A History of the End of the World

God. In the midst of all of this, more people than can be believed ran to the churches in crowds, and the priests blessed and handed out swords, clubs and pilgrim wallets in a new ritual.”⁸⁷

Some of the Crusaders were so agitated that they could not wait until they reached the Holy Land to unsheathe their swords. As they crossed the European countryside, they set upon the Jewish communities that lay in their line of march, inflicting a kind of proto-Holocaust on those whom they had been taught to hate as members of the Synagogue of Satan. Indeed, the “folk eschatology” of medieval Europe, as we have seen, included the notion that the Antichrist would be the offspring of Satan and a Jewish whore, and so the crusaders were unsentimental about slaughtering Jewish men, women, and children alike, any one of whom might be the Antichrist himself.⁸⁸

The same apocalyptic impulse was triggered in the poor and disempowered folk who, from time to time, rose up against their masters just as Hildegard and Brother John had predicted. Thus, for example, Wat Tyler’s Rebellion of 1381—a bloody rebellion by English workers and farmers against the gentry and the clergy—was seen as a sign of the end-times, and the armed mob was likened to the apocalyptic armies of Gog and Magog. The Taborites, a movement composed of Bohemian peasants and the urban poor of Prague, set up their own armed communes in the fifteenth century in anticipation of the millennial kingdom that would replace kings and priests alike. By 1452, a punitive expedition succeeded in capturing the last stronghold of the Taborites in what turned out to be only a toy- box version of the Apocalypse.

“Liberate us from the evil Antichrist and his cunning army,” they chanted as they prepared for Armageddon. “Accursed be the man who withholds his sword from shedding the blood of the enemies of Christ.”⁸⁹

The tremors and eruptions that followed in the wake of the Protestant Reformation included an armed peasant uprising in Germany under the leadership of Thomas Muntzer (ca. 1488–1525), a minister who was persuaded that God had chosen him as the new revelator on the very eve of the end-times. “Harvest-time is here, so God himself has hired me for his harvest,” declared Muntzer, alluding to the Grim Reaper as depicted in Revelation. “I have sharpened my scythe, and my lips, hand, skin, hair, soul, body, life curse the unbelievers.” He saw his faithful followers as the “Elect,” and everyone else as the minions of the Devil. “For the ungodly have no right to live,” he insisted, “save what the Elect choose to allow them.” Like so many other messianic warriors, he was hunted down, tortured, and beheaded by the very princes whom he boldly condemned as “godless scoundrels.”⁹⁰

Another upwelling of “apocalyptic activism” was prompted by the crusade that Louis XIV carried out in the late seventeenth century against the Protestants of France, the Huguenots.⁹¹ Long accustomed to persecution and oppression by the Catholic monarch, they rallied to the charismatic “child-prophets” who assured their elders that the latest outrages were sure signs of the Second Coming. And some Huguenot preachers, embracing the popular notion that the French “Babylon” would be destroyed in 1690, succeeded in setting off a guerilla war by the so-called Camisard rebels against the army of the Sun King. Fatefully, the war ended with the withdrawal of all civil and religious liberties and the self-exile of nearly a half million Huguenots.

But the acting out of the apocalyptic impulse reached its fullest expression in 1534 with the establishment of a self-proclaimed messianic kingdom in the German city of Munster. A radical faction of Anabaptists managed to convince themselves that the whole world except their hometown would shortly be destroyed. Munster, they believed, would be the New Jerusalem and the site of “a kingdom of a thousand years,” and they anointed a former tailor and sometime actor named Jan Bockelson (also known as Jan van Leiden) as “Messiah of the Last Days.”⁹² And the first public act of the charismatic, handsome, and high-spirited young man was a characteristically showy one.

“He ran naked through the town in a frenzy and then fell into a silent ecstasy which lasted three days,” writes Norman Cohn, an influential British historian specializing in medieval studies, in The Pursuit of the Millennium. “When speech returned to him he called the population together and announced that God had revealed to him that the old constitution of the town, being the work of men, must be replaced by a new one which would be the work of God.”⁹³

The townsfolk were required to surrender their gold and silver, submit to rebaptism, and comply with a strict code of sexual morality that was meant to purify all good Christians in anticipation of the Day of Judgment. Later, however, Bockelson revised the code to permit the practice of polygamy in imitation of the Hebrew patriarchs and kings—and he promptly took a gaggle of young women, “none older than twenty,” as his own wives. Anyone who defied his authority was subject to capital punishment: “Now I am given power over all nations of the earth, and the right to use the sword to the confusion of the wicked and in defence of the righteous,” he declared. “So let none in this town stain himself with crime or resist the will of God, or else he shall without delay be put to death with the sword.”⁹⁴ Bockelson, seated on a golden throne, presided over the beheadings that were conducted in the town square with the “Sword of Justice”—and the King of the New Jerusalem himself lopped off more than a few heads. Among the victims was a woman who had committed the crime of “denying her husband his marital rights.”⁹⁵

“The glory of all the Saints is to wreak vengeance,” declared one of the royal propagandists. “Revenge without mercy must be taken on all who are not marked with the Sign (of the Anabaptists).”⁹⁶

The “kingdom of a thousand years,” of course, was doomed from the start. The local bishop called upon the surrounding cities and states to contribute arms, men, horses, and money to mount a campaign against Munster, and the town was blockaded and besieged. Bockelson and his royal court continued to dine on the meat and drink that he had requisitioned from his subjects, but everyone else was reduced to eating dogs and cats, mice and rats, then “grass and moss, old shoes and the whitewash on the walls,” and finally “the bodies of the dead.”⁹⁷ At last, in 1535, the town was taken by the besieging army in a final surprise attack, and the defenders were put to a general slaughter that lasted several days. Bockelson and his cohorts were tortured at length with red-hot irons, and their broken bodies were put on public display as a warning against any other like- minded readers of Revelation who might be tempted to engage in a similar “horrendous novelty.”

So it was that a sermonizer might seek to set his audience afire with terrors and yearnings and end up in the flames of his own making. Such was the fate of a man who has been called “a martyr of prophecy,” Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), perhaps the single most famous (or notorious) of the apocalyptic radicals.⁹⁸ Florence was destined to be the New Jerusalem, or so Savonarola believed and preached, and he saw it as his divine mission to make it so. At a moment in history when Europe was afflicted by “presages, phantoms and astrological conjunctions of dreadful import,” as one contemporary chronicler put it, the Florentines were a ready and willing audience.⁹⁹

Like the author of Revelation, Savonarola was a self-appointed soldier in a culture war. The Dominican friar detested what he called “the perversities and the extreme evil of these blind peoples amongst whom virtue is reduced to zero and vice triumphs on every hand”¹⁰⁰—that is, the worldly ways of life and art that are seen today as the glory of the Renaissance. And, just as John denounced the pleasures and treasures of Roman paganism (“Cargo of gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet…”),¹⁰¹ Savanarola condemned the opulent lives of the Roman Catholic clergy.

“You have been to Rome,” he declared. “Well, then, you must know something of the lives of these priests. They have courtesans, squires, horses, dogs. Their houses are filled with carpets, silks, perfumes, servants. Their pride fills the world. Their avarice matches their pride. All they do, they do for money.”¹⁰²

Savonarola, again like the author of Revelation, was a gifted and powerful preacher, and his sermons “ignited a fireball of religious panic that heated even the city’s most urbane minds,” according to cultural historian Robin Barnes.¹⁰³ His public lectures on the book of Revelation were so popular, in fact, that he was forced to move to ever-larger quarters in order to accommodate the crowds. They took to heart his warning that the end of the world was near: “torrents of blood,” “a terrible famine,” and “a fierce pestilence” awaited the sinners.¹⁰⁴ And they surely thrilled at the sight of a seer in action: “My reasons for announcing these scourges and calamities are founded on the Word of God,” ranted Savonarola in one of his white-hot sermons. “I have seen a sign in the heavens. Not a cross this time, but a sword. It’s the Lord’s terrible swift sword which will strike the earth!”¹⁰⁵

Above all, Savonarola commanded his congregation to forgo the pleasures of the flesh in anticipation of the Day of Judgment. “Sodomy is Florence’s besetting sin,” declared Savonarola, who complained that “a young boy cannot walk in the streets without of falling into evil hands.”¹⁰⁶ But he was no less punishing when it