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

from backing the campaign to proclaim their patron saint an apostle, promptly swung against it. When a panicky Ademar, hurrying out from the service to confront Benedict in public, attempted to press his case, they howled him down. Later that evening, in the monastery itself, the two scholars clashed again—and once again it was Ademar who was routed. The following morning, humiliated beyond all hope of recovery, he duly ceded the field to his conqueror and slunk away from Limoges, burning with shame, his reputation in ruins.

But still, despite it all, he could not bear to confess his defeat. Instead, over the next three years, Ademar persisted in arguing his ruined case. Hoax was piled upon hoax; forgery upon forgery. Everything he wrote, in the gathering frenzy of his bitterness, had only the single aim: to prove that St Martial had indeed been a companion of Christ. Ademar, the same monk who in his youth had stood transfixed before a vision of his crucified Lord, now sought, with a phenomenal but twisted display of learning, to imagine himself back into the world in which the human Jesus had lived. A form of madness, no doubt; and yet, if so, it was one that he shared with multitudes beyond the bounds of his monastery, as the 1030s finally dawned. The one-thousandth anniversary of Christ’s Passion was now a mere three years away — and upon its approach ‘many wonders were made manifest’. And the greatest of them all, a wonder that appeared to ‘portend nothing other than the advent of the accursed Antichrist, who, according to divine testimony, is expected to appear at the end of the world’, was the resolve of people in unparalleled numbers to set out on a great pilgrimage, not to their local shrine, not to Santiago, not even to Rome, but to the very city which the blessed feet of their Saviour had trodden, and where He had been nailed to a cross, and risen from the dead: Jerusalem.

The swell of this great wave had been building for some decades. Although originally there had been few travellers from the West prepared to make the long and arduous journey to the Holy Land, the years around the Millennium had seen a startling upsurge of pilgrims setting out for Jerusalem. Most, such as that venerable expert on the end days, Adso of Montier-en-Der, were eminent and wealthy: travellers well able to afford a berth on a ship. Indeed, even celebrated princes had been known to make the trip. Fulk Nerra, for instance, taking time off from terrorising his neighbours, had ended up travelling to Jerusalem no fewer than four times. His second journey, made in 1009, had been his most heroic of all: for no sooner had he arrived outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre than he had found himself caught up in the horrors of its desecration. Braving the dangers with his customary swagger, he had even succeeded in breaking off a fragment of Christ’s tomb, and bearing it back in triumphant piety to Anjou. This formidable achievemen had confirmed his reputation as a near-legendary figure. Yet even Fulk was put in the shade by the sheer scale of the human tide inspired by the millennium of the Passion of Christ, a great flood of men and women who were not necessarily noblemen, or abbots, or bishops, but people of infinitely humbler stock: ‘an innumerable multitude, gathered from across the whole world, greater than any man before could have hoped to see’.

And among them was Ademar. Defeated, embittered, and no doubt conscience-stricken as he was, there was nothing to keep him in Aquitaine. Leaving his own monastery late in 1032, he travelled first to Limoges, where he deposited his forgeries in the library of St Martial: a dossier so detailed and convincing that within a few decades it would serve to convince everyone of his case, and win for him a posthumous victory over all his critics. That done, Ademar then went back on to the open road, joining the throngs of other penitents who were similarly heading east. Most of these did not, as had for so long been the custom, take a ship for the Holy Land; for since the Millennium, and the conversion of the Hungarians, it had become possible to make the entire journey overland. True, Hungary itself was still not without its dangers: one monk from Regensburg, travelling across its plains in the early 1030s, was startled to see a dragon swooping menacingly overhead, ‘its plumed head the height of a mountain, its body covered with scales like shields of iron’. Nor were such monsters the limit of the perils that a pilgrim might be obliged to face: for beyond Hungary there awaited cheating Greeks, and officious Saracens, and thieving Bedouins. Yet it was in the very rigours of a pilgrimage that its truest value lay – and Ademar, arriving at length before the gates of the Holy City in the fateful year 1033, could only trust that he had proved himself worthy to witness whatever wonders might soon unfold.

The heavens, however, remained resolutely empty. Antichrist did not appear. The end of the world stood postponed, and all those pilgrims who had assembled in such huge numbers on the Mount of Olives found themselves waiting in vain for their Saviour’s return.

Soon enough, as 1033 became 1034, most of them set off back for home. But not all. There were some, whether through a surfeit of ‘indescribable joy’, as the pious proclaimed, or perhaps through despair, who would never leave Jerusalem – except for heaven. And Ademar was one of them. He died in 1034. ‘Come, eternal King,’ he had implored, in a prayer that was probably the last thing he ever wrote, ‘come and watch over your kingdom, our sacrifice, our priesthood. Come, Lord ruler; come snatch away the nations from error. Come Lord, Saviour of the world.’

But the Lord had not come. And still the fallen world ran its course.