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Lambert of Saint-Omer and the Apocalyptic First Crusade

Around the year 1112 [Figure 1] Lambert, a canon of the church of Saint-Omer, began

an eight-year process of writing everything that he had ever learned into a book. He

called it theLiber floridus, the Flowering Book, to indicate the diversity and beauty of its

contents, gathered, he says, from the heavenly meadow.

1

The autograph copy survives

in the collections at the University of Ghent, MS 92. To give you some sense of the its

visual and intellectual richness, Lambert tells his readers about, among other things

[Figures 2a-g], crocodiles, lions, and pigs, about the stars, the earth, and perhaps more

than anything else, about trees: good trees, bad trees, normal everyday trees, heavenly

trees, and one mystical palm treeall of which served to illustrate Gods plan, His

presence and His purpose in Creation. The work is accessible today through a facsimile

edition and through the commentaries by Albert Derolez, but the variety of the contents

and the derivative character of its texts have combined to discourage significant new

research. It is a beautiful and self-evidently important book. Its interpretation, however,

remains nonetheless elusive.2

The autograph manuscript, as it exists today, contains 287 folios. Originally it

was longer still, but several quires have gone missing. We can reconstruct many of these

lost materials in part through Lamberts table of contents, in part through setting his

autograph manuscript alongside the nine surviving copies. No single version is perfect.


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But on points of illustration, the later manuscripts can be surprisingly faithful. [Figure

3a] Consider this picture of heaven from the twelfth-century WolfenbttelLiber floridus,

the earliest surviving copy (though it is, in fact, at least one step removed from Lamberts

autograph) and now look at the original drawing. [Figure 3b] Later scribes might tamper

with the texts. They might change the order of the books contents. But they had the

sense to stick as closely as possible to the original drawings and diagrams, which seemed

to convey truths perhaps beyond what Lambert himself had imagined or intended.

Of the many truths and theories which Lambert wished to communicate, one

seems to recur more frequently than any other: the First Crusade and the conquest of

Jerusalem in 1099.3 He mentions it, for example, in the captions for his illustration of that

mystical Palm Tree. He discusses it in several short chronicles, including his own

original work, titled, The Years of Our Lord, the Sixth Age. He sacralized the

campaign in his liturgical calendar, where he lists amongst saints days the anniversaries

of key crusader battles. And one of the longest texts in theLiber floridus is an abridged

version of the Jerusalem History by Fulcher of Chartres, a participant in the crusade

and eventually chaplain to King Baldwin I of Jerusalem.4 In the midst of that same

chronicle Lambert added a map of Jerusalem as well as a portrait of the Holy Sepulchre,

the originals lost, their likenesses preserved in one thirteenth-century copy.5

It is not difficult to guess the reasons for Lamberts fascination with the crusade.

Contemporaries recognized it as an event of unusual, even unprecedented, historical

significance, and they wrote about it often. By the time Lambert had finished hisLiber

floridus he could have chosen from any of ten different narratives devoted exclusively to

the topic, with another two shortly to appear. In a book about everything, in the early


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Days, with the final confrontation with Antichrist, and with Christs return to judge the

earth, without necessarily implying that that return is imminent. Apocalypticism

indicates that Christ is indeed about to return, often on a fixed date, such as, famously,

the year 1000; or in the thirteenth century, according to many followers of Joachim of

Fiore, 1260. Lambert, I believe, saw the crusade in similar terms. He did not fix a

specific date, but that fact does not make his thought any less radical, less apocalyptic.

For Lambert seems not to have asked, Is the world about to end? He wondered instead,

Has the Apocalypse actually started? Or even, Has the world already ended?

At the risk of giving away the answer here at the beginning of my talk, let me say

that the solution lies in this picture [Figure 4] and in this one [Figure 5]. I will explain

what they are and what they mean later. For now, let me just say that the first time that I

saw this one [Figure 4] was the moment when I realized, somewhat to my chagrin, that I

was going to have to start taking apocalyptic thought seriously.

But for the moment I must set aside Lambert to discuss instead, first, the general

shape of crusade of historiography, and second, debates about apocalypticism within

medieval history. The two subjectscrusade and the apocalypsehave usually not sat

comfortably together, particularly in connection with the First Crusade. But for Lambert

the two themes were inseparable, and they inspired him to fill up a book with everything

in the world around him, even as he believed that world to have entered its death throes.

The dominant trend in crusade studies today, speaking as broadly as possible, has

been to normalize the movementthat is to say, to see the crusades as outgrowths of

intellectual and spiritual currents fundamental to medieval society rather than as the

spawn of an ill-defined, popular, apocalyptic fervor. Through the work of the English


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historian Jonathan Riley-Smith and of his many students, we have learned see the First

Crusade in particular as an expression of the most traditional aspects of medieval piety: a

love of pilgrimage and a desperate need to perform penance for sin accrued in the midst

of military activity. In advancing these arguments, modern historians are building upon

the even earlier work of certain German historians, notably Carl Erdmann, who, in his

bookDie Enstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens, demonstrated how the crusade represented

the culmination of papal reform policy. Eleventh-century popes struck increasingly close

relationship with soldiers and in the process sacralized warfare. The end result was the

crusade, a holy war fought for explicitly spiritual causes under the guidance and

inspiration of Pope Urban II himself.

There has been an alternative school of thought, advanced largely by French

historians who see the First Crusade equally as an eschatological movement, called out of

a sense that the Last Days might be near and that, by fighting an unbelieving enemy for

control of Jerusalemthe center of the earth, and the site of humanitys redemption

they were actively helping to bring those days about. The foundational work for these

arguments was carried out by Paul Alphandry in the book (completed by Alphonse

Dupront)La Chrtient et lIde de Croisade. More recently Jean Flori has written a

series of challenging books and articles which attempt to restore apocalypticism as a

serious topic for discussion in crusade studies, including his biography Pierre lErmite et

la Premire Croisade, and more recently in his remarkable survey of the connections

between Islam and apocalypticism in Western thought:LIslam et la Fin des Temps.

But despite the seriousness and erudition of this scholarship, crusade historians

and historians of eschatological thought have resisted it. The reasons why the former


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group, the crusade historians, would oppose an apocalyptic First Crusade are obvious

enough. The skepticism of the latter group, the eschatological historians, I think, stems

from two causes. First, and most directly, they have found convincing the anti-

apocalyptic arguments of crusade historians. But second, and more subtly, the First

Crusade does not fit comfortably into the established narrative of apocalyptic thought.

At the risk of oversimplifying, medieval apocalypticism falls into two categories.

In the early Middle Ages, it was fundamentally millenarian and centered on problems of

chronography. That is to say, there were expectations that the apocalypse would occur in

the six-thousandth year of Creation. How to calculate the year 6000 was a thorny

problem. According to the Six Ages model of historythat history fell into six

roughly equivalent chapters which paralleled the Six Days of Creation, with the sixth and

final age beginning at the birth of Christthe end would likely come in the year 1000

A.D. St. Augustine of Hippo famously renounced this sort of calculation, but the

condemnation was only marginally more effective than his denunciation of astrology. As

my American colleague Richard Landes his amply demonstrated, medieval

chronographers continued nervously to calculate the number of years with an anxious eye

towards 6000. By the year 1096, however, when Urban II preached the crusade, the year

6000, like the millennium of Christs birth, had, according to the most common systems

of chronology, already passed. We are then to believe that, after 1033, the thousand-year

anniversary of the Crucifixion, apocalyptic enthusiasms went into abeyance, not to be

revived until the late twelfth century through the brilliant and visionary Abbot Joachim of

Fiore, inaugurating the second great era of prophetic thought. The apocalyptic First


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Crusade, falling as it does between these two great movements, has found few

champions.

I was one of these skeptics when I began my research, until, as noted, I stumbled

across this diagram. What I would like to do now is to explain it in some detail, and then,

for the remainder of my time, walk you through the steps I have followed while trying to

make sense of it and of theLiber floridus. Let me begin, though, with one general

observation: To understand the message of this diagram we must set aside certain

stereotypes about the Apocalypse and its adherents: above all, the notion that, among the

First Crusaders, eschatological hopes and fears would have given way to disappointment

and disillusionment after July 15, 1099, when Jerusalem was conquered and when Christ

failed to appear in the clouds, sword in hand. On the contrary, at that point, with

Jerusalem in hand, with an infidel enemy from a city called Babylon turned back in an

epic battle, the sense of anticipation, the sense that the Last Days were underway,

became, in many intellectual, political, and popular circles, only more acute, the

speculation about how Christ would appear more detailed and ever more refined.

This diagram, for example, dates from, at the earliest, 1112, and probably a little

latermaybe 1115long after Lambert had had time to ponder the reality of a Christian

Jerusalem. He gives us here the product of those reflections, a distillation of world

history, based on the previously-mentioned Six Ages model. As is readily apparent,

Lambert has divided the circle into six roughly equal semi-circles, each representing an

age of history and each listing the key events and personalities from that age. The

divisions which Lambert uses are conventional. The First Age runs from Adam to Noah

and the Flood; the Second Age from Noah to Abraham and the Hebrew Covenant; the


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Third from Abraham to Davids coronation as King of Jerusalem; the Fourth from David

to the Babylonian Captivity; and the Fifth from the Babylonian Captivity to Christ. You

will also note as well a sort of ribbon running around the various sections, delineating

them, one from the other. Within each part of the ribbon there is a brief statement of how

long the age described beneath it lasted. I have summarized the diagram in the following

outline. [Figure 6]

It is unclear where Lambert found these numbers. The first two are fairly

authoritative, with most early universal histories agreeing on them.6 The sources for the

next three ages are less obvious. Whatever their origin, Lambert treated them as

authoritative throughout theLiber floridus. I have included the note about the sixth

millenniumthat the 6000th year of Creation would have passed, based on the figures

given here, in the year 783 A.D.because Lambert makes a similar statement in the

blanks space just above the diagram, a point to which I shall return,

But, setting aside for the moment the big picture, [Figure 4] what makes the

diagram so unusual and what connects it directly to the First Crusade is its title: The

Ages of the World Until King Godfrey. It is a surprising decision, to stop the summary

of history not with current events (if he were writing in 1112, for example, the year 1111

and the death of Count Robert of Flanders, also known as the Jerusalemite, might have

been a viable point to end on), but rather with an event that was by this time about fifteen

years in the past. To quote the entire summary of the Sixth Age: Augustus, Christ,

apostles, evangelists, martyrs, confessors, virgins. In the year of the Lord 1099, in the

seventh indiction, Duke Godfrey took Jerusalem. The chronological calculation in the

ribbon reads, In the Sixth Age, to the capture of Jerusalem, 1099 years. 7 It raises an


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obvious question: Has the Sixth Age, in fact, ended? Put another way, did the Seventh

Agethe Age which parallels the seventh day of creation, when God rested, the Age

which will usher in the end of human history and begin the eternal rest in heaven of the

saintsdid that Seventh Age begin in 1099 with Godfreys coronation in Jerusalem?

Any twelfth-century reader would have sensed this question, especially if he

turned one page back in the manuscript, where this diagram appears, [Figure 7] labeled,

The Order of the Chief Ruling Kingdoms.8 Again Lambert has divided his circle into

six sections, this time slicing it up like a pie, with a circular spot in the middle labeled

Ages of the World, and with labels for each age running around the circles outer edge.

The First Age he simply calls the time before the flood. The Second was a time of

labor after the flood. With the Third Age, we have the ascendancy of the Assyrian

kings, followed in the Fourth by the Medean kings, the Fifth Age, the Persian kings and

then finally, in the Sixth Age, Roman kings ruled the world. This diagram, in other

words, makes clear what the other one, about Godfrey, implies: that after the first two

ages, each historical era opens with a new dynasty or empire.

And then, by turning forward one page, a reader would see that something similar

had happened at the possible end of the Sixth Age. An entirely new monarchy, a

Christian monarchy, had appeared in 1099, and in Jerusalem no less. Unlike the other

empires, whose authority had gradually shifted to the west, in the direction of the setting

sun, the new kings had returned east, to the very center of the earth. Might the kingdom

of Jerusalem be a new empire? Lambert does not say as much. But Guibert of Nogent,

in his 1108 crusade chronicle, does say so, and in a poem:

This city, often made plunder to kings,


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Had known complete and utter destruction;

O, city, by this blessed conquest,

You deservedly ought to rule.

You should draw to you Christian kingdoms,

And you will see the glories of this world come here

And give thanks to you, as their mother.9

Lamberts diagrams also express this thought: that Godfreys elevation represented an

epochalindeed a millennialmoment in human history: a new empire, and a new era.

The same idea, of the crusade as capstone to human history, appears on the very

first page of theLiber floridus, where we find a breath-taking overview of human events.

Lambert does not begin, as you would expect, with Adam and Eve but, rather, with the

incident that provided structure to St. Augustines City of God: Cain, the first son of

Adam, founded a city, which he called Effrem.10 From there Lambert revisits events

both historical and mythic. To take only a few examples, he notes (without providing

specific years) the invention of music and astronomy, the creation of written language,

the codification of both divine and human law, the construction of the temple at

Jerusalem, Ceasars declaration of empire, the discovery of the True Cross, and the

establishment of the kingdom of the Franks and the county of Flanders. And then, at the

very end of the list, he writes two lines: Godfrey, son of Count Eustace of Boulogne,

conquered Jerusalem in the year of our Lord 1099. Then Robert, the fourteenth count of

Flanders, established Godfrey as King of Jerusalem.11 Thus for Lambert we begin our

pilgrimage at the city built by Cain, as Augustine would have it, the original avatar of the


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City of Man, and he concludes it with the arrival of the Frankish pilgrimage at the usual

earthly representation of the City of God, which is to say Jerusalem.

But there is one troublesome ambiguity about this diagram [Figure 4], seemingly

inconsequential, but ultimately revealing of the direction of Lamberts thought and of his

methods as a historian. We can easily add up the five totals he gives for each age of

history and arrive at the figure of 5217. [Figure 6] He presents this figure directly just a

few pages later on fol. 32v: In the year 5217 of the worlds foundation, Augustus

reigned, Christ was born.12 The anomaly grows out of this total. For at a later date,

Lambert added some additional commentary, using a darker ink and writing in a

somewhat finer, narrower script. [Figure 4] It is a note intended to assure readers that,

first, Lambert puts no credence in the notion of an apocalyptic year 6000, and second,

that the year 6000 has in fact already passed. He writes, alongside an anti-millenarian

thought from Isidore of Seville, We say six ages in place of six millennia, whose end

was reached in the year of the Lord 742.13 Simply put, the numbers are not correct. If

the year 742 A.D. were the six-thousandth year of creation, then the sum of the years

from the first Five Ages of history should be 5258. But, as noted, they are 5217. It may

sound like a minor ambiguity, or an exaggerated problem, but it is one that Lambert

himself confronts directly. If we return to folio 32v, we see that, immediately after

announcing that there were 5217 years until the Incarnation, he has written another very

short chronicle that concludes, The sum of years from Adam to Christ is 5257.

14

The calculation of the worlds age has thus led Lambert to, essentially, two

different totals, separated from one another by somewhere between forty and forty-two

years. This discrepancy does not result from contradictory sources; for while his sources


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(mainly the seventh-century encyclopedist Isidore of Seville and the fifth-century

historian Orosius) do contradict one another, they do not do so in a way that would lead

to this mathematical impasse. The discrepancy also has nothing to do with neuroses

about millennial years. Both 1000 and the various readings ofanno mundi 6000 had long

passed. But if the forty-year miscalculation has nothing to do with the millennium, it has

everything to do with the Apocalypse.

To understand why we must set aside conventional history and turn instead to

prophecy, specifically to theLife of Antichrist, the treatise written around the year 950 by

the cleric Adso of Montier-en-Der at the request of Queen Gerberga, wife of Louis IV of

France and sister to Otto I of Germany, and a text which Lambert includes in the Liber

floridus, though he attributes erroneously to the fourth-century church prophet

Methodius. (About forty manuscript pages before Adsos treatise, Lambert also inserted

a picture of Antichrist himself, riding a dragon. [Figure 8]. He places it, curiously, in

the midst of a copy of Isidore of Sevilles bestiary, the study of the natural world leading

directly, apparently, to thoughts of its destruction.) The background of Adsos treatise is

fairly well-known. Gerberga seems to have been worried, both about the political turmoil

in the late Carolingian court and about the rapidly approaching millennium; and she

wished to learn from Adso as much as possible about the figure of Antichrist. In

response Adso wrote a short and remarkably successful book, surviving in around one-

hundred-seventy manuscripts. Later scribes would alter its contents freely, but its core

message remained consistent: that Antichrist would not appear as long as the Frankish

monarchy survived.


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To be precise, Antichrist would not appear as long as the power of the Roman

Empire endured in the West, whose authority, according to Adso, lingered in the

government of the Franks. The model rests, fundamentally, on the Biblical book of

Daniel, where King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon dreamed of a great statue, composed of

four different types of metal. The head was of gold, the chest and arms of silver, the

stomach and thighs of bronze, and the legs of iron. The statues feet were partly of iron

and partly of clay. As Nebuchadnezzar watched, a stone not cut by human hands struck

the statues vulnerable and unsteady feet, bringing the entire monstrous figure crashing to

the ground. Only the prophet Daniel could explain the dream, a representation of what

will happen in the Last Days.15 The golden head was Nebuchadnezzar himself, the most

splendid ruler the world had seen. The remaining metals were successor states, of silver,

bronze, and iron. Each state, like each metal, was inferior in beauty to the one that had

preceded it, but the last kingdom, like iron, would be strong and able to crush all in its

path. But even this seemingly indestructible kingdom would grow divided, as

symbolized by its clay and iron feet; and God himself would strike it down and replace it

with his own empire, never to end.

What interpreters of Daniel, particularly St. Jerome, drew from Nebuchadnezzars

dream was a fourfold model of history, as intriguing to Christian thinkers as the sixfold

model based on the days of creation and the six millennia. Indeed, we have already seen

Lambert attempt to combine these two programs in his circular diagram illustrating the

Orders of Kingdoms, [Figure 7] where the last four ages history bore the names of four

separate dynasties.16 Mixing Jerome and Daniel, the golden head would be the Assyrians;

the silver, the Medeans; the bronze, the Persians; and the Iron, Rome, whose weak-footed


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demise Jerome believed himself to be living through in the fourth century.17 Adso thought

the same thing in the tenth, and Lambert conjectured that his own twelfth-century

worldwith Salian imperial claimants at war against Roman popeshad stumbled still

further from the old imperial grandeur.

And so for Lambert the signs had begun to coalesce around the Crusade. As the

authority of the Roman Empire wanedor perhaps it had disappeared altogether by

1099a Frankish monarch, according to Adso the greatest and the last of all the

kings,18 would travel to the East and engage in combat around Jerusalem. If one follows

the earlier prophecies of Pseudo-Methodius, which Lambert would insert much later into

the compilation of theLiber floridus19the king of the Last Days would defeat Gog and

Magog, for centuries locked away by Alexander the Great, the prisons location carefully

marked on Lamberts world map,20 [Figure 2d] and then reign in Jerusalem for seven

years. The figure of Godfrey, who had defeated Turkish invaders and the kingdom of

New Babylon, would have seemed unusually appropriate for this prophecy. While not

himself a Frankish king, his claims to Carolingian ancestry were well-known, giving him

as strong an argument as any ruler to the mantle of Roman legitimacy.

But there are two obvious objections to viewing Godfrey as king of the Last Days.

First, according to both tradition and accepted history, Godfrey never accepted the office

of King of Jerusalem, but preferred instead to be known by the more modest title,

Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre. Setting aside the veracity of this story (and I do have

doubts about it), we need only observe that Lambert never acknowledges it. Godfrey was

for him, as our initial diagram boldly pronounces, King. The other objection is that,

according to Adso, the Emperor would arrive at Jerusalem and lay down his crown on the


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Mount of Olives. Godfrey, by contrast, received royal authority only upon reaching

Jerusalem. But as noted, theLiber floridus makes fundamental changes to Adsos

prophecy. We dont know if Lambert was responsible for the editorial work, or if he had

simply inherited a new tradition, but according to his version of the text, after the ruler

has successfully governed his realm, he will finally come to Jerusalem and on the Mount

Olives will receive a scepter and a crown and rule of the Christians.21 The king will not

give up his crown in Jerusalem. Instead he will accept a crown and prepare for battle.

Did Lambert believe this king of the Last Days to be a crusader king, a

descendant of Godfrey? Almost certainly he did. He at least saw the prophecy and the

story of the crusade as directly connected, since he placed them one after the other in his

book, the abbreviated version of Fulcher of Chartres following directly upon AdsosLife

of Antichrist, the latter finishing on the recto side of folio 110 and the former beginning

on the verso.

Unexpectedly, this model of historical-prophetic thought also provides the

explanation for the forty-one year discrepancy which we noted earlier in connection with

Lamberts diagram of world history. Why did Lambert, in effect, decide to make the first

five Ages of history 41 years longer, laboriously demonstrating in the diagram that they

contained 5217 years, and then arguing in a later marginal note that they necessarily

contained 5258? The answer is that he did not change the duration of any of the first five

ages. Rather, he added 41 years to the Sixth Age. At some point, he made a deliberate

decision to begin the Sixth Age not with the birth of Christ but with the rise of Augustus.

He illustrates this concept in spectacular fashion. For in yet another of his summaries of

world historythis one occupying folios 136v-139r between the summaries of the


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Fifth and the Sixth Ages of history, Lambert has placed this famous diagram of the

emperor Augustus, [Figure 9] seated on a throne and literally holding the world in his

hand.22 Lambert has surrounded the emperor with a passage from the gospel, An edict

went forth from Caesar Augustus that the whole world should be registered. The verse

refers to the census which led to Christs birth in Bethlehemfrom a Christian

perspective the pivotal event of Augustuss reign. Below, written across the lower frame,

are the words, On eight ides January he closed the doors of Janus.23 As Lambert would

have known from Orosius, the doors of the Temple of Janus in Rome were closed only

during times of peace, which, in the Ancient World almost never happened. For

Augustus to close the doors therefore, on January 4, so near to the time of Christs birth,

and to do so at the apogee of Romes conquests, was to proclaim a worldwide peace. The

turbulence of the civil wars came to an end and was Christ born, a point which Orosius

draws explicitly: And so at that time, that is to say the year in which Caesar by the

mandate of God established peace securely and truly, Christ was born, whose arrival that

peace did serve.24 Augustus reigned, Lambert would have learned from Isidore and

others, fifty-six years. But Christ did not choose to appear until the forty-second year of

his rule. After forty-one years, Christ sanctioned the Augustinian Peace.

It was not an entirely anodyne concept, to link the Sixth Age of history so directly

to a political figure rather than to Christ; and Lambert himself was probably never

comfortable with it. In a way more fundamental than millenarianism it contradicted the

intent of Augustinian historiography, which sought to separate the destiny of Rome from

the story of mans salvation. Perhaps for this reason more than any other Lambert keeps

circling back to the topic of chronology and to summaries of world history. But he was


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not alone in his embrace of this model. Regardless of what Isidore of Seville himself

may have believed about when to begin the Sixth Age (if he thought about it at all: some

of the earliest manuscripts of his Chronicon do not even mention the Ages of History), a

plurality of the surviving manuscripts put the dividing line at Augustus rather than with

Christ. Some place the transition slightly earlier still, with Julius Caesar, since it is with

Caesar that the Roman Empire proper begins. It is exactly the sort of thinking that

underlies Lamberts Order of Kingdoms diagram which we noted earlier. [Figure 7]

What characterizes particular ages is not just biblical personalities but rather the

conjunctions between Scriptural events and the movements of World Empire. And it is a

model that Scripture embraces through the vision of Nebuchadnezzar, where each part of

the golden, silver, bronze, and iron statue embodies a new world empire.

And, finally, it is out of this stew of ideas that Lambert concocts his grandest and

most original statement of world history, combining his thought on chronology with

Scripture, history, and current events, all coming together to inspire this arresting and

even dazzling image. [Figure 5] What we are seeing is an illustration inspired by the

book of Daniel, combining the two dreams of Nebuchadnezzar. The first dream, the

dream of the statue, we have already discussed. The crowned, bearded, standing figure,

wrinkled with age, is that statue. The youthful sleeper is Nebuchadnezzar. Growing out

of the young kings groinbizarrely mimicking the iconography of the Root of

Jesseis a tree, the subject of the kings second dream. In that vision, a heavenly

watchman (here a Christ figure with unsheathed sword in the upper right-hand corner)

ordered the tree, a symbol of pride, to be cut down, leaving only a stump surrounded by

an iron ring. Thus, for a time, Nebuchadnezzars rule would be brought to an end. In a


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werewith three words running just above the handle, Fourth Age, Iron. Bending

chronology back on itself, the statue will, with its iron axe, strike down the tree and bring

an end to the golden era of Nebuchadnezzar, paradoxically both the first kingdom and the

ruler of the Fourth Age. Lambert, however, is not overtly interested in Medeans and

Persians. Rather, as he writes on the right-hand side of the page, just below the trees

lowest branches, At one and the same time Babylon fell, and Rome rose, in the year

before the coming of the Lord 752.27 What we are seeing, then, is the moment when

Rome replaced Babylon on the historical stage. That is why Lambert needed to label the

Fourth Age, and the axe, as ironbecause he would have known from Jerome that the

Romans, and the Franks after them, were the people of iron. But to get to this point he

has had to reconfigure the composition of the statue, and in doing so he has changed both

Jerome and the Bible.

And the picture is not just about the Fourth Age. It also is showing us the Sixth,

thus connecting the statue, the tree, and Nebuchadnezzar himself all to the First Crusade.

The clue which leads to this interpretation appears in the upper right-hand corner. There

Lambert has written an entirely new scheme for calculating the chronology of history.

Setting aside the six ages and the four kingdoms, he adopts a three-tiered model: From

Adam to the founding of Old Babylon, which is in Persia, 3342 years. It survived 1164

years, and then Rome began. From there, it was 752 years to Christ. That is 5258

years.

28

[Figure 10] These numbers are not entirely new, and we can be fairly precise as

to how Lambert arrived at them. He is, again, trying to reconcile two chronological

systemsthe loosely Isidorean system he had created in his earlier diagram and the

chronology developed by Orosius in his Seven Books of History Against the Pagans,


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written at the request of St. Augustine. Like Isidore and like Lambert, Orosius was

interested in problems of chronology and calculated most events according the founding

of Rome. Two of the numbers Lambert uses in this diagram, 1164 and 752, come straight

from Orosius. The first figure he presents near the beginning of the second book in his

History, saying that the Medeans plundered Babylon of its riches it deprived it of its king,

after it had stood for 1164 years.29 Only a few lines earlier he had observed, of Babylon

and Rome, And so in one and the same concordance of time, the one fell and the other

rose . . . Empire died in the East, and Empire was born in the West.30 Later, neatly

dividing books six and seven, Orosius notes first that in the year 752 after the founding of

the city, the Emperor Augustus closed the doors of the temple of Janus, and then in the

next chapter, that Christ was born that same year.31

The number 3342 is Lamberts own; for Orosius is quite blunt in stating that there

were 3184 years between the creation of the world and the foundation of Babylon. In

order to obtain this new number, 3342, therefore, Lambert did not engage in further

historical research. Rather, he simply did this equation posted behind me in reverse. He

started with 5258, the total number of years between Creation and Christ, and subtracted

from it the other two quantities that he had learned from Orosius (the number of years

that Babylon had existed and the number of years between the founding of Rome and the

birth of Christ), leaving him now with the first two Ages lasting 3342 years. 32

Upon close inspection, therefore, Lamberts new calculus is nonsense, but it

accomplished what he had wanted. First, it had enabled him to reconcile his two favorite

sources for chronology, Isidore and Orosius. But in doing so, Lambert had created an

entirely new system for interpreting history. On top of the six ages and the four


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kingdoms he had imposed a threefold model: the time before kings, the time of Babylon,

and the time of Rome, which would end with the advent of Antichrist. What Lambert

was specifically showing in his diagram of Nebuchadnezzar [Figure 5] was the moment

of transition between the second and the third stage, from Babylon to Rome. But

prophets are never so myopic as to reveal only one specific incident. The present and the

future do not simply reiterate the past; they are inseparable from it and they move with it.

As I mentioned, according to the Bible, Daniel told Nebuchadnezzar that, in the dream of

the statue, he was not seeing his own personal last days but rather everyones Last Days.

So the statue and this illustration do not just tell us about the fate of a sleeping

Babylonian king. It depicts the fall of Rome, toothe end of the second stage of history,

Babylon, and the end of the third stage of history, Rome, in perfect harmony. Again,

Lambert enables us to see this interpretation in one of the short texts inserted into the

picture, this one just above the axe and just below one of the tree branches: Babylon the

Great has fallen, she with whom the kings of the earth have fornicated!33 It is a

condensation of Revelation 18:2-3, and it is a scene that would have been depicted in the

illustrated Apocalypse which Lambert had once placed at the beginning of his chronicle.

The cycle illustrations has long since disappeared from the original copy of theLiber

floridus, but about two-thirds of it survives, fortunately, in the twelfth-century copy

preserved in the library at Wolfenbttel. [Figure 11] We have in it a depiction of

Revelation 11, which in the similarly complicated and interlocking temporal schemes of

that book, describes for the first time the fall of Babylon and the resurrection of the dead;

and the picture shows us not just the collapse of the city, but also Christ in Majesty,

presiding over newly resurrected souls. With sword in right hand, seated upon his throne,


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Christ bears an obvious resemblance to the holy watchman on the Nebuchadnezzar

page.34 In Lamberts final prophetic vision, Christ the watchman provides over the

simultaneous fall of two incarnations of the City of Man, separate events which are, on an

eschatological level, fundamentally the same: they are the two points, which are a single

moment, around which Lambert finally organizes his history.

The picture [Figure 5] and the event are also, necessarily, the fall of

Nebuchadnezzar and the fall of Antichrist. The young beardless king Lambert has

depicted here as the ruler of Babylon does indeed bear a noticeable similarity to the

enthroned Antichrist he had drawn earlier into his book. [Figure 8] They are both

beardless, youthful men who wear similarly shaped crowns.35 And if the sleeping figure

is Nebuchadnezzar and Antichrist, Rome and Babylon, who is the standing figure, the

statue and the axman? [Figure 5] As a symbol for kingship, it is Rome, the power that

shall replace Babylon. It is perhaps also Cyrus, the Persian king who effectively brought

Babylonian rule to an end. It may be an aging world,Mundus in the last throes of life.

Or it might be, as the art historian Penelope Mayo has suggested, a crusader king.

For it is safe to say that this diagram put Lambert in mind of his original

interpretation of Godfrey and the crusades. With mathematical precision, the calculus of

the worlds age on this page overlaps perfectly with the later revisions Lambert made to

his diagram, The Ages of the World Until King Godfrey, with which we began this

inquiry. Originally facing this page, moreover, would have been a diagram making this

connection more obvious still: The Six Ages of the World Compared to Days.36 These

pages, again, are missing, but once more we are indebted to the Wolfenbttel manuscript,

which preserves them, out of place, but nonetheless in tact.37 [Figure 12] The page


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contains two circles, the top with an old man in its center, the bottom one with a young

man. The parallel sections of the two circles here describe briefly the ages of history, the

ages of man, and the days of creation. The lower circle also associates each section with

one of the metals from the Dream of Nebuchadnezzar.38 In other words, all of the major

symbolic elements from Lamberts prophetic system and historical theories come into

play here.

But, as always with Lambert, there are differences and tensions. For in the Six

Ages Compared to Days chart, he ends the Fifth Age not with Augustus but more

conventionally with Christ; and he observes that the world had passed, at that point, 5217

years (to be precise, he observes 5216 + 1). That is the total we reached earlier, when

adding up all of the ages on the chart about Godfrey. It leaves 783 years until the six-

thousandth year of human history, not 742 as Lambert has written into the margins on fo.

20v. It was perhaps at this point, as he tried to reconcile all of the visions into one, that

he realized he ought to add another 41 years to the sum total of Gods creation, in order

to start the Sixth Age with Augustus, as most of the manuscripts of Isidore dictated.

Whatever the case, he kept working with these sums. One of the last pages in theLiber

floridus, fol. 257v, he sketches out no fewer than six different methods for calculating the

worlds age. In the first model he reaches the original sum of 5217. In four of the last

five, he settled upon variations of 5258, clearly, in the end, his preferred total.

Stated more simply, Lambert never stopped thinking about Jerusalem or its kings

and what they were telling him about the course of world history. By the latter stages of

his book, he had decided, in general and against Augustinian dictates, that secular rulers

were crucial to salvation history. And in one of his final and most powerful images, he


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showed how earthly kings, and perhaps the Last Frankish King, acting as the agent of

Christ, would strike down Antichrist and usher in the Last Judgment. By the time

Lambert created these various diagrams, Godfrey had been dead nearly twenty years. His

role, however, might as easily fall to his successors, ruling the world from Jerusalem, the

center of human history, and the center of the earth, too. Most apocalyptic movements

end with a sudden rupture between expectations and reality, and with the inevitable onset

of disillusionment and disappointment, but not the First Crusade. It was an apocalypse

that succeeded, its godless enemies vanquished in a river of their own blood. And for at

least two decades an observer as talented and well-read as Lambert of Saint-Omer could

imagine himself living not beneath the weight of endlessly postponed eschatological

expectations but rather as a man walking amidst an apocalyptic reality, its wonders

ceaselessly unfolding as rapidly as he could draw them into his book.

1

de celesti prato; Lambert,Liber floridus, fol. 3v, p. 8.2 Lambert of St. Omer,Liber Floridus: Codex Autographus Bibliotheca UniversitatisGandavensis, ed. by A. Derolez and I. Strubbe (Ghent: E. Story-Scientia, 1968); AlbertDerolez,Lambertus qui librum fecit, een codicologische Studie van de Liber Floridus-

autograaf. Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen Letteren

en Schone Kunsten van Belgie 89 (Brussels: Paleis der Academin, 1978); and Derolez,The Autograph Manuscript of the Liber Floridus: a Key to the Encyclopedia of Lambert

of Saint-Omer, Corpus Christianorum Autographa Medii Aeui 4 (Turnhout: Brepols,

1998)among others. The scholarship interlocks to such a degree that it is helpful as

well to keep on-hand and open a copy of Leopold Delisle, Notice sur les manuscrits duLiber Floridus de Lambert, chanoine de Saint-Omer,Notices et extraits des manuscrits

de la Bibliothque Nationale et autres bibliothques 38 (1906): 577-791.3 In connection with this papers topic: Penelope C. Mayo, The Crusaders under thePalm: Allegorical Plants and Cosmic Kingship in theLiber Floridus,Dumbarton Oaks

Papers 27 (1973): 31-67; and Daniel Verhhelst, Les textes eschatologiques dans le Liberfloridus, in Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, ed. by Werner Verbeke,Daniel Verhelst, and Andries Welkenhuysen. Louvain: Leuven, 1988, 299-305. Both

essays make important points echoed in my own arguments, though the latter was too


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focused on texts and the former on a particular type of image (trees) to describe with

precision the architecture of Lamberts apocalyptic worldview.4

Usually attributed to Bartolph de Nangis: Gesta Francorum Iherusalem expugnantium,

inRHCOc. 3, pp. 491-543.5

BNF lat. 8865.6 One can find four of the five figuresfor the First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth agesin

an anonymous continuation of the chronicle of Fredegar, printed inPL 71, cols. 675-698,specifically at col 676. The demarcation points for the Fourth and Fifth Ages, however,

do not quite match up. The period between Solomon and the rebuilding of the Temple is

512 years; and between the rebuilding of the temple to the coming of Christ is 548 years.The continuation divides the Third Age into two halves: from Abraham to Moses, 505

years, and from Moses to Solomon 489 years (yielding a total of 994 years, instead of

Lamberts 973). Many of these figures would appear to go back to the Latin Eusebius,printed inPL 27, esp. cols. 57-60. Col. 59 sets 548 as the number of years between the

restoration of the temple and the preaching of Christ. It is possible that Lambert was

working form memory and a set of incomplete notes to arrive at precisely this set ofnumbers, which subsequently became authoritative.7

The Latin reads, Octavianus, Christus, apostoli, evangeliste, martyres, confessores,

virgines. In hoc anno Domini MXCIX Godefridus dux cepit Hierusalem indictione VII,

and, VI etas usque ad captam Hierusalem annos MXCIX.8

Ordo regnorum principaliter regnantium; Lambert,Liber Floridus, fol. 19v, p. 40.

9Urbs ista, sepe preda facta regibus,/pessum dabatur obruenda funditus;/hac o beata

captione civitas,/hinc promerens ut imperare debeas/ad teque regna christiana contrahas,videbis orbis huc venire glorias/tibique matris exhibere gratias; Guibert,Dei gesta, 7,

14, pp. 289-90.10

Caim filius Adam primus civitatem primam quam Effrem vocavit. condidit;

Lambert,Liber floridus, fol. 1v, p.4. In fact, Cain calls the city Enoch or Henoch inGen. 4:17. Lambert draws the name here from Pseudo Methodius, as recorded in the

Liber floridus, fol. 217r, p. 433.11

Godefriuds filius Eustachii comitis. Bolonie anno domini m xc iiii: Ihlm cepit;Rotbertus quartus x comes Flandrie. Godefridum Hierosolimis tunc regem constituit.

Lambert,Liber floridus, fol. 1v, p. 4.12

Anno orbis conditi V CCXVII Octavianus regnavit, Christus natus est; Lambert,Liber floridus, fol. 32v, p. 66.13

The Latin reads, Sex etates pro sex milibus dicuntur. finem facientes in anno domini

dccxlii; Isidorus dicit.14

Summa annorum ab Adam usque ad Christum V CC LVII; Lambert, Liber floridus,32v, p. 66. Though it is apparent he has revised this section in order to reach this desired

sum. The final numerals in the total, LVII, have been written over an erasure, and two

of the other numbers have ben tampered with as well. It raises the possibility thatoriginally there was no discrepancy here. At the very least, if there were a discrepancy,

Lambert, upon further reflection, decided that he needed to correct it so that it was the

right discrepancy. This chart is also curious in that it ends the fourth age with Brutus, thefirst Roman consul, 87 years after the Babylonian captivity (the number 87 is one of the


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numbers to have been revised). This is not an argument Lambert would choose to

advance again.15

quae ventura sunt in novissimis temporribus; Dan. 2:28. The statue is described at

2:31-35, with Daniels interpretation at 2:37-44. See Floris discussion of Daniel in

LIslam, pp. 20-27.16 The diagram on fol. 19v, described above, n. **.

17Jerome Commentariorum in Danielem, CCSL 75a (Turnhout: Brepols, 1964), 1,2,31-

35, pp. 793-95. Like most modern historians, Jerome sensed the imminent fall of Rome in

the civil wars and foreign invasions of the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Adso

speaks in passing of this model when he speaks of the Romans as being clearly strongerthan either the Greeks or the Persians;De ortu, p. 25-26.18

ipse erit maximus et omnium regum ultimus; Adso,De Antichristo, CCCM 45, ed.

Daniel Verhelst, p. 26.19

Though he had the text to hand much earlier: the passages surrounding the figure of

Antichrist are based on theRevelations of Pseudo-Methodius and not on Adso.20

Lambert,Liber floridus, fols. 92v-93r, pp. 190-91.21 Qui, postquam regnum feliciter gubernavit, ad ultimum Hierosolimam ueniet et in

monte Oliueti sceptrum et coronam christianorumque obtinebit imperium; printed in

Verhelsts edition ofDe Antichristo, p. 149. Also,Liber floridus, fol. 109v, p. 222.22

Lambert,Liber floridus, fol. 138v, p. 280. Derolez suggests, convincingly but nodefinitively, that Lambert originally intended to place the illustration elsewhere in the

book. The suggestion would have no impact on the substance of the current argument;

Derolez,Autograph manuscript, pp. 125-26 and 141-42.23

Exiit edictum a Cesare Augusto ut describeretur universus orbis, and viii idus

ianuarii clausit portas Iani.24

Igitur eo tempore, id est eo anno quo firmissimam verissimamque pacem ordinatione

Dei Caesar composuit, natus est Christus, cujus adventui pax ista famulata est; Orosius,Historiae adversum paganos,PL 31, col. 1058B. Orosius had just spoken of the closing

of the temple doors in the previous lines; saying that it was only the third time that they

had been locked, and that under Augustus they stayed locked for twelve years. Hementioned this theme for the first time in his introduction: ad Caesarem Augustum, id

est, usque ad Nativatatem Christi, quae fuit anno imperii Caesaris quadragesimo secundo,

cum, facta pace cum Parthis, Jani portae clausae sunt, et bella toto orbe cessarunt : toCaesar Augustus, that is, to the Birth of Christ, which was the forty-second year of the

rule of Caesar, when, having made peace with the Parthians, the doors of Janus were

closed, and wars throughout the world ceased; col. 669.25

The two quoted passages read, in Latin, Etas. I. aurea. ab Adam usque ad Noe; andMundus in prima etate habens caput aureum.26 interpretauit Daniel propheta dum esset in transmirgratione Babylonis, e statua et

arbore in fine quarte etatis mundi;Liber floridus, fol. 232v, p. 464.

27Uno eodemque tempore Babylon cecidit et Roma surrexit. anno ante adventum

Christo DCCLII;Liber floridus, fol. 232v, p. 464.

28Ab Adam usque ad conditionem Babylonie veteris que est III. et ccc. xlii. Mansitque

annis M C LXIIII. tunc. Rome incepta est. Inde ad Christum DCC LII. Hoc sunt V C.

LVIII;Liber floridus, fol. 232v, p. 464.


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29Orosius,Libri Septem, 2, 3, col. 747B.

30Siquidem sub una eademque convenientia temporum illa cecidit, ista surrexit: illa tunc

primum alienigenarum perpessa dominatum, haec tum primum etiam suorum aspernata

fastidium: illa tunc quasi moriens, dimisit haereditatem: haec vero pubescens, tunc se

agnovit haeredem: tunc Orientis occidit, et ortum est Occidentis imperium; Orosius,Libri Septem, 2, 2, 747A.31

Orosius,Libri Septem, 6, 22, col. 1057C, and 7, 1, col. 1059B.32

Orosius also observes that from the time of Ninus and Abraham to the birth of Christ

was 2,015 years:Libri Septem, col. 669B.33

Cecidit Babilon illa magna cum qua fornicati sunt reges terre;Liber floridus, fol.232

v, p. 464.

34Wolf. Cod. Guelf. 1 Gud. Lat., fol. 14

r.

35Liber floridus, fol. 62

v, p. 126.

36CLXIII De mundi etatibus sex comparati diebus;Liber floridus, fol. 5

r, p. 11. The

diagram of the dream of Nebuchadnezzar is clearly labeled 162.37

Wolf. Cod. Guelf. 1 Gud. Lat., fol. 31

r

. I say almost miraculously because the lastthird of the Wolfenbttel manuscript is missing. According to its table of contents, thisdiagram was supposed in that section, but for some reason it has been moved to an earlier

point in the chronicle, next to the drawing of the palm tree discussed in the previous

chapter, and to a drawing of a lily, which I have not discussed here but to which Mayodevotes much analysis in her article.***38

Though in fact either this scribe or else Lambert, has altered the six metals. They are

here gold, silver, bronze (ereum), copper (aeneum), iron, and mud. It is possible that thecopyist found objectionable Lamberts revision of the Bible and tried to restore to this

page something approaching spiritual accuracy. We cannot say for certain because,

unfortunately, the Wolfenbttel manuscript does not preserve a copy of the

Nebuchadnezzar page.

rubenstein+-+lambert+_sorbonne_ (2)

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