"Anomalous Eras - Best Evidence: Best Theory"

Toronto Conference, June 28, 29, 30, 2005 The Invented Middle Ages
By Heribert Illig The thesis of the "Invented Middle Ages" created quite a stir in the German-speaking world. For years there has been an on-going discussion of this thesis that keeps flaring up again and again, though it was really less of a discussion than a determined attack by mainstream historians, an attempt to eliminate that which must not be. At present, German medievalists, after several failed attempts at refutation, are no longer willing to react to my arguments. Nevertheless, despite their attempts to ignore me, the debate continues. Two of my books have been translated into Hungarian. But although the general public takes great interest in the subject, the scholars remain silent. For my presentation here in Canada I decided on the following structure: I will present the steps that led me to results that are totally different from all the scholars who had previously dealt with this period.

How I arrived at my Thesis

A brief word on my credentials. I got my doctorate on the subject of the Viennese cultural historian Egon Friedell, but I am not a historian in the narrow sense of the word. I did study economics, mathematics, physics, some art history and Egyptology. My interest in Egyptian culture brought me into contact with Velikovsky's theses. Velikovsky's ideas showed me that the accepted time line has holes like a sieve. In other words: many periods have left so frighteningly little evidence that we must ask: did this particular period ever exist or did it originate on the desks of scholars? A response to this question was given in the book I cowrote with Gunnar Heinsohn, "Wann lebten die Pharaonen?" (When Did the Pharaohs Live?) This brings me to (Slide I) the first and essential point: Giving up an axiom, i.e. a supposition that nobody has ever doubted. As an example of such an axiom, consider this statement: the accepted time line is God-given and therefore does not need to be checked. In my study of Ancient Egypt I learned that entire periods may be written up in books, even though they have not left any traces on earth and, more importantly, in the earth. I was thus forewarned when I started looking at the history ofthe Middle Ages. Which brings us to the next point: Logic and experience of life - "Common Sense" What started me off was a phone call from a friend. He was looking into forgeries in the Middle Ages. In 1986 there had been a conference on this subject in Munich, the results of which were reprinted in six volumes totaling 3,700 pages. The final talk was given by Prof Horst Fuhrmann, then president of "Monumenta Germaniae Historica", the institution that prepares the critical edition of the old and oldest German documents. Fuhrmann talked of "forgeries with anticipatory character". I quote: "Sylvester legend, Constantinian Donation, Symmachian Forgeries, Pseudo-Clemens letters, Pseudo-Isidorian Forgeries: let us stop at that list. All these forgeries have the

characteristic that at the time they were written, they had hardly any effect. At the time of their creation, they had anticipatory character." You can see on Slide 2 that after being created the individual forgeries had to wait 250 to 550 years before they had an effect. This is an incredibly long time. Can you imagine forging a document that will suddenly become effective centuries later? How would it have to be written so that it will fit the daily politics of a future era? And where do you keep such a forgery? How does anyone remember that there was an ancient document that might be worthwhile fishing out? Where were the safes that would protect it from mice and humidity and at the same time provided an index in which it might be located? At that time I told my friend: If the monk in his scriptorium wasn't a clairvoyant, then I can provide only an ad-hoc explanation: The moment when this forgery was produced, and the moment when the forgery had an effect were perhaps much closer to each other than has been thought previously. However, in that case we would need to shorten the time line. At this point in our discussion we reached the point of testability: the mathematically comprehensible calendar calculation. Whereas questions of ancient Egyptian chronology are not directly linked with our present chronology, it's a different story with the Middle Ages. Today we use the Gregorian Calendar, which was defined by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. It is an improved version of the calendar that Julius Caesar introduced in 45 BC. At that time, the lunar calendar of the Romans was in an utter muddle because corrupt persons had bribed the responsible priests to add another month to the tax year. Caesar solved the problem by inserting three months into the calendar- this led to a year with 445 days -, by going over to a clear solar year as a basis for the calendar year, and by introducing a clear intercalary rule: every fourth year is an intercalary year with one additional day. This proved to be an excellent system, but not forever because the year was not exactly 365 days and 6 hours long (see Slide 3). From an astronomical point of view, there were 674 seconds too many. This is not even a quarter of an hour per year, but in 128 years this error adds up to a whole day. After 1,282 years, therefore, there are 10 days too many. In 1582 Pope Gregory ordered precisely ten days to be skipped in order to make the day count agree with the celestial situation. In passing it should be mentioned that the Pope introduced an improved intercalary rule which requires revision only every 2000years. What is decisive for us is the following: The ten days that were skipped in October 1582 corrected the mistake that had accumulated in the Julian Calendar over the previous 1,282 years. However, if you deduct these 1,282 years from 1582, you don't arrive in the year of Caesar's calendar reform, 45 BC, but in the year AD 300! If he had gone all the way back to Caesar, Pope Gregory would have had to skip 13 days. He did not do so, and yet: the astronomical situation and the calendar agreed. His jump was too short, yet he landed in the right place. For some years now in Germany there has been a heated discussion of this strange phenomenon. In the end, it was found that in searching for the truth, antique tradition is no help: it has not left us any evidence of the spring equinox at the time of Caesar nor the autumn equinox at the time of Augustus. But this year, Werner Frank clarified that before 1582, several experts working on the calendar reform demanded that 12, 13 or even 15 days should be skipped. The Viennese Ordinary Fabricius demanded a jump of 13 days. Giorgio Caretti asked for 14 days. The mathematician Giovanni Rastelli pleaded for 15 days, in order to get to March 25, which Columella or Pliny had indicated as being the day of the spring equinox in Caesar's time. But March 25 belongs to an alternative calendar, which probably originates with the Mithras cult. Using the Greek Eudoxos (408-355), Werner Frank calculated that in Caesar's time, the spring equinox was on March 21.

All we need to know for our subject is that our calendar contains "slack" so that the time line could be shorter. Now it was a question of making the first thesis plausible: Which period was superfluous? At first glance it was obvious that the Roman imperial era was very well documented. The Renaissance period before 1582 was also very well documented. Even the Romanesque and Gothic eras - looked at from an art-history perspective - are well documented, with thousands - even tens of thousands of buildings. So almost automaticallywe hit upon the Early Middle Ages. Only here was there darkness. Only here did we find the technical term "Dark Ages". This can be shown with a table (Slide 4). In the literature, the term "Dark Ages" is used for various periods (Slide 4). The author of a history of Byzantium, Frank ThieB, called the period from the death of Justinian I till 741 "dark centuries". The Byzantinist Cyril Mango considers events in Greece and sees "dark ages" there from 580 to the 10th century. In the Frankish west, there is talk of a Merovingian Dark Age between 600 and 750. According to Peter Schreiner, a Byzantinist, there is no contemporary historiography for the period from 600 to 800. And in Byzantine architecture, for the period between 610 and at least 850 there is a large gap. This has been described by Mango. (The first preserved building that is not known from literature only is from the period shortly after 900.) For the French medievalist Guy Bois, the century between 814 and 914 is one of the most mysterious because it is the darkest of all. For the city of Rome, its "biographer" Ferdinand Gregorovius noted in the 19th century that the period between 825 and 925 was the darkest part of an already dark era. In the Occident, it is striking that almost nothing was built between 850 and 950, which has been noticed by architectural historians such as Zimmermann or Erwin Panofsky. Incidentally, the first who talked of a dark century was Cardinal Caesar Baronius, who died in 1607. In his Ecclesiastical Annals, he used this term to describe the period between 900 and 1000. When we look at the different definitions, it can be roughly stated that in the Byzantine Empire, a large, coherent period starting in 565, 580, or 600 and lasting till the 10th century can be eliminated as a suspicious Dark Age. In the West, however, there are two dark periods: one lasts from 600 to 750, the other from 814 into the 10th century. Why? Because in the west, there is Charlemagne, a luminous figure who is supposed to have reigned from 768 to 814 and who supplies evidence for this period because of the Carolingian Renaissance he is supposed to have initiated. However, he only illuminates this time, because immediately before and after him all is dark. Gregorovius, in his "History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages," described it thus: "The figure of the Great Charles can be compared to a flash of lightning who came out of the night, illuminated the earth for a while, and then left night behind him." Thus, in my search for "superfluous times" I had hit on the Early Middle Ages, but I did not yet know whether there was one or two Dark Ages. Therefore I had to look closely at a German national treasure, Charlemagne. There are various methods for testing whether a period is real or fictitious. First, written source will have to be held against written source. Then architectural finds can be compared with architectural history. Above all, the existing architecture will be compared with the existing written sources. With certainty, the best method is the comparison of archaeological finds with written sources. These are not new methods; yet they appear not to have been used sufficiently until now. I would like to illustrate the different possibilities.

Sources vs. Sources

This comparison is easy to illustrate using the reports on the life of Charlemagne. Comparing all the biographies, I soon noticed that this ruler's achievements would have required the lives of two, three, or four "normal men." In 44 of the 46 years of his reign he goes to war. Like a Medici, he has a court of scholars at Aachen that gathers the cleverest Europeans of his time. Depending on whose calculation we use, during the course of his life he traveled the equivalent of two or even three times around the globe. At the same time he was a perfect lawmaker: he formulated more than a hundred decrees, he updated jurisdiction by introducing the jury system; wherever he was he administered justice. But he was also active as a folklorist and mythologist, ordering old legends and folk tales to be collected; he was a linguist both for German and for Latin; he ordered - remember he was illiterate! - a cleaned-up version of the Bible for he was obviously an exceptional theologian who even conducted ecclesiastical synods himself. He was a grammarian, a founder of schools, of libraries and universities - all of these long before the time when such institutions are first mentioned in Europe. In my book I have collected more than a hundred of the Great Charles' characteristics. This makes an extraordinary list: he was his own minister of agriculture; he was the physical as well as the spiritual ancestor of half of Europe; he was sole ruler to whom omniscience was ascribed; he was a classical philologist, architect, astronomer, builder and so on. The conclusion is simple: far too much is ascribed to this one person. How much of it is true? The written sources cannot answer that question, though even while he was alive and before he was crowned emperor they speak of the beacon of Europe and the father of Europe. For the moment, let's leave aside the written sources and consult the material evidence. For the item Architectural Findings vs. Architectural History, the famous Aachen Palatine Chapel, today's Aachen Cathedral, is the best example. For this structure, his most important palace, Charlemagne was not only the patron but, according to some reports, also the architect and building supervisor. Because this building has survived to our time, we can study it thoroughly. In doing so, I found more than 24 building details that - according to architectural history - are present here already in perfection, before AD 800. But these architectural features have neither predecessors nor direct successors. All these details had to be rediscovered independently during the subsequent Romanesque Period. This is a riddle of a complexity that does not occur elsewhere. As an example, I would refer to the central dome. The inner octagon at Aachen has, at a height of over 30 m, an octagonal dome 15 m in diameter. It is assembled from carefully hewn stone and at its weakest points it is 83 cm thick (not quite 33 inches). This means that above every visitor, a ton of stone is suspended. The enormous weight and the thrust it produces need to be supported by the walls. This has been achieved perfectly, otherwise the building would not have survived World War II. But where did its builder learn to build so well? The Franks were builders in wood and did not have any larger buildings. Did the knowledge come trom the Romans? The Romans had two techniques for building domes and vaults. In Rome itself domes were made trom cast concrete. Concrete consists of cement, water, and aggregate materials such as gravel or sand. The Romans had the volcanic Pozzulan earth which sets just like cement. The most famous example for this technology is the dome of the Pantheon. But no such dome was built later than AD 400. There was no building tradition that could have transported this knowledge to the Franks more than 400 years later.

In Byzantium, domes were made from tiles and other clay elements that were as light as possible, such as amphorae. The most famous examples are the domes of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Here, too, there was no continued building activity that could have transported the knowledge from Istanbul to Germany. However, knowledge that is not written down requires oral transmission from generation to generation. Thus, the Aachen Palatine Chapel appears to be a masterpiece without a predecessor. Neither does it have a successor, for there is no Carolingian building with a dome after 820. The technology appears to have been totally forgotten. In the Occident, buildings with domes started up again only around 970, but the first domes had a span of only 3.5 meters (about 11 1/2 feet). From that point onward, the span of the vaults was increased inch by inch. Around 1050, it was possible to construct vaults over the aisle ofthe imperial cathedral at Speyer on the Rhine: with 7.5 meters (approx. 25 feet) they were the largest vaults of their time. Then started the building ofthe large Romanesque domes at Toulouse, Cluny, Santiago de Compostela, and again in Speyer. Shortly after 1100, in that city, the central nave and the transept were also given vaults. As in Aachen, the transept is an octagonal dome with a diameter of around 15 meters (approx. 50 feet). With regard to Speyer, everything is right: there are the indispensable precursor buildings, there is the building evolution, and there are the successor buildings. For Aachen nothing is right: Aachen stands as a masterpiece with no precursor, no successor, as an erratic within the so-called Carolingian Renaissance. Since this debate began in Germany in 1996, this line of evidence has not been refuted. On the contrary, one of the few who looked into it, Prof. Jan van der Meulen, confirmed in writing that despite what art histories tell us - the Aachen dome is not Carolingian. It's either Gallo-Roman or Ottonian. Which means that Prof. van der Meulen places it either in the period before 650 or in the Ottonian period, which lasted from 918 to 1024. In 2004, the architectural historian Volker Hoffinann, Berne (Switzerland) went public with the suggestion that Aachen cathedral is to be placed historically in the early 6th century. In favor of this idea is the "sister building" of San Vitale in Ravenna, though the method of building the dome of San Vitale is against the comparison because the Romans did not practice such building techniques. The dome in San Vitale, like that of St. Gereon in Cologne, was built with light clay elements. From my point of view, Aachen was built at the same time as Speyer II, shortly after 1100. Whichever view is accepted, Aachen loses its distinction as a Carolingian building. This means that this period loses its best building, and the most important city of the Frankish Empire loses its ecclesiastical heart. With the loss of this dome alone, the tradition of Charlemagne's giant empire crumbles to dust. Or, in other words: Carolingian buildings do not fit into the history of the arts as it is taught today.

Next point, Existing Architecture vs. Sources.

Written sources mention numerous Dark Age buildings in the Frankish region. It has been calculated (not by me but by experts on the documents in question) that there are 1,695 major buildings from the period between 476, the end of the West Roman Empire, and 817, which is three years after the death of Charlemagne. The scholars who came up with this number understood "major buildings" to mean palaces, churches, and monasteries. When we check the actual number

of preserved buildings and ruins, we can be happy if more than 97 percent haven't disappeared. The ~ame applies to the period of Charlemagne. He was supposed to have built 65 palaces, and altogether 313 major buildings. Of the palaces, a maximum of five have been preserved. Of the monasteries, not a single foundation exists. We only know the famous monastery plan of St. Gallen but for an architectural drawing this is centuries too early. Of this number, too, about 97 percent of the buildings have disappeared. The percentage is probably even higher, since besides the Aachen Palatine Chapel there is hardly a building that is ascribed exclusively to the Carolingians. The situation is even more dramatic with regard to the most important point: Archaeology vs.

Sources.
In this area, there are gaps without number. For example, one might wonder where Carolingian graves might be found. But the relevant part of the most important building, St. Denis cathedral, today in Paris, was destroyed a long time ago. Everywhere graves have been faked, as archaeologists have been able to show, such as that for King Carloman at AltOtting in Bavaria. In the Frankish Empire, it is claimed, there were numerous destructions by Vikings, Saracens, or Avars and Huns. But archaeologists cannot show any evidence for these destructions. This is most strikingly the case for the well-researched Viking raids. What looks so plausible in the sources Vikings come up all major rivers such as the Rhine, the Seine, Loire or Guadalquivir, and pillage all the cities - cannot be shown to have occurred in these cities. It cannot be shown that churches were destroyed or that city walls were demolished. There are no Viking objects to be found in these cities, and there are no Viking graves on the Continent. Because this is the central point ofthe Thesis of the Phantom Era - what is there to prove the Dark Centuries existed? - together with a friend, Gerhard Anwander I carried out a large-scale study of Bavaria. In a comprehensive search, which has since been published in two volumes, we checked the 70,000 square kilometers of this region which is not only our home, it is representative of Central Europe, if not of more than half of Europe. About half of Bavaria was Roman, the other half Germanic; the Limes - the line of fortifications that divided the two populations - can still be seen. The population is composed of Germanic, Slav, and Romanic peoples; there are also interspersions of steppe peoples. First, we collected places named in written documents. We found 2,200 places we called "document places". But when we started looking carefully for archaeological evidence, we discovered something strange: in only 88 of these document places have archaeologists discovered any remains at all that they ascribe to the Carolingians or to the early Bavarians, called the Agilolfing dukes and their time. So, here, too, in 96 percent of all possible cases there is nothing to report! It needs to be emphasized: archaeological finds are almost never forged, because nobody secretly puts a foundation in the ground to pretend an old building existed. On the other hand, the number of forged documents is constantly growing. With each new investigation, new forgeries are discovered. The number of genuine documents diminishes all the time. In fact, it's moving toward zero. If this trend continues, Medieval Studies, an important branch of the historical sciences that puts its trust almost entirely in documents, will soon have lost its reason to exist. Most medieval scholars don't think much of my thesis, and it's not hard to see why. If I am right, then the number of genuine documents from the Phantom Era must be zero. For Bavaria, we were able to show that in all 88 questionable cases a later dating for these finds can be better justified than a Carolingian or Agilolfingian one. The same applies to those 58 finds that

come from places for which there are no old documents to supply evidence. The main problem can be summarized as follows: buildings, finds, and written documents from the Early Middle Ages are in a fundamental contradiction to each other, a conflict that cannot be resolved within conventional chronology. Another example of missing finds. One might assume that at Aachen, the central palace of the Frankish empire, there ought to be numerous finds from that period in the museum. Yet there is not even an early medieval museum. In 1999, Prof. Matthias Untermann explained why this is so: "Amazingly, there has not been an archeological dig or review of a building site within and outside the old city of Aachen that produced clear settlement remains of the Carolingian era, though the historical tradition points to the presence of merchants and numerous inhabitants as well as the existence of high-ranking noblemen and their courts, of whose buildings and physical remains there ought to be quite a lot in the ground. Everything that has so far been said about the road system, the structure of the settlement and its extent rests exclusively on written sources and theoretical considerations." Which means that of this extremely important palace beside the Palatine Chapel and its attendant buildings nothing has been preserved: neither its foundations with the streets, nor its size, nor the houses of the clergy, nor those of the merchants, nor those of the foreign emissaries and so on and so forth. Even small objects are missing. There is no clearer indication that there are no finds for this period, that it is a phantom era, a fictitious period. In the meantime, the search for evidence of the period in question, as well as for agreement between archaeological and architectural finds and written documents, has advanced quite a long way, as is shown by this list of articles and books: Germany: (Charlemagne exhibition at Paderborn) Heribert Illig (1999) Bavaria: Anwander/Illig (2002) Dortmund: Fabian Fritzsche (2002) Frankfurt: Hans-Ulrich Niemitz (1993) Ingelheim: GUnter Lelarge/H.I. (2001) Saxony: Gerald Schmidt (2002) Thuringia: Klaus Weissgerber (1999) Viking conquests: F. Fritzsche (2004) Europe: Bulgaria: K. Weissgerber (2001) Byzantium: H.I. (1997), F. Fritzsche (2003) France: Auvergne: Gerhard Anwander (2004) Alsace: Andreas Birken (2003) Italy: Lombardy H. I. (1993) Rom H.I. (1996) Sicily Gunnar Heinsohn (2003) Croatia: H.I. (2003) London: H.-U. Niemitz (1993)

Poland and the Delta of the River Vistula: G. Heinsohn (2001/02) Russia: K. Weissgerber (2001) Sweden: G. Anwander/H.I. (2004) Spain: Ilya Topper (1994), H.I. (1995), G. Heinsohn (2005) Peoples of the Steppes: Manfred Zeller (1993) Tyrol (Austria and Italy, + Switzerland): Alfred Tamerl (2003) Hungary: M. Zeller (1996), K. Weissgerber (2002; book) Zurich: John Spillmann (2004) Asia: Armenia: G. Heinsohn (1996) Ceylon: Claus D. Rade (1999) China: K. Weissgerber (2002), M. Zeller (2002) Georgia: K. Weissgerber (2000) India: C.D. Rade (1997), K. Weissgerber (2004) Indonesia: C. Rade (1998) Iran: M. Zeller (1993) Islam: various papers Israel (Jerusalem - Synagogues): G. Heinsohn (2000) Japan: K. Weissgerber (2002) Yemen: U. Topper (1994) Korea: K. Weissgerber (2002) Parsees: U. Topper (1994) Central Asia: M. Zeller (1993) Africa: Ethiopia: I. Topper (1994), Weissgerber (2003) Berber kingdoms: U. Topper (1994) Copts: I. Topper (1994) To sum up: archaeological testimony clearly contradicts the documents of that period. Since our calendar shows "slack", it is permitted to state: Charlemagne has no historical background. He is an invented figure. This conclusion is compelled by the lack of finds, to which I would add that there would be an absolute absence of finds if scholars did not strive so hard to attribute any available works of art or objects of daily use to the Carolingian era. So: The Early Middle Ages were never the way they are depicted in the textbooks. Part of the Early Middle Ages are a later interpolation. This time period never happened; it is fictitious, a phantom era. According to my research thus far, this period lies between AD 614 and 9I 1. The political events and the acting personnel are either pure invention or duplicating projections from other periods; in rare cases they were real persons who were brought into the phantom era from another time. This phantom era is not limited to the Franks or to Central Europe. It has been shown to exist in excavations from Iceland to Indonesia. Meaning, in all these areas the sources and the archaeological finds or other tests do not fit together.

The Protagonists
Needless to say, someone must have carried out this artificial and deliberate interpolation. I have shown that there was a small window of opportunity between 990 and 1009 during which the three

most important powers of the occident - the Byzantine emperor, the German emperor, and the Pope - were able to cooperate. I therefore designated Emperors Constantine VII and Otto III and Pope Sylvester II as the authors of this interpolation. The motive, at least in the west, was apparently an eschatological one: Otto III felt that he was Christ's representative and vicar on earth, who would ring in the last 1000 years on earth. For according to early Christian belief, in analogy to the seven days of creation, there would be seven days of the world of 1000 years each. And the seventh day of the world would begin according to the calculation of the day with the year 1000. The pope, as the wisest scholar of his time, had assisted the emperor, since at the time the clergy were the only ones able to read and write. When a rough dynastic structure had been designed for temporal and spiritual rulers, this structure was clothed with more and more detail in the course of time. Some details important for Charlemagne were added only under the rule of Frederick I Barbarossa, in the second half of the 12th century. This was the century during which, according to the latest research, the greatest number of documents of the Early Middle Ages were forged. The trigger here was the justification of property owned by the church after the Worms Concordat of 1122. This setting forward of the clock was taken over by others, especially the Jewish and Islamic cultures, without having to be ordered to do so. They, too, filled the invented time, which at first was empty. As far as Islam was concerned, a great many events were added, with noticeably fewer events for the Jews. This explains for the first time why in the 10th century the Byzantines, the Christians in the west and the Jews, without saying a word, introduced new calendars, an event that no one thus far has been able to explain. In fact, it was a shift in the calendar point of reference. For if the point of reference is shifted by centuries or millennia, nobody realizes that an additional, fictitious period has been interpolated. Thank you for your attention.

[Slide 1]

Steps in Researching the Early Middle Ages

Giving Up a Generally Accepted Axiom (fixed time line) Logic and Experience of Life: Common Sense (anticipatory forgeries) Astronomical-computistic Circumstances (calendar computation) Sources vs. Sources (contradictions concerning the oversized figure of Charlemagne) Architectural Findings vs. Architectural History (Palatine chapel Aachen) Existing Architecture vs. Sources (Carolingian buildings) Archaeology vs. Sources (Inner city archaeology in Aachen, large areas: Bavaria, Hungary)

[Slide 2] Forgeries with Anticipatory Character Sylvester Legend 4th century -> 8th c. Symmachian Forgery 550 -> 11th c. Constantinian "Donation" 750 -> 11th c. Pseudo-Isidorian Forgery 850 -> 11th c.

[Slide 3]

Calendar Computation to the Minute and the Second

Astronomical Year Length: 365 d + 5 h 48 m 46 s Caesar's Year Length: 365 h + 6 h Difference: 11 m + 14 s =674 s 1 day = 86.400 s : 674 s = 128,2 [years], i.e. Caesar's error adds up in 128.2 years to 1 day In 1.282 years, this error amounts to 10 days In 1582 Gregory XIII. corrects the error of 1.282 years by adding 10 days AD 1582 - 1282 = AD 300 However, Caesar's Calendar Correction took place in 45 BC Ergo: Though the error has not been corrected back to Caesar, astronomical sky and calendar are again in agreement

h = hour m = minute s = second

[Slide 4] Dark Centuries 565 -> 741 Byzantine Dark Age (F. Thien) 580-> 10th c. ark Ages in Greece (c. Mango) 600 -> 750 Merovingian Dark Age 600 -> 800 Byzantine Historiography (P. Schreiner) 610-> 850 Byzantine Architecture (C. Mango) - 768 -814 Charlemagne 814 -> 914 Occident's most mysterious period (G. Bois) 825 -> 925 Dark Rome (F. Gregorovius) 850 -> 950 Architecture in Occident (Panofsky, Zimmermann) 900 -> 1000 Historiography in Occident (C. Baronius)

[Slide 5]

How Charlemagne's Coronation Date was calculated 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 7 days of creation

Since for God 1000 years are like one day, the world will exist for 6000 or 7000 years, depending on whether the Last Judgment will take place at the beginning or the end of the Day of Rest.

Creation 1 1001 2001 3001 4001 5001

End 6001

Eusebius (AD 303) moved the birth of Christ from 5501 to 5201 after creation: 5001 a.Cr. 5201a.Cr. Birth of Christ 6001 a. Cr. 801 AD 7th Day of the World Starts

Charlemagne was crowned on December 25, 800, which according to the new calculation in the Imperial Annals, was the first day of the year 801! In the 10th c. (?): 5001 a. Cr. Birth of Christ 6001 a. Cr. 801 AD 7th Day of the World Starts

Otto III - thus the legend - visits Charlemagne in his tomb in 1000 and takes the insignia of power from him. Consequences: Charlemagne's coronation is held precisely on the day specified in the calculation produced by Eusebius of Caesarea 497 years ago. It opens the Seventh day of the World because it continues the Imperium Romanum. Otherwise, according to an old prophecy the world would have ended. Otto III also opens the Seventh Day of the World according to a new calculation (moving the Birth of Christ by 200 years). For the two critical years, 1000 and 1001 he had special seals made which show him to be the representative of Christ at the end time. Dr. Heribert lIIig, June 2005