04/13/19 MILLENNIUM PAST

MILLENNIUM PAST

THE LAST APOCALYPSE
Europe at the Year 1000 A.D.
By James Reston Jr.
Doubleday 299pp $24.95

With millennium fever building, some potential celebrants may be wondering how the world reacted when the first thousand years ended and the present, waning millennium was born. That's the intriguing question journalist and author James Reston Jr. tackles in The Last Apocalypse.
To say that millenniums pique our interest doesn't mean, of course, that these calendrical curiosities in themselves portend more than do the passing of any day or year. Still, if people believe that a year has special significance because it boasts three zeroes, there may be a story in that.
And Reston tells a darn good tale. He fills his book with colorful characters, such as Svein Forkbeard, Gerbert of Aurillac, Otto III, Empress Theophano, and Al Mansor, who strut across the stage of history, battling for kingdoms, wooing princesses, making and breaking popes and antipopes, and wreaking horrible, gory vengeance on their enemies. Reston's theme: Around the year 1000, an explosion of faith brought most of the Continent's remaining heathen nations into the Christian fold, definitively shaping a new European identity. Barbarian leaders, from Vikings to Magyars, embraced the unifying faith, while the Moorish caliphate in Spain started its self-destructive slide. All this is depicted as a ''saga...of a heroic time,'' and Reston weaves the poetry of the age--many of the book's most pleasurable passages--into his narrative.
For younger readers, Reston's saga style may offer a good enough introduction to this slice of the past. But it left me wishing the book had a more critical guiding spirit. Too often, Reston, perplexed by the problem of accuracy in medieval legend, abandons history altogether for folklore. Years ago, tutorials with Oxford historian James Campbell, a leading expert on Anglo-Saxon England, gave me a glimpse of how to find historical gold in the period's sparse records: They must be carefully probed. British historian Richard Fletcher, for example, in The Barbarian Conversion (Henry Holt) covers much of the same ground that Reston does but manages to raise more interesting issues about the evangelists and their targets. He uses narratives of the conversions, yet shows why the ones about Norwegian King Olaf Trygvesson, for instance--which Reston swallows whole--sounded, and were, ''too good to be true.'' And Reston never asks Fletcher's key question: Why did these efforts at conversion not succeed two or three centuries earlier?
So what did Europeans expect on the eve of 1000--Biblical apocalypse, the Second Coming? ''There was little sense in the 990s of the beginning of a new millennium,'' say Asa Briggs and Daniel Snowman in Fins de Siecle (Yale), since people did not think of time as having a continuous flow and marked its passing by the reigns of kings. In the end, Reston is forced to agree. The apocalypse? That's Reston's shorthand for the rapid Christianization of Europe--''a process rather than a cataclysm.'' I expected him to offer at least a parallel with today's global ''conversion'' to free markets, but Reston demurs. His vivid tale is important, but year 2000 partygoers may find it illuminates little about their upcoming revelries.
BY JOSEPH MANDEL