Dominion by Tom Holland

Author:Tom Holland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2019-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

A New Earth

Pulling back the veil from the prophecies in the Bible was a dangerous thing to attempt. The Franciscans, admirers of Joachim of Fiore though they might be, had learned to tread carefully. Any friar tempted to do as the Taborites had done and draw on scripture to speculate about the end days, was carefully monitored. In 1485, when a German Franciscan named Johann Hilten finished a detailed study of the prophetic passages in the Bible, his superiors were less than amused. The papacy, Hilten foretold, was in its last days. Its ‘disturbance and destruction’9 was sure. When placed under house-arrest in Eisenach, in the friary that had been donated to the order by Saint Elizabeth, Hilten doubled down. It was not only the papacy that was doomed, he warned. So too was monasticism. A man was coming, a great reformer, destined to bring about its ruin. So sure of this was Hilten that he even provided a date: ‘the year 1516 after the birth of Christ’.*

It was not only the decayed condition of the Church that had been weighing on his mind. There was geopolitics too. In 1453, Constantinople had finally fallen to the Turks. The great bulwark of Christendom had become the capital of a Muslim empire. The Ottomans, prompted by their conquest of the Second Rome to recall prophecies spoken by Muhammad, foretelling the fall to Islam of Rome itself, had pressed on westwards. In 1480, they had captured Otranto, on the heel of Italy. The news of it had prompted panic in papal circles—and not even the expulsion of the Turks the following year had entirely settled nerves. Terrible reports had emerged from Otranto: of how the city’s archbishop had been beheaded in his own cathedral, and some eight hundred others martyred for Christ. True or not, these stories gave a decided edge to another of Hilten’s prophecies. Both Italy and Germany, he warned, were destined to be conquered by the Turks. Their streets, like Otranto’s, would be washed in the blood of martyrs. Such were the horrors that would presage the coming of Antichrist. Once again, Hilten made sure to give precise dates for his prophecies. The end of the world, he specified, was due in the 1650s.

Hilten’s forebodings drew on an ancient wellspring. Saint John, when he warned that Satan, at the end of days, would lead entire nations out of the four corners of the earth, and that in number they would be ‘like the sand on the seashore’,10 had himself been channelling primordial fears. A dread of migrants came naturally to the peoples of settled lands. Darius, condemning barbarians as agents of the Lie, had articulated a perspective that Caesars too had come to share. Christians, though, were not merely the heirs of Roman paranoia. ‘Preach the good news to all creation’:11 so the risen Jesus had instructed his disciples. Only when the gospel had been brought to the ends of the earth would he finally return in glory. The dream of a world become one in Christ was as old as Paul.

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