by Tom Holland
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.”67 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”:
A harsh world it will be, whoredom rampant,
An axe-age, a sword-age, shields shattered,
A wind-age, a wolf-age before man’s age tumbles down.68
The very sentiments of the archbishop – and composed, it may well be, by a man who had heard him utter them.69 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.”70 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.”71 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.”72 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/Br
idgeman 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)
A longship takes to the seas, while in the scene above it a horseman is mounted on an eight-legged stallion. The rider is almost certainly Odin, the Scandinavian king of the gods. Not all the labours of Christian missionaries could serve to banish the “All-father” entirely from the imaginings of the Northmen. In Normandy, for instance, tales of a ghostly hunt, led by a huntsman very like Odin, would endure well into modern times. (Werner Forman Archive)
Across the Channel from France, the tenth century had been characterised, not by a collapse in royal authority, but by its spectacular consolidation. Edgar, shown here piously offering up the foundation charter of a new cathedral to Christ, was the unchallenged ruler of a newly united kingdom: England. (British Library)
A gold coin issued by Edgar’s son, Ethelred. England was easily the richest kingdom in western Europe, and the ability of its rulers to manage a single currency reflected a precocious degree of centralisation. Wealth, however, as Ethelred himself would find out, was not always a guarantee of security. (British Museum)
The Jelling stones in Denmark. The larger, on the left, was deliberately placed between the twin tumuli of his pagan parents by Harald Bluetooth, a king notorious for his opportunism and taste for bragging. Carved on to the runestone, Harald described himself as the man “who won all Denmark and Norway, and made the Danes to be Christian.” The boast, while not entirely accurate, has come to be commemorated as “the baptism of Denmark.” (Author photo)
Canute, despite having waded through blood to seize the rich prize of England from its native dynasty, was eager to change his public image from that of terrorist to Christian king. Here he is shown posing as the heir of Edgar, while Christ looks on approvingly from above. Facing Canute is Aelfigu, the English wife he refused to divorce even when he married Emma, widow of the deposed Ethelred. (British Library)
Christ is shown returning in glory at the end of time. To men and women living through the three decades that constituted the millennial anniversary of their Saviour’s life, marks of the imminent end of the world appeared everywhere. That it was sternly forbidden to speculate as to the precise hour of Christ’s return did little to dampen the mingled anxiety and hope felt by many of the Christian people at the prospect of witnessing the hour of judgement. (British Library)
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem marked the precise spot where Christ was believed to have been crucified and buried. Its destruction in 1009 by the Caliph al-Hakim provoked horror across Christendom. Only the speed with which it was rebuilt under the sponsorship of Constantinople served to ease the mood of shock. (Corbis)
A crypt looking like a public lavatory, set amid the concrete bleakness of a 1960s municipal square, is all that remains of the one-time jewel of Limoges: the abbey of St. Martial. It was here, in 1010, that the young Adémar saw a vision of the crucified Christ weeping tears of blood over the city; and here too, nineteen years later, that he was publicly branded a fraudster, and forced to flee in disgrace. (Author photo)
Christ as a pilgrim, carved in a cloister in a monastery in Spain. The first decades of the new millennium witnessed a startling upturn in the number of pilgrims taking to the roads. In 1033, in particular, the flood of people who descended upon Jerusalem appeared to one chronicler “an innumerable multitude, gathered from across the whole world, greater than any man before could have hoped to see.” (AISA)
The notion of “fastening to Christ’s Cross the picture of a dying man” had traditionally struck Christians as a repulsive one. Nevertheless, the decades either side of the Millennium witnessed a startling and enduring innovation: the portrayal of Christ in all his human suffering. The so-called “Gero Crucifix,” which hangs in Cologne Cathedral, dates from the late tenth century, and shows Jesus not merely dying, but actually dead. (Author photo)
Bruno of Toul, who in 1048 was crowned in Rome as Pope Leo IX. The illustration shows him (on the left) consecrating a single monastery church; but it was Leo’s ultimate ambition to see the whole Church reconsecrated. The energy, ability, and hard-headedness that he brought to this task ensured that his reign would subsequently be commemorated as the starting point of the papal revolution. (Burgerbibliothek, Bern)
At the end of time, it was the Archangel Michael who was destined to slay Antichrist, and to trample down the Devil. This illustration of the saint was drawn in Normandy, at Mont-Saint-Michel: a shrine that encouraged many Normans to regard the Archangel as their particular patron. Tellingly, it was at a second shrine sacred to Saint Michael, on Mount Gargano in Apulia, that Norman pilgrims were first recruited to serve as mercenaries in southern Italy: a fateful development for all concerned. (Bridgeman Art Library)
* The current consensus among historians is that the theory was not true. Studies of rural settlements in Scandinavia do not, in fact, appear to indicate excessive population growth.
* The evidence for this depends on an autopsy conducted on Edward’s bones in 1963. It is possible, of course, that the pathologist’s conclusions were mistaken – or indeed that the bones were not those of Edward at all.
* An equally plausible translation is “Blacktooth” – “Bluetooth,” however, has been immortalised as a sobriquet by its use as a name for wireless technology, uniting different technologies just as Harald was supposed to have united Denmark and Norway. The contemporary enthusiasm for recasting tenth-century warlords as peaceable multiculturalists is a peculiar one – and one from which the Caliphs of Córdoba have regularly benefited as well.
5
APOCALYPSE POSTPONED
The Mahdi Blues
At the end of time, so St. Paul had taught, Antichrist was destined to appear in Jerusalem, seated upon the mount where Solomon in ancient times had built his temple, “proclaiming himself to be God.”1Yet it was the sublime character of Scripture that its meaning, even when to the unlearned it appeared precise, could be interpreted by the wise on many levels. Much had happened since the apostle had delivered his prophecy. The Temple of the Jews had long since been overthrown and destroyed utterly – even as churches had spread across the world. How, then, was the “temple” in which Antichrist would take his seat best to be understood? “Does it mean the ruins of the Temple built by King Solomon, or might it actually mean a Christian place of worship?”2 It was this question, put by St. Augustine many centuries before the Millennium, that had haunted Wulfstan in the wake of the St. Brice’s Day massacre, and led him to see, in the rubble of a desecrated church, a possible proof of Antichrist’s imminence. Certainly, whether it was to be on the Temple Mount or within the shell of a Christian shrine, ruins seemed the only fitting backdrop to the throne of the Son of Perdition.
Over time, Wulfstan’s anxieties had begun to fade. The sufferings of the English had not proved fatal; and Canute, far from pillaging churches, as his ancestors had done, grew famous instead for refurbishing them. Travelling to Rome, he had ostentatiously deposited whole cloakloads of silver on the altars of abbeys; “and indeed whatever altar he passed, be it ever so small, he would give it gifts, and bestow sweet kisses upon it.”3Nor was the mania for sponsoring churches by any means confined to kings. In France and Italy especially, wherever a pilgrim such as Canute travelled, he was likely to pass carts weighed down with timber and columns plundered from ancient ruins, and to discover, in village after village, walls of white stone rising up above the shacks. A new church, almost as much as a castle brooding on its hill, was an emphatic marker of the grasping new order of things: for a wealthy castellan, by funding a place of worship, and privatising what had previously been held in common, was effectively branding the worshippers that it served as his property.
Yet the peasants too, robbed of their
freedoms and coerced into villages as they invariably had been, had their own stake in seeing a church established in their midst. No demand was more vigorously pressed by enthusiasts for the Peace of God than that the upstart lords and their swaggering, bullying knights accept the inviolability of consecrated ground. To cross into the cimiterium, the area surrounding a church where the dead were buried and the living gathered in peace, whether to hold a market, or to hear a law suit, or to celebrate a wedding, was thunderously forbidden to any man bearing arms. Invisible the ramparts of a churchyard might be – and yet every knight who swore an oath of peace was obliged to accept that they rose no less impregnably than those of a donjon. Seen as such, the village church was not the complement of the castle, but rather its mirror image: twin citadels both, one serving to guard the powerful, and the other to shelter the weak; one the lair of warlords and the other a stronghold of God. No wonder, then, that there were many who found in the unprecedented surge of building activity a mark, not of oppression, but of renewal, of promise, of hope. “For it was as if the whole world were shaking itself free, shrugging off the burden of the past, and cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches.”4 Such was the judgement of Rudolf Glaber, seated in that mightiest of all bastions of holiness, the abbey of Cluny. As a man who had no doubt that demons stalked the earth – and indeed had seen one, blubbery-lipped and hunchbacked, menacing him in his bed – his exultancy came as no surprise. For to behold Christendom clad in a mantle of churches was to know it transformed into one immense cimiterium – to know it fortified against Antichrist.