Marks of Opulence: The Why, When and Where of Western Art 1000–1914. Colin Platt

       CHAPTER ONE A White Mantle of Churches

      Rodulfus Glaber (c. 980–c. 1046), chronicler of the Millennium and author of The Five Books of the Histories, witnessed two millennial years in his lifetime. The first was the Millennium of the Incarnation of Christ (1000); the second, the Millennium of his Passion (1033). While disposed to tell of miracles and portents, of plagues, of famines and other horrors, Glaber’s message in neither case was of Apocalypse. Instead he chose to write not of the Coming of Antichrist nor of a Day of Wrath, but of a Church resurgent and victorious:

      Just before the third year after the millennium [Glaber writes of 1003], throughout the whole world, but most especially in Italy and Gaul, men began to reconstruct churches … It was as if the whole world were shaking itself free, shrugging off the burden of the past, and cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches.¹

      Cathedrals, monasteries, and even ‘little village chapels’, Glaber continues, ‘were rebuilt better than before by the faithful’. And of this, as an untypically restless monk who never stayed long in one place, Glaber had considerable experience. He was at Saint-Bénigne at Dijon when, in 1016, Abbot William (990–1031) consecrated the new church he had rebuilt ‘to an admirable plan, much wider and longer than before’. And it was to Cluny’s Abbot Odilo (994–1048), whose famous boast it was (echoing Caesar’s) that he ‘had found Cluny wood and was leaving it marble’, that Glaber came to dedicate his Histories.

      In point of fact, Glaber probably owed his life to Abbot Odilo. For it is thought that he was at Cluny during the three famine years when ‘the rain fell so continuously everywhere [that] no season was suitable for the sowing of any crop, and floods prevented the gathering in of the harvest’. ‘Heu! proh dolor!’, Glaber laments, ‘Alas! a thing formerly little heard of happened: ravening hunger drove men to devour human flesh!’² But then, in the next millennial year, the Almighty intervened and the chronicler’s tone again lightens:

      At the millennium of the Lord’s Passion [1033], which followed these years of famine and disaster, by divine mercy and goodness the violent rainstorms ended; the happy face of the sky began to shine and to blow with gentle breezes and by gentle serenity to proclaim the magnanimity of the Creator. The whole surface of the earth was benignly verdant, portending ample produce which altogether banished want.³

      Glaber died in 1046. And long before that time, ‘like a dog returning to its vomit or a pig to wallowing in its mire’ (Glaber again), the rich had reverted to type: ‘they resorted, even more than had formerly been their wont, to robbery to satisfy their lusts’. However, it was in 1046 also that the Emperor Henry III first intervened in Roman politics. And the new reforming papacy of Leo IX (1049–54) and his successors would bring about triumphantly in a very few years almost everything that Glaber had desired. ‘Everything flows and nothing stays’, said Heraclitus of Ephesus, the Greek philosopher. And of the many changes which Glaber witnessed in his own millennia-crossed lifespan, none were more important than those which were the consequence of vigorous economic growth.

      Improving weather and more reliable harvests, technical innovations in agriculture, the absence of plague, the retreat of invading armies and the banning of private war – even the supposed efficiency gains of a new feudal order – have all been given credit for this increase. And certainly the two main exogenous factors in the late-medieval Recession – a deteriorating climate and heavy plague mortalities – were neither of them present at this time. Nevertheless, the scourge of famine would return regularly to Western Europe every three or four years for many centuries yet; while the only agrarian revolution to bring permanent relief to the poor began in the nineteenth century, and not before. ‘Peace! Peace! Peace!’ had cried the bishops after 1033, their croziers raised to heaven; ‘Peace!’ had echoed the crowd with arms extended.⁴ Yet the Truce of God, thus proclaimed so charismatically in the aftermath of famine, was broken almost as soon as it was made.

      That collapse of public order during the millennial decades, causing a widespread flight to lordship in almost every Western society, was instrumental in promoting what some historians have described as a ‘feudal revolution’.⁵ And if almost every element of that revolution has since been challenged, nobody now disputes that the tax-raising royal governments of the ninth (Carolingian) and twelfth (Capetian) centuries sandwiched between them a long and dismal interlude of violentia. At this directionless time, when vendetta ruled, the building of private castles was yet another sympton of mounting lawlessness. Yet Europe’s population and its economy kept on growing. In Glaber’s Burgundy, the Churches of Saint-Philibert at Tournus, Saint-Bénigne and Cluny were the subject of major rebuildings. To the north and west, Saint-Rémi at Reims, Saint-Martin at Tours, Saint-Hilaire at Poitiers, and Bishop Fulbert’s Chartres were all being rebuilt in Glaber’s lifetime. In Germany simultaneously, the cathedrals at Augsburg and Strasbourg, Hildesheim, Goslar and Paderborn, Speyer, Trier and Mainz, were either rebuilt completely or substantially extended, as were many of the larger abbey churches.⁶

      Building on this scale, which may call for special skills, cannot usually be done without money. And it is no surprise, accordingly, that this building boom coincided precisely with what is now widely recognized as ‘the most significant period for the early growth of the use of coin in Western Europe … witnessing the real start of a money economy’.⁷ In the mid-960s, a prodigious new silver source had been found on the Rammelsberg, just above Goslar in the Harz mountains. Some thirty years later, the mines were in full production and would pay, among other things, for Goslar’s new cathedral, built in the 1040s, and for Henry III’s enormous Kaiserhaus in that city. Huge contemporary coin hoards, their principal constituent being Adelaide-Otto silver pfennigs from central Germany, have been found in Sweden. And it was the Rammelsberg mines again that furnished the silver for the locally-minted coinages of Russia and Poland, Bohemia and Hungary, Sweden, Denmark and Norway, which would play a major role in Christianization. Furs from the Baltic, wine from the Rhineland, wool and cloth from England and Flanders, were all to be bought with German ingots. But equally important for European rulers everywhere was their growing understanding of how a coinage worked, its symbolism as meaningful as bullion weight. It was Vladimir the Great, Prince of Kiev (977–1015), who brought Christianity to Russia in the late 980s. And a significant function of his new coinage on the remote Christian rim was to spread the propaganda of Church and State. On one face of Vladimir’s coins is the political legend ‘Vladimir on the throne’; on the reverse is an all-powerful Christ Pantocrator.⁸

      On Swedish coins of this date, there is a cross on the reverse; on the coins of contemporary Poland, a church is shown. And Vladimir of Kiev, having set up pagan idols in his pre-conversion days, at once became a builder of Christian churches. He owed his baptism in 988 to an alliance with Byzantium, sealed by his marriage the following year to Anna, sister of the Greek Emperor Basil II (‘the Bulgarslayer’). And he dedicated his first Kievan church to the eponymous St Basil (d.379), monastic legislator and Bishop of Caesarea. Neither Vladimir’s Church of St Basil nor his Cathedral of the Dormition (Church of the Tithe) have survived. But both are thought to have been based directly on Byzantine originals, and it was Constantinople again which set the style for the new stone churches of Yaroslav, Vladimir’s son. Yaroslav the Wise (1019–55) ‘loved religious establishments and was devoted to priests, especially to monks. He applied himself to books, and read them continually day and night.’ During Yaroslav’s reign, the same chronicler adds, ‘the Christian faith was