A History of the End of the World (24 page)

For example, Frederick II (1194–1250), the German crusader-king, “was not averse to making personal use of messianic legends about the Last World Emperor as the restorer of Christian ity and reformer of the church when it suited him.”
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Pope Gregory IX, by contrast, referred to his rival as “the beast that rises from the sea”—“What other Antichrist should we await when, as is evident in his works, he is already come in the person of Frederick?”
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—and excommunicated him in 1227 when the emperor delayed in setting off for the Holy Land. Frederick, as it turned out, was disqualified for both titles after he died unheroically of dysentery and the world went on without him, although it was later predicted that Frederick, like Nero, would be resurrected.
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Another apocalyptic innovation of the thirteenth century is the notion of the
Pastor Angelicus
or “Angelic Pope,” a wholly benign figure who would replace the venal characters who had occupied the papal throne and caused so much consternation among the church reformers. One of the earliest references to the idea is found in the writing of Roger Bacon (ca. 1220–1292), the English Franciscan who is perhaps better known for his prescient interest in gunpowder, flying machines, and experimental science. “Forty years ago it was prophesied, and there have been many visions to the same effect, that there will be a pope in these times who will purify Canon Law and the Church of God,” he writes. “Because of the goodness, truth, and justice of this pope the Greeks will return to the obedience of the Roman Church, the greater part of the Tartars will be converted to the faith, and the Saracens will be destroyed.”
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The title of Pastor Angelicus was applied to various reformers who sat on the papal throne, including a remarkable man called Celestine V who was elected by the College of Cardinals in 1294, “either by desperation or by revelation,” after more than two years of stalemate.
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He was an unlikely candidate in an era when the pope was as much a political and diplomatic figure as a spiritual one: Celestine was a venerable hermit-monk of the Benedictine order who shunned the lavish digs that he was entitled to occupy and lived instead in a modest hut that he built with his own hands on the palace grounds. Celestine reigned only from July to December, then abdicated, and ended up a prisoner of his successor, Pope Boniface VIII, who promptly declared open war on the Spirituals.

So Revelation may have been regarded by pious Christians as a book whose real author was Jesus Christ, but its hard-won status as a work of Holy Writ did not prevent generation upon generation of artists and storytellers, fantasists and fabulists, preachers and propagandists, from adding their own touches to the biblical scenario. It’s a practice that began in antiquity, reached a certain flowering in the High Middle Ages, but—as we shall see—never really ended. Indeed, the phantasmagorical quality of Revelation itself seems to provoke and invite the reader to come up with visions of his or her own.

Then, too, the book of Revelation offered a way to make sense of the exotic peoples, places, and phenomena that came to the attention of western Christendom through the adventures (and misadventures) of crusaders, merchants, and explorers in the late Middle Ages. Here is another crack in the wall of conventional wisdom that has been built up around the so-called Dark Ages: the medieval world was hardly confined to the walled towns, feudal estates, and cloistered monasteries of Europe itself, and the medieval imagination resorted to old and familiar texts like Revelation when it encountered something new and unfamiliar.

A medieval manuscript titled
Mandeville’s Travels,
for example, elaborates upon a tale told about the satanic armies of Gog and Magog: they had been confined in a defile in the Caucasus Mountains of Asia by Alexander the Great, or so the legend goes, and that’s why the wall that holds them back is dubbed “Alexander’s Gate.” Gog and Magog are actually the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, the author continues, and he insists that the Hebrew language has been preserved and studied by the Jewish communities of Europe so that they could communicate with their long-lost brethren when the Antichrist releases them to fight in the battle of Armageddon. For the readers of
Mandeville’s Travels,
however, the account was more than a mere folktale: Gog and Magog were recognizable as the Tartar hordes and Saracen armies that threatened Christendom on its eastern frontier.

The same dreamy conflation of biblical prophesy and baffling reality can be found in
The Fifteen Signs of Doomsday,
a checklist of the signs and wonders—earthquakes, eruptions, falling stars, and various other oddities and curiosities—that would supposedly signal the arrival of the end-times. The text, which was traditionally ascribed to Jerome but first appeared in Ireland in the tenth century, survives in more than 120 manuscripts and a number of languages. And it suggests that any natural phenomenon—but especially a freak of nature—was likely to provoke a new apocalyptic thrill among those who waited and watched for the end of the world.

If a cow or a donkey gave birth to an offspring with catastrophic birth defects, for example, the medieval reader of Revelation might see apocalyptic meanings in the appearance of the misshapen creature. The so-called “Monk-Calf” and “Papal Ass” were famously touted as miraculous signs of “the abominations of the Roman Church and the nearness of the judgment.”
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And the sighting of the celestial light show that later came to be called Halley’s Comet was understood as a fulfillment of John’s visions in Revelation: “And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto earth,” writes John, “and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.”
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Apocalyptic fancies, no matter how weird or woozy, were capable of taking on the quality of revealed truth. The so-called Tripoli Prophecy, also known as the Cedars of Lebanon Prophecy, first appears in English chronicles of the early thirteenth century as a reading of astrological signs. To the modern reader, the words of the prophecy are near-gibberish:

But the credulous readers of the Middle Ages came to see the Tripoli Prophecy as an eerily accurate vision of the Mongol armies that crossed into Russia from the Steppes of Central Asia in 1237—and as a fulfillment of biblical prophecies of the end-times: “And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates,” goes the text of Revelation, “and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared.”
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The sure and urgent expectation of the end-times was, quite literally, a fact of life in the Middle Ages. That is why the author of
Mirror of History,
an encyclopedia published in 1250, presented the nightmarish visions of Hildegard of Bingen—who came to be called “the German Sibyl”
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—as “future history” rather than mere mystical speculation. Among the book’s other entries were a biography of the Antichrist, a checklist of the signs of the end-times, and a description of the last judgment.
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Neither Christ nor the Antichrist actually showed up, of course, but the long narrative title of a work by a German visionary named Nicholas Raimarus, first published in Nuremberg in 1606, is plain evidence that the end of the world was always regarded as inevitable and imminent:
Chronological, Certain, and Irrefutable Proof, from the Holy Scripture and Fathers, That the World Will Perish and the Last Day Will Come Within 77 Years
.
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No incident of life, in fact, was too mundane or too intimate to put someone in mind of the book of Revelation and its promise that the end of the world is near. “Concern with the last things was not limited to fanatics or heretics,” explains Richard K. Emmerson, “but was an essential part of what it meant to be in living in
novissimis diebus
”—that is, in the last days.
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After William the Conqueror put himself on the throne of England in 1066, for example, he famously ordered a survey of his new realm. The result was a book of lists—landowners and land holdings, freemen and slaves and livestock—that is most accurately described as a census tract. The common folk of England, however, were reminded of one of John’s haunting visions of judgment day in the book of Revelation: “And I saw the dead, small and great, standing before God; and the books were opened,” writes John, “and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.”
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The royal census “could hardly be further removed from the apocalyptic cataclysms of Judgment Day,” observes Penn Szittya, a specialist in medieval literature, but William’s new subjects spontaneously dubbed it the Domesday Boke (that is, “Doomsday Book”) in “an unspoken analogy” to those fateful books.
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Even a scandalous love affair might be seen to reveal apocalyptic meanings. When Peter Abelard, a charismatic teacher of theology, seduced, impregnated, and secretly married his young student, Héloïse, the star-crossed lovers were condemned by her uncle, a high churchman in the cathedral of Paris. The outraged uncle contrived to punish Peter with castration, and, as if that were not enough, he kept the lovers apart by confining Héloïse in a convent and sending Abelard into a monastery. The letters exchanged by Abelard and Héloïse are famous, of course. Rather less celebrated is a letter written by one of their contemporaries, who saw the defiant Abelard as the forerunner of Satan: “Peter Abelard already goes before the face of Antichrist to prepare his ways.”
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Apocalyptic imagery was so pervasive and so powerful that the fingerprints of the author of Revelation, however faint, can be found on the arts and letters of western Europe throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond, ranging from Caedmon and the Venerable Bede in the seventh and eighth centuries to Petrarch and Chaucer in the fourteenth century and Donne and Milton in the seventeenth century. The villainous Mordred of the Arthurian legend, for example, was seen as a stand-in for the Antichrist, and Merlin the Magician was credited with apocalyptic foresight: “Woe to the red dragon,” Merlin is made to say in a work dating to the twelfth century, “for his destruction is nigh.”
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Even Shakespeare, who preferred to draw his plot lines from classical pagan sources rather than the Bible, conjures up a vision of the end-times that was very much on the minds of his audience in the waning years of the sixteenth century.

Indeed, the Apocalypse shows up in some altogether unlikely and unexpected places. The medieval manuscript known as the
Carmina Burana,
a collection of ribald songs and satires and religious poetry dating back to the thirteenth century, includes a ritual of exorcism that invokes a “twisted venomed snake” with a sweeping tail
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—an oblique reference to the “great red dragon” of Revelation whose “tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and cast them to earth.”
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And Jan Vermeer, who depicts the mundane scene of a Dutch matron at work with a jeweler’s balance in
A Lady Weighing Pearls
(ca. 1660), pointedly includes a painting of the Last Judgment on the wall behind her—a wink and a nod to readers of Revelation who know that one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse carries a pair of balances as a symbol of the day of judgment that awaits all men and women in the end-times.

Perhaps the single best example of how Revelation was recycled for various artistic, political, and theological purposes is
The Divine Comedy.
Dante (ca. 1265–1321) was inspired by not only the canonical book of Revelation but also by some of the more obscure apocalyptic writings of the Pseudepigrapha, including the so-called
Apocalypse of Paul,
where the apostle is taken on a tour of heaven and hell that resembles the one depicted in Dante’s masterpiece. Dante borrows and uses the familiar imagery of Revelation, including the Great Whore, the woman clothed with the sun, the four living creatures, the seven-headed dragon, the seven lamps, and the twenty-four elders. And he engages in the same kind of apocalyptic projection that can be found in Revelation itself, suggesting obliquely that King Philip of France is the Antichrist and the papal court at Avignon—a rival papacy known in church history as “the Babylonian Captivity”
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—is the Mother of Harlots.

“It was shepherds such as you that the Evangelist had in mind,” he writes in the
Inferno,
addressing the pope at Avignon, “when she that sitteth upon the waters was seen by him committing fornication with the kings.”
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Dante also follows the example of Revelation by ornamenting his text with a mystical number code and challenging his readers to discern the historical figure whom it is meant to signify: “For I see surely…stars already close at hand…that shall bring us a time wherein a Five Hundred, Ten, and Five, sent by God,” writes Dante in
Purgatorio,
“shall slay the thievish woman [and] that giant who sins with her.” The alphanumeric code is understood by scholars to represent the numerical value of the letters in the name of Henry VII of Luxembourg, a now-obscure monarch who was Dante’s own candidate for the role of the Last World Emperor as predicted by the Tiburtine Sibyl.
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