. Literally, millennialism (also millenarianism, chiliasm) refers to the belief, expressed in the book of Revelation, that Christ will establish a 1,000-year reign of the saints on earth before the Last Judgment. More broadly, millennialists expect a time of supernatural peace and abundance here on earth. Both usages reflect the eschatological belief that at the end of time God will judge the living and the (resurrected) dead. This belief in ultimate divine justice has provided the solution to the problem of theodicy for countless generations of Christians suffering under hardship and oppression.
In most early forms, millennial beliefs were anti-imperial, even antiauthoritarian: as the messianic vision of Isaiah 2:4 depicts, the instruments of war and domination will be beaten into instruments of peace and prosperity. Apostolic Christianity demonstrates all of the key traits of apocalyptic millenarian groups: the rhetoric of the meek versus the powerful, of the imminence of the Lord’s Day of wrath and the coming Kingdom of Heaven; the shift from a disappointed messianic hope (Crucifixion) to a revised expectation (Second Coming or Parousia); a following among common, working people; the rituals of initiation into a group preparing for and awaiting the End; the fervent spirituality and radical restructuring of community bonds; and the prominence of women visionaries.
As Christianity evolved from a charismatic cult on the fringes of society into a self-perpetuating institution eager to live in harmony with Rome, the hopes of apocalyptic millenarianism embarrassed church leaders who emphasized that Jesus’s kingdom was “not of this world.” With the advent of imperial Christianity, millenarianism was pushed to the margins of acceptable Christian thought.
As a result, as early as the 2nd century, two of the principal themes of medieval millennialism emerged: the use of chronology to postpone the End, thus encouraging patience, and the transformation of the Roman Empire into a positive force. The former teaching invoked a sabbatical millennium that would come in the year 6000 after Creation; ca. A.D. 200, the first Christian chronology placed the Creation in 5500 B.C., thus providing a buffer of 300 years until the year A.D. 500. The latter interpreted Paul’s reference to an obstacle to the “man of iniquity” (2 Thessalonians 3:4) to mean that as long as the Roman Empire endured, the Antichrist could not come. This proRoman eschatology would, after the mutual conversion of Rome to Christianity and Christianity to imperialism, produce the myth of the Last Emperor, a superhuman figure who would unite all of Christendom, rule in peace and justice for 120 years, and finally abdicate his throne.
But both these approaches merely delayed the problem: despite pagan and Christian belief in Roma eterna, the empire (especially in the West) was doomed; and, coincidentally, the year 6000 grew inevitably closer, transforming an antiapocalyptic chronology into an apocalyptic one. Jerome and Augustine reoriented Latin thought on the millennium in two ways. Jerome introduced a new set of calculations, which placed the Creation in 5199 B.C., delaying the year 6000 another three centuries. Augustine went farther, arguing that no historical event or chronology can be intepreted apocalyptically and that the millennium was not a future event but already in progress—the millennium began at the time of Jesus. To explain why the evils of war, hatred, injustice, and poverty continued unabated, Augustine introduced the concept of the Two Cities: a heavenly city, the celestial Jerusalem, where the millennium was already manifest, and the terrestrial Babylon, the time-bound city of violence and oppression in which the millennium was not visible.
Augustine’s opposition to millennial thought so dominated the theological writings of the early Middle Ages that many historians think that it actually disappeared. But there are signs of its presence, both in the activity of antiecclesiastical prophets like the “False Christ” of Bourges described by Gregory of Tours (Histories 10.25) and in the antiapocalyptic uses of chronology. In the 8th century, Bede and Carolingian historians shifted the dating system again, this time to anno Domini.
It is surely no accident that Charlemagne took up the imperium in the absence of a legitimate emperor in Byzantium, and thus assumed the role of continuator of the Roman Empire, on the first day of the year A.D. 800, or 6000 annus mundi. With the apocalyptic dimension of the deed eliminated from the documentation, modern historians have analyzed this pivotal moment in western history without any awareness of its background. It has gone down in history as the Coronation of the year 800, not 6000 annus mundi.
Charlemagne’s coronation contributed two essential elements to European millennialism. He “transferred” the empire, with all its apocalyptic and millennial freight, to the West, and he shifted the chronological hopes for the Apocalypse from 6000 annus mundi to the year A.D. 1000, a date at once millennial (the end of the sixth age, dawn of the sabbatical era) and Augustinian (the end of the millennium of the church). Germany and France of the year 1000 illustrate the two directions of millennial symbolism: whereas the emperor Otto III manipulated every aspect of the imperial variety of millennialism (renovatio imperii Romani, opening Charlemagne’s tomb on Pentecost of 1000), King Robert II the Pious of France, second ruler of a new and still uncertain dynasty and excommunicate in 1000, presided over a kingdom marked by the social turmoil of the castellan revolution. Here, apocalyptic and millennial symbols were generated from below, especially in the earliest popular religious movement of the Middle Ages, the Peace of God. This conciliar movement, which mobilized huge crowds at open-air revivalist gatherings in the collective pursuit of God’s peace on earth, may have been the earliest sustained millenarian movement that joined all levels of society. It appeared in two waves, each in the decades before the millennium of the Incarnation (1000) and the Passion (1033), first south of the Loire, then throughout France.
When the year 1000 passed without the Parousia, there was a sea-change in millennial hopes. The period after the year 1000 saw much vaster millennial movements, often approved by ecclesiastical authorities—popular crusades, Joachites, Flagellants, the Peace Movement. Some of these movements were broadly based, militant, and hostile to ecclesiastical authority, the wealthy, and Jews, thus bringing out the most revolutionary elements of millennialism.
But the more documentable, and in some ways more surprising, aspect of medieval millennialism was its use by lay and ecclesiastical elites to buttress their own authority. Starting with the Gregorian Reform in the 11th century, papal reformers used apocalyptic imagery both to attack their enemies as Antichrist and to wrap their own efforts in messianic promises. Similarly, royal and even comital courts used eschatological prophecy as propaganda. Dynastic publicists often painted their patrons in the imagery of the Last Emperor—the Norman William the Conqueror consciously used themes from Revelation (his crown, his Doomsday book) to buttress his conquest of England. Supporters of Thierry d’Alsace, count of Flanders, responding to the seemingly apocalyptic civil war of 1127–28, disseminated prophecies claiming that Thierry’s (Carolingian) dynasty was the last barrier to Antichrist.
Millennial hopes and ambitions reached new levels as a result of the work of Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202). Joachim was the first theologian to reject Augustine and return to a notion of a future earthly age of bliss. Joachim revitalized every aspect of medieval millennialism: within decades of his death, prophecies attributed to him began to circulate that people identified with current events, mystical numerology, Franciscans and Dominicans, Holy Roman emperors, and popes all became elements in vast and evershifting predictions of imminent apocalypse. Chronological calculations fixed on 1250, then 1260 as the beginning of the new age; the Franciscan order split over interpretations of Joachite prophecy, one branch becoming inquisitors, the other, revolutionary millenarians; angelic popes and messianic emperors (some dead but returning), vied among lay and clerical constituencies for a following. In France, the imagery of millennialism continued to influence political discourse throughout the remainder of the Middle Ages. The catastrophes of the 14th century—the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death—renewed fervor for the final, divine intervention.
The hopes and expectations of the Christian Apocalypse offered the outlines of a powerful if ultimately impractical, and hence suicidal, ideology of social revolution to the peasants and the urban poor of France in the later Middle Ages. The thousands of shepherds, or Pastoureaux, who swept through the French countryside in 1251 and again in 1320, were convinced that they were God’s chosen instrument to free the Holy Land, thus bringing about the Parousia. While none ever reached the Holy Land, they traveled in bands throughout the kingdom of France, amazing some with their piety, all the while slaughtering clerics, Jews, and university intellectuals. Similar apocalyptic ideas regarding the election of the poor to usher in God’s kingdom motivated other popular insurrections and probably inspired the great Jacquerie of 1358.
Modern historians, limited by the nature of the documentation, tend to emphasize “political” or imperial millennialism in their analyses. The presence and strength of popular and revolutionary millennialism, rarely reported except by hostile clerical sources or by later spokesmen eager to downplay millenarian origins, are more difficult to assess. If one limits oneself only to explicitly millenarian groups, the numbers are few; if one identifies such groups by their patterns rather than their or others’ claims about them, they are far more numerous. Given how dangerous even proimperial millennialism could be (e.g., Spiritual Franciscans or John of Roquetaillade), the prominence of conservative millennialism in medieval thought may testify to the ineradicable nature of its appeal to the populace at large. In short, millennial beliefs and aspirations must be ranked among the most profound and versatile of medieval ideologies of social change.
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