The feeling that a new age has dawned will always serve to concentrate the mind. To leave a momentous anniversary behind is invariably to be made more sensitive to the very process of change. So it was, it seems to me, that concerns about global warming, despite the evidence for it having been in place for years, only really picked up pace with the new millennium. The same could be said of anxieties about other deep-rooted trends: the growth in tensions between Islam and the West, for instance, or the rise of China. So too, back in the 1030s, this book argues, men and women who felt themselves to have emerged from one order of time into another could not help but suddenly be aware of how strangely and disconcertingly the future now seemed to stretch ahead of them. For a long while, the notion that the world would be brought to an end, that Christ would come again, that a new Jerusalem would descend from the heavens, had been a kind of answer. With the disappointment of that expectation, the Christian people of western Europe found themselves with no choice but to arrive at solutions bred of their own restlessness and ingenuity: to set to the heroic task of building a heavenly Jerusalem on earth themselves.
The story of how they set about this, and of how a new society, and a new Christendom, came to be raised amid all the turmoil of the age is as remarkable and momentous as any in history—and one that must inevitably possess a certain epic sweep. A revolution such as the eleventh century witnessed, after all, can only truly be understood in the context of the order that it superseded. So it is that the narrative of this book reaches far back in time: to the very origins of the ideal of a Christian empire. The reader will be taken on a journey that embraces both the ruin of the pax Romana and the attempts, lasting many centuries, to exhume it; will read of a continent ravaged by invasion, social collapse, and the ethos of the protection racket; will trace the invention of knighthood, the birth of heresy and the raising of the earliest castles; will follow the deeds of caliphs, Viking sea kings and abbots.
Above all, however, this is a book about how an anticipation of the end of days led to a new beginning: for seen from our own perspective, the road to modernity stretches clearly from the first Millennium onwards, marked by abrupt shifts and turns, to be sure, but unriven by any total catastrophe such as separates the year 1000 from antiquity. Though it might sometimes appear an unsettling reflection, the monks, warriors and serfs of the eleventh century can be reckoned our direct ancestors in a way that the peoples of earlier ages never were. Millennium, in short, is about the most significant departure point in Western history: the start of a journey that perhaps, in the final reckoning, only a true apocalypse will serve to cut short.
Europe in the year 1000
‘But do not ignore this fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.’
Peter 3.8
The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.’
Hilaire Belloc
1
THE RETURN OF THE KING
The Whore of Babylon
‘All these will I give you,’ said Satan, showing Jesus the kingdoms of the world, ‘ifyou will fall down and worship me.’ But Jesus, scorning empire, refused the temptation. And Satan, confounded, retired in great confusion; and angels came and ministered to the Son of Man. Or so, at any rate, his followers reported.
The kingdoms shown to Jesus already had a single master: Caesar. Monarch of a city which had devoured the whole earth, and trampled it down, and broken it to pieces, ‘exceedingly terrible’, he swayed the fate of millions from his palace upon the hill of the Palatine in Rome. Jesus had been born, and lived, as merely one of his myriad subjects. The rule proclaimed by the ‘Anointed One’, the ‘Christ’, however, was not of this world. Emperors and their legions had no power to seize it. The Kingdom of Heaven was promised instead to the merciful, the meek, the poor. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.’ And Jesus — even facing death — practised what he had preached. When guards were sent to arrest him, his chief disciple, Peter, ‘the rock’ upon whom it had been prophesied that the Church itself would be built, sought to defend his master; but Jesus, healing the man wounded in the ensuing scuffle, ordered Peter to put up his weapon. ‘For all who take the sword,’ he warned, ‘will perish by the sword.” Dragged before a Roman governor, Jesus raised no voice of complaint as he was condemned to death as an enemy of Caesar. Roman soldiers guarded him as he hauled his cross through the streets of Jerusalem and out on to the execution ground, Golgotha, the Place of the Skull. Roman nails were hammered through his hands and feet. The point of a Roman spear was jabbed into his side.
In the years and decades that followed, Christ’s disciples, insisting to the world that their master had risen from His tomb in defiance of Satan and all the bonds of death, not surprisingly regarded the empire of the Caesars as a monstrosity. Peter, who chose to preach the gospel in the very maw of the beast, named Rome ‘Babylon’; and it was there that he, like his master, ultimately suffered death by crucifixion. Other Christians arrested in the capital were dressed
