The Real History of the End of the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

fixed amount in taxes and tithes, to have enough left over to sell at markets. Many settled new villages under favorable terms from local lords. Now I don’t think it was just good weather that kept medieval society from believing that the Apocalypse was imminent. But good crops, spare cash, and new frontiers do tend to make people think things aren’t so bad. By the late 900s even the Vikings were settling down and learning French.
    There were a few interesting apocalyptic trends, particularly toward the end of the period, when the earth entered the little Ice Age. ea The increasing cold led to crop failure, famine, and disease. These set the stage for both political and religious upheaval.
    There is another reason that there were few millennial movements in Europe during this time. It wasn’t a politically sound proposition. The Roman Church had come to terms with the Book of Revelation. The end was coming, of course, but there were a lot of things that needed to be done first. One of the standard beliefs was that Christ would not return until all the Jews converted to Christianity. Now, I know that forced baptism occurred, especially in the Rhineland and in Spain. However, it was never sanctioned by Rome. The sensible reason they gave was that conversion has to come from the heart. The reason that carried more weight with the public was that, if all the Jews became Christian, then doom was at hand. Unlike the First Christians, most medieval Christians weren’t all that eager for the end.
    That didn’t prevent them from talking about it, writing about it and painting pictures of it.
    What medieval philosophers, theologians, and visionaries did was set the stage for later developments. It’s at this time that the stories of what would happen at the end and of the Antichrist were developed.

    Miniature from a Manuscript of the Apocalypse: The Fall of Babylon . France, Lorraine, c. 1295. Ink, tempera, and gold on vellum, 12 14.2 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L . Severance Fund, 1983.73.1.b
    This is reflected in the late-thirteenth-century picture from the Apocalypse of John shown above. The scene is the fall of Babylon, and John is on the left. Unlike similar scenes from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the sense is that Babylon is a stage set from one of the religious plays staged every year by the guilds. The beasts are very much like Maurice Sendak drawings. In this and in most high medieval representations of the Apocalypse, there is no sense of terror or foreboding. It’s something to make fun of because the reality is a long way off.
    They knew it was a long way off because by the sixth century, when the world didn’t end in 500 C.E., as predicted by some theologians, the concept of the ages of the world that the Greeks had perfected had been firmly adapted to Christian time, and while they were probably in the final age (aren’t we always?), it was still early on.
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    IT had been suggested that the crusades were a millennial movement in the sense that returning the Holy Land to Christians was the beginning of the events that would lead to the Second Coming. It seems plausible that there were some crusaders who did think so, although not all by any means. eb The crusaders didn’t take their millennial belief from the Bible so much as the Tiburtine Sibylline Oracles. The Sybil had been keeping up her prophecies through a number of Christian interpreters (and forgers) with hardly a break since the fall of Rome. In a popular forecast, she tells of a Last World Emperor, a human king who will destroy the Muslims, establish himself in Jerusalem, and usher in a Golden Age that will prepare the world for the end. ec Whether the conquerors of Jerusalem thought of themselves in the light of an army out to pave the way for the Last World Emperor is hard to say. In my own work on the Crusades, I don’t sense that Godfroye de Bouillon, his brother Baldwin, or any of