Antichrist, 1403

Abstract

Vincent Ferrer returned to Spain after a decade spent preaching of the apocalypse’s imminence. He had come to believe not only that the world would end soon but also that Antichrist had been born in 1403. Preaching to Spanish audiences, the Dominican expanded his proofs of the apocalypse’s imminence, as well as his counterarguments against those who disagreed; at Alcañíz on July 27, 1412, Vincent penned a letter to Benedict XIII that contains the wandering friar’s most systematic elaboration and defense of his apocalyptic views. The letter treats “those things that I have preached throughout the world for a long time, namely, concerning the end of the world and the time of Antichrist” and states that Vincent wrote it because Benedict had bade him to do so.¹ The pope may have been wondering about the orthodoxy of Vincent’s apocalypticism, because the Dominican concluded his letter by acknowledging that all the views contained therein were subject to the pope’s “correction and determination.”² Nonetheless, what had become the core concept of his apocalypticism, namely, Antichrist’s birth in 1403, remained the core concept. How he preached about the apocalypse changed, but the hallmarks of Vincent’s apocalypticism in Spain and beyond were continuity and consistency.