The three major monotheistic world religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, incorporatethe idea that God created the world and, at the end of time, will destroy it.Then the Messiah, the returning Christ or the Mahdi will save the righteous while sinnerswill, together with their evil, be condemned to eternal perdition. In the pre-modernepochs studied here (the fourth-to-seventeenth centuries of the Common Era),these framing predictions were commonly known, accepted as natural conditionsof human existence and, consequently, were taken very seriously. Given their sharedclaim as revealed religions, they possess fairly detailed divine indications about theEnd, their adherents were, therefore, ever inspired to read holy texts in search of newinterpretations of divine visions. As a result of such quests, prophets urged people tochange their course, often with a moral message, and instructed them to fulfill moreor less specific actions in preparation for the world’s imminent End.Thus, these monotheistic religions, including their internal variants (e. g. Sephardicand Ashkenazic Judaism; Latin, Byzantine and Armenian Christianity; Shiite andSunnite Islam), established its own end-time scenario, each with a well-known orderof basic events and embellished in numerous regional or local story lines. These scenariosdid not emerge independently within a given religious culture; rather, theirdevelopment resulted from vivid exchanges and reactions among them. Whether directlyor by reputation, members of these religious communities knew each other,despised or feared one another, and envisioned their counterparts as eschatologicalenemies or, less commonly, as eschatological allies. Knowledge of another religion’steachings often prompted an opposing position in the form of a counter-eschatology,a pre-modern type of entangled history that has received little scholarly attention todate.

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