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

of the persecution that was launched against the Jews in 1010, it could hardly have been on the scale of the pogroms that were simultaneously tearing al-Andalus apart – for ‘the fury of the Christian people’, as even Glaber admitted, in a tone of some disappointment, ‘did not take long to cool’. The sudden eruption of Jew-killing, as unprecedented as it had been savage, subsided quickly. As well it might have done – for it carried a penalty, according to a papal mandate that had been issued only two years previously, of excommunication. With the mobs laying down their weapons, so the dust began to settle. Communities everywhere set to picking up the pieces. Across France, the Christian authorities resumed gracing the Jews with their customary disdainful tolerance. On both sides, it appears, there was a determination to regard the violence as an aberration – or indeed as something that had never happened in the first place.

This attitude was dictated for the persecuted by simple common sense – and for the persecutors by something like embarrassment. All well and good, no doubt, to turn on the enemies of Christ during the reign of Antichrist, that time of terrible and cosmic danger when, as Adso had pointed out, ‘the Jews will flock to him, in the belief that they are receiving God – but rather they will be receiving the Evil One’. As it proved, however, the desecration of the Holy Sepulchre had not served to usher in the end days — just as al-Hakim had not turned out to be Antichrist. Indeed, far from persisting in his persecution of the Christians, strange rumours began to spread in the West that he had become a Christian himself. By 1021 he was dead, lost in the Egyptian desert, and in such mysterious circumstances

that there were some, both Muslim and Christian, who claimed he had been taken up to heaven by an angel. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, work had soon begun on rebuilding the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, so that within two decades of its destruction services were once again being celebrated before its altar, and pilgrims, entering the shrine, could gawp at all its beauties, at ‘its coloured marbles, its ornamentation and sculptures, its Byzantine brocade with pictures spun in gold’. No wonder, then, back in the lands of the West, that the hysteria that had followed its original destruction was a source of some mortification, and one that most people preferred to forget.

Yet this was not always easily done. There were those for whom the terrors of 1010 had been so overwhelming as to shake them to their very core. How, for instance, as Limoges returned to normal, and the years gradually slipped by, and even the banished Jews began to limp their way back to the town, was Ademar to make sense of his vision of the weeping Christ? Tellingly, when he finally came to write down what he had seen, he still could not bring himself to confess the precise context of his revelation. Instead, with a finicky display of deceit that only a true scholar could possibly have attempted, he set out to muddy it. History, in Ademar’s chronicle, was painstakingly rewritten. The destruction of the Holy Sepulchre was dated, not to 1009, but to the succeeding summer. The likelihood that it had been the alarming news from Jerusalem which inspired the persecution of the Jews – not to mention Ademar’s own vision — was discreetly buried. In all his account of the harrowing events of 1010 not a hint remained that they had been prompted, as a later and more scrupulous historian would put it, ‘by a rumour spread in many places across the globe, one that frightened and saddened many hearts, that the end of the world was at hand’.

Yet still, in Ademar’s own soul, at any rate, the question must have abided: why had his saviour appeared to him, nailed to a cross, and weeping? There was nothing in his monastery that would have prepared him for such a spectacle. Just as the ancient Romans, shrinking from imagining their god as a victim of torture, had preferred to think of Him instead as a celestial emperor, ablaze with the glory of His triumph over death, so too had their successors, in the Latin West no less than in Constantinople, persisted in representing Christ as a Basileus, serene and remote, enthroned in heaven. His cross, when it was portrayed at all, was conceived of less as an instrument of execution than as a victory standard, dyed by His blood an aptly imperial purple. That Jesus, who had once trod the earth as a human being, had experienced suffering no less excruciating than that endured by the most wretched of peasants, that He had hungered, and thirsted, and even wept: all these were details that scarcely registered with most Christians. Well might Ademar, then, have found himself perturbed by his vision.

And all the more so because he would have suspected that what he had been shown that fateful night was something that might prove perilous to acknowledge. There were many, since the Millennium, who had laid claim to strange revelations. Most of these, in the view of anxious clerics such as Ademar himself, derived not from any parting of the veil of heaven, but rather from shadows and phantasms risen up from the fumes of hell. In the fateful year 1000, for instance, a French peasant by the name of Leutard had dreamed that a great swarm of bees entered his body through his anus, and spoke to him, ‘ordering him to do things impossible for human kind’; simultaneously, Vilgard, a grammarian at Ravenna, imagined himself in the company of assorted ancient pagans; and in 1022, most alarmingly of all, it was reported that twelve clerics in Orleans, one of whom had been high in the favour of King Robert himself, were in the habit of being visited regularly by the Devil, ‘who would appear to them