Imagining the End: Visions of
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| The Medieval
Manichee , 33 and with great forensic ingenuity as part of a highly organized conspiracy of international dimensions by Poly and Bournazel. 34 The latter, however, overlook or ignore what the former (in his first edition) had little opportunity to consider. By the early s a comprehensive and minutely argued scholarly debate over some thirty years had convinced virtually every serious student of the subject, East and West, that every link in this chain was weak, if not fictitious. Rather, a variety of episodes, arising in various ways from the disparity between the simple idealism of the Gospels which the Church was beginning to preach more vigorously and the intimate entangle- ment of its hierarchy with the structures of local power, wealth and kinship which would tear Europe apart in the great struggle for ‘reform’ of the second half of the eleventh century, were given a spurious unity by the habit of classifying erroneous or troublesome teachings as heresies which had been condemned by the Fathers, or as fulfilling the prophecy of Paul that in the last times heretics would appear ‘forbidding to marry and the eating of meat’. 35 To the best of my knowledge, nothing that has been said in the last twenty years weakens these well established conclusions in any way. On the other hand, a good deal has emerged, and is still doing so, especially from the work on the enormous surviving oeuvre of Ademar of Chabannes, who can now be seen as one of the most prolific though still largely unexploited writers of the entire medieval period, of Landes on his life and historical work, and of Daniel Callahan and Michael Frassetto, who are editing his sermons, to show that there was an intimate connection between the first signs of the emergence of popular heresy in the medieval West and the movement for the Peace of God in Aquitaine. 36 That movement began essentially as an attempt to recover from lay control monastic and cathedral lands which had been alienated to (or, in the ecclesiastical language of the moment, ‘usurped’ by) their lay patrons, and to resist the continuing attempts of the
to build up new lordships for themselves at the expense of the churches, and of small free proprietors who were being reduced to serfdom, many of whom flocked to the standards of the peace in self-defence. Its leaders, however – the bishops and great abbots of the region, and the Duke of Aquitaine himself – though certainly opposed to such lawless self-aggrandisement on the part of others, were not (as Barthélemy rightly insists) opposed to the construction of the seigneurie per se, so long as control of the process remained in legitimate hands, to wit their own. Hence the disillusion which by
caused the Duke of Aquitaine to summon a Council at Charroux, in Ademar’s words, ‘to wipe out the heresies which the Manichaeans had been spreading among the people’ 37 – in stark contrast to the Peace Councils of the
s, which had so stirringly called 139 Medieval Europe upon the people to defend themselves and the churches against the trans- gressions of the knights. 38 There had already been signs that the accusation of heresy was being increasingly employed as a weapon in the struggle within the elite for control of landed property – hardly surprisingly, when the leading protagonists on one side of the dispute were bishops. We can see it, for example, in the charter from St Hilaire of Poitiers which Landes and Bonnassie reprinted in
. 39 Here Duke William V of Aquitaine, in , is enforcing the reform of St Hilaire of Poitiers – that is, passing control of its lands to the bishop from the canons among whom they had been divided, as the custom was, by requiring the latter to lead the common life (that is to abjure private property and embrace the rule of celibacy, thus disinheriting any children they might inadvertently produce). The division in the chapter which might be anticipated in the circumstances was clearly present: the duke has ordered, at the behest of certain canons, that none of their number should sell goods or property belonging to St Hilaire, and any who disobey will be guilty of the sin of Arius – classically, that is, of dividing the church. Hence his reference to that heresy as responsible for ‘the pullulation of wicked deeds sprung from the Arian heresy not only among the people, but even in Holy Church’ is a rhetorical flourish which does not, as Landes and Bonnassie concluded, indicate the presence of popular heresy, but does point the way towards blaming popular resistance to ducal or episcopal authority for the presence of ‘heresy’ among the people which we first find in Ademar’s assertion of the appearance of Manichees which he places under the year in his chronicle, but actually wrote about ten years later. The most famous incident in the resurgence of the heresy accusation as a political device – often misleadingly spoken of as part of the emergence of popular heresy, though it contains no popular element whatsoever – is the trial at Orléans in which resulted in the burning of a large number of people – ten, fourteen or sixteen in different sources – including several canons of the cathedral. All were of the highest social standing, and one of the two alleged leaders of the sect was a former confessor to Queen Constance of France, the undermining of whose connection R.-H. Bautier showed long ago to have been a major objective of those, orchestrated by the faction of the Count of Blois, who unveiled the ‘heresy’ by infiltrating into the cathedral a member of the Norman ducal house in the guise of a seeker after religious illumination. 40 The affair, still in many regards mysterious, is too complicated to follow further here. Enough has been said to indicate the remoteness of its context from popular enthusiasm or discontent, while Barthélemy’s suggestion that the accusation that the leaders of that group, Etienne and Lisois, denied the validity of ordination probably arose from their having accused fellow members of the chapter of simony further reinforces the general interpretation
140 Medieval and Early Modern Periods offered here. 41 A campaign to extirpate simony would have been a normal constituent of the political intrigue behind the affair. In that context we might even regard the related ‘discovery’ of ‘Manichees’ at Toulouse in the same year as another possible trace of the wider drive against the ‘alienation’ of ecclesiastical property whose most familiar expression is the movement for the Peace of God. In the first instances, therefore, allegations of heresy must be taken, like those of sorcery in early medieval courts, as evidence of increasing tension and widening sources of dispute within the social elite. 42 It is another matter to make a case for real and widespread anxiety in the elite about the spread of heresy among ‘the people’, let alone to establish that such alarm, if expressed, was justified by any corresponding reality. Nevertheless, it would be entirely unsurprising if the turning outwards of the accusation of heresy as a justification of repression rather than a stratagem of rivalry within the elite which we see reflected in Ademar’s writings in the late s and early s had its counterpart in the emergence of a popular leadership to articu- late the bitterness and disillusionment which spread as it became apparent that the Peace of God, far from heralding an era of peace and justice, was being used to consolidate and legitimize the building of castles, the imposition of seigneurial justice and labour services, and the other evils against which such enthusiasm had been aroused in the
s. To speculate about the priority between chickens and eggs would be as futile in this context as in any other. The arguments which such popular spokespeople might be expected to have deployed must also be largely a matter of speculation. But Michael Frassetto argues 43
the end of his life – that is, in the early
s – contains assertions about ‘heretics who secretly arise amongst us’ which, while consistent with the famous entry in his chronicle
also contain particulars which are not obviously inspired by the Pauline prediction of the last days or standard patristic accounts of Manichaeism. These heretics ‘say that nothing comes from communion at the holy altar’, ‘deny baptism, the cross and the church because they are messengers of Antichrist’, reject money, secular honours and marriage. In other words, they repudiate the reassertion of ecclesiastical authority and the manifestations and structures of the social transformation with which it was so closely allied. What else should we expect? The question remains whether, if there were such false prophets or sub- versive preachers at work (and, however plausible, we cannot take it as proven by such indirect reports, especially from a writer as imaginative, not to say deranged, as Landes has shown the ageing Ademar to have been) their presence is in any degree attributable to the circulation of apocalyptic or millennial fears and expectations. It will be immediately obvious that the methodological 141 Medieval Europe problems attendant upon both quantitative and qualitative assessment of such ideas are similar in principle to those relating to heresy, and considerably more difficult in practice. It is common ground, of course, that the anticipation and the terror of the Last Judgment were central to Catholic teaching, and that while any attempt to calculate its date in terms of earthly time was regarded as potentially a dangerous heresy, the Church’s general interests were best served by the view that it was neither imminent nor impossibly distant. 44 While there is room for debate as to whether or to what extent in our period the increasing number and variety of references to the Last Judgment in documentary sources, diplomatic, narrative and normative, is a function simply of the increase in the documentation itself, we have only to think of the tympana of the white cloak of churches which was cast over Western Christen- dom in these decades to see its centrality in the Church’s message at the time. Whether the sense of the imminence of the Last Judgment was lent either greater force or greater precision by the approach of the millennium in the literal sense, of the years and
, is another question altogether, and one which confronts us with a classic case of the irresolvable dilemma. From what is contemptuously referred to as the positivist – its protagonists would rather say, with what seems arrogance to their opponents, the rational – point of view, no compelling evidence has been produced that the dramatic events or the social crisis of the decades around the millennium (supposing either to have occurred at all, which is certainly not granted by Barthélemy) were triggered by messiahs prophesying the approach of the millennium. To Landes this is because ecclesiastical and secular leaders were terrified of the revolutionary potential of millenarian sentiment, and therefore suppressed or reinterpreted anything that might stimulate or seem to validate it. Thus, for example, there is a well-known incident recounted by Abbo of Fleury, when
. he heard a preacher in Paris say that the Antichrist would appear after One Thousand Years, and be followed shortly by the Last Judgment. 45 Landes
and Barthélemy agree that this is the orthodox Augustinian view, the thousand years being equated with the reign of the Christian Church, but for Landes the fact that it was said and is reported by Abbo with further comments on the correct interpretation of the relevant passages of Daniel and the apoca- lypse points to the existence of a literally millenarian opinion which the sermon was designed to rebut. 46 The unbridgeable chasm between the two positions is encapsulated by their reading of the famous account by Radulphus Glaber of how vast crowds of pilgrims set out for Jerusalem in the year :
Radulphus Glaber: he does not speak of men and women setting out in expectation of imminent Judgement, or of the tribulations which will precede it, or of any “millenarian” sentiment in the widest sense’. 47 For Landes that 142 Medieval and Early Modern Periods is because Glaber wrote the final version in which his text survives
. , after he knew that the events which he had once anticipated at the Millennium of the Passion did not come to pass. His account therefore represents his attempt to come to terms with his own earlier failure of judgment, which meant reinterpreting events to de-emphasize or even suppress what he had previously thought to be signs of the rapidly approaching End. To understand his hopes or fears at the time of the events in question, therefore, we must reconstruct what with this hindsight he edited out about their causes and significance. 48 To illustrate, Landes reproduces the text with interpolations to indicate what Radulphus was not saying. His reconstruction begins thus, what ‘Glaber assumed his readers would understand’ being italicized: At this time an innumerable multitude of people from the whole world
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