Were People Scared of the Year 1000 New Millenium ?
Few periods have as bad reputation as around the year 1000. Romantic historians in the nineteenth century have accredited the idea of a period of anarchy, famine, gullibility and fear.
Contemporary testimonies
From the rare acts of the time, there is nothing to expect. Some people speak of a “world which is approaching its end”: common place, customary since the 6th century. There are also a few letters, a few chronicles, all written by Church mens: by vocation, by training, they read and interpret the world like a vast book, written by the Creator. Comets, eclipses, “star battles”, birth of monsters, food shortages and epidemics: everything has a meaning.
The Burgundian monk Rodulfus Glaber built his Chronicle (which spreads from 900 to 1046) around the demonstrations accompanying the two millennia of 1000 and 1033. The impiety of the men of the century, the rapacity of aristocrats, anthropophagy at the worst of famine, so many crimes that call for divine punishment. That the beliefs of Rodulfus Glaber, an unstable and tormented spirit, were shared, is not improbable: we know that in Paris a preacher waved before his audience the threat of the millennium and predicted the arrival of the Antichrist for the year 1000.
The file, particularly thin, is not enough to support the hypothesis of a collective psychosis: little more anxiety, no doubt, than a few centuries before or after. The whole Middle Ages, tending towards salvation, was seen in the middle of an aging and decrepit world.
Hopes for the year 1000
More than anarchy, the period is one of a reorganization of powers on local bases: society goes out of ancient patterns and, in an often oppressive framework, is reconstituted around cells and parishes. The time of great perils has passed for the West. The famine can always arise, but famines are less frequent, the “plagues” less general. Undoubtedly driven by a climatic improvement, demographic and agricultural growth is obvious: earlier on the Mediterranean shores, it increased during the 11th century.
The overall assessment can certainly not hide the daily, physical and moral violence. Rare testimonies remain of hard-subdued peasant revolts, such as in Normandy (996-997), as of heretical movements which concern theologians haunted by the reports of faith and reason, or which involve marginal clerics and “illiterate” , that is to say layman: thus in Champagne, where one recriminates against the tithe, in Flanders and Milanese. Much more than fear, it is a powerful movement of bottom which carries the West on the roads to the conquest of the ground. Rodulfus Glaber himself translates well the optimism of this young world which believes itself old: began on almost all the earth, mainly in Italy and in Gaul, to rebuild the basilicas (…), as if the world had shaken itself to reject old age and had, almost everywhere, put on a white coat of churches. ”
Millenarianism
We call millenarism a movement to challenge order, based on the expectation of a “Messiah”: an envoy of God called to establish on earth a reign of a thousand years (millennium), before the Last Judgment.
In Christianity
The problem for Christians is that the Messiah has already come and has refused to establish his earthly reign. The Christian Church therefore sees in the millennium only the promise of its triumph in the world, before the Last Judgment.
But the millennial tradition is based on the Apocalypse of John, anticipated chronicle of the end times, which describes a period of calamities, that of the provisional reign of an Antichrist.
Historical movements
It is especially after the 11th century that they take shape. Until the thirteenth century, crises were caused by the enlightened who pretended to be the Messiah.
Among some clerics, millenarism leads to a criticism of the ecclesiastical hierarchy: Joachim of Fiore, who announces the Apocalypse for 1260, influences part of the Franciscan current. The movement was exacerbated at the end of the Middle Ages and took an anticlerical (Hungarian taborites), psychological (flagellant) or revolutionary social (Münster rebellion, 1535) sense.
A trend of all religions
Millenarianism exists in Judaism as in Christianity, in Islam as in “primitive” beliefs, such as the Cargo cult in Melanesia, which promises the expulsion of the Whites and the establishment of an age of peace and prosperity marked by the return of the ancestors on a large white boat.
