Venice quails as Murad II slaughters Epirus and Albania with a yatagan dripping blood. The Byzantine Empire shrinks to the size of Constantinople; John VIII and his brother Constantine watch anxiously from the walls to see if Osman is heaving into view. Unite, Christians of the East and West, against your common foe! Be reconciled and unite!

But it’s probably too late…

That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness.

Dies irae…

King David prophesied it in the Psalms, the prophet Zephaniah foretold it, the pagan Sybil augured it. When you see a brother sending his brother to death, the young rising up against their parents, a wife deserting her husband and one nation waging war against another, when you see a great famine over the whole world, great pestilence and much ill, then you know that the end is nigh.

Eh? What are you saying? That what I describe occurs every day, repeatedly and again and again? And by no means only recently, but for centuries, over and over? Ha, both you, noble knight with the Abdank coat of arms, and you, honourable Brother of Saint Francis, are both right. You are also right, noble lords, as are you, pious monks, and you, gentlemen merchants, nodding your heads and making wise faces. You are right. There is evil and transgression everywhere. We see fratricide every day, treachery again and again and blood spilled endlessly. Behold, indeed, an age of betrayal, rape and violence, an age of ceaseless warring. How then, with this all around us, can we know: is it now the end of the world or is it not? How can one judge? What signs will show us, what signa et ostenta?

You still nod your heads, noble gentlemen, good burghers and pious brothers, I see. I know what you think, for I also have oft pondered on it.

Perhaps, I thought, it will come about without a sign? Without a larum? Without a warning? Simply: boom! And the end, finis mundi? Maybe there’s no mercy? Perhaps there isn’t one innocent person in Sodom? Perhaps, since we are a perverse tribe, we won’t be given a sign?

Please, don’t be afraid. We will. The Evangelists have promised. Both the legal and the apocryphal ones.

And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the Earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring. The powers of Heaven shall be shaken. And so shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from Heaven. And his kingdom shall be divided towards the four winds of Heaven.