Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

know the extent of his nightmares in 1010; but Ademar did record how one night, unable to sleep and looking out at the sky, he was granted a vision infinitely more disturbing than any dream. Indeed, so shattering was the spectacle of what he found confronting him that night, rising over Limoges and framed against a blaze of brilliant stars, that he would end up keeping it to himself for almost twenty years. High against the southern sky, planted as if in the heavens, he saw a giant crucifix -- and nailed to it was Christ Himself. ‘And the figure of the Lord, hanging on the cross, was weeping forth a great river of tears.’ Ademar, struck dumb with fear, could do nothing as he gazed at this harrowing apparition but fall to weeping himself. ‘In all, he saw this cross and the image of the Crucified One, the colour of fire and deep blood, for half a full night hour, until the sky closed itself. And what he saw he sealed in his heart.’

As well he might have done. The implications of the Saviour’s tears, shed in rivers over Limoges, could hardly but have appeared overwhelming to the shaken monk. Almost a thousand years had passed since Christ wept over Jerusalem; and now, with His own tomb desecrated, He had appeared in the heavens to weep again. What, then, could this portend, if not the fatal moment of which St Paul had warned, when Antichrist would emerge upon his throne and lay claim to the rule of the world? Indeed, who was to say that he had not already done so? Was it not by trampling down the Temple in Jerusalem, and putting the faithful to the sword, and proclaiming his own divinity, that Antichrist was destined to announce himself? Had not the Prince of the Saracens fulfilled every last term of the prophecy?

No wonder, then, with strange eclipses shimmering above Limoges, and her streets broiling in murderous heat, and her rivers drying up as though scorched by celestial fire, that a sense of terror began to sweep through the town. It needed no vision of a weeping Christ to panic the citizens – nor to set them looking for scapegoats. The same gusts of rumour that had brought the news from the Holy Land had also served to broadcast to them the shocking charges against the Jews of Orleans. The Christians of Limoges—fearful, it appears, that the reign of Antichrist was come indeed, and that his cohorts might be lurking in their very midst – had begun to fix their suspicions upon the Jews of their own town. The local bishop, sensitive to the mood of rising paranoia, duly summoned a council. Ademar, writing some fifteen years later, described what happened next. For a month, the wretched Jews of Limoges were bullied and hectored in what was laughably termed a ‘debate’. At the end of the proceedings, they were ordered to convert to the Christian faith. Only three or four could bring themselves to do so. The remainder, so Ademar recorded, were then driven from the town.

This, as a breakdown in community relations, was certainly ground-breaking - indeed, a bolt from the blue. Bishops in the West were not in the habit of harassing Jews, still less of deporting them. Better by far to affect a lofty blend of contempt and indifference: such had been the judgement of St Augustine, an authority not readily brooked. For the Jews, the great doctor of the Church had ruled, despite undoubtedly having the blood of Christ on their hands, had not known, when they dispatched Him to crucifixion, that they were killing the Son of God; an extenuation that Christian kings and bishops had been more than content to accept. As in the lands of the Saracens, so in Christendom: tolerance was firmly rooted in self- interest. Jews would be offered protection, and even special privileges, so that their talents might then all the more readily be exploited. And sure enough, whether as court officials, or as physicians, or as linchpins of the slave trade, they had long provided their sponsors with an excellent return. No wonder, then, over the years, that the Jewish communities of Francia had grown increasingly prosperous--and increasingly well integrated too. Not only did they live cheek by jowl with their gentile neighbours, but they tended to wear the same clothes, speak the same language and even give their children the same names. There was nothing, in short, in centuries of peaceful co-existence with the Franks, that could have prepared them for the sudden ethnic cleansing of Limoges.

And it is possible – indeed probable — that the persecutions of 1010 were even more brutal than Ademar could bring himself readily to acknowledge. Later in his career, when he came to emend his account of the treatment of the Jews of Limoges, he let slip a telling indiscretion. ‘And some’, he wrote, ‘preferred slitting their own throats to avoid baptism.’ This, it appears, had been the true climax of the ‘debate’ staged in the town by the bishop. Nor, necessarily, had the atrocities been confined to Limoges. Rudolf Glaber, recording the paroxysms of that feverish year in the more heated terms that came naturally to him, described the whole of Christendom as gripped by a blood lust. ‘For once it had become quite clear that it was the wickedness of the Jews which had brought about the Temple’s destruction,’ he explained, ‘they became the objects of universal hatred: they were driven from the cities, some were put to the sword, others were drowned in rivers, and many found other deaths; some even took their own lives in diverse ways.’ A grotesque exaggeration, it might be thought – and not least because Glaber concluded with a palpable falsehood, a smug assertion that ‘after this very proper vengeance had been taken, very few Jews were to be found left in the Roman world’.

In truth, whatever the precise details