Great turning points in history are two a penny, and the question of why Western Europe won its battle with just about everyone else has been endlessly debated. But to ascribe the victory of a hunk of petty principalities in North Western Europe over the rest of Christendom (and, ultimately, the rest of the world), to the submission of a now-forgotten emperor and a now-forgotten Pope seems like chutzpah. That Tom Holland doesn't quite pull it off is no reproach to his genius, but rather to the limitations of any understanding of history that is primarily based on significant dates and great individuals.
When Pope Gregory VII accepted, at Canossa, in 1077, the submission of Henry IV, the path was paved, so the author assures us in his preface, to "Voltaire and the First Amendment, Multiculturalism and gay weddings". So brilliantly seductive is his analysis that any objection seems impudent and even a bit mean.
From ancient times, the world – and not just the Roman world – had been dominated by the ideal of the emperor: one ruler to bind them all. With the dissolution of the Roman empire in the West, petty lords could run riot, peasants could run free and, though temples decayed, churches could sprout. Then came the threat of Hungarians, the Wends of western Poland, the corsairs of Africa and, finally, the Turks. All were seen as tokens of the Last Times, ambassadors of the Antichrist. Some students of the time remembered Augustine's admonition that the "Last Days" foretold in the Book of Revelation could not be calculated or predicted. The hour (as he and his followers had endlessly to remind the faithful or fanatical), was not quite the point. The point was to stay watchful.
Holland's story takes us through the collapse of the Carolingian empire to its partial restoration under the three Ottos of Saxony. He shows how even the venerable emirs of Al-Andalus were troubled by signs and wonders. Pogroms on the one hand, and acts of extravagant kindness on the other, adverted to a universal fear that judgement was at hand. Fulk Nerra "the Black", founder of the Angevin dynasty, burned his own wife to death for sedition, and yet was endlessly haunted by the judgement to come. For every killer there was a reprover of killing. Holland gives us the strangely inspiring story of Adalbert, a missionary to the east, who believed, as the Englishman Alcuin did before him, that the heathen could not be converted at swordpoint; indeed that the Lord had forbidden this. He was martyred, but his martyrdom served to sway the wavering Poles. The author also shows how attitudes to warfare differed markedly between East and West. The Christian East looked upon war as "the worst of all evils" and imposed a penance on soldiers "who killed"; in the early days of Saxon Christendom, Christ was seen as the "god of war", an unsettling precedent.
As if in defiance of all those humanists who condemn, or, worse, patronise the early Middle Ages, Tom Holland shows a humble and humbling insight into the agonies and complexities of that time. Occasionally, he falls victim to his own metaphors: Otto I apparently decapitated his Wendish prisoners in order to "demonstrate" a wider "decapitation" of his pagan enemies. I'm not quite convinced that Otto did this to impress posterity, especially given that the metaphor was not his own.
But where is the promise of the preface? Why the West Won is, as the author acknowledges, too great a matter for any historian, so why does he attempt it? As a stirring, vivid and formidably learned analysis of the events surrounding the millennium, this will hardly be equalled. Extraordinary insights and lapidary phrases abound. Holland's vision of a multicultural, all-conquering Europe forged by a Pope's refusal to accept the interference of an emperor seems wild. But he may well be right.
Though we all need knights in shining armour and castles to repair to, it is something to be reminded that knights were originally thugs hired to oppress their fellows, that castles were built not for the defence of land lawfully owned but as bandit fortresses, that even villages, treasured totems of right-wing nostalgia, began as human "sheep-pens", and that the Dark Ages were dark chiefly for the powerful, and for the poor a time of comparative, though fugitive, bliss. More radically, though, Holland shows how the motives of Crusaders venturing east to reclaim the Holy Places for Christendom, of prelates apparently in cahoots with the powers of oppression, of emperors even, could be animated by something other than the ghastly purity of the fanatic.
