Millennium, Holland, Tom [manga ereader txt] 📗

evil lord, physically assaulted the altar in his shrine, beating it with her fists, and roundly abusing her heavenly patron. It was a truth as evident as it was regrettable, however, that even miracles performed by a living saint such as Romuald were hardly to be relied upon: for while the celebrated hermit was more than content, on occasion, to punish robber lords by having them choke to death on the meat of stolen cows, or be struck down by invisible arrows, he could hardly punish every thieving castellan, as ultimately it was his very isolation from the turbulent currents of human sinfulness that marked him out as holy. Yet even amid the swamps, Romuald and hermits like him might serve as an inspiration to the oppressed and groaning peasantry because they bore witness to the power of a lord greater and infinitely more powerful than even the most brutal castellan. The poor did not despair of the protection of Christ; nor did they doubt that He heard their groans, and pitied them. Perhaps they knew as well what had been foretold in the Holy Scriptures, that He was to come again at the end of days, to judge the living and the dead, and that the oppressed would be bade welcome, and sat at His right side, to take their place in the New Jerusalem, while the wicked were delivered over to eternal fire.

But when? When? Always the question: when? Whether there were those among the peasantry who were aware of the Millennium we do not know—for the silence of the poor is almost total. Yet such was the scale of the horrors that had overwhelmed them, and such their yearning for redemption from all their miseries, that it seems implausible that they could have been wholly ignorant of so portentous and fearsome a date. That they were living through the one-thousandth anniversary of their Saviour’s life, even as the shadows that had engulfed them were thickening into an ever more hellish darkness, would surely have struck many as a coincidence too far. Certainly, there were those among the learned who had no doubts. ‘For it is revealed as an evident fact by the Holy Gospel that as the last days go by, so love will be chilled, and iniquity will blossom amongst men. And they will face dangerous times for their souls… Here, then, is the cause of the evils which, on an unprecedented scale, have afflicted every portion of the world, on and around the thousandth anniversary of the birth of our Saviour and Lord.’

Such was the judgement of one observer of his times, a monk named Rudolf Glaber; and it could hardly be dismissed as an eccentric one. The monastery in Burgundy to which he belonged was no backwater, no nest of cranks or heretics. Indeed, in all Christendom, there were few assemblages of stone and mortar that could boast a greater charge of holiness than the monastery of Cluny. The voice of prophecy to which Rudolf laid claim was nothing less than his prerogative as one of its brothers. ‘Truly, our life lasts one thousand years.’ So had warned Odo, the second of puny’s abbots, decades before the anarchy that would mark the passage of the Millennium. ‘And now here we are, arrived at the last day of the very span of time itself.’ These were words that no Christian could readily ignore: for they had issued from the place that seemed to its admirers, more than any other, the nearest there was to heaven on earth.

Knocking on Heaven’s Door

Evil times made for perilous journeys. Even before the spread of castles across the kingdom had helped to make lords out of bandits, and bandits out of lords, the roads were not lightly trodden. Hugh Capet himself, returning from Rome and his mortifying audience with Otto II, had been able to escape the attentions of kidnappers only by submitting to a yet greater humiliation, and travelling in the disguise of a groom. The decades that followed his accession had seen the dangers grow ever worse. The poor were far from alone in being the prey of predatory knights. Merchants too, as they travelled to markets, would increasingly find themselves being stopped and obliged to pay extortionate tolls, or else ‘be whipped for their possessions’. Pilgrims, huntsmen out with their dogs, even ‘noble women journeying in the absence of their husbands’: all might end up as targets. ‘Omnia permixta sunt’: ‘chaos reigns everywhere’. It was hard for the nervous traveller, hurrying to find shelter as the light thickened, glancing anxiously over his shoulder, ever fearful of the sound of distant hoof beats, to doubt that this was so. Man had indeed become predacious, it appeared, as predacious as the wolf, that snifFer after carrion, and no less cruel, no less savage in his appetites. Where, then, as the twilight gathered, was shelter to be found?

Perhaps -- God’s mysterious hand being what it was -- amid the very worst of the disorder. Just as there were whole regions of France that had been spared dramatic upheaval, so were there others that had been convulsed by a particular violence. In Burgundy, for instance, on the easternmost frontier of the kingdom, royal authority had collapsed no less totally than elsewhere in the south. Here, however, exceptionally, King Robert had sought to make a stand. For decades, he and his armies* would persist in trampling the fields of the duchy, while the local castellans, profiting from the conditions of ceaseless warfare, grew fat on the carnage like flies on gouts of blood. A traveller did not have to venture far across Burgundy to witness marks of agony. It was no wonder to find the bodies even of children lying by the roadside. Men driven lunatic by what they had witnessed - or perpetrated, perhaps -- haunted the region’s woods, spectral figures wasted by despair.

Yet Burgundy was not all horror. Very far from it. Though the duchy was violent, it