The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West by Tom Holland

Author:Tom Holland [Holland, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780385530200
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-05-05T04:00:00+00:00

Jesus Wept

By 1010, reports of the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre had reached as far as Aquitaine. As southern France was racked by widespread violence and upheaval, the shock wave broke across the duchy with an especial force. In one town in particular, the news served to induce an almost personal sense of horror: for Limoges, an ancient and flourishing settlement in the heart of France, was the proud possessor of a holy sepulchre all of its own. St. Martial, while hardly on a par with apostles such as Peter and James, was nevertheless much cherished by the locals: for, back in the third Christian century, he had first brought the Gospel to Aquitaine. His tomb, deep in the crypt of a monastery that bore his name, was widely reverenced as the reservoir of an awful power. Back in 994, on the occasion of a trail-blazing peace council, the mere process of transporting the saint’s earthly remains to a nearby hill had been sufficient to prompt an earthquake. As an immense crowd moaned and shuddered at the sight of the relics, a terrible pestilence of “invisible fire” had been lifted from Limoges, and the duke and all his lords had together sworn “a pact of peace and justice.”27 Over the succeeding years, miracles had continued to be performed upon St. Martial’s tomb. Pilgrims had flocked to it in prodigious numbers. As the new millennium dawned, and the weather turned increasingly freakish, afflicting the region with heatwaves, and violent rainstorms, and strange wonders written in the sky, so the inhabitants of Limoges had begun to imagine themselves a chosen people, appointed by God to serve as witnesses to the fracturing of the times. Indeed – in an excitable display of immodesty – the town had dared to conceive of itself almost as a new Jerusalem. And then had come the baleful tidings from the Holy Land.

Nightmarish news, to be sure – and there must have been many in Limoges, during the course of that strange and menacing summer, who suffered sleepless nights as a consequence. We know for certain, however, of only one: a monk by the name of Adémar, a twenty-year-old of good family who had recently journeyed from his own monastery to study at St. Martial. Proud and sensitive, the young scholar appears to have been a natural loner, one who combined a restless intellect with emotional depths so turbulent that he sought, by and large, to conceal their existence. We do not know the extent of his nightmares in 1010; but Adémar did record how one night, unable to sleep and looking out at the sky, he was granted a vision infinitely more disturbing than any dream. Indeed, so shattering was the spectacle of what he found confronting him that night, rising over Limoges and framed against a blaze of brilliant stars, that he would end up keeping it to himself for almost twenty years. High against the southern sky, planted as if in the heavens, he saw a giant crucifix – and nailed to it was Christ Himself.

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