Millennium by Holland, Tom (diy ebook reader .TXT) 📗

Lord of the Heavens as His deputy, and whose duty it was, a most fearsome and burdensome one, to uphold for Him the world. Even in his very travails, if these were endured for the good of a suffering people, there might be glimpsed an imitation of the Passion of Christ Himself. And yet there was, for this reason, in the steady collapse of the royal authority established by Charlemagne, much more at stake than the future of the Prankish crown alone. To many Christians, the troubled condition of kingship in Francia appeared to speak of a sickness that might sap the order of the very universe, and menace God’s people wherever they lived. Only human sinfulness, poisoning the world so that ‘men behave like monsters of the deep, blindly devouring all those weaker than themselves’, could explain the evident scale of heaven’s anger. The landscape of Christendom, which under Charlemagne had been compared to a tapestry of blazing stars, appeared increasingly to be returning to blackness. As the tenth century since the Incarnation continued to darken, so men looked at the world about them, and dreaded the portents that they read there.

In the sky, for instance, phantom hordes might sometimes be seen, their ranks formed of swirling fire; and yet, since the turning of the century, there had been deadlier signs, and more terrifying hordes, unleashed upon the groaning earth itself. Back in 899, wild squadrons of horsemen, so strange and savage as to seem a sudden eruption from the nightmares of every civilised Christian, had descended upon the plain of Lombardy, and stripped it bare. ‘Of disgusting aspect, with deep-set eyes and short stature’, the invaders were rumoured even to have drained their victims of their blood. One year later, and the hoof beats of the mysterious barbarians had made all Bavaria shake. Soon, they were being heard as far west as Provence. Every year, somewhere in the decaying Frankish Empire, new fields, new villages, new monasteries were scoured and plundered utterly.

Against foes such as these, clouds of monstrous hornets, possessed of such speed as to seem barely human and the devilish ability to fire arrows even while on the gallop, resistance seemed futile. Not until the earth split open, the invaders were reported to have boasted, would they ever be brought to defeat. Their wretched victims were inclined to agree. Certainly, there were few among the local princes who seemed capable of making a stand. Even when the raiders were at their most vulnerable, withdrawing to their lairs on the Danube along rutted and muddy trails, their wagons piled high with loot, their trains encumbered by tethered and stumbling captives, they were rarely confronted. To survivors of their razzias, the scenes of devastation that were their inevitable aftermath — the countryside blackened, the churches still smoking, the corpses of those not fit to be enslaved left fly-blown amid the ashes – appeared visions conjured up from hell. That the invaders were in truth not demons but rather tribesmen from the outer limits of the world, a people known as the Hungarians, was widely acknowledged. Yet so too, among the overwhelming majority of those who bore the brunt of their attacks, was the notion that such a plague was in itself the symptom of an evil more than human. ‘For they say that this is the last time of the age, and the end of the world is near, and therefore the Hungarians are Gog and Magog. Never were they heard of before — but now, behold, it is the end of time, and they have materialised!’

The monk who recorded these opinions did so in order to refute them. He wrote with a self-assurance that came naturally, perhaps, to a man ensconced at a safe distance from the devastation, in Auxerre, in northern Burgundy. Those more directly in the Hungarians’ path tended to be less sanguine. It was not only ‘the frivolous’, wild-tongued prophets from beyond the ranks of the priesthood, who dreaded that ‘the last time of the world has dawned’. The Burgundian monk, attempting to calm such fears, did so in response to a letter from a bishop, no less, the Primate ofVerdun, whose flock had repeatedly suffered from the depredations of the Hungarians. Surely, the bishop had asked in a tone of high panic, the end of the world was drawing near? The brethren of the monastery in Auxerre, famed as they were for their learning in the study of Revelation, were growing used to such anxious enquiries. Patiently, although with more than a hint of the long-suffering schoolmaster, they would admonish those who presumed to imagine that the mysteries of God’s plans for the future could ever be fathomed. ‘For to grieve over the end of the world’, as the Bishop of Verdun was reminded pointedly, ‘is the business only of Him who plants the roots of His heart in the love of the world.’ The orthodoxy of the Church, as it had been formulated many centuries previously by Augustine, still held. The terrors of the age were a summons, not to panic, but to repentance. They should be met, not with wild prophecies, but with prayer, and contrition, and penance, and good works. To imagine otherwise was the very height of sacrilege.

So it was that there was set up in the souls of dutiful Christians everywhere an excruciating tension. On the one hand, it was all too clear to them that ‘great calamities, the fruits of divine judgement, are everywhere increasing, heralding the end of the age of men’. Not since the very earliest days of the Church, when the return of Christ had been hourly expected, had a sense of the imminence of the end of days so utterly possessed the ranks of the faithful. That the world was hurtling towards the fiery ruin so long prophesied for it appeared to most Christians, amid all the violent tribulations of the century, self- evident.

For even if it were granted that the Hungarians