Medsoc.doc Created 7.9.1999 Modified 10.10.1999 16:00
10 October 1999
OPENING LECTURE
UNISA MEDIEVAL SOCIETY CONFERENCE
University of South Africa
Pretoria
South Africa
22 - 23 September 1999
ON THE SMOOTHNESS OF MILLENNIUM CHANGES
AND
THEIR ROLLOVER BALLAST
Chemistry Department
University of South Africa
Pretoria
SUMMARY OF A VERY ENTERTAINING LECTURE THAT DEALS WITH REAL
PEOPLE WHO LIVED AND DIED AROUND THE FIRST MILLENNIUM CHANGE
For my opening lecture at the September 1999 Unisa Medieval Society Conference Quests for Humanity: the Middle Ages and the Millennium I decided to select a topic that would allow me to join the Quest for Humanity, with particular reference to the Middle Ages and the transition from the first to the second Millennium.
A very interesting and instructive set of stories from the life of King Otto III (984-1002), based upon the Annales Lamberti Hersfeldensis of the 11th century, is used to analyze the nature of the first millennium change and the ballast of problems that rolled over into the second millennium. This story, although it is fully based upon historical records, reads like one of the tales from the Decameron.
The main characters of my story will tell us that we search in vain for the concept "Humanity" in this period. They will also tell us how the first millennium ended for them and how the second began, as well as furnishing us with evidence about the rollover ballast of the millennium change.
At the same time I would like to see whether I could draw some conclusions about millennium transitions in general, including the one we are going to experience in about one hundred days. In particular, I would like to enquire about the smoothness or not of millennial transitions. The conclusions I reach will be given in the form of what I call the inevitable rollover ballast that seems to accompany us from the one millennium to the other.
After fairy long introductory and background passages, the story of the end of the first millennium starts, as told by the actions of the main characters:
1077 AD Lambertus writes his Annals, covering the main events of the 6200 years since Adam
982 AD Birth of Otto III - accession to throne 984 AD
Regent problems - Theophano his mother - Adelaide his grandmother
994 AD full accession to Throne - Revolutionary Ideas of Otto III
996 AD Otto III installs Sylvester II as Pope in Rome - Otto III crowned as Emperor
Intermezzo: the murder of the Lady Marozia and the Ottonian revenge
997 AD Revolt by the Roman noble Crescentius - Sylvester II dethroned - Antipope John XVI
998 AD Otto III beheads Crescentius - dethrones and maims Antipope - installs Pope Sylvester II
999 AD Pope Sylvester II dies - Otto III installs Pope Gregory V - death of Queen Adelheid
1000 AD Exhumation of Charlemagne
1001 Ad Otto III's last Christmas in Rome
1002 AD Otto dies just outside Rome
The conclusion: the Human Brute and the Double Death
GENERAL REFERENCES USED FOR THIS LECTURE
Time
elapsed from Adam to the birth of Christ
The year one
of the incarnation of our Lord
Some
other interesting dates from Lambertus
Lambertus
and a picture of his times
Questions
about Lambertus and the millennium change
The
Annales entries for the years 983 - 1002 AD
983 -
984: Death of Otto II and coronation of Otto III; the regencies, and Otto III's
coming of age
The
intermediate years 985 - 996
Who
put these novel ideas in Lambertus' mind?
996 - 998
Otto III in Rome; Pope Gregory V; Marozia the whore
998: Crescentius hanged; pseudo-pope dethroned and executed
999: death of
Pope Gregory V; death of Queen Adelheid
1000: Otto III's exhumation of Charlemagne
1002: death of Otto III near Rome
The millennium change 999/1000/1001
The ballast of
the first millennium carried over into the second millennium according to
Lambertus
Ballast of the second millennium carried over into the third millennium
according to SCHUTTE
GENERAL REFERENCES USED FOR THIS LECTURE
A picture of
Otto III enthroned.
The Palatine Chapel, Aachen Cathedral
The Dome of Charlemagne in the Church in Aachen
I am very pleased to have been asked to open this conference that has
the intriguing title:
Quests for Humanity: the Middle Ages and the Millennium
The programme looks very interesting and presents lectures from a
variety of disciplines within the Middle Ages.
I wish the organisers and the participants a perfect conference.
I want to tell you a simple story - the story of several people during
the last sixteen years right at the end of the first millennium and the first two
years into the second millennium. It is in essence parts of the story of Emperor
Otto III of the Holy Roman Empire, as seen through the eyes of two
particular persons. One of the persons is a contemporary writer, and I am the
other - I'll add some details from other historical sources to the main story
in order to paint a more complete picture of the canvas of life at the
millennial transition.
The main characters of my story will
tell us that we search in vain for the concept "Humanity" in this
period. They will also tell us how the first millennium ended for them
and how the second began, as well as furnishing us with evidence about
the rollover ballast of the millennium change. They are:
Emperor
Otto III (July, 980 - Jan 23, 1002
near Rome).
Otto I, paternal grandfather,
(November 23, 912 - May 7, 973)
Adelheid of Burgundy and Italy, paternal
grandmother (second wife) (d. 999)
Otto II, father (955 - Dec 7, 984)
Theophano of Byzantium, mother, (d.
991)
Pope John XV (d. 996)
Pope Gregory V (Bruno von Kaernten, 972 -
999; cousin to Otto III)
Antipope John XVI (survived 998, d. c. 1013)
Pope Sylvester II (Gerbert of Aurillac, c.
945, Auvergne - May 12, 1003)
Crescentius II, Roman Noble (d. April 29,
998)
Marozia, a noble whore (b. c 896 -
executed 996)
Charlemagne (742 - 814), who only appears as a cadaver
Some other
characters will also briefly appear, such as the Venerable Bede, St
Adalbert, Pope John XII, etc.
A picture of Otto III enthroned.
Let me start the
story without further ado.
The first two, very brief sentences of six words each in Thomas Mann's
book Joseph und seine Brueder [2], in which he recreates one
of the oldest of all our stories, always bring me to a hovering stop, make me
almost hesitate to read further, force me to look back in time to our recorded
beginnings even before I start reading. They are:
Tief ist der Brunnen der Vergangenheit. Sollte man ihn nicht
unergruendlich nennen?
Deep is the well of the past. Shouldn't one call it impenetrable (or
unfathomable)?
In the pages that follow these statements Thomas Mann makes it clear
that the well of the past is indeed deep and impenetrable, and that its depth
(mostly) has nothing to do with the linear progression of time in our minds or
penned down in so-called historical records. History is much more than times
and events.
Moreover, we all know that the well representing recent events may be
just as impenetrable and deep as those of a thousand years ago. Where we have
written or other records we view the past through the prejudiced eyes of those
who produced the records. Even where we have none, the effects of some
unrecorded events may produce identifiable ripples for centuries afterwards.
Superficially, it also seems that most people and the events they participate
in simply disappear as if they have never happened, as though they have had no
consequences, as though they have only contributed to the
"irrelevant" background "historical noise" of the time. [3]
Jung [4] remarked, that when we look at the history of mankind we can only
observe the exterior surfaces of the events, and even that observation occurs
through the warped mirror of tradition. Jung claims what really happened in any
historical event is bound to remain outside the research area of the historian
because
… the actual historical events are deeply buried, experienced by
everyone, but not observed by anybody.
It is well to keep these
remarks in mind for this lecture and perhaps for some of the other lectures as
well.
I have used the word record several times in the first minutes
of this lecture, and it is no coincidence. We have a conference today called Quests
for Humanity: the Middle Ages and the Millennium. The lectures to be presented
today and tomorrow all make it clear that they deal with recorded events having
either real or fictional natures, or both. Let me then also deal with records -
real records that I am fairly sure that many of you have never heard
about.
In our Christian western world we have experienced only one previous
millennium change - that of the year 1000 AD. Other peoples around the globe
were blissfully uninterested in the end of the first millennium - the year 1000
AD was the Gengzi year on the Chinese calendar, year 10.8.12.5.0 on the
Mayan calendar, and year 4760 on the Jewish calendar. There was in the year
1000 AD no calendar that was peculiar to Africa; the continent was (mostly)
still blissfully unaware of the need of any exact measurement of the passage of
time and was content with the eternal cycles of nature.
I asked myself the following questions about that millennium change
occurring almost a thousand years ago:
What did people living during or near that millennium change think of
what we now call "an awesome event"?
Did they experience it is as smooth process, or as a discontinuous one?
What was the rollover ballast of the previous millennium that they took
with them into the next millennium?
Is the rollover ballast of a thousand years ago any different from ours
that we are taking into the third millennium?
Since I am not a medievalist or historian, I do not feel obliged do an
extensive literature search and to produce a thick academic tome to answer the
questions. The words of one person living a thousand years ago might be enough
to allow me to generalize - provided I am able to pick the right kind of person
to parade in front to you. And I intend to do just that. Let me tell you about
that person and his work.
On a very cold, very windy
and very rainy day some years ago I had some hours to kill in the small German
town of Konstanz on the shores of the Bodensee. I wandered into one of its dry and warm antiquarian bookshops in
order to survive. Several warm and enjoyable hours later I left the shop in a
happy mood with a book that I did not even know existed when I had entered the
shop. I had no reason on earth to spend 35 DM on it [5] except that I liked its contents on a first scan, and that its author
was born exactly 900 years before me, although some do insist that he is 908
years older! On a world scale, it is not an earth-shattering book, but rather a
dry chronicle of events, written in Latin during the last quarter of the
eleventh century by an important (and to me, then unknown) ecclesiastical and
secular chronicler. I bought it in spite of the fact that my Latin voice has
become fairly hoarse and faint because of my "long Latin silence",
although not as long as that of Dante's shade of Virgil - whose period of
silence beats mine by a factor of twenty six times.
Why on earth would I buy such a book and proudly depart with it, then
sitting down in a restaurant and start reading? Somehow, but on a much simpler
and less intense level, it reminded me of a book by a Dutch author, Bouman,
which appeared around the middle of the nineteen fifties under the title Revolutie
der Eenzamen or The Revolution of the Lonely. [6] Bouman looked behind the official histories of the first half of the
20th century, trying to do dig in the recent well of the past to
reach some of the unrecorded "Jungian" events. In a way, he was
successful and his "unputdownable" book very decidedly influenced the
way I look at the world.
The historical canvas of the author of the book I bought in Konstanz is
much larger than that of Bouman and his attention to detail is consequently far
less. He certainly gave no thought to dissecting the psyches or even the
motives of the people behind events and analyzing them, but somehow some of
this mystery shimmers through his dry, inverted telescopic style: short reports
for distant and more voluminous ones for contemporary events. The way that it
is written makes one certain that there are "Jungian facts" hidden
behind it. It just about induces one to start looking around for the story
behind the history. This author deliberately - and I stress the word deliberately
- selected and recorded events in our well of the past that were important to
him, events that stretched over a period of just under 6200 years (according to
him), starting at the creation of Adam and continuing right up to sometime
during March of the 1077th year of our Lord, when the chronicle
entries abruptly stopped.
To whet your appetites, the entries for the year 1066 of our Lord, for
instance, make it clear that the author did not consider the fact that some
Normans overran a large band of Anglo-Saxons on the fields of Hastings in
England worthwhile to mention. For him, on a world scale, it was a non-event,
just one of the innumerable local wars that marred these times and made life a
misery for all and everybody. Wars were
part of natural human activities in those days. [7] I'll come back to this statement at the end of the lecture today.
Which book is it that I bought in Konstanz? It is the Lamberti
Hersfeldensis Annales, re-published in 1843 by the indefatigable German
scholar Pertz [8]. Lambertus (b. c. 1025--d. c.
1088) was a monk ordained at the monastery of Hersfeld in the year 1058.
Lambertus recorded important and other interesting events that were on
his horizon or caught his attention. These events pertain to church, pope,
monastery, King and court, and, now and then, some "alien" and
extremely interesting gems. The book, I learnt afterwards, is one of the most
important sources about life in the 11th century Germany, and
especially about the strained relations between State and Church. In one way or
another, this little book "grew" on me and provided me with many an
hour of fun, trying to trace some of the relevant and irrelevant events, names
and dates penned down by the author - of whom we know very little. [9] It provides an excellent driving force to do some reading concentrated
around certain events and people.
The book starts off with an
arithmetical computation of the time elapsed since Adam. An incredibly
complicated, ordered and measured set of lives of fathers and sons, rulers and
dateable periods leads us through very vague and complicated additive
arithmetic to the statement in the book that records the occurrence of the year
1 of our Lord:
Octavianus annis 56. Huius anno
420 Dominus noster Iesus Christus nascitur, completis ab Adam iuxta
Hieroniemum annis 5199. [10]
The whole time and date reckoning process of St. Jerome (= Hieroniemus)
and Lambertus is based upon the belief that has been with mankind since the
times when we had first learnt to count and number. Once a number
designating some physical quantity (such as, "duration of reign")
is written down, the number itself, by a magical process that is rooted
deep within our psyches, becomes equivalent to the hallowed and unchangeable
truth. This process effectively defines time to be linear since it does not
assume that names may be left out of a list, or that some, or even all time
spans given may be in error. We are back with Thomas Mann and the
unfathomability of the well of the past and the non-linearity of time.
Lambertus makes no fanfare about the wonderful start of the Year One
of our time reckoning. He just makes a dry, factual statement that it had
started concurrent with the year 43 of Octavianus Caesar. In fact, he does not
even use the Christian reckoning of time passed after this statement, but
merely continues with his list of the sequence of Western and Eastern Roman
Emperors and the duration of their individual reigns. To illustrate, he says
that:
Focas annis 8. Angli-Saxones fidem Christi susceperunt.
Who knows when Focas ruled?
Four Kings before him in the Annales we read the name of Justinian I,
the Byzantine Emperor (483 - 14 November 565). Focas then reigned, according to
the arithmetic of Lambertus for 8 years from the year 603 onwards. However, who
remembers him now? [11] But during Focas' time Lambertus informs us, the heathen Anglo-Saxons
folded under the sheer weight of the inevitability of the belief in Christ, and
were en masse converted - an important date, to be true. Today one may
ask whether it wasn't a fairly useless conversion? Because now, 1400 years
later, Christianity is in full retreat, as we'll see later in the lecture.
The first real AD date
specifically designated as such by the author at the left margin is the year
705 AD with the statement that it is characterized by the fact that a certain
King Aldifridus [12] had died:
Anno
dominicae incarnationis 705. Aldifridus rex Nordanembrorum, filius Oswi fratris
sancti Oswaldi Regis, obiit.
Why on earth would he cite this
event out of all other events of the year 705?? Aldfrith of Northumberland, an
illegitimate child, was a scholarly King who created conditions in the Kingdom
under which scholarship thrived. The Venerable Bede was one of these
scholars, and his book on the History of the English Church and People [13] became one of the standard works of historiography. Bede's method of
dating all events with respect to the year of the incarnation of Christ our
Lord (AD) became the western standard that we all use. Lambertus also followed
this practice. [14] It is thus appropriate that
Lambertus starts his AD dating sequence with this oblique tribute to the man
who had created the conditions under which Bede flourished. And sure enough,
the entry for the year 736 (again, a year out!) reads (incidentally, also
recording the date when the Monastery of Hersfeld was initiated):
736 Beda,
nobilis et praeclarus doctor, obiit. Initium Herveldensis monasterii.
Some other interesting dates from Lambertus
The year 723 is noted solely
by the fact that a King Karolus had been sick.
Lambertus reports that in the year 733 an Eclipsis facta est
solis [17].
In the year 807 he says that
Mortalitas maxima facta est in Fulda.[18]
The years 745 (Karolus
magnus natus est) [19] to 814 (Karolus Magnus imperator obiit) of Lambertus' Annales
were almost exclusively devoted to very brief statements about Charlemagne and
also about some of the various popes. We'll discuss some concepts of
Charlemagne later on in the lecture when I describe how his almost intact
cadaver after 186 years of lonely darkness suddenly found itself staring into
the wavering lights of some candles in the dead of night of Pentecost in the
year 1000 AD.
Lambertus and a picture of his times
Lambertus' knowledge was
vast, his records come from good, well-dated sources and he includes reports
from all four directions of the western world; he must have had access to a
well-stocked library. Many of the records read like the obituary column
of the Times during wartime. He had, like Bede three hundred years
before him, the capacity to select valuable information from a morass of
irrelevancies. He reports many (incessant?) large and small wars and continuous
strife, especially between church and state.
He also records some natural catastrophes and events. There are
references to the martyrdoms of many saints.
As one sequentially reads
through his entries, a picture of the times around the year 1000 starts to form
in one's mind. It is a picture of a world that can, at best, be said to have
been be in the flux of an agitated semi-chaos between church and state. It was
a hard world that knew very little mercy, especially on governing level. It was
a world in which common mankind continuously suffered tribulations such as,
pestilence, wars, persecution, hunger, sickness and cold. It was a world where
death was a normal part of life, hardly worth saying more about it than the
laconic "obiit" in the Annales. In spite of the
semi-chaotic state of his world, and the fact that the leaders of the Church
were wallowing in sin, Lambertus' annals also record the inexorable march of
Christianity in Europe towards universality. The lack of morals and religious
convictions of many of its secular and religious leaders seemed to play no role
in this. As I mentioned earlier, in our times exactly the opposite is
happening; I'll return to this remarkable phenomenon later in the lecture when
I talk about the present Pope.
As one fleshes out the bare
bones of many of the events recorded by Lambertus one is rather surprised that
the Lord did not make use of the apocalyptic opportunities at the change from
one millennium to the next to eradicate all humanity. [20] His patience with mankind, and his mercy must indeed be infinite.
Maybe his wrath generated by the behaviour and actions of the governing classes
in both church and empire was alleviated by the simple faith of priests, monks,
nuns, old women and children. Maybe this is the reason why the bureaucratic and
ecclesiastic machines of the Church continued to function so well through all
these tribulations. And most importantly, the Church itself continued to grow. [21]
Questions about Lambertus and the millennium change
How would a man of
Lambertus' knowledge see the end of the first Christian millennium and the
start of the next? How would he record it, as well as anticipate it in the years
converging upon the millennium year 1000?
-
Does
he note its imminent occurrence during one of the preceding years?
-
Would
he mention that all Christianity was anxiously awaiting the end of the first
and the start of the second millennium?
-
Does
he rejoice that mankind could now proudly look back upon a thousand years of
Christianity?
-
Is
he happy that a thousand birthdays of Christ had passed?
-
Does
he report about wonderful, dignified and impressive religious processions and
festivals commemorating the new millennium (if any), organised by the Church in
general, and, especially, by the Holy See?
-
Does
he describe great pilgrimages to religious centres, and especially to Rome to
commemorate the event?
-
Does
he describe the rejoicing of all Christianized mankind in the changeover from
the first to the second millennium?
-
Would
he look back and rejoice in the spread of Christianity and civilization?
-
Would
he mention anything about apocalyptic expectations that the general masses
seemed to have had about the end of the millennium?
-
Would
he mention what Emperor Otto III did in preparation for the millennium change?
As we'll see, sadly, none of
these questions can be answered in the affirmative. Lambertus is silent about
the millennium change, even though he has explicitly written down the year 1000
AD with an attached chronicle entry. For him, the millennium is a
non-event. For him there is only the
inexorable mach of time from one season to the other, from one year to the
next, from one marriage to the next birth, from one death to the next, from one
grave to the next, from one coronation to the next, from one Pope to the next,
from one clinical martyrdom to the next, from one war to the next, from one
famine to the next, from one pestilence to the next. For him there is no love
between people, there is no joy, or song, or happiness - or suffering. For him
noblewomen only existed to be married to princes to further national or local
politics of power - and to provide heirs. For him there are no works of poetry
and literature. For him, there are only facts and dates. For him history is
linear. For him the loves and lives, the sufferings, the ideals, the sweet and
bitter of ordinary people belong to the (almost flat) background historical
noise that can safely be ignored.
What did Lambertus
write down about this period just before and just after the millennium change?
The Annales entries for the years 983 - 1002 AD
Let us now carefully look at
the entries in Lambertus' Annales for the years 983 - 1002 AD, skipping some
of the intermediate years where the entries are general in nature and
contribute very little to the present discussion. The individual entries are
discussed in detail below. The years 985 - 995 were left out because they do
not contribute to the discussion below.
The relevant entries are:
983. Otto
secundus imperator Romam post male gestas res regressus obiit, ibidemque
sepultus est. Heinricus dux Baioarae,
regnum invasit; sed a princibus est reprobatus.
984.
Filius imperatoris, tercius Otto, patri successit in regnum, unctus in regem
Aquisgrani a Iohanne ravennati episcpo.
…
996. Otto
rex contra Crescentium Romam venit, ubi et Brunonem in sede apostolica
constituit, a quo et ipse imperator factus est. Gothehardus abbas factus est in Altaha.
997.
Iohannes, Placentius episcopus, sedem apostolica invasit consilio
Crescentii. Adalbertus episcopus
martirizatur.
998.
Crescentius ab imperatore decollatus, cum duodecim suis ante Urbem
suspenditur. Iohannes pseudopapa creatur.
999. Bruno
papa, qui et Gregorius, obiit; cui Gerbertus, qui et Sylvester, successit. Adelheit imperatrix obiit.
1000.
Imperator ossa Karoli Magni Aquisgranni, a pluribus eo usque ignorata,
invenit. Gaudentius, frater Adalberti
martiris, in Praga archiepiscopus constituitur.
1001.
Imperator navitatem Domini Romae celebravit.
1002 Otto
III. Imperator obiit; cui Heinricus Baioarius successit. Eggihardus marchio, regni usurpator, Poledi
accissus est.
Perusing these entries in
the Annales, it is clear that Lambertus had no thoughts about the end of
the first millennium and the start of the second that he would have liked to
write down. His thoughts were far away
from any festivities about the end of the first millennium. He was
concentrating upon getting the facts straight about an incredible, almost
unbelievable, sequence of events that almost defy description that occurred
between the years 983 and 1002 AD.
These events would contribute to perturb Europe for some time to come -
although he did not know the full implications of it when he penned these lines
down in the thousand and seventies in the monastery of Hersfeld.
The terrible sequence of
events contained in these few dryly-written and innocuous-looking entries
shows that the first millennium could not have ended more inauspiciously, nor
could the second have started more inauspiciously. I say this despite the
rather tame-looking record of the year 1001 AD, which states that the Imperator
had attended the celebrations of the incarnation of our Lord in Rome.
What happened during the
years 983 to 1002 AD? [22] And what can we learn from these entries about the end of the first
millennium and the rollover ballast that took us into the second? How
does this compare with the imminent end of our second millennium? And what
rollover ballast will we be taking with us into the third millennium? Do we
have more cause for optimism than Everyman of the first? Should our motto not
rather be:
Never mind the millennium, just
get through the next 24 hours
as the title of a new book
by Clem Sumtner suggests?
Let me very briefly tell you
some of the events submerged in these austere entries in the Annals of
Lambertus. And let me assure you that I cannot even try to do justice to the
full horror of these events.
983 - 984: Death of Otto II and coronation of Otto III; the
regencies, and Otto III's coming of age
The story at the end of the
millennium that I want to tell you starts in the year of our Lord 883. But
stories never start where they appear to start, say Thomas Mann and Jung, and
this one is no exception, since, for all intents and purposes, it started
almost three centuries earlier. To be exact, parts of it started with the
coronation of Charlemagne as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in the year 800
AD and with his death in 814. Other parts of the story started about fifty
years earlier, but they too, have long histories within histories. All these
events we are going to talk about have an arithmetical endpoint early in the
year 1002, but their ripples were felt for a long time.
983. Otto
secundus imperator Romam post male gestas res regressus obiit, ibidemque
sepultus est. Heinricus dux Baioarae,
regnum invasit; sed a princibus est reprobatus.
984.
Filius imperatoris, tercius Otto, patri successit in regnum, unctus in regem
Aquisgrani [23] a Iohanne ravennati episcpo.
The Holy Roman Emperor Otto
II died during June of the year 983 in Rome after a confluence of fever
(malaria?) and long-standing internal ailments, [24] which the Emperor himself treated at the end by a cumulative daily
routine of self-administered (lethal) overdoses of a laxative containing aloe
and the subsequent unstoppable diarrhea. He was buried in Rome, as Lambertus
records, and now lies in the impenetrable catacombs underneath St. Peters.
His son, Otto III, succeeded
him at the tender age of three years. His mother was the non-purple wearing
Princess Theophano from Constantinople, who acted as Regent. However, Henry II,
called the Quarrelsome ("der Staenkerer"), the deposed Duke of
Bavaria, invaded the Kingdom and seized the child in Cologne to obtain the
regency (or even the throne, who knows?). He was forced to return the child in
May 984 by the Imperial Diet, as Lambertus records, and was banished. Otto III
was crowned in 984 AD.
The intermediate years 985 - 996
His mother, Theophano of
Byzantium, then resumed the regency until her death in 991 in Nijmegen. [25] Otto III's grandmother, Adelaide (= Adelheid) of Burgundy, wife of
Lothair of Italy and Burgundy and then married to Otto I, returned from her
exile in Pavia and took over the regency until the King became of age in 994 in
his fifteenth year. He then occupied the throne in his own right, possessing
all its rights, privileges and powers. And he thoroughly made use of them for a
period of eight turbulent and degrading years, till he died on January 23 of
the year 1002, a lonely and rejected wanderer with his tail between his royal
legs on the foothills of Mount Soracte near Rome.
The stage at the full
accession of Otto III to the throne in 994 AD was set for a sequence of
tragedies, some of them caused by his youth, others by events that forced
themselves upon him, some of them by new ideas that had entered into his
thoughts, others by his anxiously trying to bring Italy into the Imperial fold,
while keeping a strong hand upon the Church and its dignitaries. This is one of
the cases where one would love to have access to the elusive non-historical
information that Jung spoke about that make history so disconcertingly
non-linear. As Jung says, most of the events during those years were
experienced by everybody, but not observed by anybody.
Who put these novel ideas in Lambertus' mind?
Let us speculate on who it
was that put the ideas that shaped some of Otto's subsequent actions into his
head?
-
Was
it due to himself, reading too widely in the classical authors under the
tutelage of a series of very good tutors, the last being the French
ecclesiastic and mathematician Gerbert - whom he later made Pope Sylvester II?
-
Was
it perhaps Henry, the Quarrelsome Bavarian, who abducted him?
-
Or
was it perhaps his mother, the Empress Theophano?
-
Or
his grandmother, Adelaide of Burgundy of whom Lambertus records that she died
in the year 999?
-
Or
was it his other tutor, Philagathus the Calabrian, who became the Pseudo-pope
John XVI, whom he would later allowed to be maimed in Rome in a horrible and
degrading fashion?
-
Or
was it is cousin Bruno whom he made Pope Gregory V?
-
Or
was it some other pious soul who became fed-up with the ever-changing Papacy,
with about 35 Popes in 150 years - about 4 years per Pope on the average, some
of them being well under the average?
-
Or
someone just sick with the debauchery and wickedness of some of the Popes?
-
Or
was it the fact that his grandfather had actually been crowned Emperor
of the Holy Roman Empire in Rome by the infamous John XII, but could never
really rule from the city because of the strong Italian family clans opposing
his presence in the City?
What are the ideas I
mentioned above?
The young King accepted the
concept of the Holy Roman Empire, but, somehow, a new element insinuated itself
into his mind: He would attempt to recreate the original Roman Empire
through the Holy Roman Empire, based upon the Empire of Charlemagne. He would
govern the world from Rome as the only ruler. Both the State and the
Church will be subject to him, the Emperor. He would be a theocratic
Emperor. He would reign above the Pope and the Church. He would appoint Popes
to serve under him. He would break away from the tradition that governed the
reciprocal relationship between the Papacy and the Empire; this had, in theory,
allowed Otto II to appoint new Popes, but be subject to them in religious life.
And above all, he would not allow powerful Italian families (= Roman families)
to appoint new Popes as they had done for at least the previous six
decades. He called himself Otto Dei Gratia Romanorum Imperator Augustus,
and at the end, he even tried to unite the eastern and western empires -
something that his great example, Charlemagne, had explicitly warned against.
996 - 998 Otto III
in Rome; Pope Gregory V; Marozia the whore
Let me continue with the
life of Otto III as reflected in the Annales of Lambertus.
996. Otto rex contra
Crescentium Romam venit, ubi et Brunonem in sede apostolica constituit, a quo
et ipse imperator factus est.
Gothehardus abbas factus est in Altaha
Otto III was in Italy in the
year of our Lord 996 at the behest of Pope John XV to put down a rebellion led
by the Roman noble, Crescentius II.
Unfortunately, Pope John XV died before Otto III could reach Rome.
Usurping the "right" to appoint a new Pope from the hands of the
powerful noble Roman families, Otto III then installed his 25-year-old cousin
Bruno of Carynthia (Kaernten) as the first German Pope under the name of
Gregory V. Sadly, everybody had high
hopes that the young German duo would improve matters in Rome, in the Church and
in the State.
The new 25 year old Pope Gregory V promptly crowned his cousin, the
fifteen-year old Otto III, as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in Rome on May
21, 996 - to the considerable annoyance of the of the Roman nobility,
especially the Crescentii family, who had been appointing Popes for at least
forty years and felt that it was their "right" and not that of the
"foreigners".
Shortly after the coronation Otto III left Rome to stabilize some
problems that had occurred in his absence in Germany. A contributing factor to
this decision to leave Rome most probably was the dreadful malaria scourge of
the city in summer months.
The areas in blue are the empire itself, while the areas in pink are
the associated areas.
However, before he left Rome, Otto III had another self-imposed task to
do. This barbaric act of the two cousins, I think, strongly points towards
Otto's grandmother Adelheid (= Adelaide) as the person who exerted a great
influence on his thought patterns and later actions. By this act, Otto III at
long last completed an act of retribution that his grandfather, Otto I, had
started about fifty years earlier - but was unable to finish. A collective
royal memory, it seems, is very long, even remembering the transgressions of a
certain "loose" lady by the third royal generation - who had never
even laid eyes upon her.
What did they do? Otto III and Pope Gregory V sent a prelate into the
dungeons of the Mausoleum of Hadrian, known as the Castell Saint' Angelo. This
priest removed an old woman of almost hundred years, Marozia of the
Roman Theophylact family, from the cell where she had languished for over 55
years in (solitary) confinement. She was then - in the best Christian fashion -
exorcized of her daemons, her sentence of excommunication was revoked and she
was absolved of her sins. Then Otto III had "the bag of bones, clad in
rags" summarily executed without any trail. This execution was act of
delayed revenge that even surpasses that of Caesar, who had the leader of the
Arverni tribe of the Gauls, Vercingetorix, whom he had caught in 52 BC after a
difficult campaign in Gallia, executed in Rome by strangulation during some
public festivities he sponsored to honour himself in 45 BC - after an
imprisonment of seven years.[26]
Who was this Marozia?
The beautiful Marozia can safely claim the title of the whore of the
first millennium, if not of all millennia, her mother Theodora breathing
closely into her neck. [27] Marozia of the powerful Theophylact family, at the age of 15 was the
mistress of Pope Sergius III (904-911), proudly presenting him with an
illegitimate son, who later became Pope John XI at the age of twenty. Her third
husband was Hugh, King of Burgundy and Italy. She gave the nuptial feast in
Castell St Angelo, which is situated on the principal Roman bridge over the
Tiber. During the feast, her new husband struck down her second, legitimate,
son the twenty-year old Alberic. This was one of the most expensive blows in
history, since Alberic started a popular revolution, chasing the King away with
his tail between his royal legs. The twenty-year-old Alberic became very
powerful in Rome. Immediately after the failed nuptial feast he dethroned his
half-brother, Pope John XI, from the Holy See. He then had his forty-year old
mother Marozia, whose power he hated, excommunicated and imprisoned.
Alberic now became the virtual ruler of Rome, appointed Popes at will -
and made it his life's business to keep the Holy Roman Empire and other noble
families, including the King of Italy and other foreign kings, out of Rome. The
Ottonian Empire will not forget this insult. And fifty years later many of the
events in the life of Otto II would be shaped by this fact.
King Hugo's widowed daughter in law, Adelaide, who was in danger of
losing her seat, Pavia, to an usurper, asked Otto I of Germany in 951 to
protect her. Otto I rushed to her aid, liberated her, looked at her, and then
married her. She must have hated her imprisoned
ex-stepmother in law, Marozia, and all of the Theophylact family: King Hugo was
driven from Rome only because he had married Marozia. Adelaide's second
husband, Emperor Otto I, could never really establish a power base in Rome due
to the strenuous efforts of the same Alberic, Marioza's second son.
Marioza had truly generated an enormous bill at the expense of the
Imperial court, a bill that screamed for revenge. Such a bill could only be
settled by her death. It was natural
for Adelaide to pass the feud on to her grandson Otto III and his cousin, Pope
Gregory V, who then completed the task of revenging the family honour in May
996 by executing the centenarian, Marozia. Lambertus, understandably, did not
include this barbaric and senseless act of Otto III in his Annales. On the
other hand, he could easily have included it with the statement that the Mills
of the Lord do grind slowly, but then he never moralizes.
Tief ist der Brunnen der Vergangenheit, said Thomas Mann, Sollte man ihn nicht unergruendlich nennen?
In this case, too, we see that Jung is correct because the actual historical
events are deeply buried, experienced by everyone at the time, but not
observed by anybody.
In a further ironical twist to the story, Marozia's legitimate
grandson, Sergius, son of Alberic became Pope John XII at the ripe old age of
sixteen). Marozia's grandson, Pope John
XII, could easily claim the title as the most sinful Pope of the first
millennium, if not of both millennia - but he has some very stiff
competition. Platoons of monks in monasteries spent their days over a period of
six years fervently and ceaselessly praying that the Lord be merciful in his
wisdom and take Pope John XII away - so that the Holy See could, hopefully,
revert to Holiness. If you do not believe
me, the Emperor Otto I wrote the following letter to Pope John XII, setting the
tone of the complaints against him:
Everyone, the clergy as well as laity, accuses you, Holiness,
of homicide, perjury, sacrilege, incest with your relatives, including two of
your sisters, and with having, like a pagan, invoked Jupiter, Venus and other
demons.
The combination of the word Holiness with the rest of the letter leads to a contradictio
in terminis of the first rank. And Otto I did not even enumerate the worst
of John's crimes against humanity, Christianity and good taste. One of the
charges against Pope John XII before the Church meeting of November 6, 963 in
Rome was that he drank a toast to the health of the Devil. [28] Fancy, the Chief Executive Officer of the Church drinking a toast to
the health of Satan … and on this rock will the Church be built and to him
are given the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, as St. Matthew relates in
Chapter 16:18.
Otto I came to Rome in the
year 962 to help to solve the problem that Pope John XII presented. However, he first allowed himself to be
crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire by the sinful, but legal Pope, John
XII. The Pope was deposed shortly thereafter and Leo VIII was instated in his
place. However, John XII won a legal battle, and was reinstated as Pope. Soon
afterwards, at long last, the prayers of the common monks were heard, and Pope
John XII died at the ripe old age of 25 in the worst possible position a Pope
can exhibit when he faces his Maker: He died in the bed of a married woman, the
back his head (sic!) bashed in with a heavy hammer by the jealous husband. [29] The position of the wound in his head makes it clear that he was
taking his duty as the first missionary of the Church very seriously. The
Romans, noted for their savage wit, jokingly said that he died at the climax of
his career.
997: the
pseudo-pope John XVI
997. Iohannes, Placentius episcopus, sedem
apostolica invasit consilio Crescentii.
Adalbertus episcopus martirizatur.
Let me now return to the main story. Seizing the
opportunity during the absence of Otto III from Rome, Crescentius II drove the
new Pope Gregory V from Rome, deposing him. Crescentius then installed a Greek
monk, Philagathus the Calabrian, as his own Pope, and called him John XVI.
Philagatus had been Otto's tutor, and was just returning from Byzantium where
he was negotiating for a bride for the King. [30]
998: Crescentius
hanged; pseudo-pope dethroned and maimed
998. Crescentius ab imperatore decollatus,
cum duodecim suis ante Urbem suspenditur.
Iohannes pseudopapa creatur.
In 998 Otto returned, beheaded Crescentius II, who
was betrayed, and then hanged him by his heels and twelve of his men by their
necks outside the city. Pope Gregory V was reinstated.
The Antipope, John XVI, was dethroned, his eyes
gouged out, his nose, lips and ears were slit off with a curved surgical
scalpel, and his tongue was torn out of his mouth. After his Papal robes were
stripped off his body, the poor wretch was given to the masses to do their
pleasure, parading him sitting backwards upon an ass; according to some sources
he actually lived for about 15 years after this. This mutilation was done in
spite of the fact that Otto III had promised his other tutor, old Nilus the
Hermit, that he would not harm the Antipope. Thereupon Nilus, in a very
effective Old-Testament manner, theatrically damned the new Emperor, saying (in
the German translation):
So wie Ihr Euch jenes nicht erbarmt habt, den Gott
in Eure Haende gab, so wird sich der himmlische Vater auch Eure Suenden nicht
erbarmen!
Just as you have not shown mercy to him whom God has
given into your hands, so would the heavenly Father not be moved to pity by
your sins.
999: death of Pope Gregory V; death of Queen Adelheid
999. Bruno papa, qui et Gregorius, obiit; cui
Gerbertus, qui et Sylvester, successit.
Adelheit imperatrix obiit.
Gregory V did not survive his restoration for long -
he died in February 999. It seems that he was poisoned, most probably as an act
of revenge by the Crescenti family.
Otto then appointed his other tutor, the Frenchman
Gerbert of Aurillac as Pope Sylvester II, being the first French Pope. Gerbert
was a towering intellectual and a distinguished and internationally known
scholar who invented a new kind of abacus and was one of the pioneers who
started playing with Arabic numerals. [31]
However, he was not the material a strong Pope was made of, although he tried
his best in adverse circumstances. He could not supply the strength that his
pupil lacked, and above all, he could not resist the powerful forces that the
old Roman families exerted to push the Emperor out and to regain their
supremacy over city and the Papal See.[32]
Gerbert/Sylvester was very badly treated by later "historians" and
his reputation decidedly took a turn for the worse after about 1050 AD. This
resulted him being branded as a devil-worshipper in the 14th century. He has
now been re-instated in a correct historical position, being a serious Pope
amidst his most sinful predecessors and successors.
Otto III spent Christmas 999 in Ravenna and January
and February 1000 in Regensburg. Then he went east to visit the Grave of his
friend, Saint Adalbert, in Poland. [33]
He was back in Aachen in April 1000. There was no time for real Y1000
festivities - he must have spent considerable periods in the saddle.
1000: Otto III's
exhumation of Charlemagne
1000. Imperator ossa Karoli Magni
Aquisgranni, a pluribus eo usque ignorata, invenit. Gaudentius, frater Adalberti martiris, in Praga archiepiscopus
constituitur.
A strange and pagan act of Otto III that Lambertus,
rather surprisingly, did include in his Annales, caused great concern
throughout the Empire. Some people even thought that Otto III was certifiably
mad to do an unchristian thing like that. It gives one the shivers just to
think about the macabre candle-lit project executed in the dead of night and
without permission of the ecclesiastical authorities.
What did Otto III do at the start of the new
millennium? On the night of Pentecost (seven weeks after Easter) in the year
1000, Otto III (who was already very sick at that stage), his friend the Duke
of Lomello (who wrote an eyewitness account of the events; it is now in the
chronicle of the monastery of Novalese) and a small army of helpers and
friends, stole into the Carolingian cathedral of Aachen and started digging in
front of the altar of Mary, Mother of Christ. Deep under the floor they found
what they had come to search for: the tomb of Charlemagne.
The Palatine Chapel, Aachen Cathedral
They found that old King was not buried in the
normal Christian fashion with his feet towards the east, but was sitting on his
throne (they said), perfectly preserved except for the tip of his nose, in full
court regalia and still wearing his imperial crown. [34]
Otto cleaned him, restored the tip of the imperial nose with a golden replica,
cut his nails (which grew rather long after death and were showing through the
royal gloves!), replaced some worn clothing, removed a tooth from the rather
smelly corpse, took the golden crucifix and chain from the neck of the King, as
well as some parts of the clothing - and departed, after closing the tomb,
taking his ancestor-trophies with him. [35]
This was not an idle and macabre practical joke of a
man who has lost his senses. It was a conscious pagan ancestor act on the part
of an Emperor drowning under the weight and responsibility of the throne, in
order to find help in the strength of his legendary predecessor who was crowned
just 6000 years after Adam took his first breath (they say). [36]
What a way for the Emperor of the Christian Holy
Roman Empire to start the new millennium by digging up his illustrious
predecessor!
1001. Imperator navitatem Domini Romae
celebravit.
Perhaps as a counterpoise to this paganism, Otto III
and Sylvester II staged a ususual procession on August 15, 1000, noted in a
Bamberg Manuscript of 1067: In assumptione sanctae Mariae nocte quando
tabula portatur. [37]
Otto III also seemed to find it necessary to isolate himself for two weeks in a
hermit's cell in the Basilica of Saint Clemente in Rome. Some think that he
wanted to prepare himself for the millennium, but he liked "playing
Hermit" to contemplate and to recuperate from his chronic illness. He
often retired into temporary hermitship [38],
but Lambertus does not find it necessary to mention this fact. As an
afterthought, Otto III also attended the nativity of Christ in Rome in December
of the year 1001 as Lambertus reports.
1002: death of Otto
III near Rome
1002. Otto III. Imperator obiit; cui
Heinricus Baioarius successit.
Eggihardus marchio, regni usurpator, Poledi accissus est.
The weakness of Pope Sylvester II combined with
Otto's own unpopularity and the determination of the Crescentii, drove Otto III
from Rome early in January 1002 AD - with his tail between his legs.
So much for Otto III's ideal of resurrecting the
Roman Empire and subjecting the Church to the State. So much for his searching for
help from his illustrious predecessor, Charlemagne. Nilus must have watched
this departure with deep satisfaction and a sense of power. He must have been
certain that he had had a direct line to the ear of the Lord, and that the Lord
had promptly acted on his damnation of Otto III.
Otto III died on January 23 of the year 1002, a
lonely and rejected wanderer outside Rome on the foothills of Mount Soracte [39],
his body devastated by a combination of a very serious internal ailment[40]
and the malarial fever[41]
that crept out of the surrounding marshes, his soul burdened by his sins and
his mind contemplating the miserable wrecks of his high ideals.
He died at Mount Soracte
just to the north outside Rome.
It is the same Mount Soracte, clad in its winter
snows, that was so lovingly described about a millennium earlier by the Roman
poet Horace in his unforgettable ninth Ode vides ut alta. [42]
For Otto III there would be no warm log fire at a ripe old age, or a shared
bi-handled Sabinian amphora of four-year old sweet wine. For him there would be
no promise of the enticing laughter of a young lady love, the assistance of a
helpfully unhelpful hand of a willing female, and the promise of the start of
the eternal cycle of new life:
Just when Otto III's corpse reached the Brenner
pass, his contracted bride, the purple-wearing Princess Zoë, from of the family
of Basileus II of Byzantium, landed at the Italian port Bari, anticipating a
good future as the wife of an Emperor.
Church and State would remain in the deep winter
snows of strife, their major members, just like the trees on Horace's Soracte,
bowed down under the cold and icy weight of sin and ignominy for another fifty
years before the strong hand and even stronger conviction of Benedict, the
eighth Pope of that name, would start to repair the damage of the previous 150
years.
Otto's bodyguard had to fight their way out of Italy
with his corpse. Otto's last wish was that he be buried in the Cathedral of
Aachen; his body stretched out towards the east, near his long dead but sitting
idol, Charlemagne, still staring silently towards the east over the new
gleaming golden tip of the imperial nose, patiently waiting for the first bugle
call to rise up and welcome the second coming of his Lord. This last wish of a
very complex King was executed, and his body was buried in Aachen on Easter
Sunday, April 5, 1002 in the main crypt of the Muensterkirche after being on
display in all the main churches of Cologne. His grave was moved in 1513 and a
marble monument was built over it. The
French removed it in 1803 when Aachen came under French rule. There is today
nothing to indicate where Otto III was buried, although a tablet put up by
Frederick Barbarossa silently commemorates the place under which Charlemagne is
still sitting, patiently waiting, waiting ...
The Dome of Charlemagne in the Church in Aachen
The millennium
change 999/1000/1001
The second millennium was well on its way, its start
closely similar to the previous one and the one before that, and to the one before
that… The transition between the two millennia was smooth, nothing special
happened.
What about the four questions I asked right at the
beginning about the millennium change? The first two were already answered in
the discussion above:
What did people
living during or near that millennium change think of what we now call "an
awesome event"? They never gave it a real thought, at least Lambertus did
not consider it to be an awesome event worth reporting about.
Did they
experience it is as smooth process, or as a discontinuous one? Lambertus is very
clear about it: it is a smooth process with no discontinuities.
A considerable ballast of the one millennium was
carried into the next. And so will be the next one, when our Christian calendar
turns to the year AD 2000. The
following two questions will be answered below:
What was the
rollover ballast of the previous millennium that mankind took with them into
the next millennium?
Is that rollover
ballast any different from ours that we are taking into the third millennium?
The ballast of the first millennium carried over into the second
millennium according to Lambertus
Let us first look at the ballast of the year 999
that was rolled over into the next millennium by considering the entries from
Lambertus' Annales, which I discussed with you earlier this morning, as
well as all the other entries that I did not read to you. The ballast is:
-
Wars,
little and major, continued unabated.
-
Corruption in Church was widespread, especially at higher levels.
-
Weak
secular rulers with widespread corruption, although this started to
change at around 1050 AD.
-
Christianity continued to grow.
-
Pestilence continued to ravish whole populations.
-
Malnutrition was widespread.
-
Human life was cheap.
-
Crime
paid, and crime kept people alive, in spite of horrendous and inhuman
sentences.
-
Horrible
natural disasters occurred often and led to great suffering.
-
The
concept of human health was almost non-existent, except for the fortunate
few that had chosen the genes of their parents wisely.
Let us now look at what I believe the ballast will
be that we will be taking with us into the year 2000.
The list of the two sets of
ballasts parallel one another closely, with some important differences of
accent. However some new components of our rollover ballast are important, and
will I briefly discuss them.
Ballast of the second millennium carried
over into the third millennium - according to Schutte
-
Wars,
little and major, will continue unabated. Just think of East Timor, Kossowo,
Bosnia, Russian republics; Ireland; Congo, Nigeria, Sudan, Natal, etc.
-
Corruption on the scale of the first millennium in the generic Church will not be
as widespread. In particular, the Catholic Church has re-invented itself and
the way it appoints it dignitaries, especially with respect to the selection of
a Pope. The Church is today blessed with a Pope that is one of the most
respected leaders of our time, a man of simple faith and unshakeable integrity.[43]
-
Weak
secular rulers with widespread corruption at all levels of government
occur all around the world, and the lie is a standard and accepted form of
political activity. Think of our own country that battles with corruption,
think of the Oval Office [44],
think of any country …
-
Christianity will continue its slide downwards (into oblivion?) [45] and the Moslem faith will continue to
advance all around the globe. [46]
Think of France that has all but ceased to be a Christian country in terms of
numbers, think of Germany where the churches of all denominations are in a
serious decline,[47] think of
Russia where the Orthodox Faith is in serious decline … Democracy in all
its great manifold of "sectarian" guises under the United Nations
(UN) is replacing the role of faith and church, and the Secretary-General of
the UN is starting to play the global role that the Popes used to perform. But
instead of prayer and persuasion, guns accompany his emissaries into countries
like Kosowo and East-Timor to keep peace between irreconcilable warring
factions…
-
Pestilence will continue to ravish whole populations, in spite of all our
knowledge about infectious diseases. Think of AIDS and the devastation it is
wrecking upon or own continent, to say nothing of our own country …
-
Malnutrition will be more widespread due to overpopulation and other economic and
climactic factors. Think of Ethiopia, think of almost anywhere on the African,
Asian and South American continents. In
the light of the six billion (and still growing) population of the earth, the
church will have to rethink the implicit birth control conflict between the two
divine instructions given to Eve and Adam as contained in the single sentence
in Genesis 1:28: And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be
fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it: and have
dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every
living thing that moveth upon the earth. We have filled
the earth, and now our dominion over Nature
(including over ourselves) must take precedence, so that human conception can
be limited even before it takes place.
-
Human life is cheap: think of all the atrocities in Kossowo, Serbia, Russia, Rwanda,
Congo, Nigeria, etc. Think of all the terrorist and criminal activities all
around the world; think of our own murder statistics in Natal and elsewhere.
-
Crime
pays and keeps people alive, in spite of trivial and human sentences,
where democracy now protects the rights of the criminal, rapist and murderer
rather more than that of their poor victims.
-
Horrible
natural disasters will still occur. Think of the increase in the
frequency of occurrence of hurricanes, volcanic activity, earthquakes, but most
of all think of the gradual climatic change, driven by inter alia the global
warming phenomenon, which we assisted in bringing upon ourselves.
-
The
concept of human health is becoming one of the central themes of our
times and humans will be kept alive despite the genes that they received from
their parents or the incidental sicknesses they may suffer from.
However, there are a few things that will become
major driving forces in the years beyond 2000 that were not present in
the year 1000. Some examples are:
-
Information - especially its synthesis into new knowledge and understanding - has
always been a problem. There were always people like Bede and Lambertus and
many of the other chroniclers of the middle and later ages, such as Gibbon,
that could find information, peruse and select, followed by synthesis and
understanding. The present computer, information technology and communication
technology revolutions will unleash a flood of undigested and untested
information upon the world. Mankind will have to learn to deal with this;
hopefully women and men of the quality of Bede and Gibbon will appear.
-
The
computer, information technology and communication technology revolutions,
driven by the digital concept, may reduce each of us to a set of traceable
and continuously tracked digits that may dehumanize our individuality and make
us just pure numbers, devoid of personality and privacy. We will have to learn
to deal with this insidious and invidious phenomenon.
-
Science will let us feel that we have better understanding of ourselves and
the world and cosmos around us.
-
We
will export our bodies - and our perennial problems - into other parts
of the universe wherever we go.
I have illustrated some aspects of the previous millennium
change in the form of a little story found in the Annales Lamberti
Hersfeldensis.
This story shows that millennial changes
are just like annual changes: business goes on as usual. Just try to
get through the next twenty-four hours.
The usual business I mention, is the full
rollover ballast we have had during all the previous times and includes all the
horrible and good things that we do to one another.
The horrible things (mostly) become
history and the good things (mostly) only contribute to the historical
background noise of the times.
For the first time in history the rollover
ballast accompanying the millennial change will have new, scientific components
included. We will have to learn to live with them, as we have learnt to live
with the bow-and-arrow, printing presses, photography, sound and video
recording, radio, the cinema, the automobile [48],
flight of all kinds, gunpowder, anesthetics, heart transplants, etc. - the list
is endless.
And if we look at the ballast that accompanies us from
millennium to millennium, then one can only come to the conclusion that we are
what Ulrich Horstmann calls "Das Untier" - The Brute. [49]
He concludes that:
Die Geschichte des Untiers ist erfuellt, und in
Demut harrt es des doppelten Todes - der physischen Vernichtung und des
Ausloesens der Erinnerung an sich selbst.
The history of the Brute is
fulfilled, and it waits in humility for the double death - the physical
annihilation and the dissolution of the recollection of itself.
GENERAL REFERENCES
USED FOR THIS LECTURE
The following sources I used for this lecture give an interesting account of these times:
(a) Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ. The Dark Side of the Papacy, Bantam Press, London, 1988 (see especially Chapter 3. Papal Pornocracy).
(b) Philip Hughes, A History of the Church. Volume 2. The Church and the World the Church Created, Sheed and Ward, London, Revised Edition, 1948; see especially Chapter V. The Siege of Christendom, 814 - 1046, Subsection V. The Roman See and the Anarchy, 900-1046.
(c) S. Fischer-Fabian, Die deutschen Caesaren, Knaur, Munich, 1977; especially Kapitel 5. Otto III. - ein deutscher Juengling.
(d) C.W. Previté-Orton, The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History. Volume I. The Later Roman Empire to the Twelfth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, reprinted with corrections, 1953.
(e) The 1998 Encyclopaedia Britannica on CD-ROM, Multimedia Edition. This Encyclopaedia on CD-ROM is one of the very best I have ever used, especially the multimedia edition.
(f) Gerd Althoff, Otto III, Primus D., 1997.
(g) Der Brockhaus Multimedial on CD-ROM, 1998.
(h) Ferdinand Seibt, Glanz und Elend des Mittelalters. Eine endliche Geschichte, Goldmann/ Siedler-Verlag, Berlin, 1987.
(i) Karl Hampe, Das Hochmittelalter. Geschichte des Abendlandes von 900 bis 1250, Boehlau Verlag, Colgne, 5th edition, 1963, p.51ff.
(j) Heinrich Guenter Das deutsche Mittelalter. Erste Haelfte: Das Reich (Hochmittelalter), Zweite unveraenderte Auflage, Herder & Co GMBH Verlagsbuchhandlung, Freiburg, 1936. See especially, Chapters 1 and 2.
(k) Wilhelm von Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, Erster Band, Gruendung des Kaiserthums, Fuenfte Auflage, Verlag von Duncker & Humblot, 1881. See especially pp. 609 - 742.
(l) Bruno Gebhardt, Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte Band 1. Fruehzeit und Mittelalter, Union Verlag, Stuttgart, 1954; see especially pp.161 - 209.
(m) Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, London, edition of 1904, Volume V, Chapter XLIX, p.342ff.
(n) Knut Goerig, Otto III. Romanus Saxonicus et Italicus. Kaiserliche Rompolitik und saechsische Historiographie, Verlag Thorbecke Jan, 1995.
(o)
Siegfried Obermeier, Die unheiligen Vaeter. Gottes Stellvertreter
zwischen Machtgier und Froemmichkeit. Eine Geschichte der Paepste, Scherz
Verlag, Bern and Muenchen, 1955. See especilally pp.58ff (Johannes XII), 76ff (Sylvester II).
(p)
Georg Webers, Lehr und Handbuch der Weltgeschichte.
Band II. Mittelalter, Neu bearbeitet von Alfred Baldamus, Verlag Wilhelm
Engelmann, 22nd Edition, 1916. See
especially §§ 117 - 140.
[1] The term rollover ballast I derived from the concept of a rollover account, that is, an account where the funds left over at the end of a financial term are transferred to the next accounting period.
[2] Thomas Mann, Joseph und seine Brueder, Berman Fisher Verlag, A.B., Stockholm, 1948.
[3] Noise in an electronic system is caused by random variations in signals. The 1998 Encyclopaedia on CD-ROM says:
In
electronics and information theory, noise refers to those random, unpredictable,
and undesirable signals, or changes in signals, that mask the desired
information content.
Noise invariably accompanies all operations of electronic systems, and can even "drown" or "obliterate" a signal or information when it is large enough. In the same fashion one can say that the common people produce random patterns of contemporary background "historical noise". Sometimes this historical noise may be manipulated (as in electronic systems) to produce changes - as in "spontaneous" population reactions. We'll meet one such case in this lecture where a blow to Alberic during at a wedding reception struck by his new stepfather, King Hugo of Burgundy and Italy, amplified the random noise into a revolution in Rome.
[4] C. Jung, Wirklichkeit der Seele.
[5] This is the equivalent of one fairly miserable steak and some good boiled potatoes.
[6] P.J. Bouman, Revolutie der Eenzamen, Koninklijke van Gorcum en Comp. N.V., Assen, no date, around 1955. The book is also translated into Afrikaans by Leon Rousseau under the title Die Revolusie van die Eensames, Nasionale Handelsdrukkery Bpk., Elsiesrivier, 1958. An English translation under the title Revolution of the Lonely is also available.
[7] I explored this statement in a lecture entitled "On Peace" that I delivered at the UNISA graduation ceremony in May 1994 in Durban - on the day that the Inkatha Party decided to join the democratic election process in South Africa. In that lecture I discussed the reasons why a great university would like to have peace in a country and what lasting peace would mean for a country and its inhabitants. The lecture can be accessed on my Web Site http://members.tripod.com/~cschutte. In the lecture "On Peace" I also refer to one of the main characters hovering like a spectre over the historical period I'll cover today, namely Charlemagne.
[8] (a) Georgius Heinricus Pertz, Lamberti Hersfeldensis Annales, ex recensione Hessii. In usum scholarum ex monumentis Germania historicis recudi fecit, Hannoverarae, Impensis Bibliopolii Hahniani, 1843. The Annales can also be found in the Patrologia Latina, Volume 146; it is also available for on-line subscribers at the Web Site http://www.umich.edu.latin/pld/pldauth.html.
(b) German translations of some of the later parts of Lambert's Annales are found in Eberhard Orthbrandt, Das deutsche Abenteuer. Deutsche Geschichte von Caesar bus zur Gegenwart in Erlebnisberichten der Zeitgenossen und Augenzeugen mit verbindendem Text, Herman Pfahl-Verlag, Baden-Baden, 1960, pp. 139f, 152f, 154f, 156f, 161f, 164f, and 172f.
[9] I will not supply a full list of references to the events I am going to describe in the lecture today; the footnotes contain some references that can be used as starting points for literature searches. A very good source of initial information about the times and people I'll talk about, is the 1998 Encyclopaedia Britannica on CD-ROM.
[10] Lambertus cites Saint Jerome, or EUSEBIUS HIERONYMUS (b. c. 347, Stridon, Dalmatia--d. 419/420, Bethlehem, Palestine), and says that according to (iuxta) him 5199 years had passed since Adam. However, according to the Judaic calculation, using basically the same data set, the world was created on Oct. 7, 3761 BC. Charlemagne was crowned as Emperor in November, 800 (that is in the 801st year). The calculation of St Jerome, as accepted by Lambertus, thus says that Charlemagne's coronation took place in the year 6000 (= 5199 + 801) since creation. Fancy Charlemagne crowned just six millennia after the birth of Adam! Once this had been established in modern times it caused a flood of papers about the positive effects of millennia changes; the stream is still continuing. The coincidence is too great to be allowed to be a coincidence! See also: Hiltgart L. Keller, Reclams Lexicon der Heiligen und der biblischen Gestalten. Legende und Darstellung in der bildenden Kunst, 5th Improved Edition, Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart, 1984, p.290f.
[11] But he is not that unimportant. The 1998 Encyclopaedia Britannica on CD-ROM has an entry devoted to him under the name Phocas.
[12] Aldifridus rex Nordanembrorum = Aldfrith of Northumbria. Lambert is just one year out on the date of his death - an extraordinary achievement!
[13] Bede, A History of the English Church and People, Translated with an Introduction by Leo Sherley-Price, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1955. The works of Bede are collected together in Patrologia Latina, Volumes 90 - 95.
[14] The first reference to our date system is found in Bede (loc. cit.), Chapter 4, "In the year of our Lord's Incarnation 156, Marcus Antonius Verus, …. "
[15] I have not been able to trace the origins of this very interesting remark.
[16] This could not have been the Comet Halley with a period of 74.4 years. Halley was at its closest approach ever to the earth on 9 April 837. Its previous appearance then was sometime in the year 763 AD. Halley's comet returned in the year 989, but Lambertus does not mention it. See P. Moore and J. Mason, The Return of Halley's Comet, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984. In the year 968 there was widespread panic in the army of Otto I when an eclipse occurred which was taken for the end of the world (Gesta episcoporum Leodensum, MGH SS IX, p. 202); there is no mention of this in the Annales of Lambertus.
[17] According to the 1998 Encyclopaedia Britannica on CD-ROM statements such as this in old chronicles are important because:
"Combining the various results obtained from analysis of ancient and medieval data, it is possible to show that over the last 1,000 years the average rate of increase in the length of the day was only about two-thirds of what it was in the previous millennium.
Following the close of the Classical Age, eclipses were in general only rarely recorded by European writers for several centuries. Not until after about AD 800 did eclipses and other celestial phenomena begin to be frequently reported again, especially in monastic chronicles."
[18] This pestilence Lambertus mentions occurred during the time that Hrabanus Maurus (the nickname Maurus stems from Alcuin), one of the leading intellectuals and poets of the ninth century, was at the Abbey of Fulda; he started his work there in the year 803. The works of Hrabanus Maurus are collected together in Patrologia Latina, Volumes 107-112. A brief biography of Hrabanus Maurus is found in Helen Waddell, Medieval Latin Lyrics, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1929, p.320f.
[19] We now believe that Charlemagne was born in 742, probably on April 2.
[20] There seems to have been some apocalyptical millennium expectations amongst the lay folk and the lower ecclesiastical orders, but no too much amongst the religious and secular leaders. The matter is still controversial and I'll refrain from entering the fray. A good bibliography is found in Johannes Fried, Endzeiterwartung um die Jahrtausendwende, Deutsches Archiv fuer die Erforschung des Mittelalters, 45(2), 385-473 (1989). A bibliography of some secondary sources is found on the Web Site http://www.mille.org/1000-bib.htm; this document also includes some references to primary sources. The Web Site http://www.mille.org/1000.html contains the programme of the international conference on The Apocalyptic Year 1000. History and Historiography, which took place at Boston University, November 3 - 5, 1996. Robert Fleming of Boston College gave a lecture Otto III, Gerbert, and the Year 1000 in which he tried to show that eschatological passage of St. Paul in 2 Thessalonians, 2, 1 - 12 may have influenced Otto III and Sylvester II (he did not convince me!). The Web Site http://www.mille.org/1000-dos.htm contains a document The Apocalyptic Dossier: 967 - 1033, collecting most of the primary material relating to the apocalyptic aspects of the change into the new millennium. An interesting remark by Abbo of Fleury (dated 994 - 996) underlines the controversy:
De fine quoque mundi coram populo sermonem in Ecclesia Parisiorum adolescentulus audivi, quod statim finito mille annorum numero Antichristus adveniret, et non longo post tempore universale iudicium succederet: cui praedicationi ex Evangeliis ac Apocalypsi et libro Danielis, qua potui virtute, resistiti. (Abbo of Fleury, Apologeticus ad hugonem et rodbertum reges francorum, British Museum manuscript 10972, f22v; Patrologia Latina, Volume 139 c.471-2.)
Concerning the end of the world, as a very young person, I heard a sermon in a church in the presence of a crowd in Paris that, as soon as the number of a thousand years should come, the Antichrist would come, and not long thereafter the universal Judgment would follow; which preaching I resisted with all my strength from the Evangeliums and the Apocalypse and the book of Daniel.
[21] (a) The dichotomy between the sinful lives of the "top management" of the church and its continuous growth during another period of Papal depravity about 350 years later is beautifully illustrated by a story by Boccaccio. It occurs as the second story of the first day of the Decameron. In this story Bocaccio relates how a rich Jew of Paris, Abraham, at first absolutely refused to be converted to Christianity. However, he later eagerly embraced the Faith after an extended exploratory visit to Rome where he saw that the extremely sinful life of the Pope and his Church dignitaries did not prevent the rapid growth of the Church. Abraham concluded that Christianity must indeed be the only true faith because it grows in spite of the strenuous efforts of the Church dignitaries to drive it from the face of the earth by the astounding multitude and intensities of their sins. He further concluded that, surely, the Holy Ghost supports the Church and nourishes it to grow in spite of the Pope - this is, he thinks, the real wonder of Christianity. It is noteworthy that this very powerful story occurs right at the beginning of the stories of the first day of the ten days of the Decameron! The description of the sins of the Pope and other Prelates in Boccaccio almost verbatim reproduces the contents of the letter of King Otto I to Pope John XII (see below). (I am indebted to Professor Gerhard van den Heever of Unisa's Faculty of Theology, who reminded me about this story of Bocaccio after my lecture.) See Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, Translated with an Introduction by G.H. McWilliam, Penguin Books, 1972, p82ff.
(b) A point worth noting in this respect is the definition of Christian given by Bertand Russell: Christian: Contrary to the Gospels. See Bertrand Russell, The Good Citizens Alphabet, with drawings by Francizka Themerson, Gaberbocchus Press Limited, London, 1953.
[22] The following sources I used for this lecture give an interesting account of these times:
(a) Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ. The Dark Side of the Papacy, Bantam Press, London, 1988 (see especially Chapter 3. Papal Pornocracy).
(b) Philip Hughes, A History of the Church. Volume 2. The Church and the World the Church Created, Sheed and Ward, London, Revised Edition, 1948; see especially Chapter V. The Siege of Christendom, 814 - 1046, Subsection V. The Roman See and the Anarchy, 900-1046.
(c) S. Fischer-Fabian, Die deutschen Caesaren, Knaur, Munich, 1977; especially Kapitel 5. Otto III. - ein deutscher Juengling.
(d) C.W. Previté-Orton, The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History. Volume I. The Later Roman Empire to the Twelfth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, reprinted with corrections, 1953.
(e) The 1998 Encyclopaedia Britannica on CD-ROM, Multimedia Edition. This Encyclopaedia on CD-ROM is one of the very best I have ever used, especially the multimedia edition.
(f) Gerd Althoff, Otto III, Primus D., 1997.
(g) Der Brockhaus Multimedial on CD-ROM, 1998.
(h) Ferdinand Seibt, Glanz und Elend des Mittelalters. Eine endliche Geschichte, Goldmann/ Siedler-Verlag, Berlin, 1987.
(i) Karl Hampe, Das Hochmittelalter. Geschichte des Abendlandes von 900 bis 1250, Boehlau Verlag, Colgne, 5th edition, 1963, p.51ff.
(j) Heinrich Guenter Das deutsche Mittelalter. Erste Haelfte: Das Reich (Hochmittelalter), Zweite unveraenderte Auflage, Herder & Co GMBH Verlagsbuchhandlung, Freiburg, 1936. See especially, Chapters 1 and 2.
(k) Wilhelm von Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, Erster Band, Gruendung des Kaiserthums, Fuenfte Auflage, Verlag von Duncker & Humblot, 1881. See especially pp. 609 - 742.
(l) Bruno Gebhardt, Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte Band 1. Fruehzeit und Mittelalter, Union Verlag, Stuttgart, 1954; see especially pp.161 - 209.
(m) Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, London, edition of 1904, Volume V, Chapter XLIX, p.342ff.
(n) Knut Goerig, Otto III. Romanus Saxonicus et Italicus. Kaiserliche Rompolitik und saechsische Historiographie, Verlag Thorbecke Jan, 1995.
(o) Siegfried Obermeier, Die unheiligen Vaeter. Gottes Stellvertreter zwischen Machtgier und Froemmichkeit. Eine Geschichte der Paepste, Scherz Verlag, Bern and Muenchen, 1955. See especilally pp.58ff (Johannes XII), 76ff (Sylvester II).
(p) Georg Webers, Lehr und Handbuch der Weltgeschichte. Band II. Mittelalter, Neu bearbeitet von Alfred Baldamus, Verlag Wilhelm Engelmann, 22nd Edition, 1916. See especially §§ 117 - 140.
[23] Aquis Grani = Aachen, derived from the Celtic God of Health Granus. The Roman name of the town refers to the hot springs (78oC) near Aachen, the warmest in Europe.
[24] The symptoms of the internal ailment, as related in many annals, sound to me like those of intestinal cancer.
[25] See Adelbert Davids (Editor), The Empress Theophano, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995 (a collection of 17 papers). See also Gunther Wolff, The Itinerary of the Princess Theophano, or the Empress Theophano, http://crs-www.bu.edu/~wlucht/wlucht/wlucht_theophanu.html. The Princess (later Empress) was constantly on the move, and her journeys took her from her native Constantinople to all the territories covered by the Holy Roman Empire. She died in Nijmegen in the presence of her son, Otto III, on June 15, 1991 and was buried in Cologne in the church of St. Pantaleon.
[26] Colliers Encyclopaedia, The Crowell-Collier Publishing Company, Volume 23, p.81, 1964.
[27] This period of time in Papal history has been called aera meretricum = Age of the whores. Gibbons (loc. cit., p.348) says that Marozia and Theodora were "two sister prostitutes", but other sources speak of mother and daughter. The phrase two sister prostitutes might not mean that they were actually sisters, but merely that they used the same operational methodology to obtain power and riches. The almost irreparable damage that these two noble and rich courtesans wrought in State and Church is very graphically described by Gibbon (loc. cit. p348ff), using, for him, fairly unususual adjectives.
[28] Gustav Roskoff, Geschichte des Teufels. Eine kulturhistorische Satanologie von den Anfaengen bis ins 18. Jahrhundert, Parkland Verlag, Stuttart, 1993, p. 247. This book is a reprint of the edition of 1869.
[29] Pope Benedict VII faced his Maker using the same position and dying from an attack by a jealous husband, also in the bed of the married woman.
[30] See the Catholic Encyclopaedia On Line at http://www.knight.org/advent/athen/04484c.htm.
[31] See:
(a) http://forum.swarthmore.edu/epigone/math-history-list/rulprinvox.
(b) A short description of Gerbert and his contributions to mathematics and physics is found in Eberhard Orthbrandt, Das deutsche Abenteuer. Deutsche Geschichte von Caesar bus zur Gegenwart in Erlebnisberichten der Zeitgenossen und Agenzeugen mit verbindendem Text, Herman Pfahl-Verlag, Baden-Baden, 1960, p122ff. This document also sheds some light upon the relationship of Gerbert and Otto III.
(c) Patrologia Latina, Volume 139 has material related to pope Sylvester II (Gerbertus).
[32] Modern scholars are reassessing Sylvester II's role as academic, tutor and Pope, as well as his relations with Otto III. See the 1998 Encyclopaedia Britannica on CD-ROM.
[33] The relationship between Otto III and Adalbert was rather "strange".
[34] The 1998 Encyclopaedia Britannica on CD-ROM has the following to say about funerary rites and embalming (my bold print!):
"… The
ancient Babylonians, Sumerians, and Greeks seldom practiced any but the most
superficial kind of embalming, anointing the body with unguents, perfumes, and
spices. Nor did the Jews employ embalming procedures, with the notable
exception of Joseph, who ordered embalming for himself and his father, and
further departed from Jewish custom by having his body placed in a coffin.
Among the ancients who profoundly influenced Western culture, only the Romans
employed cavity embalming, not for religious reasons but for the temporary
preservation of bodies exhibited for some time before burial. Although there is
evidence that some early Christians were embalmed, generally they rejected
embalming as well as cremation, considering them pagan customs that mutilated
the corpse. Such scruples were sometimes overcome by the desire to have an
outstanding person linger on, a desire that was reinforced by the belief that
the bodies of some of the devout were kept intact after death as a mark of
divine favour. Consequently, some Christians were embalmed, a notable example
being Charlemagne, whose embalmed and richly dressed corpse was placed
in a sitting position in his tomb at Aachen after his death in 814. The
body of the 11th-century Spanish epic hero El Cid, which remained seated
on an ivory chair in the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña for a decade before
burial, is also presumed to have been embalmed. …"
[35] The eyewitness report of Otto von Lomello is translated in Wilhelm von Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, Erster Band, Gruendung des Kaiserthums, Fuenfte Auflage, Verlag von Duncker & Humblot, 1881, p.734. In modern times it is speculated that this act of Otto III may have been undertaken to pave the way for Charlemagne's eventual beatification. There may be some truth in this, since Otto III unsuccessfully tried to obtain a relic from the cadaver of Saint Adalbert while he was in Poland to visit the grave of his friend. The tooth of Charlemagne may have served the same purpose.
[36] See Doomsday Calculus and the Year 6000 in the Article: While God Tarried: Disappointed Millennialism and the Making of the Modern West, http://www.mille.org/wgt-prec.html.
[38] See the Web Site at http://interactive.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/mill-1-1000-ahed.htm.
[39] Mount Soracte, a 630 m high, pine-clad white limestone ridge visible from Rome on a clear day, lies about 8 kilometers to the southeast of Civita Castellana. He died in the Castle Paterno on the foothills of Mount Soracte - from where he could see Rome below him. (See Wilhelm von Giesebrecht, loc. cit., p.758.)
[40] Thietmar von Merseburg speaks of internal growths pressing on important organs and Brun von Querfurt says that he was already looking like death during May 1000 while he was still in Aachen.
[41] According to the Hildesheimer Annals he died of febre et Italico morbo = malaria, although there were rumours that he was poisoned due to an amorous relationship with a certain Roman lady. (Bruno Gebhardt, loc. cit. p.208, Note 1.). Gibbons (loc. cit. p.352) says that the (lingering) poison was administered as an act of revenge by the widow of Crescentius II; she was, incidentally, at that stage, the mistress of Otto III, the man who had her husband executed four years earlier.
[42] A good English translation is found in Horace, The Complete Odes and Epodes, Translated, with Notes by W.G. Shepherd, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1983. The following South African book on Horace is very handy and contains the Latin text of the ninth Ode: K.O. Matier, Horace. Selected Odes. A Commentary, Rhodes University Library, Grahamstown, 1971.
[43] See, for instance, His Holiness John-Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Edited by Vittorio Messori, Jonathan Cape, London, 1994. In this respect, the first Chapter, "The Pope": A Scandal and A Mystery, is of prime importance; this view of the concept of the Papacy and the responsibilities of a Pope contrasts sharply with the scandalous practices of those early Popes near the first millennium change.
[44] The Oval Office in the White House has generated very many good jokes in the recent past. For instance, on the Internet one finds 493 Web pages dedicated to the "Oral Office". See, for instance, http://mponline.cpm/cigar.htm.
[45] It is strange that Christianity is at present in decline - and that at a time when the Papacy and the Church are precisely the opposite of what they were during the Ottonian Empire when Christianity just grew and grew in spite of the sins of the Prelates.
[46] In the year 2000 the number of Muslims will outnumber the Christians for the first time in history. In this respect, see His Holiness John-Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Edited by Vittorio Messori, Jonathan Cape, London, 1994, p.101ff.
[47] There are, for instance, at present serious (and for some, insoluble) differences between the German Bishops' Conference and the Pope about birth control, including abortion. If these conflicts are not resolved, the influence of the Church in Germany may be even more quickly reduced.
[48] Automobile accidents have already killed more than 20 million people globally since its inception a century ago (RTL TV Station; News Bulletin in Germany, September 1999); South Africa's annual contribution is about 15 000 dead per year, which is still less than its annual rate of 25 000 murders (Beeld 29 September 1999).
[49] Ulrich Horstmann, Das Untier. Konturen einer Philosophie der Menschenflucht, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985. He makes the point that mankind is just about pre-programmed to eliminate itself in the long run - and thus also all its memories of itself - by wars, murders, etc.
