been captured and plundered, and the king, Louis IV, briefly held a prisoner. No wonder, then, that his wife, the Saxon queen Gerberga, should have turned for advice, not to a great warlord, but rather to a churchman who was famed above all for his knowledge of Antichrist: Adso, the Abbot of Montier-en-Der. The celebrated scholar, in his reply to Gerberga, did not succumb to the temptation of giving a precise date for the end of days; but he did feel able to confirm that it was imminent. 'In fact,' he informed the terrified queen, 'the times we live in being what they are, there is no topic of more pressing urgency.' 61 And for those of the royal house of the Franks more than for anyone: for it was they, and they alone, who stood between the world and Antichrist.
It was a sensational assertion - but one arrived at on the back of flawless logic, nevertheless. After all, if it was the Roman Empire that had served as the bulwark against Antichrist's coming, and the Franks who were the heirs of the Roman Empire, then what could the collapse of their kingdom possibly spell if not the end of the world? Morale-boosting though Adso might have imagined this conclusion to be, it hardly served to ease the burden of responsibility on the shoulders of the Frankish king. Nor was the abbot done yet with piling on the pressure. 'What I say is not a product of my own thoughts or fancy,' he insisted, 'but due to my diligent research' 63 - and Adso, in his library, had been studying St Methodius. The vision of the ancient martyr, with its prophecy of a Roman emperor who would conquer the world before travelling to Jerusalem, laying down his crown upon the hill of Golgotha, and setting in train the Second Coming, had originally been translated into Latin in the eighth century; but it was only in Adso's time that its implications had-been fully grasped by scholars in the West. How arrogant the Greeks had been, how arrogant and grotesquely wrong, to have imagined that it was one of their emperors who would lay claim to Jerusalem! Rather, a Frank was destined [to] 'in the last of days, be the greatest and last of all kings'. So Adso, with all the weight of his great scholarship, pronounced. 'And this will be the end and the consummation of the Roman Empire - which is to say, the Empire of the Christians.' 64
Almost five hundred years had passed now since the collapse of Rome's dominion in the West. Ghoul-like, though, its spectre continued to haunt the dreamings of all those who sought to interpret God's plans for the future of mankind. As in the age of Charlemagne, so in the infinitely more troubled age of Adso: no solution to the problems confronting Christendom could be conceived of saving a return to the long-vanished past. No climax to human history either. The shipwreck of things might be dreaded, yet it was simultaneously conceived of as a harbour: as the escape from innumerable tempests and violent waves. In the end would come a new heaven and a new earth, and the return of the Son of Man; but first, 'although everywhere we look we see it lying in almost total ruin', there would have to be the return to a Roman Empire.
It is hard to imagine a programme more expressive of paralysis and despair. Beyond the walls of Adso's monastery, great princes feuded with one another, and fields were trampled by rival armies, and the borders of Christendom were lit by flames and dyed with blood. Still, as their only solution to this crisis of desolation, the subtlest and most learned minds in Francia whispered decrepit fantasies of global empire. Yet these same fantasies, even amid the general chaos of the times, had not entirely lost their ability to transfix kings as well as scholars. Adso, writing to Gerberga, had presumed that any future emperor was bound to be a Frank. The times, though, were changing—as Gerberga herself, a Saxon princess, might well have chosen to remind the abbot. For the Franks, even as Adso penned his letter, were
It was a sensational assertion - but one arrived at on the back of flawless logic, nevertheless. After all, if it was the Roman Empire that had served as the bulwark against Antichrist's coming, and the Franks who were the heirs of the Roman Empire, then what could the collapse of their kingdom possibly spell if not the end of the world? Morale-boosting though Adso might have imagined this conclusion to be, it hardly served to ease the burden of responsibility on the shoulders of the Frankish king. Nor was the abbot done yet with piling on the pressure. 'What I say is not a product of my own thoughts or fancy,' he insisted, 'but due to my diligent research' 63 - and Adso, in his library, had been studying St Methodius. The vision of the ancient martyr, with its prophecy of a Roman emperor who would conquer the world before travelling to Jerusalem, laying down his crown upon the hill of Golgotha, and setting in train the Second Coming, had originally been translated into Latin in the eighth century; but it was only in Adso's time that its implications had-been fully grasped by scholars in the West. How arrogant the Greeks had been, how arrogant and grotesquely wrong, to have imagined that it was one of their emperors who would lay claim to Jerusalem! Rather, a Frank was destined [to] 'in the last of days, be the greatest and last of all kings'. So Adso, with all the weight of his great scholarship, pronounced. 'And this will be the end and the consummation of the Roman Empire - which is to say, the Empire of the Christians.' 64
Almost five hundred years had passed now since the collapse of Rome's dominion in the West. Ghoul-like, though, its spectre continued to haunt the dreamings of all those who sought to interpret God's plans for the future of mankind. As in the age of Charlemagne, so in the infinitely more troubled age of Adso: no solution to the problems confronting Christendom could be conceived of saving a return to the long-vanished past. No climax to human history either. The shipwreck of things might be dreaded, yet it was simultaneously conceived of as a harbour: as the escape from innumerable tempests and violent waves. In the end would come a new heaven and a new earth, and the return of the Son of Man; but first, 'although everywhere we look we see it lying in almost total ruin', there would have to be the return to a Roman Empire.
It is hard to imagine a programme more expressive of paralysis and despair. Beyond the walls of Adso's monastery, great princes feuded with one another, and fields were trampled by rival armies, and the borders of Christendom were lit by flames and dyed with blood. Still, as their only solution to this crisis of desolation, the subtlest and most learned minds in Francia whispered decrepit fantasies of global empire. Yet these same fantasies, even amid the general chaos of the times, had not entirely lost their ability to transfix kings as well as scholars. Adso, writing to Gerberga, had presumed that any future emperor was bound to be a Frank. The times, though, were changing—as Gerberga herself, a Saxon princess, might well have chosen to remind the abbot. For the Franks, even as Adso penned his letter, were
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