by Tom Holland
In the West too, at the Saxon court, news of the coup had been greeted with delight. No surprise, perhaps, that Otto and Nicephorus, both of them peerless warriors, both of them claimants to the title of emperor, should have regarded the pretensions of the other with resentment. In 968, hostilities between Christendom’s two greatest monarchs had come to a head: Otto, attempting to annex southern Italy, had invaded the territories there still ruled from Constantinople; shortly afterwards, finding his campaign bogged down, and resolved to redeem the situation through a display of quite breathtaking nerve, he had sent an ambassador to the imperial capital and demanded a princess for his younger son and namesake, Prince Otto. This was a gambit that Nicephorus, unsurprisingly, had dismissed with furious snorts of scorn; but Tzimiskes, a well-honed athlete much given to vaulting over horses, had shown himself more willing to take a leap into the dark. The youthful Otto may have been barbarian – yet he was not a wholly worthless catch. Liudolf, the rebellious crown prince, had died back in 957 – leaving Otto as his father’s only heir. Whoever married him, so Tzimiskes had calculated, was likely to end up Empress of the West. A tempting prospect – even by the standards of Constantinople. So it was that in 972 a young girl of perhaps twelve or thirteen, adorned in the heavy robes of an authentic Byzantine princess, weighed down with gold and precious stones, and accompanied by an intimidating train of flunkeys, treasure chests and changes of wardrobe, had been dispatched to Rome. Her name was Theophanu; and both the elder and the younger Otto had been dazzled by the show of her arrival. The marriage contract, inscribed on parchment painted to look like purple silk, had licensed the most splendid wedding in Saxon history. St. Peter’s had provided the venue; the Pope himself had officiated; the very union of East and West had seemed achieved as the squat and ginger-haired groom was joined to his willowy bride.
Only in the complaints of a few curmudgeons, muttered behind the emperor’s back, had the awkward truth been whispered: Theophanu was not, as everyone at the Saxon court had initially been led to believe, Tzimiskes’s daughter at all, but his niece. Some had even suggested that she be returned to Constantinople as damaged goods. Otto I had refused. It had not taken him long to appreciate the pearl he had obtained in his new daughter-in-law. By the time of his death, barely a year after his son’s wedding, Theophanu was already casting the spell of her star quality over East Francia. Indeed, so protean were her abilities that the Saxons could not even agree as to what they were. Some praised their empress for her modesty, “which is, of course, a rare thing in a Greek”;27 others for the very opposite, an eloquence which they felt might easily shade into “insolent prattling.”28 All, however, were agreed on her talent for forging the kind of political friendships that were so essential in the Reich, fractured as it was, and fractious too. On her own, Theophanu could hardly hope to mitigate the more turbid characteristics of her husband’s court, and yet her very presence at the side of Otto II, elegant, silken and bejewelled, served as a constant reminder of a very different style of monarchy: a touch, in the heart of Saxony, of the ineffable glamour of the New Rome.
For Theophanu herself, the experience of life in the West, where displays of riotous merriment were held to impair the kingly dignity not a jot, would certainly have provided a most striking contrast with the decorousness she had left behind. The court of the Basileus, its conceit burnished by its antiquity, persisted in its sublime ambition to hold a mirror up to heaven. The emperor himself, elevated and aloof, presided over his table as the image of Christ; the empress by his side as the Virgin Mary; even the eunuchs, sexless go-betweens, flitted around in the manner of angels. Back in the West, where one of the distinctive marks of royal table manners was held to be the ferocious cracking open of animal bones for their marrow, such role playing would have been regarded as so stiff and chill as to be grotesque; and yet Otto II, under Theophanu’s influence, showed himself not immune to its appeal. So it was, for instance, in the years following his accession, that he and his wife paraded their devotion to the Virgin with a quite exceptional show of piety – even as the Virgin herself, not previously famed in the West for having dripped with priceless jewellery, began to be portrayed across the Reich in the manner of a Byzantine empress. The glory of this, even as it dignified Theophanu, naturally redounded upon Otto as well – and hinted at the aspirations that were starting to gnaw at him.
For less than a decade into his reign, and East Francia was already coming to seem altogether too cabined a stage for his dreams. Whether it was the whisperings of his empress that had seduced him or the impetuosity of his own desires, Otto, bold and wilful, appeared no longer content with the sway of his native land. In the winter of 980, he and Theophanu left Saxony for Italy. By the spring, they were in Rome. Here, in the months that followed, Otto drew up plans to subdue the whole peninsula. A primordial fantasy, one that had haunted many generations of princes, was once again stirring from its troubled sleep. The dream of an empire without limits, of a universal dominion – of a Rome reborn.
Yet it remained the nature of this phantasm to mock all who sought to embrace it. Beyond the southernmost limit of Otto’s Italian kingdom, as tantalising as any mirage, there stretched regions that in ancient times had been both the playground and the breadbasket of the Caesars. Ruins from this fabulous past – palaces and temples, theatres and baths – still dominated the landscape, their hulking stonework defying the passage of the centuries, whether looming up from the curve of the Bay of Naples or frowning down upon the winding, inland roads. All their massy grandeur, however, served only to emphasise their abandonment – and the desolation of the badlands in which they now stood. It was barely a decade previously, after all, that southern Italy had been a war zone, fought over by the rival empires of East and West; and now, in the summer of 981, Otto II was minded to make it so again. The bonds of alliance woven by his marriage to Theophanu had already snapped: for in Constantinople John Tzimiskes was dead – poisoned by a eunuch, it was claimed – and Theophanu herself, implacably hostile to the dynasty that had replaced her uncle’s, clearly believed the rumour true. In September, when the Saxon emperor, riding at the head of a great force of iron-sheathed loricati, advanced southwards out of Rome, his queen was by his side. That it was Otto’s intention to lay claim to the entire inheritance of the ancient empire, in defiance of the new regime in Constantinople, Theophanu knew and surely approved. Empress of the West, perhaps she dared to imagine herself raised to rule the East as well.
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.”29 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.”32 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.