Tite Year looo 431 such a catastrophe, then quotes from Gerbert a rhetorical allusion to the impending days of Antichrist and from Thietmar and Ra- dulf Glaber such testimony to the corruption of the times as could well make it believable. For what is found in a work of such authority one does not too closely scan the proofs. Thus set afloat, the story was sure to spread ; and like all good stories, it grew. In 1633 Le Vasseur, in his annals of the church of Noyon, enriched it with the statement, which he thought he drew from Radulf Glaber — the familiar pass- age about the earth's " covering herself with a white robe of churches" — that the world's escape from the terrors of the year 1000 was the occasion of a great burst of church-building. Thus enriched, it passed into the great Benedictine works of the eighteenth century — the annals of Mabillon, the dictionary of Calmet, the His- toirc Litterairc de la France — and into many another standard work of learning. If here and there a scholar like Fleury, Muratori, Voltaire, Gibbon, gave it no mention, the silence passed unnoticed. But it was the Scotchman Robertson who made it a common- place of histor}'. In that luminous Viciv of the Progress of Society in Europe during the Middle Ages which in 1769 he prefaced to his History of Charles the Fifth, and which, translated into all European tongues, remained for a century the favorite survey of medieval civilization, he not only emphasized the panic, bringing it into direct connection with the Crusades, but gave it a more scientific standing by citing in its support, besides Abbo, three medieval chronicles — those of St. Pantaleon and Godellus and the " Annalista Saxo." It remained only, in our own century, for that inspired Frenchman, Jules Michelet, to reveal its worth to literature at large. It is the keynote of that majestic prose dirge upon the misery of France un- der the early Capetians with which, in 1833, he began this period of his great history. And he lends it vividness by working into his narrative, after his fashion, not only from the chronicles, but from the Councils and from the preambles of charters,' what seem corroborative extracts. Poet, novelist, dramatist, have since made the most of it." Even the German historian-poet, Felix Dahn, was beguiled into devoting to it a cycle of lyrics ; and the Italian poet-historian Carducci has depicted it in a prose poem more melodious than verse. Yet protesting voices began to be raised. In 1840 the Italian jurist Francesco Forti doubted that the panic could have been gen- ' These, indeed, Michaud, the historian of the Crusades, had used before him. « A long list, though by no means an exhaustive one, is given by Orsi, in his mono- graph later to be mentioned.
