The Millennium
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 29 July 2003
Abstract
The Year 1000
William of Volpiano commissioned Rodulphus Glaber to write a history of the “events and prodigies” that occurred around the year 1000. Richard Landes uses the work of Glaber to describe the eleventh century, and does it fully on a website devoted to millennial matters. For Glaber, the millennium was time for the final battle, the beginning of the apocalypse.
All this accords with the prophecy of Saint John [Revelation], who said that Satan would be released once the thousand years had been completed.
Millennial movements emphasize not so much doctrine as social issues—justice, oppression and inequality. Apocalyptic belief subverted the established power. The fear of that power was the same fear in reverse—the clergy too thought the End was near, and the final battle with Satanic forces was beginning. The poor were promised, in Revelation, the millennium when all would change for them.
Jesus began it all, for Christians, and was crucified. Speaking of the End of the World, Jesus proclaimed to his disciples:
Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.Matthew 24:34
That was 2000 years ago, and many generations have passed. Nothing yet seems to have been fulfilled. The original Jerusalem Christians who were led by James the Just, and were Jews, expected that the generation to be up when the Jewish war was fought, but Satan—Rome—won that one. The Catholic Church then postponed the Parousia for a thousand years, but after another 400 years, to be on the safe side, it propounded a new excuse, in the fifth century—the kingdom of God was social and psychological, rather than an event ending reality. The kingdom had indeed come! S Augustine of Hippo told the established Church that it was the kingdom of God (The City of God), And so it seemed from the luxury of the high prelates of the Church, but the poor, who preferred the original simple Christianity, continued to wait patiently for the millennium.
From about 550, “Little Dennis”, Dionysus Exiguus, had worked out the system of dating as years from the supposed date of birth of Christ, denoted by AD. It was adopted in the West so any one willing to listen to a priest or prophet could know when the millennium was expected. If it was a millennium after the birth of Jesus, the correct date was about 1000. If the death of Jesus marked the beginning of the millennium then its end would be around 1030. Glaber relates these tales as part of the “wondrous events that occurred around the millennial year since the Incarnation”. The three decades from 1000 to 1030 must have been the significant ones. Glaber was writing in the 1020s, and he shows direct interest in the millennium at the time.
The clergy held to the Augustinian view that no one could know when the end was, even if it were near. Various earlier dates of a millennium had come and gone, and they hoped to remain blasé about the coming one. Augustine advised against executing the Circumcelliones as heretics because it made them into Christian martyrs. So, they were supposed to keep tolerant, but they suddenly did not. Church authority began using massive force against heresy. Execution was largely a millennial innovation in Christendom. To start executing people for heresy in the West must have signified witless fear.
Catharism rivalled Catholic Christianity, and would have ousted the more corrupt religion had it not been hacked down, brutally and savagely. During the eleventh century, people of this religion began to appear everywhere—most visibly on the stake and gibbet. Theirs was a pacific religion, as it had been taught to them! The Catholic Church, however, remembered it got where it was by being a battle totem for Constantine, and began using its historical holy weapons of persuasion—persecution, torture and murder.
In 1010, the news of the Moslem messiah, al-Hakim’s destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem arrived, proof that the End was nigh. There is a close parallel between violence against heretics and the singular violence against Jews at just this time. Jews were being asked whether they were with the saved or the damned. To be with the saved, they were obliged to convert to Christianity, otherwise they were aligning themselves with Satan. Glaber, a contemporary chronicler, says that Christendom rose to destroy the Jews. Soon, heretics were in the same boat. In 1012, several “Manichæans” were prosecuted in Germany. In 1017, thirteen canons and priests of the diocese of Orleans were convicted of Manichæism and burned alive. In 1022, cases were recorded at Liège, in 1030, in Italy and Germany, in 1043, near Châlons in France, in 1052, again in Germany. Most documents on heresy are written after 1022, describing the continuing phenomenon once it had started.
Bishop Wazo tells Roger of Châlons, in Anselm's Gesta episcoporum leodiensium, the authorities should not be doing God’s job for him in sorting “the tares from the wheat”, and especially burning them, and Wazo called on S Augustine as evidence of it. The tares naturally were the heretics. Heribert wrote to all the churches of the world about the heretics of Perigord, while John of Ripoll wrote to his bishop telling him to beware the presence of heretics of the same “type” as those burned at Orleans, and to search for them everywhere in his bishopric.
From the execution of heretics, in 1022 by the king, killing heretics must have been widespread in France, though they must mainly have been commoners at such an early date when the nobility would not have been easily intimidated, or failed to protect themselves. Indeed, the nobility and the higher clergy must have been in league to suppress popular religion. There was nothing unusual about this. The Frankish aristocracy, with clerical backing, had slaughtered common people of Orleanais in 859 for arming themselves against the Vikings. Paradoxically, similar violence had been later directed against Norman peasants towards the end of the millennium. Anselm added in a comment on the French, which Landes cites for us:
For he had heard that they identified heretics by pallor alone, as if it were certain fact that those who have a pale complexion are heretics. Thus, through error coupled with cruelty, many truly Catholic people had been killed in the past.
Both Glaber and Ademar confirm it. Ademar writes:
And from the secular judges of Christian dignity not a few [accused heretics] when submitted to torture, preferred to choose execution to the salvation of conversion.
Glaber (from Landes) describes the the millennial case of Leutard of Châlons-sur-Marne:
It occurred around the end of the millennial year that a common man in Gaul in the village of Vertus in the county of Châlons appeared. As events proved in the end, it is probable that he was an envoy of Satan. This is how his most vicious insanity began. One day when he was working alone in the field, he fell asleep and dreamt that a great swarm of bees entered his secret parts. They came out of his mouth and stung him all over many times, but eventually spoke, ordering him to do things impossible for humans. Exhausted, he arose, went home and dismissed his wife in divorce as if following the evangelical precept. He went out as if to pray but, entering into a church and ripping down a crucifix, he broke it. Whoever saw him was struck with fear, believing him to be what he was, insane. But he managed to persuade them, as rustics have inconstant minds, that he did all this from a wondrous revelation from God.
He poured forth a great many useless and empty sermons and, desiring to be a teacher, he led people away from the master of doctrine. For he claimed that tithes were unnecessary and senseless. And just as the other heresies, the more craftily to deceive, he claimed that the scriptures were divine although he opposed them, and similarly he claimed that though the prophets said many good things, they were also mistaken in some matters. His fame, as if that of one of a religious person of sound mind, rapidly won him a not inconsiderable following among the commoners.
When the aged bishop of the diocese, Gebuin, heard of this, he ordered Leutard brought before him. When Gebuin questioned him about all that he was reported to have said or done, Leutard began to hide the poison of his vileness, wishing that he had not learnt to take texts from Holy Scripture for his purposes. But the able bishop saw that his teachings were not only incorrect but filled with great and damnable error, and so he revealed to all how Leutard’s madness had led to heresy. In this way he rescued many of those who had been deceived, and restored them more firmly than ever to the Catholic faith. As for Leutard, when he saw that he was defeated and deprived of the support of the commoners, he committed suicide by throwing himself in a well.
Leutard was a charismatic messianic figure, who arose around the end of the millennial year, and Glaber thought it relevant to note this. The end of 1000 was the moment where people, as Augustine had warned, would lose faith, disappointed by the failure of ecclesiastical promises for that year. The significance of Leutard and the apostolic tradition of the High Middle Ages is that the faith lost in post apocalyptic times was not faith in Christianity, but in ecclesiastical Christianity. It was the failure of the millennium to bring believing peasant Christians any nearer to the Parousia and the kingdom of heaven on earth that led to the realization that the clergy of the established church were phonies.
Glaber seemed to have modelled Leutard on Gregory’s “false Christ”, driven to his religious madness by flies, but bees drove Leutard mad. Flies are unquestionably from the devil, being part of the Zoroastrian evil creation—bees are symbols of good, and compunction, which drives the soul to repent, feels like bee-stings in Gregory the Great’s teachings. Moreover, bees had some religious significance in early Christianity, if Joseph and Aseneth means anything. Conceivably the flies of the earlier prophet were really bees but Gregory could not bring himself to say so.
The ending is not convincing. Heretical leaders did not normally end so resignedly. Apocalyptic prophets manage to retain the loyalty of their followers. Both Ademar and Wazo of Liège said that once won to heresy, people were lost forever to the church. Heresy certainly continued in the diocese of Châlons for centuries more. Wazo’s letter of the mid-1040s, answered an inquiry from the Bishop of Châlons about how to handle the continuing problem. Glaber’s ending looks like a Church calumny, the sort of thing the historian has to be alert for.
Leutard is perhaps a cautionary fiction. Landes thinks he stands for a much broader range of millennial protest against the church, a range which is rich compared with the previous 500 years, but one that corroborates many points Glaber makes. Vilgard, the worshipper of the classics mentioned below is similar. Through these two men, Landes thinks Glaber shows the two extreme reactions to the advent of the apocalyptic year 1000—popular surges of millennialism and elite retreats from Christianity.
Though the messages of the messianic leaders of this time differ, they are more alike than they are different. The consistency of the message suggests they was a reservoir of consistent beliefs, that were anti-ecclesiastical and upon which the messianic leaders drew in a series of revolts. Some of them were reported to have done bizarre things without upsetting their followers, but the critical reader has to consider that the reports come from clerics and they had a motive for making the revolutionaries seem ludicrous. If, these reports are factual or close to the truth, they serve to indicate the depth of conviction that the followers had for their leaders. Some, mainly clergy converted to heresiarch, were just opportunists and rogues out for what they could get. Leutard seemed not to be in this category, and did not even claim to be a Christ, unless the report suppresses it.
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Moses and Exodus
