The World Ends in 1260

In an earlier post I discussed the mistaken notion that people in the year 1000 expected the world to end.  Here I discuss a real medieval belief that the world was about to end--in the year 1260.

Why 1260? you may well ask.  Back in the early thirteenth century, an Italian priest called Joachim of Fiore tried to calculate the age of the world based on the Old Testament, as people have done both before and since.  His calculations gave a shorter time span than most people's calculations, 1,260 years from the Creation to the birth of Christ.  This period he called the Age of the Father.  Logically, then (medieval people were always logical, even though we may not always accept the premises from which they argued), there should be another 1.260 years for the Age of the Son.

(Incidentally, BC/AD dating did not begin until five or six centuries after the birth of Jesus, when a monk tried to translate the Roman dating system everyone in the West had been using into a Christian one.  Scholars now think he was close but off by a few years, which is why you will generally see Jesus's birth as dated to about 4 BC, based on the years when Herod was king.  Medieval people did not worry about this.)

Joachim of Fiore died well before the year 1260, so it is unclear exactly what he expected to happen then, but he did say that that year would mark a major change, the beginning of the Age of the Holy Spirit.  In the 1250s, a number of people read his work, and by the time 1260 rolled around panicked crowds assumed the end was at hand.

With only a short time left to atone for their sins, great masses of people took off cross-country, weeping and wailing and flagellating themselves, that is beating themselves with whips.  The bishops declared that this was a heresy, but they had to say it in a quiet voice, because so many people believed it--including some of the bishops.  Mostly the bishops kept their heads down and hoped the madness would soon pass off.

When 1261 dawned and nothing had happened, most of the flagellants quietly went home and back to whatever they had been doing before.  Some of the leaders of the bands announced loudly that it was their piety and prayer that had preserved the world from ending, but this was widely disregarded.

The only group to proclaim the reality of the supposed big change of 1260 was the Spiritual Franciscans.  The Franciscans, founded by Francis of Assisi in the early thirteenth century, had initially followed radical poverty, where the friars lived solely by begging and owned nothing--they could not even save a piece of bread over from one day to the next.  But after Francis's death in 1226, many of his successors decided this was an impossible way to run an Order and started creating exceptions and building houses for the friars.  Those who held out for Francis's original vision called themselves Spiritual Franciscans.

In 1260, they declared that their day had come, that they were the "dusty-footed preachers" whom Joachim of Fiore had vaguely suggested would appear during the Age of the Holy Spirit.  For them, the world really had ended, even if no one else noticed, and they were now in charge.  This was declared a gross heresy, and over the next two generations the Spiritual Franciscans were determinedly exterminated.  The Franciscan Order today still follows a life of simplicity and love for all of God's creation, but the radical extremes of the Spirituals have been quietly forgotten.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014
For more on medieval religion, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

The Year 1000

Along with the mistaken belief that medieval people thought the world was flat, one of the most persistent myths about the Middle Ages is that everyone thought the world was going to end in the year 1000.  This is, in fact, untrue.

For one thing, most people had no idea what year it was.  Without calendars, newspapers, cell phones that display the date, or the like, they would not have had any easy way of telling the year.  When the year 2000 came along there was a quite real possibility of messed-up computers on January 1, as everyone heard about in great detail, but there was nothing similar a millennium earlier.

For that matter, there was not even general agreement then on when the new year began.  Some places began the new year on January 1, which was the Roman norm.  Others began it on Easter.  This of course could create problems:  if Easter was early one year and late the next, a year might have two months of April, one at the beginning and a partial one at the end.  Others began the new year with the supposed date of the Incarnation, that is the conception of Jesus, March 25 of the previous year.  So different regions, even different cities, could easily be a year apart in what year it was.

And of course, even for those who tried to keep track of the year, without outside verification it was very easy to slip up (remember, they were using Roman numerals, always confusing).

The millennial event which medieval people did celebrate was 1033, the thousandth year after the Crucifixion, when, as one chronicler put it, "France was covered with a white mantle of churches."  No one expected the world to end--rather, they anticipated a spiritual awakening.  (The image above is of Tournus, an eleventh-century church in southern Burgundy, an example of what the chronicler meant.)

However, some nineteenth-century scholars read these accounts of 1033 and misinterpreted  them thoroughly.  There was not indeed any suggestion, either by people at the time or by historians, of the "terrors of the year 1000" until the nineteenth century.

These nineteenth-century scholars took as "proof" some preambles to charters, "We who live in the final days…"  There are two main problems with this "proof."  First, these charters, which are only found in one or two places, all date to about 950, two generations too early to suggest fear of the year 1000.  Secondly, and even more importantly, the scribes who wrote out these charters were using an old "formulary book," a handbook on what charters were supposed to look like.  This formulary book dates from the seventh century.  So the apocalyptic charter language which some thought "showed" that people feared the end in the year 1000 actually showed that at least one person feared it three centuries earlier.

In fact, there have been repeated predictions over the centuries that the world was about to end.  There certainly were charismatic preachers in the Middle Ages who announced the Second Coming was right around the corner, just not in the year 1000--and then as now, most people ignored them.

So far, the world has been very stubborn and persistent.  In the Middle Ages, as now, the response to a failure of apocalyptic prophecy was generally to slip quietly home and pretend one never believed it anyway.  Other possibilities included saying the end was still coming, but somehow the date had been miscalculated; here the difficulty was getting anyone to believe you next time.  More imaginatively, leaders could announce that the piety and prayers of their little apocalyptic group had "saved the world" from destruction, or, even better, say that the world really had ended, but everyone else was too stupid to notice.

The one year that there really was a belief in the imminent end was 1260, but that's a topic for another day.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014
For more on medieval life and religion, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.