As for the Huns, they were worse. They now had a new king: Attila. In 444 he was at the height of his power. Can you remember who was in power 444 years before Christ’s birth? Pericles, in Athens. Those were the best of times. But Attila was in every way his opposite. People said that wherever he trod, the grass ceased to grow. His hordes burnt and destroyed everything in their path. And yet in spite of all the gold and silver and treasures the Huns looted, and in spite of all the magnificent finery worn by their leaders, Attila himself remained a plain man. He ate off wooden plates and he lived in a simple tent. Gold and silver meant nothing to him. Power was what mattered. It is said that he never laughed. He was a fearsome sovereign who had conquered half the world, and those he didn’t kill had to fight for him. His army was immense. Many of his soldiers were Germans – largely East Goths, or Ostrogoths (for by this time the Visigoths had settled in Spain). From his camp in Hungary he sent an envoy to the emperor of the Roman Empire of the West with the following message: ‘My Lord, and your Lord, Attila, bids me tell you that you will give him half of your empire and your daughter to be his wife.’ When the emperor refused, Attila set out to punish him with his mighty army, and take by force what had been denied him. The two sides met in a tremendous battle on the Catalaunian plains in Gaul, in 451. All the armies of the Roman empire, assisted by Germanic troops, joined forces to repel the barbarian horde. The outcome being undecided, Attila turned towards Rome. Appalled and panic-stricken, the Romans could only look on as the Huns approached. Nearer and nearer they came, and no army there to save them.
It was at this point that one man dared defy Attila and his host: this was Pope Leo, known as Leo the Great. With priests and holy banners he went out to meet him. Everybody waited for the Huns to strike them down. But Attila was persuaded to turn back. He left Italy, and this time Rome was saved. Only two years later, in 453, Attila married a German princess and died on the same night.
Had the Pope not saved the Roman Empire of the West on that occasion it would have ceased to exist. For by this time the emperors had lost all authority, and such power as remained was in the hands of the soldiers, most of whom were Germans. The day came when the soldiers found that they could do without an emperor, so they decided to depose him. The last Roman emperor had a rather remarkable name: Romulus Augustulus. It is a curious coincidence that Rome’s founder and first king was called Romulus and the first Roman emperor was the Emperor Augustus. Romulus Augustulus, the last one, was deposed in 476.
In his place, a German general called Odoacer proclaimed himself king of the Germans in Italy. This marked the end of the Roman Empire of the West and its Latin culture, together with the long period that goes all the way back to prehistoric times, which we call ‘antiquity’.
So the date 476 marks the birth of a new era, the Middle Ages, given its name for no other reason than that it falls between antiquity and modern times. But at the time no one noticed that a new era had begun. Everything was just as confusing as before. The Ostrogoths, who had previously fought alongside the army of the Huns, had settled in the Roman Empire of the East. The Roman Emperor of the East, wishing to be rid of them, suggested that they might do better if they went to the Empire of the West and conquered Italy. So in 493, led by their great king, Theodoric, the Ostrogoths went to Italy. There, the battle-hardened soldiers made short work of a wretched, war-torn land. Theodoric captured Odoacer, but he promised to spare his life. Instead, he invited him to a banquet and stabbed him to death.
It has always puzzled me that Theodoric could have done something so monstrous, because in other ways he was a truly great ruler, a man of real merit and distinction. He made sure that the Goths lived in peace with the Italians and gave his warriors no more than one piece of land each to farm. He chose Ravenna, a harbour town in northern Italy, to be his capital and built beautiful churches decorated with wonderful brightly coloured mosaics.
This was all quite unexpected. That the Ostrogoths might succeed in building themselves a mighty and prosperous kingdom in Italy, one that would one day pose a threat to the imperial rule in Constantinople, is something that would never have occurred to the Emperor of the East, who must have regretted his advice.
From 527 onwards Constantinople was ruled by a mighty, luxury-loving and ambitious sovereign, whose name was Justinian. The emperor Justinian was possessed of one great ambition. This was to recover the whole of the old Roman empire and unite it under his rule. His court had all the splendour of the East. His wife, Theodora, was a former circus dancer and they both wore heavy robes of jewel-encrusted silk and great ropes of gold and pearls round their necks, which must have made a tremendous swishing and jangling when they moved.
In Constantinople Justinian built a gigantic church with a huge dome on top called the Hagia Sophia, and did his utmost to revive the lost grandeur of ancient Rome. He began by making a collection of all the laws of ancient Rome, together with the many commentaries made on them by great scholars and legislators. This great book of Roman law is known as the Pandects of Justinian. Even today, anyone who plans to become a lawyer or a judge should read it, as it forms the basis of many of our laws.
After Theodoric’s death, Justinian tried to drive the Goths out of Italy and conquer the country, but the Goths put up a heroic defence and held out for decades. Given that they were in a foreign land whose inhabitants were also hostile to them, this was no easy task. Moreover, although they were also Christians, their beliefs were unlike those of either of their opponents – for instance, they did not believe in the Trinity (the existence of one God in three persons: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit). So they were attacked and persecuted as unbelievers as well. In the end most of the Goths were killed in these battles. After the last battle, those who were left – an army of less than a thousand men – were allowed to disband without reprisals, and vanished away towards the north. It was the end of that great tribe, the Ostrogoths. Now Justinian ruled over Ravenna as well. He built wonderful churches there which he had decorated with splendid portraits of his wife and himself.
But the rulers of the Empire of the East didn’t stay long in Italy. In 586, new Germanic peoples called the Lombards came down from the north. The land was conquered yet again and today part of Italy is still called Lombardy after them. That was the last rumble of the storm. Then, slowly the clouds parted to reveal the starry night of the Middle Ages.
19
THE STARRY NIGHT BEGINS
You will probably agree that the peoples’ migrations were a sort of thunderstorm. But you may be surprised to hear that the Middle Ages were like a starry night. Let me explain. Have you ever heard people talking about the Dark Ages? This is the name given to the period which followed the collapse of the Roman empire when very few people could read or write and hardly anyone knew what was going on in the world. And because of this, they loved telling each other all sorts of weird and wonderful tales and were generally very superstitious. ‘Dark’, too, because houses in those days were small and dark, and because the streets and highways that the Romans had built had all fallen into decay and were overgrown and their camps and cities had become grass-covered ruins. The good Roman laws were forgotten and the beautiful Greek statues had been smashed to pieces. All this is true. And it isn’t really surprising, given all the dreadful upheavals and war-torn years of the Migrations.
But there was more to it than that. It wasn’t all dark. It was more like a starry night. For above all the dread and uncertainty in which ignorant people lived like children in the dark – frightened of witches and wizards, of the Devil and evil spirits – above it all was the bright starlit sky of the new faith, showing them the way. And just as you don’t get lost so easily in the woods if you can see stars like the Great Bear or the Pole Star, people no longer lost their way completely, no matter how much they stumbled in the dark. For they were sure of one thing: God had given souls to all men, and they were all equal in his eyes, beggars and kings alike. This meant there must be n
o more slaves – that human beings must no longer be treated as if they were things. That the one, invisible, God the Creator of the world, who through his mercy saves mankind, asks us to be good. Not that in those days there were only good people. There were just as many cruel, savage, brutal and pitiless warriors in Italy as there were in the lands where the Germans lived, who behaved in a reckless, ruthless and bloodthirsty manner. But now when they did so it was with a worse conscience than in Roman times. They knew they were wicked. And they feared the wrath of God.
Many people wished to live in strict accordance with God’s will. They fled the bustling cities and the crowds where the temptation to do wrong is always present and, like the hermits of India, withdrew into the desert for prayer and penitence. These were the earliest Christian monks. They were first seen in the East, in Egypt and in Palestine. To many of them, what was most important was to do penance. They had learnt something about it from those Indian priests who, as you may remember, had special ways of tormenting themselves. Now some of these monks went and sat on the top of tall pillars in the centre of towns, where, barely moving, they spent their lives meditating on the sinfulness of mankind. The little food they needed was pulled up in a basket. There they sat, above all the bustle, and hoped it would bring them nearer to God. People called them Stylites, meaning pillar saints (from stylos, the Greek word for pillar).
But in the West, in Italy, there was a holy man who, like the Buddha, could find no inner calm in the solitary life of a penitent. He was a monk named Benedict, meaning the Blessed One. He was convinced that penitence wasn’t all that Christ wanted. One must not only become good, one must do good. And if you want to do good, it’s no use sitting on a pillar. You must work. And so his motto was: Pray and work. With a few like-minded monks he formed a community to put his rule into practice. This sort of monastic community is known as an Order, and his is called after him, the Order of the Benedictines. Monks like these lived in monasteries. Anyone wishing to enter a monastery and become a member of that Order for the rest of his life had to make three vows: to possess nothing; to remain unmarried; and to obey the head of the monastery, the abbot, in all things.
Once consecrated as a monk you didn’t just pray – though of course prayer was taken very seriously and Mass was celebrated several times a day – you were also expected to do good. But for this you needed some skill or knowledge. And this is how the Benedictine monks became the only people at that time to concern themselves with the thought and discoveries of antiquity. They gathered together all the ancient scrolls and manuscripts they could find so they could study them. And they made copies for others to read. Year in, year out, they filled the pages of thick parchment volumes with their fine, flowing script, copying not only bibles and the lives of saints but ancient Greek and Latin poems as well. We would know very few of these if it hadn’t been for the efforts of those monks. Not only that, but they laboriously copied other ancient works on the natural sciences and agriculture, over and over again, taking infinite care not to make mistakes. For, apart from the Bible, what mattered most to them was to be able to cultivate the land properly so that they could grow cereals and bread, not only for themselves but for the poor. In those lawless times wayside inns had all but disappeared, and anyone bold enough to travel had to look for shelter overnight in a monastery. There they were well received. Silence reigned, together with hard work and contemplation. The monks also took it upon themselves to educate the children who lived near their monasteries. They taught them reading and writing, to speak Latin and how to understand the Bible. Those few scattered monasteries were the only places in those days where learning and the handing down of knowledge went on and all memory of Greek and Roman thought was not extinguished.
But it wasn’t only in Italy that there were monasteries like these. Monks wanted to build them in wild and out-of-the-way places where they could preach the Gospel, educate people and clear the useless forest for cultivation. Many of the earliest monasteries were built in Ireland and in England which, being islands, had suffered less from the storm of the Migrations. Germanic tribes had settled there too, among whom were the Angles and the Saxons, and Christianity had taken root there very early.
Monks then began to make their way from the British Isles to the kingdoms of the Gauls and the Germans, preaching and teaching as they went. There were still many Germans to convert, though their most powerful leader was a Christian, if only in name. He was called Clovis, and was a member of the Merovingian family. He had become king of the Franks at the age of fifteen, and by a combination of courage, intrigue and murder had brought half of Germania and much of what we now call France – which takes its name from his tribe – together under his rule.
Clovis had himself and his tribe baptised in 496, probably in the belief that the Christian god was a powerful demon who would help him to victory. For he was not devout. There was still much work for the monks to do in Germania. And indeed, they did a great deal. They founded monasteries and taught the Franks and the Alemanni how to grow fruit and vines, proving to the barbarian warriors that there was more to life than brute force and deeds of valour. They frequently acted as advisers to the Christian kings of the Franks at the Merovingian court. And because they were the best at reading and writing they wrote down the laws and did all the king’s written work for him. Now the work of writing was also that of ruling: they composed letters to other kings and kept in touch with the pope in Rome. Which meant, in fact, that beneath their plain hooded cloaks those monks were the real masters of the still very disorderly kingdom of the Franks.
Other monks from Britain braved the wild stretches of land and dense forests of northern Germania, and what we know as the Netherlands today. These were very dangerous places to preach the Gospel. The peasants and warriors who lived there weren’t even Christian in name and held fast to the beliefs of their ancestors. They prayed to Odin, the god of Battle, whom they worshipped not in temples but in the open air, often beneath ancient trees which they held sacred. One day an English monk and priest called Boniface came and preached under one of these trees. To prove to the northern Germans that Odin was only a fairy-tale figure, he picked up an axe to chop down the sacred tree. Everyone expected him to be struck down on the spot by a bolt of lightning from the heavens. But the tree fell and nothing happened. Lots of people then came to him to be baptised for they no longer believed in the power of Odin or in other gods, but other people were angry and in 754 they killed him.
Nevertheless paganism in Germany was at an end. Before long almost everyone was going to the simple wooden churches which the monks built next to their monasteries, and after the service they would ask the monks’ advice on such things as how to cure a sick cow, or how to protect their apple trees against an infestation of caterpillars. The monks were also visited by the mighty, and of these it was often the most brutal and savage who readily gave them large tracts of land, for when they did so they hoped that God would pardon their sins. In this way the monasteries became rich and powerful, but the monks themselves, in their simple, narrow cells, remained poor, praying and working, just as St Benedict had told them.
20
THERE IS NO GOD BUT ALLAH, AND MUHAMMAD IS HIS PROPHET
Can you picture the desert? The real, hot, sandy desert, crossed by long caravans of camels laden with cargoes of rare goods? Sand everywhere. Just occasionally you see one or two palm trees on the skyline. When you get there you find an oasis consisting of a spring with a trickle of greenish water. Then the caravan moves on. Eventually you come to a bigger oasis where there is a whole town of white, cube-shaped houses, inhabited by white-clothed, brown-skinned men with black hair and piercing dark eyes.
You can tell that these men are warriors. On their wonderfully swift horses they gallop across the desert, robbing caravans and fighting each other, oasis against oasis, town against town, tribe against tribe. Arabia probably still looks much as it did thousands of years ago. And yet it was in this strange de
sert land, with its few, warlike inhabitants, that perhaps the most extraordinary of all the events I have to tell took place.
It happened like this. At the time when the monks were teaching simple peasants and the Merovingian kings were ruling over the Franks – that is to say, around the year 600 – nobody talked about Arabs. They were busy galloping around in the desert, living in tents and fighting each other. They had a simple faith to which they gave little thought. Like the ancient Babylonians, they worshipped the stars, and also a stone which they believed to have fallen from heaven. This stone lay in a shrine called the Shrine of the Kaaba in the oasis town of Mecca, and Arabs often made pilgrimages across the desert to pray there.
Now there was at that time, in Mecca, a man named Muhammad, son of Abdallah. His father was of high birth but not a rich man, a member of a family charged with watching over the Shrine of the Kaaba. He died young, and all he left his son Muhammad were five camels, which didn’t amount to much. When Muhammad was six his mother also died, and he had to leave the desert encampment where he lived with the other children of men of high rank and earn his living tending goats for the well-to-do. Later he met a rich widow, much older than himself, and made great journeys in her service as a camel driver leading trading caravans across the desert. He married his employer and they lived happily together and had six children. Muhammad also adopted his young cousin, whose name was Ali.