Death Of The Ancient World And The Creation Of The New Age
For the first millennium AD, Heinsohn gathers evidence of three major civilizational collapses caused by cosmic catastrophe followed by plague, in the 230s, the 530s and the 930s, and argues that they are one and the same, described differently in Roman, Byzantine, and Medieval sources.
The first of these cataclysms caused the “Crisis of the Third Century” that started in the 230s. Textbook history defines it primarily as a “period in which the Roman Empire nearly collapsed under combined pressures of barbarian invasions and migrations into Roman territory, civil wars, peasant rebellions, and political instability.” Disease played a major role, most notably with the Plague of Cyprian (c. 249-262), originating in Pelusium in Egypt. At the height of the outbreak, five thousand people were said to be dying every day in Rome. Although Latin sources make no mention of it, the massive damage observed by archeologists in several cities suggest that the crisis was triggered by a cosmic cataclysm. In Rome, “Trajan’s market—the commercial heart of the known world—was massively damaged and never repaired again. All eleven aqueducts were destroyed. The first was not repaired before 1453. As illustrated above, thick layers of so-called “dark earth” are found immediately above the 3rd century, with no new construction above before the 10th century. This situation, which is repeated in many other Western cities such as London, is generally interpreted as proof that the land was converted to arable and pastoral use or abandoned entirely for seven centuries. But it is more likely that the mud resulted primarily from a cosmic cataclysm.
Three hundred years after the Third Century Crisis in Italy, the Eastern Empire was impacted by an identical phenomenon, whose effect, notes historian of Late Antiquity Wolf Liebeschuetz, “was like the crisis of the third century.” A climatic disaster is documented by ancient historians of that period, such as Procopius of Caesarea, Cassiodorus, or John of Ephesus. Procopius writes that in the tenth year of Justinian (536), “the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year.” This led to a “pestilence, by which the whole human race came near to being annihilated.” John of Ephesus writes: “the sun became dark and its darkness lasted for eighteen months…as a result of this inexplicable darkness, the crops were poor and famine struck.” To explain this Late Antique Little Ice Age, some scientists like David Keys hypothesize massive volcanic eruptions. Others see “a comet impact earth in AD 536” causing a plunge in temperatures by as much as 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit for several years, leading to the crop failures that brought famine to the Roman Empire. Its weakened inhabitants soon became vulnerable to diseases. In 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, exactly like Cyprian’s Plague 300 years earlier, this time spreading to Constantinople, with some 10,000 people dying daily in Justinian’s capital alone, according to Procopius. In the words of John Loeffler, “How Comets Change the Course of History”: “The terrified citizens and merchants fled the city of Constantinople, spreading the disease further into Europe, where it laid waste to communities of famished Europeans as far away as Germany, killing anywhere from a third to a half of the population.”
According to Heinsohn, the Western collapse of the third century and the Eastern collapse of the sixth century are both identical with the “Tenth Century Collapse” starting in the 930s. This civilizational collapse is documented by archelogy in peripheral parts of the Empire: “Widespread destructions from Scandinavia to Eastern Europe and the Black Sea are dated to the end of the Early Middle Ages (930s CE). The disaster struck in territories where no devastations appear to have occurred during the ‘Crisis of the Third Century’, or the ‘Crisis of the Sixth Century’. Archaeology shows that Austria, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria was also hit in the early 10th century, as well as Slovak and Czech territories. Bulgarian metropolis Pliska basically disappeared, strangled by considerable amounts of erosion material (colluvium), also known as “black earth”. All Baltic ports suddenly and mysteriously “undergo discontinuity.”
What Heinsohn calls the “Tenth Century Collapse” is well known to historians of the Middle Ages, but generally attributed to invasions. Mark Bloch wrote about it in his classic work Feudal Society (1940):
“From the turmoil of the last invasions, the West emerged covered with countless scars. The towns themselves had not been spared—at least not by the Scandinavian—and if many of them, after pillage or evacuation, rose again from their ruins, this break in the regular course of their life left them for long years enfeebled…Along the river routes the trading centers had lost all security…Above all, the cultivated land suffered disastrously, often being reduced to desert…Naturally the peasants, more than any other class, were driven to despair by these conditions…The lords, who derived their revenues from the land, were impoverished.”
The upheaval marked the end of the ancient world and was followed by the emergence of the feudal world. Heinsohn remarks: “The Tenth Century Collapse ran its lethal course closer to the present than any other world-shaking event in human history. However, it is the least researched, too…We do not yet know what could have been powerful enough to bring about such a mind-boggling transformation of our planet. Though it must have been enormous we still cannot reconstruct the cosmic scenario.” This is because most sources dealing with the catastrophe have been shifted backward. Yet the few Western chronicles that we have for the 11th century do inform us. Such as the chronicle of the monk Rudolfus Glaber, writing between 1026 and 1040, which I quoted in the introduction.
Birth of AD Chronology
The confused perspective of eleventh-century men on the earlier ages, that Patrick Geary analyses in Phantoms of Remembrance, can account for the chronological distortions that later made it into history books. Within a few generations, what Rudolfus Glaber still calls the “Roman World,” destroyed by cataclysm, plague and famine only decades before his time, was idealized and pushed back into almost mythic times.
This coincides with the rise of Christianity, heavily dominated by apocalypticism in its infancy. In Matthew 24:6-8, when Jesus’s disciples asked him: “Tell us, when is this going to happen, and what sign will there be of your coming and of the end of the world?” he answered: “There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All this is only the beginning of the birthpangs.” “In the minds of the survivors,” Heinsohn writes, “the ancient gods had failed, but the apocalyptic books of the Bible had been proven right. Spontaneous conversions to the various Judaism-derived sects quickly increased throughout the empire.”
Heinsohn suggests that the Book of Revelations directly influenced the chronological shift, because its chapter 20 postulates a thousand-year period between Jesus and the catastrophe: “Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven. / He took hold of the dragon, / Satan, and chained him for 1,000 years. / He could not fool the nations anymore until the 1,000 years were completed.” Church father Cyprianus (200-258 AD, i.e., 900-958 in revised chronology), a survivor of the catastrophe in his heavily hit city of Carthage, wrote: “Our Lord has foretold all this. War and famine, earthquakes and pestilence will occur everywhere.” Rudolfus Glaber also wrote at the end of book 2: “All this accords with the prophecy of St John, who said that the Devil would be freed after a thousand years.” Heinsohn suggests Michael Psellos (c. 1018-1078 AD), author of the Chronographia, as the main engineer of the chronological shift.
To understand more precisely the role played by Christianity in the chronological reset, we would need a clear vision of the history of early Christianity, which we don’t have. What is almost certain is that, contrary to what Church historians have written, the Roman world was not dominated by Christianity until the eleventh-century Gregorian Reform. Excavations of the Carolingian tombs cast doubt on the Christian religion of that age: “Excavators recently analyzing the contents of 96 Carolingian burials from 86 different locations (dated 751-911, but mostly from the time of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious), were shocked by an extremely widespread practice resembling Charon’s obol. That payment was used as a means of bribing the legendary ferryman for passage across the river Styx, the river that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead.” Even more puzzling—but logical within the Heinsohn paradigm—some of those coins are Roman coins.
One likely factor in the chronological confusion of the eleventh century, leading to the stretch of 300 years into a millennium, came from the traditional Roman computation. Roman historians counted years ad urbe condita(“since the foundation of the city”), abbreviated AUC. A monk named Dionysius Exiguus determined that Jesus’ birth took place in 753 AUC. That means that 1000 AUC falls on 246 AD, during the Third Century Crisis. People living soon after the cataclysm (like Dionysius) believed they were living around 1000 AUC. They could easily be led to believe that they really lived 1000 years after Christ. It has actually been suggested that “Dominus” in Anno Domini originally meant Romulus, the founder of Rome. Changing Romulus into Christ would have been easy since both legendary figures have similar mythical attributes. Like Christ, Romulus suffered a sacrificial death, and then the Romans “began to cheer Romulus, like a god born of a god, the king and father of the city, imploring his protection, so that he should always protect his children with his benevolent favor” (Titus Livy, History of Rome I.16). (Whether we take the resemblance between Romulus and Christ as another clue that Livy is a medieval or Renaissance fabrication makes little difference.) At some stage, people were led to by the Church to change their notion of living in one millennium after Romulus into the notion of living one millennium after Christ. This shift was part and parcel of the Christianization process: just like the Church Christianized many Pagan gods, holy places and holy days, it Christianized AUD in AD. The confusion was facilitated by the fact that AUC was still used in the eleventh-century (some chroniclers such as Ademar of Chabannes also counted years in annus mundi, based on biblical chronology).
Since, according to Dionysius, Jesus was born in 753 AUC, the confusion of AUC with AD added 753 years, which is approximately the length of phantom time added into the first millennium according to Heinsohn. The Church was then happy to fill in the vacuum and make itself look older than it was, with forgeries such as Liver Pontificalis, the Donation of Constantine, and the pseudo-Isidorian decretals. Papal clerics imposed their millennium-long Christian history, when in reality, their Christ had been crucified (under Augustus) only 300 years before Gregory VII (1073-1085).
Conclusion
Heinsohn’s theory still leaves many unanswered questions, but it solves a few crucial problems. I have introduced some of these problems in the first chapter of this book.
In chapter 1, I agreed with Polydor Hochart’s objection to the possibility that books from Imperial Rome were preserved until the 14th-15th century, when Florentine humanists later discovered them in the attics of European monasteries, because monks had copied them in the 9th, 10th or 11th century. Christian monks copying pagan works on expensive parchments is just too unlikely. Rather, we have every reason to believe that, whenever they got their hands on such books, monks either destroyed them or scrapped them to reuse the parchment. From the incongruity of the common assumption, Hochart concluded that most of this Roman literature was late medieval or Renaissance forgeries. But Heinsohn’s revised chronology now points to an alternative solution: the original composition of these works (1st century) and their medieval copies (9th century at the earliest) are not separated by seven centuries or more, but by one or two centuries at the most. The 9thcentury still belonged to Roman times, and Christianity was then in its infancy. The seven centuries that our Benedictine monks are supposed to have spent copying them again and again never existed. That doesn’t eliminate the suspicion of Medieval or Renaissance fraud, but that reduces it. We can now read Roman sources with a different perspective.
-excerpted from “Anno Domini: A Short History of the First Millennium AD” by Laurent Guyenot (2023)
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