THE LAST APOCALYPSE: Europe at the Year 1000 A.D.

By James Reston, Jr. Doubleday. 299 pp. $24.95

In a.d. 1000, Otto III, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, paid a visit to Charlemagne’s tomb. Otto had Apocalypse on his mind, and, considering himself Emperor of the Last Days, he felt the need to pay tribute to the man who had established the Kingdom of Christ in Europe. To Otto, the end of the world, as predicted in the Bible, seemed to be at hand. Nations were at war, and royal courts were rife with corruption. The Holy See was a chaotic and debauched institution, and the population of once-glorious Rome had shriveled to some 50,000 souls. Plague was rampant, and a 30-year-old famine had driven many peasants to cannibalism. The great city of Constantinople had recently been ruled by an ugly, foul-smelling dwarf. Even Charlemagne’s royal descendants— Charles the Bald, Charles the Fat, and Charles the Simple—had seemed to presage nothing but inevitable decline. Otto wanted to spruce things up, and so, after opening Charlemagne’s tomb, he dressed the great king’s 200-year-old corpse in white and ordered that it be given a manicure and a new gold nose. Charlemagne had to look just right for the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The Horsemen never came, of course, but Reston, a journalist and author, contends that there was indeed an apocalypse a thousand years ago, and that it came in the form of "a process rather than a cataclysm." Christian Europe early in the 10th century was threatened from all sides: Islamic Spain was ascendant, pagan Vikings were terrorizing the continent, and ruthless Magyar horsemen were arriving from the east. Yet by the end of the century, these threats had subsided and the borderlands of Europe had been securely Christianized, almost as if by magic. "No more dramatic change can be imagined," Reston argues. "Christianity in 999 a.d. represented civilization and learning and nationhood against the darkness of heathenism, illiteracy, and chaos."

In writing what he calls "a saga of the millennium a thousand years ago," the author paints surprisingly vivid pictures of such figures as Norway’s Olaf Trygvesson, Denmark’s Svein Forkbeard, England’s Ethelred the Unready, Poland’s Boleslav the Brave, Spain’s Al-Mansor, France’s Gerbert of Aurillac, Constantinople’s Princess Theophano, and Germany’s Otto III. Reston’s goal is to tell the story of the "concatenation of [millennial Europe’s] dramatic personalities and battles and social forces," and he does so admirably, even if his conclusions seem somewhat suspect at times. (Did the downfall of the Moors in Spain, for example, really represent the triumph of "learning" over "illiteracy?" Did the sudden Christianization of the edges of Europe really culminate "in peace and tranquility?")

Reston avoids drawing parallels between the end of the last millennium and the end of our own, but it’s impossible not to find at least one lesson here. "In considering the millennium," he observes, "people are looking for apocalypse in the wrong place." Those expecting a cataclysm in 2000, in other words, are likely to be disappointed— but the changes we’re living through may prove every bit as apocalyptic as those of a thousand years ago.

—Toby Lester