changing viewpoints provide "pure" tra- 

 jectories of evolving human attitudes — 

 and we can therefore map societal trends 

 without impediments of such confusing 

 factors as discovered truth. 



I had intended to spend only a few 

 hours in research for this essay, but as I 

 looked up documents from century transi- 

 tions, I noticed something interesting in 

 this sociological realm. The two posi- 

 tions — I have called them "logical" and 

 "common sensible" so far in this essay — 

 also have clear social correlations that I 

 would not have anticipated. The logical 

 position — that centuries must have a hun- 

 dred years, and transitions must therefore 

 occur, because Dionysius included no year 

 zero, between '00 and '01 years — has al- 

 ways been overwhelmingly favored by 

 scholars, and by people in power (press 

 and business in particular), representing 

 what we may call "high culture." The 

 common sensible position — that we must 

 honor the appearance of maximal changes 

 between '99 and '00 years and not fret 

 overly about Dionysius's unfortunate lack 

 of foresight — has been the perpetual fa- 

 vorite of that mythical composite once 

 designated as John Q. Public, or "man in 

 the street," and now usually called vernac- 

 ular, or "pop," culture. 



The distinction goes back to the very 

 beginning of this perpetually recurring de- 

 bate about century transitions. Hillel 

 Schwartz traces the first major hassle to 

 the 1699-1701 passage (place the moment 

 where you wish), the incarnation that 

 prompted Samuel Sewall's trumpeting in 

 Boston. Interestingly, part of the discus- 



sion then focused upon an issue that has 

 been persistently vexatious ever since: 

 namely, did the first millennial transition 

 of 999-1001 induce a period of fear about 

 an imminent apocalyptical ending of the 

 world — called "the great terror" by sup- 

 porters of this position. Opinions range 

 from the luridly supportive (see the re- 

 markably uncritical book by Richard Er- 

 does, who elevates every hint of rumor 

 into a dramatic assertion — A.D. WOO, 

 Harper and Row, 1988), to the fully de- 

 bunking (see Hillel Schwartz, previously 

 cited, and scores of references cited in 

 chapter one therein). 



I will, in my ignorance, take refuge in 

 the balanced position of the French histo- 

 rian Henri Focillon {The Year 1000, Fred- 

 erick Ungar, 1969). Focillon allows that 

 apocalyptic stirring certainly occurred — at 

 least locally in France, Lorraine, and 

 Thuringia — toward the middle of the tenth 

 century. But he finds strikingly little evi- 

 dence for any general fear surrounding the 

 year 1000 itself — nothing in any papal 

 bull, nothing from any ruler. 



On the plus side, one prolific monk 

 named Raoul Glaber certainly spoke of 

 millennial terrors, stating that "Satan will 

 soon be unleashed because the thousand 

 years have been completed." He also 

 claimed, although no documentary or 

 archeological support has been forthcom- 

 ing, that a wave of church building began 

 soon after 1000, when folks finally real- 

 ized that Armageddon had apparently 

 been postponed: "About three years after 

 the year 1000," wrote Glaber, "the world 

 put on the pure white robe of churches." 



^^^'^'i^i::> 



Glaber's tale provides a striking lesson 

 in the dangers of an idee fixe. He was still 

 alive in 1033, still trumpeting the forth- 

 coming millennium — although he admit- 

 ted that he must have been wrong about 

 Christ's nativity for the beginning of a 

 countdown, and now proclaimed that the 

 apocalypse would surely arrive instead at 

 the millennium of Christ's Passion in 

 1033. He read a famine of that year as a 

 sure sign: "Men believed that the orderly 

 procession of the seasons and the laws of 

 nature, which until then had ruled the 

 world, had relapsed into the eternal chaos; 

 and they feared that mankind would end." 



I doubt that we should grant much criti- 

 cal acclaim to Fra Glaber (who, according 

 to other sources, was quite a wild charac- 

 ter, having been expelled from several 

 monasteries during his checkered career). 

 I do tend to side with critics of the great 

 terror. Why, after all, should the year 1(X)0 

 have provoked any great reaction at the 

 time — especially since Dionysius's sys- 

 tem had not been generally accepted, and 

 different cultures hadn't even agreed on a 

 date for the inception of a new year. I sus- 

 pect that the notion of a great terror must 

 arise largely as an anachronistic backread- 

 ing, combined with clutching at a few le- 

 gitimate straws. 



As another reason for doubting a great 

 terror in 999-1001, the legend of such an 

 episode begins with only a brief mention 

 in a late sixteenth century work by the Vat- 

 ican librarian Cardinal Cesare Baronio. 

 Once the debate on century endings got 

 started in the 1690s, however, backreading 

 into the first millennium became in- 

 evitable. Did the legendary terror occur at 

 the end of 999 or 1000? Interestingly, the 

 high-culture versus pop-culture distinc- 

 tion can be traced even to this anachronis- 

 tic reconstruction, with scholars favoring 

 1000, and popular legends 999. Hillel 

 Schwartz writes: 



Sarcastic, bitter, sometimes passionate de- 

 bates in re a terminus on New Year's Eve 

 '99 vis-a-vis New Year's Eve '00, have 

 been prosecuted since the 1690s and confu- 

 sion has spread to the mathematics of the 

 millennial year. For Baronio and his 

 (sparse) medieval sources, the excitements 

 of the millennium were centered upon the 

 end of the year 1000, while the end of 999 

 has figured more prominently in the legend 

 of the panic terror. 



The pattern has held ever since, as the 

 debate bloomed in the 1690s, spread in the 

 1790s with major centers in newspapers of 

 Philadelphia and London (and added 

 poignancy as America mourned the death 

 of George Washington at the very end of 



10 Natural History 4/94 



