Otto and his imperial sons regularly stormed down to Rome but were unable to gain control of the papacy for long. In 974, Crescentius, Marozia’s great-nephew, seized Rome for the Marozians and overthrew the German-backed popes, strangling several inconvenient pontiffs. The family appointed popes until 996, when Emperor Otto III, who was just sixteen, famed for his classical intellect, swooped on Rome and deposed Crescentius. Otto then had him beheaded, his wife gang-raped and his pope, the Marozian cousin John XVI, blinded, with his nose, ears and tongue cut off. Otto, assuming the titles Emperor of the World and Consul of the Romans, planned to rule his German empire from his new Roman palace, only to die at just twenty-one.
The Crescentians still dominated the old Rome when in the eastern New Rome, Leo the Wise’s illegitimate son Constantine VII, born in the porphyry chamber of the Great Palace where empresses gave birth, asserted his legitimacy with the title
The Rus now challenged the Khazars. In 971, Prince Svyatoslav attacked and burned their capital Atil and then, blessed by Constantinople, he attacked the Bulgars with 60,000 troops, routing them and seizing their capital and so much of Bulgaria that the Roman emperor was alarmed and orchestrated his assassination. In the ensuing chaos, Svyatoslav’s youngest son by a concubine, Valdemar, who had been driven out of Novgorod, was given troops by his cousin, the king of Norway. He then defeated all his brothers to seize Kyiv.
Valdemar kept a harem of 800 girls, took seven wives, several bearing him children, and worshipped the pagan gods Dazhbog, Stribog and Mokosh, celebrating his victories by sacrificing two children. But his envoys were overwhelmed by the Christian magnificence of the Great City and its Hagia Sophia – ‘We no longer knew whether we were in heaven or on earth’ – and when Valdemar himself realized the benefits of conversion, his timing was excellent. The latest of the Macedonian dynasty, Basil II, faced a rebellion and needed help.
The thirty-year-old Basil was a force of nature: ‘From the day that the King of Heaven called upon me to become the Emperor, overlord of the world,’ he wrote for his own epitaph, ‘no one saw my spear lie idle.’ In a city of berobed luxury, scented eunuchs and Byzantine intrigue, he was a compact, plainspoken swordsman, a pious ascetic uninterested in women and probably homosexual.
Valdemar sent the new emperor a unit of Varangians as a present with the warning, ‘Don’t keep them in your city or they’ll cause you harm – and don’t allow a single one to return this way.’ The Kyivan next demanded marriage to a sister of the emperor. This was an impertinence, but Basil, recognizing Kyivan power, agreed, provided the grand prince of Kyiv converted and helped retake his Crimean colony, Chersonese. Valdemar played his part, but when Basil delayed sending his sister, Valdemar kept Chersonese; Basil immediately dispatched his sister. In 988, Valdemar, taking the name Vladimir or Volodymyr, was baptized according to the rites favoured in Constantinople, a decisive moment in world history which, together with the Bulgar conversion, ensured Russia and eastern Europe would develop their own distinctive rituals and doctrine – later known as Orthodox.* The emperor’s sister Anna Porphyrogenita dreaded her marriage to an oafish barbarian, but Basil begged her: ‘God turns the land of Rus to repentance through your agency and you’ll save Greece from the danger of grievous war.’ God’s work was hard to refuse.
PAGAN CONVERTS: VLADIMIR AND ROLLO
