Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/440

This page needs to be proofread.

430 G. L. Burr than now, as we stand at the threshold of another Christian century and look across it to the near close of another millennium ? The earliest author, and the only pre-modern one, in whose pages has been found any mention of a panic at the year looo is the German abbot Joannes Tritemius, who lived and wrote just as the fifteenth century was changing to the sixteenth. In his chronicle of the world, the Annales Hirsaugienscs, as it now lies before us, there is, in the passage devoted to the year looo, this sentence : " In this year a terrible comet appeared, which by its look terrified many, who feared that the last day was at hand ; inasmuch as sev- eral years before it had been predicted by some, deluded by a false calculation, that the visible world would end in the year of Christ lOOO." But, as this chronicle, left in manuscript by its author, was never printed in full till 1690, as the abridged form earlier printed says nothing of this panic, even mentioning the comet in another connection, and as by 1690 the belief in such a panic was already in vogue from other sources, there is much reason to suspect that the sentence belongs not to Tritemius but to his seventeenth-century editors. Whether his or not, it should perhaps be brought into connection with an earlier passage, under the year 960, which tells of the appearance at the council of princes in Worms of a Thuringian hermit, named Bernhard, well versed in the scriptures and popularly venerated as a saint, who declared it revealed to him that the end of the world was already at hand. Some, says Tritemius, thought him an inspired prophet, while others laughed at him as a man out of his mind or swollen by self-conceit. But the first book to publish to the world the millennial terror was the famous Annales Ecclcsiastici of Cardinal Baronius, in 1605. Beginning with the year looi the eleventh volume of his great work, he opens it with the statement that this year, the first of a new century, had been by some " foretold as the world's last, or nigh thereto, when Antichrist should be revealed;" and he quotes in full from the tenth-century abbot, Abbo of Fleury, a passage telling how while he was yet a youth he heard in Paris a preacher declare that at the end of the thousandth year Antichrist should come and not long after him the Judgment,' and how once in Lor- raine there had spread a report that when Annunciation Day should fall on Good Friday the end of the world would arrive. To this, from Sigebert of Gembloux he adds a list of the prodigies seen in the year 1000, remarking that these might well seem heralds of ' ** Oe fine quoque mundi coram populo sennonem in Ecclesia Parisionim ado- lescentulus audivi, quod statim, finito mille annorum numero, Antichristus adveniret, et non longo post tempore, universale judicium succederet.