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 Eisenberg, 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. Hilten, prophesying the fall of Christendom to the Turks, had foretold as well their conversion. That Islam was destined to vanish upon the approach of the end days, and the Jews too be brought to Christ, had long been the devout conviction of every Christian who dared to map the contours of the future. Hilten too, for all the blood-curdling quality of his prognostications, never thought to doubt it.
Across Christendom, then, dread of what the future might hold continued to be joined with hope: of the dawning of a new age, when all of humanity would be gathered under the wings of the Spirit, that holy dove which, at Jesus’ baptism, had descended upon him from heaven. The same sense of standing on the edge of time that in Bohemia had led the Taborites to espouse communism elsewhere prompted Christians to anticipate that all the world would soon be brought to Christ. In Spain, where war against Muslim potentates had been a way of life for more than seven hundred years, this optimism was particularly strong. Men spoke of El Encubierto, the Hidden One: the last Christian emperor of all. At the end of time, he would emerge from concealment to unify the various kingdoms of Spain, to destroy Islam for good, to conquer Jerusalem, to subdue ‘brutal kings and bestial races’12 everywhere, and to rule the world. Even as the people of Otranto were repairing the sacrilege done to their cathedral, and Johann Hilten was foretelling the conquest of Germany by the Turks, rumours that El Encubierto had come at last were sweeping Spain. Isabella, the queen of Castile, did not rule alone. By her side, her equal in everything, was her husband, the king of the neighbouring realm: Ferdinand of Aragon. Before the combined might of these two monarchs, the truncated rump of al-Andalus stood perilously exposed. Of the great Muslim empire that had once reached to the Pyrenees and beyond, only the mountainous kingdom of Granada, on the southernmost shore of Spain, survived. Its continuing independence, to monarchs as devout and ambitious as Ferdinand and Isabella, was a standing affront. In 1482, their forces duly embarked on its conquest, fortress by fortress, port by port. By 1490, only Granada itself still held out. Two years later, on 2 January 1492, its king finally surrendered. Ferdinand, handed the keys to the royal palace, could be well pleased. The conquest of Spain’s final Muslim stronghold was a feat worthy of El Encubierto.
Last emperor or not, Ferdinand was certainly free now to look to broader horizons. Among the cheering crowds watching the royal entry into Granada was a Genoese seafarer by the name of Christopher Columbus. His own mood was downbeat. For years he had been trying to persuade Ferdinand and Isabella to fund an expedition across the uncharted waters of the western ocean. Confident that the world was smaller than geographers had calculated, he was notorious in courts across Christendom for his claim that there lay across the Atlantic a short and ready route to the riches of the Orient: to ‘India’, as Europeans termed it. Wealth, though, was not an end in itself. Shortly before the fall of Granada, Columbus, pressing his suit, had pledged the profits of his enterprise to a very particular cause: the conquest of Jerusalem. Ferdinand and Isabella, listening to this, had smiled, and said that this plan for a crusade pleased them, and that it was their wish too. Then nothing. Columbus’ appeal for funding had been rejected by a panel of experts appointed by the two monarchs to investigate his proposal. Turning his back on Granada, its palace now topped by a cross, he rode despondently away. After only a day on the road, though, he was overtaken by a messenger from the royal court. There had been a change of heart, he was told. The two monarchs were ready to sponsor him.
Columbus sailed that August. In the event, despite making landfall barely two months after his departure from Spain, he did not reach India. The day after his first Christmas in the West Indies (as he would come to call the islands he had arrived among), he prayed to God that he would soon discover the gold and spices promised in his prospectus; but the wealthy entrepôts of the Orient were destined always to lie beyond his grasp.* Nevertheless, even as the realisation of this began to dawn on Columbus, he betrayed no disappointment. He understood his destiny. In 1500, writing to the Spanish court, he spoke in unabashed terms of the role that he had been called to play in the great drama of the end times. ‘God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of Saint John after having spoken of it through the mouth of Isaiah. And he showed me the spot where to find it.’13 Three years later, during the course of a voyage blighted by storms, hostile natives and a year spent marooned on Jamaica, Columbus’ mission was confirmed for him directly by a voice from heaven. Speaking gently, it chided him for his despair, and hailed him as a new Moses. Just as the Promised Land had been granted to the Children of Israel, so had the New World been granted to Spain. Writing to Ferdinand and Isabella about this startling development, Columbus insisted reassuringly that it had all been prophesied by Joachim of Fiore. Not for nothing did his own name mean ‘the dove’, that emblem of the Holy Spirit. The news of Christ would be brought to the New World, and its treasure used to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Then the end of days would come. Columbus could even identify the date. Just as Johann Hilten had done, he specified the 1650s.