New light on a dark age

Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom, by Tom Holland

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Millennia, like centuries, are artificial quantities, mathematical nothings. Medieval men may not have shared our obsession with marking the years in round numbers. But they had much the same desire to bring form and structure to a history that might otherwise be a mere jumble of events.

Chronicles traditionally began at the Creation. All history was a divinely ordained cycle concluding with the last trump. Men lived under the perpetual threat of extinction. Apocalyptic writers of the age were remarkably precise about how it would happen. There would be natural calamities, human catastrophes, plague and mass-murder. Antichrist would come to reign on earth. Then all would be extinguished by the Second Coming.

But when? The first millennium was a damp squib, rather like the second.