ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the dramatic error—much more fun than the truth, it must be confessed, but seriously misleading. It provides the real record of the year 1000, which is actually fairly clear, a few debatable details aside, if sedulously ignored even by sober reporters in the present. Sometimes the fraud has been unwitting, due to sloppy exaggeration or repetition with no real research, but sometimes it has been quite calculated. The image is clear: In a culture imbued with religion, terrified by natural and man-made catastrophes, the year 1000 loomed as the end of the world. Most of the contemporary writers who have retold this story of the year 1000 seek both to call attention to the coming millennium and to introduce some of the same fear into a modern populace—if not wholesale, and then at least through some kindled sparks. Medieval people did not, however, establish very clear precedents for signaling the millennium.
