Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;

  21. Westrem, “Against Gog and Magog,” 57, 60–65; Anderson, Alexander’s Gate, 3–7, 87–104; von den Brincken, Fines Terrae, 26, 61–62, 70, 93, 115, 118–19; and Andrew Gow, “Gog and Magog on Mappaemundi and Early Printed World Maps: Orientalizing Ethnography in the Apocalyptic Tradition,” Journal of Early Modern History 2 (1998): 61–88.

  22. This is particularly so given the rather loose connotations of “the East.” As Mary Campbell has aptly put it, “‘The East’ is a concept separable from any particular geographic area. It is essentially Elsewhere.” Campbell, Witness and the Other World, 48.

  23. Pseudo-Methodius, Revelationes, ed. in Ernst Sackur, Sibyllinische Texte und Forschungen: Pseudomethodius, Adso und die Tiburtinische Sibylle (Halle: Niemeyer, 1898), 91–92: “Tunc reserabuntur portae aquilonis et egredientur virtutes gentium illarum, quas conclusit intus Alexander . . . Gentes namque, que exient ab aquilone, comedent carnes hominum et bibent sanguinem bestiarum sicut aqua et commedent inmu[n]das serpentes et scorpiones et omnem sordissimum et abominabilem genus bestiarum et reptilia, que repunt super terra.”

  24. Seymour, ed., Mandeville’s Travels, ch. 29, p. 193.

  25. Roger Bacon, Opus majus, 1: 303: “O terra, mater draconum, nutrix scorpionum, fovea serpentum, lacus daemonum, facilius fuerat in te infernum esse quam tales gentes parturire. Vae terrae fructiferae et mellifluae, quando ingruent tot serpentes et bestiae in eam.”

  26. Westrem, “Against Gog and Magog,” 68–70.

  27. Westrem, “Against Gog and Magog,” 69; see Seymour, ed., Mandeville’s Travels, ch. 29, p. 193.

  28. But many of the chroniclers cited in this paper—e.g., Heinrich of Herford—reject the notion of the Jews’ guilt (Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 280). Heinrich says the Jews were killed on account of their money, like the Templars. According to the confessions extracted from Jews in Chillon, the conspiracy had been directed from afar, by Jews in Toledo. Urkunden und Akten der Stadt Strassburg: Urkundenbuch der Stadt Strassburg (Strasbourg: K. J. Triibner, 1896), 5: 167–74; the confessions have been translated in Horrox, Black Death, 211–19. See also Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 33–68. Ginzburg notes the parallels to the imagined leper conspiracy in 1321 that also linked up both external and internal enemies.

  29. Horrox, Black Death, 73, translating from Historia Roffensis, in British Library, Cottonian MS, Faustina B V, fols. 96v–101. There are excerpts from this chronicle printed in Henry Wharton, Anglia sacra, sive collectio historiarum, partim antiquitus, partim recenter scriptarum, de archiepiscopis et episcopis Angliae (London: Richard Chiswel, 1691), part 1, 356–77. There the chronicle’s author is identified as William Dene. Wharton omits the sections dealing with the plague, however.

  30. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 269; Chronica Monasterii de Melsa, 35, 69.

  31. It is perhaps not insignificant that Roger Bacon had proclaimed that the gates enclosing Gog and Magog “cannot be broken apart by . . . anything other than a mighty earthquake.” Roger Bacon, Opus majus, 1: 304 (“nec igne nec ferro nec aqua nec aliqua re dissolvi potest, nisi solo terrae motu violento”).

  32. See, e.g., R. W. Southern, “Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing: 3. History as Prophecy,” Royal Historical Association Transactions 5th ser. 22 (1972): 159–80, esp. 170–73.

  33. To be sure, many commentators read Revelation as presenting allegorically the whole course of the Church’s history, so that, for example, in Nicolas of Lyra’s commentary, all of the events described in the first sixteen books of Revelation have already been fulfilled (including all the earthquakes mentioned in Revelation, which Nicolas reads metaphorically anyway). See Philip D. W. Krey, trans., Nicholas of Lyra’s Apocalypse Commentary (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), 214–16.

  34. Gregory of Tours (Gregorius Episcopus Turonensis), Libri historiarum X, ed. Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levison, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum, 1.1 (Hanover: Hahn, 1951), IX.5, p. 416: “Et multa alia signa apparuerunt, quae aut regis obitum adnunciare solent aut regiones excidium.” See also V.33 (storms, a light traversing the sky, and an earthquake all precede the outbreak of an epidemic in V.34) ; VI. 14 (fire and lights in sky and a rain of blood precede an epidemic of boils and tumors in the groin); IX.5–6 (a rain of snakes, flashes of lights, strange vessels bearing strange writing, floods, and odd growths all precede the appearance of a false Christ, Desiderius, whom Gregory specifically links to the false Christs of end times in Matthew 24:24). Gregory links the portents, plagues, and false prophets all together at the beginning of X.25 with apocalyptic quotations from Matt. 24: 7 (“And there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes”) and Mark 13: 22 (“For false Christs and false prophets shall rise”).

  35. Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. Henry Richards Luard, 7 vols., Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores (Rolls Series) 57 (London: Longmans, 1872–83), 5: 191–98:

  Notandum autem est, et non leviter attendendum, quod in nulla illarum quinquagenarum, scilicet viginti quatuor, sicut in ista ultima quinquagena, scilicet quae jam praeteriit, videlicet vicesima quinta, tot mirabilia et insolitae novitates evenerunt, ut in ultima. Et sunt quidam et multi historiarum scriptores et diligentes inspectores, qui dicunt, quod nec in omnibus aliis quinquagenis visa sunt tot prodigia et novitates admirandae, sicut in hac jam terminata. Et his tamen majora cum formidine expectantur. (191)

  And at the chronicle’s original end (he later changed his mind and continued the work up until his death in 1259), Matthew notes additionally, “It is thought to be not without significance that in this last year all the elements suffered unusual and improper degradation.” (“Creditur quoque non vacare a significatione, quod omnia hoc ultimo anno elementa insolitum et irregulare passa sunt detrimentum” 5: 197). This reference to the four elements may be apocalyptic, too. In at least one enumeration of signs before Judgment Day, the author notes that “The natures will change/of each element, report that is most wondrous.” The tenth-century Irish poem Saltair na Rann, strophe CLIX, as translated in William W. Heist, The Fifteen Signs Before Doomsday (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1952), 12.

  36. Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, 4:603: “quia, ut credebatur, significativus et insolitus in his partibus occidentalibus, necnon et innaturalis, cum soliditas Angliae cavernis terrestribus et profundis traconibus ac concavitatibus, in quibus secundum philosophos solet terraemotus generari, careat; nec inde ratio poterat indigari. Erat igitur, secundum minas Evangelii, [prope] finem mundi senescentis descriptus quasi per loca.”

  37. Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, 5: 192–93: “Una noctium visae sunt stellae infinitae cadere de caelo, ita quod simul et semel decem vel duodecim, hae in Oriente, hae in Occidente, Austro, et Aquilone, et in medio firmamenti, volitare viderentur, quae si essent verae stellae, nec una in caelo remansisset, nec potest inde in libro metheororum ratio reperiri manifesta, sed ut Christi comminatio mortalibus immineret, Erunt signa in sole, etc.” (Luke 21: 25).

  38. This is parallel to the scholastic redefinition of miracles as something contra or praeter naturam. In his commentary on book II of Lombard’s Sentences, Thomas Aquinas classified miracles as contra, supra, or praeter naturam. S. Thomae Aquinatis Opera Omnia, vol. 1, In Quattor Libros Sententiarum, ed. Roberto Busa (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1980), bk. 2, dist. 18, ques. 1, art. 3: “[Miracula] autem quandoque sunt supra naturam, quandoque praeter naturam, quandoque contra naturam.” See also Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record, and Event, 1000–1215 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982, 1987), 3–9; Laura Smoller, “Defining the Boundaries of the Natural in the Fifteenth Century: The Inquest into the Miracles of St. Vincent Ferrer (d. 1419),” Viator 28 (1997): 333–59; and Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 9
3–124, which surveys definitions of the marvelous and the miraculous from Augustine through Francis Bacon. The eclipse at the crucifixion similarly was explained as not a natural event. See Laura Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre d’Ailly, 1350–1420 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 46, 160, n. 13. On the medieval “disenchantment of the world,” see M.-D. Chenu, “Nature and Man: The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century,” in Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 11–18 (Chenu calls it a “desacralizing” of nature); Tullio Gregory, “La nouvelle idée de nature et de savoir scientifique au XIIe siècle,” in John E. Murdoch and Edith D. Sylla, The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, Boston Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 26 (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel, 1975), 193–218; and Daston and Park, Wonders’, esp. 109–133. Later fourteenth-century authors extended this type of discussion, so that an author like Nicole Oresme could assert that all mirabilia can be explained by natural causes (even if these causes could not always be knowable by humans). Bert Hansen, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature: The De causis mirabilium (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1985), esp. 70–76.

  39. The term “bleeding edge” refers to a technology that is so new—and therefore requires such a powerful system to use—that a company will actually lose customers by employing such technology in its web site. The term implies going too far too fast.

  40. See the discussion of judicial astrology in part 4 of the Opus maius, in Roger Bacon, Opus majus, 1: 251–69. It has recently been argued that Bacon’s condemnation by the Franciscan order in 1277 was because of the excessive claims he made for astrology’s ability to predict religious change. See Paul Sidelko, “The Condemnation of Roger Bacon,” Journal of Medieval History 22 (1996): 69–81. There is no contemporary evidence indicating what in Bacon’s work was deemed offensive, however; Sidelko argues simply on the basis of Bacon’s assertions about the stars’ effects on religion.

  41. Bacon, Opus majus, 1:269: “Scio quod si ecclesia vellet revolvere textum sacrum et prophetias sacras, atque prophetias Sibyllae, et Merlini et Aquilae, et Sestonis, Joachim et multorum aliorum, insuper historias et libros philosophorum, atque juberet considerari vias astronomiae, inveniretur sufficiens suspicio vel magis certitudo de tempore Antichristi.”

  42. See Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars, 33, 152–53; S. J. Tester, A History of Western Astrology (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1987), 177; and Philippe Contamine, “Les prédictions annuelles astrologiques à la fin du Moyen Age: genre littéraire et témoin de leur temps,” in Histoire sociale, sensibilités collectives et mentalités: mélanges Robert Mandrou (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), 192 (listing twenty-seven condemned propositions dealing with astrology).

  43. Arnau de Vilanova, De tempore adventus Antichristi, ed. Heinrich Finke, Aus den Tagen Bonifaz VIII: Funde und Forschungen, Vorreformationsgeschichtliche Forschungen 2 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1902), p. cxxxiv: “suam potentiam et sapientiam Deus non alligavit naturalibus causis. Set sicut in productione mundi fuit supernaturaliter operatus, sic et in consummatione huius seculi supernaturaliter operabitur.”

  44. John of Paris, Tractatus de Antichristo, ed. in Sara Beth Peters Clark, “The Tractatus de Antichristo of John of Paris: A Critical Edition, Translation, and Commentary,” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1981, 46–47, 59–62; John dismisses astrology’s claims to offer any certainty about the time of Antichrist’s arrival. See also Laura Smoller, “The Alfonsine Tables and the End of the World: Astrology and Apocalyptic Calculation in the Later Middle Ages,” in Alberto Ferreiro, ed., The Devil, Heresy and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey B. Russell (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998), 211–39.

  45. Henry of Harclay, Utrum astrologi vel quicumque calculatores possint probare secundum adventum Christi, in Franz Pelster, ed., “Die Questio Heinrichs von Harclay über die zweite Ankunft Christi und die Erwartung des baldigen Weltendes zu Anfang des XIV Jahrhunderts,” Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietá 1 (1951): 82.

  46. Ibid., 82: “Ad argumentum principale, cum arguitur: in diebus ultimis post tribulacionem sol contenebrabitur etc., dicendum quod tale signum erit miraculosum ante finem mundi, non naturalis eclipsis.”

  47. The astrologer was John of Aschenden (Joannis Eschuid). See Smoller, “Alfonsine Tables,” 220–21, and the references therein.

  48. John Clynn, Annales hiberniae, in Richard Butler, ed., The Annals of Ireland by Friar John Clyn, of the Convent of Friars Minor, Kilkenny, and Thady Dowling, Chancellor of Leighlin, Together with the Annals of Ross (Dublin: Irish Archaeological Society, 1849), 36: “De ista pestilencia facta est visio mirabilis (ut dicebatur) anno precedenti scilicet 1347, in claustro Cisterciensium Tripolis, sub hac forma; quidam monachus celebravit missam coram abbate suo, uno ministro presente, et inter ablucionem et communionem misse apparuit quedam manus scribens super corporale in quo predictus monachus confecerat. ‘Cedrus alta Libani succendetur.’ ” Clynn’s entry describing the plague has been translated in Horrox, Black Death, 82–84.

  49. John Clynn, Annales hiberniae, 36: “Non est auditum a principio seculi tot homines pestilencia, fame aut quacunque infirmitate tanto tempore mortuos in orbe; nam terre motus, qui per miliaria multa se extendebat, civitates, villas, et castra subvertebat absorbuit et subversit; pestis ista villas, civitates, castra et oppida homine habitatore omnino privavit, ut vix esset qui in eis habitaret.”

  50. Ibid., 28–29.

  Item, die Martis, scilicet xv. Kal: Decembris, fuit maxima inundancia aque, qualis a xlta. annis ante non est visa; que pontes, molendina et edificia funditus evertit et asportavit; solum altare magnum et gradus altaris de tota abbacia Fratrum Minorum Kilkennie, aqua non attigit nec cooperuit. Hic annus fuit tempestuosus nimis et nocivus hominibus et animalibus; quia a festo Omnium Sanctorum usque Pascha, ut plurimum fuit pluvia, nix, aut gelu . . . Hoc anno boves et vacce moriebantur, et oves precipue, fere sunt desctructe . . . Item, in hoc anno in quadragesima, salices in Anglia rosas protulerunt, que ad diversas terras pro spectaculo sunt advecte.

  Then Clynn lists a number of battles, duels, and murders, none of which is clearly said to be foreshadowed by these portents. Perhaps he simply enumerated these signs in the hopes that their meanings would become clear later.

  51. Clynn, Annales hiberniae, 36: “Tunc passagium erit commune ab omnibus fidelibus ultra aquas congregatas ad Terram Sanctam.” The consolatory power of such prophecies is a major theme of Lerner’s in Powers of Prophecy and “Black Death and Eschatological Mentalities.”

  52. John of Winterthur, Die Chronik Johanns von Winterthur, ed. C. Brun and Friedrich Baethgen, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum germanicarum, nova series 3, pp. 275–76:

  Item eodem anno [1348] in fine Ianuarii in conversione sancti Pauli factus est terre motus magnus, qui in Longobardia multas turres deiecit, menia scidit vinaque in doliis turbulenta fecit. Villach quoque civitatem Karinthie subvertit. . . . Anno Domini MCCCXLVIII. tempore hyemali vel circa principium veris in partibus ultramarinis exorta est mortalitas seu pestilencia tam grandis, quod infinitam et inestimabilem multitudinem infidelium absorbuit et absummpsit. . . . Predicta, scilicet terre motus et pestilencia, precurrencia mala sunt extreme voraginis et tempestatis secundum verbum salvatoris in ewangelio dicentis: “Erunt terre motus per loca et pestilencia et fames” et cetera.

  John of Winterthur’s chronicle ends in the year 1348; it is likely that he died in the plague.

  53. Historia Roffensis, as translated in Horrox, Black Death, 73. The chronicle does note that the plague began in the east: “A great mortality of men began in India and, raging through the whole of infidel Syria and Egypt, and also through Greece, Italy, Provence and France, arrived in England, where the same mortality destroyed more than a third of the men, women
and children” (Horrox, Black Death, 70).

  54. Heinrich von Hervordia, Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, 268:

  Sed et inter ecclesiasticos, seculares et religiosos eo tempore dissentiones, rebelliones, conspirationes, conjurationes et conventiones ubilibet et vallidissime sunt exorte, sicut predixerat apostolus II. Thim. 3. et 2. Cor. 12. Sed et alie tumultuationes, puerorum contra senes, ignobilium contra nobiles, in civitatibus, monasteriis et congregationibus plurimis seditiones et generales et particulares plurime temporibus hiis exstiterunt. Heresis etiam symoniaca tantum invaluit in clero et tam exuberanter inundavit, ut quilibet quanticumque status, maximus, mediocris et parvus, et qualiscumque, scilicet secularis vel religiosus, et quomodolibet etiam manifeste emeret et venderet spirituale quodcumque, nec verecundaretur, nec a quoquam corriperetur vel reprehendetur. . . . Prebendas etiam et personatus et dignitates ecclesiasticas alias omnes, ecclesias parrochyales, cappellas, vicarias et altaria pro pecunia, pro mulieribus et quandoque pro concubinis commutabant, in ludo taxillorum exponebant, perdebant et acquirebant. Tunc tumultuationes et decertationes pro regnis, principatibus, archiepiscopatibus, episcopatibus, prebendis et aliis hujusmodi plurimi plurimas habuerunt.

  55. Ibid., 280: “Eodem anno gens sine capite, sui multitudine et adventus sui subitatione mirabilis universis, ex omnibus subito Theutonie partibus exsurgunt.”

  56. The prophecy reads, in part: “The high Cedar of Lebanon will be felled, and Tripoli will soon be destroyed and Acre captured. . . . Within fifteen years there will be one God and one faith. The other god will vanish. The sons of Israel will be liberated from captivity. A certain people (gens) who are called without a head will come.” Translation quoted from Lerner, Powers of Prophecy, 74 (the version that began to circulate shortly after the fall of Acre in 1291).