Volume 46, Number 20 · December 16, 1999
Chaos
By Gore Vidal
Like everyone else at millennium's end, I keep thinking of how it all began in Europe. Does a day pass that one does not give at least a fleeting thought to the Emperor Otto III and to Pope Sylvester II? I should highly doubt it. After all, they are an attractive couple—a boy emperor and his old teacher, the intellectual pope. Together, at the start of our millennium, they decided to bring back the Christian empire that two centuries earlier Charlemagne had tried to re-create or—more precisely—to create among the warring tribes of Western Europe. If Charlemagne was the Jean Monnet of the 800s, Otto III is the Romano Prodi of the 900s. As you will recall, Otto was only fourteen when he became king of Germany. From boyhood, he took very seriously the idea of a united Christendom, a Holy Roman Empire. Like so many overactive, overeducated boys of that period he was a natural general, winning battles left and right in a Germany that rather resembled the China of Confucius' era, a time known as that of 'the warring duchies.'
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