How did a European Christian living at the end of the tenth century feel about the approaching end of the millennium? As Arthur Herman points out in his review of The Forge of Christendom , by Tom Holland, not very good:
The men of the 900s, Mr. Holland notes, had good reason for feeling hopeless. Christian Europe was under siege: Viking marauders from the north (they had overrun Britain), nomadic Magyar horsemen from the east, and Muslim Saracen pirates from the south, who sacked the saints’ tombs in Rome in 846. The Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne had dissolved into anarchy under his feeble successors. Corruption and neglect had left the Roman Catholic Church in disrepute and disarray. The papacy had become a political shuttlecock whacked back and forth between quarreling Roman families in pointless feuds.What is more, Europe’s economy still suffered from the demographic collapse of the last days of the Roman Empire. Western Europe in 950 was a subsistence economy, farmed almost entirely by serf labor. Only a prosperous farmer could afford a copper pot or an iron hoe; vast stretches of marsh, bog and forest hemmed in every human settlement. And virtually every lay person, from king to peasant, was illiterate.
Living under the shadow of the millennium, it would have been easy for a citizen of almost any European principality to resign himself to Western Christendom’s demise—to imagine himself (or his children) being left prey for every passing invader while dependent on a disdainful Byzantine Empire on one side and a hostile Islamic world on the other.
But, as it turns out, things weren’t as hopeless as they had once seemed:
Instead, Europeans clawed their way back from the abyss. In 955, the Saxon emperor Otto I and his mailed horsemen crushed the Magyars, while in England King Athelstan, a grandson of Alfred the Great, checkmated the Vikings. A monastic movement based in Cluny, in Burgundy, breathed new life into the forms and ceremonies of the church. A scholar named Gerbert of Aurillac rediscovered the wisdom of Aristotle as well as the astrolabe and abacus. The son of peasants, Gerbert became Europe’s most influential teacher and eventually pope, the first truly great pontiff in nearly 400 years.In the following century recovery became rebirth. The Viking’s descendants, the Normans, channeled their drive and energy into the service of Christendom, not against it. One of their number, Duke William, brought England back into the European fold by conquest in 1066. Meanwhile the ancient cities of Italy, such as Pisa, Genoa and Venice, once beaten down by pirate raiders, became the intrepid pioneers of trade across the Mediterranean. As early as 1100 lands that had once been a threat, like Scandinavia and Poland and Saracen-dominated Sicily, had become permanent parts of Latin Christendom.
