Millenium

by Tom Holland

  In West Francia especially, borne upon the general ebbing of royal power, the taboo against private fortresses was increasingly in full retreat. The Capetians, as they struggled to assert their authority over even the patchwork of territories that constituted the royal domain, were hardly in any position to forbid distant princes from raising fortifications of their own. The consequence, sprouting up suddenly across region after region of West Francia, like toadstools from rotten wood, was a great host of strange and unsettling structures, as men­acing as they were crude: what would come to be termed in English 'castles'. Here, bred of the throes of the Millennium, was yet another far-reaching convulsion — and right at its forefront, testing its limits, was the Count of Anjou.

  Fulk's enthusiasm for castles reflected a typically cold-eyed insight: that their defences might be deployed as tools of aggression. The fortifications raised in Anjou, unlike the much larger 'castella' which Otto II had ridden past in southern Italy, were designed to intimi­date, not protect, the local population. Planted as a forward base in hostile territory, planned as merely one of a whole ring of similar structures, investing an obdurate target and gradually throttling it into submission, a castle founded by Fulk was built to provide shelter for its garrisons, and no one else. The great discovery, one exploited ruthlessly along the whole length of the Angevin marches, was that a fortification might be no less effective for being basic. Castles, in the first revolutionary flush of their existence, provided immediate payback for an often minimal outlay of effort. It did not take much to construct one. The ideal was to locate a rock, or a spur, or a lonely hillock - a feature, in short, of the kind that only a few years previously would have been regarded as quite valueless — and plant on it some rudimentary wooden battlements. Even where the Loire valley was at its flattest, artificial mounds - or 'mottes', as they were termed — could be thrown up in a matter of months. Then, with the site secured, the castle could be progressively upgraded. Fulk, as befitted a wealthy prince with a taste for the cutting edge, often ended up constructing battlements on an awesomely imposing scale. By the end of his reign, Anjou was shielded all along its frontiers by great donjons of solid stone. Castles and county alike: both had been built to last.

  Yet if the new technology could be made to buttress a prince's ambitions, so also might it menace them. In the millennial year itself, for instance, the citadel in Angers, Fulk's capital, was seized and held against him. As a stab in the back, this revolt was especially shocking: for its captain was Fulk's own wife, Elizabeth, who had been caught out in an affair. The cuckolded husband, never known for his good temper at the best of times, duly swept into town upon a great firestorm of rage. The citadel was stormed; much of Angers laid to waste; Elizabeth herself captured and burned at the stake. A brutal reprisal, to be sure - but bred, as was so often the case with Fulk, of measured calculation. Even had he wished to, he could not possibly have shown mercy to his wife. Treachery from those who most owed him their love imperilled everything. If rebellion could flare up in his household, in his marriage bed, then where else might its embers lie, waiting to burst into flames? In every castle there was a castellan, appointed to serve as its captain; and in every castellan a taste for violence and ambition. 'No house is weak that has many friends.' So Geoffrey Greycloak, Fulk's father, had advised his son. 'Therefore I admonish you to hold dear those of your followers who have been faithful to you.'17 A wise prescription, and one that Fulk adhered to throughout his life; yet never once did he presume to take those followers for granted. Humbly, in exchange for gifts of property, whether lands or strongholds or both, they were obliged to acknowledge their submission. Genuflecting before their lord, placing their clasped hands in his, humbly offering his foot or leg a kiss, they proclaimed themselves to all the world his 'vassi': his 'vassals'. This, an ancient Gaulish word, had once referred only to the very lowest of the low, the most desperate, the unfree; and even though, by the time of the Millennium, it had proved itself a term so upwardly mobile that it was held no shame even for a count or a duke to acknowledge himself the vassus of a king, the submission that it implied was no less solemn for that. Every vassal of Fulk knew of the penalties that would be exacted for any hint of treachery: the wasting of all he owned, and the desecration of his body. A lord prepared to burn his own wife, after all, could hardly have made the consequences of rebellion any clearer. No wonder, then, that Fulk's castellans generally opted to keep their heads down. His vassals, by and large, proved themselves true to their oaths. Anjou cohered.

  Nevertheless, even on a man as hard as the Black Count, the pres­sures of lordship were immense. Much more was at stake than his own fortunes. 'Fearful of the day of judgement':18 so Fulk described himself. The same blood that had soaked the fields of Anjou, and served to fertilise his greatness, could not help but remind him too of the terrifying vanity of all mortal wishes. 'For the fragility of the human race being what it is,' as he acknowledged bleakly, 'the last moment may arrive at any time, suddenly and unforeseen.'19 Always, amid the harrying of his adversaries, and the trampling of their ambitions, and the shattering of their swords, he dreaded ambush by the deadliest foe of all. Strategies to blunt the meat-hook of the Devil, and to fend off his assaults, were never far from Fulk's mind. So it was, for instance, haunted by the thought of the Christian blood he had spilled at Conquereuil, that he founded 'a church, a most beautiful one',20 in a field named Belli Locus, the Place of Battle. The count's many enemies, scornful of what they saw as his crocodile tears, were naturally exultant when on the very day of its consecration a violent wind blew down its roof and a part of its wall: 'for no one doubted that by his insolent presumption he had rendered his offering void'.21 Perhaps — and yet to damn Fulk as a hypocrite was to misrepresent just how profoundly he feared for his soul, and for the troubled times in which he lived. 'The end of the world being at hand, men are driven by a shorter life, and a more atrocious cupidity consumes them':22 so had written a monk living in Poitiers, on the southern flank of Anjou, even as Fulk's horsemen were raiding the fields beyond his monastery. Yet Fulk himself, had this judgement been brought to his attention, would not have disputed it. All his crimes and ravins, and all that he had won by them as well, he presumed to dedicate to a cause far nobler than his own.

  How precisely Fulk saw his role was evident from his church at the Place of Battle, which he dedicated first to the Holy Trinity and then, and with great emphasis, to 'the holy Archangels and the Cherubim and Seraphim'.23 These were the warriors of heaven: ser­ried in glittering ranks before the Almighty's throne, they served Him watchful and unsleeping, ready, whenever called upon, to descend upon His enemies and restore order to the cosmos, howso­ever it might be threatened. In this, then, what did the Cherubim and Seraphim resemble, if not the followers of an earthly count - and what were the holy archangels, if not the counterparts of Fulk himself?

  A most flattering conceit, of course - and inoperable without an anointed king to play the part of God. Fulk himself, shrewd and cal­culating, understood this perfectly. True, Robert Capet's ministers might occasionally have to be eliminated, and his manoeuvrings blunted, and his armies put to flight; but never once, not even when tensions were at their height, did Fulk forget the courtesies that were due the king as his overlord. Robert himself reciprocated. 'Most faithful':24 so the Count of Anjou was named in royal documents. An example of near-delusional wish-fulfilment, it might have been thought — except that Fulk did indeed see himself as solemnly bound by the ties of vassalage. Even a fantasy, if repeated with sufficient conviction, can come to possess its own ghostly truth. Adversaries on numerous occasions they may have been - and yet king and count had need of each other. Mighty though Fulk and the lords of other counties were, they could not afford to cut themselves entirely loose from the seeming corpse that was the crown. For any of them to have done so - to have repudiated the authority of the Capetians, to have declared a unilateral independence, to have pronounced themselves kings - would have been
to shatter irrevocably the whole basis of their own legitimacy. The threads of loyalty that bound their own vassals to them would at once have been snapped. The entire social fabric would have begun to unravel, from top to bottom, leav­ing behind only ruin. Every pattern of authority would have been lost. Nothing would have been left, save anarchy.

  And so it was — just - that the centre held. Splintered into rival principalities the kingdom may have been, yet a sense of shared identity persisted all the same. Even among the great lords of the south, where initial hostility towards the Capetians had soon dulled into indifference, no one ever doubted that there had to be a king. In truth, if anything, they needed the idea of him even more urgently than did a powerful count such as Fulk. In their territories too, the spectacle of rough-hewn castles was becoming a familiar and ominous one; but, unlike in Anjou, it was rarely the princes who were responsible for building them. 'For their land is very differ­ent from our own,' as one traveller from the north explained. 'The strongholds I saw there were built on foundations of solid rock, and raised to such a height that they seemed to be floating in the sky.'25 Perhaps even Fulk would have found such fortresses a challenge to subdue.

  His brother lords of the south certainly did. No iron grip on their castellans for them. As a result, if the authority of the king lived on in the region as little more than a memory, then so too, increas­ingly, did the authority of the princes themselves. Like fish, the southern principalities appeared to be rotting downwards from their heads. But how far, and how completely, would the rotten­ness serve to spread? And how incurably? On the answer to these questions much would hang. Perhaps, as Adso appeared to have died believing, the very future of all humanity: for that a multiply­ing of wickedness was to herald the end days had been asserted a thousand years previously by Christ Himself.26 Certainly, the future of millions would prove to be at stake: men and women caught up in a terrifying escalation of lawlessness, one that would result in an unprecedented reordering of society, and leave their lives, indeed their whole world, transformed utterly. A storm was brewing, one that would ultimately come to affect all the lands that acknowledged a Capetian as their king: lands that it is perhaps not too anachronis­tic to refer to henceforward as France.

  Knightmare

  No matter that they had been a Christian people for many centuries, the Franks were still more than capable of a red-blooded love of vio­lence. So much so that Saracen commentators, with the insight that often comes most naturally to outsiders, ranked it as one of their defining characteristics — together with a ferocious sense of honour and a distaste for taking baths. Even though it was true that Frankish warriors themselves were trained to value self-restraint as the cardinal virtue of a warlord, this was in large part because, like gold, it was so precious for being rare. The black fury which descended upon Fulk Nerra at Angers, and resulted in the burning of much of the town, was regarded by his contemporaries as nothing greatly out of the ordinary. Flames invariably spread in the wake of war bands, no matter who their leader. A horseman preparing for an expedition would sling a fire-starter from his belt as instinctively as he would draw his sword. The farms and fields of an adversary were always held to be fair game. His dependants too. No less a lord than Hugh Capet, a man famed for his coolness and sagacity, thought nothing of reducing an enemy's lands to a wilderness of blackened stubble, and littering it with corpses, in such a wild fury was he,' men reported, 'that he scorned to spare a single hut, even if there were no one more threatening in it than a mad old crone.'27

  Not that a practised village-waster such as Hugh would have made . much distinction between a mad old crone and any other class of peasant. From the vantage point of an armed man in a saddle, they were all of them indistinguishable, mere bleating sheep, who milled and cowered and never fought back: 'paupetes'. This word, which in ancient times had been used to describe the poor, had gradually, by the tenth century, come to possess a somewhat different meaning: 'the powerless'. This was a revealing shift, for it reflected how arms, once held to be the very mark of a free man, of a 'Francus', a Frank, had become the preserve of the wealthiest alone. No peasant could afford to dress himself in chain mail, still less maintain a warhorse. Even an arrowhead might prove beyond his means. No wonder that the find­ing of a horseshoe was held the supreme mark of good luck. A greaf lord, knowing that there were men willing to grub in the dirt after iron that had once served to shoe his mount, could hardly help but feel confirmed in all his lofty scorn for them. Filth and mud and shit: such were seen as the natural elements of the peasantry. They were 'lazy, misshapen and ugly in every way'.28 Indeed, so it struck the 'potentes', the 'powerful', there was something almost paradoxical about their ugli­ness: for while cropped hair, the traditional mark of inferiority, might serve as one means of distinguishing peasants from their betters, then so too did the opposite, a matted and loathsome unkemptness, befitting men who were presumed to eat, and sweat, and rut like beasts. Men, it might be argued, who fully merited being rounded up like beasts as well.

  For give them half a chance, and peasants, just like pigs in a wood, or sheep on a mountainside, might all too easily stray. Once, back amid the upheavals that had followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, there were those who had slipped entirely free of their landlords, liberating themselves so successfully from an enfeebled regime of extortion that they had ended up almost forgetting what it meant to be screwed for taxes. A scandalous state of affairs - and not one that could be permitted, in the long run, to carry on. Charlemagne, labouring to rebuild the order of Rome's vanished empire, had made certain as well to renew its venerable tradition of exploiting the pauperes. The aristocracy, their wealth and authority increas­ingly fortified by the expansion of Frankish power, had needed no encouragement to sign up to such a mission. Briskly, and sometimes brutally, they had set about reining in the errant peasantry. Stern rights of jurisdiction and constraint, known collectively as the 'ban', had been granted them by the king. Armed with these fear­some legal powers, the counts and their agents had been able to sting their tenants for a good deal more than rent — for now there were fines and tolls to be imposed, and any number of inventive dues exacted. The natural order of things, which for so long had been in a tottering state of dilapidation, had once again been set on firm foundations. All was as it should be. The peasantry toiled in the fields; their betters skimmed off the surplus. It was a simple enough formula, and yet upon it depended the dominance of even the great­est lord.

  On that much, at any rate, all the potentes could agree. The disin­tegration of Charlemagne's empire, unlike that of Rome's, did not noticeably serve to weaken their capacity for extortion. Even as peasants learned to beware the feuding of rival warlords, and to dread the trampling of their crops, the looting of their storehouses and the torching of their homes, so were they still obliged to cough up rents, and to endure the grinding exactions of the 'ban'. There were those, as season followed season and year followed year, who found it ever more impossible to meet the demands being piled upon them. Divine as well as human intervention might serve at any moment to waste a peasant's meagre fortune. Blessed indeed was the year when he did not find himself hag-ridden by a dread of famine. Every spring, when the supplies of winter were exhausted, and the fruits of summer yet to bloom, the pangs of hunger would invariably grip; but worse, infinitely worse, were those years when the crops failed, and the pangs of hunger followed on directly from harvest time.

  No wonder, then, that peasants learned to look to the heavens with foreboding: for even a single hailstorm, if it fell with sufficient ferocity, might prove sufficient to destroy the fruit of a whole year's labours. Whether such a calamity was to be blamed upon divine wrath, or the malevolence of the Devil, or perhaps even the hellish skills of a necromancer, there would be time enough to debate as the icy nights drew in and people began to starve. Then 'men's very voices, reduced to extreme thinness, would pipe like those of dying birds';29 women, desperate to feed their children,
would grub about despair­ingly, even after 'the unclean flesh of reptiles';30 wolves, their eyes burning amid the winter darkness, would haunt the margins of human settlements, waiting to chew on the withered corpses of the dead. In such desperate circumstances, who could blame the man prepared to countenance a fateful step, and barter away the few genuine assets that might still be left to him? An ox, for instance, which in good times could go for a whole hectare of land, was far too valuable, even during a famine, simply to be butchered for meat. Nevertheless, so ruinous a step was it for a peasant to sell his cattle that there were certain bishops, in times of particularly terrible hunger, who would grant money to the most impoverished, or dispense grain to them free of charge, so as to steel them against the temptation. These were acts of true charity: for once a peasant had struck a deal, and seen his precious oxen driven away, he would be left, come the spring, without the means to drive his plough. Nor would he have anything much further to sell: only his plot ofland and then, last of all, himself. No longer a francus, he would, from that moment on, rank as merely a 'servus': a serf[7]

  A bitter and beggarly fate. And yet would the neighbours of an unfortunate prostrated so utterly have discerned in his ruin anything more ominous than an individual tragedy? Most likely not. Man was fallen, after all, and suffering was his lot. There were worse calamities, perhaps, in a world blighted by sickness, and deformity, and pain, than servitude. More universal ones too. In the decades leading up to the Millennium, a peasant did not need to have a startling amount of flesh upon his bones, nor of supplies stored away for the winter, nor of oxen in his barn, still to feel conscious of his liberty. Darkly though the storm clouds of famine and war had massed over France during the previous century, there remained a majority of peasants, perhaps a large majority, who persisted in defining themselves as something more than serfs - as men who were free.