Last time, Gerbert travelled to Rome with Borrell, Count of Barcelona, met the Pope, stayed behind to teach the Holy Roman Emperor’s son, and ended up being hired to teach at the Cathedral School of Reims. In Reims he introduced innovative teaching methods, that might have been to some extent inspired by ideas he picked up in Spain. There were various devices used to observe and model the stars - including what sounds a lot like an Armillary Sphere, a sphere made of interlocking rings that could move around to visualise the motions of the stars and planets through the sky. These didn’t exist in Christian Western Europe at the time, and in the works of the Classical authors that people had access to in Latin, there are only minimal hints at their existence. They were well-known in the Islamic world, though, so there’s a strong possibility this was where Gerbert got the idea. Then there was the Abacus. This isn’t what we’d now think of an abacus, with beads that you move along rails to do calculations. Instead, it was a board with 27 columns, that Gerbert could arrange counters on to perform calculations - and written on the counters, were some of the earliest known examples of Hindu-Arabic numerals in the West.
There was more to Gerbert’s life than just teaching, though. He’d met the Pope, he’d met the Emperor, he’d taught the Emperor’s son. And now he was the sidekick of Adalbero, Archbishop of Reims, and the Archbishop of Reims, or any Medieval Bishop, was not merely a priest, but in effect a powerful lord, controlling land with castles and peasants and all that, just like a secular lord.
Gerbert would have grown up in Aurillac expecting to spend his whole life in that monastery, but now he’d travelled to Spain and Italy and back to France, and was tied up with the complex web of loyalties and rivalries that extended right across 10th-century Europe.
He’d also have expected to spend his whole life strictly bound by the rule of St Benedict, required to remain in one place, obeying an abbot, and forbidden from owning property. His position now meant none of that applied to him. This probably suited him quite well. In his letters, he never comes across as especially religious. He makes literary allusions, but the majority of them are not to the Bible or the writings of the church fathers, but to Pagan Roman poets. He keeps asking for people to send him books, too, but never once a Christian religious text.
Gerbert’s position was a powerful one, and made more powerful by the fact that, the year after he reached Reims, the Emperor Otto I had died, and been replaced by his son, Otto II and, if you remember the last episode, Gerbert had actually been Otto II’s tutor when he was in Rome. Gerbert was now a friend of the actual Holy Roman Emperor.
For his first few years in Reims, though, Gerbert doesn’t actually seem to have been particularly on the Emperor’s radar. But in 980, he came to the attention of a certain Otric, his counterpart to the east, master of the Cathedral School of Magdeburg in Saxony.
Otric sent a student to Reims to see what this Gerbert guy was all about and whether he was legit. According to Richer of Reims:
“He attended the lectures and cautiously brought together the divisions of kinds as arranged by Gerbert, nevertheless in that great division that divides philosophy as a whole, he massively cocked up the order.”
The student presented Otric with a diagram showing what he’d learned from Gerbert, and Otric went straight to the Emperor. Apparently that idiot Gerbert had been teaching that Physics is a subdiscipline of Mathematics, when it’s obviously actually an equally valid discipline in its own right.
The thing is the Emperor actually knew Gerbert. Gerbert had taught him in Rome, and Otto didn’t believe that he’d be teaching something so obviously idiotic. But there was only one way to find out for sure.
The Emperor had business to attend to in Italy. The Romans were trying to depose the Pope again, so he had to march across the Alps to deal with that, ideally before the snow started. But Gerbert could always cross the Alps as well and meet him in Italy instead.
Gerbert’s journey across the Alps was probably easier than it had been the last time he went to Rome. It was winter again, but November or early December, rather than January, so the snow wouldn’t have been as bad. Additionally by this point the Saracens who had controlled the passes had been thoroughly dealt with. The kidnapping the Abbot of Cluny incident in 972 had been the last straw. Gerbert and Adalbero descended from the heights of the Great St Bernard Pass to the Aosta Valley and then the plains beside the Po and Ticino rivers, riding into Pavia, where the Emperor was waiting for them. Otto welcomed Gerbert and Adalbero in grand Imperial style, and introduced Gerbert to none other than Otric, who had also travelled to Pavia ready to humiliate this charlatan who thought Maths was better than Physics.
Gerbert, Adalbero and Otric departed by with the Emperor and his entourage, travelling in a fleet of riverboats down the Po towards the Adriatic.
Their destination was Ravenna, that had been the Capital of the Western Roman Empire in the years leading up to its fall to the Goths. It had flourished under the Goths and then under the Byzantines, and had plenty of grand Roman architecture left over, including churches you can still see with extravagant Gothic and Byzantine mosaics. In fact, given the difficulties the emperors had in controlling Rome itself, Ravenna even in the 10th Century was the next best thing as a Capital of the half of the Holy Roman Empire south of the Alps - plus it was easier for them to get to. You could get on a boat down the Po as soon as you came down from the Alps, rather than having to go back up over the Apennines.
The Emperor got all the dignitaries in the Imperial palace together and announced his plan.
“As I believe, regular contemplation or practice improves Human knowledge, whenever the substance of things, suitably arranged, is explained in refined terms by wise people.”
He began (at least, according to Richer of Reims).
And he asked Otric to present the diagram that his spy had shown him, illustrating the nonsense Gerbert had apparently been spouting in Reims about the hierarchy of the Sciences.
Gerbert studied the diagram carefully, explaining that whatever this idiot thought he was saying, what he’d said was completely different. Otric challenged him to explain what he did think, and Gerbert did.
Philosophy, he said, was an overarching category with two subcategories: applied and theoretical. Within the applied category, there were three further subcategories: administrative, distributive, and civic. Physics, mathematics and theology were all subcategories of the theoretical category. If anything it would make more sense to say mathematics was a subcategory of Physics.
“Ah, but what about Physiology?” Was how Otric responded. Surely if physiology was subordinate to Mathematics and Physics, then it made no sense for mathematics to be subordinate to Physics. Gerbert responded by saying that he actually didn’t think Physiology was a subcategory of Physics.
Among murmuring from the spectators, shocked that Gerbert would say something so outrageous, they next turned to the question of the cause of philosophy. To which Gerbert’s straightforward answer was that
“It was invented so we might understand the divine and the human.”
Otric’s next angle was to criticise Gerbert for using too many words to make his points. Gerbert explained, with some erudite references to Plato, that sometimes you just have to use a lot of words to say something precisely enough. Richer portrays Gerbert using his rhetorical skills to full effect to rebut Otric’s next challenge, to do with Porphyry’s definition of a human as a ‘mortal, rational animal’ - I think I mentioned Porphyry in the last episode. He was one of the Roman Philosophers that people read in the Middle Ages, and he’d been a major influence on Boethius. Anyway, this was a chance for Gerbert to show off his knowledge of Ancient Philosophy, and in Richer’s telling Otric came away thoroughly embarrassed.
From Ravenna, Gerbert and Adalbero presumably continued to Rome. Maybe they travelled with the Emperor, who was on his way to put down the rebellion that had forced the Pope to flee the city. This had been accomplished by March, and there was a synod at St Peter’s Basilica. Adalbero headed back North from Rome, over the St Bernard Pass to Reims, but Gerbert may well have stayed in Italy.
The Emperor had been thoroughly impressed by Gerbert’s performance in the debate with Otric, and wanted to give him another job, with even more prestige than his job at Reims. Gerbert was going to be the Abbot of Bobbio.
Bobbio lies about halfway between Genoa and Piacenza, in a valley in the Northern Apennines, where the Trebbia River leaves a steep-sided gorge on its descent towards the Po. Its abbey was very old, founded in 614 by St Columbanus, an Irish missionary who persuaded the King of the Lombards to convert to Christianity. It was an important place by the 10th Century, important enough that as its Abbot Gerbert would be equivalent in rank to a bishop, and answer directly to the Pope. Medieval monasteries were major feudal landowners, too, which meant Gerbert would also be in charge of huge land holdings, and the wealth that came with them. And most importantly for Gerbert, it boasted the largest library in the Latin West, with literally hundreds of books (compare that with my 21st-century small town’s public library, with at the time of writing appears to have eleven thousand and twenty-seven distinct books, and that’s before you get into audiobooks, ebooks, access to online resources, etc.). But unlike my local public library, as far as I’m aware, Bobbio also had a scriptorium churning out extravagant illuminated manuscripts.
You’d think Gerbert would have loved it here. but the problem was that his day job as an Abbot was not browsing the library for interesting manuscripts, or building exotic astronomical instruments, or anything like that. A medieval Abbot, especially in an abbey the size of Bobbio, was effectively running a large feudal estate, and dealing with neighbouring feudal lords who wanted bits of the abbey’s land.
And the problem was compounded at Bobbio by the fact that the Emperor was away to the South fighting the Greeks in Apulia and the Saracens in Calabria, and didn’t really have troops to spare keeping the peace in Northern Italy. This meant that the various feudal lords surrounding Bobbio seem to have thought they could just do whatever they wanted. Gerbert even had to write to the Bishop of Pavia, who you’d have thought really should have known better:
“You demand interviews yet you do not cease from thefts from our church; you, who ought to compel the complete restoration of what has been distributed, are yourself distributing our possessions to your knights as if they were your own.”
On top of this, a lot of the monastery’s income had come from renting out its land to various local nobles, and they had stopped paying rent. That and the last abbot, Peter, had managed to engineer a situation where for legal purposes he was technically considered the personal owner of the abbey’s lands, and he had made his heir a monk called Petroald, from a powerful local family, rather than Gerbert. And the result was that there was no money left.
“when I see my monks wasting away from hunger and suffering from nakedness, how can I keep silent?”
Gerbert wrote in a letter to the Emperor. And
“the money which was collected is nowhere to be found; the storehouses and granaries have been emptied; in the purses? there is nothing.”
Or in a letter to the Bishop of Tortona, also called Gerbert:
“Everything is said to have belonged to Petroald, nothing to the abbot, and the result is that nothing is left to us save the buildings and the use of the natural elements, common to all.”
But that’s not to say there was no time at all for more edifying pursuits than trying to get neighbouring warlords (and Bishops) to stop stealing stuff. He wrote excitedly to Adalbero, back in Reims, about some geometry books he’d found in the library, as well as a work of Boethius titled On Astronomy (which is unfortunately now lost). He asked for more books to add to the abbey’s already magnificent collection, too. He asked the abbot of Piacenza for the beginning of work by Cicero, and the end of a Roman work on the anatomy of the eye. He asked one of his former students at Reims for corrections to a manuscript of Pliny’s Natural History, and a commentary on the Roman playwright Terence. He asked Adalbero for a copy of Caesar’s Gallic War, and promised to have the new books he’d found at Bobbio copied and sent to him in return.
But the violent situation in which the Emperor had dumped Gerbert - where clergy didn’t really behave any differently from regular warlords - becomes particularly apparent in a letter from 983 where he describes sheltering two monks whose monastery had been destroyed by the forces of the Bishop of Lodi and by a rogue abbot by the name of Neophyte. These guys were still Medieval Italian noblemen, after all, and holy orders did little to change that.
Gerbert himself was in danger, too. He was forced to flee to the Imperial palace at Pavia, where he wrote
“For, in proportion to the greatness of my mind, Fortune has honored me with enemies everywhere. For what part of Italy does not contain my enemies?”
And, quoting Cicero,
“O tempora, O mores, where in the world am I living?”
And even the Imperial Palace, he found infested with disloyal slanderers, who plotted against the Emperor while he was away. Indeed, the Emperor had recently suffered a disastrous defeat to the Muslim Emirate of Sicily in the Battle of Stilo, in Calabria, where he’d had to swim out into the sea to escape, and was rescued by a passing Greek ship, which had only encouraged his opponents. And even Gerbert’s relationship with the Emperor was suffering. Nancy Marie Brown puts it down to him not sending any troops from Bobbio’s lands to support Otto’s campaigns and, while there are perfectly valid reasons that wouldn’t have been feasible - he had too much to deal with back in Bobbio, as I’ve already described - he still had to write to Otto
“Let not an accusation of high treason be brought against him for whom it has always been a glory to take a stand for Caesar and a dishonor to be against Caesar.”
One of his more intriguing works was produced in this context, dedicated to Otto. This was his Carmen Figuratum.
A Carmen Figuratum - or “shaped poem” is a clever sort of wordplay, where a poem is written so that the words form the outline of an image. This kind of thing was popular with the late Roman writers that Medieval intellectuals were into, and they were revived by Charlemagne’s scribe Hraban Maur. The way these things often work, is that there’s one poem that takes up the whole page, and then there’s a picture drawn on the page - often a simple geometric figure, perhaps a cross, but sometimes as elaborate as a portrait of the patron - as in one Hrabanus did for Charlemagne’s successor, Louis the Pious - and the poem is written so that the letters inside the picture also spell out something that makes sense. In this case, this is just one step in a whole network of intricate puzzles. Usually, something like this would be presented along with a booklet explaining how to read them. Unfortunately in this case, the booklet has not survived, meaning modern historians were left with the task of figuring out what was going on.
Basically, what we’ve got is a circle with eight spokes, and a square in the centre, with another square nested inside it, so the sides are diagonal to the sides of the outer square. And there’s text written round the outside of it - in Latin, obviously, and every intersection is at either an O or a T. If you figure out what order you’re supposed to read them in so it makes sense, you end up with an acrostic where every line starts and ends with either an O or a T, and fortunately the name of the emperor consisted entirely of these two letters. The first letters of the lines and the last letters of the lines end up spelling “Otto Otto Otto Otto Otto Otto Otto Otto”. And the poem is about a pipe organ that Gerbert is making for Otto - at least, according to some scholars. Others will tell you the word organa in the poem isn’t actually referring to a physical musical instrument but perhaps to the celestial spheres, and the poem is about God creating the natural harmonies of the universe. There’s even disagreement about what order the lines are supposed to be read in.
With this one, Flavio Nuvolone and Clyde Brockett worked out, as recently as 1999, that if you rearrange the lines in the right way, you get letters in the shape of what else but the Hindu-Arabic numerals, spelling out another poem, and then Gerberto Ottoni - from Gerbert to Otto - formed out of letters in the shape of a Celtic Knot, a symbol popular in Celtic art and associated with the Abbey of Bobbio via the Irish monk who founded it, and also, in the shape of a Greek lower case omega, there’s the name of the Empress Theophanu.
Apparently the names of the Arabic numerals are buried somewhere in all this, too. Igin, andras, ormis, etc., if you remember from the last episode. There are apparently several layers of high-quality Latin verse that can be extracted if you can work through the various puzzles Gerbert has set, but I haven’t managed to find an explanation I can understand of how it all works. To be fair, Gerbert would have written a whole booklet explaining it all for Otto.
But all this effort he put into winning back the Emperor’s favour turned out to be futile. On December 7 983, in Rome, at the age of 28, Otto, Emperor of the Romans, died of Malaria.
Gerbert couldn’t stay in Bobbio. Up until this point, even if the Emperor wasn’t physically able to protect him, he could always remind his various enemies that at some point Otto would be back from his wars in the South, and then they’d be sorry. But now he didn’t even have that. The Emperor’s son, also Otto, was just three years old, and Gerbert couldn’t guarantee that whoever ended up as his regent was going to be as friendly as the late Otto had been. He wrote to the Pope, begging to be sheltered in Rome - unfortunately the old Pope, the old Emperor’s friend, had died earlier that year, and the new Pope was none other than Peter, the Bishop of Pavia, who Gerbert had given a bollocking to for stealing Bobbio’s stuff. So that was a non-starter. He went back to Pavia, leaving Petroald in charge of running the sinking ship of Bobbio. He met Theophanu in Pavia, and then from there he headed north, in the depths of Winter, up the Aosta Valley to the deep snows of the St Bernard Pass, leaving the turmoil of Italy behind on his descent towards Lake Geneva. Where would he go but Reims, back to Adalbero’s cathedral school.
As he wrote to the Abbot of his old monastery at Aurillac:
“Ruined, ruined, my father, is the stability of God’s churches. The commonwealth has perished; the sanctuary of God is broken into; the people have become the booty of His enemy.”
He’d made it out of Italy, but now the problem was that Otto II had been succeeded by the three-year-old Otto III, and that meant there had to be a regent. This should have been fairly straightforward. Theophanu was the King’s mother, the former King’s widow, and clearly very competent. The problems were that 1) she was a woman, 2) she was Greek, and 3) she was currently in Pavia, while Otto III was in Aachen, on the other side of the Alps. The other option was the young king’s cousin, the Duke of Bavaria - a man called Henry the Quarrelsome, imprisoned as a result of an attempted coup against Otto II, but released as soon as he died. His big advantages were that 1) he was a man, 2) he was German, and 3) he was on the correct side of the Alps at the time Otto II died, meaning that as soon as he was released it was a simple matter to ride to Cologne and abduct the new King of Germany.
Gerbert was all in for Theophanu and her son. He wrote frantically to notables who were on the fence. To the Bishop of Liege, he wrote
“Are you watchful, O father of the country, for that onetime famed fidelity to the camp of Caesar, or do blind fortune and ignorance of the times oppress you? Do you not perceive that at the same time divine and human laws are being trampled underfoot? Behold, openly deserted is he to whom you have vowed your fidelity on his father’s account and to whom you ought to preserve it once vowed.”
And he warned him that Henry was planning to offer Lorraine (including Liege) to Lothair, the King of France, in return for an alliance against Theophanu. If this had happened, it would have been awkward for Gerbert, because he was well-known as a supporter of the Ottonians, yet he lived in France, under Lothair. But this wouldn’t be an issue because he managed to bring the King of France, too, into his coalition against Henry the Quarrelsome.
He wrote to the Archbishop of Trier, on behalf of Adalbero:
“Whither has sacred fidelity vanished? Have the benefits bestowed on you by the Ottos escaped from your memory? Bid your great intelligence return; reflect on their generosity, unless you wish to be an everlasting disgrace to your race.”
And he even mentioned an offer from Adalbero to share the archbishopric of Reims if Egbert of Trier came round to Theophanu’s side.
And he reminded the Archbishop of Mainz that Henry wasn’t exactly the most trustworthy guardian of Otto III:
“Will he, who has attempted to kill two Ottos, be willing that a third should survive? Remember that Ciceronian passage: ‘It is foolish to expect fidelity from those by whom you have been many times deceived.’”
Curiously, he accuses Henry of attempting to kill two Ottos. While Henry certainly attempted to kill Otto II, if he also had a pop at Otto I, this is the only record of that.
And all Gerbert’s letter-writing paid off. As the German nobles all switched their allegiance to Theophanu, Henry realised the game was up. That summer, in Rohr, in Thuringia, he handed over the 4-year-old King to his mother.
All this time, as well as politics, Gerbert had been trying to get on with what he loved - i.e. reading and writing. He’d kept in touch with people from back in Catalonia, and he wrote to Miro Bonfill, Bishop of Girona, to ask for a copy of a book called On the Multiplication and Division of Numbers, by a certain Joseph the Wise. Like a lot of the books mentioned in this series, this book no longer exists, and nobody knows what was in it. Miro Bonfill is an interesting character himself, if somewhat mysterious, and seems to have been involved with this process of transferring Arabic astronomy to the west that was going on while Gerbert was in Catalonia. He may well have had a hand in producing a work called the Alchandreana, probably made in the Hispanic March in the mid-10th Century - i.e. a bit before the time in question, that’s a compilation of various texts on astrology and onomancy - that is, telling people’s fortunes based on their names - that seems to have been based on Arabic and Hebrew originals from Al-Andalus (although the original texts are lost). This represents one of the earliest examples of the transmission of astrology and astronomy from the Islamic World to the Christian world, and if Miro Bonfill was involved in it, this is a bit more evidence linking Gerbert himself to that process.
And the identity of Joseph the Wise is another mystery. He was presumably a scholar from Al-Andalus, but there’s not much else we can know about him for certain. The main identity people suggest is Abu Yusuf Hasdai ibn Shaprut, a Jewish physician, diplomat and general polymath from 10th Century Cordoba. Interestingly, as Marco Zuccato points out, there was another Jewish scholar, Dunash al-Qarawi, from Kairouan in Tunisia, who wrote to Hasdai ibn Shaprut about astronomy, and in particular celestial spheres, the same things Gerbert ended up making, that we don’t know where he learned about them from. It’s unlikely Hasdai ibn Shaprut went into much detail about them in a book called On the Multiplication and Division of Numbers, but maybe Gerbert was reading other unknown works by Hasdai or other scholars in this Andalusian-Maghrebi Jewish intellectual scene.
He wrote to another of his Catalan contacts as well. This time a man named Lupitus of Barcelona, who he asked for a copy of a book called On Astrology (that is, of course, lost), that Lupitus had apparently translated, presumably from Arabic. The traditional narrative about what was happening here, is that this book was the same as a manuscript on the astrolabe found in Ripoll library, and Lupitus was the archdeacon Seniofred Llobet, possibly with help from an Arabic speaker from across the border. As for the first part, we dealt with that last episode. The consensus nowadays is that the Ripoll manuscript was actually written in the early 11th Century, several decades too late to be this one. As for the second part, Thomas Freudenhammer (who we also met in the last episode, writing about the first known Latin astrolabe) reckons this doesn’t make much sense. Gerbert doesn’t address Lupitus as an Archdeacon, and Seniofred Llobet’s will doesn’t mention that he owned any books at all (surprising for a translator, learned enough to be able to translate such sophisticated texts).
Thomas Freudenhammer reckons a more likely explanation is that this guy was actually a Mozarab - a Christian from Al-Andalus - who emigrated north of the border to Barcelona and worked as a translator. Maybe he was called Lope, a common Andalusian name. Maybe he’d already worked as a translator between Arabic and Latin in Al-Andalus as well. He was presumably very highly educated, and fluent in both Arabic and Latin, and his native language was probably neither, but the poorly-attested extinct Romance language of the Andalusi Mozarabs. He must have known quite a lot of astronomy too, to be able to translate an astronomical or astrological text to a high enough standard that someone like Gerbert was interested in it.
What hasn’t been particularly relevant to the story so far - given all Gerbert’s entanglement with the politics of the Holy Roman Empire - is that he was in fact a Frenchman, living in France, working for the most important cathedral in France. But that’s about to become very significant indeed because, as soon as Henry the Duke of Bavaria was out of the way, Lothar, the King of France, invaded the Holy Roman Empire.
He started by taking Verdun, in Lorraine, in a brutal battle with siege engines and grappling hooks and everything. This put Adalbero and Gerbert in a difficult position because not only had they sworn loyalty to the Ottonians, who their king was now at war with, but Adalbero’s brother, Godfrey, was actually the Count of Verdun. And he was now Lothair’s prisoner - in fact, he’s ended up known as Godfrey the Captive.
Gerbert ended up in the position of deploying his rhetorical skills to write letters on Godfrey’s behalf, to his wife and sons, saying things like
“The fealty which you have promised to the son of Caesar keep inviolate: guard all strongholds from the enemy.”
“Prepare assistance everywhere; show yourselves, like your father in everything as liberators of your fatherland.”
“You with your sons preserve an unstained fidelity to Lady Theophanu, ever august empress, and to her ever august son; make no agreement with the enemy, the French; repulse the kings of the French.”
This was straight-up treason, and when Lothair found out, Adalbero and Gerbert’s lives were on the line. Gerbert, for these letters. Adalbero, officially for letting his nephew, Godfrey’s son (also Adalbero) go to the Emperor to be nominated as Bishop of Verdun. Gerbert prepared Adalbero’s defence, to present to the French nobles gathered at Compiegne.
But before they could read it, word got round that none other than Hugh Capet, Lothair’s rival for the French throne, had gathered an army of 600 knights. The nobles at Compiegne scattered. Gerbert and Adalbero were safe, for now, under Hugh’s protection.
Gerbert could start thinking about other things now - i.e. writing to people to get them to send copies of various manuscripts. But the following year Lothair died, and Richer of Reims goes into remarkable detail about the various gastrointestinal symptoms he experienced immediately beforehand. His 19-year-old son, Louis V - Louis the Lazy, took over as king. And Louis the Lazy took Reims back from Hugh Capet. Richer of Reims gives us what he claims are the exact words of the speech Louis made about Adalbero’s treason:
“Adalbero, the Metropolitan Bishop of Reims, the most villainous man of all that the Earth sustains, scorned my father and gave his full support to the Emperor Otto, the Enemy of the French. With his support, Otto raised an army against us. Through his wiles, the lands of Gaul were laid waste. With him supplying guides, he returned uninjured with his army. It seems just and prudent that he should pay the penalty for such a crime, so that, when this pestilence is suppressed, fear of committing such deeds may be instilled in all the wicked.”
Surely this time the game was up for the Bishop of Reims and his sidekick. With a new date set for Adalbero’s treason trial, Gerbert wrote desperately to Theophanu on his behalf:
“We beg you to bring definite aid to us, therefore, at this uncertain time, permitting no false hope to delude us who never have hesitated in maintaining our fidelity to you.”
The King prepared to travel to Reims, where Adalbero awaited his doom. But first, he went hunting in the forest of Senlis to the north of Paris.
And he fell, and suffered catastrophic internal injuries. On May 22, 987, at the age of twenty, with blood pouring from his nose and from his mouth, King Louis V of France died. Maybe Gerbert did have a special arrangement with the Devil after all.
Now the French nobles had a succession crisis to deal with, so the treason trial would have to wait.
And who was to be the next King of France? Hugh Capet, of course. Adalbero himself, as Archbishop of Reims, presided over his coronation, and Hugh Capet’s dynasty would remain on the French throne continuously until 1792, when Citizen Louis Capet lost his crown and then his head.
With their ally on the French throne, things were once again looking up for the duo from Reims. And even Godfrey the Captive was finally released from prison. The skilled letter-writer Gerbert was now writing letters not only in Adalbero’s name, but also in the name of King Hugh himself, as he consolidated his power and dealt with Lothair’s brother, Charles, the Duke of Lower Lorraine.
He was getting back into scholarship, too, asking for people to send him books, and apparently making his spheres, too, that he used to demonstrate astronomy. Remi of Trier, a fellow scholar, had been asking him to send one, and in return Gerbert asked for a copy of the Achilleid - a Roman epic poem about the life of Achilles, reminding Remi of just how much work it actually takes to make one of these things. A few months later Remi sent him a copy that was incomplete. Gerbert started work on the sphere, but insisted Remi do better.
And maybe it was also at this time that Gerbert built the Head.
If you remember the first episode, the 12th Century English chronicler William of Malmesbury recounted how Gerbert had studied the dark arts in Seville. He had fled with a book of occult wisdom stolen from his teacher, and in return for safe passage back to his homeland, he had pledged his soul to the Devil. And as well as the celestial spheres, William of Malmesbury tells us about another device, yet more strange and powerful, fashioned by the mathematician of Reims.
Gerbert knew the sky inside out and back to front. He had learned that in Spain. He knew better than anyone the signs that the heavens gave to humanity. And from the perpetual motion of the fixed stars, and the drifting of the wandering stars that he modelled on his armillary sphere, he determined the moment when he could harness the wisdom imparted by the heavens, and crystallise it in a machine of his own making. At this auspicious time, he fashioned a head, from brass.
If the scholar asked the head a question, it would answer, with a deep, metallic resonance, yes, or no. It knew no other words, but that was good enough.
Gerbert tried it out. He asked it, first,
“Will I become the Pope?”
“Yes”
And he pressed it further. If he was to be the Pope, what other extraordinary news could the head give him.
“Will I die, before I say mass in Jerusalem?”
“No.”
So that was excellent news. He couldn’t have imagined when he was sent to a monastery as an oblate from an obscure part of rural France that he’d ever even end up as master of the Cathedral School of Reims, let alone as literally the actual Pope. Plus, he was now effectively immortal, just as long as he stayed clear of Jerusalem.
And that’s where I’ll leave it this time.
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