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Bill Leadbetter a Byzantine Narrative of the Future and The Bill Leadbetter A Byzantine Narrative of the Future and the Antecedents of the Last World Emperor In 1985, in the course of an article discussing the different ways in which Malalas and Procopius had read and represented the same body of material, Roger Scott mused a little on sixth-century apocalyptic speculation. At the end of his article, he posed a significant question: 'For is it just possible that the arrival of the millennium had its effect too on an equally superstitious Justinian and, in consequence, really d id affect the course of h istory?' 1 Th is is a fundamental question which raises the deep and recurrent issue of the relationship between apocalyptic narratives and history. Scott raises the recursive question: at what point might such narratives become self-fulfilling prophecies? The irony of this question lies in the response which is at the heart of this paper: it is not so much history which changes in response to prophecy, but prophecy which changes in response to history. This can be most clearly seen in the great gift of Byzantine apocalyptic to Christian prophetic discourses: the figure of the Last Christian Emperor. 2 This figure was invoked as late as 1683 during the second siege of Vienna. As the Ottoman Turkish hosts of Kara Mustafa were surrounding the city, within its walls, broadsheets were distributed to inspire the defenders in their struggle with their infidel foe. 3 They reminded those within that the authority of the holy Roman Emperor derived from heaven itself and, according to ancient prophecy, it would be the Emperor of Rome who would annihilate the hosts of Islam and drive them back into the deserts whence they carne, before handing over the rulership of the world to Christ himself. 4 This was no seventeenth-century novelty, but a deeply ingrained tradition in western Catholic and eastern Orthodox Christianity. 5 Significant and enduring 1. R. Scott, 'Malala-,, The Secret llistory. and Justinian's Propaganda' DOP 39 (19S5) 109. 2. On Byzantine apocalyptic. see recently. David Olster 'Byzantine Apocalypses· The Encyclopaedia of Apocalypticism. vol. 2. Apocalypticism in Western History and Culture (London 2000) 48-73. 3. E. Sackur. Sibyllinische Texte und Forschungen: Pseudomethodius. Adso und die tiburtinische Siby/1 (Halle 1898) 5; there was a 1677 commentary on Pseudo­ Methodius entitled Vaticinum de interitu Turcarum Sancti Methodii martyris. On this. and on eighteenth-century Austrian interest in the prophecy of the Last World Emperor. see A. von Gutschmid. Kleine Schr(fien (5 vols Leipzig 1889-94) 5:501 tr 4. M. Kmosko, 'Das Rätsel des Pseudomethodius· Byz 6 ( 1931) 273-4. 5. On the influence of the idea of the Last World Emperor in western mediaeval apocalyptici sm. see N. Cohn. The Pursuit of the Millennium (rev. ed. London 1962) (still magisterial and influential after more than forty years) chapters 1-V; on the receipt of the idea in Byzantine culture. see P. Magdalino. 'The History of the Future and its Uses: Prophecy. Policy and Propaganda' The Making of By::antine History: Studies Dedicated to Donald M Nico/ ed. R. Beaton & C. Roueché (Aldershot 1993) 3-34. Byzantine Narrative. Papers in Honour of Roger Scott. Edited by J. Burke et al. (Melbourne 2006). Byzantine Narratives of the Future 369 vocabulary of western mediaeval apocalyptic had emerged from texts initially written in a Byzantine context, the most enduring being this apocalyptic figure of a Last Christian Emperor. The long currency in Christian apocalyptic narratives has been remarked upon by Norman Cohn: there can be no doubt that in one form or another the prophecy [of the Last World Emperor] continued to fascinate and excite the common people ofGermany, peasants and artisans alike, until well into the sixteenth century. In one Emperor after another - Sigismund, Frederick 111, Maximilian, Charles V - the people contrived to see a reincarnation (in the most literal sense of the word) of Frederick ll. And when these monarchs failed to play the eschatological role expected of them the popular imagination continued to dweil on a purely fictitious emperor, a Frederick who would arise from the midst of the poor... to oust the actual monarch and reign in his stead. 6 The Last Emperor proved constantly mutable, depending upon historica( circumstance. The earliest reference, in the Tiburtine Sibyl, looked to a rex Graecorum named Constans; a subsequent version to a rex Romanorum et Graecorum; and the eighth-century Latin text of pseudo-Methodius, less elaborately, toa rex Gregorum (sic) sive Romanorum. 1 The tenth-century French divine, Adso, in writing his treatise on the Antichrist, de ortu et tempore Antichristi, probably drew upon a version of pseudo-Methodius. In this deeply intluential work, Adso transformed the apocalyptic king from a rex Romanorum et Graecorum, into a rex Francorum. 8 Almost immediately thereafter, the Last Emperor carne to be identified with a range of monarchs. As Norman Cohn has demonstrated, there was an intensification of apocalyptic speculation on the eve of the First Crusade. 9 Benzo, Bishop of Alba, wrote a long poem addressed to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, praising him as the successor to a line of great 6. Cohn, Millennium 122ff. 7. The earliest reference seems to be in the Tiburtine Sibyl, a document which may date back as early as the fourth century. For the reference, see Sackur, Sibyll 185. The next reference is in the Latin text ofpseudo-Methodius, originally a Syriac text of the seventh century. On the Syriac version, see Kmosko, 'Pseudomethodius': P.J. Alexander. The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition (Berkeley 1985) 36-51: W.E. Kaegi. 'The Initia) Byzantine Reactions to the Arab Conquest' ChHist 38 ( 1969) 1- 11: fora Latin text, Sackur. Sibyll 89. 8. Sackur. Sibyll 1 10 ( ... unus ex regibus Francorum ... ). See the discussion of B. McGinn. l'isions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (rev. ed. New York 1998) 82-4: see also P.J. Alexander, 'Byzantium and the Migration of Literary Works and Motifs: The Legend of the Last Roman Emperor' MedHum n.s. 2 ( 1971) 53; Cohn. Millennium 541T.There is a significant literature on Adso's sources, but see P.J. Alexander, 'The Diffusion of Mediaeval Apocalypses in the West and the Beginnings of Joachimism' Prophecy and Millenarianism: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Reeves ed. A. Williams (London 1980) 67ff. 9. Cohn, Millennium 55; M. Reeves. The lnfluence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford 1969) 301 tT. .
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