The utter absence of documentation attesting to apocalyptic beliefs and movements is, in this view, decisive proof. Glaber openly alludes to this tendency when he points out how many expected the same extraordinary events around the millennium of the Passion as that of the Incarnation. Quite the contrary, the Peace of God movement may be one of the most powerful and consequential chiliastic movements in the history of the West. Why is the vast bulk of this mountain of belief and activity submerged below the waterline of the documentation. To understand, we must consider the dynamics of apocalyptic rhetoric and the impact it has on the documentary record.
Roosters crow the dawn is imminent, owls that the night is still young.
So rather than sweep the passages about apocalyptic expectation and the year 1000 away as so much flotsam and jetsam, if we examine these texts closely, they offer us precious insights into that largely invisible body below the waterline of documentation, the commoners of Europe. Approached as a complex, dynamic, and highly protean phenomenon with the power to arouse the energies and imaginations of that normally passive mass of the population, the apocalyptic year 1000 offers important insights into the transformations of the period around the turn of the millennium. It is time that social historians began to take this aspect of popular Christian theology seriously in their analyses of the cultural and social mutation de l'an mil and the extraordinarily active and surprisingly autonomous population of commoners who, in succeeding generations will transform the rural, urban, and cultural landscape of western Europe. There is an important difference to be noted between the impact of apocalyptic expectation in Eastern and Western Europe ca. In the East this translated into missionary activity which, as in Hungary, worked from the top down, introducing not the popular Christianity of Peace councils and pilgrimages, but that of monarchical and episcopal authority.