Germany and France in the year ad 1000 illustrate the two tendencies of millennialism: the former manifested the “top-down” imperial version, while the latter displayed a remarkable array of “bottom-up” populist expressions. In Germany, Emperor Otto III, who manipulated every aspect of the imperial variety, proclaimed the renewal of the Roman Empire and revived the “obstacle” to the Antichrist. Moreover, on Pentecost of 1000, he opened Charlemagne’s tomb and urged rulers throughout eastern Europe to convert to Christianity. In France, King Robert II, the second ruler of the dynasty that replaced the Carolingian “obstacle,” presided over a kingdom beset by the anathema of social turmoil in the form of an uncontrollable castellan revolution. French apocalyptic and millennial symbols were generated from below, especially in the earliest popular religious movement of the Middle Ages, the Peace of God. This conciliar movement, which began south of the Loire River and spread throughout France, appeared in two waves, one in the decade before the millennium of the Incarnation (1000) and the other in the decade before the millennium of the Passion, the suffering and death of Jesus on the cross (1033). Mobilizing huge crowds at open-air revivalist gatherings in the pursuit of God’s peace on earth, this millenarian movement may have been the earliest to bring together all levels of society. It thus displayed two key aspects of subsequent millennialism in the West: vast revivalist gatherings and the sense of a social covenant.
Of course, the years 1000 and 1033 passed, and, despite all-encompassing covenants followed by years of peace and abundance, there was still no Parousia, still no millennium. A failure as a popular movement with millennial overtones, the Peace of God became institutionalized as the “king’s peace.” Yet apocalyptic expectations did not disappear in medieval Europe; on the contrary, there was a sea change in millennial hopes. Instead of the predominantly passive expectation of the earlier period, the passing of 1000 seems to have introduced, via the peace movement, a new and more aggressive form of millennialism, postmillennialism. This notion, that Christ would come after a millennial kingdom was wrought by the saints, challenged believers to work toward that kingdom. While popular "messiahs" continued to emerge, the period after the year 1000 gave rise to much larger movements that were often initially approved by ecclesiastical authorities. Among these were the Crusades and the Franciscan and flagellant movements. Some of these movements had popular support and were militant and extremely hostile to ecclesiastical authority, the wealthy, Jews, and intellectuals. They also displayed the anger, paranoia, and violence that would dominate one strain of antimodern Christian millennialism found in the pogroms of the Crusaders to the genocidal persecutions of the Nazis.
But the better-documented, and in some ways more surprising, aspect of medieval millennialism was its use by lay and ecclesiastical elites to support their own authority. Starting with the Gregorian Reform in the 11th century, papal reformers employed apocalyptic imagery both to brand their enemies as Antichrists and to wrap their own efforts in messianic promises. Similarly, royal and even comitial courts used eschatological prophecy as propaganda. William the Conqueror consciously used themes from Revelation, including his crown and Domesday Book, to buttress his conquest of England. Supporters of Thierry of Alsace, the count of Flanders, spread prophecies claiming that his (Carolingian) dynasty was the last barrier to the Antichrist. At the time of the Second Crusade, a French prophet evoked the Tiburtine Sibyl to predict that Louis VII would conquer the Orient in the fashion of the great Persian king Cyrus II.
Millennial hopes and ambitions reached new heights in the late 12th century as a result of the work of Joachim of Fiore, who identified three great ages of history: (1) the age of the Law, which had been characterized by the vesting of righteousness in married persons, (2) the age of the Gospel, during which an order of unmarried clerics served as the guardians of righteousness, and (3) the age of the Holy Spirit—i.e., the period of the Refreshment of the Saints to follow the reign of the Antichrist—during which the order of monks would bring an era of earthly peace and spiritual contemplation. Joachim was the first theologian to reject Augustine and return to a notion of a millennium to come, and his influence on subsequent millennial thought was immense.
The earliest historians of millennialism believed that Joachim was the first millennial thinker since Augustine’s ban of such ideas. He now appears to be the first formal thinker whose millennialism survived in writing. Instead of being a lone millenarian presence, Joachim’s work stands as written expression of an oral discourse that had never ceased, despite its sudden ups and long downs, since well before Augustine. The spectacular success of the movements inspired by Joachite “age of the Spirit” rhetoric illustrates the broad social and religious appeal of this postmillennial discourse.
Joachim revitalized every aspect of medieval millennialism. Within decades of his death in 1201/02, prophecies attributed to him circulated that were identified (in profoundly un-Augustinian fashion) with current events: Franciscans and Dominicans, Holy Roman emperors, and popes all figured in grand, ever-shifting predictions of imminent apocalypse. Chronological calculations fixed 1250, then 1260, as the beginning of the new age, producing new and fearsome forms of spirituality. The Franciscan order split over interpretations of Joachite prophecy, one branch becoming inquisitors, the other becoming revolutionary millenarians. Angelic popes and messianic emperors (some to return from death) were seen by lay and clerical constituencies as part of Joachim’s plan. By the end of the 13th century, millennialism had reached a fevered pitch, especially among the Spiritual Franciscans and their lay counterparts, the Apostolic Brethren, as well as among the more mystical elements of the Beguines and Beghards. The execution in 1300 of the founder of the Apostolic Brethren, Gerard Segarelli, by Pope Boniface VIII set the stage for a particularly violent round of millennialism under the leadership of Fra Dolcino in the early 14th century.
In France the imagery of millennialism continued to influence political discourse throughout the remainder of the Middle Ages, and the catastrophes of the 14th century renewed fervour for the final, divine intervention. The Franciscan John of Roquetaillade (Rupescissa), writing immediately after the humiliating rout of the French knighthood and the capture of the French king John II at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, prophesied that plagues would cut down the populace like the harvest in the fields, the poor would rise up against tyrants and the rich, the church would be stripped of its wealth, and Antichrists would arise in Rome and Jerusalem. At least one contemporary observer, Villehardouin, seems to have thought that Roquetaillade’s prophecies inspired the Jacquerie, a French peasants’ revolt in 1358. However, according to Roquetaillade, the agony of the world would end by 1367, for a great reforming pope would come to power and the king of France would again be elected the Holy Roman emperor. Fulfilling his glorious role as a second Charlemagne, this worthy king would conquer the entire world and establish a millennial reign of peace and prosperity. Indeed, French kings bearing the name Charles were the subjects of particularly intense millennial prophecies throughout the late Middle Ages. A prophecy of 1380 pertaining to Charles VI was subsequently applied to Charles VII and Charles VIII in the late 14th and 15th centuries, respectively, as well as to England’s Charles II while in exile in France in the 17th century.