Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

VIII

CONVERSION

754: F

RISIA

As dawn broke, the camp on the banks of the river Boorne was already stirring. Boniface, its leader, was almost eighty, but as tireless as he had ever been. Forty years after his first journey to Frisia, he had returned there, in the hope of reaping from its lonely mudflats and marshes a great harvest of souls. Missionary work had long been his life. Born in Devon, in the Saxon kingdom of Wessex, he viewed the pagans across the northern sea as his kinsmen. In letters home he had regularly solicited prayers for their conversion. ‘Take pity upon them; for they themselves are saying: “We are of one blood and bone with you.”’¹ Now, after weeks of touring the scattered homesteads of Frisia, Boniface had summoned all those won for Christ to be confirmed in their baptismal vows. It promised him a day of joy.

The first boats arrived as sunlight was starting to pierce the early morning cloud. A mass of men, after clambering onto dry land, walked up from the river and approached the camp. Then, abruptly, the glint of swords. A charge. Screams. Boniface came out of his tent. Already it was too late. The pirates were in the camp. Desperately, Boniface’s attendants fought back. Not the old man himself, though. Christ, when he was arrested, had ordered Peter to put up his sword; and now Boniface, following his Lord’s example, commanded his followers to lay down their weapons. A tall man, he gathered his fellow priests around him, and urged them to be thankful for the hour of their release. Felled by a pirate’s sword, he was cut to pieces. So violently did the blows rain down that twice a book he had in his hands was hacked through. Found long afterwards at the scene of his murder, it would be treasured ever after as a witness to his martyrdom.

‘Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations.’² So Christ himself had commanded. Augustine, insisting that the Church was for all humanity, had drawn on Genesis to emphasise his point. There, the story was told of how God had sent a flood that covered the entire world; but also of how a righteous man named Noah, forewarned of what was to happen, had built a great ark, in which two of every living creature had found a refuge. The mission of Christians was to build an ark that could shelter all the world. ‘The Heavenly City calls out to citizens from every nation, and thereby collects a society of aliens, speaking every language.’³ Yet Augustine, true to the missionary spirit of Paul though he was, had been the exception that proved the rule. Most of his contemporaries, schooled in a deep contempt for barbarians, had regarded Christianity as far too precious to be shared with the savages who lurked beyond the limits of Roman power. Those few missions that did venture past the frontier had been sent not to convert the natives, but to minister to Christian captives. In 340, for instance, the priest Ulfilas – the descendant of Cappadocians enslaved a century previously by Gothic raiders – had been appointed ‘bishop of the Christians who live among the Goths’. Despite ministering beyond the Danube for seven years, he had not hesitated, when faced with a sudden bout of persecution, to lead his flock to Roman soil. That, after all, was where Christians properly belonged. Even centuries on, long after the collapse of the empire in the West, such attitudes died hard. The division between kingdoms that had once been Roman and the world beyond was one that even the most outward-looking bishops still tended to take for granted. Gregory, when he sent his mission to Kent, had been motivated in part by his awareness that Britain had once been an imperial province. The paganism of its new rulers had offended him not merely as a Christian, but as a Roman.

To Angles and Saxons, however, such considerations meant nothing. Grateful though they were to Gregory for his role in bringing them to Christ, their loyalty to the papacy implied no devotion to any long-vanished Roman imperial order. For Anglo-Saxon monks, the pagan darkness that loured over the eastern reaches of Germany, from the North Sea coast to the great forests of the interior, spoke not of an invincible savagery, not of a barbarism best left alone, but of a pressing need for light. All the world was theirs to illumine with the blaze of Christ. It was not the inheritance of Roman imperialism that inspired them, but the example of Patrick and Columbanus. To experience hardship was the very point. Fearsome stories were told of what missionaries might face. Woden, king of the demons worshipped by the Germans as gods, was darkly rumoured to demand a tithe of human lives. In the Low Countries, prisoners were drowned beneath rising tides; in Saxony, hung from trees, and run through with spears. Runes were dyed in Christian blood. Or so it was reported. Such rumours, far from intimidating Anglo-Saxon monks, only confirmed them in their sense of purpose: to banish the rule of demons from lands that properly belonged to Christ.

As vividly as anyone, they understood what it was to be born again. ‘The old has gone, the new has come!’⁴ The tone of revolution in Paul’s cry, the sense that an entire order had been judged and found wanting, still retained a freshness for men like Boniface in a way that it did not in more venerable reaches of the Christian world. So august a presence was the Church in Rome or Constantinople that people there might struggle to imagine that it had ever been something insurgent. Yet still, fissile within its scriptures and rituals, the portrayal of change as a force for good, as a process to be embraced, as a road capable of leading humanity to a brighter future, continued to radiate. Boniface, as a West Saxon, a man whose people had only lately been brought to Christ, stood in awe of it. He suffered no anxiety in contemplating the world turned upside down. Quite the opposite. Taking to the roads, he felt himself called to serve just as Paul had once served: as an agent of disruption.

To banish the past, to overturn custom: here was a fearsome project, barely comprehensible to the peoples of other places, other times. The vast mass of humanity had always taken for granted that novelty was to be mistrusted. Boniface’s own countrymen had been no different. Many among the Angles and the Saxons had been afraid to let go of the past: kings who prided themselves on their descent from Woden; peasants who resented monks for ‘abolishing the old ways of worship’.⁵ Now, though, time itself was being transfigured. Barely a decade after Boniface’s arrival in the Low Countries, missionaries had begun to calculate dates in the manner of Bede: anno Domini, in the year of their Lord. The old order, which to pagans had seemed eternal, could now more firmly be put where it properly belonged: in the distant reaches of a Christian calendar. While the figure of Woden bestowed far too much prestige on kings ever to be erased altogether from their lineages, monks did not hesitate to demote him from his divine status and confine him to the remote beginnings of things. The rhythms of life and death, and of the cycle of the year, proved no less adaptable to the purposes of the Anglo-Saxon Church. So it was that hel, the pagan underworld, where all the dead were believed to dwell, became, in the writings of monks, the abode of the damned; and so it was too that Eostre, the festival of the spring, which Bede had speculated might derive from a goddess, gave its name to the holiest Christian feast-day of all. Hell and Easter: the garbing of the Church’s teachings in Anglo-Saxon robes did not signal a surrender to the pagan past, but rather its rout. Only because the gods had been toppled from their thrones, melted utterly by the light of Christ, or else banished to where monsters stalked, in fens or on lonely hills, could their allure safely be put to Christian ends. The victory of the new was adorned with the trophies of the old.

It was Boniface who had demonstrated this most ringingly. In 722, he had been consecrated a bishop by the pope in Rome, and given a formal commission to convert the pagans east of the Rhine. Arriving in central Germany, he had headed for the furthermost limits of the Christian world. At Geisner, where Thuringia joined with the lands of the pagan Saxons, there stood a great oak, sacred to Thunor, a particularly mighty and fearsome god, whose hammer-blows could split mountains, and whose goat-drawn chariot made the whole earth shake. Boniface chopped it down. Then, with its timbers, he built a church. The woodman’s axe had long served to humble demons. In Utrecht, a fortress on the north bank of the Rhine that had provided Anglo-Saxon monks with the base for their mission to the Frisians, an axe made of polished stone was confidently identified as having once belonged to Martin. Stories were told of how, to demonstrate the power of Christ’s name, the saint had stood in the path of a falling tree, and lived to tell the tale. Boniface, by chopping down Thunor’s oak, had shown courage of a similar order. That he had not been struck by lightning, nor slain for his temerity by outraged locals, was widely noted. The bare stump of the oak served as a proof of what the missionary had been claiming. Christ had triumphed over Thunor. Pilgrims still travelled to Geisner; but now, when they did so, it was to worship in an oratory made from freshly sawn oaken planks.

Boniface had not been so naïve as to think that his mission was thereby done. The task of winning people for Christ could not be achieved merely by cutting down a tree. Converts, even after baptism, continued to practise any number of pestiferous customs: offering sacrifice to springs, inspecting entrails, claiming to read the future. Such back-sliding was not the worst. Travelling through the lands east of the Rhine that lay under the rule of the Franks – Hesse, and Thuringia, and Swabia – Boniface had been horrified by what he found. Churches that in many cases reached back centuries seemed rotten with pagan practices. Merchants who sold slaves to the Saxons for sacrifice; noblemen who hid their worship of idols ‘under the cloak of Christianity’;⁶ priests who made sacrifice of goats and bulls; bishops who fornicated, and inherited their sees from their fathers, and indulged in spectacular blood-feuds: these were not the kinds of Christian that Boniface was content to leave to their own devices. Rather than venture further into the forests of Saxony, as he had long dreamed of doing, he had embarked instead on a great labour of reform. Flinty, prickly and exacting, he had not stinted in his efforts to set the churches of eastern Francia on what he saw as a proper footing. The loathing of the local bishops for his finger-wagging he had met with a matching contempt. Not merely a man of unyielding principle, he had displayed a rare talent for securing powerful patrons. As well as the pope, he had won the backing of Charles Martel. The Frankish warlord, no less keen to break the eastern marches to his own purposes than the Anglo-Saxon bishop, had found in Boniface a man after his own heart. Tortured though Boniface was by the need to curry favour at court, and by his frustrated yearning to save the souls of pagans, he had succeeded, by the end of his life, in shaping the churches east of the Rhine to something like his own image. Returning, in the last year of his life, to the mission that had always been closest to his heart, he had done so as the dominant figure in the Frankish church.

To convert was to educate. This, the great lesson taught by Boniface, was one that the Franks would not forget. Touched as it was by the aura of sanctity that clung to him as a martyr, it would bequeath to kings as well as to priests a stern and implacable sense of their duty to God. Yet even as Boniface was being cut down amid the reeds and mud of Frisia, the lead given by missionaries in the spread of Christianity eastwards was passing. A new and altogether more militant approach to paganism was being prepared. The willingness of Boniface to meet death rather than permit his attendants to draw their swords was not one that the Frankish authorities tended to share. Three days after his murder, a squad of Christian warriors tracked down the killers, cornered them and wiped them out. Their women and children were taken as slaves. Their plunder was plundered. The news, spreading through the pagan redoubts of Frisia, achieved what Boniface himself had failed to do. ‘Struck with terror at the visitation of God’s vengeance, the pagans embraced after the martyr’s death the teaching which they had rejected while he still lived.’⁷

It was a model of conversion that the Carolingian monarchy, for one, would not forget.

Sword and Pen

In the summer of 772, fifty years after Boniface’s felling of Thunor’s oak, another tree – the greatest of all the Saxons’ totems – was brought crashing down. Fearsome, phallic, and famed across Saxony, the Irminsul was believed by devotees of the ancient gods to uphold the heavens. But it did not. The skies remained in their place, even once the sanctuary had been demolished. Yet to the Saxons themselves, it might well have seemed as though the pillars of the world were crumbling. Devastation on a scale never before visited on their lands was drawing near. The desecrator of the Irminsul was no missionary, but a king at the head of the most menacing war-machine in Europe. Charles, the younger son of Pepin, had ascended to the sole rule of the Franks only the previous December. Not since the vanished age of the Caesars had anyone in the West commanded such resources. Prodigious both in his energies and in his ambitions, he exerted a sway that was Roman in its scope. In 800, the pope set an official seal on the comparison in Rome itself: for there, on Christmas Day, he crowned the Frankish warlord, and hailed him as ‘Augustus’. Then, having done so, he fell before Charles’ feet. Such obeisance had for centuries been the due of only one man: the emperor in Constantinople. Now, though, the West had its own emperor once again. Charles, despite his reluctance to admit that he might owe anything to an Italian bishop, and his insistence that, had he only known what the pope was planning, he would never have permitted it, did not reject the title. King of the Franks and ‘Christian Emperor’,⁸ he would be remembered by later generations as Charles the Great: Charlemagne.

Many were his conquests. During the four decades and more of his rule, he succeeded in annexing northern Italy, capturing Barcelona from the Arabs, and pushing deep into the Carpathian Basin. Yet of all Charlemagne’s many wars, the bloodiest and most exhausting was the one he launched against the Saxons. For years it raged. Charlemagne, despite his overwhelming military strength, found it impossible to bring his adversaries to submit. Treaties were no sooner agreed than they were broken. The whole of Saxony seemed a bog. Charlemagne, faced with the choice of retreating or draining it for good, opted for the unyielding, the protracted, the merciless course. Every autumn, his men would burn the harvests and leave the local peasants to starve. Settlement after settlement was wiped out. Entire populations were deported. These were atrocities on a Roman scale – but Augustus, whose own efforts to pacify the lands east of the Rhine had ended in bloody failure, was not the only model to hand. Charlemagne’s lordship had been sanctified as that of the kings of Israel had been: by the pouring of holy oil upon his head. He ruled as the new David; as the anointed one of God. The record of Israelite warfare was a formidable one. Centuries before, translating the scriptures into Gothic, Ulfilas had deliberately censored it, on the principle that barbarian peoples needed no encouragement to fight; but the Franks, as the new Israel, had long ceased to rank as barbarians. In 782, when Charlemagne ordered the beheading of 4500 prisoners on a single day, it was the example of David, who had similarly made a great reaping of captives, that lay before him. ‘Every two lengths of them were put to death, and the third length was allowed to live.’⁹

There was more to the bloody rhythms of Frankish campaigning, however, than the goal merely of securing for the new Israel a troubled flank. Charlemagne aimed as well at something altogether more novel: the winning of the Saxons for Christ. This ambition was one that he had only arrived at gradually. Like any king in the post-Roman world, he had been raised to view pagans primarily as a nuisance. The point of attacking barbarians was to keep them in order, and plunder plenty of loot. Charlemagne, unlike Boniface, could not convert pagans on the cheap. Toppling the Irminsul, he had been as anxious to strip it of the gold and silver that adorned it as to humble the pride of Thunor. The longer it took him to subdue the Saxons, however, and the more blood and treasure it cost him, so the more he came to realise that his adversaries would have to be born again. Rare was the uprising that did not begin with a burning of churches, a massacre of priests. The taint of the demonic lay heavy on the Saxons. Only by washing away all that they had been, and erasing entirely their former existence, could they be brought to a proper submission. In 776, Charlemagne imposed a treaty on the Saxons that obliged them to accept baptism. Countless men, women and children were led into a river, there to become Christian. Nine years later, after the crushing of yet another rebellion, Charlemagne pronounced that ‘scorning to come to baptism’¹⁰ would henceforward merit death. So too, he declared, would offering sacrifice to demons, or cremating a corpse, or eating meat during the forty days before Easter. Ruthlessly, determinedly, the very fabric of Saxon life was being torn apart. There would be no stitching it back together. Instead, dyed in gore, its ragged tatters were to lie for ever in the mud. As a programme for bringing an entire pagan people to Christ, it was savage as none had ever been before. A bloody and imperious precedent had been set.

But was it Christian? Forcing pagans to convert at sword-point was hardly the cause for which Boniface had died, after all. Perhaps it was telling, then, that the most pointed criticism of the policy should have come from a compatriot of the sainted martyr. ‘Faith arises from the will, not from compulsion.’¹¹ So wrote Alcuin, a brilliant scholar from Northumbria who in 781 had met Charlemagne while returning from a visit to Rome, and been recruited to his court. Pagans, he urged the king, should be persuaded, not forced to convert. ‘Let peoples newly brought to Christ be nourished in a mild manner, as infants are given milk – for instruct them brutally, and the risk then, their minds being weak, is that they will vomit everything up.’¹² Charlemagne, far from objecting to this advice, appears to have taken it in good spirit. In 796, the policy of forcible baptism was eased; a year later, the laws that governed the conquered Saxons reissued in a milder form. The king, who enjoyed nothing more than discussing theology with Alcuin while soaking with him in a hot bath, had full confidence in his advisor. He knew that the Northumbrian’s commitment to the creation of a properly Christian people was absolute. Alcuin’s conviction that there was no improvement so radical that it might not be achieved by education was precisely why Charlemagne had employed him. ‘For without knowledge no one can do good.’¹³ Alcuin, schooled in the sternest traditions of Northumbrian scholarship, wished everyone in his patron’s empire to share in the fruits of Christian learning. Monasteries, in his opinion, had a greater role to play in the pacification of Saxony than fortresses. It was not only Saxons, though, who caused Alcuin anxiety. Christians in lands from which paganism had been scoured many centuries before still laboured in darkness. How, when they were illiterate, and their priests semi-lettered, could they possibly profit from the great inheritance of writings from the ancient past: the Old and New Testaments, the canons of Nicaea and other councils, the teachings of the fathers of the Church? How, without these timeless texts, could they be brought to a proper knowledge of God’s purposes and desires? How could they even know what Christianity was? It was not enough to take the light of Christ into the forests of Saxony. It had to be taken into the manors, and farms, and smallholdings of Francia. An entire society needed reform.

Charlemagne did not duck the challenge. He knew that greatness brought with it grave responsibilities. A king who permitted his people to stray, who indulged their mistakes, who failed to guide them, would be sure to answer for it before the throne of God. Charlemagne, declaring in 789 his ambition to see his subjects ‘apply themselves to a good life’, cited as his model a king from the Old Testament: Josiah, who had discovered in the Temple a copy of the law given to Moses. ‘For we read how the saintly Josiah, by visitation, correction and admonition, strove to recall the kingdom which God had given him to the worship of the true God.’¹⁴ But Charlemagne could not, as Josiah had done, cite a written covenant. His subjects were not, as Josiah’s had been, governed by the law given to Moses. Different peoples across his empire had different legal systems – nor, provided only that these codes did not subvert Frankish supremacy, did Charlemagne object. The one law that he wished his subjects to obey, the one law that existed to guide all the Christian people, could not be contained in a single book. Only on their hearts could it be written. Yet this imposed on Charlemagne a ferocious obligation: for how could God’s law possibly be written on the hearts of the Christian people if they were not properly Christian? Without education, they were doomed; without education, they could not be brought to Christ. Correctio, Charlemagne termed his mission: the schooling of his subjects in the authentic knowledge of God.

‘May those who copy the pronouncements of the holy law and the hallowed sayings of the fathers sit here.’¹⁵ Such was the prayer that Alcuin, following his appointment as abbot of Tours in 797, ordered to be inscribed over the room where monks would toil daily at their great task of writing. Under his leadership, the monastery became a powerhouse of penmanship. Its particular focus was the production of single-volume collections of scripture. Edited by Alcuin himself, these were written to be as user-friendly as possible. No longer did words run into one another. Capital letters were deployed to signal the start of new sentences. For the first time, a single stroke like a lightning-flash was introduced to indicate doubt: the question mark. Each compendium of scripture, so one monk declared, was ‘a library beyond compare’.¹⁶ In ancient Alexandria, it had been called ta biblia ta hagia, ‘the holy books’ – and in time, so as to emphasise the unique holiness of what they were producing, monks in Francia would transliterate the Greek word biblia into Latin. The Old and New Testaments would come to be known simply as Biblia – ‘the Books’. The sheer number of editions produced at Tours was prodigious. Large-format, easy to read, and distributed widely across Charlemagne’s empire, they gave to the various peoples across the Latin West something new: a shared sense of God’s word as a source of revelation that might be framed within one single set of covers.

Yet Alcuin and his colleagues were not content that scripture and the great inheritance of Christian learning be made available merely to the literate. Familiar as they were with the shrunken settlements that huddled within even the most imposing Roman city walls, they knew that there could be no true correctio without reaching deep into the countryside. The entire span of the Latin West, from its ancient heartlands to its newest, rawest marches, needed to function as a great honeycomb of dioceses. Even the meanest peasant scratching a living beside the dankest wood had to be provided with ready access to Christian instruction. This was why, every time Saxon rebels burned down a church, the Frankish authorities would hurry to rebuild it. It was why as well, under the stern and tutelary gaze of Charlemagne, the project of correctio had as a particular focus the education of the priesthood. This was a topic on which Boniface, only a generation previously, had expressed robust views. Frankish priests, he had charged, ‘spend their lives in debauchery, adultery, and every kind of filth’.¹⁷ Some were barely distinguishable from serfs: ordained at the behest of their lords, they were more practised in holding the leashes of hunting dogs or the reins of a lady’s horse than in teaching the word of God. That, as ever more instructions flowed from Charlemagne’s court, was now starting to change. Everyone in the empire, so the king ordained, was to know the Creed. So too were they all to learn the words which Christ himself, asked by his disciples how they should pray, had taught: the Lord’s Prayer. Small books written specifically to serve the needs of rural priests began to appear in ever increasing numbers. Battered, scruffy and well-thumbed, these guides were the index of an innovative experiment in mass education. Charlemagne’s death in 814 did nothing to slow it. Four decades on, the archbishop of Reims could urge the priests under his charge to know all forty of Gregory the Great’s homilies, and expect to be obeyed. One was jailed for having forgotten ‘everything that he had learned’.¹⁸ Ignorance had literally become a crime.

Increasingly, in the depths of the Frankish countryside, there was no aspect of existence that Christian teaching did not touch. Whether drawing up a charter, or tending a sick cow, or advising on where best to dig a well, rare was the priest who did not serve his flock as the ultimate fount of knowledge. The rhythms of the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed, repeated daily across the Frankish empire and beyond, in the kingdoms of Britain, and Ireland, and Spain, spoke of a Christian people becoming ever more Christian. The turning of the year, the tilling, the sowing, the reaping, and the passage of human life, from birth to death – all now lay in the charge of Christ. As generation succeeded generation, so the teachings of priests to labourers in the fields, and to expectant mothers, and to old men and women on their deathbeds, and to children mouthing their first prayers, came to seem ever more set on foundations that transcended time. Christian order could proclaim itself eternal, and be believed.

Earthly order, meanwhile, was like a rainbow, ‘which adorns the vault of heaven with dazzling colours, and then quickly disappears’. So wrote Sedulius Scottus, an Irish teacher who, some time in the 840s, arrived at the Frankish court. The age was darkening. Charlemagne’s empire, divided among his heirs, had become a thing of shreds and patches. Meanwhile, the borders of the Latin world were everywhere being made to bleed. Saracen pirates, who had long been pillaging the Italian coastline of its riches and seizing human livestock for the slave-markets of Africa, in 846 sailed up the Tiber and sacked St Peter’s itself. In Britain and Ireland, entire kingdoms were overthrown by armies of robbers, wicingas, from across the northern sea: Vikings. In the skies, phantom armies were to be seen clashing amid the clouds, their ranks formed of plumes of fire. ‘Now the earthly kingdom, because it is transitory and fleeting, never reveals the truth, but only some slight semblance of the truth and of the eternal kingdom.’ Sedulius Scottus, writing to Charlemagne’s great-grandson, did not mince his words. ‘Only that kingdom is real which endures forever.’¹⁹

Time, then, would be the decisive test of just how firmly the foundations of Christian order had been laid.

Turning Back the Tide

The crisis had long been building. Year after year warbands of pagans had been coming, crossing from the steppes of the Carpathian Basin into Swabia and Bavaria, horsemen possessed of terrifying speed, and the nightmarish ability to fire arrows from the saddle. ‘Of disgusting aspect, with deep-set eyes and short stature’,²⁰ they were darkly rumoured to feed on human blood. They certainly had a talent for battening onto the possessions of Christians. Wherever they went, they left behind them a trail of smoking churches and blackened fields. Various policies had been attempted to stem their onslaughts: carrots, in the form of financial subsidies, and sticks, in the form of strengthened border controls. Nothing seemed to work. Now, for the authorities in eastern Francia, the moment of truth was drawing near. The choice they faced was a stark one: either to secure a definitive solution to the crisis, or else to lose control of their borders altogether.

The storm finally broke in the summer of 955. ‘A multitude of Hungarians, such as no living person can remember having seen in any one region before, invaded the realm of the Bavarians which they devastated and occupied simultaneously from the Danube to the dark forest on the rim of the mountains.’²¹ It was not only the scale of the invasion force that chilled Christian onlookers, but the evident scope of its preparations. Previously, when the Hungarians had come sweeping out of their steppe-lands, they had done so exclusively on horseback, setting a premium on speed, the better to strip a landscape bare, and then to retreat back to the Danube before the more heavily armoured German cavalry could corner them. Plunder, not territorial acquisitions, had been their goal. Now, though, it seemed that they had a different strategy. Crossing into Bavarian territory, their horsemen rode at a measured pace. Alongside them marched huge columns of infantry. Siege engines creaked and rumbled in their train. This time, the Hungarians had come to conquer.

Early in August, they arrived before the walls of Augsburg. The city, rich and strategically vital though it was, stood perilously exposed. In the hour of its darkest peril, it was Ulrich, the city’s aged and formidably learned bishop, who took command of its defence. While men laboured to shore up the walls, and women walked in procession, raising fearful prayers, the old scholar toured the battlements, inspiring the garrison to trust in Christ. Yet so overwhelming were the forces besieging the city, and so menacing their preparations, that it seemed to many that Augsburg was bound to fall. On 8 August, as the siege engines crawled towards the fortifications, and infantry were driven forwards under the lash, a gateway above the river Lech was breached. Ulrich, ‘wearing only his vestments, protected by neither shield, nor chain mail, nor helmet’,²² rode out to block the Hungarians’ path. Miraculously, despite the hissing of arrows all around him, and the thudding of stones, he succeeded in holding the attackers at bay. The open gate was secured. The Hungarians did not enter the city.

And already, relief was on its way. Otto, a king crowned in the very throne-room of Charlemagne, famed for his piety, his martial valour and the quite spectacular hairiness of his chest, had been brought the news of the invasion in the marches of Saxony. Furiously he rode southwards to confront it. With him he brought three thousand heavily armoured horsemen and the single most precious treasure in his entire realm: the very spear that had pierced the side of Christ. These advantages, in the terrible battle that followed, would gain the relief force a stunning victory against the odds. A great surging cavalry charge crushed the Hungarians; the Christian cavalry, pursuing their foes across the floodplain of the Lech, then hacked and speared them down; of the mighty force that had laid siege to Augsburg almost nothing was left. The Hungarians would later claim that only seven had escaped the slaughter. Such was the glory of it that the exultant victors, standing on the battlefield amid the tangle of corpses and banners, could hail their triumphant king as ‘emperor’. Sure enough, within seven years, Otto was being crowned by the pope in Rome.

A portentous moment. Long before, a bare couple of decades after Charlemagne’s death in 814, a Saxon poet, writing in praise of the god brought by the Franks to his people, had contrasted ‘the bright, infinitely beautiful light’ of Christ with the waxing and waning of mortals. ‘Here in this world, in Middle Earth, they come and go, the old dying and the young succeeding, until they too grow old, and are borne away by fate.’²³ The coronation of Otto in the ancient capital of the world bore potent witness to just how unpredictable were the affairs of men. The throne of empire had stood vacant for over half a century. The last descendant of Charlemagne to occupy it had been deposed, blinded and imprisoned back in 905. The Regnum Francorum, the ‘Kingdom of the Franks’, had fractured into a number of realms. Of these, the two largest were on the western and eastern flanks of the one-time Frankish empire: kingdoms that in time would come to be known as France and Germany. The dynasty to which Otto belonged, and which had been elected to the rule of eastern Francia in 919, had no link to Charlemagne’s. Indeed, it was not even Frankish. Otto the Great, the heir of Constantine, the shield of the West, the wielder of the Holy Spear, was sprung from the very people who, less than two centuries before, had been so obdurate in their defiance of Christian arms: the Saxons.

‘I am a soldier of Christ – it is not lawful for me to fight.’²⁴ So Martin, the future bishop of Tours, had informed the emperor Julian when resigning his military commission. It was hardly surprising that Otto, the descendant of men and women brought to baptism at sword-point, should not have felt any great calling from his Saviour to rule as a pacifist. Even had he done so, the times would not have permitted it. For a century, the frontiers of the Latin West had repeatedly been slashed, and uprooted, and burned. To attempt their repair, and to defend the Christian people, was to fight ‘the demons who permanently assail God’s Church’.²⁵ The defeat of such adversaries, risen up from hell as it was assumed they were, had naturally required an unrelenting effort of courage and fortitude. Otto’s great victory beside the Lech was not the only sign that the tide might be turning at last. Four decades previously, on the banks of another river, the Garigliano, less than a hundred miles south of Rome, a great lair of Saracen pirates had been smoked out. The pope himself, riding in the train of the victorious army, had twice in his excitement charged the enemy. That heaven had forgiven him his offence was demonstrated by the startling but widely reported appearance of Saints Peter and Paul in the battle-line.

Meanwhile, in the northern seas, the forces of Christian order were recovering from near implosion. In 937, a great Viking invasion of Britain was defeated by the king of Wessex, a formidable warrior by the name of Athelstan. The triumph, though, was not Athelstan’s alone. For three generations, under his father and grandfather, the West Saxons had been locked in a desperate struggle for survival. They alone, of all the Anglo-Saxon peoples, had managed to preserve their kingdom from Viking conquest – and even then, only just. For a spell, the very future of Christianity in the lands cast by Bede as a new Israel had seemed to hang by a thread. God, though, had saved it from being cut. Not only had the Vikings been brought to submit to Christ, but an entire new Christian kingdom had been built out of the ruins of the old. Athelstan had emerged from a lifetime of relentless campaigning as the first king of a realm that, by the time of his death, stretched from Northumbria to the Channel. ‘Through God’s grace he ruled alone what previously many had held among themselves.’²⁶ Redeemed from the brink of disaster, Bede’s vision of the Angles and the Saxons as a single people had been fulfilled.

Great conquerors such as Otto and Athelstan stood in no barbarian’s shadow. After a long century of reverses and defeats, Christian kingship had recaptured its swagger, its mystique. What god could possibly rival the power of the celestial emperor who had brought the Saxons from sinister obscurity to such greatness, or the House of Wessex to feed so many of their foes to the wolves and the ravens? It was only natural for a pagan warlord defeated by Christian arms to ponder this question long and hard. Battle was the ultimate testing-ground of a god’s authority. Not only that, but the rewards of suing for terms from Christ were evident. To accept baptism was to win entry into a commonwealth of realms defined by their antiquity, their sophistication and their wealth. From Scandinavia to central Europe, pagan warlords began to contemplate the same possibility: that the surest path to profiting from the Christian world might not be to tear it to pieces, but rather to be woven into its fabric. Sure enough, two decades after the great slaughter of his people beside the Lech, Géza, the king of the Hungarians, became a Christian. Reproached by a monk for continuing to offer sacrifice ‘to various false gods’, he cheerily acknowledged that hedging his bets ‘had brought him both wealth and great power’.²⁷ Only a generation on, the commitment to Christ of his son, Waik, was altogether more full-blooded. The new king took the name Stephen; he built churches across the Hungarian countryside; he ordered that the head be shaved of anyone who dared to mock the rites performed within them; he had a rebellious pagan lord quartered, and the dismembered body parts nailed up in various prominent places. Great rewards were quick to flow from these godly measures. Stephen, the grandson of a pagan chieftain, was given as his queen the grand-niece of none other than Otto the Great. Otto’s own grandson, the reigning emperor, bestowed on him a replica of the Holy Spear. The pope sent him a crown. In time, after a long and prosperous reign, he would end up proclaimed a saint.

By 1038, the year of Stephen’s death, the leaders of the Latin Church could view the world with an intoxicating sense of possibility. It was not just the Hungarians who had been brought to Christ. So too had the Bohemians and the Poles, the Danes and the Norwegians. Ambitious chieftains, once they had been welcomed into the order of Christian royalty, were rarely tempted to renew the worship of their ancestral gods. No pagan ritual could rival the anointing of a baptised king. The ruler who felt the stickiness of holy oil upon his skin, penetrating his pores, seeping deep into his soul, knew himself joined by the experience to David and Solomon, to Charlemagne and Otto. Who was Christ himself, if not the very greatest of kings? Over the course of the centuries, he ‘had gained many realms and had triumphed over the mightiest rulers and had crushed through his power the necks of the proud and the sublime’.²⁸ It was no shame for even the most peerless of kings, even the emperor himself, to acknowledge this. From east to west, from deepest forest to wildest ocean, from the banks of the Volga to the glaciers of Greenland, Christ had come to rule them all.

Yet there was a paradox. Even as kings bowed the knee to him, the hideousness of what he had undergone for humanity’s sake, the pain and helplessness that he had endured at Golgotha, the agony of it all, was coming to obsess Christians as never before. The replica of the Holy Spear sent to Stephen served as a sombre reminder of Christ’s suffering. Christ himself – unlike Otto – had never borne it into battle. It was holy because a Roman soldier, standing guard over his crucifixion, had jabbed it into his side. Blood and water had flowed out. Christ had hung from his gibbet, dead. Ever since, Christians had shrunk from representing their Saviour as a corpse. But now, a thousand years on, artists had begun to break that taboo. In Cologne, above the grave of the archbishop who had commissioned it, a great sculpture was erected, one that portrayed Christ slumped on the cross, his eyes closed, the life gone from his body. Others beheld a similar scene in their visions. A monk in Limoges, rising in the dead of night, saw ‘the image of the Crucified One, the colour of fire and deep blood for half a full night hour’,²⁹ high against the southern sky, as if planted in the heavens. The closer that 1033, the millennial anniversary of Christ’s death, drew near, so the more did vast crowds, in an ecstasy of mingled yearning, and hope, and fear, begin to assemble. Never before had a movement of such a magnitude been witnessed in the lands of the West. Many gathered in fields outside towns across France, ‘stretching their palms to God, and shouting with one voice, “Peace! Peace! Peace!”, as a sign of the perpetual covenant which they had vowed between themselves and God’.³⁰ Others, taking advantage of the land-route that the conversion of the Hungarians had opened up, followed the road to Constantinople, and thence to Jerusalem. The largest number of all set out in 1033, ‘an innumerable multitude of people from the whole world, greater than any man before could have hoped to see’.³¹ Their journey’s end: the site of Christ’s execution, and the tomb that had witnessed his resurrection.

What were they hoping for? If they declared it, they did so under their breath. Christians were not oblivious to Augustine’s prohibition. They knew the orthodoxy: that the thousand-year reign of the saints mentioned in Revelation was not to be taken literally. In the event, the millennium of Christ’s death came and went, and he did not descend from the heavens. His kingdom was not established on earth. The fallen world continued much as before. Nevertheless, the longing for reform, for renewal, for redemption did not fade. On one level, this was nothing new. Christ, after all, had called on his followers to be born again. The longing to see the entire Christian people purged of their sins had deep roots. It was what, some two and a half centuries previously, had inspired Charlemagne in his great project of correctio. Yet though his heirs still claimed the right to serve as the shepherds of their people, to rule – as Charlemagne had done – as priest as well as king, the ambition to set the Christian world on new foundations was no longer the preserve of courts. It had become a fever that filled meadows with swaying, moaning crowds, and inspired armies of pilgrims to tramp dusty roads. To cross Hungary in the reign of King Stephen was to know just how remarkably the world might change. It had become a place of miracles. In 1028, a monk from Bavaria named Arnold travelled there, and was startled to see a dragon swooping over the Hungarian plains, ‘its plumed head the height of a mountain, its body covered with scales like shields of iron’.³² What marvel was this, though, compared to the true wonder: a land that was once the home of blood-drinking demons brought to Christ, its king serving as the guardian to thousands of pilgrims bound for Jerusalem, its towns filled with cathedrals and churches sounding to the praises of God? Arnold could recognise the shock of the new when he saw it. Far from unsettling him, the prospect of even further change filled him with a giddy excitement. In a world animated as never before by the fire-rush of the Holy Spirit, why should anything stand still? ‘Such is the dispensation of the Almighty – that many things which once existed be cast aside by those who come in their wake.’

Arnold was right to foretell upheaval. Much that had been taken for granted was on the verge of titanic disruption. Revolution of a new and irreversible order was brewing in the Latin West.