Clotttell UttiuBtaity Hibtaty mtiite l^tatacical Slibrary THE GIFT OF PRESIDENT WHITE MAINTAINED BY THE UNIVERSITY IN ACCORD- ANCE WITH THE PROVISIONS OF THE GIFT Cornell University Ubrary CB359 .H91 1915 Renaissance, the Protestant revo^^^^^^^ a oljn 3 1924 032 334 736 The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://archive.org/details/cu31924032334736 THE RENAISSANCE THE PROTESTANT REVOLUTION AND THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION IN CONTINENTAL EUROPE THE CENTURY HISTORICAL SERIES George Lincoln Burr, of Cornell University, General Editor THE VOLUMES I Introduction to the Study of History. George L. Burr of Cornell University. II The Ancient World. (To about 49 B. C-) William L. Westermann of the University of Wisconsin. III Rome. (To about 568 A. D.) IV The Middle Ages. (To about 1273.) Dana C. Munro of the University of Wisconsin. V The Renaissance and the Reformation. (To about 1598.) Earle W. Dow of the University of Michigan. VI The Period of the Absolute Monarchies. (1603 to 1763.) Wilbur C Abbott of Yale University. VII The Revolutionary Period. (From 1763 to 1815.) Henry E. Bourne of Western Reserve University. VIII The Nineteenth Century. (1815 to 1900.) William E. Lingelbach of the University of Pennsylvania. THE CENTURY CO NEW YORK THE RENAISSANCE THE PROTESTANT REVOLUTION AND THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION IN CONTINENTAL EUROPE BY EDWARD MASLIN HULME Professor of History in the University of Idaho IReviseb leMtlon NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1915 Copyright, 1914, 1915, by The Century Co. TO GEORGE LINCOLN BURR, BEST OF TEACHERS AND BEST OF FRIENDS, THIS BOOK, SO DEEPLY INDEBTED TO HIM, IS DEDICATED PREFATORY NOTE This book is based upon the Outlines of the Renaissance and the Reformation by Professor George Lincoln Burr, printed, but not published, for the use of his students at Cornell. Here and there I have ventured to change the outlines, but the framework of the book remains his in every essential respect. To his list of references I am also indebted for guidance in my reading and for aid in compiling the list of books published for the first time in the second printing of my book. In the course of our long correspondence other books than those mentioned in his Outlines have been called to my attention by my former teacher, and for this aid, too, I wish to make public acknowledgment. Another debt to my master is for his " enthusiasm of humanity," which is so highly contagious, and which I hope pervades in some degree every page I have written. For the subject-matter of the book I am particularly indebted to Gebhart, Berger, Dilthey, Gothein, and Beard, whose works are mentioned in the lists of references for the various chapters to which they relate. E. M. H. TABLE OF CONTENTS THE RENAISSANCE CHAPTER PAGE sVl THE PAPACY II POLITICAL AFFAIRS 3 19 III THE REVIVAL OF THE NATION 50"-- IV THE REVIVAL OF THE INDIVIDUAL 59"^ V THE REVIVAL OF LITERATURE 72 VI THE REVIVAL OF ART 108 ^-Vn THE REVIVAL OF SaENCE 134 ^ V/VIII THE REVIVAL OF CONSCIENCE I44 ) 175 ^IX THE AGE OF DISCOVERY THE PROTESTANT REVOLUTION X POLITICAL AFFAIRS AT THE OPENING OF THE PROTESTANT REVOLUTION jgg MCI HUMANISM AND HERESY 201 XII THE GERMAN REVOLT FROM ROME 223 XIII THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 241 XIV PROTESTANTISM AND THE BALANCE OF POWER .... 258 XV THE SWISS REVOLT FROM ROME 269 XVI THE FRENCH REVOLT FROM ROME 283 XVII REVOLT IN THE NORTH AND HERESY IN THE SOUTH . .307 XVIil THE RESULTS OF THE PROTESTANT REVOLUTION . . . 343^^^ XIX THE DEVELOPMENT OF LETTERS AND ART 3^1 THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION XX THE TURK, THE COMET AND THE DEVIL -g^ XXI THE RISE OF THE JESUITS ^j^ 'XXII THE COUNCIL OF TRENT ^^^ XXIII THE TRIUMPH OF MILITANT CATHOLICISM aaa XXIV THE SPANISH SUPREMACY 4^5 TABLE OF CONTENTS XXV THE REVOLT OF THE NETHERLANDS 475 XXVI THE RELIGIOUS WARS IN FRANCE 488 XXVII PAPACY AND EMPIRE 501 XXVIII MAGYAR AND SLAV . .- 511 XXIX THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS 520 XXX THE REPUBLIC OF ARTS 549 GENEALOGICAL TABLES 557 LIST OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPERORS 569 LIST OF THE POPES 569 LIST OF REFERENCES 571 INDEX .609 LIST OF MAPS FACING FACE FRANCE AT THE OUTBREAK OF THE HUNDRED YEARS* WAR . . 28 ITALY AT THE CLOSE OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 38 THE UNIVERSITIES OF GERMANY AND IMPERIAL CITIES IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 210 THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 248 THE PRINCIPAL GERMAN ECCLESIASTICAL TERRITORIES AT THE OUTBREAK OF THE SCHMALKALDIC WAR 260 THE PRINCIPAL GERMAN SECULAR TERRITORIES AT THE OUTBREAK OF THE SCHMALKALDIC WAR 266 THE SWISS CONFEDERATION 270 THE NETHERLANDS AT THE ABDICATION OF CHARLES V .... 478 THE RENAISSANCE THE RENAISSANCE CHAPTER I THE PAPACY 1. Christendom at the Dawn of the Renaissance. 2. Pope Boniface VIII and King Philip IV. 3. The " Babylonish Captivity " of the Papacy. 4. The " Great Schism of the West." 5. The Rivalry of Papacy and Council. WE shall begin the study of the Renaissance with the last chap^i quarter of the thirteenth century. Not that the Middle 1275 Ages ended at this time and that then the Renaissance, in all its aspects, began. One cannot say when the Middle Ages gave place to the Renaissance. Indeed, in some respects, the Middle Ages are not over yet. They still subsist, stealing in silent cur- rents along the subterranean ways of the world. It is impossi- ble to date the bounds of an era with any degree of accuracy. Eras are not initiated with single dramatic events. In the great development of civilization there is nothing sudden, but rather is the change like that which takes place in a forest — birth, growth, and death go on almost unnoticed side by side. There are always many foreshadowings of any intellectual movement. So, one must not expect to find the Renaissance, or any other important era, inaugurated by a striking event or a violent revo- lution. Only very gradually did the new dispensation take form and shape. It was not announced to a startled world by the blast of a sudden trumpet. Let us first of all make a brief survey of the Europe of that day from Sicily to Scotland, and from Cape Finisterre to the frontiers of Muscovy. At the dawn of the Renaissance, Chris- Extent of tendom could claim only a small part of the world. The Moham- ^^^^t ^^^ medan conquests had greatly diminished its extent since the dawn of seventh century. Christianity, as the ruling power, had been nais^ance expelled from her most glorious seats ^- from Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, North Africa, and from a considerable part of the Spanish peninsula. The Greek and Italian peninsulas 3 THE RENAISSANCE CHAP. I 1276 Tie Dl-rt- siona of Christen- dom Tlie Neigb- bors of Cliristeii- dom The Greek Church Thd Pope were hers, the German Empire, France, the northern part of the Spanish peninsula, the British Isles, the Scandinavian king- dom, and in a rather dubious way the outlying Slavic and Dan- ubian kingdoms. In exchange for her old and illustrious strong- holds she had fallen back upon the northern countries, and all along her frontiers she maintained a spirit of incessant watch- fulness and sometimes of actual aggression. But Christendom was divided within itself into two parts. There were the Greek Church and the Latin Church, In the Greek peninsula, and in Asia Minor, were to be found the ad- herents of the former, surrounded and submerged by the con- quering Moslem ; and here and there, too, in the turbulent Dan- ubian and Slavic lands. To the Latin Church belonged the re- mainder and by far the greater part of Christendom. To the East and the South there lay the Soldan's country. When the Moslems were defeated by Charles the Hammer, in 732, the tide of their conquest in the West was checked ; but in the East it continued to flow onward, slowly yet steadily, until even Constantinople itself was subject to the age-long threat of capture. Beyond Islam was the far Orient, of which little definite information was possessed by the Europeans. The schism that had divided Christendom into its Greek and Latin Churches took place in the tenth century; and so bitter had become the controversy between the two churches that in Constantinople the opinion was freely expressed that the Turk- ish turban would pollute St. Sophia less than the hat of the cardinal. The Greek Church had been reduced to a fatal though oftentimes mutinous subjection to the State; and it had little contact with Western life. Not only doctrinal and ritualistic differences had separated it from the Latin Church, but also political and racial. The elements that went to make up the Greek Church were very composite ; and this is to be accounted for, in part, by the fact that there was a large Asiatic admix- ture. At the head of Latin Christendom was the Pope who claimed both spiritual and temporal supremacy, a claim which received its fullest expression at the hands of Innocent IV and Boniface VIII. No Roman Emperor ever wielded such power. He it was who launched the Crusades against the infidel, the heathen, and the heretic. He alone could call a general council of the Church, and he alone could confirm its decisions. He could pro- nounce an interdict against an entire country ; and he could create and depose kings. All Western Europe professed obedience to the Roman pontiff. The same splendid ritual was performed THE PAPACY CHAP. I in the same sonorous language, the same incomparable tradi- tions were held in reverence, and the same doctrines received 1275 universal assent. Within this vast fold were to be found the most diverse peoples and kingdoms antagonistic one to the other. This great Church was exceedingly well organized and immensely rich. The Pope had his curia at Rome, the supreme appellate tribunal of the Church with great power and many functions. Indeed, the twelfth century had witnessed the final change of the pastoral character of the Roman see into the juristic and political character ,of the Roman curia, its moral and theolog- ical activity superseded by its worldly interests. Law had re- placed theology as the basis of the papal power. The cardinals were the advisers of the Pope, and it was they who elected his successor. Eventually they were to be found in all the principal countries, but as yet the non-resident cardinal- ate was only beginning and so the large majority of them were Italians. Beneath the Pope were the archbishops, who could Theciergy exercise their power only after having received the pallium from Latin him, and each of whom was the overseer of a number of bishops, church Under the bishops were the priests who administered the serv- ices of the Church to the people in town and country. The regular clergy consisted of monks, and nuns, and friars. They were grouped into different orders, the more recently organized of which acknowledged obedience to a general. They were more directly under the control of the Pope than were the secular priests, who owed obedience to their bishops; the Pope could give them direct orders through the generals, or other officers, so they could be used as a sort of papal militia. The monks remained in their monasteries and left the care of men's souls to the secular clergy. But the friars, fortified with the priv- ileges given them by the Pope, traversed the world. Every- where they preached and heard confessions. They were itiner- ant priests. Through the friars especially the papal power was felt directly in every part of the continent. The Latin Church had gradually built up a most comprehen- sive and, with regard to its fundamental dogmas, a well-articu- lated system of belief; though one must not think that all its Creeds and various elements had been completely harmonized, because there ^*°*^c«s were many cross-currents, many conflicts of theory with prac- Latin tice, and not a little that was confusing. For her creed she ^^^^^^ claimed in the most outspoken of terms indefeasible authority. She alone was the interpreter to man of the will and the word of God. Seven sacraments had been instituted for the salvation of man; they were indispensable to his spiritual life, and they THE RENAISSANCE CHAP. I 1275 The Greek Empire The Holy Boman Empire could be administered, with the exception of baptism under cer- tain conditions, only by a regularly ordained priest. So the laity were absolutely dependent upon the priesthood for the nourishment of their religious life. Outside the pale of the Church it was hopeless to seek an approach to God. In tem- poral matters, also, the Church was omnipresent. Her pene- trating power touched every worldly subject. She had come to be not only a religious guide, but also a great juristic, eco- nomic, and financial institution. Over the temporal as well as the spiritual personalities of men she exercised control in an extraordinary degree. Nor was her power confined to this world. She had been given authority to bind and loose in purgatory as well as upon earth. . There were two empires, both of them '* imperial shadows that represented the majesty of Constantine and Charlemagne," yet both of them claiming the inheritance of the ancient authority of Rome. For centuries the Greek Empire had been essen- tially a static not a dynamic State. Its history is that of a gov- ernment, not that of a nation. Its story is that of administra- tion and law, rather than that of literature or of liberty. Yet it must not be forgotten that through the Middle Ages it held in its keeping the treasures of Greek learning. Out of hordes of barbarians it had created the kingdoms of Seryja, Croatia, and Bulgaria. To Slavs and to Goths it had given ideas and institu- tions of government ; and its missionaries were to be found from the shores of the Baltic to Abyssinia. Yet now it was in its last agonies of servile decrepitude, awaiting inevitable extinc- tion at the hands of the Turk, The Holy Roman Empire extended from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean and from France to Hungary. Nominally this vast territory was ruled over by an Emperor with supreme au- thority, but except in his own personal dominions his power was but a shadowy thing. Under strong and able successors of Charles the Great the imperial power had been made something more than symbolical, but under weak and irresolute ones it had diminished again to the vanishing-point. There were many rea- sons for this, — ^geographical, social, and political. The Holy Roman Empire had for its basis only an idea, that of cosmopol- itan dominion, or world-monarchy; but feudalism established itself in Germany as elsewhere, and before the fact of feudalism the idea of imperialism gave way. Every decade saw the centrif- ugal force increase and the common bond of union grow weaker. The imperial office was not hereditary but elective ; and the elec- tion lay in the hands of great feudatories who were generally THE PAPACY CHAP. I unwilling to place in power any one who would be likely to check the gradual growth of their own independence. Imperial tax- 1275 ation and an imperial army, two things indispensable to the exer- cise of imperial authority, had never been acquired. So the Empire remained a congeries of some 362 principalities, ecclesi- astical and secular; many of them composed of patches lying separate from each other ; and many of them too infinitesimal to be represented on any ordinary map. Among the more important of the Germanic secular. States were Saxony, Brandenburg, Bavaria, Lorraine, and Bohemia. And now, having glanced briefly at the empires, let us look at the kingdoms. In Germany the most striking fact of the time is the election of Rudolf I of Hapsburg to the imperial throne. The territorial possessions of that secondary prince were insignifi- cant, but in a few years he acquired Austria and Styria and so The a new dominion was created, destined to assume great impor- ^^8'^°™^ tance among the principalities that made up the Holy Roman Empire. Bohemia, which lies in the very heart of Europe, almost equally distant from each of the great seas, a distinct physical unit by virtue of its encircling and forested mountains, became a kingdom in the middle of the twelfth century, but it remained within the Empire. In France the ptinciple of con- solidation had been at work for a long time, and was continuing when the age of the Renaissance opened. Nowhere else was there to be found so highly centralized a government. These things were made possible by the sense of nationality which the French people had acquired, and by the existence of a national army and national taxation. In England the long reign of Ed- ward I, a vigorous, able, and truly national king, had just begun. It was an era in which the English came into their own, a time of political, economic, and social development, and of territorial aggrandizement. In the land won back from the Moslem in- vaders in the Spanish peninsula there were four Christian king- doms, — Aragon, Castile, Navarre, and Portugal. At times there had been more than three Spanish kingdoms. Their unions and divisions had been frequent, and such changes were to continue until at last but two kingdoms, Spain and Portugal, should share the territory south of the Pyrenees. In the far North there were three Scandinavian kingdoms, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, whose relations to each other had constantly shifted. To the North and East three Slavic kingdoms were to be found. Bo- hemia, the land of the Czechs, was, as we have seen, a member of the German Empire. Poland had grown up from a collection of small States into a powerful kingdom. Lithuania, the last 8 THE RENAISSANCE CHAP. I 1275 The Cities TheUni- versitieB of the heathen States in Europe, which had led a troubled career, witnessed at the close of the Middle Ages a great outburst of vigor and became one of the most far-extended of the European countries. In the territory drained by the Danube there was Hungary, the land of the Magyars, who with the Ottoman Turks, were the only Turanian people who succeeded in establishing permanent States in the continent of Europe. The two other Danubian kingdoms, Servia and Bulgaria, were both Slavonic powers, and the chief of them was Servia, whose people made a brave resistance to the Turk. Italy was made up of inntmierable little republics and despo- tisms, petty commonwealths that were constantly at war with each other. In that Southern peninsula it was the cities that were of chief importance. In Italy and in Germany territorial disintegration had favored the rise and growth of cities that became centers first of commerce and then of culture, Venice, Milan, Florence, Rome, Padua, Siena, and Naples were among the principal Italian cities. In other countries, too, cities had achieved importance. They were to be seats of the new secular culture that was to work so great a change in the world. In Ger- many there were Augsburg and Nuremberg, and in the far North, Liibec, Hamburg, and Bremen, In the Low Countries, Bruges, Ghent, Amsterdam, and Antwerp were all busy hives of com- merce. In this brief survey of Europe the universities must not be overlooked. Until the rise of secular culture made the cities of chief importance in the social life of Europe the universities were the most potent of the intellectual forces. In them were to be found the acutest minds of the time drawn from every country and from every class. Far to the South lay Salerno, then as always chiefly a medical school. The great law school at Bologna gathered to itself vast numbers of students from every land and by its inculcation of the principles of Roman Law became a force in the decline of feudalism and the rise of the modem nations. The mother university, the one that served as a model for others, was Paris, and there scholasticism made for itself a stronghold. In England there were Oxford and Cambridge. In Spain there was Salamanca, devoted especially to law, and quite aloof from its sister institutions of other countries. At the be- ginning of the Renaissance period Germany did not possess a single university. Prague was founded in 1348, and the same century witnessed the establishment of Vienna, Erfurt, Heidel- berg, and Cologne. There were other schools of lesser impor- tance such as Padua, Toulouse, and Montpellier; but altogether THE PAPACY there were not many universities. The new age was to make ohap.i important additions to their number. ^ 1294-1303 Such was the general condition of Europe when, on Christmas Eve, 1294, Benedetto Gaetani was elected Pope and assumed the title of Boniface VIIL He was a scholar learned in the civil Bonifac* and the canon law, handsome, eloquent, and arrogant, and filled ^^^^ with the lust of worldly power. Although he was an old man his vigor, as he proceeded to assert the most extreme claims of the Papacy, soon became apparent. Nine years previously there had succeeded to the French throne Philip IV, a man bent upon continuing the work of welding France into a compact monarchy- He was ably assisted in his government of the country by men of the sword and men of the law. Between the Papacy and France there was soon precipitated a quarrel. In the great struggle Vith the Empire the Papacy had triumphed, very largely because the world-wide dominion to which the Empire aspired was op- posed to the tendencies of the time. In its struggle with France it was destined to fail, because it had come into conflict with one of the rising forces of the time, that of national development. Philip the Fair was the representative of the growing feeling of nationality. The French and the English kings were at war with each other over the possession of Guienne. The Pope re- Ptmpiv quired them to submit to his arbitration, and when they refused, ^^^^•^ he issued the bull Clericis laicos which forbade the clergy to pay with the taxes or to make gifts to laymen without the papal consent, and ^°^® summoned the French prelates to confer with him in Rome. This bull, one of the most important pronunciamentos of the temporal power of the papacy, is also the keynote of its decline. Both Philip and Edward I replied with retaliatory measures. The former, by prohibiting the exportation of money from France without the royal consent, cut off French contributions to Rome. In 1300, while this struggle between the medieval Papacy and the rising tide of nationality was still in its first stages, Boniface proclaimed the famous year of Jubilee. Remission of sins was granted to all who should visit the Holy City in that year. Vast throngs of pilgrims from many countries came flocking to the " threshold of the apostles," filled with the desire to see the holy places with their bodily eyes, and leaving large sums of money as a token of their devotion. Boniface was seemingly tri- umphant. He had crushed the Colonna, his personal enemies in Rome, and he had proclaimed that the Pope was set over the kingdoms of the world, to aid or to destroy. But he could not read the signs of the times. He was misled by the outburst of feverish religious enthusiasm, and he failed to estimate the grow- lo THE RENAISSANCE C HAP. I jjjg sense of nationality in Europe. He strained the bow too 1294-1303 hard and it broke in his hands. The breach between the Papacy and France went on widening. The people of France, including the lawyers whom the recent development of legal studies had created, and even the clergy, were gathered about Philip, for they saw in him the champion of French nationality. In the course of the controversy the papal legate was imprisoned and brought to trial. In reply, Boniface, on December 5, 1301, issued the bull Ausculta fill in which he reasserted the papal power over kings and kingdoms, denied the right of all laymen to exercise any power over ecclesiastics, and repeated the summons of the French prelates to his presence. Philip caused the bull to be burned in public; the legate was banished, and the clergy for- bidden to attend the papal conference. On November 18, 1302, Boniface issued the bull Unam scmctam in which he declared that the Pope holds both the temporal and the spiritual sword, of which he delegates the latter to secular princes; and that it is absolutely necessary to salvation that every human creature should be subject to the head of the Church. Both sides began the final attack. At a meeting of the States-General in June 1303, in which every class of the nation, except the peasantry who were unrepresented, voiced its protest against the demands of the pontiff, the Pope was accused of heresy, tyranny, and unchastity, and an appeal was made from him to a general council of the Church. Boniface, who had gone to the little mountain town of Anagni, pronounced excommunication against Philip and was preparing to declare the French throne vacant, when he was seized by an emissary of the French king aided by Italians who had suffered injury at the hands of the Pope. It had been planned to capture the Pope and bring him before a Council in ' Lyons, but one of the cardinals persuaded the repentant populace of the town, who had abandoned the Pope to his enemies, to avenge the outrage upon the pontiff. The conspirators were driven from the town and the Pope released. A few weeks later, greatly weakened, if not mad with rage and terror, Boniface died. The outrage of Anagni has been called a "generative fact." With it the political supremacy of the Papacy comes to an end, and its ecclesiastical supremacy is threatened. Even the great Innocent III had failed to secure for the political claims of the Papacy more than a temporary success, and since his time the new force of nationality had made their success more hope- less than ever. So, when those claims were asserted at this time by a pontiff of inferior power, in words more haughty than those of the most powerful of his predecessors, it is scarcely a THE PAPACY II CHAP. I matter of surprise that the struggle ended with their defeat. Henceforth if we would find the medieval Papacy we must 1303-77 descend with Dante to visit the regions of the dead. Boniface was succeeded by Benedict XI, a mild and concilia- tory Dominican friar, who died within a year after his accession to the papal throne. The next Pope, Clement V, elected after an interregnum of nine months, was the nominee of Philip IV. He was a Frenchman, and after his coronation at Lyons he never set foot in Italy. For some time he wandered over Gascony and Guienne, stopping wherever he found reverence and entertain- ment. Then he took up his residence in the town of Avignon, which, in 1348, became the property of the pontiffs. With the election of Clement there began the long foreign residence of the Papacy. Seven successive pontiffs resided in Avignon, sur- rounded by French influence and, in the opinion of contemporary Europe, dominated by French interests. It is true that Clem- ent V and his immediate successor bowed to the will of the French monarchy, but the other Avignonese popes were more independent of French control than has been commonly sup- posed. Clement, at the instigation of Philip, revoked the ob- noxious bulls of Boniface VIII, and concurred in the suppression of the Templars whose property the king desired and whose power and privileges he wished to take away. The next Pope, - John XXII, quarreled with Louis of Bavaria who had succeeded The'Xap- to the Germanic Empire ; and when he pronounced heretical the 'Jj^^/^pacy doctrine of the Spiritual Franciscans that the Church and the inAvigiiou clergy should follow the example of Christ and his apostles and hold no corporate or individual property he alienated a large part of that powerful body and also great numbers of the Ger- man peasantry. Benedict XII was a modest and feeble Cis- tercian who remained a monk under the purple robes of the pontifical office. Clement VI was an amiable man, luxurious and lettered, fond of the society of scholars and artists, and self-indulgent to the point of laxity. Under Innocent VI, a bdrn ascetic and something of a reformer, the license of the papal court which had become notorious was somewhat checked. Urban V displayed no little sagacity in carrying out the reforms to which he was earnestly devoted. He returned to Rome but deemed himself too insecure there and so went back to France. The last of the Avignonese popes, Gregory XI, was also an able man of high character, sincerely though not very aggressively active in the work of ecclesiastical reform. What had transpired in Rome, the erstwhile capital of Latin Christendom, during all these years of the " Babylonish Cap- 12 THE RENAISSANCE CHAP. I 1303-77 Borne during the Captivity The Church dnrizLg the Captivity tivity *' ? Even under the ablest of the popes who lived in Rome before the Captivity the Papal States had never been effectively governed. Every city of importance was either a self-governing community or subject to a despot. In Rome itself the popes had exercised very little direct authority. Indeed, in turbulent times popes had been obliged to seek safety in flight. It was a difficult city to govern. Its rabble had been demoralized ever since the days of patient et circenses. Its streets were narrow and tortuous. It was perpetually crowded with thousands of foreigners, many of whom doubtless discarded their own code of morals when they visited a city of alien manners. " Omnia RomcB venalia " was justly said of it. But the chief cause of disorder was per- haps the fact that the great feudal families, particularly the Orsini and the Colonna, who had made the city a cluster of forti- fied camps, carried on warfare with each other within the city walls. It was seldom that the popes when they were in Rome had been able to quell the disturbances ; and now that they were absent, the lawlessness and the license went on without restraint ; the squalid populace was the prey of first one baronial family and then another ; and brigands came up to the very gates of the city. At last Cola di Rienzi (i3i3?-54), a man of humble birth, took it upon himself to restore Rome to her greatness. He persuaded her people to resist the oppression of the nobles. On May 20, 1347, a self-governing community was established. But it was only for a brief time that the pale shadow of the great republic had been evoked from the ruins of the Campagna, for Rienzi was essentially a weak man The new government fell at the end of seven months, and Rome relapsed into anarchy. Despite the fact that the removal of the papal residence could be justified, in part at least, by the prolonged state of political anarchy that had prevailed in Italy, the residence of the popes in Avignon had the most deleti ons effects upon the Church. When the Papacy became to all outward seeming the mere vassal of France, it lost in a large measure the respect and the allegiance of other countries. Its revenues diminished. To offset this it resorted to increased taxation and to irregular practices. Bish- oprics and abbacies were handed over to la3mien in consideration of payments to the Papacy, that they might enjoy the incomes. Plurality of benefices was allowed for the same reason. The meshes of the whole network of the deplorable fiscal system were drawn ever tighter. At the head of monastic establishments were men better fitted to wear the helmet than the miter, and on the episcopal thrones were men who would have made better bankers than bishops. Increased fees were demanded for indue- THE PAPACY 13 tion into the episcopal office and for the trial of cases in the ohaki ecclesiastical courts. This financial system contributed with the 1303-77 Avignonese residence to a great loss in the prestige of the Papacy. No longer did the Papacy derive any support from the fact of living outside the jurisdiction of any one of the conflicting Euro- pean nations. No longer did it obtain additional reverence by residence at the shrine of the two great apostles, in a city uni- versally deemed sacred and sonorous with the voice of many centuries. Upon the religious life of the time the effect of the captivity was no less undesirable. It is true that several of the Avignonese popes were not unworthy men themselves, and that they initiated that patronage of the Renaissance which the papacy generally Eflfectsof maintained until the Council of Trent: but their court was only tiiocap- r r 1 1 A 1 "^c T ^ " tivity upon too often a center of scandal. As the seat of the Papacy, theEeUg- Avi^on wa"sr"arcosmopolitan city and the center of European g^^^e^^* politics. Artists, scholars, statesmen, and adventurers flocked Time thither. It was a city given up very largely to worldly affairs, to pleasures and to gaieties. Its corrupt politics and foul im- morality provoked the wrath of Dante, the mockery of Petrarch, and the censure of all who had the welfare of the Church at heart. The moral state of Latin Christendom matched that of its temporary capital. Everywhere immorality was increasing. The Franciscan revival was a thing forgotten ; and the preaching friars of St. Dominic had themselves fallen into the most de- plorable degeneration. Among the monastic and secular clergy alike, monks and nuns, prelates and priests, moral corruption was rampant. The quarrel with the Spiritual Franciscans had pro- duced a profound division within the Church. Lollardy in Eng- land had alienated the sympathy of thousands. And everywhere' mysticism was making for less dependence upon the Church and her sacraments. But while there was much corruption within the Church and incipient revolt against the Papacy there were many devout men who desired the return of the pope to Rome and an internal reform that should sweep away the crying evils of the time. It was St. Catherine of Siena, a dreamy and mystic girl, who in a state of ecstasy, so she believed, saw Christ and received the Host from the hand of an angel, that gave supreme expression to this spirit of religious enthusiasm. From her con- vent cell she had closely watched the politics of Italy, and had become aware of the wide-spread corruption that prevailed. She determined to restore the Papacy to Rome and to initiate a moral reform. There floated before her eyes " the vision of a purified Church, of which the restoration of the papacy to its original 14 THE RENAISSANCE C HAP. I gg^^ ^y^2 |.Q ^^ ^^ once the symbol and the beginning." Display- 1378-1418 ing the diplomatic finesse of the Italians in the highest degree she corresponded with popes and princes. From city to city she went pleading for peace in the distracted peninsula. She braved the perils of the sea, and at last stood at the foot of the papal throne. What passed between the pontiff and Catherine in their final interview at Avignon we do not know, but on September 13, 1376, Gregory, stepping over the prostrate body of his aged father, took the road to Marseilles where the galleys had secretly been made ready to take him to Rome. It was destined that Gregory and Catherine should meet only once more, but that was on Italian soil. She died on April 29, 1380, having proved her- self to be the leading statesman in Italy in the fourteenth century. Had she lived, her purity and her perspicacity, her ardor and her persistence, and the feminine grace of her policy, would doubtless have profoundly modified the course of events. Gregory died fourteen months after his triumphant entry into the Eternal City. Then it was felt that a great crisis was at hand. Only by the election of an Italian pope could papal resi- dence at Rome be assured. The election to the Papacy of a French prelate would involve a return to Avignon. The con- clave resulted in the election of Urban VI, an Italian, who at once began measures for the reform of the curia and the Church. But so tactless was he, and even brutal, that he soon oifended a large number of the cardinals. Still more important than their personal dislike of Urban were the deep-seated motives of po- litical interest that made the French cardinals view with disfavor the new Italian pope. Six months later, declaring that the pres- sure of the Roman populace, in its demand for an Italian pontiff, had prevented the free action of the conclave, some of the cardi- nals elected Roger of Geneva who assumed the name of Clem- ent VII, and who before long took up his residence at Avignon. It is impossible to learn the absolute truth of the circumstances that brought about the great schism in the Church. The wit- nesses of one side take sharp issue with those of the other. But the schism was an indisputable fact. Motives that for the most part were purely political began to group the various nations and principalities about each of the rival popes. The German Em- peror declared for Urban, but he did not carry all the Germanic principalities with him, for Bavaria, Luxemburg, Lorraine, Mainz, and other German States lent their sanction to Clement. Italy also was divided. Naples, Savo^, Piedmont, and Monfer- rato adhered to Clement, while the remainder of the peninsula acknowledged obedience to Urban. Scotland held for Clement. Tte Great Schism of the Papacy THE PAPACY 15 England supported the Roman pontiff, as also did Flanders, c hap, i Hungary, and Poland. France, too, was divided; the English 1378-1418 possessions followed the leadership of their ruler, while the French king recognized Clement. For a time Castile, Aragon, and Navarre remained neutral, but eventually they gave their support to Clement, while Portugal gave hers to Urban, Every- where the prelates followed the princes in their allegiance, and the people followed their pastors. The Schism was complete. Very early there was broached for the settlement of the Schism the plan of a general council of the Church. But great difficulties were in the way. It would not be easy amid the conflicting interests of Europe to decide upon a place of meeting. The two popes were.opposed to it. Who, therefore, should convoke it? Then, too, the question as to who should be summoned was TheCoun- a disputed one. And, should these difficulties be overcome, how ciiof pua, could the decrees of the council be enforced? While the ques- tion of a general council was being debated, three popes of the Roman line died — Urban VI in 1389, Boniface IX in 1404, and Innocent VII in 1406. The Roman pontiff was now Gregory XII, In 1394 the Avignonese pope, Clement VII, had died. His successor was Benedict XIII. Some of the cardinals of both popes issued an invitation to all bishops to attend a council at Pisa. An imposing number of prelates was present at the council which met in 1409. The two popes, having failed to answer the summons to appear at the council, were solemnly deposed, and Alexander V was elected in their stead. The new pope was acclaimed by the majority of the countries. But neither of the deposed popes acknowledged the action of the council ; and as Naples, Poland, and parts of Germany continued to obey Gregory, and the Spanish kingdom and Scotland per- sisted in their allegiance to Benedict, the council instead of les- sening the number of popes simply added a third one. And in the matter of the reformation of morals the council did nothing. The new pope, Alexander V, proved to be altogether too feeble and ineffective to meet the crisis. His pontificate was a short one, lasting only a little over ten months. He was succeeded by John XXIII who was more of a politician than a priest, more of a condottxere than a Churchman. --^ A second council was inevitable. It was opened at Constance in 1414, and continued for four years. John XXIII, the pope elected by the council of Pisa, was deposed and submitted with xhe coun- little opposition. The Roman pope, Gregory XII, resigned. *5" **' ^°^- Benedict XIII of Avignon, was also deposed, but he stubbornly refused to yield. When he died in 1424 three of his cardinals i6 THE RENAISSANCE C HAP. I elected one successor, and one cardinal elected another. But 1378-1418 eventually these *' phantom popes " disappeared. Then there was left only the Pope who had been elected by the council of Constance, Martin V. Thus the council had accomplished one of the tasks that had confronted it. The Schism had been healed. In its attempt to check the spread of heresy it committed John Hus and Jerome of Prague to the flames. But as for the moral reformation, for which the very stones in all Christendom were crying out, it did practically nothing. Europe was hopelessly distracted, and the council failed in its most important work very largely because it had reflected only too faithfully the na- tional dissensions and antagonisms of the time. The results of the long Captivit}' and the Schism had been most deplorable. At Avignon the papal retinue had gradually become larger and more luxurious, and the immorality of the city on the Rhone, despite its thousand belfries, had become a Eesuita of byword throughout Europe. And when the Schism had occurred Sd sSSm ^^^ nations had taken the side of one or the other of the rival pontiffs as best suited their own interests. Finally, when the high office of the successor of St. Peter was contested like a temporal throne by unworthy disputants, who were continually fulminating excommunications against each other, it had fallen into greater disrespect than ever. The papal administration had become demoralized. Among clergy and laity alike, immorality had spread like a plague. Corruption in every rank of the hierarchy is the constant theme of St. Catherine of Siena; and the reform measures considered by the Council of Constance " are eloquent as to the evils which they were designed to re- ^ J. ' move." Very largely the Church had ceased to answer to the spiritual needs of the people, and so heresy had been fostered and increased, and eventually the Protestant Revolution was to result. A not undesirable impulse was given to European thought. Within the Church the anti-papal theory of the su- premacy of general councils over popes had gained adherents and had become entrenched in the University of Paris, hitherto the champion of orthodoxy. This discussion of the basis of papal power was not without result. The " old unquestioning confi- dence in the vice-gerent of God was gone." The Schism had ended ; but the position of Martin V was beset with difficulty. In the midst of the conflicting interests of na- The EiTai- tions and of individuals he had to regain the lost power and pacy'jmd prestige of the Papacy, and to effect a satisfactor}"^ reformation oouncu throughout the entire Church. Something of the first part of this great task he had accomplished when he died in 1431, and THE PAPACY 17 he had also made a beginning with reform. The Council of ^ ^^^- ^ Constance had provided for the periodical summoning of a gen- 1418-49 eral council; and so it came about that a council was convoked at Basel in 1431. Three questions confronted it — that of re- form ; that of the spread of heresy, especially in Bohemia ; and that of union with the Greek Church, the ever-increasing pres- sure of the Turkish conquest upon the Eastern Empire having brought this last question to the surface. The new Pope, Eu- gene IV, though- " self-opinionated like all Venetians," was a man of culture, skilled and aggressive. He viewed with disfavor the independent spirit of the council, and the cynical politicians of the curia smiled at its enthusiasm. So, another struggle began between papal absolutism and the aristocracy of the prelates. The long-continued differences between the pope and council broke out into open war. On September 13, 1437, Eugene de- clared the council to be dissolved and then, as a foil, he sum- moned another one to meet at Perrara, which duly acknowledged the primacy of th? papal power .y^ He desired to effect a recon- ciliation between the Greek and the Latin Churches, and the dire extremities to which the activity of the Turjcs had reduced the Eastern Empire seemed to furnish a fair prospect of success. For several reasons the Pope's council was removed from Ferrara to Florence. Thither came the Byzantine Emperor, John Palas- ologus VI, in company with a number of eminent prelates and scholars. It was argued that if a reunion of the two Churches could be brought about, men and arms could be obtained with the papal influence from the Western powers to thrust back the infidel Turk. The chief doctrinal differences between the two Churches were that the Greeks held that the Holy Ghost proceeds directly from the Father and not from the Father and the Son, and that the Pope does not possess supreme authority over the Church. Beneath these differences in dogma were deep-seated differences in temperament, in history, and in political interests. But so dark was the despair to which they had been reduced,- that at length the Greeks acknowledged that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son, and that the Pope is the vicar of Christ upon earth and the supreme head of the entire Church. T^ Council of Florence, however, did not result in the union of the two Churches, for the action of the Greek envoys was repudiated by the Greek people. In the meantime the Council of Basel, which had denied the right of the Pope to dissolve it, was pursuing its own way, and for some time it was not without support. In 1438 a synod of French prelates at Bourges resolved that general councils were i8 THE RENAISSANCE CHAP. I 1418-49 Toreshad- owiDgs of National Vigor and of Ecclesi- astical Bevolntion to be sunimoned evety ten years, recognized the authority of the Council of Basel, and provided for a number of ecclesiastical reforms in France: This was the assertion by a national church of the right to determine for itself the details of its administra- tion. These things the king of France made binding as a Prag- matic Sanction. The Sanction was obnoxious to the Pope be- cause it gave countenance to the conciliar movement, and because it served as an example of national-opposition to the universal authority of the Papacy. True, the Sanction was abolished twenty-three years later, but it was another indication of the gathering force of nationality. The Council of Basel ventured to depose Eugene for summoning a new council, and in his place it elected the Duke of Savoy, who assumed the title of Felix V. By this time the council had lost greatly in numbers and in influence. It had degenerated from a body earnestly committed to moral reform to a mere " engine of political attack upon the papacy," and afterwards it had resolved itself into a mere col- lection of political cliques. So, gradually, it lost support. Eu- gene was succeeded upon his death by Nicholas V, a man of high character, whose pacific diplomacy enabled him to win over Germany from the Council to the papacy. Then Felix laid aside his office and, in 1449, the Council, having decreed its own disso- lution, came to an end, . The Captivity was concluded, the Schism was at an end, and the Papacy, though not restored to its former power and prestige, was at least unmistakably reinvigor- ated. But although the storm was past and a period of com- parative calm was at hand, there loomed on the far horizon the ominous clouds of the Protestant Revolution, CHAPTER II POLITICAL AFFAIRS IN THE AGE OF THE RENAISSANCE 1. The Holy Roman Empire: Decentralization. 2. In France: the Hundred Years' War. 3. In the Balkan Peninsula: Turk and Mongol. 4. In the Italian Peninsula: Decentralization. 5. In the Spanish Peninsula: Centralization. HAVING seen something of the ecclesiastical and religious chap. 11 conditions of Europe in the fourteenth century and the 1273-1308 first half of the fifteenth it will be well to get a bird's-eye view of the political affairs of the continent, to treat very briefly of the political history of the Holy Roman Empire, of the Hundred Years' War between France and England, of the coming of the Turk and Mongol into Europe, and of the break-up of Italy and the up-building of Spain, before proceeding to deal with the various revivals of human activity that constitute the Renais- sance. An outline of these events will serve as a setting for a study of those deeper forces at once the cause and the conse- quence of the energetic and full-blooded activity of the life of the time The interregnum in the Germanic imperial power, which be- cause of its chaos is known as the period of " fist law," came to an end in 1273 with the election to the imperial position of Ru- dolf, count of Hapsburg. The last thing the electors desired was a powerful and vigorous emperor, so they chose a " pauper count." But Rudolf disappointed them. He abandoned the Rise of the efforts of the preceding emperors to subjugate Italy and con- Hapsturl centrated all his attention upon Germany, From the control Luxem- of Bohemia he wrested Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Camiola, witters-*^ which had been added to the Bohemian territories in the in- ^ach terregnum, and he succeeded in making the Hapsburg power a factor to be reckoned with. Because of the important terri- tories he had inherited, the electors passed over Rudolf's son at the election in 1292 and chose another petty prince, Adolf of Nassau, for the imperial office.' His brief reign of six years was all too short to demonstrate that the electors had made another mistake in their search for a puppet tuler. He was 19 20 THE RENAISSANCE CHAP. II 1308-13 Quarrel 'between the Papacy andtbe Empire succeeded in 1298 by Albert I, the son of Rudolf and the sec- ond emperor of the Hapsburg line, whose restless rule of ten years, devoted chiefly to the carrying out of the policy of cen- tralization and aggrandizement inaugurated by his father, was ended in 1308 by his assassination. The dectors passed over Albert's son and chose Henry, count of Luxemburg. The reign of Henry VII lasted only five years, and for most of the time he was absent in Italy, having been lured thither by the old dreams of universal empire. The next election was a disputed one. The Hapsburgs put forward as their candidate Frederick, the son of Albert I, who had failed of election at his father's death; while the opposition forces united upon Louis, of the house of Wittelsbach, Duke of Upper Bavaria, known in history as Louis the Bavarian. The electors were divided and a double election and a double coronation took place. Seven years of dreary warfare ended with the defeat and capture of Frederick, and then a quarrel broke out between the Emperor Louis and the Pope. What was this quarrel? John XXII was the second of the Avignonese popes. The ending of the protracted war between the two claimants for the imperial title seemed to him to threaten the papal interests in Italy. So he required Louis to surrender his crown and to await the papal action, without which, he averred, the imperial election was of no avail. But Louis declined to submit his cause to the curia, and it was with his excommunication that this new struggle between the empire and the papacy began. When John declared the doctrine of the Spiritual Francisc^is, that the Church and the clergy should hold neither corporate nor individual prop- erty, to be heretical, another quarrel was precipitated, and into the arms of the defiant Emperor the recalcitrant friars who advocated this doctrine were driven as allies. Then the flood- gates of a voluminous literary warfare regarding the relations of Church and State were opened. First of the important docu- ments in the battle of books was the Defensor Pacis, issued in 1324, and written by Marsilio of Padua (1270-1342) and John of Jandtun, two members of the University of Paris. The orifi[- ; inal sourc e r^i ^]1 prnT7Pi-|^T|^f;n^ al power^ the book declares, resides i n the people . Xfafi- ^ublic law is valid ^n^ in so far as it^5 c- p resses the public will^ and it can be modified. suspendedTor abrogated by a majority of the people at their discretion. The power of _the prince is merely delegated to him by the p eople. T^j^ theor^r of popular gmrprnmpnt diH nnt nrigri>intft ^vith Mnf - silio. I t wa s en unciated in the-Eo man law , and it ha d been Th e original co ntribution of held by several medieval thinkers. POLITICAL AFFAIRS IN THE AGE OF RENAISSANCE 21 the Italian publicist lies in the fact that he bo l^v carried the chap, ii "TKgofy over into the ecclesiastical fiel d. He asserted" that Th e- 1313.47 C hurch consists of all the faithful and that i n their hands rest s ffie ultimat e legisla t ive and elective powers ^ The faithfuTmake known their will through the instrument of a general council, consisting of laymen as well as ecclesiastics, which is the highest delegated authority in the Church. The pope can impose upon the people only the things decreed by the council. The members of each parish have power to elect their parish priest. The power of the priesthood is equal in all priests. It comes directly from God ; it does not require the intervention of a bishop ; and * it can be conferred by any priest upon any person who has been duly elected by the members of his parish. No man can be punished or even tried for heresy, for each is responsible for his religious beliefs to God alone. The clergy are entitled only to those exemptions and privileges directly necessitated by their spiritual activity, and they have the right to hold only as much property as is necessary to maintain them. The relations are clear. The pope, as a priest, has no greater religious power than any other priest, for all priests are equal. Whatever govern- mental authority he may possess arises out of expediency, and not out of any faith essential to salvation. This executive au- thority is derived solely from a general council and requires confirmation by the State. The pope, then, is merely an ad- ministrative official. In so far as spiritual matters are concerned, the Church has no visible head and requires none. All the prop- erty of the Church rightfully belongs to the emperor, the supreme representative of the people, who can punish any ecclesiastic. Such was the most audacious of all the attacks yet made upon the Church, an attack that went far beyond the positions that were to be assumed by Luther and Calvin, an attack that had to wait for a partial realization until the days of the French Revo- lution. The papal controversialists were equally bold. Agostino Trionfo and Alvaro Pelayo claimed for the pope absolute au- thority over the entire world. Among the Spiritual Franciscans who flocked to the support of Louis was William of Occam ( ?-i349?), an Englishman who at Paris, where he was a distinguished lecturer, had been closely influence associated with Marsilio by whom he had been greatly influenced *>'^*^- in his political thought. Taking as his point of departure the Occam distinction between the temporal and the ecclesiastical authorities he asserted that to the temporal power belongs the control of all the secular things of life and that to the ecclesiastical power there is entrusted only the care of faith derived from revelation. 22 THE RENAISSANCE CHAP.n The Church has no coercive authority; she can exercise no juris- X347-78 diction. There is only one authority, the secular, in legislative and judicial matters alike. The power that makes the law is the only power that can interpret and apply it. So the cognizance of what is just or unjust belongs exclusively to the secular au- thority. The influence of Marsilio and Occam upon their time was not very wide-spread, for they were too far in advance of it. Yet they did much to help the legal theory of the inalienable and imprescriptible sovereignty of the State to displace the medi- eval conception of the subordination of the State to the Church, and their influence seems clearly traceable in the thought of the leaders of the Protestant Revolution. In the flaring up of a national sentiment in Germany, due very ' largely to the French residence of the Papacy, Louis enjoyed an important advantage not possessed by his imperial predecessors in their great struggle with the popes. But his personal unfit- ness rendered him unable to profit by the situation. He threw away the opportunity to build up a strong central government in Germany, spent his energy in pursuing the Italian will-o'-the- wisp, alienated many of the German princes by his policy of adding to the territorial possessions of his family, and finally, in 1346, saw himself displaced from the imperial office by the elec- Chariesiv tion of Charles IV. The new ruler, the first of the Bohemian Gulden emperors, a member of the house of Luxemburg and a grandson Buu of Henry VII, was a diplomat, a peace-maker above all things else, well fitted to cope with the serious difficulties that con- fronted him. In four years all opposition to his election had been smoothed away and then, practically renouncing the imperial claims to Italy, he found himself free to devote his attention to creating an effective central government. Foremost of all the problems to be settled was that of the imperial elections. The solution to this was found in the famous Golden Bull of 1356 which restricted the right to vote in the imperial elections to seven princes — the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier, the king of Bohemia, the count Palatine of the Rhine, the duke of Saxony, and the margrave of Brandenburg. The new law resulted in peaceful elections, but it increased the prestige and power of the electors, whose territories were never to be divided and whose succession was to be determined by the law of primo- ( geniture, and it stamped Germany as a confederation rather than a nation. At his death in 1378 Charles was succeeded by his son Wenceslaus, a boy of sixteen, who ruled fairly well during the first ten years of his reign, but who afterwards gave way to indolence and drink. POLITICAL AFFAIRS IN THE AGE OF RENAISSANCE 23 It was in the time of Wenceslaus that the Swiss succeeded in c hap, ii freeing their Confederation from all external control except that i387-i4io of the Empire. When the Hapsburg family, taking advantage of the anarchy of the interregnum, sought to win for itself the territory of the disrupted duchy of Swabia the villages of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden made a vigorous resistance. The courageous little communities would probably have been crushed had not the Hapsburg energy been deflected to the conquest of Austria. In 1291 they drew up their first articles of alliance of which we have record. In the struggles of the Hapsburg family* to maintain itself in the imperial position the young confederacy found its opportunity for expansion. When, in the person of Henry VII, a Luxemburg emperor was elected, the freedom of the mountain league from all control except that of the Empire was confirmed. The effort of Austria in 1315 to check the grow- ing power of the Confederation met with disaster in the battle Progreas of Morgarten, and three years later the Hapsburgs acknowledged ^J^l con- the independence of the forest cantons from all but the imperial federation authority. Thus assured of its position the Confederacy was joined by several of its neighbors, by Lucem in 1330, by Ziirich in 135 1, and by Glarus in 1352. In this last year it was that the Confederacy by the conquest of Zug made the first forcible addi- tion to its territory. The following year witnessed the accession of Bern, the last of the eight old cantons. There was as yet no central government, and the union of the eight, which had various relations with each other, was by no means uniform. It was the external pressure of the Austrian menace that held the loosely- knit confederacy together. When at last hostilities broke out again the Swiss in the battle of Sempach, 1386, won an even more decisive victory than that of Morgarten and two years later they inflicted another defeat upon the Austrians at Nafels.fSff By the treaty of 1389 the Hapsburgs renounced their feudal claims over Lucern, Glarus, and Zug and thus left the little Confederation as a component part of the Empire subject only to imperial control. The apathy and incompetence of Wenceslaus led the three ecclesiastical electors and the Count Palatine to depose him in 1400 and to elect one of their number, Rupert, the Prince Pala- The tine, in his stead. Wenceslaus declined to acquiesce in the pro- gS'®"^^ ceedings and so for ten years there was an imperial schism. , Rupert ruled in the West, and Wenceslaus retained the obedience of the East. In the year of Rupert's death, 1410, the electors raised to the imperial position Sigismund (1410-37), a half- brother of the unworthy Wenceslaus who thereafter for the rest 24 THE RENAISSANCE CHAF. II 1410-40 The Aus- trian Em- psrors The Bising Houses of his life, restricted to the affairs of Bohemia, remained in a state of " innocuous desuetude." To Sigismund, a valiant war- rior who had exerted every effort to check the invading Turk, was chiefly due the effort to solve the grave problems of the time by summoning the Council of Constance. The failure of the council to effect the desired reforms rendered impossible the fulfilment of Sigismund's cherished plan of building up a strong monarchy in Germany. Everywhere the prevailing discontent deepened. The Hussite wars broke out in Bohemia, and all the disintegrating forces in the Empire gathered headway. When Sigismund died in 1437 ^^^ male line of the house of Luxemburg became extinct. His daughter had been married to the man who succeeded him, Albert of Austria, and so a union of the two houses of Hapsburg and Luxemburg had been effected. Unfortunately Albert II, a man of justice and energy in whom all those who desired law and order reposed the greatest confi- dence, survived his election only a year. He left no son, and so a Hapsburg of the younger line, Frederick III (1440-93), was elected his successor. The fifty-three years' reign of Frederick, a man altogether lacking in the qualities required by the critical condition of his country, was a disastrous period for the imperial interests. On the West the national feeling in England, France, and Spain had resulted in each of those countries in a compact national union. France acquired Dauphiny, Provence, and Bur- gundy, and thus extended her territorial possessions to the border line of Germany. In the East the Turks were steadily advanc- ing; Poland, which had declared her independence in the inter- regnum, secured additional German territories for herself; and Bohemia acquired Silesia and Moravia and became practically independent. Internally the imperial losses were even more serious. Never had the imperial power sunk so low. All the centrifugal forces were unchained. " The Empire is attacked by a mortal sickness," said Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, " and it will certainly perish if a cure be not found immediately." Let us then pause to glance at the rival forces that were making for the dismemberment of the Empire. First there were the rising houses. When the custom of divid- ing the lands of a ruling prince among his children, a great hindrance to the growth of powerful houses, had been done away with by the introduction of primogeniture, houses that aspired for national supremacy began rapidly to develop. These new rivals appeared especially along the frontier for there it was easier to acquire additional territory. In 1423 the house of Wettin, which for long had held the mark of Meissen, became POLITICAL AFFAIRS IN THE AGE OF RENAISSANCE 25 one of the most important of the princely houses by the acquisi- c hap, ii tion of the electorate and duchy of Saxony. The power of the 1440-93 house was greatly lessened, however, by the division of Saxony in 1484 into the Ernestine and the Albertine branches. The house of Hohenzollern at first held some scattered territories in Swabia, then others in Franconia. Then it acquired the mark of Brandenburg and afterwards it grew by various means, conquest and inheritance, until at the end of the fifteenth century it was a great Germanic power. To the west of the empire there lay the loosely connected territories of the Burgundian Capetians, substan- tially increased in the reign of Duke Philip the Good (1419-67). Philip hoped to weld his motley aggregation of possessions into an organic whole, to fuse them with a national life, and to transform his duchy into a kingdom, but the dream was vain. His son, Charles the Bold (1467-77), inherited his father's ambitions. He thought to win for himself a spacious kingdom between Germany and France, and gradually his dreams grew greater and before his eyes there floated the alluring phantom of the imperial crown. Within the Empire there were lesser dynasties rising into power. When in 1268 the last Duke of Swabia died a considerable part of the duchy fell into the hands of the count of Wiirtemberg. Then the possessions of the house of Wiirtemberg, which was the first to make imperative the indivisibility of territory, adopt- ing the principle of primogeniture in 1482, grew steadily until in 1495 they were made a duchy. Two other rising principalities were the margraviate of Hesse, which was substantially enlarged by Henry of Brabant who secured possession when in 1247 the line of the former rulers, the landgraves of Thuringia, became extinct, and the margraviate of Baden, whose scattered terri- tories had once been part of the now extinct duchy of Swabia. Owing to the frequent subdivisions of its territories the once powerful house of Welf was a waning force and was destined not to become prominent again until the eighteenth century when a prince of its house became King of England. The second force that made against national unity in Germany increasing was the increasing power of the electoral princes. The right of ^/JL" voting in the imperial electiqns had, as we have seen, been con- Electoral fined by the Golden Bull to seven princes of the realm. None ^^*'*" of the good results that might be expected to flow from the new plan of electing the emperor came to pass. It was seldom the £ole concern of the electors to choose the best man, but rather did they choose men whose power they did not fear, or those who had offered the most tempting bribes. Then when the Haps- burgs grasped the scepter they never let it slip from their hands. 26 THE RENAISSANCE CHAF.H 1440-93 The City Leagues The Imperial Knights The Vehmic Courts with a single unimportant exception in the eighteenth century, until the title was abolished. Candidates were obliged to pur- chase their elections with relinquishments of imperial power that left the emperor ever more and more a mere shadow. And just as the imperial power was diminished that of the electoral princes increased. A third disrupting force was that of the city leagues, the Hansa associations in the North and West and the Swabian League in the South. In the fifteenth century the Hanseatic League reached the height of its power, carrying on its commercial operations not only in Germany, but also in Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Den- mark, Norway, Scotland, England, France, Spain, and Portugal. Charles IV had realized the dangerous disintegrating tendencies of the municipal confederations and in the Golden Bull he sought to cripple them by requiring all such associations to obtain the sanction of the territorial lord and forbidding the towns to be- stow their citizenship upon people outside their walls and to give shelter to fugitive serfs. In spite of all restrictions, however, the towns continued to develop. Never were the city leagues so numerous as during the decades immediately following the promulgation of the Golden Bull. The Hanseatic League was never so powerful as at the end of the third quarter of the four- teenth century. The Swabian League was able to compel Charles to grant them the right of union that had been denied to them, and under the feeble Wenceslaus its gains were so marked that it boasted a membership of seventy-two towns and the command of ten thousand men-at-arms. A fourth element making for decentralization consisted of the /imperial knights, belated remnants of feudalism, living from hand to mouth, hostile to all the other forces, the princes, the burghers, and the bishops, that were slowly crushing them out of existence, and preying upon them whenever opportunity offered. Finally, among the forces hindering the development of an effective central government, were the Vehmic courts, survivals probably of the courts of Charles the Great. Appearing first in Westphalia, where they flourished best and acquired an immense power, and thence spreading throughout the empire, these secret tribunals played an important part in the life of Germany from the end of the twelfth century to the middle of the sixteenth. They were of two kinds, open and secret. The open courts took cognizance of civil suits and ordinary crimes. The secret courts, to whose meetings only the members of the Holy Fehm were ad- mitted, took charge of crimes of a serious nature, especially heresy and witchcraft. Their rise was due to the failure of the POLITICAL AFFAIRS IN THE AGE OF RENAISSANCE 27 imperial power to enforce law and order, and at first they were ohap^ii a beneficial institution ; but gradually their secrecy and the arbi- 1154-1328 trary character of their rules changed them into the ready tools of the lawless and selfish forces they were designed to resist. Such were the concrete causes that made for the impotence of Germany as a national power. To these must be added a cause Bflfects more impalpable but none the less potent in its disastrous effects ?'*^V, — the theory that held the Empire to be an international power Theory and thus led to the dissipation of its energy. Instead of regarding themselves solely as the kings of Germany and making them- selves the leaders of the national sentiment, the emperors al- lowed themselves to be lured by the will-o'-the-wisp of the imperial title and tradition into the quagmire of international diplomacy and warfare. Thus all through the Renaissance era was Germany an aggregation of principalities and powers and not a robust monarchy^ ^' " Leaving the conglomeration of conflicting elements of which the Germanic Empire was comprised, we have now to deal with a people who became imbued with a powerful sense of nationality and who achieved an effective national union. When Henry II causes of of Anjou became King of England in 11 54 he retained his great JJ®^^"' French possessions, Normandy, Mai^|^^Anjou. Later on he Years- secured the overlordship of Britt^^BCd when he married ^*^ Eleanor of Aquitaine he obtained Poitdl^quitaine, and Gascony. He was succeeded first by his son Richard Lion-Heart, who left no direct heirs, and then by his third son John, who, by a for- feiture that the French kings regarded as absolute, lost all the French possessions except Aquitaine and Gascony. In 1259 there was concluded the Treaty of Paris by which Henry III definitely renounced all the revived claims of England to Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Poitou, and by which he agreed to hold Gascony as a fief of the French king. On his part, Louis IX acknowledged Henry as the Duke of Aquitaine (which had be- come known as Guienne) and ceded to him several minor terri- tories. The treaty was disliked by the French because of the surren4er of territory and by the English because of the aban- donment of their wide-sweeping claims. The chief thing to note is that the agreement confirmed England in possession of territory that hindered the development of the French monarchy and thus left a cloud upon the horizon. The predominant charac- teristic of Edward I (1272-1307), one of the greatest of the medieval kings of England, was his conscious devotion to the cause of his country. Equally devoted to the welfare of France was Philip IV (1285-1314), who included among his projects 28 THE RENAISSANCE CHAP, n ti^g ending of the independence of Flanders under its counts and 1328-38 the conquest of Guienne, in both of which plans, however, he failed. The brief reigns of Philip's three sons, Louis X (1314- 16), Philip V (1316-22), and Charles IV (1322-28), were all insignificant, save that in the time of Charles, with whose death the main line of the house of Capet came to an end, the French encroached upon Gascony. Uneventful, too, and dismal was the reign of Edward II (1307-27) of England. It was left to the successors of these kings to witness the opening of the long impending war. Philip VI (1328-50), Count of Valois, the first of the Valois kings, nephew of Philip IV, inherited his uncle's ambition to wrest Aquitaine (as the two provinces of Guienne and Gascony came to be called) from the English. Opposed to him was Ed- ward III (1327-77), one of the most energetic of the English kings, who exhausted his country in his efforts to ruin France. In their reigns it was that there broke out the long and terrible struggle called the Hundred Years' War. What were the causes of the conflict? On the one hand it was always with reluctance that the English kings did homage to the French" kings for their territories over the water; while, on the other hand, the French kings, actuated as tt^ig^^ by the natural desire to win for their country all the ^^^^y from the Pyrenees to the English Channel and from the .SRntic to the Alps and the Rhine, seized every opportunity to loosen the hold of the English kings upon the French possessions that still remained to them. This was the fundamental cause of the war. There were several more immediate causes. First, the bitter rivalry of the French and English sailors and fishermen resulted in constant quarrels in the Channel. Second, the French frequently gave assistance to the Scots in their wars with the English, and the latter were becom- ing convinced that it would be possible to conquer Scotland only after France had been crushed. Third, the English were de- termined to resist the encroachments of France upon Flanders. The independence of Flanders was of prime importance to Eng- land. English wool, the chief product of the island, was woven into cloth in Flemish looms and from that cloth much of the clothes of Northern Europe was made. The export-tax on wool was the largest single source of revenue that the English crown possessed down to the sixteenth century. Fourth, Edward III, through his mother, laid claim to the French crown. If a woman could inherit the crown, Edward certainly had a right prior to that of Philip. The French, of course, balked at the idea of an English king in Paris ; and so it was declared that a woman, un- U A POLITICAL AFFAIRS IN THE AGE OF RENAISSANCE 29 able herself to inherit the crown, cannot even transmit the crown, c hap, ii As a result, the personal relations of the two kings were embit- isss-eo tered ; and the animosity of Philip increased when Edward gave refuge to his mortal enemy Robert of Artois, and that of Edward deepened when once more the French gave assistance to the struggling Scots. The horizon had long been darkening. At last the storm broke. Men and money were gathered in England for the imminent war; and alliances, which, however, proved of little worth, were made with the Netherlandish princes and the Emperor Louis the Bavarian. The English won a great naval victory at Sluys in 1340, and at Crecy in 1346 they were even more overwhelmingly successful on the land. For nine years, with the exception of the capture of Calais, the war was practically at a standstill. Hostilities continued to smolder; but both countries were ex- hausted, and throughout Western Europe there swept the terrible ""^ scourge of the Black Death, the most fatal of all the visitations The rirat of the plague, leaving untold desolation in its wake. In 1349, S?^!^^**' by treaty and purchase, France secured the important province of Dauphiny ; and in the following year Philip was succeeded by his son John II (1350-64), who, burning with desire to avenge the disaster of Crecy, attacked Edward's eldest son, the Black Prince, at Poitiers in 1356 with greatly superior numbers, only to meet with a defeat equally as decisi^lfe as that sustained by his father. John the Good was himself taken captive and was sent to England where he " went a-hunting and a-hawking in Windsor forest at his pleasure." Under the dauphin the degeneration of France, that had been going on since the outbreak of the war, increased. The peasants, who had suffered terrible hardships, rose in revolt and were put down with extreme brutality. At last, in 1360, the first period of the long and devastating war came to a close with the Peace of Bretigny in which Edward re- nounced his claim to the kingship of France and to all territory north of the Loire in return for full ownership without homage of Calais, Guienne, Gascony, and Poitou. England also agreed ■ to end the alliance with Flanders, and France that with Scotland ; and for the release of John the sum of about $2,500,000 was to be paid. The fundamental cause of the war remained. Indeed, the very considerable increase of the English possessions in France se- Tiie sec- cured by the Treaty of Bretigny served to make that cause still ond Period more potent. So, before long, the struggle was reneSved. John °'*^®^*^ was succeeded by his son Charles V (1364-80), who since his father's capture at Poitiers had been the practical ruler of France. 30 THE RENAISSANCE CHAP, n 1360-80 TlieTlilrd Period of the War By temperament the new king was a man of peace. Even had he been so minded, his arm was too weak to wield a weapon. But he fully merited the epithet of " Wise," for he was patient, tactful, and diplomatic. His policy of peace and of the rehabili- tation of France, of the dressing of its bleeding wounds, o;f the strengthening of its defenses and the reparation of its material loss and its moral ruin, was exactly the policy calculated to result eventually in the expulsion of the invaders. He subdued unruly nobles, cleared his land to some extent of the vulture hordes of mercenaries, punished the infraction of law, and prepared for the inevitable renewal of the conflict with the hitherto invincible English, In the second period of the war the wisdom of the cautious tactics of Charles and his commanders was fully demon- strated. The French avoided pitched battles, kept themselves shut up in the fortified towns, and left the English to be wasted by want and disease and to be harassed by guerrilla attacks. The Black Prince, stricken with fever, returned to England, where his death was soon followed by that of his father and by the accession of his only child, Richard II (1377-99), a forlorn little boy of ten. For five years the English had lost comn;iand of the sea, and further defeats made even the voyage from Dover « to Calais a perilous one; while on the land the English posses-\ sions melted away one after the other. But heavy losses befell the French, for the deafll of Bertr and du Guesdin, the ablest ' of their generals, was followed in a few weeks by that of Charles, the wisest of their kings. With the passing of all these great figures the second period of the war came to a conclusion. Charles VI (i 380-1421) was also a child when he came to the throne. Like Richard of England he was a handsome and lovable boy; but like Richard, too, he was unfitted to rule in so tem- pestuous a time. About the lad there clustered his uncles, the Dukes of Anjou, Berry, Burgundy, and Bourbon, each greedy to advance his own personal interests, each oblivious to the wel- fare of the country, who plunged him so deeply into voluptuous- ness and sensuality that they led him on to madness. All through the remainder of his life he was lucid only at intervals and was always subject to the dictation of whomsoever happened to have control of his person. So oppressive were the financial burdens of this third period of the war that everywhere from the Alps to the Bay of Biscay and from the Pyrenees to the Cheviot Hills the people, with an essential identity of cause, rose in rebellion. Under Wat Tyler the peasants from the Southeastern counties of England demanded the abolition of serfdom. At Rouen the coppersmiths opened the prisons and destroyed the charters; the n POLITICAL AFFAIRS IN THE AGE OF RENAISSANCE 31 Parisians seized twelve thousand mallets and for three days were c hap, ii masters of the city; in Flanders the burghers rallied around 1413-29 Philip von Artevelde only to be cut to pieces by the French at Roosebeke; and in Auvergne, Languedoc, and the old Swabian duchy the uprisings of the peasants and the townspeople, goaded to desperation by the misery of war and taxation, were sup- pressed with unspeakable cruelty. The quarrels between the relatives of Charles gradually resolved themselves into one be- tween his younger brother, Louis, Diike of Orleans, and his youngest uncle, Philip, Duke of Burgundy. The Burgundians were clever enough to enlist the support of the tax-ridden people, being especially diplomatic in winning the support of the Paris- ians; while their opponents, the Orleanists, who from their leader received the name of Armagnacs, represented the forces of feudalism. All France became involved in the war of the factions, the whole country was ravaged, and for two years Paris was in the hands of the turbulent proletariat. In the early years of this war of Burgundian and Armagnac neither Richard II nor his successor, Henry IV (1399-1413), was in a position to make an effort to regain England's lost posses- The Fourth \ sions; but with the accession of Henry V (1413-22), a wild ^®'^S? **' prince suddenly transformed into a sober monarch of iron will, conditions changed and a fourth period of the war began. Once more English fleets swept the narrow Channel; and, in 1415, the field of Agincourt was reddened with the blood of the flower of French chivalry. The rivalry of the French factions continued to paralyze the national activity, the king was mad and the que«*v was licentious, and so when two years later Henry began the conquest of the country in earnest he found but a feeble oppo- sition. The murder of the leader of the Burgundians by an Armagnac retainer drove the former party into the arms of the English. By the Treaty of Troyes, signed between the English and the Burgundians, Henry was married to the daughter of the crazy king and declared to bg the Regent of France and the heir of his father-in-law. The dauphin Charles, who was associated with the Armagnacs, did not approve of the iniquitous agreement ; but the opposition was powerless to stay the advance of the Eng- lish and Burgundian armies, when suddenly, in 1422, Henry died, and a month later he was followed to the grave by that sad symbol of his country's decadence, the mad king Charles. Henry VI (1422-61) was a babe of nine months when he became King of England arid, so far as the treaty with the Burgundians could make him. King of France, while his rival, Charles VII (1422- 61), was a youth of nineteen. Son of a mad father and a disso- 32 THE RENAISSANCE CHAP. II 1413-29 The Piftli Period of the War: Jeanne d'Arc lute mother, it is little wonder that Charles, who spent most of his years safe inside the walls of strong castles, proved weak both in body and mind. He held his court at Bourges, while the Duke of Bedford, uncle of the infant Henry and Regent in France, made his capital at Paris. This, then, was the condition at the close of the fourth period of the war. Roughly speaking, all the territory North of the Loire and East of that river as f ai" south as Lyons refused allegiance to Charles, while in the South much of the country that surrounded Bordeaux was loyally Eng- lish. The remainder of the Southwest was held by self-seeking nobles not actually committed to either side ; and in the Southeast Provence was practically independent. Only the center of France, a mere remnant, acknowledged Charles. Armagnacs, Burgundians, and English, hordes of armed brigands who cared little for the cause for which they fought, ravaged the wretched country, laid desolate the fields, sent up the villages in smoke, tortured and killed the starving peasants, and found the only effective resistance to their plundering forays in the walls of the cities whose inhabitants, forewarned by experience, denied ad- mittance to them one and all. Such was the mournful situation when, while the siege of Orleans, the gate-way to the central provinces, was under way, there appeared upon the scene the last and fragrant flower of medieval civilization, Jeanne d'Arc, the savior of France. We do not know a great deal about Jeanne before she was drawn into the whirlpool of war. She lived at Domremy, a little village in the green and narrow valley of the Meuse, on the highway from Dijon to Flanders. But whether Domremy belonged to France or to the Empire, to Champagne or to Lor- raine, we are altogether uncertain, so complex were the feudal relations of that border region. Even her name is uncertain. The name " Dare " came to her from Arc, the place from whence her father came. But in those days a girl usually had no sur- name. She was known only by her first name, or if she had another it was from her mother that she got it and not from her father. The habit of taking the father's name was only jusS coming into vogue. Jeanne of Domremy was called Jeanne la Pucelle ; and when she was ennobled she called herself by het; mother's name, Jeanne du Lis. Her own village was devoted to the Armagnac-French cause, while the neighboring village of Maxey was attached to the Burgundian-English side. Between the two villages there were frequent disputes upon the burning question of the time; up and down the highway there traveled the news of the weary struggle, and on the northern horizon POLITICAL AFFAIRS IN THE AGE OF RENAISSANCE S3 Jeanne more than once saw the columns of smoke that marked c hap. h the trails of the bands of soldiers that harried the countryside. 1429-53 So all through her childhood and youth she must have been familiar with the sore plight of France. Slowly there dawned upon the peasants the consciousness of the fact that the first step to end the horrors to which they were subjected was to expel the English; their French oppressors could be dealt with after- ward. And that belief was implanted in the heart of the child. One summer noon when Jeanne was in her father's garden she Jeanne's had a vision of the archangel Michael, and to the frightened little ^^y^ces girl the angelic visitor returned again and again in succeeding days. Gradually her fear passed away. Other heavenly visi- tants appeared, and St. Catherine and St. Margaret bade her to go to the help of the unhappy King. For several years she kept the apparitions a secret. In the house and in the fields she worked, a true peasant's daughter. She nursed the sick, and loved to hear the angelus sounding sweetly the twilight benedic- tion. For some years the " voices," as she chose to call them, repeated, though indefinitely, their injunctions to save France. In 1428 the village of Domremy was raided and set on fire, after which the commands of the voices became more definite. Orleans was to be delivered from the English investment, Charles was to be consecrated and crowned at Rheims, and then there were vague words about driving the English from France. In her own day men did not deny that voices spoke to Jeanne, but wondered only whether they were divine or devilish. In our day men wonder whether she was mentally deranged or an im- postor. Both of these modern impressions are wrong. All of us have visions unless we have been educated out of them. It is the hardest thing in the world to discriminate between what we know and what we imagine. It must ever be remembered that Jeanne was a peasant girl, that the only education she ever re- ceived was the religious teaching given in the parish church, that it was a natural thing for her to hear voices, that many in that time saw visions and dreamed dreams, that the woods that sur- rounded her village were full of spirits and fairies, baleful and beneficent, who had lived there since the days of Merlin, aye, and beyond that in those far-off days of which we have not even a legendary record. The sincerity and the sanity of Jeanne are certain. Whatever one may think of her visions and her voices, be sure they were to that sound and sweet and noble girl the gravest of realities. At last, in the middle of February 1429, after meeting with many humiliating refusals of aid, clad in male attire and accom- 34 THE RENAISSANCE CHAP. II 1429-53 Jeanne's Career and Death. panied by six armed men, Jeanne set out from the nearby castle of Vaucouleurs for Chinon where Charles was keeping his court. Through the heart of France they rode, often avoiding the inns for fear of detection and sleeping in the winter fields. After protracted examinations at Chinon and Poitiers she was sent at the end of April with a little army of about three thousand men and several of the ablest of the French captains to put an end to the weary siege that Orleans had suffered for seven months. In this manner did the fifth and the last period of the war open. She infused new courage into the hearts of the demoralized French soldiers and with undaunted energy drove the English from the outlying and strongly fortified tower of the Tourelles, which they had captured, and compelled them to abandon the siege. The effect of this victory upon the morale of the French may well be said to have been miraculous. The downcast, downtrodden, and despairing country was thifilled with a fierce confidence in its new leader, the boastful assurance of the English began to disappear, and the whole course of the war was changed. There were, however, two parties at the court. At the head of one was La Tremoille, a selfish and unscrupulous nobleman who had secured control of the weakling king, and who saw his own defeat in the establishment of an orderly government that would follow a final triumph of the French arms. So a month was lost in indecision before the campaign to drive the English from the valley of the Loire began, Jeanne wished Charles to be crowned at Rheims without delay, but she was overborne in the matter. When military operations were re- sumed the French captured Jargeau, Meung, and Beaugency; and at Patay the English, greatly outnumbered, after a feeble resistance left 2,500 dead upon the field. With such evidence as this the ecstatic faith of Jeanne in her mission became more contagious than ever and despite the fact that the road, lined with fortified towns, ran for one hundred and fifty miles through the hostile country of Champagne, the cowardly king at last yielded to the urgent pleadings of Jeanne that he go to Rlieims. The danger was not nearly as great as it appeared, for the Eng- lish garrisons of the towns were small and the French inhabitants not difficult to win over. The march was accomplished in safety ; the king was crowned; and Jeanne, then at the culmination of her career, was eager to press forward in the work of driving the English from France. Troyes had already submitted, and now in quick succession Beauvais, Senlis, Laon, Soissons, Cha- teau-Thierry, Provins, Compiegne, and other towns acknowl- edged Charles as their king. If quick, aggressive action had POLITICAL AFFAIRS IN THE AGE OF RENAISSANCE 35 been taken the hated foe could unquestionably have been expelled, p hap. ii But the old indecision and delay caused valuable time to be spent 1429-53 in aimless wanderings. The intrigues of La Tremoille made the further success of the French army practically impossible; and so when in September Jeanne led the troops in an attack upon Paris that was repulsed, she met with her first bitter disappoint- ment. She never wavered in her belief that she was divinely inspired, but the unbounded confidence she once instilled in the hearts of men was gradually dissipated. Thereafter most of her efforts resulted in failure, and at the end of May in the follow- ing year she was captured in the siege of Compiegne. The story of her trial need not detain us long. For three months, with an interval of sickness, the unlettered peasant girl of nineteen years, enfeebled and harassed by the brutal treatment of her jailors, confronted the learned theologians and legists. " I see many counselors," she might well have said, as did Mary Stuart at Fotheringay, " but not one for me." Yet she had not much need of a legal counselor, for her fate would have been the same, and her simplicity, sincerity, and native shrewdness enabled her to evade the most ingenious attempts to make her convict herself of wrong-doing. On May 30, 143 1, the fagots were lighted in the old market-place at Rouen and the last word that Jeanne uttered with her blistering lips was the name of Jesus. So perished the peasant girl of Domremy, while in all the long months of her imprisonment and trial there had come from those whom she had delivered from the depths of despair never a let- ter offering ransom, never a message threatening retaliation upon the captive English leaders, and never a lance to attempt her rescue. Yet the life of Jeanne d'Arc was not in vain. About her name there gathered the memories of the sorrows inflicted upon France by the foreign foe. In her the spirit of nation- ality found an inspiring leader. Because of her devotion and her deeds the fierce hatreds of Burgundian and Armagnac began to cool. Out of her life, " stainless amid all the corruptions of the camp and compassionate amid all the horrors of war," a new patriotism was born in France. For her country she brought together its shattered elements, made it hale and whole, and into ^^^ it she breathed the spirit of her sweet and tender heart, her ^^^ noble and unconquerable soul. t. ^ The English gained very little by the c^ure and judicial The Re- murder of Jeanne. Not all the criminalaBlf-seeking of La ?v"y' Tremoille and the other perverse counselors of the miserable j puppet of a king could turn back the growu^tide of French patriotism. All that it could do was to^clH^the final ex- ^ ^ 36 THE RENAISSANCE CHAP, n 1429-53 Turk azid Mongol in Europe t pulsion of the English for a score of years. In 1433 the trai- torous favorite was surprised in his bed by the opposing faction and thrown into prison. Gradually the French auxiliaries de- serted the English ranks. Bedford, the leader of the English forces, died in 1435 ; and in the same year Philip of Burgundy broke his alliance with the invaders. The Norman peasants, made desperate by the license of the English soldiers, rose to the aid of the bands of mercenaries in the hire of France, Paris was regained in 1436. Still the dreary war dragged on. The French soldiers were nothing less than brigands; ecorcheurs, skinners or flayers, their captains were called; and they were dreaded alike by those whom they came to deliver and those whom they came to despoil. In order to rid France of the in- vader it was necessary to reorganize the military forces. So the indiscriminate forming of free companies and the carrying on of private war were forbidden, and all the troops were paid out of the royal treasury and placed directly under royal au- thority. In order to procure the necessary revenue to do this the taille was taken out of the hands of the nobles and made exclusively a national tax. The men to whom these reforms were chiefly due were Richemont, constable of France and long an enemy of the worthless La Tremoille, Dunois, a captain who had fought with Jeanne d'Arc, and Jacques Coeur, a wealthy merchant of Bourges. Thus was the monarchy sent once more along the road to absolutism. A formidable revolt of the nobles, the Praguerie, against these measures was suppressed, and with the reorganized army the English were at last expelled from France^ retaining of all their great possessions only the town of Calais. The warfare of a century had laid desolate the land of France. Everywhere the condition of the peasantry was wretched,, and the prosperity of many of the towns had long been halted. But out of all the misery liiere was born a deepened national feeling/^ Before we proceed to consider the break-up of Italy and the building of Spain we must stop to note the coming of the Turk and the Mongol into Europe, and to glance at the dying empire of the East. The Mongols originally came from the valleys of the upper tributaries of the Amur in Northern China. Their greatest leader was Jenghiz Khan (i 162-1227) whose victorious armies swept from the plains in central Asia westward as far as the Dnieper. L,Qng before this great invasion the Seljukian Turks, who were^«) from Northeastern Asia, had established themselves in Asi?PMinor. After the Mongolian invasion an- other division of^e Turks, the Ottomans, moved westward to the Mediterra^^BMd, in Asia Minor, mingled with the kindred Jr'Ui.i i ICT^ TCFFXLRSrnsrTHE AGE OF RENAISSANCE ^ race and confronted the decaying Byzantine empire. The Otto- c hap, ii man Turks were a young nation and to the freshness and vigor 136O-1453 of their life was added the fanaticism of the conquering religion of Mohammed. Under Orkan (1360-89) the Turkish posses- sions were made to include all of Asia Minor and were consoli- dated with consummate skill, while the dwindling Greek do- minion remained, as it had always been, a collection of heterogeneous nationalities. Then under Murad I (1360-89) European conquests to the west of Constantinople were made, and Bayazid I (1389-1402) pushed those conquests to the Danube. No sooner had this been done than still another kindred race under the dreaded Timur (1338-1405), or Tamer- lane as we call him, which had been sweeping westward, cap- tured Bagdad, Aleppo, and Damascus. Thus for a time the attention of the Turks was diverted from their westward ad- vance to their Eastern frontier. Indeed, with the defeat and capture of Bayazid by Tamerlane the Turkish power seemed to have crumbled to dust, and the existence of the Byzantine empire indefinitely prolonged. At the opening of the thirteenth century the fourth crusade had been deflected from its destination to Constantinople, that capital had been captured, and a Latin empire, with Count Bald- win of Flanders at its head, had taken the place of the effete Byzantine empire. The Byzantine rule was restored in 1261, but only a miserable remnant of its once extensive territory remained. So it was but a feeble resistance that could be of- fered to the Turks, who after the death of Tamerlane regained 4:heir vigor and continued their western conquests. The appeals of the Byzantines to the Christians of the West to help them to stay the infidel tide fell upon heedless ears, and so the Turks were able to continue the systematic and gradual extension of their possessions. Constantinople, left like an isle in the midst of the Mohammedan sea, was surrounded by their conquests. But on their Western frontier it was Latin Christendom ' the Turks now confronted, and they found it able to offer a more stubborn resistance than Greek Christendom had shown^. Un- der the adventurous knight and able general John Hunyady, the Hungarian forces drove the Turks back across the Balkans; but they failed to press on to Adrianople, the Turkish capital, and finally met with defeat. In 1453 the Turks captured Constan- tinople. At last the day of Byzantium had Sbe to its end and the night had fallen. For more than a hundmn years the Turk-'^ ish invasion of the Christian continent had been in progress and the fall of Constantinople could not have beea ^Built to predict. f 38 THE RENAISSANCE C HAP, n Yet it came as a great shock to the Christians of the West. 1360-1453 They were ashamed to think they had lifted not a hand to avert the capture of the last citadel of the andent Greek civilization. They were afraid of the further advance of the Mohammedan tide, now that every vestige of the intervening barrier had dis- appeared. Their apathy had allowed the Turks to secure pos- session of one of the most famous capitals of their continent, to cement the hitherto divided territory in Asia and Europe, and to become a European power. But when the first sorrow died away, the old indifference was resumed. Europe was separating into distinct nations, each with its own problems, and the ideals of the age of the Crusades lived on only here and there, in the heart of a Prince Henry the Navigator or of a Christopher Columbus. ^ While France, England, and Spain were rising into vigorous Italy after national life, Italy was sinking into political insignificance. It rtaiSn*"' ^^^ ^ mere congeries of principalities. Let us then glance at the seven Italian States that were the chief divisions of the peninsula in 1305 at the beginning of the Avignonese captivity. In the South the kingdom of Naples and Sicily belonged to the house of Anjou, summoned, in the person of Charles I (1266- 85), a younger brother of King Louis IX of France, by the Papacy across the Alps to Italy to assist in driving the imperial power from Italian soil. In 1282, fifteen years after the com- ing of Charles, the Sicilians revolted against his harsh rule, compelled the withdrawal of his forces from the island and persuaded Peter HI of Aragon to accept the crown. Thereafter the Angevin possessions were confined to the kingdom of Naplesi^ Charles II (1285— 1309) was succeeded by his second son, Robert (1309-43), who, having outlived his own son, Charles of Cala- bria, left his grand-daughter Giovanna I (1343-82) his only direct heir. An attempt to make the rule of a female more secure by a marriage with her cousin, Andrew of Hungary, resulted in arousing the jealousy of some of the Neapolitan nobles and in creating opposition to the Hungarian influence. The story of Naples an 1 its rulers we shall continue later on. We are here concerned only with the beginnings of the principal Italian States. Venice was founded by men who, fleeing in terror from the ferocious Huns, left the rich and pleasant plains of Padua for t the sHallow salt^^shes and low sandy islands of the Adriatic. While the mainlSn of Italy, overrun by the pitiless robber bands, was falling intoruins, these peaceful islanders went their way building slo^^Bvith tireless energy, their unique city of the POLITICAL AFFAIRS IN THE AGE OF RENAISSANCE 39 sea. Independence was the first and constant thought of the c hap, ii Venetians, and it was maintained with the utmost tenacity and 1266-1306 courage. Their poHtical life, dominated by a powerful aris- tocracy, enjoyed a stability unknown to the principalities and communes of the mainland; and when the riches of the Orient were in part disclosed to Western Europe their city became the gateway to those shining lands and grew to be a commonwealth unsurpassed in commercial prosperity. "^ It was in the confusion resulting from the Lombard invasion that Genoa began to gain her independence. Additional im- munities were obtained from time to time by contending nobles until at last it became a self-governing commune. Its prosperity was greatly enhanced by the expansion of commerce consequent upon the Crusades, and Genoese traders established themselves in the Levant, on the shores of the Black Sea, and on the banks of the Euphrates. For two centuries a fierce rivalry raged be- tween Genoa and Pisa, but after the victory of the former in the battle off the island of Meloria, in 1284, the latter lost most of its maritime power and Genoa was left to contend for com- mercial supremacy with Venice. , Milan, one of the most important of the Roman cities, at the conflux of great commercial highways, had been the capital of the decaying Empire. Seated in the middle of a great and fertile plain it never lost its importance and became a great center for the manufacture of wool, silk, armor, and jewelry; and a center, also, of a great agglomeration of republics and lordships. Florence, unlike Milan, was one of the least important of the Italian cities in the days of the Empire, and she developed later than did the cities of the Lombard plain and still later than the maritime republics. But gradually the little town began to grow and to enter upon a career of conquest until at last it became the capital of the most important republic in Tuscany. Last of the important provinces in Italy at the opening of the Renaissance era was the Papal State, acquired by real or pre- tended gifts of emperors and other rulers, and occupying the center of the peninsula. It must be remembered that these seven States that we have noticed, Sicily, Naples, Venice, Genoa, Milan, Florence, and the Papal State, were only the principal divisions of Italy at the opening of the fourteenth century. The many minor communities in the Northern part of the discordant peninsula we shall not stop here to notice. Such was the disrupted condition of Italy when the popes took up their residence in A-fignon. The inhabitants of the peninsula did not speak of themselves as Italians, but as members of the 40 THE RENAISSANCE C HAP.n State to which they belonged, as Florentines, Milanese, or Nea- 1305-77 politans. The aim of every one of the numerous political divi- sions of the peninsula was merely to secure f ree-play . f or per- sonal interests or party intrigues by making still weaker the central authority, by keeping alive the antagonism of pope and emperor. The significance of Guelf and Ghibelline had long evaporated, but the innumerable factions still conjured with the names and sought their petty local and personal interests in the deepening anarchy to the sacrifice of the common welfare. Yet there were men who dreamed of a united Italy. Dante longed for some leader who could rise above the paltry politics of his own State and undertake the task of healing the dissensions of Italy Dur- his country, of welding it into a nation. Petrarch, too, never ingtheAb- considered himself as merely a Florentine but as an Italian. sence of -.,.. tbe Papacy When he saw the Italian communities either oppressed by the yoke of sanguinary tyrants or torn by internal dissensions and ruined by fratricidal wars among themselves he uttered in his Italia Mia a passionate plea for national union that was pathet- ically preniature. All these dreams were doomed to defeat for yet five hundred years. The tragic drama of Italian politics moved rapidly to scenes of still greater degradation. Italy failed utterly to understand the profound change that was being consummated by the creation of a deep national sentiment in other countries. She had few statesmen who perceived the signs of the times and none who could command effective sup- port. Let us note, briefly, some of the more important of the political events that took place in Italy at this time. The Holy Roman emperors had not yet either explicitly or implicitly abandoned their iclaim to suzerainty over Italy, but for sixty years they had failed to make any practical assertion of it. In 131 1 Henry VII entered the peninsula. Never had there been an emperor so well-fitted for the task of replacing anarchy with unity. Far above the petty intrigues of German princes and Italian despots Henry moved serene with his heart set upon justice. He was the chivalrous ideal of all Italians who longed to see an ending made of their deplorable political divisions, Dante wrote an impassioned address to the rulers and people of the peninsula hailing the new Emperor as the deliverer of Italy. But Henry failed. In spite of his desire to keep aloof from either faction, the situation forced him to ally himself with the Ghibelline party, and then in 13 13 he died suddenly of fever. The Scala family at Verona may be chosen as the type of the despotic rulers of the period. When the cruel Ezzelino da POLITICAL AFFAIRS IN THE AGE OF RENAISSANCE 41 Romano, whose thirst for blood was never satisfied or equaled, c hap, ii died in 1259, Mastino della Scala was chosen by the citizens as 1305-77 their chief magistrate, and the tyranny that he established became dynastic and continued in power for more than a century. The most illustrious of the family was Cangrande della Scalla (1308- 29), an able and ambitious soldier, a bold and clever statesman, one of the greatest of the Ghibelline chiefs of Northern Italy. He made considerable additions to the already extensive terri- tory of his family; and, with no mere selfish end in^ view, dreamed of the political unity of the whole peninsula; but he died suddenly when he was only thirty-eight years of age. Summoned by the Ghibelline leaders in a time of need, an- other emperor, Louis IV, called by the old chroniclers in scorn and hatred " the Bavarian," entered the peninsula in 1327, had himself crowned in Rome, deposed as a heretic Pope John XXII of Avignon who had excommunicated him, set up an anti-pope, and then hurried back to Germany to look after his interests there without having given any eftective aid to his Italian allies. The next invader of Italy was King John of Bohemia, who entered the peninsula in 1330. Son of Henry VII, he could rightfully expect the support of the Ghibellines. Friend of Pope John XXII, he had a good claim upon the allegiance of the Guelfs. And so many communities hastened to place them- selves under his control that it seemed for a time as if the dream of Italian unity would come true. But the legacies of hate were still too deeply cherished to be dispelled by the first effort. The affairs of Bohemia demanded John's hasty return, and when he went back to Italy he found the task to be a hopeless one. So he turned his back upon the warring factions and made his waj over the Alps. The invasions of Henry of Luxemburg, Louis the Bavarian, and John of Bohemia had left behind them bands of mercenary soldiers who lived by brigandage or were taken into the employ- of the despots in the work of putting an end to the independence , of the republics and aggrandizing the despotisms. Knowing little about the cause for which they were fighting and caring less, concerned only with their pay, their plunder, and the grat- ification of their lust, these pitiless robbers and murderers left desolation and death in their wake. " Un ecorcheur ne p.eut pas alter en enfer," boasted such a bird of prey, " parce qu'il trou- blerait la repos du diable!' The republics were not slow to follow the example of the despots in hiring these mercenary troops. The condottieri, as the leaders of these soldiers-of- fortune were called, found numerous opportunities for self- 45 THE RENAISSANCE C HAP, n advancement. They became commanders of independent armies, 1306-77 lending their aid to those who offered the highest pay. Thej became wealthy. Some won for themselves ephemeral terri- torial possessions, while others conquered important States, and founded famous dynasties. At first these mercenaries were foreigners, but in the latter part of the fourteenth century they were gradually replaced by Italians. Among the more famous of the condottieri were " Duke " Werner, Moriale, Lando, Bar- biano, Attendolo, Braccio, Francesco Sforza, John Hawkwood, Colleoni, Gattamelata, and Carmagnola. In this period it was that the death of Robert of Naples plunged that kingdom into indescribable anarchy. His heir, as we have seen, was his granddaughter Giovanna I (1343-82), a girl of sixteen, who in her childhood had been married to her cousin, Andrew of Hungary. Giovanna grew to be a wilful and dissolute woman and her husband proved to be a worthless rake. Giovanna wished to be the actual ruler and to regard Andrew as being merely her husband; but Andrew, being the nearest male heir, claimed the right to rule as king. In 1345 Andrew was murdered, and rumor accused his wife of being an accom- plice if not the instigator. Two years later Andrew's brother, Louis of Hungary, came to avenge the crime and assert his own claim to the throne. Many Neapolitan nobles flocked to his banner, and a desultory warfare lasted until 1351 when the affairs of his kingdom compelled Louis to return to Hungary. Giovanna, who had no children, retained the throne for thirty years more. When the schism in the Papacy began in 1378 her nearest male heir, Charles of Durazzo, who as a claimant of the Neapolitan throne assumed th§ title of Charles III (1382-86), supported Urban VI, while she upheld Clement VII. So Gio- vanna sent to France to invite Louis of Anjou j:o become her heir. The offer was accepted. This creation of the claim of the second house of Anjou to Naples, while it failed to effect the disinheritance of Charles of Durazzo, resulted in a century of intermittent warfare and furnished to Charles VIII of France an excuse for his invasion of Italy. It was in the midst of this anarchy that there came the ap- parition of Rienzi, whose story, briefly touched upon in the preceding chapter, is one of the most romantic in an age of romance. Rienzi, born in the most squalid of all the quarters of Rome, was the son of a tavern-keeper and a washer-woman. His mother died when he was still an infant, and he was sent to a relative at Anagni where he acquired a fluent command of Latin, read widely in literature, and perhaps became imbued with POLITICAL AFFAIRS IN THE AGE OF RENAISSANCE 43 his special hatred of the house of Colonna. At the age of c hap, ii twenty he returned to Rome, then, in truth, a city of desola- 1305-77 tion. The Colonna family had surrounded with a palisade the section of the city they claimed as their own; the Orsini had fortified another quarter in the same manner; the Savelli were entrenched in a third position; and the Frangipani held the Colosseum. The Roman populace, some thirty thousand in number, led the most precarious existence in the ruined capital. Rienzi brooded over the desolation of Rome and dreamed of raising her from her abject prostration and of reviving her free- dom and her glory. His fluent and impassioned eloquence won the support of the people; and on May 20, 1347, he was able to effect a bloodless revolution. He promulgated the laws of " the Good Estate," a brief and excellent code, the administra- tion of which brought peace to the tumultuous city. Although invested with absolute power he took for himself the title of " Tribune " which in the olden days had been associated with the cause of popular freedom. His plans were not confined to the papal State. They included the pacification and unity of all Italy ; and for a time in that crowded and dream-like summer it seemed as though that dearest dream was soon to be fulfilled. But the summer drew to its close, and the autumn opened in strife and bloodshed. The swift ascent of the Liberator turned his brain; his pretensions, despite his sincerity and his disin- terestedness, became not only vain but impious ; and the nobles recovered from their consternation. On November 20 a fierce conflict took place in which a dozen of the leading Roman nobles, including several of the house of Colonna, were slain. Rienzi permitted the bodies to be grossly insulted, inaugurated a season of riotous feasting, and failed to follow up the victory with vigorous measures. From that time his influence declined. " Of the two alternatives," said old Stefano Colonna, the ven- erable head of the house, " it is assuredly better to die than to submit any longer to the tyranny of this peasant " ; and he placed himself at the head of the baronial faction. A few weeks later, seven months after his accession to power, Rienzi fled to Naples. Suddenly, as if man had not done enough to devastate Italy, the crowding calamities of the country were increased in the spring of 1348 by a visitation of the plague, conveyed to the peninsula by a Genoese ship returning from the East. In Siena eighty thousand people, three-quarters of the population, died; in Pisa; where five hundred people a day were buried, seven- tenths of the population perished ; and the pestilence was equally 44 THE RENAISSANCE O HAF. n virulent and fatal at Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, and other 1305-77 parts of the peninsula. " We go out of doors," said Petrarch, " walk through street after street and find them full of dead and dying; and when we get home again we find no live thing within the house, all having perished in the brief interval of our absence." The morbo nero carried off one-third of the entire Italian population and added to the anarchy of the time. The wanderings of Rienzi during the years of his exile may be quickly passed over. In 1354 he was sent by Innocent VI from Avignon to Rome to aid Cardinal Albornoz to restore order in the papal State. After some months he decided to act independently of the warlike legate, and on the first day of August he reentered the imperial city in triumph. But Rienzi was now broken in body and unbalanced in mind. In October he perished in a tumult of the populace, and confusion reigned again. There are two reasons for the sudden fall of Rienzi, The degraded Roman populace were quite unfitted for democracy, and Rienzi lacked every one of the stern qualities demanded by a time so disordered. It was a double and a difficult task that had been given to Cardinal Albornoz. He had to resist the inroads of secular rulers upon papal territory and to restore to order and obedience the unruly population of the State. But so successful was the indefatigable Spaniard, alike in war and in diplomacy, that he succeeded in depriving the princes of most of their usurped possessions, of recovering practically complete the temporalities of the Church — though he failed to subdue Perugia — and in restoring something like order within the papal State, The war- rior-cardinal, however, died in 1367, and the old lawlessness soon returned. The third stage in the melancholy story of the break-up of Italy is the recounting of the most important events that oc- curred during the papal schism and the time of the councils. The history of the schism, and of the councils that attempted to end it, has already been given. So we are free to turn our attention to the first of the important events, the struggle be- tween Venice and Genoa for maritime supremacy, that trans- pired in Italy while they were in progress. There were at first three Italian competitors for the trade of the East — Venice, Pisa, and Genoa. But the maritime power of the Pisans re- ceived a blow in the battle of Meloria from which it never recovered. Then began a long and sanguinary struggle between the victor and Venice, in which the strength of the two great maritime republics was wasted, while the constant encroach- Italy in the Time of Scliisia and Coon- cils POLITICAL AFFAIRS IN THE AGE OF RENAISSANCE 45 ments of the Turks became a peril ever more urgent to the West, c hap, ii and which ended in 1380 with the irreparable defeat of the 1S78-1450 Genoese at Chioggia. Thus Venice, left comparatively free from her rivals in commerce, became mistress of the Mediter- ranean sea. We have seen something of the rise of Milan into industrial and political importance. It lost its independence in 1295 and came under the dominion of the Visconti family, the greatest of whom was Gian Galeazzo, in whose subtle mind there was born again the dream of a kingdom that should embrace all Italy. No sooner had Venice made herself mistress of the great in- land sea than she aspired to conquest on the mainland. Great States were springing up all about her, and she deemed her dominion of the lagoons to be no longer secure. So she en- tered upon a new stage of her history, acquired a territory that extended, roughly speaking, from the Alps to the Po and from Triest to the lake of Como, became involved in the intrigues of Italian politics and by her success excited the jealousy and the fear of rivals who later on were to combine and cripple her. Florence, as we have seen, rose from comparative obscurity to be the most important republic in Italy. It found prosperity in the pursuit of the wool and silk trade. But, like every other commune, it became divided by the rancorous strife of its vari- ous factions. A plutocratic aristocracy of merchants, bankers, and manufacturers gradually arose, of which, amid tumult and conspiracies, banishments and proscriptions, first one party gained the upper hand and then another. The wars of conquest in which the republic engaged and which made her the greatest power in Tuscany, necessitated heavy taxation; and when, in 1427, the people clamored for a more equitable system of rais- ing the sums needed to meet the expenses of the State, Giovanni de' Medici, the richest banker in Italy, openly sided with them. Giovanni had long lurked behind the people and did not fail to seize the opportunity to put himself at their head. Thus the Medici rose above the level of their fellow-citizens and began their remarkable history. No other family has so influenced the destinies of humanity. Slowly they absorbed the governmental power by their cunning and traditional policy of identifying themselves with the popular interest. Giovanni died in 1429. Cosimo (1389-1464), his son, more daring and less cautious than his father, engaged in an open effort to secure ascendancy. But his rival, Rinaldo degli Albizzi, was too powerful to be overthrown at once, and the attempt resulted in Cosimo*s exile. 46 THE RENAISSANCE ^'^^^^ Hardly a year passed, however, when at an election in Florence 1378-1450 the tide turned, Rinaldo was banished and Cosimo reentered the city triumphant, to be thereafter its virtual ruler. Consum- mate financier that he was, he was also an extraordinarily clever diplomat and politician. The outward show of a republican form of government he kept, but little by little he gathered more power to himself until he became as truly a despot as was to be found in Italy. The Medici continued their regular pursuits of trade after acquiring the attributes of sovereignty; and in finance, the patronage of art, domestic government, war, and diplomacy, they displayed an insight, a grasp, a varied capacity, and an enterprising spirit that was unexcelled. Piero (1419- 69) succeeded his father in 1464, but, weak in health, he was not able to keep so firm a grasp upon the city. Lorenzo (1449- 92) became the ruling spirit even before Piero died and with inflexible will he continued in the path that led to an absolute personal despotism. '' Maravigliosamente" is the word chosen by Machiavelli to describe Lorenzo, and the characterization is most apt. The chains with which he bound Florence were golden chains. Nowhere else was there to be seen such splendid pa- geantry, such frequent festivities; and the licentious abandon- ment of the carnival time was complete. So were the Floren- tines beguiled; and so was the sober spirit of their earlier days transformed into the most pronounced paganism. But relent- less and cruel as was Lorenzo's determination to make himself supreme, he was yet a genuine as well as a generous patron of art; and about Wmself he gathered the greatest painters and poets and philosophers of the age. The dynastic struggle still dragged out its weary length in Naples. When Giovanna I, because of their diflFerence regard- ing the papal schism, passed over Charles III of Durazzo and madeL-ouis I of the second house of Anjou her successor, war broke out again. But Charles III, his son Ladislas, and his daughter Giovanna II, who belonged to the first house of Anjou, succeeded, each in their turn, in keeping the throne tmtil the death of Giovanna in 1435. This second Giovanna, like the first one, was also childless. She chose as her successor Al- fonso of Aragon and Sicily, until whose death in 1458 Naples and Sicily were retmited. But the second house of Anjou did not abandon its claims. The Neapolitan nobles were divided in their allegiance to the Aragon and Angevin houses and so a pro- longed war distracted the unhappy country, until in 1442 Rene le Bon of Anjou abandoned the struggle. Alfonso who was King of Sardinia as well as of Aragon, Sicily, and Naples* was POLITICAL AFFAIRS IN THE AGE OF RENAISSANCE 47 styled by the humanists " The Magnanimous." His court was c hap, i i filled with scholars, and there men who were persecuted in 1266-1469 other places for their opinions found an asylum. During all this time that Italy was torn with conflict the Turks were approaching ever nearer. In 1457 they gained Athens, and five years later the Morea was in their possession. Thus had they come into distinct contact with Venice, who had expended so much of her strength in crushing Genoa and secur- ing for herself a dominion on the mainland. Here we pause for a time in , the unhappy narrative of the disruption of the peninsula. Italy, it has been well said, was not a nation but merely a geographical expression. The career of the most westerly of the Mediterranean penin- sulas, the chronicle of the up-building of Spain, is altogether a different story. When, in 1266, the Moors were driven beyond the mountains and shut up in Granada the long warfare of Chris- The tian against Moslem paused for nearly two hundred and fifty ^/g^^"^^ years. The effect of the united and protracted struggle to expel the infidel, which had been carried on at intervals for seven hun- dred years, had been to weaken the provincial jealousies, which in the Italian peninsula had been growing ever more intense, and to infuse into the Spanish peoples something of the senti- ment of nationality. With such a foundation it did not take long to weld the Spanish States into a strong modern power. At the opening of the Renaissance era there were four of these States — Navarre, Aragon, Castile, and Portugal. Navarre was made up of territory on both sides of the Pyrenees. Aragon had been formed by the union of the three provinces of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia; and later it gained Sicily, the Balearic Isles, and Sardinia, and, for a time, Naples. Castile, when it was united with Leon, became the largest of the Spanish States. Portugal was at first a comparatively unimportant State. In 1 139 its count, Alfonso I, assumed the title of king; and Denis the Laborer (1279-1325) succeeded in consolidating the king- dom. The work of uniting Aragon, Castile, and the Spanish part of Navarre into one country, Spain, was accomplished by the house of Trastamara . Alfonso XI of Castile (1312-50) was succeeded by his son Peter the Cruel (1350-69). But Al- fonso left a number of illegitimate children, the eldest of whom, Henry II of Trastamara (1369-79), killed Peter and placed him- self upon the throne of Castile. He was succeeded in turn by- four male descendants and then by the famous Isabella (1474— 1504). The succession to the throne of Aragon came into dis- pute. The Cortes offered the crown to Ferdinand I (1412-16), 48 THE RENAISSANCE C HAP. n a prince of the reigning house of Castile, who accepted. So the 1266-1469 family of Trastamara, despite its illegitimate origin, became the royal family of both Aragon and Castile. In due time Ferdinand was succeeded by two of his sons, and then by his grandson, Ferdinand II ( 1479-15 16) the Catholic. In 1469 Isabella and Ferdinand were married, and thus the two branches of the house of Trastamara were united. The two kingdoms, however, al- though directed by the same policy, remained distinct until after the death of Isabella. In 15 13 Ferdinand conquered all of Navarre south of the Pyrenees and added it to the kingdom of Spain. Having made an attempt to study the history of the Papacy throughout the period that intervened between the end of the Middle Ages and the opening of the era of the Protestant Revo- lution — more definitely from the accession of Boniface VIII in 1294 to the close of the Council of Basel in 1449 — and hav- ing glanced at the political conditions of Germany, France, Italy, and Spain during the same period, we are now ready to turn our attention to that effort to recover the intellectual and artistic inheritance of Greece and Rome, to develop that inheritance and to utilize it in all the channels and aspects of life, that consti-* tutes the Renaissance. It seems advisable to insist, at the out- set, upon the fact that the development of the classical in- heritance was of much greater importance in ushering in the modem world than was the recovery of the actual inheritance itself. It would be fatal to think that the Renaissance consisted exclusively of the attempt to recover the classical literature and the classical art ; or, indeed, to deem that attempt to be its most important constituent. The effort to resuscitate the remains of the antique thought and art was indispensable, it is true. At least the modern era would have been greatly delayed without its aid. The spirit of the Middle Ages was one of intellectuals constraint, while that of Hellenism had been one of intellectual . freedom. The passage from the one to the other was like the passage from a prison to fields that stretched unbounded to the blue sky. But the inheritance of the past was merely a point of departure. Far from being no more than a renewal of an- tiquity, the Renaissance was a new life, indigenous, autocthonous, such as the world had never before witnessed. The mere revival of Greek and Latin letters soon developed into a pedantic clas- sicism that, with its back turned to the future, looked only to the past. It would be wrong to think that these philologians, who disdained the work of helping to create the national lan- guages and literatures, preferring instead slavishly to copy the POLITICAL AFFAIRS IN THE AGE OF RENAISSANCE 49 forms of tongues that were dead, were the most potent figures < ^^'p- ^^ of the period. It was not they who made the Renaissance ; but i266-i469 rather was it those Italians, and, later, those men of other coun- tries, who, in spite of their ardent admiration of the ancients, gave expression to their own personalities, voiced the national sentiment of their own countries, found utterance for the spirit of their own time, who looked keenly and lovingly into the world about them and scanned with eager eyes the far horizon of the future. It is the various "revivals," each of which was more of an inauguration than a revival, which these men imbued with the deepening spirit of modernity effected that constitute the true Renaissance. One other word of warning may be per- mitted. Politics and wars had even less than the revival of let- ters to do with the Renaissance. That is why they have been relegated to the background. CHAPTER III THE REVIVAL OF THE NATION 1. Nationality. 2. How it had been lost. 3. How it came back. 4. Where it came back. 5. Where it lagged and why, 6. The Value of Nationality. cHAP.ni JN dealing with the revival of the nation it is necessary, first A of all, to arrive at the meaning of the terms " nation " and 1275-1500 Nation- ality ' nationality." In doing this it is perhaps well to come to an understanding of the meaning of some words that are not synonymous with them, but which are sometimes considered to be so. First, there is the word " State," which means the en- tire political community, all its ordinary citizens. It should not be confused with the term " nation." Austria-Hungary is a sin- gle State; but its multifarious peoples with their diverse inter- ests and mutual antagonisms by no means constitute a single nation. Magyars and Slavs and Germans remain as distinct imder the crown of St. Stephen as they were eight hundred years ago. The term " government " is likewise not equivalent to that of " nation." It is used to designate the person or the persons in whose hands rests the function of political control ; and it also includes the body of electors. Beneath a single gov- ernment there are oftentimes distinct elements that, like oil and water, refuse to unite. The term " society " is applied to all human communities no matter how loose their organization may be, and regardless of whether nationality has been achieved. A nation is none of these things. It is a body of people united by common ideals and a common purpose. It is the " unity of a people." What is it, then, that gives a people unity, that makes of them a nation? Is it race? Race is oftentimes an important factor in forming a nation, but by itself it cannot create a nation. If racial unity were the essential factor there would be no nations to-day, for there is not a single pure race in l^rope. Every modern nation has mixed blood. The Spanish are one of the most homogeneous of peoples, and yet they are the product of mixed blood. It is true that race is the most popular of the so THE REVIVAL OF THE NATION 51 CHAP. Ill rule-of-thumb solutions for the question of nationality, but so vigorous a nation as the English includes prehistoric Briton, 1275-1500 Celtic Briton, Roman, Saxon, Angle, Dane, Norman, Fleming, and Huguenot. Does language make a nation ? It, too, can help to make one ; but it, too, by itself is powerless to create one. It would seem to be the most obvious mark of nationality, and at times it has been held to be an indispensable condition. The difficulty of uniting populations speaking different languages has appeared to be insuperable. But the Irish despite the fact that they speak the same language are not united to the English by national feel- ing. And Switzerland's three languages have not prevented her from becoming one of the most unified of nations with a popular and parliamentary government carried on by oral and printed discussion. Similarity of language invites the unity of a peo- ple, but does not compel it. Nor does religion determine nationality. It is true that re- ligion had much to do with the formation of the Spanish nation. The Perpetual Crusade against the infidel in the Spanish penin- sula did much to weld the Christians into a nation. But that was an exceptional case. There is not a single nation to-day that has religious unity. For some time religion has been in the process of becoming a personal matter, a matter of the in- dividual conscience. It no longer has any influence in the de- termination of political boundaries. If a common religion were an indispensable condition the leading nations of the world to- day would not exist. Geographical unity may help to make a nation, but it is by no means the controlling factor. It has been well said that the limits of a nation are not written on a map. It is violence at times and at other times the wisdom of concession, and not nationality, that have as a rule determined political boundaries. Switzerland is altogether lacking in geographical unity, and yet for centuries she has had pronounced nationality ; while on the other hand Italy with her striking and unusual geographical unity was able to achieve national unity only in the nineteenth century and then only because of other things. Political boun- daries are shifting and comparatively unimportant. What is the width of the sea, the height of the mountains, or the breadth of a river, that amounts to political severance? Similarity of physical environment cannot in itself make a nation. It is written that " we are what sun and wind and waters make us." Of course even inert environment counts. It has its effect upon man. It helps to condition his life. But 52 THE RENAISSANCE C HAP.m ni^jj jg j^Q^ under the complete control of his environment. He 1275-1500 is able to modify and to change it. One must take into consid- eration the seed as well as the soil. It is the seed that tells, more than the soil. The innate potency of men is responsible for national feeling far more than their physical surroundings. Sim- ilarity of environment may contribute toward nationality, but it cannot of itself produce it. Nationality, the unity of a people, is not produced exclusively by race, or language, or religion, or geographical unity, or sim- ilarity of environment; nor does it come as the result of any number of these things, nor of all of them combined. Two "^ things produce a nation — a rich inheritance of memories and the desire to preserve those memories. A nation is a spiritual unity that has been brought into existence by complex historical conditions, by similar traditions and a similar imagination. A nation, like an individual, is the product of experience, of achievement and of failures. Common triumphs to rejoice in; common sacrifices to remember. Common sorrows are espe- cially the basis of nationality. Grief and sacrifices are a more potent element in the creation of nationality than are the com- mon joys. When a people begins to look back upon a loved hero or heroine, upon those who have been brave and true, upon a Cid, a Richard Lionheart, a St. Louis, a St. Francis, or a Jeanne d'Arc, or when it begins to look back upon a common foe, upon the Northmen, the Mohammedans, upon England, the Empire, or the Papacy, then it begins to be conscious of a unity that not all the other contributory forces could have produced. Men are not bound together or kept apart by external and inci- dental things. They are not united or disunited by racial, or linguistic, or religious, or geographical conditions. Ireland has been united to England for centuries by linguistic ties. She has largely lost her own language. Yet she cherishes memories that keep alive the sense of Irish nationality. For a long time Poland has been dismembered; Russia has taken one part, Austria a second, and Germany a third. Yet the Poles keep in their hearts the memories of the past, and so the Polish nation lives to-day, though one shall look in vain upon the map for the country of Polanq.'^/It is the influence of common experience, penetrated by poetry and by passion, that is fundamental in the creation of a nation. The national bond is not necessarily dependent upon similarity of race, or soil, or religion, or language. It is want- ing between the Spaniards and the Portuguese who are so nearly allied in all these respects. It is present among the Swiss where nearly all these things are absent. Like an individual, a natioi: THE REVIVAL OF THE NATION S3 is the result of a long past of triumph and of sacrifice, of devo- c hap, m tion and of defeat Service and sacrifice in the cause of a be- 1275-1500 loved ideal seal the soul to the object of its devotion. To toil and to suffer for the common welfare and for the fruition of the common hopes, to v^^in life eternally through losing it, is the sure road to that high unity of a people that we call nation- ality. And there is in all the world no confirmation of a faith like that of abuse, contumely, and defeat endured in its service. Nationality had been lost among the Romans. Originally there was a single state unified by the common experiences and How Na- aspirations of its people. By the process of absorption and con- Had^Been quest this was gradually changed. In the place of Roman na- Lost tionality there came the conception of a world-wide State. And this State was conceived merely as a jural society, bound to- gether only by its common laws and the power to enforce them. Such a conception is obviously too narrow and imperfect. Such a bond is based neither upon reverence for the past nor upon hope for the future. It is powerless to spread the contagion of sacrifice for the sake of the future. And yet this is the chief thing that conserves the life of nations. When Roman life came to be conceived of as consisting only of relations estab- lished and defined by the Roman Law, all that was vital, and noble, and inspiring, disappeared. When this was the only bond that united Romans, the Empire itself was doomed. Nationality was dormant throughout the Middle Ages. Before the Teutonic peoples invaded the Roman Empire they lived un- der a crude form of tribal unity. They were united to each other by personal allegiance to their leaders. The various tribes combined with each other and fusion with the Roman popula- tion was gradually effected. Homogeneous peoples with com- mon traditions and common aims, like the Franks, began to appear. But the Church gave to Charles the Great the title of " Emperor," and thus the national feeling of the various Teu- tonic peoples was side-tracked. It is true that the Empire after Charles was only a shadowy institution, but " the idea of the world-State continued to fascinate men's minds long after it had lost material existence." One looks in vain for any vital mani- festation of nationality in medieval institutions. Civil law and > canon law alike were international, and feudal law and custom were local. In the Middle Ages the wars were not an outcome of national feeling. It was not for national purposes that the crusades were fought. The long-continued struggle between the Empire and the Papacy was one for world-wide supremacy. The innumerable petty strifes of feudalism were the very denial 54 THE RENAISSANCE C HAP.m of nationality. It is not until the Hundred Years' War that 1275-1500 national feeling is visibly present. Even religion was arrayed "* against nationality for it was universal and inter-national. In the Middle Ages the European countries were nothing but vast feudal nebulae. Only very gradually was the sense of nationality restored, HowNa- It was a silent transition due to many influences slowly inter- Came^Eack ^^scd. One thing that caused the universalism of the Papacy and the Empire to dissolve and the merely local feeling of feudal- ism to give way to nationality was the fusion of the races. Men of Wessex and men of Northumbria disappeared. The Eng- lishman came in their stead. Norman and Gascon were merged into the Frenchman, and Catalonians and Castilians were re- placed by Spaniards. The growth of the royal power was another factor in the re- vival of nationality. As the power and authority of the king grew, the imperial idea became fainter and fainter, the secular claims of the Papacy were successfully disputed, and the dis- . integrating forces of feudalism were crushed. The king was a symbol of national unity, and in him were centered the national aspirations. The increase of kingly power was a concrete and effective force in the gradual consolidation of the heterogeneous feudal nebulae into compact and homogeneous countries. Another force that made for the resuscitation of nationality was the rise of the vernacular literatures. In the Middle Ages all Latin Christendom was bound together .by the Latin language. It was the language of the Church, of the secular as well as the ecclesiastical law courts, and of all educated men. A district I in a city in which a university was situated was called the Latin Quarter because there Latin was not only written but spoken. The vernacular tongues were spoken, but they were regarded as dialects are to-day. They were not organized. They had no grammars and no literatures. But gradually, and almost simul- taneously, in France, in Italy, in Spain, and in England, the vernacular tongues acquired a greater dignity, and national lit- eratures arose. These vernacular literatures displaced the idiom of the Church and became both an expression and a guarantee of national feeling. The advent of the Third Estate was still another force in ^^^ the revival of the nation. The peasants did not gain representa- tion and a voice in the national councils. That still lay far in the future. But the townspeople, the bourgeoisie, succeeded in gaining recognition in the national assemblies. The middle classes were far more national in their feeling than were the THE REVIVAL OF THE NATION 55 feudal nobility, and more so, too, than the clergy. Retrospec- c hap, m tion did not lead them to regret a time of feudal independence. 1275-1500 It was only with the growing power of the nation that they had won their emancipation from the thraldom of feudalism. Only as the nation grew in power could they hope to compete in social matters with the feudal aristocracy; only as the nation grew in strength could feudal warfare be made to give way to the king's peace, and peace was necessary for the commerce and industry of the towns. Nationality affected the interests, touched the hearts, and fired the imagination of the townsfolk. More important in the history of the Middle Ages than the struggle between the empire and the Papacy, was the struggle between the secular and the spiritual power. And this in its last analysis was nothing less than a struggle between the natural instinct ^; of nationality and the universal authority of the Church. With ^' the growth of the towns and the consequent increase of secular culture, the sense of nationality received a great impetus. In general it may be said that at the end of the thirteenth century the medieval ideal of universality began to give way before the rising tide of national spirit. Nationality came back in France. In the days of Hugh Capet, France had been the name of only a single duchy. It was merely one of a number of feudal lordships, and it was by no means the most powerful of them. But step by step the Capetian kings where Na. had subdued the feudal nobles and built up a compact nation, ^onauty They encouraged the towns and made them valuable supports of the kingly power and they assumed direct lordship over the peasants. And so, as we have seen, in the struggle with Boni- face VIII the French kings could appeal successfully to a sense of nationality. Papal excommunication was pronounced in vain. But more than all else it was the Hundred Years' War that kindled French nationality. Jeanne d'Arc is the godmother of the French nation. Around her name there clustered the mem- ories of the misery and the humiliation of the long and cruel war which the French people had suffered in common. Their common memories of the past gave them a common aspiration in the present. The peasant maid of Domremy became the patron saint of their patriotism. England also witnessed a revival of nationality. The geo- graphical conditions were particularly favorable. Feudalism had never been so rampant as on the continent, and England had never been affected greatly by the idea of the medieval empire. But the popes had disposed of English benefices in the most arbitrary way ; and its kings had been men of foreign blood who 56 THE RENAISSANCE 1276-1500 CHAP, m had introduced alien elements into the land. Edward I, whose long reign began in 1272, was unmistakably English. He gave preference to Englishmen and to English customs. Parliament was made more widely representative by the introduction of the middle classes, and the laws were developed and codified. The papal pretensions were resisted by Edward IH, whose parlia- ment gave him its support; and Edward IV and the Tudors continued the work. The English custom of sending the younger sons of the nobility into the ranks of the commons helped to consolidate the people; and the opposition of the people to Poite- vins and Gascons served to develop in them a strong sense of national unity. In Scotland the sense of nationality was developed by the struggle under Wallace and BrQce for independence. And the Bohemians, who, despite the fact that their kings received in- vestiture from the German emperor, and were included among the seven electors, kept aloof from the general politics of the Empire, were drawn together by the brilliant conquests of Otto- kar II and the struggles of the Hussite movement. The feeling of nationality was greatly strengthened by its association with the religious reform movement which was directed to the estab- lishment of a national Bohemian church. In the Spanish penin- sula the long warfare against the infidel drew the people to- gether. Provincial jealousies were^^w.ealf'ened, they were rele- gated to the background by the greater interests of the common enterprise. So the Spanish peoples were welded by the Per- petual Crusade into a natioui^ And when the elements of a strong national life had thus been gained, Ferdinand of Aragon married Isabella of Castile and thus hastened the definite political union of the Spanish kingdom. So strong did the sense of na- tionality become in Spain that ecclesiastical afifairs were in a. large degree withdrawn from the dominion of the Curia and. made subject to the Crown. From this movement towards nationality Italy and Germany stood aloof. In Italy the Papacy, which thought that its. own position would be weakened by the union of the numerous Italian States, effectively opposed political consolidation. Ever since the days of the Lombards it had been the traditional policy of the Papacy to thwart any attempt of a secular leader to secure national sovereignty in the peninsula, and the papal restoration had made it strong enough to carry out this policy effectively. Then, too, Italy at this time seemed to be more concerned with intellectual emancipation than with political consolidation. It is true there were dreamers who had visions of a united Italy, — Where Na- tionality Iiagged THE REVIVAL OF THE NATION 57 Dante and Henry of Luxemburg among others. But Italy had c hap, m become relaxed by prosperity and still further disintegrated by 1275-1500 the rapid mental enfranchisement of the Renaissance movement. For a long time the Italians had been accustomed to the shifting combinations of the many States into which their peninsula was divided. The changes in these combinations were " a game of ceaseless check and counter-check," Oftentimes the moves in this game were directed with extraordinary astuteness, but the great principle of nationality was lost to view. More important to Italians than the unification of Italy seemed to be the preser- vation of the distinctive marks and the privileges of a Florentine, a Venetian, a Neapolitan, or a Roman. And so, " the swelling tide of nationality passed them by to wash other shores." It was not until the days of Garibaldi and Mazzini that the sense of nationality was developed in Italy, and it is still only opening its wings. The medieval idea of the universal lordship of the Holy Ro- man Emperor, although it had grown more shadowy with each succeeding century, had much to do with retarding national con- solidation in Germany. The emperor was bound to assert his suzerainty over Italy. Although many attempts were made this proved to be an impossible task. But it engaged the energy that might otherwise have been directed against the 1 disintegrating forces that distracted Germany, and so Italy became the sepukher of German national unity. Germany was dissolved into a con- federacy of States and cities and classes each bent upon the fur- therance of its own special interests. Towards the end of the Middle Ages there were some forty secular princes and seventy ecclesiastical princes, besides an uncounted host of greater and smaller imperial cities and inconsequential nobles. The em- peror became nothing more than the titular head of this loose confederacy. Yet the medieval ideal of empire was not the sole cause of the disintegration of Germany. Other historical con- ditions, such as the opposition of the agricultural and urban in- terests, and geographical differences were by no means unim- portant factors. The revival of the nation had its roots deep in human nature. It is by the maintenance of wholesome relations with one's fel- low-men that the individual can best secure his own development. The ties that bind men together are not so much the accidental and incidental things of race, language, theological creed, or geography, but rather the common memories of a people and the will to perpetuate those memories. A nation, therefore, is not an artificial expedient devised to attain certain special and tem- The Wortli of Katlon- aUty 58 THE RENAISSANCE C HAP. I ll porary ends. Its elements, distinctive character, treasured his- 1276-1500 tory, deep and passionate desire, are to be found in human na- ture itself, in the indwelling necessity for the association of men. Yet there should be no narrow conception of nationality. A too limited idea of nationality inevitably results in spiritual disaster. It makes of patriotism only a magnified selfishness. It is only with a generous and an expanding ideal of nationality that the solidarity of human interests, the essential brotherhood of all men, can be concretely realized. ' It is only with such an ideal that individuality can find its finest development. CHAPTER IV THE REVIVAL OF THE INDIVIDUAL 1. Individuality. 2. How it had been lost. 3. How it came back. 4. When and where it came back. 5. The Significance of Individuality. THE word " individuality " means the quality of not being chap, iv capable of further division. Society is an organization of 1275-1600 men. It is not an organism. It is dependent upon the organ- isms which it includes. It derives its life from the individuals who compose it. Society cannot be resolved into anything more fundamentally simple than the individual. The individual man is the atom of human society. He is a real concrete entity, in- capable of division and incapable of fusion. He remains for- ever separate. Individuality, the force of separate self-hood, is the most important fact in human life. Only as a man stands squarely and solidly upon his own feet can he deal in the most effective way with the world of nature and the world of men. It is only through the channel of individuality that new thought individ- and new art can come into the world; and thought and art, im- ^^^^y material though they be, are the matrix that shapes the issues of life. Personality is the central fact and force of human na- ture. The reverse of the old saying that there is nothing new under the sun is true. There is nothing under the sun that is not new. No two leaves upon the same tree are identical. No two animals, even of the same parentage, are exactly alike. Every life is a new combination of old forces. Every person- ality is original and unparalleled. The difference between men is so great as to become, in the case of genius, incalculable and illimitable. The difference of our faces and our voices is merely symbolical of mental and emotional differences vastly more im- portant. " No other man's fingerprint," said a recent English poet, " has the same pressure as mine, and I shall see that it appears on everything I handle, everything I adopt, everything I own. The gloves of party, of culture, of creed, wherewith men hide their fingerprints lest they should be caught in the 59 6o THE RENAISSANCE CHAP. IV 1275-1600 How Indi- viduality Had Been Lost act of being themselves, I decline to wear." The process of multiplication is powerless to produce an admirable society when the units multiplied are themselves contemptible. " If I see nothing to admire in a unit," said Emerson, " shall I admire a million units ? " It is through individuality that the force of creation flows on continually in the world. " Je n'en sais rien" said Napoleon when asked the origin of his new tactics, '' je suis fait comme ga" So every powerful individuality is a channel through which new truth comes among men. The certain real- ity of the self is the starting-point of modern philosophy. The one key to the great enigmas of life is personality. The Greeks to a certain extent had realized the importance of individuality. It is to this that their supreme achievements in art were largely due. Yet despite the fact that Greek art tells us of a high development of individuality, the political thinkers of Greece gave the State the first claim. And Rome endeavored to substitute for the diminished individuality of that time her comprehensive and formulated law. Individuality sank from sight still further in the Middle Ages. The Church taught that individuality was rebellion and sin. Conscience,- which is the individual judgment of what is right and wrong, might exist between man and man, but not between man and God. Man must not be content to live his own life. Instead, it should be his aim to live over again, as far as possible, the life of the saints, the life of Christ. He must divest himself of selfhood. In- stead of seeking to create he should endeavor only to imitate. * All utterance of the carnal self was fraught with danger or with Self-abnegation, self-annihilation, was the goal of the me- sin dieval Christian life. It was a sort of Buddhism, save that the Nirvana of the Christian was God and not mere oblivion. The ^spirit of implicit faith, of unquestioning obedience, inculcated by the age of faith, was destructive of individuality; for mere right-doing in obedience to external commands leaves the power of individual thought and judgment in abeyance. It empties action of all rational significance. The ideal of life of the Mid- dle Ages was one closed about with the circumscribing walls of a cloister. Yet its vision, though narrow, was lofty. It ignored as much as possible the world of nature and the world of men, but it opened upon the infinite like " the chink which serves for the astronomer's outlook upon the abysses of heaven." Indi- viduality was also restricted in other aflFairs of life in the Middle Ages. It was so in political matters. When the cities threw ofi^ the yoke of feudalism it was a collective, communal, liberty they enjoyed, not individual freedom. They were free as societies, THE REVIVAL OF THE INDIVIDUAL 6r CHAP. IV but as individuals they were still unemancipated. It was so in industrial matters. The peasantry on the manorial estates were 1275-1600 chained to the wheel of labor. And in the cities the life of the craftsman was directed in all essential respects by the trade at which he worked, the corporation to which he belonged, the parish in which he worshiped, and the quarter of the city in which he dwelt. His station in life was determined as im- mutably as that of the villein. There were few things in which his individual taste or opinion was a deciding factor. It was a time of aggregate and not individual strength. Feudalism and the ideals of universal empire and universal church had bound together the various peoples of Europe " in a rigorous hierarchy which imposed order on the confusion of barbarism. On all the stages of the immense pyramid, united one to another by an invisible force, there reigned the fundamental law of the new society. The individual was only part of the whole. Isolation, had it been possible, would have been fatal to him ; for he had no value except as a member of the group to which he belonged, and his group was held together only by its subordination to masters who in their turn were subordinate to a still higher group. Thus the unity of the feudal and Catholic edifice was maintained from stage to stage; kingdoms, duchies, counties, baronies, bishoprics, chapters, religious orders, universities, cor- porations, the obscure multitude of serfs. At each stratum the human being was fettered and protected by the duty of fidelity, by perfect obedience, and by community of interests and of sacrifice. The individual who tried to burst his bonds, the baron who revolted, the tribune who agitated for liberty, the unbelieving doctor, the heretical monk, the Jacques or the Frati- celli, were crushed." All through the Middle Ages man knew himself only as a member of a family, a race, a party, a guild, ^ or a church. He was for the most part unconscious of himself as an individual. The central figure of Joinville's Histoire de Saint Louis, says Gebhart, is the one clearly individual character which the Middle Ages have left us. The story of the Renais- sance is the story of the revival of the individual — in science, invention, in discovery, in art, in literature, and in religion. The deep, underlying cause of the Renaissance was the revival— of the individual. And it was in Italy that the individual first began to emerge from the guild, the corporation, the commune, the religious order, and the hierarchy. This emergence of the individual was not a sudden apparition; nor did it occur only when the hour of the Renaissance was about to strike. It was a gradual evolution; and its workings 62 THE RENAISSANCE How Indi- viduality Came Back Througli Taste C HAP. I V may be observed long before the appearance of Petrarch who i275-i6oo has been called the first modern man. It was at the close of the thirteenth century, while the peoples of other countries were still cognizant of themseJ^^es only as members of their respective races and associations, that individuality began to assert itself in Italy. Italians acquired the desire and the courage to be them- selves. No longer were they afraid of being singular. Evoi in the matter of dress, expression was given to personal idiosyn- crasy and taste. In Florence there came to be no longer any prevailing fashion of dress for men. It was in the matter of taste, the thing that differentiates us from our fellow-men in what we like to eat, or smell, or hear, or see, that the re-birth of selfhood first became apparent. Nowhere is the significance of individuality so evident as in literature and art. Indeed, art depends upon individuality for its very existence. Upon all poetry that has left its impression upon humanity there can be seen the seal of personality — the " keen translunar music " of Milton, the " cloudless, boundless human view " of Shakespeare, Shelley's " flush of rose on peaks divine," and the " wizard twi- light " that Coleridge knew. Before Dante there were poets in Italy who were able to stamp their work with the unmistakable impress of their personality, but it was he who for the first time poured " in all his writings a stream of personal force by which the reader, apart from the interest of the subject, feels himself carried away." Others following in his wake expressed them- selves in lyric, epic, novel, and drama. Petrarch was explicitly aware of the fact that the highest conditions of culture can be attained only by the free evolution and interaction of self-de- veloped intellects. By the recognition and expression of their ^ individuality were the Italians enabled to emerge from the bondage of the Middle Ages and become the apostles of hu- manism to the modern world. Men became animated by an over- powering desire to make the best of themselves. All around them were the priceless riches inherited from the past, the architecture, sculpture, literature, and philosophy of the bygone days of a golden age which the inundating wave of barbarism had hidden and Christianity caused to be neglected for many cen- turies. They became filled with a deep belief in the desirability and possibility of man's perfection. They were reinstated in their human dignity as one by one the trammels of authority were discarded and they began to febl, to think, and to act as their own thought and instinct directed. And as a powerful stimulus there came about a rehabilitation of the pagan idea of fame. The desire for immortality upon earth was coupled with THE REVIVAL OF THE INDIVIDUAL 63 the hope for immortality in a world to come, and, indeed, in ohap.iv many instances, replaced it altogether. 1275-1600 Tihe story of the development of Italian art, like that of Italian literature, is also the story of the gradual revival and unfolding of individuality. Little by little the spell of the Church which had held art in thrall, and allowed it to be noth- ing more than its handmaiden, was broken. Gradually the archi- tects, the sculptors, and the painters dared to be themselves. Instead of mere conformity to long-established traditions, in- stead of blind obedience to canonical conventions, the artists learned to look within themselves, to look out into the world of nature and of men, and then to record their visions. Some of the arts require greater independence in the artist than do others. Architecture is one of the least exacting. More than any of the other arts it is dominated by the national genius and by the pre- vailing force of the age. The cathedrals of the Middle Ages are the expression not of the genius of individual architects but of the spirit of the Age of Faith. They do not bear the stamp of individual thought and feeling so much as that of popular instinct. Their beauty and their spirit belong to the age that gave them birth. In the architecture of the early Renaissance one can witness the exercise of individual taste. It was this exercise of individuality that gradually revived the Greek and Roman styles of architecture, changed them first in one respect and then in another, and finally combined them into a new style that received its name from the age. Sculpture and painting — demand a more complete exercise of individual taste. The statue or the picture is far less a common product of a people or of an age than is the temple or the cathedral. Every picture and every statue that has attained to the rank of art is unmis- takably the product of an individual. So the individuality of the Italians found fitting mediums of expression in these arts. Although the expression of personality by the sculptors and painters was very feeble at first, one has but to recall their names, Cimabue, Duccio, Giotto, Orcagna, Ghiberti, Donatello, to realize distinctly how differentiated they became. It is of course only by the expression of their contrasting personalities that this differentiation was produced. Each recorded his own vision. Despite the fact that Donatello was the first sculptor of the - Renaissance to make a free-standing nude figure he refused to follow the conventions of classic scuplture, of which there were doubtless many memorials about him, and trusted to his own fine power of observation. Very feeble is the expression of personality in the pictures of Cimabue, one of the first painters 64 THE RENAISSANCE C HAP. I V Qf ^]^e Renaissance, but it is unmistakable in Giotto, charming in 1275-1600 Perugino, opulent in Raphael, and overwhelming in Michel- angelo. In curiosity, as well as in taste, individuality found a channel for expression and development. Not the ignoble curiosity of " my landlady's neighbor, she who lives behind us to the left, whose window commands our garden," but the curiosity that inspired Roger Bacon, Newton, and Darwin. In the Age of Faith curiosity was a cardinal sin. The idea that it is a duty or that it is the part of wisdom to find out the reality of things was quite foreign to the time. It was dangerous to trust to the guidance of one's depraved self. Revelation was the sole source Howindi- of truth. But when Peter the Hermit preached the first Crusade cwne^ack ^^ unconsciously helped to set in motion forces that resulted in Through the Renaissance. Travel incited the curiosity of men and Curiosity j^rought them into contact with the wonderful civilizations of Byzantium and the Saracens. Men became filled with curiosity not only to know the civilization of other countries, but to learn something of men who had lived in distant ages and who had been actuated by different ideals of life. This curiosity came to "^ be a powerful and important force. It extended the narrow horizon of the Middle Ages. It produced a revival of learning and of research, it resulted in invention and in discovery, and so it was the starting point of modern civilization. It " whis- pered to Columbus, plucked Galileo by the sleeve, and shook the apple off Newton's apple-tree." It initiated the experimental method. It implanted in the hearts of men the desire to study and to know the world for themselves, unencumbered by the bonds of authority. It spurred them to the most daring voyages and the most patient and careful investigations. It was perhaps in the field of learning that the stirring of curiosity first became evident. And when knowledge of the classic tongues was in- creased and men became able to see the world from the Greek and the Roman points of view, the aroused interest of man, his developed intelligence and his critical curiosity led him into other fields of activity. Thus it was that the Renaissance of science and literature and art came about; with the awakening of curi- osity there had come into existence " that which at once produced and was produced by all these — thorough perception of what exists, thorough consciousness of our own freedom and powers — self-cognizance. In Italy there was intellectual light, enabling men to see and judge all around them, enabling them to act wit- tingly and deliberately. In this lies the immense greatness of the - Renaissance; to this are due all its achievements in literature THE REVIVAL OF THE INDIVIDUAL 65 CHAP. IV and science, and, above all, in art, — that, for the first time since the dissolution of antique civilization, men were free agents, 1273-1600 both in thought and in deed." Individuality also made itself felt in the field of religion. In the Age of Faith men had but to hearken and obey. The postu- late of an infallible church that was the sole custodian of truth rendered unnecessary the exercise of the reasoning faculty of man. To trust one's unaided instinct or reason was to run the risk of being deceived. But with the revival of individuality men began to trust something within themselves — the consensus of their faculties, which we have narrowed into the word " con- *" science." Against the authority of the Church men asserted the reliability of the reasoning faculty, even its sovereign power, How indi- and the dignity of the individual conscience. The only test of o^e^Jck truth, said Abelard, is its reasonableness ; and the wandering Througn scholars who had flocked in tens of thousands to hear him sowed ^''^s"^^*^® the seed of his method everywhere. In Provence, in northern Italy, and elsewhere, there were found people who thought they could live a religious life unassisted by the priesthood and di- rected only by conscience. They dispensed with sacraments and with clergy. The Cathari and the Patarini in Lombardy, the Albigenses in Provence, the Lollards in England, the Hussites in Bohemia, and the Waldenses in the Alpine valleys were the principal groups of heretics. But not all those who were borne along on this wave of intellectual emancipation became heretics. There were those who stayed within the pale of Mother Church, who denied none of her doctrines, but strove to effect a reform in the morals of clergy and laity. Francis of Assisi, Dominic, ^- Bernard of Clairvaux, Bernardino of Siena, Savonarola, num- bers of the cis-Alpine humanists, and many another reformer, were filled with a passionate desire to regenerate society. The movement of emancipation, the casting aside of the accepted rules and criteria of the medieval period, led to moral reckless- ness, to that practice and tolerance of vice which constitutes the worst feature of the Renaissance ; but the age was by no means given over wholly to immorality. It is of ten-times the striking feature, the abnormal condition, that arrests attention. The Crusades, as we have already seen, had much to do with'^wiien and the revival of individuality. They opened hitherto unknown dis- "^^^^^ ^°- tances to the European mind. They awakened a passion for oameBack travel and adventure; and travel is perhaps the best method of setting men free from prejudice. Gradually this passion became coupled with a thirst for knowledge. The two became allied in Italy. So to study the beginning of the revival of individualism, 66 THE RENAISSANCE C HAP. I V the interest in the individual that overleaps all the claims and 1275-1600 bonds o£ race, nation, and church, one must go back to the Cru- sades. The Crusades were the realization of the Age of Faith, the triumph of the Church. But the results were far from those expected by the Church. New groupings were made, new asso- ciations formed. Englishmen, Neapolitans, Spaniards, Germans, Frenchmen, and Italians, were brought into most intimate com- panionship with each other. There were new crystallizations. Everywhere, in camp, during truces, in hospitals, on the way, and in pilgrimages, men were taken out of their old environ- ments, out of the hearing of their village church-bells that con- stantly recalled them to the piety of their childhood, and con- fronted with new things. They mingled with the Mohammedan infidels and found them to be human, kindly, intelligent, and prosperous, and sincerely devoted to the worship of what they believed to be the true God. The Crusaders got a new standard of life from the comforts and luxuries of the Saracens. They got intellectual stimulus. They lost their provinciality. No longer were they content with the common and uniform nourish- ment of Mother Church, but each began to crave for himself individual stimulus to beauty and religion. It was the common — broadening effect of travel raised to a higher power. It did all that travel can do to emancipate men in a brief space of time. It set them to discovering that the present world is interesting and beautiful, real and God-given. It helped to make their vision less vertical and more horizontal. The last part of the twelfth century and the first part of the thirteenth was the time of the Goliardi, the wandering scholars, who lived the life of the open road, the free song, and the flow- ing bowl. Theirs was a care-free, jovial life. They turned their backs on convention and gave full vent to impulse. Their vagrant life along the roads and in the villages and towns of Europe was filled with youthful exhilaration, irrepressible fun, and madcap pranks. Everywhere they were received with pleasure. Their songs, " the spontaneous expression of care- less, wanton, and unreflective youth," were listened to with eager- ness. Perhaps it was the new thought which these songs con- tained that made them so appealing, thought that helped men to peer beyond the bounds of feudalism and ecclesiasticism. They were charged with the new message of humanity. They made men pause and wonder whether after all there might not be something worthy and necessary in the impulse of 'nature. They breathed the freedom of man. It is true that these songs of the Goliardi were in Latin, but it was significant that a par- THE REVIVAL OF THE INDIVIDUAL 67 ticular class of society should be making its own songs. The c hap, i v transition from this to lyrics in the vernacular was not long or 1275-1600 difficult. In Provence individuality found a fruitful soil and a con- genial climate. Most beloved of all the possessions of Rome, it was known in imperial times as " the Province." And not only the name of this province par excellence bore memories of Rome, but its roads, its bridges, its towns, and many a less prehensible inheritance. Immigration had brought to it not only Romans, but Phoenicians, Ionian Greeks, and Saracens. Its civilization was stamped with the genius of the East as well as with that of the West. Its town life had not been obliterated by the wave of barbarism. Always some traces of the old ideals and the old culture remained. Commerce flourished and brought ' with it from distant places not only necessities but also luxuries. Its burghers early won for themselves a large measure of free- dom, and its nobles were less exclusively concerned with warfare and the chase than were those of the more feudal North. In the twelfth century the lyric poets of this country, the trouba- dours, struck th^e'iiote of modernity. Men of the proletariat as^^elPas the men of the palace became poets ; and the songs of all of them appealed to the whole populace and had for their burden the passions and the dreams of men. Things that are not the exclusive privilege of birth, a generous and a brave heart, a fearless mind, courtesy, and, above all, love that has forgotten itself and that is the birthright of every youthful soul, furnished^ the themes of the troubadour. Individuality found a wide field in which to roam. Their verse-forms, too, were diversified. They had the stately chcmsorij the dramatic sirvente, the elegiac complainte, the pliant tenson, for the morning love-song at the shy hour of dawn the auhade, for the twilight the^erenadej and for the poem of idyllic mood the pastourelle. It was a vibrant lyrical poetry, this of the troubadours. It gave expression to the life of the whole people. The bonds of feudalism and ecclesiasticism had been burst astinder. The individual emerged from the medieval shell. Freedom of thought in secular matters - led to independence in religion. Criticism of the clergy in- creased. Heresy took root and flourished. But at length a crusade was preached against the Albigenses. The French king, in part because of political considerations, gave his aid to the ipope, and Provence, devastated by fire and everywhere stained Invith blood, lost its liberty and its civilization; and so its awaken- fiiig individualism was extinguished. This yearning for youth and love, this responsiveness to na- 68 THE RENAISSANCE O HAF. I V ture, quenched in Provence, f ounda home in Sicily. It is there 1275-1600 that one finds the first well-rounded type of manhood in that intellectual adventurer and oriental dreamer, Fr eder ic II, wit, "^statesman, philosopher, poet, skeptic, and theologian, who evoked a premature Renaissance, at his southern court. This descendant ofTBarbarossa, who was bom in Italy, and who spoke Italian, French, Greek and Arabic from his childhood, was far removed in spirit from the Middle Ages though he lived eighty years before Dante. The civilization that he encouraged was essen- tially rational and geiierously liberal. Its prime concern ^and. dominant element was intellectual culture. The Italians, who before many years had gone by were " to be charmed by persona^ energy more than by virtue, and who in the following century permitted their masters to do anything provided only that they accomplished great things, . . . admired this Emperor who tried to wrest the world from the grip of the Church and who, while amusing himself among his poets, astrologers, musicians, and singers, was reconciling Christian Europe with Mohammedan Asia." In his conflict with the Church, Frederic, who was ex- communicated, dispossessed, betrayed by his chancellor, and compelled to defend his possessions in all parts of the peninsula, died as defeat was coming upon him. But his work left a last- ^ing impression upon the course of civilization. The stimulus i he gave to the development of individuality by example and by patronage was by no means ephemeral. In the city-republics of the Italian peninsula individuality found opportunity to unfold. The cities themselves had thrown off the dominion of the Empire, and this emancipation, no doubt, was an example to the individual. The JLatin intelligence and fine imagination of the Italians was sharpened by the quick life of the towns. The change of rule from one party to another induced the successful leaders to exercise an ever-increasing degree of watchfulness, thought, and power. The exigencies of the situation compelled the leaders to develop every ability they possessed. So more and more did these political leaders become marked by their distinguishing characteristics. The hope of se- curing their lost positions was likewise a stimulant to the de- feated leaders to greater and more thoughtfully-directed energy. The lack of such hope led them to turn their attention to other lines of activity, to literature, or to the other intellectual and artistic pursuits that were beginning to attract the attention of men. It would be a mistake to think that the incessant civil discords and political convulsions always hindered the progress of the communes and the development of individuality. It was THE REVIVAL OF THE INDIVIDUAL 69 in the midst of such struggles that personality was formed. It c hap, i v was only for the purpose of defending or aggrandizing their 127B-1600 own interests that the free citizens of the commune took up arms, — the interests of their city against a neighboring commune, the interests of their party against a rival party, and their own personal interests against those of their opponents. Even exile played a part in this revival of individuality. Banishment " either wears an exile out or develops what is greatest in him." The emigrants gave to their new cities a cosmopolitan air, and cosmopolitanism is attained only through the widening of the horizon by means of an increased individualism. All of them had learned^ to resist authority that they deemed to be arbitrary, 3XiS when independence has been asserted in one sphere of life it is less difficult to assert it in the others. But these city-republics gradually lost all the essential features of a republic; they eventually became self-governing communities in name only. They passed into the control of the despots, of the men who by the force of their individuality had made themselves the masters of their fellow-men. The age of the despots " fostered in the highest degree the individuality not only of the tyrant or condottiere himself, but also of the men whom he protected or used as his tools — the secretary, minister, poet, and companion. These . people were forced to know all the inward resources of their own nature, passing or permanent; and their enjoyment of life was enhanced and concentrated by the desire to obtain the greatest satisfaction from a possibly very brief period of power and influence." Up to this time the Italians had been arrayed against each other only in solid masses, town against town. But the age of the despots produced a condition even more favorable to the development of individuality, for " the qualities, virtues, passions, and even the vices, which the Italians had up to that time employed for the collective good of their town were henceforth diverted to their own private advantage with an energy all the greater because their effort was egotistical and solitary. It no longer sufficed to act in self-defense to avoid destruction. One must attack and conquer in order to secure to-morrow's peace and to content one's pride. In this struggle of man against man it was, of course, the one equipped with the better arms that triumphed. Wealth, knavery, and boldness proved excellent arms; but the most certain of all was intellect." The conditions of the time called into play the varied potentialities of each individual. So there came into existence those versatile men of the Renaissance who are the wonder of to-day. In order to win control of a ^o THE RENAISSANCE C HAP. I V state it was not necessary to be of noble birth. Any one might 1275-1600 make the attempt, a soldier, a priest, or a tradesman, an adven- turer, or even a criminal. The ability of the individual was not circumscribed by convention. Provided only that he had suffi- cient daring and the talent of success the way was open to any one, even though of the most obscure or illegitimate birth. Ability enabled one to climb from the lowest rung of the social ladder. Gismondo Malatesta, who is in many respects a typical despot, proceeded upon the assumption that to the individuaJ^U things are possible. He trusted his own powers implicitly and in them he placed his sole reliance. He gave free rein to his desires. He realized that only his own capacity could protect him against the increasing power of the pope and the growing hostility of his powerful neighbors. He displayed the indiffer- ence to humanity, the relentless cruelty, of the Middle Ages, the political sagacity for which every early Italian statesman became famous, and the intellectual independence of the age in which he lived. Italy was a seething mass of struggling despotisms in which personal power, intellect and skill, were essential to suc- cess. And when political success had been attained every ruler proceeded to satisfy his personal desires in his own way. The will of the despot was supreme. But even the subjects over whom the despot ruled, as well as the poets, artists, scholars, and philosophers whom he patronized, felt the impulse of indi- viduality. The large majority of these acquiesced in the des- potism, especially when it was unmistakably benevolent in character. They were, of course, without political power; but that did not prevent them from engaging to the fullest extent of their capacity in any others of the varied activities of the social life of the time. Aside from the lack of participation in the control of the State, the conditions of life in the Italian des- potism seem unquestionably to have fostered the development of individual thought and power. " The private man, indifferent to politics, and busied partly with serious pursuits, partly with - the interests of a dilettante, seems first to have been fully formed in these despotisms of the fourteenth century," The democra- cies and despotisms of Italy were the seed plots of individuality. It was there that man first emerged from the bondage of the age of feudalism and the Age of Faith. -^The insistence upon individuality was the greatest of the many factors that gave rise to the Renaissance. It caused men to question the authority of external control, and inspired them to develop their latent powers beyond the restricting confines of authority. It made them ready to question the conventional THE REVIVAL OF THE INDIVIDUAL 71 standards of conduct. It filled them with a vivid apprehension c hap, i v of life and a zeal for activity of all kinds. Endowed with confi- 1275-I600 dence in their own powers they faced without fear every problem that confronted them. They " dared to be themselves for good or evil without too much regard for what their neighbors thought of them." The energy which their intense individuality created found a wide range of expression, from superlative in- tellectual activity and artistic creation to the depths of pagan sensuality. The standards of internal moral control had not yet been developed, and those of external control had been discarded. It is this that produced such violent contrasts of emotion and individ- conduct and that "makes the psychology of the Renaissance at J^^g*^!^® once so fascinating and so difficult to analyze." It was the portant seemingly illimitable vitality of the individual force of princes fjfj^^e°' and popes, of statesmen and scholars, of poets and of painters, naisaance that made the Renaissance one of the most remarkable eras in the history of the world. " A man's mind," said the wise author of Ecclesiasticus, " is sometime wont to tell him more than seven watchmen, that sit above in an high tower." The desire to study and to know the world, to put aside the fetters of arbitrary authority and discoloring prejudice, and see things as they really are, gave birth to new thought, to literature, science, and art, and it revived the experimental method of investigation without which it is impossible to extend the horizon of man's knowledge. It produced the Renaissance and the modern world in which we live. The consciousness of the individual is the only creative faculty in life. In the last resort it is the only center of good and evil, the sole home of values. " For what avail the plow or sail. Or land or Hfe, if freedom fail?" Without the freedom and development of the individual the modern world would have been impossible. And, one may add, without the devotion of the emancipated individual to social service the salvation of the modem world shall be sought in vain. CHAPTER V THE REVIVAL OF LITERATURE 1. Why the Renaissance did not Begin in France. 2. Why the Renaissance Began in Italy. 3. Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. 4- The Revival of Latin and Greek Letters. 5. Humanism in Florence, at the Italian Courts, on the Papal Throne, in the Schools, and Beyond the Alps. Why the Beziais- sance did not Begin in France C HAP. V T]s;f the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was France that held 1275-1300 -■- the intellectual supremacy of western Europe. But, as we have seen, the premature Renaissance of Provence was extin- guished with fire and sword. This was not the sole cause, how- ever, of the decline of southern France. The civilization of that country contained intrinsic defects. It was essentially lyrical, emotional, and egotistical. It was incapable of that calm, dis- passionate, objective view of life which is indispensable to intel- lectual progress. Then, too, after its rapid emancipation from feudalism it had receiyed certain streams of thought which threatened to detach it from the civilization of Christendom. It listened eagerly to the iconoclastic whisperings of Manicheism, it gave welcome to the austere rationalism, of the Vaudois, neither of which was calculated to encourage the development of art or of science, and it furnished votaries of Averroism, which set its face against the revival of Greek culture. It was because of these things that southern France failed to become the seat of the Renaissance. Northern France had produced the most spiritual architecture that the world has ever seen. The sculp- ture that adorned her Gothic churches, delicate product of a refined religious sentiment, was, in its way, well-nigh perfect. Of the seemingly lost art of stained glass that made her cathe- drals glow with the splendor of the sunset she was the chief mistress. She possessed the epic spirit and the deep earnestness that were lacking in the south. Her language was known and used all over the civilized world. Civil liberty had made great progress in her towns. And Abelard, in his lectures at the great University of Paris, had shown the way to intellectual freedom. Why, then, did northern France fail to carry forward the lighted torch of civilization? Scholasticism blighted its thought. Ob- THE REVIVAL OF LITERATURE 73 serration of the world of nature and of men, investigation, was c hap, v not practised. Men were engrossed with the method of reason- 1275-1300 ing. They held logic, and not investigation, to be the sole key to knowledge. They made the syllogism the very end of science instead of recognizing it as being merely one of the instruments of science. Given over to the discipline of the syllogism, they failed to base their premises upon the data of experience, and they failed to verify their conclusions. Instead of going out into the world to gather data upon which to base their generaliza- tions they were completely absorbed in the processes of logic. ''^' So their ingenious and interminable disputations, that remind one of a squirrel going round and round its cage with exceeding skill and arriving nowhere, were barren of results. The intel- lect of northern France was benumbed by its system of educa- tion. Logic is too thin and bloodless a thing to direct and govern life. It is possible to reason forever and yet to learn nothing.^ A second reason is to be found in the decline of the inde- pendence of the towns. The social conditions that had come to exist in the municipal democracies favored the development of thought and the progress of civilization. But in the process of the centralization of power in the hands of the king, the towns lost their independence. As a political force the middle class grew more and more insignificant. Thus northern France lost the two conditions that are indispensable to the development of civilization — freedom of thought and political liberty. The springs of her intellectual life ran low. So that the Renaissance which might have been cradled in France found a birthplace in Italy. _ In Italy all the conditions necessary for the success of such a movement as the Renaissance were present. She possessed free- ' dom of thought. Scholasticism had never been accepted as the sole and infallible method of thought. The Italian genius, un- why the like the French, did not lend itself to the study of lo^ic for its ^enais- IT i*