal bones for Otto; instead, in an echo of the gilded rituals of his mother’s native city, he began to sit at feasts aloof from his henchmen, at a semi-circular table, and to be saluted as ‘the Emperor of Emperors’. Even the titles with which he graced his courtiers in turn -‘senator’, ‘consul’, ‘prefect of the fleet’-had all been fastidiously pilfered from the lumber box of antiquity. In short, it was a display of pageantry like nothing seen in Rome for many centuries - and those who witnessed it were accordingly dazzled. To the excitable, it seemed almost as though Otto’s work were already done; as though, through the sheer force of his will, he had indeed brought the Roman Empire back to life and restored its greatness to its ancient limits. Both Baghdad, ‘the empire of iron’, and Constantinople, ‘the empire of gold’, were imagined by admirers as bowing in stupefaction before ‘great Otto’. ‘Rejoice, O Pope,’ as one of them put it, ‘rejoice, O Caesar! Let the Church exult in a fervour of joy, and let joy be great in Rome, let the imperial palace rejoice! With this pope, under this Caesar, the age itself is renewed!’

  But the young Caesar himself was racked by doubts. Visionary he may have been – but he was not naive. He had patrolled the frontiers of Saxony. He knew perfectly well that Rome, although the heart of Christendom, was not the world. He knew too – for the words of Nilus still sounded in his memory – that all his labours to fortify his empire, all the blood he had spilled and all the brutalities he had committed, might have served only to put his fitness as God’s anointed into doubt. For a year, he continued to ignore the promptings of his conscience. Then, in February 999, and with the anniversary of the Lenten atrocities fast approaching, Pope Gregory fell suddenly sick and died. The cause was malaria – but how was Otto to attribute it to anything save the effect of Nilus’s curse? Abruptly after his cousin’s death, he left Rome and headed southwards. Although he did not neglect the due business of an emperor on the way—taking hostages here, dispensing favours there, exploiting the rivalries of his Italian subjects with his customary dextrousness — he also made sure to perform acts of very public penance. Wherever there was a shrine, he would walk to it barefooted. By the time he found himself approaching Nilus’s cell, it was evident that his contrition had been accepted as truly heartfelt: for the old man, leaving his cave, walked to the side of the road, from where he saluted the emperor fondly. Otto, slipping down from his saddle, knelt in tears before the hermit; and then removed his crown. A portentous gesture: for so it had been prophesied that the last Roman emperor would do, as he knelt upon Golgotha, and thereby usher in the end of days. Nilus paused — and then, demonstrating that he regarded the man before him as guiltless of any presumption, gave him his blessing. Finally, with due reverence, he handed the emperor back his crown.

  Otto, returning to Rome, could do so with his sense of mission powerfully fortified. Even the death of his cousin, which only a few weeks earlier had struck in him a knell of icy foreboding, now appeared the working of Providence. At a fateful moment for him and for all mankind, with the one-thousandth anniversary of the Incarnation only months away, and the great labour of renovatio weighing down implacably upon his shoulders, he had been graced with the opportunity to promote to St Peter’s throne the man best qualified to help him. On 2 April 999, Gerbert of Aurillac, the peasant from the Auvergne, was crowned Pope. The name he took – Sylvester II – signalled unmistakably to all the world how he saw his own role and that of his master. Just as the first Sylvester was supposed to have served Constantine, so would he serve Otto: Pope and emperor together, they would shepherd the Christian people.

  And swell their numbers too. Ancient prophecies long current in Italy
foretold how at the end of times the last Roman emperor would summon all the pagans in the world to baptism; and now, as the fateful year of the Millennium dawned, a Roman emperor was preparing to do just that. Not at sword point — the example of Adalbert would hardly have licensed forced conversions – but rather in a manner as pacific as it was mystical. So it was, for instance, that the chieftain of the Hungarians, those one-time predator horsemen, was sent a replica of the Holy Lance by Otto, and a diadem by Pope Sylvester, and publicly welcomed, as King Stephen, into the order of Christian royalty. So it was too, in the spring of the millennial year, that the Roman emperor himself, travelling eastwards to where the ancient Caesars had never reached, crossed the border into Poland and processed to Gniezno. Columns of brightly dressed warriors stood massed to greet him as he walked, barefoot once more, to the shrine of St Adalbert. Then, having prayed beside the tomb, Otto rose and set out to complete what his murdered friend had begun. The Polish duke, like the Hungarian prince, was presented with a crown and a copy of the Holy Lance; the fur-clad Boleslav, not to be outdone, reciprocated by giving the emperor one of St Adalbert’s arms. Otto, profoundly moved, burst into tears. ‘And that day the two men were joined together with such bonds of affection that the Emperor called Boleslav his brother, and proclaimed him a friend of the Roman people.’