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the other leaders of the armies that took Jerusalem played the millennium card in their struggles for power after the conquest.
    But that doesn’t mean that the rank and file among the crusaders didn’t see their actions as helping the millennium along. One of their earliest efforts to end the world was to massacre the Jews in the Rhineland. Their rationale for this has always been that these were the infidels in their midst; therefore, it was only right to rid Europe of them. The vague understanding that all the Jews were supposed to be converted before Christ returned became secondary to stamping them out, although there were also a number of forced conversions.
    It’s possible that this persecution caused the Jews to also believe that they were living in the end times and that the Messiah would soon come. This made it all the more important for them to hold fast to the faith, even if it meant mass suicide. ed
    The trigger for the crusading movement was the conquest of Jerusalem by the Seljuk Turks in the early 1070s. Jerusalem had been governed by the easygoing Fatamid caliphs who didn’t mind Christian pilgrims and were fairly tolerant toward the Jews who lived in their midst. The Seljuks were alien to the area. They dressed differently, spoke a non-Semitic language, and were recent converts to Islam. So they were much stricter with the infidels. The Jews of Jerusalem expressed their reaction to the Turkish invasion in apocalyptic terms. ee This was reinforced by letters from Europe, particularly one written about 1096 stating that Jews from Karzaria in the Balkans were heading to Israel to meet the remnants of the lost tribes. ef
    In Salonika on the island of Cyprus the pre-crusade Jewish sense of a coming Apocalypse was particularly strong. People sold their businesses, gave away their goods, and stopped their daily activities. “They sit in their prayer shawls, they have stopped working and we don’t know what they are hoping for,” a Jewish observer wrote to another community. eg It was also reported that Elijah had appeared in Egypt to announce the pending arrival of the Messiah. The leaders of the various Jewish communities tried to keep a lid on these expectations but the rumors kept circulating. eh
    Actually, while the Middle Ages saw few millenarian movements among Christians and Ashkenazic Jews (those in northern Europe), the Sephardic Jews of Spain, Italy, Africa and the Near East seemed to have been constantly on the lookout for the Messiah. In the eleventh century, there was much excitement connected with the thousandth anniversary of the fall of the Temple to the Romans. At the end of the thirteenth century, there were a number of predictions of the end coming from Spain, including one from the town of Ayllon that said “on a specified day of that year a blast of the messiah’s horn would summon Jews out of their exile.” ei
    In this section of the book, I discuss some of the other millenarian and messianic ideas in more depth, especially the Islamic Mahdi, the Maya, and Merlin. These all have repercussions that echo to the present.
    On the whole I don’t see the Middle Ages as a particularly apocalyptic time. But don’t be discouraged. The traumatic fifteenth century may have produced great art, but it was also a hotbed of apocalyptic thinking and the following century was even worse.

PART FOUR:
    All Hell Breaks Loose
    The Renaissance and Reformation

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
    Any Minute Now
    The Millennial Renaissance and Enlightenment
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Apocalypses, or books of revelations, were not so numerous:
but of these too there were several. One of these particularly,
the apocalypse of St. Paul, I could almost wish that we had,
since it pretended to relate the ineffable things he saw in the
third heaven. But it is lost as well as others: and if that which
we have under the name of St. John had been lost likewise,
there might have been some madmen the fewer,