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The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages

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The apocalyptic imagination has always exercised great control over the mind of the Western man - from bands of Jewish zealots in the time of Josephus to the masses of poor warriors in the Crusades to take the Holy Land for Christendom to the mutual hurling of the epithet "Antichrist" between Luther and the Pope, and it has been keenly expressed in the Biblical tradition within the Books of Daniel and Revelations. _The Pursuit of the Millennium_ takes a look at the mass movements and delusions that developed out of this tradition in the Middle Ages and the period following the Middle Ages, the Reformation. Norman Cohn shows how prejudices and hatreds among the poor (especially against the Jews, the clergy, and the wealthy) were used by mystical prophetae in conjunction with the apocalyptic tradition to give rise to mass movements which resulted in much mayhem and bloodshed. For example, the People's and Shepherd's Crusades in the Middle Ages were movements of mindless zealotry which ended in mass slaughter. Cohn examines various sects that developed out of these apocalyptic traditions around such figures as the Emperor Frederick, Joachim of Fiore, and various other individuals and imposters who sought to mobilize the masses of poor. In the later Middle Ages, this type of movement was exemplified among the flagellants, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, Taborites and followers of Thomas Muntzer, the militant wing of the Anabaptists, and later the Ranters in England. Often, these movements incorporated Joachimite speculations about a coming Age of the Spirit, mystical doctrines that made one was free to sin as one pleased (Free Spirit), and communistic ideals that involved belief in a Golden Age in which all men had lived as brothers with all things in common. Class struggle between rich and poor, or between poor and clergy (who were often contaminated by the sins of Avaritia and Luxuria) developed into all out wars. The belief that the apostles had lived in poverty and that God had intended all men to live in a communistic setting gave impetus to many individuals to reject church orthodoxy and form their own apocalyptic movements. These movements depended on the poor who held steadfastly to their often megalomanical leaders in their pursuit of messianic ideals and the coming of the millennium. Cohn does an excellent job of describing this process in detail and deals with much of the mysticism and myth surrounding it.

In the modern era, it is apparent that millenarian zeal has not died off at all. The communist revolutions in Russia and the rise of the Third Reich in Germany were both movements in the same line as these earlier mass movements in the Middle Ages. While they have shed much of the apocalyptic myth and become atheistic, the same principles were involved in their formation, and in the formation of similar movements that continue in the world today.

A friend recommended this to me as 'a great read' and I also recommend it to you for the same reason. It is rare that a work can be appreciated for its academic value, and for pure fascination. Who could not but be fascinated by the medieval flagellants, the Taborites, Joachim of Fiore, the Tafurs, the Anabaptists and the Ranters. Some groups awaited the returned of the Emperor Constantine, or Frederick Barbarossa, or even the Duke of Flanders, to herald the last days. Other preached, and practised, Free Love, and community of goods. Startingly, the Anabaptists of Munster (Germany) withstood a lengthy siege for their beliefs, while what was happening inside the walls of the city seemed to prefigure the regime of Stalin. Important to recall the limitations of medieval Catholicism, which drove many into fringe sects, and eventually helped spawn the Reformation. Not that the Protestant princes were any more sympathetic to the Prophets of the Poor. For an academic book, this is also fun to read, though its subject in places in quite grisly.

When I first read the book, I began in the back--it's divided well so that it reads like small hilarious tales or longer, fascinating and riotous history. The tales are Monty Python-esque, especially because the best Monty Python humor is the use of straight-forward history. From the whacked out tales of Protestant reformation, utopian and distopian enclaves of cultish religious fanatics, to riveting tales of 'witchcraft and mysticism,' this isn't comedic fiction, it's unbelievable History! I love to read this book aloud to others, and that's my highest compliment

A book for anyone who has read "The name of the rose" and found the strange groups and sects that move in and out of the narrative as interesting as the story itself. The otherworldly inhabitants of this book come alive as you read and the wonderful "logic" and inevitability of the period become almost obvious. This book contains a unique combination of strict scholarly research and stories that would defy all but the most imaginative of fiction writers.

There are two quite good and extensive reviews of this book on the Amazon site, one by a Zosimos and another by DerekPillion.I recommend them.
The phenomena discussed by Norman Cohn in this book, millenial expectations leading to revolutionary and often violent behavior are of course not confined to the medieval Christian period. But the amount of energy and proliferation of these movements suggest that they were particularly prevalent in this time. The eleven through sixteenth centuries were too the time of the Crusades another product of millenial expections. The clergy, the wealthy and the Jews were subject to particular attack.
Cohn does not a masterful job in describing the very complicated developments of this historical period.
This work is a classic of social history.

The wonderful Norman Cohn has created an interesting and important book examining revolutionary messianism in medieval and Reformation Europe. It was not quite as good as Norman Cohn's Europe's Inner Demons (a very high benchmark, indeed) but it posesses the same potent ability to chart accurately and interestely a trend from the past in its own historical context and then to demonstrate to the reader the ways in which this knowledge is important for an understanding within our own historical period. He cleanly takes the reader through the various millenial movements in a way that is both entertaining, informative, and, best of all, understandable. The adept mind of an historian blended with the skill of a writer. A good book.

A classic- I was referred to the book via Cantor's the "invention of the middle ages", and once again, I was not dissapointed.

I would imagine this is the standard work on the topic, judging from its continued popularity after being in print for half a century. The histoiographical method- his use of various sources and willingness to give voice to many which "traditional" history ignored, is most impressive.

Considering that this book was first published in 1957,Cohn was ahead of his time in his presentation of a social history of the "Pursuit of the Millennium".

The cast of characters is colorful, to say the least: ranters, flaggelants, the brotherhood of the free spirit, taborites, anabaptists.

You could almost call this a history of the "pre reformation". Classic text.

This is a brilliant and fascinating history of Christian millennial movements, cults and apocalyptically-motivated uprisings from earliest times up until the Reformation era. In the sheer bizarre freakishness of this tale of flagellants, messiahs, visionary madmen, heretical saints, reincarnated Jesuses, religious libertines, crazed hordes of rootless paupers, and genocidal prophets who sought to bring on the millennium in a sea of blood, this study is like a deformed sideshow mutant that both mesmerizes and disgusts you. However, it's more than just entertainment. I believe that it is a prophetic work.

The apocalyptic DNA strand was never eradicated from the human animal and will surely resurface in the Christian world when the conditions are right. Those conditions, among which are social dislocation, cultural deracination, political corruption, establishment-religion apathy and hypocrisy, have been rising to an extreme heat since the 1960s. Millions of people have been, and will continue to be, severed from traditional means of understanding the world and will find meaning by turning to the deviant and heterodox forms of Christianity that have proliferated in the past 30 years in America. The powerful leaders of these faith groups provide certainty, spirituality and carnal satisfaction with prophecies, visions, "miracles", divine revelations, new experiences via mind-altering practices, promises of earthly prosperity and a sense of belonging by exacerbating the hostility with "the world". Apocalyptic theology is an ever-present theme. The followers of these televangelist messiahs are peaceable enough now, but should their bellies ever be shrunken by an economic downturn- the last of the necessary conditions- we will see violent millenarian movements like nothing the world has ever known. If you're interested in what that kind of world may look like, read this book.

Cohn's "Pursuit of the Millennium" has aged well and nearing 50 years of age it is deservedly a classic. Its subjet might be considered by some to be esoteric: it deals with prophets from middle age Europe who led others to believe that the end of times was at hand, and that they had been chosen by God to purify the world in preparation for the Kingdom of the Last Days, and with pantheistic mystical anarchists who believed that they could do no evil because they had connected with their divine essences. In most cases these figures are virtual unknowns even for people who like history. The few that still turn up are Thomas Müntzer, the leader of the rebellious peasants who were exterminated in the Battle of Frankenhausen (a character in the historical fiction pastiche "Q" by Luther Blisset) and John of Leyden, the tailor who created a totalitarian kingdom of saints in Münster. For the revolutionary millennarians the tale is a bit repetitive, and it usually went like this: a former priest or a hermit with a violent disposition concludes, after meditating for a long time, that he is living at the end of times and that he is God/ he is a god/ he has been chosen by God or a god to lead the just and the good in a final, apocalyptic, war against Antichrist and his followers, to usher in the millennium of the saints announced by John the Divine, prior to the end of the world and the final reckoning. The hermit or defrocked priest finds some followers and eventually is able to take hold of a town or a castle, which he converts into a stronghold with the help of the rootless rabble. Then he proceeds to plunder from the rich (nobles and clergy) and to purge the unredeemed. Eventually the powers-that-be get their act together and dispatch an army of knights who, after a bloody fight are able to capture the prophet and his main followers, who usually are burnt or beheaded after enduring torture. It is peculiar that even thought they are always defeated and crushed, the sort of people who are drawn to this type of leader will rise up to follow them again and again.

Cohn's book tells the story in just the right detail. He shows that certain regions were particularly sensitive to the millennarian prophets. Many such arose in the Northwestern corner of Europe (Northeastern France, the Benelux countries, the Rhineland in Germany). He also shows that generally poor people have had rational aims: to use pressure in order to improve their lot by acquisition of certain rights. Only a minority has felt the attraction of millennarian revolutions, and these usually have been uprooted people without a settled role. Also, these revolutionary initiatives were able to succeed (even if for a short while) only in times of chaos or unrest (i.e., the Crusades, visitations of the plague or black death, economic crises, etc.). Usually the self-appointed prophets used the social disruption in order to further their cause and take advantage from the momentary weakness of defenders of the status quo.

Cohn is a sober commentator who shows that recent historians have sometimes ignored the evidence to further a political agenda. Thus, leftist historians sometimes refused to acknowledge some activities of the prophets whom they regarded as protorevolutionaries (such as their inclination to institutionalized promiscuity or their remarkably violent language), probably in order to maintain their status as predecessors of current "progressives".

An interesting conclusion from the reading of the book is that, contrary to what many think, ideas are not a neutral good to be chosen by informed customers in an efficient marketplace. Some ideas appeal to dark places in people's minds: these are dangerous ideas, and parents and teachers would do well to instruct their children, so that they do not succumb. One such idea is that "God" is in everything, and that when a person becomes aware of this he or she becomes entirely free and can follow his or her desires without any negative ethical implication. Another way of putting this is that nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so, as Hamlet said. This type of belief might lead a person to the most brutal behaviors without any perception that they had done ill. This is a very common opinion nowadays, and in fact both the millennarists and the mystical anarchists have their successors nowadays. Today, the center of millennarian agitation is surely the USA, were many people believe that the Book of Revelation (Apocalypse) is a play-by-play description of the end of the world and that they will live to see it happen. And many new age sects (including Scientology) appear to hold the belief that we can become gods and be free of conventional morality and ethics.

In his conclusion Cohn suggests that many radical movements of the XX century are in fact new versions of the old millennarian revolutionary heresies. There can be no doubt that this is the case: human motivations change little over time. What changes is the language in which they are articulated. In a religious era, the language and imagery were religious. in a godless age the language attempts to be scientific and logical. But underneath there beats the same old hope: the hope to see evil punished and evildoers destroyed, to be part of a chosen elite with a new understanding of the nature of reality, and an exhilarating vision of a better future through hardship and strife. We can all empathise with these feelings. Action movies, comic books, tragedies, country music and soap operas resonate for many of us because they take their inspiration from some of these elements. I only regret that Cohn did not expand the point, although other authors have done so, most notably Michel Burleigh, who in his recent two volume history on the clashes between politics and religion from the French Revolution to our days has shown that much of what passes for politics is in reality religion by another name, and how the most revolutionary creeds of the XX century were really millennarian sects.

And Cohn's perspective is so pertinent that it even explains the rise of Islamic fundamentalism tinged with visions of a holy war that will redeem the world and turn into the Umma, the community of the believers. The followers of fundamentalism have been the large masses of uprooted peasants without a clear role in a modernizing world, and their leaders have been intellectuals or semi-intellectuals who can understand how the world works but want no part of it, other than to redeem it in an apocalytic struggle. Their counterparts in other religions are very similar to them: people who want to find a meaning for lives that provide none, people who are sensitive to unfairness and who instinctively resonate with violence and retribution, people who yearn for zoroastrian visions of entirely distinct good and bad. As ever, for these people, the new millennium of peace and joy is just around the corner, although sadly it can only come about on mountains of corpses and through rivers of blood.

"O just God, mighty judge, the game was not fairly divided between them and us. Their satiety was our famine; their merriment was our wretchedness; their jousts and tournaments were our torments...Their feasts, delectations, pomps, vanities excesses and superfluities were our fastings, penalties, wants, calamities, and spoilation. The love ditties and laughter of their dances were our mockery, our groanings and remonstrations."

The Chancellor of Cambridge, John Bromyard, wrote this quote in a sermon, cited in Norman Cohn's intriguing study of revolutionary millennial movements. It illustrates the feeling of resentment toward the established Church in Europe and aristocracy in Europe in the middle ages. It also reminds one of similar social protest movements from whatever party throughout history. Popular resentment arose during the Middle Ages, with legitimate grievances, whenever the stable social order rooted in feudalism and economic stability was threatened. Cohn's defines "the Millennium," which medieval heretical sects and religious radicals strove for as collective, terrestrial, imminent, total, and miraculous. The Millennium was a hypothetical Kingdom of Heaven/God on Earth where the faithful would enjoy material wealth in this world in a state of total equality and oneness with nature after some cataclysmic battle with the forces of evil. This tradition arose from the obvious sources: the biblical texts of Daniel along with certain scattered Old Testament prophecies; and from the words of Jesus and Paul in the New Testament, and in particular the Book of Revelation (the Apocalypse) of St. John. Similar prophetic traditions developed in the medieval period from the Sibylline Oracles, which were Roman texts purporting to reveal the appearance of Christ, and blatant forgeries attributed to either Old Testament prophets, the Apostles or authoritative Fathers of the Church (such as the apocryphal Fifth Epistle of Clement). A popular legend in particular was the second coming of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire who would abolish poverty, reunify Germany and destroy the Muslims who threatened the frontiers of Christendom at that time. Frederick II and Charlemagne were two popular emperors in the medieval eschatological imagination. The notorious first "Peasants Crusade" was stirred up and (more or less led) by Peter the Hermit, a wandering mystic who visited the Holy Land. Some secular/lay religious ascetic groups, notably the Flagellants, believed that their self-inflicted sufferings were equal to that of Christ and that they were atoning for the sins of the people in order to stave off the Black Death which was ravaging Europe at that time. Several sects, like those of the Adamites in Bohemia, Thomas Muntzer and the Anabaptists led by John of Leyden went on terrorist rampages to overthrow the surrounding secular and Church authorities in order to establish a reign of the saints on earth. Muntzer and the Anabaptists called for a holy war to cleanse the earth of sinful humanity, and the common ownership of property. John of Leyden instituted a Soviet-style reign of terror in Muster, a town in Germany. Inspired by religious fanaticism against what he perceived as the apostate churches of Rome and Luther, Leyden burned all Church books except for the Bible, declared communal ownership of property, mandated polygamy and forced the excess women of the town to become extra wives for the men of the city. His quasi-socialistic experiment failed when his followers were starved out the soldiers of the local Catholic archbishop and local lords and the city was taken over. The most interesting category of religious renegades that Cohn outlines are the "mystical anarchists" or Brethren of the Free Spirit. They were a disparate group of mystics and intellectuals who believed that since they had conquered sin within themselves and attained inner Divinity, they could commit any crime they wanted without any incurred guilt. They believed that they could rob, commit murder and fraud without any sin or guilt because living "totally in the spirit" liberated them from all man made and external religious constraints. The Free Spirit adepts were particularly interested in indulging in sexual promiscuity because sexual transgressions such as homosexuality, fornication and adultery went directly against the grain of the Roman Catholic ideals of celibacy and chastity. The only sin in their eyes was to be ignorant of one's own inner God, much like today's New Age movement.

These millennial movements gained ground among the urban, unskilled poor who had been uprooted by famines, high taxes and lack of opportunities in the countryside. Millennialism took off particularly in the High Middle Ages (1100-1400s) and persisted after the Reformation in the form of several radical Anabaptist sects, as opposed to the earlier "dark ages" before the advent of the Crusades. The leaders tended to come from the educated classes and merchants, were either intellectuals or pseudo-intellectuals and skilled at demagoguery--inciting the popular imaginations of the disaffected crowds that followed them. The most interesting parts of Cohn's Pursuit of the Millennium__ are the parallels between these medieval upsurges and how Communism and Nazism in retrospect reflect upon them. Many of the itinerant prophetae aroused popular anger against the Jews and encouraged physical attacks and massacre upon them, along with the loose living clergy. Some millennial movements were inspired by the ancient Greek notion of a human state of Nature, similar to the Genesis version of the created man in Paradise, where all humans lived in a state of harmony and mutual cooperation. This "Golden Age" was later destroyed, not by disobedience to God as in the biblical account, but by the creation of the concept of private property and the division of labor and therefore the socioeconomic inequalities this "fall" entails. It is very similar to Marx's vision of communist utopia free from the external constraints of the state and organized religion. In the final analysis, modern popular anti-religious movements such as those inspired by mass media pop culture, and the rhetoric of equality and democracy are by no means new. They are part of a tradition of revolution stretching back to the beginning of time.