The Historical Evidence

History cannot prove a reading of prophecy. It can do something more modest and still important: it can show whether a reading fits the facts. If someone tells you that a promise has been fulfilled, the honest thing is to go and look.

Revelation 20 makes a claim that can be looked at. It says that Satan was bound "that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled" (Revelation 20:3). The binding concerns the nations — peoples, kingdoms, their worship and their law — not the private struggles of every soul. If the thousand years are behind us, there should be a long stretch of history in which the nations, as nations, were no longer held by the old deception: their idols put away, their kings bowing to Christ, their law and calendar and buildings ordered around His name.

What I believe, and what this paper does with it

I read Revelation 20 literally. I believe Satan was bound when the temple fell in AD 70; that the thousand years were the medieval age, about 500 to 1500; and that the little season began about 1500 and is the age we live in now. I set no dates. This is my conviction; weigh it for yourself.

The calendar between AD 70 and the medieval centuries does not add up in a simple sum, and I will not pretend it does. I hold the standard first-millennium calendar to be unreliable, following Gunnar Heinsohn's argument from stratigraphy.¹ Most historians reject it, and their evidence (tree rings, radiocarbon, eclipses) is real and should be weighed. This is my conviction; weigh it for yourself. Heinsohn, a German scholar, argued that centuries of the first-millennium chronology in the history books have no layers of their own in the ground. The companion paper The Millennial Reign (kylelauriano.com/resources/millennial-reign.pdf) sets out the Scripture and that question more fully.

This paper is about the history itself. It does not ask you to accept my reading of Revelation 20 before you read it. It asks you to look at the centuries from about 500 to 1500 through the documents those centuries left behind, and then to ask whether "that he should deceive the nations no more" describes what you see.

How this paper works

Wherever possible the people of the age speak in their own words: laws, letters, councils, chronicles, rules and inscriptions, quoted from published translations that you can check online. Where I summarise, I footnote. Where the record is dark, I say so. A study that only collects the flattering evidence is not a study.

Seven parts follow. Part 1 describes the world the gospel entered. Part 2 follows the nations as they turned. Part 3 reads the law. Part 4 goes into the monastery, the hospital and the school. Part 5 stands in the cathedrals. Part 6 looks at Christendom as a whole — empire, papacy and the idea of a Christian world. Part 7 keeps the honest ledger and describes the turn around 1500.

A word about me

Eventually I gave up and called myself an atheist. I decided to read the Bible for one reason: to disprove it, so I'd have an excuse to stop going to church for good. It did the opposite. I came to faith in 2022, and my wife came to faith a month later. The story is at kylelauriano.com/about. I mention it here because this paper asks you to do with history what I did with the Bible: read the record for yourself.

A note on Scripture

Every verse in this paper is from the King James Bible. Read it free in the 1611 Reader at kylelauriano.com/library, and keep a KJV with Strong's Concordance beside you. Medieval writers are quoted as witnesses to their age, never as Scripture.

To see what changed, we have to see what came before. This part matters because the phrase "deceive the nations" means little until we remember what the nations were.

A world given to idols

When Paul walked through Athens, "his spirit was stirred in him, when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry" (Acts 17:16). He told the Athenians, "I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD" (Acts 17:22-23). At Lystra he said that God "in times past suffered all nations to walk in their own ways" (Acts 14:16). The Roman world was full of gods — the gods of the city, of the household, of the emperor, of the harvest and the sea — and every public act was bound to their worship.

The New Testament does not treat that worship as harmless. Paul calls Satan "the god of this world" who "hath blinded the minds of them which believe not" (2 Corinthians 4:4), and he describes his own commission as being sent to the nations "To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God" (Acts 26:18). The deception of the nations was the worship of other gods, and the power behind it.

Three centuries of persecution

For nearly three hundred years the church lived under that world's suspicion and, at times, its sword. The Reformation martyrologist John Foxe, writing in 1563, counted "those terrible and horrible persecutions of the primitive time, universally throughout the world during the first three hundred years of the church" as proof that Satan was not yet bound in those years.² We need not follow Foxe's dating to see his point: the early church was a minority that the nations could imprison and kill.

The empire turns

Then the empire itself turned. Constantine ended the persecution in the early fourth century. In 380 the emperor Theodosius I issued the decree later placed at the head of the religious laws of the Theodosian Code, ordering that all the peoples under his rule "should continue to the profession of that religion which was delivered to the Romans by the divine Apostle Peter", authorising its followers "to assume the title Catholic Christians", and declaring that the rest should be "branded with the ignominious name of heretics".³ The sixteenth book of that code, compiled under Theodosius II in the 430s, gathered the imperial laws on religion, including the laws that closed the old sacrifices.

That decree is both a sign of victory and a warning. It shows the old gods losing their public place. It also shows a Christian state beginning to use law to punish belief, which the gospel never asked for. Both threads run through the thousand years that followed, and this paper follows both.

The fall of the West

In the fifth century the Roman government in the West collapsed. Rome was sacked in 410; Augustine of Hippo wrote The City of God in the years after, partly to answer pagans who blamed the disaster on the abandonment of the old gods. By the end of the century the western empire was gone, and its lands were ruled by Franks, Goths, Burgundians, Vandals and others, many of them still pagan or holding to the Arian form of Christianity that denied the full deity of Christ.

That is where the thousand years, as I read them, begin: not in a Christian empire, but in the ruins of one, among peoples who had never been Christian at all. If the nations were going to stop being deceived, it would have to happen among them.

This part follows the nations of the old Roman West and beyond as, one after another, they put away their gods. It matters because Revelation 20:3 is a statement about nations, and this is what happened to them.

Clovis and the Franks

The first great turning came among the Franks. Their king Clovis, a pagan, married a Christian wife and, about the turn of the sixth century, was baptized by Remi, bishop of Reims. The bishop Gregory of Tours, writing his History of the Franks later in the same century, records the words he says Remi spoke as Clovis came to the font: "Gently bend your neck, Sigamber; worship what you burned; burn what you worshipped." He adds that "of his army more than 3000 were baptized."⁴

Gregory wrote with an eye to edification, and historians debate the details and the date. The direction is not in doubt. The Franks, who would dominate western Europe for centuries, became a Christian people, and they did so as the catholic faith of the Trinity rather than the Arianism of many of their neighbours.

Kent, and a pope's advice

At the end of the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great sent a group of monks led by Augustine (not the bishop of Hippo) to the pagan English. They landed in Kent in 597. The historian Bede, writing in the early eighth century, says that when King Ethelbert "believed and was baptized, greater numbers began daily to flock together to hear the word, and, forsaking their heathen rites, to associate themselves, by believing, to the unity of the church of Christ." He adds a line worth remembering: the king "compelled none to embrace Christianity, but only showed more affection to the believers".⁵

In 601 Gregory wrote to Abbot Mellitus, then on his way to England, with advice about the old shrines. Bede preserves the letter. Gregory says that "the temples of the idols in that nation ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed." If the temples were well built, they should "be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God".⁶

Gregory's language matters. He did not think the old gods were harmless myths. He called their worship "the worship of devils" — the same judgment Paul makes. The conversion of a people was, in his eyes, a transfer from the service of devils to the service of God. That is the language of Revelation 20:3.

Boniface and the oak

In the eighth century the English sent missionaries back to the continent, to the Germanic peoples east of the Rhine. The best known was Boniface. His biographer Willibald describes a scene at Geismar, in what is now Hesse, where stood "a certain oak of extraordinary size called in the old tongue of the pagans the Oak of Jupiter" — the tree of the thunder god. Boniface began to cut it down while a crowd of pagans watched and cursed. Willibald reports that the oak fell and split, that the onlookers "ceased to revile and began, on the contrary, to believe and bless the Lord", and that Boniface "built an oratory from the timber of the oak and dedicated it to Saint Peter the Apostle."⁷

Willibald wrote as an admirer, and he tells the story as a sign. What is not in doubt is that the sacred trees, groves and springs of the Germanic peoples lost their public worship in these centuries, and that churches stood where shrines had stood.

The Saxons, and the wrong way

The conversion of the Saxons shows the other side. Charlemagne, king of the Franks, fought the pagan Saxons for some thirty years, and his law for the conquered land, the Capitulary for Saxony, mixed the faith with the sword. Its first chapter says that the churches being built in Saxony "should not have less, but greater and more illustrious honor, than the fanes of the idols had had." Its eighth chapter decrees: "If any one of the race of the Saxons hereafter concealed among them shall have wished to hide himself unbaptized, and shall have scorned to come to baptism and shall have wished to remain a pagan, let him be punished by death."⁸

Put that beside Bede's Ethelbert, who "compelled none". Both are part of the record. A baptism at the point of a sword is not the new birth, and the Lord who told Peter, "Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword" (Matthew 26:52), never asked for it. Yet even here, as I read it, the outcome Revelation 20:3 describes came about: within a few generations the Saxons were a Christian people, and in the tenth century Saxon kings would rule the empire in the name of Christ. God's purposes over the nations did not depend on the methods of kings, and the methods of kings will be judged.

North and east

Through the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries the turning spread. Missionaries reached Scandinavia. The prince Vladimir of Kiev was baptized in the late tenth century, and the Rus became a Christian people in the Byzantine tradition. Iceland's assembly accepted Christianity around the year 1000. The Poles, the Hungarians, the Bohemians, the Bulgarians and the Serbs became Christian peoples in the same centuries.

The Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the last great pagan power in Europe, accepted baptism at the end of the fourteenth century under its ruler Jogaila, who was baptized in 1386 when he became king of Poland and returned home with missionaries in 1387.⁹ By then the old gods of Europe — Jupiter and Woden, Thor and Perun — had no temples, no priests and no public worship anywhere on the continent.

Beyond Europe

The gospel did not stay in Europe. A great stone tablet set up in 781 by the Church of the East at Chang'an, the Tang capital (modern Xi'an), and carved with some two thousand Chinese characters and the Syriac names of its clergy, still stands in the city's Forest of Tablets. It records that a missionary from Syria named Olopun arrived there "In the year of our Lord 635", that "the sacred books were translated in the imperial library", and that in 638 the emperor issued a proclamation ordering the faith to be spread.¹⁰ The same church planted congregations along the Silk Road, in Persia, Central Asia and India.

In Africa, the kingdom of Aksum in Ethiopia had become Christian under King Ezana in the fourth century, and its church endured through the whole medieval period. The Nubian kingdoms of the Nile were Christian from the sixth century to the late Middle Ages. Armenia and Georgia were Christian nations long before most of Europe.

The Lord had said, "And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come" (Matthew 24:14). The Psalmist had sung, "All nations whom thou hast made shall come and worship before thee, O Lord; and shall glorify thy name" (Psalm 86:9). Between about 500 and 1500 the name of Christ was confessed from Ireland to China and from Iceland to Ethiopia. Islam's conquests in the same centuries took much of the old Christian heartland in the Middle East and North Africa, and that loss is real. But in the centuries before the modern age, few if any other faiths were received by so many nations as nations.

The law of a people shows what it worships. This part reads the law of the thousand years, because Revelation 20:4 speaks of thrones and judgment, and because a nation that is no longer deceived will order its common life differently.

Sanctuary and the honour of churches

The Capitulary for Saxony is harsh, and Part 2 did not soften it. But its second chapter shows another side of Christian law. It protects anyone who flees to a church: "let no one presume to expel him from the church by violence, but he shall be left in peace until he shall be brought to the judicial assemblage; and on account of the honor due to God and the saints, and the reverence due to the church itself, let his life and all his members be granted to him."¹¹ The right of sanctuary, rooted in the cities of refuge of the law of Moses, ran through medieval law. A building given to God was a place where even a guilty man could not be dragged out and killed without trial.

The Peace of God and the Truce of God

When Charlemagne's empire broke apart in the ninth and tenth centuries, much of France fell into the hands of armed men who fought each other and preyed on everyone else. The church's answer was a movement historians call the Peace of God. In 989 the bishops of the province of Bordeaux met in synod at Charroux and laid down decrees. They anathematised anyone who broke into a church, anyone who attacked a priest or clergyman "not bearing arms", and anyone who "robs a peasant or any other poor person of a sheep, ox, ass, cow, goat, or pig".¹²

The Truce of God went further, forbidding fighting on certain days of the week altogether. A decree of the bishop of Thérouanne in 1063 says the truce "begins with sunset on Wednesday and lasts until sunrise on Monday", and that "During those four days and five nights no man or woman shall assault, wound, or slay another, or attack, seize, or destroy a castle, burg, or villa, by craft or by violence." Its penalty was thirty years' exile as penance or excommunication.¹³

Think about what this means. Men with swords and horses, answerable to no king, were told by unarmed bishops that God forbade them to rob a peasant of his pig, and that four days in every week belonged to peace. They did not always obey. But the idea that the poor man's pig was under God's protection is the idea of a society that knew whose world it was. The prophets had promised a reign in which "they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks" (Isaiah 2:4). The Peace of God was a long way short of that. It was also a long way from the old world, where the strong did as they pleased and called it the will of the gods.

Canon law

Over the same centuries the church built up its own body of law, the canons. In the twelfth century a teacher at Bologna named Gratian gathered the councils, papal letters and church fathers into a single ordered textbook, known as the Decretum, about 1140; with later collections it became the core of the church's law for the rest of the Middle Ages.¹⁴ Canon law governed marriage, wills, oaths, the clergy, the sacraments and much else. Whatever we think of the medieval church, the fact is plain: for centuries the common life of Europe was regulated by a law that claimed to answer to Christ.

The Fourth Lateran Council

The high point of that law was the Fourth Lateran Council, called by Pope Innocent III in 1215. Its canons reached into every parish. Canon 21 required: "All the faithful of both sexes shall after they have reached the age of discretion faithfully confess all their sins at least once a year to their own (parish) priest", and receive communion at least at Easter.¹⁵ Canon 18 forbade clergy any part in bloodshed: "No cleric may pronounce a sentence of death, or execute such a sentence, or be present at its execution", and it barred them from taking part in the judicial ordeals.¹⁶

The same council also did harm, which Part 7 records. I am not holding it up as a model. I am showing the reach of the law: a single council in Rome could order the yearly confession of every Christian from Scotland to Sicily. No law before had ever claimed so many nations in the name of Christ.

What the law shows

The law of the thousand years was mixed, as the law of every age is. It could protect the weak and it could persecute the dissenter. But it was never again the law of the old gods. Sacrifice to idols was gone from the statute books of Europe. Sunday was the day of rest. Oaths were sworn on the Gospels. Kings were crowned in churches and told that they would answer to God. "When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn" (Proverbs 29:2). The rulers of those centuries were often far from righteous; but the measure they were judged by, in their own courts and their own chronicles, was the law of Christ.

This part goes inside the institutions that carried the faith through the thousand years: the monastery, the works of mercy, and the schools that became the universities. They matter because a people that is no longer deceived does more than stop worshipping idols; it learns, prays and serves.

The Rule of Benedict

About the year 530, in Italy, Benedict of Nursia wrote a rule for monks. It became the pattern for monastic life across the whole Latin West. Its prologue describes the purpose plainly: "We are about to found therefore a school for the Lord's service". Its forty-eighth chapter orders the monks' days: "Idleness is the enemy of the soul. And therefore, at fixed times, the brothers ought to be occupied in manual labour; and again, at fixed times, in sacred reading."¹⁷

Work and the reading of Scripture, hour by hour, day by day, for centuries. The monasteries cleared forests, drained marshes and kept farms; they copied the Bible and the fathers by hand; they sang the Psalms through every day and night. Much of what survived of ancient learning in the West survived because monks copied it. I do not hold up the monastic life as the pattern for every believer, and the New Testament does not. But the monasteries kept the word of God alive in Europe when there was little else to keep it.

Cluny and the works of mercy

In 910 Duke William of Aquitaine founded a monastery at Cluny in Burgundy. Its charter set it free from the control of any lord, bishop or king, so that it might answer to God and to Rome alone. The charter says the monks shall be "subject neither to our yoke, nor to that of our relatives, nor to the sway of the royal might, nor to that of any earthly power." It also lays down a duty: "there shall daily, with the greatest zeal be performed there works of mercy towards the poor, the needy, strangers and pilgrims."¹⁸

Cluny became the head of hundreds of houses and a centre of reform. Its charter's words about the poor echo the Lord's own: "For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me" (Matthew 25:35-36). Hospitals for the sick, houses for lepers, almshouses for the old and lodgings for pilgrims spread across medieval Europe, most of them founded and run by the church. The old world had its physicians, but it did not have the idea that the stranger and the leper had a claim on you because Christ was in them.

Charlemagne's schools

Charlemagne, whose law for the Saxons we have read, also cared about learning. In a letter to Abbot Baugulf of Fulda, written some time between about 780 and 800, he ordered that "the bishoprics and monasteries entrusted by the favor of Christ to our control, in addition, in the culture of letters also ought to be zealous in teaching those who by the gift of God are able to learn". His reason was theological: "For although correct conduct may be better than knowledge, nevertheless knowledge precedes conduct."¹⁹

The schools of the cathedrals and monasteries that grew from orders like this one trained the clergy, and in time they trained much more.

The universities

From the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the schools of a few cities grew into something new: the university, a self-governing corporation of masters and students. Bologna, famous for law, traditionally dates its founding to 1088; Paris, famous for theology, grew from the cathedral schools of Notre-Dame in the twelfth century.²⁰ In 1215 the papal legate Robert de Courçon issued statutes for the masters and students of Paris. They begin with a standard: "No one is to lecture at Paris in arts before he is twenty years old. He is to listen in arts at least six years, before he begins to lecture."²¹

The highest study in the medieval university was theology — the knowledge of God from His word. The universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Salamanca, Prague and many more followed. It was in those universities, at the end of the thousand years, that men like John Wycliffe at Oxford and Martin Luther at Wittenberg would read the Scriptures and challenge the church that had founded the schools.

Nothing the thousand years left behind speaks more loudly than its churches. This part stands inside a few of them. It matters because, as I read it, these buildings were raised during the reign by people who believed the King was reigning.

Hagia Sophia

At the very start of the period, in 532, the emperor Justinian began to rebuild the great church of Holy Wisdom in Constantinople after a riot had burned the old one. The new church was dedicated in 537. The historian Procopius, who saw it new, wrote that "one might say that its interior is not illuminated from without by the sun, but that the radiance comes into being within it, such an abundance of light bathes this shrine." Its dome seemed "to cover the space with its golden dome suspended from Heaven."²²

Procopius tells us what it did to those who prayed there: "whenever anyone enters this church to pray, he understands at once that it is not by any human power or skill, but by the influence of God, that this work has been so finely turned. And so his mind is lifted up toward God and exalted, feeling that He cannot be far away, but must especially love to dwell in this place which He has chosen."²³

For nine centuries Hagia Sophia was the greatest church of the eastern Christian world. In 1453, when the Ottoman Turks took Constantinople, it became a mosque — one of the signs, I believe, that the age was turning.

The Romanesque

In the West, after the Viking and Magyar raids of the ninth and tenth centuries, a great wave of church building began around the year 1000. Its style, heavy and round-arched, is called Romanesque. Durham Cathedral in northern England, built in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, is one of its masterpieces, the largest and finest example of Norman architecture in England; the daring of its vaulting foreshadowed the Gothic.²⁴ A building like Durham took lifetimes. The men who laid its first stones knew they would not see its roof.

Isaiah's picture of the reign includes exactly that kind of work: "They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat: for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands" (Isaiah 65:22).

Suger and the birth of Gothic

In the 1130s and 1140s, Suger, abbot of Saint-Denis outside Paris, rebuilt the front and the choir of his abbey church. His new choir, consecrated in 1144 before five archbishops and thirteen bishops, opened the walls into windows of coloured glass and is usually counted the first Gothic building. Suger wrote an account of what he had done. Over the gilded bronze doors he set a verse explaining it: "The dull mind rises to the truth through material things, And is resurrected from its former submersion when the light is seen."²⁵

That one line is the theology of the Gothic cathedral: the building is meant to lift the mind from what it can see to the God it cannot.

Chartres, Amiens, Cologne

Within a century, the new style had swept France and spread across Europe. A few dates show the pace and the scale:

| Church | Built | Note | |---|---|---| | Chartres | Partly built from 1145; rebuilt over some twenty-six years after the fire of 1194 | Its twelfth- and thirteenth-century stained glass survives in remarkable condition | | Amiens | Begun 1220 under Robert de Luzarches, continued by Thomas de Cormont and his son Renaud until 1288 | One of the largest "classic" Gothic churches of the thirteenth century | | Cologne | Begun 1248; completed only in 1880 | Later builders kept faith with the original medieval plan |

These dates are the ones UNESCO gives for each building.²⁶ Behind every row are generations of masons, carpenters, glaziers and labourers, and the gifts of whole cities. Many of those who gave and worked never saw the finished building.

What the builders meant

We do not have to guess what the builders thought a church meant. In the 1280s and 1290s William Durandus, bishop of Mende in France, wrote a great handbook on the meaning of every part of the church and its worship, the Rationale divinorum officiorum. Its first book explains the building itself. The church is to be laid out so "that the head of the church may point due east", toward the rising sun.²⁷ "The glass windows in a church are Holy Scriptures, which expel the wind and the rain, that is all things hurtful, but transmit the light of the true Sun, that is, God, into the hearts of the faithful."²⁸ Even the weathercock on the spire had a lesson: "The cock is the preacher, who preacheth boldly, and exciteth the sleepers to cast away the works of darkness".²⁹

Durandus's symbolism can run to fancy, and much of it is medieval allegory rather than Scripture. But his windows say something true. The light that came through the glass of Chartres came through pictures of the Bible: the patriarchs, the prophets, the life of Christ, the apostles and the last judgment. For a people most of whom could not read, the cathedral was the Bible in stone and glass.

Built for a reigning King

Solomon asked at the dedication of the first temple, "But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded?" (1 Kings 8:27). The medieval builders knew that too. They did not think they were housing God. They thought they were honouring a King.

I believe they were right about the King, and right about the time. The cathedrals were not built in a world waiting for Christ to begin His reign. They were built, I believe, in the reign itself, by nations that were no longer deceived about whose world it was. They read their own age through Augustine, as a symbolic reign. I believe it was the literal one. This is my conviction; weigh it for yourself.

This part steps back from the parts to the whole. The people of the thousand years had a word for the world they lived in: Christianitas, Christendom — the realm of Christian peoples. This part asks what that idea was and how it worked, because Revelation 20:4 speaks of "thrones" and of those who "reigned with Christ".

The emperor crowned in Rome

On Christmas Day in the year 800, in Saint Peter's in Rome, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor. His biographer Einhard says he "received the titles of Emperor and Augustus", and adds that at first Charlemagne disliked them so much "that he declared that he would not have set foot in the Church the day that they were conferred, although it was a great feast-day, if he could have foreseen the design of the Pope."³⁰

Whatever Charlemagne felt, the coronation fixed an idea for the rest of the Middle Ages: a Christian empire in the West, its ruler crowned by the church, its people one body under Christ. The empire was revived in the tenth century under the Saxon kings and lasted, in name, until 1806.

Pope and emperor

That idea had a fault line in it: who stood higher, the emperor or the pope? In the eleventh century the question exploded. Pope Gregory VII set down his claims in a list known as the Dictatus Papae (1075). Among them: "That the Roman church was founded by God alone"; "That it may be permitted to him to depose emperors"; "That he may absolve subjects from their fealty to wicked men."³¹ In 1077 the emperor Henry IV, excommunicated, stood in the snow at the castle of Canossa to seek the pope's absolution. The quarrel over who appointed bishops was settled, for a time, by the Concordat of Worms, agreed in 1122 between Pope Callixtus II and Emperor Henry V.³²

I do not read Gregory's claims as the reign of Christ. I read them, frankly, as the kind of overreach Jesus warned against when He said, "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36). But the quarrel itself shows the age. Popes and emperors fought over many things; they did not fight over whether Christ was King. Both claimed to rule under Him. Even the sins of Christendom were committed in His name, because no other name was left to claim.

A shared world

By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Christendom was a real, shared world. A scholar could travel from Oxford to Paris to Bologna and be taught in the same Latin. A pilgrim could walk from Scotland to Rome, or to Compostela, and find the same Mass, the same Psalms, the same calendar of feasts. Merchants dated their contracts by the year of the Lord. Kings were crowned with oil in churches. The great council of 1215 legislated for every parish in the Latin West. The Lord said, "Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid" (Matthew 5:14). Christendom was not that city. But it was a civilisation that knew that city existed and measured itself by it.

The thrones of Revelation 20

Revelation 20:4 says, "And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them". I do not claim to know exactly who sat on those thrones, and The Millennial Reign explains why I hold that detail open. I am not saying the popes or the emperors were the saints of Revelation 20:4. What I am saying is that, for these thousand years, the crowns of Christendom confessed Christ as the King above them. That had never been true before. It is not true now.

A paper like this one is tempted to collect only the cathedrals. This part refuses that temptation. It matters because truth told selectively is not truth, and because Scripture never asks us to pretend that God's people were sinless.

Forced baptism and the sword

We have already read Charlemagne's death penalty for Saxons who refused baptism. It was not the only such case. Across the thousand years, rulers sometimes forced baptism on conquered peoples and on Jews. The church's own teaching often condemned it; the practice happened anyway.

The massacres of 1096

When the First Crusade was preached in 1095, bands of crusaders heading east turned on the Jewish communities of the Rhineland in the spring of 1096. A Jewish chronicler, Soloman bar Samson, recorded what happened at Mainz on 27 May, when crusaders under a nobleman named Emicho forced their way into the archbishop's palace where the Jews had taken refuge. The editor of the standard collection of these sources writes that the crusaders "killed thousands of 'infidel' Jews in the larger cities such as Speyer, Worms, Mayence [Mainz], and Cologne".³³ Some bishops tried to protect the Jews; many failed.

The council that also persecuted

The Fourth Lateran Council, whose canon on confession we read in Part 3, also bound every ruler by oath "to exterminate in the territories subject to their jurisdiction all heretics pointed out by the Church".³⁴ Canon 68, in Schroeder's summary, laid down that "Jews and Saracens of both sexes in every Christian province must be distinguished from the Christian by a difference of dress."³⁵ In the decades that followed, the church set up the inquisitions against heresy, which used imprisonment and torture and handed the condemned to the secular arm to be burned.

Power and corruption

The church of the thousand years grew rich and often corrupt. Bishoprics were bought and sold. Popes made war. Gregory VII claimed the right to depose emperors. By the end of the period the sale of indulgences — the claim that the church could sell remission of punishment for sin — had become a business. It was that business that provoked Luther's protest in 1517.

What the ledger means

How can an age with such a ledger be the reign of Christ? I answered this at length in The Millennial Reign; here is the short form.

Revelation 20 does not promise a pure church. It promises that Satan will not "deceive the nations" as he had. The Lord told a parable about His kingdom in which an enemy sowed tares among the wheat, and the householder said, "Let both grow together until the harvest" (Matthew 13:30). He told another in which the kingdom is like a grain of mustard seed that "becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof" (Matthew 13:32) — a kingdom that grows large enough to shelter things that do not belong to it.

The sins in this ledger were real, and many were committed by men who used Christ's name to do what Christ forbade. They will answer for them. But notice what else the ledger shows: nation after nation abandoning the old gods. By the end of the period, not a single nation of Europe sacrificed to Woden, no king was enthroned in the name of Jupiter, and no law code was built on the old gods. The tares grew in a field that belonged, by its own confession, to Christ. The reign of Christ over the nations is not a claim that the institutional church was pure. I was raised Roman Catholic but never really connected. I hold both truths at once: those centuries were full of sin, and in those centuries the nations were not deceived about who the King was.

The turn around 1500

Every age ends. This last section describes how the thousand years ended, as I read them, and points ahead to the season that followed.

The signs of a turning

In the second half of the fifteenth century the world of Christendom began to change in ways no one could undo. In 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, and Hagia Sophia became a mosque. Around 1455 Johann Gutenberg at Mainz completed the first great book printed in Europe with movable type — a Latin Bible. In 1492 Columbus crossed the Atlantic, and the known world doubled. In 1517 Luther posted his ninety-five theses. Within a generation the West was divided into Catholic and Protestant lands, and within a century they were at war.

Some of those changes were great goods. The printed Bible put the word of God into the hands of ordinary people; the English Bible of 1611, which I read and quote, is one of its fruits. Others were the beginning of sorrows. The unity of Christendom broke, and over the centuries that followed a new confidence rose that man could explain himself, rule himself and save himself without God.

The Reformers' own reading

The men who lived through that turn noticed it. In the preface to Revelation that he wrote for his German Bible from 1530, Martin Luther said: "For it is our opinion that this picture, which is separate from the preceding, has been put in because of the Turks, and that the thousand years are to begin at the time when this book was written, and that at that time the devil was bound; though the reckoning need not hold out to the very minute."³⁶ He identified Gog and Magog with the Turks who had besieged Vienna the year before. John Foxe, a generation later, headed the books of his history that covered the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries "The last 300 years from the loosing of Satan".³⁷ Their dates are not mine, and The Prophetic Timeline (kylelauriano.com/resources/prophetic-timeline.pdf) discusses them. But both men read their own age as the time after the thousand years.

The little season

"And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth" (Revelation 20:7-8). I believe that loosing began about 1500, and that the age since then — with its new gods of reason, nation, money, pleasure and self — is the little season. The Little Season (kylelauriano.com/resources/little-season.pdf) traces it. This is my conviction; weigh it for yourself.

Here is what the documents show. Between about 500 and 1500, the peoples of Europe, and many beyond it, put away the gods their fathers had worshipped. Kings were baptized and peoples followed. The old temples were emptied or turned into churches; the sacred trees were cut down; the last great pagan power in Europe was baptized before the period closed. The law of the nations answered to the name of Christ, protecting the sanctuary, the peasant and the poor man's pig, even as it also persecuted. Monasteries kept the Scriptures and the habit of prayer; the church fed the poor and housed the sick; schools became universities whose highest study was the knowledge of God. And across the continent rose churches of stone and glass, built over lifetimes, meant to lift the mind from the material to the truth.

The documents also show sin — forced baptisms, massacres, persecution, corruption — and an honest reader must hold both in view.

What the documents cannot show is the meaning. That is a question of Scripture. My conviction is that these centuries were the thousand years of Revelation 20, the reign in which Satan could not deceive the nations, and that we now live in the little season after it. Others read the same history and see only the slow growth of the church, or a golden age still to come. You have the documents and the Bible; weigh it for yourself.

A next step

Read Revelation 20 in the 1611 Reader at kylelauriano.com/library, and then read some of these sources for yourself. Every one quoted in this paper is online, in the Internet Medieval Sourcebook at Fordham University and the other sites listed in the bibliography. The Millennial Reign sets out the Scripture and the history of interpretation; The Prophetic Timeline reads Revelation 20 verse by verse.

An invitation

The cathedrals were built for a King. The question they ask every visitor is the one this paper ends with: is He your King? The builders are dead and their buildings will one day pass away with the earth (2 Peter 3:10). The King will not. He calls every person to "repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ" (Acts 20:21), and salvation is His gift: "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9). If you have never come to Him, come now — in whatever season you believe this is.