Three Men on a Mission: Three Architects of Early Christendom

Staying true to its name, the fourth instalment of The Wanderer Chronicles invites the reader to journey far and wide, in company with Viking warrior-in-exile Erlan Aurvandil and his partner in adventure, Queen Lilla Sviggarsdottír. A Savage Moon follows the pair’s struggle to return to the north after surviving what history has dubbed the Second Arab Siege of Constantinople (AD 717-718). Once there, they plan to recover Lilla’s kingdom of Sveäland (these days part of Sweden) from the man who violently took it from Lilla in the third book in the series. But as any reader of this novel will discover, daring plans all too easily go awry. Their misadventures will take them from the swelter of Byzantium through the mist-wreathed marshes of the Rheinland and on into the shadowy forests of the Merovingian kingdom of Austrasia (modern day eastern France). To find out why, you’ll have to read the book.

So far, so fictional.

However, in the pursuit of their mission, they cross paths with three outstanding figures of early medieval history. Three men whose influence arguably helped forge the development of Europe during this formative period of the 8th century. Three men on a mission, you might say. Very different men on very different missions. But each sowed seeds that would galvanise many of the disparate kingdoms of early medieval Europe into that singular civilisation which we now call Christendom.

The first is Emperor Leo III, known as “the Isaurian”, whose reign from AD 717 to 741 was nothing if not dramatic. He came in with a thunderclap – usurping the imperial throne from Theodosius III just in time to lead the defence of Constantinople against the largest combined land and sea siege force yet assembled: a Muslim army of perhaps 150,000 and a fleet of nearly 2,000 ships, led by the Syrian Prince Maslama ibn Abd Al-Malik, determined to decapitate the ailing Late Roman Empire and open the road into Europe for Islam and the Prophet’s ascendant armies. A year later, after suffering the harshest winter in living memory, famine and disease, as well as a bloody defeat in the field at the hands of Leo’s Bulgar allies, a paltry remnant of Maslama’s fleet and army withdrew. The chroniclers record that only five ships made it back home to Syria.

One might imagine that such an emphatic victory over the Byzantines’ deadliest enemy would secure Leo the Isaurian’s standing as emperor and his undisputed authority over what remained of the late Roman Empire for a long time to come. Instead, the crisis of the siege had barely passed before the kind of scheming for which the word “Byzantine” has become synonymous began. In AD 718 he had to put down an insurrection in Sicily. And then in AD 719, his erstwhile ally Khan Tervel of the Bulgars conspired with another previously deposed Emperor Anastasios II in an attempt to restore the latter to the throne. The plot was uncovered. Anastasios was captured and then executed along with his co-conspirators. One can only speculate what made Khan Tervel switch allegiance from Leo to his rival. Perhaps personal loyalty, since it was with Anastasios that Khan Tervel had agreed the Bulgar–Byzantine Treaty of AD 716. Whatever the reason, after that Leo could be forgiven for being a little paranoid. But above all, he was determined to preserve the Empire at any cost. One of the measures he took to do this would have profound repercussions on the rest of Europe.

It is always hard to separate the spiritual from the political during this period of Byzantine history. Leo would later become infamous for stoking religious conflict when he ordered the destruction of religious images across the Empire with his iconoclastic decree of AD 726. This was the bolt of lightning that would split the Empire down the middle. His position on the question of icons – whether they were a form of idolatry (he thought they were) or mere veneration of the holy (as the Pope in Rome and many others believed) – would ignite a bitter internal conflict that would take eighty years to settle. By then, the bonds that had hitherto tethered Rome and the Italian provinces to Constantinople had long been severed, never to be restored. Instead, in the shadow of an expansionist Lombard kingdom to its north, the Papal Territories of Rome turned their gaze northward to the Franks for their protection.

Of course, Leo had his reasons. One of his chroniclers, Theophanes the Confessor, called him the “Saracen-minded”. He came from a region in the south of modern-day Turkey and was probably instinctively opposed to icons which were such provocation to the Muslim aggressors to the south. It’s my view that Leo adopted his iconoclastic position out of expedience, again motivated by his determination to preserve the Empire in the face of that enduring threat, whatever the cost. Whatever the truth of it, the result was a seismic shift in power dynamics within the Empire that would draw Rome (and importantly its church) from looking east to now looking west.

*

The next of my three figures of history featured in A Savage Moon is known to posterity as Saint Boniface, an Anglo-Saxon by birth whose original name was Winfrid. His life embodies quite nicely the Church of Rome’s shift in focus to the west, especially under the papacy of Pope Gregory II.

Charles Martel at Versailles

Of course, the Roman Church had already had a profound effect on the northwest of Europe, in particular with its late 6th century “Gregorian” mission to Kent and the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the British Isles. The late 7th and early 8th centuries saw the reversal of this, with Anglo-Saxon missionaries now setting out from their island shores to spread the gospel to the European mainland.

Winfrid of Nursling was one such missionary. Born in AD 675 in the south of what is now Devon, probably near Exeter, he spent much of his early life as a Benedictine monk, priest and scholar, only venturing on mission to Frisia at the age of forty-one. So doing, he had passed up the chance to take over leadership of the monastery at Nursling following the death of his mentor. Truly he abandoned his books to become a man of action instead.

His adventures were many. A number of hagiographic accounts of his life survive. Personally, I owe him a special debt, since without him The Wanderer Chronicles would not exist. In 2009, I attended a lecture in Oxford in which I heard for the first time the story of Winfrid chopping down the sacred oak of Donar (god of thunder) at a place called Fritzlar in the German state of Hesse. Immediately an image was conjured in my head of a great confrontation between the old paganism of Europe and the new and fiery Christian faith, set in a dark Germanic forest. At the time, I’d never written a word of fiction in my life. How true this image really was, I don’t know, but it stayed in my head, almost blindingly vivid, and proved to be the catalyst that was to launch my writing career.

So much for my own debt to the man.

In AD 718, Winfrid travelled to Rome seeking an audience with the Pope. Impressed, Gregory gave him the new name of “Boniface”, together with a grand commission to carry the gospel to the Germanic peoples. At this, Winfrid proved remarkably successful, and is now known as ‘Apostle to the Germans’. Towards the end of his life, having established innumerable churches in the Germanic lands, he returned on mission to Frisia, a place for which he’d always held special affection. There his journeying ended; he was martyred in AD 756.

But his evangelistic zeal aside, it was Winfrid’s diplomatic role as friend and interlocutor between Pope Gregory II and the third of my trio, Charles Martel, the most powerful Frank of the age, that would give him claim to being one of the architects of early Christendom. The complex symbiosis between the Church of Rome on the one hand, and the emerging polities of kingdom and empire on the other, which would define the first centuries of the Early Middle Ages, began with the dialogue between these men. At least, they would certainly steer the broad shape of it: the Church of Rome, the ascendant religious power of the age; and the Frankish kingdom and then Empire (in particular under the Carolingian dynasty) as protector and benefactor of that church. Two pillars on which Christendom would stand for centuries.

*

The last of the trio – the character on whom “Karil, son of Pepin” in A Savage Moon is based – is this same Frankish nobleman who would become known to history as Charles Martel. He is perhaps best remembered as the victor of the Battle of Tours in AD 732, the high watermark of Islamic encroachment into early medieval Europe from the Moors’ power base of El Andalus (the Iberian Peninsula). Historians endlessly dispute the true significance of this battle, whether it turned back a concerted invasion or merely an opportunistic raid. But whatever present-day historians feel able to conclude, certainly the Carolingian propagandists made much of it in the decades and centuries that followed, lauding Martel as the ‘Saviour of Europe’. Such controversy aside, he was undoubtedly a figure of tremendous influence in shaping early medieval Europe, not least for the diplomatic reasons already discussed above, but also, perhaps supremely, because he would be grandsire to the Emperor Charlemagne, that historical colossus of early Christendom.

Influential though he was, Martel’s career was nearly ended having barely begun. When his father Pepin of Herstal, Mayor of the Palace and the strong man of the Merovingian court, died, he left a power vacuum that stirred up a real hornet’s nest of competing interests. King Chilperic’s campaign to destroy the young Austrasian warlord, Martel, unfolded more or less as described in A Savage Moon. However, having suffered an initial rout at the hands of Chilperic’s ally, King Rathbod of Frisia, from which he was lucky to escape with his life, Charles bounced back pretty hard. He never suffered another military defeat. Indeed, he was reckoned the military genius of his age. But he would never seize the crown for himself. Instead, he laid the foundations for his son Pepin to take that final step. In AD 751 Pepin ousted the last Merovingian king from the Frankish throne, and so inaugurated the new Carolingian Age. Thus, the name “Karl” or “Charles” became one worthy of kings and emperors. Since then, France had ten of them; England has now had three.

So, it is perhaps a timely moment to consider the man, since once again, we are all Carolingians now.

Theodore Brun is the author of The Wanderer Chronicles. The latest is A Savage Moon.