Wednesday, May 12, 1999; Page H01

If you had been alive in Europe in 999 A.D. -- on the eve of the last millennium -- you'd have inhabited a world only barely recognizable to modern Americans. The grand, sophisticated cultures and large urban centers were elsewhere: China, which boasted perhaps the greatest city in the world, the imperial capital of Kaifeng; the Byzantine Empire; and the vast extent of Islam, the most widely dispersed civilization on Earth at the time.

Since the fall of the Roman Empire five centuries earlier, Europe had become a comparatively poor, backward and intensely rural place. Although there may have been 70 million people from Scandinavia to Greece (far fewer than present-day Germany alone), more than 90 percent of them lived on the land, and a really big city had 10,000 or 20,000 inhabitants. Much of Europe's population was clustered from what now is Holland, down through France and into Italy, and most people lived near the coast.

Without the vanished Roman legions (powered by slave labor) to maintain roads, cities and fortifications, travel had become extremely difficult. Maps were practically unknown, and once dependable routes had fallen into ruin. Some lords maintained the roads across their holdings and charged a toll to use them. But there were so few travelers that it wasn't cost-effective.

One intrepid French monk of the period, undertaking what would earlier have been a quite uneventful short trip from Reims to Chartres, "lost his way on several occasions. His pack-horse was unable to withstand the hardships and soon collapsed. In the dark, the monk hardly dared set foot on the bridge across the Marne leading to Meaux, because of the many holes. On top of all this, he was in constant fear of robbers," writes historian Hans-Werner Goetz. The monk finally made it after three days and felt lucky to have arrived.

Most folks never left home nor had any reason to do so. Except, of course, the chronically underfed Vikings, who had spent three centuries looting northern Europe and would reach what now is Canada in 1000 A.D.

Today's nations didn't exist, and the region was a political patchwork of monarchies and fiefdoms, held together -- barely -- by the influence of organized Christianity. Indeed, virtually every educated person in Europe was either a cleric or a monk. Some powerful monarchs, notably including Otto the Great (912-973), king of Germany and emperor of what still was called the Roman Empire, were barely literate if they could read at all.

To be sure, things were about to improve quickly. Population was on the verge of a spectacular expansion that would last until the Black Plague of the 14th Century.

But in 999 and for many decades to come, says William J. McCarthy of Catholic University, for most Europeans "life was, by our standards, almost unimaginably mean, dirty, unhealthy and short -- even for those at the pinnacle of society."

Life SPAN

In the late 10th century, average life expectancy was about 30, largely because the infant mortality rate was 40 percent.

A male who survived his teens might live to a ripe old 47 or so; women died at about 44. This pattern agreed with Aristotle's pronouncement that men, being the more perfect representation of human beings, should naturally live longer. Things began to change in the later Middle Ages, and by the Renaissance, women were outliving men, as they do today.

Nonetheless, life was dismayingly short by today's standards. In 999, even the average age of kings at death was well below 50. Most children would not have known their grandparents.

On the other hand, they would have grown about as tall as today's Europeans. Many historians now believe that it was not until the rise of urban crowding and poor diet late in the Medieval period -- continuing through the industrial revolution -- that the general European stature was shortened.

This was no better than even the most benighted peasant solution and often worse than nothing.

Status SYMBOLS

In 999, society had three grand divisions: the clergy and its associated minions, the feudal nobility and the peasantry, or as one bishop put it, "those who pray, those who fight and those who labor."

The overwhelming majority of people in Europe were peasants living in villages of 75 to 250 people. The class of merchants and craftsmen that eventually would become city dwellers -- burghers or bourgeoisie -- was just beginning to form. You might be either a free farmer, who worked the nobleman's fields, or a serf bound to the local manorial lord, likely a knight or mid-level aristocrat.

Either way, you lived in a "nucleated" gaggle of huts centered in the manor's fields. The village may have had its own church maintained by the local monastery through tithes, or the lord may have had his own, private church whose priest he paid. If your village was fairly large, there might be an open area where markets were held every two weeks in season.

Slavery of the sort typical during antiquity had changed somewhat, and in many places serfs had acquired a variety of property rights as early as the 8th Century. But the institution remained an essential part of society and by no means disappeared with the fall of the Roman Empire. The Germanic peoples who destroyed the Roman empire were avid slave traders and owners. (Our word "slave" originates from the practice of making servants of Slavic captives.)

So some fraction of the population was "owned" by lords or monasteries. Moreover, a free peasant who went broke could voluntarily enslave himself and his family to the manor to ensure survival.

Free or not, workers had to produce at least a small surplus of food for the non-working manor lord and his retinue. In exchange for being allowed to farm a few acres, free peasants were required to perform specific services amounting to as much as 100 days of labor a year and to give up a percentage of their yield. In addition, mandatory tithes to the local church were common.

If you were a peasant, you probably would have lived in a single room containing the hearth, work area and sleeping space for between four and a dozen people. Examination of medieval skeletons shows that the average woman had 4.2 children, about three of which would have lived past early childhood and that homes occasionally were occupied by all members of a family, meaning blood relations.

Except in general terms, no one knew what time it was. Church bells provided the only standard, and they were necessarily inaccurate because mechanical clocks would not arrive for another 300 years.

Monastic life, however, demanded strict adherence to a schedule, so monasteries and churches kept time with candles that burned at a fixed rate, as well as with sundials and water clocks when weather permitted. The church bells would have been the only artificial sound most people ever heard.

Food, GLORIOUS FOOD

Your diet, if you could have gotten enough of it, would have contained little meat, which was reserved for special occasions. In many respects, it would have been close to what health experts recommend today: high-fiber, low-fat grains and vegetables.

On the other hand, it probably would have been mighty short on protein and fats and deficient in vitamins A, C and D, according to historians Francis and Joseph Gies.

The staple crops were grains (chiefly used in bread but also made into beer), including wheat, barley, oats and rye. Common vegetables, depending on location, included squash, beets, cabbage, pumpkins and celery. Berries, fruits, nuts and cheese rounded out the menu. Sugar was nonexistent in Europe until much later, and the only way to sweeten a dish was with honey.

Meat -- chiefly pork and poultry for the lower orders -- often was not fresh. It could be prohibitively expensive to feed animals over the winter, so most were slaughtered in the fall and the meat cured as well as possible. Nonetheless, a fair amount was likely to rot.

Spices were in great demand because, historian Robert Hoyt notes, they "smothered the taste of the semiputrefied food served up from the typical medieval kitchen."

Dishes were wood or, rarely, ceramic. Even in the manor house, the single common utensil was a knife, and each person used his own wooden spoon. The fork, a high-toned innovation from Byzantine society, would not make its way into even polite society for a century or more. Cups usually were wooden.

Ale was the universal drink and preferable in the many areas where water was unsafe. Wine was comparatively hard to make but increasingly popular and often sanctioned even by the most rigorous monastic orders. "We think that one pint of wine a day is sufficient" for each monk, Saint Benedict wrote.

PERSONAL Hygiene

The most visible difference among social classes was in clothing, a practice that would be formalized in the 12th century in the form of dress codes for different groups. "Peasants are not allowed to wear any colors other than black or gray," intoned one Germanic edict about 1150, and "seven yards of linen for shirts and pants are adequate."

In 999, the average peasant would have worn a knee-length tunic or smock with a shirt beneath and cloth wrapped around the legs in lieu of trousers. The better classes wore pants, but underpants were extremely rare in any social class before the 13th century.

Shoes were made from a single piece of leather stitched together at the top. Except for special occasions, nobles wore a more costly and colorful variation on these same themes.

The standard of personal cleanliness for ordinary people is not known. Knights and other gentry had combs and such dainty tools as ear-wax picks. For the most fastidious of these, washing may have been fairly common. Danes were said to bathe once a week, but the European average undoubtedly was far less frequent.

For ascetic reasons, many monasteries limited bathing to five times a year -- and some to Christmas and Pentecost only. So frequency among laypersons probably was somewhat higher.

When public bathhouses became increasingly available in the 12th century, they were a huge hit. In fact, their success prompted church and government crackdowns in the early 14th century, intended to stop the sexually inflammatory practice of coed bathing.

"Hygiene thus disappeared from Western society," historian Jean Gimpel writes, a bit archly, "not to reappear for half a millennium."

Marriage VOWS

In most parts of Europe in 999, one became a legal adult at 12. If you lived in an area still following old German customs, you only had one name -- a practice that has made it difficult for historians to trace family lines in many places.

Marriage, widespread even among enslaved serfs, was allowed as early as 14 for boys and 12 for girls but averaged about 20 to 24 for men and 14 to 16 or later for women. A restricted or fat-poor diet delays the onset of menstruation, which probably arrived about age 15 for peasant girls in many 10th-century cultures. So it is not surprising that average age at marriage was considerably older than the official ecclesiastical minimum.

The wedding ceremony, though usually blessed by a priest, would have been local and secular. The church didn't have formal marriage rites until the 12th century. Divorce was correspondingly uncomplicated in 999.

You might have loved your spouse, though probably not in anything like the current sense of the word. "Romantic" love, with its emphasis on enthrallment and devotion, would not arrive even among nobles until the 12th century. In 999, the same words used for love of spouse also were applied to describe love of God or charity to one's neighbors.

But then, you might have had very little choice. Arranged marriage, once a common practice for allocating property and binding families into alliances, was becoming less frequent by the 10th century. Living in a village of 100 people, many of whom were relatives and thus off-limits according to church rules of the time, would have limited the number of possible spouses pretty severely, however.

On the other hand, fidelity was demanded, and the rules were particularly tough on women. Gregory of Tours, a celebrated historian, relates that, when a woman was found to be having a sexual relationship with a priest, she was burned alive by her family. The priest was obliged to pay a fine.

Not that women weren't in demand. Several surveys from different parts of Europe at the time show about 110 to 125 men for every 100 women.

Some historians have argued that the imbalance may have reflected -- at least in part -- the earlier practice in some cultures of killing unwanted children, particularly girls.

More likely, it is an indication of how many females were left at the abbey door as infants or put into service at the manor house in early childhood.

Whatever the cause, the comparatively rare women were valued highly. In most places, their vergeld ("person-money," the price you had to pay to the heirs if you killed somebody) was as high as that for men, if not higher, historian David Herlihy notes.

Moreover, 10th-century grooms often paid a substantial marital dowry. That was a complete reversal of the classic pattern, in which the dowry was offered by the bride's family.

Refunds were possible. In most cultures, virginity was expected at marriage. In England in 999, for example, a groom could take back the traditional "morning gift" paid to the bride after the wedding night if the situation proved unsatisfactory.

MANUAL LABOR

Work was incessant and hard, and crop production per acre was approximately one-tenth of the current average.

According to one estimate of the period, a peasant family produced about 700 liters of grain each year. Of that, about one-third was kept for seed, 15 percent sent to the manor lord and 10 percent tithed to the church. The remainder was enough for about 1.2 pounds of bread per day year-round for each member of a family of five.

Although peasants could grind their own grain, it may not have been necessary. Water mills were fairly common. Windmills, however, would not arrive until the 12th or 13th century.

But in the 10th century, an ingenious horse collar began to transform agriculture. Traditional Roman harnesses for draft animals tended to strangle horses, compressing the windpipe and blood vessels of the neck.

With the advent of a stiff, padded collar that fit around the shoulder bones, horses could be used for plowing. The result was dramatic. Although a horse or ox pulls with about 120 pounds of force, the horse does so at about 3.6 feet per second, compared with the ox's 2.4 fps -- a whopping 50 percent increase.

Add to that the fact that horses usually can work two hours a day longer than oxen, and it is easy to see why agricultural productivity began to climb.

The women of a household generally were responsible for all domestic chores, including maintaining the livestock, shearing sheep and making fabric for clothing. They also helped with farm labor, although it was widely regarded as perverse.

"When Gerald of Aurillac noticed a woman plowing because her husband was sick," one account says, "he gave her money so that she would pay other peasants to do it for her and . . . she would no longer have to perform 'male labor.' For, he said, 'God detests everything which is against nature.' "

Despite one's sex, however, there was so much work to do that clerics constantly had to reiterate the prohibition by Charlemagne, the nearly mythic 8th-century emperor, against work on Sunday.

Church AND STATE

Standing firm in the uncertainty of life in 999 was an institution that gave life meaning and imposed order -- the Christian church, the most influential force in Europe.

From birth to death, the church permeated almost every aspect of life. With spiritual and temporal powers closely intertwined, it offered sustenance for the soul and served as a powerful civic authority.

There's a good chance that you would have worked for it in some way, perhaps farming the extensive lands of a bishop or producing goods for one of hundreds of monasteries rapidly establishing themselves after years of Viking plunder.

As Europe's wealthiest organization and the receptacle for all of its knowledge and learning, the church was in a unique position to fulfill its multiple roles.

Its nominal head was the pope in Rome. The Eastern, or Orthodox Christian, Church had been drifting from the West for centuries, with the split finalized in 1054. The pope's partner, at least in theory, was the Christian emperor who ruled over the large collection of German and Italian states later known as the Holy Roman Empire.

The relationship between papacy and empire had been strained for centuries, each side claiming ultimate authority. The tenuous partnership was rooted in an ideal first propagated by Charlemagne. Under that, the Christian empire of the West upheld and defended the Roman church for the greater glory of God.

Pope Sylvester II and Emperor Otto III brought some semblance of the ideal to their partnership as the millennium turned. While Otto possessed the real power and guarded it jealously, he was devoted to Rome, upholding the rights of the papacy and showering the church with gifts.

In a practical sense, though, the papacy was almost irrelevant. Popes were accorded honor and respect, especially in England, but the church's power was locally based. That's where the money was and where the bishops ruled.

Owning vast tracts of land and collaborating closely with the kings who often appointed them, bishops were pillars of the establishment. They, not Rome, decided matters of faith and morals.

The turn of the millennium was a period of enhanced piety, from the emperor on down, says Uta-Renate Blumenthal of the Catholic University of America. People were extremely reliant on and trusting of the clergy, and faith was heavily emphasized.

Great reverence was accorded saints, and many legends grew. People, not the pope, determined who merited saintly status. "You were a saint if you were considered a saint," Blumenthal says, and every local church had a precious and revered relic of its own blessed personage.

When Viking raiders were about to plunder churches and monasteries, the fleeing clergy carried off the relics for safekeeping. Any treasure was left to the invaders.

With new trade routes opened by the Vikings, pilgrimages to holy sites became more common for ordinary people. In addition to places such as Rome and Jerusalem, pilgrims visited sites renowned for their legendary saints and brought with them offerings that benefited the local church or monastery.

So lucrative were these pilgrimages that one Adhemar of Chabannes brought great fame and wealth to his abbey when he claimed that it held the bones of St. Martial, the 13th apostle of Christ, whom Adhemar had conveniently invented.

Elsewhere: The Vikings

Aside from the Christian church, Vikings were one of the most dynamic forces affecting Europe in 999. These fierce pirates and warriors from what now is Denmark, Norway and Sweden had terrorized southern Europe for centuries in search of loot. By the turn of the millennium, however, many Vikings had settled in areas they once menaced, establishing trading routes and opening Europe to the rest of the world.

A long period of rapid population growth in Scandinavia had reduced the amount of available farmland and forced many Vikings to seek new ways of living. They spread throughout Europe and beyond. Many of the Normans who participated in the famous invasion of England in 1066, in fact, were of Viking stock, having earlier settled that part of France.

While some Vikings became the scourge of Europe, others became great seafarers. Their ships carried settlers to Greenland, a land unknown to Europeans at the time, and to Iceland. One Viking, Leif Ericson, even landed in North America about 1000 and established a short-lived settlement there. This was 500 years before Christopher Columbus.

The Byzantine Empire

Rising out of the eastern half of the old Roman Empire was the Byzantine Empire, which for centuries buffered much of Europe from such eastern invaders as Arabs and Turks. While Byzantine rulers retained Roman government and legal traditions, the empire was far more influenced by Hellenic culture than Latin. As a result, the Byzantines helped to preserve ancient Greek language, literature and philosophy.

The capital, Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), was one of the world's most important cities at the turn of the millennium -- the crossroad between East and West through which the wealth and knowledge of the East flowed into Europe.

Christianity flourished in the empire and became an important civilizing force among the Slavic peoples of southeastern Europe and Russia. The Eastern church in Constantinople had always been united with the Western church in Rome under one banner of Christianity, but strains between the two had been growing for centuries over a multitude of issues.

The divide became permanent in 1054. Standing apart from Rome, Byzantine Christianity eventually developed into the Eastern Orthodox churches.

The Islamic World

The spread of Islam was rapid after its establishment in the 7th century, and Muslim civilization carried with it a vast amount of learning retained from Hellenic science, imported from Hindu sources or pioneered by Arab researchers.

The physicist Alhazen (965-1039) advanced knowledge of optics, mirrors and lenses, and others extended the work of al-Khwarizmi, the 9th century mathematician from whose name comes our word algorithm and from whose work comes the term algebra.

Hindu mathematicians had introduced the notion of zero, as well as a decimal system in which the value of each number was determined by its position. Both are familiar now. But they would transform science in Europe, which remained stuck with unwieldly Roman numerals until the Arabic-Hindu "positional" system took over in the 13th century.

Chinese scientists also were busily at work, taking detailed astronomical observations, inventing modern paper and gunpowder and exploring the magnetic properties that would lead to the compass, although that device would find perhaps its greatest effect in the West.

Apocalypse Then

Depending on where you were living in 999, you might have heard "informed" reports that the world was coming to an end.

The idea was based on the biblical book of Revelation, which stipulates that, at some point in a somewhat ill-defined future, the devil will return, after having been locked up "in the abyss" for 10 centuries:

"And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations, which are in the four quarters of the earth."

Whereupon would ensue a final battle and Last Judgment. If you believed that the millennial period began with the birth of Jesus, then 1000 A.D. seemed like a good bet for apocalypse.

A few doomsday boosters took up this theme, but none with the exuberance of Roger Glaber, an itinerant monk from Burgundy who couldn't hold a job but wrote a sizable history of the period, insisting that a spate of bad news and weird events (including the appearance of Halley's comet in 989) seemed to agree pretty well with Revelation.

As it happened, the world failed to end in the year 1000. Glaber recalculated, adding the age of Jesus at his death to the millennium to arrive at a new due date of 1033.

It is never difficult to find turbulent or worrisome events at any time in history, and Glaber found sufficient heresies, famines and whatnot by 1030 that it seemed, he wrote, "that the order of the seasons and the elements . . . had fallen into perpetual chaos," portending "nothing other than the advent of accursed Anti-Christ."

Doubtless, this inflamed some imaginations. Meanwhile, Archbishop Wulfstan of England was telling the nation in 1014 that "the world is in haste and is drawing ever closer to its end."

No pope, king or other official, however, endorsed the idea. The year 1033 came and went. Europe was not shaken to its core, although, as Stephen Jay Gould observes in Questioning the Millennium, there is "sufficient evidence" to support "at least a modest claim for substantial millennial stirring, especially in peasant and populist strata of society."