The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade (71 page)

Svyatoslav now turned against his employer; he sent a message to Nikephoros Phocas, “announcing his intention to march against them and capture their city.” He was a talented fighter, but a poor ally.
¹⁷

Before Nikephoros Phocas could deal with the threat, he was murdered.

He had the soldier’s habit of sleeping on the floor instead of his bed when he was in Constantinople (although he tempered this asceticism by spreading a leopard skin and a scarlet felt cloth on the hard stone). On the evening of December 10, he was sleeping on his leopard skin when his wife Theophano and his nephew John Tzimiskes broke into the room, accompanied by handpicked members of the royal guard. Leo the Deacon writes,

Nikephoros Phocas had grown unpopular with his people, since his expensive campaigning had forced them into higher and higher tax payments. Within seven days, John was able to convince the entire city and the patriarch to crown him as emperor in his uncle’s place. “At times of great changes in government, usually a lot of unrest and tumult flares up,” Leo the Deacon marvels, “but good order and deep quiet prevailed over the people, and only the emperor Nikephoros and one of his bodyguards were killed, no one else receiving so much as a slap in the face.”
¹⁹

The only other casualty of the coup was Theophano, who had counted on remaining empress. John immediately exiled her to an island in the Sea of Marmara (although he allowed the two boys to remain at court) and instead married one of Constantine Porphyrogenitus’s daughters. This allowed him to claim, with some truth, that he (unlike his uncle) was a member of the rightful imperial dynasty.

Meanwhile Svyatoslav of the Rus had threatened Boris II of Bulgaria into an alliance with him, and their combined armies had crossed the Danube and were approaching Constantinople. John Tzimiskes organized a defensive force and marched towards them. The two armies met at Arcadiopolis, sixty miles west of the Byzantine capital, and the Rus were pushed backwards. The Bulgarians, who had not been completely committed to the operation anyway, retreated home. John followed them. He captured Boris II, along with his brother and heir Romanus, and sent the two men back to Constantinople as prisoners. And then he annexed Bulgaria.

Svyatoslav fared even worse. On his way back to Kiev, he was ambushed and assassinated by the nomadic Turkish tribe of the Pechenegs, who had been his enemies for his entire twenty-eight-year rule. The Pecheneg chief made a gold-overlaid cup out of his skull and passed it around for all of his warriors to drink from.
²⁰

With Svyatoslav dead, his sons fought over the throne of the Rus. The youngest, Vladimir, eventually triumphed, and in 980 he became king of the Rus. Eight years later, after John Tzimiskes died from dysentery and Theophano’s sons Basil II and Constantine VIII had been crowned co-rulers in Constantinople, Vladimir negotiated a treaty with the two young emperors. The Rus would remain at peace with Constantinople and would supply soldiers for the Byzantine army when needed; in return, he would marry the emperors’ sister Anna and convert to Christianity.

Anna was not overly pleased with this arrangement: Vladimir was rumored to have over eight hundred wives and concubines scattered around in various Rus villages, so that he would always have at least one on hand no matter where he went. But Basil II, as senior emperor, convinced her that she would be doing God’s work, since Vladimir would only agree to be baptized if the marriage went through.
²¹

Anna went to Kherson to meet her new husband, taking her own priests with her, and Vladimir submitted to baptism: “Now you will have her as your wife, inherit the kingdom of God, and be our companion in the faith,” Basil II wrote to his new brother-in-law.
²²

Vladimir was more interested in the kingdoms of the earth, though, and he saw a monotheistic religion with a strong internal network of priests and scholars as an important part of his country’s stability. (He had investigated Islam, the
Russian Primary Chronicle
reports, and rejected it when he learned that he would have to swear off alcohol; he also hadn’t been too pleased with the Jewish requirement of circumcision.) As soon as he arrived back home, he ordered all his people to follow him into the new faith:

The conversion was a state decision, not an act of faith, and thus too important to leave to individual conviction.
²³

Vladimir ordered churches built, created a parish system with priests in charge of different districts throughout the country, and instituted a system of Christian education: “He took the children of the best families,” the
Primary Chronicle
says, “and sent them for instruction in book-learning. The mothers of these children wept bitterly over them, for they were not yet strong in faith, but mourned as for the dead.”
²⁴

The old ways were past. Vladimir had wiped out the past and transformed the warrior alliance of the Rus into a state. He had created a new Christian Russia, one that could stand as full ally to Byzantium and take its place as equal to the kingdoms of the west.

I
N
950,
AN OLD ENEMY RETURNED
. The Magyars had left the German kingdom alone for over two decades, but now Magyar raids on the south of Germany began again. In 955, a sizable band of Magyars under the command of two warlords named Lél and Bulcsu set up camp on the Lechfeld flood plain, just across the river from the city of Augsburg. The
Gesta Hungarorum
, the national history written three hundred years later by the Hungarian cleric Simon of Kéza, tells us that they “mounted attacks upon the city day and night,” raiding the lands around the walls with their light quick-moving cavalry. Desperate, the people of Augsburg “sent messengers to the emperor urging him to come to the aid of the city.”
¹

Otto I had already taken note of the increasing Magyar threat. He assembled a heavily armed German cavalry force and marched as swiftly as he could from his court at Ulm to Augsburg. “There he fell on them at the third hour during a rainstorm,” writes Simon of Kéza, “swiftly overwhelming the army which was nearer the city.”

Later stories about the Battle of Lechfeld insisted that only seven Magyar warriors survived; this is unlikely, but the German attack was absolutely devastating, slaughtering an entire skilled class of Magyar warriors and officers. Lél and Bulcsu tried to flee down the Danube in a boat, but German naval forces intercepted the boat, arrested the two men, and brought them before Otto. He sentenced them to be hanged like common felons.
²

This broke the back of the Magyar attack. The Magyar alliance stopped in its tracks. Between 955 and the turn of the century, the Magyars settled ever more firmly into the Carpathian Basin, the flat lands surrounded by the ring of the Carpathian mountain range. Although they couldn’t quite break the habit of raiding their neighbors, they spent more time farming and less time fighting. Christian practices and Christian baptism began to spread into the Magyar community from the outside.

71.1: The Magyars and the West

The Battle of Lechfeld convinced Otto’s subjects—not to mention the historians who chronicled his reign—that he had God on his side. While still on the battlefield, his soldiers hailed him as the God-appointed head of the Christian world. His victory over the heathen Magyars had convinced them that divine favor rested on Otto above all other men; the bloody defeat of the enemy had proved, beyond all doubt, the righteousness of Otto’s rule.
³

Otto was already both king of Germany and king of the Italian lands, the first man to hold that particular combination of titles; four years earlier, after a nasty fight over the rule of northern Italy, the dukes had invited Otto to take the Iron Crown. Now he was also the savior of Germany, conqueror of the Magyars. In 962, Pope John XII yielded to the inevitable and crowned him emperor of the Romans, after the title had lain vacant for nearly forty years.

The title of emperor did not come free. In exchange, the pope demanded that Otto take an oath: “I will never make laws or rules in regard to the things which are under your jurisdiction, or the jurisdiction of the Romans without your consent,” the oath ran, “and I will restore to you all of the lands of St. Peter that shall come into my hands.” Those lands were enumerated with careful accuracy: Rome and the land around, Ravenna and its port, the island of Corsica, and dozens of other towns, fortresses, and cities, each one listed by name. The pope not only governed these lands but also collected taxes from them: “We confirm your possession of all these things,” the oath concluded, “they shall remain in your right and ownership and control, and no one of our successors shall on any pretext take from you any part of the aforesaid provinces, cities, towns, fortresses, villages, dependencies, territories, patrimonies, or taxes, or lessen your authority over them.” John XII did not intend to give Otto the sacred
imperium
unless he could be quite sure that it would not be wielded against him.
⁴

Otto took the oath, in a way: he sent an ambassador to take it on his behalf, which was legally binding but displayed a certain lack of enthusiasm. The circumlocution worried John XII. Despite having just crowned the new emperor, he had serious doubts about Otto’s growing power. He decided to take prudent pre-emptive action; he sent ambassadors to the Magyars, encouraging them to distract Otto from empire-building by attacking the Germans once more.

Word of this behind-the-scenes negotiation reached Otto. Furious, he marched south towards Rome in 963. When John XII heard that the angry emperor was approaching, he packed up and fled the city—taking much of the treasury with him.
⁵

This was not calculated to make Otto any happier, and when the emperor arrived in the city, he announced that John had been deposed. On his own authority, he appointed a new pope: Leo VIII.

In the past, popes had been given their titles by an undefined and shifting process: the senior priests of Rome would gather together and argue until they came to some agreement about who should be the next leader of the church, and as long as the people of Rome didn’t riot, the candidate was publicly proclaimed as the next pope. Although previous “emperors of the Romans” had also jumped into the fray, offering imperial approval if disagreement over the election threatened to cause trouble, the selection of St. Peter’s successors had generally rested firmly within the Christian church itself.

But Otto had now taken this task on his royal and secular shoulders.

For him, this was not such a huge departure from ordinary practice. In the kingdoms of Germany and Western Francia, it wasn’t unusual for a lay man to appoint a priest, a practice called “lay investiture.” Over the previous centuries, landowners had been accustomed to build private churches on their own estates; it was the Christian version of the old Roman “home altar,” a reasonable-enough action for a Christian Goth or Frank to take, in a world where they were too distant from great cities to make regular visits to the bigger churches or cathedrals built there.

These churches were used by villagers and vassals nearby, but the building belonged to the landowner—and he generally chose, and installed, his own priest to run the services that happened inside. It wasn’t uncommon for a father to install a younger son as priest, and for the priesthood itself to become hereditary, passed down for several generations.
⁶

In the centuries before Otto, bishops and landowners tussled over the control of these churches. By and large, though, they remained under the control of the families who had built them, which meant that the right to appoint a priest could be sold, or given as a gift in exchange for goodwill. A clergyman with money might pay a landowner to make him a priest—a practice that church authorities frowned on (it became known as
simony
, after a New Testament magician named Simon who tried to buy the divine gift of healing from the disciples of Jesus).
⁷
Kings built not only churches but also monasteries on their own royal holdings and, like noble landowners, appointed priests and abbots to run them—a practice that tended to bleed over into other parts of the country, not just the land specifically held by the king’s family. The king, after all, could claim (in a way) to own all of his country, not just his royal estate.
*

Otto had done his share of building monasteries, appointing abbots, and choosing priests; the difference was that he had done it mostly in Germany, where he was king (although even there, he and Pope John XII had argued about who had the right to appoint a bishop in several of the German cities). Although Otto was king of Italy as well, Rome was a Papal State and not under his jurisdiction, which meant he had no right to appoint a pope.
⁸

He dealt with the problem by ordering his newly chosen pope, Leo VIII, to make a new proclamation: “We, Leo, bishop, servant of the servants of God,” Leo decreed, obediently, “with all the clergy and people of Rome, by our apostolic authority bestow upon lord Otto I, king of the Germans, and upon his successors in the kingdom of Italy forever, the right of choosing the successor of the pope, and of ordaining the pope and the archbishops and bishops…. They shall receive their investiture and consecration from him.” The pope, chosen by the emperor, had completed the circle of power: he had given the emperor the right to choose all future popes.
⁹

Otto I had now claimed for himself the sole, the only, the
inalienable
right of the emperor to choose the leader of the Christian church. And in doing so, he had become more than emperor of the Romans. He had extended his scepter into the realm of the ineffable. He was no longer content simply to surround the church with his soldiers and shield it from harm; he had opened the doors, walked up the aisle, and taken his place in front of the altar.

He had become the first
holy
emperor.

Folding sacred duties into the secular job was a two-steps-forward, one-step-back sort of process. Otto remained in the city for three months; as soon as he left, John XII returned and (with the support of most of Rome) announced that Leo was not the pope and that the decree had been invalid. Otto, who hadn’t gotten too far away, reversed his direction and headed back towards Rome, and once again John fled from the city.

This time he never returned. He had a stroke in the village where he had taken refuge (he was rumored to have been in bed with a married woman at the time) and died, not yet thirty years old. Otto’s man, Leo, was reinstalled with the help of the German army, and when Leo died, Otto exercised his authority as pope-maker once more and appointed another hand-chosen pope, John XIII.
¹⁰

Once again, power pulsed neatly around the closed circle. John XIII, appointed by Otto, agreed to crown Otto’s son and heir Otto II as co-emperor, guaranteeing a smooth transition of the emperorship. The right to claim the
imperium
had never been hereditary before. But Otto was establishing a dynastic claim not just over Germany but over the less tangible realm of the “Holy” Roman Empire as well. Both would now be ruled by the Ottonian or Saxon dynasty, which was German and imperial in its claims.

The strength of both claims was put to the test over the next decades. When Otto I died in 973, his titles passed at once to his eighteen-year-old son. Otto II was now king of Germany without election and emperor of the Romans without coronation.
¹¹

Not all of the German nobles were content to see their ancient power of election decaying before their eyes. At once Otto II faced numerous rebellions, particularly in the southern duchies of Germany. The most troublesome of the rebels was his own cousin Henry, duke of Bavaria, four years his senior. Henry’s abrasively aggressive personality had earned him the nickname “Henry the Quarrelsome,” and he saw no reason why he should not lobby to be elected king in Otto II’s place.

Otto II spent the first seven years of his reign fighting against these revolts. By 980, he had confirmed (by force) his right to be king of Germany, driving Henry the Quarrelsome into exile and seizing part of Bavaria as a royal possession. He then decided to firm up his claim of emperor of the Romans in the same way. He planned a military campaign into Italy that would drive all remaining Byzantine control off the peninsula, putting it firmly and singly under the Ottonian crown. He would fight for Italy, he declared, under the banner of the Roman emperor. No longer content to be “Emperor of the Romans” as his predecessors had been—an emperor whose subjects were heirs of the remnants of old Roman civilization—he aspired to be
Roman emperor
: fully imperial, fully Christian, and fully in control of the old Roman lands.

Otto II, says the contemporary chronicler Thietmar of Merseburg, was “noted for his outstanding physical strength and, as such…tended towards recklessness.” His energy and ambition plunged him into enormous trouble; the attempted conquest was a horrendous failure. Otto II fought in Italy for three years, repeatedly losing his battles with the Byzantine garrisons still on the peninsula. Southern Italy slipped from his hands, as the duchies detached themselves from any allegiance to the northern Italian kingdom. In 983, still claiming to be Roman emperor, still fighting, he grew ill. He died in the city of Rome, not yet thirty years old.
¹²

He had already declared his three-year-old son Otto III to be co-emperor. But Otto II himself had barely managed to hold onto the titles transferred to him by
his
father, and the baby Otto was in no position to insist on his hereditary rights. The pope declined to recognize him as Roman emperor. And the rebel nobleman Henry the Quarrelsome, skulking around on the northern coast of Germany, laid a plan to get the throne of Germany away from the baby.