(not, that is, after the Four Last Things) and would be marked by universal peace, in which the institutions necessary for a turbulent world would wither away. For Marxists the parallels are disturbingly close. Men read Joachim with the same care and excitement with which they read the more imaginative historians like Otto of Freising. They thought that God intended the future to be discoverable and that it was the duty of society to prepare for it. Roger Bacon, perhaps the best true scientist of the Middle Ages, wrote to the Pope (c. 1267): ‘If only the church would examine the prophecies of the bible, the sayings of the saints, the sentences of the Sibyl and Merlin and other pagan prophets, and would add thereto astrological considerations and experimental knowledge, it would without doubt be able to provide usefully against the coming of Antichrist. . . . for not all prophecies are irrevocable and many things are said in the prophets about the coming of antichrist which will come to pass only through the negligence of Christians. They would be changed if Christians would strenuously inquire when he will come, and seek all the knowledge which he will use when he comes.” This passage, representing the higher conventional wisdom of the thirteenth century, implies a degree of possible control over the universe, present and future, which fits in with the theory of limitless papal monarchy, then nearing its zenith. It springs from the same assumptions as the wild triumphalism of Boniface VIII, quoted at the beginning of this section. But neither the papacy nor the Church as a whole had a firm grip on the total Christian society even in the thirteenth century. Thereafter what grip it had slackened. From about this time, the unified Christian society began to dissolve, and forms of heterodoxy became endemic, their detection and punishment being part of the routine operations of the Church and State. Every form of religious manifestation filled the authorities with disquiet; none could be trusted not to slip out of control. And for much of the time there was not one pope, to act as invigilator and monitor, but two: sometimes three. Joan of Arc, for instance, was not a victim of English nationalism: only eight of the 131 judges, assessors and other clergy connected with her trial were Englishmen. She was, rather, the casualty of a French civil war which had a wide theological dimension. One of the things which aroused suspicion about her was that she headed her letters 'Jnesus Maria’ - evidence of a Jesus-cult which did not have the sanction of Pope Martin V but of the anti-Pope Calixtus. We are not surprised to learn that one of the judges who originally condemned her, Jean le Fevre, was also a judge at her rehabilitation; or that Thomas de Courcelles, who advised that she be tortured during her interrogation, was promoted to be Dean of Notre Dame the year she was cleared and lived to preach the funeral panegyric on her hero-Dauphin, Charles VII. Because the Christian society was total it had to be compulsory; and because it was compulsory it had no alternative but to declare war on its dissentients. Thus in the later Middle Ages it was weighed down by the multiplicity of its enemies. If Joachim was an ‘acceptable’ prophet, he was soon saddled with a mass of interpretations and commentaries which became the small-change of rustic millenarians and village charismatics. It was a feature of medieval prophecy that ‘sleeping’ kings or emperors would awake, and either restore harmony or rampage, depending on whether you believed the Pope was the vicar of Christ or Antichrist himself. Men claiming to be Arthur or Charlemagne or the first Latin emperor of Constantinople, or the Emperor Frederick |I, appeared, raised a following, were hunted down, then hanged or burned. Disproof by events seems to have done nothing to shake men's belief in prophecy; crucial years came and went 1260, 1290, 1305, 1335, 1350, 1360, 1400, 1415, 1500. 1535; nothing happened as foretold, but still men believed. Many of these pretenders produced elaborate social manifestos, with an egalitarian or distributive object. Most began, or ended, in anti-clericalism. Religious hysteria expressed itself in almost every imaginable form of: outrageous behavior. Selfflagellation, for instance, had been a feature of certain sophisticated pagan sects absorbed into Christianity 86