Inscribing the Orient into a historiography of the past, present, and future of latin Europe: Alexander Minorita’s Expositio in Apocalipsim

1“Since our interest aimed at the history (gesta) of the church and whether its acts (facta) were anywhere prophesied, we were searching in the words of this book [the biblical Apocalypse] for a concordance with them… and we did not find it”.1 In c. 1248/49, in the prologue to what is edited under the title of Expositio in Apocalipsim, Alexander Minorita, probably a North German Franciscan about whom little is known, explains the intent and the spirit behind his book. Alexander started from the idea that –in the sense of Joachim of Fiore’s (+1202) Concordiae2– the Old and New Testaments, lex and evangelium, refer to each other typologically as do, more specifically, also the old prophets and Saint John’s Apocalypse. He was convinced by Joachim’s teaching that not only is the history of the Church prophesied in the New Testament as the book of the Second Age of the Son, but that it can be found particularly in the one prophetic book of the New Testament. He was disappointed in his expectation at first, but –as he explains in his prologue– one Sunday, when preparing for the Eucharist, some of the dark meanings were disclosed to him. On the third day of communion with the body of Christ (die tertia cum corporis Domini nostri Jesu Christi communicaremus),3 without whom no one can really open (aperire) a book, it was revealed to Alexander how a large part of the book of Revelation had already been fulfilled by the course of Church history.

2By Alexander’s time, the Orient had become a well-known factor in politics and even Saint Francis himself had turned the Franciscan order towards the Orient.4 The Crusades especially, aimed to regain the Promised Land, reminded the Christians of their roots in a practical fashion and also that not only their past lay in Jerusalem, but also their present and, even more importantly, their future. For Alexander, who started from an interest in Christian history, the Christian past, present, and future in the Orient had to be a focal point and a well of knowledge in more than one sense. In terms of the overall ideas for this volume, encounters with the Orient created useable knowledge, furthermore, knowledge about the encounters themselves could be used to shape a reading of history, more specifically, the history of salvation in the past, present, and future. Alexander Minorita used this knowledge, as will be seen in the following, by reading the 22 chapters of the Book of Revelation (which on the literal level relates events from a historical period, but one that lies completely in the future) as Christian historiography. He takes it as an encrypted progressive History of Salvation from Jesus Christ to the Last Judgment and identifies quite a few of the positive and negative apocalyptic figures, places, and events (angels, dragons, beasts, Armageddon, and earthquakes) with positive and negative equivalents from Christian Oriental history.

3Alexander clearly started from his interest in world history, but turned to the prophetic biblical book for it and, like any prophet (in the sense of reader of a prophetic text), he needed to be inspired in order to understand it correctly.5 Consequently, his work was copied together with works by Joachim in medieval manuscripts6 and modern editors have categorized it as a commentary on a biblical prophetic book clearly aspiring to prophecy,7 although, like most medieval manuscript works, this one has no clear title and was dubbed Expositio in Apocalipsim only much later. But besides being a biblical commentary and a prophetic text, Alexander’s work must also be classified as historiography, since he lays a great deal of emphasis on historical events and their backgrounds. For this he used the best possible sources for good historical, geographical, and religious information (such as the universal chronicle by Ekkehard of Aura and Frutolf of Michelsberg, and especially for Oriental events, Jacques de Vitry’s Historia Orientalis).8

4This mixture of genres may seem strange to modern eyes, but medieval historiography and medieval prophecy were not that far from each other (and not far from medieval biblical commentaries in means and intent).9 At least parts of medieval historiography, especially what we call world or universal chronicles, put world history into the framework of the history of salvation and are therefore more or less explicitly concerned with the history of the world from the beginning towards the end. Also medieval eschatological prophets were concerned with the history of the future of mankind before the absolute end. By the thirteenth century, however, prophetic writing had, under the influence of Joachim of Fiore’s teaching (his “theology of history”), become decidedly an interpretation of several New Testament books as foretelling the history of mankind and thus a genre that depended heavily on historiography – the Book of Revelation always tells a sequence of future events and thus was especially suitable to be read as historiography.

5This close interdependence and the possibility of examining Alexander’s book analytically as a piece of historiography are further strengthened by another factor pertaining to Alexander Minorita. As far as we know, he was a not-too-well-known writer from Northern Germany,10 and certainly close to the Franciscan order although he calls himself laicus.11 There is a slight regional bias for Northern Germany and Alexander emphasizes the eschatological role of the Franciscan Order in the way the members of this order did frequently in the wake of Joachim’s ideas about the third millennium.12 Whether the author’s name was really Alexander remains an open question: Alexander is an eschatologically profound name, and the author himself explains his name as a cryptogram (which may mean either that he felt called to his task because of his name or that he took this name in order to fulfill his calling). Quoting Jeremy, he gives the meaning of his name as someone levans angustias tenebrorum (easing the narrowness of darkness), which can be equated with “Alexander”,13 thus possibly as someone who took history in order to decrypt the dark meanings of the Book of Apocalypse or, vice versa, who took the Apocalypse in order to (spiritually) read the true meaning of the signs of the (historical) time.

6The passages of historiography Alexander relies on for Europe are very often taken literally from the Annales Stadenses by one Albert of Stade (died after 1256 or 1264 at the latest), a Benedictine who had turned to the Franciscan order, in a measure that has led historians to discuss whether he and Alexander Minorita may have worked closely together or even been identical.14 Perhaps due to this closeness, beyond the general closeness of prophecy and historiography, contemporaries could understand his typological biblical prophecy as a kind of historiography or at least very close to it, as an abbreviated history, and fill in the data selected by Alexander with a great deal more historiography. One of the manuscripts of Alexander’s book, today in Cambridge but stemming from Northern Germany, was considerably enlarged by further passages from the Annales Stadenses, which in some places makes the text much longer for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

7In the case of Alexander’s book, this enlargement is a clear misunderstanding: he chose his facts very carefully in order to give all the evidence he needed to recognize the historical meaning of every single verse, even word, of the Book of Revelation. He deemed it necessary to prove that his reading of John’s revelations was the one and only correct one, in fact the one John himself had seen, as is apparent from the book itself. At the same time, he wanted to give only the historical evidence with true eschatological meaning and left out everything that would disturb a clear understanding of history according to God’s plan. According to Alexander, the Orient featured quite prominently among the places where these essential events took place, not so surprising considering its general meaning for Christianity.15 Interestingly, the Orient became more prominent as the story approached Alexander’s own time – interesting because we know that many events in the Christian history of the future were supposed to take place in the East, especially towards the End of Times.

8We will now follow the course of history according to Alexander,16 not step by step, but in a way that allows us to firstly see how he works and secondly put his specific emphasis on the Orient into context. Alexander himself generally does not simply tell the course of history step by step along the lines of the Book of Revelation, but emphasizes decisive (in his reading) epochal steps in two ways that can both be used at the same time: Sometimes he dedicates quite a few biblical verses to a relatively short period of time and sometimes he has lengthy discussions on a specific interpretation, accumulating evidence and different voices. Thus, the Orient is especially present at a decisive moment and in a crucial period of Church history. The events around Jerusalem between 614 and 637, and the crusades from 1099 onwards, still ongoing in Alexander’s own time.

9Early on Alexander establishes the reason why the Orient is a place in the Christian orbis. He starts with interpreting the first seven chapters of the Apocalypse:

10We find parallels to names and events from very early Christianity and see the glory of God’s throne as image of the Church established by Christ. Then we recognize Roman emperors starting with Gaius, Nero, Domitian, Decius and others, we briefly see Titus, inspired by God punishing the Jews by conquering Jerusalem (Apoc. 6, 6), we find persecutions of Christians (with martyred popes and other saints) and the prevention of the spreading of Christian faith as well as heretics who threatened to poison it.

11After this, Alexander for the first time looks beyond the orbis Romanus when he finds Oriental Christians among the followers of the late antique heretic Eutices/Euticius (or Eutyches, originator of Monophysitism), whom he recognized disguised as the fourth of the seven angels who blow their trumpets after the seventh seal is opened (Apoc. ch. 8).17 Monophysites and their counterpart, the Nestorians, are both identified by their specific Christological convictions, and then Alexander underlines their importance for the Church by referring to the situation of the orbis Christianus in his own time, quoting extensively from the best possible (historiographical) authority he can find, Jacques de Vitry’s Historia Orientalis.18 There are nationes in the Holy Land and among the Saracens and, moreover, far away, in India, are those called Nestorians, who, together with the Jacobites, are far more numerous than the Latins and Greeks. And although the Christians who live among the Saracens have refused to accept the poisonous law of Machometus, they are unluckily perverted by heretics.

12But that is only a first glance to the East in the context of heresies plaguing mostly the Roman Christians. Alexander goes on, laying out the Church’s many contestations by heresies and other disturbances that support heresy, which he finds prophesied by John in the seven angels: Before Eutices, the Arian Roman Emperor Valens, the Pneumatomach Macedonius, and Pelagius, and after him the Arian Vandal King Geiserich (Jesericus), the antipope Laurentius who provided space for heretics by freeing the four angels bound at the Euphrates River, and finally, and a great deal later as the seventh angel, the great Byzantine general Narces/Narses who, as nuntius Dei, helped the minister Domini Emperor Justinian to finally destroy heresy and bring peace to the Roman Empire again. While the Euphrates could have been an opening for turning to the Orient again,19 Alexander understands it as the fourth river of Paradise and thus a symbol of the Fourth Empire according to the prophet Daniel (2 and 7), the Roman Empire. Consequently, the four angels are the forces opposing each other in the Gothic wars in Italy in the fifth and sixth centuries (a topic that gains weight in Church history by the sheer number of verses Alexander dedicates to it: Apoc. 9, 13 – 11, 19), namely, Laurentius himself, Patricius Symmachus, Emperor Anastasius, and Theoderich, king of the Ostrogoths. Among other things, these disturbances strengthened the opponents of Christianity, which gives Alexander an opening for a brief note on his own Saxonian gens, still obstinately heathen at that time and explicitly among the important historical entities and in detail foreseen by John (Apoc. 9, 20-21).

13Only in Apoc. 12 does the focus of Church history turn seriously to the Orient, because after the destruction of the heresies within, new enemies come from without. The early seventh-century events in the Middle East were deemed crucial for the fate of Christianity:

And a great sign appeared in heaven: A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars: And being with child, she cried travailing in birth, and was in pain to be delivered. And there was seen another sign in heaven: and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads, and ten horns: and on his head seven diadems (Apoc. 12, 1-3).20

14The Sasanid ruler of Persia, Cosdras (Chosrau or Khusro II),21 the draco rufus magnus, was a powerful ruler with many allies (even designated by the devil himself, Apoc. 12, 9) who stole the True Cross from Jerusalem and led many Christians into captivity. Emperor Heraclius –whom Alexander calls the son of the mulier amicta solis,22 herself standing for the Church– defeated Chosrau and shortly afterwards also his son, the “beast coming up out of the sea” (Apoc. 13, 1), who actually died shortly after his father in 628. Heraclius brought the Cross back to Jerusalem and established the feast of Exaltatio crucis as memory.

15But another Oriental climax was yet to come, with another “beast coming up out of the earth” whom Alexander identifies with Mahumet sive Machometus, whose rising stands for the renewed loss of Jerusalem and the Cross.

And he had two horns, like a lamb, and he spoke as a dragon. And he executed all the power of the former beast in his sight; and he caused the earth, and them that dwell therein, to adore the first beast, whose wound to death was healed. And he did great signs, so that he made also fire to come down from heaven unto the earth in the sight of men. And he seduced them that dwell on the earth, for the signs which were given him to do in the sight of the beast, saying to them that dwell on the earth that they should make the image of the beast which had the wound by the sword and lived. And it was given him to give life to the image of the beast, and that the image of the beast should speak; and should cause that whosoever will not adore the image of the beast should be slain. And he shall make all, both little and great, rich and poor, freemen and bondmen, to have a character in their right hand or on their foreheads. And that no man might buy or sell, but he that hath the character or the name of the beast or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. He that hath understanding, let him count the number of the beast. For it is the number of a man: and the number of him is six hundred sixty-six (Apoc. 13, 11-18).23

16It was mostly Jacques de Vitry, who, with his extensive information on Mohammed’s life, teaching, and legend,24 provided Alexander with the information needed to recognize this “pseudo-prophet”. Thanks to Jacques, in the case of Mohammed Alexander can use an approach he clearly prefers to the relatively vague connections he could draw between Cosdras and his son and their respective symbols in the Book of Revelation: He wants deeper knowledge in order to grasp the one true meaning of John’s images. Mohammed is clearly the beast doing signa magna because it is said that ox and lamb spoke to him and a fig tree bowed on his command.25 He, like the beast, made fire come down from heaven unto the earth because Mohammed took the word from the Holy Scripture, thus heavenly words, and turned them around to earthly (terrenus) understanding.26 And like the beast he “seduced them that dwell on the earth” telling them that whoever was killed by an enemy would enjoy paradise.27 And even more, he said that his scriptures were sent from heaven as the Saracens say about Mohammed’s miracles that the moon came down into his lap and he took it apart and rejoined it.28

17Identifying Mohammed as one of the players in chapter 13 meant, in Alexander’s time, bringing him into close connection with the Antichrist –who is not explicitly present in the Book of Revelation but even more in its commentary tradition, who will do great signs and deceive people etc.29– especially when Alexander reaches the number of the beast, 666: Like many interpreters, he discusses the meaning of this number widely and again with extensive help from Jacques de Vitry’s chapters V and VI. Alexander, however, explicitly prefers reading 666 not as the Antichrist (who will come in the end of times) but –according to a letter by Pope Innocent III30– as Mohammed; this helped him calculate that Islam would be defeated by the Christians in 1249 due to the calculation of 666 years from the supposed year when Mohammed was born onwards. All this is in keeping with the fact that Alexander may have been aware of the future meaning of Islam and is really well-informed on Mohammed, but the great red dragon Chosrau seems the more important person at that point; he also compares the weight of the dragon and the beast out of the earth in the Apocalypse: “Syrois, the son of Chosrau, reigned Persia after his father. Under them was Mohammed, the leader of the Saracens”.31 The great importance of all the oriental events can again be measured in the number of verses of the Book of Revelation alone. Alexander dedicates two full chapters (12,1 – 13,18) –to the relatively short period between 614 (the conquest of Jerusalem by the Sasanids) and 637 (the conquest of Jerusalem by the Muslims).

18After all this, history goes on quite speedily while the Church is adorned by the orders of Saint Benedict and Saint Augustin. Alexander needs only from chapters 14, 5 to 16, 12, via a number of angels (Saint Boniface, +754, Charlemagne, Otto III, and Pope Gregory VII, and few others in between), to reach the time when “from the mouth of the dragon, and from the mouth of the beast, and from the mouth of the false prophet, three unclean spirits like frogs” arise (Apoc. 16, 13). The kings of Babylon and Persia, the Saracens and the Turks, came together “into a place, which in Hebrew is called Armageddon” (Apoc. 16, 16): “This, explains Alexander, is the land where God died and we all in him, and where he was resurrected and we all with him”.32 And the seventh of the “seven angels having the seven last plagues” (Apoc. 15, 1) called for help against them: “And the seventh angel poured out his vial upon the air, and there came a great voice out of the temple from the throne, saying: ‘It is done’” (Apoc. 16, 17). This is Alexios I imperator Constantinopolitanus, who poured his heart into his words to bring God’s wrath over the enemies of the Church, and Urban II, who called the Christians with a loud voice to relieve the Holy Land. After the pope preached, “and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunders, and there was a great earthquake, such a one as never had been since men were upon the earth, such an earthquake, so great”. The first crusade, which followed, takes up quite a bit of space in Alexander’s book; from c. 1100 onwards the crusades and the events in the (Christian) Orient become more and more dominant and determining in Alexander’s reading of the history of the Church. Alexander kept well-informed about Oriental matters, e.g., when he explains Babylon magna quae est in Mesopotamia in contrast to the Babylon in Egypt, or he knows –again from Jacques de Vitry– about the meaning Jerusalem has for the Muslims beside Mekka.33 Alexander used the chronicles of the first crusade extensively (such as those by Fulcher of Chartres and Robert the Monk) to describe a great deal of fighting and the conquest of Jerusalem.

19After a very short glance at internal church events (Apoc. 20, 1-4 deal with the Investiture Controversy and the Concordat of Worms), in 20, 4 Alexander returns to the Holy Land with John’s statement:

And I saw seats; and they sat upon them; and judgment was given unto them; and the souls of them that were beheaded for the testimony of Jesus, and for the word of God, and who had not adored the beast nor his image, nor received his character on their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.34

20In 1138, the time when (the Roman) King Conrad ruled, the king of Babylon started a great persecution of Christians, conquered their places and killed many believers because of the testimony for Christ whom they confessed (confiteri) and whom they did not want to deny even under persecution.35 And, “for the word of God” Pope Eugene made the holy Abbot Bernard preach the Cross, which led to another huge expedition against the Saracens in which King Conrad and Louis of France also participated. But this second crusade failed miserably, and “for the word of God” more than 100.000 were killed –in different ways, but this certainly fits (claims Alexander) the decollatio.

21It is interesting that as the history gradually approaches Alexander’s own time he takes a stand more explicitly on certain items, with the authority of an interpreter of prophecy inspired to understand the one right meaning of God’s revelation to John. Thus, he behaves more like a prophet than a chronicler. In his brief retelling of the story of the Investiture Controversy, Alexander has a clear opinion on how the pope and emperor should share authority in the world instead of struggling for the one position on top.36 For the second crusade he is even more explicit: the memory of “the souls of them that were beheaded for the testimony of Jesus”, thus clearly martyrs of the Second Crusade, is not kept by the Church, and no relics of their bodies are revered. Although (quamvis) the Church once kept the memory and revered the relics of any single martyr (a fact that Alexander himself reiterates in several earlier passages of his interpretation) it fails here. John saw their souls crowned by God (with the crown of martyrs) and confessed with the Father because they had confessed the word of God and had kept the testimony of Jesus until death. Since this is not just Alexander’s opinion but his inspired reading of what John saw, what God truly wanted to tell John, Alexander claims that the church should venerate the crusade martyrs, but does not.37

22At the same time, –as Sabine Schmolinsky has shown when tracing revisions in the manuscripts38– it became much more difficult for Alexander to match the identification of historical events with the verses of the Book of Revelation the closer he came to his own time and as time went by: the Apocalypse only has 22 chapters, and some of them clearly hint at events in the future, such as the Last Judgment. In this eschatological phase, Alexander only includes the Orders of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic, who might fulfill Joachim’s prophecy of an angelic order in the last millennium.39 The attempt to rewrite the last identified events in the manuscript version B, written only after the author’s death (of which it gives the year 1271), is typical for this problem. As one consequence of this kind of unclear or even floating situation for the Orient in the book, changing identifications are found in different manuscripts. The beast the martyrs would not venerate in 20, 4 should have been the beast coming up out of the sea from Apoc. 13, 1 (where it is Chosrau’s son), but is now identified with Saladin, who took Jerusalem away from the Christians in 1186, and for whom Alexander once again turned to Jacques de Vitry.40 Since Alexander takes the verses of the Apocalypse as steps of history this need not necessarily be read as a reinterpretation, but can simply be an interpretation of another historical moment (maybe with an implicitly comparable figure, especially since Mohammed remains important). In the late manuscript B, however, the second appearance of the beast is discussed as Emperor Frederick II, for whom Alexander could not have found another beast bad enough.

23The end remains open, and, as is typical for prophetic interpretation, offers specific hints about the end (taken from John’s Apocalypse as in this case or from other prophetic texts). They had to be reinterpreted as time went by –a problem historiographers also encountered when trying to write contemporary history in a meaningful way.41

24Medieval historiography and prophecy prove to be very close to each other in Alexander Minorita’s work: As a historiographer, he could treat the Apocalypse of John –a book that describes events, at first glance of the future (even of the last times) of mankind– as a history book he had to open for his readers. For his reading of the biblical Apocalypse as God’s own outline of the history of the (Christian) world, Alexander Minorita chose events, places, and persons he deemed decisive for the one correct reading of God’s plan. Among these, Oriental elements gained a meaning beyond Jerusalem and the Holy Land as the home of Christianity when heathen rulers like the Persian Chosrau, or the Ayyubid Saladin, and even the prophet Mohammed; however, Christian protagonists, especially of crusading history, are recognized among the crucial players who promoted the History of Salvation until nearly the end. Knowledge from and about the Orient and became key for the right reading of the Book of Revelation –and gained more and more overall weight as time went by– and the Book of Revelation became the crucial key for selecting the most important events of the History of Salvation, among them many Oriental ones.