Customer Reviews

A.D. 1000: Living on the Brink of Apocalypse

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The author portrays the life of a medieval French monk, Gerbert d'Aurillac, as he struggles to obtain the highest office in Christianity. Characters and events in Europe at the turn of the millenium come alive to reveal a brilliant snapshot of this critical time in history. It is the closest thing to time travel.

The book is reminiscient of Tuchmann's "A Distant Mirror" yet seems to paint even a warmer portrait of individuals and their complex relationships. The pace of the writing is surprisingly lively for an historical work. At the end, I found myself wanting to go back to the back of the line for another ride.

Gerbert is born of unknown parents and given to the monastary in Aurillac. From there, he leads an intense and passionate search for knowledge taking him to Catalonia in medieval Spain. Returning to France, he soon gains a reputation as the most brillant teacher in Europe. The emporer Otto I invites him to Germany where he becomes a major player in early European politics. After unsuccessfully holding several positions, he is finally appointed to the Papacy by Otto III. However, the rumors of having consorted with the Moslems in Cordoba haunt him and make his short five year tenure difficult. He dies amid stories of being the antichrist. A brilliant man unable to overcome the petty politics of his time, it is only later in Erdoes book that his true potential is revealed

As Karen Armstrong says in her introduction, the year 1000 was a very different world, one that would never have believed that the global triumph of the West would take place in the next 1000 years. There were no cohesive nations of long standing; the Roman Empire's collapse hundreds of years prior remained the defining influence, and even consolidations under the likes of Charlemagne would not change the fact that half of Europe was still fighting the other half, usually in small, tribal cliques.

Despite the dominance of the Christian church, still at this time officially undivided, much of Europe was rife with superstition and nature religions that occasionally practiced barbaric rituals; the church unfortunately occasionally engaged in barbaric rituals of its own.

The Muslim and Chinese dynasties, on the other hand, were cultivated and developing at a rapid pace; the Greek Christian world was considered peripheral civilisation not to the West (considered barbarian territory) but to the other two dominant powers, neither of which concerned themselves much with Europe.

Robert Erdoes' book is not really a history book, but rather a narrative historical almost-fiction, a dramatised vision of what the world was like at the turn of the first millennium. he speculates that many people were thinking that this might be the millennium spoken of in some biblical interpretations -- this is generally incorrect, given that many people didn't realise what year it was, and other dominant cultures didn't use the now-standard Christian-inspired calendar.

The main figure in Erdoes' book is a man named Gerbert, an up-and-coming figure in the Western church hierarchy, who by virtue of his position is afforded opportunities to travel and experience different peoples and places. Gerbert, the teacher of the emperor Otto III, eventually becomes Sylvester II, a powerful but always embattled pope. Otto, holding on to the remnants of Charlemagne's empire and vision of a reunited vision, works with him, but in the end, both fail.

Erdoes develops the worldview in an interesting fashion. This being more a novel than a history, it does not have citations, facts and figures for the most part. Erdoes often opts for the historically-incorrect but true to the mindset rendering of history -- as in the most ancient of times, sometimes the truth of a civilisation can be told more from its mythology than from its simple history.

A fun book to read!

The era this book presents has become a fascination for this reader, partly because of its similarity to the era we post-year 2000 people find ourselves in, and partly because of the drama its history has given us.

Erdoes fashions his story about one Gerbert, a French peasant priest who became the brightest intellect in Post-Roman Empire Europe and who later became Pope. Erdoes welcomes us to an age fraught with superstition, violence, poverty, famine, and social conflict - an age most people of that time thought were earths "final days." Gerbert is that age's foil; he restores learning of the Greek and Roman ages to a mostly illiterate Europe and sets the stage for the Renaissance. As only real life to conjure it, his greatest ally in a world that saw Gerbert as a scion of Satan, was Otto III, the hyper-Christian but far-seeing Emperor of the so-called Holy Roman Empire.
Gerbert, the paragon of a newly minted reason, and Otto, who lived his life largely for a heavenly world, formed a ruling duo that, if they'd lived a decade or two longer, would have reshaped Europe in ways we can only imagine.

As a fiction writer might, Erdoes parcels out this difficult telling with great suspense and drama, and leaves us with hope for our own, similar transitional period of world history. The only failing here is in the writer's biases - for and against - but without them, the story would been a mound of facts, not the vibrant historical telling that it is.

As Karen Armstrong says in her introduction, the year 1000 was a very different world, one that would never have believed that the global triumph of the West would take place in the next 1000 years. There were no cohesive nations of long standing; the Roman Empire's collapse hundreds of years prior remained the defining influence, and even consolidations under the likes of Charlemagne would not change the fact that half of Europe was still fighting the other half, usually in small, tribal cliques.

Despite the dominance of the Christian church, still at this time officially undivided, much of Europe was rife with superstition and nature religions that occasionally practiced barbaric rituals; the church unfortunately occasionally engaged in barbaric rituals of its own.

The Muslim and Chinese dynasties, on the other hand, were cultivated and developing at a rapid pace; the Greek Christian world was considered peripheral civilisation not to the West (considered barbarian territory) but to the other two dominant powers, neither of which concerned themselves much with Europe.

Robert Erdoes' book is not really a history book, but rather a narrative historical almost-fiction, a dramatised vision of what the world was like at the turn of the first millennium. he speculates that many people were thinking that this might be the millennium spoken of in some biblical interpretations -- this is generally incorrect, given that many people didn't realise what year it was, and other dominant cultures didn't use the now-standard Christian-inspired calendar.

The main figure in Erdoes' book is a man named Gerbert, an up-and-coming figure in the Western church hierarchy, who by virtue of his position is afforded opportunities to travel and experience different peoples and places. Gerbert, the teacher of the emperor Otto III, eventually becomes Sylvester II, a powerful but always embattled pope. Otto, holding on to the remnants of Charlemagne's empire and vision of a reunited vision, works with him, but in the end, both fail.

Erdoes develops the worldview in an interesting fashion. This being more a novel than a history, it does not have citations, facts and figures for the most part. Erdoes often opts for the historically-incorrect but true to the mindset rendering of history -- as in the most ancient of times, sometimes the truth of a civilisation can be told more from its mythology than from its simple history.

A fun book to read!