A unitary state since the 10th century, its borders have effectively been unchanged since the 11th. The history of England, the kingdom founded by Æthelstan, is familiar. The union of Edith and Otto brought together two realms destined for very different things. It was, for any Christian king, the ultimate promotion. Sure enough, within seven years he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope in Rome. After becoming king in 936, he won a victory over a vast invading force of Hungarians so decisive that his troops, standing on the battlefield amid the tangle of corpses and banners, hailed him “emperor”. Edith was the half-sister of Æthelstan who, only two years previously, had won for himself the rule of all the English-speaking peoples of Britain, and thereby attracted the admiration of the most eligible bachelor in Christendom: Otto.įearless, charismatic and intimidatingly hairy, Otto was as peerless a warrior as he was formidable an overlord, heir to a vast agglomeration of territories that stretched from Frisia to Bavaria. In 929, one of Alfred the Great’s numerous granddaughters travelled to Saxony. Tom Holland welcomes a definitive study of the amorphous state that lasted a thousand years
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