at open-air revivalist gatherings in the collective pursuit of God’s peace on earth, may
have been the earliest sustained millenarian movement that joined all levels of society. It
appeared in two waves, each in the decades before the millennium of the Incarnation
(1000) and the Passion (1033), first south of the Loire, then throughout France.
When the year 1000 passed without the Parousia, there was a sea-change in millennial
hopes. The period after the year 1000 saw much vaster millennial movements, often
approved by ecclesiastical authorities—popular crusades, Joachites, Flagellants, the
Peace Movement. Some of these movements were broadly based, militant, and hostile to
ecclesiastical authority, the wealthy, and Jews, thus bringing out the most revolutionary
elements of millennialism.
But the more documentable, and in some ways more surprising, aspect of medieval
millennialism was its use by lay and ecclesiastical elites to buttress their own authority.
Starting with the Gregorian Reform in the 11th century, papal reformers used apocalyptic
imagery both to attack their enemies as Antichrist and to wrap their own efforts in
messianic promises. Similarly, royal and even comital courts used eschatological
prophecy as propaganda. Dynastic publicists often painted their patrons in the imagery of
the Last Emperor—the Norman William the Conqueror consciously used themes from
Revelation (his crown, his Doomsday book) to buttress his conquest of England.
Supporters of Thierry d’Alsace, count of Flanders, responding to the seemingly
apocalyptic civil war of 1127–28, disseminated prophecies claiming that Thierry’s
(Carolingian) dynasty was the last barrier to Antichrist.
Millennial hopes and ambitions reached new levels as a result of the work of Joachim
of Fiore (d. 1202). Joachim was the first theologian to reject Augustine and return to a
notion of a future earthly age of bliss. Joachim revitalized every aspect of medieval
millennialism: within decades of his death, prophecies attributed to him began to
circulate that people identified with current events, mystical numerology, Franciscans and
Dominicans, Holy Roman emperors, and popes all became elements in vast and
evershifting predictions of imminent apocalypse. Chronological calculations fixed on
1250, then 1260 as the beginning of the new age; the Franciscan order split over
interpretations of Joachite prophecy, one branch becoming inquisitors, the other,
revolutionary millenarians; angelic popes and messianic emperors (some dead but
returning), vied among lay and clerical constituencies for a following. In France, the
imagery of millennialism continued to influence political discourse throughout the
remainder of the Middle Ages. The catastrophes of the 14th century—the Hundred
Years’ War and the Black Death—renewed fervor for the final, divine intervention.
The hopes and expectations of the Christian Apocalypse offered the outlines of a
powerful if ultimately impractical, and hence suicidal, ideology of social revolution to the
peasants and the urban poor of France in the later Middle Ages. The thousands of
shepherds, or Pastoureaux, who swept through the French countryside in 1251 and again
in 1320, were convinced that they were God’s chosen instrument to free the Holy Land,
thus bringing about the Parousia. While none ever reached the Holy Land, they traveled
in bands throughout the kingdom of France, amazing some with their piety, all the while
slaughtering clerics, Jews, and university intellectuals. Similar apocalyptic ideas
regarding the election of the poor to usher in God’s kingdom motivated other popular
insurrections and probably inspired the great Jacquerie of 1358.
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1174