Millennium by Holland, Tom (diy ebook reader .TXT) 📗

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.

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’. 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