century.

The year A.D. 1000 deserves a special word of notice. Christians fancied
that the world was to last for but one thousand years after the birth of
Christ, and that it would therefore come to an end in A.D. 1000. "Many
charters begin with these words: 'As the world is now drawing to its
close.' An army marching under the emperor Otho I. was so terrified by
an eclipse of the sun, which it conceived to announce this consummation,
as to disperse hastily on all sides" ("Europe during the Middle Ages,"
Hallam, P. 599) "Prodigious numbers of people abandoned all their civil
connections, and their parental relations, and giving over to the
churches or monasteries all their lands, treasures, and worldly effects,
repaired with the utmost precipitation to Palestine, where they imagined
that Christ would descend to judge the world. Others devoted themselves
by a solemn and voluntary oath to the service of the churches, convents,
and priesthood, whose slaves, they became in the most rigorous sense of
that word, performing daily their heavy tasks; and all this from a
notion that the Supreme Judge would diminish the severity of their
sentence, and look upon them with a more favourable and propitious eye,
on account of their having made themselves the slaves of his ministers.
When an eclipse of the sun or moon happened to be visible, the cities
were deserted, and their miserable inhabitants fled for refuge to hollow
caverns, and hid themselves among the craggy rocks, and under the
bending summits of steep mountains. The opulent attempted to bribe the
Deity and the saintly tribe, by rich donations conferred upon the
sacerdotal and monastic orders, who were looked upon as the immediate
vicegerents of heaven" (p. 226). Thus the Church still reaped wealth out
of the fear of the people she deluded, and while fields lay unsown, and
houses stood unrepaired, and the foundations of famine were laid, Mother
Church gathered lands and money into her capacious lap, and troubled