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Sofia 2013

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Issue 5

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CAS Working Paper Series No. 5/2013

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Copyright © 2013 by the CAS contributors/CAS Copyright remains with the individual authors/CAS. This publication may be distributed to other individuals for non-commercial use, provided that the text and this note remain intact. This publication may not be reprinted or redistrib-uted for commercial use without prior written permission from the author and CAS. If you have any questions about permissions, please, write to [email protected]. Preferred Citation: Stepanov, Tsvetelin, Invading in/from the ‘Holy Land’: Apoca-lyptic Metatext(s) and Sacred and/or Imagined Geography, 950–1200. CAS Work-ing Paper Series No. 5/2013: Sofia 2013. Advanced Academia programme, a project

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The following publication presents part of the author’s research carried out under the Advanced Academia Programme of the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia.This programme is supported by the America for Bulgaria Foundation, Stifterverband für die Deutsche

Wissenschaft and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.

TsveTelin sTepanov

invading in/from The ‘Holy land’: apocalypTic meTaTexT(s) and sacred and/or imagined geography, 950–1200

Ideas about the ‘Holy Land’ (among so many titles on this issue, see Magdalino 2003, 233–270; Magdalino 2005, 41–53; Patlagean 1998, 112–126; Данилевский 1999, 134–150), the ‘Second Coming’ of Christ and the Year 1000 (see, for instance, McGinn 1979; Landes 2000, 97–145; Fried 2003, 17–63; Verhelst 2003, 81–92; Cal-lahan 2003, 181–204; Barthélemy 1999; Carozzi 1999; Magdalino 2003, 233–270; Шиваров 2002, 291–304; Моллов 1997), the Crusades (the literature on the topic is innumerable; amongst the latest works see, Rubenstein 2011; ), etc., are well known and also well studied. The same could be said of the relevant texts (chroni-cles, historical apocalyptic texts, etc.) and the symbols found there (e.g., the ‘four Kingdoms’, the ‘four beasts’, the ‘Gog and Magog’ people, etc.; for details see Alex-ander 1985, 185–192; Тъпкова-Заимова, Милтенова 1996, 45–64, 89–93, 101–106; Tăpkova-Zaimova 2003, 231–239; Тъпкова-Заимова 2004, 460–474). There, such notions appeared during the Christian Middle Ages and some of them are connected to phenomena such as ‘pilgrims’, ‘saints’, ‘relics’, etc. (amongst the lat-est studies see, Treasures of Heaven 2010; Saints and their Lives 2010; Promoting the Saints 2011). It is also known that around the mid-10th century, ideas about the Messiah’s coming were to be seen not only in the Christian societies in Eu-rope (with the approaching Year 1000), but also amongst some Jewish literati from the Cordoba caliphate and the Khazarian elite as well (Hasdai b. Shafrut and the Khazar king Joseph, respectively) (see Коковцов 1932; Рашковский 2011, Ch. 3).

The connection between death and apocalypse in the Western Middle Ages has recently been thoroughly presented as well (Bynum and Freedman 2000). And last but not least, it is also well known that the roots of all these questions connected to Apocalypse and Eschatology are to be found in the Old and the New Testament, mainly in the Books of Daniel and Isaiah as well as those of St. Matthew the Apostle (Matt. 24), St. Paul the Apostle (2 Thess. 7–8), and the Apocalypse of St. John the Apostle (Rev. 20).

During the Middle Ages, Alexander the Great’s ‘space’ was viewed, in both Chris-tian and Muslim worlds, as a meta-space with trans-cultural and trans-chronologi-cal characteristics (after Sharif Shukurov, 1999, 33–61), i.e. the space of the civiliza-

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tion par excellence. The civilization was viewed as protected by a barrier, gate, or (iron) wall from the ‘other’ world (on the barrier/wall/gate see, van Donzel, Schmidt 2010, 53–54), i.e. that of the so-called ‘unclean people’ of the steppe (named in the Old Testament “Gog and Magog”). So, for the three monotheistic religions this space and civilization, respectively, formed a meta-space delineating ‘usness’ from ‘otherness’ by (clear, but not always clear enough) frontiers and/or barriers.

In the centuries known as Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, several natural ‘signs’ (on the earth’s surface) were used to mark a ‘frontier’, e.g. rivers, seas, moun-tains, etc. Let us mention here only one exemplum taken from a Byzantine author, Michael Psellos (11th century): “Ravines, mountains, and rivers formed the natural frontiers, reinforced by towns and fortresses constructed by men” (Michaellis Pselli 1941, 239). Of course, this was a view typical for the classical Antique tradition. However (and regardless of the real frontier situation), it was later shared by many of the literati in Byzantium and the Christian world as a whole. In addition, during Late Antiquity, another view regarding the boundaries existed. Themistios wrote in his “On the peace of Valens”: “What divides the Scythians and the Romans is not a river, nor a swamp, nor a wall…but fear…” (Themistii 1965, 210–211 (10. 38), quoted after Mattern 1999, 115). Thus terms such as ‘Holy Land’, ‘Second Coming’, ‘fear of the invaders’ and alike indeed have a common literary (rhetoric) base and, probably, common (historical and “mental”?) roots.

At the same time, and with all this in mind, the aim of this article is to pose another and, as it seems to me, very important question, namely that of the connection between the understanding of one’s ‘own’ ‘Holy Land’ (viewed by the Christians as ‘New Israel[s]’) and the geographic locations of the invaders “Gog and Magog”, who, according to some paradigmatic texts from the Old Testament and other sources, had to attack these (e.g., “New Israel”) polities in the Last Time, before the Second Coming of Christ, on the one hand, and the topos (e.g., the original) ‘Holy Land’ in the Near East, on the other.

The well-known dictum of St Peter the Apostle (1 Pet. 2: 9–10), namely “But you are a chosen people, (ital. mine, Ts. S.), a royal priesthood, a holy nation (ital. mine, Ts. S.), a people of His own…. You once were not a people, but now you are God’s people” (ital. mine, Ts. S.) was directed to the Early Christian communities. In the Early Middle Ages, and with the processes of far-reaching Christianization of the so-called ‘new peoples’ in Europe, e.g. Franks, Anglo-Saxons, Irish people etc., this dictum was taken quite seriously by the new converts, who started thinking of themselves as the ‘new elects’, the ‘new people of God’. Thus they appropriated a new Christian identity and – especially in the Frankish case – even a new mission, i.e. to disseminate the new doctrine ‘in the name of God’ among the pagan peo-ples. It was typical, for instance, for the early years of the Carolingians (Garrison 2000, 114–161). It can also be seen later, for instance in the Bulgaria of Symeon (893–927), when the Bulgarian ruler presented himself as a ‘new Moses’ and a ‘new David’, and his people as the new ‘chosen people’ of the Western part of the Chris-

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tian oecoumene (the so-called Dysis), leaving for the Eastern Romans (Byzantines) the Eastern part of it, the so-called Anatole (for more on these see, Shepard 1991, 9–48; Shepard 2003, 339–358; Рашев 2007, 9–31, 60–72, 97–104; Николов 2000, 135–145; Николов 2006; Степанов S. a., 122–129; Степанов 2007, 197–204; Вачкова 2005). In my opinion, all these issues can be perceived through the prism of the real and/or imagined geography of both the Christian ‘New Israel(s)’ and the invading peoples.

Who were all those invaders in reality? Were they pagans and polytheists stricto sensu, ‘labeled’ after the Holy Bible as the people of “Gog and Magog”? Were the invaders in this ‘Holy Land’, regardless of the written texts and contexts, always presented as following the archetypical direction of the approaching ‘punishment’ mentioned in the Bible (i.e., North – see Genesis 10:2), or not? These are very im-portant questions since they directly connect to the notion of the real sacred (or imagined?) geography of the ‘chosen people’ and its ‘Holy Land’ (amongst the latest books on the ‘chosen peoples’ see Smith 2003).

Furthermore, there is one more question that could be raised as to the spread of this phenomenon, namely invading in/from the ‘Holy Land’: Was it typical only for the Christian polities, or was it also spread among Muslims, in particular in Volga Bulgaria between the 950s and 1230s? If so, what notions stood behind it? Was it the common heritage of Alexander the Great, an ‘ideal ruler’ for both Christians and Muslims during the Middle Ages, who was believed to have established some of the towns in Volga Bulgaria?

From the above, it becomes clear that one of the aims of this article is to explore areas that so far have not been clarified enough. Another aim is to find out in these different sources, which come from different European areas, the archetypi-cal markers for ‘our’ Holy Land, for ‘us’, perceived as a ‘chosen people’, as well as for the Caucasus Mountains (as ‘the Wall’ par excellence), the Danube River, ‘our’ saints, ‘our’ holy mountains, etc., and also the prototype of the ‘unclean’ invad-ers known from the Bible and the ‘Apocalypse’ of Pseudo-Methodius of Pathara (a Syriac source dated most probably in 691/2) and its Medieval images-and-names up to the end of the 12th century (Magyars, Pechenegs, Cumans, i.e. the ‘people of the steppe’ as a whole, and ‘Northmen’, or the so-called ‘blonde people/beard/race’, the latter especially found in Byzantine and Bulgarian apocalyptic texts).

Behind this level of interpretation there stands the well-known idea about the ‘core’, ‘center’, ‘kernel’ (after Mircea Eliade and his school, i.e. ‘Axis mundi’, ‘omphalos’ and the like) (Елиаде 1995, 408–429) and its representations in different places and cultures (mainly) in Europe and the Mediterranean region: sacred mountain, palace, temple etc., later to be developed by the Christians into the concept of the Sacred and, therefore, ‘Holy’ Land populated by a ‘chosen people’. But this no-tion and belief (i.e., the ‘center’) can also be seen in texts from the Old Testament, namely in two verses from the Book of Ezekiel: “This is Jerusalem; I have set her in the center of the nations (ital. mine, Ts. S.), with countries all around her” (Ezek. 5:

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5); and “… the people who were gathered from the nations… who live at the center of the earth” (ital. mine, Ts. S.) (Ezek. 38: 12). In these texts, according to Adriaan H. Bredero (Bredero 1994, p. 96), ‘Center’ was umbilicus, “navel”, in the Latin Vul-gate, and “this word was taken literally and led to the conviction that Jerusalem was at the navel of the world. There the heavenly Jerusalem would descend”. Behind this belief stood the well-known passage from the Psalms (74: 12), that God works His salvation in the midst of the earth. In Bredero’s words, this “cosmological concept of salvation was of Jewish origin” and was introduced into Christianity by Hegesippus, a Christian anti-heretical author, indeed a convert from Judaism who lived in the 2nd century. St. Jerome took from Hegesippus’s views some ideas as to the commentary on Ezekiel (see Commentariorum in Ezechielem 2.5, in: Patrologia Latina XXV, 52), which had been carefully copied during the Middle Ages (Bredero 1994, 96).

Being the ‘center’ in principle, for the learned men of the monotheistic religions this sacred land was viewed as populated by ‘us’ and perceived as situated in the ‘center’ of the civilized world; moreover, it was believed that this land was encircled by different enemies, pagans and/or infidels by definition. The same was believed for the city of Jerusalem, too, which would remain the center of the messianic king-dom until the End of Time (Bredero 1994, 98), because in the Book of Revelation (20: 7–9) it was written that the downfall of this final empire would take place exactly in Jerusalem: “When the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his pris-on and will come out to deceive the nations at the four corners of the earth (ital. mine, Ts. S.), Gog and Magog, in order to gather them for battle; they are as numerous as the sands of the sea. They marched up over the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city” (ital. mine, Ts. S.).

The Muslims also had an idea about the ‘End of Time’, but, quite understandably, not of the ‘Second Coming’ of Christ. They also shared that same notion of the sacred land. So in this study the point of departure is the common pre-modern understand-ing that everybody thinks of his/her patria as the ‘centre’ of the world, i.e. the ‘Holy Land’ (marked by its holy cities, holy mountains, holy places that had “kept” its reli-quae, cathedrals, etc. and thus bearing the signs of Almighty; for the Christians in particular, all of them were believed to be Lord’s sacred objects-and-places).

On the basis of two levels of research, (1) the Christian world from the mid-10th up to the end of the 12th century, both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox (e.g., Byzan-tine and Bulgarian, and Rus’ian – after the middle of the 11th century), which was waiting for the Second Coming of Christ around the Year 1000, together with the learned Jewry in Europe which had been waiting for the Coming of the Messiah in that same 10th century and, (2) the Muslim world located in the most eastern part of Europe, namely the Volga Bulgars (the latter having an independent polity there from the mid-10th century until the 1230s), this article also aims to present the problem of the ‘invasion’ in/from the so-called ‘Holy Land’ in a comparative perspective. A study of this kind, and in a comparative perspective, could show that one and the same cultural matrix, namely the three Abrahamic religions and their

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Holy Books, which were indeed modeled after the Old Testament, is the source for similar – to some extent – ideas and notions about ‘invading from/in the Holy Land’ that appear in the narrative sources, regardless of their specific details. Most probably all these notions had one and the same central idea, that of the sacred ‘Holy Land’ seen as the ‘core’ of the world.

The literati of all the polities mentioned above had their own ideas as to the real or imagined sacred geography of their own ‘Sacred/Holy Land’. Most probably terms such as ‘time’, ‘space’, and ‘memory’ could be also understood through the prism of this specific idea, i.e. the Second Coming of Christ and messianic expectations, studied on the level of real and imagined geography as well as on that of concepts such as ‘chosen people’, ‘holy places’, ‘unclean invaders’, and the like.

Special attention should also be paid to the interdependence of the different ideologe-mae of the ‘chosen Kingdom’ of Alexander the Great, with its trans-cultural space and heritage, with those of the ‘Axis Mundi’, ‘Holy Land’, messianism and apocalypse, etc., which are easy to find almost everywhere amongst the learned men of the Early Middle Ages. Most probably the roots of many of them are to be searched for in the common, indeed archetypical, concepts characteristic for the monotheistic religions in the Mediterranean area, which were developed during the Middle Ages according to the specific ‘needs’ of these different ethno-cultural entities.

The sacred geography of both the ‘chosen people’ and the ‘Holy Land’ had its spe-cific topoi/loci. Moreover, it had a specific direction from which the ‘unclean peo-ple’ of Gog and Magog were supposed to enter this ‘Holy Land’. With this notion in mind, it seems to me appropriate to ask whether it was typical for all these tradi-tions in the Medieval Christian realms to follow the arch-model of the invaders’ direction in the Holy Land known from the Bible, i.e. North, later to be viewed especially as the steppic north. If not, what were the reasons for the ‘manipulation’ of the real geography? Why, in a text from Kievan Rus’ (sub anno 1096, a chronicle from the Kievo-Pechersky monastery near Kiev), for instance, were the Cumans who invaded Rus’ from the south/south-east termed by the unknown Rus’ian au-thor ‘Gog and Magog’, or ‘Ishmaelites’? Why, for the Byzantines in the 11th century and even later, was the main threat the West, just before the crucial date for Byzan-tium, i.e. 1204, and not the North, as is mentioned in the Old Testament? It is inter-esting to see how the steppe Magyars, attacking Western Europe in the course of the 10th century from an eastern direction (from the so-called Pontic steppes), were termed in the Western chronicles: Were they intruders coming from the North, or from the East?

There is also another question that might be considered relevant for a study of this kind, namely how many perspectives existed as to the notion of the ‘Holy Land’ in the period mentioned in the title, one or two? So, a hypothesis could be put forward that first, in the Western European case there was a double perspective, the first one typical for the years between roughly 950 and the start of the First Crusade in 1095/96 (‘our’ realms are the ‘New Israel(s)’, that is the new ‘Holy Land’,

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and they are attacked by invaders, Magyars and Northmen, in particular), and the second for the period between roughly 1095/96 and 1200, which could be defined as “the ‘Holy Land’ is in Palestine and it should be captured by ‘us’”, e.g. the Western Christians. Let me give one example from the Chronicle of Pseudo-William Godel-lus, dated to the early 12th century. There it is said that “In the year of the Lord 1009, with the permission of God, the unclean Turks invaded the lands of Jerusa-lem and captured Jerusalem… This happened under Kings Basil and Constantine of the Greeks, under Emperor Henry of the Romans, and in the eleventh year of King Robert of the Franks. In that same year many Jews were baptized on account of fear” (quoted from, The Apocalyptic Year 1000, 338).

Secondly, in the case of Byzantium and Danubian Bulgaria, ‘our’ realms/Empires were viewed as the ‘Holy Land’ par excellence; therefore ‘we’ were attacked by in-vaders coming from the outside. So what one sees here is a single perspective on the ‘Holy Land’. In relation to the Byzantines, E. Patlagean called this notion ‘Byz-antium’s Dual Holy Land’, which, in my opinion, is true also for Bulgaria. This could be seen in the phrase ‘Mezina land’ in a Bulgarian apocalyptic text known as the ‘Vision’ of Isaiah about the Last Days (13th century): “They will come to the river which is called the “hidden paradise”; this river is running through the land of Is-rael, which is called ‘Mezina land’. […] It is not me who is speaking, but the Holy Spirit…. […] And [listen] I am giving you a sign but it is not [in fact] me but the Holy Spirit! When you see the end of the realm in Mezina land, after that there will be no other tzar of that same origin” (Тъпкова-Заимова, Милтенова 1996, 237–238 / Eng. trans. by Ts. Stepanov). Needless to say, ‘Mezina’ is very close to ‘Moesia’, i.e. the core territory of the First and the Second Bulgarian Empire, but it could also be derived from the Greek word ‘mesos’, meaning ‘center’, ‘core’, i.e. land which is ‘in the center’, the core territory! Thus the Bulgarians also “doubled” the ‘Holy Land’: The first one was the original Promised Land of the Jews, which was later to become the Holy Land of Christianity, and the second one was the Bulgar-ian land, since Bulgaria became a legitimate Christian Empire in 927 and once again in 1235 (for more, see Stepanov 2007, 108–118).

Third, in the case of the Muslim Bulgars living along the Volga and Kama Rivers: ‘Our’ land was the ‘Holy Land’ and since ‘we’, i.e. the Bulgars, were Muslims, ‘we’ were obliged to attack both the infidels and pagans around ‘us’ (the jihad idea); so what we see here is again a single perspective. Fourth, as far as the case of the Jews and the Khazar élite is concerned, the attitude towards the ‘invader’ is still little known, because this kind of information is lacking in the available sources. One may suppose that all the abovementioned people possessed a notion of the ‘Holy Land’ but had different strategies as to the invaders and invading in (or, from) this ‘Holy Land’. As far as the directions of invading are concerned, some of them rested upon the meta-texts, i.e. the Bible and the ‘Apocalypse’ of Pseudo-Methodius of Pathara, but others did not follow the arch-model direction known from the Bible, that is North, a conclusion that I shall try to defend later.

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To sum up, there are several thematic circles in a study of this kind. Firstly, apoca-lypse and eschatology, first among the Jews and later in the Christian world; secondly, concepts of the ‘chosen people’ and the ‘Holy Land’; third, Gog and Magog people as the intruders par excellence in these ‘Holy Lands’; fourth, the legends of the deeds of Alexander the Great and the blocked ‘unclean people’ of the North blocked on his order (made possible by a barrier, gate or wall); fifth, the “tradition of the Book” or, as it is also known, the ‘Big Tradition’, i.e. the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim monotheistic traditions where many of the abovementioned motifs can be found; sixth, geographi-cal knowledge in Medieval Christian and Muslim worlds (the concepts of ‘the seven climes’ and the so-called ‘Tau-maps’ [and “T – O”-maps], the latter typical only for the Christians). In what follows, I shall focus mainly on the questions of the ‘Holy Land’ and the sacred geography of the ‘chosen people’, ‘Gog and Magog’-type invaders, and the Medieval ‘heritage’ of Alexander the Great and its “monotheistic” features.

THe quesTion of THe sources:

There are many sources that give information about the issues already mentioned. Of course, in an article there is no possibility for any one of them to be carefully studied, or even presented with details. That is why I have chosen some of the sources available: from Danubian Bulgaria, first of all, the historical apocalyptic texts dating from the end of the 11th up to the end of the 12th century, such as ‘Visions’ of Daniel and Isaiah; secondly, from Byzantium and Kievan Rus’, mainly chronicles, ‘Visions’, dreams, etc.; third, from Volga Bulgaria, Abu al-Garnati’s trav-els, Najib al-Khamadani, etc.; fourth, from the Jewish milieu, the correspondence between the khagan beq of Khazaria Joseph and Hasdai b. Shaphrut of Cordoba dating back to the mid-10th century; and fifth, from Western Europe, different ‘Vi-sions’ as well as Adso of Montier-en-Der, the so-called ‘Letter on the Hungarians’, Radulfus Glaber, Ademar of Chabannes, Ælfric and Wulfstan in late Anglo-Saxon England, etc. All these different types of sources suggest different approaches and, consequently, require different methods of study. Thus, as far as methodologies are concerned, they are multiple depending on the sources under consideration, e.g. chronicles, historical apocalyptic texts, personal correspondence, etc., as well as different topoi and clichés typical for some of these sources.

Since the ‘primary’ sources of these notions are to be searched for in the Bible, in both the Old and the New Testament, and in the ‘Apocalypse’ of St John the Apostle in particular, one should also have to consider that the emblematic text of Pseudo-Methodius of Pathara (dating most probably from 691/2, according to G. Reinink) re-modeled some of the known arch-topoi from the Bible. All data available are to be treated comparatively (east and west, north and south); thus, hopefully, they provide a relevant synthesis of scholarship, namely history, hermeneutics, and his-tory of mentalities as well as religions.

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THe genealogy of some of THe moTifs:

Right from the beginning it should be said that many of the motifs presented below are interconnected. This is an important issue, as it requires one to be well aware of many of the specific features and interconnections established between the motifs and their origin, so as to be able later to investigate and appropriately interpret the novelties that appeared in the course of time. Some of these motifs are discussed below.

1. ‘The Gog and Magog peoples’ in the Old Testament: their position on the map is ‘North’. It must be noted that in the beginning, in Genesis 10: 2, ‘Magog’ marks only a geographical entity, with no apocalyptic implications. But it was already before the Babylonian capture of the Jews when, in the prophet Jeremiah for in-stance, we see both apocalyptic expectations and the idea of the invading enemy from the North. In the course of the 6th century B.C., these ideas can be seen in Zacharia 12–14, and Joel 1:6, 2:20, the latter announcing the coming of the final enemy from the north (van Donzel, Schmidt 2010, 4–5). However, the basis of the later traditions of Christianity and Islam as to these ‘unclean peoples’ is the prophecy of Ezekiel 30: 8f. In his words, Gog will be the leader of the evil powers sent by God Himself who will come from the north to punish Israel in the Last Time. The first who attached to the Gog and Magog peoples a name of real tribes from the North was Flavius Josephus (1st century); he chose the Scythians as the most appropriate nation to fit in the scheme of the most ‘evil’ people living in the north (van Donzel, Schmidt 2010, 9).

2. Apocalypse of St John the Apostle and the ‘evil nations’ in the End of Time: in the New Testament, Gog and Magog are to be found only in the Apocalypse of St John (Rev. 20: 7). Here they appeared bound to a new and very important theme, namely the messianic kingdom of a Thousand Years, against which God Himself will send the Gog and Magog peoples, who will fight the God-chosen people and finally will be destroyed by the Heavenly powers before the Last Judgment. Already in the 5th century, the Greek and Latin Fathers (esp. St Jerome and later Isidore of Seville, who died in 636) became the most important transmitters and interpreters of the Gog and Magog motif, connecting the final ‘evil’ with Huns or Goths (van Donzel, Schmidt 2010, 12ff.). It should also be noted that this book of the Scriptures was not that popular in early Byzantium.

3. The barrier/wall/gate of Alexander the Great:

3.a. in the early Jewish milieu: This idea is not yet found in Ezekiel’s proph-ecy. The legend of Alexander’s wall was understood as that barrier which would stop the Magogians, meaning the northern barbarians, for the first time by the abovementioned Flavius Josephus, i.e. in the Hellenized circles of the Jewry. Flavius Josephus claimed that Alexander the Great built an iron gate south of the Caspian Sea against the Alans, who were of Scythian origin (in ‘Jewish Wars’ by Josephus Flavius – see van Donzel, Schmidt 2010, 10). Where exactly Alexander built the

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iron gate/barrier is not a matter to be discussed in this article (see different opin-ions in, van Donzel, Schmidt 2010; Перевалов 2005, 173–180);

3.b. in the Christian world: The Legend of Alexander (Alexander Romance) was originally composed in Greek (the so-called Pseudo-Callisthenes, which was lost) probably in the 3rd century, and was ancestor of the apocalyptic Alexander. According to Bernard McGinn, the Syriac versions based on the lost Greek original are the earliest witnesses to the fusion of the Alexander legends with late classical apocalypticism. During the 10th century, they were translated into Latin by a Nea-politan priest (McGinn 1979, 56). The story of the building of a gate/wall by Alex-ander in the Caucasus to stop the steppe people from the north before the civilized world established by that same Alexander the Great, well-known already thanks to Josephus, now received further development in the works of some Church fathers and other authors. When in 395 the Huns managed to break through the Caucasus and invade south of it, i.e. in the civilized world, these legends were interwoven with apocalyptic interpretations and thus the ‘excluded’ nations were identified as Gog and Magog of Ezekiel and the Book of Revelation. This happened in a text known as ‘Syrian Christian Legend concerning Alexander’, attributed to a Syriac author called Jacob of Serugh (ca. 451–521). There one can see the phrase “this great gate…shall be closed until the End of times”; and this was already predicted in Jeremiah (1: 14), in his phrase “the gate of the north (sic!) shall be opened on the day of the End of the world”, when Evil shall hit the wicked. Jacob also speaks of Agog (sic) and Magog people who shall be gathered together, and these two peo-ples, most fierce of all creatures, are from the mighty house of Japhet. Later on in the text, he mentions the “wise king Alexander, the son of Philip” as well as some of the prophecies of Jeremiah, Daniel and Isaiah. In Jacob’s words, Alexander himself had predicted that Rome is going to disappear and that the cities and villages will be desolated; and all this will happen “before the coming of the sinful people of the children of Magog”. “They shall not, however,” Jacob continues, “enter into Jerusa-lem, the city of the Lord. For the sign [e.g., the True Cross] of the Lord shall drive them away from it, and they shall not enter it” (McGinn 1979, 56–58).

How should one interpret these excerpts? It seems that for Jacob of Serugh it was not possible for the ‘unclean peoples’ to enter the Promised Land centered around the Holy City of Jerusalem. The existence right there of the True Cross, the spe-cial sign of God’s protected area, prevented such a scenario. This interpretation is confirmed by another dictum of Jacob, who said that the Magogians would not approach “Mount Sinai”, since Sinai is “the dwelling place of the Lord” (McGinn 1979, 58). Therefore, for Jacob of Serugh, Mount Sinai and Jerusalem were indeed manifestations of ‘the center’ of the world, the most sacred place on earth. In his eyes, with the end of the atrocities committed by Agog and Magog, during the days of desolation and tears “shall Antichrist rise upon the whole earth”. “Through that gate (sic) shall go forth and come that rebel… […] These things which I have spo-ken shall come to pass before the End of the world”; and, Jacob continues, “these beautiful things” were interpreted by Alexander the Great (McGinn 1979, 59). Un-

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til the end of the 7th century, this wall/gate motif, together with that of Gog and Magog, became known thanks to the aforementioned Josephus Flavius, St Jerome, and Isidore of Seville. After the 690s, with the Syriac text of Pseudo-Methodius of Pathara being translated into Greek and Latin (no later than 720s-730s), the Syriac tradition became most influential (van Donzel, Schmidt 2010, 14). It should be especially noted that in Pseudo-Methodius’ vision, Alexander the Great’s clash with the Gog and Magog peoples happened to be not in the north but in the east (van Donzel, Schmidt 2010, 28). What we see here is an adjusting of the last and real points on the map where Alexander managed to reach in his campaigns, i.e. in what is now Tadzhikistan and Northern India, which for the Syrians were indeed not in the north but in the east.

The influence of this text of Pseudo-Methodius of Pathara in Western Europe was immense. Apart from the Latin translation made in the early decades of the 8th century, this text was later translated into a number of vernacular literatures, in-cluding Middle English. In McGinn’s opinion, Adso of Montier-en-Der might have been familiar with the version in Latin (McGinn 1979, 72–73). It is worth men-tioning another passage of that same text, namely that where Alexander the Great is presented as going “as far as the sea, which is called the region of the sun”, and exactly there he “beheld unclean races (sic!) of horrible appearance… Leading them [the unclean people – my note, Ts. S.] from the East (sic!), he restrained them with threats until they entered the northern lands (sic!) where there is no way in or out from East to West…”. After that, on the Lord’s command, two mountains called the ‘Breasts of the North” (sic!) came together to within twelve cubits and just after that Alexander managed to build bronze gates there. Among the enclosed nations (22 in number) not only fictitious people (Gog and Magog, Anog and Ageg, Dephar, etc.) but also real ethnoi such as Alans, Sarmatians (‘Zarmatae’ in the text), Lybians (‘Libii’ in the text) are mentioned (Sackur 1898, 72 f.; McGinn 1979, 73);

3.c. among the Muslims before the 10th century: That same Syriac tradition of the late 7th century prevailed in the Muslim sources, too. That is why in some of them there was confusion about the location of the wall/barrier and the Gog and Magog peoples, respectively: According to some authors, they both should be searched for in the east; for others, in the north. Since this issue is thoroughly studied in the book of Emeri van Donzel and Andrea Schmidt (van Donzel, Schmidt 2010, Chapters 4–6), the analysis given below will rest mainly upon their conclusions.

The theme of the Gog and Magog peoples and the barrier/wall is well represented in the Islamic Tradition, e.g. hadith. In the Sunni collections, it can be seen in the ‘Six books’ or ‘Six Sahihs’ compilations from the 9th century. The compilers’ names are al-Bukhari (d. 870), Muslim (d. 875), Ibn Madja (d. 887), Abu Dawud (d. 888), al-Tirmidhi (d. 892) and al-Nasa’i (d. 915). Before the 10th century, two other im-portant traditions are those of al-Tayalisi (d. 819) and Ahmad b. Hanbal (d. 855). In the Shi’i collections, the largest one, and most authoritative, was that called ‘Bihar al-anwar’ (‘The seas of the lights’), by a compiler named al-Madjlisi (d. 1689). Here

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the motif of Gog and Magog is found under the heading ‘The place of return: Signs of the hour and the story of Gog and Magog’. Concerning the texts under study, it is commonly accepted that there is hardly any difference between Sunni and Shi’i traditions, although many have shown that the chains of transmitters represent great differences. But the most important thing to emphasize is that over the cen-turies there were only minor nuances made in these texts, and they did not touch the data collected by the original authors of the 9th and 10th centuries (van Donzel, Schmidt 2010, 55–56).

As far as Quran commentators are concerned, the abovementioned theme is well rep-resented by al-Tabari (d. 923). Indeed, on this topic he followed the traditions of the 9th century. The same is also valid for authors such as al-Zamakhshari (d. 1144) and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1209). The name of al-Hawari (second half of the 9th century) may also be added to such a list. Among the Shi’i commentators of Quran, al-Qummi (10th century) should be mentioned as well. Some Arab lexicographers did their best to keep this theme alive, for instance al-Jawhari (d. 1006–7). For both Sunni and Shi’i authors working on the motif of Gog and Magog and Alexander the Great, the ‘two-horned one’, Sura XVIII: 82–97, 99 and Sura XXI: 96–97 were those parts of the sacred text which were considered most important since they pointed to the tradition.

All these traditions were best summarized by a later author, al-Qazvini (d. 1283), an eminent geographer and cosmographer who left two extant works. One of them is titled ‘Book on prodigies of things created and miraculous aspects of things ex-isting’ (known also as ‘Cosmography’); the other one is the ‘Book on monuments of the countries and history of their inhabitants’ (known as ‘Geography’). They both contain parts on the Gog and Magog peoples based on hadith collections, com-mentaries made on Quran as well as early geographers, Yaqut in particular (van Donzel, Schmidt 2010, 56–57). Scholars have found many common themes in the passages regarding Gog and Magog and the ‘two-horned one’ (for more, see van Donzel, Schmidt 2010, 57–79), but what is important to my topic are the names, location and identification as well as the role in eschatology of all those ‘unclean peoples’. Apart from al-Tabari speaking on the original Arabic names of Gog and Magog, e.g. Yajuj and Majuj (for more, see van Donzel, Schmidt 2010, 89), it was al-Tusi, a Shi’i scholar, who drew attention to these names; and in his opinion, they were both of foreign origin (van Donzel, Schmidt 2010, 73).

Where did these two peoples live? According to the Islamic geographical tradi-tions, the world was divided into seven climes and the area inhabited by the ‘un-clean peoples’ was generally located between the fifth and the seventh climes. In the 13th century al-Qazwini, for instance, pointed to the eastern parts of the sev-enth clime as the land of Gog and Magog.

Al-Tabari and al-Baydawi are inclined to locate the two mountains mentioned above (see also Quran XVIII: 93/96) “in Armenia, in Azerbaijan or in the most eastern part of the land of the Turks; but the two mountains perhaps are also to be found between Armenia and Azerbaijan or in the farthest North”. The traditions represented by Shi’i

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scholars made their ‘choice’ for the place of the barrier either behind the Mediter-ranean, “between the two mountains found there, whose rear part is the encircling Sea/Okeanos” (Bahr al-Muhit), or behind Derbent and the “Two Khazars” in the direction of Armenia and Azerbaijan (van Donzel, Schmidt 2010, 73). The aforemen-tioned al-Tusi prefers for the barrier’s location “behind the Bahr al-Rum between the two mountains found there”. In his words, the “rear part of these is near the Bahr al-Muhit”; but others, adds the same author, still locate them “behind Derbent and near the Caspian Sea (Bahr al-Khazar), towards Armenia and Azerbaijan”. Another author, Razi, said the following on this topic: “the place of the two barriers is in the north, between Armenia and Azerbaijan, or they should be looked for in the degree of latitude of the Turks” (van Donzel, Schmidt 2010, 74).

In the decades after the 690s, the arch-evil peoples of Gog and Magog were termed by the Christians (who followed the model of Pseudo-Methodius of Pathara estab-lished in the last decade of the 7th century) ‘Ishmaelites’, a naming that became very influential all over Christian Europe after the first decades of the 8th century, and in the 10th century in Bulgaria, and later on in Kievan Rus’, in particular. According to G. Reinink, Pseudo-Methodius of Pathara’s ‘Apocalypse’ was written most probably in 691/2. There, it was the Arab-Muslims that were “deciphered” as those Biblical peo-ple who would fulfil God’s commands to punish the Christian Byzantines (because of the “lawlessness” of the latter). Through the Arab “Ishmaelites”, God was supposed to give a sign that the Second Coming of Christ was approaching (the literature on the topic is enormous. For instance see, Alexander 1985; Reinink 1992, 149–187).

4. The ideas of Constantinople as the ‘New Jerusalem’ and the Heavenly Jerusalem as the Heavenly Constantinople, the latter city seen through the prism of the Cent-er of the new ‘Holy Land’. These are matters that deal with the so-called imperial ideology and eschatology, as well as the ‘dual Holy Land’ notion (see, for instance, Podskalsky 1972; Magdalino 1993, 10; Patlagean 1998, 112–126).

It is well known that since 330 AD the capital city of the eastern Romans has been moved to Constantinople. Long before that, the fall of the Roman Empire was linked by many Christians with the Second Coming of Christ. At the same time, many of the learned men believed that the Kingdom of God was already being anticipated, or even realized, in the Empire of the Rhomaioi (Magdalino 1993, 10). According to Kosmas Indikopleustes (6th century) and his ‘Christian Topography’, the prophet Daniel had nothing to do with the sequence of the four kingdoms that appeared in Daniel’s prophecy. For Kosmas, the prophet had many things to say about the four kingdoms, and in particular about the end of this world after the fourth one, but he ended with the Hellenistic monarchies and had nothing to say about the Roman Empire (Magdalino 1993, 10; for more see Podskalsky 1972, 11–12; MacCormack 1982, 287–309). Thus a special connec-tion between the ‘Blessed city’, ‘chosen people’, and (Roman) Empire, as well as between Constantinople and Jerusalem, was soon to be established in the mental ‘schemes’ of the Byzantines.

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The first idea, i.e. Constantinople perceived as the ‘New Jerusalem’, appears already in a text written ca. 500, and after that it became a standard topos in laudations of Constantinople. It can also be seen in the building of two churches in Constan-tinople during the 6th century, the first one dedicated to St. Polyeuktos (completed in 527), and the second one the famous ‘Hagia Sophia’ of Justinian I (527–565), which was built between 532 and 537. That of St. Polyeuktos imitated some of the decoration and measurements of the Solomon Temple in ancient Israel (described in 2 Kings 6). As far as ‘Hagia Sophia’ is concerned, there are even more explicit examples of comparisons with the achievements of the old ‘Elects’, e.g. Jews. Thus in a hymn by Romanos the Melodist (ca. 536), the author stresses the fact that ‘Hagia Sophia’ surpasses not only the buildings of the Jewish Jerusalem of King Solomon but also the Christian Jerusalem of the first Christian Emperor, Constan-tine the Great (Magdalino 1993, 12). In a later hymn, dated to 562 and left by an anonymous writer, the same theme and comparison went further as the author concluded that the Temple of Solomon was erected in the Promised Land for one people, the Jews, whereas ‘Hagia Sophia’ in Constantinople was universal and was built for all the nations on earth (Life of Daniel the Stylite 1923, 12; Magdalino 1993, 12, and n. 35).

Probably in the 9th century, a source called ‘Narration on Hagia Sophia’ (Diegesis) tells that Justinian I was inspired by God and started building “a church such as had never been built since the time of Adam” (for the whole text, see Dagron 1984, 196–211; also see Mango 1972, 96–102; Brubaker 2011, 80). This divine inspiration is further approved by the structure of the text: The author dedicated 20% of the whole text to the angelic intervention (Brubaker 2011, 83, 86), a fact that leaves no room about speculation as to the special ideological meaning of this church built in the capital city of the Roman Empire. The so-called ‘angelic passages’ in this Narration demonstrated the divine collaboration and approval of the church, which is visible in the claim that these messengers of God can be seen in almost all of the aspects concerning church plans and adornment. Thus angels and God are presented in a dream given to Justinian in which they planned the edifice, then angels determined the distribution of windows and the disper-sal of light; also a guardian angel swore that he was going to protect the church until the End of Time (sic) (Brubaker 2011, 83). Moreover, the conclusions end with the events connected to the church’s dedication and with a claim made by Justinian I, who said that he had vanquished King Solomon, a clear reference to the supreme glory of this church, which had surpassed the glory of the hitherto greatest edifice in the Promised Land, the Temple of Jerusalem made on Solo-mon’s order (Brubaker 2011, 85, 87). We may assume that this text emphasizes the relationship between both the Emperor (and Empire) and God, and Emperor and Constantinople, as embodied in Hagia Sophia, thus representing the great-ness of the Byzantine Empire protected by God Himself because of its mission before the Last Judgment. It is then not strange to see in all these texts many signs of the symbolic dimensions – as eternal destiny – of both the Great Church

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and the capital city of the Romans, the new ‘Elects’ (Odorico 2011, 43). There al-ready existed a notion that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and Last Judgment would take place in Jerusalem. “But what,” says Paul Magdalino, “if Jerusalem had been superseded by Constantinople?” (Magdalino 1993, 12) It is then not strange that the capital city of Byzantium sheltered so many relics, especially those con-nected to Christ’s Passion, the Apostles, and the Mother of God, as well as those of different saints and martyrs. Moreover, in that same capital city huge and mar-velously decorated churches were built, as if jewels of a crown. The second idea, i.e. the Heavenly Jerusalem perceived as a Celestial Constantinople, is presented in a vision in the 10th-century Byzantium (cited by Mango 1980, 216).

Further developments of the direction motif in the 10th–12th centuries, which is connected to the notions of the ‘End of Time’, ‘Holy Land’, and the ‘Second Com-ing’ of Jesus Christ, as well as the sacred geography and Alexander the Great’s paradigm:

1. in Byzantium:

As regards the Byzantine understanding of Jerusalem as a centre of the ‘Holy Land’, and the “last emperor”-motif from the end of the 11th century, which was “exem-plary” for the Bulgarians and later for the Rus’ as well, Paul Magdalino, taking a stand on John Zonaras, writes the following: After the conquest of Jerusalem by the knights of the First Crusade, the basileus Alexios I Komnenos (1081–1118), incited by some monks, considered going on a pilgrimage to the Holy city himself and leaving his crown there, precisely as was described in the ‘Apocalypse’ of Pseudo-Methodius of Pathara, as an allusion to the actions of the ‘last emperor’ before the appearance of the Antichrist (Magdalino 2005, 49 f.; also see Magdalino 1993, 3–34; Alexander 1985, 162 f. – on the different versions of the prophecies referring to the leaving of the crown by the ‘last king’ in Jerusalem). And all this provided that it was not the Byzantines and their emperor, but the knights of the First Cru-sade who captured the Holy Jerusalem from the “Ishmaelites”.

Magdalino acknowledges the existence of another text, by John Tzetzes dating be-fore the Second Crusade (1147), according to which a persistent feeling that the West would attack Constantinople already existed among the Byzantines. There-fore in Byzantium, before the mid-12th century, one can observe a reactivation of the motif of the Ishmaelites’ invasion of Constantinople after the siege of 717–718 and especially after the 820s and the Arabs’ attack on Sicily, when – based on the prophecies of Pseudo-Methodius of Pathara – this assumption also arises (Magda-lino 2005, 51). Does this then mean that, in view of Constantinople’s fate, the idea that the knights from Western Europe would take on the role of the apocalyptic “Ishmaelites” had already become widely accepted in Byzantium during the 12th century? Because the name “unclean people (of ) Gog and Magog” does not suit the latter (since the western knights were in fact Christians), although after the Great

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Schism in 1054 the Byzantines had ample reason to think even worse things of the Western Catholic world besides its being called “unclean.”

However, if we were to go back to an earlier period in the Byzantine perception of Gog and Magog and the invasions of the “Scythian” people against God’s ‘chosen’ Byzantines and the “saved by God” city of Constantinople, we would have to ac-knowledge the fact that it was the Rus’/Varaggoi who were identified by the Byzan-tines as “the northern barbarians” before the Apocalypse, following the prophetic description by Ezekiel of the people Rôs (Ezekiel 38: 2, 39: 1 – about Gog and Ma-gog and among them, the people Rosh). This notion was widely accepted in the Byzantine capital after the unexpected siege of Constantinople by Rus’ian ships in 860 and, of course, during the 10th century. At the same time, not one of the apocalyptic scenarios depicts the invasion of Gog and Magog in Constantinople, or Rome or Jerusalem. However, P. Magdalino also admits that during the 10th century the Byzantines – in connection with the year 1000, or due to some other reason – feared for the fate of their capital city and that among its dwellers a widely accepted notion existed that “barbaric people” from the north (or from the west) would de-stroy Constantinople. According to Magdalino, during this century Byzantium as a whole became flooded by all sorts of eschatological expectations (Magdalino 2005, 47; Magdalino 1993, 25; this thesis is shared also by Miltenova 2006, 851. On the siege of Constantinople in 860, see Vasiliev 1946; Kazhdan 1996, 191–192; Photios Homilies 1958, 82–110).

Another important fact is worth noting here, namely that the Syrian, Greek and Latin versions of the ‘Apocalypse’ of Pseudo-Methodius of Pathara mention that the ‘last emperor’ will first defeat the Arabs, i.e. “the sons of Ishmael,” and only then will an angel of God stop the invasion of the “Gog and Magog people” (Alex-ander 1985, 163, cf. 191 f.). At the same time, nowhere in the Holy Scripture can one find a prophecy that the Roman emperor will win a battle against some hostile army and only then will go to Jerusalem and give up his crown there (Alexander 1985, 174). Traditionally, after the end of the 7th century, the Byzantine basileus was considered the ‘last king’ who would have to fight the “Ishmaelites” (during the 7th century), and the people “Ros’/Rosh” (during the 9th-10th century). How this type of thinking affected the image of the Seljuk Turks after the 11th-12th century has not yet been sufficiently clarified, although it is clear that they fall into the cliché “Ishmael-ites” by being Muslims, as well as into another cliché – “unclean (Scythian) people from the North” – because they had recently been nomads. Against this backdrop, during the 11th-12th century the Rus’, as was mentioned earlier, considered the “Ish-maelites” and especially the “Polovtsi” (Cumans) as their arch-enemies.

2. in Western Europe:

As far as the 10th century is concerned, in Western Europe, with the growing ex-pectations for the coming of the Last Time around the Year 1000, some interest-ing texts dealing with different eschatological issues (invaders, astronomical signs, etc.) appeared. Maybe the most important source concerning the invasions in

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Western Europe was that written by Adso of Montier-en-Der (known also as Adso Dervensis) in northeastern France. This text appeared between 945 and 954 (some suggest between 953 and 954). It was written as an answer to a letter of the queen Gerberga, wife of the Frankish king Louis IV. The title of the text is “De ortu et tempore Antichristi”. It is most important to note that it appears in a time when the lands of West Francia (and of the West as a whole) were facing devastating attacks from both Magyars and Northmen. It seems then that the queen saw in these cruel people an obvious sign for the coming of the ‘unclean people’ of Gog and Magog before the Last Time. The passage under study reads as follows: “This time has not yet come, because, though we see the Roman Empire [of the West – my note, Ts. Stepanov] destroyed in great part, nevertheless as long as the kings of the Franks who hold the Empire by right shall last, the dignity of the Roman Empire will not totally perish, because it will endure in its kings. Some of our learned men say that one of the kings of the Franks who will come in the last time will possess anew the Roman Empire. He will be the last and the greatest of all rulers. And... at last he will come to Jerusalem and will put off his scepter and crown on the Mount of Olives. This will be the end...of the Roman and Christian Empire” (text in, D. Verhelst, ed., Adso Dervensis, 26).

What Adso did in fact was to diminish the queen’s fear by proposing a very sophis-ticated scheme in his answer. It is true, said Adso, that the old Roman Empire had ceased to exist, but after the coronation of Charlemagne in 800, the Franks became de facto and de jure the legitimate heirs of the Romans. So the Empire of Romans and Christians would last until the time of the last Frankish king. Therefore, the queen should not be so dismayed by the invasions from the east (of the Magyars/Hungarians) and north (of the Northmen), because the power and the Empire were still in the hands of her husband. Adso was not interested in the directions whence these Hungarians and Northmen were invading the ‘sacred lands’ of the Roman-and-Christian Empire of the Franks. In his work there appeared an interesting mo-tif that had already been known in the West at least since the beginning of the 8th century: the ‘last Roman Emperor’, which was in fact ‘invented’ by Pseudo-Metho-dius of Pathara in the 690s. This motif, however, can be seen in the writings against the Jews of the bishop Agobard of Lyon (d. 840), where he mentions the Antichrist’s coming, repeatedly adding this motif of the ‘last emperor’ of the Romans whose reign would precede the appearance of Antichrist (Bredero 1994, 98).

But it was not only the queen Gerberga who was frightened by the ‘signs’. For some of the common people of the West, but mostly for many of the literati there, “Northmen and Magyars” were indeed “the legendary apocalyptic destroyers Gog and Magog” (see the ‘Preface’ of “The Apocalyptic Year 1000”, 2003, viii). This is the excerpt from the so-called letter on the Hungarians from the mid-10th century: “First it is to be said that the opinion that has persuaded many people in your re-gion and ours is frivolous and without any merit: that the Hungarian people, hate-ful to God, are Gog and Magog ... concerning which it is especially said: “You will come out of your places in the North …” [Ezek. 38: 15]. They said that this is the last

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time of the age, and the end of the world is near, and therefore Gog and Magog are the Hungarians…’ (quotation see in, The Apocalyptic Year 2003, 337–338).

In one of his articles, Johannes Fried says that the Hungarians were perceived by some westerners as “the perfectly ordinary people from the east or north”, who came out from the Maeotian (=Sea of Azov) swamps and in fact were pushed out “by hunger”, which is why they become known as ‘Hungri’. In Fried’s words, this ar-gument sounds “false but sensible” (Fried 2003, 19). However, the most important thing that should be underlined here is that for many of the learned men in West-ern Europe, the book of Apocalypse of St John, in which Gog and Magog peoples are explicitly mentioned, should be read only in a “mystical”, not in a historical, manner; thus “Gog and Magog are to be identified not with real peoples”, Hungar-ians and Northmen in particular (Fried 2003, 20).

What was the situation with the Anglo-Saxons, and what were their expectations towards the approaching year 1000? The lands of early Medieval England, though not a part of the restored Roman Empire in the West, were severely attacked by ‘Northmen’, mainly Danes, at that time. So one may wonder: Did the Anglo-Saxons share the same expectation of the Endzeit coming soon and, moreover, did they did perceive these invaders as the Gog and Magog peoples? It seems that one could quote Malcolm Godden on this issue: “The imminence of the end of the world is one of the most important themes, a framing concept indeed, for Anglo-Saxon writers in the decades surrounding the year 1000” (Godden 2003, 155).

Among the sources of this period I have chosen well-known authors such as Ælfric, who lived in the second half of the 10th and the first decades of the 11th century, as well as Wulfstan who wrote a series of homilies on the end of this world in the dec-ades around the year 1000 (for details, see Godden 1994, 130–162; Godden 2003, 155–180). Both of them witnessed the Viking raids at the turn of the 10th century and the first decades of the 11th century.

Ælfric became abbot of Eynsham in 1005, and in the next few years he dedicated many pages to these savage Northmen coming from across the sea; but in fact he had written a lot on the Vikings since the 990s. In his early works, he used an apocalyptic setting, but there was no reference to the Viking threat. In the begin-ning of his first series of the so-called ‘Catholic Homilies’ (dated around 990), the approaching End of this world as well as the coming of Antichrist is indeed the context of his own works (The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church 1844, 2–6: quoted after Godden 1994, 132). He cited the well-known Biblical phrase that dur-ing the Last time ‘nation shall rise up against nation and kingdom against kingdom’, but nowhere did he mention the Vikings as those nations – Gog and Magog – who would punish the sinners. At the same time, in another of his works, namely in a collection called ‘Lives of Saints’ (dated around 1000), Ælfric used the Old Testa-ment ‘Book of Maccabees’ as a paradigm story; there the longest single item was, in Godden’s words, the account of the just wars of the Maccabees against the heathen invaders of Israel (Godden 1994, 141). This story gives a good model for the fu-

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sion of the ‘national’, e.g. English, and ‘religious’, e.g. Christian, so as to provoke an adequate military defense on the side of the Anglo-Saxons facing the attacks of the Danes (Godden 1994, 142). The latter, being pagans, were obviously viewed as that tool of God’s punishment predestined before the Second coming of Christ for the sinners. On the island, they were all termed ‘people (coming on boats) from across the sea’, which meant two geographical directions, namely North (from what is today Norway) and East/North-East (from what is today Denmark).

Wulfstan outlived Ælfric and although strongly influenced by the latter, had to develop new perspectives as to the notions of apocalypse and the Old Testament models appropriate for use in Anglo-Saxon England. He faced an even more severe crisis on the island than Ælfric did, but even so, in the beginning of his career, Wulfstan’s central question and preoccupation was Apocalypse and not the Vi-kings (see Godden 2003, 168–172). Just like his eminent predecessor, Wulfstan’s early sermons (five in number, dated most probably around 1000) dealt both with the Gospel passages on the End of the world and the approaching kingdom of An-tichrist, which he saw as imminent (Godden 1994, 142–143; the text see in, The Homilies of Wulfstan 1957, sermons i-v). In the third sermon, Wulfstan says that some of the tribulations that will mark the End are already visible in England and are indeed a consequence of the sins there; he blames his compatriots for being dis-loyal to God and to each other (Godden 1994, 143). The passage reads: “Therefore many misfortunes harm and afflict us, and foreigners and people from overseas (ital. mine, Ts. S.) greatly harass us, just as Christ in His Gospel clearly said it should happen; He said: ‘Nation shall rise up against nation’” (The Homilies of Wulfstan 1957, iii, 20–6).

Wulfstan’s major work dealing with the Vikings, ‘Sermo ad Anglos quando Dani maxime persecuti sunt’ (also known as ‘Sermo Lupi ad Anglos’) appeared not be-fore 1014. Interestingly enough, this work had been re-edited several times by the author, and in a radical way. It exists in five MSS but they display three distinct versions of the text: a brief one, to about 130 lines, the longest one, of about 202 lines, and a middle one of 178 lines (Godden 1994, 143). The second version of the Sermon (MS 201, from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge) is dated to the mid-11th century and is interesting for us due to the fact that it has a passage of 30 lines on the Vikings (for the whole passage, see The Homilies of Wulfstan 1957, xx (C) 97–126). In it, there is a direct citation of ‘Vikings’ or ‘seamen’ who almost every day humiliated the Anglo-Saxons, for their ‘shame’ and because of the ‘anger of God’; within these 31 lines the phrase ‘anger of God’ is used by Wulfstan six times (Godden 1994, 148–149). It is interesting to note that when writing this brief work in 1014, Wulfstan shaped it as a short apocalyptic sermon. Twice in the next two years, however, he made some addenda so as to give more room to the Viking raids. In Godden’s opinion, Wulfstan was indeed “finding a framework” for the Viking invasions, and what is more, “its [the text’s] emphasis gradually shifted from the apocalyptic crisis to the national one” (Godden 1994, 152). For Godden, the attacks of the Danes had been presented by Wulfstan as precursors of Antichrist’s

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coming in both his early works and in the ‘Sermo ad Anglos’; for the author of these texts, the problems with the Vikings are present and past, while Antichrist’s coming is still a matter of the future, which means that Wulfstan was following the well-known Mediaeval Christian tradition based on Revelation 17: There would be a final battle between the powers of God and that of Evil, the latter’s forces in-cluding the tribes of Gog and Magog (Godden 1994, 152). According to common scholarly opinion, it was Adso of Montier-en-Der’s text that was the main source used by Wulfstan for notions on the coming of Antichrist (Emmerson 1981, 88). The particular tradition of Gog and Magog – and this deserves special attention – is not present in the ‘Libellus de Antichristo’ of Adso. This means that “neither Gog and Magog nor the four beasts seem to be what Wulfstan is invoking here” (Godden 1994, 152–153). For, in the eyes of Wulfstan, Antichrist shall seduce the Anglo-Saxons, who were Christians, while the Danes/Vikings were not believers in Christ, i.e. they were not seducers, and thus they could not be Antichrist’s forces (Godden 1994, 153). Therefore, it was Wulfstan’s idea to include the Vikings in the frame of the Apocalyptic ‘picture’, but not as agents of Antichrist; for him, it was more important to link the Danes with the turmoil that would predate the time of Antichrist, as well as to present them as divine punishment for the sins and crimes that St Paul the Apostle saw as precursors of the End.

As far as the topos of divine punishment is concerned, for both Ælfric and Wulf-stan the emphasis is tribal/national, i.e. regional, whereas the Apocalypse is univer-sal; this meant that the divine anger would be directed against a particular nation for particular sins, whereas apocalypse would bring tribulations to the whole of mankind and to Christ’s believers in particular (Godden 1994, 154). If this last in-terpretation of M. Godden is correct, then it should be taken as certain that in the last decades of Anglo-Saxon England, the learned men there did not perceive Eng-land’s land as the ‘Holy Land’, meaning the ‘center of the (Christian) world’. May we suggest that for both these authors, England was not equal to the Promised Land? For in the historical apocalyptic literature, this contamination – between ‘our’ Holy Land and the original one in the Near East – had been demonstrated on several oc-casions. It is then clear that the invaders, regardless of their names, should a priori attack the lands of this new Holy Land following the Biblical model of the Gog and Magog peoples. Another possible explanation could take this shape: Because England had never been part of the Carolingian nor of the Ottonian Empires of continental Europe, it had never been perceived as an Empire predestined for the salvation of mankind in the Last Days. As is well-known, Christian emperors, and their courts’ literati in particular, were deeply concerned with ideas such as ‘Holy Land’, ‘chosen people(s)’, ‘last Emperor’ and the like, claiming such titles for them-selves and their people. At the moment, it seems that questions are easier to ask than to answer. This English case is obviously not in tune with another important feature of such periods of chaos and signs (e.g. plague, destruction and invasion, the appearance of comets’ in the sky, etc.), when, as a rule, messianic expectations were soon to appear. The attacks of the invading Vikings who, being pagans and

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coming from the North and East, could easily be viewed as the ‘Gog and Magog’ peoples according to the Biblical paradigm, seem the best possible example of such notions and expectations becoming very seriously accepted. Can one connect this fact with the future fate of Wulfstan since in 1018 he became a personal adviser to the Danish king Cnut? In Godden’s words, he might well be trying to impose himself in the Danish hierarchy in England, thus preserving his new position. To answer such questions as those raised above, Malcolm Godden, as far as Wulfstan’s views are concerned, is inclined to see in this divine anger not so much a reflec-tion of the apocalyptic traditions as the influence of another set of paradigms, i.e. that of the Old Testament (Godden 1994, 154; Godden 2003, 173). In his opinion, many of Wulfstan’s sermons “hint at an identification” of Old Testament events with the contemporary ‘Viking situation’, for instance references to the Babylonian captivity (for the original text, see Bethurum 1957, vi. 115–122). A passage is given concerning the fate of Zedechiah the king of Israel who had been captured and whose aristocracy had been killed by pagan invaders, and after whom for 70 years Israel had been enslaved; and all this happened because “the people became so sin-ful” that God allowed the pagans to raid and enslave all that [Israel’s] land (Godden 1994, 154). And another example: in the excerpts from the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah (see Bethurum 1957, xi), Wulfstan preferred to select God’s warnings to the people of Israel (Godden 1994, 155). This underscored God’s wrath at the sins of the Anglo-Saxons, and Wulfstan pointed out that the Viking invasions had to be linked with the sinfulness of the people of England. It seems then that in the sec-ond version of ‘Sermo ad Anglos’, Wulfstan “draws heavily on the Old Testament paradigms” (Godden 1994, 155). According to Godden, however, these Old Testa-ment parallels suppose “the cyclic repetition of divine punishment…rather than the once-only end of all things; they imply divine anger with the chosen people rather than the destruction of the whole world”. Wulfstan himself admitted that it was possible that when settling down on England’s soil the Vikings could be Chris-tianized, thus becoming a civilized people. That is why their invasions cannot be viewed as the sign of the absolute End (Godden 1994, 155). However, it is worth remembering here that according to the Church fathers, the exact End was known to Lord alone; and both Ælfric and Wulfstan were well aware of this interpretation.

Although in one of his early homilies Wulfstan tried to link the raids of the Danes with the biblical portent of the End that should come soon (e.g., “surget gens contra gentem” / ‘Nation shall rise up against nation’ – see Homilies, 3. 20–26), in ‘Sermo ad Anglos’ (at least in the revised version) he did not make such a connection be-tween the Viking invasions and harrassment. Instead, Wulfstan preferred to pose the raids in another context of old historical (and indeed paradigmatic) precedents, that of divine wrath against the chosen people of Israel in the Old Testament, who were interpreted as representing the Britons in English history. The latter history, namely that of Gildas and the fate of the Britons conquered by the Anglo-Saxons some centuries earlier because of their sins, was well known to educated English society (Godden 2003, 172, 175). Thus, as the millennium passed, Wulfstan, at

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least in the first years of the second decade of the 11th century, had to overlay the apocalyptic crisis with that launched by the increasing Viking raids. That is why he stopped writing about the end of this world and focused on the issue important then, that is, on the Danes’ raids and violence repeating a model already known in the history of England (e.g., the Anglo-Saxon invasion against the Britons) and the Assyrian invasion of Israel. It was in fact a replacement of linear with cyclical time (Godden 2003, 176). Here it should also be added that different Old Testament models were very popular in different Mediaeval states across Europe, especially when recalling issues of power, ideology and the like (for the Bulgarian cases, see Билярски 2011, passim).

Even after the death of both Ælfric and Wulfstan, and long after the Year 1000, their successors did not lose interest in apocalyptic homilies. Many of their works were copied through the 11th and 12th centuries, thus pointing simultaneously to two different senses of history – linear, on one hand, and cyclical on the other (for details on the copies, see Godden 2003, 177).

3. in Danubian Bulgaria:

What was the situation in this respect with the Bulgarian apocalyptic cycle that appeared after the mid-11th century? Who were the apocalyptic intruders there? Were they nomads coming from the north, from the “unclean people of Gog and Magog”, and crossing the border of the civilized people, i.e. the Danube River? Or, were they real “Ishmaelites,” i.e. Muslims? It is immediately noticeable that in the cycle of historical apocalyptic texts that appeared in the Bulgarian lands, the invad-ers before the ‘End of time’ are most often called “Ugri(ans)”/”V’gri(ans)” (i.e., the Magyars), or “Pechenegs” (Тъпкова-Заимова, Милтенова 1996, 135–136, 156, 198, 202). The first serious clash with the Magyars was in the 890s, during the reign of Symeon (893–927). And there were many more invasions by the Magyars in Bulgaria during the reign of Symeon’s successor, Tsar Peter (d. 970), especially be-tween the 930s and 960s (on the invasions see Златарски 1971, 518–519, 542–546; Димитров 1998). It is then clear that the Magyars’ invasions were ‘moulded’ in the memory of the Bulgarians, in both folklore and written texts, for they happened before the year 992 (or 1000?) – i.e. exactly in time when the Second Coming was expected to happen. The events shocked the Bulgarians also because, prior to the approaching year of 992 (or 1000?), when the “End of the world” was expected, the Magyars, as a whole, were pagans and thus easily “identifiable” through the cliché “Gog and Magog, that attack the Christian (i.e., Bulgarian) kingdom” before the ‘End of time’ and the Second Coming. Moreover, the Magyars were entering the Bulgarian lands from the north (!) and were pagans (!); thus they easily fit in the abovementioned cliché of Gog and Magog.

Let us now pay attention to the Pechenegs, the next nomads to enter the Bulgar-ian lands from the north. In the so-called ‘Bulgarian Apocryphal Chronicle’, dated from the late 11th (or beginning of the 12th) century, the first real Bulgar ruler of Danubian Bulgaria – Asparukh (called there “Ispor”) – is represented as a victor

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over the ‘Ishmailites’ and later as the one who was killed by those same ‘Ishmael-ites’ “on the Danube [River]” (Тъпкова-Заимова, Милтенова 1996, 196, 199–200). The passage under consideration reads as follows: ‘And then after him [Slav tzar – my note, Ts. Stepanov] another tzar was found in the Bulgarian land...to whom was given the name Ispor tzar [...]. And this tzar founded big towns: on the Danu-be River – Drăstăr [=Durostorum]...; it was also he who established the town of Pliska. And this tzar killed a big majority of Ishmaelites. [...] Tzar Ispor reigned in the Bulgarian lands for 172 years, and after that he was killed by the Ishmaelites on the Danube River’ (Тъпкова-Заимова, Милтенова 1996, 199–200 / Engl. trans. by Tsvetelin Stepanov). Of course, this does not mean – as it is understood by some scholars – that Ispor/Asparukh died by a Khazar hand there (on the notion about the river Danube as a border of the Christian and before that Roman Empire and ci-vilization, see Тъпкова-Заимова 1976; Моллов 1997, 33, 35, 67–69, 102, 105, 109 and n. 9; Степанов 2003, 14–27; Вачкова 2004, 135–150), or by the real Muslims, but by imaginary intruders entering the Christian realm through the well-known border of the Roman civilization, the Danube River. At the end of the same text, the real Pechenegs were mentioned, this time ‘labeled’ as “infidels and law-breakers” as well as “oppressors and fraudsters” (Тъпкова-Заимова, Милтенова 1996, 198, 202). According to Anisava Miltenova (Милтенова 2006, 859–860), the so-called Bulgarian Apocryphal Chronicle was written “around the end of the 11th and the beginning of the 12th century” or “around the first decades of the 12th century”. Todor Mollov (Моллов 1997, 190) is also inclined to claim that the text was writ-ten after the battle at Levounion in 1091 and the final crush of the Pechenegs and Uzes made by Alexios I Komnenos. It is well known that the Cumans, who were mentioned in the same text, launched their attacks against the Balkan Peninsula in 1070s-1080s (on the Cumans in South-Eastern Europe, see Павлов 1990, 16–26; Стоянов 2005, 3–25; Стоянов 2006; Vásáry 2005; on Cumans in general, Golden 1992; Golden 1995–1997, 99–122; Golden 2003).

The Pechenegs launched their attacks against the Bulgarian lands from the 1030s on; they came exactly from the north/north-eastern direction, and had been living as nomads north of the Caucasus Mountains and between the Volga and Dniester rivers at least from the beginning of the 10th century. So for the Bulgarian scribe of the 11th-12th centuries who left the ‘Bulgarian Apocryphal chronicle’, they perfectly fit the cliché of the ‘unclean people’ of Gog and Magog.

Together with the Ugrians and Pechenegs, the so-called blonde beards, i.e. “blonde people/race” (Тъпкова-Заимова, Милтенова 1996, 93–94, 135, 155, 157) were also often labeled as invaders of the Bulgarian lands. Some scholars identify them as the well-known Norman mercenaries in the Byzantine army during the 11th cen-tury, more specifically Harald Hardraade and his warriors, whose help was deci-sive for the crushing of the Bulgarian uprising of Peter Delyanos in 1041. Only after the First Crusade did people start using the name “blonde race” to refer also to the Latin-speaking crusaders and the people from Western Europe as a whole (Тъпкова-Заимова, Милтенова 1996, 93–94). In this last case, the marking is not

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explicitly done through either “Ishmaelites” or “Gog and Magog”/”unclean people” (and other such archetypical names), but with the help of a specific physical trait (differentiable from one’s own), such as blonde beards.

At the same time, these apocalyptic texts, and especially those called “Legend of the saint prophet Isaiah of the coming years and of the kings and of the Antichrist who shall come” as well as “And this is the exegesis of Daniel” (Тъпкова-Заимова, Милтенова 1996, 135 and n. 8, 136, 155–156), contain a specific piling up of “blonde beards”, “V’gri(ans)” (i.e. Ugrians/Magyars) and “Ishmaelites”, all in con-nection with battles between the Bulgarians (in particular, the so-called Tsar Ga-gen, who is the real historical figure of Peter Delyanos) and different “oppressors” of the Bulgarian lands. These battles were fought in the region of what is today Skopie, on ‘Ovche pole’ (i.e., ‘Sheep Field’), ‘Graovo pole’ (i.e., ‘Peas Field’), and ‘Edrilo’ Field, as well as near actual cities in modern Bulgaria, Macedonia and Greece, such as Zemen, Pernik, Sredets (today Sofia), Velbuzhd (today Kiustendil), Strumitsa, Thessaloniki, etc. Obviously, the unknown Bulgarian scribes did not emphasize direction in their accounts, since the nomads in this particular case came from the west, from the territory of what is today Italy. In relation to the Bulgarians, they were neither northern people (‘Gog and Magog’), nor southern (‘Ishmael’s tribe’), and because of this they did not fit into the ‘paradigmatic’ apocalyptic scheme. It should be taken into account, however, that their very name, which has been known in the West at least from the 8th century in the form of “Normans”, contains an allusion to the North, meaning “people from the North/Northern people”.

The apocalyptic text called ‘Skazanie about the holy prophet Isaiah, about the years to come and the kings and Antichrist who will come’ explicitly notes that “the Ish-maelites will go out from the northern (sic) countries, and shall advance on the town of Thessaloniki… […] And the citizens of Thessaloniki will go out against the V’gri(ans)” (Тъпкова-Заимова, Милтенова 1996, 156). The contamination of the archetypical ‘Ishmaelites’ with the real Magyars/Ugrians/V’gri here is obvious and does not need further explanation. Except perhaps for this – that the direction of the attack is the ‘north’, while at that time and in view of geography the real Muslims could have attacked the Bulgarians only from the south. According to Alexander Nikolov (private conversation), these Muslims could be from Hungary, i.e. Muslim people who came there from Volga Bulgaria some time earlier, settling down in the Hungarian realm. This cannot be denied as a possibility, but the problem is that in the Bulgarian historical-apocalyptic texts there is no such a claim (for these Hun-garian ‘Muslims’ and Pechenegs, who were guardians of the Hungarian borders, see Berend 2001; Berend 2002, 200, 203 f., 207).

It seems that the unknown Bulgarian scribe “forgot” the direction/place of the Pseudo-Methodius’ ‘Ishmaelites’. He remembered, however, something more im-portant, that the intruders shall enter the sacred space of the Christian Empire in order to punish the ‘God-chosen’ people, i.e. the Bulgarians. What we have here, just as in the Rus’ case already mentioned above, is a ‘false’ geography of the ‘Ish-

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maelites’, not that known from the paradigmatic text of Pseudo-Methodius of Pa-thara (for more on this aspect, see Иванова 2006, 67–70; Моллов 1997, 110, 131–155). At the same time, what we see here are some real historical events that hap-pened in the Bulgarian lands from the mid-10th century as well as in 1040–1041, but presented in apocalyptic framework.

In view of this article’s title, another topos found in Bulgarian apocalyptic texts is also of interest, namely the place of the battle against the “unclean people” Gog and Magog. According to the Old Testament, it was to happen at Jericho’s field, while the Byzantine apocalyptic texts point to the field near Joppe/Joppa and the Bulgar-ian works talk of the so-called ‘Ovche pole’, but also of ‘Graovo pole’ and ‘Edrilo pole’ (Alexander 1985, 190, 192; Тъпкова-Заимова, Милтенова 1996, 155–156 and n. 19). The place of the battle has been memorialized by the archetypical text – the battle unfolds on a field. But why does the unknown author need so many different names of fields in modern Macedonia and Southwest Bulgaria? And if “Graovo Field” can be perceived both in the light of the adjective “pea” (“grahovo” in Bulgarian) and of the area Graovsko in modern Bulgaria, then can “Edrilo Field” be interpreted as ‘Odrino pole’ (i.e., the field near Odrin, ancient Hadrianopolis in Thrace), as V. Tăpkova-Zaimova and A. Miltenova assume? (Тъпкова-Заимова, Милтенова 1996, 156, and n. 21).

In my view, we should not pass up another option for “translating” Edrilo Field by connecting it with the concept of the “kernel” (“yadro” in Bulgarian), i.e. the centre. In this case, we should emphasize the phonetic aspect (Edrilo – yadro) and also take notice of the idea of the ‘last eschatological battle’ before the Second Coming of Christ, which by presumption is being fought at the centre/kernel of the holy space of the Tsardom/Empire (for the same interpretation of the phrase ‘Mezina zemia’, in similar texts from the cycle dated to the 13th century – as ‘center’, ‘kernel’ from the Greek ‘mesos’ – see Stepanov 2007, 113–115). Almost two dec-ades earlier, it was Todor Mollov (Моллов 1997, 45–47, 105, 188–189 and esp. 185 and notes 5 and 6, where he claims that ‘Edrilo Field’ has a clear connection to the Old-Bulgarian word ‘iadro’, i.e. “kernel, pea”) who has attempted to connect ‘Ovche pole’ (‘Lambs’ Field’) with another important center – “Sredets”, i.e. ancient Serdica (today Sofia), etymologically from Bulg. ‘sreda’, i.e. ‘center’, as well as the Polar star perceived as an axis in the center of a sacred space. Since by the ‘laws’ of mythological thinking, hyper-significant things should happen exactly in the cen-tre, it is then not strange to see the “Ugrians”/”V’gri(ans) and “Ishmaelites” being connected eschatologically with ‘Ovche pole’ and Sredets in this type of works. The passage of interest reads: “And ... will appear the 38th tzar ... named Gagen with a nickname Odolian [Peter Delian, the son of the Bulgarian tzar Gabriel-Radomir (d. 1015), who rebelled against the Byzantines in 1040/41 – my note, Ts. S.] [...] And with his coming he will crush down the people with the blonde beards... [...] And then he will be met by the Ishmaelites on the Pea Field [Graovo pole] and they’ll de-feat him... and he shall flea to the town of Zemen. And the Ishmaelites will take in hand the whole of the Bulgarian lands. [...] Then a maiden will go out, holy and with

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a nice body, and shall bring 300 holy fathers with her. And he [Tzar Gagen – sic!], holding the True Cross will come out against the Ishmaelites...and shall kill the Ishmaelites... [...] Then will go out some oppressors from the west ... and will come to the Ovche pole (=Sheep Field) with a big army. And Tzar Gagen will then come to Ovche pole.... And there a big fight will happen.... And Tzar Gagen will die there, and together with him more than 1000 men [will die]. And during these years the Ishmaelites will go out from the northern (sic) regions, and will go out against the city of Thessaloniki... [...] And the citizens of Thessaloniki will go out against the V’grians (=Hungarians)...” (Тъпкова-Заимова, Милтенова 1996, 155–156. / Eng. trans. by Ts. Stepanov).

The Bulgarians, therefore, viewed themselves as predestined to save the world in the Last Days and before the Second Coming. This notion was further developed in detailed schemes, especially after the two unsuccessful revolts in the Bulgarian lands led by Peter Delyan (1040/41) and Georgi Voitekh (1072) and around the turn of the 11th century, with the expectations of the approaching ‘Endzeit’ in the year 1092. In the years between, roughly, 1060s/1070s and 1200, several apoca-lyptic texts appeared, mainly ‘Visions’ of the prophets Daniel and Isaiah, that presented the Bulgarians as the ‘center’ of the Christian Empire, which was dev-astated by different ‘oppressors’ called “V’grians” (=Magyars), or “Pechenegs”, or “blonde race/beards”. One of these texts is the above-mentioned ‘Vision’ of Isaiah about the Last Days (13th century): “They will come to the river which is called the “hidden paradise”; this river is running through the land of Israel, which is called ‘Mezina land’. […] It is not me who is speaking, but the Holy Spirit…. […] And [listen] I am giving you a sign but it is not [in fact] me but the Holy Spirit! When you see the end of the realm in Mezina land, after that there will be no other tzar from that same origin” (Тъпкова-Заимова, Милтенова 1996, 237–238 / Engl. trans. by Ts. Stepanov).

It is worth noting that two of ‘the unclean’ nations were depicted as coming exactly from the paradigmatic northern direction, namely the Magyars and the Pechenegs, often termed in these apocalyptic texts “Ishmaelites” and “unclean” tribes having no laws. As for the “blonde race”, it is clear that originally it was the Rus’ians (of the 9th-10th c.) who were modeled this way by the Byzantine authors, but in the course of the 11th century, in the Bulgarian texts, this naming already meant people com-ing from the West, i.e. the Normans then centered in Southern Italy. It is then clear that for both the Byzantines and the Bulgarians, during the decades between the 1040s and 1200, the arch-evil before the Second Coming was seen as coming from either North or West. There is in fact fluidity in the aspect of the direction from which the ‘evil’ could invade the ‘Holy Land’. Magyars and Pechenegs fit perfectly in the scheme of the steppe people of the North called Gog and Magog. But the same cannot be said about the Northmen/Normans, who in the course of the 11th century invaded what was then the Byzantine Empire (indeed the western/south-western parts of the Balkans, lands inhabited mostly by the Bulgarians) from the West; moreover, these Normans were neither pagans nor Muslims but Christians.

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4. in Kievan Rus’:

It should be noted that in the 11th century Kievan Rus’ was already thought of as being the state and its people ‘chosen’. Thus the Rus’ian so-called ‘Sofiiskaia I Le-topis’ (Sophia’s First Annals) promised to narrate “kako izb’ra Bog stranu nashu na posled’nee vremia”, i.e. „how God made His choice for our [Rus’] country for the Last Time” (Полное собрание русских летописей 1925, 8). During the year 1096, in a text written by a certain monk from the Kievo-Pechersky monastery, it was stated that Kiev and its hinterland had been devastated by the “Polovcians”, i.e. Cumans, termed there “sons of Ishmael” who came out from the Nitriv (sic) desert, i.e. (Saudi) Arabia [and Medina – my note, Ts. S.], attacking the southern Rus’ lands and Kiev in particular, devastating the Christian Rus’ land. According to the monk, from their [i.e., Ishmaelites’ – my note, Ts. S.] stock appeared “Tort-mens (sic) [Turkmen] and Pechenegs, and Torks [i.e., Oguz] and Cumans” (Полное собрание русских летописей 1962, Стб. 231–232, 233–234). More importantly, right after this the unknown monk added that Methodius of Pathara himself re-ferred to the Cumans, a statement that is, understandably, not found in the original text of the Syrian author.

In that same text, the Rus’ scribe also mentioned the Volga Bulgars as well as the Khorasmians (“Khvalis” in the text) as people from the Biblical Ammon and Moab, respectively, who were living not far away from Rus’. It is well known that both the Bulgars near Volga and the Khorasmians near the Caspian Sea were Muslims. It seams then that for the scribe his Christian Rus’ was thought of as being encircled by enemies: Muslims (i.e., Volga Bulgars and Khorasmians, as well as Saracens) and the ‘unclean peoples’ of Gog and Magog (i.e., the ‘Scythian’ people of the North) who were expected to attack the ‘chosen people’, i.e. Rus’ians, before the appear-ance of Antichrist. In other words, in this text Rus’ was perceived as the ‘center’ of the Christian world, which, according to the Bible, should be attacked by the arch-enemies, namely the Gog and Magog of the North. The latter were, at that time, mainly the Cumans (and other Turkic-speaking people) living in the steppes north of the Black Sea and the Azov Sea after the mid-11th century. The hostile sur-roundings of this “Holy Rus” are recognisable from the Old Testament prophecies of Daniel, from more subsequent prophecies (by the ‘Tiburtine Sibyl’ and others) and mostly from the ones dated to the end of the 7th century, i.e. the work of Pseudo-Methodius of Pathara, but, as could be expected, the names of the peo-ples in the Rus’ian text are different and non-Biblical.

Furthermore, another interesting fact from the same article s. a. 1096 deserves to be mentioned here, namely that the directions from which God’s punishment will appear have also been changed by the Rus’ian chronicler. In relation to Kievan Rus’, the steppe lies to the south, so the Cumans cannot be considered – from the point of view of the Biblical meta-text – “the people of the North”. Perhaps this manipu-lation of the real geography of Eastern Europe occurred partly due to the Cumans’ real positioning on the map since during the 11th-13th century, when they inhabited

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the steppe area to the north of the Caucasus Mountains and around the Black Sea. And it was right there, moreover, next to the Caucasus, that the aforementioned iron wall/barrier of Alexander the Great was erected against the “unclean people” of the steppe. Obviously, for the Rus’ during the 11th-12th century, the nomads were the arch-enemy, identified also as Gog and Magog (i.e., pagan nomads), and at the same time – judging from the aforementioned example of the article about the year 1096 – also as “Ishmaelites” (i.e., Muslims). What one sees here is in fact a mixture of both the times and the topoi/loci, as well as the peculiar doubling of the image of the nomad – he is not only one of the ‘Scythians’ living near the Caucasus Moun-tains, but also one of the “Saracens” from Arabia.

5. in the Muslim world (of Volga Bulgaria, in particular):

Before starting with the Volga Bulgars it seems important to take a look at the geographical traditions in the Islamic world. Where do these ‘unclean people’ live? Were they situated according to the so-called climes/climates cliché known to the Ancient Greeks? The last question should be answered in a positive way, as will be demonstrated in the following examples. It was the astronomer al-Farghani (d. after 861) who claimed that, “The seventh clime begins in the east, in the north of the lands of Gog and Magog, and extends to the land of the Turks” (van Donzel, Schmidt 2010, 89–90). Another author, Ibn Rusta (10th century), said that, “The fifth clime begins in the land of Gog and Magog in the east and passes immediately into Khurasan; the sixth clime begins in the land of Magog and passes over the land of the Khazars; the seventh clime begins in the east with the Northern Gog, passes over the land of the Turks…” (van Donzel, Schmidt 2010, 91). The aforementioned al-Tabari claims that, “Coming back from the West, the “two-horned one” [=Alex-ander the Great – my note, Ts. S.] went to the east via Tibet. He constructed the barrier of Gog and Magog between two high mountains…” (van Donzel, Schmidt 2010, 91). Moreover, the climes and the Gog and Magog peoples are explicitly linked to the Alexander the Great paradigm.

The famous ruler of the ancient Macedonians is the only one amongst the Hel-lenes who later received a special position in the Quran (sura XVIII, 82–102). The Russian scholar Sharif Shukurov put forward the idea that authors from different Islamic centers tried to involve trans-cultural and trans-chronological character-istics in the image of Alexander the Great (in some Arabic texts, he was called Iskander, or ‘the two-horned one’). It seems to me that it would not be a mistake to add here trans-regional, too, for some data from Volga Bulgaria give us grounds for such a suggestion. Since before the Islamization of vast regions in Asia and Northern Africa, Alexander’s space was viewed as stretching from Hellas and the Balkan Peninsula, as a whole, in the West; in the East to Asia Minor, Persia and part of North India; to the South, it reached Egypt and the Middle East. For us, it is most interesting to understand the ‘natural’ Northern frontier of this space, i.e. the Cau-casus Mountains and the Amu Daria River in Central Asia. In this area, Alexander the Great appeared as a real demiourgos, as the constructor of a world, a culturally

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unified and civilized space marked by several towns named ‘Alexandria’. These spe-cific characteristics of the new alexandrocentric space would later have, in Volga Bulgaria, interesting repercussions. Once the early Islamic authors put forward the idea about Iskander – as a prophet, an ideal ruler, and a demiourgos –it was not difficult for the Volga Bulgars after the end of the 9th and the beginning of the 10th century ‘to forget’ about the real and most distant points of Alexander’s campaigns, and ‘to relocate’ the civilization’s frontier far away to the North, in Northeastern Europe.

The Volga Bulgars started to view themselves as a first post in the North of this civi-lization’s core; in fact, on the level of imagination, they linked the Mediterranean and the Middle East with the region of the Volga and Kama Rivers. In their notion, therefore, it was not the Caucasus Mountains that were the old ‘frontier’ between the Gog and Magog peoples, i.e. between civilized and uncivilized peoples, but their own polity situated along the Volga and Kama Rivers. Since the 920s, the Bulgars had already been ‘people of the Book’, and only heathen people were living north of them. It is interesting to mention here the evidence left by Abu Hamid al-Garnati, who paid a visit to Volga Bulgaria in the 12th century. In his words, there were ideas amongst the Bulgars that “Iskander [Alexander – my note, Ts. S.] passed through the town of Bulgar when he was on his way to Gog and Magog” (Путешествие Абу Хамида ал-Гарнати 1971, 59 / Eng. trans. by Ts. Stepanov). Another author, Najib al-Khamadani (12th century) wrote that, “In the city of Bulgar is their [the Bulgars’] padishah, who is one of Iskander’s descendents” (Ковалевский 1956, 61 / Eng. trans. by Ts. Stepanov). And another source could be added, this time from Medieval Rus’: a Rus’ chronicle mentioned a Bulgar legend according to which the town of Oshel was built by Alexander the Great.

It may then be assumed that Volga Bulgaria started to perceive itself not only as Alexander’s space par excellence, but also as an imaginative Caucasus, as an imagi-native Wall before ‘the unclean peoples’ of Gog and Magog. A well known fact is that until the 7th century, the Bulgars’ homeland was situated north of the Cauca-sus’ slopes and around the Black Sea and the Azov Sea, i.e. beyond the so-called Alexander’s Wall and, indeed, in a space “predestined” for the people of Gog and Magog. Most of the Bulgars then were pagans. In the course of the 8th century, some of the Bulgar tribes moved to the remote North, near the Volga and Kama Rivers. With the adoption of Islam (920s), all of the Bulgars there became ‘purified’ and thus entered the imagined space of the civilized people. With such a mental, imaginative manoeuvre, the Volga Bulgars, being outside Alexander’s space prior to the 10th century, through the act of Islamization became true civilized people with a mission to defend as well as expand the frontiers of the civilized world. Thus Volga Bulgaria, after the inclusion of its lands to territories marked by Alexander the Great’s deeds, added some nuances to the symbolic, unreal, imaginary space, modeled after Alexander’s paradigm. The Volga Bulgars indeed made an imagi-native ‘movement’, something like a translatio of the well-known Caucasus Wall (= the Northern frontier of the Civilization) to the northern boundaries of Volga

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Bulgaria. Thus Volga Bulgars became the northernmost point of the new, imagined and symbolic Mediterranean macrokosmos “invented” by the Volga learned men after their Islamization. Needless to say, their land was viewed as a holy one.

6. in the Jewish milieu of the 10th century:

For many centuries, there lived many Jews in the two most remote parts of Europe: in Spain (Cordoba Chaliphate) and near the Sea of Azov and the Caspian Sea, the latter being at that time a territory under Khazarian rule. In Khazaria, it was in the course of the 8th and the 9th centuries that its élite became Judaized (for more, see Dunlop 1954 [1967]; Shepard 1998, 9–34; Pritsak 1978, 261–281; Golden 2007, 123–162; Новосельцев 1990; Stepanov 2010; Живков 2011).

It should be noted that amongst the European Jewry, in the decades of the 10th century, there was also a revival of Messianism, i.e. of the tradition of the estab-lishment of a Jewish tzardom at the Last Time. It was the Jewish ‘majordomo’ of the khalifs in Cordoba, Hasdai b. Itzhak Shafruth, who linked all these expecta-tions with the Khazar Empire. There is an explicit mention of the ‘tzardom of the Khazars’ in the correspondence between Hasdai and the Khazar qagan-beq Joseph (mid-10th century): “There is a tzardom amongst the Jews called by the name ‘al-Khazar” (Eng. trans. by Ts. Stepanov, after the Russian text in Pavel Kokovtsov’s book of 1932). It is worth noting that Khazaria at that time was situated north of the Caucasus Mountains, i.e. exactly in the steppe region perceived traditionally as the ‘land of Gog and Magog’. But whether Hasdai made such a connection, is not clear from his letter. According to Boris Rashkovskii, Hasdai b. Shafruth treated the Khazars as real Jews on purpose, and as one of the Lord’s ten blessed but lost tribes of Israel, in particular, although he was well aware that their origin was in fact the Great Steppe (Рашковский 2011), and therefore that they were connected much more to the Turkic world than to that of the ancient Near East, the original homeland of the Jewish people.

Daniel al-Qumisi is one of the Karaite ‘wing’ of 10th-century Jerusalem who sent an appeal to the Jewish diaspora asking the Jewry to send men to settle down firmly in Jerusalem: “…and you, brothers, come to Jerusalem and if you cannot do that…send from each town five men and food for them…”, wrote al-Qumisi (see the first edition of the letter in, Mann 1922, 257–298, esp. 283–285; Юваль 1999, 220, and n. 20). Such an appeal, namely to gather five men of each town, is recalled in a phrase from a later source, the anonymous text with quite a telling title “Midrash about the King Messiah, Gog and Magog”, which appeared in the rabbinical milieu of 13th-century France. In this text was written that in Israel “one man of each town and two men of each tribe” should be gathered in order for the expectation of the advent of Messiah in the Last Days to be fulfilled (Юваль 1999, 220–221). The last words are in fact a quotation of the prophet Jeremiah (3:14): “Come back chil-dren… says the Lord, because I…shall take from you one men of each town and two men of each tribe and shall bring them to Sion” (Eng. trans. by Ts. Stepanov). The Sion topos here means that the prophet had in mind the Promised Land of the Jews,

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which was later to become the ‘Holy Land’ for both the Christians and Muslims, with its central – real as well as imagined – city of Jerusalem.

These two sources from the Jewish milieu show that at the turn of the Year 1000, just like in Byzantium, even among some learned Jewish men, and in the Cordoba Cha-liphate in particular, a notion of the “dual” Holy Land appeared: one in the original Israel, the other – paradoxically – in the lands north of the Caucasus Mountains, under Khazarian domination at that time, where after the 1st century A.D. Flavius Josephus situated the Gog and Magog peoples. This might be called an ‘adjustment’ to contemporary “Realpolitik” and the political context in Europe as a whole.

some possible conclusions:

This article is based upon different levels of analysis and takes into consideration the idea that Europe and parts of the Near East were thought of by many Medieval intellectuals, both Christian and Muslim, as having common roots and charac-teristics, e.g. the heritage of Alexander the Great, of the Roman Empire and of the Abrahamic (three monotheistic) religions as well. In my opinion, and keeping the above in mind, some new questions could be asked, such as whether there was any serious distortion in the picture of the ‘own’ Universe/‘own’ Holy Land, or whether it was distorted only in some details but not in the ‘core’ of the doctrine (understood as ‘we’ are [in] ‘the center’ [=‘Holy Land’] and the ‘invaders’ are [in] ‘the periphery’, according to the typical mental scheme of the pre-modern socie-ties). This question is quite reasonable, since for many of the Medieval Christian societies the so-called spatial segregation of the ‘Others’ (Jews, Muslims, heretics, etc.) was a typical feature. That is why all the ‘unclean people’, according to the Gog and Magog cliché, were situated on the margins, beyond the world of civilization. This is indeed a spatial segregation developed through the scheme of the spatial exclusion of the ‘Other’.

From the original texts it becomes clear that there were manipulations as to the location of these ‘unclean’ intruders as well as the direction of their raids. So far, and this can be said for sure, such manipulations of the paradigmatic model can be found in the Byzantine, Bulgarian, and Rus’ian sources dating back to the 11th-12th century. One could say there was a fluidity in some perceptions of the main motifs mentioned above as well as in the names of the ‘Gog and Magog’ people: Following the model of terming them ‘Scythians’, ‘Huns’, Ishmaelites’, etc., after the mid-10th century and depending on the historical contexts, their role was ascribed to dif-ferent tribes/ethnoi, namely Hungarians, Turks, Pechenegs, Northmen/Normans, Cumans, etc. In principle, all of these were viewed by the civilized intellectuals and scribes as the ‘Other’ par excellence and, consequently, as living on the fringes of the civilized world.

All of the above cases offer a picture which is not marked by signs that give a coher-ent ‘structure’ of the notions of ‘the invader’ and its representations. Rather, in all of

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these regions of Medieval Europe, differentiated both ethnically and religiously, all these signs were in fact quite flexible, depending both on the existing stereotypes and clichés and the realities of the given moment, i.e. the historical contexts. That is why the emblematic direction of Evil, North, was sometimes changed for another option, i.e. East, West or South. Thus, speaking “topographically”, the place of the ‘unclean nations’ Gog and Magog was not restricted to the paradigmatic North alone and, obviously, there was no consensus as to the place of Evil’s ‘unclean nations’.

The image of Alexander the Great, the notion of the civilization’s space situated south of the Caucasus Mountains as well as the idea of Gog and Magog intending to pun-ish the human race before the ‘Last Days’ were in fact important matrices during the Middle Ages. They all were used by different élites or simply by literati in order to build doctrines, notions of the ‘Other’ as well as real or imagined frontiers.

The topic presented here suggests a difficult balance of different ethno-cultural entities and some of their notions. Hopefully it will help some of the characteristics of the ‘mental’ map of medieval Europe – with regard to concepts-and-notions of the ‘Holy/Sacred Land’ and the places of ‘the invaders’ – to be better understood.

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