thus providing a buffer of 300 years until the year A.D. 500. The latter interpreted Paul’s
reference to an obstacle to the “man of iniquity” (2 Thessalonians 3:4) to mean that as
long as the Roman Empire endured, the Antichrist could not come. This proRoman
eschatology would, after the mutual conversion of Rome to Christianity and Christianity
to imperialism, produce the myth of the Last Emperor, a superhuman figure who would
unite all of Christendom, rule in peace and justice for 120 years, and finally abdicate his
throne.
But both these approaches merely delayed the problem: despite pagan and Christian
belief in Roma eterna, the empire (especially in the West) was doomed; and,
coincidentally, the year 6000 grew inevitably closer, transforming an antiapocalyptic
chronology into an apocalyptic one. Jerome and Augustine reoriented Latin thought on
the millennium in two ways. Jerome introduced a new set of calculations, which placed
the Creation in 5199 B.C., delaying the year 6000 another three centuries. Augustine
went farther, arguing that no historical event or chronology can be intepreted
apocalyptically and that the millennium was not a future event but already in progress—
the millennium began at the time of Jesus. To explain why the evils of war, hatred,
injustice, and poverty continued unabated, Augustine introduced the concept of the Two
Cities: a heavenly city, the celestial Jerusalem, where the millennium was already
manifest, and the terrestrial Babylon, the time-bound city of violence and oppression in
which the millennium was not visible.
Augustine’s opposition to millennial thought so dominated the theological writings of
the early Middle Ages that many historians think that it actually disappeared. But there
are signs of its presence, both in the activity of antiecclesiastical prophets like the “False
Christ” of Bourges described by Gregory of Tours (Histories 10.25) and in the
antiapocalyptic uses of chronology. In the 8th century, Bede and Carolingian historians
shifted the dating system again, this time to anno Domini.
It is surely no accident that Charlemagne took up the imperium in the absence of a
legitimate emperor in Byzantium, and thus assumed the role of continuator of the Roman
Empire, on the first day of the year A.D. 800, or 6000 annus mundi. With the apocalyptic
dimension of the deed eliminated from the documentation, modern historians have
analyzed this pivotal moment in western history without any awareness of its
background. It has gone down in history as the Coronation of the year 800, not 6000
annus mundi.
Charlemagne’s coronation contributed two essential elements to European
millennialism. He “transferred” the empire, with all its apocalyptic and millennial freight,
to the West, and he shifted the chronological hopes for the Apocalypse from 6000 annus
mundi to the year A.D. 1000, a date at once millennial (the end of the sixth age, dawn of
the sabbatical era) and Augustinian (the end of the millennium of the church). Germany
and France of the year 1000 illustrate the two directions of millennial symbolism:
whereas the emperor Otto III manipulated every aspect of the imperial variety of
millennialism (renovatio imperii Romani, opening Charlemagne’s tomb on Pentecost of
1000), King Robert II the Pious of France, second ruler of a new and still uncertain
dynasty and excommunicate in 1000, presided over a kingdom marked by the social
turmoil of the castellan revolution. Here, apocalyptic and millennial symbols were
generated from below, especially in the earliest popular religious movement of the
Middle Ages, the Peace of God. This conciliar movement, which mobilized huge crowds
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