The Real History of the End of the World (15 page)

Joachim, in his afterlife, took on the image of a seer in more areas than for the end of the world. His work was known fairly early but not well understood, if the commentaries on it are anything to go by. By the middle of the thirteenth century, he was a name on a list of prophets from the ancient past.

Joachim's computations and views on the nature of the Trinity were never that much studied. It was his prophecies that made him famous. So, like Merlin, the Sybil, and other ancient prophets, new predictions written under his name eventually eclipsed the reality of his personality and his life's work.

Apocalypses, or books of revelations, were not so numerous:
but of these too there were several. One of these particularly,
the apocalypse of St. Paul, I could almost wish that we had,
since it pretended to relate the ineffable things he saw in the
third heaven. But it is lost as well as others: and if that which
we have under the name of St. John had been lost likewise,
there might have been some madmen the fewer, and
Christianity would not have suffered so much.

—Henry, Lord Bolingbroke (1678-1751)
¹

 

 

 

 

P
eople can't decide when the Middle Ages ended. Personally, I think we're still in them. After all, if this is the last age, then any quibbles about eras within it are rather pointless. However, there was one event of the middle of the fourteenth century that changed Europe and the Near East from being basically optimistic about the future to being frightened of it. The Apocalypse was no longer a distant event that one could laugh at in plays and stories. It walked the streets. Representations of the monsters no longer came from visions or nightmares but one's own village.

The plague had come.

In the early twenty-first century, the fear of global pandemics returned with the advent of AIDS, followed by avian and swine flus, with a shadowy worry about
Ebola.
But, while the threat is there, the pandemic hasn't actually happened yet. The response in Europe to the Black Death is a warning of how we might react.

It is not certain that the plague that hit Europe in the 1340s was bubonic plague, as has long been assumed. But that isn't important. People died between sunrise and sunset, along with their families, friends, and whole towns. It didn't spare people who were rich or pious or kind. No one was certain how it was transmitted or what to do to prevent catching it.

In their search for explanations of this disaster, it was natural to think that this disease was the first sign of the end that had been prophesied and ignored for centuries. In the twenty years after the plague, any number of supposedly ancient prophecies circulated, all showing that the plague was a harbinger of the coming of the Antichrist and the time of tribulation.
²

I would argue that this was the end of the optimistic Middle Ages and the beginning of an age of uncertainty. While the economic recovery of Europe didn't take that long, the emotional recovery never began. The fifteenth century saw much more questioning of the order of society, especially the validity of religious authority. In the past, most heretical movements, with the exception of the Cathars, who established their own church, were intended to reform the papacy, not destroy it. After the plague, the Catholic Church split into squabbling nationalistic factions, which each elected and followed their own pope. This Great Schism lasted from 1378 to 1415. Even after the matter had been settled and there was one agreed upon pope, the papacy had lost a lot of prestige.

Added to the undermining of papal authority was the lessening of importance of the warrior class. Gunpowder had been introduced into Europe, and now it wasn't necessary to spend years developing the skill to fight with sword and lance. Even though most early cannons had a good chance of blowing up as they fired, any idiot could load one and set it off to bring down a castle wall.

Finally, the latter half of the fifteenth century, the Age of Exploration, resulted not only in the discovery of new ways to get to the wealth of India and China but in shocking revelations about the world itself. Each succeeding change in a worldview that had worked for five hundred years caused more people to wonder if this upheaval was what the Bible meant when it warned of a coming Armageddon.

Then the sixteenth century rearranged the face of Europe. There was no longer one unified Christendom in which the secular rulers used the pope as a universal arbiter. Of course, that only ever existed in theory, but it was a nice, tidy theory that helped organize society and let people get on with day-to-day activities. Now the principalities were divided and subdivided, some staying in allegiance to the papacy, others following one or another of the new splinter groups, each of which claimed to be the only true, apostolic Christians. To make things worse, some cities had been taken over by the groups and turned into theocracies. This generally didn't last long, but it was unsettling to have noble rulers replaced by charismatic religious leaders.

Added to that, it seemed there was a whole new continent that had gone unnoticed for millennia. And there were people on it! Wasn't it bad enough that the world order at home was turned upside down?

The discovery of the inhabitants of North and South America rocked the belief system of the Europeans. How did those people get there? Were they really human? Some believed that the natives were the lost tribes of Israel. In that case, their conversion would certainly mean that the end times were near. For some of the Puritan settlers in New England, the conversion of the natives was one of the essential goals intended to hasten the Millennium. Even Christopher Columbus saw his voyages in a millennial light.

The myths about Columbus having to prove the earth was round have been used to show that he was a modern Renaissance man in a dark and superstitious age. Actually, everyone knew the shape of the earth and had for some time. Columbus didn't have to prove it. What he needed to do was demonstrate that he could get to the east by sailing west without starving on the way. In his library, scholars have found marginal notes in Columbus' own hand that show he knew of Roger Bacon's thirteenth-century theories that there were Atlantic islands and maybe even another continent to counterbalance Europe, Africa, and Asia. He may have thought he could use these as stops for provisions.
³

That he thought he was on a millennial quest is made clear in his writings as well, particularly the notes that make up his “Book of Prophecies.”
⁴
In it, he collected quotations from biblical texts as well as from medieval Christian writers such as Nicholas of Lyra and Joachim of Fiore. In his arguments to convince King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, Columbus stressed the eschatological importance of the mission, especially for the later voyages.

The Franciscan and Dominican missionaries who accompanied the Conquistadors to the new continent were on their own millennial quest. The remaking of the world as Christian and the establishment of the New Jerusalem was a cherished goal to both Protestants and Catholics.

But it wasn't just in Christian Europe that people were considering that these might be the end times. Jewish messianic figures, like Sabbatai Sevi, attracted thousands of followers. In Ismaili Islam, there continued to be those who declared they were the promised Mahdi, who would usher in the end times.

In China, the sixteenth century saw rebellions under the banner of the Pure Land White Lotus, and many expected the Buddhist Mayatreya to appear to lead their armies. And it is possible that The Aztecs were conquered so easily by the Spanish because of a world-changing prophecy in their culture.

At some point, society developed a strong undercurrent of pessimism, especially in Europe. From now on, at any given moment, someone, somewhere would be anticipating the imminent end of the world.

1
Henry St. John Bolingbroke,
The Works of Lord Bolingbroke: With a Life, Prepared Expressly for This Edition, Containing Additional Information Relative to His Personal and Public Character
, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1841), 477.

2
Robert Lerner, “The Black Death and Western European Eschatological Mentalities,”
The American Historical Review
86, no. 3 (1981): 533-552.

3
Delno C. West and August Kling,
The Libro de las Profecias of Christopher Columbus
(Gainsville: University of Florida Press), 11.

4
Ibid., 99-260. This edition has Latin and Spanish on facing pages to the English translation. Very useful.

5
Ibid., 29.

[Hus] replied that he had neither preached nor wished to
follow the erroneous doctrine of Wyclif or of anyone else,
as Wyclif was neither his father nor a Czech.

—Peter of Mladonovice, “The Examination and Execution of Hus”
¹

 

 

 

 

T
he winds of religious change swept all of Europe in the fifteenth century. Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic, was no exception. One of the most influential of the leaders of the new movements was Jan Hus (c. 1372-1415), a priest and follower of the English reformer John Wycliffe, despite his denial of this at his trial. Hus agreed with Wycliffe that the pope and his court in Rome should not have the final word on matters of dogma unless they changed their lives and returned to the poverty and humility of the Apostles.
²

Prague already had a tradition of lay involvement in preaching the Gospels. In 1402, two wealthy men of the town had established the Bethlehem Chapel, a building only for preaching, with no Mass or other sacraments.
³

When the Church banned all of Wycliffe's writings, Hus was forbidden to preach. But Hus was both a priest and an influential master at the University of Prague. He produced tracts and pamphlets outlining his interpretations of Wycliffe's work, often in a much less inflammatory tone. However, his antipapal attitudes did not go unnoticed. In the late spring of 1415, he was summoned to the Council of Constance to be questioned about his beliefs.
⁴

The council was held in the cathedral of Constance, in Germany. While the interrogation of Hus was an important matter, the first order of business was to decide which of three claimants was the real pope. The split in the church had occurred in 1378, and while everything was in chaos, heresy had been allowed to flourish. The hierarchy and the secular rulers realized that this was leading to a crisis of authority. In the end, two of the popes were deposed and one resigned. In 1417, a new candidate, Martin V, was given the office.

Hus, who had been imprisoned at a Dominican monastery at Gottlieben to await his trial, was brought before the council on June 5, 1415. He had apparently been promised an open interrogation as well as the freedom to return to Bohemia afterward. However, he wrote to a friend that he wasn't going to be allowed a public forum unless he paid 2000 ducats to “the servants of the antichrist.”
⁵
He also promised his friend that if he did take back his antipapal statements, it would be “only with my mouth, but not from my heart.”
⁶

He was questioned for several days on his support of Wycliffe's forty-five articles of faith and on his own book,
On the Church
. Hus thought he was being clever by answering that only a pope who “sells benefices, is proud, avaricious or otherwise morally opposed to Christ,”
⁷
is an antichrist. A good pope would not be. I don't think he was as subtle as he thought.

The council adjourned on the morning of June 7 to watch a solar eclipse and then returned to Hus. The points on which he was questioned were mainly matters of doctrine: on the nature of Christ in the communion Host, if laypeople could have communion in both bread and wine, and whether the sacraments performed by a priest in mortal sin were valid. One question was rather intriguing. The council wanted to know if Hus had said an earthquake that took place during an earlier council in London was a sign that God agreed with Wycliffe.
⁸