The Y1K Problem

One example of the "white mantle of churches"

So...the Venerable Bede suggests that time be reckoned since the year of Christ's birth. People start numbering years. They start to notice a disturbing trend: they are approaching a big even number: 1000. Ralph Glaber lived through this traumatic transition, and left us an account.

Born in 985 in Burgundy, at the age of 12 his monk uncle found him a place in the monastery of Saint-Léger-de-Champeaux for education and discipline, but he was expelled for bad conduct. He later joined the Benedictines at Cluny, becoming a monk of his own accord. He later lived at two other monasteries. He died in 1050. His life's work was a five-volume chronicle called Historiarum libri quinque ab anno incarnationis DCCCC usque ad annum MXLIV ["History in five books from 900 to 1044"]. His Latin was far from elegant, his grasp of historical facts was far from accurate, and yet the history he wrote provides us with insight to the mood of the time.

And that mood was dark and dire. Glaber saw corruption everywhere:

Warned by the prophecy of Holy Writ, we see clearer than daylight that in the process of the Last Days, as love waxed cold and iniquity abounded among mankind, perilous times were at hand for men's souls. For by many assertions of the ancient fathers we are warned that, as covetousness stalks abroad, the religious Rules or Orders of the past have caught decay and corruption from that which should have raised them to growth and progress.. . From this [covetousness] also proceed the constant tumult of quarrels at law, and frequent scandals arise, and the even tenor of the different Orders is rent by their transgressions. Thus also it comes to pass that, while irreligiousness stalks abroad among the clergy, froward* and incontinent appetites grow among the people, until lies and deceit and fraud and manslaughters, creeping abroad among them, draw almost all to perdition!

After the millennium was survived, however, he lets us know that the world changed for the better:

It was as if the whole world were shaking itself free, shrugging off the burden of the past, and cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches.

The phrase "white mantle of churches" has entered the lexicon of medieval imagery, and is remembered and used in print more than Glaber's darker imagery of the corruption leading up to the year 1000.

*FYI: "froward" is not a typo; it means "to lead away/astray"

The End of the World

Given all the fuss about the Mayan calendar, I thought it would be fun to look at other times when people thought the world might end.

The Epistles of Paul (1st century CE) in the New Testament suggest that Jesus' return was imminent and would start the process of the end times.

Saint Clement (c.90 CE) predicted the end of the world was imminent (probably influenced by Paul).

Bishop Hilary of Poitiers (c.300-c.368) was called the "Hammer of the Arians" for his opposition to them. He claimed in 365 that Emperor Constantius II (a semi-Arian) was the Antichrist, and the Apocalypse was imminent.

Hilary's student, St. Martin of Tours (316-397), claimed the end would come by 400 CE.

Hippolytus (170-35), sometimes called the first antipope, was a great scholar who thought 500 CE was a good round number for the end of the world. The historian Sextus Julius Africanus (c.160-c.240) also thought 500 was a good round number for the end times.

In 968 CE, the army of German Emperor Otto III saw an eclipse and widely believed that the end was nigh.

In 992 CE, Good Friday (a "floating" holy day) coincided with the Feast of the Annunciation. This concurrence had been thought to be a sign of the end. A report came from Germany that the sun rose in the north, and that suns and moons were fighting in the sky. Other countries missed that sight.

In May of 1000 CE, Charlemagne's body (that's him in the illustration) was disinterred in order to fulfill a legend that an emperor would rise from his sleep to fight the Antichrist.

A belief that Jesus would return 1000 years after his death made people look to 1033 CE as a date for the beginning of the end.

Pope Innocent III, scholar that he was, added the legendary number 666 to the date of the founding of Islam, and concluded that the end would come in 1284 CE.

The Black Death was seen by many as the end.

...and so on.

Mappa Mundi

Approximately 1100 mappae mundi (maps of the world) have survived from the Middle Ages; about 200 are separate maps; the rest are in books.

Maps of the world were obviously limited by knowledge of geography. This did not deter medieval cartographers, however, since maps existed for along time not as guides for travelers, but as diagrams of the layout of God's creation. Minutiae weren't as important as portraying the overall plan, or showing a particular feature. For instance, Gervase of Canterbury's Mappa Mundi was drawn up specifically to show the bishopric s and ecllesiastical foundations of England, Scotland and Wales.

One of the most common of the map designs was the T-O design, called that by modern scholars because it resembled those letters. The "T" was the division of the major landmasses with the enormous Asia topping Europe and Africa; "O" was the encircling Ocean.

Note that Asia is on top. When choosing proper positioning for the arrangements of the continents, the direction of the rising sun seemed to be a logical place to begin. East is therefore placed at the top of the maps, and the arrangement of things in their proper place on a map therefore was called "orienting."*

Cicero's Dream of Scipio (in which a vision of the world is viewed in detail) was very popular in the Middle Ages for what it had to say about the world and the divine. Macrobius' (5th century CE) Commentary on it was how many readers became familiar with it. Many copies of the Commentary include mappa mundi of the type therefore called Macrobian. The Dream includes a description of the various zones, cold to temperate to hot to temperate to cold. Only the temperate zones were considered habitable.

Fourteen manuscripts of Beatus of Liébana's (c.730-800) popular Commentary on the Apocalypse of St. John include the quadripartite-style map that squeezes the Antipodes into the extreme south.

The most famous and most detailed maps provide the most variety and data and start to approach the realism and usefulness of modern cartography. The symbolic value of the mappae mundi began to be replaced by the need for accurate information to aid in travel and, especially, navigation on the seas. The new "Portolan Charts" became far more valuable to have and reproduce, and the number of mappa mundi were produced less.

If you would like to see some maps from across the ages, a good start is the Imaginary Museum.

*An extra tidbit: "orient" comes to Middle English from Latin via French and the verb oriri, "to rise"; once in English it starts being used for the direction itself in which the sun rises.