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
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