Imagining the End: Visions of

The Pursuit of the Millen-

nium.

21

 Paradoxically, Cohn’s riveting account of  messianic movements in

medieval Europe does not mention the events of  the early eleventh century

which are the subject of  this chapter. Writing before the implications of

Duby’s work had begun to percolate, he assumed with the rest of  the historical

world that all was darkness, and stillness, until the age of  the Crusades.

22

In applying the insights and models used by Cohn to an earlier generation,

therefore, Landes and others raise a fresh set of  questions about the per-

spective itself, as well as about the nature and adequacy of  their sources to

sustain it. In addition, as beneficiaries of  Duby’s historiographical revolution,

which identifies the millennium as a crucial turning point in European history,

they now find themselves at the eye of  a storm of  counter-revolution which

seems to have gathered all the more force and rage from the fact that it was

for so long delayed. For if  Duby’s account is still very widely accepted, and

in some quarters tenaciously defended, it has come under an increasingly

withering and comprehensive fire, very largely inspired and for some years

almost single-handedly sustained by Dominique Barthélemy. It is unnecessary,

and would be impracticable, here to survey the extremely broad front across

which Barthélemy, in a continuing series of  massively detailed and forensically

devastating papers and a superb 



,



-page monograph, has insisted that the

social and political structures of  the Carolingian world neither retained (or

indeed achieved) such vigour as Duby and his followers maintain until 



,

nor disappeared so comprehensively and cataclysmically thereafter.

23

 Our

concern is rather to test the matter in relation to the single, though in

themselves quite sufficiently complicated, set of  issues represented by the

body of  sources which suggest that the generations before and after the

millennium saw an eruption of  seditious or potentially seditious popular

activity, inspired by religious fervour. Such activity was manifested in the

movement for Peace of  God which has attracted so much attention in the last

few years, and in the first assertions since antiquity that heretical preachers

were active and heretical convictions current among the poor. The evaluation

of  reports of  both of  these phenomena has in recent discussions been held

to turn largely on the view that is taken of  the currency and influence of

apocalyptic beliefs stimulated by the approach of  the millennium. These

issues, clearly, are crucial to both of  our initial questions, whether there was

indeed a social revolution at that time, and, if  so, whether or how the fact had

anything to do with the date at which it took place.

In 



 Barthélemy’s critique of  ‘mutationism’ took a new turn with a

powerful assault both on the view sustained by the fine volume of  essays

which Landes and Tom Head edited a few years ago, about the Peace of  God

---

135

Medieval Europe

movement

24

 as

 

both indicative and productive of  profound social crisis, and

on Landes’s thesis, defended (if  that is the right word for so vigorously

sustained an assault on orthodoxy) in many articles and in his book on Ademar

of  Chabannes,

25

 that popular belief  in the impending apocalypse was correctly

identified by the ruling elites as potentially a powerful engine of  social change,

supremely corrosive of  hierarchy and imposed order, and therefore suppressed

in the sources as ruthlessly as it was repressed in the real world.

26

 It was

(though I don’t think Landes has actually used the word) a counter-revolu-

tionary force, in so far as Duby’s ‘feudal revolution’ was carried out by the

elite in the interests of  securing

 

its own command of  a newly dynamic and

productive agrarian economy. Stressing the princely and ecclesiastical initiative

for the Peace Councils and their (undisputed) roots in Carolingian powers

and institutions which they gave every appearance of  attempting to restore,

Barthélemy sees their ostensible concern for the protection of  the poor as an

expression of  the Carolingian chivalrous ideal, and the deployment of  relics

in their support as a symptom (like other tenth- and eleventh-century expres-

sions of  popular opinion through religious activity) of  the decline of  the

Carolingian order. The Councils were not anti-seigneurial in goal or character

and, although they attracted a certain amount of  popular support, the conflicts

which gave rise to them were not conflicts between the aristocracy and the

people; they arose essentially from the determination of  the churches to

defend their recent territorial acquisitions against the 

milites

. Much of  this is

not in dispute; all of  the points in this summary, for example, are accepted

in my own essay in