Yet to look forward from what has aptly been dubbed ‘the Papal Revolution’, and to insist upon its far-reaching consequences, is to beg an obvious question: whatever could have prompted so convulsive and fateful a transformation? Its origins, as specialists candidly acknowledge, ‘are still hotly debated’. When Gregory met with Henry at Canossa, the papacy had already been serving as a vehicle for radical change for almost three decades- and pressure to reform it had been building for a decade or so before that. What could possibly have been astir, then, during the early 1030s, capable of inspiring such a movement? The question is rendered all the more intriguing by a most suggestive coincidence: that the very years which witnessed the first stirrings of what would go on to become the Papal Revolution have been identified by many medievalists as the end- point of an earlier, and no less fateful, period of crisis. A crisis that was centred, however, not in the courts and basilicas of the mighty, but out in the interminable expanses of the countryside - and not in Germany or Italy, but in France. Here, from around 980 onwards, it has been argued, a violent ‘mutation’ took place, one that served to give birth, over the span of only a few decades, to almost everything that is today most popularly associated with the Middle Ages: castles, knights and all.
Admittedly, the precise scope and character of this upheaval is intensely controversial, with some scholars disputing that it even so much as happened, and others claiming that it was a decisive turning point for Western Europe as a whole. Indeed, in a period of history that hardly lacks for treacherous bogs, the question of what precisely happened in France during the final decades of the tenth century and the opening decades of the eleventh has ended up as perhaps the most treacherous of all. French historians, for whom the entire debate has become a somewhat wearisome fixture, tend to sum it up with a single phrase: ‘L’an mil’, they call it – ‘the year 1000’.
A most arresting title. Scholarly shorthand it may be—and yet the date sounds no less hauntingly for that. Or does it only seem so to us – we who have passed from the second Christian millennium into the third? Historians, ever concerned not to foist contemporary presumptions on to the past, have conventionally argued as much. Indeed, until a couple of decades ago, even those who made the case most exuberantly for a wholesale transformation of western Europe around the time of the Millennium were content to regard the year 1000 itself as having been one with no more inherent significance than, say, 1789 or 1914. That it lay slap bang in the middle of a period identified by many historians as the birth-pangs of a radically new order – this, sober scholars insisted, was a mere coincidence, and nothing more. Certainly, any notion that the date might have generated the kind of apocalyptic anxieties that we, in the approach to the year 2000, projected on to the prophecies of Nostradamus and the Millennium Bug was regarded as utterly ludicrous: a fantasy to be slapped down quite as mercilessly as outre theories about the pyramids or the Templars. ‘For the moment that one stops combating an entrenched historical error,’ as one eminent medievalist sighed with weary hauteur, ‘back it immediately springs to life.’
No doubt – and yet lay into a hydra too indiscriminately and there is always the risk that truths as well as errors may end up being put to the sword. A neck may twist, and coil and snake – and yet, for all that, not merit being severed. ‘The false terrors of the year one thousand’, as one recent book termed them, have tended to be dismissed as a febrile and flamboyant concoction of the nineteenth- century Romantics - and yet that was not wholly fair. Often -- surprisingly often, indeed - the myths about the first Millennium that twentieth-century historians set themselves to combat were of their own devising. A universal conviction that the world would end upon the very striking of the millennial hour; princes and peasants alike flocking to churches in panic as the fearful moment approached; an entire Christendom ‘frozen in utter paralysis’ – here were ‘false terrors’ indeed, grotesque and implausible straw men set up largely by the sceptics themselves. Not only were they distortions, in many cases, of what nineteenth-century historians had actually claimed; they were also, and infinitely more damagingly, distortions of the evidence that survived from the time of the Millennium itself.
To talk of ‘terrors’ alone, for instance, is to ignore the profound degree to which, for the wretched, for the poor, for the oppressed, the expectation of the world’s imminent end was bred not of fear but rather of hope, it comes, it comes, the Day of the Lord, like a thief in the night!’ A warning, certainly, but also a message of joy — and significant not only for its tone but for its timing. The man who delivered it, a monk from the Low Countries who in 1012 had been granted a spectacular vision of the world’s end by an archangel, no less, had not the slightest doubt that the Second Coming was at hand. That more than a decade had passed since the Millennium itself bothered him not a jot: for just as the ‘terrors of the year 1000′ were not simply terrors, so also were they far from being confined to the year 1000 itself.
To be sure, the millennial anniversary of Christ’s birth was an obvious focus for apocalyptic expectations – but it was not the only, nor even the principal, one. Far
