Imagining the End: Visions of
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| pre-Antichrist millenarianism
of the Last World Emperor legends. This scenario, found in the
of the Pseudo- Methodius (
) and the Latin versions of the Sibylla Tiburtina (beginning in the eleventh century), predicts that a final Roman emperor will arise to defeat the Islamic opponents of Christianity and even Gog and Magog (Apoca- lypse
– ) and introduce an era which Methodius describes as follows: ‘Then the earth will sit in peace and there will be great peace and tranquillity upon the earth such as has never been nor ever will be any more, since it is the final peace at the end of time.’ 17 After reigning at Jerusalem for a period that Methodius portrays as relatively brief (e.g. seven-and-a-half years), but that the Sibylla Tiburtina describes as lasting years, the emperor voluntarily hands over his crown to God, marking the end of the Roman empire and giving the sign for the coming of Antichrist. After the traditional three-and- a-half-year persecution of the righteous, the Final Enemy is struck down by God and the Last Judgment follows. The Last Emperor legends, later applied first to German medieval emperors, then to national kings, especially of France
152 Medieval and Early Modern Periods and Spain, gave this form of millennialism a considerable role in the later Middle Ages and well into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 18 From the end of the thirteenth century, similar predictions of a final period of peace and plenty and reform of the Church before the onslaught of Antichrist were predicted for a holy pope or popes of the last days, often called
. 19 The second form of medieval millenarianism is the post-Antichrist variety
originating in a discrepancy between two enumerations found in Daniel : – . Here the time of ‘the Abomination of Desolation’ (i.e. the Antichrist) is described as lasting ,
days, but Daniel then goes on to say that whoever remains faithful during his persecution will be made blessed after ,
days. 20 The first commentator on Daniel, the Greek Father Hippolytus ( c.
), solved this problem by identifying the extra forty-five days with a period after Antichrist before the Last Judgment. 21 He was followed by Jerome, and later by Bede and the ninth-century exegete Haimo of Auxerre, who opined (following gospel prohibitions against exact predictions of the End), that the forty-five days should not be interpreted literally, but was a marker for some indefinite brief period after Antichrist. The Glosa ordinaria of the twelfth century spoke of this by now canonical time as the
. Without in any way equating this exegetical anomaly with the suspect millen- nium, twelfth-century authors, such as Honorius Augustodunensis (d. c.
), Otto of Freising (d. ), Gerhoh of Reichersberg (d. ) and Hildegard of Bingen (d.
), began to speculate on what kind of reform and better- ment this period after Antichrist might bring to the Church. The ‘refreshment of the saints’ after Antichrist seems to have had some role in Joachim’s revival of millenarianism, but what is significant about the Calabrian abbot’s view is that he was the first to link a spiritualizing and non- chronological millennial perspective back to the text of Apocalypse . In
this, as in much else, Joachim stands out as the foremost Christian millenarian since John of the Apocalypse. The influence exerted by the Calabrian abbot was far-reaching, even if often realized in tortuous and indirect ways. We can say that creeping Joachite millenarianism during the thirteenth and through to the fifteenth centuries moved closer to revived hopes for a literal , - year earthly kingdom, even if it continued to eschew the gustatory and sexual delights of the carnal forms of the early Christian variety. Joachim’s most perspicacious reader, the Franciscan theologian Peter John Olivi, composed an important
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