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- PARIS (AFP) - The collapse
of a mighty empire. Economic crisis. A deadly epidemic. The appearance
of a comet and other omens. Surges of religious fervour. Sounds familiar?
It ought to -- it seemed to many Europeans, in the year 999, that the world
was about to end. Or so we're told.
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- Did it really seem that way? Not according to historians
who have long dismissed this version of events 1,000 years ago as a popular
myth created by the Romantic historians of the mid-19th century, a distortion
of the reality of European life in the late 10th and early 11th centuries.
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- But now a new generation of historians is challenging
the orthodox view that 1000 was "a year like any other."
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- They are arguing that Pre-Millennial Terror was indeed
a reality to our mediaeval ancestors, probably a good deal more vivid than
anything we face on the eve of the third millennium.
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- Apocalyptic expectations -- the fear, or hope, among
Christians that the world would end after a great final battle between
the Antichrist and the Messiah -- invariably rose in times of instability,
and the late 10th century was just such a time.
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- The fall of the house of Charlemagne in 987 was followed
by destructive struggles for power in western Europe. The Danes launched
a series of raids on England, and anarchy and famine were rampant in France.
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- With preachers announcing the end as nigh, pilgrimages
were made to Jerusalem in the hope of witnessing the Final Days, and mass
gatherings called for peace.
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- The problem for the "terror" theorists is that
there is little documentary evidence to suggest that fear was widespread
at the time.
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- Orthodox historians insist that the prevailing anxieties
were all part of the sense of insecurity to be derived from living at a
time of disease, poverty, political chaos and superstition -- all part
of the daily round in the Middle Ages -- and that there was no more millennial
feeling than usual.
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- Moreover, they note, relatively few people knew what
year it was or had any idea of chronological time.
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- Richard Landes, of the Centre for Millennial Studies
in Boston, is one of several historians who disagree. He maintains that
the Roman Catholic Church, anxious to ensure that its calendar could not
be used to trigger an apocalyptic panic, played down millennial speculation
and kept it out of the written record as far as possible.
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- And he retorts that the use of the AD (Anno Domini, "in
the year of our Lord") calendar was widespread in churches throughout
Europe, so that any peasant with an interest in knowing the date would
need only to speak to his local priest.
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- The "Histories" of Ralph (or Rodolfus) Glaber,
an unruly French monk who worked in -- and was thrown out of -- several
monasteries, provide a contemporary account which is invoked on both sides
of the "terror" argument.
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- Writing in the 1030s, Glaber described a series of "events
and prodigies which happened around and after the millennial year,"
including raging fires in Rome and other Italian cities, the death of the
greatest men of his time and -- perhaps a reference to declining standards
-- the arrival in France of "strange men with indecent shoes and clothes
too short for them."
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- Though himself convinced that the apocalypse was at hand,
Glaber provides little evidence of apocalyptic terror among the populace.
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- And with the failure of the world to end in 1000, he
switches his attention to 1033, the anniversary of Christ's death, which
was also, he notes, prefigured by disastrous omens, including an economic
crisis that brought price inflation and cannibalism.
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- Despite the efforts of Landes and others, the general
view remains that "not very much happened" in terms of apocalyptic
expectation around the year 1000, says mediaeval history lecturer Michael
Staunton of St Andrew's University, Scotland.
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- Staunton believes the issue is unlikely ever to be resolved.
Though the "terror" theory has seen a revival of interest lately,
"the concrete evidence is very slight," he says, citing a decision
in 1000 by German emperor Otto III to disinter of the body of Charlemagne
as one that "may have had millennial motivation."
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- Charlemagne was believed by some to be poised to rise
from his sleep to fight the Last Battle. Otto however found him still dead,
sitting upright in a chair, and duly clipped his fingernails.
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