Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Pimlico, London, 2004.
The communities of the first Christians, Cohn were very different in many aspects than Christianity a thousand years later. As written in Acts, “All that believed were together, and had all things in common…neither said any of them that aught of the things he possessed was his own.” Beginning in the 12th century, itinerant lay preachers demanded a return to these early ideals, and a new form of society that would embody them. The likeliest cause, according to Cohn, was the rising wealth and corruption of the Church while the vast majority remained desperately poor. The gulf between rich and poor, and between early Christian aspirations and the emerging society of late feudal Europe, were growing ever wider. The true Church, disenchanted lay preachers held, was comprised of those who lived lives of poverty and simplicity. Selfless love and caring for others, they maintained, was the essence of true Christianity.
As their numbers grew, these wandering preachers became a formidable threat to the established Church. Around 1145, the self-proclaimed Breton “Christ” Eudo de Stella, for example, began his outdoor preaching. His followers, roused to wrath against the Church, destroyed churches and monasteries. Earlier in the 12th century, Tanchelm of Antwerp had also preached in open fields, condemning clerics who dwelled with their concubines, then broadened his attack to encompass the Church as a whole. Gradually Tanchelm united his followers into a community that saw itself as the one true Church.
In the mid 13th century, a renegade monk named Jacob attracted his own army of followers. They were called the Pastoureaux because many of them had been shepherds and cowherds. Jabob attempted to incite the murder of all priests as he and his followers made their way through Amiens, Rouen, and Paris. At Tours, they whipped Dominican and Franciscan friars and dragged them through the streets. In Orleans, Jacob’s throng stormed houses where priests and monks had taken shelter and burned them to the ground. Other clergy were drowned in the Loire. Following a battle with local authorities at Bourges, however, Jacob was himself captured and cut to pieces.
In the 1180’s in central France, a carpenter founded the “Caputiati”, the “crusaders of peace.” Their initial goal was to free their region from brigands. They soon however, in Cohn’s words, “turned into a revolutionary movement of poor folk that proclaimed the equality of all men.” They recalled often the teaching of Jesus that none of the wealthy would ever be able to enter the Kingdom of God. The Caputiati began to slay nearby nobles until the movement itself was finally suppressed. Increasingly the needy poor “regarded the rich as damnable and damned”.
In the early 14th century, armed columns of poor artisans and laborers appeared on the roads of Picardy, the Low Countries, and the lower Rhine, storming the castles of nobles they encountered along their way. Ten years later, a new army of Pastoureaux swelled in the north of France then headed south, threatening to seize Church and monastery property. Finally, at the Pope’s desperate urging, the nobles of southern France assembled to confront this vast armed and angry “rabble.” In a series of pitched battles in 1320, the army of the Pastoureaux was largely destroyed, but they had struck terror into the hearts of the Pope and the rich.
In the years that followed, such clashes between rich and poor, haves and have-nots, grew even more fierce. In Flanders, peasants and cloth workers again took up arms against landlords and the Church. Spurring these uprisings, according to Cohn, were “dissident clerics preaching a millenarianism of a markedly revolutionary and egalitarian kind.” In Germany too, the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries saw similar outbursts of opposition to the existing order of society and the Church. By the middle 1300’s, Cohn writes, in the growing towns of central and southern Germany “amongst the poor there smoldered a deadly hatred of all the rich.”
In the following century, the pseudonymous “Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine” demanded that “the whole clergy must be annihilated.” Church property, he argued, “should be secularized and used to benefit the whole community and especially the poor.” The “Revolutionary” looked forward to a time when private property would be entirely abolished and all things held in common.
In Champagne in the early 13th century, a sect known as Amaurians taught that, “All things are One, because whatever is, is God.” They believed each of them to be an incarnation of God, that each was, like all human beings, “Christ and the Holy Spirit.” In the dawning time ahead, they had faith, every person would know himself or herself to be divine.” The Amaurians were an initial expression of what would become the Heresy of the Free Spirit. When its members were discovered, they were often burned as heretics.
During the 1300’s, the Brotherhood and Sisterhood of the Free Spirit spread across northern Germany. One of the female branches became the Beguines. By 1320, persecution by the authorities had driven adherents of the Free Spirit entirely underground. Those who were discovered were tortured by the Inquisition. In mass slayings, up to fifty members were put to death at one time. The English Peasants Revolt, led by John Ball, occurred in 1381. Ball too is recorded as having declared that, “Things cannot go well in England nor ever shall until things are held in common and there is neither villain nor noble but all of us in one condition.”
In Bohemia, during the first decades of the 15th century, the Taborites believed the millennium to be close at hand and that it would be characterized by the abolition of rents and private property and a classless new order of society. The Taborites advocated the extermination, before then, of lords, nobles, knights, and wealthy merchants and declared that all the substantial towns of Bohemia, including Prague most of all, should be burned to the ground. They were, however, defeated and virtually destroyed at the Battle of Lipan in 1434. Cohn makes clear that medieval society was certainly not actually a placid scene where everyone meekly accepted their “place”. That comforting, to some, but false Victorian fantasy has, however, persisted stubbornly into our own time.