Dave Barry's History of the Millennium (So Far) (2 page)

A
nd so we stand together—the human race, plus the members of Limp Bizkit—poised on the brink of the year 2000.

In a matter of days, we will find ourselves in a new millennium, facing exciting challenges and questions, such as: Why are we lying in a Dumpster naked? And when did we get this highly personal Pokemon tattoo?

But this is not the time to think about our New Year's Eve plans. This is the time to take one last, lingering look back at the millennium that is drawing to a close. For as the ancient Greek historian Thucydides often said, when he was alive, “History is a bunch of things that happened in the past.” His point was that human civilization is a journey, and only by retracing the steps of that journey can we truly come to know, as a species, where we lost our keys.

And so let us now press the
REWIND
button on the VCR of time. Let us travel back together, back a thousand years, back to…

JANUARY 1, 1000

…This was the historic day that humanity celebrated the dawn of our current millennium. The occasion was marked by feasting, dancing, and the public beheading of a whiny, tedious group of people who would not stop insisting that, technically, the new millennium did not begin until January 1, 1001.

But it was not all fun and games back in those days. It was a world of ignorance and fear; a world of pestilence and famine; a world of extremely high b.o. levels. Also there was “the Y1K problem”—an unforeseen manufacturing glitch that caused parchment to malfunction such that many words were turned inside out (
OTTO,
for example, became
TOOT
).

Fortunately, back then almost nobody could read, so most people were able to continue doing their jobs under the popular economic system of the time, feudalism, which is sometimes called “the Internet of the Middle Ages.” Feudalism was based on a “ladder type” of organizational structure, similar to Amway. You started out on the bottom rung, in the position of serf. This was not an easy job, but if you worked hard, followed the rules, did not complain, and were a “team player,” after a certain period of time you fell off the bottom rung and died.

This system freed the people higher up on the ladder to form noble families and create new empires, which began ebbing and flowing all over the place—in the words of the great British historian Thomas Carlyle—“like MoonPies on a hot sidewalk.” In Asia, the Chinese had just invented gunpowder, which would have made them the strongest military power in the world, except that they had not yet invented guns. Their tactic was to make a pile of gunpowder on the ground, try to trick their enemies into standing on top of it, and then set it off with sparks, thus blowing the enemy up. This tactic only worked against really stupid enemies, so the Chinese did not become a major power until the year 1083, when they developed both the cherry bomb and the bottle rocket, using plans apparently stolen from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

In western Europe, the two dominant cultures were the French and the English, who hated each other because of a bitter, centuries-old dispute over the right way to prepare food. The French, led by the French warrior Maurice LeBeurre, repeatedly attempted to invade England and forcibly introduce the use of sauces. The English, led by King Harold the Comically Monikered, resisted valiantly until 1066, the year of the Norman Conquest, so called because England became the sole possession of a man named Norman, who has owned it ever since.

Another big conflict was started in 1095, when Pope Urban II (son of Mr. and Mrs. Pope Urban I) launched the Crusades to get the Holy Land back from the Infidels (so called because they wore jackets that said
INFIDELS
across the back). Over the next two centuries, courageous knights wearing gleaming armor suits would periodically set off from Europe, traveling by day and spending each night in a Motel VI, until finally, after years of hard journeying, they reached the Holy Land, where they instantly cooked like eggs in a microwave. The Infidels thought this was hilarious.

“They wear METAL?” they'd say. “In THIS climate?”

Meanwhile, in Scandinavia, Viking adventurers (or, as they called themselves, “Norsepersons”) were looking for new lands where they could loot, rape, pillage, and eat without utensils. The most legendary of these was Leif Eriksson, who was the son of the legendary Erik the Red, who was the son of the legendary Eric the Mauve, who was the first one to think of wearing a hat with horns. Leif and a hardy crew set sail from Greenland, and finally after many harrowing weeks at sea, during which they almost perished, discovered a new land. It turned out to be Canada, so they went home. After that things remained fairly quiet until the early…

1200s

…when a Mongol named Genghis Khan (son of Murray and Esther Khan) organized the rest of the Mongols into a fierce horde and took over China by thundering across it on big, scary horses that did not care where they went to the bathroom. Khan and his descendants created a vast empire that ultimately encompassed all of Asia, Asia Minor, Asia Minor Phase II, and the Shoppes at Asia Minor Plaza.

The Mongol Empire had little contact with Europe until it was visited in 1271 by the Italian traveler Marco Polo, who stayed in China for seventeen years before returning to Venice with two thousand little packets of soy sauce. This led to increased trade between Europe and the East that ultimately came to involve soup, egg rolls, and any two dishes from Column B.

Meanwhile, in England, the English noblemen had become involved in a big dispute with King John over the issue of whether or not he should be required to reveal his last name. This led to a big showdown in 1215 (known to English schoolchildren as “The Big Showdown of 1215”) that resulted in the signing of the historic Magna Carta, which is the foundation of the modern legal system because it guaranteed, for the first time, that the noblemen had the right to habeas corpus (literally, “wear tights”).

But the good times did not roll for long. In 1337, France, which was then under King Philip VI, was invaded by England, which was then under King Edward III, who had vowed to kill any monarch with a higher Roman numeral. This led to the Hundred Years' War, which, because of delays caused by equipment problems, is still going on.

Matters were not helped any by the arrival of the bubonic plague, or “Black Death,” which in the fourteenth century spread throughout Asia and Europe, in the words of the great historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee, “like the plague or something.” In those ignorant times, it was believed that the plague was caused by evil spirits. Now, thanks to modern science, we know that the real cause was tiny germs, which were carried by fleas, which in turn were carried by rats, which in turn were eaten by cats, which are in fact evil spirits. The plague killed about one-third of the total European population. It was not covered by HMOs.

Elsewhere in the world, important strides were being strode. In South America, the Aztecs had invented a highly sophisticated calendar; it consisted entirely of weekends, and that was the last anybody heard of the Aztecs. In North America, the indigenous peoples, who called themselves “Native Americans,” were building hundreds of mounds, and you will just have to ask them why. Meanwhile, way out on a tiny speck of land in the Pacific that we now call Easter Island, giant, mysterious stone heads were being erected. This was done by teenagers. They'd erect one and then hide in the bushes and wait for the homeowner to come out and see it and yell, “Dammit, Marge, those kids have erected a giant stone head on the lawn again! We're moving off this island!” This led to the development of Polynesia.

Speaking of developments, the “hot trend” sweeping through Europe in the early…

1400s

…was burning people at the stake, which had become the punishment for just about every infraction, including jousting without a permit. By the 1430s, so many people had been burned at the stake that Europe ran out of stakes and had to start burning people at the lump of peat, which took forever. Eventually, the fuel was exhausted, and the Dark Ages began. Virtually all learning ceased as the great universities of Europe closed their doors (although in response to alumni demand they were able to maintain a full football schedule). It was also around this time that Constantinople was captured by the Ottomans (or, as they were known on parchment, the “Toot-mans”). This led to the fall of the Byzantine Empire, an important empire that we should have mentioned earlier.

The Dark Ages finally ended when a printer named Johannes Gutenberg had a brilliant idea. In those days, printing was a laborious process because the type was not movable. A typical letter, such as
B,
was four feet high and weighed as much as six thousand pounds. So, to print a book, you had to carry the blank paper around and press it against the letter you needed, one letter at a time; this was slow and tedious, and the printers tended to take shortcuts, as we see by the 1412 edition of the Old Testament, reprinted in its entirety here:

“In the beginning, etc.”

One day, Gutenberg had an idea: Instead of moving the paper to the type, why not move the type to the paper? So he tried it, and on a historic day in 1455 three of his assistants were crushed while attempting to lift the letter
W.
So then Gutenberg had the idea of using small type, and within days he printed the first modern mass-produced book,
Codpieces of Passion,
by Danielle Steel.

This led to a rebirth of knowledge that we now call the Renaissance (literally, “Easter Island”). It was spearheaded by the brilliant multitalented Italian Leonardo da Vinci. One day, he was painting a portrait of a young woman named The Mona Lisa when they got to talking in English.

“Leonardo,” said The Mona Lisa, smiling enigmatically, “do you think Man will ever be able to fly?”

“I don't know, The,” he answered. “But I sure am hungry.”

And so he invented pizza, without which the modern world would be a very different place indeed.

But the most important development of the fifteenth century was taking place in Spain and Portugal, which were determined to find a new sea route to Asia. Year after year, they sent ships out into the Atlantic; year after year, they were disappointed. And then they had an idea: Why not put men on the ships to steer them? And thus it was that in 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain and discovered America, which he believed was the East Indies. The reason he believed this is that prank-loving Vikings, who had discovered America three hundred years earlier, had left a sign that said
WELCOME TO THE EAST INDIES!

Nevertheless, as the great historian Edward Gibbon often used to say before passing out, “Once the genie is out of the bottle, the shoe is on the other foot.” The Age of Exploration had begun, and by the…

1500s

…there were ships sailing everywhere, carrying the message of European civilization to the indigenous peoples of Africa and the Americas (the message was: “Hi! We own you!”). Among the greatest mariners of this era was Ferdinand Magellan, who, in 1521, proved that the Earth was round by sailing all the way to the Philippines and getting killed, thus paving the way for what we now know as the tourism industry.

In Asia, many exciting things were happening, but we frankly do not know what they were.