i Columbia (MnitJet^ftp THE LIBRARIES GIVEN BY Austin P. Evans Longitude" West 0' Longitude East 10° from Green wicii ^ A^ PHYSICAL AND RACIAL MAP OF EUROPE S b. 100 200 300 400 500 Names of races and peoples life enclosed in brackets () I [Areas above 5.000 feet 1 I •' •• 60U I I " below 600 I 1 *' " sea level 40 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE BY LYNN THORNDIKE, Ph.D. Associate Professor of History in Western Reserve University UNDER THE EDITORSHIP OF JAMES T. SHOTWELL, Ph.D. Professor of History, in Columbia University BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY ®l!)e Ritactfibe pteis? Cambtibge ■ K COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY LYNN THOKNDIKE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Gift l\astiY\ p. fu^K?^ FEB 22 1957 CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A a J e c LD a) 03 CM TO MY FATHER REV. EDWARD ROBERT THORNDIKE, D.D. AND MY MOTHER ABBIE BREWSTER LADD THORNDIKE PREFACE This book aims to trace the development of Europe and its civilization, from the decline of the Roman Empire to the opening of the sixteenth century, for the benefit of the college student and the general reader. It is almost needless to say that such a work makes little claim to originality in method and still less in subject-matter, which it has shame- lessly borrowed from numerous sources. Indeed, in a book of this sort it is more fitting to apologize for anything new that one says than for following in old and beaten tracks. The author, of course, hopes that without making too radical departures he has introduced some improvement in selection and presentation of material, and that he has made few mistakes of fact and interpretation. The Table of Contents indicates the general plan of the volume, which is to treat medieval Europe as a whole and to hang the story upon a single thread, rather than to recount as distinct narratives the respective histories of France, England, Germany, Italy, and other countries of modern Europe. French or English history may be studied as such in courses and books so labeled. Moreover, the modern interest in the national state has usually been car- ried too far in the study of the Middle Ages. Local division, not national unity and central government, is surely the striking feature through most of the medieval centuries. Nor should one be misled by the influence of the German historical seminar or by Bryce's brilliant essay into making the Holy Roman Empire the central thread of medieval history. Far more important in actual life than the ideal of one Roman Empire were the feudal state and the self-cen- tered town, the diversity and vigor of local law and custom. But it would be difficult to overestimate the importance of the pope and the clergy as unifying forces in medieval civili- zation. Consequently several chapters are devoted to the VI PREFACE Christian Church, and some mention of it has to be made in almost every chapter. Inasmuch as emigrants from all parts and from all races of Europe have long since been coming to the United States and becoming American citizens, it has seemed worth while to include the states and racial groups of central and east- ern Europe, as well as the richer medieval history of those western European lands whose institutions and culture have thus far had the greatest influence upon our own. In conformity with present tendencies in historical writ- ing, economic and social conditions are given due attention, and many minor details of military and political history are omitted. In these days of tottering thrones I have even ven- tured to lay the axe at the root of absolutism and to dis- pense with genealogical tables. Contemporary events sadly remind us that the age of wars is not past ; but they have also demonstrated that an intensive study of Caesar's Com- mentaries and the tactics of Hastings and Crecy is of little use even to the modern military specialist ; while they have further reminded us that in the art of the past there are precious models and inspirations, whose loss is almost irrep- arable. Since man is a reasoning and emotional being, it is unfair to the past actors and uninteresting to the present readers of history merely to chronicle events without some indication of the ideas and ideals behind them as well as of the personalities that produced them. But discussion of economic and intellectual influences should not be carried so far as to reduce the narrative of events in political history to a mere skeleton. If wars and politics are to be discussed at all, they should be treated with sufficient fullness to in- sure clearness and interest. The background of physical geography is frequently re- ferred to and described. In the maps the aim has been to omit confusing detail and to keep them in close accord with the text. As a rule all places mentioned in the text and no others are given in the accompanying maps. Considerable space has been devoted to the Roman Empire, its civiliza- tion, and its decline, and to the early history of the Chris- PREFACE vii tian Church. These matters are essential preliminaries to the study of the Middle Ages. I have also dealt frequently with the history of European law and with the chief medi- eval forms of government. As an undergraduate the author received high grades in a course in English history without the thought occurring to him that the statements of the textbook or of the instruc- tor concerning the Anglo-Saxon period rested on any less ample and solid foundation than did their accounts of the nineteenth century. History seemed a seamless robe instead of a worn garment full of holes and patches. True it is that a textbook or general history is chiefly intended to tell what we do know, and that its space does not permit detailed discus- sion of the sources. Yet one of the most important things for the student or reader of history to realize is the old lesson of Socrates that there are many things which we do not know and many more which we only half know. There- fore in the introductory chapter I have discussed history's task and obstacles, and throughout the volume have every now and then informed the reader briefly as to the quantity and quality of the source material. But a stern effort has been made to avoid fine print and footnotes, which in this kind of a book are objectionable alike from the typographical, the literary, and the peda- gogical standpoint. I hope that all quotations are so marked, but I have not felt it necessary to mention the name of the author in each case at the bottom of the page. In place of cross-references the teacher and student are referred to the unusually full index, which is intended to serve somewhat^ the same purpose that a vocabulary does in the teaching of a language. In the text I have rather made it a point to repeat the names of important men and places as often and '•■ in as many historical contexts as possible, in order that they may gradually grow familiar to the reader and in order that he may not forget them when he has once learned them. By reference to the index one can tell how many times the name or topic in question has already been mentioned or discussed. The index should also prove useful for topical reviews. viii PREFACE Ten years of experience in teaching medieval history to Freshman sections have convinced me that most students who enter our colleges are neither wide nor trained readers, and are at a loss, if thrown upon their own resources into a whole volume or even a whole chapter of the average his- torical work available for outside reading in addition to the textbook. It is advisable to give them brief specific readings to do, and specific questions to answer and problems to work out from such readings. No doubt each teacher will prefer for the most part to make his own selections and to ask his own questions on such reading. He may, however, find sug- gestive the listing of a few such specific readings and histori- cal exercises, many of which have already been tried out in actual teaching. It is hoped that these exercises, listed at the end of the chapters, may prove still more welcome to the reader who has not the advantage of personal tuition, but who has access to a fair-sized library. Where a particular chapter or certain pages of a book are recommended, this does not imply that the rest of that volume is to be es- chewed ; it is simply advice where to begin. Moreover, these suggested readings are distinctly for the undergraduate and general reader, not for the advanced student, and conse- quently many important historical works are not mentioned. A brief list of books and periodicals where fuller biblio- graphical information may be found is appended at the close of this preface. Of historical works and articles to which the present volume is indebted the list is too long to essay here. The attempt has been made — without yielding to new theories and hypotheses which have not yet been sufficiently tested — to embody the results of recent historical scholarship. Much use has been made of such works as Luchaire's six volumes on Innocent III, Beazley's Dawn of Modern Geog- raphy, Workman's The Evolution of the Monastic Ideal, and the two volumes of the Cambridge Medieval History which have thus far appeared. Some passages in this book are the result of my own study of the sources and will not be found covered in any other secondary work. PREFACE IX A textbook is a fitting place in which to remember one's own teachers. Of previous historical manuals I have been most influenced by the brief but admirable History of West- ern Europe of my former teacher, James Harvey Robinson, — a work which I have used for many years as a textbook. Before entering Professor Robinson's well-known course in the intellectual history of Europe, my interest in the history of literature and philosophy had been already aroused by C. T. Winchester and A. C. Armstrong. The parts of this volume dealing with the history of law owe much to the lectures of Munroe Smith. Some of the historical exercises were, in their inception at least, due to Henry E. Bourne, with whom I have worked in teaching the Freshman history course at the College for Women of Western Reserve Uni- versity. Other colleagues. Professors H. N. Fowler, S. B. Platner, and J. L. BorgerhofT, have been so good as to read and criticize certain chapters falling within their respective special fields, and Miss Eleanor Ferris has very kindly read galley proof for the entire text. Professor J. T. Shotwell, under whose editorship the book is so fortunate as to appear and whom I also am happy to count as a former teacher, has read the text in manuscript, made a number of helpful suggestions, and in other ways aided me by his cooperation and encouragement. These scholars, however, should not be held responsible for any of the faults of the book, especially since in a few cases I have been so foolish as not to follow their advice. But I shall be fortunate, indeed, if others accord me as sympathetic a reading as theirs. Lynn Thorndike. August 14, igiy LIST OF GUIDES IN HISTORICAL READING HANDBOOKS Langlois, Ch. v., Manuel dc bibliographie lustonque, two parts, Paris, 1 90 1 and 1904. Robinson, J. H.. Readings in European History, vol. I, Boston, 1904 Thompson, J. VV., Reference Studies in Medieval History, Chicago, 19 14 ENCYCLOPEDIAS Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopddie der classischen Altertums-wissenschaft, as yet only partially completed Catholic Encyclopccdia, New York, 191 2 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh edition Palgrave, Dictionary of Political Economy, London, 1910 Jewish Encyclopcedia, New York, 1901 Wage and Piercy, Dictionary of Christian Biography, Boston, 191 1 Hughes, Encyclopaedia of Islam, London, 191 3 PERIODICALS American Historical Review English Historical Review Revue Historique Revue des Questions Historiques Le MoyenAge Historische Zeitschrift STANDARD HISTORICAL WORKS CONTAINING BIBLIOGRAPHIES Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, edition by J. B. Bury, 1897-1900 Cambridge Medieval History, vols, i and li Lavisse, E., Histoire de France, 1900-191 1 Histoire Litteraire de la France Jahrbikher der deutschen Geschichte Hunt and Poole, Political History of England, 1905-19 10 LosERTH, J., Geschichte des Spdteren Mittelalters von iigj his 1492, Munich and Berlin, 1903 De Wulf, M., History of Medieval Philosophy, 1909 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 461-431 B.C. Age of Pericles 451-449 B.C. Twelve Tables of Roman Law 336-323 B.C. Reign of Alexander the Great 31 B.C.-14 A.D. Reign of Augustus Caesar and foundation of the Roman Empire A.D. 70 Destruction of Jerusalem 98 Germania of Tacitus 98-117 Reign of Trajan; Roman Empire at its greatest extent 161-180 Reign of Marcus Aurelius; signs of decline 227 Persian Kingdom replaces the Parthian 251 Decius defeated and slain by the Goths 284-305 Reign of Diocletian 325 Council of Nicaea called by Constantine the Great 378 Battle of Adrianople 395 Death of Theodosius the Great 410 Sack of Rome by Alaric 413-426 The City of God of Augustine 419 Kingdoms of West Goths and Burgundians in southwestern and southeastern Gaul 438 The Theodosian Code 439 Carthage captured by the Vandals 440-461 Pope Leo the Great c. 450 Britain invaded by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes 451 Battle of the Catalaunian Fields or Ch&lons 455 Valentinian III assassinated Rome sacked by the Vandals 466-484 Reign of Euric, King of the West Goths; conquest of Spain begun 476 Transition from the Roman to the Byzantine Empire 481-51 1 Reign of Clovis, King of the Franks 493-526 Reign of Theodoric, the East Goth, in Italy 518-565 Reigns of Justin and Justinian 529 The Rule of St. Benedict 533 The Digest or Pandects of Justinian 534 Byzantine conquest of North Africa from the Vandals Prankish conquest of the Burgundian Kingdom 555 Byzantine conquest of Italy from the East Goths 565 Mission of St. Columba to lona, Scotland 568 Lombards invade Italy Avars invade central Europe 582 Fall of Sirmium 590-604 Pope Gregory the Great xiv CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 597 Mission of St. Augustine to Kent 6io Accession of Heraclius in the Byzantine Empire 615 Death of St. Columban in northern Italy 622 Hegira of Mohammed Etymologies of Isidore 629-639 Prankish territories reunited under Dagobert 632-651 Mohammedan conquest of Syria, Egypt, Persia 661 Ommiad dynasty founded 664 Synod of Whitby 687 Battle of Testry 698 Carthage permanently captured by the Mohammedans 71 1-7 1 3 Mohammedan conquest of Spain 718 Mission of Boniface to Germany 726 Iconoclastic decree of Leo III, Byzantine Emperor 731 Ecclesiastical History of Bede 732 Battle of Tours 750 Abbassid dynasty founded 751 Ravenna captured by the Lombards Carolingian dynasty founded by Pepin 755 Ommiad Emirate of Cordova 768-814 Reign of Charlemagne 774 End of the Lombard Kingdom 787 Danish invasions begin in England 800 Imperial coronation of Charlemagne 827 Saracen invasion of Sicily begins 842 The Strassburg Oaths 843 The Treaty of Verdun c. 859 Rurik becomes Grand Prince of Russia 864 Conversion of Boris I of Bulgaria 869 Eighth (Ecumenical Council at Constantinople 870 The Treaty of Mersen 871-901 Reign of Alfred the Great in England 885 Paris besieged by the Northmen 887 Deposition of the Emperor Charles c. 896 Invasions of the Magyars begin 904 Saloniki seized by the Saracens 909 Fatimite dynasty founded in North Africa 910 Abbey of Cluny founded 911-912 Origin of Normandy 929 Caliphate of Cordova founded by Abd-er-Rahman III 934 Kingdom of Aries begins 955 Battle of the Lechfeld 962 Otto the Great crowned Holy Roman Emperor 969 Egypt conquered by the Fatimites 975 Death of Edgar the Peaceful, King of England 980-1037 Avicenna 987 Hugh Capet founds the Capetian dynasty 997-1038 Reign of St. Stephen of Hungary 999-1003 Pope Sylvester II (Gerbert) CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE xv c. looo Discovery of Vlnland Oldest manuscript of Beowulf 1 002 Death of Almansor 1013 Danish kings in England 1015-1087 Constantinus Africanus 1032 End of the Kingdom of Aries 1036 End of the Caliphate of Cordova 1036-1067 Baldwin V, Count of Flanders 1039-1056 Henry III, Holy Roman Emperor 1040 Death of Foulques Nerra, Count of Anjou 1057 End of Macedonian dynasty in the Byzantine Empire 1059 Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily, as the Pope's vassal 1063-1118 Cathedral at Pisa built 1066 Norman conquest of England 1 07 1 Battle of Manzikert 1073-1085 Pope Gregory VH (Hildebrand) 1078 Jerusalem captured by the Turks 1079-1 142 Abelard 1081-1 118 Reign of Alexius Comnenus, Byzantine Emperor 1085 Toledo captured by Alfonso VI of Castile and Leon 1086 Battle of Zalaca 1086-1127 William X, Duke of Aquitaine, first known troubadour 1095 Pope Urban II proclaims the First Crusade Foundation of Portugal 1099 Jerusalem stormed by the crusaders 1108-1137 Reign of Louis VI, the Fat, King of France Roman law taught by Irnerius at Bologna Questions about Nature of Adelard of Bath 1122 Concordat of Worms 1126^1198 Averroes 1137 Union of Aragon and Barcelona 1143 Liibeck founded 1144 Fall of Edessa c. 1150 Decretum of Gratian; Sentences of Peter Lombard 1 154 Henry II, King of England, founds the Plantagenet or Angevin dynasty with vast continental fiefs End of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Geography of Edrisi 1163 Foundation-stone of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris laid by Pope Alexander III 1170 Murder of Thomas Becket 1171 Saladin overthrows the Fatimite dynasty in Egypt 1176 Battle of Legnano 1180-1223 Reign of Philip II, Augustus, King of France 1183 Peace of Constance 1187 Jerusalem captured by Saladin 1198-1216 Pope Innocent III 1204 Latin Empire of Constantinople established xvi CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 1208 Albigensian Crusade 1 2 10 Study of Aristotle's works on natural philosophy forbidden at the University of Paris 12 1 2 Battle of Navas de Tolosa Children's Crusade 1215 Fourth Lateran Council Magna Carta 1220 Amiens Cathedral begun 1 22 1 Death of St. Dominic 1226 Death of St. Francis 1226-1270 Reign of St. Louis in France 1228 Teutonic Knights called in to conquer East Prussia c. 1235 The Romance of tJie Rose begun by William of Lorris 1241 Mongol invasion of Europe Choir of Rheims Cathedral completed 1250 Death of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor 1252-1284 Reign of Alfonso the Wise of Castile 1256-1273 Interregnum in the Holy Roman Empire 1258 Bagdad sacked by the Mongols Proinsions of Oxford 1260 Cathedral of Chartres consecrated 1 261 Byzantine Empire restored 1265 Simon de Montfort's Parliament c. 1266 Opus Maius of Roger Bacon 1268 Hohenstaufen line extinct Charles of Anjou conquers Naples 1271-1295 Marco Polo in the Far East 1273 Rudolf of Hapsburg elected Holy Roman Emperor 1274 Death of Thomas Aquinas 1282 Sicilian Vespers 1284 Pisa defeated by Genoa First ducat coined at Venice 1285-1314 Reign of Philip IV, the Fair, King of France 1 29 1 League of the Three Forest Cantons 1293 Noble families of Florence disqualified for office 1295 The Model Parliament of Edward I 1296 Clericis laicos 1297 Membership in the Grand Council of Venice becomes heredi- tary 1302 First meeting of the Estates General Battle of Courtrai Exile of Dante 1303 Humiliation of Pope Boniface VIII at Anagni Conciliator of Peter of Abano 1308 Papacy at Avignon 1314 Battle of Bannockburn 1315 Battle of Morgarten 1 32 1 Death of Dante 1324 Defensor Pads of Marsiglio of Padua . . CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE xvii 1328 End of the direct Capetians Battle of Cassel 1337 Opening of the Hundred Years War Death of Giotto 1340 Battle of Sluys 1 34 1 Petrarch crowned poet laureate at Rome by King Robert of Naples 1345 Jacob Artevelde murdered 1346 Battle of Crecy 1348 The Black Death 1 350-1 355 War between Genoa and Venice 1351 The Laurentiayi Portolano 1353 The Ottoman Turks enter Europe 1356 The Golden Bull Battle of Poitiers 1357 Revolutionary movement in Paris 1358 The Jacquerie 1360 Treaty of Bretigny 1363 Origin of the House of Burgundy 1367 War of theHanseatic League against Denmark and Norway 1368-1370 Mongols are expelled from China 1369 Charles V, the Wise, King of France, renews the Hundred Years War with success 1372 Battle of La Rochelle 1376 The Good Parliament 1378 The Great Schism begins Uprising of the Ciompi in Florence 1378-138 1 War between Genoa and Venice 1 38 1 The Peasants' Revolt in England 1382 Disenfranchisement of the Ciompi Battle of Roosebek 1384 Death of John Wyclif 1386 Union of Poland and Lithuania under the Jagellons 1389 Battle of Kosovo 1396 Battle of Nicopolis 1397 Union of Kalmar 1399 Richard H deposed; Lancastrian dynasty in England 1401-1429 Masaccio 1402 Battle of Angora 1405 Venice acquires Verona and Padua 1407 Louis of Orleans murdered by John, Duke of Burgundy 1409 Council of Pisa 1414-1417 Council of Constance 1415 Battle of Agincourt Ceuta captured by Portugal 1416 The St. George of Dona telle 1419 Hussite W^ars begin 1420 Treaty of Troyes 1429 Relief of Orleans by Joan of Arc xviii CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 1 431-1449 Council of Basel 1435 Death of Duke of Bedford Duke of Burgundy abandons the English alliance Cosimo de' Medici comes into power in Florence 1435-1442 Alfonso V of Aragon and Sicily wins the Kingdom of Naples in a struggle with Ren6 of Anjou 1437 House of Hapsburg becomes practically hereditary in the Holy Roman Empire 1438 Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges 1438-1439 Council of Ferrara-Florence 1444 Battle of V^arna c 1450 Invention of printing 1 45 1 Francesco Sforza becomes despot of Milan 1452 Last coronation of a Holy Roman Emperor at Rome 1453 Fall of Constantinople Close of the Hundred Years War 1455 Wars of the Roses begin 1460 Death of Prince Henry the Navigator 1465 League of the Public Welfare against Louis XI 1469 Marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile 1477 Death of Charles the Bold; marriage of Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian 1478 Novgorod captured by Ivan III of Russia About the same time Russia is freed from the Golden Horde 1485 Battle of Bosworth Field; Henry VII founds the Tudor dy- nasty i486 Diaz rounds the Cape of Good Hope 1492 Discovery of America Conquest of Granada Death of Lorenzo de' Medici » 1494 Charles VIII invades Italy 1498 Vasco da Gama reaches India Execution of Savonarola 1505 Michelangelo called to Rome 1508 League of Cambray against Venice Raphael comes to Rome 1 513 The Prince of Machiavelli 1 51 5 Battle of Marignano 1 51 7 Luther posts his Ninety Five Theses 1519 Charles V elected Holy Roman Emperor Death of Leonardo da Vinci CONTENTS I. The Study of History i II. The Roman Empire 19 III. The Barbarian World outside the Empire .... 40 IV. The Decline of the Roman Empire .... ^ . 60 V. The Barbarian Invasions 75 VI. "The City of God" 95 VII. German Kingdoms in the West 117 VIII. Justinian and the Byzantine Empire 128 IX. Gregory the Great and Western Christendom . 154 X. The Rise and Spread of Mohammedanism .172 XI. The Prankish St.\te and Charlemagne 192 XII. The Northmen and Other New Invaders .... 216 XIII. The Feudal Land System and Feudal Society . 232 XIV. Feudal States of Europe 256 XV. The Growth of the Medieval Church 280 XVI. The Expansion of Christendom and the Crusades . 301 XVII. The Rise of Towns and Gilds 327 XVIII. The Italian Cities 341 XIX. French, Flemish, English, and German Towns . . 357 XX. The Medieval Revival of Learning 373 XXI. Medieval Literature 397 XXII. The Medieval Cathedrals 416 XXIII. The Church under Innocent III 434 XXIV. Innocent III and the States of Europe .... 455 XXV. The Growth of National Institutions in England . 474 XXVI. The Growth of Royal Power in France .... 490 XX CONTENTS XXVII. The Hundred Years War 511 XXVIII. Germany in the Later Middle Ages 532 XXIX. Eastern Europe in the Later Middle Ages . . .548 XXX. The Papacy and its Opponents in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries 550 XXXI. The Italian Renaissance: Politics and Humanism . 576 XXXII. The Italian Renaissance: Fine Arts and Voyages OF Discovery 5^7 XXXIII. The Rise of Absolutism and of the Middle Class 614 Index 641 MAPS AND PLANS 1 Physical and Racial Europe (colored) .... Frontispiece 2 The Roman Empire (colored) i8 3 Gaul in the Fifth Century 89 4 The Byzantine Empire Under Justinian 137 5 Ground-Plan of the Church of St. Sophia 144 6 The British Isles in the Seventh Century 165 7 The Mohammedan World about 732 180 8 The Prankish Empire 201 9 The Expansion of the Northmen 224 10 The Holy Roman Empire and Southern Italy (colored) . 262 11 Feudal France (colored) 270 12 Christian Expansion in Spain (colored) 304 13 German Eastward Expansion 306 14 The Eastern Mediterranean during the Crusades . .317 15 Towns and Trade of France and Flanders . . . . . 359 16 Ground-Plan of Rheims Cathedral 420 17 France in the Early Fourteenth Century 509 18 Rise of the Swiss Confederation (colored) 542 19 Hanseatic League and Teutonic Knights 545 20 The Mongol Empire and Trade Routes to the Far East (colored) 550 21 Conquests of the Ottoman Turks 555 22 Italy in the Fifteenth Century 579 23 Charles the Bold and his Neighbors 619 24 Review of Medieval Civilization (colored) 640 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE CHAPTER I THE STUDY OF HISTORY History has to do with the past of humanity. Every phase of man's life and every human interest of the present has its background and previous development Definition which may be historically considered. We study ""^ ^'^^^''^ the history of English literature, for example, or we may take courses in universities in the history of architecture, or in church history, or in the history of diplomacy, or in the history of education. These are specialized branches, devoted each to some one department of human affairs. History in the broad and general sense includes all these particular "histories" and many others. It aims to under- stand and to picture the entire life of the various races and groups of mankind at all times throughout the course of long ages. We sometimes speak of the history of plants or other non-human beings — of natural history. But a subject like geology, although it deals with changes in the Natural earth's crust, and surveys a period of appalling histoo^' length stretching back for hundreds of thousands and geology of years before the advent of human life upon this planet, is not history in the usual sense, since it is not directly con- cerned with mankind. In so far, nevertheless, as the earth's surface, being man's home, affects his destiny by its changes, geology and its branch geography are sciences useful to the historian. Geology often renders a special service to his- torical chronology by enabling one to tell the approximate age of human remains and monuments found embedded in different strata of the soil. 2 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE It is evident that history has set itself a tremendous task in trying to understand and picture the entire past life of Vastness ^^^ ^^^ ^^ ^^^ times in all places. Probably the and difficulty attempt will never be completely successful. The great difficulty is that history is dependent for its knowledge of the men of the past upon those men themselves. Since they are dead and gone, we have to depend upon the writings, buildings, personal effects, works of art, and other monuments, memorials, and memories which they have left behind them. For many periods and regions such evidence is slight indeed. Another trouble is that former men were in many cases not interested in the same things that we are, and so do not tell us what we should like to know. They loved to dwell upon wars; we wish to hear of commerce and industry in times of peace. They chronicled the deeds of kings; we want to know the life of the people. They took it for granted that their audi- ence would understand the state of civilization, since they lived in the midst of it. Instead of describing the personal appearance of the Roman general and statesman, Titus Flamininus, in his biography of that worthy, Plutarch referred his readers to a bronze statue of him at Rome opposite the Circus Maximus. But to-day the statue has disappeared, and the same is true of most of the manners and customs of the distant past, which were once too familiar for historians to think it worth while to mention them to their readers. The story of the past as it has reached us is, indeed, in many respects like the ruin of some ancient amphithea- History is ter or medieval monastery. Some sections are like a ruin better preserved than others, some parts are gone entirely, others have been faultily restored by later writers who failed to catch the spirit of the original. In -some places nothing is left but a shapeless core of vague ^statements or a few bare dates and facts. Elsewhere we get a vivid glimpse of the life of the past in its original coloring. Sometimes the story has improved with age, as ruins are sometimes beautified by becoming weather-beaten or over- THE STUDY OF HISTORY 3 grown with moss. So the haze of romance, or the glamour of hero-worship, or the mere spell of antiquity, add to the past a charm that is history's own. But to-day we are better equipped for the study of his- tory than ever before, and are in a position to understand the men of any given past period better in some Recent respects than they understood themselves. We progress in can compare them with men of other lands and times of whom they knew nothing, and can discover the origin of some of their customs or explain the true meaning of some of their institutions. The great advances made in the natural and exact sciences in modern times have enabled man to comprehend both nature and himself much more correctly than before. For instance, it is but recently that it has been recog- nized how long man has inhabited this globe and how far back a considerable degree of civilization can ^g^ ^j be traced. Until the eighteenth or nineteenth man on 1 T-.-1 1' 1 r 1 1 • this earth century the Biblical account of human history was generally accepted in Christian lands, and it was figured out accordingly that God created Adam, the first man, just about 4004 B.C. To-day skulls have been discovered which scientists assert belonged to human beings who lived from two to four hundred thousand years ago; and it is certain that flourishing civilizations already existed in the Nile and Euphrates Valleys at the time when Adam was once sup- posed to have first opened his eyes upon a newly created world. A distinction used to be made between prehistoric and historic men and periods. Historians were unable to make use of any except oral or written evidence. upj.gjjigjori(,.' Where no such evidence was procurable, they and "his- . , . , ... , , J tone ages spoke of the period as prehistoric and beyond the bounds of history. To-day learned investigators eagerly search out the material objects which men have left behind and draw many inferences from them concerning the life and character of their former owners. Over one hundred sites have been found in northern Italy of villages where 4 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE before the dawn of Roman history men lived on platforms built on piles in water, but with their streets and canals laid out in the same regular fashion as the later Roman military camps. The history of ancient Greece used to start about 750 B.C., and all before that was reckoned prehistoric, and no one knew whether to believe in the Trojan War of Homer or not. But not many years ago excavations were made in \^arious spots in the ancient Greek world with the result that the city of Troy of which Homer sang was actually unearthed, while in the island of Crete ruins of palaces were disclosed telling plainly of luxury, art, and commerce four thousand years ago. Modern investigators also pick out the survivals and relics of earlier periods in the languages and customs of later times. For example, the resemblance between the word for "bride" and the verb meaning "to steal away" in Indo-Germanic languages is taken as evi- dence of marriage by capture in early times, and another indication pointing in the same direction is the formality of prearranged abduction and mock pursuit in early German law. In Roman religion the disabilities of the priest or fla- men of Jupiter, who might not ride horseback, nor have knots in his clothing, nor touch beans and she-goats, nor trim his hair and nails with an iron instrument, point back to a primitive period of magic and taboo and to the Bronze Age before iron came into use. The two sciences which especially investigate the so- called prehistoric period are archaeology and anthropology. Archaeology Archaeologists devote themselves primarily to the and discovery and interpretation of works of art and other material objects, but in the course of their investigations they often come upon inscriptions and other written records previously unknown. For instance, gold coins of the Visigothic Kingdom in Spain in the early Middle Ages give us the names of several kings not men- tioned elsewhere. Similarly, the anthropologists, who study man himself and are interested in observing, measuring, and classifying the various types of humanity, do not con- fine their attention to prehistoric skeletons, but in the THE STUDY OF HISTORY 5 numerous savage peoples still to-day existent in many parts of the world, find a splendid opportunity to observe not only varying physical types, but all sorts of primitive customs, religious rites, and mental attitudes. Among such tribes they can compare varying gradations of civilization and savagery, which in other parts of the globe disappeared very likely many thousands of years since, and they may detect there the germs of some of our present-day institu- tions, or note in our society silly survivals from those savage days. Thus anthropology and archaeology are both depart- ments of history in the broad sense. Human activity and hence history may be conveniently subdivided under five captions: political, economic, so- cial, religious, and cultural. Political history, of Historical course, covers wars and the affairs of kings and categories of other forms of government, also legal development. Eco- nomic history traces the production, distribution, and con- sumption of wealth in the past, the business of the world, its trade, industry, and agriculture. Social history deals with family life, classes, manners and customs, dress, diet, and the like. Subjects such as the rise of the Papacy, or the spread of Mohammedanism, or the Protestant Revolt, be- long primarily to religious history. The history of culture includes the progress of art, literature, learning, and educa- tion, and traces those two supreme products of hand and mind, the fine arts and philosophy. It is evident that these categories are not mutually exclusive. Taxation, for in- stance, is both political and economic. Slavery is both a social and an economic institution. Almost any event would produce effects in more than one of these five fields. Human life is one and all such divisions of it are more or less artifi- cial, but they are also rather helpful. History is sometimes grouped with political science, economics, and sociology, and they are called social sciences in distinction from the natural and mathematical sciences and from linguistic studies. But history may equally well be associated with literature, philosophy, and art. They cannot get along without history, nor can it amount to much if it takes no 6 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE cognizance of them. It is one of the "humanities" as well as a social science. History is not a mere record of events, but tries to under- stand the life of the past. The pilgrim seeking the way to The the past must first of all, like Christian at the attitud? is wicket gate, free himself from the burden of all sympathetic his present prejudices and even principles. He must forget for the time being whether he is a socialist or capitalist, an imperialist or a democrat, Protestant or Roman Catholic, German-American or Scotch-Irish. To see the scenes of the past he must borrow the eyes of the past. What men did then will mean little to him unless he comprehends their motives, their ideas, and their emotions, and the circumstances under which they acted. One of the greatest benefits derivable from the study of history is this entering into the life and thought of other people in other times and places. Thereby we broaden our own outlook upon the world as truly as if we had traveled to foreign countries or learned to think and to express ourselves in another language than our own. History, indeed, alone makes it possible for us to travel both in time and space. The student of history should, however, be critical as well as sympathetic. Truth is always his aim, a thorough The understanding of the past as it really was. He attitude^ is must not bclicve everything that the men of the also critical p^gt tell him about themselves. He must get to know them well enough to tell when they are trying to de- ceive him or themselves. He must be aware of their failings and prejudices as well as of their motives and obstacles. He must not allow himself to be swept off his feet by excessive enthusiasm for some one man or ideal or institution of the past; he must always retain his sanity and preserve a cool, impartial, and open-minded attitude. He will be suspicious of sensational and miraculous stories and of dramatic de- nouements. He will make allowance for the universal tend- ency of human nature to exaggeration and to make a good story whenever there is the slightest opportunity. To know the past truly, to appreciate the men of long ago THE STUDY OF HISTORY 7 fully, to grasp their spirit and point of view, we should read their own words in their own language, and see Primary their own handiwork. In other words, we should secondary go to the original sources, whence in the first works instance all our knowledge of the past comes. But it is sometimes necessary to travel far and obtain a special per- mit to see an original document or monument, although modern art museums and the great printed collections of historical sources which have been published have greatly lightened the labors of the historian. In the latter he finds the manuscripts of olden chroniclers carefully edited, the handwriting and abbreviations deciphered, and printed in legible type with helpful footnotes. Even so the sources may still be in Latin or Arabic or some other language unknown to or difficult for the ordinary student. Furthermore, there are many passages in the original documents which only the trained specialist can correctly interpret. Then many prim- ary sources are incomplete in character, or fragmentary, or full of errors which other sources correct. In short, from one document or monument we seldom obtain a full view of the past and often obtain a perverted view. Hence the historian who combines the fragments into a harmonious whole renders us a great service. The writings of modern historians concerning the past, produced after a study of the original sources, are called secondary works. But even the student beginning the study of history should not confine his attention to secondary works. A number of medieval original sources have been translated into English in whole or in selections and are as available as the secondary works. Into these, at least, every student of history should dip, and supplement the picture of the past which the historians draw for him by his own vivid glimpses into the minds of the men of the past themselves. The ordinary reader of history at the present time needs to be almost as critical as the specialist who in- Dangers of vestigates the very sources of historical knowledge hSorfcal^"^ for new facts, for there is a deal of historical reading misinformation current in the talk and writing of to-day, in 8 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE editorials and sermons and magazine articles and even in pretentious volumes. The fact is that of late great progress has been made in historical investigation, and that not only have many details been corrected, but many old classifica- tions and generalizations have gone by the board. The re- sult is, especially in America, where higher education and advanced investigation have only recently attained great development and where history used to be taught very poorly in the schools, that any one who learned his history twenty or thirty years ago and has not kept up with the progress of the subject since is liable to have many false notions concerning both the past and the science of history itself. Consequently men learned in other fields — lawyers, natural scientists, teachers pi literature and philosophy — often relate their studies of the past to a scheme of history which has been or is being rapidly discarded. One must be careful, then, where one gets one's historical information and especially any sweeping generalizations. It is also unfor- tunate that readable histories are apt to be the least reliable because they are generally written to sell by professional authors who know how to write entertainingly, but lack historical training and ideals. But after all history is not merely a branch of literature to be read with interest ; it is a social science to be studied with care. One may consult critical bibliographies where the best books are listed with some statement of their scope and worth, and one may refer to the reviews of books in the historical journals. But the best thing to do is to cultivate a critical sense of one's own, to keep asking one's self how the author arrived at the conclusion which one is reading, to keep observing whether his tone seems fair and sane and his statement of details plausible and likely. We have said that readable histories are often unreliable, but that does not prove that reliable histories are of neces- History ^^^Y ^O^' History may be hard, but it ought to need not be be Interesting. Unless life itself is dull, unless dry reading , , i • r i the heroes and writers of the past were tiresome personalities, unless the most painstaking and inspired THE STUDY OF HISTORY 9 works of the leading artists are of no interest, history should not be tedious. Polybius, the most modern in spirit of the ancient Greek historians, spoke scornfully of the mere bookworm historian who lacked human experience and spent all his hours "reclining on his couch," studying docu- ments from a neighboring library and "comparing the mis- takes of former historians without any fatigue to himself." To him the dignity of history seemed to require both lit- erary genius and ** The man of many shifts, who wandered far and wide, And towns of many saw, and learned their mind ; And suffered much in heart by land and sea, Passing through wars of men and grievous waves," History is, after all, and always will be, despite dry-as-dust research and writing, the most human of sciences. Since history treats of all sorts of men in different times and varied places, three fundamental questions confront us at the start: how to classify mankind, how to Theques- distinguish different localities, and how to meas- ^^'^^ °^ ^^^^ ure time. To these introductory queries anthropology, geography, and chronology give answers. It is now recog- nized, however, that it is no simple operation to divide men into distinct races. Various methods have been tried and classifications have been made according to the color of the skin, or the shade and curl of the hair, or the measurements of the skull, — a handy method in the case of men of the past, — or the language spoken. But these classifications run counter to one another. Entire peoples adopt a foreign language for their own, so that tribes who are physically alike are found to speak totally different languages, while utterly different physical types are found to have a common speech. Moreover, men have lived for so long upon the earth and have wandered so widely that probably all peoples found to-day represent racial mixtures. Also it has recently been asserted that the shape of the skull and other physical traits alter when the individual or tribe moves to a new and different environment and climate. The past, however, has probably seldom seen such rapid immigration and mixing lo THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE and absorption of miscellaneous races and nationalities as we see in this country. Because the Celtic, Teutonic, Slavic, Greek, Latin, Sans- krit, and Persian tongues seem to belong to a single linguistic The Aryans System, it used to be assumed that those peoples not alike in formed the white or Aryan or Caucasian race, only in and that they had once lived together in a speech common home whence they had spread through Europe and western Asia. But it is now realized that there are marked racial differences between peoples speaking "Aryan" or Indo-European languages, and that some Aryan-speaking peoples are akin in physical type to other peoples who do not speak an Aryan language at all. Lan- guage, in short, seems the only common bond between the "Aryans." The division of the peoples of Europe into races which is current at present is as follows: Three main European The races physical types are recognized and are named of Europe after their original habitat or the place where the type is at present to be found in its purest state. These are the Northern race, the Mediterranean race, and the Alpine race. All are white men, but the Northerners are fair and tall with long heads or skulls — a type found at its purest in the Scandinavian countries and on the north shore of Germany and the east coast of Great Britain facing those countries. The Mediterranean type is best seen in Spain and southern Italy, and is short and dark, but long-headed like the Northerners. To this Mediterranean race, too, be- long the Berbers of North Africa. The Alpine race comes midway between the other two in respect to stature and color, but is broad-skulled, unlike either of them. The Celts and the Slavs are largely of this type, though its especial home is in the highlands of Europe that stretch east and west be- tween the Mediterranean world and the north. In many countries one naturally sees fusions of these races, but there are to-day or were in the Middle Ages several peoples whose race, language, and customs defy attempts at classification, such as the Basques of the extreme southwest of France and THE STUDY OF HISTORY ii north of Spain and the Picts of early Scotland. Among the peoples of Europe we further find an Asiatic racial factor and see the effect of immigration and invasion from the Orient. Different authorities divide the Asiatic races some- what diversely, and vary especially in their nomenclature. The main point to note here is that a number of European peoples, such as the Lapps, Finns, Turks, Magyars of Hun- gary, and the Bulgarians, represent a considerable infusion of blood from the western Asiatic racial groups. The scene of medieval history is laid in Europe and in those regions of Asia and Africa adjoining the Mediterra- nean Sea. To follow the history intelligently it is Geography essential to have some knowledge of the geogra- °^ Europe phy of this area. The reader should have in mind the main physical features of the continent of Europe, the great mountain ranges, the chief rivers and other bodies of water, and also the modern political map of Europe with its national boundaries and chief cities. The continent of Europe has a coast so deeply indented by arms of the sea that many parts are distinctly and definitely marked off from the main trunk. The British Isles form such a group. The Scandinavian peninsula is another clearly marked unit, although, on the other hand, the Baltic Sea forms a common center and meeting-place for all the lands border- ing upon it. To the south Greece, Italy, and Spain are peninsulas separated by mountain ranges from the rest of Europe, although here again the Mediterranean forms a channel of communication between them. The plain of Hungary is surrounded on three sides by the Carpathians, and four mountain chains enclose the upper basin of the Elbe River in a sort of parallelogram called Bohemia. The Alps are very abrupt on the Italian side, but slope gradually northward toward Germany, which divides into southern highlands and the North German plain. The latter is sub- divided by the Rhine, Elbe, and Oder Rivers. It merges indistinguishably into the Low Countries and northern France, and to the east into the vaster area of Russia, and thus is the chief feature of the main trunk of Europe. 12 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Russia is intersected by a network of rivers, some flowing north to the White and the Baltic, others south to the Black and the Caspian Seas. In ancient times Russia was largely covered with swamps and forests, but there were fertile grass steppes then as now in the south. Between eastern Europe and western Asia there is no abrupt transi- tion in climate, flora and fauna, or topography. The plains and mountains of the one fade into those of the other, but the boundary is roughly marked by the Ural Mountains. In France west and northwest of the Alps come other lesser mountain ranges, the Cevennes, Jura, and Vosges; and west of these the basins of the Garonne, Loire, and Seine Rivers, flowing through plains to the sea. From the Alps four important rivers, the Po, Danube, Rhine, and Rhone, flow in opposite directions into as many different seas, the Adriatic, Black, North, and Mediterranean. As from the Alps the land slopes off to the Baltic and North Seas and the English Channel, so on the farther side of those bodies of water — which once, by the way, were for the most part dry land — rise, after an interval of lowlands, the mountains of Norway, of the Shetlands and Iceland, of Scotland and northwestern England and Wales. They face the Continent as the opposite tier of seats rises up in a stadium. It is hardly possible to overestimate the effect of physical environment upon man's life, especially in earlier ages when Influence of tunnels and canals, steam and electricity, had geography not yet ovcrcomc and harnessed nature. Once '^ '^^^ natural boundaries and obstacles could not be so easily disregarded ; and trade routes, race migrations, and military campaigns alike had to follow certain lines. Also man's food and costume and dwelling and industries and artistic creations were dictated to him largely by the ma- terials available in his immediate neighborhood. Fear and appreciation of the forces in nature long Influenced reli- gion. Even to-day, if we travel, we find different races and languages and customs and governments and religions in different lands, as well as mines In one region, olive groves THE STUDY OF HISTORY 13 in another, and sheep grazing in a third. These differences are in part due to geography. And we still are unable to escape the effects of changes in the barometer upon our spirits. Indeed, recent experimental tests tend to confirm the general notion that physical and mental efficiency are greatest in a climate where the temperature is moderate and variable, and that a tropical climate weakens moral char- acter as well as decreases the capacity for intellectual and manual labor. The question "When?" is no less important to the stu- dent of history than "Where?" To trace the progress of civilization and to understand historical relation- importance ships, it is necessary to know when things hap- o{ dates in ' . , „ . ^ ' history pened or existed, bvery important event has its causes and results, and to learn them we must know what preceded and followed the event. Human society in any place at any time consists of many particular things and persons, events and customs. These go together and what unites them is their simultaneous occurrence. They are a bundle of sticks which must be tied together with a date. Moreover, the effect of an event upon society depends greatly upon when it happened, for circumstances might be favorable 'at one time and not at another. It is true that many social conditions which have existed for a long period began and disappeared so gradually that it is impossible to date them precisely and one must be content with such approximate expressions as "the thirteenth century," "the early Roman Empire," and "the later Middle Ages." Other events which undoubtedly did happen within some particular year we are also unable to date because of lack of reliable source material. But the object of the historical student should be not so much to fix exact dates in his memory as to be able to list events in their proper sequence, to associate closely together all simultaneous happenings, and to cultivate a feeling for the lapse of time — to be able to realize, for instance, what five hundred years ago means. Of course among the lowest savages chronology is a mat- ter of slight utility, since their life develops little and there 14 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE is nothing to record different from the past. But among civilized peoples who are either progressing or declining, one has to turn back but a generation or two to find great changes. The life of some one old man still living to- day goes back to the days before our Civil War. His grand- father could, perhaps, tell him stories of the period before railroads and factories had come into existence. Three more such lives would take us back to the first permanent settle- ments made by white men in this country, and but two more would land us on the verge of the Middle Ages. Different peoples have had different calendars and sys- tems of chronology. For instance, in the Middle Ages the ^, , Mohammedan lunar year was over eleven days Chronology i /^, • • , , shorter than the Christian solar year, so that thirty-three and a half years elapsed in Arabia and North Africa and southern Spain while thirty-two and a half were passing in France and Germany. Even the Christians in the Middle Ages had leap-years a little oftener than we do, so that their reckoning was ten days ahead of time by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Another difficulty in deal- ing with medieval dates is the varying usage as to when the year shall begin. Certain medieval annals say that Charle- magne was crowned emperor in 80 1 instead of 800 because they reckon Christmas Day as the first of the new year. On the other hand, his death is put in 813 instead of 814 by those who do not begin the new year until Easter. This book will follow the customary Christian chronology intro- duced by the monk, Dionysius Exiguus, in the sixth century, by which events are dated so many years before or after the year set for the birth of Christ. But various other eras were in use here and there in the Middle Ages. The Mohamme- dans began their era with the Hegira of Mohammed (622 A.D.) ; the Greeks and Russians employed the era of Constantinople which assumes to date its years from the creation of the world; and in Aragon and Castile until the fourteenth century Christians used the era of Spain or of the Caesars which made the initial year what we call 39 B.C. The present volume will trace the history of Europe and THE STUDY OF HISTORY 15 of the parts of Asia and Africa adjacent to the Mediterra- nean and thus closely connected with Europe. It The Middle will trace the history of those lands from the ^^^^ decline of the Roman Empire and of classical civilization, from the entrance of new peoples upon the stage of Euro- pean history, and from the beginnings of Christianity. It will carry that story to the discovery of the new continents of North and South America and of an all-sea route around South Africa to the Far East, to the eve of the revolt of the Protestants from the Church of Rome, and to the opening of the momentous and disastrous reign of Charles V of the House of Hapsburg in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, and large portions of Italy. This period of more than a thousand years is usually called the Middle Ages on the supposition that it lies between ancient and modern times. Such a division of the history of the world gives many thou- sands of years to ancient history and a disproportionately brief duration to the other two periods. It is not our purpose here, however, to quarrel with this familiar convention, which was adopted at a time when ancient history had not yet been traced so far back in time. We may simply note that there is almost never a sharp break nor a total dis- similarity between periods which adjoin in time. Thus the Middle Ages inherited much from ancient times, and many features of our present civilization may be traced back several centuries into medieval history. This illustrates how one age dovetails into its successor, no sharp line being drawn between them, but some features of the old life con- tinuing for some time after innovations have been made in other respects. In medieval history we have the decline and then the recovery of civilization to note ; we have various lands and peoples in different stages of civilization to study. Method of and we shall have to distinguish progress in va- ^^^^ volume rious departments of human activity. Consequently the history of the Middle Ages will be here set forth partly in order of time, partly by regions, and partly in topical ar- rangement; and the reader must bravely endeavor to keep i6 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE abreast of all three. It may somewhat assist him to have some of the main topics, periods, and regions associated with the greatest men of the age, and this has been done where the men seemed great enough to justify it. But many of the greatest accomplishments of the Middle Ages were either anonymous or the work of countless laborers. The Middle Ages deserve our attention, partly because they contributed much to our modern civilization and be- Value of cause our study of them helps to explain many medieval existing conditions. Then grew up our modern ^^^°^^ languages, then began modern literatures and universities, then developed the Roman Catholic Church and the states of France and England, then were discovered the mariner's compass, gunpowder, and printing. But the Middle Ages also merit our study because they had institu- tions and ideas which are gone and which are strange to us, but the study of which serves to widen our experience, broaden our outlook, and deepen our sympathies and under- standing. It is a good thing for one who has been brought up on the Western prairie to study not merely the west- ward movement of the American people or the life of Abraham Lincoln, but also to read of the crusades and the monasteries, of Byzantine and Gothic art, and other matters foreign to his own experience and stretching beyond his personal horizon. Those medieval men, moreover, were our ancestors, and the history of Americans before 1492, or when- ever it was that each of our families first migrated hither, is the history of Europe. THE STUDY OF HISTORY 17 EXERCISES AND READINGS The Character and Value of History. Questions to be answered orally or in writing as a result of personal reflection: — 1. How does history dififer from other subjects which you have studied? 2. Of what use to you personally has the history been which you have studied or read? 3. In what occupations is a knowledge of history most essential, and why? 4. How would you compare the historical point of view with the scientific or literary or philosophical or religious standpoints and methods? Historical Categories. When you come to read chapter 11, ill, or iv, classify the contents of each paragraph according as they seem predominantly political, economic, social, religious, cultural, or geographical in character. Map-Work. On an outline map of Europe locate the following: — 1. Mountains: Alps, Apennines, Balkans, Pyrenees, Carpathians, Ural, Vosges, C6vennes, Jura. 2. Seas: Black, Caspian, JEgean, Adriatic, Baltic, North, White. 3. Rivers: Volga, Dnieper, Don, Vistula, Oder, Elbe, Danube, Po, Rhine, Rhone, Seine, Loire, Garonne, Guadalquivir. Political Geography of Modern Europe. 1. Name in order of populousness the six chief nations of Europe and state the form of government existing in each. 2. Name and locate what you consider the fifteen most important European cities to-day. 3. To what extent do the political boundaries of the present states of Europe coincide with natural boundaries? Historical Bibliography. A. Find two books consisting of selections translated from the original sources of medieval history; two secondary works on the early Middle Ages; two on the Middle Ages in general; two historical atlases usable in medieval history; and one book on each of the following subjects: the Roman Empire before 476 a.d,, the decline of the Roman Empire, France in the Middle Ages, Germany in the Middle Ages, Italy in the Middle Ages. Give the following information concerning each book: author's last name followed by his initials; full title; place and date of publication and edition if other than the first; number of vol- umes or of pages if there is but one volume; whether the book has illustrations, maps, and index. 18 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE B. Select some one of the above books for closer examination. From its table of contents or by skimming its chapter and page headings determine what period it covers, to what lands it applies, and whether it is pretty exclusively devoted to political history or treats of other matters. Open the book somewhere else than at the very beginning or end, read a few consecutive pages, and form an opinion as to its readability and reliability. C. Distinguish between the following books in respect to length and authorship: — Cambridge Medieval History, vol. I. Munro and Sellery, Medieval Civilization. Thatcher and McNeal, Source-Book of Medieval History. Dow and Seignobos, Feudal Regime. D. Compare the following two works in subject, period covered, length, and method of treatment: — Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Readings on History and its Study. Polybius, Shuckburgh's English translation, book ii, p. 56; book ill, p. 31 ; book xii, p. 27; book xv, p. 36. The views of a writer over two thousand years ago. Lord Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History (in any edition of his works). The views of an English statesman, writer, and phil- osopher two hundred years ago. Carlyle, Essay on History. J. T. Shotwell, History, in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopccdia Britannica. J. H. Robinson, History, in The New History (New York, 1912). G. T. Warner, Landmarks in English hidustrial History, pp. 1-8. Freeman, History of Sicily, vol. I, Preface, pp. viii-xii. Sabatier, St. Francis of Assisi (1894), pp. xi, xxi, xxxiii. Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. I, chap. I. CHAPTER II THE ROMAN EMPIRE The Roman Empire included all the lands bordering upon the Mediterranean Sea, which was for long the great thor- oughfare of civilization. Speaking in a general ^j^ ^ .._ way and allowing for local differences and irreg- terranean ularities, the climate of this basin and the vege- tation of its coasts are uniform. That is to say, the coastal region north of the Sahara Desert belongs with the southern coasts and peninsulas of Europe rather than with the bulk of the African continent; and the French Mediterranean littoral is more like the coasts of Spain and Italy than it is like the rest of France. It is, indeed, easy to cross from Africa to Spain, or to Italy by way of Sicily, while the islands of Cyprus and Crete form stepping-stones from Egypt to Greece and from Syria to the ^gean Sea and west coast of Asia Minor. Owing to the narrowness of the Straits of Gibraltar and to their shallowness as well, — since a sunken ridge stretches under water from Spain to Africa, — neither tide nor cold ocean currents exert much influence in the Mediterranean. The air is sunny and the water warm, but it is very salt because of rapid evaporation. The tide- less sea leaves the mouths of rivers obstructed by silt and unfit to serve as ports; and the coast-line changes with pass- ing years. In ancient times it was difficult to put out to sea from a harbor without a favoring wind ; on the other hand, small vessels could be drawn up on almost any sandy beach and left there without fear of their being carried off by the tide. Caesar lost most of his fleet in one of his expeditions to Britain when he imprudently left his ships drawn up in this way on an exposed shore. Even the Mediterranean, how- ever, could be stormy enough in winter, so that the ancients did little navigation at that time of year. Fishing is not a very important industry in the Mediterranean, but in 20 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE ancient times the dyes obtained from the purple fisheries were highly prized. The Roman Empire may be divided into three sections differing in their previous history and civilization; namely, Q . J the Oriental, the Greek or Hellenic, and the section of Roman- Barbarian. The Oriental section had a e mpire j^jg^Qj-y going back at least four or five thousand years in the river-valley civilizations and despotisms of the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates. Here are still found to-day magnificent monuments and ruins of stately edifices, an abundance of written records, and evidences of a carefully organized government and society, of artisans and mathe- maticians, of people with high standards of morality and a belief in a future life and last judgment, and provided with a calendar dividing the year into twelve months and three hundred and sixty-five days, of a city forty miles in circum- ference and trading in gems from India, silks from China, ivory and ostrich feathers from the heart of Africa, — and all this hundreds or thousands of years before Rome had ceased to be a village, before Julius Caesar had added an extra day each leap-year, before Roman jurisprudence had developed, and before Rome's censors and imperators had built a single road or erected one triumphal arch. This cul- ture is also found at an early date in the islands of Cyprus and Crete. In the latter place works of art have recently been excavated worthy of the Greek genius, but made many centuries before the history of Greece begins and at a time when the Orient was the industrial center of the world. The Phoenicians spread this Oriental civilization to various points in the Mediterranean, notably to Carthage in North Africa. Most of Asia Minor is also to be counted within this Oriental section of the Empire. Greek or Hellenic civilization — the Greeks called them- selves "Hellenes" and occupied more territory than is in- The Greek cluded in modern Greece — reached its height section jj^ ^^^ f^f^j^ ^^^ fourth centuries before Christ. The Hellenes were great colonizers, and lived on the west coast of Asia Minor, in Sicily and southern Italy, and in THE ROMAN EMPIRE 21 coast settlements scattered about the Black and Mediter- ranean Seas, as well as in Greece proper and the islands of the JEgean. Their culture owed much to the Orient, but they were freer politically and intellectually, since no lo'^ dynasties of rulers nor ancient hierarchies of priests dor^j- nated their life and thought. They were "free-born wan- derers of the mountain air" or on the sea. They enjoyed the advantage of a better system of writing than those of the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians. They developed art, especially sculpture, to a higher point, and even in architec- ture their simple temples are better proportioned, and their Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns and capitals more graceful. In their Aryan language, which invaders from the north had introduced among them, they expressed them- selves more clearly and beautifully than Oriental languages and thought had permitted. It is to them that we look for the first "classics " in many varieties of literary production ; for instance, the epics of Homer, the lyrics of Sappho, the history of Herodotus, the tragedies of ^schylus, the com- edies of Menander, the orations of Demosthenes, the pas- torals of Theocritus. The thought of the Hellenes at first took the imaginative form of beautiful mythology, but then changed to rational speculation concerning the nature of the universe „, ., .... ,. ,, ., r t • "nilosophy in which man lives and the right conduct of his life in it. Such reasoning has ever since been called "phil- osophy," the name the Greeks themselves gave to it, and is important to note, not only as a prominent feature of their civilization, but because of its great influence upon Chris- tian writers both during the Roman Empire and throughout the Middle Ages. The Greek historians themselves narrated little but wars and the doings of generals and statesmen ; but the medieval historian, who never had heard of Themisto- cles or Agesilaus or Philopoemen, could give a brief outline of the views of all the Greek philosophers from Thales of Miletus, who foretold an eclipse of the sun and held that everything is made out of water, down through such names as Pythagoras, who asserted the importance of number 22 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE and harmony in the universe, Democritus, who first taught that the world is made up of atoms, Socrates, and Plato, to the late schools of thinkers called Stoics, Epicureans, and Neo-Platonists, of whom we shall have to speak again lab;er. Of all Greek philosophers Aristotle was to be the most influential in the Middle Ages. He had profited by the teaching of Plato, just as Plato had been the disciple of Socrates; but his own teaching was very different from the Platonic philosophy. Plato was a poetical idealist; Aristotle was more systematic and scien- tific. His History of Animals collected and classified a large amount of zoological data; his Poetics discussed various forms of literature and is our first fundamental work of literary criticism and theory; his Politics summarized the different forms of government existing in his day. More theoretical were his writings on physics, metaphysics, and ethics, but here too he dissented from Plato in many im- portant respects. Several of his treatises were devoted to psychological subjects; and in his works on logic he laid down sound rules which have been observed in the art of reasoning ever since. Aristotle was for a time the tutor of a young conqueror who was to change the map and civilization of the east- Alexander ern Mediterranean world. Alexander the Great, the Great j^jj^g q{ Macedon, 336-323 B.C., finishing the work which his father Philip had prepared and begun, con- quered the world from the Balkans to Egypt and from the Greek peninsula to the frontier of India. Into this Oriental world, and especially into that portion of it which the Roman Empire later included, was now introduced Hellenic culture, which fused with what was left of the old cultures of Egypt, Babylon, and Assyria into a civilization termed "Hellenistic." At Alexandria in Egypt, named after and founded by Alexander, was developed the largest library in the ancient world, a zoological park and gardens to encour- age further investigations like Aristotle's History of Animals, and a learned society of librarians, editors, literary critics, THE ROMAN EMPIRE 23 men of letters, geographers and astronomers, botanists and physiologists and medical men. Antioch in Syria was a similar center. Greek art, too, now left the peninsula, and the chief centers of sculpture were at cities in Asia Minor. Alexander's empire was divided after his death into the three great monarchies of Macedon, Syria, and Egypt, and many lesser states in Asia Minor and the Greek Greek in- peninsula. Therefore, when Rome had united the Roman under her rule all Italy, including the declining Empire Greek colonies of southern Italy and Sicily, and had deci- sively defeated her great opponent in Africa, Carthage, she found it comparatively easy to bring the powers of the eastern Mediterranean one by one under her sway. But as Greek civilization had gone on spreading through Alexan- der's empire after it had ceased to be a political unit, so now it was adopted by the Romans, who indeed had borrowed much from it in Italy before they conquered the East. Dur- ing the time of the Roman Empire and early centuries of the Christian era, Greek continued to be the written and learned language of the eastern half of the Mediterranean Basin, and the science of the Hellenistic period was contin- ued by such writers as Galen and Ptolemy, our chief sources for ancient medicine and astronomy respectively. It is worth remarking that both these scientists believed in astrology. The third section of the Roman Empire included the Latin civilization of Italy and the barbarians whom Rome had conquered and added to the civilized ancient -,, ^ ' ^ ^ The Roman- world. Geographically it embraced all that part Barbarian of the Empire to the north or west of Macedon, Sicily, and Carthage. Orientals and Greeks had done some- thing for these regions, but in the main their civilization was the work of Rome. It will be noted that this section included not only the coasts of the western Mediterranean, but also the valley of the Danube River, the Alps, the valley of the Rhine, and the entire interior of the Spanish penin- sula and of what is now France. This brought Rome to the Atlantic Ocean; she did not halt there, but added the 24 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE province of Britain beyond the English Channel. Italy had once been the western frontier of the ancient civilized world and the Latins had been far inferior in culture to the Greeks. But they had now adopted Greek mythology and Greek philosophy ; copies of the masterpieces of Greek sculpture were to be seen in the houses of the rich Roman nobles; and the various forms of Greek literature were paralleled and imitated in Latin. Terence corresponded to Menander; Seneca, to yEschylus; Cicero, to Demosthenes; and Vergil, to Homer. Pliny the Elder in his Natural History tried to combine all the science of antiquity in a single encyclopaedia. This Latin version of Greek culture the Romans spread among the barbarians whom they subdued. Thus we have already begun to pass from the history of the Mediterranean Basin to the history of western and northern Europe. There is a key to classical civilization and to the daily life of the Greeks and Latins which has not yet been men- The tioned, the ancient city-state. Our word "poli- aty-state tics" comes from the Greek word for a city^ — poUs. This was the fundamental political, social, and religious unit among the Hellenes, the Latins, and several other ancient peoples. Such a state consisted normally of a f walled town and a small surrounding area under its govern- ' ment. Peasants who lived outside the walls might perhaps \ be citizens, but they would have to go to town to vote and * to obtain justice. One reason for the existence of such states was that the mountains or seas shut the Greeks off from one another in small compartments, or on islands, or on a distant shore as a colony amid an alien population. But geography was not the sole reason for the existence of the , city-state. Its citizens believed that they were all related j to one another and that they were descended from a com- mon divine ancestor whom they worshiped. Their fathers and grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers had lived in that same little town or plain or island as far back as they could remember. Consequently the citizens were well acquainted with one another; had the same customs and ways of doing things ; and had no desire to admit strangers THE ROMAN EMPIRE 25 to share their life and citizenship. Each city-state had its own religion, its own legends and myths and gods and heroes, its own festivals and forms of worship, in which all the citizens participated and which were presided over by the town magistrates. If one went to another city one found gods with different names and functions, and strange cere- monies on the wrong days. There was, therefore, no distinc- tion between Church and State in Greece and Rome. The city-state was both. One's duty to the gods and one's affec- tion for one's own kindred could best find expression in serving the State. In Sparta the city took boys away from the home at seven years of age, and henceforth they lived together in bands, training to be soldiers and statesmen. Each city naturally was a distinct economic unit, with an agora or market-place where the peasants and merchants sold their produce and wares. There was trade between different cities, but one also felt quite free to plunder the ship of any one but a fellow-citizen. Even more than to-day the city was the center of art, literature, learning, and amusement, since there were no cheap ways of spreading these things to farm and home such as we possess in printing, photography, and phonographs. Partly for the same reason and partly because the climate encouraged meeting in the open air, the inhabitants — more especially the men — of the ancient city spent much of their time together out-of-doors, not merely engaging in athlet- ics, but listening to public speakers, poets, and philosophers, enjoying a dramatic performance, or admiring statues and other works of art, which were exposed to the air rather than enclosed in museums. Also the exterior rather than the interior of a temple was adorned with frieze and colonnade, for only the priests and individual petitioners entered the small cella where were the images of the gods. Festivals and other large religious gatherings, such as athletic games and tragedies or comedies, — all three of which were religious exercises, — were held in the stadium, open-air theater, or some other large open place. The streets of the town were, however, apt to be narrow, because the towns were limited 26 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE in size by their enclosing walls and because there was little traffic except that of pedestrians. In a prosperous city-state there were usually numerous slaves, who of course were not citizens, but whose toil enabled those who were citizens to devote more of their time to war, politics, and culture. Every citizen took an active personal share in the government unless he lost his rights through the rise to power of a tyrant or an oligarchy, or through conquest of his city by some neighboring town, which would either leave a garrison and governor of its own, or establish the rule of a few persons favorable to its sway. The ancients seldom practiced representation in govern- ment; the citizen was supposed to vote and fight in person, and to plead his own case in court. But it was evidently impracticable for the inhabitants of one town to attend popular assemblies and law courts and religious festivals in another town many miles away. Therefore, either each city had to be left some government of its own, or, if its inhab- itants were to be admitted to real citizenship in another town, they must be transplanted thither and their old walls and city destroyed. Syracuse often did just this to the other Greek cities of Sicily. Rome itself was a city-state, and, although more liberal than the Greeks in bestowing its citizenship on others, its Municioaii- ^^^^ ^^ Italy was essentially a league of cities, ties in the Moreover, Alexander the Great and his suc- "^^"^^ cessors had founded scores of such cities through- out the eastern end of the Mediterranean world. Rome, through her colonies and municipalities, now spread the system in the West. Of course the cities now lost their precious privilege of fighting with one another, and the inhabitants were no longer so closely related. But many of the features of the city-state continued, and the town was "the fundamental local unit throughout the Roman Empire. The municipality was now almost always organized with an aristocratic government, with duumvirs, who corresponded to the Roman consuls and decurions or curiales (members of the curia), who resembled the Roman senators. But these THE ROMAN EMPIRE 27 rich men gave freely of their wealth and showed much civic pride in adorning their native city with hands®me buildings, or undertaking the expense of public works like aqueducts, or endowing charitable foundations, or pro- viding games and amusements. They gave to the city where modern philanthropists give to universities and for- eign missions. While the city-state organization thus lasted into the Roman Empire and continued for some time to display a healthy life, the superimposition of the Roman Superimpo- imperial system and law upon the Mediterranean fmperial world and western Europe was a change of the government greatest consequence. It is true that the Roman emperors borrowed many of their methods of government from the monarchs whom they conquered and whose lands they incorporated into the Empire, and that the Roman law, before it attained to its final perfection, added to the orig- inal ''civil law" (i.e., law of the citizens, or of the city) of the Romans themselves the best of the laws of the Mediter- ranean world. But the Romans knew how to combine into a smoothly working system these odds and ends which they had drawn from diverse sources. So they gave to the peo- ples over whom they ruled the advantage of one united government and of a single, harmonious body of law. This meant, on the whole, peace and justice for millions of human beings for hundreds of years. To reach this goal, however, a terrible price had to be paid. Rome had won the supremacy in Italy and had then annexed most of the Mediterranean Basin under the lead of her senate of three hundred members, from whose fam- ilies most of the annual magistrates and generals were elected and into whose ranks these officials usually went at the expiration of their term of office. The Roman people were normally docile and deferential, trained in strict obedi- ence to their fathers and superiors, and accustomed to the military discipline of the army in which they all served. When Rome no longer had to struggle for existence and the world lay open before her to be conquered and despoiled, 28 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE the ruling class, who had hitherto been distinguished for their ability, integrity, and devotion to the State, could not resist the temptation, but now devoted themselves to battening upon the poor Italians and other conquered peo- ples, and became corrupt and inefficient. The rank and file of the citizens were dissatisfied with their small share of the plunder, but could see no better way to increase it than by forwarding the ambition of some city official who would give them amusing shows and cheap food, or by serving under some military leader who would let them sack cities and gorge themselves with loot, and then, when their fighting days were over, settle them somewhere in a colony where each would be provided with a farm of his own. This delec- table devastation could not go on forever, however, espe- cially since the ruling class became so inordinately ambi- tious and avaricious that they were not content to divide things decently with one another. The result was civil war, revolts of Italians, revolts of provincials, assassinations, massacres, until finally the exhausted combatants gladly welcomed the strong rule of one man and until at last that one man came to see that it was bad policy to kill the geese that laid the golden eggs. This consummation was practically completed under Augustus Caesar, 31 B.C.-14 A.D., whose rule marks the transition from Republic to Empire. He pretended to share his power with the senate, but was commander-in-chief {imperator) of the entire army, appointed the governors of half the provinces, and had vast private estates scattered all over the Empire and bringing him in a princely income. These private possessions of his included all Egypt, whose fertile soil alone had once sufficed to support the pomp of Pharaohs and of Ptolemies and to pay the cost of huge temples and pyramids. In the city of Rome he was protector of the common people and was constantly being elected to this or that office. The successors of Augustus kept increas- ing their own authority and lessening that of the senate until after about a hundred years the imperator had become indeed an emperor. THE ROMAN EMPIRE 29 But whenever an emperor died, there was liable to be a struggle for the throne between rival candidates, and in settling such disputes the army was apt to prove ^^^ ^^^ the decisive factor. The soldiers expected dona- tions, if not a steady increase in pay, from each new incum- bent. This was especially true of the praetorian cohorts or imperial bodyguard at Rome; but the legions from the distant frontier provinces sometimes took a hand too and supported the claims of their ambitious commanders. Nor- mally, however, the legions were far away on the frontier or in camps in provinces which were as yet not thoroughly subdued. But those provinces which had ceased to rebel against Roman rule and which had adopted its civilization were left almost entirely free from the presence of troops, unless the local cities kept a few guards of their own as police against brigands in the mountains or pirates along the coast. Thus, in Gaul troops were to be found only near the Rhine frontier, and even in Britain the legions were not stationed in the southeast, but off in the mountains of Wales and northwestern England where they formed a ring of camps protecting the peaceful province. An army of only about four hundred thousand soldiers served to assure peace to the entire Empire. They served for twenty or twenty-five years, at the expiration of which term they received the Roman citizenship if they did not possess it already, and allotments of lands on which to pass their declining years in ease. Usually enough volunteers enlisted every year to keep the ranks filled. The best emperor was one who traveled about his Empire a great deal, strengthening the frontiers or making wise alliances with the peoples outside the Empire, hearing the complaints of his subjects against their governors and tax collectors, and noting all opportunities for improving the government and civilization. We have seen that each city-state had a religion of its own which was directed by the town government. In the Oriental despotisms, such as Egypt, it had been Worship of customary to regard the ruler as divine. It was ^^^ emperor therefore natural that the Empire should have a state 30 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE religion of its own, and that this should take the form of worshiping the emperor, who seemed to symboHze and to embody the great Roman power. This was the one form of worship that bound all the peoples and races of the vast Empire together, whatever might be their own local gods and religious customs. The government did not much care what other rites and doctrines the people might practice and believe, so long as they showed their loyalty by joining in the imperial cult, and did not engage in secret assemblies where rebellion might be plotted or crime perpetrated. The Roman law has survived the Roman Empire, and the laws of many European countries are still to-day based in large measure upon its definitions, principles, Roman law ° r t i , • i • , V , and ways of legal thmkmg, or have even retamed many of its particular provisions. It is therefore essential for us to note its leading characteristics. First, it was adapted to the needs of a large empire and highly civilized society, where property relations and busi-— ness life, if not quite so complex in organization or advanced in economic development as at the present day, were yet probably more like modern conditions than in any previous age, and certainly more so than during the Middle Ages. Second, it was a scientific system consistently and care- fully worked out in its every detail by generation after gen- eration of capable jurists. These men, by their skillful inter- pretation of the old written law of the Twelve Tables pub- lished in 451-449 B.C., had enabled the Romans still to con- duct their affairs under that primitive code long after their life had greatly altered from that of the early period and their ideas of justice had become more enlightened. Then, through the edicts of successive city praetors and provincial governors, a new body of law, better suited to the require- ments of a great city and of the Mediterranean world, had been built up. Finally, through law schools, through the decisions of imperial jurists, and through the legal literature, which reached its height about 200 a.d. in the writings of Ulpian and Papinian, and which is marked by acuteness in reasoning, clearness in statement, and fairness in judgment, THE ROMAN EMPIRE 31 the Roman law became both technically and practically the greatest legal system that the world had known. Third, equity and humanity were guiding ideals of the Roman law, and for their sake it gradually rejected old cus- toms, forms, and precedents. The Roman jurist was not contented with logical reasoning if it led to an unfair deci- sion. In such a case he went back and reexamined his premises. He was not satisfied to apply an old law or judi- cial decision in its original meaning if the social and eco- nomic conditions to which it would have to be applied had altered since. In such a case he would ask himself, what would the maker of this law or the judge who rendered this decision have said had he lived under present conditions? And he would proceed to interpret the statute or precedent accordingly. The jurists had learned from the philosophers the conception of a single universe, which, if not itself a living whole and animated by reason, at least was subject to one law, the law of nature. Aristotle had spoken of "natural justice"; the Stoics taught man to order his life after nature and reason, to try to put himself into harmony with the universe of which he was a part, to serve, not merely the city in which he lived, but mankind at large. Humanity thus became an ideal. Even the slave was a part of nature as much as his master, and was a man like him. The Roman Empire, breaking down the barriers between city-states and between races, giving peace within its borders, forbidding such practices as piracy upon the inhabitants of another city than one's own, and ultimately in 212 a.d. making citi- zens of all freemen in the Empire, helped on this ideal of world-citizenship and the brotherhood of man. The law- yers, however, would usually resort to the ideal principles of natural law only when there was no ordinary law in exist- ence upon the case in question ; and they did not refuse to recognize slavery as legal, although they did not think it sanctioned by the law of nature. But as the Empire wore on, slaves were more humanely treated. Women also secured a much more favorable position before the law. The old ar- bitrary power of the head of the family over its members 32 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE was greatly reduced; and on the other hand, youth was protected by the law from losses and injuries sustained through its natural heedlessness and inexperience. The Romans, however, seem to have had no qualms about sub- jecting convicted criminals to cruel punishments, and tor- ture was not unknown in extracting evidence, especially from slaves. Next to their reputation as lawgivers the Romans are most justly famed as builders. Wherever they ruled we still r, . find to-day massive remains of their activity in Remains _ -' ^ ■' of Roman this respect. They seem to have delighted to '"^ show the majesty of their power and their faith in its permanence by extremely solid structures of the most durable materials, built with a proud disregard of expense and of nature. They were not as artistic as the Greeks, but were abler builders and engineers. Their roads, though only a dozen feet or so in width, had deep foundations and cov- ered thousands of miles. They went straight on regardless of hill and valley without swerving to right or left, and were so carefully and solidly constructed that they continued to serve commerce in the Middle Ages and can still be traced in many places to-day. Their magnificent triumphal arches, though covered with sculpture and inscription, were large enough to serve as medieval fortresses. Their vast public baths, which also served as social clubs and lecture halls, and their spacious basilicas, a sort of combination of a modern court-house and stock exchange, showed structural skill in their vast vaults of masonry and decorative genius in column and mosaic. The aqueducts which brought the water for city use were huge stone channels often borne on successions of arches varying in height according to the lay of the land ; and they spanned rivers by bridges made of a similar succession of round stone arches supported on great piers. Apparently every town of size had its arena or amphitheater, a great oval surrounded by tiers of stone seats supported beneath and behind by successive arches through which tunneled a perfect labyrinth of exits and entrances, while the external circumference consisted of two THE ROMAN EMPIRE 33 or more stories made up of rows of arches and ornamented with pilasters and columns. Here from eight thousand to fifty thousand persons could look on at the combats of wild beasts and gladiators. Such huge structures can still be seen to-day, not only in cities of Italy, France, and Ger- many, but amid desert surroundings in North Africa. Temples in the rectangular Greek style surrounded by col- onnades, or round in ground plan and covered by a dome; theaters with a stage wall and facade three hundred and thirty-eight feet long and one hundred and twenty-one feet high, one of which still stands to-day in the little town of Orange in southern France; forums full of the bases of pillars and statues long since fallen; town gates, partly fortified and partly ornamental ; and towers, either for for- tifications or for signaling purposes, are other specimens of the more frequent and imposing of Roman public re- mains, not to mention the ruins of once sumptuous private villas. For the economic life of the Roman Empire our records and remains are much scantier than for its military history, its laws, or its architecture. Men of the govern- Economic ing and intellectual classes, the nobles and the conditions writers of Rome, considered money-making a vulgar pur- suit ; and while all of them were ready enough to follow it if they had to or if large profits were in sight, they did not like to write and talk about it. It is also true that their economic life was simple and undeveloped compared with that of our age; that commerce, industry, advertising, and credit were not organized on so vast a scale, and consequently did not exert so great an influence on all other sides of man's exist- ence; while other matters, such as the belief in demons, in supernatural forces, in souls of inanimate objects, in magic powers of animals and plants, in divination and witchcraft, which to-day have much less effect upon human conduct, at that time controlled men potently. But economic forces also affected their fate more than they realized, and hence deserve our attention. The coming into existence of the Roman Empire made 34 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE commerce freer and easier than before between the various countries composing it. Trade was facihtated by the fine roads and the widespread prevalence of peace. Yet, aside from the imperial post reserved exclu- sively for military and government purposes, the Romans had neither a letter nor parcels post, and neither transpor- tation nor express companies of any considerable size. We know little of ancient merchant vessels except that they were usually small and not especially seaworthy. Despite all this, there was a good deal of trade with distant India, and even some interchange of goods with China; and the balance of trade seems to have been against the Empire, which received from the East such costly wares as silks, spices, medicinal herbs, and gems. Wild beasts for the arena came from central Africa, while Belgic Gaul was already known for its draught-horses. The table of the rich epicure at Rome often included dishes drawn from distant points of the Empire, such as oysters from Britain, fish from the Black Sea, game from Asia Minor and the ^gean Archi- pelago, hams from Gaul, fruit from North Africa, dates from Egypt, and nuts from Spain. Staple articles of trade all over the Empire were grain, timber, metals, skins, leather, wool, cattle, slaves, purple dye, wines, and olive oil. The products of the vine and olive tree played a great part in Mediterranean life. The first squeeze of the olive press gave oil fit for food, the second for ointment, the third for illumi- nation, and what was left could be burned as fuel. In the early fourth century we have listed in the city of Rome twenty-three hundred places where olive oil was sold as against only two hundred and fifty-four bakeries. Within the Empire the merchant usually accompanied his goods by land or sea and sold them himself in some distant port or inland town. One might, however, buy a share in a ship or other com- mercial venture; and there were partnerships and business Capital corporations, which were perhaps more often and interest formed for purposes of banking or of taking over from the State the contract of collecting the taxes in this or THE ROMAN EMPIRE 35 that province. Bookkeeping was a universal Roman prac- tice, and we hear of large transactions made on credit. It is _\^ certain that many large fortunes were amassed, and that capital was abundant. There was, however, a prejudice against the professional money-lender; and the Emperor Augustus degraded a noble from the equestrian rank, be- cause he had borrowed money at a low rate of interest and then loaned it out again at a higher rate. A greater proportion of the trade was in raw products and less in manufactured articles than to-day. Millions of bushels of wheat were brought each year from Egypt and North Africa to supply the populace of Rome; marble columns and other building materials were transported for public works. But there were no great man- ufacturing establishments, such as exist to-day, where hun- dreds of machines turned out vast quantities of copies of the same article for diffusion over the face of the earth. Articles were hand-made by individual workmen, who usually sold what they made each from his own tiny workshop, and whose entire set of utensils and stock in trade could usually be packed up in two or three big earthenware jars. Local retail merchants also had small shops; there was nothing resembling the modern department store. Articles were generally bargained for, not sold at a fixed price. In a city j of any size each trade had its own street or quarter. Some- times those engaged in the same trade banded together in a loose social and religious union; but the imperial govern- ment at first was quite unfavorable to such societies, and the Emperor Trajan even forbade one of his provincial governors to allow a city in Bithynia to organize a fire com- pany for fear that it might prove a hotbed of sedition. A rich man might have an entire household of slaves working at the same trade, but still their labor was manual and so quite different from the modern factory system. A few mil- itary engines and building appliances seem to have been about the only machinery known to the Romans. It is some- times said that the Romans possessed industrial processes which are lost to the world to-day. If this be true, it is 36 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE precisely because their procedure in any trade was largely by rule of thumb and represented a separate discovery, hit upon perhaps by chance, instead of by a rational use of applied science. Many workmen mixed religious ritual or magical ceremony and incantations with their material ingredients and actual manual and mechanical operations without realizing that the article thus made was entirely the result of the latter factors and not at all of the former. If a doubt sometimes entered their minds, they probably thought it safer to continue making the thing in the way it had always been made. Some places were noted for the manufacture of some one article, as Athens had been for its vases before the time of the Empire, and as Gaul became for its woolens and linens during the Empire. In such cases these products would be exported to other localities. But since under the Empire workmen could move about without danger and go wherever there was a demand for their serv- ices, the general rule was that most of the articles used by the inhabitants of a town were made in that town. Historians disagree widely in their estimates of the popu- lation of the Empire — a matter difficult to determine. Rome was certainly a more populous city than Population , . , , ^ i to-day, as its vast extent and many rumous quarters indicate, and there were at least half a dozen other cities each with a population of three hundred thousand or over. But of course lands like Gaul and Britain had a much smaller population than they support now, while Greece and Italy had become depopulated to a considerable extent by the time of the Empire. On the other hand. North Africa was more populous than it has been since. The East was undoubtedly the most thickly settled part of the Empire. In large cities like Rome and Carthage there were buildings many stories high, and the narrow streets were crowded by the passing throng. Leaving city for country, and commerce and industry Land foi" agriculture, we find the leading feature of system ^j^g \^^^ system to be the large domain of the great landowner, cultivated by small tenants and by slaves. THE ROMAN EMPIRE 37 These slaves were sometimes large gangs owned by the land- owner; sometimes smaller groups or individuals belonging to the more prosperous tenants. If the great landowner had too much land to attend to himself, he would lease it out in large tracts to contractors {conductor es), who would sublet these to tenants or cultivate them by slave labor. Seldom or never did the person who actually tilled the soil own it. The emperor was the largest landowner of all. As war waned and conquest ceased, it became more difficult to get slaves, while tenants made their landlords considerable trouble by roving about and not remaining permanently in one place. The tenant was, however, rather dependent upon his land- lord, who usually had to provide him with ploughs, domestic animals, and other equipment at the commencement of his tenancy. The Romans spread new plants, trees, breeds of domestic animals, and perhaps better methods of cultiva- tion into the lesser developed parts of the Empire, such as Britain. It is perhaps worth while to list some of the typical occu- pations in the Roman Empire. Politicians and soldiers, lawyers and financiers, priests and diviners, ^ . . Occupations magicians and astronomers, orators and gram- marians, poets and philosophers, mathematicians and med- ical men, musicians and athletes, merchants and business agents, sculptors and painters, jewelers and goldsmiths, druggists and dealers in aromatics and pigments and un- guents, dyers and fullers, tanners and potters, workers with fire and metals, cooks and tavern-keepers, fishermen and fowlers and hunters, farmers and gardeners, shepherds and grooms, cowherds and swineherds, pilots and sailors, divers and water-carriers, embalmers and undertakers and guards of sepulchers, weavers and workers in wool, makers of tunics and manufacturers of linen, miners, turners, shoemakers, millers, bakers, flower-sellers, and wine merchants, — such were the workers in the Roman Empire. Social life in the Empire has already been touched upon in several connections. It remains to point out that eating, drinking, and love-making absorbed man more than to-day 38 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE for fewer artificial amusements and intellectual diversions ^ . , ,., were available to him then. "Eat, drink, and Social life , . , . , , be merry, tor to-morrow we die, summed up both precisely and completely the life of many an ancient. "Clothes," however, were also a very important matter to many, and the wearing of gems and purple linen, of chaplets and garlands, and the anointing of one's self with oil, pig- ments, aromatics, and unguents, seem to have provided a great source of satisfaction. As for health, medical practice was vastly inferior to that of our time, and was full of magic, and as a result disease was more rife. But outdoor life and the heartless practice of exposing unpromising infants per- haps exerted a counteracting influence in this respect. Society was, however, exceedingly susceptible to the ravages of plagues and pestilences. In estimating both ancient and medieval callousness to cruel customs like torture and gladiatorial combats we must take somewhat into account the fact that men were then more accustomed to physical pain, since they lacked many modern preventives, such as dentistry and anaesthetics. Nowhere can a better notion of the society of the Roman Empire be obtained than from the pages of Plutarch, who Plutarch's wrotc his famous Lives of Illustrious Men and his classical °^ so-callcd Moral Essays about lOO a.d. The latter civilization is really a large collection of essays on the most miscellaneous topics, giving us many glimpses of ancient science, religion, superstition, manners, and morals. The same is true of the biographies, where he not only sets before us in pairs for comparison the great names in Greek and Roman history, and tells many facts for which we have no other sources, but also recounts anecdotes, quotes from his favorite authors, often pauses to moralize and to supply us with precious detail concerning the civilization and customs of his own day as well as of the time of the man whose character and career he is unfolding. Plutarch himself was a cultured and humane man, who often could not approve of the deeds of the great men of the past, and who shows us the higher standards of morality and altruism that were THE ROMAN EMPIRE 39 coming to prevail in the peaceful Empire, where, too, how- ever, many vices and superstitions of antiquity were still perpetuated. EXERCISES AND READINGS Geography of the Roman Empire. From maps of the Roman Empire and of modern Europe determine: — 1. What modern European states would lie entirely within the boun- dary of the Roman Empire at its greatest extent? 2. Which would lie entirely outside those boundaries? 3. Which would overlap those boundaries? 4. What Roman province included modern Roumania? 5. Compare the boundaries of ancient Gaul and modern France. 6. Compare the extent and location of Germany in Roman times with that of the German Empire to-day. 7. What are the present names of the districts in North Africa which were once ruled by Rome, and who rules each of them to-day? Influence of Greece on Rome. A. Holm, History of Greece (English translation, London, 1902), vol. IV, chap. XXIV, pp. 514-24. Greek Culture under the Romans. J. P. Mahafify, Survey of Greek Civilization (New York, 1899), chap. x. Municipal Life in the Empire. S. Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (London, 1905), book II, chap. 11, pp. 196-250. The Roman Provinces. E. S. Bouchier, Life and Letters in Roman Africa (Oxford, 1913), pp.l-2l. F. J. Haverfield, Roman Britain, in Cambridge Medieval History (Cam- bridge, 191 1), vol. I, pp. 367-77. E. S. Bouchier, Syria as a Roman Province (Oxford, 1916), any chapter. Roman Law. W. A. Hunter, Introduction to Roman Law (London, 1900), pp. 1-15. A good brief history of the Roman Empire in one volume is H. S. Jones, The Roman Empire (New York, 1908). For economic conditions in the Empire see W. S. Davis, The Influence of Wealth in Imperial Rome (New York, 1910). The classic on the city-state is N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (English translation, Boston, 1901). See also W. W. Fowler, The City State (London, 1904). Source Reading. Any one of Juvenal's Satires or of Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Ccesars will, like Plutarch's Lives and Morals, be found to throw much light on life and thought in the Roman Empire. Both may be had in English translations. CHAPTER III THE BARBARIAN WORLD OUTSIDE THE EMPIRE One thinks of the Roman Empire as including the whole ancient civilized world, except distant China and India. .... r But it should be remembered that, if the Romans umits of 1 1 iM the Roman had Spread Greek culture to Western lands like Empire q^^j ^^^ Britain, they had lost a large part of the empire of Alexander the Great, and that their frontier went no farther east than the Euphrates River and the Arabian Desert. They were unable to conquer and hold the Tigris- Euphrates Valley, once the most civilized and influ- ential region on earth. Here they were successfully opposed, first, by the Parthian, and then, after 227 A.D., by the Per- sian Kingdom. Of the vast continent of Africa they occu- pied only the Nile Valley and the Mediterranean coast. The greater part of the area and many of the nations of modern Europe lie outside the Roman boundary. It did not include Russia, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Ireland; it included only a little of Scotland, the Netherlands, and the German Empire; and not all of Austria-Hungary. In these lands, as well as in the East, lived peoples whom Rome had failed to subdue, and who were destined some day to subdue her. By 117 A.D. she had reached the limit of her conquests; the question then became how long would she hold what she had? In distant Britain she had to build walls across the island to keep out the Picts and other barbarians of the northern highlands, while Celtic Ireland was left uncon- quered under the rule of the chiefs of many clans. Around the Baltic Sea and to the east of it dwelt Scandinavian and Finnish and Slavic tribes of whom the Romans knew next to nothing, and who were not to appear in history for some time to come. Nearer to the Roman frontier were the "German barbarians," extending from the North to the Black Sea. They were to deal the death-blow to ancient Rome. THE BARBARIAN WORLD 41 Caesar speaks briefly of the character and customs of these German barbarians in his account of his conquest of Gaul, but the chief, and indeed almost the sole, c^^^^.^ ^r description of them which has come down to us the early from Roman times is the brief Germania of ^'"'"^"^ Tacitus, written in 98 a.d. Scholars have fought almost tooth and nail over the interpretation of a sentence or the wording of a phrase in this precious text. Every student of the Middle Ages should read for himself the dozen of its pages that deal with the traits and institutions of the Ger- mans as a whole, and get a first-hand knowledge of this original source which forms the basis of all modern accounts of the early Germans. Although Tacitus was one of the ablest of Roman historians, one caution must be observed in reading him. In his other historical writings we find him bitter against many persons and things in Roman society and politics; this bias and discontent may make him too ready to see good in the Germans and their customs. When, for instance, he says that among the Germans freedmen are of slight account, except in those tribes where the king elevates them above freemen and even nobles, he is prob- ably sneering at the imperial freedmen of Rome — who often held high governmental positions under the emperor — rather than accurately depicting German conditions. When he describes German funerals as exceedingly simple, he probably has it in mind to reprove Roman pomp and luxury, and ignores the elaborate games and feasting that often accompanied the funeral of a German chieftain. Aside from Csesar and Tacitus, our sources of information about the early Germans may be roughly summarized as follows: (i) primitive utensils, valuables, and other human remains, which are found most richly in excavations made in Scandinavia; (2) brief and usually unsatisfactory inci- dental allusions to the Germans in the works of Greek and Roman geographers, travelers, romancers, and historians, of whom the last simply recount the wars of Rome against the barbarians and tell little of the Germans themselves; (3) laws issued in Latin, after the break-up of the Roman 42 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Empire, by the German tribes who formed states in the West; (4) early German literature, such as the poem Beo- wulf, the mythological Eddas of Iceland, the skaldic poetry of Norway, the sagas or prose histories, and the Nibehmgen- lied. Unfortunately most of this literature was not written down until the twelfth century, and so must be used with caution as a source for the language, religion, and customs of the barbarian Germans of Roman times. The laws, too, though written down much sooner after the fall of Rome, are apt to show Teutonic customs considerably altered by lapse of time, Christian influence, contact with Roman civilization, and the altered circumstances under which the Germans were by then living. To sum up, our scanty sources about the early Germans are spread out thin over a period of some three thousand years, beginning with archaeological finds dating fifteen hundred years or so before Christ, and ending with poems and stories not set down in writing until nearly twelve hundred years after Christ. In the middle of this long dark road the little beacon of Tacitus sends forth a welcome light. The Germans belonged to the northern European race and to the Aryan or Indo-European linguistic group. Their The Ger- earliest home was, perhaps, the region about the iTome a^nd^ wcst end of the Baltic Sea, where from about expansion i^qq to 500 B.C. archseological evidence shows them to have been in the bronze age of civilization. Toward the close of this period they appear to have expanded south- east to the Vistula River and the Carpathian Mountains. They next came under the uplifting influence of the higher, iron-age type of civilization characteristic of the Celts to the southwest. Meanwhile the Germans were also advanc- ing in this southwestern direction, until they reached the Rhine and Main Rivers. A century before Christ two peo- ples called the " Cimbri " and "Teutones" entered Gaul and soon threatened Italy; but were finally annihilated by Roman armies, the Teutones in southern Gaul just as they were preparing to cross the Alps, and the Cimbri the follow- ing year just after they had crossed into northern Italy. By THE BARBARIAN WORLD 43 Caesar's time the Germans were again pressing into Gaul. He checked their progress and brought the territory from the Pyrenees to the Rhine under Roman rule. Through the time of the Empire the Rhine and Danube Rivers, roughly speaking, continued to be the frontier between Romans and Germans. Csesar was impressed with the dififerences between the Gauls and the Germans, and Tacitus regarded the Germans as quite distinct from all other peoples and prob- Personal ably an unmixed, indigenous race. His reason, appearance however, — that no one would consent to live in such wild forests and filthy swamps and so cold a climate as theirs, unless he had been born there and knew no other clime, — scarcely recommends itself to the serious consideration of the modern student of ethnology. But their large, tall bodies, fierce, blue eyes, and reddish hair all marked them off from the shorter and darker men of Mediterranean race. Skeletons — some of them seven feet long — have been found to bear out his assertion of their height, but they sometimes dyed their hair red, a fashion which came to be copied in Rome. Roman ladies imported a kind of soap from Germany for this purpose ; the Emperor Caligula wore a German wig, dyed the hair of Gallic prisoners in his triumphal procession to make them look like Germans, and had a bodyguard of Germans who were personally devoted to him, and who, when they heard of his assassination, in a fit of grief and rage tried to avenge his death by killing every one in sight. Warfare, plundering, and hunting were the favorite occu- pations; loafing, carousing, and gambling were the chief diversions of the German freeman, who left the Mode care of house, fields, and cattle to the women, old °^ ^^^^ men, and others who could not fight, or to his slaves, if he was fortunate enough to own some. The hut was a rude affair of rough timber more or less plastered with mud. In winter the Germans sometimes tried to keep warm in caves dug underground. Clothing was simple and made largely of skins of animals, which left much of the body uncovered. Caesar says that they bathed in the rivers even in the depth 44 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE of winter; but Tacitus makes them take warm baths in cold weather and sleep late in the morning. As Caesar knew them, they lived mainly on milk, cheese, and flesh, and raised little grain. Swine and horses, as well as cattle, were used for food. Poultry and bees were kept, and a fermented drink called "mead" was made from the honey. It is a moot point whether they had private or communal landownership. Caesar and Tacitus imply that the community controlled the distribution of land ; and it seems likely that the plots held by different individuals were ploughed and tilled together, while forest, swamp, and pasture land were not subdivided, but used by all in common. In the time of Tacitus their cul- tivation was not at all intensive and they had plenty of spare land. They had no cities and little that could be called commerce or industry. Trade was mere barter except as merchants from the Roman Empire introduced coins. From the barbarians these traders got amber, furs, goose feathers, and slaves. Capital and interest were unknown to the Ger- mans. Those who lived along the seacoast had rude boats, but considerable nautical skill and a passionate love for sea voyages. They had almost no art, but were fond of orna- ments of gold, and we can perhaps trace the germ of medie- val heraldry and coats of arms in the remark of Tacitus that "their shields are distinguished by very carefully selected colors." He also mentions their "ancient songs," but they seem to have had no written literature except the brief Riinic inscriptions which are occasionally found, written in letters copied from those of Greece and Rome. From the accounts of Caesar and Tacitus one might judge that these barbarians were a thoughtful people, capable of Mental reflection and argument. Thus, Caesar says that traits they offer many reasons for their custom of re- distributing the land annually among the clans and kinship groups, which reasons he proceeds to list. He also gives the reasons why they lay waste the land about them in all direc- tions. Tacitus represents them as thinking it inconsistent with the sublimity of celestial beings to confine the gods within walls or to liken them to the human face and form. THE BARBARIAN WORLD 45 They are said to discuss important private matters and affairs of state at their drunken feasts, "because they think that at no other time is the mind more open to fair judg- ment or more Inflamed to mighty deeds. . . . On the day following the matter is reconsidered and a particular advan- tage is secured on each occasion. They take counsel when they are unable to practice deception; they decide when they cannot be misled." ^ One suspects, however, that Caesar and Tacitus have put these reasons into the mouths of the Germans, and in any case they are incorrect explana- tions of the customs in question. From the later literature of the Germans themselves it has been inferred that they were shrewd and somewhat skeptical, and of a philosophical, moralizing, and epigrammatic turn of mind. We know little of the religious beliefs and practices of the Germans before their conversion to Christianity. Caesar says that they worship only those gods whom they can see; namely, such forces In nature as the sun, moon, and fire. Tacitus in one passage tells of their carrying into battle "images and standards taken from their sacred groves"; elsewhere he states that they make no images of their gods, whom they worship not in temples made by hands but In sacred groves. He applies the Roman names Mercury, Hercules, and Mars to the German gods Woden, Thor, and Tiu, whom they faintly suggest. He tells us that the Germans sometimes practiced human sacrifice, and that they were addicted to many forms of divination, by bits of wood, by sacred horses, and by birds. From other sources we learn that they burned their dead and believed in a future life. They worshiped their ancestors, and indi- cations of fetish worship are seen in their sacred trees, whence are derived our Maypoles and Christmas trees. Their early religion was also marked by much magic ritual. Woden was their teacher in mystic writing, Incantations, and the performance of marvels. For legends of their gods and heroes somewhat similar to Greek mythology, we have ^ There is a similar passage in the Greek historian Herodotus about the Persians. 46 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE to turn to the Icelandic Eddas and German Nibelungenlied, which date in their present extant form from the twelfth century. Although the women had to do manual labor in the fields as well as in the home, their social position was fairly high Position for an uncivilized people. Tacitus says that the of woman gjj.jg -^ygj-e of the same vigor and stature as the young men, which suggests that they were neither over- worked nor starved. They dressed with arms and part of the breasts bare without losing the respect of the men. Marriages were not contracted at so early an age as is com- mon among Southern and Oriental peoples, and monogamy prevailed. "Almost alone among barbarian peoples," writes Tacitus, "they are content with one wife each, ex- cept those few who, because of their high rank rather than out of lust, make several marriages. For no one there laughs at vice, nor is corrupting and being corrupted spoken of as the way of the world." In some tribes widows were forbid- den to remarry, and their voluntary death met with the ap- proval of tribal opinion. The women were sometimes at hand to encourage the warriors in battle, and the Germans feared captivity "far more intensely on account of their women than for themselves." Certain women were looked upon with awe as prophetesses. Mothers nursed their own children, who grew up naked and sturdy, ignorant alike of the allurements of Roman amphitheaters and modern automobiles. The father had the legal right to reject the newborn babe and leave it to die of exposure, a practice which was all too frequent among the cultured Greeks and Romans, but after he had once taken it to his bosom he could not kill it. Tacitus implies that the children were seldom exposed. When a son married or was allowed by the father to receive his arms from any other man in the popular assembly, and when a daughter married, the paternal authority over them ceased. The husband's power over the wife was not quite so great as that of the father over the children. In early days the wife was either stolen from another tribe or peacefully THE BARBARIAN WORLD 47 purchased from her kindred, if two persons within the same tribe married. In this latter case the wife's kinsmen did not entirely abandon their interest in her welfare, and could in some instances offer her legal protection. As the last sentence suggests, in addition to the family the Germans had another larger social group, the Sib, or association of kinsmen. This institution was The kin- analogous to the gens of the Greeks and Romans, ^^'p 2''°"p Possibly the Sib was older than the family, a relic of the time when a wandering life was led and before settlement on the land and the founding of separate households and homes took place. Members of the Sib fought side by side in battle, and stood by each other in lawsuits, providing security or compurgators, and receiving the Wergeld or damages for a slain member.^ The Sib either itself acted as guardian of widows and orphans or appointed some individual so to act. Both nobles and slaves were to be found among the early Germans. Some of the privileges and prerogatives of the nobility will be brought out later in the course Nobility of this chapter. The slave class was made up of ^"*^ slavery captives in war, delinquent debtors, men who had gambled away their freedom or sold themselves into servitude to get something to eat and wear, the children of slaves, and slaves purchased from other tribes. The father of a family had the right to sell child or wife, if he were in dire need. By strict law the slave was a mere chattel; he could not contract a legal marriage and had no position before the law; his mas- ter was responsible for his acts and had the power of life and death over him. According to Tacitus, however, most of the servile population among the Germans had houses of their own, and paid their masters a portion of their produce, and were seldom beaten or punished; and so might better be called serfs than slaves. As war was the German's chief occupation, so the army was the oldest political organization and the Army and bearing of arms the sign and test of freedom and freedom of citizenship. Tacitus says that it is "not customary for * For compurgators or oath-helpers see page 51; for Wergeld see page 52. 48 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE any one to assume arms until the tribe has recognized his competency to use them." Some kinsman or chief equips the youth with his shield and spear in the presence of the whole army, or popular assembly, which amounts to the same thing. " Before this he was only a member of a house-' hold; hereafter he is a member of the tribe." This one sen- tence and this custom suggest a great deal. The son passes from the paternal authority at an early age to become a free warrior on an equality with his fellows. This Is very differ- ent from the custom of Chinese society, for instance, where the son even after marriage lives on under his father's roof, where old men and their ideas or lack thereof control life, and where duty to the family takes precedence of business obligations or patriotism. It is also very different from early Roman usage where the father retained his authority, re- gardless of whether his sons married or not ; and could pun- ish a son even after he had served as consul at the head of the army. It was the duty and privilege of every freeman to attend the tribal assembly in arms, and the warrior who had left Popular his shield behind him on the battlefield was not assembly permitted to enter. The influence of religion is manifest in the holding of the assembly — at the time either of the new or full moon — in an open place consecrated to the war god Tiu, where the hallowed ground was roped ofif and priests proclaimed silence and kept order. The freeman, however, was fond of asserting his independence by arriving late. Debate was regulated by age, rank, military prowess, eloquence, and power of persuasion. The mass of freemen present usually contented themselves with shouting their dissent in chorus or clashing their spears against their shields in unison as a token of approval. A council of chiefs discussed beforehand the matters to be submitted to the assembly. The assembly decided the question of peace and war, had criminal jurisdiction, chose the magistrates to act as judges in the localities, and was consulted on all other important matters. It seldom legislated In the modern sense of the word, because law among the early Germans was THE BARBARIAN WORLD 49 regarded as customary, sacred, eternal, and unchangeable. The object of government, they thought, was not to make new laws, but to maintain the good old customs. Neither was there any state taxation, because there was no coinage and few officials, and all government and warfare were attended to personally by the freemen without receiving pay. Tacitus says, however, that it was customary to make voluntary gifts of honor to the chiefs. Caesar states that the tribe chose a single leader only when about to engage in war; and some of the Teutonic peoples appear not to have had kings until they invaded the Roman Empire. Tacitus affirms that their kings are chosen for their ancestry; their gen- erals, for their valor; that the power of the former is limited, and that the latter lead more by example than command, only the priests venturing to inflict such penalties as death, flogging, or imprisonment. The first part of this statement probably refers to the custom of electing the king from among the members of some one noble family. The king was liable to be deposed by the assembly or violently slain by some offended warrior or ambitious rival. Besides the tribal army, the Germans had a smaller and more personal military organization, commonly known by its Latin name, comitatus, indicating a band of The comrades {comites). Caesar tells us that fre- <^o^^^(^^^s quently in an assembly a chief would propose a raid upon some neighboring tribe and ask for volunteers to join therein. It was easy to get them, because, as Tacitus says, "If their native state sinks into the lethargy of long peace and quiet, many of the noble youths voluntarily seek those tribes that are still carrying on war." Such young men would join the following of some distinguished chief and take an oath "to defend and protect him and give him all the glory of their brave deeds." To survive him in battle was a lasting infamy. He in return had to support them with the proceeds of plunder and war. In Beowulf the com- panions live in their lord's hall and his wife mends their clothes. The size and fighting ability of his comitatus 50 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE brought fame and influence to its leader both in his own and neighboring tribes. The followers did not regard their posi- tion as dependent in any humiliating or restrictive sense, but felt themselves the social equals of their leader. There were, nevertheless, in the time of Tacitus grades among them, "assigned by the judgment of their leader" and "great rivalry ... as to who shall rank first with the chief." But on the whole we see in the comitatus another illustra- tion of the importance of youth, social equality, and volun- tary organization among the early Germans. Although the Germans engaged sq much in war, they were not a lawless people. They had their ancient customs Early Ger- and Standards, which they tried to fix in their man law memories by alliterative or proverbial expres- sions. They had their folk-courts, local magistrates, and "law-speakers," but no police. A man's kindred were sup- posed to look after him and see that he kept the peace. The individuals concerned in a case and the community as a w^hole had to bring wrongdoers to court, and to enforce rights or execute sentences after these had been determined in court. The law was very strict, and less fair than the law of the Roman Empire. One had to suffer for his act, regard- less of whether his intention had been good or evil. Legal procedure consisted chiefly of set forms of words and ceremonies employed by the litigants themselves to Judicial decide the controversy. These forms must be procedure observed most scrupulously, and one was not permitted to repeat in order to rectify a mistake. A lawsuit normally opened by the plaintiff's going with witnesses to the house of the defendant and formally summoning him to appear in court. At the court the plaintiff, holding a staff in his hand, made his complaint in set terms, and the defend- ant had to answer by denying each charge fully and explic- itly or he would be regarded as admitting its truth. The court then straightway decided which of the two parties should be put to further proof. Their methods of proof were not the careful sifting of evidence, but by oath or by ordeal. The only sort of testimony that they desired was that of THE BARBARIAN WORLD 51 ceremonial witnesses to the effect that in the case in ques- tion the legal forms prescribed by custom, such as handing one a spear, glove, or sod, had been duly observed; or the sworn assertions of the friends and kinsmen of each party that they believed him to be a credible person. Both oath and ordeal were religious tests. In taking an oath one in- voked the gods and feared condign punishment from them if one perjured one's self. Sometimes one litigant was allowed to establish his side of the case by his solitary oath, but more often either the plaintiff or defendant was required to produce a certain number of oath-helpers to swear with him. Ordeals, as we know them later, had been considerably altered by the Christian Church from their original form of appeals to the judgment of heathen deities. The two liti- gants might draw lots to determine who was in the right, or they might engage in single combat with the idea that God would give victory to the right. Or the one who had made the less favorable impression upon the court by his pleading might have the burden of proof put upon him in the form of undergoing the ordeal of fire or of water. He might be thrown into holy water, which was supposed to reject any guilty person, so that if he floated on its surface he was condemned, while if he sank he was believed to be innocent. Or he might have to plunge his hand into boiling water, or carry a red-hot bar for three paces, or walk a short distance over hot ploughshares. The injured member was then bound up, and if after three days it was found to be healed, the decision was in his favor; if otherwise, he was pronounced guilty. Still another ordeal consisted in trying to swallow a large morsel of bread or cheese without its sticking in the throat. It has been said that there were no police to enforce this system of justice, but public opinion was behind it, and if any man refused to submit to it, he was liable ^ , 1111- 1 '1 Outlawry to be outlawed ; that is to say, he was put outside the peace of the tribe. No one in the tribe could protect or shelter him ; in fact, it was the duty of all the tribe to hunt him down ; he became a wanderer on the face of the earth, 52 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE and his property was divided between his king and his kin. Women could not be outlawed because they were not directly under the protection of the law in the first place, but under the care of their fathers, husbands, or kindred. Outlawry was also the penalty for those crimes considered the most heinous. Killing a man, however, was not then esteemed so serious an offense as now, and could usually be atoned for by pay- Wergeld ing the Sih of the dead man the amount of his and feud Wergeld, which varied in value as he was a noble, freeman, or freedman. If one killed a slave, one simply paid his master damages. This practice of compensation largely replaced the older custom of feud by which the Sih of the dead man tried to get open revenge upon the slayer or any other member of his kinship group. In general it may be affirmed that all free members of th-e tribe who were not still under paternal authority had equal German law rights before the law, except that nobles were personal protected by a larger Wergeld and that their oaths carried more weight in court. The Germans had no testa- mentary law because they made no wills. A man's property was inherited by his children or other relations according to rules fixed by custom. Their real-estate law was not at all complex because their agricultural life was as yet so simple. Of the law of partnership, sales, contracts, and other busi- ness relations they had still less knowledge. In short, their law was largely personal. Each tribe, of course, had its own customs or laws, which differed considerably from those of other peoples. It should be added, however, that while German law, taken as a whole, was incomplete, crude, and harsh, com- Germans pared to the fine humane system which had compared to grown up in the Roman world, it was, on the other hand, much like the law with which the early Roman farmers had been contented in their little settlement on the Tiber. Indeed, the Germans were not so unlike the people within the Empire as they at first sight seemed. The Greeks and Latins themselves had been pro- THE BARBARIAN WORLD 53 duced a thousand or more years before Christ by a fusion between the Mediterranean race and invaders of the north- ern European race speaking Indo-European languages, for the Latin, Greek, and German tongues all belong to the same group. The future was to show what the invasion of the Roman Empire by the Germans would produce. Already in 98 a.d. Tacitus saw in the Germans a greater menace to Rome than the Samnites, Carthaginians, Span- iards, or Gauls had been ; and he feared "German Germans liberty" more than the Parthian Kingdom. The witWnthe Emperor Marcus Aurelius (i 61-180 A.D.) had to Empire spend almost his entire reign away from Rome in a hard struggle against both the Parthians in the East and German tribes, the Marcomanni and Quadi, on the upper Danube. These latter, together with the Sarmatian lazyges, who were probably not Germans, had overrun the Roman prov- inces of Rhsetia, Noricum, and Pannonia, and had reached the Adriatic Sea. Marcus Aurelius at last managed to bring the territory as far as the Danube again under Roman con- trol, but in order to replenish the wasted population of Pannonia he settled there many thousands of the conquered barbarians. Their duty was to till the soil, which they were not allowed to leave, and to defend it against any further invasions that their kinsmen across the river might attempt. To such an extent did the successors of Marcus Aurelius allow or compel the barbarians to settle within the bounda- ries of the Empire that we are told that a century later "not a province was free from the presence of the barbarian settler." Of these many were Germans, who thus had already begun to fuse with the Romans. The ancient Greeks had planted colonies along the northern and eastern coasts of the Black Sea and had traded with the inland tribes, whom they called The Pontus Scythians, and whose country, the Pontus Steppe Steppe, lies open to inroads from western Asia. Neither Alexander the Great nor the Romans had included these regions in their empires. But while the Romans were occu- pied in keeping the Cimbri and Teutones out of Italy, 54 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Mithridates, a handsome giant of Persian descent and Greek education, a great athlete and linguist, an able orator and general, but withal a cruel Oriental despot, was pro- tecting the Greek cities of the Black Sea against the north- ern barbarians who threatened them, was building up an empire for himself about the Black Sea, and was spreading Greek civilization through it. In this respect, however, he could make only a beginning, since his empire included all sorts of races, languages, and religions, and peoples in every stage of civilization from tree-dwellers, pile-dwellers, and the pastoral stage up. In a single city of his realm as many as seventy dialects were spoken. His promising beginning was soon terminated by wars with Rome which resulted in his downfall. Rome annexed some of his possessions on the southern coast of the Black Sea, but let the rest go, and the Greek cities soon succumbed to barbarian pressure. These barbarians were now spoken of as Sarmatians rather than Scythians. About the beginning of the third century A.D. these Sarmatians were for the most part driven out by the Ger- man Goths, who migrated from their earlier home on the Baltic to the Black Sea. The middle of the third century was a period of civil strife and mis- government in the Roman Empire, which came near going to pieces as a result. The Goths took advantage of this state of affairs to cross the Danube and the Balkans, and to defeat and kill the Emperor Decius. They also ravaged the shores of the Black Sea with their fleets, completely devastated the Roman province of Bithynia, and, passing through the Dardanelles into the ^Egean Sea, wrought havoc and ruin along its coasts. Meanwhile, in the West the Franks had crossed the Rhine into Gaul and then into Spain, and other Germans had invaded Italy itself, while Moorish tribes made trouble in northwestern Africa. Finally the barbari- ans were defeated, but the emperors found it necessary to surround the city of Rome by walls once more, and to abandon Dacia, a large province on the north side of the lower Danube which had been added to the Empire at the THE BARBARIAN WORLD 55 beginning of the second century. The Goths thereupon spread into this abandoned province, and henceforth were found along the Danube as well as to the north of the Black Sea. They divided into two peoples, the East and West Goths, or Ostrogoths and Visigoths. In the fourth century A.D. we see signs of the conversion of the Goths to Christianity. Those in what we call the Crimea were represented by a bishop at the Ulfilas and Council of Nicaea in 325. The chief missionary gjon of the was Ulfilas (311-381), an Arian or unorthodox Goths Christian who worked among the West Goths in Dacia. His ancestors had been carried off by the Goths, and he himself was "in heart and by speech a Goth." He had his troubles, however, with the heathen king, Athanaric, and most of his converts moved with him into Roman territory. He is famous for his translation of the Bible into the Gothic vernacular, which gives us our earliest example of writing in a Germanic language. Three hundred years elapse before we have another specimen. The manuscripts of Ulfilas's Bible which have come down to us comprise a few chapters of the Old Testament and a large part of the Gospels and Epistles. The story goes that he refrained from translating such books as First and Second Kings and First and Second Samuel on the ground that the Goths were too fond of fight- ing already. Since the Goths as yet had neither books nor writing of their own, he had to invent an alphabet, using the Greek letters. We have spoken of the Pontus Steppe — in other words, the Russian plain to the north of the Black Sea — as lying open to inroads from western Asia. We must ^j^^ mount- now go on to describe the people who inhabited ed nomads of the basin of the Caspian and Aral Seas and the deserts of Turkestan. Here lived the mounted nomads of Altaian race. These Asiatics were of short stature, with small hands and feet, but strong bones, a comparatively long trunk, and a decided tendency to corpulence. Incessant horseback riding made their legs bowed and their gait waddling. Their faces were broad, especially their noses, 56 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE mouths, and chins; also their noses were flat, their ears were large, their eyes were oblique and slit like those of a China- man, and were dark and sunken. Their cheek-bones were -prominent, and what hair they had — for their beards were scanty — was coarse, stiff, and black. The nature of the country accounts in large measure for the nomadic life of these Asiatics and for their never Their eo- progressing to a higher stage of civilization. They graphical live to-day much the same life as two thousand environmen y^^^j-g ^^^^ jj^ ^^le Caspian-Aral Basin the evapo- ration exceeds the rainfall, the two seas have shrunk to less than their original limits, and the rivers of the region fail to reach the ocean. The temperature varies from Il8° Fahrenheit in the shade to 31° below zero, and the wind that drives the sand about in summer whirls the snows to and fro in winter. Deserts of sand or gravel predominate, and only a very small fraction of the region is fit for agri- culture. But in the south the salt steppes afford a good winter pasturage, though in summer they dry up and are uninhabitable from lack of water. Far to the north, how- ever, are well-watered grass steppes on the edge of Siberia. These provide abundant summer pasture, but are under deep snow in winter. Evidently the nomad must drive his flocks and herds back and forth each year, seeking his winter camp in the south when the snows begin to force him from the northern grass steppes, and moving northward again when summer heat has dried up the luxuriant and nourishing early spring growth of the salt steppes. He natu- rally spent most of his life on horseback. Cattle could only with difficulty endure the sort of life just described, so that he chiefly kept sheep and horses, and sometimes camels. He ate little either of meat or grain and vegetables, but lived mainly upon milk products. Each man kept a number of mares, for his favorite food and drink was the nutritious kumiz, or fermented mare's milk. Horse's blood also ap- peared upon his restricted menu. When not on horseback, the nomads lived in tents, and wandered together in bands of a suitable size for a single THE BARBARIAN WORLD 57 camp and grazing area. A number of these camps to- gether formed a clan, and there might be further ^, , , ,., . . ., ^ r^ • ^^ Mode of life union mto tribes and peoples. Occasionally some great conqueror, called a khagan or khan, would arise at the head of a vast horde made up of various tribes and peoples. The life of the wife or wives of the nomad was very hard, and he was cruel to his slaves or to the wretched communi- ties of subject serfs whom he forced to cultivate for him the few fertile spots that existed in the region over which he wandered. Family life was not nearly so pure as among the Germans. Nor was cleanliness at all esteemed. The new- bom babe, it is true, was washed daily in the open air for the space of six weeks regardless of whether it was summer or winter; but these forty-two baths had to last it for the rest of its life. The smoke in the tent, however, served as a disinfectant; and the life that the nomad led soon trained him to endure hunger, thirst, and almost any hardship. His horses were even tougher than himself. Had this disgusting race, which lacked any legal or political institutions as well as any vestiges of culture, re- mained in its own unattractive region, we might ^ standing well pass it by. But the nomads did not limit menace to themselves to stealing one another's herds or fighting among themselves for the best pasturage and winter camping-stations. They were continually plundering and devastating the adjoining regions, or enslaving the neigh- boring peoples and reducing them, too, to a low state of civilization. On their swift and hardy horses they could cover hundreds of miles in a few days, and either take the enemy by surprise, or overwhelm him by the fury of their onslaught, or evade him and reduce to a wilderness the country he was trying to defend. It was as difficult to stand against them as to fly before them. Moreover, at intervals in the course of history, owing either to changes of climate that lessened their pasturage and decimated their herds, or to overpopulation, or to defeat incurred in their struggles among themselves, a great horde would entirely detach itself from its native habitat and sweep onward in a wild 58 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE career of conquest, altering the face of the earth by its depredations, and the map of the world by transplanting whole peoples, whom the nomads either forced to join them or to flee before them. They were a menace to China, In- dia, and Persia; but we are especially concerned with their inroads into Europe. Such, perhaps, had been the origin of the Scythians and Sarmatians whom we have already men- tioned ; such were the Tartar or Mongolian invasions of the thirteenth century, when most of Russia submitted to the Great Khan. The Turks, too, are of this stock. Before the Turks and Tartars make their conquests, we shall hear in the earlier Middle Ages of Bulgars, Avars, and Magyars, who, in their first appearance at least, all represent the same sort of inroads from Asia into Europe. And such mounted nomads were the people with whom we have now to deal, and who about 372 a.d. burst like a cyclone into the region between the Volga and the Don Rivers and filled the neigh- boring Goths with unreasoning terror and aversion. These nomads were the Huns. THE BARBARIAN WORLD 59 EXERCISES AND READINGS C^SAR AND Tacitus on the Early Germans. Translations and Reprints of the University of Pennsylvania, vol. vi, no. 3, pp. 2-16. A. Take full notes of what Caesar and Tacitus say on the following points and arrange your notes so that those under each point will be together: — 1. Physical and personal traits. 2. Manners and morals. 3. Economic conditions. • 4. Social classes. 5. Gods and religion. 6. Magistrates and chiefs. 7. Citizenship and popular bodies. 8. Administration of justice. 9. Intertribal relations. B. What statements concerning the early Germans in pages 42-52 of this chapter seem drawn from other sources than Caesar and Tacitus? Comparison of Germans and Romans. From this and the preceding chapter find as many points of resemblance or of difference as you can between the life and civilization of the Germans and the inhabitants of the Empire, and set these points down opposite each other in parallel columns. German and Norse Mythology. C. M. Gayley, Classic Myths in English Literature (Boston, 1893), pp. 30-34 (pars. 13-14) and pp. 366-403 (pars. 177-86). K. Gjerset, History of the Norwegian People (New York, 191 5), vol. I, pp. 92-109. H. A. Guerber, Myths of Northern Lands (1895), any chapter. Early German Religion. C. F. Keary, The Vikings in Western Christendom (1891), chap. ii. Early German Law. See exercise on the Salic law at the close of chap. vii. General Reading on the Germans. Gummere, Germanic Origins (New York, 1892). Ulfilas. Article in the Catholic Encyclopedia. The Mounted Nomads, or Huns. T. Peisker, The Asiatic Background, in the Cambridge Medieval History, vol. I, pp. 323-59- CHAPTER IV THE DECLINE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE About 372 a.d. the Roman Empire was not In a condition to enable it to resist the oncoming tide of barbarian inva- Whv did sion. It no longer possessed either the superior the Empire force neccssary to keep the invaders out, or the civilizing capacity requisite to absorb and ele- vate their barbarism. Exactly why and how came to pass this decline of the great Roman Empire, which had seemed to knit together so satisfactorily most of the civilized lands of antiquity, is a problem not easy to solve, especially with the scanty sources at our disposal. Numerous attempts have been made to solve the mystery, and the fall of Rome has been variously attributed to mosquitoes and malaria, to the drain of precious metals to the Far East, and to exhaus- tion of the soil. Probably the fundamental reason was that the Roman Empire was founded on the ruins of states and civilizations that had already declined, like Egypt, Phoe- nicia, Asia Minor, Carthage, and the Hellenic cities of the Greek peninsula, Sicily, and southern Italy. The Empire was a patchwork of outworn nationalities or despotisms and of bygone cultures, which had not been able to save themselves from Rome's attacks and which had little to give to reinvigorate the new whole. The Roman Empire, then, possessed little new life of its own; it was the last stage in the ancient history of the Mediterranean Basin. Greece and Italy, the very heart of the Empire, had shown unmistakable symptoms of decay even before the Roman Earlier Empire, Strictly speaking, had begun. Not only Greeks and ^^^ ^^^ Hellenes lost their cherished liberty and Italians political independence, not only had the repub- lican form of government and popular assemblies proved a failure at Rome, but in both Italy and Greece depopulation and alarming economic decline were painfully evident dur- DECLINE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 6i ing the two centuries before the Christian era. Moreover, first the Greeks and then the Italians had displayed an increasing distaste for military service and an increasing fondness for lives of ease and luxury. It is significant that after the first century of the Christian era Italy furnished no more emperors; Rome's rulers henceforth came from the provinces. To her new acquisitions in the North and West, Rome, as we have seen, spread the benefits of classical civilization. This had raised those provinces to a higher state Apparent of culture than their previous tribal life, but it ofThTearly had not led them as yet to create any new art or Empire literature, or any new industrial methods or political insti- tutions of their own. They merely dropped to a greater or less extent their previous ways and adopted to the best of their ability the arts and letters and institutions of the Greeks and Romans. This change, together with the con- tinued prosperity of Eastern lands, such as Egypt and Asia Minor, where there were still plenty of inhabitants and wealth, if not any new ideas, made the early Empire appear flourishing and successful, especially as peace prevailed. But in reality scarcely had the Romans achieved their work of extending through the western half of their Empire that classical culture which had originated among ^ • c ° , ° rassing of the gifted Hellenes, when that classical culture the ancient began to dry up at the roots. In an earlier chap- and ifs^dls- ter we noted the city-state as the key to classical tinctive civilization and described the flourishing urban life of the early Empire. We may now trace the decline of that civilization in connection with the decay of the ancient city. Perhaps first of all came the decay of civic religion. Once all inhabitants of a city had joined in the same religious beliefs and acts of worship, and the supreme reli- Decay of gious duty of every citizen had been to serve his ^'^^^ religion city. Now the changed external conditions of life and the growth of philosophy had made educated men skeptical concerning the gods, the myths, the religious rites and cere- 62 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE monies of their forefathers. Of the late schools of Greek philosophy the Epicureans had attacked religion as an evil and had advised each man to search intelligently after his own happiness. The opposite school of the Stoics made some effort to save the old myths by warning men not to take these tales about the gods too literally ; but they had somewhat the same ideal of "the self-centered sage" as the followers of Epicurus, and thought that the good and wise man should not be affected by evils about him. The Stoics, however, laid stress on something other than selfish happiness, and emphasized, as we have seen in an ... earlier chapter, the existence of one law of nature New ideals 111 r n of the Stoic to which all men should conform. But this, too, philosophers ^^^ contrary to civic religion and substituted for narrow patriotism the brotherhood of man and a world- religion. Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor from 161 to 180 A.D. as well as Stoic philosopher, turned his thoughts in his famous Meditations, not to some particular city such as Athens, called by the poet "dear city of Cecrops" after its legendary founder, but to the "dear city of Zeus"; that is, to the whole world about him. "All things harmonize with me which are in harmony with thee, O Universe," he wrote; "all things are fruit to me which thy seasons bring, O Na- ture; from thee are all things, in thee are all things, unto thee are all things." This was a noble conception, but for the time being it meant the death of that city religion which was the basis of so much in classical civilization and the root in especial of Greek and Roman patriotism. It is true that the state was now an empire, not one city; but after all it had grown from one city and was now not Failure of much more than a collection of cities. Anyway, emperor- ^^g worship of the emperor, though more uni- worship as ^ , ^ i-, a state versal than a local city cult, did not prove an reigion adequate state religion. It exerted a marked influence in some respects, particularly upon Roman art; but in the long run it did not satisfy the religious inclina- tions of the inhabitants of the Empire any more than the old city worships now did. DECLINE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 63 Under the Empire many Oriental cults were spread abroad both in the East and West, which exerted upon many people an attraction greatly superior to g , , the hold that the outworn formalities of the Oriental municipal worship had upon them. These East- ^^ '^'°"^ em religions were not state worships. They aimed at sal- vation of the individual rather than the prosperity of a social or political group, such as the tribe or town. In many cases they were open to any one, even to slave as well as to foreigner, instead of being restricted to a limited number of citizens. They offered to their initiates as a compensation for external ills a feeling of inner satisfaction and the hope of a better life after death. The ordinary civic religion, although it stimulated a devout patriotism, does not seem to have controlled man's private life very successfully, or at least had ceased to do so by the time of the Empire. We have seen that there was much sensuality and sexual excess in ancient society. Now there seems to have been a reaction against this ; men felt sinful and desired to find some means of purification from their guilt. The Oriental worships offered men, upon the basis of a revelation supposedly divine and authoritative, a personal redeemer by whose aid and by following whose example and previous experience, as recounted In some sacred legend, they too could, through symbolic rites and sacramental mysteries and acts of pen- ance, become purified from sin and evil, enjoy moments of emotional ecstasy even in this life, and after death win an immortal union with a deity outside and above our present world. The Egyptian cult of Isis had its baptisms and fasts, its liturgy and prayer-book, its well-organized priesthood with tonsure and vestments, and its Mother-Goddess who had herself been through sufferings and who longed to relieve suffering humanity. In the Metamorphoses of Apu- leius she appears to the hero in a miraculous vision and says, " Lo, Lucius, I am come, moved by thy supplication, I, nature's mother, mistress of all the elements, the first be- gotten offspring of the ages. ... I am come in pity for thy woes." Other widely disseminated cults than that of 64 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Isis were those of the Great Mother from Phrygia, of Baal from Syria, and of Mithra from Persia. Along with such exalted aims these religions preserved many primitive rites and some notions of a questionable or Relation of ^ven distinctly immoral and superstitious char- Christianity acter. But it is somewhat difficult to judge them Oriental ^^ fairly, because most of the information which religions j^^g come to US concerning them is from the writ- ings of early Christians, who were bitterly opposed to them and regarded them as indecent parodies upon the Christian faith invented by the Devil. And it is evident that in a number of respects they roughly resembled Christianity, which, of course, was one of the many religions that spread from the East over the Roman world and which for a long time had to struggle with the others for supremacy. To its rise we shall presently devote a separate chapter. The spread of these cults meant the break-up of civic religion. Their legends were different from those of classical mythology. In place of Greek intellectual free- Incompati- ■' °-' , *^ ... , . bility of dom they imposed an authoritative revelation. reUgion with Civic service was replaced by mystic sacraments. classical Affairs of the present world were liable to be civilization 1111 • 1 1 • neglected and the attention centered upon things of the spirit or the world to come. The tendency was to re- tire to a desert and live as a hermit rather than go to the frontier as a soldier or rear a large family of children. The early Christians were regarded as unsocial and dangerous by the people of the ancient cities and by the Roman gov- ernment. Gradually, under the increasing pressure of the Oriental religions, philosophy lost much of its former sanity and Philosophy rational investigation of nature ceased. Religious and science mysticism was the main interest of the phi- tend toward . , mysticism losophy called " Neo-Platonism " because it pro- and magic fessed to be based upon Plato's doctrines, and of which Plotinus (about 204-269 A.D.), born in Egypt, may be regarded as the founder. The chief problem of this phi- losophy was not the study of nature, nor the conduct of man DECLINE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 65 in this world, but how the human soul might return to God — a goal which the Neo-Platonists often sought to attain by asceticism or mortifying the flesh, by ceremonies of purifi- cation, and sometimes by magic and incantations. Their one supreme being, they believed, transcended all attempts at description and was outside and far above the world of nature, — a transcendent God. The great Christian writer, Augustine, in the fifth century, admits that he was led to a more spiritual and monotheistic idea of God by reading Plotinus. The followers of Plotinus, however, feeling the need of mediators between man and so lofty and distant a God, or else desiring to retain some of their old religious be- liefs, stated the existence of a host of intermediate spiritual beings between the supreme deity and the human soul, and of a multitude of daemonic forces In the stars, the air, and nature generally. These mediators and demons could be propitiated by sacrifice and ceremony or coerced by magic and Incantations. Religion In ancient and medieval times was the chief inspiration of art and literature, and we have seen that classical art and literature centered In the city, r-, r r . . ■' Decline of Hence, when the city-state and civic religion art and declined, art and literature deteriorated too. '*^^''^^"^^ Moreover, the efforts of men who were neither Greeks nor Latins by birth to write in those tongues resulted in a nat- ural falling-ofT in purity of style and diction, while they failed to introduce much new subject-matter. Public taste, too, had degenerated, and where Athens had supplied large audiences for the tragedies of ^schylus and Euripides, the people of the Roman Empire preferred pantomime, as the people of to-day prefer moving pictures. Seneca's tragedies in the first century of our era were probably written to be read rather than acted, and after him no dramas are extant from the time of the Roman Empire. Here we have a good illustration of how the decline of religion affected literature. Many had attended the performance of a drama by ^schy- lus, just as many listen to a sermon to-day, not because they especially enjoyed or even thoroughly comprehended it, but 66 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE because it was part of a religious festival which every one was expected to attend. By the time of the Empire they felt under no such obligation, and, as far as amusement was concerned, preferred the exciting combats of the arena or races in the circus. Whatever the reasons, what is called "classicism" in literature and art had for the most part dis- appeared before the end of the second century. There are, it is true, several writers — from the African, Apuleius, a vivid romancer and mystic with a style of unfailing gusto in the second century, to the sober historian and soldier, Ammianus Marcellinus, in the fourth century — whose tone and content interest intensely the student of history; but students of the classics usually regard such writers as of minor importance from their standpoint. Such authors are seldom read in courses given by Latin and Greek depart- ments, and the great period of Latin literature is considered to end with Juvenal and Tacitus. Building upon a large and magnificent scale continued as late as Constantine in the fourth century, for the imperial idea was more of an inspira- tion to art than to letters, and dying antiquity reared im- pressive monuments in its last moments. But we see that the Hellenic genius in sculpture is gone, when we compare, among the friezes and medallions that adorn the Arch of Constantine, the crude carvings executed by contemporary artists with the sculptures which were transferred to this structure from older buildings. The material prosperity, indicated by the costly build- ings in the municipalities of the early Empire, in time P . ^j ceased. As early as Trajan (98-117 a.d.) we find municipal the central imperial government sending its prosperity agents to manage the affairs of towns whose finances were in a bad state. This imperial interference kept growing until the cities had little self-government left. By the fourth century the chief function of the curiales, or members of the governing class of the town, had come to be the collection of taxes, for which the emperor held them personally responsible. But the towns had so decreased in prosperity, or else the taxes had so increased, that it was DECLINE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 67 very hard for the curiales to squeeze the required amount out of their fellow-townsmen and the landholders of the im- mediate neighborhood. In this case they had to make up any deficit from their own pockets. This tended to ruin a class of men who had once been the richest in town, and they often tried to escape from their office, but instead the em- peror made it hereditary. This decline in prosperity of the cities was due in part to the civil wars and barbarian inroads of the third century, but also to the fact that the prosperity of the Decline of ancient city was founded largely upon slave deo-ease^hi labor, and that with the cessation of Roman population conquests it became increasingly difficult to obtain slaves. Moreover, many slaves were given their freedom as the Empire progressed. This should have produced a large working middle class, one would think, which would have revived the languishing industry and commerce of the Empire. But unfortunately the population of the Empire as a whole, as in the cases of Greece and Italy earlier, began to decrease seriously. A great plague which swept over the Empire during the reign of Marcus Aurelius reduced the population terribly for the time being, and afterwards the ancient stocks apparently did not possess enough vitality to repair its ravages. It was perhaps this simple lack of men and life and energy that did most to terminate the Roman Empire and classical civilization. Unless it could be stopped, it meant, of course, that many towns would become depopu- lated and that municipal life would give way to a scattered agricultural society. This was what finally happened after the barbarian invasions. A clear indication of the depopulation of the Empire is seen in the repeated settlement, from the reign of Marcus Aurelius on, of large numbers of barbarians Settlement of within the Roman frontiers. These barbarians ^^Jf^'the were given waste lands or depopulated areas to Empire till and formed a half-subject peasant class. Naturally they were not admitted to the towns in the first instance, for they knew nothing of business and industry and were unfitted to 68 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE participate in city life. But neither could their children go to the city to learn a trade, since the imperial government forced them to till the soil as their fathers had done. Thus the cities went on declining, the barbarian settlers remained ignorant peasants and came little into contact with classical civilization, and no new middle class developed. Rome's early conquests had been largely due to the dense population of Italy at that time, which furnished her with Decline in Plenty of soldiers; for men had to fight to exist, military and it was natural for them to overflow the ^^^" crowded peninsula and conquer other territories. But then, as we have seen, came depopulation and a decline of military spirit in Italy. The provinces, however, for a time supphed soldiers enough. But in the later centuries of the Empire with the general falling-off in population came a decline in fighting spirit on the part of the provincials, and finally the emperors had to recruit their armies mainly from among the Germans. With the ancient city doomed, with classical religion and art and literature dying out, with the old races disappearing Discouraged and barbarians taking their places both as peas- g°"of 'J}^^" ants and soldiers, there still remained the Roman later Empire imperial system and law to hold the weakened Empire together; and for a long time the imperial govern- ment struggled persistently on and succeeded in sta\ang ofT the day of destruction. But the members of the governing class sometimes felt the almost hopeless nature of their task, and it is with a heartfelt sigh of relief that we find some of them laying their burdens down. Dio Cassius, who wrote his history of Rome in the third century, belonged to the senatorial class and held many administrative positions under the dynasty of the Severl. In the last book of his history he excuses himself for not giving a detailed account of the recent reign of Alexander Severus, "for the reason that for a long time I did not so- journ at Rome. After going from Asia to BIthynIa I fell sick, and from there I hurried to my duties as head of Africa. On returning to Italy I was almost immediately sent DECLINE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 69 to govern in Dalmatia, and from there Into Upper Pannonia. After that I came back to Rome and on reaching Campania at once set out for home." Then, after narrating the murder of Ulpian, the famous jurist, by the Praetorian Guards of whom he was prefect, and the Persian conquest of the Parthian Kingdom and subsequent war upon Rome, DIo continues: "The troops are so distinguished by wantonness and arrogance and freedom from reproof that those in Mesopotamia dared to kill their commander. . . . And the praetorians found fault with me before Ulpian because I ruled the soldiers In Pannonia with a strong hand ; and they demanded my surrender for fear that some one might compel them to submit to a regime similar to that of the Pannonian troops. Alexander, however, paid no attention to them, but promoted me in various ways, appointing me to be consul for the second time as his colleague, and taking upon himself personally the responsibility of meeting the expenditures of my office. As the malcontents evinced displeasure at this, he became afraid that they might kill me. If they saw me in the insignia of my office, and he bade me spend the period of my consulship in Italy somewhere outside of Rome. Later, however, I came both to Rome and to Campania to visit him. After spending a few days in his company, during which the soldiers saw me without offering to do me any harm, I started for home, being released on account of the trouble with my feet. So I expect to spend all the rest of my life In my own country, as the Divine Presence revealed to me most clearly at the time I was in Bithynla. Once In a dream there I thought I saw myself commanded by It to write at the close of my work the following verses : — " ' Hector was led of Zeus far out of the range of the missiles, Out of the dust and the slaying of men, out of blood and of uproar.'" We meet the same attitude a century later in another work by a man of senatorial rank, but this time by Julius Firmlcus Matemus, a pleader in the law courts rather than a commander of the legions. But as Dio Casslus wrote a history to divert his mind from Its other cares, so Firmlcus Maternus composed an astrological work for his friend 70 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Lollianus or Mavortius, who was still higher up than he in the governmental hierarchy. Firmicus states that he had formerly "resisted with unbending confidence and firmness " factious and wicked and avaricious men "who by the terror of lawsuits seemed formidable to the unfortunate"; and that "with liberal mind, despising forensic gains, to men in trouble ... I displayed a pure and faithful defense in the courts of law." But by this upright conduct he had incurred much enmity and danger, and he is glad at last to retire from this hard world, where Socrates and Plato suffered while Alcibiades and Sulla prospered, and from the sordid atmosphere of law courts and forum, in order to spend his leisure with the divine men of old of Egypt and Babylon and to purify his spirit by contemplation of the everlasting stars and of the supreme God who works through them. During the civil strife and barbarian inroads of the third century the Empire for a time fell into anarchy, but before Diocletian's the ccntury was over, the imperial government savrtVe° seemed more strongly established than ever. Empire This was largely due to the reorganization effected by Diocletian (284-305 A.D.). He increased the power of the emperor, making him an absolute ruler in every respect, whom his courtiers and subjects were to treat as a god and whose court was characterized by most elab- orate ceremonial and etiquette. His predecessor Aurelian had already closely associated the cult of the emperor with the worship of the Unconquered Sun, whose earthly repre- sentative the emperor now asserted himself to be. Diocle- tian also endeavored to establish a regular and unbroken succession to the throne, in order to avoid civil strife. Further, he divided the Empire into many more provinces than before, greatly increased the number of governors and officials, to all of whom high-sounding titles were given, put the army under leaders separate from the provincial gov- ernors, and established an elaborate system of espionage over all his subordinates. He also tried to regulate economic conditions and issued an edict to keep prices down. From this time forth, indeed, the imperial government itself took DECLINE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 71 charge of an increasing number of state industries. Whether the State killed private business by so much paternal inter- ference, or whether the State interfered because private business was dying already, is a problem that our sources do not suffice to solve. The chief flaw in Diocletian's "system," as it has been called, was that he subdivided functions too much, and especially that he divided the imperial office Dgfg^ts of itself between two Augusti and two Caesars, the the Diode- latter of whom were to succeed the former when their terms of ten years expired. But here again he perhaps did the best that could be done and was forced to accept an inevitable tendency of the Empire to split into two parts, the East and the West, if not to go to pieces entirely. Ap- parently a ruler with all the attributes and trappings and sanctity of the imperial office was now needed simultane- ously in East and West to control the situation. During a period of nearly two hundred years after Diocletian's sys- tem first went into effect, there were less than thirty years when there was not more than one emperor. But the elabo- rate officialdom introduced by Diocletian was very expen- sive to maintain. Heavy taxation was necessary to support two Augusti and two Caesars, each with a splendid court and a large army, the four praetorian prefects, the vicarii or heads of the ten or a dozen dioceses into which the Empire was divided, and the hundred-odd consular es and prcEsides, who, under the superintendence of the prefects and vicars, ruled the smaller provinces which formed subdivisions of the dioceses, and all of whom drew large salaries and kept numerous clerks and assistants. All this made a burden almost too much for the diminished population of the Empire to bear. Constantine, who became the sole emperor for a time in the first half of the fourth century, took two very impor- tant steps. He rebuilt and fortified the city of The epoch- Byzantium, situated where Europe and Asia ^^g^ol meet at the entrance to the Black Sea, and hence- Constantine forth named Constantinople in his honor, and he made it -^2 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE the center of his Empire. Thus Italy and western Europe were relegated to a secondary place in the later Roman Empire. In the second place, Constantine first raised the Christians to equal privileges with other religions in the Empire, then favored them, and finally on his deathbed was himself baptized. Just what his motives were and how sincere was his conversion has been disputed by historians, but his act was in a sense a confession of weakness. The emperors had tried.various expedients — such as Aurelian's association of himself with the Unconquercd Sun — to make the worship of the emperor more of a living force which would sustain their government and insure them popular support. Now the emperor adopted an unworldly religion which his predecessors had striven to extirpate, and thereby recognized that Christianity had or was to become a power superior to the Roman State or to classical civiliza- tion. Constantine's successors in the imperial office were almost all Christians, and Christianity became the state religion. Presently no other form of worship was allowed. A collection of the laws issued by Constantine and his successors has come to us, named the Theodosian Code after Decline of ^^s Compiler, the Christian emperor, Theodosius the Empire H, in the fifth ccntury. This mass of imperial as revealed , . , . i i rr r i in the Theo- legislation revcals the efforts of the government dosian Code ^^ check the decline of the Empire, and at the same time the adoption of policies which probably had the unfortunate result of hastening that decline. Some of the laws conflict with others; the policy of the emperors evi- dently fluctuated and perhaps the conditions with which they had to deal changed too. For instance, at one time private individuals are allowed to quarry marble; at an- other time the right is reserved to the State. Some sweeping commands probably were never executed thoroughly ; other laws are merely the sanctioning of already existing condi- tions. But on the whole the reader of the laws gets the impression that things are going very badly in the Roman world, and that all the scolding and threats of the emperors cannot prevent it. In 364 they have to order that no new DECLINE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 73 buildings shall be constructed at Rome until the ruins of the ancient buildings have been repaired ; the year following they forbid their subordinates to despoil out-of-the-way towns of their marbles and columns in order to adorn this or that metropolis. In 389 private landowners who tap the public aqueducts to irrigate their farms are threatened with confiscation of their land. Some workers are forced by pen- alties to pursue the same trades as their fathers; others are encouraged in their callings by immunities and exemption from taxes. Skilled labor seems to be getting scarce. It is also difficult for the government to procure enough ships to bring provisions to the populaces of Rome and Constanti- nople, or the workmen necessary for a number of other public enterprises. The toilers in the state mines and quar- ries often run away. So difficult has it become to keep the governing class in the municipalities at their disagreeable task of tax-collecting that evildoers are sometimes forced to join a curia by way of punishment, while five gold pieces are offered as a reward to any one who drags a runaway decurion back to his office. Life in the country has become as burden- some as in the town, since as early as the reign of Constan- tine a law shows us that the tenants or coloni are now bound to the soil like the later medieval serfs ; that the landowner on whose estate a colonus belonging to another is discovered must not only restore the fugitive to his rightful master, but pay damages for the time that the said colonus has worked for him; and that coloni who "are meditating flight" may be put in chains and "compelled by such condemnation as a slave deserves to perform the tasks that a freeman should." The burden of taxation became so great, and the petty tyranny exercised by the host of officials whom the bureau- cracy of Diocletian and his successors necessitated became in many cases so oppressive, that at about the time the Huns were appearing on the scene the emperors established in the cities new officials called defensores, or "protectors," who were to defend their subjects from their own other officials. Numerous laws were also passed to protect the peasants against oppressive exactions. Finally we may note -y 74 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE that the Codex Theodosianus marks a decline in the Roman law compared to the writings of the jurists of the second and third centuries, to which it is inferior both in language and in thought, both as literature and as law. EXERCISES AND READINGS Trace on the map the itinerary of Die Cassius as described in pp. 68-69. Bring together the facts about Marcus Aurelius and Constantine and their respective reigns which are scattered through this chapter (use index). The Spread of Oriental Religions. H. S. Jones, The Roman Empire, pp. 212-20. T. M. Lindsay, Cambridge Medieval History, vol. I, pp. 90-94. F. Cumont, Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (Chicago, 191 1), any chapter. F. Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra (Chicago, 1910), any chapter. The System of Diocletian. H. S. Jones, The Roman Empire, pp. 262-73. Taxation in the Fourth Century. Munro and Sellery, Medieval Civilization, pp. 34-41. Decay of the Middle Class; Aggrandizement of the Aristocracy. Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire (second edition revised), pp. 245-81. Causes of the Fall of the Western Empire. T. Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, vol. li, book ill, chap, ix, sees. 1-7 (pp. 538-613 in the second edition). Source Readings. There is more than one English translation of the Meditations or Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, and Dio Cassius may be read in Foster's recent translation; but Firmicus and the Codex Theodosianus have not been translated. The Notitia Dignitatum, an ofificial list of all the posts in the administrative system of the late Empire, is translated in vol. II, no. 4, of Translations and Reprints of the University of Pennsylvania. The translation includes but one of the many interesting illustrations with which the Latin text is adorned and which may be examined in Seeck's edition (Berlin, 1876). The last book of The Metamorphoses of Apuleius (translated by E. H. Butler, 2 vols., Oxford, 1 910) is rich in information concerning the spread of Oriental cults. CHAPTER V THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS: 378-5 II A.D. At the time the Huns invaded Europe the Roman emperors were Valentinlan I (364-375) and his brother Valens (364-378). Their father, a peasant rope- Valentinian, seller in Pannonia, had risen from the ranks in the last stronff the legions to the command first in Africa and emperor in then in Britain. Valentinian by his military ^^^ ^^^^ ability went on to win the imperial throne, and then made his less able brother his associate in the East. Valentinian found the western half of the Empire in great disorder and invaded in many places by barbarians. Most of his reign he spent in expelling the Alamanni and other Germans from Gaul and in strengthening the Rhine frontier. Meanwhile he dispatched Theodosius, a trusted lieutenant, first north \^' into Britain and then south to Africa to restore order. The last year of his life Valentinian recovered the provinces of Pannonia and Moesia, situated along the Danube, from neighboring barbarians who had been devastating them. With stern face and imposing presence, often angry and sometimes cruel, Valentinian was the last strong emperor that the West was to have. Even he had all he could do to keep the Germans out of the Empire, and wherever he was not personally present misgovemment prevailed among his corrupt and oppressive subordinates. Hence- forth, with the advent of the Huns, conditions were sure to grow steadily worse. The first appearance of the Huns struck the Germans with repugnance and terror. No one seemed able to stand before them. They rapidly conquered the Alani, .^j^^ battle of who were probably not Germans, and most of Adrianople, the East Goths, who were Germanic; then they ^'' pressed on westward. Most of the West Goths decided to take refuge from the dreaded foe within the Roman Empire. 76 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE They asked permission to settle south of the Danube, prom- ising not to plunder and to aid the emperor in defending the frontier. They were allowed to cross the river, but then the imperial officials failed to supply them with food until they could grow crops for themselves, and in other ways ill-treated them. In consequence they began to ravage the country-side and before long crossed the Balkan Mountains and entered Thrace, leaving the Danube frontier behind them open to any one who cared to follow. Valens, who already had experienced quite enough trouble for one reign from would-be assassins and usurpers, conspiracies and rebellions, and wars with Persia in the Far East, was now called upon to face this new danger. Before he arrived, there had been considerable indecisive fighting with the Goths, whose numbers by now had been further swelled by bands of Alani and Huns, who now, however, fought as their allies and to whose hideous appearance and coarse manners the Goths seem to have quickly reconciled them- selves. With the arrival of Valens a pitched battle was fought, in which the emperor himself, his leading generals, and the greater part of his army were slain. The Goths, however, were unable to take either the city of Adrianople, near which the defeat had occurred, or the capital, Constan- tinople, against which they next marched. But their vic- tory left them permanently within the Empire, where in the Balkan peninsula they and other barbarians who sooner or later followed in behind them formed a wedge separating the eastern and western halves of the Empire. Therefore, it has long been the custom to date the beginning of success- ful barbarian invasions or migrations of the peoples from the battle of Adrianople in 378. Gratian, a boy in his teens, had become emperor in the West on the death of his father, Valentinian ; on the death Reigns of of his uncle, Valens, he named as his associate in Theodosius the East Theodosius, son of the general who had the Great fought for his father. Huns, Ostrogoths, and Alani came westward, but Gratian satisfied them for the time by abandoning to them Upper Moesia and Pannonia, THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS 77 provinces which his father had just recovered. Meanwhile Theodosius prevented the victorious Visigoths from pene- trating farther into the Empire or from devastating on too vast a scale by fighting with them now and then, in which encounters he was sometimes worsted ; but more by allow- ing them to occupy under their own rulers and law as much of Lower Moesia and Thrace as they wished, by paying them an annual tribute, and by employing many of them as his own soldiers. He was called " the friend of the Goths." Indeed, it now became not at all unusual for the emperors to employ Huns as well as Germans in their armies ; Gratian favored the Alani among his troops. These barbarians did not merely enlist as individuals; they were hired in bodies and fought in their native organizations under their own kings. Theodosius' two chief generals were Arbogast, a Frank, and Stilicho, a Vandal ; and the imperial family even intermarried with such barbarian chieftains. Barbarian troops were not so favored by the civilian populace as they were by the emperors, and especially not when such troops were quartered upon citizens. The mas- A famous incident will illustrate this and some Thessalon- other important points. Theodosius had placed 'ca; Theo- . . rr^. . . dosius and a German garrison m Thessalomca, one of the Ambrose largest cities in the Balkan peninsula and the same as the modern Saloniki. When the barbarian leader imprisoned a charioteer who was a great favorite in the races of the circus, the mob of the city rose in rebellion and killed the comman- dant. The news of this riot threw Theodosius into a terrible rage and he allowed his soldiers to slaughter some seven thousand of the populace. Yet he had often shown mercy to defeated enemies, and was an orthodox Christian who did so much for the Church as to win the appellation, "the Great." On this occasion the Church was to show that it dared reprove even an emperor when he sinned. Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, warned Theodosius that he should refuse to perform the sacrament of the mass in his presence until he atoned for his crime, and the emperor soon did penance before him. Thus the story of Thessalonica illus- 78 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE trates the relations between bishop and emperor, Church and State, as well as the attitude of Greek citizens to Ger- man soldiers and the attitude of the em.peror to them both. We also see the populace of an ancient city become mere spectators at chariot races instead of themselves serving in the army. The emperor favored his barbaric soldiery above such degenerate Hellenes and Romans, but before the bishop even Theodosius bent the knee. He scented the future. While the ancient city and Its life passed away, these two forces were to survive ; namely, barbarian soldiers and the Christian Church. But the chief bishop of the latter was to be at Rome instead of at Milan. During the reign of Theodosius In the East, things went badly in the West. Gratlan came to neglect his state du- Confusion ties and then was assassinated. For some years in the West thereafter his younger brother, Valentlnian II, ruled in Italy, but Gaul and Britain were controlled by a usurper. Finally Theodosius found time to come West and settle the matter In Valentlnlan's favor, while his Franklsh general, Arbogast, drove out the German Invaders who had once more been crossing the Rhine. But not long after Theodosius had returned to Constantinople, Valentlnian II was strangled and a new emperor, Eugenius, was set up by Arbogast, who had turned traitor. Theodosius came West again with his other barbarian lieutenant, Stillcho; Visigoths under their leader Alaric fought with him against Franks and Alamanni In the service of Eugenius; Eugenius and Arbogast were defeated and killed, but Theodosius himself died at Milan in 395. Theodosius left two sons, Arcadius, aged seventeen, and Honorlus, aged eleven, to succeed him In the East and West Arcadius and respectively. Both were incompetent weaklings. Honorius Stillcho remained in the West as Honorlus' guardian and tried also to Interfere In the East. When Gratlan had made Theodosius his colleague in the East, he had allotted most of the Balkan peninsula to him; Stillcho held that this territory should now revert to the western half. The court of Arcadius was hostile to the Vandal general, THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS 79 however, and he also had enemies in the West. Barbarians within and without the Empire were now everywhere re- belHng, invading, and devastating. In northwestern Africa a Moorish prince tried to rule independently, and farther east Roman Africa was subject to Libyan inroads. The Huns not only appeared in Thrace, but, bursting through the gates of the Caucasus near the Caspian Sea, penetrated to Syria and Asia Minor. Asia Minor was also being devas- tated by some native tribes, the Isaurians. In Constanti- nople the Gothic troops, on their return from the West after the death of Theodosius, murdered the Roman regent, but were later massacred or driven from the city. Stilicho had to give the Vandals and Alani lands just northeast of Italy in Noricum; presently he had to defeat a host of them who invaded Italy together with Ostrogoths and the Quadi; they then withdrew from Italy and wandered about over Gaul. Burgundians and Alamanni also established them- selves west of the Rhine. The troops in Britain set up an emperor of their own named Constantine, who crossed over to Gaul and left Britain henceforth to defend itself if it could. Soon both this usurper and the Alani, Vandals, and Suevi had forced the passes of the Pyrenees and entered Spain. But most dangerous of all the barbarians at this time were the Visigoths in the Balkan peninsula under their leader Alaric. After the death of Theodosius, c^i- u ' Stilicho Alaric had failed to get the generalship which versus Theodosius had promised for his assistance in the ^"^ West, and the imperial government also stopped paying the Goths tribute. Thereupon the Goths ravaged the vicin- ity of Constantinople and then went south into Macedonia and Epirus. Stilicho had come out against them with troops that the death of Theodosius had left in Italy, but the government at Constantinople told him to return to Italy and to send their troops back to Constantinople, where, as we have seen, they revolted against the government. Meanwhile Alaric captured Athens, Corinth, Argos, and Sparta, — all famous Grecian cities. Since the Eastern 8o THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE emperor still did nothing, Stilicho came from Italy again, but contented himself with making a treaty with Alaric, and in consequence was now declared a public enemy by the government at Constantinople. Alaric went on devas- tating until Arcadius gave him the generalship and money he desired, and perhaps persuaded him to direct his future ravages toward Italy rather than Greece or Constantinople. That at least is what he did. In both 402 and 403 he in- vaded Italy and fought with Stilicho; in 408 he came again, but was bought off by four thousand pounds of gold. In 408, too, Arcadius died, leaving a seven-year-old son, Theodosius II, but the rule of the East was already really Improved in the hands of the praetorian prefect, Anthemius, the Eastern who govcmcd wcll from 404 to 414, repelling the Empire Runs and other invaders and mending the fron- tiers on the Danube and in Illyria. After the battle of Adri- anople it had rather seemed as if the eastern half of the Empire would fall first, but the barbarians had been unable to take the strong city of Constantinople and the eastern half of the Empire seems to have been better able to buy them off. They turned instead, therefore, against Rome. In the same year, 408, in the West the foolish Honorius executed Stilicho on a charge of high treason. As a conse- Sack of quence Alaric again entered Italy and was joined Akric, ^ ir^ great numbers both by the imperial German 410 A.D. troops, who were discontented with Stilicho's fate, and by runaway slaves. Honorius took refuge in Ravenna, the home henceforth of the Western imperial court. It was a city close to the Adriatic coast just north of the Apennines, where, protected by surrounding swamps and with access to the sea and so to Constantinople, one could watch the main roads leading to the Alps and to Rome. Alaric did not try to take Ravenna, but marched on Rome. Constantinople, open to the sea, could not easily be cut off from supplies; but Rome, dependent on Africa for grain and located many miles from the coast, could be starved out by blockading the Tiber. Since Honorius sent no aid, the senate had to pay Alaric a huge sum to raise the THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS 8i siege. He lingered in Italy, however, and, when after long negotiations Honorius failed to come to terms with him, he marched on Rome again and forced the senate to select a new emperor, Attalus. Attalus, however, was unable to secure Africa and its grain supply, so Alaric deposed him. His negotiations with Honorius were again a failure and he marched upon Rome a third time. The siege led to famine as before, and one night a city gate was treacherously opened to the besiegers. For three days Alaric's army plundered the great metropolis ; then departed with their spoil for the south of Italy, whence they intended to embark for the wheat-fields of Sicily and Africa. A storm, however, de- stroyed their fleet, and before the year 410 was over, Alaric died. Slaves turned a river from its bed, buried the dead monarch there, restored the waters to their course, and then were executed, that none but German warriors might know the secret of the grave of the Goth who was the first, since the Gauls had burned it just eight centuries before, to sack the city that had so long ruled the world. The Visigoths, under Ataulf, Alaric's successor, roamed about Italy for a while longer, but in 412 entered Gaul. Here Ataulf helped Constantius, one of Hono- Further rius' generals, by defeating a usurper whom the ofThe West Franks, Burgundians, and Alani had set up; but Goths then he was unable to come to terms with Honorius and so set up Attalus again as emperor. It is remarkable how even the barbarians felt that some one must be emperor and kept putting up their own candidates. Constantius soon cut off Ataulf's supplies and forced him to retreat to Spain, where at Barcelona one of his own followers assassinated him. The Goths then tried to cross from Spain to Africa, but the same misfortune befell their fleet as in southern Italy. They therefore made peace with Honorius, were provided with grain, and proceeded to reconquer much of Spain from the Vandals, Alani, and Suevi, — who had recently overrun it. For this service they were rewarded with lands in south- western Gaul with Toulouse as their capital and what amounted to an independent kingdom. About the same 82 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE time the Burgundians established a kingdom in territory granted to them on the Rhone. It may be worth while to pause for a paragraph to con- sider the period of invasions from a woman's experience, Galla especially since the ladies of the imperial family Placidia j^j-g frequently mentioned in the pages of the Greek historians of this time. Galla Placidia, the sister of Honorius, had a career that was both influential and full of adventure. She was at Rome when Alaric first besieged it, and she agreed with the senate at that time in executing Stilicho's widow on the charge of conspiracy with Alaric. When Alaric set up Attalus as anti-emperor, he kept Galla with him as a hostage, and his successor Ataulf carried her off to Gaul, where in 414 at Narbonne he married her. Their son died in infancy and his father was killed soon after. His first successor, who reigned only a week, humiliated the widowed queen by making her walk before his horse for twelve miles. The next year, when the Goths made their peace with Honorius, she was restored to her brother's court. He forced her to marry his general, Constantius, who be- came his colleague in 421. This Constantius III died that same year, however, and Placidia was again left a widow with a young son Valentinlan and a daughter Honoria. For a time she seemed to overshadow her weak brother Hono- rius, but in 423 she and her children were banished to Constantinople. Honorius died before the year was out, however, and Theodosius II sent his aunt, Placidia, and cousin, Valentinian III, back to Italy with an army to secure them the throne against a rival whom their enemies had set up. Placidia ruled for her son until he came of age. Even then he proved of little account, like his cousin at Con- stantinople, whose learned and orthodox and ascetic court was dominated either by his wife or his sister, although he has perpetuated his name in the Theodosian Code. In 437 Valentinian married Theodosius' daughter. Galla Placidia, and her nephew Theodosius, died in 450, five years before the death of Valentinian. Her mausoleum at Ravenna, though small, is a notable example of early Christian archi- THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS 83 tecture. It is in the shape of a Latin cross with a low tower rising over the crossing. Within this tower is a dome cov- ered, Hke the arched ceilings of the arms of the cross, with beautiful mosaics in blue and gold. In the three short arms rest the empty sarcophagi of the emperors, Constantius III and Valentinian III, and the empress, Galla Placidia. Meanwhile the barbarians had been continuing their invasions. The Vandals, who remained in Spain after the West Goths had returned to Gaul, moved south- ^.^^ ward and by 425 were attacking the African Vandals coast. In 429 they began a wholesale invasion of Roman North Africa under their new king, Gaiseric, who was to have a long reign until 477. A civil war between Boniface, Count of Africa, and the court at Ravenna afforded them a good opening, Boniface and Ravenna soon reunited against them and an army was also sent from Constantinople, but to no avail. The Vandals, however, found the taking of walled towns slow work, especially as they were accustomed to fight on horseback; and in 435 they made a peace by which they were to hold Mauretania and part of Numidia as tributary allies of Rome. But the Vandals had by this time built up a navy of small, swift vessels which soon gained the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, and part of Sicily, and committed acts of piracy all over the Mediterranean. Thus the Empire became everywhere infested with barbarians, by sea as well as by land. In 439 Gaiseric pounced unexpectedly upon Carthage. A fleet which the Eastern emperor sent to the rescue accomplished little, and in 442 the Western emperor came to terms with the Vandal and recognized his complete independence. Gaiseric, however, dated the beginning of his reign and also of the legal year from the day when he captured Carthage. When Valentinian III was assassinated in 455, Gaiseric sailed to Italy, took Rome without resistance, sacked it for two weeks, and carried off the imperial widow and her two daughters. In Gaul during the reign of Valentinian III the chief representative of the Empire was Aetius, a statesman and 84 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE general of Roman birth, but who had a great capacity for enhsting Huns in his service, perhaps because he had Aetius and eadier spent some time among them as a hos- the Huns tage. He prevented the Visigoths in southwestern Gaul and the Franks in the northeastern part from increas- ing their conquests, and conducted an aggressive campaign against the barbarians in Rhaetia and Noricum. Aetius had at first opposed the accession of Placidia and her son, and although he had been forgiven and received into their serv- ice, she seems to have still distrusted him. His command in Gaul was now given to Boniface, whom the Vandals had by this time driven out of Africa, and who had sided with Placidia of old against Honorius and sent her money when she was in exile at Constantinople, although of late he, too, had been for a time in rebellion. But Boniface soon died, and Aetius, who had taken refuge among the Huns, came back with an army of them and forced Placidia to restore him to power. He then continued to make his power felt in Gaul, reducing the strength of the Burgundians by crush- ing defeats and keeping the West Goths within some bounds. He was unable, however, to help the inhabitants of Britain against the Picts and Scots who, they piteously complained, were driving them into the sea. For some time the Huns had been receiving tribute from the Empire as well as serving in Aetius' armies as mercena- , ., ries. They also of late had been consolidating their Attila •', , ., ,, ... , *= . power and buildmg up a great mihtary despotism over all tribes and races to the north of the Danube and the Black Sea. At its head was Attila, a typical Hun in appear- ance and destitute of education and culture, though pos- sessed of abundant energy and cunning. He had succeeded to the throne in 433 with his brother, whom he killed in 444. During the decade from 440 to 450 the Huns made the Eastern Empire no end of trouble, devastating from the Danube almost to the walls of Constantinople and forcing Theodosius II to triple the tribute paid them. They took scores of towns and forts as far south as Thermopylae, and demanded that a strip of land five days' journey in breadth THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS 85 be left waste to the south of the Danube. In 450 the new emperor at Constantinople, Marcian, refused to pay the tribute, but the next year Attila, instead of making war upon Marcian, began his first onslaught upon the Western Empire and led a huge host westward into Gaul. Aetius now had to fight against the Huns instead of having them as his soldiers, but he was joined by Theodoric, King of the West Goths, against whom he had often contended in the past. Orleans, situated on the northernmost bend of the Loire, is a strategic point whose possessor can enter almost any section of Gaul or France. Theodoric and Aetius, coming from southwest and southeast, reached it before the Huns, who advanced from Metz which they had just sacked. Attila withdrew eastward again and a few miles from Troyes was fought the great battle of the Catalaunian Fields, sometimes called Chalons. It was indecisive, but at least a limit had been set to Attila's hitherto unbroken series of victories. Moreover, he continued to retreat, and the following year (452) he decided to invade Italy where there were no Goths to oppose him. He ravaged the north, sack- ing such cities as Pavia and Milan, but then was met by an embassy of three persons from the emperor and senate at Rome, and soon afterwards withdrew northward once more. One of the ambassadors was Pope Leo I. The next year Attila died and his empire went rapidly to pieces. Sensational events followed one another fast at this time. In 454, Valentinian III, with his own sword, killed Aetius, much as his father, Honorius, had ordered the End of the death of Stilicho in his day. In 455, Valentinian Empire in in his turn was publicly assassinated, and no one ^^e West punished his slayers. In the same year occurred the sack of Rome by the Vandals already mentioned. Meanwhile Britain began to suffer from new invaders — marauding bands of Jutes, Angles, and Saxons from the coasts of Ger- many and Denmark — who were gradually to conquer and occupy most of England. With the murder of Valentinian the dynasty of Theodosius the Great ceased to rule, and in the West emperors were put up and pulled down with con- 86 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE fusing rapidity. The real power was in the hands of Ricimer, a man of German descent, who seems to have resolved not to share the fate of Stilicho and Aetius, and hence killed his emperors first. Finally, however, he himself died a natural death in 472. In the East the emperors maintained them- selves more successfully against the leaders of the soldiery. It is true that when the able emperor, Marcian, died in 457, a barbarian named Aspar succeeded in making emperor his steward, Leo; but Leo proved too strong for Aspar, whom he had killed in 471, and Leo handed on the crown in 474 to his son-in-law, Zeno, an Isaurian from Asia Minor who reigned until 491. Constantinople also demonstrated its superiority by twice nominating rulers for the West. But Nepos, the second of these, was not acceptable to the bar- barian mercenaries, who drove him out of Italy in 475. Their leader Orestes is then said to have made an emperor of his handsome fourteen-year-old son, who bore the aus- picious and historic name, Romulus. In any case, in 476 the soldiers turned against Orestes, who had not rewarded them with the grants of land they desired, and he was overthrown by another barbarian, Odoacer, Odoacer was willing to admit a vague sort of overlordship by the Eastern emperor and to receive such titles as " patrician " from him ; the sen- ate and consuls and much of the administrative system introduced by Diocletian still went on in Italy. But the emperor at Constantinople had practically no authority in the West. Britain, Gaul, Spain, and North Africa had already passed quite out from his control, and Italy now became to all intents and purposes an independent king- dom. From 476 to 800 there was no other Roman emperor than the one reigning at Constantinople. Since Constanti- nople was not Rome, nor its inhabitants in any true sense Romans, — though they so called themselves, — it is legiti- mate to speak of the Roman Empire as now at an end. It is true that the Roman law and governmental system and for a time the use of Latin as the official language con- tinued at Constantinople. But it will be clearer henceforth to speak of this half or less of what had once been the THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS 87 great Roman Empire by a distinctive name, and to call it the "Eastern" or "Greek" or "Byzantine Em- The Eastern, pire." The last adjective, which comes from By- Byzantine zantium, the former name for Constantinople, and Empire is especially applied to the art and literature of this Empire during the Middle Ages, is the most distinctive. For we have already spoken of the Eastern Empire before 476, and the adjective "Greek" would not distinguish the culture from that of earlier Greece. The expression "Later Roman Empire" has been used of this survival of Roman rule in the East, but is a confusing phrase, since such expressions as "the early Empire" and "the later Empire" are used of the Roman Empire before 476 to distinguish its early period of peace and prosperity from the later centuries of decline and invasion. We shall therefore henceforth speak of the government at Constantinople as the "Byzantine Empire." The Balkan peninsula much of the time was hardly more under the control of the Byzantine emperor than was western Europe. The East Goths or Ostrogoths The East were now the chief disturbing element there, the*^ Balkans although Bulgars, Huns, and Slavs also made and in Italy trouble at times. Various lands were assigned to the Goths and they devastated many others. When the walls of Constantinople were damaged by an earthquake, they would have broken into the city but for the emperor's Isaurians, and they vainly attempted to cross over into Asia Minor. At last, in 488, the emperor persuaded Theo- doric, who by this time had become king of all the East Goths, to march against Odoacer, and Constantinople was delivered from them as it had been eighty years before from the West Goths and twenty-eight years before from Attila. Other barbarians, however, soon took the place of the Ostrogoths in the Balkan peninsula. It required four or five years for Theodoric to conquer Italy. He got rid of Odoacer, who had endured a siege of three years behind the walls of Ravenna, only by promising to divide the rule of Italy with him and then murdering him at a friendly banquet. Last in our chronological and narrative survey of the 88 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE period of invasions, beginning with the advent of the Huns Expansion and the battle of Adrianople, we have to note the Franks expansion of the Prankish people to the death into Gaul of Clovis in 5 1 1 . There were two branches of the Franks, the SaHans dwelHng along the North Sea and the Ripuarians who lived along the Rhine. Both had expanded across the Roman frontier even before the battle of Adrian- ople, but had been defeated. The Ripuarians were driven back across the river, while the Salians were allowed to remain as allies of the Empire in the extreme northeast of Gaul. By the beginning of the fifth century they ceased to recognize Rome's authority, and the Ripuarians, too, came west of the Rhine once more. Aetius checked the advance of the Salians for a time, but they soon had spread as far south as the Somme River, and made Tournai their capital. The Ripuarians gradually wrenched from the Empire the important cities of Cologne, Bonn, Aix-la-Chapelle, Juliers, Treves, and their surrounding country. South of the Ripuarians on the Rhine came the Thurin- gians and then the Alamanni, who occupied Alsace, the Political region between the Vosges Mountains and the of Gau? alt Rhine, and extended eastward through the Black this time Forest to the Lake of Constance. Farther south, in the upper Saone and Rhone Valleys and in Savoy on the west slopes of the Alps, were the Burgundians. What the French call "/e massif central,'" an elevated and barren region whose eastern boundary is formed by the Cevennes Mountains, occupies a considerable portion of south-central France and separates both southeastern from southwestern France and the Mediterranean littoral from the interior. The Vi-sigoths had at first been west of this central plateau, but had now also expanded south of it and occupied most of the Mediterranean coast region. To the north their kingdom reached the Loire. The remainder of Gaul, between the Loire and Somme Rivers, had not yet been conquered by the German Invaders. A certain Syagrlus had inherited it in 464 from his father ^gidius, a lieutenant of the Ro- man emperor at that time, and was known as the "Roman loniitufle "West 2 2" Longitude East fRim Greenwich i" 90 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE King of Soissons," where he had his capital rather than at Paris. In 486 Syagrius was defeated — and later secretly put to death — by the Salian Franks under the lead of Clovis (481- Conquests 511), a name equivalent to the modem Louis, Franks un- "^'ho then gradually took the walled towns of the der Clovis region until his dominion reached the Loire. This was for Clovis but the beginning of a career of conquest. He brought the Thuringians under his sway; he drove the Alamanni out of Alsace and up the Rhine into the Rhaetian Alps; he defeated the Burgundians. In 507 he killed with his own hand the king of the West Goths and forced that people back into Spain except for a strip of land extending south of the central plateau from the Pyrenees to the, Alps. Indeed, of this the West Goths in Spain kept only Septi- mania, which extended from the Pyrenees to the city of Nimes, while Provence, which extended from the Alps to the city of Aries, was added to Italy by Theodoric the Ostrogoth, who had come to its relief. Clovis murdered the other kings among the Salian Franks and was also accepted by the Ripuarians as their sole ruler. At his death he ruled all Gaul except the Mediterranean coast and Rhone Valley, and by 536 his sons had added the Kingdom of Burgundy and Provence to the Prankish possessions. As one contemplates all the usurpations and assassina- tions, all the war and destruction of the confused period of General over a century's duration, of which only a few and effects leading facts have been listed in this chapter and barbarian °^ which our original sources do not tell a tenth invasions part, one almost wonders, not merely that the declining Empire struggled on in the West as long as it did and that at Constantinople it was to continue its course for several more centuries, but that any peasants remained alive after so much devastation, that any fields were in cultiva- tion, that any cities were still in existence. But the number of invaders in any one expedition does not seem to have been very large and the invading barbarians usually acted without system or policy. When forced to leave one place, THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS 91 they went to another, but even their leaders seem seldom to have had any settled plans, and least of all any intention of destroying the Roman Empire. Two writers of the time tell of men who prefer to flee to the barbarians and live under their rule rather than endure the misery and oppression which is their lot within the Empire; but the German chief- tains had no objection to receiving offices and titles from the emperor or lands within the Roman frontiers. They wanted grain and gold, or lands to live on and a chance to fight frequently. They fought as readily and fiercely with one another as with the imperial armies, and were willing to fight for the Empire if they were well paid. A skillful imperial diplomat by a not too great expenditure could play them off against one another with success for a long time. Moreover, while the invaders ravaged the country- side easily enough, they found it hard to besiege or storm the walled towns. When they did take one, they soon passed on with their plunder, since it was some time before they reconciled themselves to city life. We are told that the dis- tricts through which the Alani, Suevi, and Vandals swept on their way across Gaul to Spain were prosperous again within a generation. But unfortunately there were parts of the Empire to which invading armies did not leave that length of time for recovery, and what one section suffered in life and property the rest of the Empire had to make up for in part by increased taxes. Whatever the actual amount of damage that can be directly charged up to the invaders, it is certain that the decline of ancient civilization went on apace and Continued that the age was one of great misery for the anTsocM Roman world. Lawlessness and brigandage were decline a natural result of the invasions and disorder. Tombs were robbed, parents sold their children into slavery, slaves ran away from their masters and were probably guilty of worse acts of rapine and cruelty than the barbarians. In 458 the legislation of the Emperor Majorian tells the same story as the earlier Theodosian Code, of things going wrong gen- erally, of oppression and corruption by officials, of wretched- 92 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE ness of the people. To check depopulation Majorian forbids women to become nuns before forty and commands childless widows to remarry within five years or forfeit half their property. The burden of taxation is revealed when the em- peror cancels arrears of tribute that are eleven years over- due but feels obliged to increase the land tax for the future. The only class in society who remained at all prosperous were the wealthy aristocrats, the great landowners, who had enough influence with the government to secure themselves from oppression or even to oppress others with impunity, whose large estates only a large band of invaders could ven- ture to attack, and whose retinue of servile tenants and dependents was now being constantly reinforced by poor citizens, who in these hard, disturbed, and cruel times found it impossible to maintain their independence either in town or country. In this landed aristocracy the barbarian invad- ers formed an increasing element, since they everywhere demanded and took lands for themselves. Yet we meet with luxury and extravagance amid this economic and social decline, and costly games and festivals were still fur- nished the populace in the large cities. Something of ancient art, literature, and learning still continued, or perhaps it would be better to say, still con- Continued tinned to decline. The landed aristocracy of the decay in art senatorial and official class prided themselves upon their culture and were addicted to writing one another letters, poems, and panegyrics. Athens contin- ued to have a university even after Alaric had taken it. No new attitudes, spirit, and ideas refreshed the works of this age, however, except in the Christian writings, of which we shall learn later, and in the Christian art of secluded Ravenna. Nor did the writers succeed in retaining the spirit of the classical period. Instead they indulged in mere rhetoric, combining words in unusual and striking ways, but also in a rather unnatural and bombastic fashion, and making all sorts of quaint and recondite allusion to the rich background of literature, mythology, and history that lay so far behind them. In the West, Gaul was the region THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS 93 where Roman culture had the strongest hold in the fifth century. A vivid picture is drawn for us of the wreck and ruin of the ancient world by Salvian, a Christian clergyman of the time. He holds that the Roman world richly salvian's deserves the multifold calamities that have be- picture of fallen it, because of the immoral lives of the majority of Christians who are not a whit better than the barbarians, although the latter are ignorant pagans or here- tics who cannot be expected to have as high standards as the orthodox and cultured Christians of the Empire. He charges that, even while cities are being besieged by the barbarians, Christians of long standing get drunk within the walls and that "honored Christians who are decrepit with age" continue slaves to gluttony and lasciviousness when their cities are on the very verge of being sacked. The barbarous Goths are models of chastity compared to the lustful Christians of Aquitania, and the Vandals did away wath the public prostitutes of Roman Carthage. "Nothing is left to us of the peace and prosperity of our ancestors except the crimes that have ruined that prosperity." Salvian's moral indignation is perhaps somewhat over- drawn; his language is very rhetorical; and his sweeping charges of universal immorality are probably exaggerated, and partly due to his prejudice against circuses and thea- ters, which Christian society had generally retained from the pagan past. But he seems well informed and sometimes speaks with the assurance of personal experience, and many of his statements are corroborated from other sources. He tells us how fathers, in order to get a little protection for themselves, give up their property to the great and power- ful, so that their sons lose their inheritance and have no lands. Yet the government still holds them liable to taxa- tion. These and many others who have fled from their lands to escape invaders or tax-collectors, have no course left but to become the coloni of rich landowners, losing their liberty as well as their property and becoming transformed from men into swine as if by the wand of Circe. He himself, 94 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE after the sack of cities, has seen nude corpses of both sexes lying about everywhere and torn by birds and dogs. And his rage rises to a white heat against certain nobles of Treves who, after the city had been burned and sacked thrice, could still ask the emperors for circuses. "Where would you hold these public spectacles ? " he asks, — "Over the graves and ashes, the bones and blood of the dead?" In another passage he gives us briefly the conclusion of the whole matter: "The whole Roman world is in misery and yet is luxurious. ... It is dying and it laughs." EXERCISES AND READINGS It is not intended that the student should attempt to memorize every detailed event and proper name in this chapter. These details have been given to aid him in forming a correct general impression for himself. Many of the emperors at this time are hardly worth remembering for themselves, but are named for the sake of clearness. The period is one of confusion, without commanding central figures, and I have not wished to make it seem too orderly and simple by omitting a good deal and overemphasizing a few points. The original sources are so scanty and most secondary accounts so wordy that outside reading may be done rather more profitably in connec- tion with other chapters than this. For a rather full account of the sources with translations of some of them see the work of C. H. Hayes, An Introduction to the Sources relating to the Germanic Invasions (New York, 1909). Sources for the Barbarian Invasions. Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. I, pp. 28-33, 35~39' 44~5i' 57-59- Compare the following pairs of selections as to authorship, date, reliability, ground covered, and general tone and attitude: 10 and 14, 12 and 13, 8 and 9, 15 and 16. The General Character of the Invasions. Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire (second edition revised), pp. 285-302. Secondary Narratives of the Invasions. Any chapter applying to this subject and period in either of the follow ing: — Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Bury, Later Roman Empire. Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders. Odoacer and Theodoric. Oman, The Dark Ages, chap, i, pp. 1-18. CHAPTER VI "the city of god" The City of God is the usual English translation for the title of the most influential book written in the fiith_-cen[- tury and one which was the favorite reading of The occasion Christians for many succeeding centuries. The ^i^^ci^^ entrance of Alaric's barbaric soldiery into of ^^^ Rome, the "Eternal City," in 410 made a tremendous im- pression. Rome had at last fallen! Of all cities of the Empire it had remained a stronghold of paganism. The senate had maintained the old rites until the reign of Gratian (375-383), who had refused to hold the ofhce of Pontijex Maximus, had stopped payment for pagan sacri- fices and ceremonies from the imperial treasury, and had taken away the time-honored privileges and revenues of the Roman priesthoods. Now, within less than thirty years since Gratian had removed from the senate-house the altar and statue of Victory that had stood there as long as the Empire itself, the most humiliating of defeats had come upon the city. To those who still adhered to the Roman religion and the old ways, this seemed the crowning calam- ity in the series of misfortunes which the adoption of Christianity as the state religion had brought upon them and their cause. Such pagans attributed the fall of Rome to the fact that the government and many citizens had aban- doned the worship of the ancient Roman gods, had neglected those efficacious rites and spurned that divine guidance under which the city had risen through victory after vic- tory to the height of its power and had transformed itself into a world-empire. Such complaints found an answer from the great church father, Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa. From 413 to 426 he labored on his long and elaborate reply. Four years after finishing it, he died in Hippo while that city 96 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE was resisting a siege by the Vandals. Augustine had shared c, A the secular life of his times before he became a bt. Augus- tine, the Christian and a clergyman, and he was well ac- quainted with many of the leading men of the age. He had studied in the schools of rhetoric and had taught that subject at Milan; he was well versed in Latin culture; he had dabbled in his youth in Manichseism, astrology, and Neo-Platonism, reading Plotinus in Latin translation, not in the original Greek, but being repelled at that time from the Christian Scriptures by the rude Latin of the copies which he tried to read. His life before he became a Christian had not been beyond reproach, as he had an illegitimate son and more than one mistress. We know so much about him chiefly because he talked so much about himself, being, like Petrarch and Rousseau later, one of those who have penned Confessions for the world's eye. In 388 he returned from Italy to Africa, and three years later was ordained a priest at Hippo without having passed through any of the lower orders. He introduced into Africa the practice of having all the clergy of a town live together as monks, although he did not write the rule followed by the later Augustinian Order. In 396 he was made bishop. The City of God is only one of his numerous writings. The City of God is divided into twenty-two books, but these do not correspond to sharply defined logical divisions Argument o^ the thought, as the contents are not very well of the book arranged and there are many digressions. But the main points for us are as follows. The book opens with the assertion that C hristianity j s^ not_responsible for the v) sack of Rome and that, on the contrary, its horrors were V> softened and worse atrocities were prevente3~] 5y "C hristian Influence upon the Goths. Soon leaving this unpleasant memory, however, Augustine launches forth into Roman S history, which, he asserts, shows._by many previous disas- ters that the old gods had not saved Rome from misfortune. Augustine persuaded a Spanish disciple of his, Orosius, to write a very distorted history of the world to bring out the same point. Augustine further makes many criticisms of THE CITY OF GOD 97 the Roman gods and their worship, describing the vicious Roman stage, the immorality of the gods themselves as set forth in classical mythology and of the rites used in their worship, ridiculing Roman theology for its multiplicity of deities and infinite subdivision of functions among them, denying the belief in oracles and pagan methods of divina- tion, engaging in a passing tilt with the astrologers of his day, and, finally, affirming that all the deities and divine forces believed in by the non-Christian world are "demons" only in the sense of being evil spirits, fallen angels, and serv^ants of Satan. Having thus disposed of paganism, he .^ ; declares that one Christian God controls all states and all human endeavor. It was He, not any gods snatched by ■^neas from the flames of a Troy which they could not save, who had raised Rome to power because of the moral and devoted lives of her early patriots. Her decline in turn was . due_to the decay of those pristine virtues, not to the intro- "^ duction of Christianity, since even before the birth of Christ the Roman Republic had gone to ruin. Augustine also insists that Christians do not favor peace at any price, and that the principles of Christianity, if practiced gener- ally by both people and officials, would save the State. But he has not yet answered the natural query, Why has God allow ed the barbarians to sack Rome now that it has become Christian? He can only say that such an earthly disaster is no death-blow to the true Christian, and turn his readers' attention from the earthly to the heavenly city, from the city of Rome to the city of God, just as we saw the Stoic emperor, Marcus Aurelius, turn his mind from the dear city of Cecrops to the dear city of Zeus. The city of God is not merely heaven, the abode of the Trinity and angels, to which those who have been saved by divine grace may look forward from among the The Chris- woes of this world as their eternal home. It also a?Jhe city has an existence here on earth in the spiritual life of God of true believers. Augustine traces its history from creation down through Abel and the story of the Jews, God's chosen people, to the coming of Jesus, preaching of the Gospel, and 98 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE spread of Christianity. The Church, in short, is the cijfc v of God. ^"^ ^^ Christianity began in Palestine among the Jewish people, who, however, had by this time been subjected to the Teachings of Hellenistic culture which spread through Alex- Christianity ^^der's empire. So close was the relationship between Christianity and Judaism that the Hebraic reli- gious literature of the Old Testament was incorporated in one Bible together with the Greek New Testament, which was of Christian authorship and which was believed to ful- fill the prophecies of the Old Testament. To the Hebraic conception of one supreme and personal God, who had created the universe out of nothing and who guided the affairs of men, was now added the Gospel story. It told of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who had been born in this world of a woman, had led a sinless life, had left many social and moral teachings, had worked numerous miracles, had then been crucified by the Jewish priests and Roman governor, but had demonstrated his divinity by rising from the tomb and ascending to heaven and by the workings of the Holy Spirit ever since in his followers. They were held to high standards of morality, were to try to lead pure lives themselves and to engage in loving service of their fellow- men. In return they were promised forgiveness of their past sins, a comforting personal communion with the Holy Spirit, and after death an eternal life of bliss with God. The teachings of the New Testament marked an advance ■upon those of the Old Testament, whose Mosaic law and R lation chroniclcs savor in parts of an age of crude super- of Chris- stition and bloodshed — just as its psalms and p?evious° prophets at times reach high planes of moral -thought fervor and religious sentiment. The Christian and practice , , . , , . , teachmgs were by no means, however, entirely new or strange to the age in which they were put forth. A ■gospel of " peace on earth and good-will toward men " chimed in with the peaceful and humane Roman Empire from Au- gustus to Marcus Aurelius. Back four hundred years before Christ the Greek tragic poet Euripides wrote many tender THE CITY OF GOD 99 or moral passages, which are suggestive in thought and some- times even in phraseology of the New Testament. Many philosophers had already come to a belief in one God, whom, however, they did not venture to describe as a per- son. The Stoics advanced the idea of one law of nature and of the brotherhood of man, even including slaves. Plutarch, though still immersed in pagan religions and old supersti- tions, shows us a distinct advance in the early Empire over the moral standards of the older Greeks and Romans, and Juvenal, another non-Christian writer of Rome, tells us that "fools seek revenge, philosophers forgive." Nor were the teachings of philosophy confined to the educated and intel- lectual classes, for we hear of philosophers who preached to the mob in the streets or who rolled over naked in the show to show the privates in the imperial army that cold has no terrors for the good man. The actual daily life of most people was, however, far from realizing the ideals of the philosophers, — people seldom have lived up to their ideals in any age, — and the Apostle Paul had to warn his Chris- tian converts repeatedly and painstakingly against worship of idols and illicit sexual intercourse. Not philosophy alone, but other religions had been moving in much the same general direction as Christianity. We have already noted in the spread of other Oriental cults in the Empire the em- phasis upon personal relation with the deity, forgiveness of sins, a redeemer, and a resurrection or after life. Thus the way was prepared for the spread of Christianity by other movements, either earlier or contemporaneous with it. What especially distinguished Christianity from the other cults was the remarkable personality of its founder, sketched so vividly in the four Gospels against The distinc- the familiar background of daily human experi- a^Ity^of^^"" ence. For one thing, for example. He was a most Christ unconventional person who brushed aside the cobwebs of conservatism. He broke the Jewish Sabbath, talked with a woman of Samaria, feasted with tax-collectors and sinners, forgave an adulteress, justified Mary Magdalene for buy- ing costly ointment with which to bathe his feet instead of lOO THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE giving the money to the poor, and, in place of the neg- ative injunctions of the Hebrew Ten Commandments, with their "Thou shalt not," preached a positive gospel of love. During the first and second centuries the Christians seem to have come mainly from the poorer and lower classes of The early socicty. Christ had said, "Come unto me all ye Christian who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest." Rich men, on the other hand, were warned that they would have difficulty in entering the kingdom of God and were advised to dispose of their prop- erty first and to give unto the poor. The disciples were sent forth penniless to preach the Gospel — an ideal of apos- tolic poverty which was to have great influence throughout the iVIiddle Ages. The first Christian communities shared their goods in common and awaited expectantly the end of this world and the coming of a better. Even when they gave up the notion that the second coming of Christ was close at hand and returned to a more normal mode of life, they still reckoned things spiritual as of more importance than ordinary human interests and activities, and the pros- pect of eternal life in the next world as of more moment than citizenship in the Roman Empire. Ignatius, one of the earliest Christian writers, even went soTaras to assert that "nothing visible is good." This tendency was accentuated by the persecution to which the Christians were often subjected by the outside world, and by the fact that they lived in an atmosphere of miracle, prophecy, and martyr- dom. Various apostles and wandering missionaries like Paul had founded numerous scattered churches, of whose local organization we at first know little, except that they had officials called overseers or episcopi or bishops, elders or presbyters or priests, and deacons. From these are de- rived the present names of such churches as the Episco- palian and Presbyterian. At first Christian sentiment seems to have favored great liberty in "prophesying"; that is, in preaching by any one who was so moved by the Holy Spirit. One early Christian declared that the truth or falsity of a THE CITY OF GOD loi prophet should be inferred not from what he said, but from the godliness or selfishness of his life. Besides hymn and prayer, preaching and prophecy, cer- tain sacred ceremonies and symbols played a large part in early Christianity. Such were the sign of the The sac- cross, the name of Jesus, and the mysteries or raments sacraments of baptism with water and the Lord's Supper or Eucharist of bread and wine. By these sacraments divine grace and life were believed to be communicated to the believer. Baptism was believed to cleanse from sin, and many Christians, including later some of the Christian emperors, postponed it until the very end of life in order that all their sins might be blotted out. The proper time for baptism, however, was when one entered the Christian life. Three of the four Gospels represent Jesus, at the Last Sup- per with his disciples before he was crucified, as blessing and breaking the bread and giving it to them with the words, "This is my body," and as then passing the wine with the remark, "This is my blood which is shed for many for the remission of sins." This ceremony was continued by the early Christian communities, and the idea came to prevail that the words of Christ were to be taken literally, that the bread and wine were his body and blood, by par- taking of which the human body became joined with the divine Christ. The founding of scattered communities by different wan- dering missionaries, and the freedom at first permitted to "prophets" of airing their supposedly divine Growth of revelations, naturally produced much local vari- heresy ance in belief and practice, especially since Christians in different places sometimes retained customs and notions from the previous religion of their particular locality. As a result heresies sprang up and apocryphal scriptures were composed which the Church as a whole has rejected. One or two prominent early heresies may be mentioned by way of illustration. Montanism is named from Montanus, an ec- static prophet in Asia Minor about 150 A.D., whose life was very strict and ascetic and who emphasized unduly the I02 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Christian reaction against ancient learning and civilization. Gnosticism, on the other hand, was a heresy of the second century which adopted the cosmology and astrology of the ancients and interpreted Christian story in the light of them. Many men of that day were inclined to take the Gospel story as a sort of allegory rather than as history, or to hold that God had never really become man, but that Christ was a kind of phantom or celestial image. The most dangerous heresy during the period of the Roman Empire was Arian- ism, which, the orthodox held, relegated Christ to a second- ary place compared to God the Father. Arianism in the fourth century had a strong hold in the East and most of the barbarian invaders of the fifth century were Arians. To prevent heresy church unity and organization devel- oped. The bishop became the chief local authority and one Develop- was elected by the members of the Christian dim-ch or- Community in each city. By the middle of the ganization third century the Christian Cyprian, in his Unity of the Church, declares that there is only one Catholic Church, and that no one outside it can be saved even though he suffer a martyr's death "for confessing the name of Christ." For "he can no longer have God for his father who has not the Church for his mother." In order to keep the various bishops in agreement two customs grew up. One was to have the bishops of a given area meet together; Cyprian, for instance, during the ten years that he was Bishop of Carthage called a number of such meetings or local church councils. Another method was to look to some one Christian community as a rhodel or authority in doctrine and as an umpire in disputes. The church at Rome seems from an early date to have been thus looked up to; the sees of Alexandria and Antioch perhaps came next in importance. The bishops in such places were known as metropolitans or archbishops. The early Christians were very unfavorably regarded by Roman society. It is hard for us to realize that Christians, who have always prided themselves upon their lofty moral standards and regarded other faiths and rites as supersti- THE CITY OF GOD 103 tious, were themselves considered grossly immoral and su- perstitious by the pagan world. Yet Suetonius p^ ^^ ^^^^ spoke of "Christians, a class of men of a new tility to and vicious superstition " ; and Tacitus remarked their "moral enormities" and their "hatred of the human race," and asserted that "they were criminals who deserved the most severe punishment." The pagan mob believed them guilty of such practices as incest and devouring children. Such horrible stories circulated about them prob- ably because they seemed to the pagans a people with strange, peculiar, and mysterious ways, who held aloof from popular festivals and much of the life of the ancient city and had their own private meetings. We find the same attitude toward the Jews in the Middle Ages, when they were often attacked by Christian mobs and when similar stories were current among Christians concerning them. One might expect the Roman government with Its good law courts to have soon discovered that there was little truth in these charges against the Christians Attitude of and to have protected them against mob vio- ^^^ ^"JJ^nt lence. And so to a certain extent it did. But the government had further reasons of Its own for being suspi- cious of the CTiristians and for punishing thenK^Chrlstianity had originated in Judea, and not long thereafter~tEeJews haHTevolted^againsT the rule of Rorne, and had refused to submit eve"iT"^when Jerusalem was besieged in 70 a.d. Rather than surrender they did eat human flesh, and killed themselves and burned the city as the Romans stormed It. Jerusalem till this time had been the chief center of Chris- tianity, and the allusions in the Book of Revelation to Babylon, the great harlot, and to "the image of the beast" probably apply to Rome and to worship of the emperor. At any rate. Christians refused to worship the emperor or to join in other civic rites, and so the government could hardly do anything else than regard them as obstinate rebels. Origen, the great Alexandrian church father In the first half of the third century, admitted the truth of the charge " that Christians decline public offices," and declared I04 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE those persons " enemies of our faith who require us to bear arms for the commonwealth and to slay men." Moreover, the organization of Christians in churches and their fre- quent meetings violated the laws of the emperors against associations, which we have seen one emperor so careful to enforce that he even forbade the establishment of a volun- teer fire department lest it lead to sedition. Consequently the usual penalty for confessing one's self a Christian was death, sometimes in the arena or with torture. Such was the letter of the law, but sincejthe Christians did not actu- ally attack the government, most emperors did not try to ferret them out and to annihilate them by wholesale perse- cution, but did punish any one who was publicly charged with being a Christian and who did not free himself from the accusation by worshiping the statue of the emperor or images of the gods. But anonymous accusations were usu- ally disregarded, and any one who falsely accused another of being a Christian was liable to severe punishment himself. Meanwhile the Christians kept increasing in numbers in pursuance of the injunction of Jesus, "Go ye into all the From perse- ^^^^^ ^^d preach the gospel to every creature, cution to He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved ; riump ^^^ j^^ ^^^^ believeth not shall be damned." By the third century there were erudite Christian writers to reply to the attacks which cultured pagans now thought it worth while to make upon Christianity. The emperors, too, awoke to the fact that the Christians were increasing rapidly in numbers, wealth, and power, and from the middle of the third century tried to crush them by systematic persecution. Many Christians suffered martyrdom and more recanted; some did neither, but purchased from corrupt officials certifi- cates that they had performed pagan sacrifice when they really had not; but the Church as a whole successfully weathered the storm. We possess an edict of 311 in which the Emperor Galerius says that he has decided to tolerate even the Christians because persecuting them does no good. Finally with Constantlne Christianity triumphed ; and soon began In its turn to persecute all pagans and heretics. THE CITY OF GOD 105 At Constantine's call the first general or oecumenical council of all Christian churches met at Nicsea, near Con- stantinople, in 325 and decided against Arianism. Christianity There now had come to be a regular series of the state offices through which a clergyman usually had to "^^ *^^°" pass; namely, reader, exorcist, acolyte, sub-deacon, deacon, priest, and bishop. For there was now a clear distinction in the Church between mere believers, the laymen or laity, and those who officiated in the churches, the clergy. The clergy were given many privileges by the Christian suc- cessors of Constantine, as their edicts in the Theodosian Code show. They were in large measure personally ex- empted from state duties and taxes; and in most criminal and some civil cases were to be tried by their own bishops rather than by the imperial courts. Before Christianity had been recognized by the State, it was often the practice for the laity as well as the clergy to settle their disputes pri- vately before their bishop instead of in the public courts, and the emperors now allowed the bishops to continue this jurisdiction to a certain extent. The emperors would not permit rich men to escape paying taxes by becoming clergy- men, but they did allow the Church as a corporation to re- ceive bequests, and themselves endowed it freely. Such church lands were subject to taxation, but this did not prevent the Church and many individual bishops from growing very wealthy, and by the fifth century the Church is estimated to have become the greatest landholder in the Empire. Although a century had elapsed between the time when Constantine presided at the Council of Nicaea and the pub- lication of The City of God, and although many Persistence edicts against paganism had been issued in the °^ paganism interim by Christian emperors, Augustine's book itself shows us that the pagan religions had not yet disappeared. Close friends, members of the same family, even husband and wife, might still be, one pagan, the other Christian. It is hard to tell whether some of the extant writings of this period were penned by a Christian or not. There were men io6 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROrE who "looked on Christ and the sun as almost equally good symbols of the Supreme," and others who regarded astrol- ogy as the truth back of all religions. Synesius of Cyrene, previously a Neo-Platonist, suddenly became a Christian bishop at the beginning of the fifth century, apparently without surrendering his belief that man could read the future in dreams and in the stars, and certainly without giving up either his wife or his Neo-Platonism. When the emperors legalized and favored Christianity and legislated against heresy, one might fear that they Growth of would make themselves heads of the Church, the Papacy Constantine had been responsible for the calling of the first general council, and he came to be known in the East as one of the apostles. A Western Christian apolo- gist during the reigns of Constantine's sons — the same Firmicus whose book on astrology we have already quoted — addresses them as "most sacred emperors," setting them above the rest of mankind and closely associating them with the celestial bodies and "the Supreme God," at the same time that he urges them to eradicate pagan cults. In 429 the Patriarch of Alexandria called the emperor the "image of God on earth." But the emperors in the West seem for the most part to have preferred to leave religious matters to the Church itself to settle, and in the East the emperors often failed to control the strife of religious parties when they did try to interfere. Councils were now held with in- creasing frequency and at the same time the Bishop of Rome appears to have increased in importance and power. One would naturally expect, especially after the fall of Jerusa- lem in 70 A.D., that the leading early Christian community would develop at Rome, the center and the greatest city of the Empire. Moreover, it was believed from an early date that both Peter and Paul had suffered martyrdom there. In the Gospels Jesus often addresses Peter as the leader among the disciples, and in one passage says: "Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church. . . . And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven : and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in THE CITY OF GOD 107 heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."^ The Bishops of Rome have therefore argued that Peter was the first Bishop of Rome and that they are his successors as chief of the apostles and as head of the Church. The pagan historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, tells of a fight at a papal election in 366 as a result of which one hundred and thirty-seven persons were killed ; but adds that the office was worth fighting for, since it brought with it a large income which enabled the bishop to dress elegantly and to ride in a carriage and to give banquets that outshone those of the emperor. Damasus, the very pope elected on that occasion, is the first to give us a definite statement of the papal claims and of the doctrine of the Roman Church. From his successor, Siricius, comes the first extant papal decretal or order issued to the Church at large. ^^Since the popes consistently opposed Arianism, whereas the attitude of many Eastern bishops was wavering, when the orthodox Theodosian dynasty came into power the papal influence continued to increase. | The last Western emperor of that family in 445 issued an edict ordering other churches to recognize as supreme the authority of the apostolic see at Rome, and Leo the justifying that supremacy by Rome's connection Great with Peter, by the majesty of the city itself, and by a decree of the Council of Sardika a century before. The Bishop .of Rome at this time was Leo the Great (440-461), who is often regarded as the first to try to raise that office to something like the power of later times. He not only claimed to be sole head of the Church, but by his partici- pation in the embassy to Attila left a precedent for the political activity of his successors. During the fifth century several quarrels between the Patriarchs of Alexandria and Constantinople prevented any single see In the East from acquiring an authority comparable to that of Rome in the ^ Matthew xvi, 18, 19; but two chapters later (Matthew xviii, 17, 18) the same powers are given to the disciples and the Church in general. See also John XX, 22, 23. io8 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE West, and gave the Papacy a chance to assert its supremacy by interfering in those quarrels. Leo in especial was incHned to make his influence so felt, as we may see illustrated in the story of two church councils. An abbot condemned for heresy by the Patriarch of Constantinople appealed both to the Eastern emperor and The "Rob- to the pope. It is to be noted that the Western t'er Council" emperor had no part in the affair. Contrary to Council of Leo's wish the Eastern emperor called a council Chalcedon ^^ Ephesus Under the presidency of the Patri- arch of Alexandria. Leo, however, wrote out his decision in favor of the Patriarch of Constantinople and sent it to the council by his three representatives. The council did not deign even to read Leo's tTome, but deposed the Patri- arch of Constantinople, and further treated him with such violence that he soon died from the effects, while one of the papal legates who protested against the council's action was lucky to escape with his life. Leo had no intention of allowing such proceedings to pass unchallenged ; he induced the members of the imperial house in the West to write to Constantinople in his support; and finally secured another council at Chalcedon, near Constantinople, to reconsider the action of "the Robber Council," as Leo termed the recent assembly at Ephesus. Now the Patriarch of Alex- andria who had presided at Ephesus was driven from his see, and the questions in dispute were settled on the basis of Leo's Tome. Leo, however, was very much offended by the twenty-eighth canon of the Council of Chalcedon, which he regarded as -an attempt to raise the see of Constanti- nople to an equality with that of Rome. This canon may be taken as marking a growing breach between the Eastern Church and the Western, which was Schisms in increased in 482 when the Emperor Zeno issued the East ^ letter called the HenoHcon. It was intended to provide a common meeting-ground for all the religious factions in the East; but it was not at all acceptable to the pope at Rome, who finally excommunicated the Patri- arch of Constantinople and thus instituted a schism of THE CITY OF GOD 109 over thirty years' duration. In the East itself, moreover, Christian Egypt was already tending toward the formation of a distinct Coptic Church, and the Nestorians, treated as heretics in the Empire, built up a strong church of their own in the Persian Kingdom, whence they were soon to spread as missionaries to the Far East. Meanwhile there had ceased to be an emperor in the West, and the pope was freed from the danger that a ruler at Rome might interfere with his ecclesiastical ^ j ° , . Papacy and supremacy as the Byzantine emperor often did barbarians in the case of the Patriarch of Constantinople. The barbarian kings in Italy, Odoacer and Theodoric, had little desire to interfere in ecclesiastical matters; and the Germans generally were to prove docile to the dictates of the Western Church. For the time being, however, the break-up of the Roman Empire and the war and disorder separated the Western churches outside of Italy from papal influence. The other-worldliness of Christianity has already been emphasized. There are many passages of Scripture which have led men to hate their bodies, to withdraw Growth of from the world, to devote themselves to the con- asceticism templative life, and to exercise their souls in holiness. But we do not hear much of Christian hermits and monks until the close of the third century. Martyrs had been the heroes of the early Church ; but as the chance of winning an immor- tal crown by being thrown to wild beasts ceased with impe- rial toleration and recognition of Christianity, ascetics came to be considered the holiest Christians. During the fourth and fifth centuries every one was reading with awe and ad- miration the Lives of St. Antony and St. Martin of Tours, and many were fired ^rtH~the desire to imitate their self- renunciation and austerities, and with the hope to triumph like them over the flesh and the Devil and to work miracles. The early Christian communities had been composed largely of those whose ordinary worldly life was hard enough, and whose secret meetings and communistic views shut them off sufficiently from the world. But when Christianity became the state religion and the majority of the population became • no THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE at least nominal converts and the Church began to grow wealthy, many persons began to feel that they must do something more than belong to the Church or even to the clergy, if they wished to be sure of saving their souls. Their method was to flee to the desert, to seclude themselves in tombs and caves, to see nothing of the opposite sex, to eat and sleep very little, to wash even less, in general to avoid doing anything pleasant, to have no property or passions or will of their own, to forget all family and social ties, to spend their time partly in some dull, mechanical operation like weaving baskets or copying manuscripts in order to eke out their scanty existence, and to pass the rest of each day in prayer, repeating Scripture, and other acts which would keep their minds off any other subject than religion. All this may seem to us gloomy and unprofitable, but to them it seemed the path to perfect peace, happiness, and contentment. The age delighted in stories of the recluse who burned unread a package of letters from his family containing the first news that he had had of them for fifteen years, of the hermit who ate but one meal a week for thirty years, or of the grazing monks who lived on the grass of the fields a la Nebuchadnezzar. The movement started in Egypt, where Antony was the first noted hermit and where Pachomius established some Egyptian of the earliest Christian monasteries. Antony monachism ^^ twenty sold the property which his parents had left him, distributed the proceeds to the poor, and spent the remaining eighty-five years of his life as a hermit — the last fifty in a mountain three days' journey beyond the Nile in order to escape from his throngs of admirers. Pachomius founded ten monasteries, each of about three hundred inmates. The monks labored at different trades, such as carpenter, tanner, smith, cobbler, tailor, as well as in the kitchen and fields of the monastery. They learned the Bible by heart and held four daily religious services. They lived in individual cells and had their meals at different hours. The Rule of Pachomius strictly prohibited all ablutions except in case of sickness. THE CITY OF GOD iii The movement spread before the close of the fourth century into Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Persia; and St. Basil introduced it among the Greeks. Spread in Symeon Stylites in Syria led a life like that of an ^^^ ^^^^ Indian fakir, spending thirty-seven years on top of a pillar which was gradually raised from six to sixty feet in height. He was always covered with vermin, but took some exercise by bending his forehead until it touched his feet, a process which he would repeat so many successive times that observers lost count. Basil, on the other hand, organized communities of monks and gave them a mofe specific rule to live by than that of Pachomius. Some of the Greek mon- asteries founded then still survive to-day, isolated from the world on steep crags to which one can gain access only by climbing long rope ladders or by being drawn up in a basket, and in them the monks still live much the same life as their predecessors of fourteen or fifteen hundred years ago. Athanasius, the great opponent of the Arian heresy, is also credited -with the introduction of monasticism in the West. Later St. Jerome was a great advocate of Western the ascetic life. By the end of the fourth century monasticism monasteries and nunneries were numerous in Italy. In Gaul the movement was spread by the fame of St. Martin of Tours, and by the labor of Cassian at Marseilles after 410, where his two monasteries contained over five thousand monks and nuns, while his Institutes and Conferences were influential books on the subject. The missionaries, St. Patrick and St. Severinus, carried monasticism to Ireland and Noricum ; but in Spain and North Africa the movement seems to have been checked by the Visigothic and Vandal conquests. In Ireland entire clans turned themselves into monastic communities with their former chieftains as abbots. The word monk or monachos originally meant one who lives alone, but in the West the community found favor as against the hermit life, and "monasticism" is used to refer especially to life in monasteries, whereas "monach- ism " is a term covering the life both of hermits and of the members of monastic communities. 112 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE The motives of those becoming monks soon ceased to be entirely religious. The chaotic conditions of the period of Motives in barbarian invasion, loss of property, friends, and entering a home, the impossibility of earning a livelihood, monastery ^j^^ example of Others, the comparative quiet, security, and perhaps even comfort of a monastery — all these conditions might impel one to withdraw from the world which had become so unattractive. Jerome wrote to one of his female friends at the time of the sack of Rome by Alaric, "Dearest daughter in Christ, will you marry amid such scenes as these?" In that same year, when St. Patrick escaped from slavery in Ireland to the coasts of Gaul, "he journeyed through the desert" for four weeks, and was doubtless glad to end his wanderings and find a refuge at last in a monastery. But the city of God had to go on, though the Roman Empire had become a wilderness; nay, it had to convert Good and lands that Rome had never conquered. After a bad monks score of years spent in Gallic monasteries Patrick went back as a missionary to the land to which he had before been carried away as a slave, and labored for thirty years more in spreading Christianity through Ireland. This allows us that monasticism, was already preparing men for service, and not merely turning out freak sa,ints like Antony and Symeon. However, the chief advocates of monastic life in that age themselves complain of persons who want to become monks, but not to suffer hardships, or who wander about doing as they please, yet pretending to be ascetics. In short, monasticism had grown so popular that both good and bad were entering the field. The triumph of Christianity hastened the decline of classica.1 art, literature, philosophy, and science, which it Transition was eventually to replace by a theology, a liter- ca°To^Ch?is- ^ture, and an art of its own. Many Christians, tian culture especially ascetics, felt that ancient art and poetry were dangerous, closely connected as they were with pagan mythology, and appealing as they did to the sense of beauty and the passion of love. Yet for a long time THE CITY OF GOD 113 Christians who had any education had a classical one, be- cause that was the only one to be had. The early Christians did not excel in art and literature, as the lack of literary style in the Greek New Testament and the rude frescoes of the Roman catacombs show. Often Christian artists took statues of Apollo or Mithraic monuments and used them with slight modifications for Christian personalities and Biblical scenes. For their church services they adopted, not the classical temple, but a style of building sufficiently similar to the Roman forensic basilica to be called by the same name — a rectangular structure with a central nave higher in the roof than the two side aisles which paralleled it and which were separated from it by colonnades or arcades. At one end was added to the rectangle a semicircular recess for the altar, and the interior unless small was covered with a flat wooden roof. Gradually the Christians came to express their new faith in hymns differing in both form and spirit from classical verse, while Lives of the saints took the place of epics and romances. Symbolism in art and allegory in literature were important Christian characteristics, the mysteries of the faith being told in parable or veiled in sign and symbol . The voluminous Christian writers of the closing centuries of the Empire, like Jerome and Augustine and Basil and Ambrose, are called "church fathers" because Church fa- of their influence upon the thought and usage of patrLdc^ the Church then and since. Jerome besides his literature. own works made the Latin translation of the Bible, called the Vulgate, which is still used by the Roman Catholic Church. The name, "church father," is indeed applied to all early Christian writers, including, after the Roman Empire had fallen, many like Gregory the Great, and the term "patristic literature" is used to cover their writings. Augustine once said, "The authority of Scripture is higher than all the efforts of the human intelligence." This was a hard saying for experimental science or rational philosophy, but represents fairly well the attitude of patristic literature, which is based largely on the Bible and is concerned chiefly 114 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE with religious matters. Augustine, for example, had little interest in or knowledge of natural science ; he more often picked up some of its errors and superstitions than he appre- ciated its true merits and purpose. A work like his City oj God, however, digresses on many miscellaneous topics, such as marriage, the stature of the antediluvians, the age of Methuselah, Noah's ark, monstrous races of men, the an- tipodes, Hebrew the original language of the human race, Europe, Asia, and Africa, human transformations into animals, the Erythraean sibyl, whether Hebrew learning is older than Egyptian, early Christian persecutions, torture, society, international law, and what costume a Christian may wear. From such passages a reader could gather con- siderable information or misinformation without having to read classical authors. And on almost any page of The City of God could be found a quotation from Vergil, although Augustine at times had conscientious scruples about his fondness for the great Latin poet. In short, while Christianity turned its back upon much in classical civilization, it also retained a considerable amount The classical of ancient culture into the Middle Ages. This heritage residue has well been called "the classical heritage." We must keep in mind, however, that it was the last and most threadbare and decaying stage of classical culture that most influenced early medieval Christian so- ciety. But the Latin language was to be preserved in writ- ings by the clergy and some of the Latin literature was still read. Greek philosophy had greatly influenced Chris- tian theology already, and there were survivals from pagan mythology and festivals in the legends and ceremonies of the Church. The administrative divisions of the Roman Empire had been closely copied in the ecclesiastical organi- zation. When Valens divided Cappadocia into two provinces in 372, it meant that there would henceforth have to be two archbishops there instead of one; and in 451 the Council of Chalcedon definitely ruled that every town which the emperor raised to the rank of a city thereby acquired the right to a bishop. In France to-day the sees of bishops still THE CITY OF GOD 115 correspond closely to the sites of Roman municipalities, where, before Christianity became the state religion, there had been a pagan flamen for the cult of the emperor. Not only did the Roman law Influence the decisions rendered in the episcopal courts, but its very phraseology can be traced in doctrinal statements made by the Papacy. Finally, the city of God kept for its capital that same Rome which had for so long ruled the world. Ere long Rome would resume its conquests, the Invading barbarians would yield to its control, and the pope would begin the building-up of a power almost as abso- ^j^ ch r h lute and extensive as that of the Roman emper- in medieval ors in their prime — in some respects, indeed, '^ "'^^ more extensive and absolute. It had been eight hundred years between the sack of early Rome by the Gauls and the recent entry by the German Alaric. Over a thousand years were to elapse between the pontificate of Leo the Great and that of Leo X, when the first successful revolt against Roman Catholicism was initiated by another Teuton, Martin Luther. The long intervening period is that of the remainder of this book, and all through those centuries we shall constantly meet the power of the city of God. EXERCISES AND READINGS Religious Life of the Roman Empire. T. R. Glover, The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire, any chapter. The Early Christians. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. xv. 1. Briefly characterize Gibbon's literary style; why do you like or dislike it? Is it a suitable style for a historian? 2. In his treatment of the early Christians does Gibbon show a lack of any quality essential to a historian? 3. What is his estimate of the morality, intellectual caliber, social standing, and numbers of the early Christians? How would or does he compare them in these respects with the pagans? 4. What is his opinion concerning Christian miracles? 5. What is his attitude toward classical men and ideals? ii6 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Resemblances between Stoic Philosophy and Christianity. Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. i, pp. 14-17. Botsford, Source-Book of Ancient History, pp. 510-16. Note those passages which you think resemble Christian thought and writing, and also any that show a different point of view. Persecution of Christians under Marcus Aurelius. Translations and Reprints of the University of Pennsylvania, vol. iv, no. i, pp. 10-19. Rise of the Papacy. Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. i, pp. 63-73. Church Fathers. The writings of many church fathers, including Augustine's City of God, may be found in close English translation in two sets of volumes called The Ante-Nicene Fathers, and The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. An hour employed in turning the leaves of one or two vol- umes and reading a bit here and there will be well spent. One should beware of the translation of The City of God in the Temple Classics, as it omits a great deal, is misarranged, and numbers the books in- correctly. Persistence of Paganism. Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, pp. 3-26, "The Pagan Aristocracy and the Confusion of Parties," Early Christian Art. Cambridge Medieval History, vol. I, pp. 598-613. MONASTICISM TO THE FiFTH CeNTURY. Cambridge Medieval History, vol. i, pp. 521-32. H. B. Workman, The Evolution of the Monastic Ideal (19 13). Chap, i, "The Ideas of Monasticism" (pp. 1-74); chap. 11, "The History of Monasticism" (pp. 75-136). These chapters are subdivided into sec- tions, in case shorter readings are desired. The Life of St. Severinus, by Eugippius, has been recently translated into English for the first time by G. W. Robinson. CHAPTER VII GERMAN KINGDOMS IN THE WEST Of little account compared to the Church, before which opened so impressive a future, or to the great Empire, whose glory now lay in the past, were the crude Qgrman kingdoms of the present that the invading bar- states on barians had founded in the West. In many respects these states were mere fragments of the preceding Empire, going on from the momentum which it had given them, rather than from any political capacity or civilizing power on the part of the newcomers. We note, for one thing, that all the barbarian kingdoms which in any true sense could be called states were upon Roman soil. Attila's em- pire had not been, but it had lasted only so long as life was in his commanding person. It took a Roman population and ordered society, a Roman civil service, Roman walls and roads, though they might be in ruins, to keep any sort of a government going at that time. Yet we note further that all^ese states were German kingdoms. Huns, Slavs, and Alani founded no states at this time that have left records or are worth studying. The Germans were farther advanced on the road toward political organization and settled life than any of the other barbarians, and showed themselves capable with Roman help of keeping some sort of government and society in existence into the sixth century. The founding of the kingdoms of the Burgundians and Franks in Gaul, of the Visigoths in southwestern Gaul, of the Vandals in Africa, and of the Ostrogoths in Duration Italy have already been narrated in the chapter ^"^ extent on the barbarian invasions. Only approximate dates can be given for the beginning of some of these states, since at first they were nominally still parts of the Empire and only gradually asserted their complete independence. At their ii8 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE greatest extent the Vandals held North Africa from the Atlantic to Tripoli, the Balearic Isles, Corsica, Sardinia, and for a brief interval Sicily. Under their rule Rome's ancient enemy, Carthage, became again the capital of an independent sea power. The varying extent of the Visi- gothic Kingdom in Gaul has already been set forth in speaking of the conquests of Clovis. The West Goths began to occupy Spain under their king, Euric, before 484, but it was a long time before their kingdom covered the entire peninsula. Petty independent Roman rulers held out here and there, and the Suevi in the Northwest were not con- quered and absorbed until 585. The Ostrogothic Kingdom under Theodoric included, besides Italy and Sicily, Pro- vence, the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic, and consid- erable territory northeast of Italy. The Burgundian and Vandal Kingdoms ended in 534; that of the Ostrogoths in 555. Those of the Visigoths in Spain and of the Franks in Gaul continued into the next period. Burgundy was added to the extensive Frankish dominions in 534, Provence in 536, and Bavaria in 555, but Brittany still remained inde- pendent. After Clovis, the Frankish territory tended to divide into three kingdoms ruled by differeift^members or branches of the royal family :^ustrasia on both sides of the lower Rhine, the original home of the Franks; Neustria, the region centering about Soissons or Paris whicntHey had conquered from Syagrius; and third. Burgundy^ Aquitania, once the Gallic kingdom of the West Goths, and Bavaria also tended to break away under separate rulers. In Britain the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes were devastating, conquering, enslaving, and settling at this time, but as yet they had formed no kingdoms of any considerable size, but were divided into ten or a dozen little ones, of which we have almost no record. The Lombards, too, who did not enter Italy until the second half of the sixth century, will come into our story later. Not much, it is true, is known of any of these German states. There were hardly any contemporary historical writers. The Franks fare best in this respect and almost our GERMAN KINGDOMS IN THE WEST 119 only account of them is the crude, strongly partisan, and often sadly ungrammatical and incoherent chron- gQ^j-ces icle of Greg ory of Tours (538-594). For Theodo- of our j;ic, the East Goth, we have the letters of his "°^^ ^^ secretary, Cassiodorus, who made some pretense to learning and literary style. Cassiodorus also composed a history of the Goths, now lost, but of which some use was made by Jordanes, who wrote a history of the Goths later in the sixth century, but who was an unreliable lover of legend with no capacity for criticism or exactness. Otherwise we have to rely on incidental references to Western events in Byzantine historians and on the laws issued during this period by the German kings. How large the new German element in the population of these kingdoms was, it is difficult to say. Sometimes the invading armies were not very large; Gaiseric, Population for instance, is said to have led only eighty thou- and language sand Vandals into North Africa which probably had a population of millions. We must remember, however, that there were many barbarians scattered through the Empire before this. Except in Britain and northeastern Gaul the language of the invaders had little or no abiding influence. The Salian Franks almost completely obliterated Roman civilization and Christianity from the region between the Meuse and the Scheldt, which they occupied in their first aggressions against the Empire, and where to-day is spoken a German dialect, Flemish. The Ripuarians also, in their first permanent advance west of the Rhine, seem to have dislodged Roman culture and the Christian religion, and their southwestern boundary at that time coincided roughly with the present limits of the French and German lan- guages. The Alamanni also appear to have introduced a permanent German element in the population west of the Rhine. Elsewhere in Gaul, and still more in Italy and Spain, the Latin races seem to have held their own. The German invaders usually became the aristocratic, fighting, landhold- ing class, though some of them dropped to a lower rank in economic prosperity and in the social scale, while many 120 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE of the old Roman senatorial class remained wealthy and powerful. Our information is vague as to how much land the Germans took for themselves, from whom they took it, and how it was distributed among them. The religion of the Germans in all these states e xcept, the Prankish Kingdom was either pagan or Arian, and the ver- . . nacular language was used in the service. After the conversion of Clovis in 496 the Franks, hitherto pagan, became orthodox Roman Catholics. The conquered population, however, was predominantly Roman Catholic in all the kingdoms and usually little effort was made to convert them to Arianism. In Africa, however, Catholics were expelled wholesale from the two provinces which the Vandals themselves settled, and Theodoric perse- cuted Catholics fiercely in the last three years of his reign because the Byzantine emperor at that time was ill-treating_ the Ariaffs in the East. The German kings controlled the calling of church councils in their kingdoms except in Italy, where the pope lived, and Theodoric was careful not to interfere much in ecclesiastical affairs. Once he refused to decide a disputed papal election, telling the clergy, "It is your duty to settle this question." Most of the kings, how- ever, were inclined to exert considerable control over the election of bishops within their realms. The Visigothic Kingdom became Roman Catholic toward the close of the sixth century. The conquest of their new homes had been made possible for the invaders by entrusting the military leadership to some one man and by combining into larger Kingship . . 1 1 1 '1 1 aggregations of peoples than the tribal organiza- tions of the early Germans. When they had settled down on the new soil, it depended largely on the personality of the leader whether he could convert his office into a perma- nent, absolute, territorial monarchy, or whether the king- ship would dwindle before the local independence of the other great landowners — the king, of course, took a lion's share of confiscated lands. Gaiseric, who founded the Vandal state in Africa and continued to rule it vigorously until 477, GERMAN KINGDOMS IN THE WEST 121 established a truly absolute monarchy and alone among the German monarchs was strong enough to establish a direct male hereditary succession to the throne. He also forced the surrounding Moorish tribes to remain quiet, although they had previously made the Roman Empire a deal of trouble and were to resume their raids after his death. Theodoric, the East Goth, whom we have already had occasion to mention many times, was another dominant personality who wisely regulated affairs, not only in his own kingdom, but in some of the neighboring states, and who made marriage alliances with all four of the leading German states of his time, Vandals, Visigoths, Franks, and Burgundians. Cjovis was another great king who, though inferior to Theodoric as a statesman, built up the Prankish power by his conquests. That power, however, was^dimin- ished under his successors by the Prankish practice of equal division of the kingdom among all the sons of the previous ruler, who then usually fought and plotted against one another, or were frequently assassinated by some one else. One poor king made a public speech requesting intending assassins kindly to postpone their attacks for two or three years longer, until there should be some one old enough to succeed him. Among the Visigoths, too, especially after the transfer of their rule to Spain, kings were murdered at a rapid rate and the unruly Gothic nobles were very obstreperous, although the monarchs tried to discourage conspiracies by atrociously cruel punishments. These kings were usually glad to continue such Roman administrative machinery as they found still in existence. The Vandals kept the old divisions into provinces Retgntion of and left many important offices in the hands of Roman ad- T, T-« • • i» • 1 r ministration Romans. Roman municipalities and governors 01 provinces continued in southwestern Gaul under Visigothic rule. Theodoric was deferential to the Roman senate, still appointed consuls, and at his palace at Ravenna had a court much like that of Constantinople. The Prankish Kingdom, which developed later than the others, retained less of Roman methods of government. As a rule taxation, 122 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE to which the Germans themselves were not accustomed, was not as oppressive in their kingdoms as in the late Empire. When the Byzantine emperor reconquered North Africa, the overtaxed peasants sighed for the easier days of Vandal rule. The German invaders retained their own laws and courts, and their customs were now for the first time written down — in Latin. The Roman population in cases be- tween themselves were allowed the benefit of their own Roman law to which they were accustomed and the German king usually had a statement of it made in writing also — generally a crude, meager code compared to the masterpieces of Roman jurisprudence in the days of Ulpian, Paulus, and Papinian. Euric (466-484), the most notable king of the V^est Goths since Alaric and under whom their expansion in Gaul reached its height and their conquest of Spain was begun, published the laws of the Visigoths, our earliest fragments of German legislation. His son, Alaric II, just before he was conquered and slain by Clovis, had issued a compilation of Roman law for the use of his Latin subjects in Gaul and Spain, which to-day is known as the Breviary of Alaric. The Franks adopted it for their Gallo-Roman subjects. The Salic law was written down in Clovis's reign and the customs of the Ripuarian Franks somewhat later. About 500, King Gundobad pub- lished a code of laws for both Burgundians and Romans, but later added a special code for Romans only. About the same time in Italy appeared the Edict of Theodoric, a brief compilation of Roman law. No code of Vandal law is extant, but we know of particular legislation by the kings, who also frequently interfered in legal proceedings. The Anglo-Saxons in Britain and the Lombards in Italy committed their laws to writing at the end of the sixth and during the seventh century, while the customs of the Alamanni, Thuringians, Bavarians, and Saxons were not reduced to writing until the seventh and eighth centuries. In the middle of the seventh century Romans and West Goths in Spain were brought under one system of law at GERMAN KINGDOMS IN THE WEST 123 just about the time that they were permitted to intermarry. Under this law of Chindaswind the court organization and procedure were Roman rather than German. Documentary evidence was much used and the old German methods of proof were not recognized. Torture was employed as in the late Roman Empire. Everywhere economic life tended more and more to be- come purely agricultural. Grass grew in many erstwhile busy city streets and ruins of once thickly peo- Economic pled quarters were now hidden by vegetable gar- '"^ dens and vineyards. Gradually the municipal governing bodies disappeared and the bishop was alone left to look after the public welfare. Some town sites were entirely abandoned. In the country the estate of the great landholder was as prevalent as ever. Probably for a time the number of small landowners was increased by the allotment of lands to the conquering barbarians, for it scarcely seems as if all their warriors could have received large estates. But these small farmers were unable to hold their own for long, and presently began to "commend" themselves to some power- ful local magnate. On the whole the wars and lack of strong government had the effect of increasing the amount of serf- dom and, at least among the conquering Franks, the num- ber of slaves. The monastery was a local center of economic activity of which we shall treat In the ninth chapter. At first there was a considerable social distinction be- tween German and Roman. Intermarriage was forbidden except among the Franks and, after 652, among „ . the West Goths. But among the Franks the Salic law fixed the Wergeld of a Frank at twice that of a Roman. The Vandals regarded the North Africans as a conquered population without rights; the East and West Goths treated the Romans more as equals. About the king in each state centered a new nobility who derived their privileges from him as a reward for services rendered. Otherwise the old social divisions among the Germans and Romans were continued. The Jews, whom the Emperor Theodosius in 388 had forbidden to marry Christians, were 124 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE still a social problem. After the Visigothic Kingdom became Catholic, they were persecuted in Spain through a long period. Theodoric in Italy and the Prankish rulers in Gaul, where the Jews had communities, generally protected them. Some classical culture, like Roman administration and law, still continued. The poet, Sidonius Apollinaris, and Latin Other representatives of the last period of Latin literature literature in Gaul found a refuge at the Visigothic court. Even in the last years of Vandal rule in Africa there was a considerable literary output. Under Theodoric in Italy flourished Cassiodorus and Boethius. Besides his let- ters and Gothic history the former wrote some extremely brief textbooks concerning the seven liberal arts — gram- mar, rhetoric, and logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. The chief value of these manuals, whose facts are poorly selected and whose style is stilted and affected, is that they show how little one needed to know to be considered educated in that barbarous period. Boethius, in his well-known work. The Consolation of Philosophy, "written in sound, pure Latin prose with occasional inter- ludes of verse," shows himself a much more talented writer with something still of true classical style. Boethius held a high political post under Theodoric. When a man of senatorial rank was accused of treasonable intrigues with Constantinople, Boethius spoke boldly on his behalf. Thereupon Theodoric cast Boethius into prison, and there, while awaiting trial, he is supposed to have written The Consolation of Philosophy. He tells us that the real reason for the charges against him was the hatred which he had aroused by protecting the lands of the Roman provincials against the greed of the Goths. After a short trial he was tortured by twisting a cord bound tightly about his head, and finally he was killed with a blow from a club. He was regarded as a Chris- tian during the Middle Ages, when a work on the Trinity directed against the Arians was attributed to him. But there is no Christian theology in The Consolation of Philosophy, GERMAN KINGDOMS IN THE WEST 125 which does not mention Christ or the hope of immortality, as one would expect a Christian facing death to do. Virtue and philosophy are its main themes. But if the book shows the difficulty of distinguishing Christian and pagan as late as the early sixth century, its reception later shows that medieval Christianity was broad enough to embrace such a work as its own. Boethius was a great name in the Middle Ages for another reason, his Latin translations of Aristotle's treatises on logic and his own writings in such fields as arithmetic and music. He may be considered, then, the last great writer and the last prominent scholar of the ancient world in the West, as well as a last representative of the dignity of the Roman senate and the rights of the Roman people. On through the sixth and seventh centuries literature and learning continued their decline in Gaul under the Merovingian kings, as the successors of Clovis Isidore of were called, and in Spain under the Visigoths. Seville Gregory of Tours, whose history has already been de- scribed, was the leading writer of this period in the one country and Isidore of Seville in the other. Isidore's chief work is his Etymologies (622-623), ^ jejune encyclopaedia in one volume. It is a list of Latin words, with far-fetched and usually incorrect guesses at their etymology, and then some elaboration of their meaning, which generally takes the form of a stringing together of excerpts from earlier authors. For instance, Isidore says that the vulture gets its name from its slow flight {a volatu tarda), and that horses are called equine {equi) because those harnessed together in spans are equal, being a pair and maintaining the same gait. Dry and ridiculous by turns as this meager display of knowl- edge seems to the modern reader, it was superior to Cassio- dorus' manuals and was the leading work of erudition produced for some centuries in the West. Almost every monastic library contained a copy of it. There seems to have been little art in these German states except for armor, jewelry, and the work of the goldsmith. Nothing in a historical museum is more tedious 126 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE to look at than a Merovingian monument, which usually takes the form of a shapeless stone with some obliter- ated sculpture of the rudest sort. We hear of Art some building, but almost none of it was of sufficient beauty or durability to be preserved to us through the ages. In Spain, for instance, where the Visigoths ruled for more than "two hundred years, there is not a single building left to illustrate their architecture, just as scarcely a word in the Spanish language can be traced back to their tongue. Theodoric probably did the most building in Italy, and his tomb and a few bits of his palace and some Arian ecclesiastical edifices of his reign may still be seen at Ravenna. These last, however, may be more appropri- ately considered in the next chapter along with Byzantine art. Most of his structures were composed of fragments from ruined buildings, and a bishop in an oration in his praise declared, in the usual stilted language of panegyric, "He rejuvenated Rome and Italy in their hideous old age by amputating their mutilated members." New public baths were built in Africa by the Vandal kings. Indeed, the destruction of Roman civilization in Africa is not to be laid to the charge of the Vandals, but rather to the wild Moorish tribes of the desert. The old Roman amusements and popular customs, even when expensive, perhaps outlived the loftier elements in classical culture. The Vandal warriors by the sixth century had surrendered to the attractions of Roman luxury in food, clothing, and love-making. They lived in palaces and often attended the theater. The mob of Rome still had to have its "bread and circuses" even under the Ostrogoths. Theodoric continued the distribu- tion of grain to the city populace, maintained the chariot races and the pantomime, and is praised by the aforesaid bishop and by Cassiodorus, both pious Christians, for hav- ing revived gladiatorial combats. We also hear of the Franks holding games in the arena at Aries as late as the sixth century. GERMAN KINGDOMS IN THE WEST 127 EXERCISES AND READINGS German Kingdoms in the West: Map Exercise. Indicate upon an outline map all the kingdoms and lesser regions mentioned in the second paragraph of this chapter. The Salic Law. E. F. Henderson, Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, pp. 176-89. Ogg, Source Book of Medieval History, pp. 61-67. Thatcher and McNeal, Source Book for Medieval History, pp. 16-26. The extracts given by Henderson are the fullest and most inter- esting, but the other two works contain explanatory notes which Henderson lacks. In doing the following exercise upon the Salic Law, use Henderson's text, supplementing it by reference to Ogg: — 1. What other name is given to the hundred court? 2. What sort of penalty is imposed for almost every offense? Find one exception. 3. What social classes are distinguished? 4. Have the old Roman population equal rights before the law with the Franks? 5. Find some examples of the principle of self-help and others of quaint customary legal formalities. 6. Prove from the laws that economic life at this period is almost purely agricultural. 7. What laws show that warfare is a common occupation? 8. What laws indicate the prevalence of superstition and magic? 9. What do these laws show concerning the royal power? 10. Which law suggests the existence of a self-governing village community? Germans in the Roman Empire. Munro and Sellery, Medieval Civilization, pp. 50-59. The Vandals in Africa. Bouchier, Roman Africa, pp. 105-11. Cambridge Medieval History, vol. I, pp. 316-22. The Career of Brunhilda, a Merovingian Queen. Oman, The Dark Ages, pp. 158-76. Kitchin, History of France, vol. i, pp. 87-93. Theodoric, King of Italy. Oman, The Dark Ages, pp. 19-32 (chap. ii). Selections from Gregory of Tours. Thatcher and McNeal, Source Book for Medieval History, pp. 27-37. Ogg, Source Book of Medieval History, pp. 47-59. Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, and Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, have recently been translated into English by E. Brehaut; and the Gothic History of Jordanes, by C. C. Mierow. CHAPTER VIII JUSTINIAN AND THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE The Vandal and Ostrogothic Kingdoms in Africa and Italy were overthrown in 534 and 555 by generals and Conditions armies of the Byzantine emperor, who also before ^^' reconquered some of the Spanish coast from the Justinian Visigoths. We therefore turn in this chapter to Constantinople and to the most famous of all its rulers, Justinian. In 518 had ended the troubled reign of Anasta- sius, filled with a succession of rebellions at home and wars abroad, riots in Constantinople, revolts of the Isaurians, bar- barian raids in the European provinces, war with Persia in the East, a breach with the Papacy, and religious opposition among the emperor's own subjects because of his Mono- physitism. The Monophy sites were those who insisted that Christ had only one nature, the divine. This view was widespread in the East and the cause of many popular dis- turbances, since in the East even the lowest classes took sides in theological disputes. Anastasius, however, had left a well-filled treasury behind him. Justin, an aged soldier and orthodox Christian, — judged by papal standards, — now came to the throne. But the Justin and old man could scarcely read, had to use a stencil (5i*8-'527- *o ^^S^ h^^ name, and knew little of politics. 565) The real ruler during the nine years of Justin's reign and then for thirty-eight years longer in his own name was Justinian, a nephew of Justin, who had received a broad education, was trained in politics, and in 518 was already thirty-six years old. Indeed, the great historian, Gibbon, said that Justinian "was never young." He lived to be eighty-three. He was a man of somewhat cold and ascetic temperament, of simple manners and abstemious habits. "His stature," says a contemporary, "was neither JUSTINIAN AND THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE 129 too great nor too little, well proportioned and rather in- clined to be fat; his face was round and comely; his com- plexion was fresh, and sometimes when he had eaten nothing for two days." He had the love of order and system, and the enormous capacity for details which has marked all great administrators, and, like Napoleon, he could do with very little sleep and hated to be idle. He gave his personal attention to every department of government, and also took a keen interest in theology. He had great power of self-control, was expert in hiding his feelings and intentions, and outwardly always gave the impression of great strength and firmness of purpose. We are told, however, that his mind sometimes vacillated in critical moments, and he was perhaps at heart more a man of intellect than of action. His actions were guided in the main, however, by definite poli- cies and fixed principles, and it was only stress of untoward circumstance that made him hesitate. From the start he aimed to be a great emperor and he succeeded. In a church in that same city of Ravenna, where are the tombs of Galla '^^ Placidia and of Theodoric, the East Goth, and which Jus- tinian reconquered from the barbarians, are still to be seen in resplendent mosaic the of^cial portraits, made during the course of his reign, of the "Lord Justinian" himself and of his empress, Theodora. For the great achievements which Justinian planned he needed a number of able assistants, and he was either for- tunate enough or, more likely, wise enough to Justinian's find them. In Belisarius and the eunuch, Narses, able he had two remarkable generals. Anthemius of Tralles was the architect who had charge of his public buildings. His two chief ministers were the learned jurist, Tribonian, who executed the great legal work of the reign, and John of Cappadocia, an able administrator and re- sourceful financier. John was accused, however, of resort- ing to cruel extortion to supply Justinian with the funds needed for his great enterprises, and Tribonian was charged with corruption and sale of justice. Justinian was watchful, if not suspicious and jealous, of even his most successful I30 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE subordinates. Finally among his chief helpers the remark- able empress, Theodora, should not be forgotten. The reign was also graced by an eminent historian, Procopius, the_secretary of Belisarius, whose works on the Procopius wars and the buildings of Justinian have con- ^fret tributed to his fame. Procopius, however, also__ History wrote a venomous Secret History, in which he depicted Justinian as a fiend incarnate and his reign as a terrible orgy of oppression. The wild exaggeration of this work may be seen in such statements as that "more mur- ders were committed by Justinian's order or permission than in all the ages before him," and that "he had no money himself and would suffer no one else to have any." The wives of both Belisarius and Justinian are represented as women of the worst type. Amid all the slander, however, a certain amount of probable fact can be selected. Theodora is said to have been the daughter of a wild- beast keeper at the Hippodrome and was for a time a very The Empress popular and fast young actress in the pantomime Theodora ^^ Constantinople. After questionable adven- tures in the East she returned to the capital a reformed character. Justinian now fell in love with her, married her in 523, and she shared the imperial throne with him from 527 to 548, during which time she is supposed to have exerted a vast influence over him in political and religious matters. Procopius admits that she "had an excellent face, and though her person was small, yet she was exceedingly well shaped; her complexion was neither too white nor too red; her eyes were extremely quick, and she cast them a thousand ways at once." According to Procopius, Justinian and Theodora made it a regular policy to pretend to disagree in matters of state and to side with different parties, while really they always worked hand in glove with each other, betrayed their associates freely to each other, and thus learned the secrets of their enemies. Indeed, they seem to have been as well adapted to each other as the famous Jack Spratt and his wife. While the wakeful Justinian walked the palace all night, the drowsy Theodora slept on half JUSTINIAN AND THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE 131 through the day ; he was easy to see, she was very inaccessi- ble; he merely touched his food and barely sipped his wine, she interrupted her slumbers to have a bath and breakfast and then went back to bed again, and "at dinner and at supper there was no sort of meat but she would have and that in abundance." The chief things that Justinian seems to have aimed to bring about were as follows: (i) to make the power of the emperor absolute; (2) to end the schism with the Policies of Papacy and to maintain ecclesiastical unity and J'^stiman orthodoxy; (3) to reconquer the lost possessions of the Empire in the West and restore the ancient Roman Empire "to the limits of the two oceans"; (4) to insure the existing Empire from attack by skillful diplomacy with the.barbari- ans, by constructing and repairing numerous fortifications in the Balkan peninsula and throughout the East, and by avoiding war with Persia and the barbarians as far as pos- sible; (5) to reform the imperial administration and secure good government; (6) to finish the work which Theodo- sius II had barely begun in his Code of 438, and to preserve the Roman law in a permanent and consistent form ; (7) to be a great builder like the emperors of old. Justinian made the position of the emperor even loftier than it had ever been before. He outdid Diocletian in the luxury of his court, in the elaborateness of cere- His monial, and in the use of high-sounding titles, absolutism His state papers are couched in imperious and pretentious language. In his presence men had to prostrate themselves and kiss the imperial feet of the " Lord Justinian." Yet even the Secret History admits that he was very accessible, that no man was ever denied an audience by him, and that he received every one courteously. Indeed, so many matters were taken over by the central government and so much more business than before was transacted at his court that it was always thronged. Like all the Byzantine emperors, however, Justinian had the turbulent populace of Constantinople to reckon with. In 52 1, Justin spent the equivalent of over a million dol- 132 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE lars in shows for the people. Anastasius had abolished hu- The sports man combats with wild beasts, but they were o"the^^'^'°"^ now once more permitted. Even more than such Hippodrome combats, however, or than going to the theaters, of which one bore the sinister name, "The Harlots," the favorite pastime of Constantinople was the exciting four- horse chariot-races of the circus, which were held, usually on Sunday, in the great Hippodrome seating thirty thou- sand men — for women did not attend. The spectators took sides according to the colors worn by their favorite charioteers, and occupied blocks of seats reserved for their respective colors. Thus arose the two great parties of Greens and Blues, who divided the city and who often car- ried their rivalry to the point of animosity and blows. These two factions could, at least on occasion, become political parties. Anastasius had favored the Greens. Justinian and Theodora adhered to the Blues. Triumphal processions were held in the Hippodrome; also the emperor was a frequent and interested spectator of the races; and the people thus had a chance upon this informal occasion to let him know how they felt. Usually he was applauded, but sometimes was hissed, "boo-ed," or made the target of saucy remarks and of complaints about the conduct of the government. Sometimes a serious riot occurred, if not in the Hippo- drome during the performance, then afterwards in the The Nika Streets. In 532, both Greens and Blues became revolt offended at the city prefect, and then demanded the dismissal of both Tribonian and John of Cappadocia, and were not satisfied even with that. When troops were^ sent against them, they drove the soldiers back to the imperial palace and set the city on fire. Justinian made a personal appeal to them in the Hippodrome, but the fren- zied crowd refused to accept his promises and proclaimed a rival emperor. Justinian thereupon became thoroughly alarmed and was inclined to leave the city. But Theodora made a courageous speech to his council declaring that she would not flee; Narses went out to win back some of the JUSTINIAN AND THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE 133 Blues by a discreet distribution of cash; and Belisarius and Mundus with barbarian mercenaries slaughtered the throng in the Hippodrome. From the cries of " Beat them ! " which had been raised by the mobs this six-day disturbance is known as the Nika riot. For some years afterwards Jus- tinian discontinued the games of the circus, and instituted a number of new administrative measures intended to make the city more orderly henceforth. But before his long reign ended the Blues and Greens were at it again as lively as ever. Almost the first act of Justin's reign was a reconciliation with the Papacy, followed by a persecution of the Mono- physites. Justinian felt that the support of the ^^^ p^ Pope was necessary in his reconquering of the and West. As soon, however, as his generals had J"^^'"'^" gained a foothold in Italy and control of the city of Rome, it became evident that Justinian intended to be master even in ecclesiastical matters. In 537, Pope Silverius, in whose election Gothic influence had been felt, was deposed, and Vigilius, the candidate of the Empress Theodora, re- placed him. She also is credited with convincing her hus- band that it would be better policy to lessen his severities toward the Monophysites, who, despite repeated persecu- tions, were displaying increasing strength. Accordingly Justinian tried to win them over by an imperial edict anathematizing the writings of certain Nestorians, which had, however, been approved by the Council of Chalcedon in 451. When Pope Vigilius opposed Justinian's edict, the imperial troops removed him from Rome, where he was not very popular anyway, owing to such acts as killing a notary with a blow of his fist and ordering his own nephew flogged to death. The pope was taken first to Sicily, then to Con- stantinople, and was ready by the time he arrived there to give in to Justinian. But he soon repented of this decision, and the remaining seven years of his pontificate were spent in a vain eff^ort to squirm out of the position to which he had committed himself by solemn vows and written statements. He was kept a virtual prisoner at Constantinople much of 134 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE the time, was threatened with force when he fled to sanctu- aries for safety, and finally was banished to a desert island. The fifthoecumenical council of tJieChurch, held at Con- stantinople in 5^53 in the new church of St. Sophia, supported Justinian; and those clergy who sided with Vigilius were punished with stripes, imprisonment, exile, and deposition. Vigilius himself in the end submitted, but by so doing les- sened the authority of the Papacy in the West, where the Archbishops of Milan and Aquileia termed him a traitor to orthodoxy and initiated a long schism. During the remain- der of his reign Justinian controlled the elections of popes and church afi'airs generally. In short, Justinian was as autocratic in religious as in political matters and acted as if supreme head of the Church. Religious ^^t he was also as eager to forward the interests policy of of Christianity as he was to restore the power of Justinian it-. x- • tt • t the Roman Empire. He was generous m guts to churches and monasteries, zealous in encouraging mission- aries to the barbarians, and severe in legislation against pagans and heretics. He has the discredit of having closed the schools of philosophy at Athens and of confiscating the endowments even of Plato's Academy and the funds whose income supplied the salaries of the professors, who them- selves fled to the Persian court. In Justinian's old age, when he had lost interest in wars and in the details of the defense of the Empire, which had once so absorbed his attention, he still loved to engage in theological discussions and was still intent upon making his people one in faith and doctrine. Justinian's trouble with the pope illustrates the extreme difficulty of holding together in one Church the two halves The East- of the Christian world in East and West. It has ern Church \)qqii estimated that Constantinople was at vari- ance with Rome over religious matters nearly half of the time between 337 and 878. The eighth and last council in the East which is accepted as oecumenical by the Roman Church was that held in Constantinople in 869. The final schism did not come until 1054, but there had been little true unity for a long time before. Ever since then, despite JUSTINIAN AND THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE 135 one or two attempts at reunion, the Roman Catholics have been distinct from Greek CathoHcs and from Russian Christians. Hilderic, the weak king of the Vandals from 523 to 530, had been favorable to the orthodox Catholics rather than to the Arians, and^ friendly to Justinian, whose Rgconquest overlordship he recognized nominally. When the of North Vandals, dissatisfied with his rule, deposed him, and made Gelimer their king, Justinian had a pretext for in- terference. Belisarius, with an army of some twenty thou- sand whose chief strength lay in its heavy-armed mailed cavalry (cataphracH) , quickly defeated the Vandals in two battles and Gelimer surrendered in 534. Sardinia, Corsica, and the Balearic Isles were also occupied by Justinian's lieutenants, and the spoils taken from Rome in 455 were recovered. The Moors or Berbers, however, who had already been winning their native soil back from the Vandals, maintained a stubborn resistance for fourteen years more. Justinian was never able to conquer much of Mauretania, the westernmost stretch of North Africa and equivalent to mod- em Morocco. But he held Ceuta, the important citadel guarding the Straits of Gibraltar. He thoroughly fortified the frontier of what he had gained — a great labor, since the Vandals had razed the fortifications of most towns except Carthage. Huge ruins remain to-day to show on how vast a scale the work was done. The African provinces had suf- fered terribly during the long struggle with the wild Berbers, and complained of the heavy taxation of Justinian's officials. We may get some idea of the population of North Africa at this time from the exaggerated complaint of the Secret History that five million people were slain in the course of its conquest, and from the large corps of officials employed in governing it. At the head was the praetorian prefect, later known as the "exarch," who received a larger salary than did all the members of his staff together. Beneath him were his staff of about four hundred persons, seven gover- nors with fifty helpers each, and six dukes with forty clerks apiece in charge of the frontiers — altogether a thousand 136 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE officials. Justinian did what he could to restore the pros- perity of Byzantine Africa, and embellished Carthage with a number of new buildings. When Justinian undertook his war against the Vandals, the Kingdom of the Ostrogoths in Italy was ruled by a Reconquest young king whosc mother was well disposed of Italy toward Justinian and who allowed Belisarius to use Sicily as a base of operations against Africa. Her son had disgusted the Gothic chiefs by crying when his teacher whipped him ; but the manly education, which they insisted upon giving him instead, had the effect of making him too tough ; and his vicious ways caused his death a few months after the Vandal king surrendered to Belisarius. The queen mother succeeded in marrying the next candidate for the throne, her cousin, but presently he had her strangled. This gave Justinian an excuse for declaring war. Belisarius, helped by the Franks, whom Justinian's clever diplomacy induced to invade Provence and the north of Italy, and by another Byzantine general who conquered Dalmatia, but hampered by Narses, whom Justinian sent out for a time with another army to spy upon him, won a series of suc- cesses from 535 to 540 culminating in the capitulation of Ravenna. But then under a new king, Totila, the Goths renewed the struggle, and by 551 had reconquered most of Italy and had seized Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica as well. Finally the now aged Narses defeated and killed Totila in 552, and by 555 resistance was practically at an end, and the Franks and Alamanni, who had taken advantage of the disorder to ravage Italy, had been driven out. But Rhaetia, Noricum, and Pannonia were lost to the Empire, and in 568 the Lombards began their successful invasions and partial conquest of Italy. Meanwhile Justinian had no thought of setting up again a Western emperor; Italy, like Africa, was ruled by an exarch subordinate to Constantinople, and the days of the Roman senate were over. This Exarchate of Ravenna, though soon greatly reduced in size, lasted for a long time after the Lombards entered Italy. Ravenna itself did not fall until 751, and the Byzantine Empire held 138 THE MEDIEVAL HISTORY OF EUROPE Sicily, parts of southern Italy, and other scattered points on the coast like Venice, on into the tenth and eleventh centuries. A considerable strip of southeastern Spain was also seized by Justinian, when a usurper appealed to him for aid p . . against the Arian king, who was persecuting his reconquest Catholic subjects. In the course of time, how- o pain ever, this territory gradually reverted to the Visigoths. But Justinian had almost succeeded in bringing the coasts of the Mediterranean within the Empire, and he assumed by virtue of his generals' conquests a series of titles such as Africanus, Vandalicus, Gothicus, Alamannicus, Francicus, Germanicus. Nominally the Balkan peninsula east of Dalmatia and Pannonia had formed a part of the Empire at Justinian's T . . ' accession, but barbarians had been plundering Justinian , . . and the it almost at will. He now filled the entire region barbarians ^^^^ ^^^ Danube to the Sea of Marmora with lines of forts, and here, as on all his frontiers, he revived^ the old Roman system of entrusting the defense of the border to troops levied from that province and settled upon lands granted to them upon the very frontier. The armies of Belisarius and Narses, on the other hand, were largely re- cruited from barbarians outside the Empire. Justinian also relied upon a very ingenious and complicated diplomacy in dealing with the barbarians. We have already seen his skill in making friends in the royal houses of Africa, Italy, and Spain, and then in discovering plausible pretexts for con- quest. He dazzled the simple ambassadors of the savage tribes upon his borders by the splendor of his court when they came to Constantinople, and gratified their kings with presents, favors, and titles. But he^as also constantly set- ting them upon one another and thus keeping them occupied so that they might not invade his territory. His alliances extended to Ethiopia, Abyssinia, and the Upper Nile. This policy was expensive, however, since the barbarians would not do his bidding without subsidies. But what especially hampered Justinian in his schemes for extending JUSTINIAN AND THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE 139 and strengthening the Empire was the hostility of the Persian Kingdom on his eastern frontier. Wars which were none of his seeking and which lasted from 524 to 532, from 540 to 545, and from 549 to 562, ended by his agreeing to pay Persia an annual tribute. Meanwhile he had been forced to draw away so many troops from the northern frontiers for these Persian wars and for the long-drawn-out conquests of Africa and Italy, that the Huns, Slavs, and Bulgars were able to make incursions across the Danube on an average of one in four years for the reign. In the end they were always driven back, but sometimes got as far as the Isthmus of Corinth or the environs of Constantinople. In his old age Belisarius gained his last laurels by repulsing a great invasion of the Huns in 558. The original Bulgars were nomads like the Huns and fol- lowed them into the Pontus Steppe at a somewhat later date. They first appeared south of the Danube _. _, , The Bulgars toward the end of the fifth century. As the Huns a century before had conquered many German tribes and driven others into the Roman Empire, so now the Bulgars carried the Slavs with them in frequent raids across the Danube. Though originally the masters, the Bulgars were eventually to adopt the language and customs of the Slavs, and fuse with them into the Bulgarian nation that we Imow to-day. The early history of the Slavs is uncertain. They are classed as of Alpine race, and their closest racial affilia- tion seems to be with the Celts ; they speak Ian- ^, ^, Vt^i • The Slavs guages of the Indo-European group. They m- clude Letts and Lithuanians near the Baltic Sea as well as the Russians and the Slavs south of the Danube. Several centuries before our era the Germans had pushed them back east of the Vistula, but in the early centuries of our era the Slavs appear to have multiplied rapidly in numbers and to have expanded widely over eastern Europe. They were an agricultural peasantry, inferior to the Germans, however, in their vegetarian diet and lack of domestic animals to aid their labors. Also political and social institutions were little 140 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE developed among them, and, while they were kindly, thrifty, and inured to hardships, they were rather wanting in enterprise and aggressiveness, and were fonder of music than of warfare. Many of them became a subjected peas- antry, toiling under the yoke of the nomads from the East, but others seem to have learned from their invaders the lesson of fighting and ravaging, and to have become invaders themselves when the East Goths left the Balkan peninsula free for new plunderers and occupants. Procopius speaks of the Slavs especially in Bessarabia, Moldavia, and Wallachia. Toward the close of Justinian's reign two important changes occurred in the barbarian world. The White Huns Turks and OT Ephthalites, a barbarian tribe in the Oxus '^v^^'s Basin beyond the Persian Kingdom, which they had often distracted by their attacks from its aggressions against the Byzantine Empire, were overthrown by the Turks, who were later to afifect European history so pro- foundly. At the same time another wave of Asiatic nomads, the Avars, began to roll westward. Justinian in his last years paid them a yearly subsidy as a reward for defeating the Bulgars and Slavs who had been attacking his territo- ries. Soon after Justinian's death they fought under their khagan, Baian, against the Franks in Thuringia, and then combined forces with the Lombards to defeat the Gepidse on the Upper Danube. The Lombards then descended from Pannonia upon Italy, while the Avars absorbed the territory of the Gepidae and occupied the plain of present Hungary. Soon they came to tyrannize over a much greater region, for the Germans in pushing west and south had left central Europe open. During the remainder of the sixth century Avars wintered yearly in the neighborhood of modern Numberg in northern Bavaria; their sway at its height probably extended from the Baltic Sea to Sparta and from the Tyrol to Russia. But by the eighth century their power began to decline. Returning to Justinian, we have to note some of his administrative reforms. He abolished the sale of ofhces, a practice liable to lead the purchaser of the ofhce to make JUSTINIAN AND THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE 141 as much profit out of it as possible, and he raised the sal- aries of his governors so that they would not Reforms be tempted to steal. He suppressed a number in internal of unnecessary offices, even including such high sovernmen posts as those of the vicarii, and he rearranged and simpli- fied the official hierarchy and adapted it to present needs. He was aware that only about one third of the taxes reached his treasury and tried to make his officials more efficient, careful, and honest in this respect. His many enterprises were very costly, however, and although he economized strictly in certain respects, and although his officials taxed the people almost beyond endurance, he died leaving debts as against a considerable surplus in the treasury at the beginning of Justin's reign. The Secret History complains bitterly that he was wastefully extravagant in some things, while in others he deprived many people of their source of revenue or their customary enjoyments by his strict policy of financial retrenchment. For instance, he discontinued public shows and the free distribution of corn; he seldom created consuls; he reduced the soldiers' pay and the fees and pensions of lawyers and physicians and the imperial post by relays of horses. On the other hand, he tried to les- sen the law's delays and to make it possible for most liti- gants to settle their cases without having to appeal to Constantinople and undertake an expensive visit or resi- dence there. But the great legal work of Justinian was to put the entire living body of the Roman law into permanent and final form. That law, as we have seen, had ceased Law books to develop, had begun to deteriorate, and would °^ Justmian have soon died out, as did most of classical civilization, had not Justinian boiled it down and preserved it, as a housewife cans fruit that would otherwise decay. This ex- tremely valuable labor was performed in a few years. Law- yers were becoming lazy in Justinian's day and contented themselves with citing old statutes and authorities, in- stead of reasoning out the correct solution of a case for themselves. But there was often disagreement as to the 142 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE authorities. Justinian felt that the law should be standard- ized, that one correct and official version of it should be published. We have seen that the Theodosian Code of 438 brought together and abridged under various headings merely the Code of legislation of the emperors since Constantine, Justinian ^j^g^^ some of the laws ordered what others for- bade, and that one cannot tell from the Code which were enforced and which were dead-letters. There were similar codes of the imperial legislation before Constantine. In 528, the second year of his reign, Justinian appointed a commission of ten to collect all imperial statutes down to his own time, but to leave out repetitions and contradic- tions and to include only laws which were still in force. This piece of work was finished by 529. The next year Tribonian, who had been a member of the previous commission, was given full charge, with professors The Digest and practicing lawyers of his choice, of the more or Pandects difficult task of making a digest of all the writ- ings of Roman jurists. Tribonian estimated that his com- mittee, which worked in three sections, had reduced three million lines of legal literature to about one hundred and fifty thousand. From some writers they made but a single excerpt, while one third of their book is drawn from the writings of Ulpian. Here again anything obsolete or contra- dictory was omitted. The extracts were arranged according to their subject-matter under four hundred and thirty-two titles similar to those in the Code, although a belief in the mystic significance of numbers led to a further division of the work into seven parts of seven books each, and fifty books in all, since there was one introductory book. Hence- forth this work was to be the exclusive authority and no one was to write a commentary on it. Such was the famous Digest or Pandects, completed in 533. It preserved in a practical form enough of the writings of the earlier great jurists to enable later ages to benefit by their thought and to continue to make use of the Roman law. The preparation of the Digest had revealed to Tribonian JUSTINIAN AND THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE 143 the need of further revision of the Code, which was reissued in 534 in the form now extant. The other two The revised law books of Justinian which have come down institutes to us are his Institutes, a textbook for students and Novels in the law schools based upon the earlier I?istitutes of Gaius, and his Novels, or new laws issued during the remainder of the reign. Some of these were enacted in order to supple- ment or correct certain parts of the Code and the Digest. Such was the Corpus luris, or body of law, which medieval and modern western Europe were to revive and use. Most of it is in Latin, but the Novels are mainly in Greek. Justinian maintained the Roman tradition of magnificent public works as well as of lawmaking. We have already mentioned the elaborate rings of massive fortifi- ^ ., ,. • 1 I'll 1 1 1 T- • Buildings cations with which he surrounded the Empire and the splendid structures with which he adorned his newly acquired city of Carthage. When the Persians de- stroyed the great Eastern metropolis, Antioch, he rebuilt it in munificent style, as he did other Syrian cities destroyed by earthquakes in the latter part of his reign. But most impressive was the new Constantinople that rose after the great fire during the Nika riot. To-day little is left of its statues, porticoes, basilicas, hospitals, and the vast and richly adorned Sacred Palace of the emperor. Even of the churches only two or three remain, but among them is the greatest of all, St. Sophia. This church is the finest example of Byzantine architec- ture and is " perhaps the boldest instance of a sudden change in almost every respect, whether of plan, eleva- The church tion, or detail, which is known to architecture." °^ ^'- Sophia The dome had been used by the Romans, but, as in the well- known Pantheon at Rome, had been built up directly on a foundation of thick, circular wall, so that the ground-plan of the interior was no larger than the circumference of the dome itself. Now a central dome, one hundred and seventy- nine feet above the floor, one hundred and seven feet in diameter, and forty-six feet in depth, was raised high in air above the roofs of the rest of the structure, and was 144 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE supported on the keystones of, and by pendentives between, four great round arches springing from four great piers, placed at the four corners of a square large enough to cir- cumscribe the circumference of the dome. Pendentives are triangular segments of masonry which carry the weight of the hemispherical dome down to the four piers and which thus make the transition from the circular space above to the larger square opening below. Two of the great arches y\ i I j 1 1 /\ I «-'•»-• GROUND-PLAN OF THE CHURCH OF ST. SOPHIA opened into half domes, beneath which, as beneath the great central dome, was open floor space. What is more, each half dome rested upon, and opened into, three smaller half domes or apses. The two great arches on the north and south sides of the dome, however, were filled in with sup- porting arches and columns, and beneath them were porti- coes running along either side of the main auditorium. If we include these porticoes beyond the columns at either side of the open floor space beneath the domes, we have an interior two hundred and thirty-five by two hundred JUSTINIAN AND THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE 145 and fifty feet in the form of a vast nave with an aisle on either side. In this respect St. Sophia is something Hke a basilica, but by virtue of its central and subsidiary domes it belongs to the round or concentric style of ecclesiastical architecture. The central dome was pierced with a ring of forty arched windows through which light flooded th^ spacious interior. "It is singularly full of light and sunshine," writes Proco- pius. " You would declare that the place is not lighted from without, but that rays are produced within itself, such an abundance of light is poured into this church." Columns and capitals have now broken away from the restrictions of the three classical Greek orders and are no longer uniform in style. Often the capitals are carved differently and have each some particular design worth noting, but this variety is not carried so far but that they harmonize. Henceforth we must speak of Byzantine as well as Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns and capitals. "Who could tell," con- tinues Procopius, "of the beauty of the columns and marbles with which the church is adorned? One would think that one had come upon a meadow full of flowers in bloom. Who would not admire the purple tints of some and the green of others, the glowing red and glittering white, and those too which nature, like a painter, has marked with the strongest contrasts of color? " Unfortunately, since the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, much of this wonderful coloring and ornamentation has been covered with Mohammedan whitewash. The mosaics of the cherubim with six wings in the pendentives of the great dome are almost the sole visible remnant of Christian decoration. Procopius finally speaks of the psychological and religious effect of the great, yet light and graceful, interior upon the beholder. "Whoever enters there to wor- ship perceives at once that it is not by any human strength or skill, but by the favor of God that this work has been perfected. His mind rises sublime to commune with God, feeling that He cannot be far off, but must especially love to dwell in the place which He has chosen. And this takes 146 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE place not only when a man sees It for the first time ; but it always makes the same impression upon him, as though he had never beheld it before." At Ravenna in Italy, where the buildings of Justinian's time have remained unaltered, one can study, better even Churches at than at Constantinople and Rome, the graceful Ravenna Byzantine capitals and columns and brilliant mosaics, and the early Christian basilican type of archi- tecture. The church of Sant' Apollinare In Classe, which stands three miles outside the city in a deserted plain, where was once the busy Byzantine seaport, and the church of Sant' Apollinare Nuovo In Ravenna Itself, are two fine sixth-century specimens of the columnar basilica adapted to Christian use. Both are oblong In ground-plan except for the large semicircular apse which protrudes at one end. Each basilica has at Its side a round tower of fortified aspect, which does not, however, form an Integral part of the building. Their exteriors are very plain, and the low roofs over the side aisles slant In lean-to fashion against the main body of the church. The beauty Is all In the columns, the capitals, and the mosaics of the interior. Before entering the nave one passes through a sort of. portico or vestibule extending across the front of the building and known as the narthex. The long central nave is separated from the narrower aisle or corridor on either side by a row of slender columns connected by a series of round arches springing from their graceful capitals. Upon these slender columns and arches rest the walls of the main body of the basilica and also the roof which those walls support. Consequently the walls can neither be thick nor carried to a great height and the roof must be a light one of wood. Windows cut In the walls above the roofs of the side aisles admit light directly to the nave and form the "clear- story" of the basilica. Between these windows there is some space for mosaics. But especially beneath them and just above the arches leading into the side aisles is, on either side of the nave, a frieze or strip of mosaic running the entire length of the interior. Furthermore, the apse in which the JUSTINIAN AND THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE 147 nave terminates is roofed over with a half dome filled with mosaics. A mosaic is a design or picture made of small cubes of stone or glass of different colors set in the floor or wall or ceiling of a building. Those of ancient Roman times are usually patterns or pictures set in pavements and are rather dull and colorless compared to the later Byzantine ones seen in the domes and upon the walls of Christian churches. San Vitale, another church of the sixth century at Ravenna, illustrates the round or concentric style of early Christian architecture. It is octagonal in shape with a central dome surrounded by a lower aisle. Here again are to be seen splendid mosaics, including those of Justinian and Theodora, and beautiful capitals in the double Byzan- tine form of a lower part adorned with floral or other designs and an impost above upon which the arches rest. The little fifth century mausoleum of the Empress Galla Placidia at Ravenna has already been described in another connection, but may be mentioned again as one of the earliest distinct examples of a building in the shape of the Latin cross, although some of the early basilicas at Rome seem to have approximated to that shape by having transepts at the very end just before the apse and altar. Later on, in the Middle Ages, in the time of Romanesque and Gothic archi- tecture in western Europe, cathedrals came to be regularly built in the form of a Latin cross. Por several centuries after Justinian, Constantinople led the world in art. Almost all fine work in gold, silver, or bronze, in ivory carvings or colored enamels, Byzantine that one finds in museums of western Europe ^""^ as dating from before the twelfth century, is pretty sure to be of Byzantine workmanship. The influence of Byzantine architecture, with its concentric plan, its domes and cupolas, its capitals and mosaics, its Oriental tinge, may be seen in southern France and elsewhere besides Italy. In the Byzan- tine painting, sculpture, and mosaic, faces, costumes, and draperies change to suit the times, and since the motive of art is Christian and Oriental rather than classical, the 148 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE artists strive to express saintliness rather than physical beauty and emphasize color rather than form. Both the individual figures and their arrangement together are stiff but stately, like the ceremony of Justinian's court. The Christian symbolism soon became conventionalized at Constantinople; Byzantine painting had always been more decorative than natural, and before long it lost its creative power and simply followed the previous artistic traditions and conventions. Byzantine art also suffered from the iconoclastic movement of the eighth and ninth centuries. Many of the art treasures of Constantinople were later carried off to the West, where they may be seen to-day in museums or churches, like the four bronze horses from Chios which are now at the church of St. Mark in Venice, but which used to stcind above the Imperial box In the Hippodrome. In literature and learning, too, Constantinople led the Christian world through the eleventh century. Greek lit- Byzantine erature was there preserved and read. From literature ^^q ^q 8qq ^a,s a barren period, but from the ninth to the twelfth century there was much reading and writing. This culture, however, consisted largely in "mak- ing inventories" and digests of past Greek literature much as Justinian and Tribonian had done with the Roman law. Such a work is the Myriobiblos, or "Library," of Photius in the ninth century. Suidas composed a famous lexicon about 1000. A compilation of all historians was made in fifty-three books, and many other encyclopaedias and com- pilations were produced. Such books are of the greatest value to the classical scholar, but show little new thought or life. Psellus in the eleventh century wrote on almost every subject and sometimes gives us a vivid picture of his own society. By the twelfth century some lively historians, among them the daughter of an emperor, wrote of their own age. A number of the emperors, in fact, turned author. But as a rule Byzantine literature lacked naturalness and origi- nality, and was written in obsolete learned Greek and not in the language of the people. Classical culture did not die JUSTINIAN AND THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE 149 out at Constantinople as it was doing in the West, but it was preserved in cold storage. Constantinople was not only to continue a center of art and learning, while the West sank deeper and deeper into barbarism and ignorance ; it was also to continue cornmerce to be a great emporium of trade. It was a city of Constan- of a million inhabitants, where the height of the '"°^ ^ houses had to be regulated, at a time when town life had almost disappeared in the West and when even Rome had shrunk to a population of a few thousands. Justinian tried to develop industry and co;nmerce and to establish a trade* route to the Far East that would not need to pass through the hostile Persian Kingdom. Toward the close of his reign two missionaries introduced silkworms from the East. The commerce of Merovingian Gaul was largely in the hands of Byzantines, who had trading stations at Marseilles, Bor- deaux, and Orl6ans. By way of Cartagena and Barcelona they traded with the interior of the Visigothic Kingdom. The coins of the emperors were copied by the Prankish kings into the seventh century, and the "byzant" was the standard coin of the Mediterranean world. Constantinople imported grain from Egypt for its populace, who also ate salted provisions a good deal — fish, ham, and cheese. The city had a good fresh vegetable market, however, and a large trade in wine. The chief articles of manufacture at Constantinople were its fine cloths, silks, or silver and gold brocades. But the finest fabrics, made in the imperial work- shops, were not allowed to be exported, and left the city only as gifts from the emperor to foreign potentates. The latter part of Justinian's reign was a rather gloomy period, when the old emperor, who came to care less and less for the things of this world, neglected the weakness army and other departments of the government, g^^antine A destructive plague, which prevailed for four Empire after years, and, according to Procopius, killed the •'"^ ^"'^" best and left the worst men, perhaps made the difference between the earlier period and the close of his reign. Under his successors things went from bad to worse. While the I50 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Lombards were overrunning Italy and the Visigoths were recovering the southeastern coast of Spain, the Persians and northern barbarians nearly destroyed the Empire. Justinian's immediate successor discontinued the tribute paid to the Avars and also rushed into a war with Persia (572-591). Both acts had dire consequences. The Persians took Antioch and other Syrian cities and captured nearly three hundred thousand prisoners. When news came that they had also seized a city supposed to be impregnable, where the Byzantines had stored a vast amount of treasure, the emperor went insane. The interval before the next Persian war was filled with wars with the northern barbari- ans, and when the Emperor Maurice ordered his troops to winter north of the Danube, he lost his throne. During the following reign of terror of the monster, Phocas (602-610), the whole Empire seemed in a state of anarchy, and at first there was no improvement under his successor, Heraclius. Another war with the Persians (603-628) had begun and the Persians were even more successful than before, taking Damascus and Tarsus as well as Antioch and occupying Egypt as well as Syria and Palestine, carrying off the holy cross from Jerusalem, and penetrating Asia Minor to the island of Rhodes and the city of Chalcedon. Moreover, Heraclius came near losing both his life and his capital in an ambush which the khagan of the Avars laid when they were holding a conference just outside Constantinople. The em- peror, with his crown under his arm, barely escaped inside the walls, and the next year the city mob had to go without its free bread. A little later Heraclius became so discouraged that he was on the point of abandoning Constantinople and return- Temporary ing to his native Africa. But the people pleaded un^der^'^^ with him and the Church offered its treasures to Heraclius assist in prosecuting the war. He then engaged for six years in a series of victorious campaigns in the East. Meanwhile, in 626 the Avars, Gepidae, Bulgars, Slavs, and other barbarians besieged Constantinople from the Euro- pean side in cooperation with the Persians operating from JUSTINIAN AND THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE 151 Asia. Their small boats, however, were soon destroyed, and, convinced that the city could not be taken so long as it remained open by sea, they raised the siege. Two years later Heraclius concluded peace with the Persians, who returned the cross and all their other conquests and cap- tives. But Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt had suffered terribly in the long wars and now were taxed heavily to pay for them. What is more, only five years were to pass before they would be exposed to the irresistible expansion of the warlike religion which Mohammed had been founding in Arabia. During these Persian wars the Avars and Slavs had been scouring the Balkan peninsula, destroying towns, carrying off thousands of captives, or settling in the terri- Slavic set- tory which they had desolated. From this period thrBalkan we may date the beginnings of the present Bal- peninsula kan peoples — Serbs, Croats, and Bulgarians, though the first two names are not met with until the ninth century. Sirmium, the key to the northern half of the peninsula, fell in 582. During the next century the Slavs settled in the depopulated lands south of the Danube, so that seven different racial groups of them were counted between the river and the Balkan Mountains. They also pressed south of that range into Thrace and Macedonia, and thence west into Albania, Dalmatia, and the eastern Alps, and south- ward into Greece. Concerning this great change of popula- tion there is only a single contemporary source of the seventh century, but conclusions are also drawn from the relative thickness with which Slavic place names have sup- planted those of classical geography. It is also supposed that at this time the Slavs left Dacia in such numbers, to migrate south of the Danube, that the previous Roman population came again to preponderate in what is to-day called on that account Roumania. In Greece itself the ancient Hellenic language was to survive, but the popula- tion ceased to be of pure Hellenic descent, and as late as the fifteenth century there were still in Laconia, the southern- most province of Greece, people speaking a Slavic dialect. 152 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Some of the Greek cities, however, remained undestroyed amid all these waves of invasion and kept up their trade with Constantinople. Christianity was spread among the Serbians and Croatians by Latin-speaking clergy in the period from 642 to 731. Conversion ^^^^ Conversion, however, was superficial and of the Bal- the church service in Latin took slight hold upon an peop es ^^^ masses. It was only when the Scriptures were translated into a Slavonic version by the two brothers, Constantine (or Cyril) and Methodius, and when the liturgy also was put into Slavic, that Christianity really be- came the religion of the people. This occurred in the second half of the ninth century under the auspices of the Eastern Church. The Croatians, however, soon returned to their allegiance to the Papacy. In 864, the Bulgarian monarch, Boris I, was converted to Christianity, and, after some vacil- lation between the Eastern Church and the Church of Rome, finally adhered to the former. He later abdicated in order to enter a monastery. The first Serbian churches were hardly big enough to hold the priest and altar; the people stood outside in the churchyard, which also served ia.s a cemetery, f Though the campaigns of Heraclius did not permanently ^'save Jerusalem and his eastern provinces, we must not be- little his achievement. For he probably did save ocrvicc rcn- dered by Constantinople, which might not have held out nopk to''' had he abandoned it in the depths of its adver- European gity. As it was, that great city was to endure for civilization centuries to come, was to serve as a protection to western Europe from attacks from the east, was to set an example of superior civilization to a barbarous world about it in both East and West, was to be a center whence Christian missions would radiate, a preserve for classical culture and Christian art, a mart of trade, a spring of busi- ness life in the midst of general economic stagnation. To a certain extent the ancient city, if not the ancient city- state, lived on in Constantinople; but in many respects its life and culture had been essentially altered by Chuis- JUSTINIAN AND THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE 153 tianity, though one would scarcely think of designating that immoral and luxurious metropolis as the "city of God." EXERCISES AND READINGS The Emperors at Constantinople, 476-527. Oman, The Dark Ages, pp. 33-52. Reign of Justinian. E. A. Foord, The Byzantine Empire (London, 191 1), chap. iv. J. B. Bury, The Later Roman Empire, any one of the first fourteen chap- ters in book iv, found in both vol. I and vol. ll. Cambridge Medieval History, vol. ii, chap. I or 11. The City of Constantinople. Foord, op. ciL, chap. i. The Hippodrome at Constantinople. Munro and Sellery, Medieval Civilization, pp. 87-113. Justinian and the Papacy. Dudden, Gregory the Great, vol. i, pp. 58-68 and 199-21 1. Heraclius. Bury, op. cit., vol. II, book v, chap. 11. Byzantine Art. Taylor, The Classical Heritage, pp. 336-44, and the middle paragraph on P- 383. Bury, op. cit., book iv, chap. xv. Sturgis, History of Architecture, vol. ll, book vil, chap. V. Procopius, Of the Buildings of Justinian. Translated into English by A. Steward (London, 1896). Byzantine Civilization. Bury, op. cit., book iv, chap, xvi; and book v, chap. xiii. Munro and Sellery, op. cit., pp. 212-23. Byzantine Society and the Byzantine Empire's Place in History. Foord, op. cit., chap. XX, pp. 397-406. The Migrations and Early Culture of the Slavs. Louis Leger, A History of Austria-Hungary (1889), chap. iii. CHAPTER IX GREGORY THE GREAT AND WESTERN CHRISTENDOM After Justinian the next commanding personality and central figure to appear in European history is Gregory the Gregory's Great, pope from 590 to 604. His father was a and^char-^'^ rich Roman noble; his mother and aunts were acter pious ladies who were later canonized ; so that Gregory was brought up in a Christian home and given the best education obtainable in that age. Jerome and Augus- tine were his favorite authors, but he was trained especially in the law, and in 573 held the important position of city prefect at Rome. After his father died and his mother re- tired to a nunnery, he used his inherited fortune to found seven monasteries, six in Sicily, the other in his own family mansion on the Caelian Hill, where he himself now became a monk. Fastings and vigils ruined his health, and through later life he was subject to attacks of gout, acute indigestion, and slow fever. He became one of the seven deacons in the churches of Rome, and was sent as a papal envoy to urge the Byzantine emperor to rescue Italy from the attacks of the Lombards. In this capacity he resided at Constantinople six years, but failed to get help from the emperor, who was busy with the Avars and Persians. Gregory did not learn Greek during his stay at Constantinople, but employed his leisure in writing an allegorical work in Latin. He was elected pope while Rome was in the throes of the bubonic plague. Despite his asceticism, Gregory made many useful friendships with the great both in Church and State; he knew the value of liberal hospitality, and how to make agreeable presents to the rich and powerful as well as to dispense charity to the poor and needy. Through the early Middle Ages, as both imperial and municipal administration disappeared in the West, it be- came increasingly the tendency for every conscientious GREGORY THE GREAT 155 and Industrious bishop to look after the political and social as well as religious welfare of his flock. For ex- His admin- ample, the bishop would take charge of the aque- ihe1:ky"of ducts which supplied the city with water. Sim- Rome ilarly, Gregory, after he became pope, tried to feed the hungry populace, to relieve the sufferings of the city poor and of the war refugees, to ransom Christian captives, and to allay the ravages of the plague by leading religious pro- cessions. The exarch at Ravenna found it difficult because of the Lombards to exercise any close control over the west coast of the peninsula, and the pope's political Influence in- jcreased. in consequence. Gregory also acted as the landlord of large private estates which the Roman Church already owned in Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and even In Gaul, Africa, and The papal . Illyricum. He was an excellent business man, Patrimony with as great a genius for small details as Justinian, and he watched very carefully over this private patrimony of the popes, writing frequently to his agents In distant provinces and demanding full reports and strict accounts from them. While he insisted upon the proprietary rights of the Church, he wished to be just to every one, to have none of the cor- ruption and oppression that we have seen disgraced im- perial taxation, and to be merciful and charitable to the poor and unfortunate. Gregory had serfs, if not slaves, upon his estates, like all the great landlords of this period. Gregory wrote letters not only to his real-estate agents and to the overseers of his serfs and tenants, but also to numerous imperial officials great and small p^j^ ^j^^^. throughout the West, and to the emperor him- political self concerning these same men. He watched and ^ ^^' ^ advised them even in their political actions, and constituted himself a kind of imperial minister of the West. They took his advice, too, because It usually was sound counsel. When the exarch did little or nothing for central and southern Italy, Gregory stepped in and performed his duties for him. The Lombards had been in Italy for over twenty years 156 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE when Gregory became pope. After the death of Alboin, who „ , . had led them into Italy, they went for ten years Relations . , , . , "^ , i • , , with the without a kmg, and were ruled mstead by some Lombards thirty-five dukes in as many different districts. Then the nobles elected a king again in the north, which on that account has since been called Lombardy; but the Duchies of Friuli in northeastern, of Spoleto in central, and of Beneventum in southern Italy remained practically inde- pendent, and other dukes occasionally made the king trouble. The emperors were too occupied at home to send adequate forces against the Lombards, and yet would not make peace with them, although the exarch at Ravenna could not pro- tect Rome and Naples. Gregory, on the contrary, favored coming to terms with the Lombards. In 592, in order to save Rome, he made peace on his own~authority with the Duke of Spoleto. Next the king of the Lombards besieged the city, but Gregory by a personal interview persuaded him to withdraw and vainly urged the emperor to make peace with him. At last in 599 peace was made. When the war was resumed in 601 between the Empire and the Lom- bards, Rome seems to have remained neutral, and Gregory rejoiced in 603 at the baptism into the Catholic faith of the heir to the Lombard throne. This, however, did not mean the end of hostilities between the Lombard kings, the Lom- bard dukes, the exarch, and the pope, which continued in- termittently until the Lombards finally captured Ravenna in 751 and then were conquered in their turn by the Franks a few years later. Gregory's election to the Papacy had to be sanctioned by the Emperor Maurice before he was consecrated, and he . duly informed the four patriarchs at Constsmti- power under nople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, of Gregory j^j^ accession and his adherence to the teachings of the oecumenical councils. However, he abated none of the papal claims in theory and advanced them greatly in practice by his energetic activity throughout the West. It was not easy to maintain anything like a general super- vision of church affairs in those troubled times, when com- GREGORY THE GREAT 157 munlcation was so difficult, when Italy was thrown into con- fusion by the Lombards, and when the monarchs of the Franks and Visigoths tried to keep their clergy under their own control. Even in Gaul, however, Gregory interfered occasionally in church matters, while in imperial Africa he was able to make his authority generally felt, although even there he had to abstain from judging some cases because of the difficulty in securing adequate information. He dis- tinctly advanced, nevertheless, the jurisdiction not only of his own, but of ecclesiastical courts generally. Especially in Italy and Sicily he made use of the stewards of his estates to maintain discipline in churches and monasteries, to fill vacant bishoprics, and to prosecute heretics. The Arch- bishop of Ravenna, supported by the exarch, refused in practice to take orders from Gregory, but even he admitted the papal claims in theory, writing to Gregory in this strain, "How could I possibly venture to oppose that most holy see which transmits its decrees to the church universal?" and "The providence of God has placed all things in your hands." The Archbishop of Dalmatia, after a long contro- versy, had to lie prone on the paving-stones of Ravenna for three hours and cry out, " I have sinned against God and the most blessed Pope Gregory." The patriarchs of Constanti- nople at this time evoked strong protests from Gregory by assuming the title, "Universal." Gregory's successors in the Papacy during the seventh century seem to have lacked his ability and not to have increased the papal power; but his many-sided influence and forceful personality had set a standard which was not forgotten, especially as it re- mained recorded in his writings. Because of his writings Gregory ranks with Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome as one of the four great Latin doc- tors of the Western Church. Forty sermons are Writings of extant of the many that he preached before sermons great crowds. He seems to have preached hell- and hymns fire a good deal, and perhaps the rough men of his time needed this. As he sincerely believed that the wars, plagues, and decline of civilization in his day meant the near end of 158 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE the world, he was able to refer with the more force to the last judgment. Gregory usually has been represented, and usually represents himself, as a writer who paid little atten- tion to "grammar"; that is, to literary style. Such apolo- getic statements are always open to suspicion, however, even when they come from a pope, and in any case show that there were critics then who still esteemed literary style. Moreover, we find Gregory himself lamenting the fact that some of his sermons had been published by monks who took down his words at the time without giving him an oppor- tunity "to emend them *with care as I intended." The "Gregorian chants " approved by the Roman Catholic Church are attributed to this pope, but some doubt has been raised lately as to how much of an innovator he was in the liturgy, and the hymns attributed to him are perhaps spurious. Besides fourteen books of letters Gregory's chief works are the Pastoral Rule, the Moralia, or commentary on the Pastoral Book of Job, and the Dialogues. The first is an Moralia eminently practical book, instructing the bishop Dialogues in the care of his flock and showing a wide ac- quaintance with human nature. The commentary on Job, written during his residence in Constantinople, is a good specimen of the allegorical interpretation of Scripture so much in favor during the Middle Ages. The Dialogues are about the lives and miracles of the saints, and introduce us to a strange world of monks, miracles, demons, and special providences. One must always be on one's guard against demons as against germs to-day; a woman once nearly swallowed one who was sitting on a lettuce leaf. Gregory, like the later Calvinists, delights in stories of condign pun- ishment especially dealt out by God to heretics, blasphem- ers, and the irreverent; in his pages even those who care- lessly disinter the bones of martyrs meet with sudden death. The object of many of his anecdotes is to stimulate his readers to venerate the relics of the saints, to accept such beliefs as that the souls of the dead can be saved by saying masses for them, and that the sign of the cross dispels de- mons even when made by an unbelieving Jew. GREGORY THE GREAT 159 The frame of mind shown in the Dialogues was, however, characteristic of all Christian writers of that time. The same atmosphere of the mars^-elous, the same Mental wealth of miracles — some of which seem child- the early° ish and others immoral to the modern reader — Middle Ages are found in all the saints' Lives of the period, in the history of the Franks by Bishop Gregory of Tours, of the Lombards by Paul the Deacon, and of the Church in England by the monk, Bede. Among the miracles ascribed to St. Columban — who died in 615, and of whom we shall presently speak — by the monk, Jonas, in his almost contemporary biography, are such as filling a storehouse with grain, curing a finger cut in harvesting, preventing a beer vat left open by a monk from overflowing the pitcher set beneath the spigot, and causing a raven to become conscience-smitten and return a stolen glove. Gregory of Tours resembled his namesake the pope, not merely in his firm belief in the miracle-working powers of the relics of the saints, so that he sought a cure for every bodily ill at the shrine of his own St. Martin of Tours, and also in the special sanctity of the persons of the clergy and the property of the Church, but furthermore in his readiness to overlook the most serious faults in rulers provided they supported the orthodox faith. Thus, the ruthless and bipod-stained Clovis is a Christian hero for the good" Bishop of Tours, while Pope Gregory treated the cruel and unscrupulous Prankish queen, Brun- hilda, as the hope of true religion in Gaul, and wrote cordial congratulations on his accession to Phocas who became By- zantine emperor by murdering Maurice and all his family. Less tactful, but more fearlessly outspoken against iniquity in high places, was St. Columban, whom Brunhilda forced to leave the monastery where he had spent twenty years be- cause he rebuked her grandson for keeping concubines. While Pope Gregory believed that the bones of the saints possessed marvelous virtues, — a belief by no Gregory's means so contrary to the science of antiquity as common to that of our time, — he did not, like Gregory sense of Tours and some other Christians, go so far as to advise i6o THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE against the practice of secular medicine, nor did he think that asceticism and zeal for religious observ^ances should be carried to extremes. When a bishop had a hemorrhage, Gregory consulted every doctor in Rome and sent him a written statement of the diagnosis and prescription of each one. He also urged him to drop all fasting, vigils, and public speaking until his health should improve. When certain zealots wished to observe the Sabbath so strictly as not to wash at all on that day, Gregory made the astute reply that he did not approve of bathing as a pleasure or luxury on any day, but that washing as a physical necessity he did not for- bid even on the Lord's day. When his missionaries began their labors of converting England, Gregory warned them that the heathen barbarians could not at once be entirely weaned from their old ways; that they should not destroy the old temples, but only the idols in them, in order that the barbarians might the more readily worship God in places to which they were accustomed; and that the Anglo-Sax- ons might continue "to the praise of God" the religious feasts at which they had been wont to sacrifice oxen to demons. In short, Gregory invariably showed plenty of common^ense in dealing with any practical problem of the present. Gregory was the first monk to become pope, and he is largely responsible for the general adoption of the Bene- c , , dictine Rule throughout the rrionasteries of the spread of » the Bene- West. Indeed, almost all that we know of Bene- dictine Rule (jict himself is what Gregory tells us. St. Bene- dict of Nursia (480-543) came, like Gregory, of a noble Roman family. After three years of hermit life he gained so many followers that he organized them into communities, but his Rule was not promulgated until about 529 at Monte Cassino. It does not seem to have become widely known until the time of Gregory, when Lombard attacks drove the monks from Monte Cassino to Rome. Gregory gave his hearty approval to the Rule and it was spread to England by his missionaries. It did not reach Gaul, however, until the seventh century, and no trace of it is GREGORY THE GREAT i6i seen in Spain during the Visigothic period. But eventually it was to be universally employed through western Europe, and followed in thousands of monasteries and nunneries. Benedict profited both by his own experience and that of others, making discriminating use of various earlier rules, in drawing up this manual for the army of the Church — for ecclesiastical writers were constantly comparing monks and hermits to athletes in training or soldiers under discipline. He had begun his own ascetic career as a recluse," and once rolled about naked in a thorn bush, but he evidently came to the conclusion that the best religious life, at least for the average man, was in an organized community where he could practice the virtues of obedience, silence, humility, and ser\ace of others. "Let no one follow what he thinks most profitable to himself, but rather what is best for another." The Rule is made up partly of general moral and religious precepts like that just quoted, which appeal to the better nature or ascetic enthusiasm of the reader; partly of specific regulations which remind one of a boarding-school or military camp. The monks are instructed when they must stop talking, when they must go to bed, where and how they are to sleep, when they are to rise for prayers in the night, when they must be up in the morning, and what schedule of devotional exercises, manual labor, and reading they must carry out during the day. Also, whose weekly turn it is to cook and wash or to read at meals, at what hours the meals shall be and of what diet they shall consist, and what clothing the monks are to wear. There is a list, not too long, of penalties for tardiness or mistakes either in the devotional exercises or in other work. Then there are care- ful exceptions made for special cases, for very old monks, very young monks, sick monks, new monks, monks away from the convent on a journey or distant piece of work, priests who reside in the monastery, pilgrim monks or secu- lar guests who may stop there for shelter or entertainment, artificers employed at the monastery, and the special monastic offices of cellarer, doorkeeper, and provost. At the head of the monastery is an abbot, elected for life i62 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE by the monks, whom all must obey, through whose hands all letters to the monks from without must pass, and who is urged to be severe and impartial in rebuking and punish- ing all offenses. The individual monk is to have absolutely ^o personal property, and the social classifications of the outside world are not to be regarded in the cloisters, where the monks are to rank^nly by seniority and as they may be promoted or degraded by the abbot. Each monastery is to be self-governing and independent except for the episcopal supervision of the bishop in whose diocese it is located; the Benedictine Rule contemplates no general grouping of monasteries into orders or provinces, no placing of one abbot above another. Numerous writers have united in extolling the Rule for its moderation and practicability, its avoidance of the extremes of asceticism found in Eastern monachism, its Roman genius for organization and regula- tion, its suitability to Western conditions and spirit, its psychological insight and lofty moral standards, its glorifi- cation of manual labor which slavery had cast into dis- repute in antiquity. The reader can easily test these conclusions for himself and learn of the details of the monks' life by reading in English translation this famous document under which lived so many men through many centuries. The monastery had the advantage of being an orderly community in the midst of a disordered world. When city, Monasteries trade, industry, emperors, and kings were all as centers of failing to hold society together, and only the civilization in i great landholder seemed able to keep a certain local area and social group under his control, the Church showed its power to establish close settlements where a number of men lived in harmony and served one another. A corporation is likely to have an advantage over the in- dividual especially in economic matters. Moreover, public opinion venerated the monastery as the resort of holy men ; it was often spared in war, and kept receiving bequests of land and other privileges. The monks were not supposed to be primarily agriculturists or preservers of ancient manu- GREGORY THE GREAT 163 scripts; their main business was prayer, praise, and devo- tion; but they usually did their other work well, since they did it not for a lord, but for the Lord. The Rule did not explicitly encourage monks to engage in literary or artistic work ; it merely prescribed a good deal of hard manual labor and a little reading. Cassiodorus^, however, had in his old age, at about the time of Benedict's death, established a monastery to which he gave his own large library and where the monks gave much time to study and the copying of manuscripts. And as time went on many Benedictine monks devoted more time to such pursuits and less to outdoor work than their Rule prescribes. The abbot, who was usually a man of superior training and intellect, would em- ploy the best methods of agriculture and husbandry upon his estates, or see to it that intelligent copying and painting were done in his scriptorium. Thus the monks did better agricultural and industrial work than most laymen in the world about them, and, while at first they did not do much educational or literary work, they did much more than any one else at that time. The monks were, therefore, of great importance in the economic and intellectual development of the early Middle Ages. Almost the only records of real- estate and business transactions which have come down to us from that time are those of the monasteries, which, it is true, outlived most private houses and families, but whose abbots would seem to have been more systematic business men than their contemporaries. Almost the only records of contemporary events that we have for the period are the monastic annals and chronicles. They are meager and unsatisfactory records — a sentence or two per year where to-day we have a huge file of three hundred and sixty- five newspapers. But if we can scarcely call the monk- ish chronicler a journalist, he was at any rate the only annalist that the age knew. Besides, society had grown stagnant and there was probably not much more to re- cord in a whole year then than happens in the course of a modern day. The monks were preeminently the missionaries of the 1 64 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE medieval Church, and Pope Gregory too gave a great im- The pope petus to the spread of Christianity. Moreover, the monks, he increased the authority of the Papacy by and missions ,, . ., .,, ,. • , , , • allying it with monasticism and by bringing new heathen lands under its control. Under Gregory's guidance began the conversion of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who had been conquering Britain ^nverTion piecemeal since the middle of the fifth century, of the Anglo- and blotting out the Latin and Celtic languages and the Christian religion. About 600 they were divided into a number of petty kingdoms, and the previous inhabitants of Roman Britain still held Wales and some parts of western England. Gregory, whose custom it was to buy barbarian slave boys and give them a Christian edu- cation, had been especially attracted by the beauty of some English lads with light hair and complexions, and deter- mined to send missionaries to their land. In 597, a monk named Augustine landed with forty others in the Kingdom of Kent in the southeastern corner of England. Here they soon converted King Ethelbert, whose Prankish wife was already a Christian. Their first church was St. Martin's at Canterbury, which was still standing from the days of the Roman Empire and which may still be seen to-day. Can- terbury was henceforth the religious capital of England and the seat of an archbishop. Another archbishop came to be located at York in the north. The emissaries of Pope Gregory were not the first mis- sionary monks in the British Isles. The conversion of Ire- Irish land by St. Patrick, while the Roman Empire monasticism ^^^ falling to pieces in the West, and the peculiar clan monasteries established there have already been men- tioned. In those monasteries some ancient culture was preserved and even Greek was still studied. Over a hundred early Irish manuscripts still extant in Continental libraries testify both to the culture and to the widespread missionary activity of these Irish monks. What writings have come down to us in Old Irish are exclusively religious. The Irish monks also surpassed the rest of western Europe at this 8" Loneitude Weat 4° from GreeniTJch 0* Lonpitude East THE BRITISH ISLES in the Seventh Century Anglo-Saxon territory is left white Kingdoras.of the Native Britons Ficts and ScotB are shaded i66 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE time in illuminating manuscripts; that is, in decorating them with colored initials, border designs, and illustrations. The Celtic peoples of the British Isles were restless in the fifth and sixth centuries, partly owing, no doubt, to the race migrations that were in process all over Europe. Many na- tives of Britain, driven first by the Picts and Irish and then by the Saxons, crossed the Channel to the peninsula of Brittany. Among them monks were prominent, and some of these were Irish. About 500 there had been a great mi- gration of Irish tribes, called "Scots," from North Ireland to Scotland, where they founded the Kingdom of Dalriada. Here about 565 came from Ireland St. Columba (521-597), who had changed his name from Wolf to Dove in token of his conversion. He founded a monastery upon the island of lona, and then passed on to preach the Gospel among the heathen Picts. Other Irish monks went north to such distant islands of the sea as the Shetlands, Hebrides, Ork- neys, and even Iceland. From lona they spread their faith southward among the heathen Angles who had invaded Northumbria. Here the center of monastic and missionary activity was at Lindisfame, on the east coast, under the lead of Aidan about 635. Meanwhile Columban (543-615) had wandered to east- em Gaul — much of Austrasia was still pagan — and had St. Colum- founded monasteries in the Vosges Mountains ban and where his rigorous Rule was enforced. Columban Irish mis- i i- • • i i ' i , sions on the did not believe in sparing the rod, and a monk Continent ^^^^ f^jj^^ ^^ g^y " Ameh" after the grace at meals received six blows, while a monk caught speaking alone with a woman received two hundred. He did not, however, forbid the reading of classical literature and was well versed himself in Greek mythology and poetry. WTien he was driven from Luxeuil in the Kingdom of Burgundy by Brunhilda, as before mentioned, he entered the country of the Alamanni, but was banished thence in turn because of his violent attacks upon their heathen temples and idols. Then he pushed on into Italy and built a monastery in the Apennines, where he dwelt until his death. But his work GREGORY THE GREAT 167 went on. Despite his departure Luxeuil remained the center of monastic Hfe in Gaul. His disciple, St. Gall, had re- mained among the Alamanni, and founded near the Lake of Constance the great monastery which has been named after him, and which has had a Swiss canton named after it, and in whose library many priceless manuscripts have been preserved. Other Irish monks penetrated Germany as far as Salzburg and Wiirzburg. When all the Prankish king- doms were reunited under Dagobert (629-639), St. Aman- dus went as a missionary to the Basques in the extreme south and to Flanders and Hainault in the extreme north of Gaul. Toward the close of the same century a part of Frisia beyond Flanders and the Rhine was conquered by the Franks, and the Anglo-Saxon missionary Willibrord founded there the episcopal see of Utrecht. The Irish monks had not been sent out by the pope, and, owThg to their separate development far away from the in- fluence of oecumenical councils and out of touch -phe Irish with the rest of the Christian world, they dif- monasteries fered in some of their usages from the Church of under papal Rome, especially in their method of determining ^°"'^''°^ the date of Easter each year. In England these diver- gences led to considerable bitterness between the papal mis- sionaries, who soon spread from Kent to the other king- doms, and the British clergy of Wales and the Irish monks of the north, who in the course of the seventh century visited the South, East, and West Saxons. The chief strong- hold of Irish monasticism continued to be in the Kingdom of Northumbria, and there in 664 the Synod of Whitby finally decided the Easter dispute in favor of the papal party. Thereupon the Irish monks of Lindisfarne with- drew to lona. From 668 to 690, Theodore of Tarsus, a learned Eastern monk acquainted with Byzantine civiliza- tion, was Archbishop of Canterbury, and thoroughly or- ganized and united the Church in England in accordance with Roman usage. This church union came long before there was a united Anglo-Saxon state. The monaster- ies which the Irish missionaries had founded throughout i68 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Northumbria were gradually made Benedictine. In Gaul, too, the Benedictine Rule ultimately supplanted that of Columban, though some monasteries still followed the Celtic customs as late as the beginning of the ninth century. Meanwhile, in Ireland itself the south had submitted to the Papacy in 636 and the north did so in 697, and the monasteries founded by Columba in Scotland conformed in 717. The monasteries in England not only led to the conver- sion of the invaders, but were the chief centers of civiliza- Monastic tion, and, like the Irish monasteries, preserved England: ^^ the seventh and eighth centuries a higher cul- ^^^^ ture than could be found in most Western lands. Of their teachers and writers Bede is the best known. He wrote in Latin his ecclesiastical history which comes down to 731, commentaries on the Bible, grammatical treatises, and even some treatises in the field of natural science. He also tells us of a poet, Caedmon, who composed para- phrases of Biblical story in the Anglo-Saxon tongue. X^'hen Charlemagne about 800 wanted scholars at his Prankish court, he looked to England for them. Irish culture, too, continued for some time, and Bede praised the learning of Ireland in his day. From an English monastery went forth in the eighth cen- tury a missionary, who, building upon the foundations Boniface which the Irish monks and other earlier mission- apostle to aries had laid, converted many of the Germans to the east of the Rhine and reformed the Prank- ish Church in Gaul and brought it into closer relations with the Papacy. This was Winfrith, or Boniface, the name by which he was known after his visit to the pope in 719. With the powerful backing of Charles_Martel, the real ruler of the Franks at this time, as well as with the support of the pope, Boniface visited Frisia, Thuringia, Hesse, Bavaria. He reformed the Prankish churches through coun- cils held in Austrasia in 742 and in Neustria in 744. These synods abolished surviving heathen customs, improved the morals of the priests, which seem to have been sadly in GREGORY THE GREAT 169 need of correction, and systematized the church organiza- tion. In 747 Boniface secured from the Prankish bishops a declaration of their fideHty to Rome. In 752 he anointed Pepin, son of Charles Martel, king of the Pranks in name as well as in fact; but that event must await explanation until a later chapter. The next year the aged Boniface returned to his first love in the field of foreign missions, Prisia, and in 754 was slain there by the savage heathen natives. To the Irish Church, and especially to Columban, was perhaps due the introduction of the Penitentials, or books listing sins with the punishment or penance for . each which the priest shall require from the sinner. Such books of penance existed among the British, Irish, and Anglo-Saxons, and thence spread through the Western Church. This specific prescription of acts of pen- ance for their sins to rude barbarians in a brutal age by holy priests, whom they would fear to disobey, has been gener- ally regarded as a beneficial education for them in the essen- tials of morals and decency at a time when the State was weak and found it hard to keep order and punish crimes. Por a century or more after Gregory the Great we find in the four chief divisions of western Europe four Germanic peoples: the Visigoths in Spain, the Pranks in Lombard7~ Gaul, the Lombards in Italy, and the Anglo- and Anglo- Saxons in the British Isles. The last two peoples, however, had succeeded in conquering only parts of the territories mentioned. And neither of the last two united their conquests at this time into a strong single state. There was but one Lombard king, it is true, but he often had to fight with the Duke of Spoleto or the Duke of Benevento. The little Anglo-Saxon kingdoms kept struggling among themselves for supremacy, and now Kent, now Northum- bria, now Mercia had its brief moment of triumph. The Lombards and Anglo-Saxons had once lived close together and there are close resemblances in their laws. At first self- respecting and prosperous freemen were in the majority among both these peoples, but after they had settled on 170 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE the land economic and social inequality developed among them as elsewhere at that time. The Lombard laws of the early eighth century distinguish three classes of freemen serving in the army; namely, those who are to arm them- selves only with shield and bow and arrows, those who have more land and can afford a shield and spear and horse, and the richest, who must also wear a coat of mail and perhaps provide other soldiers besides themselves. The very poor- est freemen, on the other hand, are excused from fighting at all, probably because they can afford no equipment that would render them of any service in battle. Instead they are to do carting for the army and work for the leaders while they are away fighting. The Anglo-Saxon conquest of England seems to have been more thorough than that of the Lombards even in Lombardy itself. The Anglo-Saxons established a Teutonic language throughout England and later developed a written literature and formed a united state and nation. Before the Lombards could accomplish this, they were conquered by the Franks, and the union of Italy was put off until the nineteenth century. EXERCISES AND READINGS A. The Primary Sources Life of St. Columban by the Monk Jonas. Translations and Reprints of the University of Pennsylvania, vol. ii, no. 7, pp. 2-36. (This exercise will be found too long for one day's assign- ment.) 1. What information is given concerning Ireland and its civilization at this period? 2. With the aid of the index of an historical atlas trace the wander- ings of Columban from his landing in Brittany to his final settle- ment at Bobbio in northern Italy, locating upon an outline map the various places which he visited. 3. Characterize Columban's education and learning. 4. What book is quoted most by the author of this biography? 5. Characterize Columban's relations with and attitude toward the monarchs and states of his time. How does his career illustrate the power of the Church over the barbarians? 6. Describe Columban's relations with animals. 7. Of the many miracles recounted in this Life, select at least one example of each of the following: (a) obvious imitation of miracles GREGORY THE GREAT 171 described in the Bible; (b) trivial coincidences or fortunate occurrences which the imagination of the time has exalted to the miraculous; (c) miracles which do not seem necessary nor mor- ally justifiable. 8. Find a passage containing allegorical interpretation. Passages from the Writings of Gregory the Great. Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. I, selections numbered 28, 29, 30, 31, 35, 37. The Rule of St. Benedict. Henderson, Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, pp. 274-314. Thatcher and McNeal, Source Book of Medieval History, pp. 432-84. Extracts from Bede's Ecclesiastical History. Robinson, Readings, supra, vol. I, selections 38 to 42 (pp. 93-105). The Career of Boniface. Robinson, Readings, supra, vol. i, selections 43 to 46 (pp. 105-11). B. Secondary Accounts Gregory the Great. Cambridge Medieval History, chap. 8B, by W. H. Hutton; or a chapter of Dudden's two-volume Gregory the Great. Celtic Monasticism. H. B. Workman, The Evolution of the Monastic Ideal, pp. 183-216, omitting the footnotes. The Economic Influence of the Monasteries. Munro and Sellery, Medieval Civilization, pp. 129-36. Faith and Morals of the Franks. Munro and Sellery, op. cit., pp. 60-86. Christian Missions in Gaul and Germany. Munro and Sellery, op. cit., pp. 114-28. C. Map Exercise Italy at the Time of Gregory the Great. Upon an outline map of Italy indicate the Lombard Kingdom, the Duch- ies of Friuli, Spoleto, and Benevento, and the exarchate of Ravenna. CHAPTER X THE RISE AND SPREAD OF MOHAMMEDANISM While monks were spreading Christianity in the West, a new Oriental religion arose in Arabia under the leader- ^, , , ship of the prophet, Mohammed, who was born before about 570 in Mecca, a small trading-town fifty amme j^jjgg from the Red Sea. Of conditions in Ara- bia before Mohammed we know very little. The Arabs or Saracens had made raids into the Byzantine Empire and had also been employed by it as mercenaries. Most of them led a semi-nomadic life in their desert countr>% much of which is still unexplored by outsiders. From this region waves of invasion had swept over the fertile Tigris- Euphrates river basin in ages long before the days of Greece and Rome. The Arabs could not read or write, but were fond of extemporized poetry, in which they drew a somewhat Idealized portrait of themselves as generous, hospitable, truthful, and chivalrous bandits. There was no political organization. Society was In the tribal state and blood feuds prevailed between the clans. There were, however, some social distinctions and a certain amount of wealth and luxury. Slavery and polygamy both existed and there was a good deal of sexual Immorality. The various tribes differed considerably in their degree of civilization. Some had been more or less converted to Christianity or to Judaism; others still adhered to simple and rude rites that were suggestive of primitive man's religion. On the whole, we do not know enough of religious conditions In Arabia before Mohammed to tell how far he was indebted to pre- vious faiths and worships. The sources about Mohammed himself are much more satisfactory, although It Is hard for Western historians both to appreciate and to discount their Oriental spirit and psychology. The Koran, a collection of the prophetic utter- THE RISE OF MOHAMMEDANISM 173 ances given out by him from time to time as divine revela- tions, was put together two years after his death sources in substantially the form that we possess to-day. concerning ^ f . Ill 1' 11 Mohammed Some 01 Its passages had been dictated and pre- served; others were supplied by his followers from mem- ory after his death. It contains about two thirds as many verses as the New Testament. From the eighth and ninth centuries come Moslem biographies of Mohammed and collections of Moslem tradition. These are necessary to interpret the meaning of the Koran, which does not date the prophet's utterances or give them in the order of their delivery, but its chapters are arranged according to length. Inasmuch as some parts of the Koran enjoin what others forbid, it is important to know which passage was Moham- med's last word upon the point in question. Also the Koran is full of allusions to persons and things which were probably familiar enough at the time, but which require explanation for later readers. Mohammed came of a prominent family of Mecca, but was early left an orphan under an uncle's care. After suffer- ing some hardships from poverty, he became, p ^ Q^g^^^ when about twenty-five, the business agent of a of Moham- rich widow, whom he presently married upon his return from a successful commercial trip to Syria. He was of medium height, with a large head and broad shoul- ders; and was good-looking, with large black eyes, dark brows and lashes, long hair, and a full beard from which his white teeth flashed. His hand was soft and his health deli- cate. We are told that he disliked strong odors, dirty cloth- ing, and unkempt hair. He spent much time in fasts and vigils, was nervous and hysterical, often in low spirits, and subject to seizures in which he seemed to be in a violent fever. It was during these paroxysms that he was believed to be divinely inspired and that he indited portions of the Koran. He probably could not read or write and lacked the common Arabian fondness for poetry. He was affectionate and hu- mane by nature, but persevering in gaining his ends. His enemies have accused him of gross passion, but his defend- 174 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE ers hold that he was always faithful to his first wife, and that of the dozen or more wives whom he had in his later years some were widows of his dead warriors whom he married to protect, while others were married to cement political alli- ances or in the hope of securing an heir to succeed him. It was not until he was about forty years old that the "dreamer of the desert" began his prophetic seances and His teaching religious teaching. After four years he had won beforeThe about thirty converts. Few of his early revela- Hegira tions are preserved in the Koran ; his teaching at first was private and most of his converts were slaves and lowly persons. When these were ill-treated by the other Meccans, they fled to Abyssinia, but Mohammed's influen- tial kinsmen continued to afford him protection. Near Mecca was held annually a festival which crowds of pil- grims attended, and in Mohammed's time they also came into Mecca to visit the "Cube" (Kaaba), a building of that shape containing various sacred objects, images, and paint- ings. To these pilgrims Mohammed often preached, but without much success until finally some men from Medina were impressed by his teaching and offered a refuge to him and his followers. Medina was torn by the feuds of Jewish tribes and was ready to welcome a leader from outside. Accordingly, in 622 occurred the flight, or Hegira, of Mo- hammed and his followers from Mecca to Medina, an event from which the Mohammedan world dates its era. The Mohammedan year, as later decreed by the prophet, con- sists of twelve lunar months, or only three hundred and fifty-four days. Islam is the Arabic name for the religion founded by Mo- hammed, and his followers called themselves Muslimin, or Moslems. Both words carry the idea of surrender. His ideal was submission to the divine will and a brotherhood of equals, within which there should be no dissension or injury. His early teachings emphasized that there is only one God, "the merciful, the compassionate," and that before every man lies a day of reckoning and final judgment. He attacked idolatry. He believed in the exist- THE RISE OF MOHAMMEDANISM 175 ence of Gabriel and other angels, but refused to recognize Christ as the son of God, although admitting that he was a prophet. Like Gregory the Great, Mohammed seems to have believed that the end of this world was close at hand, though he always refused to set a date. Like Gregory, too, who at Constantinople had strenuously opposed the doctrine that the resurrected body will be impalpable, Mohammed believed absolutely in a physical after life. For the Arabs, whose ideas of the life after death had hitherto been rather hazy, he drew a vivid picture of the torments of the damned and the sensual delights of Paradise reserved for those who have been true believers. While, however, he both permit- ted and practiced the previous Arabian custom of polygamy, he ordered that fornicators should be whipped, and he prohibited the exposing of infants. He also somewhat im- proved the position of women and of slaves in Arabian society. He enjoined frequent ablutions upon his followers and "made the use of the toothpick almost a religious or- dinance." He also forbade certain articles of food and the drinking of wine. In all this he in large measure may have been simply perpetuating primitive notions of ceremonial purity and taboo. Yet his religion is probably the first to emphasize physical cleanliness and to prohibit the use of alcohol. Among Christians even monks were allowed a cer- tain amount of wine every day by the Benedictine Rule, although it forbade them to eat meat except in case of sickness. Mohammed commanded his followers to forgive those who injured them, not to seek vengeance, and to give alms to the poor. Moslems were to pray five times a day, to attend a public religious service every Friday, and to fast during one month each year from sunrise to sunset of each day. Islam has so many points in common with Judaism and Christianity that Mohammed has been charged with borrowing from both those faiths, but his knowledge of them seems to have been extremely vague. At Medina, Mohammed and his fellow-refugees found it difficult to earn a living and soon resorted to plundering caravans for a livelihood, a practice which they justified upon 176 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE the ground that the merchants were idolaters and unbe- Spread of Hevers. They won great prestige by what seemed Islam before iq contemporaries their miraculous victory in a Moham- . ^ . , med's death series oi smgle combats over the members of (622-632) ^ larger band of Meccans who tried to check their pillaging. In Medina, too, Mohammed strengthened his authority and provided funds for his followers by exiling the hostile Jewish clans and confiscating their property. Other obnoxious individuals were assassinated, and once some six hundred Jews who would not accept Islam were executed in cold blood and their women and children were sold into slavery. Thus the new religion began early to take on the ruthless and sordid features of conquest and tribute, and the persecuted prophet rapidly transformed himself into a religious despot and national legislator. Mecca continued to oppose Mohammed with increasing forces, but he weath- ered her attacks and gradually won the Bedouins of the desert to his side. Finally, in 630, he entered Mecca prac- tically unopposed and in triumph. He pardoned almost every one, and, while he destroyed idols, images, and pic- tures throughout the city, he preserved the famous "Cube" and left the much venerated black stone embedded in its wall to be kissed by future generations of Moslems from all parts of the globe. For he made the annual pilgrimage to Mecca a feature of his own religion. Mohammed defeated a hostile coalition of Bedouin tribes, and had begun raids upon the Byzantine Empire before his death in 632, but it is doubtful if all Arabia had by that time been converted to Islam. Islam was, at any rate, supreme by that time in the vicin- ity of Mecca and Medina, and within a very few 5'ears the Conquests astonishingly successful expeditions of the Mos- tines and ^"' lems against Syria and Babylonia drew the other Persians Arab tribes out of their deserts into a career of conquest and booty, and also into the bosom of Islam. The Moslem leader, Khalid, proved a very able general and won a remarkable succession of victories. Persia and Constanti- nople had just concluded peace in 628, after having fought THE RISE OF MOHAMMEDANISM 177 each other to a standstill, if not to the point of prostration, in a long series of wars. Heraclius had recovered Syria and Egypt, but these provinces were out of sympathy with Con- stantinople in religious matters and found their return to Byzantine taxation oppressive. Moreover, in Syria — and this was also true of Babylonia, the part of the Persian Kingdom next to Arabia — the mass of the population was Semitic, and so more in sympathy with the Arabs than with the Greeks of Constantin6ple or the Indo-Europeans of Persia. Within five years after Mohammed's death the Arabs had seized all Syria except Jerusalem and Caesarea, They gained Babylonia by a victory in 637 and advanced to the Tigris, where the rich capital Ctesiphon was abandoned to them without a struggle. Mesopotamia was overrun in 641, and in ten years more the remainder of the Persian Kingdom had been conquered and its independent existence ended. Egypt, where the new Patriarch of Alexandria had been persecuting the Coptic Church, was conquered in the years 639-643. The Arabs next took to the sea, destroyed a large Byzantine fleet, and occupied the islands of Cyprus and Rhodes. Meantime by land they pushed west from Egypt into Tripoli and north from Mesopotamia into Ar- menia. In 669 they advanced through Asia Minor to Chalce- don, crossed into Thrace and attacked Constantinople, but were repulsed. Then each year until 677 they made sea attacks upon the city, but all were failures, and the Arabs also withdrew from Rhodes. Nor for the remainder of the seventh century were they able to make any permanent advance into Asia Minor. In 716 Constantinople was once more attacked, but as usual weathered the storm. The Arabs did not force their conquered subjects to adopt Islam; they were willing to accept tribute from them in- stead and tolerated all Christian sects equally. Arabian Thus, some long-suffering heretical communities of the became free from persecution for the first time, conquered And the tribute was not as heavy as the imperial taxation had been. If, however, one turned Moslem, one no longer had to pay tribute and was far more likely to attain political 178 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE advancement. As a result the Copts In Egypt professed ad- herence to Islam so rapidly that the amount of the tribute fell off in the course of a few years from twelve to five mil- lions. When one had once become a Mohammedan, one could not return to one's previous faith without incurring the death penalty. The Arabs themselves did not per- manently remain fanatical or puritanical, but were often inclined to good living and to skepticism, and were easy- going in their interpretation of religious rules. They also were slow to make any great change in the governmental ma- chinery of lands which they conquered ; so long as the trib- ute came in regularly, they were content to leave Byzantine and Persian institutions much as they found them. The condition of serfs and slaves frequently improved under the Mohammedan rule of this period, and they were often emancipated by their new Arabian masters, especially if they embraced the faith of the Prophet. Because of the opposition of the wild Berber tribes as well as of the Byzantines, it took the Moslems over half a cen- Conquest of tury to conquer North Africa. Carthage did not North Africa f^y ^^til 697-698, and the western Berbers, whom Justinian had been unable to subdue, were not ab- sorbed by Islam until the early years of the following cen- tury. Ancient civilization now rapidly disappeared in Africa, a loss due more to the Berbers than to the Arabs or Vandals, and this once extremely prosperous region became desolate. Only the Christian Church lived on in Africa in decreasing strength for centuries. The Berber tribes, whose mode of life and state of civilization was similar to that of the nomads of the Arabian desert, for the most part accepted Islam, and many of them swept on westward in the wave of conquest. Spain was the next objective of the Moslems. A deposed king fled to them for aid against his supplanter. The Visi- Conquest gothic Kingdom was also weakened by its per- of Spam secution of the Jews and by the selfish treachery of the nobles. In 711, Tarik, lieutenant of the Moslem governor of Mauretania, Musa ibn Nusair, landed near the THE RISE OF MOHAMMEDANISM "'" 179 rock named after him Gibraltar {Gebel Tarik), and, before the year was out, had defeated King Roderi'ck and over- run half of Spain. Many fortified towns still held out, how- ever. Musa now arrived with reinforcements, compelled the towns to capitulate, won another great victory in 713, and proclaimed the rule of the caliph in the Gothic capi- tal, Toledo. In the mountains along the northern coast of Spain, however. Christian communities succeeded in main- taining their independence. After their rapid and easy conquest of most of the Span- ish peninsula, the Arabs and Berbers saw no reason why they should not press on farther. They began to ^rabs cross the Pyrenees just about as a great attack checked by was being made upon Constantinople by their co-religionists in the East. By 720, they had occupied Septi- mania or Narbonne, the territory which the Visigoths had still held beyond the Pyrenees. Aquitaine, which the Goths had lost to Clovis at the end of the fifth century, was at present under the rule of an independent duke, Eudes, who only nominally recognized the Prankish kings of Neustria and Austrasia and their vigorous representative, Charles Martel, mayor of the palace. Eudes unaided for a time held the Moslems in check, but in 732 they prepared a great ex- pedition which defeated him and forced him to appeal to Charles Martel for aid. To-day one taking an express train from Bordeaux to Paris passes through the towns of Poitiers and Tours. This was the route the Moslems took. Between Poitiers and Tours they were met by the Franks under Charles Martel and decisively defeated. A few years later he also prevented them from entering the Rhone Valley; but, although he devastated Septimania, it was not until 769 that his son Pepin finally drove the Moslems south of the Pyrenees. In such wise the warlike Franks, with their superior physique, set a limit to the westward expansion of Islam, just as in eastern Europe Constantinople was a bar- rier which they could not break down. As the Huns, operat- ing from the east and north, had failed to take Constanti- nople or to penetrate to the heart of Gaul, so the Arabs, i8o THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE operating from the east and south, had met with the same failure. Mohammed had died without naming a successor, and, after the reigns of his father-in-law, Abu-Bekr, and of Mohamme- Omar, the ablest of his early converts, civil wars dan occurred over the succession. In 66i, a member > nas les ^^ ^^^ Qmmiad (or Umayyad) family, which rep- resented the Meccan aristocracy and the interests of Syria, became caliph, a title meaning the representative or suc- cessor of Mohammed and so both the religious and political head of the Moslem world. He transferred the capital from Medina to Damascus. Under the Caliph Walid (705-715), the Qmmiad dynasty reached the height of its prosperity, maintaining a court of brilliant culture, with poets and scholars, and erecting imposing mosques at Damascus and Jerusalem. During his reign the Arabs not only conquered Spain in the West, but ranged as far east as the borders of India and China. In 750, the Ommiads, to whom there had always been much opposition in the East, and who were now weakened by feuds among themselves, gave way to the Abbassids (750-1258), a Persian dynasty claiming descent from Mohammed's uncle, Abbas. They moved the capital farther east to Bagdad. But the western part of the Moslem world broke away from their rule. The Ommiad Abd-er- Rahman, after five years of wandering, escaped to Spain and was recognized as emir at Cordova. It was not, however, until 929 that Abd-er-Rahman III assumed the title of caliph, and that it is strictly correct to speak of the Caliph- ate of Cordova. Several independent Moslem states also arose in North Africa, where the Berbers always inclined to establish governments of their own ; these were the germs of the modern Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco. Of their con- quests in Sicily and Italy in the ninth and tenth centuries we shall have occasion to speak elsewhere. In 909, the Fat- imites, so-called from Fatima, the daughter of Mohammed, came into power in North Africa. In 969, they conquered Egypt from the Abbassids, founded the city of Cairo, and henceforth made Egypt the center of their activities, losing Lon:,'itiido 20' West frani 10" Gruiiwich 0' Lonsitude 10' ICa^t tioin 20' Grcpuwicli 30' ^ . ^ ^t^ f yl 7' m f ^- ^u f ). a So, ^ >1 yars ^ A (- (^ ;.■"•'// ,. ivi ^ -^ / -y 4^ ■i.^.^'':yL. ^ ■SEA' ~^^^^l - / The Mohammedan World about 732 Scale of Miles 100 200 M OOO Vm////A Territory overrun by Mohammedans N^'\?^x^ The Byzantine Empire THE RISE OF MOHAMMEDANISM i8i most of their power in the West, but adding Syria to their possessions. Although great conquerors, the Arabs lacked the genius for lawmaking and empire-building of the ancient Romans. Never having developed a state worthy of the Arabian name in their native country, they could hardly Politics be expected to prove equal of a sudden to the creation of a vast empire. Consequently their states seldom held to- gether for a long period. Both Arabs and Berbers naturally inclined toward the unorganized freedom of the desert, ex- cept that certain families regarded themselves as aristo- crats, and that the Arabs were prone to consider themselves superior to the rest of the population, whether unbelievers or converts to Islam. Therefore, while ambitious and able individuals often made use of the religious fanaticism of the masses to raise themselves to supreme power, and then ruled in the manner of Oriental despots, they had to be on their guard against the aristocracy and against the instinct toward freedom. Mohammed had ratified the relationship of patron and client which already existed among the Arabs, and the Moslem leaders rewarded their followers with grants of land, so that there was in the Middle Ages much the same tendency toward feudalism in the Mohammedan as in the Christian world. Although the Arabs lacked the Roman genius for govern- ment, they rivaled the Romans as adapters, preservers, and spreaders of civilization. The Koran, it is civilization true, is not favorable to philosophical speculation °^ ^^^^"^ or to the scientific attitude, and the narrowly orthodox Mos- lem might hold that to commit the sacred book to memory was a sufficient education, and that it contained the entire law and theology of Islam. Nevertheless, learned Greeks, Syrians, and Persians living under Mohammedan rule were not bound by such scruples. And as the Arabs left behind their rude life in the desert and came in contact with the Hellenistic culture that was spread through the East, their mental horizon and sympathies expanded beyond the narrow limits of the Koran. Moreover, the Koran itself i82 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE required interpretation, and so furnished a pretext for fur- ther discussion and writing. The courts of Damascus, Bag- dad, home of the Arabian Nights, Cairo, and Cordova were renowned each in turn for luxury, culture, and learning. The caliphs were in the main broad-minded and munifi- cent patrons of the arts and letters. Therefore, while in the Christian West civilization had sunk so low that actually monasteries, where men's thoughts were supposed to be centered on another world, were its mainstay, in the Mo- hammedan Orient and in Spain civilization was not merely preserved, but in some respects progressed. The Moors or Berbers in North Africa remained, on the other hand, in a state of barbarism, and there were backward races waiting in the East who would one day submerge both Byzantine and Bagdad culture. The Arabic language was spread widely through the ex- tensive Mohammedan conquests. In Spain by the ninth Language century even the Christians had become fasci- and liter- nated by Arabian literature. In 854, an ecclesi- astical writer complained bitterly that Latin was neglected, that no one read the church fathers or the Scrip- tures, or could even compose a respectable letter in Latin to a friend. On the contrary. Christians took delight in the poetry and romances of the Arabs, and even studied their philosophy and theology, not to refute their errors, but to imitate their eloquence and elegance of style. Christians collected libraries of Arabian works, and many were able to write verses as good as those of the Arabs themselves. Our language to-day shows in a number of words the influence of the Arabs upon our civilization; for example, "muslin" and "mattress," "cupola" and "alcove," "algebra" and "alchemy," "alcohol" and "almanac," are words of Ara- bian origin. The Arabs soon began to translate the chief works of the Greek philosophers and scientists into their own tongue, Arabian although these translations were often made learning from Syriac or Aramaic versions rather than directly from the Greek original. They then wrote com- THE RISE OF MOHAMMEDANISM 183 mentaries upon these authorities, or made compilations from them, or produced works of their own on the same subjects. Medicine, mathematics, and natural science were especially cultivated by the writers in Arabic ; and in these fields they seem to have learned something from India and the Orient as well as from the ancient Greeks. The Hindu- Arabic numerals were almost as great an advance in mathe- matical notation over the cumbrous Greek and Roman numbers as the phonetic alphabet of the Phoenicians had been over Egyptian hieroglyphs. The great amount of ground covered in three continents by the Mohammedan possessions gave opportunity for extensive travel, and we possess important works by Arabian geographers or tourists of the tenth and eleventh centuries who even penetrated Russia. The Arabs also delved a good deal into occult sub- jects, and wrote many works of astrology, alchemy, necro- mancy, and various arts of magic and divination. A long list of noted Arabian men of learning has come down to us, too long to include here. They begin at Bagdad in the ninth century and last into the twelfth century in Spain. The Arabs were especially impressed by the writings of Aristotle, whose philosophy and science gained greater fame and au- thority in their hands than ever before. Life in the harem and the position of woman in Moslem society do not accord with Western and modern standards, but it was a poetess and musician, who came from Bagdad to Spain about 900, who wrote, "The most shameful thing in the world is igno- rance, and if ignorance were a woman's passport to Para- dise, I would far rather that the Creator sent me to hell!" Women, indeed, were often prominent in the learned world of Moslem Spain. The spread of Islam brought into close commercial rela- tions countries stretching from India, or even Korea and Japan, in the East to Spain and the Atlantic Mohamme- coast of northwestern Africa. The Arabs lined ^^"- ^''^^^ the west coast of India with trading-stations. They sup- plied distant China with sugar, dates, rose-water, camphor, cotton, glassware, and wrought iron, especially weapons and i84 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE coats of mail. From the Mediterranean ports of North Africa caravans traded with the interior as far as Lake Tschad and the great rivers of central Africa. From Egypt and Arabia their commerce extended far down the east coast of the same continent. Ships from Alexandria and Syria thronged the harbors of Almeria and other Spanish ports; and poets, musicians, and singing girls were imported from the Orient to grace the courts of Mohammedan Spain. Over thirteen thousand Moslem coins dating chiefly before the eleventh century have been found in the far northern provinces of Esthonia, Livonia, and Courland on the shores of the Baltic Sea, testifying to a considerable trade across Russia. Under the Abbassids Bagdad rivaled Constantinople as the mart and metropolis of the world. It was situated on the Bagdad Tigris a few miles from the site of Ctesiphon, the under the previous Persian capital, and not far from the ruins of ancient Babylon on the Euphrates. The caliphs constructed as their own sumptuous residence a cir- cular city, somewhat over a mile in diameter, and filled with numerous palaces and pleasure-houses, parks and por- ticoes. Once, to avoid the mosquitoes, the caliph not only built a pavilion upon high ground, but further excluded the insects by an incantation. About this round city grew up various quarters and suburbs until in 978 the whole me- tropolis was five miles across. There was the Christian quarter with its monasteries, its richly adorned Jacobite and severely plain Nestorian churches. There was the Har- biyah quarter, inhabited largely by Turkish and Persian im- migrants. There were the Jews' Bridge, the Suburb of the Persians, the Quadrangle of the Persians, the Shops of the Persian nobles, and the Market of the Syrian Gate, w^hence branched in all directions streets, courts, and alleys, each named after the province from which its residents had orig- inally come. The names of the streets, gates, and bridges of Bagdad also give us a picture of the occupations and wares of the city. We hear of the Market of the Perfumers, the Market THE RISE OF MOHAMMEDANISM 185 of the Money-Changers, the Straw Merchants' Bridge, the Fief of the Carpet-Spreaders, the Hay Market, Trades and the Gate of the Horse Market, the Tanners' occupations Yard, the Four Markets, the Upper Barley Gate, the Silk House, the Slaves' Barracks, the Road of the Cages, the Fullers' Road, the Gatehouse of the Date Market, the Needle-Makers' Wharf, the Archway of the Armorers, the Cotton Market. In one part of the city Chinese goods were for sale, in another the famous Attabi stuffs (whence our expression "tabby cat"), woven in variegated colors of a mixture of silk and cotton. Here paper was manufactured of rags at a time when the West had lost the papyrus of antiquity arid was forced to write all its manuscripts upon parchment made of sheepskin. Paper was originally dis- covered by the Chinese and was introduced among the Arabs in the eighth century, when factories were established at Samarkand and Bagdad. In Bagdad, too, was a mill with a hundred millstones, said to have been built for an early caliph by a Byzantine ambassador possessed of engineering skill. There were lanes lined with great warehouses and streets crowded with shops and bazaars, — twenty-four shops of the weavers of palm baskets, forty-three shops of perfume distillers, sixteen shops of drawers of gold wire, and over a hundred booksellers' establishments. Bridges of boats seven or eight hundred feet in length connected the quarters on opposite sides of the Tigris. An orphan school, — for Moslem rulers often endowed education and provided for the poor, — a hospital, an assembly hall of the poets, jails, cemeteries, mosques, and in East Bagdad alone some thirty colleges, were further features of the Paris of the Orient. This Oriental city life was to be seen on a somewhat smaller scale in Spain, although not much smaller, if we accept the statements of Arabian writers that Cordova and Cordova, the political and religious capital of other Span- Mohammedan Spain, had a population of half a million, over one hundred thousand residences, three thou- sand mosques, and three hundred public baths. It extended i86 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE for three miles from east to west and for one mile from the Bridge Gate to Jews' Gate. It was famed for its scholars and merchants, and for the piety, intelligence, social ele- gance, and discriminating taste in matters of dress, food, and drink, of its inhabitants in general. Its crowning feature was the great mosque with its sixty attendants, its thousand columns, its one hundred and thirty candelabras, its beautiful ceilings, arcades, enamels, its mosaics pre- sented by the Byzantine emperor, its pulpit of ebony, box, and scented woods, on whose carvings and paintings six master workmen and their assistants had labored seven years, and its tower near by, whose minaret was reached by two winding staircases which never met until the very top. Other towns of Moslem Spain were smaller than Cordova, yet noted for their commerce or manufactures. Almeria on the southern Mediterranean coast had eight hundred silk looms, nine hundred and seventy caravansaries licensed to sell wine, and manufactures of copper and iron utensils. Its inhabitants were reputed to have more ready cash and greater stores of capital than those of any other Spanish city. Chincilla produced woolen carpets that could not be imi- tated elsewhere. Tortosa was a center of shipbuilding ow- ing to the impermeability of its pines to insects. Seville, located on the Guadalquivir below Cordova, exported its cotton — a plant introduced into Europe by the Mohamme- dans — and olive oils to East and West by land and sea. Other places were noted for their figs and raisins, their drugs and colored earths, their iron industries and their draperies. Mohammedan Spain, in short, seems to have been very prosperous, and we hear of the emir or caliph leaving millions of gold pieces in his treasury at a time when money was very scarce in Western Christendom. The Moslem conquerors usually left the Spaniards their own laws and gave them native counts to collect the taxes Moham- ^"^ judge disputes. Unbelievers paid a grad- medan rule uated income tax according to their wealth, and in pain ^j^ landed proprietors, whether converts or not, were subjected to an impost upon their crops averaging one THE RISE OF MOHAMMEDANISM 187 fifth. In the process of conquest a considerable amount of land had been confiscated from those who persisted in re- sistance. This was now more widely distributed than before among a large number of Moslem proprietors. Slaves and serfs went with the land as before, but emancipation was to be won more easily than hitherto, especially by those who ran away from Christian to Moslem masters. These changes were not especially objectionable to the majority of the population, and during the eighth century Christian insur- rections were almost unknown. As time went on, however, and more and more Christians became converts to Islam, the government treated the remainder with less considera- tion. The Mohammedan rulers had always controlled the summoning of Christian church councils by the clergy in their dominions, and they also sometimes sold the offtce of bishop or bestowed it upon persons objectionable to the Church. As the Moslems increased in numbers there was a tendency to convert the cathedrals into mosques. In the ninth century the Christians were subjected to new and ruinous taxation, and occasionally to such decrees as that all inhabitants regardless of their religion must be circum- cised. Indeed, the government, as is apt to be the case in Mohammedan countries, tended to become increasingly despotic. Moreover, those Christians who had turned Moslems were not satisfied with the small share allowed them in the government, and the Berbers and Syrians in Revolts and Spain were also jealous of the Arab aristocracy. the"ninth° The result was a series of revolts. Indeed, the century Berbers, who had been assigned by the Arabs the less de- sirable northern regions of Spain, had rebelled soon after the conquest. This revolt had been crushed and, together with a famine of five years' duration, had so weakened the Ber- bers that the Christians in the extreme north had been able to push them back and recover considerable territory. Between them and the retreating Berbers there lay long un- occupied a wide strip of land which had been denuded by war and famine. Toledo, the old Visigothic capital, is lo- i88 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE cated almost exactly in the center of Spain, so that an Arabian geographer described it as nine days' journey alike from Lisbon on the west coast, Cordova in the south, the Christian pilgrim shrine of St. James at Compostella in the north, and from Almeria and Valencia on the Mediterra- nean coast. Through the ninth century it was usually at war with the Sultan at Cordova and in alliance with the Chris- tians of the north. Around Toledo in central Spain various Berber tribes were often at war with one another. In the south, in Andalusia, the real home of Arabic civilization in Spain, extending from Lisbon on the Atlantic almost to Barcelona on the Mediterranean coast, all was in revolt against the government of Cordova during the latter half of the ninth century. Bandits abounded and many nobles had turned brigands, so that a trip across Spain was a perilous undertaking. By the beginning of the tenth century the Fatimites were menacing Spain from North Africa. Abd-er-Rahman III (912-961) restored the power of Cordova, put down the rebellious nobles, held Ceuta oppo- The great site Gibraltar against the Fatimites, drove back the^ent°h the Christians of the north, took Toledo, and century amasscd a treasure of twenty million pieces of gold. His police maintained perfect order throughout the land ; prices were low and almost every one could dress well and afford a mule; Abd-er-Rahman assumed the title of caliph and built a new city just outside Cordova with a splendid palace for his harem of six thousand beauties. His successor, Hakam II, was the most learned of the Spanish Moslem rulers. He patronized scholars regardless of their nationality, religion, or irreligion, and founded many free schools for poor children in Cordova. The catalogue of his library is said to have filled two thousand pages. The next caliph was a mere figurehead and the government was managed by his minister, Almansor, until his death in 1002. Almansor is credited with over fifty campaigns against the Christians of northern Spain, where he made the Kingdom of Leon tributary and utterly demolished its capital. He THE RISE OF MOHAMMEDANISM 189 also sacked Compostella and Barcelona. Forty poets ac- companied him upon one of these northern expeditions; he constructed many roads and bridges, and enlarged the great mosque of Cordova; but he allowed the orthodox theolo- gians to purge Hakam's library of objectionable works of philosophy and astronomy. The old Arab nobility had lost all its influence during the recent despotic reigns, and, when no able successor to Al- mansor appeared, the power fell into the hands of ^ , , , Berber -generals and of the "Slavs." This name Caliphate was at first applied to the captives from Slavonic anarchy^or Europe whom the East Franks and Byzantines the eleventh sold as slaves to the Saracens. Then it was used to designate also Italians and others who were captured by Saracen pirates or purchased as children by Jewish slave- traders. Finally it came to denote all foreigners in the serv- ice of the caliph, whether as retainers in his bodyguard, eunuchs in his harem, or officials at his court. Abd-er- Rahman III had entrusted many important posts both civil and military to such foreigners in place of the troublesome old aristocracy. Now, after Almansor's death a period of civil war set in. After bloody conflicts between divers candi- dates for the throne, in which the Berbers and "Slavs" participated, and in which both sides called in aid from Castile and Catalonia and gave away fortresses and territory to secure Christian aid, and in which Cordova and other cities were sacked and half destroyed, the Caliphate of Cor- dova came formally to a close in 1036. Cordova and Seville now became republics; Berber chieftains divided up the south, where Malaga and Granada were two of the chief states; and the "Slavs" ruled the east, where the leading princes were those of Almeria and of the Balearic Isles. Toledo again became a separate state; Arab families ruled at Valencia and Saragossa ; and there were yet other princi- palities. When we consider how many followers of Mohammed there are to-day in Asia, Africa, and even in Europe, and in the distant islands of the South Seas, we observe one great result I90 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE of the events narrated in this chapter. It is also evident that R Its of ^^^ Byzantine Empire had been reduced by the the spread loss of almost all its posscssions in Asia and o s am Africa to a comparatively small and weak state, and that Justinian's ideal of a reconstruction of the old Roman Empire would never be realized. Of the Mediterra- nean Basin, which had been entirely included in the Roman Empire, the whole southern half had been lost. And as the Romans had never gained the eastern half of Alexander's empire, so now the eastern end of the Roman Empire was lost too. North Africa, whose history had for so long been a part of European history, now goes its own way; and Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor do not concern us again until the time of the crusades. The spread of Islam was a great blow to Christian- ity. But we have seen that certain heretical sects bene- fited by it. And it was not an unmixed evil for the Pa- pacy, since the Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, which were the ones to suffer most, had never really been under papal control, but were likely to be ruled from Constantinople. There was now no danger that the emperor or the patriarch at that city would overshadow the pope. Eastern Christianity had suffered most, leaving the pope undisputed head of the Church in the West. The Papacy and Islam, therefore, grew in strength simul- taneously and independently, and were not until later to lock horns in the crusades. As for intellectual and eco- nomic results, the spread of Arabian Mohammedanism can scarcely be regarded as an evil, since the Arabs quickly attained a high level in these respects, and in Spain, for in- stance, had a civilization superior to that of their Christian neighbors, to whom it was destined in due time to prove an inspiration. So if the Arabs had defeated Charles Martel Eind the Franks, whose kingdoms were eventually to go to smash anyway, and if they had overrun western Europe as they did the Spanish peninsula, European civilization might have revived the more quickly. But in that case the Papacy would probably never have made its momentous alliance THE RISE OF MOHAMMEDANISM 191 with Charles Martel's son, to which we shall turn in the next chapter, and the whole course of European history- would be different. EXERCISES AND READINGS Seignobos, Medieval and Modern Civilization, chap, iv, on " Mohamme- danism." A very brief but good description of the religion and its early spread. D. C. Munro, History of the Middle Ages, chap, ix, " The Moslem World (750-1095)." Also brief, but packed with information. Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 11, chap, x, " Mahomet and Islam," by A. A. Bevan. Thatcher and Schevill, Europe in the Middle Age, pp. 336-59. Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. n, pp. 133-40, 144-48, 151-53- 158-59. 181-84 — passages dealing with Islam and Moslems of the present. Margoliouth, Mohammed (Heroes of Nations series), any chapter. This is both the handiest and most scholarly Life of Mohammed in English. The Koran may be examined either in the complete English translation by E. H. Palmer, or in the selections made by S. Lane-Poole, Speeches and Table Talk of the Prophet Mohammed. A few excerpts are given in Ogg, Source Book for Medieval History, pp. 97-104. CHAPTER XI THE PRANKISH STATE AND CHARLEMAGNE We now turn our attention once more to the Prankish kingdoms, which under the lead of Charles Martel had Franks the brought the Westward drive of the Arabs to a chief power halt, and which were to be the center of interest Christian in the Wcst for the next century or so. Indeed, West except for the Anglo-Saxons and their adver- saries in the British Isles and the Lombards and their rivals in the Italian peninsula, the Franks included within. their borders practically all that was left of Western Christendom. Christian territory in the West had shrunk to a scanty area limited on the northeast by heathen hordes and on the south by the waves of Mohammedan conquest. Moreover, this scanty area was in a rude, inland, and agricultural con- dition, with no flourishing industries, and with foreign trade either cut off or monopolized by the Scandinavians, who controlled the seas to the north, and by the Saracens and Byzantines, who held the Mediterranean and the routes to the East. It will be remembered that sometimes the Franks were all united under one ruler, but that usually they had two The worth- or three kings in Austrasia, Neustria, and Bur- Me'rov?n- gundy. After the death of Dagobert, who from gian kings 629 to 639 had ruled the entire Frankish terri- tory, the kings were "good-for-nothings," mere boys who wrecked their lives by early debaucheries in the royal resi- dences, which they seldom quitted, and who died before they were half through their twenties, leaving their weak children to replicate their empty reigns. We need not be surprised that these gilded youths remained for the most part shut up in their palaces, since he who was not strenuous enough to ride a horse, and who insisted on lolling at his THE PRANKISH STATE AND CHARLEMAGNE 193 ease as he traveled, could find no faster conveyance in those days than a chariot drawn by oxen. This state of affairs suited well enough most of the great landholders and the local ofiftcials, of whom the dukes, counts, and bishops were the chief. Their main Local offi- desire was to be let alone: in the case of the land- great ^land- holders, not to be called upon to pay any taxes; holders in the case of the officials, not to be called upon to turn over to the royal treasury the taxes which they had collected. It should be added, however, that the local officials usually amassed large estates for themselves, and that the great landholders made every effort to be appointed local officials, so that the two classes tended to merge into one. In any case they were both ready enough to dispense with a king. But there had to be some one to repel invaders like the Arabs, to protect and control the Church, to keep some order among the great landed proprietors, to see -^j^^ mayor that the local officials did not abuse their offices, of the and in general to do those things that the kings ^^ ^^^ ought to do, but were now neglecting. The chief official at the Prankish palace, to whom the agents in charge of the royal domains and the other local officials reported, was the major domus, or mayor of the palace. In the end this stew- 'ard of the king's estates took the supreme charge of all state business at the palace into his own hands, and he also led the army to war. All this he was enabled to do, not only because of his handy situation at the palace, but because most of the nobility were his supporters and he could count upon their armed aid to crush his rivals. Under Dagobert's predecessor, who was originally King of Neustria only, both Burgundy and Austrasia were really governed by mayors of the palace. In Austrasia Origin of the the mayor's name was Pepin of Landen, or Carolmgians Pepin I, and the other leading man of that kingdom was Arnulf, Bishop of Metz. Arnulf's son — for Roman Catho- lic bishops married in that age — married one of Pepin's daughters and became mayor for a time. Pepin's son, Grim^oald, tried to supplant a "good-for-nothing" king 194 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE entirely by his own son, but the other nobles refused and he was put to death. But a generation later Pepin of Heristal, or Pepin II, the grandson of Pepin I and Arnulf, became mayor of the palace in Austrasia, and by the victory of Testry in 687 gained control of Neustria also, and ruled over all the Franks until his death in 714. It had been Pepin's intention that his grandsons should succeed him as mayors, but they were not yet of age, and Charles his illegitimate son Charles, known later as "the Mattel Hammer," or "Charles Martel," from his mili- tary successes, eventually gained control of all three Frank- ish kingdoms. In order to secure soldiers against the Arabs he seized large amounts of church lands and granted the use of them for life to his followers. Such measures brought him into disrepute with the monkish chroniclers of the time, but show his power over the Church, and gained him a strong party of supporters among the nobility. Both Pepin II and Charles Martel encouraged missionaries to, and kept fight- ing against, the Germans east of the Rhine, endeavoring to bring the Thuringians, Alamanni, and Bavarians back under Frankish control, making partial conquests at the expense of the Frisians and raids into the territory of the Saxons. Charles Martel, who always had acted as if he were king, but who still lacked the title, died in 741, leaving two sous, Pepin III Carloman and Pepin III. Carloman soon went Cardfndan ^^ ^^ Italy to become a monk, leaving his chil- dynasty dren to the care of his brother, who took care that they should become monks too. J^epin III now decided to renew the attempt at the throne which his ancestor, Grimoald, had made prematurely. He first obtained the approval of the pope and then that of a general assembly of the Franks. Then in place of the old German custom of raising him upon a shield, he was anointed king by St. Boni- face, apostle to the Germans and promoter of papal influ- ence. This new ceremony gave to the royal office a sacred character and, as it were, divine approval, and' so an added power which the Merovingians had lacked. A little later the pope pronounced a curse against any one who should try to THE PRANKISH STATE AND CHARLEMAGNE 195 disturb the hereditary succession in Pepin's family. But Pepin's resort to the Papacy to sanction his taking the crown, and his coronation by a clergyman, furnished a dangerous precedent. Later popes might claim the right to depose as well as to appoint secular monarchs, and might pose as supreme international arbiters. The pope had reason to cultivate Pepin's friendship, since he found himself in an embarrassing position both as regards the Byzantine emperor and the King of the iconoclasm Lombards. Leo IIL emperor from 717 to 740, b lantine proved a very efficient ruler in the East and re- Empire formed almost every department of the government. But in Italy he caused a revolt and the expulsion of his exarch by new taxes and by his iconoclasm, or prohibition of the use of images and pictures in churches. The former were to be removed or destroyed, the latter to be whitewashed over. A first step in this direction had been taken when the Trullan or Quinisext Council of 688-694 forbade the pic- tonaPrepresehtation of Christ by a lamb. The emperor held that the veneration of images and pictures bordered upon idolatry, and that by abolishing such superstitious reverence he would avoid the sneers and reproaches of Jews arid Moslems, and would conciliate the Nestorians, whose churches had little ornamentation, and the Monophysites, who objected to human likenesses of Christ. The icono- clastic party also felt strongly against the worship of the relics of the saints, and was hostile to the monks. Pope Gregoryll had headed the Italian opposition to the increased^ taxation, and when the decrees against images were published in 726, he called a council which p^ j replied by anathematizing all iconoclasts. The opposition to iconoclasm Byzantme emperors seldom showed much pa- tience with prelates who tried to thwart their will. A little later in this same century the Patriarch of Constantinople was deposed an O'! . CAFjE VERDE ISLANDS-B^V 30° Longitude West 1"'° fro Z J N O RT H ^ \ .^_ /i^GollafTd V'x Fill \< ' I ImIiTIHS : 1 rf^,,H£.''r ^i^^^CjL.'^ l>d— '' \ ''<>'L M>J-;!) 15V- -^^7 THE NORTHMEN AND OTHER INVADERS 225 Byzantine emperor. To the markets of the South and East they brought furs and crowds of Slavs, or slaves, — for such seems to be the origin of the word, — and took away with them articles of luxury, silks, gold and silver. Such objects of personal adornment and luxury may still be seen in pro- fusion in the national museums at the three Scandinavian capitals, but many of them represent the workmanship of native artists and not trade or plunder from other lands. Fiends of destruction as the first vikings had seemed, and fatal as their incursions had been to government, religion, economic prosperity, and monastic culture in influence the lands they invaded, when once they began oftheNorth- , men upon to occupy the land permanently, they displayed European a remarkable capacity for adapting themselves civilization to the customs of the countries where they settled. In England they formed one nation with the Anglo-Saxons ; in Normandy they adopted the language and manners of the Romance peoples and became French of the French; in Scotland and in Ireland they were absorbed in each case by the native population; in Russia they were Slavized. Those who stayed at home in Scandinavia did not develop any high culture of their own, although by the eleventh century they had become Christians like their fellows in other lands. Indeed, their vigor both physical and intellectual seems to have declined with their conversion. This was, however, perhaps due to other causes, such as the emigration of the most ambitious and energetic to foreign lands. Those who colonized in other countries not merely took on whatever culture they found there; they also contributed something, as has already been shown in the case of the Danes in Eng- land. In general we may say that the Northmen contributed to the countries they invaded and settled the following things. First, their vigorous blood and seafaring instincts and spirit of enterprise. This we may see still at work in later movements such as the Norman conquest of England, the Norman conquests of Sicily and southern Italy, and the crusades. Second, a commerce and connection with other lands which tended to break the isolation and broaden the 226 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE civilization of the regions with which they came in contact. Third, a capacity for ruHng, organization, and government which shows itself in their founding of the principality of Russia, of the Duchy of Normandy, of the republic of Ice- land, and later in the Danish and Anglo-Norman monarch- ies in England, and in the Norman kingdom of Sicily and southern Italy. While the Northmen were sailing up the rivers which empty into the North Sea, the English Channel, and the Bay The Sara- of Biscay, Mohammedan pirates raided from the ancf south^-^ ^ Mediterranean, and the shores of southern Italy ern Italy ^re Still lined with the ruins of towers built to guard against them. In 827, when they were called in by Christian rebels, a native Berber dynasty in North Africa began to wrench Sicily away from the Byzantine Empire. Palermo, on the northern coast, was taken in 831 and be- came the Moslem capital; most of the island was subjugated by the middle of the same century; then came a lull before Syracuse, on the eastern coast, was destroyed in 878, and the conquest was not complete until 902. Long before that, however, the Saracens had entered Italy. The Duke of Naples called upon them in 837 to relieve that town from a siege by the Lombard Duke of Benevento. A few years later the Neapolitans returned the favor by helping the Saracens to conquer Messina in the extreme northeastern corner of Sicily. Meanwhile the Moslems were making con- quests in Italy, especially since Benevento had split into two halves which kept fighting each other. Moslems from Crete took one side in this strife and Moslems from Sicily took the other side. They also pushed far up the Adriatic Sea and defeated the Venetians. They made Bari in Apulia their headquarters, and from that point overran southern Italy pretty much as they pleased. In 846 their fleet entered the seaport of Rome and plundered the suburbs and broke open the graves of St. Peter and St. Paul in their churches outside the walls. Three years later a similar expedition was defeated by a fleet from Italian towns of the west coast, as- sisted by a storm ; and a wall was built around the quarter THE NORTHMEN AND OTHER INVADERS 227 beyond the Tiber to protect the basilica of St. Peter and the Vatican Palace, From 847 to his death in 875 the Emperor Louis II, son of Lothair, led frequent expeditions against the Saracens without succeeding in driving them out of Italy entirely, chiefly for the reason that the petty lords who now divided the old Duchy of Benevento between them did not co- operate loyally with him. In 871, acting in unison with a Byzantine fleet, he captured Bari from the Moslems; and the Byzantine Emperor Basil, who continued the struggle after Louis's death, at last expelled them from the east coast and southern end of the peninsula. But they still held posts farther up the west coast from which they often plundered central Italy, until Pope John X finally got rid of them in 915. In Sicily their rule endured into the eleventh century and Palermo became a center of prosperity, refinement, and learning comparable to Bagdad, Cairo, and Cordova. But the state was weakened by the jealousies between the Arabs and Berbers. Toward the close of the ninth century the nomadic Magyars entered the plain of Hungary, whence the Avars had disappeared soon after Charlemagne. The incursions by Magyars to-day form the ruling class in Hungary, ^he^agyars Again and again during the first half of the tenth Hungary century they swept over Bavaria, Saxony, Thuringia, and Franconia ; they frequently ravaged Lombardy beyond the Alps; and their devastations in Gaul sometimes carried them as far as Spain or Flanders. It was the business of the kings of the East Franks to stop these invaders, but for many years they failed to do so. Arnulf (887-899) made an alliance with them. Louis the Child (899-911) was defeated by them and forced to pay them tribute. They invaded four times during the brief reign of Conrad I, who had many other wars on his hands. Henry I (919- 936), whose authority was restricted to Saxony and Thu- ringia, gained immunity for those districts for a number of years by paying tribute, and the Magyars turned their at- tention to Bavaria, whose duke was practically independent 228 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE of Henry. By 933 Henry felt strong enough to refuse to pay tribute any longer and defeated the Hungarians; but in the early years of the reign of his successor, Otto I, they continued to invade Germany and even Gaul, until at last he defeated them decisively in 955 in the battle of the Lech- feld. After that they settled down in Hungary; their con- version to Christianity is especially associated with the name of their first king, St. Stephen (997-1038). The poor Slavs during this period were still more invaded than invading, harassed as they were from the east by Condition of the mounted nomads and from the north by the Slavs the Swedish slave-traders. The mortality in the in the ninth , i s , . , and tenth slave trade at that time was even greater than centuries -j^ ^-^^ later African slave trade with America. About nine Slavs died on the way for every one who was sold as a slave. Yet they continued to increase in popula- tion. They had already freed themselves to a considerable extent from the domination of the Asiatic invaders. In the Balkan States the nomadic element became absorbed in the Slavic population. In Carinthia, Bohemia, and Poland the enslaved peasants had revolted against the rule of the Avars and founded native dynasties, although by Charlemagne's time Carinthia had a German duke. The Wends between the Elbe and Oder, and the Czechs in Bohemia were now able to defend themselves, and also made inroads into German territory. Conrad I had wars with them, Henry I created marks to strengthen his northeastern frontier against them and founded Meissen and Brandenburg, Otto I was able to take the aggressive against them. The Magyar invasion and settlement of Hungary had the important re- sult of driving in a wedge which henceforth permanently separated the Slavs to the south of the Danube from those on the northeastern frontier of Germany. In the. Balkans the expansion of the Bulgarians is the R ■ n of most noteworthy event of this period. In the Symeon of ninth century they extended their borders to the " ^^"^ west and southwest. Boris, their first Christian king, had been obliged to leave his monastic retirement THE NORTHMEN AND OTHER INVADERS 229 for a time in order to blind his ruling son, who had turned back again toward heathenism. Boris replaced him by a younger brother, Symeon, who had been educated at Con- stantinople and who lived like a hermit, touching neither meat nor wine. Symeon, however, was ambitious and tried to conquer Roumania and to become emperor of Constan- tinople. The Byzantine Empire stirred up against him the Magyars, then located in Bessarabia; but he too found allies in the Turks of the Pontus Steppe. The Magyars were de- feated and driven into Hungary, whence they began the series of westward invasions already recounted. Constan- tinople had to pay the Bulgarians tribute. In 904, Arab corsairs further weakened the Byzantine Empire by seizing Saloniki at the head of the /Egean Sea. In a second Bul- garian w^ar (913-927) Thrace and Serbia, whose prince was a vassal of the Byzantine emperor, were almost depopu- lated, but Croatia held out against the Bulgarian advance. Before his death in 927, Symeon made an alliance with the Fatimites in North Africa. His pious son, Peter, however, made peace with Constantinople ; and during his reign the Magyars ravaged eastward as well as westward, and forced both Bulgaria and the Byzantine Empire to pay them trib- ute. The Serbians, who had been driven from their country in the recent Bulgarian war, took advantage of this setback for Bulgaria to return to their homes. But of either Serbia or Croatia we know nothing more during the remainder of the tenth century. The Emperor Constantine VII (9ii-959)> called Porphy- rogennetos from his birth in the purple room of the palace at Constantinople, has left us, among his nu- Other merous writings on agriculture, economics, laws, eastern ° morals, tactics, and court etiquette, a treatise Europe On the Administration of the Empire, in which he refers to the various barbarian peoples on the northern and eastern frontiers of the Byzantine Empire. What is now Roumania and southwestern Russia — in other words, the region from the mouth of the Danube to the Sea of Azov — was then held by the Petchenegs or Patzinaks, a fierce and 230 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE barbarous people of Asiatic and nomadic origin. Northwest of them were the Russians, with the two chief towns of Kiev in the south and Novgorod in the north. Northeast and east of the Petchenegs, in what is now eastern Russia, were the Khazars, the only barbarians in Europe who were converted to the Jewish faith. West of the Petchenegs lay a territory disputed between them and the Magyars of Hungary. THE NORTHMEN AND OTHER INVADERS 231 EXERCISES AND READINGS Sources on the Disruption of Charlemagne's Empire. Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. I, pp. 157-68, selections 69, 70, 71. _ 1. List the time and place of writing of each extract. 2. Which gives the more general view of events? 3. What invaders are mentioned in these selections? 4. W'hat parts of Europe are mentioned as invaded? 5. What events other than invasions are mentioned in no. 70? 6. Compare the conduct of the bishop and the count of Paris with that of the emperor in no. 71. Viking Civilization and Expansion. Gjerset, History of Norwegian People (1915), vol. I, pp. 69-92, and illus- trations throughout the volume. Haskins, The Normans in European History (1915), chap. li, "The Coming of the Northmen." Beazley, The Daivn of Modern Geography, vol. ii, chap, il, " The Norse- men in the History of Exploration." This long chapter is not easy reading consecutively, but contains many interesting details drawn from the sagas in its text and foot- notes. It may be subdivided into the following readings: — Russia, Iceland, Greenland, pp. 17-48. Voyages to Vinland, pp. 48-74. Discussion of the reliability of the sagas concerning Vinland, its location, etc., pp. 74-83. Saint Olaf, pp. 84-101. Career of Harald Hardrada, pp. 103-111. Mauver, The Vikings (191 3). A handy treatment of 148 pages, divided in twelve brief chapters on such topics as: — Causes of the V^iking Movement. The Viking Movement to the Middle of the Ninth Century. The Vikings in the Prankish Empire. The Vikings in Ireland. The Vikings in Baltic Lands and Russia. Viking Civilization. Older works of similar scope to those of Haskins and Mauver are A. H. Johnson's The Normans in Europe, and Keary's The Vikings in Western Christendom. Early Russia. Mavor, An Economic History of Russia, vol. i, pp. 6-21. Pirst period of Russian history, eighth to thirteenth century. Early Hungary. Louis Leger, A History of Austria-Hungary, chap, v, " Formation of the Magyar State (892-1038)." CHAPTER XIII THE FEUDAL LAND SYSTEM AND FEUDAL SOCIETY With the disruption of Charlemagne's empire and the period of renewed invasions from all sides, we are no longer Meaning of able to follow the fortunes of one ruler or of feudalism several fair-sized kingdoms ;• but find ourselves in the complicated tangle of feudalism, with its o\-erlapping areas, its conflicting claims and titles to land and power, its minute subdivisions of sovereignty, its thousands of lords. Feudalism in the strict sense of the word denotes the rela- tionships which existed in the Middle Ages, especially from the ninth and tenth to the twelfth and thirteenth cen- turies, between the members of the fighting and landowning class. In a broader sense it also covers the life of the subju- gated peasantry upon the land dominated by the warriors, and all the other economic, social, political, and intellectual results and accompaniments of feudalism in the narrower sense. As the Prankish state disintegrated and central govern- ment and common action ceased to exist, the pieces out of Political and which Charlemagne and his predecessors had social chaos put together their empire fell apart again accord- and tenth ing to old geographical, tribal, and racial lines, centuries ^^ following more recent divisions. Local officials and great landholders again became a law unto themselves, and the former tried to hand on their political power to their sons as the latter did their lands. The Carolingian government had often tacitly admitted its inability to rule all the territory nominally subject to it by granting an im- munity to this or that monastery or great man. By such a grant the king renounced his right to collect taxes, admin- ister justicfe, and send his officials into the lands of the individual or monastery in question. Now the repeated in- cursions of Northmen, Saracens, and Magyars broke off THE FEUDAL LAND SYSTEM 233 communications and left each locality in isolation to look after itself. Men would not obey even the local officials un- less they had to, since those officials often were no longer legally appointed by a king or emperor and often gave no better protection than king or emperor gave against the incessant invasions of heathen and Moslems. Therefore other bonds than those of political union must be found to hold society together and insure each individual some sort of order and protection. Such bonds The bond r J • 1 1 J.' u J. of personal were lound m personal relations between men subjection: and in dependent land tenure. Already in the slavery Roman Empire and early Middle Ages men had been in personal subjection to others. Both the Romans and the early Germans had slaves, and although the number of slaves had been on the decline in the Roman Empire, the period of barbarian invasions brought in a new supply. Gregory the Great not only saw the Angle boys in the Roman slave market and planned to purchase heathen lads to educate as missionaries to their own peoples, but in one of his letters he makes a present of a personal servant (famulus) named John to another bishop. The Northmen, as we have seen, flooded Europe and Asia with slaves from Russia. In western and central Europe, however, there was at this time little but agricultural work for slaves to do, so that most of them were sooner or later set out upon the land and absorbed into the larger class of serfs. ""he serfs were peasants who were sold or transferred with the land which they cultivated, as if they had been so many ploughs or cows. When a king rewarded a valiant Medieval soldier or his wife's nephew or a new monastery serfdom with a slice of fertile soil off his own private estates, or when any one else gave or sold a piece of land, a villa, or so many mansi or hides, to another, it was understood that the peas- antry on the estate would now have to work for the new owner. We have already seen how a law of Constantine bound the coloni of the Roman Empire to the soil and thus reduc 'd them to serfdom; that the prevalent land unit in the Ri man Empire and early Middle Ages was the great 234 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE estate where one man owned all the land and e\^ery one else living on the estate worked for him; and that in the German kingdoms established upon Roman soil many of the once free German warriors soon sank to a position of economic dependence and social inferiority — in short, to serfdom. The serfs had to cultivate part of the estate for their master, to labor in and about his house, cut wood for his fire, cart his grain and wine and hay, repair the roads and bridges on his property. Their lord usually did not feed or clothe or house them, though he would probably provide breakfast and lunch for them when they worked all day in his fields or on his errands. But except perhaps in the case of a few domestic servants, he avoided the expense of supporting them by giving them bits of land, of which he had a plenty, where they could raise a scanty crop for their own suste- nance on such days as they were not engaged in toiling for him. In the course of time it came to be understood that these bits of land could not be arbitrarily taken away from them, and that their children could inherit the same by paying a fee or tax to the lord in recognition of his claim to ownership thereof. The serfs did not live together in slave barracks, but were allowed to build sej)arate huts of their own. The rude walls -pj^g were made of crossed or interwoven laths with peasant's the intcrsticcs stufTed with straw or grass, and ^^ '"^ with a thatched roof. There was only one floor to the hut, and it was the ground floor, and usually there was but one room inside with a fire in the center. Yet there was no chimney; and if there were any windows, there was no glass in them, and in rain or winter they would have to be filled up with straw to keep the damp and cold out. If the serf's entire family had a single bed, they were lucky; it was more likely their lot to sleep with a little hay between them and the soil. Their other furniture was equally scanty. The lord was far from allowing the serf to keep for him- Seigneurial Self all that he raised on his own land. Even of exploitation |^jg ^^^ wheat and oats and barley, and e ^en of his sheep, pigs, hens, and eggs, he had to hand over a part THE FEUDAL LAND SYSTEM 235 to his lord. The master could not sell his serf's wife or daughter and so break up the family, but he could require that the daughter should marry some fellow serf so that the children of the marriage might also be serfs of the same estate. The lord also compelled his peasants to observe a number of other petty and annoying usages and restrictions. They must grind their flour at his mill and pay the miller a fee; they must use the lord's wine-press; they must drive their sheep at night into his fold so that he would get the manure. In general they had to have everything done, and buy everything that they got, on the estate. However, to be able to grind their flour and shoe their horses on the spot was a certain advantage when robbers and plunderers were about and when there were no towns near. The peasants also had to settle their questions of property or of personal injury at a little court which the lord maintained. King and count and bishop had other fish to cook and paid little at- tention to such small fry as they. Needless to say, the fines and costs levied at this little court went into the lord's pocket, while most of the judicial work there was done by the peasants themselves. A lord of course might not treat his serfs too badly or they would starve or perhaps succeed in escaping to some other lord who would treat them better. On the other hand, the lord had a natural inclination to squeeze out of his serfs all that he could get. This service rendered by serfs to their masters and the profits acquired by the lords from the peasants may be summed up by the phrase "seigneurial exploitation," "seigneur" or "senior" being the name for the lord or "old man." "Villa" was still the name in most of medieval France for a large estate, as it had been in Roman times. In England the Norman word "manor" came to be used for ^, the same thmg. It varied greatly m size and not manor: dis- every villa or manor was large enough to support [ancTand ° a lord. Some lords had several manors, some had method of hundreds. The mansus or hufe was the usual unit of land measurement on the Continent, to which roughly corresponded the hide or smaller virgate in England; but 236 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE these expressions seem not to have indicated any exact area, but to have varied in different places and according to the fertility of the soil. In some parts of Europe the population was too sparse or the country too difficult for large estates cultivated by serfs, and we find single houses and farms. But the villa was the rule. Normally the lands divided among the serfs aggregated more than the mansus ijidominicatus, or demesne lands reserved by the lord; and as time went on the lord distributed more and more of his land to tenants, probably because the population increased and because he found the method of having the peasants pay him a portion of their crops more satisfactory both to him and to them than having them work on his land, which required overseers or they would work none too well. On many villas and manors the serf's holding was not a single, compact plot of land and enclosed farm, but consisted of several scattered fields and meadows and vineyard. Nor did every peasant possess a plough of his own, since the number of ploughs on a manor was often considerably less than the number of tenants and serfs. It seems evident, therefore, that the peasants ploughed their fields together, since there were no fences in the way. In those days they did not raise nearly so many different things from the soil as we do to-day. Clover, beets, potatoes, and many other agricultural products were unknown. Scientific farming, irrigation, and fertilizing were little known or practiced. Therefore the lack of variety in the crops soon impover- ished the soil, and a very general custom was to let a field lie fallow every other or every third year, in order that it might recover its fertility. Consequently each peasant needed to have several strips of arable land scattered through the large fields which the peasants ploughed to- gether, in order that while some of his land remained un- tilled he might get his subsistence from the rest. The land reserved for the lord was sometimes scattered in strips among the holdings of the peasants, and sometimes con- sisted of separate fields. Then there were common lands where serfs and lord alike might pasture their cattle or send THE FEUDAL LAND SYSTEM 2^,-] forth their pigs to feed on acorns under the charge of the swineherd of the villa, to whom every one had to give a loaf of bread for his support. Enough has perhaps been said to make it clear that the great estate with its group of servile peasants constituted a little world by itself, rather sharply severed from isolation of the rest of society. A large villa usually had a the villa few artisans in the employ of the lord, so that the peasants could satisfy almost all of their simple needs without going off the estate. On a smaller manor they might have to make their own clothing and mend their tools themselves, or wait for a chance peddler or a neighboring fair. Little spare time, indeed, had they for wandering, nor did the lord encourage it. They would be too apt to run away for good. The villa was not only an economic and judicial unit ; it w^as usually identical with the local reli- gious unit, the parish, and had its own little church, whose priest was nominated by the lord, and whose edifice, humble enough, but larger and finer than any of the huts of the peasants, served as the center of social life for the wretched community. Not all who tilled the soil were in absolute serfdom. Some are called "villeins," or "men of the vill," instead of servi, or serfs. There are many other appellations social and applied to them which show that there were dif- economic , . . 1 • r gradations erent classes and varymg gradations oi per- among the sonal subjection or freedom, and much disparity P^^s^"ts in the size of their holdings and in the amount of service and payment which they owed their lords. Some could marry their daughters to whom they pleased ; some could leave the manor if they wished; some did very little work for the lord, but made payments instead ; some did not do much more for the lord than attend his manorial court. But most of our records of medieval estates are from later centuries when the peasants had won greater freedom from their lords and had made definite bargains with them as to what services and payments they must render. Otherwise there perhaps would have been no record set down in writing. Earlier, in 238 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE the ninth and tenth centuries, for instance, there must have been more universal serfdom and more arbitrary exactions by the lords. It must also be kept in mind, however, that at all times there were some peasants who did not live on a villa nor under the control of a lord, but were independent freemen with farms of their own. We have depicted the position of the peasantry as it was before and during the feudal regime, but we have as yet said The peasant Clothing of the bonds between the owners of the was the basis estates, which constitute feudalism in the strict of feudalism ^ , i -v 7 • i 1 , sense 01 the word. Yet, without the peasants and their useful toil, feudalism, with its tournaments and trou- badours and chivalry, could not have existed for a moment. They fed feudal society. Feudalism was based largely upon land, and without serfs the land was of no use to its lords. It is perhaps also true that without feudalism the peasants could not have existed. They needed protection in a world where policemen were scarce and pirates were plentiful. This protection against invaders and criminals the lords were supposed to give, and although they often failed to do so, it was evidently to their interest to preserv^e the laborers and the harvests from which they themselves drew their incomes. Besides the serfs and peasants upon their estates, the lords had personally bound to them men who had "com- Commen- mended " themselves to their protection. Those dation ^y-j^Q could not make an independent living would commend themselves for the rest of their lives to some great man on the understanding that he should support them and that they should serve him in ways befitting a freeman. This might mean that he would employ them as fighting men, but it left problematical the fate of their chil- dren, who might sink to a servile status. This practice of commendation was mentioned by Salvian in the fifth cen- tury, had been in vogue among the Franks long before Charlemagne, and was also a custom among the Anglo- Saxons. It somewhat resembled the Roman institution of clientage, in which the poorer and weaker citizens had made THE FEUDAL LAND SYSTEM 239 themselves the dependents and followers of some wealthy and powerful noble. A less humiliating personal connection than that of client- age or commendation, because it was cemented between equals and not between a powerful rich man and The some poor fellow who was liable to be more or <^omttatus less at his mercy, was the German comitatus, described in an earlier chapter. In it men who were themselves nobles attached themselves as personal friends and followers in war- like exploits to some chief. Every king and duke and count tended to gather about him such a band of personal follow- ers, on whose loyalty he could rely and whom he employed in the chief offices and rewarded with gifts — usually of land. Now, when the State disappeared, these personal warrior bands did not. It was no longer possible to collect a national army, but all over the land powerful men had their personal followings and there was altogether a large warrior class for the servile peasantry to support. These powerful local magnates reared on their estates strongholds as a refuge and defense against the raids of the Northmen and other invaders, and with their ^^.j j^^ . personal followings beat off outside attacks and feudal held their estates for themselves free from any external control. These strongholds, at first wooden tow- ers or enclosures raised on a hill or other vantage-point or upon an artificial mound, later developed into the elabo- rate stone castle. From personal relationships we must now turn back to trace the other element in feudalism, dependent land tenure. We have already seen that the peasants held Dependent strips of land, which they usually did not own in ^^^'^ tenure the full sense of that word, but which belonged to a villa or manor, and over which the lord had so many lucrative rights that he still seemed the great landowner, and the peasants to be merely his tenants, nay, more, his dependents and serfs. Yet they were not dispossessed of their holdings and passed them on to their children. They were hereditary tenants on a perpetual lease. Such a servile holding on a 240 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE manor is dependent land tenure in its extreme form. But, although an extreme illustration, it shows that by dependent land tenure is meant the holding of land from some one else and under some one else, and not by a clear, full, and inde- pendent title. The Roman law had recognized a practice called pre- carium, by which persons lived on the lands of another with- Precarium ^^^ ^^^^ written lease or agreement, but as ten- and ants at will. They were not ordinary tenants paying a rent for a fixed number of years, but held by a precarious tenure; he might oust them or they might leave at any moment, but in reality the understand- ing usually was that they might and would stay on indefi- nitely. The early Middle Ages developed a cognate practice known as beneficium. A man who wished to endow an abbey for the good of his soul might resign the title to his lands to the monastery, but continue to live on them and to enjoy the usufruct of them during the remainder of his life. In other words, he endowed the monastery with land and in return received from it an annuity, also in land. Or the transaction might be carried out from the other side; some great landowner might grant the usufruct of a piece of his land for life to one of his friends or warriors, but keep the title to the land himself. Kings often rewarded their followers with grants of land. Sometimes these were outright gifts, leaving the giver Royal neither control over the land nor legal claim on grants ^^le recipient. Still there was always the moral bond of gratitude, and such followers, having been once well repaid for their loyalty, were likely to continue to ser^'^e the king in the lively hope of favors yet to come. When the Anglo-Saxon ruler "booked" land to one of his thegns, he gave him a written deed or charter which could be adduced in proof of ownership. It also showed, however, that the land had come from the king, and Anglo-Saxon law per- mitted the king to confiscate such lands if the owners turned traitors or neglected their military duties. The Lombard kings often gave no charter to their followers, but merely THE FEUDAL LAND SYSTEM 241 the precarious use of the land; and Charles M artel had in like fashion given his soldiers benefices from the church estates, which did not belong to him anyway, and which still belonged to the Church even after they were thus occupied for life by knights. The peasants on one manor had practically no concern with the serfs on a neighboring villa, whom they seldom even saw unless the two estates adjoined. But Transition the owners of the estates, the masters of the serfs, ^f?'^ the . 1 r 1 • 1 -1 1 seigneurial the hghtmg and gpvernmg class, came to have to the feudal intimate relations with one another, and this "^^S'"^^ system or chaos of relationships we call feudalism. Without their mutual relationships we have only the seigneurial regime, a society severed into small agricultural villages or hamlets, each presided over by a pett}^ tyrant. There isola- tion and local stagnation prevailed; feudalism contained at least an ideal of order and cohesion. It connected not only the lords, but the estates, the land, in a vast network, whose lasting influence may be inferred from the fact that the student of English law to-day must have at least some acquaintance with it. The central institution of feudalism is the fief. The fief is the beneficuim become hereditary with the personal bond added or accentuated. Grants of land, which at j^^ f^^^. j^^ first had been made for life only, were presently hereditary made for two or three lives, and finally became hereditary. The heir, however, has to pay a relief to the lord as a token of the latter's ultimate ownership of the land. And should there be no heir, the fief cannot be alienated — that is, willed, or given, or sold — to an outsider; it must escheat or revert to the lord who granted it in the first place.- Also by misconduct the holder of the fief may forfeit his right to it, whereupon the lord takes it away from him — if he can. In general feudal inheritance tended toward primo- geniture, that the fief should not be split up among several children or heirs, but that the oldest son should inherit it entire. In England this became the rule; in feudal France it was observed with exceptions, and these mainly in the case 242 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE of small fiefs of little political importance; in Germany the inclination was to divide the fief among all the sons. To receive a fief one must enter into a personal bond with the one who grants the fief. One must do homage and The feudal swear fealty to him ; one must recognize him as bond; lord one's lord and promise to be his faithful vassal. The ceremony of homage consisted in kneeling before the lord and placing one's hands in his as a symbol of the feudal bond. The oath of fidelity might be a general assurance of loyalty or cover specific services. The feudal service rendered by a vassal to his lord varied greatly with such circumstances as the size and value of the Military fief held and the relative power and position of an'd court ^^e two parties. At first the services were per- attendance haps not definitely stated and even later the matter was a frequent source of dispute and strife between the two parties. But gradually in most fiefs feudal ser\dces came to be fixed by custom or by written agreement. It was generally understood that the holder of a fief should not be required to perform any servile or menial duties, but only honorable ser\dce proper for a freeman, a warrior, and a holder of considerable property. The chief form of ser\dce was military, and forty days in the year was frequently the amount of service required. In addition to fighting for his lord in the field and mounting guard in his castles, the vassal was generally required at stated seasons to attend his lord's court, where his presence contributed to the lord's social prestige and aided him in building up something akin to political power. At court the vassal might be called upon to counsel his lord, or to help decide disputes between .other vassals or between another vassal and the lord. He might also have some ceremonial function to perform, such as waiting upon his lord at table, lighting his way with a candle as he went to bed, or counting his chessmen on Christ- mas Day. Such services were not considered humiliating and seldom involved much work. We even hear of a vassal of the King of England whose privilege and duty it was to support the royal head during a rough passage of the THE FEUDAL LAND SYSTEM 243 Channel. Lords visited their vassals, as well as summoned the latter to their courts, and the lord expected free board and entertainment when he came. When feudalism started, money was scarce, and there- fore the vassal was expected to aid his lord financially on certain expensive occasions, and only then. One Feudal aids was when the lord, captured by an enemy, re- sources of quired to be ransomed; another was when his revenue eldest son was knighted; and another was when he had to provide a dowry for the marriage of his daughter. In some places feudal aids were taken on still other occasions. The relief has already been noted, but it should be added that the vassal had to pay it, not only when he himself received the fief, but whenever a new lord succeeded over him. Other sources of profit to the lord were his rights of wardship and marriage. When a vassal died, leaving an heir not yet of age, the lord became his guardian and enjoyed the income of the fief until he attained his majority, and even then the heir often experienced difficulty in securing his full inherit- ance. If an heiress remained, a widow or a daughter, the lord was her guardian until she had with his permission married or remarried. Women usually were not allowed to hold fiefs, since they could not fight, but by the end of the twelfth century their right of succession was recognized in France. The normal fief was an estate of land large enough to support by the labors of its peasants at least one armed knight and his war horse. A vassal should have gj^^ ^^^^ enough of a fief to leave him free to perform his nature of the fief duties to his lord. The normal fief is noble land, whose holder ranks as one of the nobility and performs no servile duties. Yet the fief is not necessarily real estate. The lord might grant to his vassal an official post with lucra- tive fees, or some ecclesiastical source of income, or any- thing else desirable and profitable. The wealthy men of the tenth and eleventh centuries did not have money to Invest in commercial and industrial ventures, but they did have land which they wished to invest in men; and instead of 244 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE clipping coupons or drawing interest or receiving fat divi- dends, they received feudal services and, on certain occa- sions, various feudal aids and other revenues. As money again became more plentiful, they often invested it, in- stead of land, in soldiers, and we have money fiefs as well as grants of land. But when feudalism first came into exist- ence, land was the chief form of property and source of in- come, and the easiest thing to grant as a fief. When once men began to enter into feudal relationships, it is not hard to see how the custom would spread. The The spread great landholder who wanted an army of vassals of feudalism ^^ fight for him against barbarian invaders and against his rivals, or to throng his castle on court days, di- vided his land in numerous fiefs among men who lacked estates and who were willing and able to fight. They were, perhaps, not nobles to begin with, but their new estates soon made them nobles. The peaceful bishop or abbot, who had many church estates under his care, granted part of them to some powerful warrior who would defend the rest. The owner of only one or two villas, who was not strong enough to stand alone with his handful of peasants against the storm of invasion or the cupidity of some great neighbor with a large band of vassals, would be forced to become the vassal of the lord who otherwise might take his land from him entirely, or else the vassal of some other lord who would protect him from that lord. But the spread of feudalism did not stop there. The owner of only one or two villas might deem it advisable to Complexity become the vassal of more than one lord, and sib^"^"^^'^""' thus get some more land, especially if there were infeudation ^wo or more great men who were in a position to protect or to injure him, and if he could find time to render feudal service to both or to all, and if they were not hostile to one another. Still more likely was the man who owned a number of estates scattered here and there to become the vassal for one of them to one lord and for another manor the vassal of another lord in its vicinity. Moreover, lords who already had vassals under them entered into the feudal re- THE FEUDAL LAND SYSTEM 245 lationship with each other. Lord A, who could count on the service of a few vassals, would himself become the vassal of a much greater lord, B, and agree upon certain occasions to provide B with ten warriors. Or this great lord, B, having at his disposal vast estates sufficient to support several hundred knights, instead of trying to find all those men himself, would infeudate his land in two or three large par- cels to two or three men on condition that each of them supply him with a number of knights. Thus they would each receive a large fief and then would subinfeudate a large part of it, as a modern bank pays its depositors four per cent in- terest and then loans out part of its deposits at a higher rate. Their vassals would be his subvassals, and he would be the overlord of their men. In some parts of Europe, notably France, land was subinfeudated in this way several times, so that as many as seven or eight persons might be owing and receiving feudal service and payments from a single manor. It would be hard, indeed, to say who owned the land in such a case; all had rights in it. Sometimes very complex situations were created in the course of time. Not only might the overlord of one estate be the subvassal in the case of another villa, but he might even be in some other lord's court the fellow vassal of one of his own vassals. In short, lords and vassals were not two dis- tinct classes ; the relationship of lord and vassal was a shift- ing one, and most feudal nobles were both lord and vassal. This situation, however, can be paralleled in the modern business world, where one may buy stocks in any number of different companies, may be both a stockholder and a bond- holder, may be the president of one corporation and a director in another and a mere stockholder in a third. When a vassal subinfeudated his land, he of course did not alien- ate it, for he still owed his services to his lord from it and still himself had a lordship over it. Infeudation and sub- infeudation were sometimes carried so far, in the course of time, that estates were quite dismembered and some very small fiefs created. Sometimes the income from a single villa would be split, and to one man would be infeudated 246 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE the profit from the beehives, to another the catch from the fish-ponds and income from the mill. Church property was subdivided in a very minute and intricate manner, so that we hear of a parish church receiving from one estate *'one eighteenth of the tithe of grain, one sixth of the tithe of wine, and one half of the small tithes, offerings, and lega- cies," and similar fractions of this or that from other lands. Feudalism existed in its most highly developed form in the north and east of what is now France, where by the Varying fourteenth century it had come to be the rule Qcs^rGes of feudalism in that there was no land without its lord, where pairtro/ ^^^ feudal aristocracy was most sharply marked Europe off from the rest of society, and where most of the peasants remained serfs into the thirteenth century. In some parts of Europe feudalism prevailed less universally and society was not divided so sharply into the two extremes of serfs at the bottom and feudal nobles at the top. In southern France, for instance, many landholders recognized no feudal lord and would not admit that their estates were fiefs. In Brittany serfdom had always been exceptional; in Normandy it early disappeared, and in both these prov- inces the word "fief" was applied to the free holdings of peasants as well as to the estates of nobles. In Germany powerful lords sometimes granted fiefs to their servile per- sonal attendants, called ministeriales , and thus made knights out of serfs or slaves. Many features of feudalism were found in England before the Norman conquest, but Wil- liam the Conqueror introduced it in a more developed state from the Continent. The chief extant monument of feudalism is the stone castle. Hundreds of these combined strongholds and arlsto- The cratic residences still exist in ruins or with later feudal castle alterations, as evidence of the long prevalence of feudalism and of the enterprise and power of its many lords. Hardly any two castles are exactly alike, owing in part to the different dates at which they were built, in part to the varying resources and requirements of the feudal nobles for whom they were constructed, but most of all due to the THE FEUDAL LAND SYSTEM 247 diversity of their sites, to which the fortresses themselves were closely adapted. If the castle is perched on an in- accessible peak, the circuit of its walls will be of an irregular shape following the edges of the summit and taking advan- tage of every precipice and chasm. If the castle is built upon comparatively level ground, it will be surrounded by a deep moat full of water, so that the besiegers may not scale its walls with ladders and movable towers, nor make breaches in them with battering-rams. Sometimes the cas- tle is a single rectangular tower; other castles are exten- sive complexes of buildings and courtyards covering acres. Some castles are in the heart of cities, some are in the fast- nesses of the Alps, some line the banks of the Rhine and of many other rivers. A few common characteristics may be noted. One is the prominence of towers, square, round, or pentagonal, with pyramidical, conical, or flat roofs. Some of these towers line the outer circuit of walls, projecting beyond them to enfilade their sides and bases, and rising above them to command their tops. Oldest and chief of the towers are the donjon, or residence of the lord, and the keep, or central and most strongly fortified part of the castle where the garrison makes its last stand. Normally the defenders of the castle fight from the tops of its walls and towers, where they will be farthest away from the range of the missiles of the enemy below, and whence their own missiles will carry farthest and fall with most force. For this purpose a walk is built behind a parapet all along the top of the wall. The battlements of the parapet are usually crenelated; that is, openings through which the defenders may shoot alternate with sections of solid wall behind which they may stand protected from the enemy's arrows. Sometimes, especially around the tops of towers, are found machicolations. In this case the battlement is built out beyond the walls of the tower below upon projections called corbels, and the floor of the encircling walk behind the parapet is pierced with num- erous openings or trapdoors through which such things as boiling pitch and molten lead may be poured directly upon 248 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE those trying to enter the tower below or to scale its walls. The walls of the castle are also pierced with many narrow slits through which arrows may be shot at the foe. These walls are very thick, especially at the base in order to with- stand battering-rams and support the weight above. In- deed, the castle was something like a modern battleship with its heavy armor plate, its portholes and gun shields, and its turrets. Especial care was taken to protect the entrance to the castle, which was approached by a drawbridge suspended by chains, and which could furthermore be closed in an instant by the portcullis, a heavy grating which was let fall from above like a drop curtain. The gateway might be further protected by flanking towers; and even if the enemy got across the gap left by the lifted drawbridge and broke through the portcullis, they still might find themselves in a small enclosed court or a dark and winding vaulted passage with other doors and barriers yet to force before they were really within the castle precincts proper. Similarly, if the foe gained a footing at some point on the wall, they could not easily rush along the walk on top of the wall to other parts of the castle, since the circuit of the walls was fre- quently interrupted by towers through which one had to make one's way by crooked passages and up steep stairs. Many castles also had subterranean passages of which their defenders could take advantage, but which were unknown to the besiegers. Although a castle might be impressive by its bulk and massiveness, its exterior was plain, rough, and forbidding in appearance. The towers, battlements, and corbels, how- ever, gave considerable variety and picturesqueness. Un- less the castle was large enough to comprise inner courts, upon which windows might safely open and where decora- tive stone carving and sculpture could be indulged in with- out fear of its being damaged by stones hurled from cata- pults ■ — • unless this was the case, the rooms of the interior were of necessity dark and cold, since they were enclosed by walls several feet thick with only a rare aperture. Often THE FEUDAL LAND SYSTEM 249 an entire floor of the castle or of the donjon would be used as the great hall, where the lord and his followers ate their meals, drank their ale or wine, held court, talked together, or warmed themselves before the fire in the huge open chimney-place. When we read of horrible, damp, under- ground dungeons where prisoners languished, v/e must remember that even the lord and lady in their apartments of state w^ere none too comfortable. The fireplace, however, represented a great improvement in domestic life, for chimney flues were a medieval invention. If the Greeks and Romans wished to avoid filling the house with smoke, they had to cook outdoors, although the Romans had hypo- causts to warm their floors from underneath. Although the castle was poorly lighted and heated and dreary enough within, from its lofty battlements a wonder- ful view often could be obtained of the countryside for miles around. One rather envies the feudal lords of those cheer- less keeps, as from their commanding sites one gazes down on the long windings of a beautiful river and the fertile expanse of valley and plain below. Not long, moreover, after the steep climb up to the picturesque ruins on im- pregnable heights, one becomes conscious of a keen appe- tite, and can to some extent sympathize with the robber baron's descents from his stronghold in order to procure a round of beef or saddle of mutton from such sheep and cattle, or a cask of wine and mess of fish from such traveling merchants, as strayed within his ken while he was sui'x'^ey- ing, with an even closer scrutiny and intenser interest than that of the modern tourist, the every detail of the surround- ing landscape. As the castle suggests, war was the natural state of the feudal world. Ambitious lords, especially as population in- creased and land became scarce, waged war upon Feudal one another. Younger sons tried to win new fiefs ^^'^''^^^^ by the sword, since they could not hope to inherit them, and often fought against their fathers or older brothers. Lords perhaps fought more often against their own vassals, or rather against men whom they claimed as their vassals, 250 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE than they did with other lords. Vassals were ever quarreling with their lords over the conditions of their vassalage and the services which they were bound to render. In many cases men were unwilling vassals whose fathers had been defeated in war and forced to acknowledge the \'ictor as lord ; such men naturally would revolt at the first good op- portunity. The w-hole situation was one of disorderly rivalry where every one was trying to increase his power at the expense of others. There were, however, some mitigating features about feudal warfare. We must remember for one thing that war had been incessant before feudalism and that it has not ceased yet. Then feudal warfare was in the main conducted on a small scale; it was local or neighborhood war and the numbers of men engaged were never very large nor the number killed very great. Their armor protected the knights fairly well, and they were more often captured, imprisoned, and ransomed than they were slain. One reads of bitter strife between lord and vassal or father and son drawn out over many years, and finds both contestants as hale and hearty at the end as they had been at the begin- ning. The peasants, whose crops were destroyed and homes burned, and who had neither armor nor the prospect of large ransom to protect their lives, were the ones to suffer most from these neighborhood wars and from the ravages of robber knights who got their living largely by plundering raids. A French bishop, intent upon reforming this evil of feu- dalism, proposed in 1023 that feudal nobles should take the The Truce following oath : " I will not take away ox nor cow of God j^Qj. g^j^y Q^i^gj- beast of burden. I will not seize the peasant nor the peasant's wife nor the merchants. I will not take their money, nor will I force them to ransom themselves. I do not want them to lose their property through a war that their lord wages, and I won't whip them to get their nourishment away from them. From the first of March to All Saints' Day I will seize neither horse nor mare nor colt from the pasture. I will not destroy and burn houses; I will not uproot and devastate vineyards THE FEUDAL LAND SYSTEM 251 under pretext of war; I will not destroy mills nor steal the flour." A measure more generally adopted by the clergy was the Truce of God, by which bishops forbade fighting in their dioceses over the week-end and on a number of church holidays. It can readily be imagined that this ecclesiastical prohibition was not easy to enforce. It is, however, possible to exaggerate the amount of robbing and slaughtering of the common people done by the feudal nobility and such atroci- ties attributed to them as burning churches full of people or gouging out babies' eyes with their own hands. The pas- sages in contemporary writers expressing disapproval and horror at such cruel deeds are not a proof that they were common practices, but are a proof that there was a strong public sentiment against such conduct. Vassal and lord alike belonged to the noble class and passed their lives in the same round of warlike occupations and amusements. To their life is given the name "chivalry, " derived from the Romance word for "horse" and denoting the Hfe of cavaliers or knights. The earliest literature of feudal times extols physical hardihood and bravery, condones brigandage, and shows war brutally waged as almost the only ideal of the early chevalier. Later history indicates that it too often continued to be his prac- tice. But this military aristocrat in time developed, or rather had constructed for him by the Church and the po- etical romancers, a set of social ideals of which our present- day use of the term "chivalry " is a reminiscence. The medi- eval clergy insisted that the true knight should be a manly Christian, should respect and defend the Church, should fight against heathen and heretics, and should protect the needy and those in distress. The minstrels and romancers, who sometimes found the lords away and only the ladies at home when they visited the castles, depicted the true knight as an accomplished gentleman and perfect lover. The duty of court attendance brought knights together, sometimes in the society of the other sex, and so helped to develop the social virtue of courtesy or good manners and various chivalric conventions. 252 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE A ceremony of Initiation was necessary to admit one to the ranks of knighthood, just as the young warrior had to be admitted to the German tribe in the days of Tacitus. The prospective knight was supposed to perform some deed of arms to prove his worth, and then could be dubbed a knight by some one already of that station. Kneeling he received the accolade, originally a hard blow on the neck with the flat of a sword which he would remember for a long time. Sooner or later a religious element entered the ceremony in a vigil observed over his arms in a church the previous night and in the hearing of mass before being knighted. Sometimes bishops conferred knighthood. Before becoming a knight one was an esquire or squire, a condition in which some remained permanently, not so much through failure to win military renown as be- cause of the expense of being a knight. Knights were often accompanied in war by men-at-arms, who were heavy- armed foot-soldiers and who were usually of lower birth and less wealth. The regular course of feudal education and path to knighthood was for the aspirant at an early age to serve as a page at some feudal court, and there to learn good manners, how to ride and hunt and hawk, and to fight with spear, sword, and battle-axe, and to distinguish different knights and noble houses by the colors and devices on their shields and coats of arms — the science of heraldry. Next he would attend some knight in the field of war as his squire, and finally be knighted himself. If the feudal noble was at home alone with his family and peasants, hunting would probably be his main diversion Feudal and it also serv^ed to supply his larder. If other position^' knights were present, they would amuse them- of woman selves and keep in training by tilting or riding at each other with spears. Such mock fighting might take the form either of jousts, which were single combats, or of tour- naments, where two sides were formed or the knights par- ticipated in a general melee. Nobles were on the go from one of their estates to another much of the time. The ladies played chess and games of chance with dice, and devoted THE FEUDAL LAND SYSTEM 253 much attention to dress, judging from the tirades of preach- ers against their long trains, false hair, and rouging. The literature of chivalry made much of woman: but nobles, as well as peasants, sometimes beat their wives, and the con- temporary chronicles tell many cases of lords and even kings who dealt shamefully with their wives. Divorce was frequent among the upper classes despite its prohibition by the Church, and was secured by alleging that the married pair were too closely related and should not have been mar- ried to begin with. Feudalism seems to the modern observer who looks back on it an intricate and almost hopeless tangle. Such confused conditions were due not merely to war and vio- Continual lence and anarchy, nor further to the compli- feudd^rda- cated network of feudal relationships at any tionships given time, but also to the continual change and shifting and reshaping of those relations with passing years, making soci- ety assume new forms as when one shakes up the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope. Death, inheritance, forfeiture, escheat, vassals' changing lords, partition of fiefs, subinfeudation, union of fiefs by marriage, conquests in war — all these changes kept the feudal world in almost as fluctuating a condition as the modern stock market. 254 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE EXERCISES AND READINGS Life of the Peasant. Seignobos, The Feudal Regime, translated by Dow, pp. 3-26. Luchaire, Social France, translated by Krehbiel, pp. 381-408. Sedgwick, Italy in the Thirteenth Century, vol. ll, pp. 215-18. Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. i, pp. 418-25. Source Selections on the English Manor. Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. i, selections 157, 158, 160: or. Translations and Reprints of the University of Pennsylvania, vol. ill, no. 5, pp. 4, 7-1 1, 31-32. Questions on the first selection: — 1. In the document itself what other name than manor is given to the estate? 2. Compare the number of available ploughs with the number of men using them, and draw inferences therefrom. 3. How much land would each villein and half-villein have, if we assume that all villeins had equal amounts of land, and that every half-villein had the same amount as every other half- villein? 4. Can certain payments mentioned be apportioned among villeins and half-villeins so as to come out even? 5. How do the amounts of land held by Ascelin the clerk and Rob- ert, son of Richard, compare in size with the tenancies of the villeins and half-villeins? 6. What reasons are there for thinking the socmen a class superior to the villeins? 7. Is it preferable to be a villein or a half- villein? 8. How do you explain the term, "half- villein"? 9. What is meant by "the demesne of the court"? ID. For whom is the "i riding horse" kept? 11. Is there a fish-pond on this manor? 12. Is there a priest on this manor? 13. What period of time is illustrated by this document? Questions on the second selection: — 1. What different classes of tenants are mentioned? 2. Is the document systematically arranged, so that it subdivides into parts? 3. Do men in the same class hold exactly the same amounts of land and perform exactly the same services and make the same pay- ments? 4. Make a concise list of the varied types of payments, services, obligations, and restrictions to which men on this manor are subject. 5. How many days in the year does John of Cayworth have to work for his lord? (Since John seems to get three meals a day, a piece of work in connection with which he receives one or two meals may be reckoned one third or two thirds of a day's work.) THE FEUDAL LAND SYSTEM 255 6. What is the annual income of the lord from the entire manor, reckoned in money equivalents? 7. What information does this document afford concerning the prices of certain things and the cost of living then? 8. Explain the existence of a single tenant for life. Question on the third selection: — I. List the dues and restrictions to which William is still subjected after he has been emancipated. Life of the Feudal Nobility. Munro, A History of the Middle Ages, chap. xiii. Munro and Sellery, Medieval Civilization, pp. 159-87. Seignobos, Feudal Regime, translated by Dow, pp. 1-2, 27-65. Luchaire, Social France, translated by Krehbiel, chap, viii, ix, or x. Bateson, Medieval England, chap. l, 11, or viii. Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. i, pp. 418-25. Immunity, Beneficium, Commendation, Fief, Homage and Fealty. Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. I, selections 72, 74 (first half), 75, 78, and 83 respectively. The same or similar documents will be found in the source books of Ogg and Thatcher and McNeal. Passages from the Feudal Register of the Counts of Champagne. Thatcher and AIcNeal, Source Book for Medieval History, pp. 374-82. German Feudalism; Ministerials of the Archbishop of Cologne, Thatcher and McNeal, op. cit., pp. 563-71. CHAPTER XIV FEUDAL STATES OF EUROPE The lack of strong central government had been one cause of that feudalism which fills the political gap between Lack of ^^^ break-up of Charlemagne's empire and the central development of the national European states of governmen j^Qj^gj-n times. The various kingdoms founded by the German invaders, even including the Prankish Empire and the administrative efforts of Charlemagne, had not proved successful experiments in the political art. Their efforts to combine the last embers of Roman administra- tion with their primitive institutions, imported like green wood from German forests, had resulted in failure — in a steady decrease in the amount of government and a constant development in the direction of feudalism, which was only partially interrupted by the energy of the first Carolingians. Indeed, the Carolingians were already ruling in large meas- ure by feudal methods. With the disruption of Charlemagne's empire, kings, though still existing in name, had even less power than before. They kept resigning their prerogatives, surrendering Normandy to the invaders, granting immuni- ties from their government here, there, and everywhere, and giving away their private estates in the vain hope of secur- ing followers upon whom they could rely. In the localities political powers and offices had been turned into private property and were exercised chiefly for the sake of personal profit. Any one who wished, waged war, coined money, held a court of justice. But no one fought in his army, accepted his money, or attended his court, except the few whom he could compel to do this. But along with such division came the feudal bond, which united men and united territory, though primarily only in a personal and private way. It gradually led, however, to the growth of political units and to new forms of government. FEUDAL STATES OF EUROPE 257 The great lord, who had many vassals, could by means of their military service command a small army; poetical and so was in a position to exercise the military features of functions of the State, and to enforce obedience to his commands. It was furthermore the duty of his vassals to attend his court, and this supplied him with a council of state and the opportunity to exercise judicial powers. They owed him occasional feudal aids and reliefs; he could also fill his treasury by exercise of the rights of wardship and marriage ; thus feudalism had its equivalents for state taxa- tion and revenue. But in feudalism everything is expressed in different terms from those employed in the modern state, or in the ancient city-state, or in the Roman Empire. It has its peculiar names for its own peculiar institutions: feudal aids instead of taxes, knight service in place of standing armies, court attendance rather than a congress or parlia- ment or chamber of deputies, vassals in place of citizens, personal lordship and dependent land tenure instead of nationality and territorial sovereignty. Although feudalism could in some measure approximate to the military, legislative, judicial, and financial functions of the State, the lord's power was greatly limited Limitations in all these respects. He could require military ?" the polit- ical power service of his vassals, but he could not keep them of the from fighting also for some other lord or from ^^^^^'- '°''" waging war on their own account. He could make war, but he could not preserve the peace in the fiefs of his vassals. He could procure the assent of his vassals assembled at his court to certain laws or policies, but he could not send his officials into their fiefs to see to the execution of these meas- ures. He had to leave all that to the vassals themselves. He had no power of local administration save in his own domains. At his court he could judge his vassals and settle their disputes; but the subvassals, to whom they had sub- infeudated portions of their fiefs, did not attend his court and he found it difficult to exert any control over them, since all their services and payments were rendered, not to him, but to their lords who were his vassals. He could im- 258 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE pose no new taxes on his vassals, but could take only the customary and stipulated feudal dues. He might establish tolls and customs duties on merchants and travelers through his own domains, but his vassals would undoubtedly claim that right within their fiefs. Moreover, the obligations of individual vassals to him might vary greatly. There was no necessary uniformity in the loyalty and ser\^ices that they owed. Finally, his hold upon many of them was so slight, that for them to throw off his rule entirely and attempt to maintain their independence did not seem so heinous an offense as rebellion in a modern state, and was much easier to carry through than to foment a revolution against the well-organized states of to-day. A very important feature of the feudal state was the limiting of the lord's power by the rights of the vassal and The feudal ^^ ^^^ terms of a contract expressed or under- idea of stood between lord and vassal. It was generally recognized that there were things which the lord could do and things which he could not do. If he exceeded his rights, his vassals were entitled to take up arms against him, a privilege which they were never slow to exercise. Moreover, meeting together at his court, they shared in his government and came to act as a body which possessed in itself possibilities in the direction of representative govern- ment. The sphere of influence of a feudal lord — in other words, the lands held of him by his vassals — did not necessarily Area of the form a compact and clearly defined territory feudal state \[]^^ ^|^^^ ^f 3^ modern state. His vassals were apt to be somewhat scattered about, with territory intervening which he could not bring into vassalage to himself, either because it belonged to the Church or was defended by castles too strong for him to take. However, feudal divi- sions tended to follow geographical and racial lines pretty closely. Also feudal lords made every effort to extend their control over a compact and easily accessible territory, though they often could not resist the temptation of add- ing some distant possession, if opportunity offered. But of FEUDAL STATES OF EUROPE 259 course as a rule it was easier for them to keep their neigh- bors in vassalage than to exact service and fidelity from far- off fiefs. Feudalism, in theory at least, would not admit of distinct states with distinct territories, but would require a succes- sion of lordships within lordships. At the head pgyjaj would be the king or emperor. Then would come theory of his great vassals, the dukes and counts with their feudal courts, owing duties to the king as their suzerain, but free to govern their subvassals. Many of these sub- vassals might boast strong castles and considerable lands which they had subinfeudated to vassals of their own, over whom they might claim some powers of government. And any vassal or subvassal would at least have his manorial court, where he lorded it over his serfs. No one had com- plete governmental power or sovereignty, just as no one person had complete private ownership of the land of the fief. The functions of government, as well as real estate, incomes, and services, had been feudalized. Feudal theory, however, was never fully accepted in medieval politics, just as all the land was never divided into fiefs and manors and just as there were always Actual states some persons who were neither lords nor vassals of the feudal nor serfs. Kings still claimed to be something more than mere feudal overlords. The lords who built up local feudal states usually tried in practice to exercise greater powers than strict feudal theory would allow. Sometimes they possessed some other title or inherited position than that of a feudal lord upon which to base their claim to rule. The Dukes of Normandy and Bavaria, for instance, had once been the leaders of independent peoples. Many a feudal state had a natural or historical unity not given to it by feudalism. Not all feudal lords were able to build up states, and a state based solely upon feudalism was not likely to last long. But for several hundred years all states were greatly affected and colored by feudalism. Even kings found themselves not only limited in power by feudal- ism at every turn, but exercising most of the power that 26o THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE they did have through feudal channels and ruling by feudal methods. We should further realize that the so-called feudal states of medieval Europe, instead of being perverse and regret- Feudal states table obstacles to true geographical and racial and medi- and Hnguistic union, instead of being ugly, broken fragments of a once splendid empire of Charlemagne or of an ideal France or Germany or Italy, really often were the organic units of their age and repre- sented local life and vigor and enterprise and governable groups a great deal better than did the impossible empires aimed at by Charlemagne and Justinian and Otto the Great and Henry II. We should also realize that there was as yet no such thing as the France of to-day, nor even a French language and a French people, nor an Italian tongue and an Italian people. When the King of "France" forced his rule upon Toulouse, he was not uniting peoples already one in language, spirit, and customs, and everything else ex- cept government ; rather he was doing violence to national spirit and blotting out a beautiful language and terminat- ing a brilliant period of culture. The Prussian annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1870 was not a circumstance to the extermination of Toulouse in southern France by orthodox crusaders and by the Lord of Paris in the thirteenth century. In that century we find mentioned among the different nations at the University of Paris, not Frenchmen and Italians, but Lombards, Romans, and Sicilians, Flemings, Burgundians, Poitevins, Bretons, and Normans. The modern European states are simply historical growths and the outcome of a vast concourse of varied cir- Medieval cumstances, rather than the systematic working- states and Qut of any fine principles of nationality. To- modern "national" day the peoples of those states have grown mto states homogeneous nations, distinct from one another. But in their origins those states consisted of elements by no means homogeneous. The advent of our modern state often meant an increase of centralization at the expense of local enterprise and prosperity. France of our day is dotted with FEUDAL STATES OF EUROPE 261 remote ruins of castles and with dull towns of depleted population, which in the Middle Ages were booming centers of military, political, economic, and artistic life. We must therefore not approach the feudal period with the assump- tion that a modern "national" state is necessarily vastly superior to a "feudal" state, still less with the idea that the national state is the guiding star of all European history and the goal toward which everything moved. We must be care- ful not to see modern nationalities before they really exist. If one is studying the history of some one European country, like France or Germany, it is well enough to go back to Julius Caesar or to men of the old stone age in that region, if one wants to ; but as for the states that we call France and Germany and Italy to-day, there was nothing like them in the feudal period. There was an England even then, it is true, but no United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, much less a British Empire. What we now turn to, therefore, is a survey of the feudal states of western Europe during the period from the end of the Frankish Empire to the twelfth century. Cer- Kingdoms tain kings traced back their claim to authority qJ''^^^ ^^^"^ to the Frankish Empire, which, as we have seen, magne's had split into several divisions. There came in the ^'"P"'^ ninth century to be two kings of the Franks; one of the East Franks, and one of the West Franks. These vague des- ignations, which replace the old Austrasia and Neustria, leave the exact location of their kingdoms discreetly doubt- ful. As for the third Merovingian Kingdom, Burgundy, it was for a time divided into an Upper Burgundy in the mountains and a Lower Burgundy down the Rhone. In 934 the two were reunited, but henceforth were known as the Kingdom of Aries, from the capital city. This kingdom lasted for a century to 1032. In Italy practically no one was king in any real sense from the death of Louis II in 875 until the coronation of Otto I as emperor at Rome in 962, although a Hugo of Provence for some time claimed the title. Among the East Franks, Arnulf of Carinthia succeeded the deposed Charles in 887. A contemporary has well 262 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE summed up his reign in the sentence, "While Arnulf was The East frittering away his time, many petty kingdoms Prankish arose." The brief reign of the six-year-old Louis ing om (899-911) was filled with feuds between the nobles, and it seemed as if the great tribal Duchies of Saxony, Franconia, Lotharingia, Thuringia, Suabia (formerly Ala- mannia), and Bavaria would become independent states. With the death of Louis the Carolingian house ceased to rule among the East Franks. Conrad of Franconia (911- 918) had to fight all the other duchies to secure recognition as king. Henry of Saxony (919-936) seldom left his own domain lands and had to deed away many of his regalian rights in Bavaria, although he was able to force the Dukes of Suabia and Bavaria to recognize him as king. He also, as we have seen, checked the inroads of the Slavs and finally won a victory over the Magyars. At the coronation of Henry's son. Otto I (936-973), all the dukes did homage, and those of Lorraine, Franconia, Suabia, and Bavaria served him in the court offices of chamberlain, steward, cup-bearer, and marshal respectively; but within the next five years three of them and also his own brother and half- brother revolted against his rule, and later there were other rebellions. Otto gained prestige by repelling the invaders of German territory, and in 962 he went to Rome and was crowned The Holy emperor, reviving on a smaller scale the empire Roman of Charlemagne. Henceforth the German duch- "^^"^^ ies and portions of Italy were united in a loose and weak union known as the Holy Roman or Medieval Empire. In theory the emperors claimed a wider jurisdic- tion than this, regarding themselves, on the one hand, as successors of the old Roman emperors and, on the other hand, as feudal suzerains of the kings of other European countries, just as these were the overlords of their great vas- sals. But the emperors were unable to develop this feudal overlordship and imperial ideal into actual sovereignty, as some kings finally were to succeed in doing. One reason for their failure was that the popes, too, were soon to assert their HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE AND SOUTHERN ITALY about the year 1000 50 100 ISO 3 |Sarauen Territory | | Holj R.iman Etr JBjrzantine Territory f j Independent or serai-in.lepemlo Christian principalities I.onjitnde East li ' from Green»i,,t, FEUDAL STATES OF EUROPE 263 claim to treat kings as vassals, and to exercise a portion at least of the prerogatives of Constantine, the first Christian emperor. Of this we shall have further occasion to speak in connection with the history of the Papacy during this period. For our present purpose it is enough to note that the Medieval Empire, although it encouraged commerce and some interchange of ideas between the Germans and the Italians, in the long run assisted rather than checked the prevalence of feudalism and local division in both Italy and Germany. The emperors claimed to be overlords of so much territory that they did not become real governors of any one locality. Had they remained in Germany and painstakingly developed a machinery of government of their own, or had they devoted their entire attention to Italian affairs, they might have developed a strong kingdom in one place or the other. Instead they roamed about, posing as international arbiters and forcing the kings of lands like Poland and Bohemia to become their vassals. The rule of the Holy Roman Emperor seems to have been for the most part personal, offhand, and unsystematic. For the first century after Otto there is extant L^ck of no imperial law or ordinance directed toward the imperial r J J T-u government mamtenance 01 peace and order. 1 here were no permanent imperial law courts, no professional judges nor legal advisers. There was no central exchequer and no financial literature by imperial officials has reached us. The emperors allowed many other lords to coin money and made no effort to keep up the standard of the coinage. Customs duties and tolls also passed from the emperors into the hands of other lords. Private war was tolerantly regarded by public opinion, even when it was directed against the emperor himself; and Germans at feud with their country- men not infrequently made alliances with the Slavs and Hungarians. The fact that the emperor was elected by the other great lords, and that, while sometimes son succeeded father, the office did not remain permanently in the hands of any one dynasty, also weakened the power of the central government. 264 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE The emperors left the local government largely in the hands of dukes and other lords, and were content if the Local inde- dukes were loyal to them in imperial matters and pendence of furnished them with contingents to make up an dukes and • i i • i i • margraves army With which they might rampage about, in Germany g^^ ^^^ dukes were not inclined to do anything of the sort, and the emperors were constantly having to bring them to book. The emperors tried making members of their own families dukes, but even these did not remain loyal. Finally Henry III (1039-1056) tried to be duke everywhere himself, but found this scheme scarcely a success, and all its results were lost during the minority of his son. Even in the marks or new frontier territories, es- tablished against and won from the barbarians, as well as in the old duchies with their lingering tribal or national spirit, the emperors failed to establish a strong government of their own and allowed them to become the fiefs or family possessions of the margraves. Some of these local princes developed a machinery of government which the Empire as a whole lacked. By the end of the twelfth century the Duke of Bavaria kept court in royal style and exercised many regalian rights. He had his privy council, his chan- cery, and his court of justice, to which cases might be appealed from the courts of the counts, his vassals, who might be deposed if they failed in their duties. The duke could summon a general assembly of the land, which was divided into administrative and judicial districts. If he had no son to follow him, the duke could name his successor. The emperors could so little rely on their lay vassals that they turned for support to the bishops and showered lands ^ , . . and favors upon them in the hope of building cal princes up a loyal party. Thus began the numerous of Germany ecclesiastical states of Germany, where bishops and abbots ruled much like secular lords and sometimes fought as other feudal nobles did. Once they even fought in a church in the emperor's presence. Another instructive incident took place in Mainz Cathedral on Easter, 1184. The Abbot of Fulda and Archbishop of Cologne quarreled FEUDAL STATES OF EUROPE 265 as to who should sit at the emperor's left, and the emperor asked the archbishop to yield the point. Thereupon the angry archbishop started to withdraw to his lodgings. The Count Palatine of the Rhine, although as his title indicates he was supposed to be closely connected with the palace and the emperor, promptly arose to follow the archbishop, ex- cusing himself to the emperor by saying that he was the vassal of the archbishop. Other dukes and counts also arose to leave, and from remarks which passed between them and the abbot's adherents it was plain that there was going to be a fight, especially as the archbishop had come to Mainz attended by some four thousand armed men. The emperor accordingly apologized to the huffy prelate, and the abbot had to surrender the coveted precedence. About 900 the north of Italy was divided into a num- ber of duchies and counties, from the Duke of Friuli in the east to the Marquis of Montferrat in the west. ^ , . . , A 1 • 1 1 r rr^ 11 Feudal Italy Another marquis was lord of 1 uscany, and the estates claimed by the Papacy were really in the hands of petty nobles. In the south, what with fragments of Lom- bard duchies and the conflicting claims of the Byzantines and Saracens, the subdivision was worst of all. The revival of the imperial idea by Otto the Great did not alter con- ditions much. The emperor made occasional trips to Italy, received homage from various lords, appointed various officials to look after his interests, and then went back to Germany again. After some years he would return to find all once more in confusion. Otto II (973-983) and Otto III (983-1002), it is true, devoted their reigns chiefly to Italian affairs, but without achieving important permanent results. Their successor, Henry II (1002-1024), came thrice to Italy in over twenty years and each time to fight. In 1004 he got as far as Pavia where he received the Lombard crown. In 1014 he reached Rome and obtained the imperial crown. In 1022 he fought against the Byzantines in southern Italy. Even the city of Rome showed little loyalty to the emperor. Seldom was a coronation held without the Roman populace trying to drive the German troops from the city. 266 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE During the century from 887, when the last Carolingian emperor, Charles, was deposed, until 987, when Hugh Capet Change of founded a new and lasting dynasty, named dynasty in Capetian after him, the West Prankish Kingdom Prankish was Weakened by a struggle for the throne Kingdom between rival factions of the feudal nobility, supporting on the one hand the last members of the Carolingian line and on the other the family of the Counts of Paris. First a member of one line ruled and then a member of the other, and a Rudolph of Burgundy was also king for a time. But after the death of the Carolingian, Louis V, in 987, no more of his line reigned, and the Cape- tians ruled in unbroken succession in the direct male line until 1328. Before he was elected king, Hugh Capet already bore the title, Duke of France. This small feudal duchy was after Meaning of the lapse of centurics to give its name to most of the'^Middle'^ the territory between the Pyrenees, the Mediter- Ages ranean, the Alps, and the Rhine. But at this time the name "France" applied to a very small district. Paris was well-nigh its southernmost point and it did not extend as far north as Senlis. Thus it was less than twenty- five miles across from north to south, and not much more from east to west. Its southwestern boundary was a few miles of the river Seine; its southeastern, a few miles of the Marne, which empties into the Seine near Paris. On the west it was bounded by the Oise, a tributary of the Seine, and on the east by a small affluent of the Marne near the town of Meaux. To this day the peasants of a village near Meaux speak of going to France when they cross the Marne. The fact that this medieval France was almost entirely surroufided by rivers — for a little stream, la Theve, forms its northern boundary — probably gave rise to the expres- sion, lie de France. In later times, however, we find the name, lie de France, applied to a much larger district. From the tenth to the twelfth century the territory which the Capetians could really call their own was neither so extensive nor so rich as the domains of several feudal FEUDAL STATES OF EUROPE 267 lords. Hugh had inherited from his father, Hugh the White, the most powerful lord of the time, the The early counties of Paris, Senlis, Orleans, and Dreux, Capetmns and the jurisdiction over two richly endowed abbeys. Hugh the White had also acquired Burgundy, a feudal territory sliced from the northwest corner of the old kingdom of Burgundy, but that duchy passed to Hugh's brother. By the time Hugh ended his reign in 996 he had given away so much land to secure supporters for his dynasty that only fragments remained of the extensive territory controlled by his father. His territorial power as king was really less than it had been as duke. It is true that from the English Channel to the Pyrenees public documents were dated by the year of his reign, but this was merely nominal recogni- tion of his royalty. Of his personal appearance and private life we know nothing with certainty. His immediate suc- cessors were no more powerful than many feudal lords of the time, and were not nearly so interesting personalites as some of the barons. One hundred years after Hugh Capet's death, Philip I still found interspersed among his villas the castles of men who defied his power and acted as seemed good to them. However, he pushed as far south as Bourges, when the viscount of that town sold out to him in iioi in order to go to the Holy Land. It was a decided step in advance when the energetic and warlike Louis VI (1108-1137) took the donjons of the cas- tellans in the neighborhood of Paris, who had j^^j been making the Capetian kings so much trouble, of Louis But this was accomplishing only what many feudal lords had achieved already; namely, the bringing of a comparatively small and compact territory directly under their control. However, Louis was also powerful enough to undertake an expedition as far south as Clermont-Farrand in order to punish the Count of Auvergne for having injured the Church; and even the powerful Duke of Aquitaine de- cided that it would be best to render homage, when he saw the size of Louis's army. The Abbot Suger was the right- hand man of Louis VI and of his successor, and kept down 268 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE avaricious and corrupt favorites at court and maintained order and system at home while the king was away at his wars. Suger also has left us a Life of Louis VI. Besides be- ing a great fighter, the king was a great hunter and a great eater. The latter pursuit finally triumphed over the former pastime, for at forty-six Louis became too fat to mount a horse. Louis was good-natured, and simple and unaffected in his manners. His slight paleness contemporary gossip attributed to an attempt by his stepmother to poison him. He was not persuaded to marry until he had reached the age of thirty-five, when he wedded a very ugly niece of the pope, by whom he had six sons and three daughters. ' Despite the small territory actually under their rule, the early Capetians continued to regard themselves as successors ^j^ of Charlemagne. They retained the court cere- Capetian mony which Charlemagne had borrowed from constitution (^Qj^g^^ntinople, and their proclamations and state papers had the same high tone, compounded of Bib- lical and of imperial Roman phrases. But their machinery of government was slight and in the main feudal. There were the usual household offices of chancellor, seneschal, chamberlain, butler, and constable, held as hereditary posts by their chief vassals. Their feudal court, the curia regis, was attended for the most part only by those vassals within easy reach of Paris, but these were remarkably faithful in their attendance, although the king often summoned them as frequently as once a month. He seems to have initiated all the business brought before them, and only a few of them ventured to discuss and debate his proposals; but he evi- dently wished to secure their assent before taking action. To look after his own estates the king had local officials called prevots, who collected the revenue from his villas, led the local soldiery, and judged criminals and lawsuits among his peasants, or summoned persons of greater consequence before the king's court. The king claimed that he was the fountain of all justice, that keeping the peace was his special prerogative, and that he had the right to see that the feudal lords did justice by their subvassals and tenants. FEUDAL STATES OF EUROPE 269 Having been anointed king by the Church, he also claimed the right to protect it everywhere in the kingdom. He depended a good deal on the bishops and monks, made gen- erous grants to the Church, and also secured revenue from it even outside his own domains. The Church for its part found the king on the whole a better friend and defender than the general run of femdal lords, who were prone to be a godless set of plunderers, i Situated in whole or Jh part within the boundaries of modern France wer^j^oiSf forty feudal states, whose lords were practically indepen^nt sovereigns, though Feudal states they might nominal|^^ji?*gnize the overlordship °^ France of king or emperor, ^esnall take up in detail about a third of this number, which w€re ruled by hereditary dynasties of dukes and counts and which' were of the most importance. But some mere viscounts and seigneurs had the right to declare peace and war, had supreme legislative and admin- istrative power, judicial power in the last resort, the right of coinage, and claimed authority over the churches within their districts. Then there were ecclesiastical states where officials of the Church were also the supreme governing power, although these states never became so great and numerous as the ecclesiastical principalities in Germany. The compact possessions of the Counts of Flanders in- cluded portions of present France, but more of Belgium, and both the Flemish with their German patois and the Walloons with their French dialect. The count was a vassal of the Capetian king for some of his lands; others he held as fiefs from the Holy Roman Em- peror. He had no strong vassals of his own to weaken him and about iioo began to call himself "Monarch of the Flemings." Before this, in 1030, he had issued a decree that all within his territories must keep the peace — the first such order extant in the history of the Holy Roman Empire. He also deprived the lords of feudal castles in Flanders of most of their judicial powers, which were henceforth exer- cised by baillis of his own selection, and his example in this reform was afterwards widely followed in western Europe. 270 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Count Baldwin V (1036-1067) was successful in war against the Holy Roman Emperor whose palace he burned at Nym- wegen; he was guardian of young King Philip I of France; he helped his son-in-law, William of Normandy, to conquer England. His younger son, Robert, led the adventurous career characteristic of many feudal npbles. Before his father's The career death he had made expeditions to Spain, Nor- of a feudal way, and the Byzantine Empire, but without succeeding in carving, out a lordship for himself in any of those distant lands. Then he married the widow of the Count of Holland, and, during the minority of her sons, defended that land well against the attacks of covetous barons and of the savage Frisian peasantry. Meanwhile his older brother, who had succeeded their father as Count of Flanders and had married the heiress of the County of Hai- nault, died, leaving Flanders to his older son under Robert's protection and Hainault to his younger son under the mother's guardianship. She tried to seize both territories, thinking Robert too fully occupied in Holland to interfere, but he won everything away from her, though she called to her aid the Capetian king, the Duke of Normandy, the Bishop of Liege, and the Holy Roman Emperor, Having settled that matter, Robert made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land with other Flemish nobles. He remained two years in the East and struck up a friendship with the Byzantine emperor. A few years later he died peaceably at home. South of Flanders and east of Paris lay Champagne, where during the tenth century a considerable power had _, been built up by the union of the counties of Champagne i a t i i r i ... Iroyes and Meaux and by further acquisitions. When the holder of these counties died childless, Eudes II (995-1037), the Count of Blois and Chartres, places to the southwest of Paris, outstripped King Robert in the race for Champagne. He further augmented his territories at the expense of the Archbishop of Rheims and the Duke of Lorraine, but a coalition of King Robert and Emperor Henry II forced him to restore his conquests. But he was a LongitU'le We FEUDAL STATES OF EUROPE 271 candidate for the Italian crown in 1024 in opposition to Conrad II of Germany, and for that of the Kingdom of Aries in 1032. Five years later he was slain in an attempt to capture Aachen while Conrad was absent in Italy. In 1152 Blois anci Chartres passed to a younger son and Champagne again became a distinct state by itself. The Counts of Champagne did not develop a strong centralized govern- ment, perhaps owing to a number of minorities and of regencies by widows. But they have left us a valuable specimen of a feudal register. This book, covering the fifty years from 11 72 to 1222, illustrates admirably the Intricate and complicated personal relationships of feudalism. It contains lists of all their vassals, two thousand and seven- teen in number in 1172, and states the services owed by each. Of them one hundred and fifty-eight were also vas- sals of some eighty-five other lords, while the Count of Champagne himself held the twenty-six castellanies which composed his state from ten different suzerains ; namely, the Holy Roman Emperor, the King of France, the Duke of Burgundy, two archbishops, four bishops, and an abbot. South of Champagne was the Duchy of Burgundy, ruled by a collateral line of the Capetian family. The dukes had few domain lands of their own and little author- Burgundy ity over the local nobility, while the Burgundian Rhone^ bishops held their fiefs directly from the king. Valley and the great abbots claimed to be answerable only to the pope. After the Kingdom of Aries came to an end in 1032, the regions from the Rhone to the Alps were nominally parts of the Holy Roman Empire, but really broke up into a number of independent lordships, — among them, Franche Comte or the Free County of Burgundy, located east of the duchy. Savoy, Dauphine, and Provence. The regions south of the Loire differed from northern France in language, geography, race, and the entire life and spirit of the people. In literature, art, and trade Southern they were more closely connected with the Med- ^''^"'^^ iterranean, with Constantinople, and with Italy and Spain. Their architecture shows Byzantine influence; their Ian- 272 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE guage, the Provengal, was more like Latin than French in its sounds and more closely related to the Catalan of northern Spain. These southern districts retained more Roman influence, especrally more Roman law; more town life had survived, and social classes were less sharply dis- tinguished than in the north. The population was more Gallo-Roman and more of the Mediterranean racial type. The Frankish kings had seldom visited this region except on warlike expeditions and plundering raids. Much of the country was mountainous highland intersected by ravines and water torrents, a topography more suited to the exist- ence of many small lordships than to unified government and large states. The south, however, divided into three chief regions: the County of Toulouse or Languedoc, a Mediterranean Toulouse or land Stretching from the Rhone to the Pyrenees Languedoc, and shut off from the north by the mountain and ' barrier of the massif central, and the most south- Aquitaine ^j-j^ ^^ spirit of all ; the Duchy of Gascony , extend- ing from the Pyrenees north to the river Garonne; and the Duchy of Aquitaine, reaching from the central plateau to the Bay of Biscay. The Counts of Toulouse first gave them- selves the title, "Marquis of Gothia" and later "Duke of Narbonne," but we know almost nothing of their history in the eleventh century. During the first half of the twelfth century they displayed considerable political ability and activity, and were influential in Spain as arbitrators be- tween rival kings there. Gascony got its name from the Vascones, or modern Basques, who invaded from Spain in the sixth century, although their peculiar language and blood have never prevailed except in a very limited section of Gascony. Duke William VIII of Aquitaine (1058-1086) conquered Gascony and added it to his duchy. Aquitaine was the largest feudal ^ate in France, and had the greatest geographical and linguistic diversity in its different parts such as Poitou, P^rigord, Limousin, and Auvergne; and the duke found it hard to control his many powerful vassals. The ducal coronation ceremony was almost royal in its FEUDAL STATES OF EUROPE 273 character, and a ruler like William V (990-1029) had felt himself quite the equal of his Capetian contemporary and had been so treated by the other monarchs of his time. Since the barons both of Languedoc and Gascony fre- quently intermarried and fought with those of Aragon, Catalonia, and Navarre, since the Archbishop of Christian Narbonne had territory on both sides of the fiet"of^north- Pyrenees, and since troubadours sang in both ern Spain Provencal and Catalan, we may well interrupt for a mo- ment our survey of the feudal states of France to note the similar divisions in northern Spain as they were in the tenth century, leaving their subsequent expansion at the expense of the Mohammedans in Spain for a later chapter. The County of Barcelona represented the remains of Charle- magne's Spanish March, and included Catalonia and Rous- sillon, a little province destined later to figure often in treaties of peace between French and Spanish monarchs. Next, going west, came the tiny Kingdoms of Aragon and of Navarre. The latter, overlapping the Pyrenees like a pair of saddle-bags, half French and half Spanish, was founded by a Gascon count with the aid of the King of the Asturias in northwest Spain, to whom he paid homage. Between Navarre and Aragon and Barcelona were inter- mingled several small semi-independent Moorish states. The Christians of Spain who escaped Mohammedan con- quest were at first confined to the Asturias in the ex- treme north, with their capital at Oviedo. Alfonso II (791-842) added Galicia. Then Leon, a devastated plain, which served for a time as a march between Christians and Moslems, was repeopled and henceforth gave its name to the kingdom. Presently a new march against the Moors was established in Castile. Returning from Spain to the remaining feudal states of France north of the Loire, we may first note in the ex- treme west the peninsula of Brittany, forming Duchy of a separate geographical unit and distinct in its Bnttany history from the rest of the Prankish territory. Here the influence of the Celtic clan was still felt. From 952 to 1066 274 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE was a period of anarchy and endless war, during whi-ch various ferocious barons contended, with many crimes and atrocities, for the ducal or regal title. From 1066 to 1 148 a line of dukes managed to maintain themselves, but this required all their energies and left them no leisure to de- velop an organized government. They had to recognize the neighboring Dukes of Normandy as their feudal superiors, and Louis VI, King of France, surrendered to Henry I, King of England and Duke of Normandy, the right to receive homage directly from the Duke of Brittany. Between Brittany and Paris lay the possessions of the Counts of Anjou, with their capital at Angers on the Loire. The Counts Fulk the Black (Foulques Nerra), the founder of Anjou Qf |-}^g dynasty and a hero of many legends, was a pitiless slaughterer of his foes on the battlefield, treacher- ous to his enemies, a great builder of churches and feudal keeps. He burned monasteries and then atoned for his sin by sensational public penances. The story also goes that he made his rebellious son, conquered after four terrible years of war, do penance by traveling several miles with a saddle on his back and then kneeling before his father, who placed his foot on his head and asked him if he was broken in yet. Fulk also made conquests at the expense of his neighbors of Blois and Brittany. But there was one person whom he could not conquer, the martyr, St. Florent. When Fulk burned the monastery of St. Florent and started to remove the precious relics of the martyr to grace his capital at Angers, the rowers could not move their boat on the Loire. The furious Fulk abused the dead saint as "an ungodly hayseed to prefer to stay at Saumur and not to allow him- self to be conveyed to the great city of Angers." But his wrath was unavailing; at Saumur the body of St. Florent remained. Fulk's son, Geoffrey Martel (1040-1060), was once as saucy to the pope as his father had been to the saint, yet he endowed many churches and abbeys. He was no less brave a fighter and more versed in military science and statesmanship than his father. During the remainder of that century Anjou was weakened by misrule and civil FEUDAL STATES OF EUROPE 275 war, but in the first half of the next century two red-headed counts, Fulk V and Geoffrey the Fair, created a strong state. Geoffrey was also a noted patron of learning and literature. Our circuit of feudal France brings us back to Normandy, lying along the seacoast and the river Seine between Brit- tany and Flanders. Here the descendants of ^^^^.j^^^j^j Rollo the Northman — three of the first six dukes were the sons of concubines — had built up the strongest and best-organized state in France at this time. The duke kept better order in his duchy than the king did on his domains. With the exception of the Count of Flanders he was the only feudal lord who had direct control over his subvassals, who placed garrisons in their castles, and who insisted that certain classes of cases even between subvassals should be tried in his court. He kept the bishop- rics and counties of Normandy in the hands of members of his own family. From 1035 to 1087 the Duke of Normandy was William, an illegitimate son of Robert the Devil. In 1066 he crossed with an army to England and conquered that kingdom and brought it thereby into closer relations with Continental feudalism, Church, and culture. After the death in 975 of Edgar the Peaceful, a great- grandson of Alfred the Great, the Anglo-Saxon monarchy began to decline in strength. The Danes had Transition begun again to attack England and for a time rule in"^ were paid tribute or "Danegeld." Finally, in England 1013, Swein, King of Denmark, conquered England and his son Cnut reigned there from 1016 to 1035. Since he also conquered Norway, he had an empire about the North Sea that made him perhaps the most powerful potentate of his time. After the disorderly reigns of Cnut's two sons, Edward the Confessor, so called for his religiousness, came to the throne in 1042. He had been a refugee in Normandy, and during his reign many Normans came to England and were influential at his court. Duke William himself paid him a visit, and afterwards asserted that Edward had promised to make him his successor. William had the lust for conquest and domination in his blood and had already 276 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE absorbed Maine, defeated the Duke of Brittany, and wrenched fiefs away from the Capetians. But when Edward died childless, the Witan chose Harold, son of God wine, the leader of the anti-Norman party in Edward's reign. Wil- liam thereupon determined to invade England. The pope approved of his expedition because Harold's party had ousted the Archbishop of Canterbury, a Norman, and re- placed him by an Englishman without papal permission. William's vassals were as keen to conquer more territory as he was, and various feudal nobles from outside Normandy were allured by the prospect of new fiefs and plunder to join his forces. He also stirred up Tostig, an unworthy brother of Harold, who was in exile and who was aided by Harold Hardrada of Norway and by contingents from the Norse colonies in Ireland, the Orkneys, and Shetlands, and from the King of Scotland. Tostig and Hardrada in- vaded northern England and defeated the Earls of North- umbria and Mercia, but Harold hurried north to the res- cue and defeated and killed both Tostig and Hardrada in the battle of Stamford Bridge. But meanwhile William's army had been enabled to land unopposed on the south coast. Harold hurried south to meet him, but now he in his turn was defeated and slain at the battle of Hastings or Senlac. William soon took London and forced the Witan to elect him king, and by 1071 he had crushed all rebellion. Before the Norman conquest the Anglo-Saxon monarchy had shown a tendency to fall apart into four or five great English earldoms, which, as the names Northumbria feudalism ^j^^j Mercia mentioned above show, followed the lines of the former independent kingdoms. The earls re- placed the former ealdormen in the various shires. Besides this tendency in the direction of feudal states, it should be noted that the kings had come to rely chiefly in their govern- ment and wars upon a nobility of service called "thegns." It was with these personal followers that they filled up the Witan to secure a subservient majority, and to them they granted or "booked" lands. Immunities, too, had been granted, and some private individuals had military retain- FEUDAL STATES OF EUROPE 277 ers or held courts of justice. Also both serfdom and selgneu- rial exploitation were familiar before the Norman conquest. William further introduced feudalism by depriving most of the English who had resisted him of their estates and giving these out as fiefs to his Continental followers. He wished, however, to keep the government in his own hands as in Normandy; so he increased the number of earls and re- duced their power, transferring some of their functions to the sheriffs representing him in each shire. And toward the close of his reign he required all his subvassals to take an oath of allegiance to himself. William showed that he was a businesslike ruler by his Domesday Book, a record of the landed property of England, its tenants, serfs, animals, agricultural equip- The Anglo- ment, fish-ponds, and other sources of income, feudal and what was owing from it to the king. William monarchy and his two immediate successors greatly strengthened the central government of England, but, like Cnut, they wisely continued the old local organization and the old English customs and laws. They were arbitrary rulers who pun- ished wrongdoers severely and squeezed more money out of the land than it had been wont to pay in the easy-going, Anglo-Saxon days. Yet their rule, though absolute and even tyrannical, was feudal in form. An army was raised from their vassals by knight service. William built rec- tangular stone "towers" or castles all over the land to hold it in truly feudal style. There were the same household officials and the same feudal curia regis as the Capetians governed by. Except that the kings continued to levy the Danegeld, their financial oppression was exercised largely by stretching their rights to feudal dues, by abusing their powers of wardship and marriage, and by demanding exces- sive fines and fees in their feudal court of justice. They were accustomed to feudal methods in Normandy and continued to employ them in England, although they gladly retained any Anglo-Saxon custom that was useful to them, just as in Normandy they had preserved some Carolingian institu- tions. 278 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE The death of Henry I in 1 135 raised the question whether England and Normandy should go to his daughter Matilda The Plan- or to his nephew Stephen, and civil war rent seSonsor England for nearly twenty years over this dis- Henry II puted succcssion. The two rivals imported paid soldiers from the Continent to fight their battles, and while these devastated the land, the feudal nobles built castles and lorded it over their localities as they pleased. Matilda, a rather haughty and disagreeable lady, had married the able Count of Anjou of the Plantagenet house, Geoffrey the Fair (1129-1151), who was fifteen years her junior. After ten years of fighting he gained Normandy in 11 44; ten years later their son, Henry Plantagenet, on the death of Stephen, became Henry II of England. When the Capetian king, Louis VII, had committed the political error of divorcing for personal reasons his wife, the imperious and capricious and frivolous Eleanor, heiress of the great Duchy of Aqui- taine with its attendant fiefs of Poitou and Gascony, young Henry had married her in I152. He was only twenty-one when he became King of England in 11 54. This made him ruler in his own and in his wife's name of territories from Scotland to the Pyrenees — he also later occupied a small portion of Ireland — and lord of over half the fiefs of Gaul. He did not, however, thereby become the monarch of a vast empire; instead, he was the lord of a number of distinct feudal states, which were out of sympathy with one another and most of which were only too ready to rebel against their lord, even if he had been a native of their own locality in- stead of a foreign intruder, such as Henry seemed to them. Henry, however, was a ruler of great energy and ability who played an important part in English history, as we shall see later. With the disruption of Charlemagne's empire and the incoming of the feudal period which we have just been ^ , , , describing, almost all the written law of the Feudal law . • 1 . ^ r o 1 previous period went out of use. Several new sources of law now existed; one was the feudal court for vassals and another was the manorial court for peasants. FEUDAL STATES OF EUROPE 279 Sometimes there were intermediate courts between these two. In Germany, besides Lehnrecht, regulating the rela- tions of fief-holders to their lords, and Hojrecht or manorial law, there was Dienstrecht regulating the status of the minis- teriales. There were vast numbers of feudal and manorial courts and consequently there was great variety in the laws produced by them, especially since their attendants were not trained lawyers, but simple warriors or peasants and rough lords, who reached a decision as best they could. Royal law as yet did not have a very wide influence and was itself largely feudal in character. By the thirteenth century some lawyers endeavored to reduce feudalism and its mani- fold customs and local diversities to a system. The business of the average feudal court was in the main limited to ques- tions of personal status and personal injuries, crimes of vio- lence, rights over land or other fiefs, and the feudal bond. EXERCISES AND READINGS Feudal States. Seignobos, Feudal Regime, translated by Dow, pp. 65-68. Feudal States of France, {For those who can read French.) Lavisse, Histoire de France, vol. ll, pp. 39-77, 283-310. The Holy Roman Empire at its Height. Emerton, Medieval Europe, pp. 174-94. Italy, 867-962. Sedgwick, A Short History of Italy, pp. 67-78. For consecutive chronological narrative of one reign after another, see, in the case of the Holy Roman Emperors, Henderson, History of Germany in the Middle Ages, pp. 117 et seq.; for the Capetians, Kitchin, History of France, vol. i, book in. CHAPTER XV THE GROWTH OF THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH Charlemagne had ruled Church as well as State, but the popes rather turned the tables upon Louis the Pious and The Papacy Other later Carolingians. While local magnates after Charle- increased their power at the expense of the '"^^"^ central government, the Church gained inde- pendence too. The Church, however, also ran the risk of dismemberment and local isolation. Bishops were revolting from the control of their archbishops just as dukes and counts were throwing off the royal yoke. During the first half of the tenth century the Papacy fell into the hands of local factions at Rome, and exerted little or no influence outside Italy. Once a boy of sixteen was made pope and dishonored the ofiftce by his wild life and neglect of duty. When Otto became emperor he found it necessary to inter- vene and put candidates of his own in the papal chair. He also issued a decree that henceforth a pope should not be consecrated until he had taken an oath of fealty to the emperor. None the less the German churches recognized the pope's spiritual supremacy, asking his consent for the creation of new bishops, his confirmation for ecclesiastical charters, and welcoming the presence of his legate at their councils. About the middle of the ninth century were composed the False Decretals, purporting to have been collected from the The False documents of early popes. These forgeries were Decretals probably not made at Rome, like the Donation of Constantine, but at Le Mans in France, with the object of freeing bishops from the control of their archbishops by magnifying the authority of the Papacy, which the bishops seem to have hoped would not press upon them so much. These Pseudo-Isidorian decretals, with their theories of GROWTH OF THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 281 papal absolutism, were generally accepted in the Middle Ages. The chief allies of the Papacy, however, were not dis- contented bishops seeking their own ends, but the monks. Bishops had many worldly concerns; some were Relations of rulers of small states themselves, others were bishops and , ' . monks to advisers and helpers of kmgs. Their selection state and was usually influenced by the secular rulers, and ^P^^y as a result they were often ambitious nobles or relatives of king or feudal lord. They sometimes, therefore, did not care greatly for the religious side of their office, and they almost always sympathized with the locality or nationality to which they belonged. Monks had less interest in worldly things and were apt to be devoted to the Papacy, to which they looked for special favors and for freedom from episcopal or other local control. Feudal nobles, however, looked covet- ously upon the richly endowed monasteries and often sought the office of abbot for the sake of the lands. About 910 the Abbey of Cluny had been founded in the Duchy of Burgundy with complete immunity from feudal or ecclesiastical control except that of the pope, ^j^^ q^^^ It soon acquired great fame by its revival of gregation monastic ideals. Its monks really lived up to their rule and were models of ascetic devotion. They were well educated, engaging in intellectual rather than manual labor, although they spent a few hours shelling, beans and digging weeds in order to make themselves feel properly humble. They conducted excellent schools, were very hospitable, and their charity to the poor won them both great popularity and many donations. Cluny was fortunate during the first two centuries of its existence in a remarkable succession of abbots, some of whom had very long terms of office. Each one practically chose his own successor and trained him for his task. Finally it became the custom that the Grand Prior should always succeed to the abbotship. Cluny became so celebrated that there was not room in one monastery for all who wished to join. So the "Congrega- tion of Cluny ' ' was formed. More monasteries were founded 282 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE in other places, but instead of each being an independent community under its own abbot, as had hitherto been the case with Benedictine monasteries, all were subordinated to the abbot of the mother monastery at Cluny, who appointed a prior for each instead of allowing the local monks to elect their head. He also visited these priories to see that their discipline conformed to Cluniac standards, and the priors met in general assemblies under his presi- dency. The popes showered Cluny with favors; Christians deluged it with gifts and legacies; by 1150 there were over three hundred priories. A reform movement now began in the Church at large, which was perhaps due in large measure to the influence Church of Cluny, whose branches were scattered over the°eKv?nth Catholic Europe and whose monks were often century called to high posts in the Church. Moreover, the Cluniac monasteries to some extent reformed the parish priesthood by the following method. Usually the lord of the manor or some other person or institution that had en- dowed the local parish church with most of its property pos- sessed the right to nominate to the bishop a candidate for the ofifice of parish priest. In other words, most parishes had lay "patrons" who had the right of "presentation" to the ecclesiastical "living." Cluny now made it an especial object to acquire among its extensive properties as many "advowsons" or rights of patronage of this sort as possible in order to be able to fill the priesthood with holier men. It was now felt that the Church as a whole should be freed from the control of kings and feudal lords as Cluny had been, and more than that, that the spiritual power should always take precedence over the temporal power and that kings and lords should be subject to the correction of the clergy and the pope. To insure further that the clergy should not become worldly, it was felt that the rules against the mar- riage of the clergy must be strictly enforced, as is the case to-day in the Roman Catholic priesthood. In the West since the later Roman Empire the clergy above the rank of subdeacon had been forbidden to lead GROWTH OF THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 283 married lives, ^ but the rule was often poorly observed, and Gregory the Great had to instruct the bishops Celibacy of of Gaul concerning it in his day. In the tenth *^^ clergy and eleventh centuries there were many married clergy in England, in northern Italy, in Germany, and elsewhere. Those who believed in the celibacy of the clergy not only regarded such priests as leading impure and sinful lives, but had another cogent reason for prohibiting clerical marriage. Married priests were too liable to transmit to their sons their ecclesiastical offices and the church property under their care. If the Church was to remain a career open to every one, an institution where ability might rise to high position regardless of social rank, and if the clergy were not to become a hereditary caste, it was felt that they must remain single. Feudalism was threatening to overwhelm the Church as it had overwhelmed almost every other institution and phase of society. The Church was the great- Danger of est landholder in existence; in the Carolingian becoming period one third of all Gaul belonged to the feudalized Church, a fact that would have caused Julius Caesar to rub his eyes in amazement had he awaked from the grave then. Most church lands were now in the form of fiefs which the clergy either held as vassals or had granted out as lords to others. Therefore, there was danger that the clergy would become mere feudal nobles and forget their religious duties, or that greedy feudal nobles who cared nothing for religion would become bishops and abbots to get the use of the church lands. If bishops and abbots were worldly self- seekers, there was little hope that the monks and priests under their surveillance would be what they should. This entrance of unworthy men into church positions, this climbing of wolves into the sheep-fold, seemed to thoughtful persons of that age to be effected in two ways, by simony and by lay investiture. Simony was an abuse ^ In the East, on the other hand, a church council at Constantinople, in 688-694, declared that those who were already married before taking higher orders need not separate from their wives unless they became bishops, but that one must not marry after one had been ordained a subdeacon. 284 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE of long standing. The term is derived from the name of Simon the magician who tried to buy the gift of the Holy Spirit from the apostles. It meant in particular the purchase and sale of church offices, and might more broadly refer to the acquisition of such offices by unworthy persons or by any improper methods, and to almost any corruption or "graft" in the Church. Purchas- ing an office was nevertheless quite a usual occurrence in the Middle Ages, and outside the Church was often not regarded as illegal, while even within the Church we have instances of good men buying offices to keep bad men from getting them. But this last fact only illustrates how much corruption there must have been in the Church. Lay investiture was the power exercised by kings and feudal lords of investing with his office and fiefs the new Lay incumbent of a bishopric or abbey. By this investiture method the rulers kept somewhat under their control the clergy and church property within their borders. A large part of the church lands had been royal or ducal grants, and kings were supposed to be protectors and de- fenders of the Church; in return they claimed that all the higher clergy within their territories were their vassals. The new bishop or abbot must do homage to his king or feudal lord and receive from him, not only the church lands as a fief, but also the symbols of his religious functions, the ring and the staff, with the words, '' Accipe ecclesiam" — "Take this church." The lay lords were also accustomed to seize for their own use the goods and lands of bishoprics and monasteries during the vacancies between the death of one incumbent and the selection of his successor. The theory of the Church, on the other hand, was that monks should elect their abbot; and the clergy and people of the diocese, their bishop; and that the feudal lord should unquestion- ingly accept such choices. In practice, however, the latter not only did the investing, but usually let it be known be- forehand whom he wished chosen, and might refuse to invest any one else with the office and the property. This power the Church wished to take away from the feudal lords GROWTH OF THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 285 and political rulers; and it was repulsive to ecclesiastical sensibilities that the blood-stained hands of some lord, who was a terror to all his peasants and neighbors, and who had perhaps ill-treated and divorced several wives, should be- stow the emblems of spiritual functions upon a successor of the blessed apostles, or upon the head of a community vowed to perpetual chastity. Yet for a time the Holy Roman Emperors assisted in the reform of the Church. Henry H, called the Saint, did much to improve the monasteries and cooperated on The emper- several occasions with the pope, who in 1018 held °hurch '" a council at Pavia which forbade the marriage reform of the clergy. The next emperor, Conrad H, was absorbed in politics and gave the Church little thought. Meanwhile the Papacy fell again under the control of a powerful Ro- man family, and Henry HI (1039-1056) found it in much the same predicament as in the time of Otto the Great. Again a mere youth had been made pope, one chronicler says at the age of twelve; and his pontificate, according to the gossip of the time, was a worse orgy than that of any of the spoiled boys among the Roman emperors. Presently there were three claimants to the Papacy. At this point Henry HI interfered, deposed all three popes, and nomi- nated a good German bishop to the Papacy. Henry was a pious ruler, earnestly desirous of church reform, and held a synod at Mainz, at which the pope was present, and which condemned simony. Through the remainder of his reign Henry HI saw to it that fit men occupied the papal see. But when he died his son was but a child, and was still only fifteen Growth of when he was declared of age in 1065. In the pendence^' meantime, in 10=^9, Pope Nicholas II had decreed dunng the "-'^' ^ minority of that henceforth the pope should be elected by Henry IV the cardinals, certain clergy connected with the churches in Rome. This is essentially the method of election followed to-day, and, although many of the cardinals reside in other countries, they still hold nominal positions in the city churches of Rome. This took the election of the pope out 286 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE of the hands of the Roman mob and Influential families, but also out of the control of the emperor. A number of decrees forbidding the clergy to receive investiture from laymen were also issued at about this time. During this period, moreover, a man was rising step by step toward the highest power in the Church, in whose breast burned with the fierceness of intense conviction those ideals of eccle- siastical purity and supremacy which have been already outlined. Hildebrand, born in Tuscany about 1025 of poor peas- ants, was educated at the Lateran school; was nourished Career of from his infancy, as he himself more than once Hildebrand said, by the Apostle Peter; and spent his entire to 1073 i-r-i 1 • TT -1, lire m the papal service. He accompanied the simoniacal pope, Gregory VI, when the latter was deposed by Henry III and exiled to Germany, and he returned to Rome with Pope Leo IX, who in 1050 made him a sub- deacon and cardinal. Three years later he was sent to France as a papal legate and became acquainted with the Abbot of Cluny, but it is certain that he never became a Cluniac monk and doubtful if he was a monk at all. On Leo's death he went from France to Germany, where Henry III appointed a German bishop as Pope Victor II. When both this pope and the emperor soon after died, the Romans chose a new pope without consulting young Henry IV or his mother, the regent. This new pope sent Hildebrand back to Germany again as one of two legates to announce his election, and, when he too died within a year, before his death he forbade the Romans to elect his suc- cessor until Hildebrand should return. They, however, elected another pope without waiting for Hildebrand. But when Hildebrand did return, he disregarded their action and at Siena secured the election of Nicholas II. It is uncertain whether in this Hildebrand was executing instruc- tions from the empress; at any rate, it shows his increasing prominence in church affairs. He now became a deacon and then an archdeacon, and was entrusted with the making of a treaty with the Normans, who had by this time occupied GROWTH OF THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 287 southern Italy. What part he had in the decree of 1059 regulating papal elections is doubtful. This decree and the treaty with the Normans produced a breach between the imperial court and Pope Nicholas. On his death there were two rival popes; one, whom Hildebrand supported, was Alexander II, elected by the method prescribed in the decree of 1059; the other was nominated by the imperial court. But at this point the great nobles of Germany de- prived the empress of the regency, and Anno, Archbishop of Cologne, held a synod at Mantua which decided the disputed election in favor of Alexander II. During this pontificate of nine years Hildebrand was undoubtedly, next to the pope himself, the leading figure at the papal court, and in 1073, when Alexander was being buried in the Lateran, the people tumultuously shouted for Hildebrand as his successor and forcibly placed him upon the vacant throne as Pope Gregory VII, without paying any heed to the election decree of 1059. Gregory VII was determined to enforce strictly the decrees against marriage of the clergy, simony, and lay investiture, which his predecessors had already Policies of promulgated. He also regarded the pope as Gregory.VII entrusted by God with supreme oversight and control of all human society; he believed himself to be above kings, and empowered to issue orders to them and to punish them if they did hot obey. He thought the State a worldly in- stitution built up by sinful men who often were violent and unjust, whereas the Church was a divine foundation. Consequently the pope should correct erring or incompe- tent monarchs. Gregory was not content to try to free the Church from the control of feudal lords ; he also attempted to bring various European states into feudal subjection to the Papacy. Corsica and Sardinia he regarded as his fiefs; the Norman ruler of southern Italy had become the vassal of the pope in 1059; and Gregory endeavored to make the rulers of Spain, England, Hungary, and Denmark his vas- sals. This illustrates how universal were feudal conceptions, that even a pope who tried to free the Church from feudalism 288 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE could not free his own mind or government from feudal methods. Among Gregory's papers is found a list of twenty-seven propositions concerning powers possessed or claimed by the 1^1. r. . . popes, known as the Dictatus. This brief mem- The Dictatus , . ^ orandum was not written by Gregory, however, since some of its propositions are contradicted in his un- disputed works; but it illustrates the vast powers claimed at about this time for the Papacy. It asserts that the pope never errs ; that he is above criticism, supreme over bishops and even a church council; supreme also over the State, the law, and literature. These were prerogatives even more extensive than Gregory VII attempted in practice, but the program was one which his successors tried to realize in the next few centuries. Gregory is cKstinguished by the violent and extreme methods which he did not hesitate to adopt in the effort to Gregory's enforce his ideals. In order to root out the mar- methods j.jg(j clergy, he deprived them of their revenues, forbade the laity to recognize them any longer as priests, and even required their parishioners to rise against them and drive them out. He not only excommunicated worldly rulers with whom he had differences, but deposed them and encouraged their vassals and subjects to revolt, thus incit- ing sedition and civil war. The pontificate of Gregory was full of struggles, but the chief conflict was with the young emperor, Henry IV. Beginning of Whether we believe that the power of the Holy with ' Roman Emperors reached its height under Henry IV Henry III, or think that it had already in his day begun to decline from the power of his predecessor, Conrad II, there is no doubt that the imperial authority was greatly weakened during the long minority of Henry IV, and that he had his hands full of political problems when Gregory VII became pope. Henry was at odds with the great nobles and was trying to build up a military power based upon the ministeriales . He also was trying to cre- ate a royal domain in Saxony, and thereby encountered a GROWTH OF THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 289 dangerous rebellion of the freedom-loving Saxons. Before Gregory became pope, members of Henry 's council had been excommunicated for their interference in ecclesiastical appointments, and Henry would incur excommunication if he continued to associate with these advisors. Since in 1073 the Saxons had got the better of Henry and there was danger that another king might be set up in his place, he wrote a very humble letter to the pope, Henry's first admitting that he had sold church offices and submission named unworthy bishops, and promising henceforth to co- operate with the pope in the cause of church reform. The next year he did penance before papal legates at Niirnberg and received a letter from Gregory congratulating him upon his "devoted servitude" to the apostolic see. By 1075, however, Henry was victorious over the Saxons and pressed the pope to agree to his immediate coronation at Rome as emperor. Gregory was inclined to Events of stipulate conditions before proceeding to the the year coronation, and had held a synod which passed new decrees against lay investiture and forbade the King of Germany to dispose of bishoprics. Henry, on the con- trary, continued his interference in the ecclesiastical affairs of northern Italy, and tried to come to an understanding with Robert Guiscard, the Norman ruler of Sicily and southern Italy. Our sources for this important year, 1075, are scanty, but it terminated with a rough letter from the pope to Henry and a still more threatening verbal message brought by papal ambassadors to the effect that Henry's private immorality and public policy were both so offensive that he was liable not only to excommunication, but to deposition. Henry thereupon summoned to Worms a coun- cil of German bishops who charged Gregory with a variety of sins and declared him deposed from his papal office. Gregory promptly replied by both excommunicating and deposing Henry, and not only released all his subjects from their oaths of allegiance, but positively forbade them to obey him. The great lay lords took the side of the pope, just as the bishops had supported Henry. The nobility 290 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE ordered Henry to refrain entirely from the exercise of his polit- ical functions until he had been released from the papal excommunication. Such a release must be secured within a year and a day or his crown would be forfeited. They invited the pope to visit Germany the next spring and arbitrate their grievances against Henry. Henry saw that the time had come for another submis- sion. He crossed the Alps in the depth of winter and met Gregory on his way north at the castle of the pope's friend, the Countess Matilda of Tuscany, at Canossa. By his penitent attitude, standing, one source says, for three days barefoot in the snow, Henry practically forced the reluctant pontiff to raise the ban of excommuni- cation. Outwardly the scene appeared a great humiliatioQ for Henry, but it was not a very substantial triumph for Gregory. Henry had satisfied public opinion by his appar- ent reconciliation with the pope, and when the great lords ignored it and elected another king in his place, they failed to receive general support. Henry in his government had shown regard for the welfare of the common people and they saw no reason for disloyalty, now that he had apparently made his peace with the Church. The real objection of the great nobles and the pope to Henry was not that he was a bad and incompetent ruler, but that he was exerting too much influence in spheres which they regarded as their own. Gregory hardly knew what attitude to take between Henry and the rival whom the princes had raised against Exile and ^^"^' -^^ tried to arbitrate between them and as death of a result alienated both parties. Finally, in 1080, when Henry threatened to set up an anti-pope unless Gregory excommunicated his rival, Gregory came to a decision and again excommunicated and deposed Henry. The German bishops thereupon held various synods, pre- ferred more charges against Gregory, deposed him, and named in his stead the Archbishop of Ravenna, a good and learned man. Henry's rival was slain in battle and Henry proceeded to attack Rome. Many of the cardinals deserted Gregory, and in 1084 Henry won the city and was at last GROWTH OF THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 291 crowned emperor by the anti-pope. Robert Guiscard, the Norman ruler of southern Italy and the pope's vassal, but who had done nothing to help him during the two-year siege of the city, now at last appeared to relieve Gregory, who was still holding out in the Castle of Sant' Angelo, formerly the tomb of the great Roman emperor, Hadrian. Henry had returned to Germany, but it was only by treach- ery that the Norman gained admission to the city. A sack followed, which was possibly more destructive of property and life than that of Alaric in 410 or that of the Vandals in 455 ; many of the people were slaughtered and the greater part of the city was burned. Naturally the Romans became more alienated from Gregory than before. He deemed it prudent to leave the city with his Norman allies and died the next year at Salerno, asserting with his last breath, "I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile." But the manner of his death was not unfitting for one who had resorted to such violent methods. The end of Henry was no happier, though he seemed for the moment to have triumphed and lived for a score of years longer. Gregory's successors renewed his Settlement .... 1 of the in- excommumcation ; his anti-popes soon became vestiture powerless; he lost control of Italy, and his sons question rebelled against him in Germany. Despite this, Henry V, on succeeding his father, pursued the same policy in regard to the question of investiture. In mi he marched upon Rome and secured from Pope Paschal II the remarkably fair proposal that the bishops and abbots should give up their secular power and their estates, and that the emperor should renounce the right of investiture. This proposal proved, however, too idealistic and revolutionary to be tolerated by the bishops and abbots in question or by the German princes generally. Instead, it was finally agreed by the Concordat of Worms in 1122 that nowhere should the clergy any longer receive the symbols of their spiritual functions from the hands of secular rulers; but that in Germany ecclesiastical elections should take place in the royal presence and that the bishop, before he could be con- 292 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE secrated, must be invested with his temporal fiefs by the king or emperor; while in the Kingdoms of Aries and of Italy the secular ruler must invest the bishop with his temporalities within six months after his consecration. This made the Italian clergy practically independent of the emperor, whereas the German Church was likely to remain still under his control. For England the question was com- promised in about the same way as for Germany, but in France the Church came nearest to settling the questions of ecclesiastical elections and investitures to suit itself. In 1 139 a papal decree that bishops should henceforth be elected by the clergy of their cathedral chapter excluded the people of the episcopal city from participating in the election, but does not appear to have lessened royal inter- ference much. Of the three reforms which Hildebrand and his pred- ecessors and successors in the papal chair had attempted. Results of they had been most successful in regard to celi- the Hilde- bacy of the clergy. Simony had been partially reform and temporarily checked, but was an abuse movement ^^^^ could scarcely ever be prevented entirely. Against lay investiture they won only a limited success and one that wg^s not even so considerable as it at first seemed. But in a general way the Church and the Papacy had shown vast strength and endurance ; as a whole their power and prestige had greatly increased, and were to continue to do so for another century. For another century, too, the popes and emperors were to be at bitter strife. The chief reason for this was the Continued occasional appearance of the Holy Roman Papacy and Emperor in Italy. As a result he kept getting the Holy jnto difficulties with the Papacy and usually Roman 1 1 -i Empire bore the brunt of the pope's displeasure, while the English and French monarchs were able to exercise a control over church affairs that the pope might not have tolerated, had his attention and energy not been so absorbed by the emperor. -. William of Normandy, for example, although he had con- GROWTH OF THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 293 quered England under papal auspices, paid no attention to the decrees against investitures and refused to William the take an oath of fealty to Gregory VII, when and^he™^ the latter requested it. William further affirmed Papacy . , that his royal permission must be obtained before church councils could be held in his kingdom, before papal bulls might be published there, and before any of his officials or !* vassals might be excommunicated. Yet Gregory did not excommunicate William or threaten to depose him, partly probably because he was a generous patron of churches and monasteries and was bringing the English church service and clergy into conformity with Continental practice; but partly in all likelihood because it was hopeless to think of deposing William who had just thoroughly conquered England and held it submissive under his strong rule. Henry IV seemed easier to fight with. But the Church was sure to press its claims as it found a good opportunity, even in France and England. The suc- cessor of the Conqueror, William Rufus, whose Growing immorality, profanity, and tyranny gave the between Church a handle against him, had an indeci- sta"Je^iJi^"^ sive struggle with his archbishop, Anselm, as to England whether the latter should obey the pope or the king on disputed points. In the next reign of Henry I the investi- ture question reached England and was finally compromised as above indicated. But then during the long civil wars between Stephen and Matilda the Church slipped away from the royal control, was granted liberties by Stephen in an effort to secure its support, and through its own ecclesiastical courts tried to supply some of the justice and security that were just then so woefully lacking. We have in earlier chapters noted the judicial privileges and powers granted by the Theodosian Code to the Chris- tian clergy of the declining Roman Empire, and Rise of Z.1- J. '^1 o-i J* r • '1 J ecclesiastical ^ that With the disappearance 01 imperial and courts: their ' municipal government in the West the bishop jurisdiction often became a sort of local ruler. Naturally his court ac- quired an increasing amount of judicial business, especially 294 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE in those departments of law which were inadequately dealt with by the customs of the barbarian invaders and the tri- bunals of the feudal lords. As the church service continued to be in the Latin language, so the church courts preserved a considerable amount of Roman law, and they were usually more merciful and equitable in their judgments than the secular courts of those times. For these reasons and others, the church courts came to claim jurisdiction not only over all cases in which a clergyman or church property was con- cerned, or where a man was charged with heresy or irreli- gion, but also over many other matters which are to-day and had been in Roman times settled by the ordinary law courts. Since baptism was a sacrament performed and recorded by the clergy, it was natural for the church courts to settle lawsuits where questions of birth were involved. Marriage, too, was regarded as a sacrament and performed by clergy and subject to rules made by the Church, such as that near relatives might not wed. Consequently cases con- cerning matrimony and applications for separation or di- vorce came before a church court. The barbarians had seldom made wills, but let their property pass in accordance with fixed custom to the nearest kin ; persons who wished to contravert this rule were apt to desire to do so in order to leave something to the Church; moreover, the clergy were about the only persons who could write a will or anything else, and they were likely to be present at deathbeds to render the last ministrations to the dying. For all these reasons the ecclesiastical courts had secured well-nigh a monopoly of the law of testaments. Since an oath was a religious act, the church courts also took cognizance of cases involving sworn contracts. The ecclesiastical courts further took it upon themselves to forbid and to endeavor to punish a number of practices which were believed to be prohibited by the Bible or by the principles of Christianity, although they might not be proscribed as torts or crimes by the secular courts. Blasphemy is one example. Another is the lending of money at interest by Christians, which was absolutely prohibited by medieval canon law. GROWTH OF THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 295 Had the bishops remained under royal control to the extent that they were in the reigns of Clovis and Charle- magne and William the Conqueror, kings might Appeals to; have raised little objection to this extension of court?^^ ecclesiastical jurisdiction, although of course the canon law fees and fines of an ecclesiastical court did not go into the royal treasury. But the bishops were coming to look more and more toward Rome, and although the investiture strife had left the kings a large influence over episcopal elections, they no longer found it as easy to control a bishop once he had been elected. Moreover, the custom had grown up of appealing cases from the local episcopal courts, presided over by the archdeacons, to the papal court at Rome, which was becoming the supreme court of Christendom. Indeed, very important cases were often brought before the papal court in the first instance. A uniform system of law came to be accepted throughout the Church in the West, based upon the decrees of the popes and church councils and upon the decisions rendered in the ecclesiastical courts, and called "canon law." A few years before Henry II became King of England a monk named Gratian at Bologna in Italy had made a compilation of the canons, or rules and decrees of the Church, which was generally accepted. Henry II speedily restored order and the royal power in England, and deprived of their castles the feudal nobles who had been making trouble. It was one thing Henry II to crush rebellious vassals, who were disorderly and Thomas BccKct and lawless and of whose anarchy and evil deeds the English people were heartily tired ; it was quite another thing to try to restrict the growing power of a great organi- zation with a systematic body of law, and which had at that time a greater hold upon the popular mind than royalty had, and which was more beloved by the people than was the stocky, red-headed, young foreigner -^ho could spend but a fraction of his time away from his vast Continental fiefs. Yet Henry elected to struggle against the Church as well as against feudalism, to try to regain from it the powers which it had assumed of late in England, and to bring its property, 296 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE its clergy, and its courts under the royal jurisdiction, and to shut off all appeals to the papal court at Rome. To ac- complish this, the busy Henry in 1162 secured the election, as Archbishop of Canterbury or Primate of the Church in England, of his friend Thomas Becket, on whose devotion he thought that he could rely and who was already serving him faithfully in political matters as his chancellor. Becket protested, however, against being made archbishop, and, as soon as he was elected, resigned the chancellorship and devoted himself henceforth solely to the interests of the Church and the Papacy. Instead of cooperating with the king in the latter's effort to check the growing independ- ence of the Church and the clergy, Thomas now opposed him at every point. A crucial instance was the question of the treatment of clergymen who had committed crimes such as murder and The question robbery, or at least were accused of such deeds, of "crimi- ^^ The ccclesiastical courts would not shed blood and were apt to let such "criminous clerks" off with a light sentence, if they found them guilty at all. Henry was very dissatisfied with this state of affairs and felt that he could not keep due order in his realm unless all criminals, whether clergy or laymen, were alike severely punished. He therefore demanded that his own judges should be present at the trial in the ecclesiastical court to see that the accused was not unduly favored, and that if the accused clergyman was found guilty, he should be turned over to the royal officials for condign punishment. But Becket held that this "would be bringing Christ again before Pontius Pilate," and carried the other bishops with him in opposition to the king. Henry, however, finally induced them to agree to obey the customs of the realm, and then called a meeting of his The "Con- barons and appointed a committee of the old- stitutions of est to draw up a list of the customs bearing upon the relations of Church and State from the reign of Henry I. These are known as the "Constitutions of Clarendon." They upheld the king in the matter of GROWTH OF THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 297 "criminous clerks"; gave the royal courts the right to determine whether cases concerning ecclesiastical lands and persons should be tried in the church courts or the king's courts; stated that the king's tenants-in-chief or his officials or the men on his own estates could not be excom- municated without his consent; forbade the clergy to leave the realm without his permission; and did not allow appeals to the papal court. After a vigorous protest Thomas un- willingly accepted the "Constitutions," but immediately after repented of his action and appealed to the pope to absolve him from the oath which he had taken to observe them. Becket then fled from the wrath of Henry to the domains of Louis VII of France, where Pope Alexander III had also taken refuge from the hostile emperor, Frederick Becket Barbarossa, and an anti-pope. The pope was ^" ^^^'^ shocked by the tenor of the Constitutions of Clarendon, and absolved Thomas from observing such as infringed upon the rights of the Church and of the clergy. But the pope did not wish to make an enemy of Henry, who controlled half of France as well as all England, and who had thus far supported him against the anti-pope set up by the emperor. The pope therefore left it to Becket to carry on a struggle for six years, in which Thomas excommunicated many of the king's followers and threatened Henry himself with the same treatment. Meanwhile the papal legates made re- peated efforts to bring about a reconciliation between the king and his archbishop. Finally Becket agreed to return to England, but as soon as he arrived issued a fresh batch of excommunications. When news of this reached Henry in Normandy, ^^^ murder he flew into such a fit of rage and used such Ian- of Becket: its results guage that four of his knights crossed the Channel and murdered the archbishop in the cathedral at Canterbury. This was a disastrous event for Henry and turned public opinion quite against him. Becket was re- garded as a martyr who had died for the Church, within three years the pope canonized him, and his shrine at Can- 298 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE terbury became the great resort of pilgrims in England throughout the remainder of the Middle Ages, and has been immortalized in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, although the shrine itself was plundered and destroyed by Henry VIII after his break with the Church of Rome. Henry II found it necessary to say no more about the Constitutions of Clarendon, to allow clergy accused of crimes to be tried in the ecclesiastical courts, and to permit appeals to Rome, He also did penance both before papal legates at Avranches in Normandy and later at Becket's tomb, where he was scourged so that he was ill the next day. Henry, however, laid the foundations in England of the common law and its courts, destined in the end to prevail throughout all England, and no future Archbishop of Canterbury was so aggressive against the Crown as Becket had been. From the strife of Church and State let us revert a mo- ment to Cluny, where the movement for church reform and Monastic ecclcsiastical independence and supremacy had movements f^j-st become apparent. The Congregation of twelfth Cluny, because of the too great wealth it had century acquired, had itself declined in influence and in popular esteem. But many new monastic orders with stricter rules came into existence in the twelfth and thir- teenth centuries, especially in France. Prominent among these were the Carthusians, who wore haircloth shirts and lived each in a separate cell, and the Cistercians, who even gave up education and all ornamentation in their churches, where there must be no sign of wealth. There was now also a widespread movement to revive the custom that priests and other secular clergy in any town should live together under a monastic rule, especially those clergy called canons who formed the chapter of the cathedral church. We saw that Augustine introduced this practice into Africa about 400 A.D. and that consequently such clergy called them- selves "Augustinian" or "Austin" canons. More than one such order of canons was founded, however. Especially prominent were the Premonstratensians, founded about 1 1 20 at Premontre, in northeastern France, by Norbert. GROWTH OF THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH 299 Thus, while Cluny had declined, the monastic movement had grown. The most influential churchman of the twelfth century never became pope. This was St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153), who, as a Cistercian monk, refused all ecclesiastical offices and honors. But he de- cided a disputed papal election and healed a schism; he peached the second crusade; he often settled disputes between princes and prelates, and he arbitrated inter- national difficulties. He was of noble descent with a beauti- ful face and graceful manners, but gave himself over to a life of rigorous asceticism and mystic devotion. Some of the hymns ascribed to him are still familiar to-day and are sung in English translation even in Protestant churches; for instance, those beginning — "Jesus, the very thought of Thee With sweetness fills the breast"; and " Of Him who did salvation bring, I could forever think and sing." St. Bernard was as outspoken concerning the faults of the clergy and abuses in the Church as he was fearless in rebuk- ing kings and lords whom he believed to be offending God. He could move both kings and crowds by his eloquence; but he had little sympathy for the secular learning which was by this time beginning to appear again in the West. He always put faith above reason. Besides the widespread monastic revival, there was another great movement which was at least semi-religious in character; namely, the crusading movement ^, which will be discussed in the next chapter on the expansion of Christendom. The First Crusade was in- spired by the pope in a speech made at Clermont-Ferrand in south central France in 1095, and the crusading move- ment as a whole illustrates the great hold which the Church had upon the men of that time. 3CX) THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE EXERCISES AND READINGS The Papacy during the Carolingian Period. Emerton, Medieval Europe, pp. 41-88. Cluny. Munro and Sellery, Medieval Civilization, pp. 137-52. The Foundation Charter of the Monastery of Cluny. Ogg, Source Book of Medieval History, pp. 245-49. 1. When is the charter granted and by whom? 2. To whom is the grant made? 3. What is ceded and for what purpose? 4. What are the motives of the grantor of the charter? 5. On what conditions is the grant made? 6. What are to be the relations of Cluny to Rome? to all other powers? The Monastic Orders. D. C. Munro, A History of the Middle Ages, pp. 122-34. Henry III and Church Reform. Emerton, Medieval Europe, pp. 194-209. Gregory VII. Article in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopadia Britannica. Investitures. Article in the Catholic Encyclopcedia. Canossa. A. H. Mathew, The Life and Times of Hildebrand (London, 1910), pp. I23-33- The Norman Sack of Rome. A. H. Mathew, The Life and Times of Hildebrand, pp. 229-41. Canon Law. Emerton, Medieval Europe, pp. 582-92. Monks of the Twelfth Century. Munro and Sellery, Medieval Civilization, pp. 153-58. St. Bernard. Munro and Sellery, Medieval Civilization, pp. 406-31. Ogg, Source Book of Medieval History, pp. 250-60. CHAPTER XVI THE EXPANSION OF CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES While feudal lords were busily engaged in acquiring power over various localities and the popes aimed at world- empire, there was one work in which they cor- The causes dially cooperated ; namely, the expansion of °^ expansion Christendom and the crusades. The Christian world in the West of Charlemagne's time had covered a very restricted area, which the invasions of Northmen, Saracens, and Hun- garians during the break-up of his empire had threatened to reduce further. But these new invaders had been finally checked or absorbed. The Northmen had been converted even in their home land, Scandinavia, and the Magyars accepted Christianity during the reign of St. Stephen of Hungary (997-1038). At the same time there were political divisions rife in the Mohammedan world, and there was a temporary lull in the pressure which the nomads of Asia had been exerting upon the West almost continuously since the first appearance of the Huns. Finally, in western Europe the population was now increasing instead of declining as in the time of the Roman Empire. The supply of land to give out as fiefs was becoming exhausted and younger sons and other would-be vassals must migrate elsewhere to satisfy their desires. Also the villas were overcrowded with tenants and serfs, many of whom could readily be drawn away by an offer of new lands and slightly better conditions of holding. Into southern Italy, where Byzantines and Saracens and local nobles and towns were contending, came in the early eleventh century Norman pilgrims returning Normans in from Jerusalem and Norman soldiers of fortune i^^iy and still possessed by their race's old spirit of wan- Sicily dering and adventure. After serving the contending parties for a time as mercenaries, they entered the fray in their 302 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE own interest. In 1053 they defeated and captured Pope Leo IX, and in 1059 Pope Nicholas II recognized Robert Guiscard (the Wary) as Duke of ApuHa, Calabria, and Sicily — land which he agreed to hold as a fief from the Papacy. He proved a troublesome vassal, and conquered a number of papal possessions, and had to be excommunicated more than once; but the popes needed his aid to put down the robber barons in the vicinity of Rome, and later to resist the Holy Roman Emperor. Southern Italy was not entirely in Norman hands until the fall of Bari, the last Byzantine stronghold, in 1071 ; and twenty more years passed before the conquest of Sicily was completed, although the Saracen capital, Palermo, was taken in 1072. Western Christianity not only gained at the expense of Islam by these Norman conquests, but those regions of southern Italy which the iconoclastic Emperor Leo had transferred to the Patriarch of Constantinople were now brought back under papal control. In 1130 the Norman rulers were granted the title, King of Sicily. They built up a strong form of government, but their dynasty ended with the twelfth century, when the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI, who had married the Nor- man heiress, made good his claim to the Sicilian crown. In the Spanish peninsula, after the dismemberment of the Caliphate of Cordova in the early eleventh century, the Christian ex- Christian states gradually pushed their bound- th"spanish aries south at the expense of the Moslems, al- peninsula though this was not accomplished without oc- casional setbacks and vicissitudes. The Christians often stopped to fight among themselves. Leon and Castile were at times united under one ruler into a strong military king- dom, and then again divided among several heirs. The progress of the Christian arms was also twice checked by fanatical hosts of Mohammedan barbarians from Africa who extended their sway into Spain and were called " Almo- ravides" and "Almohades" respectively. For example, in 1085, Alfonso VI of Castile and Leon, following up the successful campaigns of his father, took Toledo; but the next year he was decisively defeated by the Almoravides at EXPANSION OF CHRISTENDOM 303 Zaiaca in west central Spain. The advent of these barbar- ous tribes of the desert was unfavorable to the civilization which had hitherto flourished in Mohammedan Spain, nor did they build up a strong state. More intolerant than previous Mohammedan rulers, they provoked their Chris- tian subjects the more to revolt. Christian knights from beyond the Pyrenees, especially from southern France, participated in the recovery of the Spanish peninsula from the Moslems and re- Knights ceived lands for their pains. The Cistercian and monks ^ x-» It • 1 in Spain monks, at St. Bernard s suggestion, spread to Spain in the twelfth century. Various military orders — some of them general European organizations like the Templars and Hospitalers, others special Spanish and Por- tuguese Orders — also established themselves in the pen- insula and received vast grants of land. Portugal began its separate history in 1095, when the aforesaid Alfonso VI of Castile gave his natural daughter, together with the Counties of Oporto and Coim- ^^ bra, to H-enry of Burgundy, one of the foreign feudal nobles who had been aiding him in his struggle against the Almoravides. In the first half of the twelfth century the Count of Portugal became a vassal of the pope and agreed to pay him four ounces of gold a year. When in 11 79 the pope added the royal title, he received a thousand byzants on the spot and the annual payment was increased to a hundred gold pieces. The King of Aragon, too, was a papal vassal and since the eleventh century had paid a handsome yearly tribute. Aragon began to extend its borders early in the twelfth century, and in 1137 it was enlarged by the marriage of its infant queen with Ramon Berengar, Count of Barcelona and Provence. This transformed Ara- gon, hitherto an inland kingdom, into a great maritime power with a long Mediterranean coast-line. Provence passed to a French line in the thirteenth century, but Cata- lonia or the County of Barcelona remained a permanent part of the Kingdom of Aragon henceforth. 304 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE The Almohades replaced the Almoravides in Mohamme- dan Spain about the middle of the twelfth century, and Navas de toward its close came into hostile contact with Tolosa ^Yie Christian states. The Portuguese defeated them in 1 184, but they won a victory over the King of Castile in 1195. The King of Leon fought against his Christian neighbors, especially Castile, and was a secret ally of the Moslems. The King of Navarre, too, was inclined to side with the Moslems against his Christian neighbors. But Pope Innocent III did all he could to arouse the Chris- tians both of the Spanish peninsula and other lands against the Moslems, and in 12 12 the Kings of Castile and Aragon, with the lukewarm aid of the King of Navarre, gained a great victory over a vast host of Moslems at Navas de Tolosa in southern Spain. This event was soon followed by extensive conquests by the Kings of Aragon, Castile, and Portugal. James I of Aragon conquered the Balearic Isles one after another in the years from 1229 to 1235, and in 1238 added Valencia to his kingdom. Meanwhile Castile and Leon had been again united under one sovereign, who proceeded to capture Cordova in 1236 and Seville in 1248. Within a few years the Mohammedans retained only the Kingdom of Granada, a small fraction of the peninsula. Political extending along the southern coast from Gibral- of °the^Span- tar to somcwhat east of Almeria. Portugal had ish peninsula attained its present boundaries. Little Navarre, in the later , , , ^ ., Middle Ages cut oflf on the south by Castile and Aragon, had failed to expand at all. In fact, in 1200, the King of Castile had taken from her the provinces of Alava and Guipuzcoa. Roughly speaking, Aragon formed a triangle, bounded on the north by the Pyrenees, on the east by the Mediterranean from Montpellier to beyond Valencia, on the west by Cas- tile. The united realm of Castile and Leon was the largest in the peninsula, being a union of earlier states like the Asturias and Galicia, and having profited most by con- quest at the expense of the Moslems. It occupied the cen- tral plateau and extended from the Atlantic on the north- west and the Bay of Biscay on the north to the valley of EXPANSION OF CHRISTENDOM 305 the Guadalquivir In the south, touching the Mediterranean coast a Httle between Aragon and Granada, and the Atlantic coast at the mouth of the Guadalquivir between Granada and Portugal. Such for over two hundred years remained the political geography of the Spanish peninsula, until the close of the Middle Ages. After Henry I and Otto the Great in the tenth century checked the Invaders who had threatened the East Prankish Kingdom from north and east, the Holy Roman German Emperors who succeeded them gave but slight expansion attention to the problem of their eastern frontier, the twelfth They were too occupied with Italian projects, ^^"^"''^ with the Investiture struggle, and with other problems. When invasions of the Empire by the Slavs forced them to interfere, they usually contented themselves with enforcing a vague recognition of their overlordship from the Slavic princes and perhaps a more substantial payment of tribute, but they made little effort to Christianize or to settle the Slavic territory. It was therefore left to the local lords of the petty states along the eastern border to carry on the work of eastward German colonization. On the whole, not much was accomplished until the twelfth century. Then, under the leadership of the Counts of Holstein, of Albert the Bear, Count of the North Mark (1134-1170), and of Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, a great advance of the German frontier was made from the Elbe to the Oder, while the Danes made haste to secure the island of Riigen in the Baltic. The previous Inhabitants of the region between the Elbe and the Oder, Baltic Slavs in the north and Sorbs In the south, were for the most part either ejected from Displace- their lands or fell to the position of serfs or "j^nt of wretched cottagers without any legal title to the German small plots of land which they occupied. The '^^'^"'sts Slavs, whose wooden ploughs merely scraped the surface of the soil, had generally occupied only the more easily culti- vated land, and had left swamps, forests, and thickets unreclaimed. Now German colonists with their superior 3o6 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE ploughs entered the land, while Flemings and Hollanders, who had learned at home the art of reclaiming fens and morasses, were introduced in large numbers by the new lords of the soil. To get colonists, however, to settle the waste, it German Xortb-Easttvard Expansion 1."n' t] Frontier of Holy Rjman. Empire before IGWi century ^Oerman colonization in \2t!i and I3tk centuries was necessary to offer them attractive terms and to free them from most of the restrictions imposed by feudal lords upon their peasants. Usually they merely paid a moder- ate money rent. They received larger allotments of land than the average peasant had at home; and in these new settlements the individual's holdings were not scattered about as on the ordinary medieval villa, but comprised one large strip which its holder was free to cultivate as he pleased. In 1 143 was founded by the Count of Holstein the first German city on the Baltic Sea, Liibeck, destined soon to be a great center of trade. In 1165 the discovery of silver in the land of the Sorbs caused a great inrush of fortune- hunters and the growth of the city of Freiberg, not far from EXPANSION OF CHRISTENDOM 307 modern Dresden. But on the whole towns did not develop much until the thirteenth century. When they did, the Slavs were allowed only in certain streets and in certain occupa- tions. Germans, on the other hand, were attracted by ofifers of personal freedom, exemption in large measure from tolls and other vexatious dues, and by grants of partial self-gov- ernment. The result was that especially in Mecklenburg and Brandenburg the country was thoroughly Germanized. Slavic traditions and folk-lore disappeared even among the common people, and in the eighteenth century more persons speaking a Slavic dialect could be found in German territory west than east of the Elbe. In Mecklenburg, however, a Slavic prince who had been allowed to rule as a vassal of Henry the Lion became the founder of the present reigning houses in both Duchies of Mecklenburg. In the southeast, in the Mark of Austria and in parts of the Duchies of Carinthia and Styria there had been some German colonization since the close of the tenth Further century, but the movement was at its height expansion there in the late twelfth and the thirteenth cen- eastward turies. In the northeast after the twelfth century German expansion went on beyond the Oder farther east in Pome- ranla, Silesia, and Prussia. The Slavic princes themselves, in Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Silesia, Bohemia, Moravia, and Poland, often called in the superior German laborers as settlers; and the frequent marriage alliances of the same Slavic princes with daughters of the German noblHty facili- tated the spread of Christianity. The new religious orders of the twelfth century were prominent In the colonization of the northeast. Norbert, founder of the Premonstratensians, was from Coloniza- 1126 to 1 134 Archbishop of Magdeburg, the f\^^^ ecclesiastical metropolis nearest to that frontier, military In the later decades of the twelfth century the °^ ^'^^ Cistercians played the greatest part, and their monastic settlements sometimes advanced to regions where the power of German lords had not yet penetrated. In the thirteenth century came the military and crusading orders, 308 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE the Teutonic Knights and the Brethren of the Sword, who were to make conquests far beyond the Vistula. Not long after Otto had repulsed the invasions of the Hungarians their kings became Christians and tried to Expansion convcrt their people forcibly to the same faith of Christian by the aid of numerous clergy from western Europe and knights from Germany. In the next century came a relapse of part of the country into pagan- ism; but in the twelfth century the Gregorian reforms and the Cistercian monks revived Christian influence. Hungary was now a powerful state and about iioo absorbed Croatia and gained access to the Adriatic, and annexed the cities of the Dalmatian coast, which had hitherto owed allegiance to Constantinople. By the close of the twelfth century Hun- gary had the same religious and political institutions as the rest of western Christian Europe, and shared also in its culture to a large extent. The monks, who were numerous in Hungary in the twelftli century, came from France. But in the second half of that century the Magyars called in Flemish and German colonists to settle and defend Transyl- vania or Siebenbiirgen, a debatable territory away over on their eastern frontier. In the East, as the power of the Arabs and Bulgarians had declined in the course of the tenth century, the Byzan- Byzantine ^^"^ Empire had begun to expand again. The expansion islands of Crete and Cyprus, the city of Antioch, about 1000 1 , , r r^ • 1 r and a large part ot Syria, were recovered from the Saracens; and the frontier was extended to the upper Euphrates. Farther north an advance was made to the Caucasus Mountains. In Europe, especially during the reign of Basil II (976-1025), all Bulgaria was brought under Byzantine rule. Once Basil blinded fifteen thousand Bul- garian captives and sent them home as a warning, leaving one prisoner out of every hundred one eye in order that he might serve the others as a guide. Basil's sister mar- ried the Prince of Russia, who thereupon adopted Chris- tianity. While the Serbs were allowed local autonomy under their own rulers, they were forced to recognize the EXPANSION OF CHRISTENDOM 309 overlordship of Constantinople, by whose territories they were surrounded on the east, south, and southwest. For both the politics and the culture of Constantinople at this epoch our chief sources of Information are the hundreds of treatises on varied subjects, the history, and the letters, of Psellus, a prolific writer of the eleventh century who was interested In everything under the sun as well as In theology. In 1057, after reigning at Constantinople for nearly two centuries, the Macedonian dynasty died out, and for a generation there was confusion and anarchy in j^jgg ^f ^j^^ the Byzantine Empire. Meanwhile the peren- ^^^J"^ nial migration of Asiatic nomads westward had been renewed by the Turks. A branch of this race, known as the "Petchenegs" or "Patzlnaks," had been for some time on the lower Danube. It was to protect their eastern frontier against this tribe that the Hungarians Introduced German settlers into Transylvania in the later twelfth century. Another branch, known as the "Seljuk Turks," from their legendary hero-founder, became In the eleventh century the ruling element in the Moslem world. After con- quering Persia they accepted Islam and entered the service of the Abbassid caliphs at Bagdad. The result was that the caliph soon ceased to be anything more than the nominal religious head of the Mohammedan world, while a Turkish sultan held all the military and political power. The Seljuks spread into Syria, Armenia, and Asia Minor; In 1071, at Manzlkert In Armenia, they won a decisive victory over the Byzantines, and soon had taken away all of Constanti- nople's Asiatic territories. The Turks were ignorant and fanatical barbarians like the Almoravldes and Almohades, and had a like evil effect upon Arabian culture. The heyday of Bagdad, Effect of like that of Cordova, as a center of civilization Turkish f y". .1 ^"^6 on was now over, and the days of Constantmople Arabian were numbered. It was time for the teeming ^" ^^^^ and expanding population of feudal western Europe to take up the torch of civilization. The Turks not only showed no bent for the remains of Greek, Persian, Syrian, and Arabian 3IO THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE arts, sciences, and industries scattered through their terri- tories; they also failed to reunite the Moslems into a politi- cal whole. Various leaders broke away from the control of sultan and caliph and conquered independent principalities for themselves. This naturally led to many wars between rival Mohammedan princes. For the present, however, the Turks were none the less a pressing danger to Constantinople, and when Alexius Alexius (1081-1118) firmly estabhshed the Comnenian Comnenus dynasty on the throne, he still found many prob- lems confronting him. Robert Guiscard, whose daughter had married the son of a preceding emperor, invaded the northern part of the Greek peninsula and penetrated as far as Thessaly. He was then called back to Italy to succor Pope Gregory VII, and in his absence his forces were ex- pelled from Greece. He continued the war until his death in 1085, however, but then his son Bohemond made peace with Alexius. Meanwhile the Patzinaks had been invading Thrace, and it was only after nine years of war that Alexius finally drove them out of his empire. He was next confronted by the far more arduous task of repelling the Seljuk Turks, but in this enterprise he was destined to receive assist- ance from vast armies of crusaders from western Europe. Our sources concerning the crusades are more ample than for any other wars or migrations of the Middle Ages. Besides Sources for numerous chronicles concerning them, there are the crusades djaries and letters written by the crusaders themselves. There is also a wealth of official documents bearing in one way or another upon the crusades and the states founded by the crusaders in the East. There were also numerous allusions to the crusades in the popular litera- ture of the time. Yet many important points are still left in dispute; for instance, whether Alexius summoned the crusaders or not. Moreover, the narrators of the crusades introduce so many portents and miracles, and are themselves so convinced that these expeditions were especially favored by divine guidance and by providential Intervention at critical moments, that their accounts sometimes seem to EXPANSION OF CHRISTENDOM 311 belong more to the realm of mysticism or romance than to that of sober history. One fears that they may even have exaggerated the losses and sufferings of the crusaders in order to make their victories seem the more remarkable. The word "crusade" is derived from the practice of "taking the cross" — after the example and precept of Christ — which was adopted by those who went Definition on the First Crusade and was then followed in °^ ^ crusade the subsequent expeditions. The crusader wore a cross of cloth upon his breast on his way to the Holy Land; upon his return after fulfilling his vow he bore the cross upon his back between the shoulders. A crusade has been defined as "a religious war, preached in the name of the Church, stimulated by solemn grant of ecclesiastical privileges, made by a more or less cosmopolitan army, and aiming either directly or indirectly at the recovery of holy places." Or, we may say more specifically that the crusades were initiated by the pope ; that remission of sins was promised to sincere crusaders; that the various feudal states, monarchies, and city republics of western Europe shared in the movement; and that the main object was to recover Jerusalem from the Mohammedans. The crusading movement was launched by the Pope Urban II, in 1095 in a speech before a great concourse of two hundred and fifty bishops, four hundred abbots. Speech of many feudal lords and knights, and a multitude Urban 1 1 of the people at a council at Clermont-Farrand in south central France. It is possible that the Emperor Alexius had appealed to the pope for aid against the Turks ; at any rate, if he had not, one of his predecessors had al- ready made such an appeal to Gregory VII. But in either case the Byzantine emperor merely wished some auxiliary mercenary troops to help him reconquer Asia Minor from the Turks. On the other hand, at Clermont the pope broached the idea of an independent Western enterprise, having for its chief aim, not to help the Byzantine Empire, but to recover Jerusalem and the holy places. The Turks had taken Jerusalem in 1078, since when the pilgrims had 312 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE brought home tales of ill-treatment of themselves and of the native Christians living there. Also Urban offered the participants in the crusade, not the wages of mercena- ries, but the hope of an eternal reward. The result was that, while in 1074 the lords of western Europe had received Gregory's request for troops to aid the Byzantine emperor rather coldly, and he himself had finally dropped the pro- ject, in 1095 Urban's eloquent appeal brought forth from the assembled throng shouts of " It is the will of God," and within a year hundreds of thousands had been persuaded to undertake the perilous pilgrimage to Jerusalem. There were yet other reasons why so many hastened to take the cross. For a long time Western Christians had Other been in the habit of making pilgrimages to the causes of Holy Sepulcher, and of late they had often gone in large numbers and armed. The crusades were a further development of this practice upon a still larger and more warlike scale. We have seen, too, that the feudal noble had wandering and adventurous instincts, that he loved fighting, and that he ever craved to gain new territory. Recently William the Conqueror had led a host against England and Robert Guiscard and his brother Roger had invaded Saracen Sicily, in each case with the approval of the pope and with a consecrated banner; while in Spain many knights from other lands had fought with the Chris- tian princes to win lands from the Moslems. The taking of Toledo in 1085 had been followed, however, by the defeat of the Christians at Zalaca in 1086 by the Almoravides. Perhaps the pope thought to offset this repulse in the West by striking a blow against the Mohammedans in the East. Moreover, the princes of the West were already of their own accord beginning to cast covetous eyes upon the East, as the recent effort of Robert Guiscard to conquer the Byzan- tine Empire had demonstrated. France was now an over- populated country where there were frequent famines and economic distress, but it was also a land overflowing with vigor and enterprise. Many of its knights would eagerly seize an opportunity to conquer new fiefs for themselves in EXPANSION OF CHRISTENDOM 313 foreign parts. Pope Urban himself was a native of Cham- pagne and he proclaimed the crusade in Auvergne, another region of France. In the coast cities of Italy, too, were a commercial enterprise and a growing sea power which did much to make the crusades possible. Indeed, the fleets of Genoa, Pisa, and Amalfi had already made attacks of their own upon the Saracens of Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and North Africa. But while such political and economic forces and worldly motives probably would of themselves have resulted in some sort of secular expeditions directed toward Religious the East, there would have been no crusades of the without the leadership of the pope and the in- crusades fluence of the Church, without the offer of indulgences and other spiritual benefits to those participating, and without the medieval susceptibility to religious emotion and excite- ment, and without the spirit of self-sacrifice to Christ. "Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." Such was the true watchword of the crusader. It is a fact that many bad men went on the crusades, — beggars, vagabonds, outlaws, criminals, — but some even of these were actuated in this case by a good motive. It is true that many who took the crusading vow in a moment of contrition and devotion afterwards sullied their cause by their actions along the route. But the fact remains that for thousands the crusade was primarily a religious act, and that multitudes laid down their lives for the cause in the arid mountains of Asia Minor or among the hot sands of Syria, victims to famine, plague, and thirst, as well as to the swords of the Seljuks, but, in their own opinion and in that of the Church which sent them forth, "more than conquerors." After the council at Clermont Urban visited many other places in France, preaching the crusade, and Participants many other clergy did the same. Chief among in the First them was Peter the Hermit, who stirred espe- cially the common people, women and children as well 314 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE as men, of central France and the Rhine Valley to seek the Holy Land. William Rufus, Philip I, and Henry IV, kings of England, France, and Germany respectively, were at this time all under papal excommunication and not one of them went on the crusade. But the feudal nobility from both northern and southern France and from Norman Italy took the cross with avidity. The pope, who was still en- gaged in the investiture struggle, sent a French bishop as his representative. The bands, made up partly of simple pious folk and partly of unruly vagabonds, which Peter the Hermit and similar March to popular preachers had gathered, contained few Asia Minor armed knights and either never reached even Constantinople or were cut to pieces by the Turks in Asia Minor. Their depredations in the countries of southeast- ern Europe through which they passed often led the natives to attack them. Or, if the crusaders were in too great force to be attacked, the peasants of the country would flee to woods and mountains until they had passed by. The feudal armies were more thorough and took longer in their preparations than the ill-organized bands which had preceded them, and crossed the Balkan peninsula to Con- stantinople in several contingents and by different routes. Godfrey of Bouillon led a great army from northeastern France and Lorraine in a quiet march across Germany and Hungary, reaching Constantinople just before Christmas, 1096. The Duke of Normandy, the Count of Flanders, and others from northern France took about the same route as the Normans of Italy under Bohemond, whose march was to Brindisi and then from Durazzo to Saloniki. The knights from southern France, under Raymond of Toulouse and the papal representative, crossed northern Italy, and then skirted the Adriatic to Durazzo and had to fight the Slavo- nians on their way. All these contingents arrived in the course of the spring of 1097. There were yet other leaders than those mentioned and the feudal lords were not inclined to take orders from one another, so that there was not likely to be much cooperation or maintenance of discipline. EXPANSION OF CHRISTENDOM 315 In Bohemond, however, they had an able military com- mander, who, by waiting with a reserve force of cavalry and then making an attack at the critical point at the critical moment, won most of the battles in which they engaged with the Turks. Alexius must have been astounded when he heard from the pope that three hundred thousand men would be on their way to Constantinople. He was perhaps Attitude still more amazed when the motley following Byzantine of Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless emperor arrived. Both in their case and that of the better equipped armies which arrived later, his policy was to get them out of the city and across the Straits into Asia as rapidly as possi- ble and before their numbers should be too greatly swelled by further arrivals. In the case of the later, well-organized armies he also endeavored to have all the leaders take an oath of fealty to him and agree to hold all conquests that they might make as fiefs of the Byzantine Empire. This they were naturally loath to do, and he had to attack some of them and bribe others to secure their oaths, while some never took the oath. In brief, Alexius' position was that he would allow the crusaders to reconquer for him the territory which he had not been able to prevent the Turks from tak- ing away from him, and which he unaided would probably have been quite unable to recover. When the various bodies of crusaders had finally joined forces in Asia Minor before the walls of Nicaea, not far from Constantinople, and were just on the point of The taking reducing it, Alexius procured by secret negotia- ^^ ^^cxa. tions that the city should surrender to him rather than to the crusaders, whom he refused to admit within the walls, although he tried to satisfy some of the leaders with presents. Thus he showed that he did not trust the pledges which the crusaders had recently made, and the result was that hence- forth they did not trust him. He had been offended by the insolent manners of some of them at his court in the city, and by their plundering the country as they marched through his territories. They had against him the deeper 3i6 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE grievance that instead of cooperating generously with them in their great enterprise, he tried by diplomacy, bribery, and tricks to make use of them for his own ends. From Nicaea they marched on and soon won a vic- tory in the field over the Turks that opened up to them the route across Asia Minor. Alexius loitered in their wake, gathering up in western and southern Asia Minor the fruits of the victories which they had won, and later attempting to wrest from them the territories which they had occupied in Syria. Naturally afterward relations be- tween the crusaders and the Byzantine emperor were sel- dom cordial. After a terrible march across Asia Minor the crusaders reached Little Armenia, a Christian state founded by fugi- -pjjg tives from Greater Armenia, and hostile alike to crusaders the Saraccns and the Byzantine Empire. As the crusaders approached Syria, the leaders began to bethink them of the territorial conquests which each might make. One of them left the main army and penetrated east of the Euphrates to Edessa, where he established a lord- ship of his own. This was nevertheless a useful exploit, as Edessa served to protect Syria from attack from that direc- tion. The main army laid siege to Antioch for seven months. It finally fell, owing to the treachery of one of the garrison with whom Bohemond had entered into secret negotiations, but in return for this service by Bohemond the other leaders had to relinquish Antioch to him, despite their oaths to Alexius and their own ambitions. But imme- diately the Christians were themselves penned up in Anti- och by a Turkish army, which had arrived just too late to save the city from their excesses. The crusading army was by now sadly depleted by famine, plague, and the desertion of many who had sailed away home. But the digging-up of what was supposed to be the lance that pierced the side of the crucified Christ suddenly inspired the host with re- newed vigor and enthusiasm, and the Turkish force was driven off. But then for several months longer the crusaders tarried at Antioch, recuperating while their leaders quar- 3i8 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE reled. At last the murmurs of the mass of the crusaders forced their chiefs to lead them on to Jerusalem. The Fatimite caliph of Cairo, whom the crusaders had been trying to obtain as an ally against the Turks, had j^^ recently captured Jerusalem from the Seljuks, taking of but refused to surrender it to the crusaders, jerusaem Therefore they marched south against Jerusa- lem, supported by the fleets of Genoa and Pisa, which fol- lowed the coast and kept them supplied with provisions. On July 15, 1099, the Holy City fell to them after a siege of two months, although they had but forty thousand men left. After slaughtering Saracens all day long in the temple precincts, at nightfall the crusaders, "sobbing for joy," paid their devotions at the sepulcher of the Prince of Peace. Their object had been gained ; and when we consider all the obstacles and difificulties which they had to surmount, we must agree that despite its shortcomings the First Crusade was one of the most daring and brilliantly successful mili- tary expeditions recorded in history. The news of the taking of Jerusalem was received with boundless joy in Europe, and many pilgrims hastened east to the support of their fellows. Unfortunately most of the reinforcements were massacred by the Turks in Asia Minor. Nevertheless, the Christians continued to hold Jerusalem, and with the aid of the ships of the Italian cities they soon Latin gained the towns of the Syrian coast. Godfrey of states Bouillon, the first ruler of Jerusalem, took the yna niodest title. Defender of the Holy Sepulcher, but upon his death in 1 100 his brother was made king. The other three principalities in Syria founded by the crusaders, Edessa, Antioch, and the County of Tripoli, which Raymond of Toulouse began to conquer in 1102 to the south of Anti- och, soon became dependencies of the Kingdom of Jerusa- lem, which extended its frontier south to the Red Sea. Thus Western Christendom had acquired a strip of territory bor- dering the eastern end of the Mediterranean from the Euphrates to Egypt. It was, however, a narrow strip with Turkish emirs and fortresses lining its eastern frontier. EXPANSION OF CHRISTENDOM 319 The Kingdom of Jerusalem was important for its trade as well as its holy places, especially so long as it touched the Red Sea waterway to the Far East and also in- -pj^^jj. tercepted the caravan routes from Cairo to commercial Damascus. The Italian cities which aided the "^^ '^ ^"^^ crusaders — Genoa, Pisa, and later Venice — received quar- ters of their own in coast towns and exemptions from tolls. In these quarters they had their own courts; in fact, such Italian trading settlements were practically colonies ruled by their mother cities. Through the Assizes of Jerusalem, a code of law of the middle of the twelfth century, we are well informed con- cerning the constitution of the Kingdom of Jeru- The Assizes salem, which had a form of government that °^ Jerusalem could be found only in the Middle Ages. It was a sort of ideal feudal state, as one might expect from the fact that a feudal army had founded it. Just as Baldwin had seized Edessa for himself and Bohemond had taken Antioch, so the lesser lords of the crusading host seized various strong- holds along the route before Jerusalem was reached and cap- tured. Therefore the new-made king found his vassals al- ready in possession of their fiefs and his power considerably limited in consequence. Besides a central feudal court there were over a score of feudal courts in the various fiefs of the kingdom. We have seen, however, that the humbler crusaders could make their wishes felt on occasion, and we shall see in the next chapter that this was a period of the growth of towns and of the acquisition of political rights by townsmen. Therefore it is not surprising to find an inde- pendent class of burghers recognized in this new kingdom alongside of the feudal nobles. Indeed a burgher might rise to knighthood, while feudal nobles were forbidden to acquire property in the towns. There were thirty-seven local courts for burghers as well as a central court of this type. There were also independent church courts, and the military crusading orders came to have large powers in the kingdom. Not very many Westerners settled permanently in the 320 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE East, and the population remained for the most part native Population Syrian Christians and Moslems. Some of the feifse!^mili- newcomers intermarried with the natives. Pil- tary orders grims arrived in goodly numbers every year, and would perhaps tarry to fight for a year or two, but seldom stayed for long. Indeed, it was difficult to get enough troops, and the king made much use of native cavalry. Two new religious orders, however, whose members took monas- tic vows but whose chief business was to fight, were estab- lished for the defense of the Holy Land ; namely, the Knights Hospitalers, or "Poor Brethren of the Hospital of St. John at Jerusalem," — originally a sort of medieval Red Cross organization, — and the Knights Templars, or Knights of the Temple. Magnificent fortresses, whose remains are still visible, were constructed both by the members of these two orders and by the other crusaders in Syria. The new lords of the land soon lost their bloodthirsty attitude toward the Mohammedans, and made little dis- Attitud tinction of race or creed in their government, toward The coinage of the Kingdom of Jerusalem imi- ^ ^"^ tated the Arabic even to the extent of retaining verses from the Koran, until the pope forbade this. The Westerners soon adopted Oriental dress and ways. They employed Mohammedan agricultural laborers, physicians, and dancing-girls. They sometimes formed alliances with Moslems against one another, like the Christian states of the Spanish peninsula. They often came to prefer to live on terms of peace and commercial intercourse with their Mohammedan neighbors, and so did not always cooperate heartily with, nor cordially welcome, the new pilgrims and crusaders who came out eager to slaughter Paynims. These Latin states in Syria were not to be a permanent possession of Europeans. In 1144 the Mohammedans cap- Fall of tured Edessa. St. Bernard took the lead in preach- fhi^SJnd i^^g ^ crusade to counteract this, and Louis VII Crusade and Conrad III, Kings of France and Germany, took the cross. Their armies started separately and were almost annihilated in traversing Asia Minor; the remnants EXPANSION OF CHRISTENDOM 321 that reached Syria failed to accomplish anything. Those who have listed seven (a sacred number) chief crusades from among the many expeditions of the sort have called this the Second Crusade. In 1 171 the rule of the Fatimites in Egypt was brought to a close by a young Moslem named Saladin, who seized the throne and soon extended his power over most of Saladin and the Moslem emirs to the east of the Latin states the Third C I* U S3. of of Syria. In 11 87 he took Jerusalem. This caused the Third Crusade in which three well-known mon- archs took part, Frederick Barbarossa, King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor, Philip Augustus of France, and Richard the Lion-Hearted of England, Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine. Frederick, who was now well along in years, took the land route via Constantinople and was drowned in crossing a small stream in southern Asia Minor. Most of his army thereupon dispersed. Richard and Philip embarked their armies at Marseilles and Genoa, and wintered in Sicily. There they began to quarrel and Richard broke off his engagement with Philip's sister. At last they set sail for Acre on the Richard Syrian coast, which the Christians had been Coeur de vainly besieging for the past two years. But Richard, who was always ready for adventures, stopped to conquer the important island of Cyprus and to capture the Byzantine emperor. In Cyprus, too, he married his new fiancee, Berengaria of Navarre, who had already joined him in Sicily. Then Acre was taken, and Saladin agreed to re- store the true cross and many Christian captives and to pay an indemnity. But now news came that the Count of Flan- ders had died, and Philip, anxious to secure his territory, announced that he was ill and must return to France, where he was soon plotting to deprive Richard of his fiefs on the Continent. Richard, remaining in the Holy Land, per- formed many knightly exploits and prodigies of valor which made him the hero of romances for a long time to come, but failed to recover Jerusalem. He won, however, the respect of the chivalrous Saladin who sent him snow and 322 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE fruit when he was sick with a fever. They finally made a truce, leaving a portion of the coast in the hands of the Christians and allowing pilgrims free passage to Jerusalem for the next three years. The Christians also still held much of northern Syria. On his way home Richard fell into the hands of his enemy, the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI, and his subjects had to pay a huge ransom to set him free. Many other crusades followed. In 1197 a German expe- dition took Beirut, but accomplished little else. A crusade End of ^^ 1 202-1 204 which was turned against Con- crusades to stantinople will be described later in another connection. In 12 12 there was a crusading move- ment among the children, whose innocence it was hoped might prevail where sinful knights had failed. Most of these bands of children wandered about western Europe a while and then broke up; some came to Rome and were sent home by the pope; some reached the Mediterranean and were disappointed that a dry path to Palestine did not open up through the sea for them, as had happened of old in the Red Sea for the benefit of the children of Israel. Some of these were induced to embark by rascally shipowners, who carried them off to Mohammedan lands and sold them into slavery. The King of Hungary went to Syria on crusade in 12 1 7, and during the four years following an expedition was directed against Damietta in the Nile Delta. The Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, went out in 1228, and by skillful diplomacy with little fighting secured from the Moslems the cession of Jerusalem and the country between it and the coast, and reconstituted the Kingdom of Jerusa- lem. It lasted until 1244, when the Turks retook the Holy City. By 1291 the Christians had lost Acre, their last stronghold in Syria. The Italian cities, however, retained their quarters and trading privileges even under Mohamme- dan rule. Meanwhile the last crusades of any importance were those of the saintly King of France, Louis IX, who in 1248 went to Egypt, where he was taken prisoner and ransomed, and in 1270 went to Tunis, where he died. The Christian people of western Europe did not, however, en- EXPANSION OF CHRISTENDOM 323 tirely drop the idea of a crusade. They continued to think and talk about crusades for the next two centuries; many popes had such a movement at heart, and princes some- times planned a crusade. But no great expedition directed toward the recovery of Jerusalem actually took place. Meanwhile the name and idea of a crusade had been ex- tended to other expeditions than those to the Mohamme- dan East, as indeed the crusades against Con- other types stantinople and Tunis have already shown. °^ crusades When St. Bernard preached the Second Crusade, he at the same time permitted the Saxons to engage in a crusade against the Baltic Slavs. Several bands of crusaders to the East had halted in Portugal and aided its monarchs against the Moslems in the Spanish peninsula; and military religious orders were founded in Spain as well as in the East. The Teutonic Knights, founded at Acre by Germans in 1190, forty years later transferred their activities to the shores of the Baltic and engaged in the conquest of the heathen Prus- sians. In 1208 a crusade was preached against the heretics in southern France. Finally, Pope Innocent IV went to the length of offering the privileges of crusaders to those who would join in his war against an orthodox Christian prince and former crusader, Frederick II. To those joining his crusade against Frederick's successor, Conrad IV, he "granted a larger remission of sins than for the voyage to the Holy Land, and included the father and mother of the crusaders as beneficiaries." This leads us back to the theme of the privileges granted to crusaders. Urban II at Clermont had simply decreed that "if any one, through devotion alone and not Privileges of for the sake of honor or gain, goes to Jerusalem crusaders to free the church of God, the journey itself shall take the place of all penance." In subsequent crusades an increasing number of material privileges had been offered to induce men to take the cross, such as a respite from debts and law suits, permission to mortgage their lands without the con- sent of their lords, and the protection of the Church for their families and property during their absence. 324 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE As wars the crusades were unusually expensive and de- structive for those times. The loss of life was enormous, but Results of perhaps served to remedy the problem of over- the crusades population in France. Whether this great sacri- fice of blood and treasure checked to a great extent the spread of Mohammedanism, and whether it saved or weak- ened the Byzantine Empire at Constantinople, are disputed questions. But we may note that hardly had the last Chris- tian fortress in Syria fallen than the Turks began to threaten Constantinople again from Asia Minor. It thus seems as if Western Christendom, by taking the offensive, had held back Islam in the East for two centuries. The crusades increased the prestige of the pope and the influence of the Church, and show how religion colored every side of medieval life. The crusades seem on the whole to have weakened the feudal nobility, many of whom impoverished themselves in order to go on the crusades or neglected their fiefs by long periods of absence. On the other hand, the association of so many knights in these expeditions stimu- lated the social side of feudalism and developed greatly the usages of feudalism, such as tournaments, heraldic devices and coats of arms, family names and genealogies. The new military orders and the w4de currency given to the exploits and adventures of the crusaders abroad added a new glamour and dignity to knighthood. The crusaders were travelers to strange and far countries as well as soldiers, and those who lived to return brought back with them new things, words, and ideas. We must remember, however, that what any one gets out of a trip abroad depends a great deal upon himself. He may see splendid works of art or strange inventions without appre- ciating them. If the crusades served as an education to the Westerners, it was because they were no longer ignorant barbarians. We must also remember that Western Chris- tians could borrow from A^rabian civilization in Spain and Sicily without going to distant Syria. Probably the most lasting result of the crusades was the trade which the Italian cities established with the Orient, and this might well have EXPANSION OF CHRISTENDOM 325 developed without any wars at all. The crusades, however, at least served to give European society a shaking-up. Holders of fiefs died in Asia Minor and their lands passed to other lords. Crusaders sold their property and borrowed money and bought supplies and hired ships and took out letters of credit on Italian or Jewish bankers in Syrian ports. All this brought money and land and goods into circulation, and made more business, and caused activity and change and bustle and excitement. The crusades were in a sense a failure, but there was enterprise behind them, and enter- prise is a good thing of itself. We shall next turn to two even greater movements at home, which accompanied the expansion of Christendom abroad ; namely, the rise of towns in western other great Europe, and a great development of art, litera- mov^rnents ture, and learning through the twelfth and thir- twelfth teenth centuries. These two parallel movements besideTthe were not caused by the crusades, but were, like crusades the crusades, symptoms and products of a new energy and enterprise and life and civilization in the society of western Europe. 326 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE EXERCISES AND READINGS The Normans in the South. Haskins, The Normans in European History, chap. vii. German Expansion to the Northeast. Fisher, Medieval Empire, vol. ii, pp. 1-24. German Expansion to the Southeast. Fisher, op. cit., pp. 25-54. A Charter granted to German Colonists. Thatcher and McNeal, Source Book for Medieval History, pp. 572-73; or Ogg, Source Book of Medieval History, pp. 330-33. Pilgrimages before the Crusades. Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, vol. 11, pp. 122-31. The Speech of Urban II at Clermont. Thatcher and McNeal, Source Book for Medieval History, selections 278-80 (pp. 512-21, omitting from page 514 to the middle of page 516). 1. Of the three appeals to a crusade which is the most stirring? 2. List the arguments for a crusade put forward in each selection. 3. What essential features of a crusade are not referred to in the letter of Gregory VII? Ibn Jubair's Account of his Journey through Syria, Munro and Sellery, Medieval Civilization, pp. 257-68. 1. Cite some passages to show that the writer is a Moslem. 2. Cite some passages showing prejudice against Christians. 3. What is his estimate of Christian rule in Syria? 4. Cite some passages to illustrate the association of Moslems and Christians in daily life. 5. What two Christian ports in Syria impress the writer most and how does he compare them? Character and Results of the Crusades. Munro and Sellery, op. cit., pp. 248-56. Stories of the Crusades. Munro and Sellery, op. cit., pp. 269-76. Essays on the Crusades. Munro, Prutz, and Diehl; published by the International Quarterly. The Children's Crusade. Luchaire, Social France (translated by Krehbiel), pp. 25-28. Original Sources concerning the Crusades. Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. l, chap. xv. Translations and Reprints of the University of Pennsylvania, vol. I, no. 2, Urban II and the Crusaders; vol. I, no. 4, Letters of the Crusaders; vol. Ill, no. I, The Fourth Crusade. The Last Crusades in the East; Their Results (i 147-1270). Duruy, History of the Middle Ages, chap. xx. CHAPTER XVII THE RISE OF TOWNS AND GILDS As the decline of the ancient city-state had sounded the knell of classical culture, so the revival of town life was a chief factor in medieval civilization. The de- Revival of structive work of war and the productive toil of ^°^" ^'^^ agriculture were the chief occupations in the early Middle Ages and the basis of feudal society. There were a few scat- tered industries in monastery and manor, but really skilled artisans had to be sought from Constantinople. What towns there were in southern Italy or on the Mediterranean coasts of France and Spain owed their existence to their trading relations with Constantinople. In most regions an occasional market or fair sufhced for the business life of a large area. Roman municipal institutions had given way to the rule of bishops or of feudal lords, and the people had to a large extent lost even their personal freedom. But after the break-up of Charlemagne's empire and the renewed bar- barian invasions, Western Christendom began to increase in population, to develop industries and commerce and cities" and a free working-class of its own. Indeed, it is thought that the very incursions of Northmen and Hungarians caused the building of protecting walls about settlements and so contributed to the growth of towns. But it is difficult to speak with any certainty concerning town life in the West before the twelfth century, since we do not possess records until then. As a matter of ^ f . f . . ., . Sources fact, our mformation is scanty until some time after that. Consequently, when first we begin to hear of the towns, the gilds, and the burghers, they are often already full-fledged and their origins are lost in a dim past. For a long time most writers were clergymen and were little interested in business and commerce except as the monasteries kept records of their own property. Nor had the authors of 328 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE literature for the knightly and feudal class much inclina- tion to dwell upon the affairs of despised traders and work- ingmen who had struggled up from serfdom. It is only when the townsmen become well educated enough to speak for themselves or rich enough to hire writers that we get adequate records of their life. To some extent medieval towns occupied the sites of previous Roman colonies and municipia, either because the _ . situation was so advantageous that a town was Town sites . .11 sure to be located there m any period or because a portion of the Roman town had remained inhabited through the early medieval period. But many Roman sites were now abandoned and many new urban centers grew up about castle, monastery, and other points favorable to the changing requirements of trade and industry. For example, many of the large cities of France to-day were places of importance in Roman Gaul, but not more than eighty out of five hundred French towns in all can be so identified. In medieval England towns were larger and more numerous than in Roman Britain, while beyond the Rhine and about the Baltic cities arose where once barbarians had roamed. On the other hand, some regions where cities had flourished under the Roman Empire failed to revive in the Middle Ages, especially in the Balkan peninsula, including even Greece, home of the city-state, and North Africa, which under the repeated attacks of wild tribes from the Sahara became little different from the desert. To the east and west of this ruined area the Arabs had established prosperous cities like Cairo and Bagdad in the East, and Cordova and Seville in Spain; but these were now menaced by the advance of Turks and Almohades, and the future lay with the cities of the Christian West. To-day many of these in turn, if their sites have not been actually abandoned, survive with a much diminished population and amount of business, since machinery and factories, steam and railroads, and changes in trade routes and in political boundaries and capitals have turned men and money to other centers. Considera- tions of defense seldom determine the site of a modern city, THE RISE OF TOWNS AND GILDS 329 but were paramount in the Middle Ages when a town must not be too exposed to the attacks of invaders, pirates, or robber barons. Towns were therefore often located upon hills like castles. In any case they were enclosed by walls and could be entered only through guarded gates which were shut at night. Rivers were then more important paths of trade than now, and many towns were located along their banks, especially at fords, ferries, or bridges. In the declining Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages men had sought protection and the means of subsist- ence from others and had commended them- Emancipa- selves to the great and powerful. Now an oppo- tion of the site tendency becomes evident. Men feel able to feed, clothe, and defend themselves, and are seeking free- dom from their lords. Individual serfs run away from their masters and entire communities rise in revolt or bargain with their lords for their collective freedom. There are traces of this movement even in the tenth century. In 997 the peasants of Normandy made an organized though in- effectual revolt against their masters, and a few years later the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto III, issued a law to check the attempts of the unfree classes to escape from their servile position. As the expansion of Western Christendom brought new soil under cultivation and the owners of these new estates offered favorable terms to attract tenants and labor, the lords of the older manors found it advisable to im- prove the lot of their peasants if they wished to keep them. They also seem to have discovered that ambitious free- men work better than disheartened slaves. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the practice spread rapidly among manorial lords of emancipating their serfs in return for a considerable lump payment by the peasantry. In fact, so attractive to the lords was this prospect of the immediate payment of a large amount that they sometimes forced charters of emancipation upon communities of serfs who had not asked for them. The granting of such a charter did not mean that the peasants would no longer work for, and pay rents to, the 330 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE lord. But now such rents and services were stated and fixed in the charter ; the lord could not henceforth exert arbitrary power over the peasants and demand payments and labor from them at will. They could move about freely, marry outside the manor without paying fines, and perhaps sell or bequeath their land. Usually, however, they continued to attend the manorial court. Finally, we must remember that many peasants were not emancipated, especially in the less progressive portions of Europe, and that, on the other hand, some peasants had never sunk to serfdom, but had remained free through the early Middle Ages. If peasants whose lands lay exposed to ravaging and plunder could thus acquire at least some measure of free- The towns dom, the inhabitants of walled towns would offer a fuller obviously acquire far more. Their denser popu- lation enabled them to organize more effectually ; their trade and industry gave them more money with which to buy concessions from the lord. Indeed, it was the exist- ence of walled towns, where runaway serfs could find a hiding-place and an opportunity to engage in other than agricultural labor, that helped to make possible the emanci- pation movement among the peasantry. Gradually there grew up in the West a native merchant class, men who devoted most of their time to buying and Rise of a selling. They found it advisable to band to- merchant gether for mutual support and protection and to diss* hcfixscs form withm each town a merchant gild or hanse of all the business men — a sort of medieval chamber of commerce. Since such an association increased the town's prosperity, the lord was generally willing to grant its mem- bers some special privileges, such as personal liberty, ex- emption from agricultural labor and payments, freedom to leave the manor for purposes of trade, protection on their journeys, and trading privileges in other places under the lord's control. In return they would make payments to him from their business profits instead of rendering their previous services. In the twelfth century, when Normandy and England were under the same ruler, the merchants of THE RISE OF TOWNS AND GILDS 331 Rouen were granted a practical monopoly of trade between Normandy and Ireland and several special trading con- cessions in England. Other unions for economic purposes which accompanied and assisted the revival of town life were the gilds of arti- sans. By the second half of the twelfth century Gilds of many were already completely organized in artisans France and Italy and were in existence in Germany and England, although not so numerous and important in those lands until the next century. It is doubtful if any of them were survivals from the hereditary gilds of the declining Roman Empire. They may have grown out of servile groups of artisans on great estates or they may have origi- nated only with the revival of town life. Then their formation was facilitated by the clustering together in the same street of men of the same occupation, either because the location was convenient for their work or to watch one another. This jealous competition gradually changed to harmonious co- operation in the prices and quality of goods sold and in car- ing for the poor and sick, the widows and orphans, in one another's families. In a gild there were apprentices, journeymen, and master- workmen. The apprentices were boys learning the trade under the guidance of a master-workman in Gild whose house they lived and worked without organization wages for several years. Indeed, at the start the lad's parents had as a rule to pay the master a sum of money ; but at the close of the boy's apprenticeship he often received a parting donation from his master or sometimes was paid wages during the latter years of his term of service. The time of apprenticeship varied from three to eleven years according to the difficulty of the craft. When this term had been completed, one became a journeyman and worked for wages under the master-workmen. The English word "journeyman" comes from the French journee, referring to the fact that they often worked by the day, but the French name for such artisans is ouvriers, or valets. Finally many journeymen became full-fledged members of the gild or 332 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE master- workmen. To attain this stage it was usually neces- sary to prove one's skilled workmanship by passing an ex- amination or producing a "masterpiece," and to have saved enough money to be able to set up in business for one's self. While the master-workman was an employer of labor, since he had journeymen and apprentices under him, he Compari- ^^so belonged to the laboring class because he son with j^3^(j himself passed through the preliminary industrial Stages and because he usually continued to work organization ^^ j^j^ ^^^^^ ^^^^^ ^j^j^ j^j^ employees. He further differed from a modern employer in that he employed but a handful of men in his own house, and was constantly in close personal relations with them, instead of employing large numbers under foremen in a factory. The entire in- dustrial situation was different from that of modern times; there was not the same cleavage between capital and labor, for there was not much capital, nor between employer and employee; and the craft gilds only faintly resembled our labor unions. The members of a gild elected officials, enacted statutes, had a court to settle their own disputes and a common Gild treasury to which all made contributions. One regulations ^f their chief concerns was to maintain a com- mon standard of "good and honest workmanship" in the output of every member. Since they worked by hand and usually made a complete article and finished product in- stead of merely feeding a machine or attending to some stage in the manufacture of a bolt or shoe, the medieval artisans took a personal pride in the artistic quality of their work. This feeling was enhanced by the fact that the workman usually sold his product direct to the consumer and so could be held personally responsible for any defects. Mem- bers of a gild charged the same price, since the quality of their goods was supposedly identical and since the organiza- tion often supplied the raw materials at cost price to its members. Moreover, the ideal then prevailed of a just price, that a workman should charge for his manufactures THE RISE OF TOWNS AND GILDS 333 only enough to recompense him for the cost of the raw material and to provide a decent wage for his time and labor. As most workmen sold direct to the consumers and towns were small and individuals well known, this ideal was comparatively easy to enforce. It was strongly sup- ported by public opinion, and butchers or fishmongers who tried to elevate prices without necessity were liable to find themselves in serious trouble. Hours of labor were regu- lated by the gilds, and as a rule the medieval artisan had a long working day, far exceeding the present eight-hour standard. But besides Sundays there were numerous reli- gious holidays, in fifteenth-century France as many as fifty a year. It was usual for the gilds to restrict the number of their apprentices, partly because a master-workman could not teach the trade as well to a number of boys as he could to one or two, partly because the members did not wish to admit more men to the exercise of their craft than employ- ment and a sufficient livelihood could be found for. In most towns only gild members could engage in those occupations which were represented by gilds, and articles made outside the town were heavily taxed before they could be sold within its limits. In short, the gilds were protected industries. The gild system was not universally adopted, just as all the land was not divided into fiefs and manors. In Brittany and central France, for example, it took little Number hold, and some large towns of southern France, tance"of°'^ like Lyons, Narbonne, and Bordeaux, had no the gilds gilds. In such cases, however, the town governments regu- lated the various crafts and trades in much the way that gilds did elsewhere. There were still other parts of France where gilds existed, but where it was possible for a laborer to exercise his craft without joining the gild. Furthermore, not all occupations in a town necessarily formed gilds. Crafts in which there were not enough workmen engaged in that town to form a gild might either remain unorganized or attach themselves for the sake of protection and associa- tion to a gild representing another trade somewhat similar to their own craft. The number and size of the gilds varied 334 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE greatly in different places. Florence, one of the most popu- lous of medieval cities, had only twenty-one gilds, but they were very influential in town affairs. On the other hand, by 1500 Hamburg had a hundred, Cologne eighty, and Lubeck seventy. The number of crafts in a medieval town, considering its relatively small population, was often surprisingly large Medieval and indicates a minute specialization among the industries artisans. Sometimes an entire gild devoted itself exclusively to the manufacture of a single part of a suit of armor, such as the helmet or hauberk. One gild might make harness and another polish it. Metal-workers in general were minutely subdivided. At Paris, for example, where at the close of the thirteenth century from four to six thousand persons were enrolled in tax lists as engaged in mechanical arts, we find farriers, cutlers, locksmiths, men who make handles for knives, coppersmiths, beaters of brass, beaters of tin, workers in tin, wire-drawers, makers of copper lamps, makers of seals, makers of nails and rivets, makers of pins, makers of buckles, makers of clasps, and so on. The manu- facture of woolen and linen goods occupied a great many men in the Middle Ages; others manufactured hemp, flax, rope, and thread; tanners and furriers were numerous; a smaller number was engaged in making silks and other fabrics. There were special gilds for particular articles of clothing, such as tailors, hatters, glovemakers, beltmakers, shoemakers, cobblers, slipper-makers, stocking-knitters, ho- siers, button-makers, sheathmakers, comb-manufacturers. Then there were the various dealers in articles of food, in beverages, and in spices. There were carpenters, masons, plasterers, mortar-makers, potters, porringer-makers, glass- makers, beadmakers, jewelers, goldsmiths, makers of gold thread and gold leaf, workers in wax, toymakers, and vari- ous other artisans and artists. But the gilds were important in social and political as well as in industrial and economic life, as indeed is shown by their power in town politics and the mystery plays which some of them presented for the general entertainment. We THE RISE OF TOWNS AND GILDS 335 turn now again to the social and political aspects of town life. Medieval men were fond of all sorts of soci- other eties and founded them not only for business popular , r 1' • 1 M 1 • associations purposes, but tor religious, philanthropic, and so- cial reasons. These brotherhoods, as they were called, usually each had a patron saint whose day was celebrated both by religious services and by banquets and social gatherings. The members helped one another in case of need ; attended the baptisms and marriages and funerals in their associates' families ; and paid for masses to be said for their souls after death. Indeed, the associations of merchants and the indus- trial corporations usually had these features too. Such broth- erhoods also sometimes had a concealed political character and under the cover of social and religious meetings hatched schemes to win concessions or liberty from their lords. Such particular societies, then, often prepared the way for a more general organization representing the town as a whole. Or the emancipation of, or grant of privi- Movement leges to, some particular group of merchants or toward artisans by the lord was often followed by con- independ- cessions to all the townsmen. Sometimes the ^"^^ townspeople, forming a commune or union of the whole com- munity, succeeded in throwing off the rule of the lord en- tirely and became a self-governing and independent unit in the midst of feudal society and feudal states. The rise of towns reached its height at different periods in different parts of Europe. The degree of freedom and self-government gained by the townsmen and the forms under which they exercised it also varied in different places. Therefore, in the two following chapters we shall consider first the cities of Italy and then those of lands beyond the Alps. In the re- mainder of this chapter we may note a few more character- istics of medieval town life in general. The medieval towns had a considerable influence upon the development of European law, first through their Laws of local customs and second through the growth ^^^ ^'^'^^ of the law merchant in the Mediterranean cities. Every town, especially if it was self-governing and had a court of 336 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE its own, had its own customs, its own set of penalties for offenses, its particular methods of court procedure, and its local legislation and ordinances prescribing how much jew- elry and how splendid raiment its citizens might or must not wear, how expensive and showy funerals might be, what prices shopkeepers might charge, what should be done with persons who sold short weight or used measures with false bottoms or peddled rotten fish. Cities sometimes, however, copied one another's laws as well as charters, and in such instances knotty cases might be referred back for decision to the courts of the city whence the laws had been borrowed. The laws of some German towns were carried eastward by colonists far into Poland and Hungary. But on the whole the town courts and customs added further variety and con- fusion to the chaos of courts feudal and ecclesiastical and manorial and royal which already existed. Town life, especially if industry and commerce and bank- ing develop extensively, requires a more elaborate system of The law laws than will suffice for persons living a simple merchant agricultural existence and not moving about much from place to place. Hence it was that lords early found it. advisable to make special provisions for merchants. Eortthje sea, too, it is necessary to have somewhat different rules of law than for the land. The law merchant was the customs of the Mediterranean Sea worked out by the cities of Italy, Spain, and southern France engaged in trade in its waters. Some of its provisions perhaps dated back to the days when Babylon had been the commercial center of the world. It later had influence upon the admiralty courts of England, and from it come those parts of modern law deal- ing with trademarks, the protection of a firm's name, agency, brokerage, and methods of bookkeeping. This law was also applied to a large extent at inland fairs. What was the external aspect, what were the material Appear- conveniences and comforts of a medieval town? medievat Seen from a distance the town as a whole, with town its walls, towers, and church spires, presented a very picturesque appearance. THE RISE OF TOWNS AND GILDS 337 "And hills all rich in blossomed trees, And fields which promise corn and wine, And scattered cities crowning these Whose far white walls along them shine." Medieval writers describe their cities as wonderfully beauti- ful and attractive, and no doubt they were more interesting than the bleak castle of a feudal lord, and their life more animated and comfortable than the weary round of exist- ence of the villein in his hut on the manor. Since most towns grew up around a castle or monastery or market, or followed the irregular contour of a hillside, a river-bank, or the shore of a harbor, the streets ^, The streets tended to be steep, crooked, and labyrinthincJ,- They were also narrow like those in an ancient city, for the circumscribing walls limited the town area and made space ) within the fortifications precious. The main streets ran to the town gates, which were the only points where one could pass in and out of town. The value of land within the walls soon led to the practice of building overhanging upper stories to the houses. Goods exposed for sale in front of the shops, flapping signboards for the benefit of those who could not read, fountains providing a water supply for the neigh- boring houses, statues of saints and little shrines for the devotional purposes of passers-by, further obstructed one's view and one's path. In some places the rule existed that at least one clear thoroughfare must be left through the center of the town, so that a horseman with lance across his saddle could ride the length of the street without encountering ob- structions. This experiment was performed annually and any part of a building that interfered with the progress of the lance had to come down. Street cleaning and lighting, sanitation and sewerage were still in a primitive state. Nevertheless, modern plumbing is based upon a medieval invention. Thomas of ^ . . ^ ^. , . r 1 1 • 1 Sanitation Cantimpre, a writer 01 the thirteenth century, says that formerly in the case of aqueducts laid under ground the lead pipes were soldered together with tin, which after a while would rust out, but that in recent times 338 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE men have discovered the process of employing molten lead to join pipes together, "for lead lasts forever underground." Again, while the streets were often dark and narrow and sometimes filled with refuse, and while the towns were crowded and unhealthy, we must remember that they had no skyscrapers and not many tenement houses, that a beau- tiful countryside usually lay just beyond the walls, and that since the town area was small a short walk would bring one from any part of the town to green fields and fresh air. Men, women, and children in medieval towns did not, like the denizens of the crowded slums in some modern cities, go from one end of the year to the other with scarcely a glimpse of nature or a moment under the open sky. The first habitations of the townsmen were probably little superior to the huts of the peasants. That they were small and of perishable materials is indicated by an old English law which directs that a house which has been contaminated by the presence of heretics shall be carried outside the walls and burned. But since the town walls afforded a protection which the peasant's fields and dwelling lacked, as the burghers grew prosperous through trade and industry, they naturally satisfied both their per- sonal ambition and their civic pride by building better and larger and more durable houses and filling them with sub- stantial furniture. Indeed, a master-workman required a residence large enough to include his shop and sleeping- apartments for the apprentices who lived with him as well as quarters for himself and his family. Of course very few houses from as long ago as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are in existence to-day, and from those which have survived we perhaps derive a too favor- able impression of medieval domestic architecture, since only the best-built houses would last .that long. On the other hand, it is mainly in small, out-of-the-way places that such houses have been left unchanged, so that they are not representative of the mansions in the largest medieval cities. Moreover, their present decrepit and disfigured condition gives little idea of how they looked when new. Allowing for THE RISE OF TOWNS AND GILDS 339 this we find that the medieval houses which have survived in small French provincial towns compare favorably in appearance, size, and construction with those inhabited by men of the same class in those towns to-day, and suggest a municipal prosperity and spirit which passed away with the disastrous wars of religion in the sixteenth century. We have seen that medieval artisans were often artists as well and it is not surprising if the appearance of their homes re- flected this. It is hard to give one general description of the medieval house which will fit all, since not only were there differences between different countries, but it seems to have been cus- tomary to construct houses with a view to the particular needs and even the personality of the owner. Instead of having the windows all of a size and placing them in regular rows, the medieval architects made the size of the windows correspond to the size of the room and placed the windows so as to admit most light. Glass windows by which the rain and snow and cold could be excluded without shutting out the light now came into domestic use for the first time, and chimneys with flues which enabled one to heat the interior without filling it with smoke were another medieval innova- tion. Such improvements did much to develop home life. In some French houses of the twelfth century the front of the ground floor is occupied by the shop of the owner. Behind it is a little courtyard along one side of which a passage runs to the kitchen situated at the rear and sepa- rated by the court from the main body of the house. Above the shop is a large living-room occupying the entire front of the house and containing also the bed of the father and mother. Over the kitchen was a smaller room or rooms, reached from the living-room by a gallery overlooking the court. Here perhaps would be the bedrooms of the older children of the family, while the apprentices slept in garrets on the third floor over the living-room. Although few houses or other town buildings, with the exception of the churches everywhere and the stone towers of the nobles and town halls and gild houses in Italian cities, 340 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE have come down to us from as early as the twelfth or thir- teenth centuries, yet the towns did not alter tion of the greatly in their general appearance and charac- ^pect^of ^^^ until after the great industrial revolution of European the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Since then the old has been rapidly swept away and even the picturesque walls have been leveled and replaced by monotonous and dusty "boulevards." But in many cities there are still a few old houses left, though their exact age is often uncertain ; and some towns, like San Gemignano in Italy, Dinan in Brittany, Schaffhausen in Switzerland, and Rothenburg on the Tauber in Germany, still preserve a great deal of their medieval atmosphere and charm. Larger cities like Rouen and Niirnberg are fast losing it before the increasing inroads of modern business, factories, and truck automobiles, although it is hard to get rid of the old, narrow, crooked, and hilly streets. EXERCISES AND READINGS Contemporary Accounts of the Rise of the Towns. Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. I, selections Ii8 and I2l. 1. When were these accounts written and to what towns do they apply? 2. Which is favorable and which is hostile to the towns? 3. Can this be accounted for in both cases by the authorship? 4. Which passage is the more informing? Secondary Accounts of the Rise of the Towns. Blok, History of the People of the Netherlands (English translation, 1898), vol. I, pp. 215-51, or especially pp. 215-27 and 244-50, on the rise of towns in general and of those of the Netherlands in particular. See the readings at the close of the two following chapters for fur- ther selections, most of which have reference to the rise of towns in some one country. The Gilds: Source Material. G. Jones, The Trades of Paris, vol. li, no. 9, of European History Studies, F. M. Fling, editor, Lincoln, Nebraska. The pamphlet contains eight passages with questions upon each. Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. I, selections 164 and 165. The Gilds: Secondary Accounts. "Industry in Pisa in the Early Fourteenth Century," in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. xxviil (1913-14), pp. 341-59. Villari, First Two Centuries of Florentine History, chap, vi on "The Greater Gilds," especially pp. 310-40. CHAPTER XVIII THE ITALIAN CITIES V The Italian cities were the first to become prominent; tiiey were the largest in wealth and in population; and they won the completest independence and self- Conditions government. Conditions in Italy for several favoring . r 11 1 1 f • 1 their inde- centuries were favorable to the growth oi mde- pendent de- pendent city-states. First, the struggle for the velopment peninsula between the Lombards and the Byzantine Empire gave coast settlements like Gaeta, Amalfi, Naples, and Venice the chance to develop their own government under their local dukes, and to protect themselves from the in- vaders by their own fleets, while still nominally professing allegiance to the Byzantine Empire. Second, when Charle- magne's empire first weakened and then dissolved, the towns of northern Italy or Lombardy were left pretty much to themselves under the rule of their bishops who had in general succeeded in displacing the lay counts. Third, during the investiture struggle Henry IV and sometimes Gregory VII granted the towns privileges in order to secure their support. Thus the maritime laws of Pisa were ap- proved by the pope in 1075 and again in 1081 by the emperor. Finally, as we shall see, the protracted strife of popes and Hohenstaufen emperors gave the cities the oppor- tunity to make good their complete independence. Moreover, Italy was well situated to control trade be- tween the eastern and southern Mediterranean and the west and north of Europe. Therefore, as Con- Growing stantinople lost its hold on the coasts of the^ Italian western Mediterranean and was also driven '^'^^^t cities from the island of Sicily and the Adriatic Sea, it lost much of its trade and its place was taken by western ports such as Pisa, Genoa, and Venice. These three cities early displayed their enterprise and sea power: Venice, under the Doge 342 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Pietro Orseolo II (983-1008), by clearing the Adriatic of pirates; the other two by their activity against the Sara- cens whom in 1015 they drove out of the island of Sardinia. That already at this early date the Venetians were engaged in transporting wares of the Far East to European lands north of the Alps is indicated by a passage in which the German chronicler Thietmar, of the eleventh century, be- wails the shipwreck in 1017 of four Venetian vessels laden with spices. Since we know rather more of the earliest period of Venetian history than we do of that of other Italian towns, Origins of since its institutions and culture were unique, Venice g^j^^^ since it became the leading medieval sea power, we shall speak first of it in this chapter. Situated on a number of small islands or banks of mud in a lagoon a little north of the mouths of the Po and Adige Rivers, Venice was secure from attack either by land or sea. The original scanty population of fisher-folk was gradually aug- mented by fugitives from the successive waves of barbarian invasion that swept over northern Italy. Theodoric the East Goth sought the aid of these islanders in transporting supplies across the Adriatic from Istria; and Belisarius, the great general of Justinian, made use of their boats in the siege of Ravenna. In 697 they are said to have elected their first doge, a single ruler for life, in place of the twelve trib- unes representing as many island communities. The doge seems to have been much like the elected kings of the Ger- man tribes. He tried to associate his son with himself in the government and thus secure his succession to the office and alter the headship from an elective to a hereditary one. On the other hand, many a doge was slain by some rival, much as kings were in the German states in the West, or was blinded in Byzantine fashion, so that the life tenure of the position was often of short duration. Charlemagne, although master of Lombardy, had to leave Venice to the Byzantine emperor. At about this time, too, the dwellers in the lagoon concentrated their population and made their capital in the central group of islands called the Rialto, THE ITALIAN CITIES 343 which lies halfway between the mainland and the Adriatic beach of the outer islands of the lagoon. With this change the definite settlement of Venice proper and its life as a town may be said to have begun. In the early ninth century, too, tradition tells us, the Venetians brought the body of their patron, St. Mark, from Alexandria. The relations at this period between Venice and the Byzantine Empire were close. Many of the doges visited Constantinople to receive confirmation in their Relations office and further Byzantine titles, or sent their with Con- sons thither to be educated or to be recognized ' ^^ as the future rulers of Venice. Also the Venetians were granted trading privileges at Constantinople in return for services which their ships rendered in transporting troops and in naval battles. In 991, for instance, they were granted unusually low tariff rates and an expeditious settlement of their lawsuits at Constantinople. In 1085, as a reward for their aid to the Emperor Alexius against the Normans of southern Italy and Sicily, they were granted a quarter of their own in Constantinople and were freed from customs duties in all ports of the Byzantine Empire. At the same time all merchants from Amalfi at Constantinople were sub- jected to a tax for the building of a new church of St. Mark at Venice. This measure marked the passing of Amalfi as a great trading city; but Genoa and Pisa were now powerful rivals of Venice for the Mediterranean trade. Meanwhile the internal constitution of Venice had been changing from the simple leadership of the doge to more complicated forms. In 1032 the doge was for- Constltu- bidden to associate his son with himself in ofiice tional and was henceforth to be advised by two ducal councilors and a senate. In 1171 the government took a forced loan from its citizens, but gave them bonds in return upon which four per cent interest was paid yearly — an early instance of a public debt. The following year the ducal councilors were increased in number to six and an in- directly elected and aristocratic assembly of four hundred and eighty members was added to the previous senate. The 344 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE doge was no longer elected by the people, if indeed he ever really had been, but was nominated by a committee ap- pointed by the assembly of four hundred and eighty, and then was merely presented to the people for formal con- firmation. The artisans of Venice, however, were now improving their condition through their gilds. Some of them still had Progress of to work for a certain length of time in the court- the gilds yard of the doge, just as the peasant on the manor had to perform his three days a week of service on the demesne of the lord. But from this servitude they now tried to free themselves. Already another important change had taken place. The gastaldo, or director of each gild, who had formerly been an agent and appointee of the doge, and sometimes had not himself been a worker in the craft at all but an outsider, now was elected by the gild from among its own members. He therefore became its representative and ceased to be the doge's agent. Among the chief manufac- tures of the Venetian artisans were glass, cloth, silk, leather, paper, and soap. Venice was, however, preeminently a city of great merchants rather than of small artisans and as such its government naturally became and remained oligarchical in character. By the thirteenth century at least Venetian traders were found well-nigh all over the known world. They made com- Venetian mercial treaties with the sultans of Iconium and commerce Aleppo and with the Christian rulers of Little Armenia and Trebizond. In 1255 a traveler found at Ico- nium a Venetian and a Genoese in partnership; they had obtained from the sultan a monopoly of the alum trade and had more than tripled the price in consequence. Such enter- prising traders were found from Damascus to Kiev and from the Crimea to the Caucasus. The Polo brothers even visited China. Venetians, however, not merely spread over the world in search of trade ; so far as they could they forced trade to flow through Venice, which thus took a profit from goods both coming and going. Venice had early monopo- lized the distribution of salt in her immediate neighborhood, THE ITALIAN CITIES 345 and she largely controlled the fur trade and grain trade and slave trade by way of the Black Sea. In pursuance of her steadfast policy to center all trade in Venice and to bring as many goods there as possible, she would not allow foreign vessels to cross directly between the east and the west shores of the Adriatic, but forced them to go by way of Venice and unload at least two thirds of their cargoes there. Venetian subjects outside the city were required to do all their importing and exporting through that port. German merchants who visited Venice, besides being disarmed and subjected to strict regulations, had to dispose of their entire stock there. No import duties were levied upon certain wares which Venice wished to secure from the regions pro- ducing them in order to sell again at a profit to other places. Such goods, however, if they came by sea, must come in Venetian bottoms if they were to escape taxation, for Venice had no mind to encourage the shipping Navigation of other towns. Since she desired the carrying '^^s trade for herself, she naturally enacted laws favoring her own shipping and sailors. In some instances she did not allow foreign vessels to enter her harbor at all; in other cases they were taxed heavily for the privilege. In the mid- dle of the thirteenth century laws were made forbidding Venetians to ship their goods in foreign bottoms or to sell their vessels to foreigners. All vessels used by Venetian merchants must be built in Venice and manned by either Greeks or Venetian subjects. The city government built and armed the ships and then rented the use of them to the merchants. At that time it was usual to arm merchant vessels which ventured on long voyages, since there was constant danger from pirates and sometimes from the ships of Medieval rival powers. Many different types of vessels shipping were employed by the medieval Italians, and they were propelled both by sails and oars. They were often built with bulging sides in order to accommodate more cargo. How- ever, the laws of Pisa, Genoa, and Venice not only forbade the heaping-up of excessive freight on deck, but ordered 346 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE that all merchantmen should be marked with a load-line. A vessel one hundred feet long was then regarded as of great size, although some war galleys were longer than that. Two hundred and fifty tons was considered a good cargo. Where oars were used, a crew of nearly two hundred men was often needed, several of them working at one oar. The vessels used in transporting crusaders to the East some- times were loaded with as many as a thousand men each, if we credit the sources. By the fourteenth century the rud- der had replaced the old method of steering by one or two oars at the stern. While Venice was becoming a great sea power, the towns on the mainland had also developed apace. Under the early The Lorn- ^^^^ ^^ their counts or bishops the townsmen, bard com- with the possible exception of a few prominent families, had little or no share in the govern- ment and might even be without personal freedom. But the opening of the twelfth century reveals a great change in northern Italy. In the Lombard cities the townsmen have abolished the rule of the bishop and have taken the reins of government into their own hands, aided by the confu- sion attendant upon the investiture strife when there were two claimants for almost every bishopric. The townsmen effected this revolution by forming communes, in which the nobles resident in the cities combined with the other free inhabitants to secure the direction of the town government. The nobles in the Lombard cities at this time were divided into the two classes of capitani and valvassores. The Social "captains" had originally been those who held the^Lom- great fiefs directly from the bishop or the em- bard cities peror, while the '*valvassors" were the subvas- sals who held under the captains or great landholders. There were a number of such nobles connected with each city because most Italian cities controlled a considerable circuit of adjoining territory. But by the twelfth century nobility had ceased to depend exclusively upon birth or the possession of a large landed estate. Wealth acquired by commerce was also a road to nobility, and we are even told THE ITALIAN CITIES 347 by a contemporary that "the cities stoop to bestow the sword-belt and honorable rank upon youths of inferior station, or even upon laborers in despised and mechanical trades who among other peoples are shunned like the pest." Below the two knightly or military classes came the ordi- nary citizens, or popolo. These shared with the captains and knights the privilege of electing and being elected to town offices. The term popolo, however, was not equivalent in meaning to the democratic modern expression, "the peo- ple." It did not include all the inhabitants of the city and its adjacent territory, but only those freemen who had participated in the formation of the original commune and their descendants and others who were specifically admitted to citizenship. When the commune was first established, many of the inhabitants were still in a condition of ser\d- tude like that of the "court artisans" of Venice. There- fore most of the small shopkeepers and artisans were not at first §iven any share in the municipal government. Still less was the franchise ceded to the poor peasants who tilled the fields that lay outside the city walls. The Italian communes were thus rather aristocratic gov- ernments, although liberal enough compared to feudalism. They included those more prosperous merchants Rule of and artisans who had been able by forming gilds theTwel'fth to win their personal freedom and a considerable century influence in the conduct of town affairs, and who fighting on foot made a formidable militia to second the efforts of their mounted nobles. At the head of the town government in place of the bishop now appeared a varying number of "consuls," who were usually chosen annually and who were often taken from all three classes of the commune, although there was a natural tendency to elect leading citizens from the upper classes. The consuls were assisted by an ad- visory council, and we also soon find in existence a Grand Council or senate or council of the commune, which often had several hundred members and represented the entire citizen body. On great occasions, however, the burghers were not content to leave the government to their officials 348 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE and representatives, but held a parlamento or mass-meeting in the pubUc square. Such a gathering sometimes resulted in a revolution or at least in a street fight between rival political parties. At the bottom of such factions and parties were the consorterie, or family unions of the nobles, and the arti or trade gilds of the burghers. Life was stirring in these Lombard towns where there was nothing of the monotony of the manor. But war was Interurban the law of the Urban, almost as much as of the intramural feudal, world. The cities fought against the cas- party strife i\qq q{ feudal lords who tried to maintain an independent existence and to prey upon trade in the neigh- borhood of the towns. The cities also fought frequently with one another over questions of boundaries, water- rights, roads, tolls, and from general trade rivalry. Within each town were sharp family rivalries. Every prominent noble or merchant family could count on the support of a multitude of poor relations and retainers. The nobles who were forced to give up their castles and live in town built lofty stone towers in the city streets and waged feuds as they had done before from their country castles. New gilds and the lower classes before long began to clamor for admis- sion to citizenship. Party struggles and street fights often led to the exile of the defeated faction or at least of its leaders, who would then seek the aid of some other city to effect their restoration. Yet the trade, wealth, and productive power of the cities kept increasing, and even their enemies admitted that they Economic were socially and intellectually above the av- fectual^^" erage of that age. The twelfth-century writer advance whom we havc already quoted concerning them, Bishop Otto of Freising, says further that, as a result of the intermarriage of the invading Lombards with the native Italians, "their children have derived from the race of their mothers, and from the character of the country and the climate, something of Roman culture and civilization, and retain the elegance and refinement of Latin speech and manners." THE ITALIAN CITIES 349 The cities of Lombardy not only shook off the control of their bishops, but were inchned to conduct their affairs as if the Holy Roman Emperor did not exist, or at Relations to least had no right to tax them, to overrule their Rodman ^ officials, to judge their citizens, or to demand Empire military and other services from them. They thought it enough to send him a few presents and some vague pro- fessions of loyalty at the time of his accession. Frederick I, however, a nephew of Bishop Otto of Freising and an emperor of the House of Hohenstaufen who reigned from 1 1 52 to 1 190, made a great effort to bring the cities truly under his jurisdiction. Frederick, though of only medium height, had a majestic presence and lordly personality. His hair was yellow and his red beard led the Italians to nickname him Frederick " Barba-rossa." He was fond of reading history Barbarossa and took Charlemagne as his model. Although he could on occasion indulge in those fits of stern anger which medieval monarchs found so useful in dealing with their rude subjects and rough vassals, he was as a general rule considerate and kindly, and clement to the conquered, and was greatly loved and respected by the Germans. A fact which con- tributed much to his popularity was that he possessed all the qualities and attributes which went to make up the thorough knight. Though he was devout and went on cru- sades both in his youth before he became emperor and in old age at the close of his reign, he had much trouble with the Papacy. And though he was an industrious ruler and indefatigable warrior, he was to find the communes of northern Italy too much for him. Frederick was handicapped in his Italian policy by troubles at home in Germany with the rival House of Welf, Dukes of Saxony and Bavaria, who had pre- Guelfsand vented his father from being elected emperor in Ghibellines 1 125. Now Henry the Lion built up great Welf possessions in Germany and refused to aid Barbarossa in his Italian campaigns. This strife of Welfs and Hohenstaufens in Ger- many was paralleled in Italy by the struggle between the 350 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE emperors and the communes and the Papacy. As a result the rival parties in Italy eventually received the names of "Guelfs" and "Ghibellines." The latter word was an Italian corruption from Waiblingen, a German estate of the Hohenstaufen family, and "Guelf " is, of course, the Italian for "Welf." In recent wars among the Lombard cities Milan had gained a leading position and other communes complained of Frederick's her aggressions to Frederick, both before he left timi to^^ '" Germany and when, in 1154, he passed through Italy northern Italy on his way to Rome to be crowned. The great feudal lords and the bishops had complaints to make of other communes. Frederick accordingly spent most of the autumn and winter in Lombardy, but it took him two months to take the town of Tortona, an ally of Milan, so that he had no time left to attack Milan itself and soon proceeded on his way to Rome. As soon as he had de- parted, the Milanese rebuilt Tortona, strengthened their own fortifications, and resumed their conquests at the ex- pense of those of their neighbors who had sided with the emperor. At Rome Frederick helped the pope suppress a revolutionary movement of the townsmen, who as early as 1 143 had formed a commune with a patrician and senate of their own choice instead of the papal prefect and judges. Frederick was also crowned emperor, but then distrust began to arise between him and the pope. Frederick's vas- sals were now anxious to return home after their long absence from Germany, so that he had to give up the idea of proceeding against the Normans in southern Italy. Nor did he stop to deal with Milan on his return north, although he pronounced the ban of the Empire upon that refractory city. But in 1 158 Frederick's German hosts poured through the Second Alpine passes by four different routes into the expedition plain of Lombardy. The feudal lords of northern and capitu- 5! , ., , . , . , lationof Italy contributed contmgents to his army and Milan g^gj^ ^l^g communes dared not do otherwise. Milan was soon forced to surrender, and agreed, in addition THE ITALIAN CITIES 351 to setting free two neighboring towns which she had con- quered, to pay an indemnity, to build Frederick a palace, and, most important of all, to relinquish to him the regalia. By this term were indicated his royal prerogatives, such as the control over the dukes and counts, the levying of tolls and customs, the taking of provender for his army, the right of coinage, and the enjoyment of various revenues from mills, fisheries, rivers, mines, and like sources. The Milanese were to be allowed to retain their consuls, but must submit their nominations to the emperor for approval. Frederick then proceeded to Roncaglia and held a great assembly where professors of Roman law from Bologna, assisted by two consuls from each of fourteen The Diet of towns, decided what the emperor's powers and Ro"caglia regalia were. The study of Roman law had recently been revived in Italy, and that law, of course, assumed the existence of an emperor with centralized and absolute power. Therefore the jurists were inclined to decide every- thing in Frederick's favor and the consuls do not seem to have ventured to oppose them. Where regalian rights had been formally granted to cities by the emperor, they were to be allowed to retain them; but few towns could prove any such grant, since most of them had simply usurped these rights. Made confident by this success, Frederick not only for- bade the communes to wage war or ally with one another, but did not even leave them the independent The struggle management of their internal affairs under the renewed leadership of their consuls. Instead he set up a representa- tive of his own called a podestd (potestas in Latin, meaning "power") in each city as a chief judge and executive. This was going too far, and the Milanese regarded it as a viola- tion of their treaty with the emperor by which he had assured them the continuance of their consuls. Therefore war broke out again between them and Frederick. At the same time the pope quarreled with him because he was extending his power over towns of central Italy which the pope regarded as possessions of the Holy See. The pope 352 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE allied with the Normans and Milan against Frederick and was about to excommunicate him, when he died and a disputed papal election followed. Frederick supported the candidate of the minority, Victor III, against Alexander III, who was more generally recognized in Europe. Milan fell in 1 162. Its population was scattered in villages and other towns, instead of being reduced to serfdom as Frederick had at first threatened, and its foes among the other communes were allotted the pleasing task of destroying its walls and buildings. In the same year Alexander III fled to France where both Louis VII and Henry II of England received him cordially. The hatred and jealousy felt by many of the other cities toward Milan had in large measure accounted for its fall. Formation But now all the cities, whether before friends of Lombard the emperor or allies of Milan, began alike to League chafe under the rule of the imperial podestas. Only a very few towns had been allowed to keep their con- suls. The others complained to the emperor that the rule of his new officials was oppressive and unjust, but he seems to have paid little attention to these complaints. Then the cities began to unite against him. As early as 11 64 five towns of northeastern Italy, Venice, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and Treviso, formed a defensive league. Three years later Cremona, Mantua, Brescia, and Bergamo banded together with the former inhabitants of Milan to rebuild that city. Piacenza, Parma, and Ferrara soon joined the league and the inhabitants of Lodi were forced into it against their will. Meanwhile Frederick had been occupied in driving Alexander III out of Rome again. A pestilence had greatly depleted his forces, and when he returned north to Pavia he was unable to crush the rebellious towns. On the contrary, they united with the five cities of the north- east in a larger Lombard League, which was also joined by Modena and Bologna. The emperor went back to Germany for more troops, but then was detained there for seven years. During this time the membership of the league kept grow- ing until it included thirty-six towns and all Italy north of THE ITALIAN CITIES 355 the Apennines from Rimini and Venice on the Adriatic as far west as Genoa and Turin, which remained loyal to the emperor. But even imperial Pavia had been at last forced to enter the league. The league also built a new town — named Alessandria after the pope — in northwestern Italy as an obstacle to the next expedition of Frederick, which they thought Alessandria would come through the western Alpine passes, and since the cities of the league held all the others. Sure enough, in 1174 Barbarossa entered Italy by the Mont Cenis Pass and proceeded against Alessandria, but was unable to take it. Then an attempt to settle the points in dispute between himself and the cities by negotiations failed, but several towns were induced to abandon the league. Finally, in 11 76 at Legnano occurred a decisive field battle between the imperial forces and the Milanese and their remaining allies. Frederick's army was routed and chased for eight miles ; his camp and banner were cap- tured ; and he himself was given up for dead until several days later he unexpectedly reappeared before the walls of Pavia. Frederick thereupon gave up his attempt to subdue the Lombard cities by force and recognized Alexander III as rightful pope. After a truce of six years, during Peace of which the emperor made separate treaties with Constance a number of the towns, the Peace of Constance was signed in 1 1 83. The townsmen were to take an oath of allegi- ance to the emperor, to whom also were reserved a few rights such as taking supplies for his army when passing through Lombardy; but most of the regalia were surren- dered to the communes, who were also given back their consuls and were permitted to form leagues or make war with one another and to hold dependent territory outside their walls. The large towns thereupon resumed with alac- rity their former interurban hostilities, and brought the nobles and small communes of the countryside more and more under their rule. Around the year 1200 town-halls with great bell towers, or palaces of justice for the law 354 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE courts, were erected in many Lombard cities, and some of them may still be seen to-day. At Padua, for example, the Palazzo della Ragione, begun in 1172 and completed in 12 19, contains "the largest vaulted hall unsupported by pillars in the world." It is two hundred and seventy feet long, ninety feet in breadth, and seventy-eight feet high. Meanwhile the towns of Tuscany south of the Apennines had been pursuing a similar development. When Matilda, Countess of Tuscany, died in 11 15, she bequeathed her es- Rise of tates to the Church, but the emperor claimed towns in them as fiefs which should escheat to the Em- uscany ^.^^ ^j^^ outcome was that neither pope nor emperor secured the cities, which set up communes with consuls similar to those of the Lombard towns. Within the towns, too, were much the same social classes and political parties, the nobles of the towers and the men of the gilds. But the Tuscan communes developed a little later than the Lombard ones. Chief among the medieval towns of Tuscany were Florence and its rivals, Pisa, Siena, and Lucca. About the year 1200 almost every commune in Lombardy or Tuscany made a remarkable change in its government. , The board of consuls which had hitherto directed the municipal affairs was now supplanted by a single ofhcial with supreme executive power who was an- nually elected, not from the citizens, but from some for- eign city. Indeed, he must neither bring his relations into the city nor acquire property there. The aim was to secure a trained soldier, impartial judge, and able leader who would have no personal interest in the rival political parties of the town and who would keep the peace between them. Like the governors appointed by Barbarossa after the Diet of Roncaglia this new official was given the name podestd. But he was now chosen by the town itself, and for but a year at a time, and was paid a salary varying in amount according to the satisfaction that he gave. A man who showed him- self a capable executive need never want for employment as a podesta by some one of the many cities. But this new office was a dangerous step in the direction of one-man rule. THE ITALIAN CITIES 355 We have seen that the taking of interest on loans was forbidden to Christians by medieval canon law, and in many places the practice was prohibited by civil law ^Use of as well. As a result money-lending and even Italian most banking was for a time in the hands of the Jews, who, besides lending money, gave letters of credit and bills of exchange. As the Italians, however, came to have a large supply of capital as a result of their commercial and industrial prosperity, they began to found banking houses, and to exchange foreign money or transmit sums from one part of Europe to another. The varieties of coinages were almost infinite in the Middle Ages when so many feudal lords and independent towns had the right to mint money, and it was easy for a money-changer to make a little profit on each transaction. The transportation of money was often difficult and dangerous, so that bankers were justified in charging a fee for rendering this service. The Papacy, which drew its revenues from all parts of western and cen- tral Europe, was the leading employer of the Italian bank- ers in collecting and transmitting sums of money. Before long the Italians began to advance large sums to kings and states as well as smaller sums to lesser individuals and to receive interest until the money advanced was repaid. They evaded the law against usury by making the loan free from interest for a brief specified period, during which they knew that the borrower could not or would not repay. When that time expired, they charged damages if the entire principal were not forthcoming and after another interval did the same again. North of the Alps almost any Italians engaged in banking were indiscriminately called "Lombards," and Lombard Street was the center of the financial district of London. But the largest banking firms were rather in Tuscany and especially at Florence, perhaps because of their nearness to Rome and employment by the Papacy. X 356 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE EXERCISES AND READINGS Map Exercise. 1. Locate on an outline map of Italy all the cities mentioned in this chapter, and the battlefield of Legnano. 2. Indicate the boundary of Tuscany on the same outline map. 3. Explain how Frederick Barbarossa could march from Germany to Italy by way of the Mont Cenis Pass without going outside the territory of the Holy Roman Empire. Early History of Venice. Any one of the first six chapters in H. F. Brown, Venice (1895); or his article on the history of Venice in the EncyclopcBdia Britannica, nth edition. Other Italian Towns. W. F. Butler, The Lombard Communes (1906), any one of the first six chapters. Duffy, Tuscan Republics (1893), any one of the first seven chapters. Sedgwick, Italy in the Thirteenth Century, vol. i, chap. xiii. Gilds and Industry. For readings on Italian medieval gilds and industry see the close of the preceding chapter. CHAPTER XIX FRENCH, FLEMISH, ENGLISH, AND GERMAN TOWNS Of the towns beyond the Alps those of southern France were on the whole older than the others, more closely con- nected with the Roman past and with Mediter- Consular ranean trade, and also most like the Italian southern cities in their government. Like them they France included both nobles and common people and were at first governed by consuls, of whom we begin to hear about 1120. These magistrates, usually twelve in number, were chosen annually, but seldom by the votes of all the townsmen. Sometimes they practically nominated their successors, and sometimes the bishop or feudal lord had retained a share in the town government and had a voice in their selection. Associated with these annual magistrates was a fairly large advisory council, drawn also chiefly from the patriciate of knights and wealthy burghers who had taken the lead in establishing the municipality. Sometimes, however, a larger assembly of citizens was called together. The south- ern towns did a deal of legislation and recorded their stat- utes at length, but this did not prevent them from tinkering with them at frequent intervals. " The Italian influence in southern France was further shown by the fact that early in the thirteenth century the office of podesta spread from Italy to several cities of Provence. The Provengals and the Catalans of ports like Mont- pellier and Barcelona in the Kingdom of Aragon were close seconds to the Italians in Mediterranean trade. Trade of There was a "port of the Provencals" on the PreS^^^'"' southern coast of Asia Minor and they had a towns street in each of the Syrian ports. Marseilles traded much with northern Africa and its sailors were the first to venture straight across the Mediterranean instead of skirting the coast of Italy. Narbonne profited by the trade route be- 358 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE tween Egypt and England, which went overland across France by way of Toulouse to Bordeaux, until early in the fourteenth century, when its harbor silted up, and it expelled its large Jewish colony, and the Italian cities began to send their fleets around Spain to England and Flanders. Bor- deaux and Bayonne on the southwestern coast of France belonged to England from the twelfth to the fifteenth cen- tury and carried on an extensive trade with it, especially in wine. They also traded both with Spain and with Flan- ders. They did not have the consuls of most southern French towns, but were communes with mayors like the towns of the north which we shall presently describe. In central France the chief channel of trade was the river Loire, although the boats of merchants were often halted Privileged to pay tolls and customs duties to the feudal central lords along its banks, and although, to-day at France least, the river is full of shoals and quicksands and keeps changing its channel. Central France was a fer- tile plain for whose agricultural products the numerous scattered towns furnished markets. As a rule these towns did not attain to self-government, but merely to freedom from many of the feudal and manorial restrictions under which they had previously labored. To distinguish towns with such charters from the consular cities of the south and the communes of the north we may call them "privileged towns. " Towns of this sort were sometimes found in the north and south too, but in central France they predomi- nated. In northern France a few communes were formed in the late eleventh century, but the twelfth was the great period The com- of their rise. They were governed by a mayor, northern who, howevcr, had less power than the mayor France Qf ^ modern American city, and by a council of from a dozen to a hundred members. In the north most of the feudal nobility lived outside the towns, and the towns- men were a class distinct from the knights and hitherto reckoned quite inferior to them. In fact the townsmen had come up from serfdom, and their acquisition of the right of 360 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE self-governraent was more of a democratic revolution than the rise of the Italian communes or of the southern French towns. Even those men who lived outside the walls were granted equal rights with those dwelling in the town proper. And since the men of the French commune were originally all of the same social class and since they were at first ani- mated by a common purpose, up to the close of the twelfth century there was little sign of the party strife so manifest in Italian towns. The governing council, however, came in many cases to represent the richer and more influential citi- zens and in the thirteenth century social and political dis- content prevailed in many French towns. A commune was a sworn association of the townsmen with the object of excluding the lord's officials and authority How a com- from their town and of taking charge of the gov- ^tablirhed- emment themselves. Sometimes they purchased Laon this concession from the lord, but usually they had to fight for it. A secret conspiracy, a sudden uprising, and either victory and independence for the burghers or a cruel suppression of the movement by the lord were the normal steps in the history of a commune. At Laon, once the favorite residence of the later Carolingians, the process was a little more complicated. Here in the early twelfth century public sentiment was aroused by the recent success of the neighboring towns of St. Quentin and Noyon in establishing communes and by the cruel rule of the Bishop of Laon, who devoted more time to warfare and hunting than to religion and who employed his negro slave, John, too frequently as an executioner. The townsmen, therefore, took advantage of the absence of their prelate in England to form a commune, purchasing the consent of other clergy and local nobles who had rights over the town. On learning of this upon his return, the bishop went into a rage, but at last was apparently reconciled by a large sum of money, and the ratification of King Louis VI was procured by a similar payment. But when the king presently paid a visit to Laon, the treacherous bishop tried to induce him to annul his consent. The citizens offered Louis four hundred pounds FRENCH, FLEMISH, ENGLISH, GERMAN TOWNS 361 more if he would keep his word, but the bishop outbid them with an offer of seven hundred pounds, and the king there- upon declared the commune abolished. The bishop then set out to recover his seven hundred pounds by taxing the townspeople, but this was too much for them to bear and proved his undoing. They took arms, raised the cry of the commune, broke into the episcopal palace, massacred its defenders, and when the bishop was found hiding in a bar- rel, a serf beat out his brains. The king thereupon hastened with an army to avenge this sacrilegious murder and sacked the town; but a few years later the people got their com- mune after all, although some rights were now reserved for king, bishop, and nobles. This case of Laon suggests several points that are true of the French communes in general. They were created espe- cially at the expense of bishops and ecclesiastical church and lords, and the Church in consequence made a communes great outcry against them. "Commune is a new and detest- able word," wrote an abbot of the time. The communes for their part usually would not admit the clergy to their mem- bership. In the rise of the communes, in short, we see a new force, primarily secular, political, and economic in character. The clergy to a considerable extent brought the communal movement upon themselves by their unwillingness to eman- cipate serfs or to grant considerable privileges and liberal charters to the towns, as many of the nobles did and thus in some measure forestalled and obviated the formation of communes. The case of Laon also illustrates royal interference in the formation of communes. The Capetians did not care to see independent towns springing up on their own King and domain, although they were sometimes unable to communes prevent it. But, especially after the reign of Louis VI, they began to see the advantage of encouraging the movement upon the estates of their great vassals, whose power would thereby be weakened, especially if the new communes should retain a feeling of gratitude toward the Crown which had sanctioned their rise. 362 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE The story of Laon further shows us how rapidly the Spread of communal movement spread from town to communal town. As a rule, however, each town had to movement: . , copying of work out its own liberty. The French corn- charters munes formed almost no such leagues as that of the Lombard cities against Barbarossa. But they copied one another's charters and laws a great deal. Each commune had a seal of its own, a belfry whose bell summoned the citizens to the defense of their liberties, and Govern- a pillory and gibbet where the decrees of town Smmune: justice Were cxecutcd. For the commune had Soissons its own court, made its own laws or followed its own customs, and the fines paid went into the town treasury and not into the lord's pocket. Indeed, the commune owned no lord. Within the area of the town and its suburbs the authority of the commune was supreme. The charter of Soissons, dating from the twelfth century and widely copied by other towns, declares that "all men living within the •walls and without the walls in the suburb, to whatever manor they may belong, shall take the oath to the com- mune; and if any one of them shall refuse, those who have taken the oath shall confiscate his house and money. All men living within the boundaries of the commune shall aid one another to the extent of their ability, and shall not per- mit any outsider to carry anything away nor to collect taxes from any one of them. When the bell summons the com- mune to assemble, any one failing to appear shall pay a fine of twelve pence. If any member of the commune has com- mitted any offense and refuses to give satisfaction before the aldermen, the men of the commune shall punish him." Such sentences illustrate the ideals of independence, demo- cratic brotherhood, and active citizenship which animated the founders of these twelfth-century commonwealths. Soissons at this time was scarcely more than an agricul- tural center with a market for the cornV.wine, timber, and Rural salt of the vicinity. The commune here preceded communes ^j^g formation of artisan gilds. Indeed, as in Italy, many tiny villages shared in this revolutionary move- FRENCH, FLEMISH, ENGLISH, GERMAN TOWNS 363 ment which swept over the land, and became rural com- munes, carrying on their husbandry and administering local justice without interference from lords. The French communes were lively centers of local inde- pendence, vigor, and enterprise, but were not as large and powerful as the Italian cities, and did not like French and them pursue an aggressive foreign policy. That communes is to say, they did not fight with one another nor compared •' ^ J ° as to foreign attempt to conquer the rural communes and policy other territory about them as the Italian cities did. Further- more, they were willing to recognize in a loose way the sov- ereignty of the king or the head of the particular feudal state in which each was located, and in time of need to fur- nish him with funds or some of their militia, provided ordinarily he left them to attend to their own affairs. Nor were their militia to be despised, as Henry II of England found in 11 88 when the citizens of Mantes, a town of only five thousand inhabitants, ventured forth from their walls fully armed and checked his advance. Not all the towns of northern France, by any means, suc- ceeded in becoming communes. Some of the largest cities, like Paris, Chartres, and Troyes, could hardly Govern- even be called privileged towns, but were still ment of largely subject to the old seigneurial exploita- tion. Parts of Paris belonged to certain monasteries and were immune from the royal ofiicials. The Bishop of Paris had well-nigh absolute power over the island in the Seine known as La Cite and over portions of the neighboring banks of the rivers. Otherwise the Parisians were ruled by a royal provost. Gilds existed, however, and certain burghers enjoyed special royal favor. When the king went on a crusade in 1 190, he appointed six burghers of Paris to the council of regency during his absence. All over France, as well as in the eastern lands colon- ized by the Germans in the second half of the twelfth cen- tury, feudal lords and monasteries now founded ^, . . New towns Newtons" {].es villes neuves), laid out m regular squares instead of the crooked streets of old towns which 364 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE had grown up irregularly. In these new settlements special privileges were offered to attract settlers. A good example is the charter of Beaumont in the Argonne, which was adopted by hundreds of other settlements. This place in 1 1 82 received from its lord permission to elect officials with powers of high justice. These officials were, however, to turn over to the lord a part of the fines and other proceeds of justice and to collect various other dues and taxes for him. These new towns were apt to be largely agricultural in their economic life, at least when first started, unless founded near harbors where fishing and trade would at once flourish. We read, however, in a poet of the time of a new city where eight hundred families came to live, of whom one hundred devoted themselves to commerce, one hundred to fishing, one hundred to various crafts. One hundred more were bakers, another hundred kept taverns, and the rest seem to have cultivated gardens and vineyards. In northern France the river Seine was an important artery of trade exploited by associations of boatmen and ^ merchants at Rouen and Paris and on the upper Commerce , , ^ ^^ of northern Seine in Burgundy, who at times came into con- flict over their respective shares in the river traffic. But the chief center of commerce in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries was Champagne, with its famous fairs, where traders from the Mediterranean cities exchanged their wares with merchants from the north. These fairs were held in succession at different places and each lasted about six weeks. The two largest fairs were at Troyes, from which the expression "Troy weight" is perhaps derived, and at Provins, whose population has shrunk to-day to a tenth of what it was then. The sagacious Counts of Cham.- pagne protected the visiting merchants, kept moderate the dues that were levied at the fairs, and strictly enforced all contracts and debts entered into there. The towns of Flanders and its adjoining districts engaged Flemish especially in cloth manufacture and in other towns textile industries. Arras, the capital of Artois, gave its name to tapestry hangings, famed in the Middle Ages FRENCH, FLEMISH, ENGLISH, GERMAN TOWNS 365 but manufactured no longer, such as Polonius hides be- hind in one of the scenes in Hamlet. Cambrai, the chief city of an ecclesiastical principality, still manufactures x cambric which was invented there in the fifteenth century. Lille, originally L'Isle, whence comes the expression "lisle thread"; Valenciennes, once noted for its lace; and Douai were then located in Flanders and Hainault, although now in France. By 1200 there were some forty towns in Flanders alone, of which Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres were the chief. These three cities ranked with the great Italian communes in their size and wealth. Elsewhere in the Low Countries cities were less numerous. There were about a dozen in Brabant, seven in Hainault, and half a dozen in the Bishopric of Liege. In- q^j^^j. ^^^^g dustry and trade developed much earlier in what il? the Low is now Belgium than among the Dutch, so that in 1200 there were very few towns in what is now the Netherlands. The rise of cities on any large scale did not occur in Holland until the latter part of the thirteenth century. Before that Utrecht with its four markets a year was the chief commercial center in the north. The great Flemish cities probably began as market- places under the shadow of castle or monastery. By the eleventh century they were flourishing centers Internal of industry and commerce, and repeatedly re- the^Fiemish volted against the authority of their counts, towns Their inhabitants made up four classes, soldiers, landowners, merchants, and artisans, of whom the two last were by far the more numerous. A number of new towns with harbors were founded by the Counts of Flanders in the course of the twelfth century. Then, too, the towns received many privileges from the counts, who entrusted the administra- tion of local justice and of municipal affairs in large measure to the rich patrician families, from whose ranks developed a council whose members held office for life and elected their successors. The magistrates and citizens not only admin- istered the internal affairs of their towns, but during the thirteenth century were usually consulted by the count /■ 366 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE when he took any important action affecting Flanders as a whole. Before the twelfth century was over, the lower classes in Ghent had expressed their discontent with the rule of the richer citizens by uprisings. Toward the close of the thirteenth century, out of 9300 burghers listed in Bruges, 8000 were artisans who had little share in the government. Before lioo the Flemings had a fair of their own at Thu- rout, and went beyond their borders as far as Coblenz on Foreign ^^^ Rhine to secure wool for their cloth manu- trade of factures. Early in the twelfth century Italians were found in Ypres, and by the close of that century a flourishing trade went on with England, France, Spain, and Portugal. In the case of the three last-named countries the trade chiefly followed land routes. The most frequented path led from Bruges by old Roman roads via Tournai, Douai, and Arras to Bapaume. This town, to-day an insignificant little place, was then the chief center for the collection of customs duties between Flanders and the rest of France, owing to its situation at the crossing of two ancient Roman roads from Arras to Rheims and from Cambrai to Amiens. From Bapaume the route proceeded through Peronne, Roye, Compiegne, Paris, Orleans, where Joan of Arc later saved France, Tours, with its shrine of St. Martin, Poitiers, where the oldest Christian church in France stands, Limoges, famous since the twelfth century for its enamels, Bordeaux, and Bayonne to Pampeluna, the capital of Navarre. There two routes branched off to Burgos and Lisbon and to Barcelona and Valencia, respec- tively. This trade developed from pilgrimages to the shrine of St. James at Compostella in northern Spain, and as a result of the part taken by the Flemish in expeditions of 1 147 and 1 1 89 to aid the Portuguese and Castilians against the Moslems of Spain. The thirteenth century saw com- merce by sea between Flanders and Spain and southwestern / France, and Spanish merchants were then permanently established in some of the towns of the Low Countries. There was free trade between the northern part of Germany and the Flemish cities, with the result that the products of FRENCH, FLEMISH, ENGLISH, GERMAN TOWNS 367 the Baltic region flowed to Flanders, whence they were exported to England and to the south and west. In commerce Bruges was the Venice of the north, resem- bling that city further in its numerous canals. One canal connected it with the sea, an arm of which was „ Bruges much nearer the town then than it is to-day. A writer of the early thirteenth century tells us that goods come to Bruges from Venice, China, the Cyclades, Hungary, Gascony, and England, and that there is room in its large quiet harbor at Damme for the entire French fleet. Bruges was eventually to displace the fairs of Champagne as the chief place of exchange between the north and south of Europe. In 1297 the city limits had to be enlarged, and the new walls then built were four and a half miles in circum- ference. Bruges at that time had a population triple that of London. By this time, too, Bruges and Ghent boasted many houses built of stone, and their municipal governments ap- propriated money for paving the streets. The leading gild in Bruges was the Hanse of London, an organization whose members were very rich and who were engaged in the wool trade with England, whence Flanders now got most of the raw material for its cloth manufactures. If Bruges was three times greater than London, the latter city was nevertheless much larger than any other English town. The population of England, which to-day English about equals that of France, then was only a ^^"^^^ small fraction of the dense population between the Rhine, the Rhone, and the Pyrenees. England was then primarily an agricultural country and towns were small. Eighty such boroughs or burgs — that is, fortified places containing dwelling-houses — are named in Domesday Book (1085), but of forty-two fairs and markets mentioned in the same record only eleven were held in boroughs. Many of the towns, however, early acquired the right to collect their own taxes and pay a lump sum to the royal officials, and in the course of time numerous privileges and charters were bestowed upon them by the English kings. By the thir- teenth century they had become centers of wealth and of 368 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE local Influence and were summoned to send representatives to the national assembly or parliament which then devel- oped. But they did not reach the height of their medieval prosperity and independence until the fifteenth century. Other prominent ports than London were Southampton in the south, and Bristol in the west. Foreign trade was largely carried on by foreign merchants, as is illustrated by the Flemish hanse in London already mentioned. The chief local fairs were at Winchester in the south, Stourbridge and Walsingham in the east. In Germany the change from rural to town life did not become marked until the thirteenth century, although be- Rise of ^^^^ there were a few large cities, especially on German the Rhine, where Basel, Strassburg, Speyer, towns • Worms, Mamz, and Cologne all dated from Roman times. And whereas the Lombard communes had established their practical independence of the Holy Roman Empire under Frederick Barbarossa in the twelfth century, the free or imperial cities of Germany did not acquire their full powers of government until the confused period of anarchy following the death of Frederick II in the second half of the thirteenth century. The building of stone walls, replacing rude earthworks and wooden stockades or ruined Roman fortifications, and enclosing a greater area, began in a few cases in the later twelfth century, but more often in the thirteenth. Even in the thirteenth century the inhabitants of most German towns still engaged to a large extent in agriculture. Their eco- and much of the land included within the new nomic life fortifications was still given over to farms and gardens. In the crowded streets of the center of the town, however, were to be found artisans carrying on various industries, and in the oldest and largest cities the gilds may be traced back to the twelfth century. Among the oldest craft gilds in Germany were the weavers of Mainz (1099), the fishermen of Worms (1106), the shoemakers of Wiirz- burg (1128), the makers of bed-ticks and the turners of Cologne, and the cobblers, tailors, and painters of Mag- FRENCH, FLEMISH, ENGLISH, GERMAN TOWNS 369 deburg from the twelfth century. Stone houses and glass windows did not come in until after the thirteenth cen- tury, although roofs of straw or shingles were already being replaced by tiles. The architects, furniture-makers, and wood-carvers of German towns in the thirteenth century gave little evidence of artistic ability. In general Germany . was at this time far behind Italy and France in commerce, industry, art, and wealth. There were three leading regions of urban life in medieval Germany. One was the Rhine Valley; another was south- ern Germany, where Augsburg, Bamberg, Wiirz- (^i^jgf groups burg, and Niirnberg were destined to become of German very wealthy by their trade across the Alps with Venice. The third group consisted of towns of the northern coast, like Bremen, Hamburg, and Liibeck, which exploited the fisheries and commerce of the North and Baltic Seas. Wisby, situated on the large island of Gotland off the Swed- ish coast in the Baltic, was a very flourishing trading town which now became German in character. Earlier, judging from the many Arabian and Anglo-Saxon coins found there, it must have been an important station in the traffic of the Northmen with the Orient by way of the Russian rivers. Though now deserted, its walls, towers, and ruined churches remain as a picturesque testimony to its medieval grandeur. In Denmark, too, and elsewhere along the coasts of the Baltic towns were numerous by the thirteenth century. Already in the thirteenth century German cities were forming leagues for their mutual protection. Prominent among these were the Rhine League and the Hanseatic League, of which we shall have more to say in the later Middle Ages. The growth toward self-government in a German town y during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries may be illus- trated by the example of Strassburg. At first How a self- there were practically no free inhabitants and governing 1 1 • 1 rr^i mumcipal- every one was dependent upon the bishop. The ity arose in expressions, "citizens" and "burghers," were Strassburg first employed in the twelfth century, but all inhabitants 370 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE except Jews and absolute serfs or slaves of the bishop were called citizens, although many of them as yet were not fully free. Gradually a city law grew up distinct from the mano- rial law, or Hojrecht, of the bishop, to which most of the inhabitants had once been subject. Finally the Hofrecht disappeared entirely and all the citizens became personally free, but there was no corporate body of citizens until the thirteenth century. The last step was the union of the citi- zens and their winning of self-government by a struggle with their prelate in 1262. In our discussion of medieval towns we have combined certain developments which did not necessarily always go „ together, but which were too closely associated to separate in the vast majority of cases. First, the growth of towns as centers of population and of indus- try and trade. Second, the rise of towns as separate units in medieval society and feudal politics, as distinct entities existing on terms of equality along with feudal lords, bish- ops, and abbots, and regulating their own internal affairs with the same freedom from outside interference that a lord enjoyed in governing his manors or an abbot in ruling his monastery. Third, the advance of the merchant and industrial classes in the towns to a position of influence and a share in the government. But some towns, like Paris, that were large in population and noteworthy for their business life and manufactures, were still not free politically. On the other hand, many places that were scarcely more than villages had gained independence and self-government. Again, many self-governing towns were far from democratic and excluded the lower classes from office or even from the suffrage. Finally, while the chief magistracies and councils in the towns of different countries have been mentioned in a general way, no description has been attempted of the numerous minor offices, nor of the many special boards and advisory bodies. It should also be realized that there was almost infinite variety in the forms of government, the local laws, and the charter provisions of the many towns. Indeed, in the history FRENCH, FLEMISH, ENGLISH, GERMAN TOWNS 371 of a single town like Florence, as we shall see later, one finds a bewildering variety and a series of kaleido- Variety of scopic constitutional changes, whose meaning it stkutions' is almost impossible to follow to-day. But as the and customs Dutch historian Blok has said, "All these differences in the arrangement and the development of the medieval cities are new proofs of the inexhaustible riches of medieval life, of the infinite variety in the society of that time, deviating so much from the greater monotony of our epoch. The endeavor to find one form for the medieval cities is a mis- take against the very nature of the Middle Ages." Or, as Hare says of the cities of Italy, "They are wonderfully dif- ferent, those great cities, quite as if they belonged to differ- ent countries, and so indeed they have, for there has been no national history common to all, but each has its own in- dividual sovereignty, its own chronicle, its own politics, domestic and foreign, its own saints, its own phase of archi- tecture, often its own language, always its own proverbs, its own superstitions, and its own ballads." 372 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE EXERCISES AND READINGS French Towns. Bemont and Monod, Medieval Europe from 3QS to 1270; chap, xxiii (pp. 375-90), on the rise of French towns. Clive Day, A History of Commerce (1907); pp. 31-78 deal with the rise of trade from the year 1000 on, with maps at pp. 58 and 66 illustrating the tolls on the Loire and the fairs of Champagne. Luchaire, Social France at the Time of Philip Augustus (English transla- tion by Krehbiel, 1912); pp. 404-15 on the emancipation of the peas- ants; pp. 415-28 on the towns and burgher class. Giry and Reville, Emancipation of the Medieval Towns (English trans- lation by Bates and Titsworth, 1907) ; a pamphlet of 67 pages dealing mainly with French towns. European History Studies, ed. F. M. Fling, vol. ii, no. 8, "The Rise of Cities"; six source selections on the communes and town charters of northern France. Compare the three charters of Lorris, Soissons, and Beauvais. Flemish and Dutch Towns. See the reading in Blok's History of the People 0} the Netherlands at the close of chapter xvii. German Towns. Munro and Sellery, Medieval Civilization, pp. 358-65; an English trans- lation of Lamprecht's passage on city life in Germany. W. King, Chronicles of Three Free Cities (1914); PP- 314-26 on Wisby and Lijbeck. Thatcher and McNeal, Source Book for Medieval History, pp. 592-604, charters and laws of German towns; pp. 604-12, leagues and agreements of German towns; pp. 574-78, Jews in German towns. The Jews in the Middle Ages. Jacobs, Jews of Angevin England, pp. ix-xxii, usury and relations of the Jews and the king; pp. 307-16, Jewish business and deeds; pp. 337-42, manners and customs. CHAPTER XX THE MEDIEVAL REVIVAL OF LEARNING In western Christian Europe in the course of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries there developed a new civilization. Feudal enterprise, church reform, a new and Christian expansion were forces that con- civilization tributed to it. Its material and economic and social side we have seen in the rise of towns and trade and industry, the emancipation of a large part of the common people, and the growth of municipal institutions and liberties. We now turn to parallel developments in art, literature, education, sci- ence, and thought. The new culture in these fields was a curious mixture of things old and new. It was in part a revival of the civiliza- tion of antiquity, which had declined so in the Nature of late Roman Empire and had almost passed away medieval during the early Middle Ages. It was in part a breaking away from ancient traditions and styles and the beginning of modern methods in speaking, writing, investi- gating, and teaching. It was in large measure the product of the medieval Church and clergy, the expression of the religious motive and of Christian interests. Yet, as the communes were antagonistic to the clergy, so in the science and literature of the period we see the rise of an independent secular spirit. Finally, the artists and the scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries learned and borrowed from the Byzantines and the Arabs as well as from the ancients and the church fathers. But their own output was neither classical nor patristic nor Byzantine nor Moorish; nor was it as yet wholly modem in character; it was medieval. The scanty learning and literature of the early Middle Ages had been limited to writing in Latin by clergymen, and for centuries there were only a few names of consequence, such as Gregory the Great, Isidore, Bede, Alcuin, and John 374 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE the Scot. For a time after the break-up of Charlemagne's Latin learn- empire this State of decHne continued and even eratureof seemed to grow worse. Then progress becomes the tenth gradually apparent. Some one has figured out eleveTtV that fewer names of writers have come down to centuries ^g from the tenth than from any other cen- tury between Charlemagne and modern times. In Italy, where cities were first to develop and where we might expect to find the most education, on the contrary well into the eleventh century books were scarce, one had to go a long way to reach a school, and there were many complaints of the ignorance of the lower clergy and against men of no education in high places in the Church. The complaints, however, indicate an awakening intellectual conscience. But knowledge was at a low ebb and what literature there was consisted of barren rhetoric. The Latin poems of the time seem mere exercises in metre and language without feeling and genius. There was still a strong feeling that a Christian ought not to study too deeply in classical litera- ture and philosophy, and even in the field of theology there was no writing of real importance. North of the Alps names of scholars were scarcer than narratives of miracles in the chronicles of the time. Bruno, Bruno and the brother of Otto the Great, was one of these Hrosvita j-^j-g apparitions. His biographer, writing imme- diately after his death, tells us that the chief aim of Bruno's own writing and of his teaching at the palace school was the cultivation of a good Latin style, and that he read the ancient tragedies and comedies through gravely without tears or laughter. "He thought that their meaning was worthless; the style was what he considered all important." A German nun, Hrosvita, who died about the year looo, not only read the plays of Terence, but composed some dramas herself, the first that have come down to us since Seneca's. Although these seem very stiff and crude to the modern reader, they possessed more plot and human interest than the liturgic spectacles which were presented about this time by the clergy in cathedrals and monasteries in connection THE MEDIEVAL REVIVAL OF LEARNING 375 with the Christmas and Easter services, but which devel- oped later into the important mystery and morality plays. Hrosvita's plots are either legends of Christian martyrs or love stories in which celibacy, not marriage, is considered "a happy ending." In Gaul Gerbert was the greatest scholar of the tenth century. He studied grammar in a monastery in Auvergne, and then went to the county of Barcelona in „ , . 1 . 1 M 1 • Gerbert northern Spam and imbibed some mathematics, a field in which he later wrote treatises. He became school- master in the cathedral at Rheims and for a year was abbot of a monastery in Lombardy. Afterwards he twice tried to obtain copies of scientific manuscripts which he had seen in its library. Gerbert was an attractive letter-writer and his correspondence is important for the history of the times, with whose rulers, especially the last Carolingians, the first Capetians and the emperors, Otto II and Otto III, he was closely connected. He became an archbishop and finally Pope Sylvester II, which indicates that the age at least respected scholarship. Later medieval legend made of him a magician and necromancer, but he seems to have done nothing more wonderful than to construct an abacus and build a pipe organ. Gerbert's clever letters dealing with contemporary events lead us to note an improvement in the writing of history which became manifest in the late tenth and improve- early eleventh century. Several writers now dis- historical played a more animated and individual style writing than the ordinary dry and meager monastic annals of the early Middle Ages or than the empty rhetoric of the tenth- century poets. Widukind narrated with spirit and vigor the story of his own Saxon people. Liutprand the Lombard tells of his trips to Constantinople and has a good grasp of the general state of Europe in the middle of the tenth century. Thietmar records the story of the German kings and of his Bishopric of Merseburg to ioi8. Raoul Glaber, writing about the middle of the eleventh century, entertains us hugely by his pot-pourri of portents and disasters, marvels 376 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE and mysteries of the preceding sixty years, and, ere he closes, confides an account of his early sinful life and subse- quent monastic adventures. Hermann the Lame, of Reiche- nau, who died in 1054, and Marianus Scotus (1026-1083), an Irish monk who wandered to Germany, wrote world his- tories, and they are noted for their chronological researches. With these men and with Adam of Bremen, who introduces us to the history and geography of northern Europe, and Lambert of Hersfeld, who gives a detailed and well-written, though partisan, account of the eventful years 1073-1077, we find the writing of history well developed before the time of the First Crusade. All these works were in Latin. A large number of the famous men of the next generation were said to have been pupils of Gerbert. One of them Famous praised his master as "a man of lofty genius and the^eleventh wonderful eloquence, by whose light, as of a century brightly burning torch, all Gaul, already grow- ing dark, was again illuminated." Gerbert's school at Rheims was followed in the eleventh century by famous teachers or cathedral schools in other French towns such as Chartres, Angers, Paris, Laon, Orleans, Poitiers, and Perigueux. Some monasteries also were noted for their instruction, such as the famous Cluny in Burgundy and Bee in Normandy, whence William the Conqueror took his first archbishop, the learned Italian lawyer Lanfranc. Both the teachers and alumni of these ecclesiastical schools rose to high positions in the Church and the State; but what was taught and learned at these places seems very scanty to us to-day. The main point, however, was that the students thought that they were learning something and sang the praises of their instructors forever after. There was at least, therefore, a growing enthusiasm for learning. Presently the amount of learning also began to increase. Progress in The first notable advance was in medicine, medicine: j^ northern Africa about 1015 was bom Con- Constan- . , . tinus stantine, usually known by his Latin name, Con- Africanus stantinus Africanus, from his birthplace. After many years of travel in the Orient in quest of knowledge, he THE MEDIEVAL REVIVAL OF LEARNING 377 came to the court of the Norman ruler of southern Italy, Robert Guiscard, at Salerno. Later he retired to the famous monastery of Monte Cassino, founded by St. Benedict him- self, and there he died in 1087. During this residence in Italy he composed several medical treatises in Latin which were in large measure merely translations of the works of Arabian physicians, but which none the less helped to in- crease the knowledge of the Christian West where Constan- tinus Africanus was henceforth a much-cited authority. His presence at Salerno also proved a stimulus to a school of medicine which had already existed there on a small scale among the monks and which now for a time became the most famous in the Latin world. A legal revival on a much larger scale in northern Italy soon followed that in medicine in the south. The rush of law students to Bologna at the very end of the Revival of eleventh century was an intellectual movement law'^t^ contemporaneous with the First Crusade. Some Bologna acquaintance with Justinian's law books seems to have sur- vived in Italy through the early Middle Ages, but it was only at the close of the eleventh century that the old Roman law proper, set forth in the Digest, began to be studied with scientific thoroughness by students from all over Europe, who flocked to the law school at Bologna presided over by the great Irnerius. He was the first of a group or series of men known as the "glossators" or commentators upon the Roman law, from the glosses or marginal notes which they made in their copies of the Digest. From 1 100 on the Roman or civil law {ius civilis) became an increasingly important force in western Europe. We have already noted its influ- ence at the Diet of Roncaglia held by Frederick Barbarossa. Those who had studied law at Bologna or Pavia found lucra- tive posts open to them in both Church and State, for canon as well as civil law was taught. It was a Bolognese professor, the monk Gratian, who about the middle of the twelfth century made a compilation of the canon law which hence- forth superseded the older collections as the standard work. The original title of his book was The Harmony oj Conflicting 378 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Canons {Concordantia discordantium canonum), but it was usually more briefly called the Decretum. Of ecclesiastical courts and canon law we have already treated. European universities to-day still give courses in canon law and grant the degree of "doctor of both laws," J.U.D. {juris utriusgue doctor). North of the Alps in the early twelfth century teachers had become much more numerous than before. Indeed, one Education writer of the time, William of Conches in Nor- outside mandy, complained bitterly that education had ^^ already become too popular, that many were teaching without adequate preparation, that most students took easy courses with popular professors instead of with the truly profound and original scholars, and yet that every teacher's time was so occupied with classes that he had scant leisure left for research and publication. This ten- dency to criticize existing educational conditions was one of the marks of the new age, and we shall meet further instances of it. What were the subjects taught in these schools north of the Alps? One of William's contemporaries speaks of him A brief ^^ ^ teacher of "Grammar"; that is, of Latin classical literature. We also know that about this time there was a school at Chartres devoted especially to the literary study of the Latin classics and to the culti- vation of a good Latin style. North as well as south of the Alps, however, the new development was to be of a learned rather than a literary character. William's extant work, for example, deals with philosophy and astronomy, although it occasionally quotes classical literature. To a great extent William follows the ancient Greek phil- osopher Plato in his interpretation of the world, although he Platonic also cites Christian writings and various books philosophy ^£ astronomy. Yet he probably knew Plato's astronomy doctrines only indirectly through other writers and through Latin translations of some of Plato's works. William's little book begins by defining philosophy and describing its method of inquiry; he then argues that the THE MEDIEVAL REVIVAL OF LEARNING 379 world was made by God and discusses the Trinity at some length; next he considers other spiritual beings in the uni- verse, such as the demons in whom medieval men generally believed ; and then he treats of the elements of which natu- ral objects are composed. Here he makes use of the writings of Constantinus Africanus, who, while still accepting the old Greek theory of only four elements, had explained that the earth, air, fire, and water which we see and feel are not the pure elements, but, like all other objects in nature, are compounds made up of all four elements. Finally, William discusses in more detail the sky and stars, and the earth and its human occupants. Other interests of the learned world of the twelfth cen- tury are illustrated by the career of Abelard (1079-1142), the oldest son of the lord of a village in Brittany, who left castle, the chase, and the profession of arms, to pursue learning. He was especially interested in dialectic or logic, the art of reasoning and disputation. This was a subject not unlike the debating of our day except that the questions argued were philosophical and theological rather than political and economic as in intercollegiate de- bates of the present — questions about the workings of the mind rather than about money matters, and questions con- cerning the other world rather than this. Abelard found many places where teachers were instructing large bands of students in the art of logic, and he himself before long be- came a lecturer of great renown at Paris. Dialectic was based upon the treatises of Aristotle in logic which had been translated by Boethius and Porphyry at the close of the Roman Empire. Teachers and stu- Medieval dents of dialectic were now exercised over such nomlnaHsts questions as whether there is any such reality as and realists color independent of the colored objects. In other words, whether we merely have red paint and red cows and red sunrises, or whether there is a redness apart from particular objects. Or, furthermore, whether there is an ideal beauty and an abstract justice which form our standards in deter- mining whether individual objects are beautiful and whether 38o THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE individual actions are just. Again, men differ in complexion, size, and temperament; is there any human genus and species which includes them all, or any ideal man after whom they are all patterned? Or, is humanity a mere collective word or simply a conception attained by our minds? Such was the problem of universals agitating the dialecticians when Abelard began his education. Those who regarded such abstract and collective terms as mere names were called "Nominalists." Those who held them to be true sub- stances, although perhaps substances of an incorporeal and spiritual nature, were called "Realists." Those who, like Abelard himself, took a middle course, were called "Con- ceptualists." All this discussion was a distant echo and revival of the theory of ideas, in which Plato, fifteen hun- dred years before in the Academy at Athens, had instructed Aristotle and his other disciples, and which is still reflected in modern idealism. The theory of spiritual substances was very welcome to the Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages, since it con- T. , . , firmed their belief in a human soul separate from Relation of i • i r i dialectic to the mortal body and m a host of demons and t eoogy angels. That substance was something distinct from external appearance and particular qualities was also an attractive thought to them. It enabled them to explain that in the sacrament of the mass, while the bread and wine might retain their outward qualities such as are appar- ent to the senses of sight, taste, and touch, yet their inner nature had been "transubstantiated" into the body and blood of Christ. This illustrates what important bearings logic or dialectic might have upon theology. Abelard himself soon gave up teaching for a time In order to study theology at Laon with a master called Anselm. Abelard as This was not, however, the famous Anselm., a theologian Archblshop of Canterbury under William Rufus and Henry I, who put forth the ontologlcal argument for the existence of God. Abelard, who formerly had made his teachers in logic a deal of trouble by frequently disagreeing and arguing with them, now soon became disgusted with THE MEDIEVAL REVIVAL OF LEARNING 381 Anselm whom he regarded as a mere rhetorician without ideas. He asked him many questions and was unable to get satisfactory answers. A favorite method in teaching theology then was for the lecturer to read some book of the Bible or work of a church father and make running com- ments upon it, not unlike the glosses of the Bolognese doc- tors of law. Soon Abelard was expounding difficult pas- sages in the Book of Ezekiel to Anselm's students instead of attending the master's lectures. Abelard now received a call to teach at the cathedral school of Paris, out of which was to develop a great univer- sity, and great crowds attended his lectures. But his tragic love affair with Heloise blighted the latter part of his career and his days were henceforth passed more in monasteries and hermitages then in the public eye, although he con- tinued to teach. St. Bernard made him considerable trouble by attacking some of his views as heretical. But the fact that those who displayed too much originality in expound- ing the mysteries of the faith were liable to be forced to retract their theories in no way diminished the fascination which theological discussion had for the medieval clergy. Abelard 's chief contribution to the future of scholasti- cism, as, from its origin in the schools, the medieval study of philosophy and theology is called, was, aside The from the general enthusiasm which he aroused ^^^ ^^ ^^^ for clever discussion and the crowds of students that he drew to Paris, his method of investigation. Writers of the early Middle Ages, like undergraduates taking notes on collateral reading, often simply copied passages from Augus- tine's City of God and other works in their meager libraries. By stringing together a series of such quotations they flat- tered themselves that they had made a new book. But Abelard, instead of merely copying, meant to compare and criticize the writings and opinions of the past. This is well illustrated by his work called Sic et Non. In the introduc- tion he holds that there are many important theological questions still open to discussion, and that the best way to reach the truth is to adopt an open-minded, skeptical, and 382 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE critical attitude. "The master-key to knowledge is to keep asking questions," says this medieval Socrates. Conse- quently he puts one hundred and fifty-eight questions about the nature of God and other theological matters, and col- lects under each heading statements from patristic litera- ture both for (sic) and against {non) the view in question. By thus showing the church fathers often in apparent dis- agreement, he demonstrated the need of further discussion and investigation in order to reach the truth in theology. He recognized that apparent obscurities might often be cleared up and that seeming contradictions might be recon- ciled by a more careful consideration of the passages or by excluding apocryphal works and by remedying the mistakes of copyists. But this, he would argue, simply shows the need of more intensive study. However, he further held that, except for the Bible itself, previous Christian writings were of unequal value and must not be unquestioningly accepted as absolute truth. If Abelard meant to discourage his age from consulting past authorities on all sorts of questions, he did not succeed. Scholasti- But his method of putting fonv^ard a problem for cism debate and solution and then finding all the state- ments pro and C07t bearing on the question that one could in past literature — this became a favorite method of medie- val teachers and writers. Only, instead of leaving the prob- lem unsolved, as the Sic et Non does, they went on to cope with the arguments on both sides and to attempt to reach a correct solution. Such writings, together with commen- taries on the authorities, became the staple products of medieval scholasticism. Gratian's Harmony of Conflicting Canons was such a work. A year or two after it came out, Peter Lombard, who had attended Abelard's lectures, pub- lished his famous SententicB, henceforth the standard text- book in scholastic theology. The title Sententicd, commonly translated as "Sentences," in this case refers to the "opin- ions" or authoritative utterances of the church fathers upon the various questions of the Christian faith, which Peter has collected, condensed, and classified in one volume. THE MEDIEVAL REVIVAL OF LEARNING 383 While Abelard was attending the lectures of dialecticians and theologians in different parts of northern France, a con- temporary of his with a similar name, Adelard, Adelard of of Bath, in England, became dissatisfied with Bath: math- "the wordy war of sophisms and the affected natural elocution of rhetoric" prevalent in "the schools ^^^^^^^ of Gaul," and went to the Greeks and Saracens to acquire fuller knowledge. His especial interest was in natural science and mathematics. He was one of the first translators into Latin of the Arabic versions of Greek and Oriental science and philosophy. He translated the geometry of Euclid, and he also wrote a work entitled Questions about Nature, in which he set forth the views of his Arabian masters and per- haps some discoveries of his own. In this book he justifies the study of natural science against narrow religious preju- dice. He also scolds his nephew, with whom he is repre- sented as engaged in dialogue, for excessive trust in authori- ties and tells him that reason and experiment are the best methods of reaching the truth. In trying to answer the questions about plants, animals, and other things in nature which his nephew puts to him, Adelard often makes incor- rect statements, some of which sound ridiculous to us. But sometimes he displays surprisingly correct knowledge; as in explaining how far a stone would fall if dropped into a hole running through the center of the earth, and why water will not readily flow out of a small aperture at the bottom of a vessel which is elsewhere tightly sealed. Roger, the Norman ruler of Sicily from 1130 to 1154, who introduced the manufacture of silk in Palermo, was especially interested in geography. He collected Roger of all the Arabian books on the subject that he S;cily and the geog- could find and eagerly questioned travelers who raphy of came jto his court and took notes on their ac- E*^"^' counts. Finally the Arabian traveler and geographer Edrisi was given the task of combining these materials into a great work on the geography of the world. Roger told him, "I want a description of the earth made after direct observa- tion, not after books." The result was a work finished in 384 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE 1 1 54 and superior to any previous medieval geography either Christian or Arabian. The employment of Edrisi by Roger shows us that the Church was not the sole center and source of learning. We Princel have also seen Constantinus Africanus at the patronage court of the Norman Robert Guiscard. Wil- earning jj^^ ^£ Conches, too, had found a patron in Geoffrey Plantagenet, the father of Henry II of England, and himself Duke of Normandy as well as Count of Anjou; and Adelard of Bath in 1130 received a sum of money from the government of Henry I of England. Roger's patronage of learning in Sicily was repeated there in the first half of the thirteenth century by the cultured court of the Emperor Frederick II, of whose scientific curiosity strange tales were circulated by credulous chroniclers. One such story was to this effect: Frederick gave two men a hearty dinner, after which one of them was made to take a nap and the other to go hunting. Both were then put to death and their insides examined with a view to learning whether sleep or exercise immediately after a meal was more favorable to digestion. Frederick's court astrologer was Michael Scot, a native of the British Isles who did much to promote the translation of Aristotle and other learned writings from Arabic into Latin, and who sooner or later won a popular reputation as a magician. Another monarch of the thirteenth century famed for his own erudition as well as his patronage of learning was Alfonso the Wise of Castile (1252-1284). In both Sicily and the Spanish peninsula in the latter half of the twelfth and the early years of the thirteenth century T, , ,. numerous translators were engaged in turning Translations « , . , r /-> i from the into Latm from Arabic the treasures of Greek ^^^^^'^ science and philosophy which the Arabs had preserved and also many writings of the Arabs themselves. As such works became available for Latin readers, they greatly increased the amount of facts and theories current, broadened the outlook of the learned world, and stimulated further that intellectual curiosity and that fondness for dis- cussion and disputation which were already very much in THE MEDIEVAL REVIVAL OF LEARNING 385 evidence. Medical students now had the voluminous works of the Greek Galen and the Arab Avicenna; astronomers profited by the ancient writings of Ptolemy, and by the more recent works of numerous Arabs. Men's minds were now formed by the ideas of the Greeks and Arabs instead of merely by reading the church fathers and Latin litera- ture. They now had a new mass of material, to which they could put the questions that were troubling them, and which suggested new questions to them. It may seem strange that ancient Greek writers, most of whom were pagans, and more recent writers in Arabic, many of whom were Mohamme- dans, should have been so readily accepted as authorities by the Western Christian world. But intellectual curiosity and respect for learning proved stronger than religious scru- ples. There was, it is true, an abiding hostility to certain free-thinking Arabs like Averroes, but this was because he was a skeptic and not even a good Mohammedan. But Aristotle, whom Averroes and the Arabian learned world generally had fervently admired as the greatest of all philosophers, was equally esteemed by the Chris- The new tians of the thirteenth century. In Abelard's ^"stotle time only his logical treatises had been known to the Latins, but now most of the other works by him which have come down to us were translated. Plato, whose philosophy of nature William of Conches had followed in the twelfth cen- tury, was now rather neglected in favor of Aristotle. For a while, it is true, Aristotle's treatises in natural science were not permitted to be taught at Paris, but soon they, together with his other works, became the common property of all Latin scholars thanks to the labors of the two great school- men, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. The former set forth the doctrines of Aristotle with additions of his own in a series of works which paralleled in titles and contents the writings of the Greek philosopher. Aquinas issued a revised translation of Aristotle's writings with an accom- panying commentary of his own. Aristotle's Metaphysics, a work dealing as its title suggests with things beyond the purely physical, was of great interest to the medieval theo- 386 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE logians and gave a further impetus to their science, although, inasmuch as Aristotle believed neither in the creation of the world nor the immortality of the soul, they experienced some difficulty in reconciling all his utterances with their Bibles. But most of such difficulties had been smoothed away by Albertus and Thomas. Albertus and Aquinas also wrote many theological works, and the latter is generally regarded by Roman Catholics as their greatest medieval theologian. Both men were indefatigable writers and the col- lected works of either to-day fill about forty portly volumes. In natural science, too, further progress was made in the thirteenth century with the translation of Aristotle's books Natural of natural philosophy and of numerous other science in Greek and Arabian scientists. In some branches the thir- r • i i l teenth of science, moreover, an advance was made be- century yond the knowledge of previous ages. In phys- ical science this was true in optics and dynamics. A branch of mathematics with an Arabian name, algebra, now be- gan to develop in addition to the older subjects of arith- metic and geometry. Early in the century Leonardo of Pisa introduced into western Europe the so-called Arabic numerals, which were really derived from the Hindus by the Arabs. As we have said before, this was probably the greatest improvement in writing made since the invention of the phonetic alphabet, for the new figures could be written in much less time than could the clumsy Roman numerals and were far handier in written reckoning than any previous system. In astronomy new tables of the movements of the heavenly bodies were drawn up under the direction of Alfonso the Wise of Castile, and the need of further re- forming the calendar was generally recognized. Many new facts were collected from personal experience and observa- tion concerning animals, plants, and countries which were either unmentioned at all or incorrectly described in those works which had come down from antiquity. Such inno- vations were partly the work of the Arabs and of the Ori- ental learning from which they drew, but were also in part the work of the Latins themselves. THE MEDIEVAL REVIVAL OF LEARNING 387 The general laws of nature were as yet, nevertheless, by no means completely and satisfactorily worked out. The facts that had been collected had not been prop- Belief in erly systematized and much misinformation was ^^ult mixed in with them. Magic, of which we saw virtues traces in the Roman Empire and to which the Arabs were especially prone, still cast its spell over learning. Men were very credulous concerning reported marvels. A few indis- putable facts for which they could not account, such as the magnet's attraction for iron, made them ready to believe in a host of wonders. Marvelous occult virtues were attrib- uted to herbs and even to parts of animals, such as the blood of a fox or the liver of a vulture. Snakes, mice, and various nasty substances were highly prized for their sup- posed medicinal properties. Going to a medieval doctor was far worse than a session with a modern dentist, for he was likely to prescribe that the patient take whole in a little wine or water "the worms with many feet that are found between the trunk and bark of trees." Gilbert of England prescribed this as a remedy for spots in the eye, but added the recommendation that the dose be accompanied by repe- tition of the Lord's Prayer. As for toothache, among the treatments for it listed in the medical work of a scholar from the Spanish peninsula who finally became pope, we find filling the cavity with the brain of a partridge or with the pulverized teeth of a dog, touching it with a dead man's tooth or with a root shaped like a tooth, as well as the more sensible application of opium. The greatest virtues among terrestrial objects were attributed to gems, some of which, it was believed, could confer wisdom and eloquence, gra- ciousness or success or riches upon their bearers, or even make them invisible. The supreme power in the natural universe was reserved to the stars. By the movements of the planets all changes in the world of physical nature and many in the ^gj-roiogv life of man were supposed to be regulated. It and was from the stars that gems and herbs derived ^ ^ ^"^^ their occult virtues. Many doctors inspected the sky with 388 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE reference to the diseases and treatment of their patients, and many rulers kept astrologers at their courts. Even bishops and popes were at times known to consult them. The alchemists tried to convert other metals into gold, and often proceeded toward this goal by mystic methods with incantations and useless ceremonial. However, the alchem- ists of the thirteenth century were more sober and scientific and less superstitious than those of the Greek-speaking or Arabian worlds. They were already on the road to modern chemistry, and there is to-day a tendency to return to their belief that one primal matter lies behind the chemical ele- ments. Peter of Abano, however, who was probably the most learned man living around the year 1300, despaired of any such discovery as that of atomic weights, declaring it impossible to find the quantities and weights of the con- stituent elements in any object. Such uncertainty concern- ing the composition of bodies was one reason for the belief in occult virtues. Scientific apparatus was still in a primitive state and the experimental method and mathematical accuracy of mod- ^ . ern science were not yet in existence. But raen Experiment , , • i i • and like the alchemists and architects experimented inventions ^ good deal in their own way and attained to some important discoveries as a result. The mariner's com- pass with its magnetic needle, gunpowder, and magnifying lenses for eyeglasses all first became known in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. We have already mentioned chimney flues, lead plumbing, and glass windows. New dyes and industrial processes were discovered, and mechanical clocks were a medieval invention. Clocks and lenses were later to prove of great help in scientific investigation, since the one enables time to be measured accurately, while the other, when developed into telescope and microscope, en- ables one to study much that is invisible to the naked eye. Many learned men, from Adelard of Bath in the early twelfth to Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century, ad- vocated experimentation as well as reading authorities as a method of discovering truth. Roger Bacon, in a work THE MEDIEVAL REVIVAL OF LEARNING 389 written about 1267 at the request of Pope Clement IV, argued that philosophy and science could be of great service to the Church, and classed "experimental science" with the ancient languages, mathematics, optics, and ethics as the five subjects of most importance after theology. All this teaching, studying, and enthusiasm for learning resulted in the organization of universities in those places where there were from year to year enough Rise of teachers and students to form a permanent in- universities stitution of higher learning. At a later date universities were founded by princes, such as that established at Naples by Frederick II, or by the municipal authorities in the Ital- ian communes; and then professors were called from other places and students were gradually attracted. But the old- est universities, such as those of Paris, Bologna, and Ox- ford, grew up spontaneously and almost imperceptibly out of the wanderings of students and the instruction given by individual teachers in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The informal character of this early teaching was slow to disappear, and for a long time many students took neither degrees nor examinations and attended or absented them- selves from classes as they pleased. It was even longer before the universities came to possess costly permanent buildings. But gradually the teachers united into faculties, university statutes came into existence, and the students organized themselves by "nations" or in other unions. At Paris there were four nations, the English, Normans, Picards, and "French." The chief faculties were those of arts, whose instruction led to the degrees of Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts, of Medicine, of Civil Law, of Canon Law, and of Theology. As the names Bologna, Paris, and Oxford suggest, universities first developed in Italy, France, and England. They also soon were flourishing in Spain, but Germany, whose universities have been so num- erous and celebrated in recent times, lagged behind in medieval education. The first university in the part of the Holy Roman Empire lying north of the Alps was founded in 1348 at Prague in Bohemia, where most of the population 390 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE were Czechs. Universities in German cities — Vienna, Hei- delberg, Cologne, Erfurt — soon followed, however. By the close of the Middle Ages there were some eighty univer- sities in Europe. The universities were as cosmopolitan in character as was the Church itself. We find Hungarians at Paris and Place of the Polish scholars in Italy. But the students were universities supposed to havc learned to speak and to under- histor ' of stand Latin in grammar schools before they came civilization to the University, where both lectures and dis- putations were conducted in the Latin language. It has been said that the medieval universities "affected the prog- ress and intellectual development of Europe more power- fully, or perhaps rather more exclusively, than any schools in all likelihood will ever do again." On the other hand, most of them are still in existence to-day as modern Euro- pean universities, and have had an unbroken, though of course changing, intellectual life since the time of their foundation. Moreover, it is doubtful if we can apply to the Greek schools of philosophy, or to the learned world of scholars at Alexandria, or to the Roman law schools, the name "universities" in the sense in which it applies to the institutions of higher learning both in medieval and modem times. We therefore owe our universities to the Middle Ages. Our word "university" is derived from the Latin univer- sitas, which in the Middle Ages at first meant any gild or TT • V corporation. At first the distinctive term for an Universities .... as scholastic educational institution was stiidium, or studium ^' ^ generate, if there were several faculties. It was natural for the teachers and students in a town, especially if they were unprotected foreigners far from home, to unite in a gild of scholars. And it is easy to see the resemblance between the masters of the Parisian faculties and the master- workmen in a craft gild, and between their students to whom they granted degrees and the apprentices whom the master-workmen admitted to their gild after due train- ing. At Bologna the maturer law students themselves united into universitates, chose a rector to enforce their statutes. THE MEDIEVAL REVIVAL OF LEARNING 391 and hired their teachers. This shows us that there was con- siderable variety in the method of organization in different universities, which were often as complicated in their admin- istration as American universities are to-day. Organization was useful in order to gain freedom from the control of the town where the university was located and to secure special privileges for the students Academic and the institution. Since the universities had P^'i'^i^eges grown up to a large extent out of church schools and clerical education, it was customary for them to claim the privileges of the clergy for their members, who usually received the tonsure and could not be tried by secular courts. This last was a useful exemption when the students got into brawls with tavern-keepers or fights with the local police. On the other hand, the universities did not wish to remain under the control of the local bishop or other clerical authorities. They therefore sought grants of special privileges and inde- pendence from the pope or the king. Or if a university were not satisfied with the treatment which it received in one place, the masters and students might migrate in a body and establish themselves in some other city, since the university seldom owned much real estate and had neither large libraries nor laboratories. Instruction was given in hired halls where the students sometimes did not even have seats or benches, but squatted on the straw-strewn floor with their notebooks classroom on their knees. As printing had not yet been instruction invented and books were expensive, instruction was largely oral, consisting of lectures and disputations. However, there were textbooks on which the lectures were based, the teacher reading a passage out of the book and then explain- ing its meaning and making comments upon it. The stu- dents could thus make their own copies of the textbook as they went along. Consequently lectures were generally two hours long and the faithful student attended about three a day. Classes began at six o'clock, at ten there was an inter- mission for lunch, at noon or soon after instruction was resumed, at five came the dinner hour. The ideal student 392 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE was apparently supposed never to have any fun : there were no authorized amusements and even chess was frowned on. But in actual practice the students had their evenings free and were liable to indulge in a deal of drinking, dicing, and nocturnal escapades. There were no classes on Sundays, and on the numerous saints' days the program was lighter than usual. Although boys entered the universities at a younger age than to-day, and, if they came from a distance, were quite cut off from home influences by the lack of rail- roads and post-oflices, they were placed under little effective restraint or discipline. Gradually, however, "colleges" were founded, especially within the English uni- versities, at first for the benefit of poor students. These were houses where the student boarded and roomed and where he could also be made to get his lessons and keep good hours. No physical training was required of the stu- dents and intercollegiate athletics were unknown. But some of the "college customs" of to-day date back to the Middle Ages. In the initiation of the Bejaunus, we see the same thing as the "hazing" of Freshmen, and modern academic caps and gowns are a relic of medieval costume. The college boy of all ages has been proverbially "broke," and we hear much of the poor students and their hardships in the Middle Ages. Instead of "canvassing" during the summer vaca- tion, they often went about begging and offering to "sing for the souls of such as assist me." Some of the Latin poems written by students or by wan- dering clergy in the twelfth century were far, however, from Medieval being directed toward the salvation of souls. Latin poetry 'pj^g Carmina Burana, a collection of Latin verse found in a Bavarian monastery, are in large part satires upon the clergy, or drinking- and love-songs written in a most frivolous and rollicking tone with invocations of Bac- chus and other pagan deities. On the other hand, we should not forget the great medieval Latin hymns such as the Dies IrcB and Stabat Mater and those ascribed to St. Bernard. The amount of learning had so increased since the twelfth THE MEDIEVAL REVIVAL OF LEARNING 393 century that men had all that they could do to absorb the contents of the new books and no longer gave Scholastic much attention to literary style either in what ^^*'" they read or what they wrote. Logic drove out rhetoric, and the literary study of the Latin classics begun at Chartres in the previous century came to an end, displaced by the enthusiasm for Roman law, medicine, Greek philosophy, and Arabian science. But although scholastic commentaries and other works are dry reading and needlessly long, their thought is often acute and their contents better arranged than in the case of many ancient books. If their style is not attractive, these scholars were nevertheless able to express themselves accurately, inventing many new technical words to supply the scientific, philosophical, and theological de- fects of the ancient Latin language. After Edrisi geographical knowledge continued to make great strides during the remaining Middle Ages. The rise in the first half of the thirteenth century of a Penetration great Mongol empire stretching from China to °^ ^^^^ Russia made it possible for Western ambassadors and mis- sionaries, travelers and traders, 'to penetrate in person to the Far East and to learn of regions of which the Greeks and Romans have left no accounts. From the thirteenth century we have interesting narratives, by the friars John de Piano Carpini and William of Rubruk, envoys of the pope and of the King of France respectively, of their journeys into the heart of Asia to the court of the Great Khan at Karakorum, and the fuller and even more fascinating book of the Vene- tian merchant, Marco Polo, who spent the better part of his life in China and other Asiatic lands. There he traveled widely in the service of the Khan, who had by that time moved his capital from Mongolia to Peking and had adopted much of Chinese civilization. Marco was the first writer to reveal that civilization to the Western world, and to tell of many other regions such as Madagascar, Abyssinia, Tibet, Burma, Siam, Cochin-China, Ceylon, Java, Sumatra, and other islands of the East Indian archipelago. Some regions that he traversed were not visited again by Euro- 394 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE peans until the nineteenth century. He left Venice with his father and uncle in 127 1 and did not return until 1295. Three years later he was captured by the Genoese in a sea fight and while in prison dictated the story of his travels. In 1 29 1 John of Monte Corvino went as a missionary to India, whence he sent back a description of the Deccan, or southern part of the peninsula, and its people. He then proceeded to China of which the pope made him archbishop and sent others out to serve under him. He died in 1328, "not only the first but also seemingly the last effective European bishop in the Peking of the Middle Ages." Other envoys, missionaries, and traders penetrated yet other parts of Asia and have left records of their travels. Besides this overland penetration of the vast continent of Asia, there were westward voyages of discovery to the Westward Canary, Madeira, and Azores Islands, and other Ho! voyages along the west coast of Africa in an effort to circumnavigate that continent and so reach the Indies. Deep-sea sailing had been assisted by the invention of the mariner's compass. We are apt to associate such enter- prises with the later period of Prince Henry the Navigator and of Columbus, but the age of discovery had really begun by the late thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth century. Indeed, Edrisi tells us of eight explorers who sailed west from Lisbon in the early twelfth century in a vain effort to find the limits of the western ocean. About 1270 Lancelot Malocello went with Genoese vessels to the Cana- ries, and in 1291 two Genoese galleys tried to establish a direct sea trade with India by circumnavigating Africa, but never returned. In 1341 a Portuguese fleet explored the Canaries and found only natives there. But a Spanish geography written at about the same time lists the Madeiras, nine of the Canaries, and eight of the Azores, while a map of 1 35 1 indicates accurately, the location and contours of the three groups. Apparently they had been known for some time. Yet the Azores are seven hundred and fifty miles from the nearest point on the Portuguese coast, and one third of the way from Gibraltar to New York on a modem THE MEDIEVAL REVIVAL OF LEARNING 395 steamer. Therefore long before Columbus there were deep- sea sailors who were not afraid to venture far out of sight of land, farther even than the Northmen who had ventured still earlier from Norway to the Orkneys and Shetlands, from these to the Faroe Islands, and thence to Iceland, to Greenland, and to Vinland. The map of 1351 to which we just referred is known as the Laurentian Portolano. It also, possibly by a lucky guess, represents the shape of the continent of Africa Th&porto- more nearly correctly than does any other map ^^"* before the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope at the close of the fifteenth century. The word portolano means a "handy-plan," and is applied to the charts of the coast-line of which our earliest examples date about 1300. But these first extant portolani are so elaborate and accurate that there must have been a preceding period of preparation before such detailed and correct charts could be produced. They are evidently the result of close observation by prac- tical men and were made by sailors for sailors. They are the first true maps in the modem sense in the history of the world, and represent an immense and sudden advance in cartography. They give a large number of place names and indicate headlands, bays, and even shoals. Those which we possess are chiefly the work of Italians and are especially accurate for the Mediterranean Sea, but often display other coasts of Europe with fidelity, and sometimes expand into world-maps like the Laurentian Portolano already men- tioned. 396 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE EXERCISES AND READINGS ' Life of Gerbert. Munro and Sellery, Medieval Civilization, pp. 376-405. Life of Abelard. Any one of the first five chapters in Joseph McCabe, Abelard (London, 1901). miscell.4neous source selections illustrative of medieval Learning. Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. i, pp. 438-61. The Intellectual Movement of the Thirteenth Century. Munro and Sellery, Medieval Civilization, pp. 458-73. Student Life. Rashdall, History of the Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, vol. ll, chap. XIV (pp. 593-712). Carmina Burana. Well translated by J. A. Symonds, in Wine, Women, and Song. Natural Science in the Middle Ages. Thorndike, Popular Science Monthly (now called The Scientific Monthly), September, 191 5, pp. 271-91. Discovery of the Compass and the First True Maps (with illus- trations). Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, vol. iii, pp. 508-19. Later Medieval Exploration. Ibid., vol. viii, pp. 1-8. The Book of Ser Marco Polo. Translated with full apparatus and notes by Yule in two volumes. A handier translation is that in Everyman's Library. For the narratives of Carpini and Rubruk see the readings at the end of chapter xxix. CHAPTER XXI MEDIEVAL LITERATURE While Latin scholars, despite their occasional experi- ments and original ideas, were devoting most of their time to rehashing the opinions of past Christian Anew authors and to absorbing the recently acquired fort?! new science of the Greeks and Arabs, popular writers literature in the new languages of western Europe and the artists in the service of the Church were engaged primarily in new creations. The new society which had developed as an outcome of the fusion of Teutons and Romans was now ready to express itself. There were also the Celts whose folklore and imagination do not seem to have come to the surface in Latin literature when they were provincials of the Roman Empire. There were the Germanic and Norse in- vaders with their new myths and legends. There was the feudal aristocracy of innumerable knights, always fighting, jousting, and crusading, until at last it wore itself out under the spurring of its own superabundant vitality. "For the sword outwears its sheath And the soul wears out the breast." There were the men of the rising communes, crude as yet in manners and not overrefined in sentiment, but ambitious and industrious, and some of them artists and inventors. Now, the vast majority of the Celtic and Germanic and Norse population of Europe neither spoke nor understood Latin, and the same was true of the feudal aristocracy and the townsmen. Literature intended for them must be written in the vernacular speech of their daily life. With a few exceptions, we first find it so written in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Let us first see what the languages were in which this literature was written; then we will return to the literature itself. The Celtic languages survived to some extent into the 398 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Middle Ages and a considerable literature was produced in Celtic medieval Ireland. But it remained apart from languages ^j^g main currents of European literature and was not followed by any great modern literature. The Gallic variety of Celtic had disappeared in Gaul by the fourth century. But the Brythonic (British) dialects still existed in England at the time of the Anglo-Saxon conquest and, although they were obliterated there by the Germani«. invaders, they found a refuge in Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany, where Welsh, Cornish, and Breton dialects are still spoken to some extent to-day. Gaelic, the speech of the Goidels or third branch of Celts, was the language of Ire- land, where many still speak it. It also prevailed for a long time in the Scotch Highlands, but is now almost extinct there. The various Teutonic tongues may be classified in three groups: first, the eastern, or Gothic, which included the Ian- Teutonic guages of the Vandals and other German tribes languages .^j^q were located in the east of Europe before they invaded the Roman Empire; second, the northern or Scandinavian group, which was cut ofT from the others by Sla\'ic inroads south of Denmark from the sixth to the ninth century; third, the western group, including High and Low German, Anglo-Saxon, Frisian, Dutch, and Flemish. Of the Teutonic languages during the early Middle Ages we know very little with the exception of the Gothic, of which a specimen is preserved in the Bible of Ulfilas. The next Germanic language of which we have considerable remains is the Anglo-Saxon spoken in England before the Norman Conquest. In Germany itself, using that name in a broad geograph- ical sense, the language divided into High and Low German. High and As the country consists of a lofty plateau Low German stretching north from the Alps and a lower coastal plain including the mouths of the rivers Rhine, Elbe, and Oder, so the linguistic line of demarcation may be drawn approximately from Aachen and Cologne to the confluence of the Elbe and the Saale. High German was MEDIEVAL LITERATURE 399 destined to become the national speech; Low German was more closely related to the Dutch and the English languages. The medieval literature in Germany of which we shall speak was composed in Middle High German, the period of Old High German having ended about iioo. The modem Romance languages, French, Spanish, Portu- guese, and Italian, have developed from the colloquial Latin spoken in the late Roman Empire and the early Romance Middle Ages. This change may be traced in the languages oaths taken by the kings of the West Franks and of the East Franks at Strassburg in 842, a document which also gives us an early specimen of German. From the eleventh century on we find many different dialects in what is now France, but on the whole here as in Germany a dividing line may be drawn marking off the two tongues of north and south. From the northern dialects modem French has grown; the southern tongue, usually called Provencal, was to disappear as a written language, but is still spoken by peasants in parts of southern France. These two groups of dialects in France are also often called respectively the langiie d'o'il and the langue d'oc from the medieval pronunci- ation of the word for "Yes" in the two sections. Proven gal was more closely related to the speech of northern Italy and northern Spain than to that of northern France, and Cata- lan, the language of the northeastern comer of the Spanish peninsula, was really a branch of Provencal. By virtue of a written literature in the vernacular during the Anglo-Saxon period, England can boast the oldest and longest continuous literary history of any coun- Anglo-Saxon try of modern Europe. Bede, though himself literature writing in Latin, tells us of earlier Anglo-Saxon poets. Beowulf, the leading piece of Anglo-Saxon poetry, is extant only in a manuscript of about the year 1000, but is believed to have existed in its present form as early as the century before Charlemagne. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, begun in Alfred's time if not earlier, is not only the chief work in Anglo-Saxon prose, but the earliest piece of original com- position in prose in any medieval popular tongue. Anglo- 400 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Saxon, however, although It is often spoken of as Old Eng- lish, is very different from the English language of later times. It is much easier for a Frenchman to understand a French poem of the twelfth century than for an English- man to attempt to read Anglo-Saxon, in which many words and expressions are still a puzzle even to scholars. After the Norman conquest in the eleventh century learned men and the court and nobility all spoke and wrote ,^ J. , for some time either in Latin or in Norman Medieval ^ , , » i r- r English French, and Anglo-Saxon went out oi use as a literature literary language except for the continuation of the Chronicle to 1154. Indeed, even before the Norman conquest Anglo-Saxon literature, like the Anglo-Saxon mon- archy, had already shown signs of decline. Anglo-Saxon now became simply the spoken tongue of the uneducated classes and the common people, and it was only after a long period of transformation of sounds, endings, and inflections, and of great alteration and enrichment of the vocabulary by words adopted from the French or Latin, that the lan- guage of the people again came to serve as a literary medium. Hence the first works of any importance in Middle English were not written until the thirteenth century, and not until the second half of the fourteenth do we reach, in Langland and Chaucer, the great period of English medieval literature. The epic Beowulf is thought to have existed in oral reci- tative form for some time before it was set down in writing. Medieval It is a tale of fighting and seafaring, of heroic survivals of conflict with wcird forces of nature, of slaying the primi- , . , . , i r i • • tive Teutonic dragons m their watery caverns, and 01 drammg folk epic flagons of ale in the halls of thegns. It is written in the alliterative verse usual in Anglo-Saxon poetry, where the important and accented words in a line begin with the same sound. The Eddas of Iceland, too, written in the most primitive style of Icelandic verse, with stories of the gods Woden and Thor, of prophetesses and magic, of thralls and giants, seem to be a collection made in the thirteenth cen- tury from the mass of myth and legend handed down from earlier heathen times. The German Nibelungenlied also, MEDIEVAL LITERATURE 405 were literary artists; they also were clever if narrow think- ers, and they possessed no slight power of psychological analysis of character and motive. We find in them further a feeling for the beauty in nature. The poetry of the troubadours developed early and ma- tured rapidly. Guilhem or William IX, Duke of Aquitaine (1086-1127), was the first known troubadour. Date and He sang of love, war, and many other topics in a Proten^af^ manner gay and light-hearted, humorous and literature sarcastic, sensual and licentious. "He knew well how to sing and make verses, and for a long time he roamed all through the land to deceive ladies," says the Provencal biography of him. He went on the crusade, but when he returned from Palestine, after having his army destroyed by the Turks in Asia Minor, he recounted his varied adventures in bur- lesque verse. The twelfth century was the flowering time of Provencal poetry : the bitter struggle against heresy and the cruel Albigensian Crusade were disastrous to the southern feudal courts and to the troubadours, and the history of Provencal literature ends with the thirteenth century. But the troubadours themselves and their verse, methods, and ideals spread to other lands, and almost every litera- ture in a modern European language has been p^^^ ^ , affected by them. The poets of other countries influence on learned from the troubadours many lessons in literary form; their refining influence upon manners was also widely felt and their attitude toward woman was gen- erally adopted. Provencal literature continued in Catalonia, Navarre, Aragon, and Valencia after it had disappeared in southern France. Through the thirteenth century Italian poetry was being shaped under the influence of the trouba- dours; they were paralleled in northern France by the trouveres, who were already in existence by the twelfth century, and in Germany in the thirteenth century by the minnesingers or "love-poets." The trouveres set up love- courts with most elaborate and artificial codes of gallantry and sentiment, but seem inferior to the southern trouba- dours in grace and naturalness. Among the German minne- 4o6 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE singers, however, was found perhaps the greatest of all medieval lyric poets, Walther von der Vogelweide (Walter of Bird-Meadow). From the south we turn back again to the north of France to consider other varieties of literature which developed The courtly there a little later than the chansons de geste. By epic |-jjg latter part of the twelfth century the south- ern court life and higher regard for woman began to affect the northern epics, especially since actual social conditions in the north also were growing more settled and refined. Consequently the courtly epic of the thirteenth century, with its glorification of love and ladies, became quite dif- ferent from the twelfth-century chansons de geste. The poets also began to seek new themes for their lays. Arthurian A French trouvere of the thirteenth century wrote romances ^f |-|^g epics of his time: — " Ne sont que trois matieres h. nul homme entendant, De France, de Bretaigne et de Rome la grant." This division of the medieval romantic epic into three great cycles has been generally accepted by modern historians of literature. The chansons de geste dealt with "the matter of France." By the thirteenth century, if not before, poets were also telling stories of King Arthur and the knights of his Round Table, of the wizard Merlin and a world of fairies and enchantment, and of the search for the Holy Grail. This was the cycle "de Bretaigne," a word meaning either Britain or Brittany. Arthur seems to have been a king of Britain who struggled against the Anglo-Saxon invaders and whose memory was cherished and made the basis of legends by the fugitive Celts either in Brittany or Wales or both. The French writers then took over the theme either by direct contact with Bretons on the Continent or through the medium of the French-speaking Normans in England and Normandy. The French poets doubtless embellished the legends with additions of their own and from other sources, but we may nevertheless see in the Arthurian romances a considerable Celtic contribution to the main MEDIEVAL LITERATURE 407 current of European literature. The stories of King Arthur, like other French romances, spread to Germany and there gave rise to the two great epics, Tristan and Parsifal. Under "the matter of Rome" we shall have to include not only the story of yEneas and the siege of Troy, but many other Greek legends such as the stories of Thebes Romances of and of the Argonautic expedition. Many changes antiquity were made in these tales from their original classical ver- sions, and the heroes and their environment were repre- sented as knights of feudal times. An especial favorite was the romance of Alexander who became almost as celebrated in medieval vernacular literature as his tutor Aristotle was esteemed in medieval Latin learning. And as Aristotle had been admired and commented upon by the Arabs before most of his works were known to the Christian West, so the story of Alexander exists in Persian, Syriac, Coptic, ^thiopic, Hebrew, and Armenian as well as in Greek, Latin, and Romance versions. The story of his early career in Macedon, his victories over the Persian Empire, and his campaigns to the frontiers of India and Tibet had grown under the workings of Oriental and medieval imagination into a series of marvelous adventures in the Far East and of feudal mUees after the style of the chansons de geste. From the twelve-syllable lines employed in these romances concerning Alexander comes the term "Alexandrines." Two of the most interesting and important of the medie- val French romances do not belong to any of the above cycles, but stand each by itself, namely, the Reynard Romance of Reynard the Fox and the Romance ^^^ ^°^ of the Rose. The former is really a collection of narratives by divers authors of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In part, at least, it is of Flemish origin. It draws its characters from the animal world, but often attributes hu- man traits to them, just as the books of science in Latin often did in listing the qualities and properties of the lion and other beasts. Reynard is a clever rascal, full of tricks and plausible talk, gay and well-pleased with himself, but sharp and malicious, and without any moral scruples what- 4o8 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE ever. Some have thought him a satire upon the robber knight of the period. Indeed, this beast epic is throughout a keen satire not only upon medieval society, but upon human nature in all ages. The poem also illustrates the medieval fondness for animals and sympathy with them which we shall meet again in the carvings on the cathedrals. The Romance of the Rose is an allegorical story. The author is represented as dreaming and seeing various virtues The Romance and vices personified. In other words, abstrac- of the Rose tions, such as False-Seeming, Largess, Courtesy, and Reason, are the characters of the Romance of the Rose, instead of beasts, such as Bernard the ass, Dame Fiere the lioness, Isengrim the wolf, and Chantecleer the cock, in Reynard the Fox. The Rose represents the loved one whom the lover seeks to win throughout the poem. This romance was begun by William of Lorris in the first half of the thir- teenth century, perhaps about 1235, and was completed some forty years later by Jean de Meun, a place on the Loire River. William's briefer part of the poem is an alle- gorical love story with descriptions of a beautiful garden and the wonderful singing of the birds therein. John con- tinues the story, but digresses or has his characters digress to discuss all sorts of subjects, scientific, historical, and social, showing us that in the thirteenth century people who could neither speak nor read Latin might nevertheless learn not a little both of nature and the human past as well as of present political and social problems. The lover's quest at last is brought to a successful termination and the poem closes with the couplets : — "Here ends the romance called 'The Rose,' Where all the art of love's enclosed: And Nature laughs, it seems to me. When joined at last are He and She." If the chansons de geste and many other romances were written largely for the feudal nobles and their ladies, in ^ , , . the fabliaux, which may be called short stories Fabhaux . -^ ' . ... m verse, we have a vanety of literature more adapted to the bourgeois society of the towns, whose ordi- MEDIEVAL LITERATURE 409 nary daily life the fabliaux often depict, although some of them are stock stories of all times. As might be expected, the fabliaux are liable to be coarse; they are full of satire, especially at the expense of women and priests; and they picture the life of the people vividly and humorously. Of those extant the oldest was written in the middle of the twelfth century, while the latest, like the last true chansons de geste, were produced in the early fourteenth century. In the mysteries and miracle plays, which represented Bible stories and the lives of saints and which were at first presented by the clergy in Latin, there came to Mygtgries be the same popular element that we have seen and miracle in the fabliaux. Laymen, especially of the gilds, ^ ^^^ were by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries giving such plays in the vernaculars of France, Germany, and England. The medieval audience enjoyed the introduction of scenes from daily life, as when the three Maries stop on their way to the sepulcher to purchase the spices of a merchant, or of comic relief and horse-play, as when Noah is knocked down by his angry wife. Even less literary in character than the mystery and miracle plays were the mummeries and other folk-festivals of a dramatic character. In the thirteenth century there began to be French prose literature, especially historical writing. The first important work was a contemporary account of the Fourth Medieval Crusade by Villehardouin. Some of the Arthur- French ian romances were written in prose, and Aucassin ^^^^^ et Nicolette, one of the most charming of all love-stories, is part prose and part verse. Such were some of the chief varieties and masterpieces of that literature, great both in quantity and quality, produced from the eleventh to the early fourteenth century within the limits of modern France and in Romance languages, "exhibiting finish of structure when all the rest were merely barbarian novices, exploring every literary form from history to drama, and epic to song, while others were stammering their exercises, mostly learnt from her." There were three groups of Romance tongues in medieval 4IO THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Spain. In the western group of Galicia and Portugal, no Spain: literature of importance had yet appeared. In The Cid Catalonia, Aragon, Navarre, and Valencia, as we have already seen, the troubadours from southern France held the field. But in Castile, whose tongue was to become the national speech of Spain, there had already been written, sometime between 1150 and 1250, the Poema del Cid, an epic with a Spanish hero. Alfonso the Wise of Castile ( 1 252-1 284), already mentioned as a patron of learning, also did much to encourage writing in Spanish and had learned Arabian works translated into Castilian rather than into Latin. The Bible was also translated into the vernacular in his reign, a great collection of laws was issued called Las Siete Partidas ("The Seven Parts"), and prose histories in the Castilian tongue began to appear. Alfonso was himself somewhat both of a poet and a mu- sician. In medieval Italy poetry first developed in the south in Sicily under Proven gal inspiration. Frederick II was a Tj . . patron of literature as well as of science, and Beginnings ^ of Italian was looked back upon by Dante as "the father of Italian poetry." In the course of the thirteenth century the Italians produced an important new verse- form, the sonnet. But it is with the great name of Dante, who lived from 1265 to 1321, that we first become conscious of an Italian literature distinct from the Provengal and of the creation of a national literary language. Since he also was the greatest and the best-known of all medieval poets and since he wrote just as the French romances and lyrics and fabliaux were passing, we may close with him our account of the prime of medieval literature. Dante was born in Florence, fought for his city and wrote love-verses like many other young gentlemen of his day. Career of and in 1300 became one of the six priors or chief Dante board of magistrates. The usual party strife and revolutions were in process, and besides there was trouble with the pope. By 1302 the opposite party came into power, Dante was accused of peculation during his recent term of MEDIEVAL LITERATURE 411 office, and was first fined and banished for two years, then condemned by the angry commune to be burned at the stake with fourteen others of his party. He always protested his innocence and was probably simply the victim of party animosity, but he had to spend the rest of his life in bitter exile and wandering, although he found some powerful patrons like the despot of Verona. Dante was well educated like the second author of the Romance of the Rose. He knew Aristotle and his philosophy, Aquinas and his theology, and was well ac- His varied quainted with the two leading medieval sciences talents of astronomy and astrology. He could write in Latin if he chose, and he knew a good deal about the great heroes and writers of antiquity. He also had had experience of con- temporary politics, and, by his wanderings from city to city and court to court, had acquired a wide fund of infor- mation concerning leading men of the present or the recent past, and a deep insight into human nature. Yet he was strongly inclined toward allegory and mystic forms of expression, and was at heart a stern moralist, lofty idealist, and devout Roman Catholic. Finally, he had poetic gifts of the very first order. Dante's earliest considerable work was the Vita Nuova, in which he tells and sings in such a mystic, dreamy, and exalted way of his early love for Beatrice and Minor of her untimely death, that many have doubted ^oi'^s whether there ever really was any such lady. His Convivio, or Banquet, is a more elaborate and learned composition, discussing in philosophical fashion such questions as. What is true nobility? and. What is true love? But this feast of reason is not set forth in Latin for the learned alone, but in Italian so that many may partake thereof. Dante also declares that Italian is as suitable for literary purposes as any other vernacular, even the Provencal. He also defended his .mother tongue in a scholarly Latin treatise, entitled De Vulgari Eloquentia, upholding it even against Latin and further giving us much information about Italian dialects and medieval verse-forms. In Latin prose from his pen we 412 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE have an important political treatise, the De Monarchia, on the proper relations between the pope and the emperor. But by far his greatest work and the one that gave fullest play to his wide learning and experience and varied talents The Divine was the Commedia, or Divine Comedy, as his ad- Comedy mirers called it, a long poem in a hundred can- tos and three chief parts, namely, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Dante, in short, visits the other world, and his guide at first is Vergil, whose account of the realm of Hades in the fifth book of the Mneid was familiar throughout the Middle Ages, and who was then regarded not only as the greatest Latin poet, but as an allegorical philosopher, and even by some as a magician. We must realize that there was hardly any subject of such universal interest to medie- val men as the other world. Other- wo rldliness had been a leading trait of early Christianity and of monasticism. The medieval chroniclers who wrote world-histories customarily closed their narrative with a very circumstantial account of the last judgment and future life both of the blest and the damned. Indeed, they often seem to have fuller and more authentic information upon such points than concern- ing the events of past centuries which were often shrouded for them in obscurity and legend. Over the doors of many a medieval cathedral, too, the last judgment was repre- sented vividly carved in stone, sometimes with the dead rising from their cofhns and pushing up the covers or being dragged off in chains by demons armed with pincers to a seething caldron. We can understand, then, that Dante's vivid description of the hereafter would be well received, especially since it went into specific personalities and defi- nitely located many recent celebrities In hell or elsewhere. Hell is depicted by Dante as a large hole in the earth, circular in shape and gradually narrowing to a point at the Dante's earth's center. Around the slopes of this huge cosmogony conical cavity run nine successive circles or zones in which famous sinners both of the remote and recent past pay the penalty for their misdeeds. Those guilty of the worst crimes are in the circles nearest the earth's center and MEDIEVAL LITERATURE 413 their sufferings are correspondingly greater. This huge dent in our planet was made by the fall from heaven of the arch- fiend Lucifer. This perturbed spirit seems to have strictly observed the law of gravitation in his tremendous tumble and consequently came to rest exactly at the center of the earth, and is forever embedded there in eternal ice, with his head pointing upward toward the city of Jerusalem. Or, more precisely, he has three heads and in their mouths he gnaws the three arch-traitors of history, Judas who be- trayed Christ, and Brutus and Cassius who assassinated Julius Caesar. Vergil takes Dante on his back and scrambles down Lucifer's shaggy body to the center of the earth and then up his hairy legs in the opposite direction to a long tunnel which leads them toward purgatory. It is situated upon a conical mountain or excrescence in the midst of ocean on the other side of the globe. It corresponds in size and shape to the hollow of hell, and it, too, was produced by the impact of Lucifer and the consequent displacement of a large section of this earth. Around it, too, runs a series of seven terraces, typifying the seven deadly sins, upon which souls that eventually will be saved are undergoing varying degrees of penance. As Lucifer was at the pit of hell, so the earthly paradise or Garden of Eden is at the peak of purgatory, and here Dante has a vision of his loved Beatrice. Under her guidance he then ascends through the celestial spheres of the moon, Mercury, Venus, and the sun, and has converse with such notables as Justinian and Aquinas, and in the fifth sphere of Mars sees those who had died fighting for the faith. Dante of course believed with Ptolemy that the sun and other planets moved about the earth in concentric orbits. After the spheres of the seven planets comes the eighth heaven of the fixed stars, the ninth or crystalline heaven, or primum mobile, and lastly the empyrean heaven where beyond the nine corporeal spheres is the throne of God Triune and the realm of pure intellect and love. To Dante is granted a momentary reve- lation of this surpassing and ineffable mystery, and with this the poem ends. 414 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Dante's Commedia is, as we have said, the greatest poem of medieval literature, but it is also one of the last, and we The last Can see in it signs of decline. The troubadours medllvil ^^^ ^^^^ ^^"^^ ^^ i^y ^^ this world and its birds literature and flowers and women; the chansons de gesie had rung with the joy of battle and the vigor of manhood ; the fabliaux had attested the crude vitality of the bourgeois. But Dante, deprived early of his beloved Beatrice, disap- pointed in the politics of his time, disgusted with the Papacy and despairing of the Empire of his day, and with no city that he can call his own, turns from this world to purify his own soul and to warn the society of his time by a picture of the consequences of sin and error, and to seek consolation in a survey of the great departed spirits of the past and of the glory of the world to come. He has lost the gaiety and self-confidence of the poets of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and in him the soul of the Middle Ages indeed "wears out the breast." MEDIEVAL LITERATURE 415 EXERCISES AND READINGS Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. I, pp. 431-38. Examples of the development of the modern languages and of the verse-forms of the troubadours. J. H. Smith, The Troubadours at Home, vol. I, pp. 228-39; vol. ii, pp. 5-12. Saintsbury, The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory : pp. 60-66, the plot of a chanson de geste ; pp. 295-99, the burial of Reynard the Fox; pp. 304-09, the plot of the Romance of the Rose ; pp. 351-60, the plot of the Grettis saga. G. W. Cox and E. H. Jones, Popular Romances of the Middle Ages. Abbre- viated prose paraphrases of Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied, the Norse sagas, the Arthurian legends, etc. Read any one. Ellis's translation of the Romance of the Rose (Temple Classics), vol. I, lines 653-93 and 7141-90. Luchaire, Social France, chap, xi, "The Noble Dame." Read any canto of the Divine Comedy in English translation, outline the story of what you have read, and explain the historical and learned allusions in the passage. Of the various translations of the Divine Comedy, Gary's was reedited by Kuhns in 1897 with an introduction and many explanatory notes. In the same volume is included Rossetti's translation of the Vita Nuova. Kuno Francke, A History of German Literature as determined by Social Forces, pp. 49-52 and 131-38. Henderson, Germany in the Middle Ages, chap, xxviii, "The Literature of Hohenstaufen Times." Article on the Nibelungenlied in the Encyclopcedia Britannica. Articles on "Miracle Plays and Mysteries," and "Asses, Feast of" in the Catholic Encylcopedia. For those who read German, Heine's Essay on German Literature for French Readers. F®r those who read French, Lavisse, Histoire de France, vol. ii, part ii, pp. 372-79, " Les Fabliaux," by Ch.-V. Langlois. Further English translations of medieval literature: — O'Hagan, Song of Roland. Morris, Old French Romances. Butler, Tales from the Old French. J. Jacobs, Reynard the Fox. Lang, Aucassin et Nicoleite. CHAPTER XXII THE MEDIEVAL CATHEDRALS The medieval revival of civilization which we have al- ready traced in other fields was accompanied by a resump- Importance tion of building on a large scale and in a durable ecdesiasdcal ^^^ monumental fashion, such as had marked architecture the heyday of the Roman Empire. Of the feudal castle and municipal buildings we have already said some- thing. But by far the grandest architecture of the time was ecclesiastical. Indeed, the remains of this medieval religious architecture which have survived to our time surpass in number, interest, and artistic merit the ruins from any previous period of the world's history. A cathedral was the external expression in material but artistic form of the vast power of the Church in those days and of the religious spirit of the Middle Ages. It was an effort to symbolize the Church in its entirety, to build a fitting house for God and all the saints. We have seen how Augustine in his literary master- piece. The City oj God, a work which dominated Christian thought for many centuries, set over against the declining world of ancient Rome the eternal commonwealth of God's elect, and sketched in his fervid rhetoric the ideals and interests of that Church here on earth which strives toward the kingdom of heaven. The cathedral-builders did in stone what he had done in words, and they did it better. His argu- ments were sometimes weaker than his rhetoric, but their adornment was in close accord with their structure. Few read Augustine's book to-day, but many cross the ocean to see the handiwork of those anonymous architects. The cathedrals were the greatest product of the Middle Ages and they were a work that only the Middle Ages could produce. They show us what the Church could accomplish at a time when it had great wealth and power and when every one belonged to it and believed in it. They show THE MEDIEVAL CATHEDRALS 417 what Christian society could accomplish by its united in- dustry and imagination. For as the pope and Cathedrals feudal lords had cordially cooperated in the ex- the peculiar pansion of Christendom and the early crusades, so medieval the clergy and the communes, whatever quarrels ^°^'^*y they may have had over the control of town government, joined hands in the work of building a vast church which would not only glorify religion, but be a credit to the city and serve as a center of civic life. Thus the Italian com- munes vied with one another in the size and splendor of their churches, each trying to outdo its neighbor. When one of two warring cities captured any notable trophies from its adversary, it would place them on permanent exhibition in its cathedral. The spacious nave and aisles also provided a splendid assembly hall for festive occasions and the church served the purpose of a modern art museum. We cannot, or at any rate we do not, build such structures to-day and many a modern city with a population ten times as great has no edifice that can compare with the chief church in dozens of French provincial towns. Christians to-day are divided into many bodies; some of these do not care for especially expensive or artistic church buildings; and none of them can count on general community support in such an enterprise. Nor is there any other modern insti- tution or ideal which unites and dominates society and thought as did the Church in the Middle Ages. It is true that society is richer to-day and that builders have the advantage of innumerable modern inventions. The de- mands of modern business have produced office buildings higher and railroad stations larger than any medieval cathe- dral, but as works of art the modern structures are vastly inferior. And the reason is that modern architects have not worked out an original style of their own, but in the main copy past architectural styles. They lack the interest and zest which goes with the creation of a new style. And they seem to lack inspiration, for trusts and railroads apparently have no noble conceptions to express in their buildings, no legends to depict, no ideals to embody, no effects to produce. 4i8 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE But the world since the Middle Ages not only has pro- duced no original edifices to compare with the creations of the medieval architects; it seldom even makes a good copy of a Gothic church; and to reproduce entire one of those vaulted cathedrals with all its wonderful detail would to-day involve great difficulty and expense. For one thing, not enough workmen with sufficient artistic ability could be secured without paying exorbitant wages. We have more money and machinery to-day than they had then, but there are things which money cannot buy. The inventive brains and deft fingers that fitted and fashioned the stones of the medieval minsters are working to-day in laboratories and clinics, and serving science instead of religion. Finally, most modern buildings are finished in a few years at most, and often do not last much longer. On the other hand, we must remember that many cathedrals as we see them to-day represent in their various parts the work of several genera- tions or even centuries. But we only marvel the more at the hold which this form of art had upon the men of the past, and at the way in which they kept at it. They might well take their time in their constructions or add new ornament to the ancient edifice, for they were building for eternity. Strictly speaking, a cathedral is the church of a bishop, but in this chapter we shall use the word to refer to any great Meaning of medieval church edifice, whether the abbey of the word somc large monastery or a collegiate church in a large town and so served by a number of secular canons or other clergy. Many of the most important early Romanesque churches were monastic; it was only as the towns fully developed that the bishops residing in them were able to afford great churches ; and even at a later date other churches might be built in the towns which rivaled the cathedrals proper in size and beauty. To the architecture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries is given the name "Romanesque" or "Romanic," because The Roman- of its having developed out of the building of the esque period RQman Empire, just as many languages of the Middle Ages are called "Romance" languages because of THE MEDIEVAL CATHEDRALS 419 their growth from the spoken Latin of the late Empire. Sometimes this art of the eleventh and twelfth centuries is called "Later Romanesque," to distinguish it from the building of the earlier Middle Ages. But inasmuch as the earlier architecture may be readily distinguished as either basilican or Byzantine in style, we shall for the sake of con- venience and brevity reserve the term Romanesque for the architecture of western Christian Europe from about the year 1000 on. For three hundred years before that date there had been no architectural activity worthy of note in the West. After that date the building which we call Romanesque was not merely an imitation or even a contin- uation of Roman architecture; much of it was experimental, progressive, full of variety, and marked by new features. Beginning with the eleventh century, too, Romanesque architecture in the West abandoned the round plan and chiefly built churches with long central naves and side aisles. Most of the round buildings of the preceding period were replaced by these larger edifices in the new style and were themselves henceforth used as baptisteries where they survived at all. Some use was still made of the dome, and even large churches were sometimes constructed without aisles, but on the whole the early Christian basilica was the type from which the Romanesque developed. The new churches, however, differed in a number of respects from the basilicas which we described in the eighth chapter. For one thing they were usually dis- Cruciform tinctly cruciform in plan, with transepts. The p^^" nave and aisles were often much longer than in a basilica, owing to their being continued beyond 'the transepts to form a spacious choir. The semicircular protuberance or apse at the east end of the church now has a diameter equal to the width of the building, so that the two side aisles meet there in a curved ambulatory behind the high altar which was placed at this curved end of the choir. Sometimes be- yond and surrounding this ambulatory are a series of sec- ondary apses or radiating chapels. These additions of a choir and transepts about tripled the space covered by the 420 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE building. The general features of this cruciform plan were to be retained in the later Gothic style. A feature found more in Romanesque than in Gothic cathedrals was the raising of the level of the floor of the choir considerably above that of the rest of the building so as to give room for a crypt underneath. As a rule Romanesque builders made their churches loftier as well as larger than previous ones. This increased height Other new both of nave and aisles made necessary larger and features stronger supporting columns between the nave and the aisles. Often they became several feet in diameter and sometimes massive piers were substituted for columns or were alternated with them to give increased support. The round arches which connected the rows of piers or columns were now broader and higher in order to harmonize with their more massive supports. Above these arches opening into the aisles no longer appeared the horizontal strip of mosaic of the Ravenna basilicas, but a second series of archways opening or appearing to open into galleries above the aisles. Above this tri- forium, as it came to be called, and beneath the roof were the windows of the clear-story. Most Romanesque churches, espe- cially when first built, had light, flat roofs of wooden tim- bers over their lofty naves. ' The lower and narrower aisles were more usually vaulted with GROUND-PLAN OF RHEiMS ^^^^^ arches or barrel vaults, CATHEDRAL smce their outer walls could be THE MEDIEVAL CATHEDRALS 421 strengthened to resist the outward thrust of the arches by projecting pilaster strips which formed soHd buttresses resting directly upon the ground. The churches of Rome, central Italy, and Tuscany kept the closest to the old columnar basilica, as we may illustrate by the cathedral at Pisa, perhaps the finest The cathe- Romanesque church in Italy. It has transepts, a ^""^^ ^^ ^'^^ lengthened choir, and great height, and an elliptical dome over the crossing of nave and transepts. But the main body of the building is covered with a wooden roof and there are bare pent-roofs over its double aisles. Like the basilicas at Ravenna, it has a detached round campanile, the famous leaning tower. In the half-dome of its apse is a mosaic, and sixty-eight classical columns taken from older buildings carry the arcades on which the walls of its nave rest. The exterior, however, has some Romanesque features common to churches of this period and which relieve the monotony of its plain walls, although at Pisa these would be beautiful anyway, owing to the golden, creamy marbles of which they are built. First, pilaster strips project at frequent intervals from the wall and carry a blind arcade or series of engaged round arches. Secondly, the exterior wall surface is inter- rupted at certain places by open colonnades, which are set in it, and which are composed of small columns with connect- ing arches and with an open gallery between them and the blank wall behind. The favorite place for such dwarf gal- leries was just under the eaves of the roof and especially around the curve of the apse, but at Pisa there are two colonnades one above the other on the apse, four rows form the upper part of the fagade, while the leaning tower is encircled from top to bottom with such colonnades. In northern Italy more of an effort at vaulting was made, but it was especially in the Romanesque building of south- ern France and of the Cluniac monks in Bur- Experiments gundy that all sorts of attempts were early made '" vaulting to solve the problem of a stone roof. Sometimes the archi- tects tried a series of small domes or cupolas over different sections of the church; sometimes, plain round vaults; some- 422 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE times, groin-vaults made by the intersection of two round ones. Tlie great and almost insurmountable difficulty was to roof the broad nave with a vault of stone and yet have windows to light the church in the very thick and solid walls necessary to resist the thrust of such a vault. Window openings, however, were now splayed or made with sloping sides so as to admit more light and prevent rainwater from settling, as it would on a flat window ledge. Southern France also showed progress in sculpture and ornamentation. At Poitiers and Angouleme are churches Progress in from this period whose fagades are almost com- and'orna- pletely covered with sculptured figures and mentation terminate at either side in ornamental towers. Instead of the plain cubical capital so often found in Ro- manesque churches, all sorts of figures and designs are em- ployed upon the capitals of the columns, and the ends of the corbels are carved into grotesque human, animal, and im- aginary heads. We also discover first in southern France the treating together as a unified architectural composi- tion of the three front portals opening into nave and aisles respectively. In Germany the chief Romanesque structures were the great cathedrals of the Rhine cities and bishoprics, Speyer, Rhenish Worms, and Mainz. The interiors of these three Romanesque churches average four hundred feet in length and one hundred feet in height of nave. At first they had flat wooden roofs, but were later vaulted. They have double choirs and a dome and two towers at either end of the building. These relieve the long, horizontal lines and bare expanse of slanting roof of nave and aisles and add a ver- tical or upward efTect. We find the usual blind arcades and dwarf galleries. Similar in style to these Rhenish churches are the Romanesque portions of the cathedral at Tournai in Belgium, which did not receive a vaulted roof until the eighteenth century. Its four towers, however, instead of being in pairs at both ends are grouped together at the four corners of the crossing. By the expression "Norman architecture" is indicated THE MEDIEVAL CATHEDRALS 423 that of England and northwestern France during the Romanesque period. There is no English cathedral which has come down essentially unaltered from that Norman time, but there are many which in greater or less architecture part are Norman in character, especially Durham, Norwich, Peterborough, Ely, and Winchester. The Norman churches usually had two square towers at either side of the west front, a comparatively low and heavy square tower or lan- tern over the crossing of nave and transepts, and a round apse at the east end. Although originally not vaulted, their interiors were nevertheless very impressive from the length of the nave, the height of its side walls, and the regular and rhythmic succession of massive piers or huge round pillars and of arches which composed those walls. In respect to ornamentation, however, the Norman work is rather rough. Their sculpture was mainly geometrical, consisting of saw- edge teeth or zigzag and spiral grooves cut in pillars or arches, and often hewn with an axe. When they attempted a few animal or human or angelic figures, in the semicircular space above a door in an archway or on the sides of a mas- sive baptismal font that one might well mistake for a horse- trough, the work was generally crude and indistinct. Our discussion of Romanesque architecture omitted, with the exception of Normandy and Flanders, the provinces of northern and east central France, because here Northern in especial experimentation was going on which French 1 1 • 1 ir 1 • r • origin of resulted, m the tweltth century, m the creation Gothic of the Gothic style. Champagne and the lie de a-'chitecture France were rather backward in the Romanesque period, but they were to take the lead in the production of the new style, just as from the neighborhood of Paris and the royal court came the dialect that was to become the French lan- guage. The misleading name, "Gothic," was foisted upon this style of architecture by Italians of the Renaissance period in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who had no sympathy with any but classical buildings, and who, be- cause a good deal of the perverted Gothic architecture in their own Italy had come to them by way of Germany, con- 424 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE eluded that Gothic was a fitting name for a style which they believed to be the work of a barbarous age. Nor did the French at that time care to claim Gothic art as their own creation, since they too had gone back to imitation of clas- sical art and for centuries neglected their marvelous medie- val churches. Only in the course of the last century, to- gether with the Romantic movement in literature and the better knowledge of the Middle Ages resulting from modern historical scholarship, has there been real investigation, comprehension, and appreciation of Gothic architecture. It has been said that "the inert principle of construction, the massive walls, the small apertures, and the horizon- Gothic tal lines of the Romanesque architecture make construction j^ g^jij closely akin to the old Roman style." Gothic, instead of being inert, is a decidedly energetic con- struction where thrust and counter-thrust are in perfect equilibrium. Instead of massive walls, it scarcely has walls at all. Its vaulted stone roof is upheld by a network of stone ribs and flying buttresses which carry the weight to a few selected points where adequate piers and buttresses receive and support it. Instead of small apertures, the front and sides and end of the cathedral are almost continuous sheets of stained glass, separated into arched windows only by the ribs of the structural skeleton. Instead of horizontal lines, every column and arch and rib and vault and roof and but- tress carries the eye upward. The church is actually higher than the average Romanesque church and it appears to be vastly more so. These changes have been effected largely through two important innovations, the pointed arch and the flying buttress. Hitherto the round arch had been employed in vaulting, in nave arches, in triforium, in doorways and windows. The pointed and in all architectural adornment. It seriously arch restricted the builders, since it must be always exactly half as high as its width and since all arches of the same height or width must be exactly alike. The pointed arch had been known before Gothic architecture started, but the systematic employment of it both in structure THE MEDIEVAL CATHEDRALS 425 and ornamentation is characteristic of the Gothic. Pointed vaults and arches permit almost endless variety, since height and width do not have to be in any fixed ratio. And they are stronger structurally, since they do not tend to spread outward as much as the Roman arch. By coming to a point at the top, they lead the eye upward and were especially adapted to the lofty effects which the architects were striv- ing to obtain. A solid buttress rests on the ground and is built directly into or against the wall of a building at points where addi- tional thickness and strength are necessary. We The flying have seen that the outer walls of the side aisles buttress were often so braced in Romanesque buildings. But the loftier and heavier walls of the nave above the roofs of the aisles could not be so braced. Here the flying buttress came in. Touching the wall of the nave only at one end, it sprang clear of the roof of the aisle in an arc of stone whose other extremity rested on one of the solid buttresses that rose from the ground to meet it. Thus no new weight was put upon the roof of the aisle, and the buttresses of the outer walls of the aisles were made to bear the burden of the nave wall as well. Of course, to do this, they had to be made thicker. The flying buttresses, moreover, not merely propped up the side walls of the nave, but were placed at the proper points to receive the thrust of the heavy vaulted roof. Of course, some of the weight of the nave walls and roof still rested on the rows of columns within the church, but these did not need to be as massive as before. As a matter of fact they remained nearly as great in actual diameter as before, but were made higher and were placed at greater intervals apart. Also the square piers and huge round pillars were replaced by more graceful clusters of slender columns, which hid the central core of masonry that united and strengthened them, and from which as they rose diverged the supporting ribs of the arched vaulting overhead. Since these ribs, columns, and flying buttresses supported the whole burden of the vaulting, it was no longer necessary to have thick or solid walls in the nave, and the clear-story could be given over 426 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE almost entirely to windov/s, especially as the flying but- tresses cut off practically no light from outside. In speaking of pointed arches, flying buttresses, columns, and ribs in vaulting we have faintly suggested the increased Grace and grace, variety, and elaborateness of architec- of^othlc^ tural memberment in a Gothic cathedral. We memberment cannot attempt to deal here with all the detail of shafts, capitals, mouldings, groining, and other architectural features which enriched the Gothic style. It had little need for wall paintings or mosaics and had little flat wall space available for them. But, although the construction itself gave rise to a deal of ornamentation, it was further adorned with sculpture and enriched with stained glass. Gothic architecture itself often seems an exquisite lace- work in stone which might be the masterpiece of some giant Gothic sculptor. Medieval sculpture, on the other hand, sculpture ^^^^ usually subordinated to architectural pur- poses. Some very crude and some very fine sculpture was produced in connection with the cathedrals. The statues were as a rule carved from the same stone that was used in building the church, and were made to fit into the architec- tural scheme and often to fill a certain place. Consequently their proportions may be unnatural in themselves but are just right to harmonize with the building. They differ further from classical sculpture in that their aim is not to express beauty and physical grace, but saintliness and devo- tion, or to symbolize some Christian doctrine or mystery. Realism and grotesque humor often appear, however, just as in the fabliaux and the mystery and miracle plays. Remarkable fancy is evidenced in some of the strange mon- sters and chimeras on buttress and parapet, and wonder- fully delicate stone carving is seen in the interior of many churches large and small. Sometimes even the shafts of small columns and the mouldings of arches were intricately carved, and sculptured heads covered the groining of the arches and the springing of the vaults. Even the coarser external work exposed to the weather was executed with remarkable fidelity, and sometimes animal grotesques high THE MEDIEVAL CATHEDRALS 427 up on the roof were carefully sculptured in every muscle and fold of their skins, behind as well as in front and below as well as above. Either the artist thought that God would see it even if men did not, or he executed the work so thor- oughly because he liked to do it. Such were the sculptors who in carving floral designs about a capital would amuse themselves by occasionally converting a petal into a face or hide an imp in a mass of foliage. In the choir stalls the under sides of the folding seats were sometimes covered with the most exquisite wood carving. In place of the Byzantine mosaics the Gothic cathedrals had transparent colored designs in their stained-glass win- dows. We first learn of the making of stained glass stained from a treatise on various industrial and artistic ^^^^^ processes written by the monk Theophilus in the twelfth century. In the thirteenth century the coloring matter was diffused into the mass of glass while it was yet in the melting- pot, so that it was colored all through and was of a brighter hue than in later times when it was merely tinted upon the surface. The windows were made up of small bits of glass which were pieced together and held in place by leads. This thirteenth-century glass was imperfect in character, and since the fragments of it differed further in shape and size, the rays of light in passing through them were broken up the more, and there was much blending of the different colors and very brilliant effects were produced like the glittering of jewels. The leads were skillfully employed to form the out- lines of the human and other figures depicted in the design, whereas later, in the sixteenth century, when large plates of painted glass were used, the leads were arranged in mechani- cal squares and would sometimes run across a saint's face or sever his body. In the fourteenth century it was discovered how to stain glass yellow by means of silver; before this, purple had been the favorite color, but it did not admit as much light. It was also discovered early in the fourteenth century that, by dipping the blow-pipe first into liquid glass of one color and then into that of another color, a sheet of glass could be blown of one color on one side and another 428 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE on the reverse. Less glass has survived from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, than from the thirteenth and sixteenth. After the latter century interest in stained glass ceased and the art practically died out. Also religious fanatics smashed many of the wonderful old windows as well as the statues of the cathedrals. The most ornamented portion of the medieval Gothic cathedral was usually the fagade or west front. Here was The facade ^^^ main entrance in the form of recessed por- of a Gothic tals, generally three in number, like the Trinity, and whose sides and arches were completely covered with statuary. These recessed portals also served the purpose of concealing and adorning the lower parts of the great buttresses which supported the front of the church — a good instance of the close relationship that was almost invariably observed between structure and decoration. On either side of the portals rose towers completely masking the roofs of the aisles. Over the portals and between the towers was a large round or rose window perhaps forty feet in diameter lighting that end of the nave. Above or beneath it were rows of statues or decorative arcades and colonnades. The buttresses before mentioned were ornamented in one way or another in their upper portions, sometimes by niches and panoplies cut in them, and in and under which stood large single statues. This sculptured screen which we have suggested was usually carried up between the towers so that it entirely hid the ridgepole of the nave behind it. If we leave the front of the cathedral and walk along either side, we see the line of solid and flying buttresses Circuit of clothing and supporting the main body of the the cathedral church. In the earliest Gothic churches these props were left bare and heavy, but soon they were made graceful in form, were adorned with carvings, mouldings, and statues, and sometimes were even perforated with arched and circular openings. It is necessary to check the outward thrust of the flying arch at the point where the flying buttress rests on the solid support below, and this is done by superimposing at this point a beautiful stone pin- THE MEDIEVAL CATHEDRALS 429 nacle or a statue of more than life-size which serves to clamp down the outer end of the flying arch. The long line of these pinnacles and statues, the intricate tracery of the flying buttresses, and the fantastic gargoyles, in which terminate the eaves-spouts that carry the rainwater off the roofs clear of the stonework below, form a graceful and symmetrical thicket of architecture and sculpture which half conceals and half discloses the main building. We get new vistas and effects where the transept projects at a right angle and again where the apse curves in a semicircle. The end of the transept has another rose window and sometimes rather elaborately decorated portals, so that it forms a sort of combination of, or cross between, the features of the fagade and of the side of the nave. The exterior of the choir, too, is often treated somewhat differently from the nave, although in general harmony with it. In short, to get a satisfactory appreciation of the exterior of a Gothic cathedral one must walk all around it and sur- vey it carefully from top to bottom. As the Psalmist says, "Walk about Zion, and go round about her: tell the towers thereof. Mark ye well her bulwarks, consider her palaces; that ye may tell it to the generation following." High aloft on the arcades of the apse, the parapets of the roof, or the battlements of the towers, are not only figures of saints and angels, but various animals and chimeras, goblins and demons, forces of the mysterious world of nature and of the other spiritual world, forces for evil as well as forces for good, since both exist in this world by divine permission. These, together with the bristling array of pinnacles and buttresses and the statues and gargoyles upon them, guard, as it were, the sanctuary within or threaten those who remain without. He who wishes to see the interior of the house of God must enter in by the door and not try to climb up some other way. And the doorways, as we have already seen, are rich in sculpture to remind him of church legend and teaching and to prepare him for the yet more solemn sensation made by the spacious, stately vaults and grand perspective of the interior, and by the brighter, more 430 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE radiant saints, apostles, and martyrs of its glowing win- dows. It was in France that Gothic not only originated, but attained its purest form, and that architects were most Gothic skillful structurally. But the new style spread architecture ^^ over westem Europe from Spain to Bohemia. France It is seen in the Rhine Valley in the second half of the thirteenth century in the nave of the great cathedral of Strassburg which was built in the French style, in the choir of Cologne which is a copy of Amiens, and in Metz which was now begun under the influence of the Rheims school of architects. In England Westminster Abbey, also built in the second half of the thirteenth century, is of all English cathedrals that which most closely resembles the French Gothic style. But Gothic influence is seen earlier in the century in the so-called "Early English" style. A number of peculiarities distinguishing English from French Gothic churches may be noted. English cathedrals Earl ' ^^ ^^^ have such broad naves or such lofty English vaulting, but they are often longer, partly be- cause the choir is extended to as great or an even greater length than the nave and sometimes has a second pair of transepts of its own, partly because supple- mentary structures such as Lady chapels and presbyteries are often added at the east end. This end of the church is usually square instead of rounded. Generally there is one main tower over the crossing rather than two at the west front. The facade is frequently a broad screen of arcades and sculpture hiding the smaller actual front of the church and not having any close structural relation to it. Indeed, such fagade screens often were later ad- ditions in a totally different style from the original nave, which it was therefore advisable to cover up. In the Early English style the central wheel or rose window is not so inevitable a feature and when employed is smaller than in French churches. The English clear-story windows do not completely occupy the pointed arches formed by the vaults of the roof, and often there is a cluster of three narrow win- THE MEDIEVAL CATHEDRALS 431 dows instead of one large aperture. Inside the church the ribs bearing the vaults are not always carried straight up from the supporting columns, but spring out of the wall at points high above the floor, and often more ribs are used than are needed, giving a fanlike appearance to the vaulting. The flying buttress is not employed on so great a scale or with such structural skill. Wooden roofs are still employed in many cases, although they no longer appear flat, but are built in imitation of vaults. For these structural deficiencies or idiosyncrasies the Early English in part atones by the beauty of its details, its sharply pointed lancet windows and blind arcades, its slender shafts and comely capitals, its intricate mouldings and carvings. Later varieties of English Gothic are called the " Decorated " and the " Perpendicular " styles, respectively. The Romanesque held its own on German soil well into the thirteenth century. East of the Rhine church edifices were as a rule on a humbler scale and in less German perfect taste than were the great Rhenish ca- and Italian thedrals which followed French models more closely. More wall space is left bare both within and with- out; the transepts are less distinct, and there is seldom an ambulatory about the choir; the aisles and nave are sometimes of the same height. In Italy the Gothic style took the least hold. The apsidal aisle was even more un- common than in Germany and the fagade had as little relation to the building behind it as in Early English. The flying buttress was almost never employed, the windows remained small, and in general little constructive genius was shown. There was no arched triforium within and a bare expanse of wall appeared in the clear-story. The piers supporting the simple vaulting of the interior were them- selves usually plain and square. The towers continued to be detached campaniles and were not very different from their Romanesque predecessors. North of the Alps, however, the Gothic towers both of France and other lands deserve especial recognition by their height, open arches, and detail of ornamentation. It is dififi- 432 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE cult to make a selection among so many marvelous struc- Gothic tures, but the reader can get some idea of their towers varied merits by examining detailed views of the twin yet contrasting front towers of Chartres, the one in the severely pure style of the closing twelfth century, the other a richly ornate spire added in the early sixteenth, and which are respectively three hundred and fifty and three hundred and seventy-five feet in height. Or of the central lantern of Lincoln from the thirteenth, and the filmy octag- onal crown from the fourteenth century above the tran- septs of St. Ouen in Rouen ; or of the intricate and delicate open-work spires of Freiburg, Strassburg, and Cologne. Such were the Gothic cathedrals. The style originated in the twelfth century and reached the highest point of excel- lence in the thirteenth. But many churches were not entirely finished until later, or received ad- ditions especially in ornamentation which enhanced their beauty. Some fine cathedrals were not started until the fourteenth century, but those of Chartres, Amiens, Rouen, Paris, and Rheims, which are alike of vast proportions and the very first rank, were all finished in the thirteenth cen- tury, and a decline in Gothic art becomes. noticeable in the later Middle Ages. If medieval sculpture was done chiefly in connection with buildings, medieval painting was performed chiefly in con- Medieval nection with books. The pages of manuscripts painting -were adorned with miniatures and illuminations which in their brilliant hues rival the Byzantine mosaics and the Gothic stained glass, and which in their realistic touches, picturesque scenes, and uncouth monsters remind us of the stone carvings. In Italy, where the churches had more bare wall surface, a good deal of fresco painting was done, and finally Giotto, a contemporary of Dante, broke away from the stiff symbolism of the earlier school and began to repre- sent scenes from the Bible and from the lives of the saints in what seemed to his contemporaries a dramatic and life- like manner. But of him we shall speak again later as a fore- runner of the greater painters of the Italian Renaissance. THE MEDIEVAL CATHEDRALS 433 EXERCISES AND READINGS Romanesque and Gothic Architecture. Sturgis and Frothingham, A History of Architecture, is one of the most recent and finely illustrated histories of architecture. Its text is, however, like that of the others, rather trying to the non-technical reader. In vol. li, book ix, will be found chapters on the different varieties of Romanesque architecture, and in vol. iii, books x and xi, a similar treatment of Gothic. Moore, Gothic Architecture, chap. I. A concise and brilliant exposition of the principles of the Gothic style. C. H. Sherill. Stained Glass Tours in France (1908). Questions on Views of Cathedrals. 1. Find six pictures of medieval cathedrals, namely, a general view of the exterior, a more detailed view of some particular part of the exterior, as general an interior view as possible, a closer view of some portion of the interior, an example of serious sculpture, and a speci- men of grotesque sculpture such as a gargoyle, chimera, or fantastic wood carving. Try to include in your selection specimens of Roman- esque as well as of Gothic architecture, and of churches outside as well as in France. State of what style each view is and from what country each view comes. 2. In the case of the two general views of exterior and interior, state from what point the view seems to have been taken, and identify all the parts that are visible — such as towers, transepts, apse, portals, buttresses, triforium, clear-story, choir, nave, ambulatory, etc. 3. Similarly identify the partial views of exterior and interior, and point out the smaller details of architectural members and sculpture. 4. In the case of the two specimens of sculpture, state whether the execution seems skillful or clumsy, and where within or without the edifice the statue or carving was placed. 5. Which of the six views do you like best and why? CHAPTER XXIII THE CHURCH UNDER INNOCENT III While towns, industries, and trade developed, while learning, literature, and art blossomed forth, although these „, new forces had their secular side, yet, as the Innocent HI i /^i i • i • cathedrals suggest, the Church continued its growth too, and with Innocent III, at the opening of the thirteenth century (ii 98-1 21 6), the Papacy reached its height. Lotario de Segni was the son of an Italian noble, and was handsome in appearance and commanding in man- ner, though slight in stature. Although he was the youngest of the cardinals, his colleagues promptly elected him pope on the same day that the preceding pontiff died. Thus, at the unusually early age of thirty-seven he entered upon the arduous duties and responsibilities of that high office with all the unabated energy and enthusiasm of the prime of manhood. He was already known for his eloquence and legal and theological knowledge acquired at Bologna and Paris, and as pope he granted the University of Paris some of its earliest privileges and filled his curia w^ith canonists and jurists from Bologna. But he knew men as well as books, and it was more probably the ability as an adminis- trator and man of affairs which he had displayed in the papal court for the past ten years that procured him his election. Once pope, he took control with a master-hand, and in the very first year of his pontificate made himself felt all over Europe. His letters, which constitute the best source for his reign, show how vigorously and incisively and sensibly he dealt with every situation and problem. Western Christian Europe at that time was still a chaos of contending feudal principalities and warring communes. The Church The one thing that united men was the Church universal ^q which they all belonged. There were English, Welsh, Irish, Flemings, Bretons, Gascons, Castilians, THE CHURCH UNDER INNOCENT HI 435 Savoyards, Florentines, Venetians, Pisans, Bavarians, Bohemians, and Saxons then; but there were no Presbyteri- ans, Methodists, Baptists, Christian Scientists, Quakers, Memnonites, and CongregationaHsts. The Church was the one universal institution of the age and the pope at its head in consequence exercised far greater authority than did any other potentate. In many ways, indeed, the Church was comparable to the Roman Empire of old, whose territorial and administrative organization it had taken over and whose official language, Latin, it still maintained in its services, records, and literature. Both were international in character. Every one recognized the pope as every one had worshiped the emperor. The Church had its legal system and courts. Its cathedrals added to the massive architec- ture and stately sculpture of triumphal arches and amphi- theaters the glorious radiance of stained glass and the diaphanous stone lacework of spire, pinnacle, and flying buttress. Its missionaries and crusaders on the frontiers of Christendom were like the ancient legionaries on the Roman borders. Its monasteries were scattered over the face of the land as thickly as had been the Roman military camps and colonies. Its secular clergy corresponded to the adminis- trative bureaucracy of the Empire. And at the head and center of it all, watching over the whole world, interfering in everything, exercising temporal as well as spiritual power, receiving reports and questions and appeals from all quarters, and reserving to himself the settlement of all ques- tions in the last resort, sat Innocent III with an authority quite comparable to that of a Trajan or a Diocletian. We shall now describe the Church and clergy as organized under him. Associated with the pope at Rome was the college of cardinals, constituting a sort of cabinet, while a host of lesser assistants performed secretarial and legal The papal functions or attended to the court ceremonial. """^^ At the beginning of his reign Innocent tried, like most popes, to reform the personnel of the papal curia, to restrict its membership to clergymen, and to prevent the taking of 436 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE bribes. As he did not, however, absolutely forbid the giving of gratuities, most suitors at the papal court still deemed it expedient to scatter money with a free hand. It was indeed remarkable that, although many a pope reformed this body at the opening of his ^ pontificate, it always seems to have needed reform by the time the next pope entered office. From the pope's side legates went forth to various parts of Europe to execute his will or to inspect conditions and Papal report upon them to him. They were held to legates strict account if they failed to carry out Inno- cent's instructions to his satisfaction. One in particular, who absolved one of the rival candidates for the German throne without first securing from him the release of certain prisoners, was upon his return deprived by Innocent of his bishopric and banished to an island to pass the rest of his life as a simple monk. It had long been customary for newly elected archbishops to receive from the pope a scarf or collar called the pallium. Archbishops By withholding this badge of their office the and bishops pope could practically veto their appointment. Innocent in one of the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 speaks of an archbishop's "receiving the pallium, that is to say, the full right to fill his office." The archbishop had a certain authority over a number of bishops whom he could summon to a provincial synod, but some bishops were practically independent of archiepiscopal control and the authority of different archbishops was very unequal. In England there were seventeen bishops under the Archbishop of Canterbury, only two under the Archbishop of York. Before Innocent's time the monasteries had pretty generally escaped from the control of the local bishop and had come directly under papal supervision. From the time of Innocent the popes claimed more and more the right to depose bish- ops and archbishops if their administration or character proved unsatisfactory, and to refuse on occasion to approve of the elections of bishops as well as to withhold the pallium from archbishops. Sometimes, however, it was not easy to depose a prelate whose see was far from Rome. In the case THE CHURCH UNDER INNOCENT HI 437 of the Archbishop of Bordeaux, for instance, Innocent had to content himself with scolding him by letter for living a life of plunder and keeping a court of brigands. This also illustrates the fact that many bishops still followed the career of feudal lords rather than of ministers of Christ. When Richard the Lion-Hearted was asked by one of Inno- cent's legates to free Philip of Dreux, Bishop of Beauvais and a cousin of the French king, whom he was keeping in chains in a dungeon, he indignantly replied that Philip had not been captured as a bishop, but as a knight in full armor, and furthermore that he was a " robber, tyrant, and incen- diary who did nothing but devastate Richard's lands day and night." Indeed, Innocent knew well enough that Philip was not a desirable type of bishop and afterwards refused to approve his election as Archbishop of Rheims. Each bishop had his own cathedral church, usually located in a town; in fact, in England no place was called a city unless it had a cathedral. The bishop shared r^^^ cathe- his great church with a cathedral chapter of dral chapter canons, each of whom by this time had a prebend or regular income for his support. They occupied the chief seats in the choir stalls: first came the dean, then the chanter in charge of the singing, then the archdeacons who aided the bishop in visiting his diocese and holding his ecclesiastical courts, then the theologian or interpreter of Scripture, the schoolmaster of the cathedral school, the penitentiary, the treasurer, and the chamberlain. Other churches which were large enough to require a number of clergy or canons to administer their affairs, but which were not the seats of bishops, were known as " collegiate" instead of " cathedral" churches. Finally we come to the simple parish church and priest. The parish was the smallest local ecclesiastical territorial unit. The priest, although nominated by some parish lay or ecclesiastical patron of the parish church, P"ests must be approved and ordained by his bishop, who was also supposed to visit and superintend the activities of all the priests within his diocese. So much of the tithes which the 438 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE people of the parish had to pay the Church and of its other revenues went to persons or institutions "higher up," that the parish priest was generally poorly paid and hence was often a man of little ability. The priesthood also suffered from lack of episcopal supervision when bishops neglected their religious functions for other interests. There were, however, archpriests or rural deans, clergymen with the oversight of a few other parishes than their own in much the same way that the archbishop was related to his bishops. Under Innocent we become aware of an increasing ten- dency of the local clergy and churches to refer everything Papal rela- ^° ^^^ pope for decision. Innocent was an tions with administrator of great industry and capacity for detail, and he did not object when arch- bishops, bishops, and abbots from all parts of Latin Chris- tendom referred to him for decision even quite petty mat- ters of local organization or problems in theology or ecclesi- astical discipline which they should have been able to settle satisfactorily themselves by the exercise of a little common sense. For instance, in 1198 we find him permitting the division of a parish in the Bishopric of Laon in northern France. However, in many cases the pope's interference was necessary in order to preserve the peace between two con- tending local parties. The lesser clergy were often at odds with their bishops, and the clergy often had to appeal to the pope for protection against the feudal lords. Sometimes the reverse was the case, and in 1198 we find the Count of Auvergne asking Innocent's help against his brother, the Bishop of Clermont. Innocent also had to warn the bishops in Champagne to be a little less forward in heaping anath- emas and interdicts upon the counts of that region for every trifling thing that they did. Taken all in all a vast business was dispatched at the papal court, and even Innocent at times complained that the burden of business left him no time for meditation or for the composition of religious works. While the medieval Church recognized the great impor- THE CHURCH UNDER INNOCENT HI 439 tance of having well-educated men of pure life and attractive personality in its priesthood, it regarded neither sacramental preaching ability nor executive capacity nor power of the moral conduct as the essential thing for one en- trusted with the care of souls. The essential was divine grace and power, and this the priest was believed to receive when he was ordained by the bishop. Henceforth, regard- less of his natural capacity or incapacity, he possessed "an indelible character" and could perform the sacraments upon which the obtaining of divine grace by his parishioners depended. The Church held that man could not save his soul by his own efforts ; that he must also receive divine grace through partaking of the sacraments. In the Sentences of The seven Peter Lombard, written in the twelfth century, sacraments we find the number of sacraments stated as seven, itself a sacred number. Two could be performed only by the bishop: namely, the ordination of priests, already mentioned, and the confirmation of children in their membership in the Church when they become old enough to distinguish good and evil. Of the five which an ordinary priest could per- form, three, like the two already described, applied to some important epoch in life and would normally be received but once by a given person; namely, baptism into the Church as soon as feasible after birth, the marriage ceremony which in the Middle Ages could be performed only by the clergy, and extreme unction just before death. The two remaining sacraments of the mass and penance were often repeated — indeed, the oftener the* better. The mass was the central feature of the church service. Often the only preaching was done by the bishop when he paid a visit. By the saying of mass the priest was believed to perform a great miracle known as "transubstantiation," by which the bread and wine were changed into the body and blood of Christ and his memor- able sacrifice of himself on the cross for sinful humanity was renewed and perpetuated for the benefit of those present and partaking of the host or consecrated bread. It 440 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE became the custom for the clergy alone to drink the wine for fear lest some drops of the precious blood might be spilt in passing the cup about among the rude laity. It was ex- plained to them that the bread or body contained full virtue. Indeed, the mere celebration of the sacrifice of the mass by the priest was beneficial and the people only occasionally actually received the communion. Moreover, masses might be said for the soul of an absent or dead person. In fact there was so great a demand and so much money left for the repetition of masses for such purposes that some priests had no parishes under their care, but devoted their entire time to chanting private masses and so were called "chantry priests." The Fourth Lateran Council ordered Christians to con- fess their sins to the priest at least once a year. In the early Christian communities sinners had perhaps con- fessed publicly before the congregation, but ere long the custom had grown up of auricular confession in private confidence to the priest. Such confession and the penitent frame of mind which it implied were the first essen- tials in the sacrament of penance. Next, the priest, to whom through Peter and his apostolic successors were supposed to have come the keys of heaven and the power to forgive sins, absolved the sinner from his guilt. There still remained, however, a penalty to be paid and which would have to be worked off after death in purgatory, unless the offender performed some act of penance imposed upon him by the priest. The Penitentials, or books informing the priest as to the proper penances for various sins, have already been mentioned in an earlier chapter. At the time of the First Crusade, Urban II decreed that *'if any one, through devotion alone and not for the sake of honor or gain, goes to Jerusalem to free the Church of God, the journey Itself shall take the place of all penance." Sometimes, moreover, the contrite sinner was permitted to give alms to the poor or to make a contribution to the Church Instead of performing the usual penance. Especially in the later Middle Ages the pope would every now and then proclaim a general Indulgence, THE CHURCH UNDER INNOCENT HI 441 by which penitent persons were offered complete remission of all their past sins upon unusually easy and attractive terms which reduced to a minimum the amount of penance that they would have to undergo both now and in purga- tory. In return for such indulgences or pardons the people were required to contribute generously of their means to the support of the Church. Thus it became a temptation for the Papacy to arrange for the preaching of indulgences whenever it needed money, while the people were liable to conclude that indulgences and money contributions were the surest road to salvation. Yet, strictly speaking, the indulgence freed them only from immediate penance and the pains of purgatory, since by ordinary confession to their priests they could at any time secure forgiveness of their sins and divine pardon of their guilt, leaving only the pen- alty to be worked off either here or in purgatory. These seven sacraments meant everything to medieval men. Most of them never questioned but that water could be made holy, that there were sacred places Excom- which it did one good to visit as a pilgrim, that ^nTinter°" bones of dead saints had wondrous virtues, and diet that living priests could perform such miracles as the mass. In their control of these sacraments the clergy had a tre- mendous weapon to use against the laity. By excommuni- cation they cut off an individual from receiving the sacra- ments, besides, perhaps, launching additional curses and anathemas against him. By an interdict the clergy were ordered to cease the celebration of some or all of the sacra- ments in a given locality. Thus, if a refractory lord paid no attention to his own excommunication, his people might be aroused against him by laying an interdict upon his terri- tories. There was one amusing case where, as soon as a cer- tain feudal noble entered the chief town on his domain, the church bell was rung and all religious services and adminis- tration of the sacraments forthwith ceased, to be resumed only when the bell again announced his departure. Natu- rally the people soon began to murmur and he found it advisable to make his visits to town brief. 442 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Such measures were effective so long as the people be- lieved in the sacramental power of the priesthood. But The spread what could be done if an entire region lost faith of heresy [^ ^j^g Church, its clcrgy, and its ceremonies? Such was threatening to become the situation in southern France when Innocent became pope. With the rise of towns, travel, and trade, and the reception of new ideas in science and philosophy, there had come in also through the eleventh and twelfth centuries strange religious doctrines and prac- tices. Often they spread by the same routes as trade. The leading heresy of this period — that of the Cathari or Patarins or Albigensians, as they finally came to be called from the town of Albi in southern France where they were especially prominent — spread from the East across the Balkans to the Adriatic, and then across Lombardy to Provence and Languedoc. Here they flourished most, but they were also frequently heard of here and there in Ger- many, Flanders, Brittany, and other parts of northern France. The Cathari or "The Pure," as they called themselves, were a revival of the sect of Manichseans of Augustine's day. The Cathari They regarded themselves as Christians, how- or Albigen- ever, but accepted only the New Testament as ^'^"^ their Bible. What we know of them is derived almost wholly from their enemies, so that the following brief summary of their beliefs and rites may not do them justice. It is hard to account for the existence of evil in the world, if we believe in but one good God. The Cathari, therefore, held that two forces forever contend in the world, one a good, the other an evil, deity. Everything material and physical and sensual they regarded as evil. This world, in short, with its crimes and lusts and diseases and wars and worldly bishops and robber barons, is evil. Christ was not a man born of a woman, but a pure spirit sent to introduce the new gospel of an "invisible, spiritual, and eternal uni- verse." The pope and clergy of the Roman Church are not representatives of Christ, but servants of the evil spirit, for they do not renounce the things of this world as they should. THE CHURCH UNDER INNOCENT HI 443 Instead of following them, one should turn for salvation to the "Perfected" of the Catharl, who have been ordained by laylng-on of hands and have promised never to He or swear, or eat meat, cheese, and eggs. Instead of the elaborate mass, the Catharl had the simple blessing of bread per- formed dally at table. The Perfected were looked upon as very holy men by the common people, who did not usually receive the consolamentum, or laying-on of hands, until just before death. The Catharl were not afraid to die for their faith, — the orthodox whispered that suicide was frequent among the heretics, — and it has been said that "if the blood of the martyrs were really the seed of the Church, Manichaeism would now be the dominant religion of Europe." Another prominent heretical sect in southern France were the Waldensians, some of whom still survive. They were followers of Peter Waldo, a rich merchant The Wal- of Lyons who abandoned his business to lead a densians life of apostolic poverty and who went about preaching to the people. At first sight there may seem to be nothing heretical in this, but Waldo was not an ordained priest. When his disciples began to criticize the lives of the bishops and priests who did not adopt a life of poverty, and to say that laymen and women could preach, and that a prayer to God made in a barn was as likely to be heard as one made in a cathedral, and that the masses said for the dead did them no good, and when they began to refuse to pay tithes, the Church began to condemn them as heretics. Such per- secution only led them to oppose the clergy the more, and some of them were well on the road to the views of the later Protestants, while others adopted some of the teachings of the Catharl. In most parts of Europe the people themselves would hound down a heretic as readily as mobs in some parts of this country will lynch a negro who assaults a Medieval white woman. The people were afraid that their to^ard^ crops would fail, or that a pestilence would be heresy sent upon them by divine wrath, if they tolerated heretics 444 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE in their midst or even let their bones rest in consecrated ground. The practice of burning heretics at the stake grew up spontaneously and was not introduced by the Inquisition. The clergy, however, had taught the people to hate heresy, and we must remember that the most learned and the most saintly men of medieval times alike approved of the perse- cution of heretics. But in southern France conditions were different. There society was worldly and tolerant, and the troubadours, ^ ,.,. feudal nobles, and municipalities cared little Conditions "^ in southern for the Church. The clergy were worldly and ^^^^^ neglected to give the people proper religious instruction, and could not be relied upon to take any ener- getic action against heresy. Even if they did, they could find no support in the lords of the land or the ruling bodies in the towns. Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse, the greatest feudal lord of the region, was a friend of the heretics and was strongly suspected of being one himself. The heretics preached publicly in town squares and at feudal courts and gained numerous adherents, so that Innocent came to the conclusion that in some archbishoprics of southern France there were more Manichseans than Christians. Innocent often said that he preferred that the heretics should be converted rather than exterminated, and that ^t A,t • they should be won back by preaching rather The Albi- -^ -r^ • i r r i • gensian than by force. Durmg the hrst ten years oi his crusade pontificate he sent a succession of legates to southern France, but with little result. He also, however, as early as 1204 appealed to Philip Augustus, the King of France, for aid, but the latter was too occupied with his struggle with King John of England. Finally, in 1207, Count Raymond was excommunicated. He submitted, promising to do as the papal legates wished, and received absolution. But Innocent went ahead and in November offered the feudal lords of central and northern France the same remis- sion of sins as for crusaders to the East, if they would take part for forty days in an expedition to crush heresy in southern France. Just at this juncture, in January, 1208, THE CHURCH UNDER INNOCENT HI 445 one of the papal legates was assassinated by an official of the Count of Toulouse. This murder aroused a storm of indignation; the clergy preached the new type of crusade with great vigor; and soon a large army was on its way south. Raymond made no attempt at resistance, but, pro- testing his innocence of the murder of the legate, joined the army of crusaders. Thus, deprived of its natural leader, Toulouse made no united opposition. The crusading army occupied itself chiefly in storming Beziers, where thousands of men, women, and children were massacred, and in forcing Carcassonne to capitulate, whereupon its inhabitants were allowed to depart with but a single garment each. Most of the original crusaders then went home. Beziers and Carcassonne were given as a fief to Simon de Montfort, who proceeded, with the aid of hired troops and of new cru- saders who kept arriving, to enlarge his fief further at the expense of Raymond and other southern lords. Raymond was unable to make his peace with the Church, although he went to Rome to see Innocent. The King of Aragon, who was Raymond's brother-in-law, and who did not like to see the barons of the north despoiling his neighbors of their fiefs, tried to interfere, at first as a peacemaker and then with an army, but he was defeated and slain in battle by De Montfort. The latter in his turn perished while besieg- ing the city of Toulouse. This was after the death of Inno- cent, for the war in Languedoc went on until 1229. A second crusade was led by Prince Louis of France, who came again as King Louis VIII in 1224. Meanwhile Raymond VI had died and his son, Raymond VII, finally made his peace with the Church and also with the King of France, now Louis IX, to whose brother he agreed to marry his daughter and leave his lands. Innocent had less difficulty with the Bogomiles of Bosnia and Dalm^atia than with their fellow heretics in Toulouse. When he Induced the King of Hungary to declare war upon the Ban of Bosnia, the latter potentate quickly submitted and asked that a papal legate be sent to receive the Bogo- mile leaders back into the Roman Church. 446 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Raymond VII of Toulouse in 1229 agreed to support the Church with all his might in the suppression of heresy, rpj^g He would punish the heretics if the Church medieval would point them out. Cases of heresy had inquisi ion hf^herto been dealt with by the local court of the bishop, but now the pope took the detection of heretics under his charge and appointed special officials — known as "inquisitors," from the Latin word for an investigation or inquiry — to visit places infested with heresy. The com- ing of the inquisitor was announced in advance and the people were encouraged to assemble at a specified time by the promise of an indulgence. To this assembled multitude the inquisitor preached, urging them to give him all possible information and assistance against the heretics in the local- ity, or to confess and repent of their error if they were tainted with heresy themselves. A period of grace, usually a month, was allowed during which any heretic who acknowl- edged his guilt and promised reformation and told the inquisitor what he could about his fellow heretics was absolved with some light penance. When the period of grace was over, the inquisitor pro- ceeded to the trials of those against whom he had gathered evidence and who had not already confessed. The accused usually had neither lawyer nor witnesses to speak for him, since others did not wish to or did not dare to defend a prob- able heretic, lest they too be suspected. A notary was pres- ent to record the proceedings and two impartial men to see fair play, but they were sworn to secrecy unless some abuse occurred in the conduct of the trial. Until the close of the thirteenth century, the inquisitor did not have to let the accused know what evidence he had against him or who had given it, but Pope Boniface VIII decreed that the names of the witnesses against him must be revealed to the accused, although he still was not allowed to call them in and cross-examine them. The procedure, therefore, re- solved itself mainly into a questioning of the accused by the inquisitor in order to determine if he really were a heretic. If he refused to answer or made statements that the inquis- THE CHURCH UNDER INNOCENT HI 447 itor believed to be false, torture was employed to force the truth from him. He was then brought back into the court- room and asked to sign, as a freely made confession, the words which had been wrung from him on the rack. But if he refused to sign, he often was put to the torture again. Even witnesses who were not themselves on trial were some- times tortured. Ordinarily in cases in the ecclesiastical courts the testimony of criminals, heretics, and excommuni- cated persons was not admitted ; but the inquisition accepted such evidence and also that of young children. Assertions against the accused made by a deadly enemy were not, however, given credence. The penalties varied according as the accused was an offender for the first time or a relapsed heretic, according to the magnitude of the offense, and according to whether his guilt seemed proved beyond question or still remained open to some doubt. The extreme penalties were life im- prisonment on bread and water, and death, generally by burning at the stake. In the latter case the State inflicted the punishment and the heretic after his conviction by the inquisition, which in this case had to be approved by the bishop of his diocese, was handed over to "the secular arm" for the punishment decreed by its laws against heretics. The inquisition must be estimated in the light of those times, when it was common to punish criminals with great cruelty and when torture was often used in secular tribu- nals. It was better to convict men on the basis of evidence, even if this was somewhat unfairly used against them, than to determine their guilt or innocence by recourse to ordeals, as had sometimes been done before even in the case of per- sons suspected of heresy. The use of ordeals by the clergy was forbidden by Innocent in 12 15. But to say that there were other courts as bad as the inquisition is no sufficient justification of it. The Church had constantly proclaimed its superiority to the State and must live up to its claim. Hitherto the ecclesiastical courts had been distinguished by their leniency and equity. Now the Church of the Prince of Peace and Love was basing its power upon brute force 448 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE and killing those whom it could not convince. For the time being this harsh policy had an apparent success ; the Cathari soon disappeared forever and the Waldensians ceased to be at all dangerous. Innocent did not establish the papal inqui- sition, although he took a step or two in its direction. But by the cruel crusade which he turned upon a Christian land he started the policy of forcible extermination of heresy of which the inquisition was the logical outcome. The inquisitors did not visit all the lands of Latin Chris- tendom. Scandinavian countries were entirely free from them and they appeared in England on only one occasion. In the Spanish peninsula they were limited to Aragon until the notorious Spanish Inquisition began at the close of the fifteenth century. In the Low Countries we hear of them only in Flanders and Brabant. The men chosen by the popes to act as inquisitors were the Dominican and Franciscan friars. The founders of these , two new religious orders, St. Francis of Assisi in central Italy and St. Dominic, a prior of Osma in north central Spain, had already begun their work in the pontificate of Innocent, although their orders were not com- pletely established and did not spread over Europe until after his death. Many legends grew up about both these saints and have been preserved in paintings as well as in literature. About Dominic we know little with certainty; concerning Francis we are better informed by contempora- ries. St. Francis has always been regarded as one of the most beautiful characters in the Middle Ages. As a boy he had St. Francis plenty of money to spend and led a gay life of of Assisi pleasure, until a serious illness wrought a great change in him just about the time that he was coming of age. The life of the apostles, whom Christ sent out to preach the coming of the kingdom of heaven, telling them not to take money, food, or extra clothing with them — this ideal of apostolic poverty came to appeal to Francis as it had done to so many others in the Middle Ages, and he deter- mined to put it into practice. His angry father, when he THE CHURCH UNDER INNOCENT HI 449 disinherited him, only aided him in accomplishing his pur- pose. Francis would not keep even the clothes on his back, but entered upon his new life in a discarded and worthless garment. He had a hard time of it at first. He was hooted at and pelted with missiles in the city streets, and when he wandered outside the walls he met some robbers. When he informed them that he was "the herald of a great king," they stripped him naked and threw him into a snowdrift. But even this treatment failed to cool his religious ardor. He repaired some ruined chapels in the neighborhood, tended the loathsome lepers, and preached in the simplest style to any one who would listen to him, — even, we are told, to the birds who were not afraid as he walked among them and reminded them how thankful they should be to God their creator. Francis was as cheerful in his rags as he had been in the luxury of his father's house; a new inspiration had come to him and he was full of love for all mankind and even for forces in nature such as "brother fire"; finally, despite his bare feet and patched garment, he remained a true gentle- man. He threw away all the outward trappings of civiliza- tion, abandoning learning as well as property, and cleanli- ness as well as clothes; but he did it in order to get back to nature, to touch our common humanity, and to see God. What the modern city dweller tries to get by "roughing it" in the woods in the summer, what other men in the Middle Ages had sought to find by secluding themselves in monas- teries, Francis sought by going into the world about him. Sometimes the ambitious youth of to-day, in order to learn more thoroughly the business in which he proposes to en- gage, "begins at the bottom" in foundry or factory or freight train. Francis began at the bottom in order to learn God's business. The men of his age appreciated his worth and he was made a saint two years after his death, whereas Dominic had to wait thirteen years, and the great pope. Innocent, has not been canonized yet. Such a personality soon drew followers, and they went forth from Assisi two by two to spread the gospel. Some- 450 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE times they simply called themselves "Penitents," sometimes The Order by the gladder name of "God's troubadours." cansror'^'^ At first they were simple laymen and might Minorites have developed into heretics like the followers of Peter Waldo. But in 12 lo Francis met Innocent and ob- tained his oral approbation, although the new order was not formally established until several years after Innocent's death. By 12 19, however, they had begun to spread outside Italy and were soon found in Spain, France, England, Ger- many, and Hungary. They were now called "Minorites" or "the lowly" because of their humility. They also have often been called "Mendicant Friars" or "Begging Broth- ers," because they had no property of their own and had to depend for food and lodging upon those to whom they preached and rendered other services. As their work was largely with the lepers and sick and poor and needy, they often had to beg their bread from other persons. But they were not allowed by Francis to receive any money, and were supposed to earn their living when they could. Francis died in 1226 after two or three unsuccessful attempts to go as a missionary to the Saracens. In 1212 a girl of eighteen named Clare left her family to become a follower of Francis, who thereupon instituted a separate order for women, known as the "Second Order of St. Francis," or the "Franciscan Nuns," or the "Poor Clares." The youth of Dominic had been that of a student and cleric. Early in the thirteenth century he accompanied his St. Dominic bishop on a diplomatic mission for the King of '■Friare^^^ Castile, and they also visited Rome. In passing Preachers" through Toulouse on their way north and again on their return, they were shocked by the prevalence of heresy. Dominic determined to remain there and devote himself to religious work. At Prouille he founded a nunnery where Albigensian orphan girls might be reared in orthodoxy, and he supported Simon de Montfort in his bloody work of orphan-making. Innocent had approved a new order called "Poor Catholics," whose leaders were converted Walden- sians, who now proposed to combat heresy in southern THE CHURCH UNDER INNOCENT HI 451 France by leading the life of poverty themselves and by preaching and teaching, by argument and discussion. They met with little success, however, because the other clergy were suspicious of them as former heretics. Dominic now took up this idea of training a body of men to combat heresy and teach the people the true faith. This order, known as the "Friars Preachers," was confirmed in 1216 by Innocent's successor and by the time of Dominic's death in 1 22 1 was spreading over Europe. Although the temperaments and ideals of their founders had differed considerably, Francis emphasizing poverty and social service, and Dominic stressing orthodox Services teaching and preaching, the two orders came to rendered by be much alike and are usually spoken of together as "Mendicant Friars," although there has generally been a certain rivalry between them. We also hear of "the four fraternal orders," the other two being the Augustinians and the Carmelites. The friars differed from the monks in going into the world and serving society more. They rendered especial service in the slums and wretched suburbs outside the walls of growing towns, where there often were not enough parish priests. Even if there were enough parish priests, the people often preferred the friars who seemed to them to lead a holier life, who were so sympathetic and cheerful, and who could preach so much better. In short, the traveling friars remedied the defects of the local priest- hood and met the new demands of thirteenth-century society. Although Francis had forsaken learning along with father, family, and all other worldly interests, his followers of ten specialized in theology, or, like the Dominicans, taught at universities. The ablest and most learned of the clergy were now apt to be found among the friars. Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas were Dominicans; Roger Bacon and William of Rubruk were Franciscans. At the head of either order was one man, the General, who called an annual assembly of the heads or Their assessors of the various provinces in different ^^^^•"^ parts of Europe. As the new orders became so successful 452 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE and Influential in all Western Christian lands, the popes freed them entirely from the control of the bishops in whose dioceses they might live and work. Such of them as had been ordained were allowed not only to preach, but also to perform the sacraments anywhere, which of course meant a further diminution in the influence of the parish priest. Although the individual friars had vowed to lead lives of poverty, both organizations were soon building large churches and convents and receiving large gifts which the world was anxious to shower upon such holy men. In time this too great wealth and popularity had an injurious effect. At the start the friars, like the monks of Cluny, represented a reform movement, but like most previous monastic orders, they were to decline in the course of time. It was impossible to keep the clergy constantly up to the ideals of St. Francis, when the Church continued to exercise so much worldly power and to possess so much of this world's goods. In 1215, toward the end of his reign. Innocent held at the Lateran in Rome a great church council, regarded by Roman Th F th Catholics as the most important in the Middle Lateran Agcs. Through this council Innocent attempted to reform various evils in the ecclesiastical sys- tem but without much lasting success, although some sev- enty reformatory decrees were promulgated. This Fourth Lateran, or Twelfth (Ecumenical Council, was notable for the numbers present, for the wide territory represented, showing how Latin Christendom had expanded, and for the supreme control exercised by Innocent over all the pro- ceedings. The council simply agreed to what he proposed. The first eight general councils of the whole Christian Church had been held in the East, and the pope had not exerted much control over their deliberations and findings, although their decrees are accepted by the Latin Church. But since the Eighth Council held at Constantinople in 869, the Roman Catholic Church had recognized only those councils which popes had summoned in the West. All four of these had been held at the Lateran, the first in 1123. In 12 15 there were present over four hundred bishops, eight THE CHURCH UNDER INNOCENT HI 453 hundred abbots and priors, besides many other clergy and the ambassadors of secular princes. Latin Christendom now extended from the distant shores of Greenland and Iceland to Cyprus, Little Armenia, and the coast cities of Syria. A Serbian prince ruling Extent of in Dalmatia, Montenegro, and Herzegovina, had ^atin Christendom asked Innocent m 1198 to send a legate to re- under ceive those territories into the Latin Church. ^""O'^^"*^ ^^^ A year or so later negotiations began between Inno- cent and the ruler of Bulgaria and Wallachia which led to the incorporation of that country into the Latin Church and to the coronation of its ruler as king by the papal legate. The participants in the Fourth Crusade set up a Latin empire in Constantinople which brought the rest of the Balkan peninsula and Greece at least nominally under papal control. Hungary and most of Poland and the Scan- dinavian peninsula were Roman Catholic lands. Over half the Spanish peninsula was already Christian territory and the victory of 12 12 at Navas de Tolosa over the Almohades meant that Mohammedan rule would soon be limited to Granada. 454 THE MEDIEVAL HISTORY OF EUROPE EXERCISES AND READINGS Letters of Innocent III. Thatcher and McNeal, Source Book for Medieval History, pp. 208-14, selections 114-22. Summarize the contents of each document and connect each with some paragraph of the above chapter if possible. Source Work on Varied Topics. Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. I, pp. 348-95, The sacraments, selections 135, 136, 137, 138, 152. The clergy, selections 140, 146, 147, 148, 149. Church property, selections 141, 142, 143. The heretics, selections 144, 150, 151, 153. St. Francis, selections 154, 155, 156. Summarize and combine the information contained in the selec- tions on one of the above topics, noting, however, which statements represent hostile criticism or are otherwise apparently biased. Coulton, A Medieval Garner. Contains a great number of brief selec- tions from medieval sources illustrating the life of the clergy and to a less extent of the laity. Examples of the Interdict. Translations and Reprintsof the University of Pennsylvania, vol. IV, no. 4, pp. 27-28 and 29-30. Ogg, Source Book of Medieval History, pp. 382-83. Southern France and the Religious Opposition. Munro and Sellery, Medieval Civilization, pp. 432-57. The Medieval Inquisition. » Any chapter in Lea, History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, or in Vacandard, The Inquisition. St. Francis. Chesterton, Varied Types, pp. 59-70. Brother Leo's Mirror of Perfection. (Temple Classics.) Henderson, Historical Documents, "The Rule of St. Francis," pp. 344-49. Any chapter in Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi. The Friars. Jessopp, The Coming of the Friars. Coulton, From St. Francis to Dante (2d edition, 1907). Chapter vi, " Cloister Life." Chapter ix, " Convent Friendships." Chapter xv, "A Bishop's Conscience." The Modern Roman Catholic View. Look up an article in the Catholic Encyclopedia upon some one of the topics discussed in this chapter. CHAPTER XXIV INNOCENT III AND THE STATES OF EUROPE Innocent aimed to be supreme, not only over the clergy, but over the kings and feudal lords of Europe. "We are established by God above peoples and realms" Papal over- was one of his favorite utterances. The policy ^o^dship of making the monarchs of Europe vassals of the Papacy reached thp height of its success under him. During his first year in office he demanded prompt settlement of all arrears of tribute owed to the pope from these fiefs. As his pontifi- cate proceeded, he brought yet other rulers into vassalage to the Holy See, or humbled them in one way or another. "The Duke of Bohemia was rebuked, the King of Denmark comforted, the nobles of Iceland warned, the King of Hun- gary admonished. Serbia, Bulgaria, even remote Armenia, received papal supervision and paternal care." Innocent interfered to settle disputed successions to thrones or quar- rels in royal families, to stop wars and to induce rulers to join the crusade. What Innocent intended the feudal relationships of these kings to himself to be may be inferred from two oaths of fealty taken by Peter II of Aragon, who came Oaths of to Rome to receive his crown at the Pope's own by Peter^T hand. At the coronation ceremony the king took of Aragon the following oath: "I, Peter, King of Aragon, confess and swear that I will ever be the obedient vassal of my Lord, Pope Innocent, and his Catholic successors, and of the Roman Church. I will faithfully keep my realm in his obe- dience, will defend the Catholic Faith, and will persecute heresy. I will respect the liberties and immunities of the Church, and will make others observe its rights. I will strive to establish peace and justice in all the territory subject to my control. I swear it by God's name and on these holy Gospels." Pope and king then visited the basilica of 456 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE St. Peter where the king placed his scepter and diadem on the Apostle's tomb with these words: "I confess from the heart and with my mouth that the Roman pontiff, successor to St. Peter, takes the place of Him who governs earthly realms, and can confer them upon whom it seems good to him. I, Peter, by the grace of God King of Aragon, Count of Barcelona, and Lord of Montpellier, desiring above all else the protection of God, of the Apostle, and of the Holy See, declare that I offer my kingdom to thee, admirable father and lord, sovereign pontiff Innocent, and to thy successors, and through thee to the most sacred Church of Rome. And I make my kingdom tributary to Rome at the rate of two hundred and fifty gold pieces which my treasury shall pay every year to the Apostolic See. And I swear for myself and my successors that we will remain thy faithful vassals and obedient subjects." On the other hand, Innocent opposed most strenuously any attempt of the State to seize church property or of Insistence on ^ingS tO COntrol CCclcsiastical elections. He in- ecclesiastical structed a Hungarian archbishop, when reading ^ ^^ y to the people the legendary life of St. Stephen, the first Christian king of Hungary, to suppress a passage which spoke of the religious authority conferred upon that monarch. When the King of Portugal drove out some monks who were deep both in crime and in debt and replaced them by nuns under his daughter as abbess. Innocent bade the Archbishop of Compostella restore the monks in order to teach the king that ecclesiastical liberty must not "suffer from the insolence of laymen," but then to oust them once more and allow the princess to start a nunnery if she wished, in order that "the depravity of the monks might not go unpunished." Innocent's relations with southern France and with the Count of Toulouse have already been mentioned in de- Relations scribing the Albigensian Crusade. It remains with France to Speak of his relations with the two royal houses, Capetian and Plantagenet, who were now engaged in continual strife with each other and who INNOCENT III AND THE STATES OF EUROPE 457 at the same time were laying the foundations of the French and English national governments. When Innocent be- came pope, Richard was still King of England and was defending against the attacks of the wily Philip Augustus of France the vast Plantagenet possessions upon the Con- tinent, which he had inherited from his father, Henry II of England, Anjou, and Normandy, and from his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Within a year the pope had induced these two monarchs to sign a five-year truce. But straight- way Richard died and his brother John, who succeeded him, within a few years had lost Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Touraine, and Poitou to Philip Augustus. Innocent re- garded Philip's conquests as unjust aggressions, but his threats and protests failed to deter the French king in the least. The pope had the further reason for taking the side of the English king that he was an ally of the papal protege in Germany, Otto of Brunswick, John, however, soon showed himself such an unmitigated rascal and so complete a failure as a ruler, that he was un- likely to remain on good terms with Innocent Misrule for long. He interfered in episcopal elections, he °^ J°^" seized episcopal revenues, and in general oppressed the Church and the clergy as he did every one else. His mother, Eleanor, and his brother's widow, Berengaria, both com- plained to the pope that John was pocketing their private incomes. Furthermore, he had left his first wife and married the intended bride of another lord, and after he captured his young nephew, Arthur, whom Philip Augustus had stirred up against him, the boy disappeared forever and John was charged with his murder. Arthur was the son of Geoffrey, an older brother than John, and by hereditary right should have succeeded Richard on the throne rather than his uncle, John. It was not these evil deeds by John, however, that di- rectly caused the struggle between the king and the pope, but a disputed election to the Archbishopric of The Canter- Canterbury. This highest church office in Eng- '^"'^ election land had been held during the latter part of Richard's and 458 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE the early part of John's reign by Hubert Walter, a faithful servant of, the Crown. Thomas Becket had resigned his position as chancellor when he was made archbishop and hacL henceforth served the Church solely and had opposed the king at every turn. But Hubert served as justiciar under Richard and as chancellor under John at the same time that he was archbishop. The cathedral chapter at Canterbury, composed of monks, had recently had a hotly fought dispute with their archbishop because Hubert's predecessor had instituted a community of secular canons in another church near by. The case had gone to the papal court and was finally settled in 1201 by a compromise. Now, when Hubert died in 1205, the younger monks met secretly, elected their sub-prior, Reginald, and dispatched him with equal secrecy to Rome to secure papal consecration. As he passed through Flanders, however, he let it be known that he had been elected, and this news soon reached England. The other bishops were indignant because they claimed a voice in the selection of their archbishop, and they sent an embassy to Innocent to complain. Meanwhile the monks seem to have regretted their hasty action in choosing Reginald; at any rate, they now agreed upon the king's candidate, the Bishop of Norwich. After a year of deliberation Innocent annulled the election of Reginald on the ground that the procedure had been illegal, and denied the other bishops any share in the election, but he also set aside the election of the Bishop of Norwich and instead had those monks of Canterbury who were present at Rome elect a candidate of his own. This was Stephen Langton, a noted scholar of English birth, though for many years he had been at the University of Paris and at the papal court. John's rage at this rejection of his candidate was un- bounded. He refused to receive Langton and drove the John is monks of Canterbury into exile. Innocent re- become the plied by putting England under an interdict in pope's vassal 1208 and by excommunicating John the next year. Meanwhile John persecuted the clergy, confiscated church property, and instituted a reign of tyranny and INNOCENT III AND THE STATES OF EUROPE 459 terror. Innocent next freed all John's subjects from their oaths of allegiance and all his allies from their treaty engage- ments. Finally, in 12 13 he deposed John and offered the English crown to Philip Augustus, who began to prepare for an invasion. John now was forced to give in after a bitter struggle of seven years, for he found that his barons and subjects, over whom he had tyrannized as well as over the Church, would give him little aid against Philip. Accord- ingly he not only agreed to receive Langton and to compen- sate the clergy for the injuries done them, but he became the vassal of the pope for his kingdom and agreed to pay a tribute of one thousand pounds a year. This was a great triumph for Innocent. William the Conqueror had refused to make England a papal fief and become the vassal of Gregory VII; now Innocent had succeeded where Gregory had failed. Since the reign of William, the Norman and Angevin kings of England had exercised the most absolute royal authority and had possessed the best organized state in western Europe; now they were reduced to vassalage to the Holy See. But Innocent's triumph w^as not unalloyed, for he had encouraged John's barons to revolt and had thus developed in England a power as hostile to the Papacy as ^^^ papac to the Crown. No sooner had John made his and Magna peace with the pope than he had to settle ac- counts with his nobility and people, who, under the lead of the very man whom Innocent had put in as archbishop, forced from their tyrant Magna Carta, the foundation of English liberties. Innocent declared this charter null and void, excommunicated the leaders of the opposition to his vassal John, and suspended Stephen Langton from his archbishopric. But the English barons took a leaf from Innocent's own book. They deposed John and called in French aid. Then, when John unexpectedly died and a new pope accepted the Great Charter, they too accepted John's nine-year-old son as their king and drove the son of Philip Augustus back to France, just as Innocent had counter- manded the father's preparations to invade England in 46o THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE 1 213. The English king remained the vassal of the pope, but the king's vassals in England had forced their sovereign to limit his power over them and to admit them to a share in the government, and neither pope nor king had been able to stop them. Innocent had triumphed over the weak personality of John; he had not conquered the English nation. Moreover, Innocent's victory over John was partly due to the fact that the latter had already been so humiliated Intractabil- ^y Philip Augustus, who had destroyed most of ity of Philip the Plantagenet power on the Continent. Thus, ugus us ^hiie the English king was weakened for a time, the French monarch kept increasing his power. And he did not become a vassal of the pope. On the contrary, his rela- tions with the pope in temporal matters were far from satis- factory to Innocent, although the king always displayed a sufficient outward respect for the Church and for religion. Philip conquered Normandy despite papal threats, he re- peatedly refused to join the crusade against the Albigen- sians, he allied with the anti-papal party in Germany, and he allowed his son to invade England and aid the barons whom the pope had excommunicated. In only one matter can Innocent be said to have forced his will upon Philip, and that was a case where the king had Divorce case clcarly been in the wrong. No sooner had he of Ingeborg married Ingeborg of Denmark, a beautiful and of Denmark • 1 r • 1 u_ • j_i r pure girl of eighteen, in 1193, than for some un- explained reason he secured the assent of the French clergy to a divorce and married again. Ingeborg appealed to Rome and then for twenty years threats, negotiations, excommunications, pretended reconciliations with, and re- newed separations from, and imprisonments of poor Inge- borg succeeded one another. Finally, in 12 13, when about to invade England as the pope's ally, Philip gave in and restored Ingeborg to her rightful place as queen, which she retained for the rest of the reign, and in his will he left a large sum of money to his "dearest wife." From Innocent's relations with the English and French INNOCENT III AND THE STATES OF EUROPE 461 monarchs we turn to his interference in Italian and German politics. The year before his election a disaster j^^jj^^^ had befallen the Holy Roman Empire and the policy of House of Hohenstaufen in the untimely death ^^'^^ of the emperor, Henry VI (1190-1197). This son of Fred- erick Barbarossa, through a marriage which his father had arranged for him with Constance, the Norman heiress of Sicily and southern Italy, had acquired that well-organized kingdom. And the party strife and interurban wars, which had at once begun again in the communes of Lombardy as soon as their danger from Barbarossa was over, gave Henry a chance to renew the influence of the Empire there. Thus he threatened to crush the political power of the pope in central Italy as if between two millstones. He had already made his brother, Philip of Suabia, Duke of Tus- cany, and had planted garrisons in Romagna, the March of Ancona, and Umbria, when death put an end to his ambi- tious designs. Immediately his power in Italy went to pieces. Philip was lucky to escape from Tuscany and across the Alps with his life. The Tuscan towns, aided by Innocent's . „ . -^ . . Its collapse predecessor, formed a federation to mamtam their independence after the model of the Lombard League. The cities of Romagna and Ancona also united against German rule, and, assisted by Innocent, forced the imperial governor to retire to the southern kingdom. There, too, however, the widowed queen-mother Con- stance was hostile to German influence. She had her three- year-old son Frederick crowned King of Sicily, innocent and recognized that Innocent was feudal over- ^"*^ ^"^'^^ lord of the kingdom. Her Norman ancestors, too, had done this much, but Innocent was able to induce her to surren- der the right which they had secured from the Papacy of being themselves the sole papal legates in their lands and thus maintaining complete control over their clergy. After making this great concession, Constance died before the first year of Innocent's reign was over, but not before she had made a will leaving the guardianship of her infant son 462 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE and the regency of his kingdom to the pope. During most of Innocent's reign, however, the Kingdom of Sicily and southern Italy remained in a state of anarchy with various persons and parties contending for the control of the person of the young king and disregarding the claims of the pope. Meanwhile in Germany there was a disputed election to the imperial throne. Frederick, who Henry VI had in- T^u J- .J tended should succeed him, was passed over as 1 he disputed . . ^ imperial too young, and the majority of the great nobles e ection ^^^ clergy chose Philip of Suabia to succeed his brother. But a month later Otto of Brunswick, son of Henry the Lion, the Guelph leader against Barbarossa, was elected by the Archbishop of Cologne and a few lesser princes, and received support outside Germany from Richard of England, who thus had his revenge for the im- prisonment which he had suffered at the hands of Henry VI on his way home from the Third Crusade. Civil war ensued between the adherents of the two candidates and soon Germany was in a state of anarchy. Both sides appealed to the pope, but he, while insisting that there could be no emperor without his approval, failed Innocent's to declare for either of the rivals for three years, interference Meanwhile confusion reigned in Germany and Innocent was free from any imperial interference in Italy. Finally, in 1201, he came out for Otto, the weaker of the two both in right and in might. Otto in return promised to abandon the aggressive Italian policy of Henry VI and to leave Innocent the undisturbed possession of central Italy, or, more specifically, of the Exarchate of Ravenna, the March of Ancona, the Duchy of Spoleto, and the lands of the Countess Matilda of Gregory VII's time. Otto, how- ever, was not yet in a position to do more than make prom- ises. Philip of Suabia continued the struggle and was getting decidedly the better of it when in 1208 he was assassinated. Otto now was able to come to Rome and be crowned by the pope in 1209 at St. Peter's, although the hostility of the Romans to him was so great that he did not cross the Tiber and enter the city proper. But Otto, despite his INNOCENT III AND THE STATES OF EUROPE 463 promises, soon revived the Italian policy of Henry VI and in 1 2 10 was excommunicated by Innocent, who now brought forward young Frederick as his candidate for emperor. Otto also had Philip Augustus, the King of France, for an enemy, and when that monarch defeated him in 12 14 at the battle of Bouvines in northern France, he gave up the struggle for the imperial throne and retired to his private estates. Again Innocent had seemingly triumphed. It is true that Frederick was the son of Henry VI, and that he was already King of Sicily, and that the Papacy held it a menace to its independence to have . ^ Innocent Germany and southern Italy controlled by the and Fred- same ruler. But Frederick had thus far shown himself a docile vassal in Sicily; he promised to surrender Sicily to his son when he himself should be crowned em- peror; he officially confirmed to the pope all the territory in Italy which Otto had promised; and he made further important concessions in connection with the control of the Church in Germany. He surrendered the "right of spoil " or royal custom of seizing the goods of dead bishops ; he granted freedom in ecclesiastical elections and freedom of appeal to the court at Rome. Finally he agreed to go on a crusade. But after Innocent's death, as we shall see, he became the arch-enemy of the Papacy. The absence of any imperial authority in Italy during Innocent's pontificate - — for the rival candidates spent practically all the time contending in Germany innocent — would afford a good opportunity, one might i"^jan suppose, for the pope to bring actually under his communes rule the territories which he claimed in central Italy. But the communes with which that region was now filled, while they had been glad to join with Innocent in driving out the imperial agents, had no desire to accept instead the rule of the pope within their walls. Only after a struggle of ten years was Innocent able to master his own city of Rome, where previous popes had been unable to prevent the com- munal movement from spreading. At one time Innocent and his brother Richard were expelled from the city, be- 464 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE cause the pope had aroused the jealousy of other prominent Roman families by the favors which he bestowed upon his brother, and because the commune as a whole had been alarmed by a gigantic tower which Richard had built. In the Patrimony of St. Peter, as the territory immediately north and south of Rome was called, Innocent succeeded in establishing something like order by 1207, when he held at Viterbo an assembly of the higher clergy, feudal lords, and magistrates of the communes throughout the Patrimony. But his efforts to exert any real control over the towns of Umbria, Ancona, and Romagna were quite unsuccessful. They continued to revolt, to elect whom they pleased as officials, to permit party strife within their walls, and to fight with neighboring towns, until the pope gave up in despair and turned over his interests in the entire region to a lay lord as a fief. Innocent was displeased that the constitution of the Tus- can League sanctioned by his predecessor made no mention of any subjection to the Papacy, but he was unable to secure any real improvement in their relations to him. Moreover, the great Ghibelline city, Pisa, refused to join the league, and by its hold on the coasts of Sardinia pre- vented Innocent from making good his claim to that island. In Lombardy the communes displayed an increasingly secular spirit, and Innocent had to make use of excom- munications and interdicts against some of them because of their support of heresy or attacks upon the rights and prop- erty of the Church or the persons of the clergy. But the various cities of Lombardy were too busy fighting one another to pay much attention to the pope and his thunders. On the other hand, Venice turned a whole crusade to its own profit. The Fourth Crusade, which occurred during Innocent's pontificate, was participated in chiefly by French knights, The Fourth although their chosen leader was an Italian, Crusade Boniface, the Marquis of Montferrat, in north- western Italy. The crusaders determined to take the sea route, and Venice agreed, in return for a cash payment and INNOCENT III AND THE STATES OF EUROPE 465 the prospect of an equal share in all conquests, to provide a certain number of galleys, transport their army, and supply it with provisions for a year. The crusaders, however, did not keep their part of the agreement well. Some of them showed an inclination to set off by other routes of their own choosing; others were dilatory in starting at all; and when finally a number of them had been rounded up at Venice considerably later than the day appointed, they were fewer than had been expected and were unable to pay the full amount agreed upon. The doge offered to remit this deficit if before proceeding on the crusade they would aid Venice in conquering Zara, a rival city on the eastern shore of the Adriatic. Now, Zara was a Christian city claimed by the King of Hungary, and consequently any crusaders who attacked it would be liable to excommunication. The Vene- tians, however, who refused to allow the papal legate to accompany the expedition, cared little about being excom- municated, while the other crusaders had a shrewd suspi- cion that the pope would pardon them immediately after- wards, as turned out to be the case. Therefore they aided in the storming of Zara. Then the expedition, instead of proceeding to Syria or Egypt, went to Constantinople, where the Venetian mer- chants were already very influential, and over- Establish- threw a usurper and restored the hereditary Lati^^ ^ ^ candidate to the Byzantine Empire. When he Empire failed to keep the promises which he had made in order to procure their aid, they deposed him in turn and disgraced themselves by sacking the rich city, burning many build- ings, wantonly destroying works of art, and committing many atrocities and brutal crimes. In place of the Greek Empire and Comnenian dynasty, whose treachery Western public opinion believed to have been largely responsible for the failure of previous crusades, a Latin Empire (1204-1261) was now set up with Baldwin, Count of Flanders, as its first emperor. Outside Constantinople itself, however, his rule extended only to Nicomedia, a part of Thrace, and four islands in the JEgean Sea. Venice received Crete, Euboea, 466 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Corfu, many other islands and coast cities of the Greek peninsula, and certain quarters of Constantinople, Boniface of Montferrat was given a kingdom about Thessalonica; and numerous other petty fiefs, such as the Principality of Morea and the Duchy of Athens, were created for the crusaders in central and southern Greece. Their holders were nominally vassals of the Latin emperor. The Greek Patriarch of Constantinople was replaced by a Venetian, and Innocent, who had distrusted and forbidden the digres- sion of the crusade to Constantinople, was now reconciled to it by the prospect of seeing all southeastern Europe under papal control. But this did not alter the fact that the pope and his legate had failed to direct the course of the crusade. Moreover, all prospect of the crusaders continuing their route to Syria had vanished ; the crusade ended at Constan- tinople. During the next few years Innocent was occupied first with the Albigensian Crusade and then with preaching a Innocent crusadc to aid the King of Castile against the and the Mohammedans in Spain. The pathetic Children's Crusade also occurred during his pontificate. The crusade to the East was again urged at the Fourth Lateran Council, but no armed expedition of consequence resulted. Innocent was always talking about the recovery of Jerusa- lem, but he himself was partly responsible for keeping the armies of Europe otherwise employed, as when he incited the barons to rebel against John and when he urged Philip Augustus to invade England, or when he allowed the King of Hungary to delay indefinitely his crusading vow because his presence was needed as a check upon Philip of Suabia, or when he kept a French knight, Walter of Brienne, in southern Italy to aid him in conquering the Sicilian king- dom. But while Innocent had failed to recover Jerusalem, the crusades of his reign led to an extension of Latin Chris- tendom in both the Balkan and Spanish peninsulas. Innocent probably deserves to be called the greatest monarch of the Middle Ages. He wielded a wide interna- tional authority. But while he achieved notable triumphs, INNOCENT III AND THE STATES OF EUROPE 467 he also had his setbacks and failures. And his attempt to bring all Christendom under the pope as tem- Summary of poral overlord as well as spiritual head was not poii°ical^ ^ destined to be carried to triumphant comple- activity tion by his successors. They were to have to struggle to maintain their political independence in Italy, and were to be absorbed in a desperate conflict with Frederick II, who had seemed so lamblike in his submission to Innocent. From 12 1 2 to 1220 Frederick was in Germany; he then returned to Italy and was crowned emperor by the pope at Rome; thereafter he made but two brief visits ^^^j to Germany and concerned himself chiefly with reign of Italian afl'airs. This was the fundamental cause of his strife with the Papacy. Before Frederick left Ger- many the princes there chose his young son Henry as King of Germany, and the pope was persuaded to permit Fred- erick to remain King of Sicily. In return Frederick promised to start on his crusade before the following August and issued various laws against heresy and in favor of the Church. But he found much disorder to suppress in south- ern Italy, and in Sicily it was necessary to crush the rebel- lious Saracens. To this end he secured another postpone- ment of his crusading vow, and it was only after five years of absorption in the affairs of his southern kingdom that he once again promised to set sail for the Holy Land by August, 1227, or become automatically excommunicate. He had already in 1222 married the heiress of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Frederick had already made it pretty clear that he was no friend of the communes. In Germany he had granted powers to the rulers of ecclesiastical states at Frederick 1 1 the expense of the rising towns, and in his i"aiian^ southern kingdom he annulled the trading privi- cities leges and monopolies of the Italian and Provengal ports like Marseilles, Genoa, and Pisa, which had hitherto en- joyed freedom from tolls and customs and had practically held the chief harbors of Sicily as their own trading stations and colonies. He intended to develop a merchant marine 468 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE and navy of his own rather than allow these foreigners to control all the trade of the land or have to depend on them for transportation when he wished to visit Germany or go to Palestine. Therefore the cities of Lombardy were sus- picious of Frederick's intentions when he summoned the feudal nobility of Germany to meet him at Cremona at Easter, 1226, to make arrangements for the crusade, and when he marched north from Apulia at the head of an armed force to meet them. Milan and her allies straightway formed a league and blocked the Alpine passes so that the Germans were unable to reach Cremona. The Lombard cities had been so independent since the death of Henry VI that now they were unwilling to observe even the terms of the Peace of Constance which they had forced from Bar- barossa. A few towns, however, looked eagerly to the emperor for aid against the others. The pope undertook to arbitrate between Frederick and the towns; but as he secured from them merely a promise p. , h *^ suppress heresy and supply a few knights for with the the crusade, but no recognition of the impe- apacy ^j^j claims, Frederick was naturally dissatisfied. Honorius III (1216-1227), however, who had directed Frederick's education, remained on friendly terms with his former pupil and perhaps was somewhat duped by Freder- ick's plausible promises and excuses and wily diplomacy. But now a more uncompromising pontiff and one less likely to have patience with Frederick succeeded to the Papacy as Gregory IX (1227-1241). When the emperor at last set sail from Sicily to the heel of Italy to put himself at the head of the assembled crusaders, a pestilence broke out in the army and Frederick himself was taken sick and accord- ingly postponed the expedition. But the pope refused to accept any excuse and excommunicated him. When Fred- erick, despite his excommunication, set sail for the East the next summer, the pope did what he could to render his expedition a failure. The Sultan, however, was having so much trouble with an obstreperous brother that he had no desire for war with Frederick. Therefore, although the latter INNOCENT III AND THE STATES OF EUROPE 469 arrived with only about ten thousand troops, he soon gained by negotiation more than the Christians had possessed since the recapture of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1 187 ; namely, the possession of Jerusalem and Bethlehem and other holy places and a right of way to these from the coast. When Frederick returned to Europe, he found that dur- ing his absence papal troops had been overrunning his king- dom, but he rapidly drove them out and in 1230 Frederick secured the removal of his excommunication, jstration*'^' He then built up in Sicily and southern Italy the oi Sicily most absolute monarchy and strongly centralized state of his time. He had great capacity for administrative detail and ruled the feudal nobility with a strong hand. They were deprived of their castles and forbidden to wage wars with one another, and the king kept criminal justice under his own control. Such methods of judicial procedure as the ordeal and wager of battle were abandoned and court pro- cedure was fully controlled by the judges and was not in the hands of the litigants. Frederick took from his subjects not only feudal dues, but taxes in the modern sense on land, persons, and trade. Salt, metals, and dye-works were state monopolies, as indeed they had been in the period of Arabian rule. But we learn of these matters from a book of laws compiled for his kingdom by Frederick in 1231. He also promoted the economic welfare of his kingdom with the result that he soon received a handsome income from it. Frederick, however, was about to become embroiled in wars with the Lombard cities and the Papacy which would require the last penny that he had in his treasury. ,^ . . The pope had again undertaken to arbitrate the Lom- between the emperor and the Lombard League, ^^ ^^^"^ but had failed to secure from the cities the least submission to the imperial authority and had aroused in Frederick a strong suspicion that he was secretly encouraging the com- munes in their attempt to maintain a complete independ- ence. In 1234 young Henry rebelled against his father in Germany and formed an alliance with the Lombard League, but he was captured and replaced as King of Germany 470 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE by Conrad his brother. In 1237 Frederick administered a crushing defeat to the League, and, although Milan and several other cities remained untaken, he promptly intro- duced his administrative system wherever he could in the north. But he appointed Italians as his officials instead of Germans as Barbarossa and Henry VI had done. The pope was alarmed by this turn of affairs and still more by Frederick's occupation of Tuscany and the mar- , , riage of Enzio, one of Frederick's illegitimate Renewal of =» , . . , . ... . strife with sons, to a Sardmian heiress, and his assumption the Papacy ^^ ^^^ ^-^^^ ^f ^^^^ ^^ ^^^^ -^^^^^^ ^^^^^ ^^^ Papacy claimed as its fief. Accordingly, while he gave many other reasons for his action, such as that Frederick was a heretic and had oppressed the Church in Sicily, Gregory IX in 1239 again excommunicated him, freed his subjects from their allegiance, vainly endeavored to set up a rival candi- date to the throne in Germany, and allied with the Lombard League and Venice and Genoa against Frederick in Italy. But from 1241 to 1243 there was a vacancy in the Papacy and when Innocent IV finally was elected, he soon fled from Italy to Lyons. There a council was held in 1245 and Frederick was excommunicated and deposed once more. With this began a struggle to the death between the Papacy and the House of Hohenstaufen. Anti-kings made ^ J , . trouble in Germany, Heinrich Raspe from 1246 End of the , ,tt.,i. r tt h 1 r Hohen- to 1 247 and William of Holland irom 1247 to staufens 1256; then foUowed until 1273 a period of inter- regnum during which there was no imperial authority in Germany. In Italy young Enzio was captured in 1249 and kept in honorable captivity at Bologna for the remaining twenty-two years of his life. Frederick himself died in 1250 and his son Conrad four years later, leaving an infant son Conradin. Manfred, however, another son of Frederick and half-brother of Conrad, continued the struggle in Italy as King of Sicily. Henry III of England was induced by the pope in 1254 to accept the throne of Sicily for his second son Edmund and to supply the pope with money in return, but Edmund never gained Sicily. Then Urban IV (1261-1264), INNOCENT III AND THE STATES OF EUROPE 471 the son of a charcoal-seller of Troyes in Champagne, offered the Sicilian crown to Charles of Anjou, brother of the French king. Manfred was defeated and slain in 1266 and two years later the young Conradin, the last representative of the Hohenstaufen line, was captured and executed. Charles of Anjou was not able to hold the entire Sicilian kingdom of Frederick II, however. After a few years the Sicilians rose against his French troops and Division into officials, who were massacred in the "Sicilian ^^° '^''}^"„ Vespers" of 1282. Eventually the island of Sic- Sicily and ily passed as a separate kingdom to a younger ^^P^^^ branch of the royal line in Aragon, and the House of Anjou had to be content with southern Italy, or the Kingdom of Naples. The Papacy had thus triumphed over the Hohenstaufens and had prevented the growth of a strong national state in Italy, just as it had done earlier in the case of the Abuses re- Lombard kings. But this political triumph had suiting in 1 11^ J. • ^ • ^ 1 the Church been purchased at a great price, lo raise the necessary money and troops, and to secure the support of influential persons and families against the Hohenstaufens, the popes had had to tax the clergy heavily and to sell church offices or bestow them upon unsuitable candidates. So while Gregory VII had begun the struggle with the Empire in order to root simony out of the Church by attacking lay investiture and by securing local freedom of election. Inno- cent IV, in order to defeat Frederick, had taken the appoint- ment to many ecclesiastical benefices away from the local clergy into his own hands and had condoned, if not actually practiced, simony in making his appointments. He regarded such appointments or "provisions" as a necessary but only temporary evil, but the practice was continued by his suc- cessors, and the Papacy kept demanding more and more taxes and filling more and more church offices with its own candidates. Outwardly it might seem that the pope had even more power toward the close of the thirteenth century than at its beginning under Innocent III. But this heavy taxation of 472 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE the local clergy and this filling of church positions with Eff n foreigners and place-hunters aroused a local, papal popular, or national opposition which mani- pres ige fested itself at this time especially in England and which in the end was to cost the Papacy dear. More- over, the popes had shown themselves too bitter and unre- lenting against the Hohenstaufens and thereby lost some- thing of the moral support which public opinion had hitherto almost invariably accorded to the Church in its quarrels with the State. Finally, the popes had not been able to put down the Hohenstaufens unaided ; they had sought the aid of England and France; they had fled to Lyons them- selves and had brought Charles of Anjou into Italy. They had blighted in the bud, it is true, the promising beginning toward a strongly centralized state made by Frederick II in Sicily, but the Angevin rulers of the Kingdom of Naples were not destined to get on with their papal neighbors much more harmoniously than their predecessors had done. It was also now evident that in Italy at large and in Germany there was no longer any hope of national states Eff t on developing in the Middle Ages, although the the states vigorous municipal life of the Italian communes urope ^^g ^^ bring forth great social, economic, and artistic progress in the succeeding centuries, and for a time sweep the Papacy away with it. But for the present what the Papacy had to face was the growth of royal and national institutions in France and England. To these new forces, which were independent of pope and Church, and which also mark a development away from the feudal states and conditions of the preceding centuries, we shall next turn our attention. INNOCENT III AND THE STATES OF EUROPE 473 EXERCISES AND READINGS The Secular Power of Innocent III. Thatcher and McNeal, Source Book for Medieval History, pp. 214-33, selections 123-35. Summarize the contents of each of these original documents, and connect each with some statement in the above chapter which it goes to prove or to illustrate. Frederick II and the Papacy. Thatcher and McNeal, Source Book for Medieval History, pp. 233-59, selections 136-45. Follow the above directions, but in the case of documents contain- ing numerous numbered articles, do not summarize each article, but try to state their general tenor in a few sentences. Reign of Henry VI. Henderson, Germany in the Middle Ages, chaps, xix, XX. Reign of Frederick II. Henderson, Germany in the Middle Ages, chaps, xxil-xxvi. Tout, Empire and Papacy, pp. 358-92. Frederick II and Sicily. Fisher, The Medieval Empire, vol. ll, pp. 167-200. Frederick II and the Lombard Communes. Butler, The Lombard Communes, chap, ix or x. The Fall of Ezzelino. Butler, The Lombard Communes, chap. xi. CHAPTER XXV THE GROWTH OF NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS IN ENGLAND England became a distinct nation before any other European country. Ever since the decHne of the Roman Early Empire its history had been distinctive. The o"nationd Romans abandoned it before their other western union provinces, and it was the one land of any size where the language of the German invaders replaced that of the Roman provincials. The British Isles were almost the only Christian lands of the West that were not included in Charlemagne's empire. When that empire dissolved into local lordships, the petty Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, on the contrary, began to coalesce into one state. The Northmen and other invaders disrupted the Prankish Empire. But under King Alfred and his successors the Anglo-Saxons united in resistance to the Danish invaders. The Danes, too, soon fused with their Anglo-Saxon kinsmen into one homogeneous people. Feudal tendencies manifested them- selves, it is true, but William the Conqueror and his sons greatly strengthened the royal power and developed a busi- nesslike central administration which did much to hold the country together. The Normans in their turn were absorbed into the mass of the population. The language gradually altered under French and Latin influence from Anglo-Saxon to something more like our modern English. Art and cul- ture and ecclesiastical usages were affected by the Conti- nent. But the Norman kings retained the old local institu- tions and agreed to observe the ancient customs of the reign of Edward the Confessor. The Norman kings, nevertheless, had introduced feudal institutions into England and were themselves obliged to The king rulc largely by feudal methods. However, they feudaf^ were successful in crushing all attempts at rebel- nobles lion on the part of their barons until the twenty years of disputed succession and civil war between Stephen NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS IN ENGLAND 475 and Matilda. Then the feudal lords were able to do much as they pleased, but they so misconducted themselves that every one became quite disgusted with their misrule, and in 1 1 54 the new king, Henry II, had little difficulty in quickly restoring order. Of this and of Henry's vast feudal posses- sions on the Continent and of his struggle with Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, we have already spoken in the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters. Henry was somewhat corpulent, but none the less a dynamo of energy. He could not sit still in church, he was ever on the go from one part of his wide domin- „ „ 1 11- tr-1 Henry II ions to another, he devoted himself with equal rapidity and zest to hunting or state business or literature and learning. His anger was terrible when aroused, and even when in good humor he kept his ministers and cour- tiers in a state bordering upon nervous prostration by his incessant activity. Henry's troublesome Continental pos- sessions forced him to spend more of his time on the other side of the Channel than in England. But he drew up many measures for the government of England, and his brief periods of residence in that country were very busy times. He appointed able ministers to carry on the central govern- ment in his absence, and he sent itinerant justices to extend his authority throughout the land. These officials resembled the missi of Charlemagne and had already existed under Henry I, but had disappeared during the disorder of Stephen's reign. So well did Henry II develop the govern- mental machinery that his son and successor, Richard the Lion-Hearted, was enabled to spend only six months of his ten years' reign in England. Henry's greatest contribution to English government and nationality was the founding of the common law. Else- where in Europe at this time there was the great- The com- est diversity of courts and legal systems. There "^°" '^^ was canon law and feudal law and the law merchant and the revived Roman law. There were hundreds and thou- sands of independent municipal and manorial courts. There was an infinite variety of local custom and usage, from 476 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE which in England alone was there to be developed in the Middle Ages a national body of law. In England alone were the royal courts and judges to be supreme over the entire land. This was to a large extent the work of Henry II and his itinerant justices. They traversed the country looking after royal interests and holding courts or "assizes" throughout the shires in the king's name. By means of royal writs they took certain cases away from the courts of the feudal lords, and at the same time they brought the old English local courts of justice in shire and hundred directly under royal control. They combined the popular legal cus- toms which they found in the various localities with new methods of procedure which emanated from the king, thus gradually building up a common law for all England. These royal judges and administrative officials often had studied the Roman law and were influenced by its spirit and scien- tific character, but they did not attempt to introduce it as a whole in the place of English custom. This is shown by two important treatises of the time upon the laws and customs of England, the one written either by Ranulf Glanville or by Hubert Walter toward the close of the reign of Henry II, and the other written by Bracton in the thirteenth century. Not only did the judges go about the kingdom on circuit, but when with the king or at Westminster they constituted Th thr central courts of justice which became perma- courts of nent and ultimately supplanted all other juris- common law j- -• _ '-ni u j. r i dictions, i hree such courts oi common law grew up in the course of the thirteenth century; namely, the Court of the Exchequer which at first considered cases connected with the royal revenue, the King's Bench which originally dealt with important criminal cases and other suits in which the Crown was concerned, and the Common Pleas whose jurisdiction covered lawsuits between private parties. But "in the end it came about that, while each court had some work all its own, each could entertain any of the common civil actions." A chief feature of procedure by the royal justices under NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS IN ENGLAND 477 the common-law system was the inquisitio, or sworn inquest of the neighborhood. This process, which seems to have come down from late Roman times through The sworn the Prankish Empire, we have seen developed by '"<3"^st the Church in the thirteenth century into the hated inquisi- tion. In England it was the seed from which has grown modern trial by jury and perhaps also the House of Com- mons. William the Conqueror had employed this institu- tion in collecting the necessary information for his Domes- day Book, and some further use of it for administrative or even judicial purposes had been made by the other kings before Henry II. But it was he who first made systematic and steady use of it. He had inquests made about this, that, and everything — an inquest of sheriffs, inquiries as to the keepers of castles, inquiry into feudal aids for marrying his daughter, inquiry as to the state of repair of buildings on the royal demesne. Henry introduced the sworn inquest in both civil and criminal cases. He decreed that certain suits concerning the ownership or possession of land should be settled Trial by in his courts by the sworn testimony of twelve J"''^ knights or freeholders of the neighborhood. By 1300 this method had become "part of the normal procedure in almost every kind of civil action." At first those men were selected who were most likely to know the facts of the case, and they were put upon their oath to tell what they knew. Their evidence, however, was also in the nature of a verdict that settled the suit. Moreover, they were allowed to consult documentary evidence and to take the testimony of others, until gradually a distinction grew up between the witnesses and the jurors as in modern trials. Our grand jury, which determines whether there Is suffi- cient evidence to warrant putting a person on trial for the crime in question, seems to have grown out of another sworn inquest of Henry's time, in which twelve knights or freemen of each hundred were to take oath to tell the royal judges whom they suspected of having committed the recent robberies and murders In their localities. Such suspected 478 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE persons were then forced to undergo the ordeal to determine their guilt or innocence of the charge thus brought against them. Henry II, however, was dissatisfied with the ordeals as methods of proof long before Innocent III forbade the clergy to take part in them. Henry showed this by ordering these accused persons to leave England even though they passed through the ordeal successfully. At some later date the jury came into use for the actual trial of criminal cases, and after Innocent's decree the or- deals went out of use. The trial jury also consisted of men of the neighborhood and sometimes was the same as the accus- ing jury. At that time there was no objection to having jurymen who were already informed about the circum- stances of the crime or who had formed an opinion about the case. At first, indeed, these were the very men for whom the king's justices were looking. In this institution of the sworn inquest we see central and local governments working together. The new process is The sworn introduced by the king and his justices, but to T*n^of local execute it requires the services of the knights activity and freeholders of the neighborhood. Indeed, it is probable that the new procedure would not have taken such general hold, had not the English people already been accustomed in the Anglo-Saxon period to take an active part in keeping the peace and in settling cases in their local courts of the shire and hundred. In fact, one law of the reign of Ethelred II might suggest that there had been something like a grand jury already in the Anglo-Saxon period. It prescribes that a court shall be held in every wapentake, a local division similar to the hundred found in some parts of England, and that "the twelve senior thegns go out and the reeve with them, and swear on the relic that is given them in hand, that they will accuse no innocent man, nor conceal any guilty one." However that may be, in the case of the sworn inquest under Henry II we see the officials of the central government going to the localities for information, which they obtain from a certain number of leading or representative men. By this method, for instance, the Con- NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS IN ENGLAND 479 queror had been enabled to determine how much property there was in the land available for purposes of taxation. Another way of achieving the same end would be to sum- mon these men of the localities to one central meeting-place, instead of having the royal officials go to them, change from The idea of a general assembly and representa- 'o^^' ''.ep^e- 1 1 r -I" 111 sentation to tive body was already familiar through the a national church synods and councils and the feudal court ^^^^"^bly attended by vassals and tenants-in-chief. Also in England the vills or townships had long been accustomed to send six men each to represent them at the court of the hundred, and the hundred in its turn sent twelve men to the shire court. All that remained to be done, therefore, was that the shires — and also the towns which had recently grown up — should send representatives to a national assembly. The first known instance of the shires' being asked to send repre- sentatives was in the reign of John in 12 13, two years before Magna Carta, when the king summoned four men from each shire "to confer with us about the affairs of our realm." Some time was to elapse, however, before this develop- ment toward a representative national assembly was com- pleted, and meantime we must pause to consider Magna Carta itself. While England had submitted much more docilely than Henry's Continental fiefs to the legal methods and the constructive enactments of his strong govern- The tyranny ment, it would not endure the illegal and capri- °^ J*^^^'^ cious despotism of John, who was selfish, treacherous, un- just, and oppressive. Moreover, John was unsuccessful and lost most of the French possessions which Henry and Richard had held, and then was worsted in his quarrel with Innocent III and became the vassal of the pope. Therefore, toward the close of his reign the feudal nobility of England banded together — by feudal theory they were entitled to take up arms against their lord if he exceeded his powers over them — and forced the king to promise, by signing the Great Charter, to reform all the abuses in his govern- ment of which they complained. 48o THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Although the Great Charter is the most important single document in English medieval history, it was not the first Granting of instance of a written charter in which a king of kings^before Erigl^nd made promises and concessions to his John people. William Rufus seems to have made merely verbal promises of good government in order to secure English support against his older brother Robert, whose claim to the throne the Norman barons were inclined to support. At any rate, whatever promises Rufus made, he did not keep them. But Henry I had issued at the open- ing of his reign a written charter of liberties in fourteen articles promising to abolish the evils of Rufus's reign. Henry II confirmed this charter at his accession, and it was taken as the precedent and model of the much longer Magna Carta. Hitherto in feudal England the nation had regularly sided with the king against the barons. The king, although at „. .r times a hard master, seemed to the people to Significance i r i i of Magna represent law and order better than the feudal ^^^^^ lords. Under the tyranny of John, however, public opinion changed sides, and the barons, who by this time had themselves become more English, received general support in forcing the king to sign the charter. They were therefore in a sense representatives of the nation, and the provisions of the charter were beneficial to the country at large as well as to the tenants-in-chief of the king. A major- ity of the sixty-three clauses deal, it is true, with feudal mat- ters, and the greater part of these in turn are concerned with the relations of the king with his immediate vassals. He is not to increase the amounts of their feudal reliefs, nor exceed his rights of wardship and marriage, nor take any other than the three customary feudal aids without the consent of the common council composed of his vassals. There are, however, provisions for the benefit of subvassals, of the merchants who are guaranteed standard measures and are allowed to move about freely, and of the freemen in general, while one clause mentions even the humble villein. Prominent among the provisions which benefit freemen in NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS IN ENGLAND 481 general are the articles correcting abuses in the administra- tion of justice and promising that no freeman shall be im- prisoned or punished without a legal trial, and that "to no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice." It is noteworthy that there was such united action by the English feudal nobles against the Crown. This was largely due to the fact that all the great lords and many The Great of the lesser nobles held their lands directly of Council the king, and that out of the feudal custom of court attend- ance, which as vassals they owed to their lord the king, had grown a great council of the leading nobles. It was at a meeting of this body in 12 13 that the agitation began which led to the signing of Magna Carta two years later. The Charter in turn assigned to the Great Council an important place in the government and declared that its assent was necessary for all taxes other than the three customary feudal aids. The Great Council had come to consist mainly of the leading nobles, because the number of tenants-in-chief who held their fiefs directly of the king was too great in England to make it advisable that all of them should be strictly held to the feudal duty of court attendance. The Charter there- fore directs that the king shall summon individually by letter the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons, while other tenants-in-chief shall merely receive a general invitation from the sheriffs and bailiffs in the shire. In 12 1 6 John died while vainly struggling to repudiate the Charter and to crush the barons. He was succeeded by his nine-year-old son, Henry III. During Henry's Misrule of minority the regency was shared between the Henry ill papal legates, — for the pope as feudal overlord of England claimed Henry as his ward, — the barons, and Hubert de Burgh, one of the chief royal officials of John's reign. Their rule was on the whole conformable to the provisions of the Charter. But as the king came of age, he came into conflict, like his father before him, with the nobility of the realm. Henry was a better man than John and a sympathetic 482 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE patron of the Church and art and learning. But his person- ality was weak, although well-meaning, and he fell too much under the influence of clever and greedy foreigners from Poitou, Provence, and Savoy, and asked for too many taxes. Moreover, during his reign the popes were constantly calling upon the English clergy and people for contributions to help them in their wars against the Hohenstaufen em- perors, and were selling offices in the English Church to for- eigners or giving them to members of influential Italian families whose aid the popes wished to secure. The king, too, often engaged in costly campaigns on the Continent in a vain effort to recover the fiefs which his father had lost. The Great Council became the chief organ of national opposition to Henry's misrule, as may be briefly illustrated Opposition ^y ^"^ ^^ ^^^ sessions in 1242 at London. On this by the Great occasion the nobility steadfastly refused to grant the king any taxes for a military expedition which he had planned on the Continent and in connection with which he had already contracted alliances. They went further and bitterly criticized his government. They wished to know what had become of previous grants of money which he had received from them ; they asked that the king consult first with them before committing himself to such perilous and expensive foreign expeditions. After a vain attempt to bring pressure to bear upon the individual mem- bers of the Council, Henr\^ finally dismissed the assembly in anger, but without securing any financial aid. Thus it went until the king accepted the crown of Sicily at the hands of the pope for his second son, Edmund, — Provisions ^^ undertaking which would benefit England of Oxford, little even if it were successful, and which in- 12^8 volved large expenditures for troops and pay- ments to the pope. The barons consequently lost patience, and in 1258 took the government out of Henry's hands and by the Provisions of Oxford appointed various committees from their own number to conduct the government and to reform the constitution. This arrangement did not work well, however, and the lesser nobility or knights wrote to NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS IN ENGLAND 483 Prince Edward, the king's oldest son, protesting against it as too oligarchical. By this time the Great Council was coming to be calleci a "parliament," or meeting to talk things over. We have heard the same word used in the Italian cities c- j himon de for a popular mass-meetmg, parlamento, and in Montfort's France it came to be applied to the chief court of ^^ 'ament justice, parlement. In England it was to be transformed from a council of magnates summoned by the king into a national assembly of two houses, one a hereditary body com- posed of nobles, the other a locally elected body represent- ing the commons or people. Under Simon de Montfort, a son of the leader of the Albigensian Crusade and for a time one of the king's foreign favorites, but who now took the lead in the movement toward reform, a parliament was held in 1265 to which were summoned not only prelates and greater barons, but two knights from each shire and two burgesses from each of twenty-one towns. But the next year Simon was defeated and slain in battle by royal forces under Prince Edward, who for a time had supported De Montfort, but then had become reconciled with his father. After the death of Simon, Prince Edward won back the other barons by his conciliatory attitude and then went off on a crusade. While he was thus absent, Henry ^ , TTT ,. 1 1 1 1- Edward I III died, but no attempt was made to dispute Edward's succession. He was the first truly English king since the Norman conquest. He was tall, with fair hair and red cheeks, and he had no liking either for foreign favorites or foreign ways. He opposed papal interference in English state affairs, and joined Philip the Fair of France in resisting Pope Boniface VIII, as the next chapter will tell. His reign ( 1 272-1 307) showed that the government of England was henceforth to be controlled neither by an absolute monarch nor by an oligarchy of nobles, but by a sovereign whose power was limited by the permanent existence of a national representative and legislative body. Edward adopted De Montfort's scheme of summoning 484 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE both townsmen and knights of the shire to his legislative p .. assemblies, and these two groups of men came completely to make up the House of Commons, composed of e\e ope representatives of the localities, while the House of Lords included only the prelates and great nobles who received a special summons from the king. We first hear of the two houses sitting apart in 1332 early in the reign of Edward III. Historians have often called an assembly sum- moned by Edward I in 1295 the Model Parliament, on the ground that it was the first body legally summoned by the king which represented all classes fully. It contained two representatives from each of one hundred and ten boroughs instead of from only twenty-one towns as in the case of De Montfort's Parliament. There were two knights from each of thirty-seven shires, ninety bishops and abbots, and forty- one barons. But there were also various representatives of the lower clergy, — deans, archdeacons, and delegates chosen by the parish priests. These lower clergy had not been summoned by De Montfort and they soon disappeared from subsequent Parliaments, so that in its inclusion of them the Parliament of 1295 was scarcely a true model. Edward was a great legislator and issued many statutes during his reign. Some of them reformed or amended the police and judicial systems; others restricted feudal tendencies, the jurisdiction of ecclesi- astical courts, and the passing of landed property into the hands of the clergy. The term "statute" came to indicate a law promulgated by the king to which both houses of Parliament had agreed. In the following reign of Edward II, after a period of civil war between the Crown and the barons and another unsuccessful attempt by the latter to manage the government themselves, the principle was reaffirmed that all royal and national matters "shall be treated, ac- corded, and established in parliament by the king and the council of the prelates, earls, barons, and the commonalty of the realm." Edward's wars with the Welsh and Scots, of which we shall speak at the end of this chapter, and his frequent NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS IN ENGLAND 485 fights with the Capetian king In Gascony and Flanders, were expensive and he often had to appeal to p ,. Parliament for funds. The king had a certain financial regular income from his crown lands or private ^^""""'^^ estates, from fees and fines, feudal incidents, and from his right of coinage, his forest rights, and his superior claim to such finds as hidden treasure and wreckage. He also might raise money by selling honors and offices, or by negotiations with the Jews and foreign merchants. But If he wished to levy any direct tax upon the property of his subjects, he had to get the consent of Parliament. Edward, it Is true, when he found Parliament penurious, sometimes took taxes without its consent. But the members wef e sure to complain of such conduct when next he appealed to them for financial aid. In 1297 they Insisted that he confirm the Great Charter and promise that henceforth he would take no "aids, tasks, or prises" without their consent. Thus Parliament early maintained Its control over the purse. Edward II, a young man fond of frivolity and of low life, was disgracefully defeated by the Scots at Bannockburn in 1314 and displayed no capacity as a ruler. He Edward 11 was the prey of greedy and insolent favorites, mJlit^^his^' and early offended the chief nobles of his realm, deposition As a result his reign was full of disloyalty, civil war, and anarchy. But the discontented barons used Parliament against him, and he, whenever for a time he recovered his power, employed Parliament against them. Parliament, it must be admitted, was subservient to whosoever happened to be in power for the moment, but on the other hand, neither side In the struggle could dispense with this national assembly. So Parliament was active throughout the reign, and finally in 1327 it deposed Edward II and chose his son to reign in his stead as Edward HI. To-day the House of Commons is supreme in the English Parliament, but at this time the Lords took the lead in resisting the royal power or initiating new legls- Lords and latlon. However, the Commons occasionally ven- Commons tured to submit humble petitions of their own. These, if 486 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE accepted by the Lords and King, would become regular statutes of the realm, although their wording might be con- siderably altered from that of the original petitions. In the House of Commons the knights from the shires, though less numerous than the burgesses, were more influential and received twice as large salaries. The English towns were still small at this time. It is noteworthy that the knights had become detached from the nobility and were simply the elected representa- Transforma- tives of the freemen holding lands in the shires. knrhtV^d ^^^ knights were ceasing to live the fighting into coun- Careers of the typical feudal noble and were be- try gentry coming simply the more prosperous landowners in the counties. Indeed, many such men were never for- mally knighted, so that it became increasingly difficult to secure knights as shire members and the government often had to be content with ordinary freemen. One of Edward I's legislative measures, known as " Distraint of Knighthood," provided that all freeholders whose land yielded an income of twenty pounds sterling a year must become knights or pay a fine. But mciny preferred to pay the fine and remain simple esquires. Being a knight was still more expensive. Serfs and villeins could neither be elected to Parliament nor vote for members. Their place was on the manor where The unfree they were subject to the rulings of their lord in classes ^j^g private manorial court. The common law of the royal courts was not for them. The manorial system, however, had never been universal or complete in England, and some of its features were disappearing by the end of the thirteenth century. Payments in kind and the performance of personal service on the lord's demesne lands were being largely replaced by money payments of corresponding value. Men who legally were villeins bound to the manor, in actual practice were moving about from place to place working for wages as hired agricultural laborers. In its general civilization thirteenth-century England was in large measure indebted to the Continent, yet in some respects peculiar. The friars appeared in England soon NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS IN ENGLAND 487 after their foundation, and English churches and universities formed one rehgious and scientific world with English the clergy and schools of the Continent. Eng- civilization land, however, produced an unusual number of thirteenth learned writers, some of whom displayed marked '^^"^"''y originality. After the Norman period the English developed their own style of Gothic architecture, called " Early Eng- lish." Owing to the decay and transformation of the Anglo- Saxon literature and language, England had no national literature worthy of the name until the second half of the fourteenth century, and most writing was in French or Latin. England was a wealthy country in the thirteenth century, but its towns were small compared to those across the Channel and not so far advanced in industry and com- merce. While England was developing national unity, the other peoples of the British Isles — Welsh, Scots, and Irish — re- mained independent. Neither the Anglo-Saxons i^^i^^^ nor the Normans had succeeded in conquering Scotland, them. But they lacked any strong political union among themselves, and in civilization fell behind England which was richer and nearer to the Continent. Henry II, not content with his other extensive Continental possessions outside England, invaded Ireland and received the submission of various native chiefs, while John, to com- pensate for the lands that he had lost across the Channel, tried to introduce English law and government throughout Ireland. He did not thoroughly subdue the country, how- ever, and during the remainder of the medieval period the land was in constant turmoil and disorder, and the author- ity of the English king was at most times limited to a small area around Dublin. Kings of Celtic race had gradually acquired a certain authority over all Scotland. At times they had recognized the overlordship of the English kings, but it was not until 1 29 1 that Edward I took advantage of a disputed succession to the Scotch throne to try to bring that country really under his rule. As a result the Scots formed an alliance with 488 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE France against England which was to be often renewed In the course of the later Middle Ages. The Scottish patriot leader, Wallace, was captured and cruelly executed in 1305, but Robert Bruce continued the struggle against annexa- tion, Edward II was decisively defeated at Bannockburn, and Scotland remained an independent country, Edward I was more successful against Wales, which he subjugated and divided into shires in English fashion, but to which he did not grant representation in Parliament. The Welsh revolted several times against English rule dur- ing the later Middle Ages, but without success, and the oldest son of the English king has borne the title Prince of Wales ever since the reign of Edward I. It should not be thought that England alone among medieval lands possessed parliamentary institutions. In Medieval most States of western Europe there developed representa- from the feudal courts of the great lords, whether tive assem- . , , . biies outside kmgs or dukes or counts, tax-grantmg and legis- Engiand lative bodies representing the three " estates" of clergy, feudal landed nobility, and townsmen. Such assem- blies existed in Normandy, Vermandois, Brittany, Artois, Burgundy, Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia, and elsewhere. The Cortes or "Courts" of Aragon embraced four instead of three estates, since the nobles divided into great and small like the English barons and knights of the shire. National sentiment made itself felt in Aragon in a united protest of the estates against Peter IPs submission to Innocent III ten years before the English barons forced their king, John, another of Innocent's vassals, to sign Magna Carta. In Aragon as in England the Cortes came to insist that their grievances must be redressed before they would grant the king taxes, and no law could be enacted without the consent of all four estates. The King of Den- mark in 1250 called representatives of the towns to his coro- nation assembly (Reichstag). He died on a campaign against Frisian peasants who had refused to pay a new tax called the "Plough-Penny." His successors during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had to consent at the NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS IN ENGLAND 489 time of their election to such conditions as annual parlia- ments and no arbitrary imprisonment. But most of these other medieval states were smaller than England; most of them were in the course of time to lose their independence and become absorbed into the larger European states of later times ; in most of them the medieval representative assemblies ultimately disappeared or sank into insignificance. Only in England was a parliament founded in the Middle Ages destined to lead a healthy and continuous existence into modern times and down to the present day, and furnish a model for other nations which have reintroduced parliamentary government in the last century. England also was the only large state to emerge from the Middle Ages with a unified national law. EXERCISES AND READINGS The Common Law. Maitland, The Constitutional History of England, pp. 1-23. Chambers, Constitutional History of England, pp. 286-301. White, The Making of the English Constitution, pp. 220-38. Magna Carta. Adams and Stephens, Select Documents of English Constitutional History, pp. 42-52. Note the numbers of the articles dealing with each of the following points and briefly summarize their contents: (i) feudalism; (2) forests; (3) Church; (4) common council; (5) judicial procedure; (6) trade and industry; (7) freedom of the subject from oppression. Omit those articles which deal with Wales and Scotland or with mat- ters of no lasting importance. How are the provisions of the charter to be enforced? Origin of Parliament, especially the House of Commons. Maitland, pp. 64-75; Chambers, pp. 167-80; White, pp. 298-325; Med- ley, English Constitutional History, sections 19-20. Reigns of Edward I and Edward II. Cross, A History of England and Greater Britain, pp. 166-81. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, sections 248, 250-55. (The standard work on the medieval English constitution.) The Spanish Cortes. Hallam, View of the State of Europe in the Middle Ages; such parts of chap. IV, "The History of Spain to the Conquest of Granada," as bear upon this topic. (A pioneer work, now old-fashioned, but the first sympathetic treatment of medieval civilization in English.) CHAPTER XXVI THE GROWTH OF ROYAL POWER IN FRANCE The France of whose brilliant civilization we have al- ready treated in several chapters was not yet a nation, but Union of a land of ambitious feudal lords and enterprising thnnieh communes. It was still a congeries of distinct the king peoples and even its nobles were divided into groups according to locality. By the thirteenth century, however, the royal power began to make great strides. Many districts which formerly had been practically inde- pendent feudal states now came under the king's authority. But before a given region passed under royal control, it often had evolved distinct customs and legal usages of its own and also a representative assembly of the estates of that locality. As the king gradually extended his lordship over such feudal areas, he left to each its local customs and often granted numerous charters assuring the ancient privi- leges of this or that town or abbey or provincial group of nobles. Thus each part of France was governed in a slightly different way from its neighbor and no common law like that of England was created. On the other hand, there was little united action in opposition to the French king, who signed no such general and sweeping concession as Magna Carta. The local charters which he did sign were easier for him after a time to disregard or to take away, since in each case only a certain district or group of persons was con- cerned to defend the charter. Thus in the end the French monarchy became more arbitrary and absolute than the English. England became a strong nation through its law and Parliament and constitutional government. But in France the king and his court and officials were the chief force uniting the different provinces, lords, and communes, and welding them at last into one people. All those small nationalities of the feudal world were ultimately swallowed THE GROWTH OF ROYAL POWER IN FRANCE 491 up by the conquering Capetians, except Flanders which survives in the Belgium of to-day. There were reasons for the growth of the Capetian mon- archs at the expense of the feudal lords. First, the kings had the advantage of a superior title; they were Reasons for the successors of Charlemagne, and were over- of^rovar*^^ lords where the others were merely lords. Sec- power ond, their unbroken succession in the direct male line, with few minorities and regencies from 987 to 1328, enabled them to outlive most of the feudal dynasties, to regain much feudal territory either by escheat or by intermarriage and inheritance, or at least to see the power of their rivals weak- ened by long regencies of widows or by struggles over the succession to those fiefs. Third, the evolution of an efficient and centralized administration in place of the clumsy gov- ernmental machinery of the feudal court. Fourth, the able personalities and energetic reigns of several kings after Louis VI in contrast to the feeble Capetians who preceded him. Fifth, the many opportunities, of which the kings were usually quick to take advantage, for alliances with the pope, clergy, communes, or sub-vassals against the great feudal lords — or with the nobility of one part of France against those of another as in the Albigensian Crusade. The King of France was called "the first son of the Church" and in attacking its enemies usually gained something for himself. Already in the twelfth century the kings began to take the advice of councilors of their own choice in place of the vassals who owed them feudal court attendance. Elaboration and to fill their offices with men of more educa- tra^l'rovern- tion like the clergy, or of especial legal training ment like the students of Roman law at Bologna, or of better business ability like the townsmen. These made more cap- able and more faithful officials than the feudal warriors and were able to give all their time to the royal service, if the king could find the money for their salaries. With the addi- tion of this trained administrative class came also a greater specialization in government. The old feudal and ceremonial household offices gradually disappeared and the much more 492 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE numerous new royal officials came to divide into three chief central bodies: the Council of State corresponding to the Privy Council in England, the Chamber of Accounts {Chambre des Comptes) similar to the English Exchequer, and the Parlement or royal court of justice which was equiv- alent to the three English central courts of common law. The kings also created new officials called haillis, who were much like the missi of Charlemagne or the itinerant justices of Henry II of England, and who traveled about overseeing the prevdts (provosts) or royal agents in the localities, who resembled the English sheriffs. By the middle of the thir- teenth century each bailli was assigned a definite territory, but they were frequently transferred. The king also began to hire troops instead of depending upon feudal military service. Our account of feudal France In chapter fourteen ended with the successful reign of Louis the Fat, who completely Reign of mastered the territory immediately about Paris Louis VII ^j^^ forced even the rulers of distant Auvergne and Aquitaine to recognize his overlordship. His son, Louis VH, however, did little more than hold his own during a long reign from 1 137 to 1 180, It is true that he established friendly relations, which were valuable later, with some of the feudal and ecclesiastical lords in what is now south- eastern and southwestern France, when he passed through those regions upon pilgrimages to the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse in the Alps and to the shrine of St. James at Compostella In Spain. But he left his realm and wasted troops and treasure on the Second Crusade, and he made the grave political error of divorcing his capricious wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, although he loved her Immoderately. She thereupon married the young Count of Anjou who soon became Henry II of England, and whose great Plantagenet empire became an extreme menace to the Capetian mon- archy. Louis, however, succeeded In preventing Henry from adding Toulouse to his vast holdings, and he stirred up a deal of trouble for him with his sons and vassals. The medieval King of France who probably most In- THE GROWTH OF ROYAL POWER IN FRANCE 493 creased the royal power and territory was Philip II, or Augustus, during his long reign of forty-three j^ . , years from 1 180 to 1223. Of his participation Philip in the Third Crusade, and his relations with "^"^ "^ Richard and John, Kings of England, and with Pope Inno- cent III, we have already spoken. At his accession "the feudal aristocracy was still the great territorial and political power on French soil. At his death the situation had been completely reversed" and the monarchy prevailed. The chronicler Rigord gave him the epithet "Augustus" of the old Roman emperors, partly because Philip was born in August, but more because he believed the word derived from the verb augeo and because Philip had so augmented the territory and power of the French monarchy. Another contemporary called him "Karolides," or "descendant of Charlemagne," and a fourteenth-century poet named him " Philip the Conqueror." For a long time it had seemed that his father, Louis VII, would leave no male heir to succeed him, and twenty-one years passed after he had first been married before his third wife bore an heir to the throne. Thomas Becket, then an exile under Louis VII's protection, tells how darkly Henry II of England scowled when he first saw this young prince — then aged four — who was des- tined to make himself and his sons so much trouble and to take from John most of the vast Plantagenet fiefs in France. Little Philip showed his precocious ability by a speech which he made to the Plantagenet king on this occasion; but he had scant time to receive an ordinary education; his life from his early teens was absorbed in practical politics and wars. He turned out to be an able warrior and military engineer, especially in conducting sieges. Even more was he a wily diplomat, quite unscrupulous about breaking promises that were not to his advantage, and this in rela- tions with his own people as well as in foreign affairs. Philip added to the royal domain about Paris and the province of BerrI, in which had consisted the pos- Territorial sessions of Louis VII, all the territory between acquisitions Flanders and Champagne on the north and east and Brit- 494 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE tany and the Loire on the west and south, including Nor- mandy, Maine, Anjou, and several other districts. Indeed, he had some lands south of the Loire in Poitou and Saintonge as well as Touraine and Berri. These gains were made chiefly from King John of England and from the Count of Flanders. The number of royal prevots had to be increased from thirty-eight to ninety-four to administer this greatly enlarged royal domain. Philip also increased his influence as feudal overlord in regions not directly under his control, interfering in feudal marriages and the garrisoning of cas- tles, and confirming legal transactions between the lords and their sub-vassals or towns or serfs. Many lords, espe- cially ecclesiastical ones, now began to share their fiefs or "go half-and-half" with the king. This practice generally resulted in the long run in royal annexation of the entire fief in question. Philip was a great amasser of treasure and always had a surplus on hand for emergencies. One contemporary com- Financial plains of his financial oppression. The extension resources ^f j^jg j-Qy^l domain and feudal overlordship greatly increased his financial resources and the revenue doubled in the course of his reign. The growing towns on his domain supplied him with militia for his wars or paid him sums of money. Louis VII had been more favorable to the gilds and communes than Louis VI, and Philip yet further encouraged towns and trade. Their representatives appear in his reign in all assemblies, together with the clergy and feudal nobles. He not only paved the streets of Paris, en- larged the circuit of its walls, increased the number of its markets, and improved its police force; he even put bour- geois of Paris on the council of regency during his absence on crusade. But he usually protected the jurisdiction and prop- erty of the clergy in the towns against the communes. In return for such protection, however, he felt at liberty to squeeze a good many contributions from church cofi"ers. He made use of the Templars as bankers and sometimes of the Jews. The brief reign of Louis VIII was memorable chiefly for THE GROWTH OF ROYAL POWER IN FRANCE 495 his paving the way for the extension of the royal power into southern France by his participation in the wars . . ^.j, against the Albigensians. He died of dysentery and Blanche on the way home, leaving a son of only twelve ° ^^^^ ^ years to succeed him. This seemed a fine chance for the King of England to recover some of his lost possessions and for the French vassals to revolt. Several coalitions were formed by the feudal lords, who had come to see that it was hopeless for them to struggle singly against the royal power. But all such efforts were thwarted by Blanche of Castile, the widowed queen-mother, a very religious and also very energetic woman, who ruled the realm with a firm hand until her son attained his majority. Indeed, she continued to influence his government until her death in 1253 while he was away on a crusade. Louis IX (1226-1270) was a dutiful son in whose educa- tion the rod had not been spared and whose mother often told him that she would rather see him dead ^ ^ . , , , . . 1 • T ^t. Louis than have him commit a mortal sin. In conse- quence he led such a holy life that he was canonized before the close of the thirteenth century, and we shall henceforth speak of him as St. Louis. His personal beauty became almost angelic in the eyes of contemporaries because of the pure life and piety that lay behind it. He wore a hair-cloth shirt and rose at midnight for matins like a monk. He attended many early masses, was fond of hearing sermons, and read much religious literature. He fasted punctiliously, every Friday he went to confession, and sometimes had himself whipped with small chains. He entertained paupers at his table, and washed the feet of the poor, or even, like St. Francis, waited on lepers. His eulogists also Inform us that despite his detestation of beer he drank it all through Lent in place of wine. His penances, however, were usually performed in private. What his court and the world saw in him was a fearless knight thoroughly trained in all the arts of war; an enthusiast for the crusading movement; a con- scientious, just, and energetic ruler, who was usually good- humored, kindly, and courteous in speech and manner, but 496 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE at times became impatient and angry; who in later life dressed soberly, but who was always dignified and some- times imperious. Like many good people he could not en- tirely refrain from admonishing others how to conduct themselves. His six sons and five daughters stood in consid- erable awe of their father, with whom they apparently were not on very intimate terms, although he gave his personal attention to their education. No scandal ever disturbed the strictly moral and incorruptible court of St. Louis, who insisted that all his servants should be of irreproachable character. And if he could not prevent crime and irreligion in his kingdom, he could at least severely punish such offenses. There were some resemblances between the reigns of St. Louis and of his contemporary, Henry III of England. Reign of Both began their reigns as mere boys ; both mar- pared with ried daughters of Raymond Berengar of Pro- $lr'^^°^TTT vence; and their brothers, Richard of Cornwall Henry III , ^, , r a • • i i • i • i i of England and Charles of Anjou, married his third and fourth daughters. Both Henr}^ and Louis were religious and peacefully inclined. They had conflicting territorial claims in France ; and the Kingdom of Sicily was offered by the pope to members of both their families. Both met with sharp opposition from the feudal nobility, and the clergy at this time in both France and England protested vigorously against the increasing pressure of both papal and royal taxation. But Henry was weak in character, Louis was strong, although a certain unsuspiciousness, which inclined him to believe what any one said, was at times abused by unscrupulous persons. Henry's wife dominated him, while Louis kept the upper hand of her equally ambitious and energetic sister. The pope made a cat's-paw of Henry to pull chestnuts out of the fire for him; but Louis, for all his piety, would not yield to bishop or pope when he believed himself to be in the right. Henry's barons were often suc- cessful in their revolts, and dictated schemes of government to him, and made trouble almost to the end of his reign. The last feudal revolt that Louis had to crush was in 1241-42, THE GROWTH OF ROYAL POWER IN FRANCE 497 when the lords of Poitou joined with many of the nobles and towns of Gascony and Languedoc against him, and received support from Raymond VII, the Count of Toulouse, and the Kings of England and Aragon. After 1243 there were no more feudal risings against Louis, who gave good and strong government where Henry III and his foreign favorites were guilty of mis- Relations rule. Louis then proceeded to broaden the juris- anJfS-"'^^^ ' diction of the royal courts at the expense of the eign powers feudal tribunals and to encourage appeals to the Parlement of Paris, to do away with the wager of battle in trials within his own domain and to forbid private wars the realm over. He improved the royal coinage so that the people would prefer it to that of the feudal lords, and he forbade the cir- culation of any other coins in his own domain, but could only secure that his coins should not be excluded from the fiefs of his great vassals who still retained the right of coin- age within their own territories. Louis's brothers became lords of a number of the chief feudal states: Robert was Count of Artois and other northern provinces; Alfonse was Count of Poitou and Auvergne and heir to the vast County of Toulouse; Charles of Anjou also held Maine and gained Provence by marriage and gradually subjected its cities and then went off to conquer southern Italy. After numerous hostilities, truces, and long negotiations, Louis made with Henry III in 1259 the Treaty of Paris, by which Henry abandoned all claim to the lost provinces of Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, Maine, and Poitou, while Louis surren- dered Guienne and Gascony to the English king, who, how- ever, was to be his vassal for these. The preceding year Louis had made the Treaty of Corbeil with the King of Aragon, settling their boundary along the Mediterranean coast. Philip HI, who was too devoted to the Interests of his uncle, Charles of Anjou, and of the pope, pre- pj^jj. jjj pared a vast expedition to punish the King of and Aragon for having deprived Charles of the island ' '^ of Sicily, but the undertaking turned out a complete fail- 498 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE ure. As the comparatively unimportant reign of Louis VIII had intervened between those of Philip Augustus and St. Louis, so that of Philip III comes between the more momen- tous reigns of St. Louis and Philip the Fair (1285-1314). Philip IV was a good-looking blond, whence his epithet of "the Fair"; his manners and conversation were refined; he was outwardly religious; but we hardly know whether he or his legal advisers really controlled the government. At any rate, the royal power was now further developed; the records of foreign embassies and diplomacy greatly in- creased in bulk; and the amount of royal taxation and ex- tortion multiplied. Philip's reign is further notable for his relations with England and Flanders, for the first known session of the Estates General, the national assembly cor- responding to the English Parliament, and for his struggle with and triumph over the Papacy. Philip the Fair resumed the policy of Philip Augustus of trying to bring Flanders and the Continental possessions of Situation in the King of England under his control. Flanders, Flanders with its large towns and flourishing industries and trade, was of great economic value and was naturally coveted by the French king. But the Flemish towns had close economic relations with England, whence they ob- tained much of the raw wool for their weaving industries, and whose import trade too they largely controlled. Flan- ders, however, was divided within itself. Besides its count there were rival parties in the communes themselves. As elsewhere in northern France, toward the close of the thir- teenth century there were uprisings of the artisans against the few rich burghers who had secured control of the ma- chinery of municipal government and distributed all the offices and favors among themselves, while they not only taxed the masses heavily, but kept wages down to starva- tion rates. This caused risings against the ruling class in 1280 and 1281 in Bruges, Ghent, Tournai, Ypres, and Douai in Flanders, as well as in some towns of northern France. In the reign of Philip the Fair the rich burghers and employ- ers of labor looked to France for aid and the workingmen to THE GROWTH OF ROYAL POWER IN FRANCE 499 England. The count was sometimes on one side and some- times on the other. Philip rather than Edward I was the aggressor in break- ing the Peace of Paris arranged by their predecessors, St. Louis and Henry IIL On the other hand, Wars of it was Edward's aggressions against Scotland England' and which led that country to form the alliance with Flanders France which was renewed again and again through the later Middle Ages. I*n the third place, it was French aggres- sion which now drove the Count of Flanders into an Eng- lish alliance. After considerable fighting Edward and Philip made peace and arranged marriages between their families, and left their allies, Flanders and Scotland, to each other's mercies. What the Scots did to Edward II at Bannockburn has already been noted, and the Flemish artisans treated the French in very similar fashion. In 1300 Philip impris- oned the Count of Flanders, declared that fief forfeit, and occupied the country. Two years later in the "Matins of Bruges" the French were massacred as they had been in the Sicilian Vespers twenty years before. Uprisings in the other towns followed. Then in the battle of Courtrai (1302) the townsmen successfully withstood the charge of the French chivalry. The conflict is also called the "Battle of the Spurs," from the many spurs taken from the fallen French knights and hung up on exhibition in the cathedral of Courtrai. Indecisive warfare and vain attempts at treaties of peace then occupied many years, and the last of the three sons of Philip IV also made war upon England again. As Edward I's wars with France and Scotland forced him to appeal to the English Parliament and resort to other devices to secure sufficient revenue, so Philip's . j '^ Increased expensive wars with England and Flanders royal caused him to adopt all sorts of methods of rais- *^^^^'°" ing money, from gifts and loans which he seldom repaid, to direct property taxes of one, two, or four per cent on the capital and five, ten, or twenty per cent on income. Some of his methods were ill-advised, notably: (i) the burden- some taxes upon trade and the sale of commodities (gabelles) 50O THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE which helped bring about the decline of the once flourishing fairs of Champagne; (2) the depreciation of the coinage; (3) ruinous measures against the Lombards, Jews, and Tem- plars, who were the chief bankers, financiers, and capitalists of the time. Of his treatment of the Templars we shall speak in another connection; he despoiled and exiled the Jews; the Lombards, too, were driven out, their goods were confiscated and debts to them were canceled except that the principal was to be paid to the Crown. Philip's officials found it no easy task to collect the direct taxes upon capital and income, to which the country was not yet accustomed. They generally allowed the feudal lords to collect it from their sub-vassals and keep a fraction for themselves, and the towns to compound for a fixed sum which they might raise from their citizens by any assessment they chose. Those who strenuously objected to the tax were assured that it would not serve as a precedent and that they would probably never again be called on to contribute, if they would help the king in his dire need this time. Nobles who refused to pay were mentioned by name to the king. But the collectors less often treated with individual com- munes and holders of fiefs than with the assembled nobility and town representatives of an entire feudal region. In this case they often had to make concessions and promises, ex- pressed in written charters, in order to get the desired grants of money. The feudal nobility thus regained some of the privileges of which St. Louis had deprived them, and various local charters were granted. The Church, too, extracted charters guaranteeing its liberties in return for the contribu- tions which it was forced to make to the king ; but the conces- sions made were so qualified by reservations or so vaguely expressed that the king seldom observed them afterwards. And, as we have said before, no document like the Great Charter was forced from the king and then enforced upon him thereafter by united action, and no power over taxa- tion like that of the English Parliament was acquired by any general assembly representing the French nation. Such an assembly, however, now came into existence. THE GROWTH OF ROYAL POWER IN FRANCE 501 Hitherto there had been provincial estates of Normandy, Artols, Vermandois, Burgundy, and so on; now. The Estates on at least three occasions during his reign, Philip General the Fair summoned the Estates General: in 1302 to secure general support in his conflict with Pope Boniface VIII, in 1308 against the Knights Templars, and in 13 14 to secure funds for a war in Flanders. To this gathering were sum- moned the tenants-in-chlef lay or clerical, representatives of the towns, and also of the cathedral chapters and monas- teries. The assembly divided, not into Lords and Commons, but Into the three estates of clergy, nobility, and townsmen. The session usually lasted only a day and there was no general debate, but each estate was free to submit a cahier or list of grievances for the king to remedy if he saw fit. In 1314 the nobles and towns joined in opposition to a gabelle which fell heavily upon both seller and buyer, and secured Its withdrawal and the promise of Improvement in the coinage. But the Estates General was not destined to gain the control of taxation and legislation possessed by the English Parliament. There was no obligation upon the king to call it; he could deal instead with different provincial estates separately and keep the opposition to himself di- vided. Moreover, when the Estates General did meet, there was a lack of common feeling and interests and action among the three estates which seldom agreed upon any united program. Perhaps this was because there were not great lay lords and bishops grouped together in one body as In the English House of Lords, nor knights and townsmen associated together as In the English House of Commons. But we must also remember the greater chasm between feudalism and communes In France, the greater size of the country, and the greater diversity of its parts in their local customs and recent history. It should be added that the so- called Estates General usually included representatives of northern and central France only; the southern provinces insisted upon making their grants through their own Estates of Languedoc. The meetings of the Estates General during the reign of 502 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Philip the Fair were entirely under his control. The Estates Lack of called during the brief reigns of his three sons, J^pSkTn Louis X, Philip V, and Charles IV, were in the to the king main provincial and partial. Local leagues of feudal nobles with some following among the clergy and communes sprang up in the last year of Philip the Fair's reign against new taxes which he had introduced. Some of these federations even extended over several provinces, and they continued into the reign of Louis X. But they did not result in any permanent check upon the royal power. Charters were granted by Louis X to the nobles in a number of provinces, but the concessions made were intended to preserve old feudal customs and privileges and not to up- build any new national and popular institutions. And through the remainder of French medieval history we shall find it in general true that, while there is occasional opposi- tion to the Crown, it fails to put itself into permanent insti- tutional form. Philip the Fair gave the supreme proof of the progress which the secular royal power had made by his time by p, ... , refusing to admit in French affairs any such Fair and theories of papal overlordship and supremacy in t e apacy international relations, or of papal interference in the internal politics of the realm, as the popes had been maintaining both by word and deed since the days of Hilde- brand. In this he was not alone; other secular rulers of his time displayed a tendency toward greater independence from ecclesiastical control and less regard for papal wishes and threats; and they were supported in this stand by their people. The State was at last becoming more powerful than the Church. But Philip the Fair as the most powerful monarch of his age naturally went the furthest in opposition to the Papacy. Indeed, he went so far that he was able to make a pope the tool of his policies. Innocent III — a cen- tury before — had found Philip Augustus refractory and independent; Philip the Fair was to find Pope Clement V subservient to his wishes. The crisis between Church and State was precipitated by THE GROWTH OF ROYAL POWER IN FRANCE 503 the pontificate of the haughty old man, Boniface VIII (1294-1303), who, unmindful of the growth of Boniface royal power and of national states and of their ^^^^ increasing hold upon the people during the thirteenth cen- tury, tried to carry still further the ideals of ecclesiastical supremacy of Gregory VII and Innocent III. He seemed to forget, too, that his own personal position was rather pre- carious. In the first place, he had been elected, not as a result of the death, but of the almost unprecedented resig- nation of Celestine V, the previous pope, — " who made from craven heart the great renunciation," — and was placed by Dante among those souls whom both Heaven and Hell rejected. Second, Boniface had quarreled with the powerful Roman family of the Colonna and had ousted two of its members from their posts as cardinals. Third, he had offended others of the nobility about Rome by building up a strong feudal lordship there for his nephew, Peter Gaetano. Boniface not only annoyed both Philip and Edward I of England by trying to interfere as arbitrator in their wars with each other and with Flanders and Scotland, cieHcis but greatly offended them by his bull, Clericis ^^^^°^ laicos, in 1296, which forbade the clergy to pay taxes to the State. Edward disregarded the bull and threatened his clergy with outlawry if they obeyed it. If they would not contribute to the support of the State, they should not en- joy its legal protection. Similarly Philip decided that if the French clergy would pay him no taxes, the pope and other Italians should derive no income from France. He forbade the export of any money, jewels, food, or military supplies from his kingdom, but ordered all foreigners to depart at once, leaving, of course, their property and business and debtors behind them. It was a sign of Philip's royal power that these commands were strictly executed. Boniface soon saw — or felt — the point, and explained that the bull was not intended to apply to certain classes of clergy, nor to prevent any clergy from helping their native land with 504 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE contributions in a time of dire need. The pope also tried to placate Philip by other measures, among them the canoni- zation of St. Louis, and the king thereupon rescinded his embargo upon the flow of French gold to Rome. Boniface's partial withdrawal of Clericis laicos did not fully satisfy Philip, however, and before the close of his reign he had secured from the pope's successors a complete exemption of France from the provisions of that bull. Meanwhile other causes of disagreement and bitterness arose between Philip and Boniface. The Viscount of Nar- Renewal of bonne did homage for his fief to the king instead the conflict gf to the Archbishop of Narbonne as his pred- between ^ *; pope and ecessors had been accustomed to do, while a '"^ haughty papal legate gave Philip great offense by his demands. Since this legate was ordinarily the Bishop of Pamiers in southern France, when his legateship expired and he returned to his diocese, Philip had him seized and tried for sedition, heresy, simony, blasphemy, disrespect to royalty, and what-not. This seemed an outrage to the indignant pope. Moreover, Boniface had been made over- confident of the support of Christendom against Philip by the success of the Jubilee, or centenary of Christ's birth, held at Rome in 1300. There had been a vast concourse of pilgrims and a great outpouring of gifts to the Papacy. Accordingly^ in the bull, Ausculta fill charissime (December, 1 301), Boniface demanded the bishop's release and rendi- tion to Rome, where, too, he summoned the clergy to con- sult with him how the excesses of the French monarch against their order might be stopped. He also asserted the superiority of the Papacy over all kings and realms. Early in this same year Edward I had submitted to Parliament a complaint from Boniface against his occupation of Scotland and a contention that Scotland was a fief of the Papacy. Parliament had completely repudiated the papal claims. Philip now followed this example and in 1302 submitted to the Estates General a garbled version of Ausculta fili, which caused that assembly to sympathize entirely with the king. Philip was thus assured of national support in the com- THE GROWTH OF ROYAL POWER IN FRANCE 505 ing struggle; even the French clergy had declared in his favor. The pope for his part proceeded to hold his synod, which some French clergy attended and at which he launched against Philip the bull, Unam sanctam. The ^^^^ assertion in this bull that it was necessary to sanctam their salvation that all human beings should be ^" "^^"' under the Roman pontiff has been generally regarded as the extreme contention of papal theory. This proud declaration was swiftly followed by a terrible humiliation. Nogaret, one of Philip's advisers, was dispatched to Italy with instruc- tions to seize the pope and bring him to France for trial by a church council to be summoned there. Nogaret was joined by the Colonna and other local enemies of Boniface, while no secular power came to the pope's aid. Boniface had left Rome and was at Anagni, his birthplace, preparing to excommunicate Philip and free the French from their alle- giance, when Nogaret and his confederates entered the gates of the town without opposition. When the pope refused to accept their terms, which included the restoration of the Colonna family and his resignation from the Papacy and captivity in France, they stormed the palaces of the pope and his nephew, and took Boniface prisoner. Although in danger of his life, for the head of the House of Colonna wished to kill him, the old man bravely persisted in refusing to yield an inch to their demands. After he had been a prisoner for three days the townsmen of Anagni rose and freed him, but his strength and spirit were broken and a month later he died at Rome. This was not, however, the first time that violence had been done a pope by secular rulers. Philip's strength was manifested more in the fact that Boniface's sue- Subserviency cessors took no steps to punish the French king y to Phmp for the outrage. Benedict XI, who reigned for the Fair only a few months, excommunicated Nogaret, Sciarra Co- lonna, and eleven of their associates, but displayed a concil- iatory spirit toward Nogaret's master. After Benedict's death eleven months passed before the election of a new 5o6 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE pope and then the choice of the cardinals fell upon Philip's candidate, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, who became Clement V (1305-13 14). Instead of taking up his residence at Rome, Clement was crowned at Lyons, a city which six years later became French territory, and in 1309 he came to Avignon on the Rhone, where the popes were to live for nearly seventy years. They purchased the town from the Count of Provence and ruled it as an independent prin- cipality. It was not annexed to France until 1791. But Provence was under the rule of a French line, the House of Anjou, and the popes at Avignon were near enough to the French boundary to be under French influence, just as Clement himself was a tool of Philip, although the city of Bordeaux of which he had been archbishop belonged to England. Clement named many new cardinals, among them sixteen from his native Gascony and four of his own family, so that the Italians and the sympathizers with Boni- face were outnumbered in the college of cardinals. Also Clement and Philip together despoiled the French clergy, giving all the choice positions in the French churches to their own favorites. Finally the pope even freed Nogaret from excommunication, restored to the Colonna family its two cardinalates, and abolished the Order of Knights Templars at Philip's suggestion. Philip owed the Templars a deal of money and coveted their property to help pay for his expensive wars. The Fall of the Knights had grown wealthy and powerful and Templars ^^^ bccome rather unpopular. Accordingly Philip had all those in France arrested and examined by inquisitors. A number of shocking charges of idolatry, irreligion, and immorality were trumped up against them. The use of torture was required to procure confessions in France, and those who confessed to such acts often declared afterwards that they had spoken falsehoods under pain or fear of torture. In other lands like England and Spain the Templars were not proved guilty. So they seem to have been unjustly condemned in France and Philip to have been responsible for this. Many died under torture, others THE GROWTH OF ROYAL POWER IN FRANCE 507 starved in prison awaiting trial, more were burned at the stake, and still others were imprisoned for life. The Order was dissolved by the pope. The property of the Templars was supposed to be handed over to the Papacy to transfer to the Knights Hospitalers. But Philip never repaid his debts to the Templars, seized all the cash that they had on hand, and did not let go their real estate until his death. Indeed, in place of turning over their property to the Hospitalers, he presented claims for the payment of sums which he alleged were owed him by the Templars and for the expense which he had incurred in keeping them in prison. In short, so far as France was concerned, the Hospitalers probably lost more than they gained by the transfer of the Templars' property to them. This chapter has thus far emphasized the growth of the royal power at the expense of the Church and of the feudal system. But it must be realized that much of Persistence the ground won from feudalism was not thor- ^^ feudalism oughly subdued, or after a little was lost and had to be re- gained later. For instance, we have already seen Philip the Fair concede again to the nobility some of the feudal cus- toms which St. Louis had forbidden. Again, many fiefs which escheated to the Crown or which came to it by con- quest or marriage, the king did not venture to incorporate at once in his domain and to rule directly by his own admin- istrative officials. It can readily be imagined that a region which since time immemorial had been under a ruling dy- nasty of its own would not care to give up suddenly its count and court and local customs, and instead be adminis- tered by the ignoble and unfeeling agents of a distant king. Such newly acquired territories the king might grant as appanages to his younger sons who would take the place of the previous duke or count. Such appanages, as their hold- ers with succeeding generations became less and less closely related to the Crown, tended to become again dis- tinct feudal states. Instead of being granted again as fiefs or appanages, the newly acquired territories might be super- intended by seneschals instead of by baillis as was the royal 5o8 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE domain. A bailli was merely a royal creature and agent; the seneschal was some local noble who became a combination of royal agent and hereditary feudal lord. When Philip Augustus won so much territory from John, he put senes- chals rather than baillis over the lands south of Normandy — William of Roches over Anjou, Maine, and Touraine, and Aimeri, Viscount of Thouars, over Poitou, Saintonge, and Guienne. Moreover, the local customs, feudal and other- wise, of different parts of France were preserved either by guaranty of written charter or simply as unwritten customs without saying anything about it. Finally, while mon- archy was gradually getting the better of feudalism as 'a system of government, the feudal land system with its fiefs and manors, and the feudal social system with its knights and nobles, were still flourishing in France of the early fourteenth century, where it had now become the rule that there was no "land without its lord." It would be hard to draw a definite boundary line on a map for the French monarchy at the close of the reign of Territorial Philip the Fair in 1 314 or at the end of the direct th?French Capetians in 1328. It would also not be easy to monarchy distinguish sharply between the royal domain, fourtee^th^ the possessions of great feudal lords who were century nevertheless loyal enough to the French king to be reckoned as within his territory, and the fiefs of those who, like the King of England, while nominally vassals of the King of France, were really to all intents and purposes independent sovereigns. But roughly we may say that Brittany, although brought in Philip Augustus's time under a younger branch of the Capetian family, and the English possessions in the southwest in Guienne and Gascony were quite outside of the French king's control, as was the city of Montpellieron the Mediterranean which owned the juris- diction of the King of Aragon. In the southeast the river Rhone was approximately the French boundary. To the northeast the Count of Champagne and the Duke of Bur- gundy were now docile vassals, and French influence had recently been pushed yet farther east in Lorraine and the Lon-'itudi; West 2° Lon^itinle 2^ East from Greenwich France in the Early Fourteenth Century Showing the chief administrative divisions Scale of miles 20 -10 UU 80 100 200 i '*' j Torjitorv practicallj'indeiiendent of the crown Routes of Edward TV and Henry V in the campai^'iis Of Crecy and. AgincouTt 5IO THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE County of Burgundy. Early in the fourteenth century we are fortunate in having a list of the chief administrative divisions of France. In southern France there were twelve seneschals of Poitou, Saintonge, Limousin, Perigord, Au- vergne, the mountains of Auvergne, Querci, Toulouse, Albi- geois, Rouergue, Beaucaire, and Carcassonne. Over Nor- mandy were five baillis, and there were nine others in the north, at Paris, Senlis, Vermandois, Amiens, Sens, Orleans, Tours, Bourges, and Macon. The language spoken in and around Paris had now begun to spread over the rest of France, supplanting the other dia- Spread of lects. It had already become recognized as the the French standard literary language and polite speech of anguage ^^^ upper classes, and it also, of course, was the official language of the royal government and court. EXERCISES AND READINGS Compare the method of treating the period from 1180 to 1328, or some one reign during it, employed by histories of France, such as those of Duruy, Kitchin, or Masson, with that of the above chapter. What subjects treated by them have already been discussed in this book in other chapters? " Institutions of Capetian Royalty," Bemont and Monod, Medieval Europe fromjQj to izyo (English translation), chap, xxvi, pp. 421-44. Munro and Sellery, Medieval Civilization, pp. 366-75, advice of St. Louis to his son. For those who read French : — E. Lavisse, Histoire de France, vol. ni, part I, by A. Luchaire. " Bouvines," pp. 166-202. Vol. ni, part ii, by Langlois. "Louis IX et son entourage," pp. 18-49. " L'Administration Centrale," pp. 322-39. " L'Administration Locale," pp. 339-52. CHAPTER XXVII THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR In the present chapter we continue to follow the history of France and England, considering them together in connec- tion with the so-called "Hundred Years War" The period between them, and comparing the development Hundred of the royal power and national assemblies in the Y^^" ^^'^'' two countries. There is also a certain convenient coinci- dence in the dates and duration of reigns in the two lands at this time. During the fifty-year reign of Edward HI of England there were three French kings, Philip VI, John II, and Charles V. Then the situation was reverse(^ and during the long reign of Charles VI in France there were three English monarchs, Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V. Finally, the reigns of Charles VII of France and Henry VI of England, which close the Hundred Years War, covered exactly the same years, 1422 to 1461.^ In considering the time of the Hundred Years War, we pass beyond the prime of medieval civilization and enter the later Middle Ages. "We pass, as it were, out of the light and truth of the thir- teenth century, that wonderful, if troublous, seedtime of principles and realities, into the gorgeous, chivalrous, un- real, selfish, oppressive, and unprincipled fourteenth." The Hundred Years War itself, however, is a rather mis- leading phrase. War between the kings of France and England had been chronic since the Norman conquest, and this so-called Hundred Years War made no important change in the relations between the two lands until its close, when England lost its possessions on the Continent and turned subsequently to the upbuilding of a sea power. We might, therefore, better speak of a four hundred years war from the Norman conquest to the close of the Middle Ages. 1 The reigns of the next two kings, Louis XI and Edward IV (1461-1483) also coincide, but do not come within the scope of the present chapter. 512 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Moreover, this so-called " Hundred Years War" was not exactly a century in duration, but covered the period from 1337 to 1453. On the other hand, the number of years of actual warfare were much less than a hundred, since in the course of this period there were numerous long truces and two treaties of peace intended to put a stop to hostilities entirely. But at the time usually accepted as the end of the war there was no treaty. Finally, the causes of the reopen- ing of hostilities in 1337 between Edward III and Philip VI were not new, but the old problems of Guienne, Flanders, and Scotland over which Edward I and Philip IV had fought already. In 1328 the direct male line of the Capetians expired and the French had to determine to whom of the royal family Th Fr n h ^^^ crown should go. Already in 131 6, upon the succession ^eath of the oldest son of Philip the Fair, it '" ^'^^ had been decided that his brother rather than his daughter should succeed him and that a woman should not hold the throne in France. Hence it was now logical to de- cide that Philip of Valois, a son of Philip the Fair's brother, should become king rather than Edward III of England, whose mother was a daughter of Philip the Fair. Not only should women not succeed to the throne, but also the male descendants of a female line were excluded. Edward's mother accepted this decision, and the young King of Eng- land, who was not yet of age, did homage to the new French monarch for his fiefs on the Continent. But a few years later the inevitable quarrel with France over Guienne, and the Scottish and Flemish questions, led Edward III in 1337 to lay claim to the French crown and declare war. One of the first acts of Philip VI had been to aid the Count of Flanders and to wipe out the disgrace of the de- Openine ^^^^ ^^ Courtrai by the victory of Cassel over the years of Flemish in 1328. But now there was a demo- cratic uprising led by Jacob Artevelde of Ghent, the power of the count was overthrown, and the Flemish towns made an alliance with Edward HI. The English king was also joined by many lords of the Netherlands and THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR 513 northwestern Germany who felt their independence men- aced by the growing power of France. These last allies, however, proved of little assistance. The first important battle of the war was a naval one at Sluys off the Flemish coast, where the English fleet, aided at the last moment by the Flemish, decisively defeated the French and gained control of the sea for the next thirty years. Papal legates now arranged a truce which lasted until 1345. Meanwhile, however, both French and English were fighting on opposite sides in Brittany over a disputed succession to that duchy. In 1345 the Flemish became dissatisfied with their leader Artevelde, who had proposed to make the son of Edward III Count of Flanders, and murdered him, but they continued for a while longer to be allies of England. In 1346 direct war between the Kings of England and France was renewed in the famous campaign of Crecy, fa- miliar, like so many other incidents of the war, ^^^ ^^^_ from the chivalric pen of the fourteenth-century paign of historian, Froissart. Edward III landed with a ^^^^ small but well-trained army on the coast of Normandy at La Hogue, and marched through that province plundering. In particular he took and sacked the rich city of Caen. When Philip VI set out to catch him and asked him to name a place of battle, Edward suggested a point south of Paris. Instead, however, of continuing his march along the south- ern bank of the Seine, he repaired a broken bridge, despite the French troops guarding it, and forced a crossing* not far from Paris. He then scurried north toward Flanders as fast as he could go. The river Somme was also guarded, and only by crossing an estuary at low tide did Edward escape being caught in an unfavorable position by Philip who was close on his heels with a much larger army. When the French overtook the English army three days later, it was drawn up in a favorable position on rising ground at Crecy waiting for them. The French were hot, hungry, and thirsty, but so eager for battle that those be- hind kept pressing on instead of obeying the royal command to halt. Presently Philip's fighting blood was aroused, too, 514 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE and he ordered his Genoese crossbowmen to open the battle, just as a modern general begins with a heavy artillery fire. These mercenaries were not so eager to advance as were the French knights, however, especially since a recent shower had affected their bows. On the other hand, the English archers had kept their long bows dry, and the de- structive volleys of shafts which they poured in throughout the battle were probably the decisive factor. When the Genoese made no headway, the French king lost his temper and ordered the knights to ride them down, thus throwing his entire front into confusion. The knights made many successive attacks upon the English position, but to no avail, and they were slaughtered in great numbers. Edward did not follow up his victory by invading France again, but continued his march northward, and, after a long Capture of siege, took the important port of Calais, just Calais across the Channel from Dover. England would henceforth have a Continental port handy for landing armies to invade France and for its wool and import trade with Flanders. Meanwhile the Scots had been defeated at Neville's Cross and their king captured, and a like fate be- fell the French candidate in Brittany. Another truce was arranged by papal intervention, which lasted from 1347 to 1355. Meantime the count recovered his power in Flanders, but Edward III did not attempt to save the Flemish towns either on this occasion or later in the Treaty of Bretigny. In Calais he now had a port of his own for the Continental wool trade, and many Flemish weavers were emigrating to England and manufacturing their cloth there. In 1348 not only both France and England, but the countries of Europe generally were visited by a plague com- The Black pared to which the most destructive wars of that Death time seemed but slight disasters. This pestilence was known as the "Black Death," from the dark blotches which appeared upon the body. It also was marked by swellings of the glands in the groin, arm-pits, and neck, where hard lumps would suddenly appear as large as hen's eggs, and by many smaller boils and carbuncles. Some- THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR 515 times those stricken by the plague vomited blood and sometimes they became delirious. The majority died within from one to three days. This terrible plague probably came from the East by the trade routes across Asia and was spread over the Mediterranean by Italian merchants from a trading station on the Black Sea. It was essentially the same as the bubonic plague which still exists in the Orient, and in Europe it frequently cropped out again dur- ing the remainder of the Middle Ages and early modern times. It has often been said that the Black Death carried off from one third to one half of the population. If such esti- mates are anywhere near correct, it must have Estimate of been an almost inestimable calamity for civili- wrought^ zation and for society. Individuals would lose by it their relatives and'friends and have no one to lean upon or to help them or to start them in the world. There would be countless widows and orphans. Homes would be broken up and entire families, some of them the noblest in the land, would be blotted out. Agriculture would cease on the man- ors for lack of tenants and laborers or for lack of lords and overseers. In the towns in many gilds there would be no master-workmen left to hand on the knowledge of their crafts to apprentices. Trade would diminish greatly in bulk and everything would be upon a smaller scale. Mon- asteries would have hardly enough monks left to maintain them; schools would cease and the Church and learning suffer. Many artists and authors would have perished, and with so greatly reduced a population there would be little demand for new ecclesiastical and municipal edifices. The difficulty would be to keep in repair those which al- ready existed. And society would be too busy in readjusting itself to the changed conditions to spare much time for works of art or of literature. There is a temptation to con- nect with this destructive pestilence the close of the great creative period of Gothic architecture, the decline of the romance and fabliau and other types of medieval literature, the stagnation of scholasticism and theology in the later 5i6 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Middle Ages. Other explanations, however, can be given, and these things seem to have begun to decline a little before 1348. Possibly the great mortality in the plague was, like the other things, due to a dying-out of medieval vitality and power. As yet the Black Death has been little studied except in connection with English history. There we know that it Its effects seriously crippled the Church and lowered the in England quality of the clergy ; that it broke up manors and left crops to rot and cattle to starve and the surviving serfs to wander off looking for work as free men. For the great mortality made labor, especially agricultural labor, very scarce and wages very high. Prices also went up. In many manors and towns the court rolls and other records are very scanty or cease altogether for many years after the pestilence. In some places all local government may have come to a standstill; in others there was no one left who could write. Yet medieval English literature reached its height after the plague in the writings of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer in the second half of the century. It was perhaps, however, in the Black Death that Lang- land lost the father and friends who had paid for his educa- rrj T7- • tion, but whose deaths left him unprovided with 1 he Vision ... of Piers the a regular living in the Church and compelled him, ougiman though he was "poor gentle blood," to "dwell on Cornhill, Kit and I in a cot, clothed as a loller," and to "beg without other bag or bottle than my belly," or "in the habit of a hermit unholy of works to wander wide in this w^orld wonders to hear. " It was thus that he gained that in- timate knowledge of the low life of his time : the vagabonds ; the beggars; the poor, uncared-for lunatics, "more or less mad according as the moon sits," and who walk "witless but with a good will in many wide countries"; the false clergy and pretended hermits and pilgrims; the deserving poor, "prisoners in pits and poor folk in cottages," who "go hungry and thirsty" in order to dress respectably and "are ashamed to beg" ; the tavern-keepers and their customers — Sis the shoemaker, Wat the game-warden, Tomkyn the THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR 517 tinker, "Rickey the horse-dealer and Hogg the needle- seller," "a fiddler, a rat-catcher, a Cheapside scavenger" — all these and many more live for us in his pages. If Will, as the poet calls himself, depicts low life for us and also satirizes iniquity in high places, he none the less cherishes high ideals both in politics and religion, and also portrays ideal charac- ters such as Piers the ploughman, the thrifty and industrious peasant. As for Will himself, after a long search for Saint Truth and for Do Well, Do Better, and Do Best, in which he was occasionally cheered by the song of wayside birds and of sweet brooks and by many a marvelous dream, Hunger and Fever met him and proved too much for him. Finally, we are told, — " Death dealt him a dent and drove him to earth. He 's now covered with clay. May Christ have his soul! " When the war began again, John the Good, so-called be- cause he was "a good fellow," not a good general or king, was on the throne of France and Charles the Bad Poitiers and of Navarre, whose sobriquet we do not need to Bretigny qualify, was making him trouble. This Charles, born in 1332, was son of that daughter of Louis X who had been ex- cluded from the succession and so Charles had the same sort of claim to the throne as had Edward HI. Edward's eldest son, the Black Prince, so named because of the black armor which he wore to set off his fair complexion, had won his spurs at Crecy and now became the English commander in Gascony. From there he made a plundering raid into Tou- louse as far as the Mediterranean, and then, after marching north and finding that he could not cross the Loire, retreated to Poitiers. There he defeated and captured King John, who spent the remainder of his reign in honorable captivity in London, voluntarily returning thither when his son, who had taken his place as a hostage while he returned to France to try to collect the remainder of his enormous ransom, broke his parole. Meantime, in 1360 peace had been concluded in the Treaty of Bretigny, for although the French govern- ment had neither army nor money left, the English could not 5i8 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE capture the walled towns, and even the peasantry offered a local resistance. The treaty gave Edward Ilia little terri- tory near Calais and greatly enlarged his borders in south- western France, where he received all Gascony, Guienne, and Poitou free from any feudal bond to the French king. In return he renounced his claim to the French throne. The terms of the Treaty of Bretigny are of slight impor- tance, however, since it was soon broken and went by the board. The French had suffered and were yet to suffer far more injury from the war than the English, not so much because rru they had been beaten as because the war was 1 he com- ■' panics of fought on French soil. Both sides soon came to mercenaries i • , i • j - j rely mamly upon hired troops under mercenary leaders, and these companies, as they were called, lived on the country, and, if they did not receive their pay promptly, made it up by plundering. Even after peace had been de- clared, it was almost impossible to get rid of them in France. They defeated the royal troops in 1362 and lasted into the next reign. In order to secure generous grants for the prosecution of the war abroad, Edward III had rather allowed the Parlia- Edward III "^^^^ ^o havc its Way in the conduct of internal and Parlia- affairs. Once he annulled some laws to which he had agreed the previous year, but Parliament secured a promise that he would not so offend again. Some- times he took taxes before asking their consent, but either obtained it later or promised not to levy such a tax again. Thus, the principle was repeatedly stated and upheld that legislation and taxation must be through Parliament. Im- portant legislation of the middle of his reign included the Statute of Treason which further safeguarded the crown, the Statute of the Staple regulating trade, the Statute of Laborers, — an attempt to keep down the wages of agri- cultural laborers after the great pestilence, — and the Statutes of Provisors and Prcemunire directed against papal appointments of foreigners to positions in the English Church and appeals of cases from English courts to Rome. THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR 519 The Parliament also repudiated the annual tribute which King John had agreed to pay to the pope. In France under Philip VI the royal power continued to develop. Philip gave away a good deal of territory in appan- ages, it is true, but added to his dominions by Royal power purchase the city of Montpellier on the Mediter- °f ^^'^'P ^^ ranean coast and the province of Dauphine east of the Rhone. As the oldest son of the King of England is called Prince of Wales, so from this time in France the crown prince was known as the "dauphin." During Philip's reign the central administration and machinery of monarchy were further elaborated by a series of royal ordinances. Royal taxation also continued to increase. Toward the close of this reign, however, and during the disastrous reign of John which followed, it looked for a time as if the Estates General might acquire the same control over taxation as had the English Parliament. The first meeting of the Estates General in the reign of Philip VI, concerning which we have detailed information, was in 1346. It ventilated various grievances, The Estates but made no grants of money. In the next year, crlJfy^to^'^""^ after the defeat at Crecy, the Estates read the Poitiers king quite a lecture, and during the remainder of the reign became increasingly niggardly and exacting toward the Crown. The provincial estates were equally difficult to deal with. Under John, who was extravagant and had bad advisers and favorites, the general dissatisfaction with the misconduct of the war and the sad state of the country in- creased until it resulted in a revolutionary movement. In December, 1355, just before Poitiers, the Estates General granted supplies for the war, only on condition that they have complete charge of collecting the taxes, organizing the army, and auditing the accounts. For these purposes they appointed committees and stipulated that they should meet again after three months to see that their wishes had been carried out. In these measures the lead was taken by the representatives of the towns under the leadership of Etienne Marcel, provost of the merchants of Paris. The Estates, 520 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE however, had not shown much wisdom in the type of taxes which they levied, and they had to alter them twice in the course of the next six months. Meanwhile, the king sus- pected Charles the Bad of Navarre of fomenting the opposi- tion and of having designs upon the throne, and in April, 1356, suddenly arrested him and beheaded his councilors. This act caused many of Charles's followers to go over to the English side. The defeat of Poitiers and the capture of the king by the English occurred in September. This absence of the king Revolution- lessened the authority of the central government rnenrhi^^ and emboldened the opposition. One could say Paris things to ministers or a regent which one would hardly utter to the king's face, and one felt less scruples about disobeying them than resisting a command made by the king in person. When the dauphin summoned the Estates General in October, they would do nothing for him unless he released the King of Navarre, reformed govern- mental abuses such as the debased currency, and replaced his advisers by men chosen by the three Estates. He there- upon prorogued them and tried in vain to secure taxes through the provincial estates. Meanwhile Marcel had armed the burghers of Paris. By February, 1357, the dauphin was forced to resort to the Estates General again. They released Charles of Navarre, appointed a committee composed of twelve representatives from each of the three Estates to direct the government, and issued a long program of reform, demanding, among other things, that henceforth the Estates General should meet every three years whether summoned by the king or not, that the administration of justice should be reformed, and that private war among the nobility should cease. When the dauphin showed himself unwilling to submit to these conditions and began to recall his former advisers, the Parisian mob killed some of his ministers, while others fled, and forced upon his head a cap with the red and blue colors of the popular party. But the other towns of France were not ready to go so far as this, and when the dauphin escaped from Paris he received sup- THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR 521 port from provincial estates and from a meeting of the Estates General summoned at Compiegne away from the influence of Marcel and the mob of Paris. But now a new uprising broke out among the peasantry of northern and northeastern France, called the "Jacquerie" from Jacqties, or Jack, the common name for The a peasant. This uprising was directed, not so J^cquene much against the royal government as against the local lords who had failed so completely to protect their ten- ants from the ravages of the English and of the compan- ies of mercenaries and yet were insisting upon their rents and services as oppressively as ever. The peasants were numerous, but poorly armed and organized, and were soon crushed by the united action of the feudal lords. As usual in the repression of such revolts, the nobles took a terrible vengeance for the acts of violence which the peasantry had committed. The Jacquerie had the effect of bringing all the feudal lords over to the dauphin's side, while the townsmen lost support in public opinion because they were suspected of having encouraged the peasants' revolt. More- over, Charles the Bad proved treacherous to his Parisian supporters and negotiated with the dauphin. Finally Mar- cel was assassinated, as Artevelde had been in Flanders, and the dauphin recovered Paris. Thus the attempt to impose a permanent check upon the monarchy through the Estates General, and in particular to give the towns a greater share in the central gov- r, , ° Royal power ernrhent, had failed. During the following reign reasserted of Charles V, known as "the Wise," and famous byCharlesV for his library and patronage of art and literature, the Estates met but once. As dauphin he had had his fill of them. He introduced two important customs which re- mained characteristic of the French government until the French Revolution of 1789; namely, the custom of having \ royal legislation registered by the Parlement or chief court of justice instead of bringing it before the Estates, and the . vicious practice of customs duties on trade between the different provinces of France. Charles taxed heavily, but he 522 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE was economical and intelligent, employed able officials, cor- rected abuses in the government, and maintained law and order to the best of his ability. He also was more successful against England than his two predecessors and did not have to shoulder the blame for any such defeats as those of Crecy and Poitiers. Philip VI and John II had led their armies in person and had displayed inferior generalship. Charles V was himself Recover sickly and no warrior, but found in the Breton, of French Du Guesclin, an able military leader. After some ern ory preliminary fighting against Charles of Navarre, and in Brittany where the succession was still disputed, and in Spain where Du Guesclin and the Black Prince fought on opposite sides in another disputed succession to the throne of Castile, direct hostilities between France and England broke out again. In 1369 an appeal from the inhabitants of southwestern France against the harsh rule of the Black Prince led Charles V to renew the war, which this time turned in favor of France. The Black Prince soon became broken in health and returned to England, where his father was still king, but now in his dotage. In 1372 the Castilian fleet in alliance with France defeated the English at La Rochelle, and by the close of the reign of Charles V, the English had little left on the Continent except such seaports as Calais, Bordeaux, and Bayonne. During the remainder of the century there was no fighting of importance. It was now the turn of the English people to express dis- satisfaction with the conduct of the war and with their royal The "Good government. In the "Good Parliament" of 1376 Parhament" ^^^ leading part was taken by the House of Commons and its Speaker,^ who is to-day purely a presiding officer, but then was the spokesman who presented their petitions to the king. The corrupt favorites and ministers of the aged king were banished or were impeached by the Com- mons before the House of Lords, the first instance of the ^ Peter de la Mare, whom the Commons chose as their leader on this oc- casion does not seem to have had the title of Speaker, but it was introduced the very next year. THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR 523 exercise of this constitutional power. Many reforms were planned in the government, and the succession to the throne was secured to Richard, the young son of the Black Prince, as against his ambitious and unpopular uncle, John of Gaunt. After this Parliament was over, the corrupt court party recovered to some extent its former position and the program of reform was not carried out. But then vvithin a year came the death of Edward III, the flight of his greedy favorites, the withdrawal of John of Gaunt from domestic politics, and the accession of the ten-year-old Richard II with a council of twelve selected both from the court and the parliamentary parties. The English Parliament, however, and even the House of Commons, made up as it was of representatives of the land- owning class and of the more prosperous towns- ^j^^ p^^^_ men, had little sympathy with the lower classes ants' Revolt of workingmen who had but recently come up ° ^"^ ^ from serfdom or villeinage, as it had already shown in its Statute of Laborers. This attempt to force men to work for the same wages as before the Black Death had caused great discontent among the laboring classes and was almost im- possible to enforce, but the government had kept trying to enforce it, and had enacted a series of similar laws in the years from 1 351 to 138 1. Now, in order to meet the expense of the unsuccessful French war, Parliament agreed to a new form of taxation ; namely, poll taxes which every one except 7 absolute paupers had to pay, instead of the usual taxes levied upon land, merchandise, and other forms of property. When in addition these poll taxes were unjustly and un- systematically collected, the peasants, especially in south- eastern England, rose in revolt. They also had other griev- ances against both their feudal lords and the clergy. They succeeded in entering London, where the humbler artisans sympathized with them; they killed the Archbishop of Canterbury and some other high officials and did some plundering; but then most of them dispersed to their homes when the boy king promised to abolish serfdom and to re- dress their other grievances. These promises were not kept ; 524 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE even had the king been sincere, the nobility and Parliament would not have allowed it. The revolt was suppressed in the same cruel way that the Jacquerie had been put down in France. However, it was as impossible to enforce the Statute of Laborers after the Peasants' Revolt as it had been before, and it is also noteworthy that poll taxes were not levied again in the Middle Ages. The peasants also continued gradually to escape from villeinage, just as they had been doing before the revolt. Contemporary with the Peasants' Revolt in England occurred popular risings in other countries. The heavy taxa- T^ ,. tion of Charles V finally resulted in popular Uemocratic , . . movements resistance at the very close of his reign and dur- e sew ere j^^ ^^^ minority of his son. Revolts occurred in Amiens, Laon, Rouen, Rheims, and other towns of northern France, and in 1382 reached Paris. In Languedoc bands of peasants and artisans became brigands in order to procure food and to escape taxation. In 1379 the Flemish towns re- volted once more against their count. When the rich towns- men in Bruges recalled him, the people of Ghent made the son of Artevelde their leader, conquered Bruges, massacred the foes of democracy there, and spread the movement, not only throughout Flanders, but into Brabant and the Bishop- ric of Liege. But the French led an army against them and they were defeated, and the younger Artevelde was slain in the battle of Roosebek in 1382. It was at this same time that the city leagues of southern Germany reached their height, and that the Ciompi, or lowest class in Florence, gained for four brief years the suffrage. All these movements failed and the lower classes nowhere secured equal political rights, largely, it would seem, because the well-to-do middle class preferred to maintain the established government. The reigns of Richard II of England and Charles VI of France were somewhat alike. Both opened with minorities Richard II during which the kings were in tutelage and and'charles ^^^irs Came largely into the hands of their uncles, VI of France whosc rule in both cases was bad. The first few years of both reigns were also marked by popular revolts, as THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR 525 we have seen. Both kings then declared themselves of age and ruled well for a few years. In 1396 Richard married Charles's daughter and peace prevailed between the two realms. From 1392 Charles was insane most of the time, and some have thought that Richard's reason became affected also. At any rate, after eight years of constitutional govern- ment he suddenly in 1397 began to disregard Parliament and act as an absolute monarch and take vengeance on those who had opposed him during the period of his minority. Such conduct resulted in Richard's deposition in 1399 and in the throne being offered by Parliament to the son of John of Gaunt, who as Henry IV was the first king of The Lan- the House of Lancaster. Richard II had left no SYiament"'^ children, but even after he had died or had been in England murdered in prison, there were alive other descendants of Edward III who had a better hereditary claim to the throne than the Lancastrians, for John of Gaunt was not the next oldest son after the Black Prince. The reign of Henry IV was filled with uprisings against the new king, whom many regarded as a usurper. Therefore Henry IV and his two successors Henries V and VI, were careful not to offend Parliament, which enlarged its powers during their reigns. They also favored the Church in order to secure its support. There had been considerable opposition to the clergy, as well as to the Papacy in England in the second half of the fourteenth century, as we shall see more fully in a later chapter. When Charles VI became insane, there ensued a struggle for the control of the central government between two parties, one led by his brother, Louis of Orleans, Burgundi- the other by the Duke of Burgundy. In the reign orLanists of John II the old feudal dynasty in that duchy in France had died out and the fief had escheated to the French Crown. But John had promptly granted it again to his younger son, Philip. This Philip presently married the daughter of the Count of Flanders, and when her father died in 1384 they inherited not only Flanders, but also the counties of Bur- gundy, Nevers, Rethel, and Artois. Philip had had less 526 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE difficulty with the towns of Flanders than his father-in-law had experienced, and now Paris and the other French towns joined the Burgundian party while the feudal nobles were generally Orleanists. In 1404 John the Fearless became Duke of Burgundy and three years later murdered Louis of Orleans. This for the moment left the Orleanists without a head, but in 1410 various nobles formed a league against Burgundy in which the leading spirit was the Count of Ar- magnac. Henceforth, therefore, the civil strife is spoken of as between the Burgundians and Armagnacs. The dauphin sided first with one party and then with the other. This divided state of France gave the brilliant and am- bitious King of England, Henry V, an opportunity to carry . . ^ the war once more into French territory. He Agincourt ... . opened negotiations with the Burgundian party and in 14 15 conducted a campaign similar to that which had led to the battle of Crecy in 1346. Like Edward III, he landed on the coast of Normandy, but north of the Seine, where he besieged and took Harfleur. He then marched north and had difficulty in crossing the Somme, just as had Edward III, and finally won, over a much larger French army, a victory at Agincourt, nor far from Crecy, and by similar tactics to those employed at that battle. He also resembled Edward III in not following up his victory, but in continuing his march north to Calais and returning home. In 141 7, however, he resumed his attempt to reduce the towns of Normandy and gained a rapid series of successes, and was now actively aided by the Duke of Burgundy who had held aloof from both sides at Agincourt. In 1418 Paris opened its gates to the Burgundians and the Count of Armagnac was murdered. But soon the English successes and exorbitant terms of peace named by Henry V caused Duke John of Burgundy to seek a reconciliation with the dauphin. By this time the death of his older brothers had made dauphin the youngest son of the Insane king. As the Duke of Burgundy knelt before this sixteen-year-old prince, he was attacked and slain, paying the penalty for his murder of Orleans fifteen years before. THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR 527 The new Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, held the dauphin responsible for his father's murder and came over wholly to the English side. He agreed to the The Treaty Treaty of Troyes in 1420, by which Henry V of Troyes married the French Princess Catherine and was to become King of France upon the death of the insane Charles VI. An assembly of the Estates at Paris approved the treaty, and Henry was making good his claim by further conquests at the dauphin's expense, when death overtook him in 1422 at the age of only thirty-five. Charles VI died a little later in the same year. Henry VI, son of Henry V, was not yet a year old; but his uncle, the Duke of Bedford, tried to pro- cure the French throne for him and continued the military successes of the English for some years. He also tried to give Normandy and other French territory under his rule good government. But the people were neither prosperous nor happy under English rule ; the country was still suffering from the effects of the war; the captains of Charles VII, as the former dauphin styled himself, kept making raids; and local resistance to English rule kept cropping out. The situation by 1429 was as follows: Charles VII, who was but nineteen at his father's death, whose face was un- prepossessing in appearance, and whose short. The siege knock-kneed legs moved with an undignified gait, °^ Orleans had so far remained inactive south of the Loire. He ap- peared to have no money and to be controlled by unworthy favorites, and was derisively known as "the King of Bourges," from the cathedral town where he most often held his court. The English and Burgundians held everything north of the Loire and some territory on the southwestern coast. We have before noted the strategic importance of Orleans, situated upon the northernmost bend of the Loire, as the key to the interior of France. It now barred the way of the English south and they were besieging it. Charles, located for the present at Chinon rather than at Bourges, seemed unable to do anything to relieve the beleaguered city. An illiterate peasant girl now turned the tide of victory 528 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE in favor of France. Saintly voices and visions, Jeanne d'Arc, or Joan of Arc, believed, bade her leave her home on the Jeanne border of Lorraine and go to the help of her king ^ ^^^ and her country. Her father had little sympathy with what he regarded as idle fancies ; but she persuaded an uncle to take her to a royal captain in the neighborhood. After this captain had refused her once, she finally induced him in turn to supply her with an escort so that she might ride through the intervening hostile territory to the royal headquarters at Chinon. Here, strange to say, she per- suaded Charles to give her a few troops and let her try to save Orleans. But many other soldiers joined her as she marched through Blois toward Orleans. She brought pro- visions into the starving town by boats on the river, and then, by capturing one English fortification after another, forced the English within a few days to abandon the siege. Then she led the army of the dauphin, as she called him un- til his formal coronation, northeast in a victorious march through the enemy's country to Rheims where he could be duly crowned king in the great cathedral. Joan's marvelous success was due chiefly to the fact that all the French needed at this time to defeat and drive Reasons ^^^ ^^^ English was confidence and leadership, for Joan's She Supplied both. She believed firmly in her "Voices" and the age was still ready to accept the miraculous. Consequently many of her followers be- lieved her to be a saint divinely inspired, and found in that belief assurance of victory. Even the English had to admit that there was something supernatural about her, but they preferred to insist that she was a witch and an instrument of the Devil. Joan also loved her country and her king. She wanted to relieve her suffering land and to drive the English home where they belonged. That there were plenty of other Frenchmen who felt as she did is evidenced by the strong backing she at once received and by the way she set her sol- diers' hearts on fire. The idea of one France in contrast to feudal states and local interests had now come into being, and devotion to the king was a sentiment that burned in THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR 529 many a breast as well as In the pure bosom of the peasant maid of Domremy. Joan had other qualities of leadership. She was not an ordinary visionary, but natural, self- possessed, and apt at repartee despite her lack of education. Her life was pure and noble, she was genuinely religious, she inspired respect in the rough soldiers, and enforced strict discipline and order throughout the camp. Although she endured many hardships and wore armor like a man, she remained womanly and in battle carried a banner in order not to kill any one. Yet she spoke out boldly her opinion in the king's councils of war, and was the most aggressive of his commanders. Where there was the most danger, there was her banner. Charles VII was still too sluggish or cautious to keep pace with her impetuosity for long. He hesitated about attacking Paris until it was too late, and then withdrew to Fate of Bourges again. Joan went off to relieve Com- J°^" piegne from the Burgundians. She was captured and tried at Rouen, the English headquarters in France, by a large ecclesiastical court under English influence in an effort to prove her a witch or at least a heretic. The trial was unfair and she was unfairly dealt with in prison. She was con- demned as a heretic and burned at the stake only two years after her relief of Orleans. The English had hoped to justify themselves and to throw discredit upon her by this course, but the result was just the opposite. Charles VII made no move to save her at the time, but twenty-four years later the pope ordered a retrial of her case and her name was cleared of all suspicion of heresy. In 1909 occurred her beatification by the Roman Catholic Church. After their execution of Joan, the English won no more victories. In 1435 the Duke of Bedford died, and thereafter there was dissension and lack of capable military ^j^^ English leadership among Henry VI's advisers and gen- are driven erals. In 1435, too, the Duke of Burgundy aban- '^^^ doned the English alliance and made the Treaty of Arras with Charles VII, from whom he received territorial and other concessions. The next year the French king reentered 530 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Paris. There was a truce from 1444 to 1449, but in 1450 the English lost Normandy and in 1453 their possessions in southern France. Calais alone was left to them. No definite treaty was signed relinquishing their claims, but none was needed ; they were not to recover the lost ground. However, it was some time before English monarchs wholly gave up the idea of invading France. Edward IV came in 1475 with the largest army that England had yet sent across the Channel, but he went home without having fought an en- gagement. Henry VII came again, but also allowed himself to be bought off with money. Henry VIII was possessed in his youth with the notion of winning glory in French cam- paigns, but was soon turned from this policy by the wiser head of his minister, Wolsey. The war left France in a sad state of desolation, depopula- tion, and apparent ruin, with large areas thrown out of cul- Eff f tivation, with homes and fields replaced by for- the war on ests and wild beasts, with large beggar and ranee criminal classes recruited from the impoverished peasants and disbanded soldiers. Crime had increased and religion had declined. It is true that the recovery from all this was surprisingly rapid. But an irreparable hurt was that for over a century France, hitherto the leader in medi- eval culture, had been held back from further accomplish- ment and development. Nationality had been attained, but at a great cost. THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR 531 EXERCISES AND READINGS Chronological Table. List the events narrated in the above chapter in three parallel columns. Devote the middle column to events in which both France and Eng- land were concerned, one of the side columns to events in which Eng- land alone was concerned, and the other side column to French history. Arrange the list of events in each column in chronological order, and so that events which occurred simultaneously may be opposite one another in their respective columns. This chronological table may be preserved and, as the succeeding chapters are read, other columns may be added to cover their history during the later Middle Ages. Edward III and Flanders. Warner, Landmarks in English Industrial History, pp. 83-93. The Black Death. Warner, op. cit., pp. 95-115. H. D. Traill, Social England, vol. ll, pp. 133-36, in the unillustrated edi- tion; pp. 184-88 in the illustrated edition. F. A. Gasquet, The Great Pestilence (London, 1893), any chapter. The Peasants' Revolt. Traill, Social England, vol. 11, pp. 97-100 (unillustrated); pp. 139-43 (illustrated) on the rise of hired laborers: pp. 137-46 (unillustrated); pp. 189-99 (illustrated) on agriculture. C. Oman., Political History of England, ijyy-i4Ss; pp. 1-25, on the causes of the revolt. The Vision of Piers the Ploughman. There is no complete translation into modern English. A portion has been translated somewhat too freely into modern prose by Kate Warren (London, 1899). It is not very difficult to read the original with the aid of the notes and glossary in Skeats's scholarly edition. Warfare of the Fourteenth Century. Traill, Social England, vol. ll, pp. 172-81 (unillustrated); pp. 234-48 (illustrated). The Lancastrian Kings. Cross, A History of England and Greater Britain, chap. XV. France under the First Valois Kings. R. Lodge, The Close of the Middle Ages, chap. IV. Burgundians and Armagnacs. R. Lodge, op. a7.,-chap. xv. Joan of Arc. Any chapter in the Lives of Joan by F. C. Lowell (Boston, 1896) and Anatole France (English translation in two volumes, London, 1909). For those who read French, E. Lavisse, Histoire de France, vol. iv, part 11, 48-70. CHAPTER XXVIII GERMANY IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES German history in the later Middle Ages lacks unity com- pared to that of France or of England, and is more closely German in connected with lands to the east like Hungary, the later Bohemia, and Poland, and with the countries ^^^ about the Baltic Sea to the north, than it is with the states of western Europe. Italy is now seldom visited by the Holy Roman emperors and has its own separate history. Germany itself is nominally under the rule of one emperor, but really has become a shifting chaos of principalities and powers, great and small. Various local dynasties rise and fall, increase or diminish in territory, impinge upon or give way to one another. Among these some are worth noting as the later founders of modern states or as still reigning to-day. Important also are certain cooperative forms of government which develop in this period: the Hanseatic League of cities in the north, the military order of Teutonic Knights in the northeast, the Swiss Confederation in the southwest. In the later Middle Ages Germans, although divided politically, are still expanding territorially. Teu- tonic colonists throng into Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary; the Knights conquer and convert Poles and Letts; the Hanse towns acquire a commercial supremacy over Den- mark, Norway, and Sweden, — in fact, from the east coast of England to Novgorod they almost monopolize trade. German cities in general flourished in the later Middle Ages as never before: the great southern cities of Augsburg and Nurnberg reached the height of their prosperity about 1500. After the extinction of the Hohenstaufens the Holy Ro- man emperors had little authority. The right to elect the The seven emperor had by this time become limited to electors seven of the leading lords of the land, three eccle- siastical, namely, the Archbishops of Cologne, of Mainz or Mayence, and of Trier or Treves, and four secular princes. GERMANY IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 533 each bearing a different title: namely, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, the Margrave of Branden- burg, and the King of Bohemia, whose electoral right, how- ever, was sometimes contested by the Duke of Bavaria. These seven electors in many cases did not elect the son of the preceding emperor, but chose some one from an entirely different family. Often, too, they imposed conditions upon the man whom they selected, and if he did not live up to these preelection promises or in other ways disappointed them, they would depose him and choose another. Some- times they disagreed among themselves and elected two candidates simultaneously. The power of the electors was permanently defined in written legal form in the Golden Bull of the Emperor Charles IV in 1356, but this was for the most The Golden part a rehearsing of what had long been custom- ^"^^ ary. It may be regarded as the chief constitutional docu- ment in the history of medieval Germany and~thus some- what comparable to Magna Carta in English history. Whereas the Great Charter shows us a united action by the baronage which was something akin to a national opposition and which later perpetuated itself in the Parliament, the Golden Bull reveals the great local lords as the chief power in the Empire and is largely devoted to their ceremonial functions and political privileges. It is treason to attack their persons; they elect the emperor and hold the chief offices about his person; in their own territories they may coin money and collect taxes and hold independent courts of their own. While the imperial office is elective, the office and lands of each lay electorate are to be transmitted hered- itarily observing the rule of primogeniture and territorial indivisibility. The electors, however, were not able to monopolize such rights for themselves; a number of other lords were equally independent in their local government. But the Many petty rule of primogeniture was not universally fol- ^^'^^^^ lowed; family lands were sometimes partitioned among several sons, and intermarriage also kept altering bounda- 534 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE ries. Germany came to be composed of two or three hundred little states. There were ecclesiastical principalities ruled by archbishops, bishops, and abbots; there were dukes and counts and margraves and landgraves. There were sim- ple knights with perhaps a solitary castle and not enough lands and subjects to support them, so that some resorted to plunder and private warfare and were hence known as "robber knights." But even such nobles often claimed to be independent sovereigns. Then there were the free or imperial cities which also undertook to govern themselves and recognized only the vague authority of the emperor over them. The territories of these lords and states, great and small, wound in and out among one another, and their jurisdictions overlapped and conflicted in a way to make the preservation of peace and order practically impossible, and feud and neighborhood war practically certain. And it was easy for criminals and outlaws and fugitive serfs to escape across the frontier of one petty state into the territory of another. This defect was to some extent remedied by an organiza- tion whose members in the fourteenth century existed in all Courts of parts of Germany and which is known as the the Vehm Vehm ov Fehm. This society had grown out of earlier local courts among the people in Westphalia. Some of its meetings were open to the general public, but others were secret, especially those concerned with criminal justice and with witchcraft or heresy. It was these secret tribunals that were of the most importance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The penalty for any outsider who in- truded at one of these secret sessions was death. Any free- man, however, who was of honest birth and character was qualified to apply for membership and be initiated into the mysteries of the organization. Such an initiate took a sol- emn oath to assist his associates in serving summonses on accused persons and in executing the sentences of the Vehmic courts, and was then informed of the passwords and secret signs by which the Wissendi of the Vehm recognized one another. GERMANY IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 535 The only penalty of these criminal courts was death. If three or more members of the Vehm caught a criminal red- handed in the act, they killed him on the spot Vehmic without further trial. Otherwise crimes were in- procedure vestigated by the method of sworn inquest, every member of the Vehm being pledged to tell what he could of crimes in his neighborhood. Having thus determined whom they should accuse and bring to trial, the next step was to sum- mon the accused before the Vehm, This was done mysteri- ously by nailing a notice on a tree or leaving it in some other spot where the accused would be sure to see it, but would not know who had posted it. At the trial, if the accused appeared and were himself a member of the Vehm, he could usually clear himself of the charges against him by his soli- tary oath. If not himself a member, he would have to pro- duce more oath-helpers who were members to swear on his behalf than had already taken oath against him. If, how- ever, as many as twenty-one initiates gave their oaths in his favor, he was acquitted anyway. If condemned and present, he was executed without delay. Otherwise it was the duty of the first member of the Vehm who met him to hang him to the nearest tree, leaving by his side a knife marked with the cryptic symbols, "S.S.G.G.," to show that the Vehm had done its work. This impressive method of intimidating the criminal classes, which reminds us of lynchings and vigilance com- mittees, but whose self-help and summary pro- its popu- cedure were to a large extent a survival of primi- ^^""^^ tive German custom, was favorably received by the society of the time, as the Vehm proved more efficacious than any other court. Only at a later date did the secret character of the organization breed abuses and call forth complaints and lead finally to its suppression. In the fourteenth and fif- teenth centuries it was joined by entire cities, by bishops and great lords, and finally by the emperor himself, who en- couraged this rough-and-ready way of dealing with offend- ers against justice because he had nothing better to offer — indeed, had no imperial system of justice at all. 536 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE It was almost Impossible for the emperor to maintain order between the various principalities or to carry out any J , , policy dealing with Germany as a whole, espe- imperial daily sInce no Institutions of imperial govern- ^ '^^ ment had been developed In the past, and since the heads of the local states seldom cooperated loyally with him in any proposed measures for the general welfare. Whether from these reasons or from mere selfish ambition, the emperors in the later Middle Ages were apt to employ the term of their office and their Imperial power chiefly in extending their own family possessions within or without the boundaries of the Empire. These local lordships they could hope to hand on to their sons, whereas the Imperial office might go to some other family upon their death. For money, troops, administrative assistance, and the like, the emperor had to rely mainly upon the particular state of which he had been head before he became emperor. If he exploited it for the benefit of the Empire, he would be liable to ruin the possessions of which his family had hitherto been reasonably sure. It seemed better and safer to him to ex- ploit the Imperial office, to which he had been fortunate enough to be elected, and to make what marriages and dip- lomatic alliances and territorial acquisitions he could for the benefit of his family. If the person holding the Imperial office did little for the good of Germany and of the Empire as a whole, the general The German assembly or Diet or Reichstag of the princes and ^^^^ nobility did still less. This body was poorly attended and seldom accomplished anything or even gave the emperor hearty support when he had proposals to make for the general welfare. The free cities desired representa- tion in this body, but were kept out by the feudal lords until the close of the fifteenth century. It should be added that most of the principalities Into which the Empire was di- vided had, if they were of any size, their own assemblies of the local nobility with whom the head of the state had to consult in all important legislation and financial matters. A rapid chronological survey of the emperors of Germany GERMANY IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 537 from the end of the House of Hohenstaufen to the beginning of the unbroken succession of the House of The Inter- Hapsburg will supply some specific illustration of '■^gnum the general statements made in the preceding paragraphs. From 1256 to 1273 no one was generally recognized as em- peror. There had been conflicting elections in 1257 of Rich- ard of Cornwall, brother of Henry III of England, and Alfonso the Wise of Castile. Both these foreigners contin- ued to be rank outsiders, for Richard returned to England after a year and a half, while Alfonso gave practical demon- stration of his wisdom by not coming to Germany at all. During this period of interregnum King Ottocar II of Bohemia, an ally of the pope against the Hohenstaufens, was the strongest prince in the Empire, and ottocar II Bohemia became under his rule one of the most °^ Bohemia powerful states of Europe. Indeed, Ottocar brought to- gether under his rule districts and peoples and tongues sug- gestive of the present Austria-Hungary; namely, Bohemia, Moravia, Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola. Hun- gary itself, however, was not under his rule, and its king, Bela IV, tried to resist his expansion. Ottocar forwarded the movement of German colonists eastward by encouraging them to enter Bohemia, where they brought woodland under cultivation and helped to found many new cities. He him- self twice participated in crusades to Prussia to aid the Teutonic Knights in extending the territory of Christendom northeastward. After the death of his friend Richard of Cornwall in 1272, Ottocar became a candidate for the imperial ofiice. But the other princes regarded him as already Rudolf of too powerful, and instead chose in 1273 Count Hapsburg Rudolf of Hapsburg, one of the lesser lords in the Empire. He was of a family hitherto obscure, but already rapidly rising and destined to become one of the greatest ruling houses in Europe. It still reigns in Austria-Hungary. The original possessions of the family were in Alsace; to these they had added various fiefs and offices in what is now Switzerland. Rudolf had increased his territories by mar- 538 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE riage, inheritance, and war. He had also shown military ability in the employ of the cities of Basel, Zurich, and Strassburg, and had been marshal at the Bohemian court. He was fifty-five years old when chosen emperor and was a man of unusual height — seven feet tall, says a chronicle of the time. He was an affable, energetic, and popular warrior. Rudolf's main achievement was to recover Austria, Styria, Carniola, and Carinthia from Ottocar and then to keep them — with the exception of Carinthia which he gave to his ally, the Count of Tyrol — as his own possessions. He was so occupied with Austria that he did not intervene in Italian affairs, and allowed French influence to increase in Lorraine and the County of Burgundy. His scheme of re- constituting the Kingdom of Aries in the regions along the Rhone failed. Especially in the entire north of Germany did he exert little influence. In the south he tried to check private wars by "land-peaces" — in which the states of a certain region would cooperate to keep the peace — and to collect taxes especially from the towns, which during the absence of Frederick II in Italy and the Interregnum had attained to prosperity and self-government. Sometimes he summoned representatives of the cities to him in order to procure a subsidy, but not in company with the ecclesias- tical and lay princes. Often he went instead to the cities or dealt with each separately, so that he failed to establish a Parliament or Estates General as his contemporaries, Edward I and Philip IV, did. Rudolf was not able to hand on the Empire to his son Albert. Instead the electors chose Adolf of Nassau (1292- U s and 1 298), but he proved even more eager to increase downs of the the possessions of his own family at the expense Hapsburgs ^^ ^^^^^^ ^^^^ Rudolf had been. The electors accordingly turned back to Albert who met Adolf in a battle which was decided by Adolf's death. After Albert's reign, however, the electors again passed by the House of Haps- burg and chose Henry VII of Luxemburg (1308-13 13), who proceeded to acquire the Kingdom of Bohemia for himself and his descendants. In 13 14 there was another double GERMANY IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 539 election and both Louis of Bavaria and the Hapsburg, Frederick of Austria, claimed the crown. Louis finally won out. The House of Hapsburg, however, continued to hold Austria and surrounding territories, and in 1363 added the Tyrol or eastern Alps to its possessions. Louis IV belonged to the Wittelsbach family which is still the royal line in Bavaria. After him the Luxemburg House returned to power in the person of Charles IV Houses of (1347-1378), who published the Golden Bull, and andtuxem- his son, Wenzel, who was deposed in 1400. burg Wenzel was so addicted to intoxicants that any one wishing to make sure of finding him sufficiently sober to transact state business did well to interview him early in the day. He was liable to be found under the table by the end of breakfast. It is one of the ironies of history that one of the chief extant monuments associated with this emperor is the bronze font in which he was baptized at St. Sebaldus Kirche, Nlirnberg. Wenzel's reign was marked by wars between leagues of cities, leagues of knights, and the greater terri- torial princes. There were associations of knights in Hesse, Westphalia, Franconia, southern Germany, and along the Rhine. The two chief city leagues were those of Swabia and of the Rhine. The Swabian League was formed in 1376 when fourteen towns banded together to resist new taxes levied by Charles IV. In two years' time the membership increased to eighty-nine towns. Wenzel was helpless before this situation, but the princes inflicted some defeats upon the towns, until in 1389 both sides agreed to dissolve their leagues. After Rupert, who had previously been Count of the Palatinate, had disputed the imperial title for ten years with Wenzel, who refused to remain deposed, j^^j ^^^ Sigismund, a younger son of Charles IV, was Sigismund, elected emperor in 14 10. He finally prevailed ^410-1437 upon his brother Wenzel to yield the throne to him, and out- lived another claimant, named Jobst. Sigismund was full of schemes, but for want of support was unable to carry most of them out. He succeeded, however, in getting together a 540 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE great church council at Constance which healed a triple schism in the Papacy. He found it so hard to get any money with which to pay his expenses while in the Empire that he absented himself from it during much of his reign, especially since he had important possessions and problems outside of Germany. Sigismund tacitly confessed his in- ability to maintain order and justice in the Empire by join- ing the courts of the Vehm. Sigismund also established two German dynasties that are still ruling. The Wettin line, whom he made Electors Origin of °^ Saxony, are now its kings. The Hohenzollerns, the Hohen- whom his father had made princes of the Empire, zoliGrns he further raised to Electors of Brandenburg, which in modern times they have developed into the power- ful kingdom of Prussia and the great German Empire. The Hohenzollerns get their name from the height of Zollern in the Swabian Alps where their original castle was located. In 1 191 Count Frederick III of Hohenzollern succeeded the Burgraveof Niirnberg, whose daughter he had married, and Frederick VI was still Burgrave of Niirnberg when Sigis- mund made him an elector. But the family had also ac- quired Ansbach, Bayreuth, Culmbach, and estates in Aus- tria. In 1427 the Hohenzollerns sold out their rights as burgraves to the city of Niirnberg. With the death of Sigismund in 1437 the House of Luxem- burg became extinct in the male line, so his son-in-law, Al- Imperial bcrt II of Austria, was chosen as his successor, comes hered- With Albert began a practically unbroken suc- itary in the ccssion of the Hapsburg family to the imperial Hapsburg office Until its abolition by Napoleon in 1806. Frederick HI, who followed the brief rule of Albert II, had a long reign from 1440 to 1493 and was succeeded by his brilliant but erratic son, Maximilian. After the downfall of the Hohenstaufens no emperor Italy, the visited Italy until Henry VII, who died there thTStern^ without having accomplished much. The efforts frontier of the next emperor, Louis of Bavaria, to main- tain an Italian policy involved him in a struggle with the GERMANY IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 541 Papacy in which he was humiliated and all but lost his throne. His successor, Charles IV, was inactive in Italy and submissive to the Papacy, and, although he went to Rome to be crowned, promised the pope not to stay there over- night. The pope himself at this time was still at Avignon, but was none the less jealous of any imperial activity in Italy. By Sigismund's time the pope had returned to Rome and quite a ceremony was made of that emperor's corona- tion, which did not occur until almost the close of his reign. Frederick III was the last emperor to be crowned at Rome. One might almost say that with him the medieval or Holy Roman Empire ended and the Hapsburg monarchy began. Through the later Middle Ages first the Kings of France and then the Dukes of Burgundy pushed their boundaries eastward at the expense of fiefs supposed to belong to the Empire. The leagues of the Rhine and Swabian cities to which we have already referred were not permanent federations. But out of the ruins of the old Hohenstaufen Duchy Origin of of Swabia developed from the thirteenth cen- Qmfedera- tury on a union of cantons and towns which was tion the beginning of modern Switzerland. The first stages of this development were made at the expense of the House of Hapsburg. The oldest historical document concerning the Swiss Confederation which has come down to us dates from 1 29 1 and records a defensive league formed between the three forest cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, located about the Lake of Lucerne. There had, however, been an earlier union, but the story of William Tell is a later legend. This defensive league was against the Haps- burg family, whose feudal claims in these territories the na- tives had disputed, asserting their right to self-government and to immediate relations with the imperial authority. In short, they rebelled against their feudal lords and became rural communes like so many other places in western Eu- rope. Rudolf of Hapsburg had recognized only Uri as di- rectly under imperial authority. Adolf of Nassau added Schwyz, and Henry VII extended the privilege to Unter- 542 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE walden. Both these emperors were hostile to the Hapsburgs and glad to encourage their foes. Although supposedly a league for defense only, the three forest cantons speedily attacked and plundered neighboring g^j Hapsburg possessions. In 13 15 the Hapsburgs medieval led an army against them but were defeated in expansion ^^^ battle of Morgarten. Other rural districts and towns which desired to escape from Hapsburg control joined the three forest cantons during the next half-cen- tury. Some of them were temporarily recovered by the Hapsburgs, but at Sempach in 1386 and at Nafels in 1388 the Austrians were defeated. They then recognized the independence of eight cantons, including the three original ones, Lucerne, Glarus, Zug, and the towns of Berne and Zurich. In 1403 the Bishop of Sion and the peasants of the Valais were brought under the protection of the league, in 141 1 Appenzell, in 1412 the town of St. Gall. By aggression the Swiss also added to the territory under their control a region to the south of the St. Gotthard Pass, and to the north- east of the Lake of Lucerne the Aargau together with the original Hapsburg castle. The confederates now reached from the Italian Lakes to the Jura Mountains and the Lake of Constance. Jealousy and dissension broke out, however, between the rural and urban members of the confederation, and when Zurich was worsted in a local war with Schwyz it allied with Austria against the Forest Cantons. But they again proved unconquerable, and in 1450 Zurich returned to the league and Austria gave up its hopes of recovering the Aargau. Like Rudolf of Hapsburg, most of his successors in the Empire had very slight authority in the north of Germany The Hanse- and paid little attention to that region. There- atic League ^qj-^ ^^le towns, deprived of imperial protection and free from imperial interference, formed leagues among themselves for mutual protection and trade. Gradually these smaller local unions became merged in one extensive Hanseatic League, so called from the word "hanse" mean- ing a gild or union for trade. The traders of northern Ger- GERMANY IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 543 many had early pushed into foreign countries. For instance, at Wisby off the Swedish coast on the island of Gotland mer- chants from as many as thirty German towns were repre- sented and formed an association — some were from places as far west as Cologne and Utrecht. It was through such co- operation in foreign trade that the Hanseatic League was formed, a loose union primarily for commercial purposes of some seventy cities. Just when it came into existence would be hard to say, and its membership fluctuated a great deal. The towns in it can scarcely be said to have formed a po- litical federation, but they held assemblies, arranged with one another for the extradition of criminals, and sometimes waged war. In 1367 fifty-seven towns declared war upon the Kings of Norway and Denmark and defeated them in several naval engagements. The league secured special trading privileges and planted settlements composed of its own members in various for- eign ports. Its chief colonies of this sort were its control at Bergen on the Norwegian coast, Novgorod in "/^'"n'^f.^" Russia, Bruges in Flanders, and London in Eng- and North land. These posts were sometimes strongly ^^ fortified, as in the case of the "Steelyard" in London, and the Hanse representatives were subjected to strict disci- pline, and were forbidden to marry during their residence abroad. As if these restrictions were not sufficient, newly arriving apprentices at Bergen were initiated into the Hanse by numerous floggings and duckings or by being hauled up by a rope through a smoky chimney and made to answer questions en route. At Bergen and Novgorod the Hanse merchants became all-powerful, largely monopolizing the trade of Norway and shutting off the Russians from the Baltic Sea and from direct intercourse with western Eu- rope. And while Hanseatic merchants had many privileges in Bruges and London, they tried to keep the commerce of the Baltic entirely for themselves and to exclude traders of all other nations from their home towns. The fisheries in the Baltic and North Seas were a source of great profit, since in the Middle Ages every one abstained from meat on Friday 544 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE and monks on most other days. Wax for candles and amber for rosaries were other Northern commodities then in great demand. Other products in which there was an extensive trade were timber, furs, certain metals, grain, and beer. The prosperity and greatness of the Hanseatic League continued through the fifteenth century. Then came its gradual decline owing to such events as the cap- ture of Novgorod in 1478 by Ivan of Russia, changes in ocean currents and in the location of the herring fishing, the rise of the Dutch and English peoples to mari- time and commercial power, and the confusion in Germany caused by the Protestant Revolt and the religious wars which followed it. The Teutonic Knights not only carried on a long crusade against the heathen Prussians and other non-German peo- pies of Poland, Lithuania, and western Russia, Teutonic but established a territorial state along the east Knights shore of the Baltic and encouraged German col- onization in this area. About 1202 the town of Riga had been founded by a German who became its first bishop and who employed the Brethren of the Sword in conquering Livonia from the Wends and Letts. Ten years later a monk tried to play the same role as Bishop of Prussia, where he founded the Knights of Dobrzin. This effort, however, was a failure. So in 1228 the Teutonic Knights, hitherto active in the Holy Land, were invited in and began in the next year their conquest of what is now called East Prussia. The Grand Master of the Order was made by Frederick II a prince of the Holy Roman Empire. The two other military orders which have been mentioned soon amalgamated with the Teutonic Order, which became very popular and was loaded with gifts. Early in the fourteenth century the Knights, whose activities had at first been eastward from the Vistula, acquired Pomerelia to the west of that river and thus shut off Poland from the Baltic. In 1346 Denmark ceded Estho- nia to the Knights. The numerous towns which sprang up along the east coast of the Baltic as a result of the Knights' conquests usually joined the Hanseatic League. The four- 546 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE teenth century saw the Knights at the height of their power and constantly campaigning against the Lithuanians. Their territory extended along the Baltic coast from West Prussia to the Gulf of Finland. But the conversion of the Lithuanians deprived them of the excuse for any further conquests, and the union after 1386 of Poland and Lith- uania under one ruler produced a neighbor who was too strong for them. In the fifteenth century they were de- feated by Poland and their power was confined to East Prus- sia where it had started. We have not time to consider in detail the medieval his- tory of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Their kings were The three elected, as was the custom also in Poland, Bo- vi^nkkig"- hernia, and Hungary. The clergy and nobility doms as a rule during this period increased in landed property and political power at the expense both of the Crown and the mass of peasant proprietors, who tended to sink toward serfdom. Trade was in the hands of the Han- seatic League and the chief towns passed under German influence. For the rest, the course of events in these North- ern lands bore a general resemblance to that in other European countries. They felt the influence of the Hil- debrandine reforms in the Church and of the Cistercian monks; they participated in the crusades and sent scholars to Paris and other universities; they had their troubles with papal legates and interdicts, with unpalatable royal tax- ation and depreciation of the coinage. Save for Norse and Icelandic literature, they were somewhat behind the devel- opment of civilization in western and southern Europe. For instance, while Sweden was nominally converted at the beginning of the eleventh century, the faith was not really spread throughout the land nor the Church thoroughly organized until the middle of the twelfth cen- tury. Similarly the first Scandinavian universities were founded at Upsala in 1476 and at Copenhagen in 1479. Denmark was a great power from 1 182 to 1223, with sway over such cities as Hamburg and Lubeck and over the re- gions of Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Pomerelia, Prussia, and GERMANY IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 547 Esthonia. But then its empire underwent speedy dissolu- tion, and later Denmark itself seemed liable to divide into several petty states. In 1397 the three Scandinavian king- doms came under one sovereign in the Union of Kalmar, which did not benefit nor please any one of the three coun- tries and which was maintained with difficulty and occa- sional secessions during the remainder of the Middle Ages. EXERCISES AND READINGS Source Selections. Thatcher and McNeal, Source Book for Medieval History, selection 152, pp. 267-69, "Union of the Forest Cantons"; selection 160, a and b, pp. 306-08, "Acquisition of the Mark of Brandenburg by the Hohen- zollern Family." The Golden Bull. Thatcher and McNeal, Source Book for Medieval History, pp. 283-305; or, more fully, Henderson, Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, pp. 220-61. i The Holy Roman Empire. W. Stubbs, Germany in the Later Middle Ages, edited by Hassall. Any chapter from the third, which deals with the Interregnum, to the ninth, on the reign of Sigismund. Rise of the Swiss Confederation. Coolidge on Switzerland history, pp. 246-51 of the appropriate volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, nth edition. Lodge, The Close of the Middle Ages, chap, vii, pp. 126-38. The Hanseatic League. Zimmern, Hansa Towns, pp. 49, 95-96, 137-40, 143-47, I54~55. 166-68, 191-93- Henderson, Short History of Germany, diap. viii, pp. 181-202. Lodge, The Close of the Middle Ages, chap, viii, pp. 419-51. Article on the "Hanseatic League," in the Encyclopcedia Britannica, nth edition. The Teutonic Order and Poland. Lodge, The Close of the Middle Ages, chap, xix, pp. 452-67. Henderson, Short History of Germany, chap, viii, pp. 172-81. CHAPTER XXIX EASTERN EUROPE IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES Again we must turn back to the thirteenth century, this time to trace the history of eastern Europe from the Mongol invasions of 1241 to the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 — the same date that marked the close of the Hundred Years War. In the preceding year, 1452, had occurred the last coronation of a Holy Roman emperor at Rome — that of Frederick III. The chief event in the history of Asia and of eastern Europe in the thirteenth century was the rise of the vast The Mongol empire of the Tartars or Mongols and their in- invasions vasions as far west as central Europe and the Balkans. The Tartars were of a kindred race to the Huns and other Asiatic mounted nomads whose incursions west- ward we have already noted, and whom they closely re- sembled in life and customs. But their home was farther east, and they were of Mongolian rather than Ural-Altaian stock. They soon, however, included the Altaian nomads in their empire. The founder of this Mongol Empire was Jenghiz Khan, under whom the Tartars united in a vast conquering horde which swept over Asia in a career of vic- tory after victory. Early in the thirteenth century they broke through the Great Wall of China and took Peking; they rapidly subdued central Asia; and about 1222 they reached Europe and defeated the Russian princes and the Rumanians who lived between the Don and the Danube. The Rumanians and the Russians continued their resist- ance, nevertheless, and received aid from the Bulgars and the Magyars, who were respectively located south of the Danube and east of the Carpathian and the Transylvanian Mountains. Then the ruler of the western dominions of the Mongols, Batu by name, a grandson of Jenghiz Khan, sent east for reinforcements. In 1237 this new wave of nomads EASTERN EUROPE IN LATER MIDDLE AGES 549 reached the Volga; the next year they took Moscow; in 1239 they so defeated the Rumanians that these took ref- uge in Hungary; in the following year Kiev, Cracow, and Breslau were sacked; in 1241 King Bela of Hungary was completely crushed and his army almost annihilated. The cruel and savage Tartar host then fearfully devastated the Hungarian plain, and also ravaged Bulgaria, Serbia, and Bosnia. Then news of the death of the Great Khan caused their withdrawal eastward. Much, however, of what is now Russia remained under their rule until almost the close of the fifteenth century, and for a still longer period was more influenced in its civilization by the Orient than by the West- ern world. A collection of Russian laws which has come down to us from the period before the Mongol invasion shows that the country was then little behind western Eu- rope in its customs. This past civilization was blotted out and future development was long retarded by the Asiatic inroads. The Kingdom of the Golden Horde, as the west- ernmost encampment and dominion of the Mongols was called, extended from Turkestan and the Caspian Sea to the river Don and to Novgorod, a city which the Mongols had been unable to capture, but which was compelled in 1260 to pay tribute to the khan. Mohammedan as well as Christian lands suffered at the hands of the Mongols. Persia was terribly ravaged by their attacks and some cities ended their existence. j^o^itoI Even Bagdad was taken and sacked in 1258, but conquests , c '. r •, from Islam soon recovered a measure of its lormer prosperity, although its greatness under the Abbassid caliphs was gone. After taking Bagdad the Mongols had pressed on into Syria, but were driven out by the Mamelukes of Egypt. These Mamelukes were captives in war of whom the Seljuk sultans had composed their bodyguard, but one of them had recently made himself Sultan of Egypt. The Mongols at first struck Christian Europe with much the same horror that the Huns had produced, and many looked for them to fulfill the prophecies concerning Antichrist and Gog and Magog. Then, however, came hopes of using 550 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE them as allies against the Moslems in the East and even of Relations of converting them to Christianity. Ambassadors Christendom were dispatched from the West to the court of Kf n*Y ^^^ khan, and Roman Catholic missionaries also Empire went out to the Far East, where hitherto only Nestorian Christians had been known. Of the letters, re- ports, and books written by such travelers to Asia and by merchants like Marco Polo, we have already spoken in dis- cussing the knowledge of geography in the Middle Ages. Kublai Khan, at whose court and in whose employ Marco Polo spent so many years, had taken up his residence in Peking and had adopted much of Chinese civilization, al- though in the summer he still migrated, in nomad fashion, north to his native Mongolia. The envoys from the West failed to effect much of diplomatic advantage in their long- distance interviews with the khan, and the missionaries had no lasting success. The western Tartars were gradually con- verted to Islam, and those in China adopted the heathen faiths current there. In 1 368-1 370, however, the Chinese revolted and drove the Mongols out of their land. The fact that the whole breadth of Asia was under the despotic rule of a single head made It easy to trade with the T, , , Far East. The Great Khan was feared far and 1 rade routes ^ _ ^ _ ■ to the wide, for he maintained relays of swift horse- men between the different parts of his extensive empire, to keep him informed of what was going on; and his dreaded cavalry would have descended rapidly upon any region that disregarded his commands or attacked persons who were under his protection. The shortest trade route to Cathay and Peking from Europe was the northern one from ports at the mouth of the Don or on the Sea of Azov. This ran north of the Black Sea, beyond the Volga, past the Caspian Sea and then across the expanse of central Asia. From Trebizond on the south shore of the Black Sea, and also from the Clllcian ports of Lesser Armenia, trade routes converged on Erzerum, and thence led to Tabriz, which was the chief market of western Asia under Mongol rule. A Spanish traveler in 1404 described it as containing over two The Mongol Empire and Routes 100 21111 :;i II I 41 III .■ Trade Routes ■ Carjiini'a journey from Cracow to Karakon . ]!iijruk'» journey from the Crimea to i;arakorum and return to Asia Minor Marco Polo's journey from I^eseer Armenia and return ■ Ciinquests of Tiiiuir (or Tamerlane ) Christian territory overrun hy the __^.._ Mongols 1 •k Mohaiumedan territory overrun by the V^^ r -^ 1 .viojiam P ' ~ ' MoULTol 1 1 Tihct and Chinese Emiiiie comiucrcd by the I 1 Mongols ~\ Homes of the nomads in Mon-olia. Turke-tan. etc. l_ — — 60' l.oniJlMde West from CJr.einvieh EASTERN EUROPE IN LATER MIDDLE AGES 551 hundred thousand dwelling-houses and as reported to have once had an even greater population. From this center routes continued east to Bokhara and Samarkand, while others led south to the great port of Ormuz on the Persian Gulf, whence one could proceed to India and Ceylon by sea. There was also, of course, the southernmost route by the Red Sea which did not pass through Mongol territory. Russia remained under the sway of the Golden Horde until nearly the close of the fifteenth century. The Mongols allowed the Russians their own religion and to ^ . , . , , . , Russia some extent their own laws and pnnces, who were, however, liable to be executed at any moment by order of the khan. But the Mongols forced the Russians to serve in their armies, burdened them with oppressive taxes, and enslaved them if they did not pay. Under such conditions economic or intellectual progress was impos- sible. Finally, about 1480 the Golden Horde broke up and Russia escaped from the Mongol yoke. Ivan HI of Mos- cow ( 1 462-1 505) now tried to bring all Russia under his rule. He ruined Novgorod and drove out the Hanseatic merchants, and carried on successful campaigns against the Lithuanians. While both Poland and Hungary had suffered terribly from the first Mongol invasions, they escaped the later domination of the Golden Horde. These two Kingdoms countries and Bohemia were contiguous, and as of central a result tended to form dynastic unions or to engage in wars over questions of boundaries with one an- other. In all three countries the kingship was elective. Silesia, comprising the upper valley of the Oder, was the disputed territory lying between Poland and Bohemia. Galicia, just north of the Carpathians, was the frontier region between Poland and Hungary, while Moravia inter- vened between Hungary and Bohemia. During much of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Poland had been divided into several contending „ , , T- ^ 1 T7-- r T^ 1 . Poland states, rrom 1300 to 1306 the Kmg of Bohemia became king of the Poles also, and when the two coun- 552 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE tries again had separate rulers, the Duchy of Silesia went with Bohemia. On the other hand, when the native line of princes came to an end in Galicia, that region was annexed to Poland. King Casimir the Great (1333-1370) collected and published the laws, favored the growth of cities, yet was known as "The Peasants' King" because of his care for their welfare, and laid the foundations of the later (1400) university at Cracow. From 1370 to 1382 Poland was ruled by Louis, King of Hungary, but upon his death the nobility offered the crown Union with to Jagello, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, upon Lithuania ^j^g condition that he marry Louis's daughter, Hedwig, and that the Lithuanians accept Christianity. The principality of Lithuania, with its capital at Vilna, had ex- panded to cover much of western Russia. It even included Kiev and stretched to the Black Sea. Thus the union with Lithuania in 1386 under the dynasty of the Jagellons greatly increased the extent of Poland. It acquired more territory and access to the Baltic as well as to the Black Sea by its conquests during the fifteenth century at the expense of the Teutonic Knights, who finally lost all their other pos- sessions and continued to hold East Prussia only as a fief from the Polish King. From 1 310 to 1437 Bohemia was ruled by the House of Luxemburg, many of whom were Emperors of Germany as . well as Kings of Bohemia. Charles IV furthered the prosperity of the land and founded the Uni- versity of Prague (1348), where the students formed four nations of Bohemians and Poles, Bavarians and Saxons. He encouraged the Czech language and the native merchants, although he continued, like Ottocar II and other previous princes, to call in German colonists, and although his chan- cery at Prague did much to fix a written form of Middle German which marks an important step in the development toward a common German tongue. Charles IV, indeed, prob- ably hoped, like Ottocar, to make Bohemia the center from which his dynasty should rule Germany or at least large portions of it. Thus, while his university was the first one EASTERN EUROPE IN LATER MIDDLE AGES 553 started in the Empire north of the Alps, and was meant for Germans as much as for Poles and Bohemians, he lo- cated it in the Bohemian capital. In the fifteenth century Bohemia became a prey to religious discontent and the destructive Hussite Wars of which we shall speak in the next chapter in connection with church history. A branch of the same House of Anjou which the popes had called in to rule Naples in the thirteenth century, reigned in Hungary in the fourteenth from 1309 ^^^ ^ to 1382. When King Louis died in 1382, Sigis- mund, who had married his older daughter, became King of Hungary, although the Poles refused to have him and, as we have seen, instead took Louis's younger daughter and married her to Jagello of Lithuania and chose him as their king. The reign of Sigismund in Hungary was not over- glorious, since it took him some time to establish his au- thority, and then in 1396 the Ottoman Turks defeated him at Nicopolis and overran a good deal of his kingdom. Sigis- mund, who it will be remembered, became emperor in 1410, succeeded his brother Wenzel as King of Bohemia as well, where he reigned from 141 9 to his death in 1437, so far as the Hussites, indignant at his betrayal of their leader, would let him. On Sigismund's death, Bohemia and Hungary, like the imperial office which he had held, passed for a few years to the House of Hapsburg, But then, through exer- cise of the old custom of election by the nobility, the two lands came under the rule of native kings and did not again come into the possession of the Austrian dynasty until well into the sixteenth century. From Hungary we pass on in our survey of Eastern lands to the Balkan peninsula. In 1261 the Genoese, who were jealous of Venetian preponderance in the JEgean The Balkan and Black Seas, helped to overthrow the Latin and Con- Empire, which the Fourth Crusade had set up stantinople in 1204, and to restore the rule of a Greek dynasty at Constantinople. But this revived Byzantine Empire was small and weak; the Frankish principalities in central and southern Greece remained independent; and Venice kept 554 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE her possessions on the coasts of Greece and in the islands of the JEgean. In 1291, however, the Latins lost their last foothold on the coast of Syria to the Moslems. Sometime after the Mongols had receded from the territory which is now Roumania, the two native principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia were founded. They "continued to exist in one form or another until their union under a single ruler in the present century." Under Stephen VI (1331-1355), Serbia became for a time the chief power in the Balkan peninsula. Stephen extended his sway over Macedonia, Thessaly, Epirus, Albania, Bosnia, and part of Bulgaria; and assumed the title, Emperor of the Romans. In the later Middle Ages the Ottoman Turks, so named from Osman, one of their early leaders, take the place of the j^. J j^ Seljuks of the crusading period, and have re- Ottoman mained a problem of world diplomacy to this ^^ ^ day. Their invasion of Europe represents the last we have to consider of those successive waves of mounted Asiatic nomads who, ever since the Huns drove the West Goths across the Danube, had so frequently appeared in medieval history. In the thirteenth century the Ottoman Turks established themselves in Asia Minor and by the first part of the fourteenth century had conquered all the Byzantine possessions in Asia except Trebizond. In the course of time they altered considerably their nomadic mode of life, but they have never shown much capacity for civili- zation. They were great fighters and fanatically devoted to Islam. They were fortunate from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century in having sultans of great ability. They themselves preferred to fight on horseback, but they also made much use of the Janizaries — Christian children who were captured and trained to serve as infantry. Presently a civil war broke out in Constantinople and the rival parties not only turned for aid to Serbia, Bulgaria, They enter Venice, and Genoa, but also employed the Otto- Europe mans as mercenaries. The result was that not only Serbia, Bulgaria, and Genoa took for themselves slices of Byzantine territory, but that in 1 353-1 354 the Turks 556 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE seized some strongholds at GallipoH on the European shore of the Hellespont. Under Amurath or Murad I (1359-1389), they began to extend their power into the Balkan peninsula and to emigrate and settle there in considerable numbers. They took Adrianople in 136 1. In 137 1 they defeated a Serbian prince at the head of a coalition of Roumanians, Magyars, and Bosnians. Another ten years and they had taken Sofia, the present capital of Bulgaria. Just before his death Murad I defeated the alliance of the Balkan States at the bloody battle of Kosovo ("the plain of the black- birds"). Under Murad's son, Bajazet (1389-1403), the conquest of Macedonia and Thessaly was completed; the independent Kingdom and Church of Bulgaria were blotted out; and many Bulgarians were transplanted to Asia Minor. Bajazet also forced the Princes of Serbia and Wallachia to recognize his overlordship, and sent punitive expeditions into Bosnia. Bosnia in the later Middle Ages was a land weakened by incessant local warfare, and by religious strife between the Roman Catholics, the Greek Christians, and the heretical Cathari. It consequently of- fered slight resistance to the Turks. Hungary was now endangered and at Sigismund's request the pope preached a crusade in which French, English, Germans, and Poles as well as Hungarians participated, but they were crushed at Nicopolis in 1396. Bajazet next turned his attention to Constantinople, which already had been forced to pay trib- ute, and it would probably have fallen at this time had he not been called away from its siege to meet a new conqueror in Asia. Timur (1336-1405), or Tamerlane, — which, however, means Timur the Lame and was really an insulting epithet ^ , applied to him, — had renewed the terrible in- Tamerlane . titit ttii ii- vasions of the Mongols. He had made himself master of central Asia, had conquered Persia, the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, and Armenia, and had penetrated south- ward to Delhi in India. The Golden Horde also owned his sway and he made expeditions to the Volga. Indeed, he EASTERN EUROPE IN LATER MIDDLE AGES 557 conducted all his conquests In person and with great cruelty, leaving a trail of blood and ruins behind him. He built towers of the skulls of those whom he had slain or embedded the bodies of the living in walls with stones and mortar. His oldest son, however, went him one worse when he began to tear down all the famous buildings that he could lay hands on in order "that men might say, ' Miran Mirza did nothing himself, but he commanded the destruction of the world's noblest works.' " This morbid craving for ill-fame his father discouraged by deposing him. Timur himself maintained a showy court at Samarkand, and, when he sacked other cities, transferred their treasures, artisans, and scholars thither to adorn his new capital. In 1400 he defeated the Mameluke Sultan of Syria and Egypt, burned the city of Damascus which had surrendered without resistance, and massacred many of its inhabitants. The next year he took Bagdad and is said to have reared a trophy of ninety thousand human heads. In 1402 at Angora he crushed the army of the hith- erto victorious Bajazet, who died in captivity the next year. Timur returned to Samarkand and prepared a great expedi- tion to conquer China, but died on the march. His vast empire quickly dissolved. An interesting account has come down to us of thirty- two years of travel and adventure as a slave in all sorts of lands, including Siberia, by Hans Schelt- berger, a German boy of sixteen who was captured by the Turks at Nicopolis. They spared his life because of his youth; then he was captured from Bajazet by Timur, and thereafter was tossed to and fro for years among the wan- dering Tartars. For some years after their defeat at Angora, the Turks were too weak to renew their attacks upon Christendom, and Bajazet's sons were occupied in quarreling j, , over his dominions. But under Murad II (142 1- Turkish 1451), Constantinople was again unsuccessfully besieged, and Saloniki was captured from Venice only after a siege of seven years. In 1439 the Turks overran Serbia, but failed to take Belgrade, and then had several successive defeats administered to them by the Hungarian general, 558 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE John Hunyadi, so that they agreed in 1444 to evacuate Ser- bia and Herzegovina and to yield Wallachia to Hungary. But the King of Poland, who also claimed the throne of Hungary, broke this treaty of peace in the hope of driving the Turks from Europe entirely. Instead, he was defeated and killed at Varna and the Turks recovered all that they had surrendered. In 1448 even Hunyadi was beaten, and Constantinople at last was taken in 1453 by Mohammed II (1451-1481). The Fall of Con- Byzantine emperor had agreed in 1438 to unite stantinople ^j^|^ ^j^g Western Church, but he received little aid from the Western powers, while the loyalty of the clergy and populace of Constantinople was lessened by this sub- mission, as they regarded it, to the Papacy. Mohammed II left the Christians their own language, religion, and customs, and they speedily restored the Greek Church. But the Byzantine Empire was forever at an end, and since 1453 Constantinople has been the capital of Turkey, and Jus- tinian's great church of St. Sophia has served as a Moham- medan mosque. In 1456, however, the Turks again failed to take Belgrade, which was relieved by an army of crusaders under John Further Hunyadi and a papal legate. Hunyadi died soon of Moham- ^.ftcr his victory, but his son, Matthias Corvinus, med II was elected King of Hungary, and the Bohemi- ans at the same time chose a native ruler, George of Podie- brad. But instead of uniting against the Turks these two national kings became embroiled in strife with each other. Meanwhile Trebizond had been conquered by the Turks, central and southern Greece had been occupied by them, and the Parthenon at Athens was converted into a mosque. Wallachia, Serbia, and Bosnia were also all in the hands of the Turks. Albania had held out since 1443 under its able leader Scanderbeg and then under his son, but with the fall of Scutari in 1479 its resistance was over. Thus the Turks held practically the entire Balkan Peninsula. Venice, to save its trading privileges in the East, made peace with them in 1479. The next year the Moslems made a vain attempt EASTERN EUROPE IN LATER MIDDLE AGES 559 to capture Rhodes from the Hospitalers, and also landed in southern Italy at Otranto. But then the death of Moham- med II caused their withdrawal and they attempted no further conquests in Europe during the rest of the century. EXERCISES AND READINGS Map Exercise. On outline maps of Europe and Asia indicate the boundaries of the states, the location of other places, and the trade routes which have been mentioned in the above chapter. Chronological Review. Arrange in chronological order the events for which specific dates are given in the above chapter. The Mongols in the Thirteenth Century. Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, vol. ll, pp. 325-30, William of Rubruk's account; pp. 281-86, 288-93, John de Piano Carpini's account. Western Embassies to the Mongol Court. Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, vol. n, pp. 275-317, Carpini's ac- count; pp. 320-75, Rubruk's account; pp. 317-20, Mission of Andrew. Bohemia: Reigns of Ottocar II and Charles IV. Liitzow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (edition of 1909), pp. 44-49, 69-76. Leger, A History of Austria-Hungary (New York, 1889), pp. 103-11, 119-26, 161-64. The Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Turks. Duruy, History of the Middle Ages, pp. 492-503. Lodge, The Close of the Middle Ages, chap, xxi, pp. 494-514. Tamerlane and his Court. Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, vol. iii, pp. 342-54. Turkish Characteristics and Humor. Eliot, Turkey in Europe, pp. 87-97, 107-11. CHAPTER XXX THE PAPACY AND ITS OPPONENTS IN THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES From 1309 to 1376 the popes remained at Avignon, a period of seventy years which suggested comparison with The Papacy the Babylonian Captivity of the Jewish people, at Avignon fhis long abscncc from Rome greatly scandalized many persons. First, the Romans, who lost the presence of the splendid papal court and the profitable stream of pil- grims and clergy from other lands. Second, the Italians like Dante and Petrarch, who felt aggrieved that Italy had thus been abandoned to its fate and that Italian families had been deprived of their accustomed first pick of all the choice church positions. Third, the English, who contended that the popes were favoring their foes, the French. Fourth, the Germans, who resented the pope's claim to temporal supe- riority over the Holy Roman Emperor and his refusal to con- firm as emperor whomsoever they elected, his disinclination to recognize any longer the imperial power in Italy, and his attempt on one occasion to make the French king Holy Roman Emperor. Fifth, all Christians who believed as a matter of principle that Rome was the true capital of Christendom. A prominent feature of the Avignon residence was a large increase in papal expenditure and revenue. This was ac- Increased complished partly by bringing into the pope's papal hands the right of appointment to an increasing number of church offices, and then demanding of these papal appointees, not five per cent, as a modern em- ployment bureau does when it gets one a position, but one half of the first year's income of the bishopric or other pre- bend. This payment was known as "annates." Moreover, far-sighted ofhce-seekers in the Church sometimes, by a liberal expenditure, received assurances at the papal court THE PAPACY AND ITS OPPONENTS 561 that a certain position should be theirs upon the death of the present incumbent. Another source of papal revenue was from payments for dispensations, and from the contri- butions of the faithful in connection with indulgences, par- dons, and jubilees or anniversaries. There were regular papal collectors scattered over western Europe, which was systematically divided up for the purpose into seven regions ; namely, the British Isles, the Scandinavian kingdoms, Po- land and Hungary, Germany and Bohemia, France, the Spanish peninsula, and Italy. At the papal court great mag- nificence prevailed, and the subordinate officials at least were very corrupt and demanded no end of tips and fees. One reason, however, why the popes required more revenue at Avignon was that their possessions in Italy were in a state of rebellion and confusion and that they not only derived little income from them any longer, but spent a good deal in endeavoring to subdue them. Indeed, the popes remained at Avignon partly because Rome and its vicinity had for a long time been gradually growing too hot for them. Whatever good reasons it may have had for being at Avignon, the Papacy did not escape criticism. John XXII, besides his struggle with the German emperor, -^j^^ Louis of Bavaria, had another with the Spiritual Spiritual Franciscans, as those of the Order called them- selves who insisted upon absolute fidelity to the injunctions of St. Francis and standards of apostolic poverty. The pope, on the contrary, supported the inquisitor of Narbonne in his declaration that it was heresy to assert that neither Christ nor the apostles individually or collectively possessed any property. There were other movements akin to the Spiritual Franciscans, such as those of the Fraticelli and the Beguins and Beghards. These, too, were often persecuted by the Church as heretics. Louis of Bavaria's court physician, Marsiglio of Padua, who had been rector at the University of Paris, Marsiglio of and who sided with the emperor and the Spir- ^^^ defensor itual Franciscans against the pope, wrote a re- P"*^" markable work, The Defender of Peace, which was translated 562 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE from the Latin into both French and Italian. The idea in the title is that the exorbitant power claimed by the pope has disturbed the peace of the world, to recover which it is essential to restore the State to its proper place of superi- ority in all worldly concerns, to reduce the pope to his and the clergy to their proper places in the Church itself as well as in society, and to recognize the fundamental sovereignty of the entire community of believers in the Church and that of the people in the State. The clergy should not judge or govern the people, but merely preach and administer the sacraments to them. The Church itself is made up of lay- men as well as of the clergy. Such a power as that of ex- communication should be exercised only by the entire Church. Marsiglio also asserts that the theory of papal primacy is not supported by the Bible. Of the feeling against the Papacy in England in the four- teenth century we have already noted signs in the Statutes p. J. , of Provisors and Prcemunire, the repudiation of criticism of John's tribute, and the hostility toward the clergy manifested in connection with the Peas- ants' Revolt. And it had even been proposed in Parliament to confiscate the property of the clergy for political needs. The author of The Vision of Piers the Ploughman, although he is careful to protest his orthodoxy and is evidently deeply devout and devotes the greater part of his poem to religion, nevertheless finds, like Dante and Chaucer, much to criti- cize in the Church of his time. The friars are "preaching to the people for profit of their paunch." Papal legates keep fools and jesters and encourage flatterers and liars. Parsons and parish priests, archdeacons and deacons "Are loping to London by leave of their bishop To sing there for simony, for silver is sweet." The pardoners who blind the people's eyes with their bulls and briefs are really "gluttons" and "profligates who prac- tice vice" and who spend "what otherwise the poor of the parish would have." At the Day of Judgment, the poet opines, indulgences and pardons and "a pocketful of pro- vincial's letters" won't be worth "one pie crust." He com- THE PAPACY AND ITS OPPONENTS 563 plains that money "bestows bishoprics on men who are base," and permits priests "to have concubines all their lives," and that "popes and patrons refuse poor gentle blood and take Simon's son to keep sanctuary." The sin of Sloth is personified as a clergyman and confesses: — " I have been priest and parson passing thirty winters; Yet I can neither tell the notes, Nor sing, nor read a saint's life. But I can find in a field and in a furlong a hare, And hold a knight's court, and account with the reeve; But I cannot construe Cato, nor speak clerically." Such was the feeling in England when John Wyclif late in life began his work as a popular preacher and religious reformer. Previously he had been a professor at John Oxford and had written works of the scholastic ^^^^'^ type in Latin. His scholastic theories of divine and civil lordship had, however, an important bearing upon his atti- tude to the problem of Church and State and led him to question the doctrine of papal supremacy. Wyclif found for a time a powerful patron in John of Gaunt, fourth son of Edward III, and supported the Parliaments toward the close of that king's reign in their hostile attitude toward the pope's temporal and financial claims. Like the author of Piers the Ploughman, Wyclif criticized the pilgrimages, indulgences, and worship of relics of his time, the mendicant orders, and the lives of other clergy. He believed that it would be bet- ter for the Church to lose its vast lands and wealth and be reduced to apostolic poverty. He also believed that the peo- ple lacked religious instruction. He preached to them and wrote tracts for them in their own tongue, founded an or- ganization of "poor priests" to do the same, and had the Bible translated into English. Thus he is one of the founders of English prose. Wyclif was a forerunner of the later Protestants in making the Bible the sole standard of religious belief and practice, and in rejecting such customs and doctrines of ^ forerunner the medieval Church as he felt could not be of Protes- justified by Scripture ; for instance, auricular con- fession, celibacy of the clergy, masses for the dead, and the 564 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE doctrine of purgatory. He not only denied to the pope and clergy any political power and held that the State was as directly founded and authorized by God as was the Church. He not only declared that the clergy were entitled to their privileges and property only so long as they lived and taught in a way to deserve them. He also argued that their spiritual power depended upon their personal faith and conduct. Even a pope who did not live a Christlike life was no head of the Church, but an antichrist. Salvation, Wyclif taught, depends not upon obedience to pope or priest, but upon divine grace and predestination and upon the faith of the individual believer. Wyclif, in fine, proclaimed "the uni- versal priesthood of believers" and denied the special sac- ramental power of the clergy. Some of the seven sacraments, like confirmation and extreme unction, he rejected entirely, and he even dared to attack the theory of transubstantia- tion in the mass. He denied any material change in the bread and wine or any priestly miracle, and taught that in the sacrament one does not actually partake of the body of Christ, but sees Him through faith and communes with Him in spirit. The pope had tried to call Wyclif to account in 1377 be- fore he had done much more than to attack the political Persecution power and worldly possessions of the clergy, but °^ Jh'^^'^ ^^^ support of John of Gaunt and of the populace followers saved him. After this he went on to more and more radical utterances, until in 1381 his denial of tran- substantiation lost him the favor of John of Gaunt and his position at Oxford. The Peasants' Revolt, for which many held him responsible, further injured his popularity. But the House of Commons declined to cooperate with the Archbishop of Canterbury in persecuting him, and while he retired to his parish in Lutterworth, he continued to pro- duce pamphlets until his death in 1384. His followers, known as "Lollards," ^ continued through the reign of 1 The origin of the word "Lollards," a term of reproach applied to the fol- lowers of Wyclif by their enemies, has been disputed. But the word "loUer" often occurs in The Vision of Piers the Ploughman, and evidently means one who lolls about and reclines at his ease; in other words, an idler, loafer, vaga- THE PAPACY AND ITS OPPONENTS 565 Richard II, when they seem to have been influential even at court; but early in the reign of Henry IV Parliament passed the statute De hceretico comburendo, which provided that they should be burned at the stake when turned over by the church courts to the secular authorities. After this the Lol- lards were pretty well stamped out in England, but some survived to help kindle the later reformation. The great schism in the Papacy, which began in 1378, had probably emboldened Wyclif to increase the vigor of his attack upon the Papacy and had enabled him to ^^.j j^ ^^ escape punishment for his heretical views. Greg- the great ory XI had at last returned to Rome in 1377 and ^^ '^"^ had died there the following year. The Roman populace now raised a great tumult outside the Vatican palace and insisted upon a Roman, or at least an Italian, as the next pope. The cardinals thereupon elected the Archbishop of Bari, a Neapolitan, who became Pope Urban VI. He soon turned the cardinals against him by his scoldings and other measures directed against their worldly extravagant life and their corrupt manipulation of ecclesiastical offices. Moreover, during the past century the cardinals had ac- quired considerable power and were therefore incensed at what they regarded as an unwarrantable infringement of their privileges and a cruel tyranny. They expected half of the papal revenues and a share in the direction of papal policy. Finally the Ultramontane or French cardinals left Rome and elected one of their own number, Robert of Geneva, as Pope Clement VII (i 378-1 394). There had been schisms in the Papacy before, but the anti-popes had usually owed their office to the Holy Roman Emperor. Now the Church was divided against itself; the schism was due to bond, or irregular wandering clerk or hermit. This last is the sort of life that the poet represents himself as leading when he was "clothed as a loller ... in these long clothes." Again he speaks of "lunatic lollers and wanderers," and in a third passage says: — " This is the life of lollers and lewd hermits; To look very lowly in order to gain alms of men, In hope to sit at evening by the hot coals. With outstretched legs lying at their ease. Resting, and roasting their backs by the fire. Drinking dry and deep.". 566 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE a quarrel between the cardinals and the pope. The French cardinals declared that the election of Urban had been forced upon them by the Roman mob. It was hard to learn the true facts of the case and many pious people were in honest doubt who was the rightful pope. The cardinals, however, had not raised objections to Urban's election im- mediately, but only when they saw how he acted as pope. The Roman Catholic Church since has regarded Urban as the rightful pope. Meanwhile Urban had more than doubled the number of cardinals by appointing twenty-nine Italians in order to Continua- Command a majority of the college. It must be tion of the admitted that Urban was a very hard person to get on with. He moved his court from Rome to Naples, from Naples to Nocera, from Nocera to Genoa, from Genoa to Lucca, from Lucca to Perugia, from Perugia back to Rome, where he died in 1389 — poisoned, it was whis- pered, by the Romans. No matter who might be monarch at Naples, Urban quarreled with him ; and the pope's own Italian cardinals were soon conspiring against him. But when he died, they elected another pope who continued the strug- gle against Clement VII ; and when Clement died, his cardi- nals also chose a successor. Thus the schism bade fair to become interminable, since there were two rival colleges of cardinals ever ready to continue it. Another circumstance that perpetuated the schism was that the different rulers and nations of Europe had taken different sides. The sup- port of the French king seemed to insure the pope at Avig- non from overthrow; he was also recognized by Castile, Aragon, Navarre, Scotland, Flanders, and a few Italian and German principalities. But most of Italy and Germany, also Poland, Hungary, the Scandinavian kingdoms, England, and Portugal, sided with the line of popes which began with Urban VI. In order to retain the support of these states, the rival popes had to make many concessions and abandon to a large extent the previous papal custom of interference in national politics. On the other hand, there were now two papal THE PAPACY AND ITS OPPONENTS 567 courts to be maintained and so the burden of papal taxation was felt more than during the Avignon period. , . . . , ° or- Injurious Also m many localities there were struggles for effect upon church positions and benefices between rival ^ ^ ""^^ appointees of the two popes. These circumstances, and the unreadiness of the rival popes and cardinals to make sacrifices in order to restore church unity, caused great scandal and distress throughout Christendom and greatly damaged the prestige of the Papacy. The religious life of the people also suffered. As a result, many writers, especi- ally at the University of Paris, suggested methods for end- ing the schism and demanded accompanying reforms in the Church. At last the two colleges of cardinals came to an under- standing and in 1409 joined in summoning a general council at Pisa and ordered their respective popes to The Council appear before this assembly. When they failed °^ ^'^^ to appear, they were both deposed as notorious schismatics and heretics, and the cardinals combined to elect a new pope, Alexander V. But the Kingdom of Naples and a few other states of Italy and Germany persisted in supporting the cause of Gregory XII, the third successor of Urban VI, ■"^^hile the Spanish peninsula and Scotland still adhered to Benedict XIII of the Avignon line. Alexander V died the next year and was succeeded by a warlike cardinal who had been helping him to conquer the Papal States and who now took the title, John XXIII. Thus the Council of Pisa, in- stead of ending the schism, had made it a triple one. The Emperor Sigismund now succeeded in assembling at Constance, a German city where no one of the three popes would have much influence, a larger and more The Council 11 J. J-' '1 ^L A.\- ^ J. ofConstance: generally representative council than that at healing of Pisa. It was, indeed, one of the most impressive the schism gatherings during the Middle Ages and lasted for three years. John XXIII came in person, bringing with him a throng of Italian supporters. But their numbers were ren- dered of no avail by the decision of the council that voting should not be by heads, but by four nations; namely, the 568 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE French, Italians, English, and Germans. This recognition of different nationalities by a Church supposed to be catholic was indeed significant of the rise of new social groups and forces. The council also received the envoys of Gregory and Benedict as papal legates, and it became evident that the plan was to secure the resignation of all three popes. John at first agreed to resign if both the others should do the same, but then he fled from Constance and called his clergy to him. But the English, French, and German nations stood firm; the cardinals and other clergy who had joined John soon deserted him again; Frederick of Tyrol, who had given him protection, was defeated by Sigismund with the aid of the Swiss; and John himself was captured, deposed, and kept a prisoner until the council was over and the schism ended. Gregory resigned voluntarily, but although Sigismund went to Narbonne and Perpignan to interview Benedict, he could not persuade him to abdicate. Sigis- mund did, however, induce Benedict's Spanish and Scotch supporters to abandon him and to participate in the Council of Constance. Martin V, of the Roman family of Colonna, was elected pope in 141 7 and therewith the great schism was practically ended. While healing the schism, the council also considered the problem of a new heresy. The writings of Wyclif had by the ^ , „ end of the fourteenth century reached Bohemia, John Huss 11. • 1 1-11 and his views had been adopted and widely spread by John Huss, rector of the University of Prague, and a preacher of great influence among the people. As a re- sult he had already been excommunicated in 141 1. Jerome of Prague had further disseminated these ideas in Austria, Hungary, Poland, and even in Lithuania and Russia. Huss also had opposed a papal bull, which preached a crusade against the King of Naples and offered indulgences in order to raise money for this purpose. He had none the less be- come the idol of the Bohemian people, and all efforts to check the spread of Wyclifism in that country had thus far been unavailing. Huss willingly appeared before the coun- cil in the vain hope of winning over to his views some or THE PAPACY AND ITS OPPONENTS 569 all of the clergy there assembled. He had received a safe- conduct from the Emperor Sigismund, but the council paid no attention to it. Huss and later Jerome of Prague were condemned to be burned at the stake. This action simply caused Huss to be regarded as a holy martyr as well as a national hero in Bohemia, and the whole country was up in arms. Priests were driven from their parishes and mon- asteries were burned. Many of the German colonists in Bohemia, however, re- mained loyal to the council and to Roman Catholicism, and the Bohemians were unable to agree among them- The selves as to their religious beliefs. The more Utraquists moderate and conciliatory party, known as the "Calixtins" or "Utraquists," and represented especially by the Bohe- mian nobility, soon adopted a platform of four articles, demanding (i) free preaching of God's word, (2) the com- munion in both kinds for the laity, (3) surrender of worldly power and property by the clergy and a return on their part to the life led by Christ and the apostles, (4) punishment by the magistrates of all deadly sins and public disorders, even if committed by the clergy. The stress laid upon allowing the laity the wine as well as the holy wafer in the Lord's Supper shows that the Utraquists were far from regarding the communion with Wyclif as a purely spiritual affair. Their name comes from the Latin word, utraque, referring to the communion "in both kinds," while Calixtins is de- rived from the calix, or cup containing the wine. Earlier than this there had been an agitation in Bohemia for a more frequent or even daily partaking of the sacrament by the laity. Thus two different currents combined to form the Huss- ite movement. The demand by the laymen for a fuller participation in the Eucharist, overemphasized The the value of the rite upon which the medieval Tabontes Church already laid the most stress. The other more pro- gressive movement, following along the trail which Wyclif had blazed, attacked the clergy and departed more or less from the customs and doctrines of the medieval Church. 570 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE The Utraqulsts had gone but a little way in this direction; the more radical party became known as the "Taborites," because their first meeting was held upon a hill to which in characteristic fashion they gave the Biblical name, Mount Tabor. They wished to do away with much of the formality and ceremony in religious worship, and their priests offi- ciated without wearing any distinctive ecclesiastical vest- ments. They also addressed one another as brothers and sisters, and represented a democratic movement among the peasantry and lower classes in contrast to the Utraquist nobles. While the Utraquists and Taborites were the two chief religious parties among the Hussites, there were fur- ther divergences of belief, and from time to time factions appeared within the two main parties. King Wenzel, who had done little toward suppressing the Hussites, died in 1419. His ob\^ous successor was his The Hussite brother, Sigismund, but the Bohemians were ^^^^ suspicious of the man who had allowed Huss to be burned to death, and it became evident that Sigismund would have to employ force to win his kingdom. The pope proclaimed a crusade against Bohemia and a great army gathered. The majority of the crusaders were Germans, just as the orthodox party in Bohemia itself was composed largely of the German settlers. Thus to religious strife was added the racial antipathy of Teuton and Czech. The cru- saders, of course, hoped to win large estates for themselves in Bohemia. But the method which the Church had found effective against the Albigensians of southern France was not to prove successful in this case. For although the Huss- ites were divided among themselves, they usually united to repel the foreign invaders, and in John Ziska, the leader of the Taborites, they possessed a great military genius. He employed the new firearms which had followed the invention of gunpowder, and also made use of ironclad wagons, which were chained together in four lines or columns and which could readily be formed into a hollow square. Even after his death from the plague in 1424, the Hussites continued their series of victories. In 1427 and 1431 the crusading THE PAPACY AND ITS OPPONENTS 571 armies fled without risking a battle, and in the years be- tween these two dates the Bohemians invaded Germany and spread terror far and wide. Both the crusaders in Bohe- mia and the Hussites in Germany were guilty of shocking atrocities. Since the Hussites could not be suppressed by force, an- other general council was called at Basel in 1431 and long negotiations ensued. While these were in proc- Compromise ess, the Hussites quarreled among themselves arranged and the moderate party of nobles administered Council of a crushing defeat to the Taborites. Finally, in 1436 the moderate Hussites accepted their four articles in a new form suggested by the council which somewhat weakened their force. The important question, however, was whether this agreement would be lived up to. The pope refused to confirm a Hussite whom the Bohemians elected Archbishop of Prague, and Sigismund was inclined toward a Roman Catholic reaction. He died the next year, how- ever; the reign of his Hapsburg successor, Albert of Austria, was brief; and then followed the long minority of Albert's posthumous son. During this minority George of Podiebrad, the leader of the Utraquists, gained the chief power, and when the young king died in 1457, he was chosen king. He main- j^ • ^^ r tained the Hussite archbishop, and, on the other George of hand, captured Mount Tabor where the radi- ° '^ "^^ cals had been holding out to the last. They survived, never- theless, as a persecuted sect and later became the Bohemian Brotherhood or Moravians. The pope now refused to stand by the compromise which the Council of Basel had made with the Hussites, and preached another crusade against Bohemia which was undertaken by Matthias Corvinus of Hungary. Podiebrad died in 1471, but was able to secure the election of a younger son of the King of Poland as his successor rather than Matthias. This king, Ladislas H, was himself a papal sympathizer, but found it necessary to tolerate the Utraquists, who con- tinued to receive the communion in both kinds. The Bohe- 572 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE mian nobles also kept the estates which they had taken from Final out- the church lands in the course of the Hussite nSte ^^^ wars. The German colonists and the monks had movement been pretty well driven out of the country, but the native peasantry, who for the most part had belonged to the defeated Taborite party, now sank into serfdom. On the whole, Bohemia had lost greatly in economic prosperity and in civilization as a result of the long period of bitter strife and cruel anarchy. But the Church and the Papacy had failed during the whole course of the fifteenth century to reduce Bohemia to obedience. Ecclesiastical authority had been long and successfully defied, and that on a sacra- mental question. Many who attended the Council of Constance had come there persuaded of the need of a thoroughgoing reform of Theconciliar the Church "in head and members." Various and church committees had been appointed and suggestions reform made, but in the end the council broke up with- out having accomplished much, leaving the task of reform to the new pope and a future council. A decree had been passed that another council should assemble at the end of five years, a second after seven years, and others every ten years thereafter. This revealed a strong tendency to intro- duce something like parliamentary and representative gov- ernment into the Church, and to limit the pope's absolute power. Indeed, at the time of John XXIII's flight and at- tempt to break up the council, that body had passed the decree Sacrosancta, affirming the supremacy of the "council over all Christians, even the pope, on the ground that it rep- resented the entire Church and derived its power and in- spiration directly from Christ. Martin V, therefore, had no desire for more councils, and the one which met at the end of five years at Siena accomplished nothing of moment. Neither did the pope execute the reform program which the Council of Constance had entrusted to him, because the most de- sired reforms were limitations of the excessive interference which the popes had come to exert in the local churches, especially in the three matters of appointments to ecclesias- THE PAPACY AND ITS OPPONENTS 573 tical benefices, financial exactions, and the drawing of law- suits to Rome. Instead of reducing his own powers in these respects, Martin V gave his attention to the recovery of the Papal States in Italy. When, however, the failure of the crusades against the Hussites necessitated the calling of the Council of Basel, public opinion was again insisting upon a real Eugenius IV reform in the Church in order to prevent the Counca of further spread of heresy. The pope was now Basel Eugenius IV (1431-1447). Instead of attending the coun- cil, he tried first to postpone it for eighteen months and then to have it meet in Italy at Bologna. But the council re- fused to disband and reafiirmed the declaration made at Constance of its superiority even to the pope. It then pro- ceeded not only to arrange the compromise with the Utra- quists, but to pass various decrees for the reformation of the Church. In 1433 the pope was forced to make his peace with the council, which was supported by most of the European governments. But when the council continued to pass re- form measures which were directed especially against the Papacy, Eugenius IV broke with it again and held a rival assembly in 1438-39, first at Ferrara and then at Florence, which arranged a fleeting union with the Eastern Church. Meanwhile the Council of Basel had deposed Eugenius; and it continued its sessions until 1449. By that time Eu- rope had grown rather weary of the council and most rulers had decided in favor of Eugenius, who usually in return promised to observe more or less of the reform decrees of Basel, or to share his powers of appointing to ecclesiastical benefices with the local secular rulers. Finally the Council of Basel recognized Eugenius's successor, Nicholas V, as pope and disbanded, and the conciliar movement was over. No further attempt by the Church as a whole to reform itself was made until after the Protestant revolt. Charles VII, however, by the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, in 1438, had assured to the French churches free- dom to fill their own church positions by election, and had strictly limited the papal income and appeals to the papal 574 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE court from France. This was the foundation of the later Church liberties claimed by the Gallican Church. In reform by 1482 Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of in France Castilc secured from the pope pretty complete and Spam control of the Church and even of the inquisition in Spain, and proceeded to execute a thorough reformation of the Spanish clergy. They saw to it that the right sort of men became bishops, that the clergy in general were well educated and of high moral character, and that purity of doctrine was maintained. After the conciliar movement was over, the popes de- voted themselves largely to Italian affairs. They gave some rp, attention to the Turkish menace, planning cru- The popes , , ' r' & of the sades against the advancing Moslems; they were still looked up to as international arbiters, as appears in the appeals of the Portuguese and Spanish sover- eigns to the pope to sanction their exclusive title to all new discoveries in America and the East ; but they neglected the problem of reforming the Church until it was unpleasantly forced upon their attention once more by the Protestant revolt. For the present some of them played a prominent part in Italian politics, while others were patrons of the Renaissance. One or two were learned men themselves, namely, Nicholas V, who founded the great Vatican Lib- rary, and Pius II, who before his election was the humanist, ^neas Sylvius. To this Italian Renaissance, which thus captivated the Papacy, we now turn. THE PAPACY AND ITS OPPONENTS 575 EXERCISES AND READINGS The Defensor Pacis. Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. i, pp. 491-97. 1. Select what seem to you the ten most important assertions or argu- ments in these extracts. 2. In which of his positions and statements does Marsiglio seem to you to be in advance of his age, and in which is he representative of his times? Give your reasons. Louis the Bavarian and the Avignon Popes. Lodge, The Close of the Middle Ages, chap, v, pp. 98-108. Wyclif. Hunt and Poole, Political History of England, vol. iv, pp. 68-80 and 102-113. The Great Schism. Thatcher and McNeal, Source Book for Medieval History selections 167 and 168 (pp. 325-27)- The Hussite Wars and the Council of Basel. Lodge, The Close of the Middle Ages, chap, xii, pp. 222-42. Comparison of Parallel Passages. Use the works by Creighton and Pastor, on the history of the Pa- pacy from its residence at Avignon to the beginning of the sixteenth century. Take passages in the two works which apply to the same topic, as their chapters upon the popes at Avignon, and note in what points they agree and disagree, and what facts or general statements made by one are omitted by the other. What do you infer as to the sympathies, reliability, and impartiality of the two m.en? CHAPTER XXXI THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE: POLITICS AND HUMANISM In the later Middle Ages the Italian cities lost for the most part their political independence and communal in- ^ , stitutions. But as a result of the economic pros- General _ ^ ^ _ ^^ character of perity won in the previous period and continued e perio j^ ^j^-^^ they produced and patronized a host of writers, scholars, and artists. This output in culture is known as the "Italian Renaissance." If we regard Dante as in a sense closing the great period of medieval culture, we may begin the so-called Renaissance in Italy about the mid- dle of the fourteenth century with Petrarch. The movement had attained its height in Italy and had begun to spread abroad through Europe at about the opening of the six- teenth century — the time selected for the close of this volume. Before considering the Renaissance itself, we may briefly notice the chief political changes in the Italian pen- insula during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The constant strife between cities and within cities, of which we have had to speak whenever we mentioned the Political Italian communes, had three outcomes. First, the decline: rise of despots or princes, absolute rulers who con ten deprived the citizens of the political rights which they had failed to exercise harmoniously. Second, the ag- grandizement of a few cities at the expense of the rest, which were for the most part reduced to subjection and de- prived of their self-government. Third, the employment of mercenary troops and leaders, called condottieri, who were not moved by patriotism, but solely by self-interest. These three things ruined public spirit and were accompanied by a great deterioration of political morality. The condottieri had reduced war to a science of getting as much pay as pos- sible out of their employers, as much plunder as possible out of the country, and as great victories as possible for THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 577 the sake of their military reputations without either losing many of their troops or terminating a war which was prof- itable to them. They would change sides at almost any moment if offered enough pay. A despotism was the logical outcome of the single magis- tracy of the podesta which at the beginning of the thirteenth century had replaced the earlier boards of con- The rise of suls in the Italian communes. Although at first despotisms the tenure of office was annual, a podesta who showed him- self capable of allaying party strife and of giving the city order and prosperity was very likely to be elected for several successive years and finally for life. Gradually the office might cease to be elective and become hereditary. In some towns it was not the podesta of the commune who thus transformed himself into a prince, but the podesta of the merchants, or the potestas populi ("captain of the people"), chosen by the popolo, which included members of all the gilds and constituted a more democratic suffrage than the origi- nal commune. In other places the vicars, who had been entrusted with the town government by pope or emperor, altered their appointment to a permanent princedom. Be- sides slipping into power by these peaceful and gradual methods, one might suddenly force one's way into a prince- dom as the leader of a successful revolution or as a com- mander of the city's army. It was especially during the troubled times of the warfare of Frederick II and his sons with popes and communes that ambitious and unscrupulous individuals were able to establish despotisms. Some despots, like some of the ancient Roman emperors, won an unenviable reputation as cruel and vicious monsters. But taken as a whole their crimes and violence Rule of the were little if any worse than those of the con- despots tending parties which had preceded them. As a rule they were able, alert, resourceful men: indeed, they had to be in order to retain their offices which often had no legal justi- fication. They could not "muddle along" like a king, on the strength of his royal title. They also were more likely than were republican governments to encourage artists 578 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE and writers, partly because they had more sympathy with genius, partly from a concern for their own fame. They usually treated the lower classes in the city, the peasants outside the walls, and the population of conquered towns, better than had the preceding form of government, which had almost always been characterized by a limited citi- zenship. The contemporary Florentine historian, Guic- ciardini, wrote on this point: "It is better to be the subject of a prince than of a republic, for a republic keeps all its subjects under and gives no share of its greatness save to its own citizens. A prince is common to all ; one man is as much his subject as another; therefore every one can hope to be favored or employed." Although a despot who ruled well could, therefore, count upon at least the passive moral sup- port of the masses, he had to be constantly on his guard against those whom he had supplanted in office or deprived of the franchise, against influential noble families and am- bitious individuals. The air was full of conspiracies and banishments, of assassinations and imprisonments and sus- picions of poisoning. Power was too much valued for its own sake and all other considerations were subordinated to political and personal ones. This state of affairs was, at the close of our period, set forth in clear, concise, convincing, and cold-blooded style Machiavelli's by the brilliant Florentine historian and pub- The Pnnce ijcist, Niccolo Machiavelli, in his little book. The Prince, which aimed to teach the beginner how to be a despot. That cruelty, violence, and deceit must occasion- ally be employed, he shows from classical history and recent Italian politics. He expects that his pupils in the princely art will indulge in some vices, but beseeches them at least to avoid those which are liable to cost them their thrones. A fair sample of his rules in diplomacy is the precept to ally with the weaker rather than the stronger of two war- ring states. For, should the stronger state win, it would then try to crush you too, even if you had allied with it. If the weaker wins, whether it is grateful for your aid or not, both sides will still need and value your alliance. Mach- Italy in the Fifteenth Century Miles 2U 40 60 120 Venetian Possessions Duchy of Milan Papal States Lucca and Siena LoDgitude East 13 irom f^; 58o THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE iavelll should not be held personally responsible for the immoral statecraft depicted in his book. He held no brief for despotism and wrote another work on the republic. He did not invent the conduct prescribed for despots in his volume, but simply shrewdly observed and set down what he saw going on all about him. In northern Italy, Milan had absorbed most of her neigh- bor communes and so had become one of the leading Ital- The chief ^^^ powers of the time of the Renaissance. The despotisms Visconti family were the first dynasty of despots in Milan. One who became archbishop utilized that office to establish a princedom for his nephew. In 1450 Francesco Sforza, a mercenary general who had married Bianca, a daughter of the last Visconti duke, became des- pot. To the west of the Milanese possessions princely dy- nasties had been ruling in Montferrat and Piedmont ever since the feudal period. To the east Verona a,nd Padua were the centers of powerful principalities, ruled by the Scaliger (de la Scala) and Carrara families respectively until the first half of the fifteenth century, when Venice conquered those territories and brought her possessions up to the fron- tier of Milan. Other smaller despotisms whose courts be- came centers of the Renaissance were Mantua under the Gonzaga, Ferrara ruled by the House of Este, Urbino under Federigo di Montefeltro, and Rimini under Gismondo Mala- testa, famed for his moral enormities, his military skill, and his culture. He and Federigo were deadly enemies and often fought against each other upon opposite sides as condottieri. Such, indeed, was the military repute of both that if one were hired by one side in a war, the other was pretty sure to be engaged by the other side. The cities of Ferrara, Urbino, and Rimini were nominally in the Papal States where other petty tyrants abounded. Venice was one city in the north which remained free from despotic rule. The power of the doge was more and more limited until his position became largely a ceremonial one. He was paid a princely salary and was expected to maintain great state and magnificence; he presided over all the various THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 581 boards and councils of the government ; but he now had al- most no opportunity for independent action. Further de- His six councilors were supposed to be in constant vdopment r • 1 . • of the attendance upon him and without their presence Venetian he was not allowed to open a letter or grant an constitution interview. Then there was the College of Experts or Sages, a sort of cabinet of sixteen members, subdivided into three sections; namely, a board of five for maritime matters, an- other board of five for the Venetian possessions on the main- land, and the six grand sages for city or home affairs. These sixteen specialists, together with the doge and his councilors and the three heads of another body known as "The Forty," constituted the "Full College," or chief executive council. The Forty by the time of the later Middle Ages were chiefly important as the supreme court of Venice, and their other functions passed to the Senate of one hundred and sixty members, which had developed out of the earlier custom of the doge of occasionally inviting groups of leading citizens {pregadi — "the invited") to give him their advice. The Senate was the chief legislative body and also considered questions of foreign policy and received the ambassadors of other states. While the Venetians had thus limited the power of their doge, they by no means had a democratic government. In the later Middle Ages all the above-named mag- The Great istracies were elected by the Great Council and Council filled from its membership, which varied from one thousand to fifteen hundred. In 1297 membership in this Great Council had been limited to certain families. Venice was thus ruled by an oligarchy of nobles who represented but a small fraction of its total population. They were, however, for the most part merchant princes and not a feudal or landed nobility. In Venice, although to a less extent than in most Italian cities, since its constitution was far more stable than the average, first one magistracy and then another The Council would come to the front and then drop to a sec- ^^ ^^" ondary place in the constitution. After 1310 the Council 582 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE of Ten gradually became perhaps the most potent single factor. In that year a dangerous conspiracy led to the es- tablishment of this new board, which was at first intended as a temporary committee of public safety, but was after- ward retained as a permanent feature of the constitution. Primarily it was a court before which persons dangerous to the State or guilty of gross immorality could be secretly tried and, if it seemed best, secretly executed. This body probably did much to prevent revolutions and to maintain the established form of government, in which there was lit- tle further change during the remainder of the Middle Ages. The Ten usually met together with the doge and his six councilors. Gradually they came, not merely to act as a secret court of treason and criminal tribunal, but, in the case of an emergency or when prompt action was urgent, to take a hand in foreign affairs and in the government of the city. But they never ceased to be a committee of the nobility and responsible to them, for, like most of the Vene- tian magistracies, they were elected annually by the Great Council and could not be immediately reelected. The fear instilled in the public mind by the secret and summary methods of the Council of Ten was perhaps not Good ov- altogether unsalutary. At any rate, it must be ernment of admitted that in general the Venetian aristoc- Vemce ^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^ ^j^^ ^ ^^^^ good government and one which was satisfactory enough to the mass of the popu- lation. Its rule was strong and intelligent and left the com- mon people undisturbed and prosperous. The nobles worked hard for the State themselves, setting an example of pat- riotism to others. The State, too, was so closely identified with the business prosperity of the city that every one had a selfish interest in it. Taxes were light; the laws were good, the courts numerous, and the settlement of cases speedy. The city had a special court for foreigners, who often volun- tarily brought their lawsuits to the Venetian courts to set- tle, so high was their reputation. The Church was carefully regulated by the State at Venice and did not exist as a con- flicting and trouble-making jurisdiction. Venice was one of THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 583 the first European states to do for its inhabitants what the modern State does, but what the Church had largely at- tended to in the Middle Ages. In other words, Venice had its own city hospitals, public institutions, and pension sys- tem. The government kept careful records and went at its problems in a systematic way, so that the city on the Adriatic has been called the birthplace of statistics. Its ambassadors stood first among the diplomats of Europe and in early modern times sent home reports of conditions in other countries which are among history's most valued sources. Of Venice's early public debt in 1171 we have al- ready spoken. Its currency circulated throughout Europe, and the gold ducat, first coined in 1284, in the later Middle Ages replaced the byzant of Constantinople as the standard coin. Of Venetian ports, islands, and other possessions and trading interests in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and of her relations there with the ,r ^. ' ^ ^ Venetian Turks as well as with Genoa and Constantinople, foreign we have already treated in other connections, p^'^^^ Genoa also was Venice's greatest rival in the western Medi- terranean and in trade with northern Europe. For a cen- tury after 1261, when the .Genoese overthrew the Latin Em- pire at Constantinople, and 1284, when they decisively defeated the Pisans, their chief competitors on the west coast of Italy, Genoa was at the height of its power. Two great naval wars from 1350 to 1355 and from 1378 to 1381 ended the struggle of Genoa and Venice for maritime supremacy in favor of the latter. Another enmity of Venice was with Hungary over Dalmatia, the east coast of the Adriatic Sea, which was desired by Venice not only for commercial rea- sons, but more in order to secure a food-supply near at hand for its city population. Until the fifteenth century Venice's interest in the Italian mainland was limited to keeping the routes through the Alpine passes open to her trade. But in the first half of that century the acquisition of considerable territory in the northeast of the peninsula brought Venice into close and frequently hostile relations with Milan, 584 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Florence, and the Papacy, and made it no longer possible for her to hold aloof from Italian politics as she had usually hitherto done. Florence during the later Middle Ages brought most of the other towns of Tuscany under her sway and was more Con t't powerful than Pisa, Lucca, or Siena, her closest tional history rivals. Her internal city government, after pro- gressing for a while in the direction of democracy, had then undergone a reaction and deteriorated into a vir- tual despotism under the cover of the old republican forms. This process we may briefly trace. At about the time that Venice was restricting both voting and officeholding to its nobles, Florence took an opposite course. In 1282 the su- preme magistracy was put in the hands of six priors rep- resenting the gilds and elected anew every two months, and in 1293 the members of thirty-seven noble houses were for- ever disqualified from these offices. There were twenty-one gilds making up the popolo of Florence. Of these the seven richer gilds of notaries, cloth-makers, money-changers, wool- weavers, silk-weavers, physicians, and furriers were known as "the fat people." The "little people" consisted of the fourteen gilds of linen-makers and mercers, shoemakers, smiths, salt-dealers, butchers, wine-merchants, innkeepers, harness-makers, leather-dressers, armorers, ironmongers, masons, carpenters, and bakers. Sometimes, however, the first-named five of these constituted a middle group with privileges superior to the other nine. These lesser gilds now began to struggle for an equal share in the government with the fat gilds and ultimately won. Next the Ciompi, who did not belong to gilds at all, secured political rights by a rev- olution in 1378, only to lose them in a counter-revolution of 1382. Under the forms of the republic there then ensued a fifty-year rule by a political ring composed of a few burgher families. This oligarchy was very successful in foreign policy, but finally in 1435 was overthrown by Cosimo de* Medici, a wealthy banker. Cosimo was a political "boss" who had put himself at the head of a popular reaction against the oligarchy in THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 585 power. He was careful, however, to keep all real power in his own hands, although he too preserved the Rule of the old republican forms. He catered, nevertheless, ^^dici to the lower classes in the city and to the peasantry outside the walls, while he taxed the wealthy citizens heavily and was harsh toward men of too prominent family or politi- cal promise. Both Cosimo (1435-1464) and his grandson, Lorenzo de' Medici (1469-1492), were generous patrons of the Renaissance and among the most enlightened of the des- pots. They preserved order, were peacefully inclined, good business men, and astute diplomats. In the field of foreign affairs they were aided by their extensive banking connec- tions and loans to other European governments. The republican government of Florence had been crip- pled by the eagerness of all its citizens to hold office and by their general reluctance to allow any one person Defects to hold office for any length of time. They there- Florentine fore multiplied magistracies until they conflicted constitution with one another, shortened the term of office in most cases to two months, and elected their officials by lot. Thus au- thority was too divided, the time in office was too short for any one to accomplish much or acquire experience, and officials were not selected with a view to their fitness. The clever and conceited Florentines, however, believed that they were all capable of holding any office. But really some political ring or boss was needed behind the scenes to run things, especially the intricacies of foreign affairs. The method of election by lot, too, lent itself to such external control. A "scrutiny" was first held for the purpose of de- termining who were "good citizens"; that is, acceptable to party or person in power. The names of these citizens were then placed in bags and were drawn out from time to time as there were offices to fill until the bags were empty, when a new scrutiny would be held. Whoever had hold of the bags evidently controlled the situation. To have any real change a revolution was necessary, and when a revolu- tion occurred the old bags were always destroyed whether they were emptied yet or not. 586 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE The history of the Papacy during this period has been considered in the previous chapter, so we pass on south to The King- ^^^ Kingdom of Naples. It deteriorated under dom of the rule of the House of Anjou, which itself de- tenorated too and had a family history full of violence. Especially notorious were two queens, both named Joanna, of whom the former died in 1382 and Joanna II in 1435. The throne then passed to Alfonso, King of Aragon and already ruler of Sicily, although Ren^ of Provence claimed both Naples and Sicily. When Alfonso died, John II succeeded him in Aragon, but Naples went to his illegitimate son, Ferrante I (1458-1494). We have seen that France, not Italy, took the lead in the great outpouring of medieval vernacular literature in the Transition twelfth and thirteenth centuries and in the inven- from medi- ^lon and development of Gothic architecture. eval to Ren- ^ , . , t>, aissance Only With Dante at the begmnmg of the four- culture teenth century did Italian literature get well started, while Italian buildings continued to a large extent to employ the Romanesque style. Italy's greatest medieval university at Bologna had been connected especially with the revival of Roman law, Dante already displays something of that closer personal interest in the Roman past which is one of the chief features of the Italian Renaissance, and even in his Divine Comedy there are many allusions to ancient history and pagan mythology. This shows us that in Italy the transition from the previous culture to the Renaissance was not so abrupt as one might think. The Italian Renais- sance was in a sense simply the last stage in medieval civilization. The word "Renaissance," signifying re-blrth, was orig- inally applied to this movement and period by men who in- The false correctly regarded the preceding medieval period of"thT^*°" as a dark age when there was no civilization. Renaissance They believed that with the revival of the clas- sics civilization again began to appear in Italy for the first time since the passing of ancient culture. They disregarded or were unaware of the fact that many features of modern THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 587 civilization, such as the modern languages and the European universities and the study of natural science, had already started in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and that many features of classical culture, such as Aristotle and other Greek learning, Roman law, and city life had also al- ready been revived at that time. We cannot, then, regard the Italian Renaissance as of such vast importance as men used to regard it. Under that name, however, we may include the movement True char- known as "Humanism," some further progress itaUan^ '^'^^ in Italian literature, and a period of great genius Renaissance and output in the fine arts, of which painting and sculpture now develop independently of architecture. These are the chief peculiar features of the Italian Renaissance. It was also, however, a time when certain currents of medieval civilization continued their course of development. The invention of printing, for instance, was now added to the earlier medieval inventions, such as clocks, chimney flues, stained glass, plumbing, gunpowder, spectacles, the rudder, and the mariner's compass. The medieval geographical ex- ploration, discovery, and map-making now terminated in the discovery of America and of a sea route to India. These innovations, however, were wrought out by other lands than Italy and so are connected only chronologically with the Italian Renaissance interpreted in any strict sense. On the other hand, in most lands of Europe in the later Middle Ages many characteristic departments of medieval culture were stagnant or waning. This brought Italy into a com- manding position and gave the lead to her more recently developed and vigorous culture. It may be added that her superior city life and economic prosperity gave an urbanity and refinement of manners to her culture which was very attractive alike to the royal courts and the rising bour- geoisie of other lands. Italy, then, was soon to become for a time the schoolmistress of Europe. As was said at the beginning of this chapter, the Italian Renaissance may be regarded as opened by Petrarch (1304- 1374). Like Dante he was a citizen of Florence, the intellec- 588 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE tual center of Italy and home of many of the geniuses of the Renaissance. Petrarch entered the clergy, whereas Dante had been a layman, but Dante was perhaps the more truly religious of the two. Petrarch sinned against the rule of sacerdotal celibacy and was also guilty of holding a plurality; that is, more than one ecclesiastical position at the same time. In his younger days he had writ- ten love poetry in Italian, inspired by a mysterious Laura as Dante had been by Beatrice. But while the masterpiece of Dante's maturity, although dealing with a solemn reli- gious theme, had still employed the Italian tongue, Petrarch in later life became so enamoured of classical antiquity that he disdained to write in any other language than Latin. Vergil had guided Dante through the Inferno: Petrarch wrote letters to Cicero and other dead ancient authors whom he passionately admired and with whom he longed for per- sonal communion. When he wrote letters to his living friends he still tried to express himself as if he were writing to Cicero or as if Cicero were writing to him. It was an event in his life when a rare or previously unknown work by Cicero or some other classical author came to his notice. With eager haste and yet with painstaking accuracy he would make a copy of the precious manuscript for his own library. Besides many letters, Petrarch composed a number of other works in Latin prose and verse. But as they dealt chiefly with classical subjects, — as, for instance, his epic Africa on Scipio Africanus, concerning whom he knew noth- ing except what he could read in classical literature itself, — they have not interested posterity nearly so much as the early love poems in which he expressed his own feelings in his own language in a comparatively new verse-form, the sonnet. Among his contemporaries, however, he aroused great enthusiasm for classical studies. His letters were passed around and read before admiring circles. He had made a wide acquaintance by his travels about Italy and in other European lands. King Robert of Naples crowned him poet laureate at Rome in 1341. Petrarch was one of the first humanists and his activities THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 589 and interests are characteristic of the rest. Humanism was the study of classical literature not merely to derive scientific or theological information from it, but „ .,(••!• • Humanism primarily for its literary and human interest. The humanists were impressed not only by the subject- matter of the ancients, but by the elegance of their Latin style. They developed a liking for Latin poetry, orations, letters, and other works whose interest was personal, emo- tional, and rhetorical rather than objective, logical, and scholastic. They took an interest in the personalities of the ancients and in their manner of life and their attitude to the world. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries, of course, had seen a great revival of Roman law and Greek science; and the interest in Latin literature and in the stories of classical mythology had never entirely died out at any time during the Middle Ages. But by the fourteenth and fifteenth cen- turies the Digest of Justinian and the doctrines of Aristotle and Galen and Ptolemy had been warmed over and made hash of so often that there was little more to be got out of them. It was time to seek new authors, new works, and new points of view. Humanism, therefore, was characterized by a search for classical manuscripts and by a great enlargement of the amount of Latin literature which was generally ^^jj ^j^^ known. The humanist Poggio, who was em- of Latin ; ployed as one of the papal secretaries and at- ' ^""^^^"^^ tended the Council of Constance, brought to light a number of precious finds in the monastery of St. Gall. The classical manuscripts discovered by the Italian humanists did not, however, date back to classical times. They were simply medieval copies of those works. Therefore all the Latin literature known to the humanists had been known some- where and at some time during the Middle Ages since Charlemagne's time. The humanists, however, brought it all together into public circulation; multiplied and edited and corrected the medieval copies, which had sometimes been carelessly or ignorantly made, and then subjected this very considerable body of literature to an intensive and 590 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE sympathetic study. As a result they in the end gained a much better comprehension of the Latin language and of ancient civilization. New grammars, dictionaries, and other linguistic treatises were issued, and the foundations were thus laid for the sci- Phil lo ences of philology and literary criticism. Learned and literary societies Were Organized and literary controversies cri icism were frequent and led sometimes to abusive per- sonalities. Scholars who began a learned argument over some detail of style or fine point of syntax would end by in- sulting each other's parents. Despots, republics, and popes alike employed humanists as their secretaries and orators. Gian Galeazzo, the despot at Milan, said that he feared a dispatch of the humanist secretary of the Florentine Re- public more than a regiment of its citizen soldiers. The hu- manists prided themselves upon knowing the essentials of classical Latin style, and were careful not to commit any medieval barbarisms. Sometimes they seem singularly con- tent with a scanty body of fact or thought, so long as they have beauties of diction in which to revel. They were in fact a little prone to follow the debased flowery rhetoric of the late Roman Empire rather than the chaste severity of earlier classical models. The later humanists, of whom Politian was probably the most proficient, improved con- siderably in correctness of diction over Petrarch, but their Latin works are as little read to-day as his. It is clear that any one wishing to comprehend classical civilization must read not only the Latin authors, but the Revival of Greek originals to which they owed so much. Greek Petrarch owned a copy of Homer's poems in the original and longed to read Greek, but could not procure a capable teacher. For a while it was almost necessary to go to Constantinople to learn Greek or to procure copies of Greek texts. Aquinas had probably used a Greek text in his version of Aristotle; Roger Bacon had attempted a Greek grammar; and Peter of Abano, a scholastic medical author- ity at the close of the thirteenth century, had visited Con- stantinople. He speaks of Greek works which he had seen THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 591 there and some of which he had translated. Toward the end of the fourteenth century noted Greek professors came to Italy to lecture. Chrysoloras at Florence is one of the best- known examples. Works of Greek literature, too, were now carried to the West. In 1423 one man brought two hundred and thirty-eight volumes to Venice. The fall of Constanti- nople thirty years later, to which the spread of Greek learn- ing in the West and even the Italian Renaissance were once ignorantly attributed, really had no such influence. The transfer of classical culture from its Byzantine storehouse had begun long before 1453, while the Turkish conquest did not blot out the Greek learning and Church or cause any great exodus of scholars and removal of treasures of art and learning. Previous church councils, however, like that of Ferrara- Florence in 1438-39, where the question of the union of the Eastern and Western Churches was considered, had had some effect in increasing learned communication be- tween Italy and Constantinople. The Italian humanists be- fore 1500 seldom reached the same point of proficiency in the Greek as in the Latin language, and were apt to content themselves with translating some Greek work into Latin. But in the course of time the study of Greek was to receive equal attention. The humanists not only read widely in both Latin and Greek literature, but also examined ancient ruins, works of art, coins, and other such remains. Besides Latin Advance in grammars and Greek dictionaries, they composed knowledge works on classical history, antiquities, geograph3^ and attitude and mythology. Thus they came to understand the sur- roundings and daily life of the ancients, the history of Greece and Rome, and the classical attitude and viewpoint as medi- eval men had not done. They no longer thought of Caesar's and Alexander's soldiers as knights nor of Nimrod as the founder of chivalry. In short, historical knowledge and sympathy with the past made marked progress. Unfortu- nately at the same time they lost sympathy with and knowl- edge of the past medieval period which was now vanishing behind them. 592 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Italy at this time produced noted educators who empha- sized physical exercise and training in manners and morals The classics as well as intellectual schooling. The ancient m education Qi-ggi^g ^^d laid as great stress upon the first two as upon the last. But the main enduring educational effect of the humanistic movement was to make Latin and Greek the staple subjects in schools for several centuries. These two languages and literatures came to be regarded as the basis of a liberal education and as essential to a cultured existence. Hitherto in medieval schools every one had been supposed to read and write and speak Latin easily; but teachers and students had not minded much whether they wrote like the ancients, so long as they understood one an- other. The other fundamental medieval subject had been logic. It was now supplanted by Greek, and much time was devoted to reading the two classical literatures and to the acquisition of a correct literary style in the ancient lan- guages. During the Renaissance, Latin and Greek were not thought of as "dead languages"; the old-fashioned and ob- solete subjects then were those of scholasticism, medieval theology, Aristotelean science and metaphysics. The fields which then seemed "up-to-date" and full of present human interest were not economics and sociology, domestic and political science, chemistry and engineering, psychology and "education." The "Humanities" then were Latin and Greek; these were the subjects that aroused youthful en- thusiasm and that seemed to open up new vistas of life. The views of life found in classical literature so attracted some of the humanists that they abandoned or slighted The pagan many Christian ideals and became almost pagan Chrisdan ^^ irreligious in their conduct. Especially they Renaissance had scant sympathy for monasticism. In Italy, however, they seldom attacked the Church or the Papacy, since they were often enabled to devote themselves to hu- manistic pursuits by holding ecclesiastical benefices which paid well and required little religious work, and since the popes themselves became such patrons of the Renaissance. Pope Nicholas V even gave a position at his court to the THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 593 humanist Lorenzo Valla, who earlier, when under the pa- tronage of King Alfonso of Naples, had written a treatise exposing the Donation of Constantine as a forgery, and who also, by use of Greek texts of the Bible, pointed out errors in the Vulgate, or Latin version. Many humanists, more- over, remained sincerely devout; and there was a Christian as well as a classical Renaissance. That is to say, the early church fathers, Greek and Latin, were studied; and the Greek versions of the Scriptures were compared with the Vulgate. Such study led in time to questioning of some of the customs and doctrines of the medieval Church and so had an important bearing upon the Reformation. A further development of Italian literature accompanied the Italian Renaissance. Together with Dante and Pe- trarch, Boccaccio (13 13-1375) completes the trio Italian of great writers who initiated this movement. He literature is known especially for his Decameron, a collection of stories of which Chaucer made much use later in the fourteenth cen- tury in England. Boccaccio himself, like Petrarch, thought his Latin works of more value, and for a time the humanists generally scorned to write in Italian. Lorenzo de' Medici, however, helped restore the vernacular to favor by inciting the writers under his patronage to literary composition in Italian and by setting the example himself. Among the favorite literary forms of the time were the sonnet and idyll and the novella or short story. The romantic epic of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had continued to find favor among the Italians; and in the later fifteenth century Pulci (1431-1487) at Florence and Boiardo (1434-1494) at Ferrara were preparing the way for the greater poetry of Ariosto and Tasso in the sixteenth century. Pulci's Morgante Mag- giore recounted partly in a serious and partly in a burlesque tone the adventures of the famous Roland and a giant named Morgante whom he conquers and converts. Boiardo, who was also a lyric and dramatic poet, told of Roland in love in his Orlando innamorato. Some attempt was made to de- velop the drama in Italian, following classical models, but without the success attained later in other lands. A series 594 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE of able historians at Florence, of whom we have already had occasion to mention the two greatest, Guicciardini and Machiavelli, gave attention to economic as well as military and diplomatic matters. Baldassare Castiglione (1478- 1539), in his Book of the Courtier ^ set forth the amenities of social life among the Italians of the Renaissance. The invention of printing with separate types for each letter facilitated greatly the labors of the later humanists Invention and spread the results of their work abroad in of printing Europe. This invention was first employed about 1450, either at Mainz on the Rhine by Gutenberg and others, or at Haarlem in the Netherlands by Coster. The printing-press greatly increased the number and reduced the cost of books, so that much larger libraries were made possible. Although some old manuscripts are as legible and more beautiful than printed books, the average printed page would be much easier to read and copies would not differ in details as different manuscripts do. Proof-read- ing provides an opportunity to avoid the errors or correc- tions inevitable in a manuscript. For some time, however, printed books continued to look a great deal like the man- uscripts, and the many abbreviations and signs for familiar words or for repeatedly occurring endings which copiers by hand had employed to shorten their labors were perpetuated in the printed page as well. More persons would now become readers and reading matter could be got to them more rapidly. The pamphlet. Some ulti- ^^^ broadside, the periodical, and all the other mate results species of ephemeral literature were now bound prin ing ^^ ^^ bom soon. The day of the orator and the troubadour was over: men could read now instead of listen. In education the textbook would take the place of lectures, reading would replace personal tuition; and a more uni- versal popular education was made possible. In scholarship the chief requisite now became bibliography rather than rote memory. In due time authors would be able to appeal to pub- lishers and reading public instead of having to rely upon rich or noble patrons. Many of these changes, however, have THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 595 come very slowly. And just as there were good — some say, better — letter-writers in the days before cheap postage and typewriters, so there were great authors who wasted neither precious words nor paper in the period before the invention of printing. When both readers and writers had to go to a great deal of trouble, there naturally was much less written and read, but both reading and writing were probably done more thoroughly on the average. Some tendencies toward humanism are noticeable in France and England during the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, but they were sporadic. „ ' -^ ^ Humanism The Renaissance began first to be really felt in in other England in the reign of Henry VII and in France in that of Charles VIII, who both ruled at the very close of the fifteenth century. German humanism started a little earlier and ran its course with more vehemence. The move- ment in Germany was practically crowded into the last quarter of the fifteenth and the first quarter of the sixteenth centuries, and then soon faded into the religious reformation. 596 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE EXERCISES AND READINGS Secondary Accounts of the Renaissance. Sedgwick, Short History of Italy, chaps, xix-xxvill, pp. 182-292. Munro and Sellery, Medieval Civilization, pp. 277-84, Voigt, "Classical Learningin the Middle Ages"; pp. 285-309, Graf, "The Latin Classics in the Middle Ages"; pp- 474-90, Gebhart, "Antecedents of the Renaissance"; pp. 524-46, Neumann, "Relation of Antiquity to the Renaissance." (This last selection is especially good.) Cambridge Modern History, vol. I, 532-6S, Jebb, " The Classical Renais- sance in Italy." J. A. Symonds, The Age of the Despots; chap, iii, "The Despots"; iv, "The Republics"; V, "Florentine Historians"; vii, "Popes of the Renaissance." Symonds, Short History oj the Italian Renaissance (an abridgment of The Age of the Despots and Symonds's other works on the Italian Renaissance); chap, iii, "Rule of the Despots"; iv, " Popes of the Renaissance"; viii, "Florentine Historians"; ix, x, xi, "The Hu- manists"; XIII, "Vernacular Literature." Venice: The Council of Ten. H. E. Brown, Venice; an Historical Sketch (2d edition, 1895), pp. 176- 83. Venetian Civilization. W. R. Thayer, Short History of Venice, chaps, x and xi. Florence and the Medici. Lodge, The Close of the Middle Ages, chap, xiv, pp. 288-314. Ewart, Cosimo de' Medici, any chapter. Armstrong, Lorenzo de' Medici; especially chapters ix and x on literature and art. Letters of Petrarch. Robinson, Readings in Etiropean History, vol. I, pp. 524-28; or more fully in Robinson and Rolfe, Petrarch. Other Source Readings. Whitcomb, A Literary Source Booh of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 15- 24, 27-29, 35-36, 40-62, 91-101. Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier has been translated into English by Opdycke. Some of the Italian romantic epics, too, have been translated into English verse. Machiavelli, The Prince (English translation). This little work can al- most be read through at one sitting. Some of its examples and allusions can be better understood after reading the last chapter of this book. CHAPTER XXXII THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE: FINE ARTS AND VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY The Italian Renaissance is one of the great periods in the history of art. Artists of the first rank were too numerous to mention each individually here, and there was j^^ ^ j^ a vast output of masterpieces. In the palace of in the his- the popes at Rome paintings by old masters that °^^ ° would command a high price to-day were actually erased to make room for new creations. Artistic sensibility was widespread through the population. Both Church and State were eager patrons and employers of the artists, and the public appreciated their genius. In short, "Art was the oxygen of Renaissance life." The chief contemporary account of the biographies of the artists of the Italian Renaissance is their Lives by Vasari, himself an artist at the close of the movement. Vasari's His work aimed to do for the Italian artists what ^^^^^ Plutarch's Lives had done for the great statesmen and gen- erals of classical antiquity. Vasari tried to cover too vast a field to attain critical accuracy in all the details of the lives of his heroes, and even his art criticism has often not met with modern approval. Recent investigators have gone back of his biographical essays, most of which are after all secondary sources, to family and state papers containing original bits of biographical information which enable them to rectify dates in the artists' careers or to revise Vasari's estimates of their personalities. Frescoes and canvases have been scrutinized with the help of photography and microscope, and thus lost masterpieces have been redis- covered or it has been found that this painting has been in- correctly attributed to that artist. Vasari, nevertheless, re- mains the foundation upon which such superior historical 598 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE criticism is based, and it is to him that the reader should still turn for the spirit, the gossip, and the relish of the age, while only the masterpieces themselves do justice to the genius of the artists. We may also catch something of the feeling of the times from the racy, if somewhat incred- ible, autobiography of the self-confessed genius, goldsmith, sculptor, musician, and desperado, Benvenuto Cellini. Both he and Vasari were Florentines of the sixteenth century as Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Giotto, and Brunelleschi had been Florentines two hundred years before. It was not un- fitting that the gifted city where the first sparks of the Ital- ian Renaissance were struck should also be the spot where the last ashes of the movement were collected. It is to be remembered, however, that Vasari sometimes overem- phasizes the importance of his fellow Florentines. The artists impress us favorably compared to the des- pots and humanists. They were devoted to their art where ^. ^ the despots were intent on power and where the Character y ... of the art- humanists were solicitous for their own fame. *^ ^ While so many despots disregarded moral con- siderations, few of the artists were afiflicted with what is sometimes called the artistic temperament. Many were affable, generous, and kindly, or frugal, honest, and in- dustrious. Even Vasari does not always do them justice. Fra Lippo Lippi, whom he depicts as a jovial spendthrift and libertine, seems not to have fallen in love until he was fifty, and to have made great sacrifices of his own comfort in order to provide for his nieces. It is also doubtful if Andrea del Sarto was an embezzler. Andrea del Castagno has been shown to have died several years before the man whom he was said to have assassinated. Perugino, instead of being a miser and atheist, "figures in the original docu- ments as a generous giver, bestowing his time and labor upon religious confraternities for little or no pay." The artists were natural where the humanists seem sentimental and affected. While the humanists imitated the writings of classical antiquity, the artists experimented and worked out new methods. The humanists were scholars; the artists THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 599 were original geniuses. Their versatility is also noteworthy; many were masters of more than one fine art. Of the three great fine arts architecture was the least im- portant during the Italian Renaissance. An abundance of churches and secular buildings had already been g^^jj^j. j^^j. constructed in the preceding medieval period ian archi- in both the Romanesque and the Italian Gothic style, while Byzantine influence had come in here and there, notably at Venice in the church of St. Mark with its domes and mosaics, its marbles and metal-work. The chief his- toric public edifices which the tourist still sees in the Italian cities, such as the palace of the podesta or the hall of the merchants, had already been built in medieval style before the time of the Renaissance. To take Venice again as an example, the Palace of the Doge had a Gothic fagade and many of the old private palaces lining the canals are of Gothic style, like the beautiful Ca d' Oro (House of Gold). In short, "Italy before the age of the Renaissance proper found herself provided with churches and palaces, which were destined in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to be adorned with frescoes and statues." Nevertheless, a considerable change took place in archi- tecture in the course of the fifteenth century. The Italians had never grasped the principles of Gothic con- j^^^^jg. struction thoroughly, and were ready to revert sance archi- to Romanesque methods and to study the ruins and monuments of ancient Rome and imitate these. Changes were also made conformably to the more peaceful and lux- urious urban life of this period. The Renaissance architects were not so much scientific builders as they were decorators and designers. Many of them, indeed, were primarily paint- ers or sculptors, so that if in the French Gothic art sculp- ture was subordinated to architecture, in the Italian Ren- aissance we may say that construction was rather neglected for appearance. Brunelleschi (i 377-1446) is regarded as the earliest great Renaissance architect, while details from ancient Roman architecture were introduced in large measure by another Florentine, Leon Battista Alberti (1404- 1472). 600 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE The outer walls of municipal buildings and private palaces now lost their rough fortress-like appearance, or retained a slight relic of it in rusticated stonework or in iron bars before the windows of the ground floor. Rustication, however, soon disappeared and the facing of the walls became smooth and elegant with the component stones carefully cut and with attention given to the arrangement of the incisions or grooves between them. Along the edge of the roof elabo- rately ornamented cornices took the place of medieval bat- tlements. Medallions and friezes, sculptured in low relief, decorated the otherwise rather bare walls, and inside the building the ceilings were coffered and the walls paneled. The three classical orders in column and capital were also now restored to favor and exclusively employed. The hori- zontal lines of the Greek temple, or the round arches and solid piers of Roman buildings like the Colosseum, were im.itated. The shape of rooms and windows, as well as the general outline of buildings, all tended to become rectangu- lar, in which respect they were more like modern and less like medieval edifices, which had intricate arcades, vaulted halls, and lofty towers. A common detail of Renaissance architecture, which may still be seen in modern houses, was the placing over the windows of ornamental gables, either triangular like the pediment of a Greek temple or curv'ed like a Roman arch. From this period, too, dates the delusion that the windows of a mansion should be arranged in regular rows and exactly above one another. Regularity and uniformity, indeed, now triumphed too much in archi- tecture over the picturesque and exquisite. In ecclesiastical architecture a new and disagreeable detail was the employ- ment of huge flat scrolls at either side of the fagade of the church to conceal the meeting of nave and aisle. The largest structure of the Renaissance was the vast church of St. Peter at Rome, which some greatly admire and others sharply criticize, but it was barely begun in our period and was not completed until the seventeenth century. The great dome is the chief feature of St. Peter's, and the dome has often been represented as especially characteristic THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 6oi of Renaissance architecture. Brunelleschi's bold dome at Florence, one hundred and thirty-five feet in diameter and one hundred and forty-five feet in height, is often spoken of as the first masterpiece of Renaissance architecture. But it was the crowning feature of a cathedral in Italian Gothic style, and its builder was able to profit by a study of the earlier medieval dome of the baptistery just across the square. Such domes as this and that of St. Peter's, which are raised on drums and pointed in shape, rise much higher above the rest of the building than the low domes of the Roman Pantheon or Byzantine St. Sophia. To such hemi- spherical domes they stand in much the same relation that a pointed Gothic arch does to a round Roman arch. They may be regarded, then, as a last stage of medieval archi- tecture rather than as a revival due to the study of anti- quity. Among the gifted sculptors, numerous but for the most part anonymous, who were at work in Italy and other lands during the thirteenth century, a certain Niccola x^. . of Pisa (c. 1 206- 1 2 78) has attracted considerable Pisano and notice by the use he made of figures on an an- '°"° cient sarcophagus in his design of a church pulpit. He is, however, too early to be classed as a Renaissance artist. But the paintings of Giotto {c. 1 266-1 337), who was a contem- porary of Dante on the one hand and of Petrarch on the other, bring us to the borderland of the Renaissance period. North of the Alps painting had developed little as yet in the Middle Ages except for the miniatures in manuscripts and the designs for stained-glass windows. In Italy there was more space on the walls of churches and monasteries for mo- saics or for fresco paintings. A fresco is painted directly upon the wall or ceiling while the plaster is still moist. In many respects Giotto's frescoes were still crude and awk- ward. Objects were not of the right size compared to other objects nor in the correct perspective, and his figures were sometimes stiff. But to his contemporaries his paintings were a revelation in lifelikeness and fidelity to nature. The point was that instead of keeping his pictures symbolical 6o3 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE in the earlier fashion, Giotto tried to have them tell an actual human story either from the Bible or the life of St. Francis. He put in monks such as people saw every day, and beds and trees and rocks and other familiar objects. Often these were crudely executed or scarcely more than indi- cated, like the scenery in an Elizabethan drama. Indeed, when Giotto tries to picture both the inside and the outside of a house at once, the result is something that looks very much like a theatrical stage. And that suggests the secret of his success ; he was not so much realistic as he was dra- matic; he put action into his pictures and held the attention of the observer. Niccola of Pisa had found bits of classical sculpture to inspire him, but there were no ancient paint- ings available for Giotto to study. Instead he struck out a new path by himself. Such originality was to be character- istic of Renaissance painting, and by the next century of its sculpture. Giotto also was a forerunner of the later ar- tists in his versatility, for he designed the stately campanile which stands by the cathedral at Florence. Leonardo da Vinci, probably the greatest all-round genius that the Italian Renaissance produced, tells us that "after . Giotto the art of painting declined again be- cause every one imitated the pictures that were already done. Thus it went until Tommaso of Florence, nicknamed Masaccio, showed by his perfect works how those who take for their standard anything but nature, the mis- tress of all masters, weary themselves in vain." Masaccio also illustrates the precocious genius of many Italian art- ists, since his short life was bounded by the years 1401 and 1429. Nevertheless his frescoes were the inspiration of the greatest masters for the rest of the century, during which the art advanced to the highest point in Leonardo da Vinci and his fellows. With Masaccio the early Renaissance at Florence may -,, J be regarded as definitely opened. Contemporary Renaissance with him was the great architect Brunelleschi, and at Florence j^ ^^^ ^j^^ j^ ^^^ ^^^^ j^^jj ^^ ^^^ fifteenth cen- tury that the art of sculpture profited by the genius of three THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 603 great Florentines, Donatello, Ghlberti, and Luca della Rob- bia. The last is especially famed for his terra-cottas ; Ghi- berti, for his bronze doors with their panels full of sculpture in relief in the baptistery at Florence, just across the square from Giotto's tower and Brunelleschi's dome. Donatello had begun his artistic career by 1406. For a score or more of years he worked in Florence on the sculp- tures of the cathedral and campanile and in com- q^^.^^^. ^^^ petition with Brunelleschi and Ghiberti. From character of 1413 to 1428 Ghiberti and he labored at statues for the Or San Michele. He also visited Siena, Venice, Mantua, Modena, Ferrara, and Prato, and worked for sev- eral years in Padua. In 1433 he was at Rome aiding in the preparations for the imperial coronation of Sigismund. Later he helped Cosimo de' Medici adorn his palace for humanists with appropriate sculptures. Many stories are told of Dona- tello's simple and unassuming character. He is said to have kept his money in a basket hung from the roof with a cord attached by which it might be lowered by any friend who wished to help himself. His patrons, the Medici, presented him on one occasion with a sumptuous costume and in his old age with a small estate on which to retire, but he re- turned the one as too fine for him to wear and the other as too much bother for him to maintain. He had, however, as further anecdotes in Vasari illustrate, little patience with business men who ventured to criticize his art or who tried to beat him down on his prices. Donatello was interested in the collection of classical antiquities, and his sculpture is described by Vasari as having "the closest resemblance to the Greeks and Romans" ; but he was even more of a realist and follower of nature. Both the style of Donatello and the themes of his sculp- ture were varied, and a list of some of his works will give us a notion of the scope of Renaissance art. His His chief Marzocco, or seated lion, is an excellent and dig- ^^^^^^^ nified example of animal sculpture. His frieze of boys run- ning and laughing made Vasari regard him as the ' ' greatest master of bas-relief." His David, depicted as a shepherd 6o4 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE boy, was the first nude bronze statue cast since Roman times. His funeral monument for Pope John XXIII in the baptistery at Florence became the model for many similar works with their combination of classical sculpture and architecture. His portrait bust of Niccolo da Uzzano is a wonderful example of delineation of character. His bronze statue of Gattamelata, a Venetian mercenary general, on horseback, executed at Padua in 1453, is, after the Col- leoni monument in Venice, the finest equestrian statue of the Renaissance. Perhaps the greatest of all his works was his St. George. It is unlike most classical statues, for the young saint is represented clad in medieval armor and his fiery gaze is fixed directly on the beholder, not downcast in passive beauty. Moreover, the effect striven for is not so much physical beauty and grace as vigor and energy, intel- lectual character and moral purpose. Vasari has well de- scribed it: "For the gild of armorers Donatello executed a most animated figure of St. George in his armor. The bright- ness of youthful beauty, generosity, and bravery shine forth in his face. His attitude gives evidence of a proud and ter- rible impetuosity. The character of the saint is indeed expressed most wonderfully and life seems to move within that stone." During the second half of the fifteenth century there was no single sculptor equal to Donatello, but the decorative side Progress in of the art was developed and further improve- painting ment was made in technique. Meanwhile the painters had been learning many lessons. Those who had served, as many did, an apprenticeship in the workshops of sculptors or goldsmiths learned lessons in anatomy and how to represent the human figure in a natural and correct way. Progress was also made in designing, some artists experi- mented with colors, and others worked out the laws of fore- shortening and perspective. Oil painting had been intro- duced at the beginning of the century, when the Flemish painter. Van Eyck, employed it on large canvases. For the cities of Flanders in the fifteenth century had painters sec- ond only to the Italians. The themes of paintings continued THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 605 to be for the most part Scriptural — Madonnas and Holy Families, or scenes drawn from church history and legend. This was partly because the Church was still the chief em- ployer of artists, partly because the ideal interests of most people were still prevailingly religious. Classical subjects, however, were also depicted and bits of classical detail were introduced in other paintings. Many portraits of contem- poraries were painted, and contemporary costumes and models and Italian scenery were employed in depicting Biblical scenes in ancient Palestine. The faces of the models were, indeed, sometimes too closely followed. Landscape and architecture were shown in the backgrounds, and animal and floral life were often brought in. Even in a portrait or group picture an exquisite landscape may be visible through an open window. But landscapes and still life were not painted separately as yet. There were now many schools of painting scattered over central and northern Italy — Tuscan, Florentine, Umbrian, Lombard, Sienese, and so on. Among the many Noted paint- great masters it is embarrassing to attempt a fifteenth^ selection. FraAngelico (1387-1455), back in the century first half of the century, lacks many of the merits of the later masters, but is celebrated for the gleaming colors of his paintings and for the spiritual rapture which shines from their angelic faces. Toward the century's close come four great artists: Ghirlandajo (1449-1494), noted for his por- traits and realism; Botticelli (1444-1510), admired for the dreamy beauty of his graceful figures and lovely "decora- tive composition"; Signorelli (1442-1524), who excelled in forcefulness and in representing muscular movement ; Peru- gino (1446- 1 524), who expressed religious contemplation and ecstasy with consummate skill. With the opening of the sixteenth century we come to the three supreme geniuses who mark the "High Renaissance," Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Raphael (1483- The"Hi h 1520), and Michelangelo (1475-1564). Leo- Renais- nardo, although also a sculptor, architect, and ^^^^^ engineer, was primarily a painter. As such he is noted for 6o6 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE his composition, his use of light and shade, and for his type of face; but some of his works have suffered from his ex- cessive zeal in experimenting with uncertain colors. Like Perugino and another great artist named Lorenzo di Credi, Leonardo had been a pupil of Verrochio, the sculptor of the Colleoni statue. Leonardo spent much time at Milan and in France, He was a man both of beauty and grace and of great physical strength. His mind also was remarkable, and from notebooks which he left behind him, although they are somewhat cryptic owing to such habits of his as writing backwards with his left hand, it has been inferred that he was interested in and more or less of an adept at almost every branch of art, science, and philosophy. He was some- thing of a humanist and musician and also had a mechanical turn of mind. Some of the sketches in his notebooks seem to forecast modern inventions. Raphael of Urbino was "the great harvester" and "se- rene perfecter" whose art formed the climax to the previ- ous period of experiment and evolution in painting. He was blest with an even temperament as well as the greatest genius, and so was able to cooperate harmoniously with others and in the course of his brief life to amass the largest fortune of any artist of his time. He was given such a multi- tude of commissions that he had to have a corps of assistants and died at thirty-seven of overwork. This participation of assistants makes some of the works attributed to him un- equal in execution and defective in detail. Michelangelo, who was perhaps even greater as a sculptor than as a painter and who also was a distinguished architect and engineer, had a long career extending beyond the end of our period. Both as painter and sculptor he displayed the greatest daring and ability in representing the nude human body in every variety of posture. His personal habits are interestingly described by Vasari: "In all things Michel- agnolo was exceedingly moderate; ever intent upon his work during the period of youth, he contented himself with a lit- tle bread and wine; and at a later period, until he had fin- ished the [Sistine] Chapel, namely, it was his habit to take THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 607 but a frugal refreshment at the close of his day's work. Al- though rich, he lived like a poor man. Rarely did any friend or other person eat at his table; and he would accept no pres- ents, considering that he would be bound to any one who offered him such. His temperance kept him in constant activity and he slept very little, frequently rising in the night because he could not sleep and resuming his labors with the chisel. For these occasions he had made himself a cap of pasteboard in the center of which he placed his candle, which thus gave him light without encumbering his hands. In his youth he frequently slept in his clothes; being wearied with his labors, he had no mind to undress merely that he might have to dress again. In his latter years he wore stockings of dog-skin for months together, and when these were removed, the skin of the leg sometimes came with them." With the close of the fifteenth century and the dispersion of artists from Florence which followed the death of Lorenzo de' Medici and the rise of the stern reformer of Rome be- religion and manners, Savonarola, Rome became a^tiSIc^ ^ the great center of the artistic Renaissance, center especially when Pope Julius II called thither Raphael and Michelangelo and the architect Bramante. There Raphael decorated the Stanze in the Vatican with a series of great paintings, and Michelangelo adorned the end wall of the Sistine Chapel — a rectangular apartment so named after its builder, Sixtus IV — with his Last Judgment and the ceiling with his sibyls and prophets and scenes from the creation and fall of man. But with this Roman period we must take our leave of the artistic Renaissance, omitting the final period of the great Venetian school of painting in the course of the sixteenth century and the spread of Ren- aissance art to other lands. In the fifteenth century overland communication and trade with the Far East became much more diffi- cggg^jion ^f cult than in the days of Marco Polo. The cru- overland sading states in the East had all disappeared ; the Byzantine Empire was hastening to its fall; the Ottoman 6o8 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Turks made conditions harder for merchants and travelers; and, most important of all, the Mongol Empire had lost its control of China and then had broken up into contending parts. Tamerlane had done trade and economic prosperity in Persia and other lands great damage. By the latter half of the fifteenth century the Golden Horde had lost its hold on Russia. Trade from the East became practically limited to the southern sea routes from the Indian Ocean by way of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. These routes were controlled by Mohammedan traders and during the overland passage from the heads of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, the wares were subject to several expensive reloadings and duties. Even in the case of what might seem the short carry from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, the goods were first landed at a port in the peninsula of Mount Sinai, then transported by land to Cairo, then transferred to boats and taken down the Nile to Rosetta, then loaded on camels again and carried to Alexandria. At each stop- ping-place such heavy duties were levied that by the time the goods reached the Mediterranean the price had quad- rupled. Evidently an immense saving and profit would be effected by any one who discovered an all-sea route from European ports to Malacca and Calicut, the two chief em- poriums of the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, the work of maritime exploration and dis- covery, which during the thirteenth and fourteenth cen- p . turies had been chiefly carried on by Italians, Henry the was Continued by the Portuguese, especially aviga or lifter their conquest from the Mohammedans in 141 5 of the important African port, Ceuta. Under the di- rection of one of the king's younger sons. Prince Henry (1394-1460), the island groups in the Atlantic were re- visited and settled, and expeditions were dispatched farther and farther south down the west coast of the African con- tinent. As governor of the Portuguese military Order of Christ, Prince Henry was aiming to do in the Atlantic what the Teutonic Knights had accomplished in the Baltic; namely, to convert heathen natives to Christianity and to THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 609 secure new territory for the Order and for Portugal In the Atlantic islands and on the Guinea coast. The economic accompaniment of these pious and political motives was a profitable trade in gold, ivory, and negro slaves, in cap- turing whom the Portuguese became very proficient. It is doubtful if Prince Henry was aiming especially at the cir- cumnavigation of Africa or a sea route to the Indies. Nor did he personally participate in these voyages, but remained in his astronomical observatory on a sea-girt promontory conning works of history and mathematics. It has never- theless become customary to speak of him as " Prince Henry the Navigator." Before his death the Cape Verde Islands had been discovered and the African coast explored almost to Sierra Leone. After Prince Henry's death the voyages went on just the same. The equator was crossed in 1472-73, the mouth of the Congo was reached in 1484, and two or three p^j-ther years later Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape Portuguese of Good Hope and sailed far enough beyond it to ^^^ °^^ '°" make sure that the southernmost extremity of the continent had at last been reached. At the same time that Diaz was rounding the Cape, King John II of Portugal sent forth three other expeditions : one to Abyssinia by way of Egypt and the Red Sea, one to endeavor to cross Africa overland from the Senegal, and one to try to sail northeast around Europe to China and India. During the second half of the fifteenth century, too, as records in Portuguese archives show, various individuals were granted rights to islands in the Western ocean which they had discovered or hoped to find. English seamen from Bristol also had been sailing westward into the Atlantic. But the scheme which was destined to prove most fruit- ful was that in which a Genoese sailor, named Christopher Columbus, finally succeeded in enlisting the Christopher support of the Spanish court after unsuccessful Columbus overtures to other governments. In 1474 Columbus had gone to the Madeira Islands, had married there, and then embarked on a voyage to the north which took him beyond 6io THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Iceland. During his residence and voyages in these distant outposts of European civilization he familiarized himself with Western waters and deep-sea sailing, and probably heard many tales of distant lands and seas. We have al- ready noted that medieval scholars knew that the world was round and had speculated as to the distance between the western shores of Spain and the easternmost coasts of Asia. In the same year that Columbus went to the Madeiras, Toscanelli, a Florentine scholar, in response to inquiries from Lisbon had written to the Portuguese king that it was possible to reach China by sailing west and had sent a chart to illustrate his argument. The Portuguese king failed to follow Toscanelli's advice, but Columbus, although not a very learned man, got hold of this idea and determined to put it to the test by a voyage straight westward to Cathay. Sailing from Palos with three caravels provisioned for a year, he put into the Canaries to refit and then sailed west T,. ,. for five weeks without reaching land. The crew The dis- ° covery of began to grumble and then to plot against him, "^^"^^ but he held to his purpose and on October 12, 1492, came to one of the small islands of the West Indies which he named San Salvador. He cruised about the archi- pelago for three months and then returned in triumph to Spain. Columbus made three subsequent voyages to the West Indies and northeast coast of South America, but died in the belief that he had reached Asiatic waters. Before his death other mariners had followed in his trail. Amerigo Vespucci, who accompanied some of these expeditions, was impressed by the fact that the South American coast did not correspond at all to the latitudes assigned to Cathay in the maps and geographies, and so wrote friends a letter in which he proclaimed it at least as a "New World." This letter was published and his name became associated with the new continents, which both in the south and the north were finally named ''America." Now that Spain had apparently found a westward route to the East, it became imperative for the Portuguese to complete their circumnavigation of Africa if they wished THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 6ii to be the first to establish trade with India and the Spice Islands. In July, 1497, Vasco da Gama left Lis- ^. bon With four ships, a well-paid and well-trained navigation crew, provisions for three years, and the best °^ ^^'^'^^ scientific instruments then obtainable. At the Cape Verde Islands he left the coast to avoid calms and adverse winds and currents and sailed for three full months out of sight of land. This was not, however, so bold a feat as the first voyage of Columbus, since Vasco knew just where he should strike land again. He rounded the Cape in November and by March, 1498, reached Mozambique, where Arabic was spoken, and then Mombasa, where he secured a pilot who conducted him across the Indian Ocean to Calicut, which he reached in May. In August he started back and arrived at Lisbon in September, 1499, with only half of his ships and one third of his men, but with a precious cargo of gems and spices. This meant that the commercial greatness of Portugal was assured for the next century and that the day of Venice as the first sea power of Europe was over. The Portuguese proved more than a match for the rival Moham- medan traders in the Indian Ocean, and they kept secret their routes to the East and received from the pope the ex- clusive right to make conquests and to convert the heathen there. Portugal could, of course, greatly undersell Venice, which obtained its Oriental wares through the Moham- medans. The Spanish discovery of a new world and the Portu- guese renewal of contact in a closer way with the old world of the Orient both broadened human knowledge stimulus to and quickened the imagination. Geography and civilization astronomy acquired vast stores of new data and were able to correct previous misinformation. Science learned of new plants and new animals, which were sometimes introduced into Europe, affecting the daily life of the average man. New races and unsuspected stages of human civilization were en- countered, although not at first scientifically scrutinized and appreciated. New fields were opened to economic, maritime, and colonial enterprise. Literature profited by new subject- 6i2 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE matter and a new inspiration. Even more, perhaps, than the crusades the voyages of discovery aroused the spirit of adventure and represented energy and enterprise. The Atlantic was now destined to replace the Mediterranean as the chief waterway of Europe, and the states bordering on it rose successively to national greatness and took the lead as maritime powers, first Portugal and Spain, then the Dutch and English. These changes came about gradually and were largely in the future, but they give us further reason for closing our survey of the Middle Ages about the year 1500. Vasco da Gama's voyage marked the beginning of that European political and economic exploitation of the Far East and of Africa which is a prominent feature of modern history. The voyage of Columbus is not only one of the boundary stones between the Middle Ages and modern times; it also reminds us that American history opens as medieval history closes. THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 613 EXERCISES AND READINGS The Fine Arts. Symonds, Short History of the Renaissance, chap, xii, pp. 197-240. Vasari. The Life by Vasari of any artist mentioned in the foregoing chapter. A recent English edition of Vasari is that of 1907 in four volumes by Blashfield and Hopkins. Berenson, The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, pp. 1-12; "Vasari in the Light of Recent Publications." Brunelleschi's Dome. Sturgis and Frothingham, A History of Architecture, vol. iv, pp. 94-97. Works of Art. The reader should familiarize himself with some of the reproductions of the masterpieces of the Renaissance to be found in the numerous illus- trated histories of art and in special studies on individual artists. Cellini. The Life of BenvemUo Cellini, written by Himself. The reader may dip for himself into one of the English translations of this book, or read the selections from it in Whitcomb, A Literary Source Book of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 110-18, and Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. I, pp. 531-34- The Age of Discovery. Cambridge Modern History, vol. i, chap, i, pp. 7-36, by E. J. Payne. Portuguese Voyages. Cheyney, European Background of American History, chap, iv, pp. 60- 78, "Pioneer Work of Portugal." K. G. Jayne, Vasco da Gama, and his Successors (London, 1910); pp. i- 32, "The Early Discoveries, c. 14 15-1497"; pp. 33-59, "Vasco da Gama's First Voyage." Columbus. I E. G. Bourne, Spain in America, chaps, ii-iv, pp. 8-53. Note especially the detailed map of his voyages at pp. 34-35. CHAPTER XXXIII THE RISE OF ABSOLUTISM AND OF THE MIDDLE CLASS In this closing chapter we have to note political and eco- nomic conditions and the course of events in the leading Introductory Countries of western Europe during the last half outline ^f ^j^g fifteenth century and the first few years of the sixteenth. This time was one of transition from the later Middle Ages to what is known as modern history. Its chief general features will prove to be the growth of ab- solute monarchies, the passing of the medieval nobility and the rise of a prosperous middle class, and the prominence of international relations and European diplomacy. The most striking particular changes are the progress of the new Bur- gundian State, the increasing fortune of the House of Haps- burg, the sudden rise of Spain and Portugal to national greatness owing in part to the voyages of discovery. Other important events were the Wars of the Roses in England, the reign of the crafty Louis XI in France, and the French invasions of Italy. We shall now take up the countries of western Europe in the following order, Germany, Burgundy, Switzerland, France, England, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and then close with the accession of Charles V. The reign of the Hapsburg emperor, Frederick HI (1440- 1493), has been well epitomized as "the longest and dullest ^ J . , of all German history. The most careful in- r rederick III of spection can reveal only a few things that are Germany ^orth remembering." Frederick was slow, poor, and powerless. For the most part he merely watched the course of events, consoling himself with gardening and astrology, and mumbling his favorite maxim, '' Rerum ir- reciiperahilium summa felicitas oblivio'' (What can't be helped had best be forgot), and the acrostic of words be- ginning with the five vowels, ''Austrice est imperare orbi RISE OF ABSOLUTISM ' 615 universo,*' or, '^Alles Erdreich ist Osterreich unterthan" (All earth is ours ultimately). But for the time being both the Bohemians and the Hungarians, when their boy king, Ladislas, of the House of Hapsburg, died in 1457, disre- garded the claims of Frederick III and gave a passing ex- hibition of national feeling by electing the native kings, George of Podiebrad (1458-1471) and Matthias Corvinus (1458-1490). A more influential figure in European politics than the slow-moving Frederick was his brilliant, cultured, and knightly son, Maximilian (1493-1519). He had . fill it»i« ivisxirniii3.ri i already taken the government largely mto his own hands during his father's last years, and had been elected King of the Romans in i486, which assured him the imperial office upon his father's death. Of his important marriage with the Burgundian heiress we shall presently speak. In 1491, by the Treaty of Pressburg, he arranged with Ladislas II, who was then King of both Bohemia and Hungary, that in case the descendants of Ladislas died out, those countries should pass to the House of Hapsburg. This actually happened in 1526, and ever since then Aus- tria, Bohemia, and Hungary have been ruled together by the Hapsburgs. During the reign of Sigismund, early in the fifteenth cen- tury, some futile efforts had been made by the German Diet to reform the imperial constitution and to secure German a standing army by regular taxation. Toward government the close of the reign of Frederick III the free imperial cities began to send representatives to the Diet. There were fre- quent meetings of this assembly under Maximilian who needed grants of money for his ambitious foreign projects. He also established a central court of justice and tried to group the various states of the Empire together in adminis- trative "circles." But these belated symptoms of common action and of a national German feeling were accompanied by the completion in the chief local principalities of the transition from feudalism to centralized administration which had been going on since the twelfth century. Such 6i6 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE regions as Bavaria, Saxony, and Brandenburg were now practically independent territorial states. The study "of Roman law, introduced into the German universities about the middle of the fifteenth century, is thought to have con- tributed considerably to the power of the princes at the head of such states. In a previous chapter we stated that the German cities reached the height of their prosperity only about the year German 1 500. By that time silver and copper were anTsocial mined extensively in Hungary, Bohemia, the conditions Tyrol, and Germany proper. Trade also flour- ished and companies with large capital were formed. These tended to establish monopolies and make things hard for the small merchant and the consumer. But an especially discontented class were the peasants who complained that their lords were requiring increased rents and services of them and were encroaching upon their common lands. From 1476 on local uprisings against the nobles and clergy were frequent in southern Germany. A sort of Christian socialism became popular among the peasants who based their demands upon the Bible and bore banners with pious inscriptions. But the great Peasants' Revolt of 1525 lies beyond the limits of our period. The origin of the House of Burgundy in the fourteenth century and its acquisition of both the Duchy and Free Growth of County of Burgundy, of Flanders and Artois, of dbn^"o7se^' Nevers and Rethel, and of other lands along the sions northeastern frontier of the Kingdom of France during the Hundred Years War, have been already men- tioned. In the first half of the fifteenth century it also ac- quired the Duchy of Luxemburg and numerous principalities in the Netherlands, such as the Duchies of Brabant and Limburg, and the Counties of Hainault, Holland, and Zee- land. By the time of Charles the Bold (1467-1477), there- fore, his possessions included most of modern Belgium and the Netherlands, a considerable slice of eastern France, and a little of western Germany. In other words, he threatened to create an important third state between the French RISE OF ABSOLUTISM 617 monarchy and Germany with a territory extending from the North Sea to the Alps. The chief strength and value of the Burgundian posses- sions lay not in the Burgundies proper, which were thinly populated and poor economically, but in the rich ^j^ . and populous cities of the Low Countries. Before of the the cities developed the peasants of the Low Netherlands Countries had been freer than in most places in the early Middle Ages, because the land was so difficult to reclaim from swamp and sea that great estates of lords were not established there, but the land was cultivated largely by hardy and thrifty individual freemen. Many of them be- came sailors, however, and in time trade developed. As the land thus grew more prosperous, feudal jurisdictions and lordships also grew up. But the feudal states and lords, except for the great County of Flanders, were petty before the Burgundian period. And as towns came into existence they bought communal privileges from their lords and then fought to keep them. But now the Dukes of Burgundy endeavored to build up a strong centralized monarchy with unified financial and judicial systems. This led them to disregard and The Burgun- ride roughshod over the particular privileges and ^|jj" overn- the diversities of custom cherished by each town ment and locality. They also demanded large grants of money from the cities in order to carry out their dynastic and for- eign ambitions. Although Charles the Bold was more eco- nomical and less given to pleasure and festivities than his father, his court was the most splendid in Europe and rich both in treasure and culture. He presided at council in per- son; he always dined in state in the presence of the entire court; sixteen equerries were in constant attendance upon him during the day and saw him safe to bed at night. Pre- cious jewels and costly plate were abundant, and the Order of the Golden Fleece was an appropriate name for the elite of the Burgundian knighthood. But all this show had the purpose behind it of impressing the world with the wealth and power of the Burgundian House. 6i8 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Beneath the pomp Charles was a hard-working executive and methodical man of business. Born in 1433, he was Charles elected a knight of the Golden Fleece when only the Bold twenty days old, two years before he was able to ride horseback on a wooden steed constructed for him by a saddler of Brussels. He was betrothed at six, and often as a mere child, when his father happened to be busy elsewhere, had been dispatched to this or that Flemish town to ask for a money grant. In the last two or three years of the life of Philip the Good, Charles was already the real head of the Burgundian State. He was frank, just, and impartial, but stern and severe to wrongdoers or to any of his subjects who resisted his commands and power. His epithet, the "Bold " or "Rash," indicates his impetuosity and military daring. He was somewhat lacking in tact and knowledge of human nature, and was too inclined to speak out his mind. Charles made an effort to consolidate his scattered pos- sessions into a compact and independent kingdom, but met His relations with many obstacles. In the Low Countries re- Netherlands volts in the cities of Ghent, Dinant, and Liege and England distracted him for a time. Liege, with a popula- tion of over 120,000 and a very democratic suffrage, was an especially hard nut to crack. There the gilds of artisans had an equal voice with the richer organizations, and apprentices who were over fifteen years of age could vote in the annual city elections. The town lay in an ecclesiastical principality and in bygone days had made its bishop no end of trouble. Now that the Dukes of Burgundy controlled the appoint- ment of its bishop, it resisted them. Charles, however, crushed its revolt. He also succeeded in adding another province in the Netherlands, Guelders, to his possessions. Charles protected himself from the side of England by marry- ing Margaret of York, the sister of Edward IV, Louis XI of France, who was Charles's chief enemy, therefore had to content himself with an alliance with the losing Lancastrian side in England. Charles and Louis from the beginnings of their reigns were either openly at war or secretly plotting against each other. Loiigituae West 4 froii. Greenwich 620 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Their personalities were almost diametrically opposed, „, , and Louis had made the mistake of affronting Bold and Charles before the latter came into power. The °"'^ ' chief manifest bone of contention between them was some towns along their frontier, the river Somme, but in general each stood in the way of the other's territorial expansion. At this time the three great provinces of Lor- raine, Savoy, and Provence were all in weak hands and only waiting for some strong monarch to come and take them. At this time, too, Charles and Louis were the two strongest princes on the Continent. Could Charles have annexed these three districts, his territories would have extended from the North Sea to the Mediterranean and have shut oflf France from any further eastward expansion. Louis had the ad- vantage of being the older of the two men, and before he became king had as dauphin spent ten years in Dauphine, laying the foundations of his future treaties with the Swiss and Milan and of his future acquisition of Savoy and Pro- vence. These provinces might, however, have been willed to Charles rather than to Louis had the Burgundian not died too soon, leaving his adversary to reap the harvest. The territory which it was most essential for Charles to secure, however, was Lorraine, since It intervened between Charles's re- the two Burgundies and his possessions in Lux- lations with emburg and the Low Countries. When in 1473 Frederick the Duke of Lorraine died childless, Charles ar- ^^^ ranged by treaty that the new incumbent should be practically his vassal, and proceeded to fill up Lorraine with his own garrisons. In the same year he conferred at Treves for eight weeks with Frederick III — since many of the Burgundian possessions were nominally fiefs of the Em- pire — over the question of Frederick's making Charles a king and marrying his son Maximilian to Charles's daughter Mary. Once before, it will be remembered, there had been a Kingdom of Burgundy which in 1032 had lost its inde- pendence and become incorporated in the Holy Roman Empire. But Frederick sneaked off down the Moselle River early one morning without having agreed to raise Bur- RISE OF ABSOLUTISM 621 gundy to the status of a kingdom. Charles then wasted a year in a war on the Rhine in alUance with the Archbishop of Cologne, when he should have been crushing more dan- gerous enemies of his own. Sigismund of Hapsburg, Archduke of Austria and Count of the Tyrol, had mortgaged his somewhat uncertain feudal rights in Alsace and the Black Forest to Charles, p, . an action which aroused the fears of the Rhine defeated cities and of the Swiss. The Swiss had previously ^ ^ ^^ ^^^^ been at war with Sigismund, who was their ancestral enemy, but now both of them combined with Louis XI in a triple alliance against Charles. The Swiss helped Sigismund to recover his mortgaged possessions, and then, encouraged by Louis XI, they declared war on Charles. He, however, in- duced his ally Edward IV to invade France in 1475 and distract Louis's attention. Meanwhile Charles conquered Lorraine, whose young duke had rebelled against his inter- ference, became himself its duke, and planned to make it the center of his dominions. But in 1476 he was defeated by the Swiss at Granson and Morat and lost Lorraine ; the next year came his final defeat and death at Nancy. He left no son to try to carry out his plans, but his daughter Mary married Maximilian within a year, thereby still holding most of the Burgundian possessions together and greatly increasing the family possessions of the House of Haps- burg. Bones of the Burgundian dead were still to be seen on the battlefield of Morat when Lord Byron visited it in 1816, although it was the custom of every Burgundian who passed that way to remove a bone to his native land, while the Swiss postillions sold them for knife handles. Byron himself carried away enough to make " a quarter of a hero," and wrote his lines on "the patriotic field," . . . "Won by the unambitious heart and hand Of a proud, brotherly, and civic band." The Swiss at this period form an exception to the general rule of the increase of absolute monarchy in Europe, but fit in well enough with the rise of the middle class. After they had further raised their military reputation by defeating 622 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Charles the Bold so decisively, they became more indepen- -,, c • dent than ever. Whereas earlier their argument The Swiss ° Confedera- against Hapsburg rule had been that they were amenable to the emperor alone, now they began to refuse to be bound by anything that the imperial govern- ment did or wished them to do. They would neither pay taxes to the Holy Roman Empire nor abide by the decisions of an imperial court. The result was a brief war in 1499, after which the Swiss were confirmed in their ancient rights and conquests, and remained henceforth practically an in- dependent state quite severed from the Empire, although their formal separation and national independence did not come until 1648. Also in 1499 their territory had not yet attained the extent of modern Switzerland; there were further additions to be made especially upon the French and Italian sides. In France as a result of the Hundred Years War the nobles and clergy lost a deal of their wealth, especially of their The bour- land. In the fifteenth century we find a consider- geoisie in ^blc middle class in the country made up of the fifteenth- r ,, , r r i century owners oi small estates and 01 tenant larmers who France leased land for periods of a dozen or fifteen years. In the Estates General of 1484 even peasants participated in the local elections of representatives of the third estate. The bourgeoisie of the towns have become richer and more in- fluential than ever, especially as the Church has decayed and the feudal nobility has lost its military prestige through such defeats as those of Crecy and Agincourt. A townsman like Jacques Coeur, the silversmith of Bourges, where may still be seen his fine Gothic residence incorporating two Roman towers in its back wall, possessed more real power than any noble of the court of Charles VII, and was as im- portant to the French monarchy as the Bank of England or the Morgans are to a modern government. He became, in- deed, such a power behind the throne that he made enemies at court who procured his condemnation, but the death sentence was commuted to banishment at the intercession of the pope, and Jacques set out on a crusade against the RISE OF ABSOLUTISM 623 Turks. Shrewd Louis XI, the son of Charles VII, cared nothing for courtiers and pomp. He preferred to see his nobility stowed safely away in dungeons. But he liked to stop at the houses of substantial citizens, take dinner with them, and learn popular opinion. His dress and his manners were plebeian ; he chose his assistants regardless of rank ; and he granted many privileges to the cities, although he also taxed them heavily. The monarch grew more powerful as the middle class be- came more prominent. This was natural since the feudal lords had been a check upon them both. Al- Military and though Charles VII at first had been such an financial .... , , . . p . power gained unpromismg kmg and the victim of corrupt fav- by Charles orites, as his reign progressed he procured better ^^^ advisers and was successful not only in expelling the Eng- lish, but also in augmenting permanently the power of the Crown. The Estates General met only once during his reign and then agreed to a perpetual annual direct tax, or taille, of 1,200,000 livres for the support of a standing army. Nobles, clergy, most of the royal officials and soldiers, and the citizens of self-governing towns were exempted from the taille, which thus fell chiefly upon the peasants. With this permanent grant the king was able to have at his beck a permanent army, regularly paid and hence well disciplined and loyal. He needed no longer to appeal to individual captains to raise bands of mercenaries, and then have diffi- culty in paying them or in disbanding them when the war was over. Indeed, henceforth no one but the king and his royal officials could raise and maintain troops. The new army consisted of fifteen companies of knights or heavy- armed cavalry with accompanying men-at-arms and pages, and of free archers, of whom one was to be supplied by each of the sixteen thousand parishes in France, and of the ar- tillery. The native bowmen did not prove a great success, however, and Louis XI relied in their place for infantry largely upon hired Swiss or Scotch soldiers. Back in 1440, as dauphin, Louis had participated in a conspiracy of the feudal nobility against his father, Charles 624 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE VII. Later he went off to his appanage of Dauphine, where he ruled for some ten years without regard to his father, against whose wishes, too, he married the daugh- ter of the Duke of Savoy. Finally he fled to the Burgundian court of Philip the Good and came very near being disinherited by his angry parent. He was already thirty-eight years old when he became King of France, full of political experience, of knowledge and mistrust of men, trained both in plausible talk and in cunning scheming, con- fident in his own cleverness and ability to outwit others. Able as he was intellectually, he was very superstitious in his religion, and is well known for his wooden beads, the leaden image of the Virgin on his disreputable hat, and for the fact that he could be depended upon to keep his word only when he had sworn by one particular saint. His face and figure were as unattractive as were his cheap clothes, and there was something cruel and malicious and stealthy about him. His great merit as king was that he attended to everything himself. He traveled about his realm and dined with burghers to learn public opinion ; he was always seek- ing information, he even put his person in peril in crises for the sake of a personal interview with some adversary; and in his spider's webs at Plessis and Loches he made periodical visits to the remotest dungeons to make sure that the prisoners were still there — and to leer at them. Since Louis had opposed the Crown for twenty years be- fore he became king, the great lords with whom he had con- „, J spired in the past, and especially the Duke of of Public Burgundy with whom he had found a refuge, ^ ^^^ looked for a restoration of their influence and power at his accession. The holders of great fiefs in France at this time were for the most part descended from younger sons of the royal family, to whom since the thirteenth century the kings had been granting appanages, thereby nullifying many of the territorial gains of the monarchy and creating a new feudal nobility. These dukes and counts soon dis- covered that the rule of Louis was even less to their liking than that of Charles VII, and in 1465 they formed the RISE OF ABSOLUTISM 625 League of the Public Welfare against him. Leading spirits in this were his own brother Charles who had so nearly sup- planted him on the throne, Charles the Bold who was al- ready the real ruler in Burgundy in place of his senile father, the Duke of Brittany, the Houses of Orleans, Anjou, Alen- gon, and Bourbon, who were all offshoots of the royal family, the Dukes of Lorraine and Nemours, and the Counts of Armagnac and Saint- Pol. The league was victorious over the king chiefly because of a victory won by Charles the Bold at Montlhery, and Louis had to cede away territories and rights of the Crown to the individual members. For the public welfare they accomplished little except to appoint thirty-six reformers to remedy abuses In Church and State and to protect the people from oppression. Louis, however, soon regained complete control of the central government, and before his reign was over he had encompassed the death or imprisonment of Royal tri- nearly every member of the League of Public t^rkoHal Welfare, and had not only recovered the lands expansion alienated in 1465, but had acquired much additional terri- tory. In 1466 he took advantage of a quarrel between his brother and the Duke of Brittany to win Normandy back from both of them. When Louis told a meeting of the Estates General In 1468 that he intended to keep Normandy as a part of the royal domain, they agreed with him that the custom of granting appanages was a bad one. Indeed, the people seem to have felt little sympathy with the strug- gles of the nobles against Louis. But Charles the Bold, when he had Louis In his power at Peronne, forced the king to recompense his brother for the loss of Normandy by a grant of Champagne and Brie. Louis had come to Peronne hoping to get the better of Charles the Bold in a personal interview, and little thinking that Charles had learned of certain treacherous intrigues of his against him. The result was that Charles kept Louis a virtual prisoner until he had agreed to his demands. But Louis never let any one go whom he once had In his power, not even when he had given him a safe-conduct. He soon hoodwinked his brother 626 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE into accepting Guienne in place of Champagne and thus separated him by the breadth of France from his Burgundian ally. This brother had previously exchanged the Duchy of Berri for Normandy, so that it is evident that he had no particular attachment to any one locality, nor had any locality much love for him. In 1472 he died so opportunely for the schemes of Louis that the king was suspected of having poisoned him. The next year Louis caught and Im- prisoned Armagnac; the year following, Alengon. In 1475 Saint- Pol, who had played fast and loose with both Bur- gundy and France, was captured by Charles the Bold, who annexed his lands, but gave Louis the pleasure of executing him. In 1477 Nemours was beheaded and Louis's numer- ous schemes against Charles the Bold at last bore fruit in the latter's defeat and death at the hands of the Swiss. Louis then attempted to annex various Burgundian prov- inces, but Maximilian had married Charles's daughter and fought for her heritage, so that at Louis's death only the Duchy of Burgundy and the Somme towns were actually in his possession, although other territories were still in dis- pute. Louis also spirited Savoy away from the heirs of his feeble-minded father-in-law. Rene of Anjou (1409-1480), titular King of Naples and Sicily and Duke of Anjou and Maine, after many misfortunes and the loss of his other possessions, had retired in 1473 to his County of Provence and devoted the remainder of his life to art and literature. When he died In 1480 and his nephew, Charles of Maine, died in 1481, Maine and Anjou reverted to the Crown, while Provence for the first time in its history was incorporated in the Kingdom of France. Except for Brittany, Artols, and the County of Burgundy, France had now very nearly reached its modern boundaries, and in 1491 the son of Louis, Charles VIII, added Brittany by marrying its heiress. Artols and the County of Burgundy, however, he ceded to Maximilian to compensate him for having nullified Maximilian's previ- ous marriage by proxy with the same heiress, and for other reasons. Savoy also regained its independence. These very great acquisitions of territory under Charles RISE OF ABSOLUTISM 627 VII from England and under Louis XI from the princely nobility and the dynasties on the frontiers could Survival of not, however, be at once absorbed into a homo- local gov- geneous whole with the rest of the royal domain, ^"^"^^"^ especially since the royal domain itself was really not yet homogeneous, but marked by the existence of local privi- leges and discrepancies. Like many of his predecessors, Louis XI followed the policy of " Divide and rule." He was no more inclined than had been his father to call the Estates General except in time of need, and preferred to deal with the numerous provincial assemblies of France. Like his father, too, he created or sanctioned local parlements in his newly acquired territories — high courts of justice practi- cally independent of the Parlement of Paris. In short, the king was still the chief bond of political union and France still lacked a national law. In the Estates General of 1484, summoned after the death of Louis XI to decide the membership of the council of regency, voting was not by estates, but by six regions, "France," Normandy, Bur- gundy, Aquitaine, Languedoc, and Provence. In contrast to the increasing power of the Crown in France under Charles VII, in England during the last years of the Hundred Years War the central govern- England at ment had been growing weaker and weaker. *}jg Humired Henry VI was a feeble, though well-meaning. Years War monarch; there was much disorder through the land; and Parliament, which had acquired so much authority under the Lancastrians, proved unable to cope with the situation alone without the aid of a strong executive. Great lords kept armed bands of retainers, and seized property which did not belong to them, and did violence to their enemies; and intimidated sheriffs and juries if an attempt was made to bring them to justice. They also controlled the elections of members to Parliament. With the close of the war in France a disorderly element of adventurers, mercenaries, and brigands had returned to England ; and discontent with the outcome of the war had weakened the hold of the king on his people. As in France, the greatest nobles were con- 628 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE nected with the royal family. Edward III had married his younger sons to English heiresses and thus some estates of great size had been brought together. The two leading houses in the realm were the Lancastrians, who had held the throne thus far in the fifteenth century, and the Yorkists, who now had a better hereditary claim to the throne be- cause they were descended from the second as well as the fifth son of Edward III, whereas the Lancastrians were de- scendants of his fourth son, John of Gaunt. Henry VI was as little able to control his Lancastrian kinsmen, the Somersets and the Beauforts, as he was to The Wars of ^^^^rain the Yorkist Party. In 1455 broke out a the Roses, series of battles, raids, border fights, feuds, and 1455 14 5 murders between these two parties and also be- tween lesser rival nobles in various parts of the land. These are collectively known as the "Wars of the Roses," but while the white rose was the emblem of the Yorkists, the red rose was not worn until the very last battle at Bosworth Field in 1485 by Henry Tudor. The chief central thread of interest was the struggle for the throne. Henry VI lost it in 1461 to Edward IV, previously the Duke of York. He in turn was forced to flee to Bruges in 1470 by a hostile combination of the nobility under the lead of the Earl of Warwick, known as the "King-Maker," and who restored Henry VI to the throne. Edward, however, returned in 147 1 and slew most of his enemies, including poor old Henry and his youthful son. Edward IV had offended most of his own family by marrying a nobody and elevating her rela- tives to the peerage. When he died, his brother Richard executed several of the queen's kinsmen, seized the throne for himself, and later murdered Edward's two innocent boys. But Richard in his turn had to face hostile combina- tions of what was left of the nobility, and after two years on the throne lost his life and crown to Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who could connect his descent in a very indirect way with the House of Lancaster, and who now became Henry VII. To make surer of his position he married Edward IV's daughter. RISE OF ABSOLUTISM 629 Some authorities date the New Monarchy in England from Edward IV's reign and others from that of Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty. Edward IV The New felt that he had conquered his throne and was Monarchy self-willed and made little use of Parliament except to put through bills of attainder against his enemies. He insti- tuted a new custom called "Benevolences," in which he got m^oney by bringing personal pressure to bear upon wealthy individuals and corporations such as those of the muni- cipalities. This was really taxation without the consent of Parliament. Benevolences, however, were an irregular and precarious kind of revenue which could not be depended upon as could the permanent annual taille of France. Nor did the English kings establish a standing army. Henry VII was a sort of English Louis XI, however, equally shrewd and calculating and stingy and averse to war, but not quite so superstitious and cruel and despicable. He continued the practice of benevolences and did not call Parliament often. He instituted the Court of Star Chamber, made up of mem- bers of his own council, to punish the disorders of the great nobles and to deal with cases where the common-law courts and juries had proved ineffectual. This court restored order in the land, but it was liable to be an instrument of tyranny, since it was not bound by the rules of the common law, could employ torture, and was under close royal influ- ence. Royal influence, indeed, was to reign supreme in Eng- land for the next hundred years, since the king gave order and protection, which the Lancastrian Parliaments had failed to do. Battles and executions during the period of the Wars of the Roses had considerably depleted the ranks of the nobil- ity. In England as in France the fifteenth cen- r^^^ middle tury was the time of the rise of the middle class, class in The English towns now reached the height of "^ ^'^ their prosperity and independence. Secure behind their walls, they took little part in the Wars of the Roses, and during that period, as well as in the preceding weak reign of Henry VI, profited by freedom from the interference of the 630 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE central government. In the country much of the manorial organization had given way to tenants who rented large plots of land on fifty-year leases. The Paston Letters show how in the fifteenth century a family of plebeian origin could gradually amass considerable landed property and hold important political and judicial offices. Both Edward IV and Henry VII legislated in the interest of the com- mercial classes and of the economic welfare of the country. Native English merchants were now getting the foreign trade into their hands. The Tudors themselves were really an upstart Welsh family of middle-class origin, and they understood how to deal with that class, how to bully it and how to please it. They replenished the nobility with other upstarts like themselves, whom for a time they were able to control. When Parliament did meet in the Tudor period, it was generally of one mind with the king. When young Henry VIII succeeded his father in 1509, he found the treasury full and his people devoted to him. The Christian kingdoms of the Spanish peninsula, during the later Middle Ages as before, had many disputed succes- c . . sions and family quarrels, and intermarried and bpain in . . the later fought with one another continually. France ^^^ and England had interfered in their afTairs a good deal during the Hundred Years War, and the Kings of Aragon were much occupied with Sicily. But no great changes in the constitutional institutions of these kingdoms or in their relative size and importance occurred until the second half of the fifteenth century. Meanwhile the Mo- hammedans continued to hold Granada for over two cen- turies after they had lost the rest of the peninsula. But the marriage in 1469 of Ferdinand, who was King of Aragon from 1479 to 15 16, with Isabella, Queen of Castile Union of and Lcon from 1474 to 1504, and their conquest Ferd^nand^*^ of Granada from the Moors, which was com- and Isabella pleted In 1 492, ended the separate existence of those kingdoms which merged henceforth in one nation and state, since called Spain. Spanish Navarre was annexed to Castile by Ferdinand after Isabella's death. Ferdinand and RISE OF ABSOLUTISM 631 Isabella accomplished more than mere territorial union. They were both able organizers and greatly developed the central government and royal power. They made much use of central councils of state and finance, and selected lawyers rather than the nobles and higher clergy as their chief administrative ofificials. Private war was forbidden, castles could not be built without the monarch's consent, an ex- amination was made into the validity of the nobles' titles to their lands and considerable property was thus reclaimed for the Crov/n. Isabella revived an old institution by which armed brotherhoods in the Castilian towns had kept the peace in the localities, but she brought it under royal con- trol and used it for the ends of the central government. Ferdinand extended this institution of the Holy Herman- dad to Aragon. The two monarchs also revived the Holy Inquisition of the thirteenth century and had it transferred from papal to royal control in their territories. In fact the Spanish Church as a whole was brought under the control of the Crown, and, as we have seen, reformed. Isabella also had Ferdinand made Grand Master of the three great mili- tary orders as vacancies occurred, and thus brought those powerful organizations with their trained soldiery under direct royal control. The long struggle with the Moors for Granada during this reign also produced an efficient fight- ing force. The medieval army was modernized and the Spanish infantry were soon to eclipse the military reputa- tion even of the Swiss. An attempt was made to unify the laws of Castile which were published in eight books. Ferdinand and Isabella were not favorably inclined to- ward representative assemblies and parliamentary govern- ment, and once sixteen years went by without a p^ ^j^^ meeting of the Cortes of Castile. The monarchs liberties treated the towns in their dbminions with con- ^" ^'^ ^^^ sideration, however, as they wished their support, and both industry and agriculture were in a flourishing condition. They also looked after the social and economic welfare of their people and gave the peasants and lower classes better protection than was afforded by any other government of 632 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE the time. Queen Isabella is believed to have established the first field hospital when in 1484 she provided six large tents fully furnished and free medical and surgical attendance. Three years later it took four hundred "ambulancias" to carry the Queen's Hospital. Yet Isabella and Ferdinand drove thousands of Jews from their realm and through the Spanish Inquisition burned at the stake many heretics and Moorish or Jewish converts to Christianity who had re- lapsed to their original faith. Spain was not a land of great economic resources and this persecution of some of its most prosperous inhabitants and those most skillful in business and industries further operated to prevent the growth of a middle class. The discovery of America still more increased the power of the Crown, which ruled the Spanish colonies absolutely and derived a great income in gold and silver bullion from them. This did not in the long run stimulate the economic development of Spain itself, however, but rather had the contrary effect. Castile was more amenable to the great increase of royal power under Ferdinand and Isabella than Aragon, which clung tenaciously to its old cus- toms and local liberties. But inasmuch as Castile was three times as large as Aragon it was likely in the end to swing the smaller kingdom with it. Ferdinand was a very astute and, it must be added, un- scrupulous diplomat. He deceived or outwitted all the other ^. , European powers at least once each. When it was Diplomacy j- r- of Ferdi- reported to him that another monarch had com- "^" plained that the King of Aragon had cheated him twice, Ferdinand exclaimed, "He lies! I cheated him three times!" A favorite method with Ferdinand was to enter alliances and then leave the others in the lurch as soon as he had secured his own object. He was generally hostile to France, with which he came into conflict in Italy and the Pyrenees. Hence he married his children to princes of other nations, giving his daughter Joanna to Philip, Archduke of Austria, the son of Maximilian and Mary of Burgundy, and his other two daughters to John II of Portugal and Henry VIII of England. Finally, however, after the death of Isa- RISE OF ABSOLUTISM 633 bella he himself married a niece of the French king. Upon the death of Isabella, Joanna and Philip had claimed the throne of Castile which Ferdinand reluctantly relinquished to them. But Philip soon died and Joanna was literally crazed with grief, so that Ferdinand recovered Castile and ruled it until his death. Portugal had with some difficulty maintained its inde- pendence of Castile during the later Middle Ages. It had increased Its territory in the fifteenth century by the acquisition of Ceuta and by further conquests in Moorish northwestern Africa and exploration along the coast and settlement in the islands of the Atlantic. The king who did most to increase the power of the monarchy within Portugal was John II (1481-1495). The voyage of Vasco da Gama opened the prospect of a Portuguese com- mercial and maritime empire in Africa and the Indian Ocean in the next century, stimulated national spirit and enterprise, and increased the power of the Crown, since the Eastern trade was made a royal monopoly. Last in our survey of the states of western Europe at the close of the fifteenth century we come to the Italian pen- insula. In a way the French invasions of Italy ^h f h at the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the invasions of sixteenth century were nothing new. Goths and '^ ^ Lombards, Byzantines and Saracens and Normans, Hohen- staufens and Angevins and Aragonese, had been invading Italy throughout the Middle Ages and much of the penin- sula had always been under foreign rule. These new French invasions, however, led to important political changes in the peninsula and determined that instead of Italy's be- coming a strong state under the rule of one king like Spain, France, and England, or remaining like Germany divided into small states ruled by native princes, it was to become for the next three centuries the frequent battlefield of for- eign monarchs and to be partitioned in treaties by them. These invasions closed the political period which had been at the basis of the Italian Renaissance, just as the voyages of discovery destroyed the economic prosperity upon which 634 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE the flourishing of art and letters had been founded. Three successive French kings, Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I, tried to win Italian possessions, and came thereby into relations with three successive popes, Alexander VI, Julius II, and Leo X. Despite their efforts the chief outcome of the period of invasions was the introduction of the House of Hapsburg into Italy. In 1492 the death of Lorenzo de' Medici left Florence under the rule of his incompetent son, Piero, and deprived The Italian ^^aly of an able diplomat who had preserved expedition of peace and the balance of power between the rival states into which that peninsula was di- vided. Charles VIII of France in 1491 had attained his twenty-first year and had married Anne of Brittany despite the efforts of Maximilian, Henry VII of England, and Fer- dinand. He now determined to conquer the Kingdom of Naples, taking advantage of the claim which Rene of Prov- ence and Anjou had bequeathed to Charles's father, Louis XI, against the actual ruler, Ferrante of the Aragonese line. Charles was urged to invade Italy by Lodovico Sforza, who was usurping the throne of Milan at the expense of his nephew and against whom Florence and Naples were con- spiring. Before setting out Charles found it necessary to protect his rear by concessions to Henry VII, Maximilian, and Ferdinand. He bought Henry off with money; Maxi- milian with Artois, Charolais, and the County of Burgundy, as already recounted; and ceded to Ferdinand Cerdagne and Roussillon in the Pyrenees. In 1494 he crossed the Alps. Lodovico gave Charles free passage through his territory. Venice held aloof. In Florence the effect of Charles's ap- proach was the overthrow of Piero de' Medici and the ascendancy of the Dominican friar, Savonarola, who set up an aristocratic constitution mod- eled after Venice and its Grand Council. Savonarola was a popular preacher who had been conducting a religious re- vival in Florence, denouncing the sins of the time and the abuses in the Church, especially at the papal court. Mach- RISE OF ABSOLUTISM 635 iavelli heard him attacking "your books, O priests, and treating you in a way that even dogs would not endure." Savonarola also assumed the role of a prophet and seer of visions, and had much to say about a scourge of God which was coming upon the Italians for their sins. The appear- ance of Charles VIII seemed to the people a fulfillment of this prediction. "This friar," wrote the cynical Machia- velli, "is coloring his lies to suit the times." Savonarola made an alliance with Charles and urged him to proceed to Rome and reform the Papacy. The pope at this time, of whom Machiavelli heard Savona- rola say "everything that can be said of any great villain," was the notorious Alexander VI of the Spanish Alexander family of Borgia. Before becoming pope he had ciir some reputation as a theologian, but as pope he Borgia devoted himself largely to politics and especially to build- ing up a principality for his illegitimate son, Csesar, and negotiating influential marriages for his daughter, Lucrezia. Csesar hesitated at no violence or crime to accomplish his political designs, and both he and his father were popularly believed to be adepts at poisoning. Their reputation in this particular is probably grossly exaggerated. But Alexander actually negotiated with the infidel Turks against the Chris- tian king, Charles VIII. The importance of Alexander VI and Caesar Borgia, however, is not that they were monsters seldom seen in history, but that they were representatives of the popes and despots of their time. The cardinals knew well enough that Alexander had children when they chose him pope, and his immediate predecessor had had children too. As for Caesar, Machiavelli in his famous book. The Prince, selected him as the model for all who would become despots. Charles did not pause at Rome to reform the Papacy or to depose Alexander VI, but hurried on to Naples. Fer- rante I had died in 1494 ; his successor, Alfonso II, in and out resigned in favor of Ferrante II, who in his turn °^ Naples fled before the French without a struggle. But after Charles had wintered in Naples, the situation in the north of the 636 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE peninsula began to assume a dangerous aspect, and the doors which had swung open so readily before him now seemed about to be bolted behind him. Ferdinand and iVIaximilian had united with Milan, Venice, and the pope in the League of Venice against him. He left half his army, which a winter of dissipation had somewhat enervated, to hold Naples and hurried home with the rest before Ferdinand and Maximilian could stop him. Venice and Milan, however, nearly did so in the indecisive battle of Fornovo. The French troops who had been left behind in Naples were soon expelled and the Aragonese line returned in the person of its fourth ruler within two years, Federigo. The only one in Italy who remained true to the French was Savonarola, and his government in Florence ended with Fate of his burning at the stake on the charge of heresy Savonarola jj^ 1498. He had tried to effect a puritanical re- form in the manners and morals of the Florentines, and had induced them to destroy a great pile of "vanities" in the enthusiasm of the moment; but they soon tired of his strictness. His unfavorable attitude drove many artists away from Florence to other centers. The Medici and the pope were of course both bitterly opposed to him. A final reason for his fall was that he was, as Machiavelli remarked, "a weaponless prophet." In the same year that Savonarola was executed, Charles VIII died childless and Louis XII of the Orleans line came to Italian ^^^ throne. Through his grandmother, Valentine policy of Visconti, he had a claim to Milan, which he proceeded to occupy, imprisoning Lodovico. As for Naples, Louis made the mistake of arranging with Fer- dinand that they should conquer it together and divide it equally. Ferdinand soon occupied it all and forced Louis to sell out his rights. This brought a third of the peninsula directly under Spanish rule: the recent Aragonese rulers of Naples had not been Kings of Aragon, still less of a united Spain as Ferdinand was. In 1503 Alexander VI died and a fiery native of Genoa took the papal title of Julius II. When Michelangelo, who RISE OF ABSOLUTISM 637 had been commissioned to make a colossal statue of the pope at Bologna, asked Julius if he should represent juiius ll him with a book in his hand, the warlike pope re- ^^^ Venice plied, "No, with a sword!" Venice now reaped the bitter fruit of her fifteenth-century policy of expansion and ag- gression in northern Italy, when she quarreled with Julius at the same time that she was already at war with Maximil- ian. The powerful League of Cambray was formed against her in 1508, consisting not only of the pope and the emperor, but also of France and Ferdinand and a number of small Italian states. Venice naturally received a crushing defeat and had to surrender her possessions in the peninsula. They preferred her government, however, and many of them took the first opportunity that ofltered itself to revolt from their new masters and return to her rule. Venice also was able later to repudiate the complete submission to the papal de- mands in ecclesiastical matters which she had to make at the moment. But she never quite recovered from the blow which the League of Cambray dealt her, and which, to- gether with the loss to Portugal of so much of her Eastern trade, resulted in time in her decline. Having taught Venice a lesson, Julius II turned about and formed with her in 151 1 a Holy League directed against The Holy France. Ferdinand, who was always on the win- League j^jj^g gj(jg^ joined them, as did young Henry VIII of England, the Swiss Confederates, and finally Maximilian. In short, all Europe now turned against Louis XII just as before all had picked on Venice. The French were driven out of Genoa and Milan, and the Swiss won a slice of Mil- anese territory. Ferdinand conquered Navarre for himself, the Medici were restored to power in Florence, Julius II recovered Romagna for the Papal States. Maximilian had entered the league too late and had contributed too little toward its success to receive much reward, and Henry VIII, who had expected Ferdinand to help him conquer Guienne, found that his father-in-law had made a fool of him, and learned the bitter lesson of distrust in humanity. Julius II died in 15 13 and Louis XII two years later. 638 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Leo X, a son of Lorenzo de' Medici, who through his father's Francis I influence had been made a cardinal at the age and Leo X ^f fourteen, was the new pope. Francis I, a young man of fine manners and cultured taste but of loose and selfish morals, came to the throne of France, crossed the Alps, and by the startling victory of Marignano over the highly reputed Swiss troops regained Milan. He then agreed with the pope to support the rule of the Medici in Florence, which was soon transformed into a hereditary grand duchy. Leo ceded Parma and Piacenza to Francis, and in place of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, which had made the Gallican Church pretty in- dependent, pope and king, in the Concordat of Bologna, increased their own influence and revenues at the expense of the local French churches. The power of France thus seemed once more in the as- cendant, when Ferdinand, dying in 1516, bequeathed all his possessions in Spain, Italy, and a new world to his grandson, who, though educated in the Netherlands, now became Charles I of Spain. Charles was really a Hapsburg, since his father had been the son of Maxi- milian; and upon that emperor's death in 1519 Charles added to his titles and territories the Hapsburg family lands in Austria and the Tyrol and the Burgundian possessions inherited from Charles the Bold. He was also elected Holy Roman Emperor to succeed Maximilian and thereby ac- quired imperial claims in northern Italy as well as a vague authority over Germany. His imperial title was Charles V and by this rather than his Spanish title he is usually known in history. He had causes for conflict with Francis I in Italy, in the Pyrenees, and along the eastern frontier of France. These two young monarchs were by far the most powerful in Europe, and the central political interest of the next half-century lies in their succession of wars with each other. Indeed, for long after that the struggle of France and Hapsburg was to be the chief feature of European politics. Charles V had not merely France to deal with. In Germany a monk named Martin Luther had just aroused RISE OF ABSOLUTISM 639 a national feeling and a religious revolt that were to disrupt the Church and work great political and social changes. Since the great medieval Church had been the one domi- nating and constant factor all through the Middle Ages, this Protestant Revolt in a way marked their close. The passing of the Middle Ages was in many respects a matter not to be regarded without regret. A writer who was not a Roman Catholic and who knew both medi- r. • c rassing oi eval and modern history, Bishop Stubbs, of the medieval Church of England, the great authority on the medieval development of the English constitution, has thus compared the thirteenth with the sixteenth century: "The sixteenth century, as a century of ideas, real, grand, and numerous, is not to be compared with the thirteenth cen- tury. The ideas are not so pure, not so living, nor so re- fined. The men are not so earnest, so single-hearted, so lovable by far. Much doubtless has been gained in strength of purpose and much in material progress ; but compare the one set of men with the other as men, and the ideas as ideas, and the advantage is wonderfully in favor of the semi-barbarous age above that of the Renaissance and the Reformation." EXERCISES AND READINGS Frederick III. Stubbs, Germany in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 184-204. The Attempt to Reform the Constitution of the Empire (1486- 1517)- Ranke, History of the Reformation in Germany, book i, including a good character sketch of Frederick III. A BURGUNDIAN CoURT BaNQUET OF I454. Putnam, Charles the Bold, pp. 49-56. Philip the Good's Castle at Hesdin. J. F. Kirk, Charles the Bold, vol. i, p. 187 et seq. The Swiss Confederation in the Later Fifteenth Century. Coolidge on Switzerland history, in nth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, bottom of page 251 to top of page 254. The French Army in the Time of Charles VII. Munro and Sellery, Medieval Civilization, pp. 547-74. 640 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Character of Louis XI. Kirk, Charles the Bold, vol. I, pp. 165-74. Kitchin, History of France, vol. ir, book i, chap. ll, pp. 24-34. Louis XI at Peronne. Kitchin, op. cit., vol. il, book I, chap. ll, pp. 66-72. Reign of Louis XI. Duruy, History of France (English translation), chaps, xxxiv and xxxv, pp. 251-74. G. Masson, Story of Medieval France, chap, xiv, pp. 281-303. French Civilization in the Fifteenth Century. Masson, op. cit., chap, xvi, pp. 326-42. The Wars of the Roses. Cross, History of England and Greater Britain, pp. 260-76. Reign of Henry VII and English Civilization in the Fifteenth Century. Cross, op. cit., chap, xviii, pp. 278-92. Ferdinand and Isabella. M. Hume, Spain, 147Q-1788 ; pp. i-ii, on foreign affairs; pp. 11-30, on domestic government. (Both these passages are written by Arm- strong, not by Hume.) The Spanish Monarchy, 1474-1525. Cheyney, European Background of American History, chap, v, pp. 79-103. Savonarola. Symonds, A Short History of the Renaissance in Italy, chap, v, pp. 85-104. The It.\lian Expedition of Charles VIII. Symonds, op. cit., chap, vi, pp. 105-20. Letter of Lorenzo de' Medici to his Young Son (Later Leo X) advising him how to conduct himself as a Cardinal. Whitcomb, Source Book of Italian Renaissance, pp. 80-84. Machiavelli, The Prince. (See close of chap, xxxi of this book). INDEX The more important passages are indicated by heavy type. Semi-colons denote a change of subject Aachen, 88, 209, 212-13, 271, 398 Aargau, 542 Abacus, 375 Abano, see Peter of Abbas, 180 Abbassid dynasty, 180, 184, 198, 309, 549 Abbot, 161-63, 264, 361, 481, 484, 534; and see Monasticism Abd-er- Rahman I, 180 Abd-er- Rahman III, 180, 188-89 Abel, 97 Abelard, 379-83, 396 Absolution, papal, 297; and see In- dulgences Absolutism, 28-30, 70, 131, 187, 199, 209, 459, 469. 490, 572, chap. zxxiii Abu-Bekr, 180 Abyssinia, 138, 174, 393, 609 Academic degrees, 378, 389 Academic dress, 392 Academy of Plato, 380 Accolade, 252 Acre, 321-23 Adam, 3 Adam of Bremen, 376 Adelard of Bath, 383-84, 388 Adige River, 342 Administration, Roman, 27, 70-71, 256; survives barbarian invasions, 86, 117, 121, 154; influences eccle- siastical organization, 1 14-15; By- zantine, 131, 135; reformed by Jus- tinian, 140-41; Prankish, 203, 205, 256; Flemish municipal, 365; university, 391 ; papal, 434; of Fred- erick II in Sicily, 469-70; Anglo- Norman, 474; Capetian, 491-92, 507-10, 519; in German principali- ties, 615; Spanish, 631 Admiralty, courts of, 336 Adolf of Nassau, 538, 541 Adrianople, battle of, 75-76, 80, 88; taken by Turks, 556 Adriatic Sea, 12, 17, 53,80, 118, 226, 308, 314, 341-43, 345, 353, 442, 583 Advowson, 282 /Egean Sea, 17, 19, 21, 26, 34, 54, 229, 465, 553-54 ^gidius, 88 ^neas, 97, 407 ^neas Sylvius, see Pope Pius II Mneid, 412 i^ischylus, 21, 24, 65 /Ethiopia, 138 ^thiopic, 407 Aetius, 83-86, 88 Africa, 19, 40, 114, 188-90, 633; cir- cumnavigation of, 15, 394-95, 608- II; trade with central, 20, 34, 184 Africa, North, 10, 14, 19-20, 23; Roman, 33-36, 39, 66, 68, 75, 79-81, 83, 86; Christian, 95-96, iii; Van- dal, chap, vii, 128; Byzantine, 135- 39, 150, 155, 157; Mohammedan, 178, 180, 182, 188, 190, 209, 216, 226, 229, 298, 302, 313, 328, 357, 376, 633 Africa, of Petrarch, 588 Agesilaus, 21 Agincourt, battle of, 526 Agriculture, Roman, 36-37; monas- tic, 162-63; Scandinavian, 217; manorial, 233-37; of Slavs, 305; medieval, 320, 327, 336, 358, 362, 364, 367-68, 486, 515-16, 631 Aidan, 166 Aimeri, Viscount of Thouars, 508 Aistulf, King of the Lombards, 196- 97 Aix-la-Chapelle, see Aachen Alamanni, 75, 79, 88-90, 119, 122, 136, 166-67, 194, 213 Alamannia, 212; and see Suabia Alani, 75-77, 79, 81, 91, 117 Alaric I, King of the West Goths, 79- 82, 92, 95, 112, 115, 122, 291 Alaric II, 122 Alava, 304 Alba, 404 Albania, 151, 554 Albert the Bear, Margrave of Bran- denburg, 305 Albert I, of Austria, Holy Roman Em- peror, 538 Albert II, 540, 571 Albert!, Leon Battista, 599 Albertus Magnus, 385-86, 451 Albi, 442 642 INDEX Albigensian Crusade, 405, 444-45, 450, 456, 460, 466, 483, 491, 495, 570 Albigensians, see Cathari Alboin, King of the Lombards, 156 Alchemy, 182-83, 388 Alcibiades, 70 Alcohol, 182; and see Drinking Alcuin, 211, 373 Aldermen, 362; and see Ealdorman Alen^on, House of, 625-26 Aleppo, 344 Alessandria, 353 Alexander the Great, 22-23, 26, 40, 53, 190, 211, 407, 591 Alexander Severus, Roman Emperor, 68-69 Alexander II, Pope, 287 Alexander III, 297, 352-53 Alexander V. 567 Alexander VI, 634-36 Alexandria, 22, 184, 343, 390, 608; Patriarch of, 102-03, 106-08, 156, 177, 190 Alexandrines, 407 Alexius Comnenus, Byzantine Em- peror, 310-11, 315-16, 343 Alfonse, brother of Louis IX of France, 497 Alfonso VI, King of Castile and Leon, 302-03 Alfonso X, the Wise, King of Castile, 384, 386, 410, 537 Alfonso I, King of Aragon, Sicily, Naples, 586, 593 Alfonso II, King of Naples, 635 Alfred the Great, King of England, 220-23, 275, 399, 474 Algebra, 386 Algeria, 180 Allegory and allegorical interpreta- tion, 113, 154, 171, 408, 411-12 Alliterative verse, 400, 402; examples of, 516-17, 562-65 Almansor, 188-89 Almeria, 184, 186, 1 88-89, 304 Almohades, 302, 304, 309, 328, 453 Almoravides, 302-04, 309, 312 Alphabet, 21, 55, 183, 386 Alpine race, 10, 139 Alps, 11-12, 17, 23, 42, 80, 88-90, 151, 197, 213, 227, 247, 266, 271, 290, 335. 342, 355, 357, 369, 374, 378, 389, 398, 431, 492, 539, 553, 601, 617, 634, 638; passes of, 350, 353, 468, 583 Alsace, 88-90, 537, 621 Alsace-Lorraine, 260 Altaians, 55, 548 Amalfi, 313, 341, 343 Amandus, St., 167 Ambrose, St., 77, 113, 157 Ambulances, 632 Ambulatory, 419, 431, 433 America and Americans, 8, 16, 358, 391, 612 America, discovery of, 15, 223, 587, 610, 632 Amiens, 366, 510, 524; cathedral of, 430, 432 Ammianus Marcellinus, 66, 107 Amphitheaters, 2, 32-33, 46, 126, 435 Amurath, see Murad Amusements, of ancient cities, 25, 27, 33; of Roman Empire, 37-38, 66; of early Germans, 43; during bar- barian invasions, 92-94; early medie- val, 126; Mohammedan, 184, 320; feudal, 252-53; of students, 392; folk-festivals, 409; of Edward II, 485; Hanse games, 543; fools and jesters, 562; of Frederick III, 614; Burgundian, 617-18, 639; and see Hunting Anagni, 505 Anastasius, Byzantine Emperor, 128, 132 Anathemas, 194-95, 438, 441 ; and see Excommunication Ancestor worship, 24, 45 Ancona, March of, 461-62, 464 Andalusia, 188 Angelico, Fra, 605 Angers, 274, 376 Angevin, see Anjou, House of Angles, 85, 118, 166, 220-21, 233 Anglo-Norman monarchy, 226, 277, 474 Anglo-Saxons, 122, 160, 167, 169-70, 192, 202, 220, 225, 238, 240, 406, 474, 487 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 222-23, 399~ 400 Anglo-Saxon coins, 224, 369 Anglo-Saxon conquest, 170, 398 Anglo-Saxon language, 170, 398, 400, 474, 487 Anglo-Saxon law, 169, 221-22, 240, 277 Anglo-Saxon literature, 168, 170, 222- 23, 399-400, 487 Anglo-Saxon state, 167, 170, 220-22, 275-77, 400 Angora, battle of, 557 Angouleme, 422 Animals in medieval literature, 407- 08; in sculpture, 603; in Renais- sance painting, 605; and see Eques- trian statues Anjou, 274, 321, 384, 457, 492, 494, 506, 508, 626; first House of, 274, 278, 459; and see Plantagenet; sec- INDEX 643 ond House of, 471-72,496-97, 553, 586, 625-26, 633-34 Annals, 163, 199, 222, 375 Annates, 560 Anne, Duchess of Brittany, 626, 634 Anno, Archbishop of Cologne, 287 Anonymousness, of Chansons de geste, 403; of medieval architects, 416; of medieval sculptors, 601 Ansbach, 540 Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, 293, 380 Anselm of Laon, 380-81 Anthemius, praetorian prefect, 80 Anthemius of Tralles, 129 Anthropology, 3-5, 9 Antichrist, 549, 564 Antioch, 23, 143, 150, 308, 316, 318- 19; Patriarch of, 102, 156, 190 Antipopes, see Schism Antiquity, romances of, 407 Antony, St., 109-10, 112 Apennines, 17, 80, 166, 353-54 Apocryphal scriptures, loi Apollinare, see Sant' Apollinaris, see Sidonius Apollo, 113 Apologists, Christian, 104, 106 Apostolic poverty, 100, 443, 448, 451, 561, 563, 569 Apostolic see, see Papacy Apostolic succession, 107 Appanages, 507, 624-25 Appeals to Rome (papal court), 295, 297-98, 463, 518, 573 Appenzell, 542 Apprentices, 331-33, 338-39, 390, 515, 604, 618 Apse, 146, chap, xxii Apuleius, 63, 66, 74 Apulia, 226, 302, 468 Aqueducts, 32, 73, 755 Aquileia, Archbishop of, 134 Aquinas, Thomas, 385-86, 411, 413, 451, 590 Aquitaine or Aquitania, 93, 118, 179, 198, 200, 212-13, 267, 272, 278, 321, 405, 457, 492, 627 Arabia, Arabic, and Arabs, 7, 14, 40, 151, chap. X, 192-94, 196, 199-200, 212, 218, 224, 227, 229, 308-09, 320, 324, 328, 369, 373, 376, 383-88, 393, 397, 407, 410, 469, 611 Arabian Nights, 182 Arabian poetry, 172-73, 182, 184-85, 189 Arabic numerals, 183, 386 Aragon, 14, 273, 303-05, 357, 404r-05, 410, 445, 448, 45&-56, 471, 488, 497, 508, 566, 574, 586, 630-34, 636 Aral Sea, 55-56 Aramaic, 182 Arbogast, 77-78 Arcadius, Roman Emperor, 78, 80 Arch, round, 32, 144, 420, 424, 600; pointed, 424-26, 430-31, 601 Arch of Constantine, 66 Archseology, 3-5, 41-42 Archbishop, 102, 114, 280, 375-76, 394, 436-37, 456-60, 481, 534; and see Aquileia, Bordeaux, Canter- bury, Cologne, Dalmatia, Magde- burg, Mainz, Milan, Narbonne, Prague, Ravenna, Rheims, Treves, York Archdeacon, 286, 295, 437, 484, 562 Architecture, ancient, 20; Greek, 21; Roman, 32-33, 418-19, 424, 599- 601; early Christian, 82-83; early medieval, 26; the first Serbian churches, 152; southern France, 271; Italian municipal, 353-54; German, 369; English, 487; Renais- sance, 587, 599-601, 605-07; and see Byzantine, Gothic, Romanesque, basilica, cathedral, house, mosque Archpriest, 438 Arena, see Amphitheater Argonautic expedition, 407 Argonne, 364 Argos, 79 Arians, 55, 102, 105, 107, III, 120, 124, 126, 135, 138 Ariosto, 593 Aristocracy, see Feudalism, Nobility, Oligarchy Aristotle, 22, 31, 125, 183, 379-80, 384r-86, 411, 587, 589-90, 592 Arithmetic, 124-25 Aries, 90, 126 Aries, Kingdom of, 261, 271, 292, 538 Armagnac, Count of, 526, 625-26 Armagnacs, party of, 526, 531 Armenia, in, 177, 309, 455, 556 Armenia, Lesser or Little, 316, 344, 453, 550 Armenian language, 407 Armor, of Northmen, 218-20; feudal, 252; medieval manufacture of, 334; of Black Prince, 517; of Joan of Arc, 529; in sculpture, 604 Army, Spartan, 25; Roman, 27-29, 61, 68-70, 75, 99; early German, 47-48; barbarian troops in Roman and Byzantine service, 77-79, 86, 91, 133, 172; size of invading German armies, 119; Justinian's, 138, 149; Lombard, 170; Prankish, 202-04; Norse soldiers of adventure, 217, 301; Anglo-Saxon, 220-21; feudal, 239, 242, 251-52, 257, 276-77 ; Cape- tian, 267, 492; crusading, 311, 314- 644 INDEX 17; of communes, 347, 363, 494; papal, 469; of Edward III, 513; de- feats of feudal armies, 488, 499, 514; French, 527-29, 623, 629, 636, 639; Mongol, 550-51; Turkish, 554; Florentine, 590 ; imperial, 615; Swiss, 621, 638; Spanish, 631; and see Knights, Mercenaries Arnulf, Bishop of Metz, 193-94 Arnulf, King of the East Franks, 227, 261-62 Arras, 364, 366; Treaty of, 529 Art, and archaeology, 4; geography and, 12; Roman, 62; classical, 423-24; early Christian, 92, 1 12-13, 1^6; early medieval, 125-26; Scandina- vian, 225; medieval, 324-25, 332, 339, 369, 397, 434, 474, 482, 515, 521; Renaissance, 576, 587, 591, 597-607, 613, 626, 634, 636; and see Architecture, Painting, Sculpture. Greek, Byzantine Artevelde, Jacob van, 512-13, 521 Artevelde, Philip van, 524 Arthur, King, 406-07 Arthur, nephew of King John of Eng- land, 457 Arthurian romances, 406-07, 409, 415 Arli, 348; and see Gilds Artillery, 623 Artisans, revolts of Flemish, 498-99, 524, 618; and see Gilds Artois, 364, 488, 497, 501, 525, 616, 626, 634 Aryans, 10, 21, 42; and see Indo- Europeans Asceticism, Neo-Platonic, 65; early Christian, loo, 109-12, 154; of St. Louis, 495; and see Monasticism Asia and Asiatics, 15, 34, 55-56, 58- 60, 71, 109, 114, 149, 151, 189-90, 216, 228, 233, 301, 309, 315, 548, 554, 610; Roman province of, 68; relations of western, to eastern Eu- rope, 10-12, 22, 53, 55, 556; medieval penetration of, 393-94, 515, 550; and see Nomads Asia Minor, 19-20, 23, 34, 60-61, 79, 86-87, 150, 177, 190, 309, 311, 313- 18, 320-2 1 , 324-25, 357, 405, 554, 556 Aspar, 86 Assemblies, popular or national, in the ancient city-state, 26; early German, 48; Roman, 60; Frankish, 194, 202; Bavarian, 264; Venetian, 343; in towns of southern France, 357; of Patrimony of St. Peter, 464; English, 479; medieval representa- tive, 488-90; French, 511; German, 536; and see Cortes, Diet, Estates, Parliament Asses, Feast of, 415 Assisi, 448-49 Assizes, 476 Assizes of Jerusalem, 319 Assonanced verse, 402 Assyria, 22 Astrology, 23, 69, 96-97, 102, 106, 183, 384, 387-88, 614 Astronomy, 23, 124, 189, 378-79. 386, 609, 611 Asturias, 273, 304 Ataulf, King of the West Goths, 81-82 Athanaric, 55 Athanasius, iii Athens, 36, 65, 79, 92, 134, 211, 380, 558; Duchy of, 466 Athletics, 25, 392, 592 Atlantic, 23, 118, 183, 188, 304-05, 608-09, 612, 633 Atomic theory, 22, 388 Attabi stuffs,' 1 85 Attains, Roman Emperor, 81-S2 Attila, 84-85, 87, 117, 401 Aucassin et Nicolette, 409, 415 Augsburg, 369, 532 Augustine, St., Bishop of Hippo, 65, chap, vi, 154, 157, 298, 381, 416, 442 Augustine, St., Archbishop of Canter- bury, 164 Augustinian Order and Rule, 96, 298, 451 Augustus, imperial title, 71, 208, 493 Augustus, Caesar, 28, 35, 98 Aurelian, Roman Emperor, 70, 72 Auricular confession, 440, 563 A usculta fill charissime, 504 Austin canons, see Augustinian Austrasia, 118, 166, 168, 179, 192-94, 261 Austria, 15, 307, 537-40, 542, 553, 568, 615-16, 621, 632, 638 Austria-Hungary, 40, 537 Authorities, trust in, 382-83, 385 Auvergne, 267, 272, 313, 375, 438, 492, 497, 510 Avars, 58, 140, 150-51, 154, 199-200, 227-28; Avarian Mark, 203 Averroes, 385 Avicenna, 385 Avignon, 506, 541, 560-61, 566-67, 575 Avranches, 298 Azores Islands, 314 Azov, Sea of, 229, 550 Baal, worship of, 64 Babylon, 20-22, 70, 103, 184, 336 Babylonia, 176-77 Babylonian Captivity, 560 Bacchus, 392 Bacon, Roger, 388-89, 451, 590 INDEX 645 Bagdad, 180, 182-85, 198, 227, 309, 328, 549, 557 Baian, Khagan of the Avars, 140 Bailli, 269, 492, 507-10 Bajazet, Sultan of Turkey, 556-57 Balance of power, 578, 634 Baldwin, Count of Edessa, 319 Baldwin, Count of Flanders, 270 Baldwin, Latin Emperor, 465 Balearic Islands, 83, 118, 135, 189, 304 Balkan Mountains, 17, 22, 54, 76, 151, 442, 548 Balkan peninsula, 76-79, 87, 131, 138, 140, 151, 228, 314, 328, 453, 466, 553-56, 558 Balkan peoples and states, 151, 228; and see Bulgaria, Roumania, Ser- bia, etc. Baltic Sea, 11-12, 17, 40, 42, 54, 139- 40, 184, 305-06, 328, 367, 369, 532, 543-46, 552, 558, 608 Baltic Slavs, 305, 323 Bamberg, 319 Ban of Bosnia, 445 Banking, 34, 325, 336, 355, 494, 500, 584-85 Bannockburn, battle of, 485, 488, 499 Bapaume, 366 Baptism, 72, lox, 294, 335, 439; and see Font Baptisteries, 419, 601, 603-04 Barbarians, in Roman Empire, 23, 67-68; outside Roman Empire, chap, iii; Justinian and, 131, 138, 150; of eastern Europe, 229; and see Invasions, Nomads, etc. Barbarossa, see Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor Barcelona, 81, 149, 188-89, 200, 273, 303, 357, 366, 375, 456 Bari, 226-27, 302; Archbishop of, 565 Barons, English, 459-60, 466, 474, 480-85, 488, 496, 533 Basel, 368, 538; Council of, 571, 573, 575 Basil, St., Ill, 113 Basil I, Byzantine Emperor, 227 Basil II, 308 Basilica, 32, 113, 143, 146-46, 419-21 Basques, 10, 167, 200, 203, 272 Bas-relief, 603 Bathing, 43-44, 57, lio-ii, 160, 175 Baths (buildings), 32, 126, 185 Battle of the Spurs, 499 Battlements, 247-48, 600 Batu, grandson of jenghiz Khan, 548 Bavaria and Bavarians, 118, 122, 140, 168, 194, 199-200, 203, 212-13, 227, 259, 262, 264, 349, 392, 435, 533, 539-40, 552, 561, 575, 616 Bayonne, 358, 366, 522 Bayreuth, 540 Beast epic, see Reynard the Fox Beatification, 529 Beatrice, 411, 413-14, 588 Beaucaire, 510 Beaufort, House of, 628 Beaumont in the Argonne, 364 Beauvais, 372, 437 Bee, Abbey of, 376 Becket, Thomas, Archbishop of Can- terbury, 295-98, 458, 475, 493 Bede, 159, 168, 171, 373, 399 Bedford, Duke of, 527, 529 Bedouins, 176 Beggars, 313, 516, 530 Beghards, 561 Beguins, 561 Beirut, 322 Bejaunus, 392 Bela IV, King of Hungary, 537 Belgium, 269, 365, 422, 491, 616 Belgrade, 557-58 Belisarius, 129, 133, 135-36, 138-39, 342 Benedict, St., of Nursia, 160-61, 163, 377 Benedict XI, Pope, 505 Benedict XIII, 567-68 Benedictine Rule, 160-62, 168, 175, 282 Beneficium, 240-41, 255 Benevento (or Beneventum), Duchy of, 156, 169, 171, 196, 200, 226-27 Benevolences, 629 Beowulf, 42, 49, 399-400, 402, 415 Berbers, 10, 135, 178-82, 187-89, 226- 27; and see Libyans and Moors Berengaria of Navarre, 321, 457 Bergamo, 352 Bergen, 543 Bernard, St., of Clairvaux, 299-300, 303, 320, 323, 381, 392 Berne, 542 Berri, 493-94, 626 Bessarabia, 140, 229 Bethlehem, 469 Beziers, 445 Bible, and history, 3; and art, 113, 432; quoted, 100, 103-04, 106-07, 313, 429; Gothic, 55, 398; Latin, 96, 113; Slavonic, 152, 224; Spanish, 410; English, 563; New Testament, 98, 173, 442; Greek, 113; commen- taries on, 168, 381; monks memo- rize, no; Charlemagne and, 210; miscellaneous, 170, 268, 294, 382, 409, 442, 562, 570, 616; and the Italian Renaissance, 593, 602, 605 Bibliography, 8, 17, 594 Bills of attainder, 629 646 INDEX Bills of exchange, 355 Biscay, Bay of, 226, 272, 304 Bishop, early Christian, 100, 102, 105- 06, 114; in early Middle Ages, 120, 155, 157, 162, 169, 187, 193, 203; in feudal period, 219, 221, 264, 280-81, 288-93, 295; relations with towns, 327, 341, 346, 349-50, 357> 360-61, 3^3, 369-70; relations to culture, 388, 391, 418, 422; in later Middle Ages, 436-39, 442-43, 447, 452, 457- 58, 463, 481, 484, 501, 534-35, 562, 574, 618 Bithynia, 35, 54, 68-69 Black Death, 514-16, 518, 523, 531 Black Forest, 88, 621 Black Prince, 517, 522-23, 525 Black Sea, 12, 17, 21, 34, 40, 53-55, 71, 84, 224, 345, 515, 550, 552-53, 583 Blanche of Castile, 495 Blasphemy, 294 Blind arcade, 421-22, 428, 431 Blois, 270-71, 274, 528 Blok, quoted, 371 Bobbio, 170 Boccaccio, 593, 598 Boethius, 124-25, 222, 379 Bogomiles, 445 Bohemia, 11, 202, 216, 228, 263, 307, 389, 430, 435, 455, 532-33, 537-38, 546, 551-53, 558-59, 561, 568-72, 615-16 Bohemian Brotherhood, 571 Bohemond, 310, 314-16, 319 Boiardo, 593 Bokhara, 551 Bolingbroke, Lord, 18 Bologna, 295, 351-52, 377, 381, 389- 90, 434, 470, 491, 573, 586, 637-38 Boniface, Count of Africa, 83-84 Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, 464, 466 Boniface, St., 168-69, 171, ^94 Boniface VIII, Pope, 446, 483, 501, 503-05 Bonn, 88 Bookkeeping, 35 Booksellers, 185 Bordeaux, 149, 179, 333, 358, 366, 522; Archbishop of, 437, 506 Borgia, House of, 635 Borgia, Caesar, 635 Borgia, Lucrezia, 635 Boris I, King of Bulgaria, 152, 228-29 Boroughs, English, 367-68, 484 Bosnia, 445, 549, 554, 556, 558 Bosworth Field, battle of, 628 Botticelli, 605 Bourbon, House of, 626 Bourgeoisie, 408-09, 414, 494, 587, 622; and see Middle class Bourges, 267, 510, 529, 573, 622, 638; "King of," 527 Bouvines, battle of, 463 Bow, see Cross, and Long Brabant, Duchy of, 356, 448, 524, 616 Bracton, 476 Bramante, 607 Brandenburg, Mark of, 228, 305, 307, 533, 540, 547, 616 Bremen, 369 Brescia, 352 Breslau, 549 Brethren of the Sword, 308, 544 Bretigny, Treaty of, 514, 517-18 Breton dialect, 398 Breton March, 203 Bretons, 260, 406, 434, 522; and see Brittany Breviary of Alaric, 122 Brie, 625 Brindisi, 314 Bristol, 368, 609 Britain, 19, 24, 29, 34, 36-37, 40, 75. 78-79, 84-86, 1 18-19, 122, 164, 166, 209, 328, 406 British Christians, 167, 169 British Empire, 261 British Isles, 11, 164, 166, 169, 192, 219-20, 384, 401, 474, 487, 561 ; and see Great Britain, Ireland, Hebrides, Orkneys, Shetlands, England, Scot- land Brittany, 118, 166, 170, 203, 213, 246, 273-76, 333, 340, 379, 398, 406, 442, 488, 493-94, 508, 513-14, 522, 625- 26; and see Breton Bronze age, 4, 42 Bronze, sculpture in, 603-04 Brotherhood of man, 31, 62, 174 Brotherhoods, medieval, 335, 571, 598, 631 Bruce, Robert, 488 Bruges, 365-67, 498-99, 524, 543, 628 Brunelleschi, 598-99, 601-03, 613 Brunhilda, 127, 159, 166, 401 Bruno, 374 Brussels, 618 Brutus, 413 Brythonic dialects, 398 Bulgaria, 308, 453, 455, 549, 554, 556 Bulgarians, 11, 139, 151-52, 228-29, 308 Bulgars, 58, 87, 139-40, 150, 548 Bull, papal, 503-04, 568 Bullion, from Spanish colonies, 632 Bureaucracy, 73 Burgos, 366 Burgrave, 540 Burgundians, 79, 81 ; Kingdom of the, 82, 84, 88-90, chap, vii; party of INDEX 647 the, in later Middle Ages, 525-27, 529. 531 ,,. , Burgundy, Prankish, 118; Kingdom of, 166, 192-93, 213, 219, 620; Up- per and Lower, 261; see also King- dom of Aries Burgundy, County of, 271, 510, 525. 538, 616, 626, 634 Burgundy, Duchy of, 260, 267, 271, 281, 364, 376, 421, 488, 501, 508, 525-27, 529, 541, 616, 626-27 Burgundy, House of, in later Middle Ages, 525, 614-21, 624-26, 638 Burlesque verse, 405 Burma, 393 Burning at the stake, 411, 444. 447. 507, 565. 569. 632, 636 Business, Roman, 33-34. 67, 7^ ; monks and, 163, 206; Arabian, 173; early medieval, 327; crusades and, 325; government and, 491, 503, 5^2, 5^5. 618, 632; Donatelloand, 603; and see Banking, Bookkeeping, Capital, Coinage, Commerce, Gilds, Industry Buttress, 421, 425, 428, 433; and see Flying buttress Byron, Lord, quoted, 337, 397. 621 Byzant, 149, 303. 5^3 Byzantine art, 16, 126, 147-48, 152- 53, 271, 419, 432 Byzantine architecture, 131, 143-47, 153, 599, 601 Byzantine civilization, 167, 182, 373 Byzantine Empire, 87, 109, 120, 122, chap, viii, 192, 224-25, 229, 270; overthrown by Fourth Crusade, 465; Mohammedanism and, 172, 176-78, 185-86, 189-90; in Italy, 154-56, 195-98, 207-09, 226-27, 265, 301- 02, 341-43, 633; Macedonian and Comnenian dynasties, 308-12, 315- 16, 321, 324; revived, 553-54'. fall of, 558-59. 591,607 Byzantine literature, 119, 148, 229 Byzantium, 71 Ck d'Oro, 599 Caedmon, 168 Caelian Hill, 154 Caen, 513 Caesar, Julius, 19-20, 41-49. 58, 211, 261, 283, 413, 591 , „ . Caesar, title of, 14, 71; and see Borgia Caesarea, 177 Cahiers, 501 Cairo, 180, 182, 227, 318-19, 328, 608 Calabria, 196, 302 Calais, 514, 518, 522, 526, 530 Calendar, 14, 20, 83, 174, 386 Calicut, 608, 611 Caligula, Roman Emperor, 43 Caliph, 179-80, 182, 184-85, 188-89, 309-10 Caliphate of Cordova, 180, 188-89, 302 Calixtins, 569 Calvinists, 158 Cambrai, 365-66 Campania, 69 Campanile, 421, 431, 602-03 Camps, Roman, 4, 29, 435 Canary Islands, 394, 610 Canon, 418, 437; regular, 298; secular, 458 Canon Law, 294-95, 300, 355, 377-78, 389, 434, 475 Canonization, 154, 297, 449, 495. 5^4 Canossa, 290, 300 Cansonetta, 404 Canterbury, Archbishop of, 164, 167, 276, 293, 296-98, 380, 436, 457-58, 475. 523. 564 Canterbury Tales, 298 Cantons, Swiss, 541-42 Cape of Good Hope, 395, 609, 611 Cape Verde Islands, 609, 611 Capetian dynasty, 266-71, 276-79, 361, 375. 456, 485. 491-92, 508, 512 Capital, in Roman Empire, 34-35; \^ Mohammedan Spain, 186, 188; in Middle Ages, 2-3, 243-44, 325. 329" 30, 332; at Venice, 343; Italian, 355; English, 487; French, 494, 503-04; capitalist class in the towns, 523- 24; German, 616; Spanish, 632 Capilani, 346 Capitularies, 199, 204, 206, 214, 228 Cappadocia, 114 Carcassonne, 455, 510 Cardinals, 285-86, 290, 434-35. 503. 506, 565-68, 635, 638, 640 Carinthia, 200, 228, 261, 307, 537-38 Carloman, brother of Pepin, 194 Carloman, brother of Charlemagne, 199 Carlyle, 18 Carmelites, 451 Carmina Burana, 392, 396 Carniola, 537-38 Carolingian dynasty, chap, xi, 219, 221, 232, 256, 262, 266, 277, 280, 283, 300, 360, 375 "Carolingian Renaissance," 2I0-II Carpathian Mountains, li, 17, 42, 548. 551 Carrara, House of, 580 Cartagena, 149 Carthage, 20, 23, 36, 53, 60, 83, ,93, 102, 118, 135-36, 143. 178 Carthusians, 298 Casimir the Great, King of Poland, 552 648 INDEX Caspian Sea, 12, 17, 55-56, 79, 224, 549-50 Cassel, battle of, 512 Cassian, III Cassiodorus, 119, 124-26, 163, 211 Cassius, 413 Cassius Dio, see Dio Castagno, Andrea del, 598 Castiglione, Baldassare, 594, 596 Castile, 14, 189, 273, 302-04, 366, 384, 386, 410, 434, 450, 466, 495, 522, 537, 566, 574. 630-33 Castilian language, 410 Castle, 239, 246-49, 258-59, 261, 267, 269-70, 275, 277-78, 290-91, 295, 320, 328, 337, 348, 365, 379, 404, 416, 469, 477, 534, 540, 631, 639 Castle guard, 242, 494 Catacombs, 113 Catalan language, 272-73, 399 Catalans, 357 Catalaunlan Fields, battle of, 85 Catalonia, 189, 273, 303, 405, 410, 488 Cataphracti, 135 Cathari, 442-43, 448, 556 Cathay, 550, 610 Cathedral, 187, 212, 264, 297, 408, 412, chap, xxii, 434, 437, 443, 527- 28, 601-03 Cathedral chapter, 292, 298, 437, 458, 501 Cathedral schools, 375-76, 381, 437 Catherine of France, 527 Cato, 563 Caucasian race, 10 Caucasus, Gates of, 79; Mountains, 308, 344, 556 Cecrops, 62, 97 Celestine V, Pope, 503 Celibacy of the clergy, 283, 292, 375, 563, 588 Cellini, Benvenuto, 598, 613 Celtic language, literature, and learn- ing, 10, 164,222,397-98, 401, 406-07 Celts, 10, 40, 42, 164-69, 273, 397, 406, 487 Cerdagne, 634 Ceuta, 135, 188, 608, 633 Cevennes Mountains, 12, 17, 88 Ceylon, 393, 551 Chalcedon, 150, 177; Council of, 108, 114. 133 Chalons, 85 Chambre'des Comptes, 492 Champagne, County of, 270-71, 313, 423, 438, 471, 493, 508, 625-26; fairs of, 364, 367, 372, 500 Chancellor, English, 296, 458 Chancery, Prankish, 202; Eavarian, 264; Bohemian, 552 Chanson de Roland, 200, 402-03 Chansons de geste, 402-04, 406-07, 409, 414-15 Chantry priests, 440 Chapels, radiating, 419; Lady, 430; repaired by St. Francis, 449; Sistine, 606-07 Charlemagne, 14, 168, 198-218, 322, 227-28, 230, 232, 238, 256, 260, 262, 268, 273, 278, 280, 295, 301, 327, 341-42, 349, 374, 399, 402-03, 474- 75, 491-93, 589 Charles Martel, 168-69, 179, 190-92, 194, 196, 198, 206, 241, 402 Charles the Great, see Charlemagne Charles the Bald, King of West Franks and Emperor, 212-13 Charles the Fat, King of East Franks and Emperor, 213, 219, 261, 266 Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, 533, 539, 541, 552, 559 Charles V, 15, 614, 638 Charles the Simple, King of the West Franks, 219 Charles IV, King of France, 502 Charles V, the Wise, 511, 621-22 Charles VI, 511, 624-26, 527 Charles VII, 51 1, 527-29, 573, 622-24, 627, 639 Charles VIII, 595, 626, 634-36, 640 Charles of Anjou, brother of Louis IX, 471-72, 496-97 Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, 517, 520-22 Charles of Berri, brother of Louis XI, 625-26 Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, 616-22, 625-26, 638 Charles of Maine, 626 Charolais, 634 Charters, royal, 205, 240, 480, 490, 500, 508; of Cluny, 300; of eman- cipation, 329-30; of towns, 336, 358, 361-62, 364, 367, 372; and see Magna Carta Chartres, 270-71, 363; school of, 376, 378, 393; cathedral of, 432 Chaucer, Geoflfrey, 298, 400, 516, 562, 593 Cheapside, 517 Chess, 242, 252, 392 Children, 313, 496, 510, 603, 618, 628; and see Education, Exposure of, Family Children of Israel, 322 Children's Crusade, 322, 326, 466 Chimney, invention of, 234, 249, 339, 388, 543, 587 China, 20, 34, 40, 48, 56, 58, 180, 183, 185, 344, 367, 393-94, 548, 550, 557, 608-10 Chincilla, 186 INDEX 649 Chindaswind, King of the West Goths, 123 Chinon, 527-28 Chios, 148 Chivalry, 238, 251-53, 403-06, 591; of fourteenth century, 511, 513 Choir stalls, 427, 437 Christ, see Jesus Christian, in Pilgrim's Progress, 6 Christianity, 3, 14-15, 294, 412; and early Germans, 42, 45, 51, 55; and Roman Empire, 64, 72, 77, 82, 93, chap, vi; in German states of the West, 119-20, 123-26, 156; and Islam, 172, 175, 179, 182, 184, 187- 90, 192, 226; expansion of Christen- dom, 200, 202, 218-19, 225, 228, chap, xvi, 537, 544, 546, 608, 630; and the Mongols, 549; and the Turks, 554; and the Papacy, 560; and the Renaissance, 592-93; and see Church, Missions, Monasticism, Patristic Literature, Art, Architec- ture, etc. Christian Socialism, 616 Christmas, 14, 208-09, 242, 314, 375 Christmas trees, 45 Chronicles, 98, 119; monastic, 163, 194; late Carolingian, 218, 222-23; oldest Russian, 224; feudal, 253, 285; of crusades, 310; German, 342, 538; of towns, 340, 371; world, 412; French, 493 Chronology, I, 13-14, 376, 531 Chrysoloras, 591 Church, early, 97-116; Western, 108- 09, 134, 169, 558; of Rome, 15, 102; Eastern or Greek, 108, 134-35, 150, 152, 190, 302, 308, 556, 558, 573, 591; Russian, 135, 224; Celtic or Irish, 164-69; Anglo-Saxon, 167, 169; Prankish, 168-69, 210; in North Africa, 178; medieval, 78, 115, 117, chaps, rv, xxii, xxiii, 563, 569, 593; and feudalism, 244, 251- 52, 258, 271, 492, 494; and divorce, 253; and crusades, 311, 313, 323- 24; and communes, 361; and civili- zation, 373, 376, 390, 397; and the Black Death, 515-16; and Renais- sance art, 599-601, 605; at close of Middle Ages, 622, 639; in Eng- land, 275, 293, 296, 474-75, 482, 487, 525; of England, 639; in Ger- many, 280, 292, 463; in Sicily, 470; in France, or Gallican, 366, 506, 573-74, 638; in Scandinavia, 546; in Bulgaria, 556; in Spain, 574, 631; and see Coptic, Jacobites, Nestor- ians. Papacy, Reform Church and State, 25, 72, 77-78, 95- 97, 105-06, 109, 115, 120, 133-35, 155, 157. 193-94, 199, 202, 206-07, 267, 269, 275, chap. XV, 376-77, 477, chap, xxiv, 502-07, 562-64, 582-83, 597, 625; and see Clergy Church Councils and Synods, 102, 106, 120, 156, 167-68, 187, 288-90, 293, 295, 452, 479, 505, 572-74; and see Nicaea, Sardika, Ephesus, Chalcedon, Constantinople, Trul- lan, Pavia, Mainz, Mantua, Worms, Clermont-Farrand, Fourth Lateran, Lyons, Pisa, Constance, Basel, Fer- rara, Florence Church courts, 105, 157, 293-98, 319, 336, 391, 435,. 437, 446-47, 484, 529; and see Inquisition Church Fathers, see Patristic litera- ture Church property, 241, 243, 246, 281- 84, 291, 327, 416, 437-38, 452, 454, 484, 562-64, 572; and see Apostolic poverty Cicero, 24, 588 Cid, Poema del, 410 Cilicia, 550 Cimbri, 42, 53 Ciompi, 524, 584 Circe, 83 "Circles," administrative, 615 Circus Maximus, 2 Circus, games of, 77, 93-94, 126; and see Hippodrome Cistercians, 298-99, 303, 307-08, 546 Cities, see Towns Citizenship, 24, 26, 29, 31, 48, 100, 362, 369-70, 576, 578 City of God, The, chap, iv, 153, 206, 381 , 416 City-state, 24-27, 39, 61, 78, 257, 327- 28, 341 Civil Law, 27, 377, 389 Civilization, antiquity and history of, 3-5; medieval decline and recovery of, 15; of Roman Empire, 20-24; nomads and, 57; from classical to Christian, 61, 1 12-15; Byzaatine, 148-49, 152-53; declining, 157, 178; monasteries and, 162-63, 168; Mo- hammedan, 180, 190, 303; of later Saxon England, 223; effect of Nor- man conquest upon, 275, 474; of Hungary, 308; Turks and, 309; of Italian cities, 348; medieval, 373; Chinese, 393, 550; France the leader in medieval, 401; of thirteenth-cen- tury England, 486-87; decline of medieval, 511, 576; effect of Black Death on, 514-15; effect of Hundred Years War on, 530; of Mongol in- 650 INDEX vasions on, 549, 551; of Turks on, 554; of Hussite Wars on, 572; place of Italian Renaissance in the history of, 586-87 ; effect of voyages of dis- covery on, 611-12; in the fifteenth century, 640 Clairvaux, 299 Clan, 273 Clare, 450 Clarendon, see Constitutions of Classe, 146 Classical culture, 21; passing of, 61, 66; transition to Christian, 112; "the classical heritage," 114, 124; at Constantinople, 148-49, 152; Irish monks and, 166; Charle- magne and, 199, 211; at school of Chartres, 378, 393; and the Italian Renaissance, 578, 586, 588-92, 596- 98, 603-05 Clear-story, 146, 420, 425-26, 430-31, 433 Clement IV, Pope, 389 Clement V, 502, 506 Clement VII, 565-66 Clergy, hierarchy of, 105, no; privi- leges, 105, 159, 198, 293; as state officials, 203, 207; Charlemagne's regulation of, 206, 210, 214; mar- ried, 283; and royal courts in Eng- land, 296-98; secular, no, 298, 435, 458; regular, see Monasticism; and townsmen, 327, 464, 494; and learn- ing. 373~74; students as, 391-92; satires on, 392, 409; medieval, 435- 39, 454; anti-clerical movements, 442-44, 562-64, 616; pope and local, 471-72, 482, 496, 506, 560, 572-74; in representative assemblies, 484, 488, 494; King of France and, 491, 494, 502; taxation of, 503; after Black Death, 516, 523, 525; in Scandinavia, 546; in Spain, 574, 631 ; in France, 622-23; and see Celibacy, Church, Marriage, Priesthood Clericis laicos, 503-04 Clermont-Farrand, 267, 299, 313, 323, 326, 438; Council of, 311 Clientage, Arabian, 181; Roman, 238- 39 Climate, influence of, 9, 13, 25, 57; Mediterranean, 19; German, 43; Italian, 348 Clocks, invention of, 388, 587 Clothing, see Costume Clovis, 88-90, 118, 120-22, 125, 159, 179, 202, 206, 213, 295 Cluny, Abbey and Congregation of, 281-82, 286, 298-300, 376, 421 Cnut, King of England, 275, 277 Coats of Arms, see Heraldry Coblenz, 366 Cochin-China, 393 Code or Codex of Justinian, 142; Re- vised, 143 Code, see Theodosian; for other codes of law see Assizes of Jerusalem, Las Siete Partidas Coeur, Jacques, 622 Coimbra, County of, 303 Coinage, 4, 44, 49, 149, 184, 204, 224; feudal, 256, 263, 269; 320, 351, 355, 369, 485, 497; depreciation of, 500- 01, 520, 546; 533, 583, 591 Colleges, 392 Collegiate churches, 418, 437 Colleoni monument, 604, 606 Cologne, 88, 334, 368, 398, 543; Arch- bishop of, 264-65, 287, 462, 532, 621; cathedral of, 430, 432; univer- sity of, 390 Coloni, 37, 67-68, 73, 93, 233 Colonization, 20-21, 26, 53, 225, 305- 09, 328, 336, 363, 435. 532, 537. 544, 552, 569. 572, 611, 632 Colonna, House of, 503, 505-06, 568 Color, 148, 427, 520, 604-06; and see Dyes Colosseum, 600 Columba, St., 166, 168 Columban, St., 159, 166, 168-69 Columbus, Christopher, 223, 395, 609-13 Columns, Greek, 21; Roman, 32-33, 73; Byzantine, 145, 212; Roman- esque, 420-22; Gothic, 425-26; Renaissance, 600 Comitatus, 49-50, 239 Commedia, see Divine Comedy Commendation, 93, 123, 238-39, 255, 329 . Commentaries, patristic, 157, 168; Arabian, 182-83; on Roman Law, 377; scholastic, 382, 385, 393 Commerce, 2, 12; ancient, 4, 20, 25; Roman, 32, 34-35, 44, 60; Byzan- tine, 149, 152; Arabian, 173, 175- 76, 183-86; early medieval, 192, 237, 327; of the Northmen, 217, 220, 224-25; revival of, 263, 306, 313, 319720, 322, 324-25, chaps, xvii, xviii, xix, 342-46, 393-94, 409, 434, 442, 465, 467-69, 480, 485, 487, 494, 498-99, 501-02, 514-15, 519, 523, 542-44, 546, 550, 552, 558, 577, 581-84, 607-09, 611-12, 616-17, 630, 633, 637; and see Business, Shipping, Trade routes Common lands, 236, 616 Common law, English, 298, 475-78, 481, 486, 489-90, 492, 629 Common Pleas, Court of, 476 INDEX 651 Commons, House of, 477, 483-86, 501, 522-23, 564 Communes, defined, 335, 360; Italian, 346-59, 363, 368, 389, 410-11, 463- 64, 467-70, 473, 576-77; French, 357-63, 490-91, 494, 500-01; Flem- ish, 498; and civilization, 397, 417; of Netherlands, 617 Communication, 156-57, 203, 233; and see Roads, Travel Communion in both kinds, see Utra- quists Comnenian dynasty, 310, 465 Companies, see Mercenaries Compass, see Mariner's Compensation, see Wergeld Compiegne, 366, 521, 529 Compilations, Byzantine, 148; Ara- bian, 183; early medieval, I25;med- ieval, 397 Compostella, 188-89, 366, 456, 492 Concentric churches, 145, 147, 419 Conceptualists, 380 Conciliar movement, 572-74 Concordat of Bologna, 638 Concordat of Worms, 291 Condottieri, 576-77, 580 Conductor es, 37 Conferences, of Cassian, ill Confessions, of Augustine, 96 Confession, 440-41, 495 Confirmation, 439, 564 Congo River, 609 Congregation of Cluny, see Cluny Conrad I, King of the East Franks, 227-28, 262 Conrad II, Holy Roman Emperor, 271, 285, 298 Conrad III, 320 Conrad IV, son of Frederick II, 323, 470 Conradin, 470-71 Consolamentum, 443 Consolation of Philosophy, 124-25, 222 Consortorie, 348 Constance, Council of, 540, 667-69, 572-73, 589. Constance, heiress of Sicily, 461 Constance, Lake of, 88, 167, 542 Constance, Peace of, 353, 468 Constantine the Great, 66, 71-72, 104-06, 142, 233, 263 Constantine, usurper in Britain and Gaul, 79 Constantine VI, Byzantine Emperor, 207 Constantine VII, Porphyrogennetos, 229 Constantinople, 14, 71, 73, 76, 78-80, 82-87, 90, 105, 121, 124, chap, viii, 154, 175-77, 179, 184, 196, 209, 224, 229, 268, 271, 308-10, 314-15, 321-24, 327, 341, 343, 375, 465-66, 548, 553-58, 583, 590-91; Councils of, 134, 283, 452; Patriarch of, 107- 09, 156-57, 190, 195, 302, 466 Constantinus Africanus, 376-77, 379, 384 Constantius III, Roman Emperor, 81- 83 . Constitutional history, see Adminis- tration, Assemblies, Councils, Courts, Government, Kings, Law Constitutions of Clarendon, 296-98 Consuls, Roman, 69, 86, 121; Byzan- tine, 141; of medieval towns, 347, 351-54, 357-58, 377 Contract, feudal idea of, 258 Contracts, 294 Convivio, 411 Copenhagen, University of, 546 Coptic, Church, 109, 177-78; language, 407 Corbeil, 497 Corbels, 247-48, 422 Cordova, 180, 182, 185-86, 188-89, 200, 227, 302, 304, 309, 328 Corfu, 466 Corinth, 79; Isthmus of, 139 Cornhill, 516 Cornice, 600 Cornish dialect, 398 Cornwall, 398, 496, 537 Coronation, of Charlemagne, 208-09, 212, 215; of other emperors, 209-10, 261-62, 289, 350, 541, 548, 603; of the Dukes of Aquitaine, 272; of Peter II of Aragon, 455 Corpus luris, 143 Corsica, 118, 135-36, I55. 287, 313 Cortes, Spanish, 488-89, 631 Cosmogony, Dante's, 412-13 Coster, 594 Costume, 12, 38, 43, 114, 126, 147, 161, 173, 186, 188, 253, 320, 334, 336, 364-65. 392, 449, 496, 603, 605, 607, 623-24; and see Vestments Cotton, 186 Councils, of chiefs among early Ger- mans, 48; Grand or Great, in Ital- ian cities, 347; in French towns, 357-60; in Flemish towns, 365; English Great, 481-83; English Privy, 492; French, of State, 492; of regency, 494; of state and finance in Spain, 631; Venetian, of Ten, 581-82; of Forty, 581; Great or Grand, 581, 634 Count and County, 186, 193, 203, 205, 219, 221, 259, 264, 341, 346, 351, 364-65, 438, 488, 498-99 , 507, 512- 13, 524-25, 534, 624 652 INDEX Courland, 184 Court attendance, 242-43, 251, 257, 481, 491 Court ceremonial officials, 202, 262, 268, 277, 491, 533 Court ceremony and etiquette, 70, 131, 148, 242, 268, 435, 617 Court life of southern France, 404-06; of Italian Renaissance, 580, 587 Courtesy, 403 Courtier, The Book of the, 594, 596 Courtly epic, 406 Courts of law, see Admiralty, Church, Feudal, Folk, Gilds, Hundred, Im- perial, Inquisition, Law, Manorial, Papal, Royal, Shire, Towns, Vehm Courtrai, battle of, 499, 512 Cracow, 549; university of, 552 Crecy, battle of, 613-14, 517, 519, 522, 526, 622 Credi, Lorenzo di, 606 Cremona, 352, 468 Crenelation, 247 Crete, 4, 19-20, 226, 308, 465 Crimea, 55, 344 Criminous clerks, 296-98 Critical attitude in historv, 6-8, 597- 98 Croatia and Croats, 151-52, 229, 308 Crossbow, 514 Cross, holy, 150-51, 321; sign of, loi, 158; "taking the," 311 Cruciform churches, 419-20 Cruelty, ancient, 32, 38; Visigothic, 121; Byzantine, 195-96, 308, 342; of Northmen, 216, 218; Bulgarian, 229; feudal, 251, 447-48; of Timur, 557; of Italian despots, 577-78 Crusades, 16, 190, 225, 260, 299, 301, 310-26, 346, 349, 363, 405, 417, 435, 444, 463. 465-69, 483, 494-95, 537. 546, 554, 612; against the Ottoman Turks, 556, 558, 574, 622; against the Hussites, 570-71 Crusading Orders, see Military Or- ders Crypt, 420 Ctesiphon, 177, 184 Cube, The, see Kaaba Culmbach, 540 Culture, see Civilization, Classical Curiales (or, Decurions), 26, 66-67, 73 Curia, see Papal court Curia regis, 268, 277 Customs, surviving from earlier peri- ods, 4; power of, among early Ger- mans, 48-49; "college," 392; vari- ety of medieval local, 371, 474-75, 508, 617, 632 Customs duties, 258, 263, 333, 335- 36, 343, 345, 351, 358, 366, 467, 521, 608 Cyclades, 367 Cyprian, 102 Cyprus, 19-20, 177, 308, 321, 453 Cyrene, 106 Czechs, 216, 228, 390, 552, 570 Dacia, 54-55, 151 Dagobert, King of the Franks, 167, 192-93 Dalmatia, 69, 118, 136, 138, 151, 209, 308, 445, 453, 583; Archbishop of, ^157 Dalriada, Kingdom of, 166 Damascus, 150, 180, 182, 319, 344, 557 Damasus, Pope, 107 Damietta, 322 Damme, 367 Danelaw, 220-21 Danegeld, 275, 277 Danes, 199, 202, 217, 220-22, 226, 275, 305, 474; and see Denmark Dante, 410-15, 432, 560, 562, 576, 586-88, 593, 598, 601; quoted, 503 Danube River, 12, 17, 23, 43, 53-55, 75-76, 80, 84-85, 138-40, 151, 228- 29, 309, 548, 554 Dardanelles, 54 Dates, in history, 13; of French and English kings, 511 Dauphin, 519-21, 526-28, 620, 623 Dauphine, 271, 519, 620, 624 David, of Donatello, 603-04 Deacon, 100, 105, 154, 286, 562 Dean, 437, 484 Decameron, 593 Deccan, 394 Decius, Roman Emperor, 54 Decorated architecture, 431 Decretum of Gratian, 378 Decurions, see Curiales Defensor pads, 561-62, 575 Defensores, 73 Degrees, see Academic De hcBretico comburendo, statute of, 565 Delhi, 556 Demesne, 236, 344, 477, 486 Democracy, 360, 362, 524, 570, 577, 584, 618; and see Communes, Gov- ernment, People Democritus, 22 De monarchia, 412 Demons, 33, 65, 97, 158, 160, 379-8o, 412, 429 Demosthenes, 21, 24 Denmark, 40, 85, 218, 275, 287, 369, 398, 455, 460, 488, 532, 543-47 Deposition of rulers, of popes, 285, INDEX 653 289, 567-68, 573; by popes, 288-90, 459. 470; of the Byzantine Em- peror by crusaders, 465; of English kings, 459, 485, 525, 628; of Holy Roman Emperors by the electors, 533. 538-39; and see Charles the Fat, and Miran Mirza Desiderius, King of the Lombards, 199-200 Despots, Italian, 411, 576-80, 584- 85, 590. 596, 598, 635 Devil, 64, 109, 528; and see Demons, Lucifer, Robert the Devil De vulgari eloquentia, 411 Dialectic, 379-80, 383 Dialogues, of Gregory the Great, 158 Diaz, Bartholomew, 609 Dice, 252, 392 Dictatus, 288 Dictionaries, 590-91 Dienstrecht, 279 Dies IrcB, 392 Diet, geography and, 12; Roman, 34, 37-38; early German, 44, 126; of nomads, 56; of Slavs, 139; at Con- stantinople, 149; monastic, l6l, 175, 206; Mohammedan, 175, 186; Charlemagne's, 199; feudal, 249; on Fridays, 543-44; Michelangelo's, 606-07 Diet, German, or Reichstag, 636, 615; and see Roncaglia Digest of Justinian, 142, 377, 589 Dinan, 340 Dinant, 618 Dio Cassius, quoted, 68-69 Diocese, 437 Diocletian, Roman Emperor, 70-71, 86, 131, 435 Dionysius the Areopagite, 211 Dionysius Exiguus, 14 Diplomacy, 29, 138, 493, 498, 550, 554. 559. 578. 583-85. 594. 614. 632, 634 Disease, 38, 154, 322, 495; and see Health, Medicine, Plague Dispensation, papal, 561 Distraint of Knighthood, 486 Divination, 33, 45, 97, 106, 183 Divine Comedy, 412-15, 586 Divorce, 200, 253, 285, 294, 460, 492 Dnieper River, 17 Dobrzin, Knights of, 544 Doge of Venice, 341-44, 465, 580-8^; palace of, 599 Domain, see Demesne and Royal Dome, 143-44, 147. 419. 421-22, 599- 601, 613 Domesday Book, 277, 367, 477 Domestic animals, 139 Dominic, St., 448-61 Dominicans, 448, 451, 634 Domremy, 529 Don River, 17, 58, 548-50 Donatello, 603-04 Donation of Constantine, 197-98, 214, 280, 593 Donation of Pepin, 197, 200 Donjon, of the castle, 247 Douai, 356-66, 498 Dover, 514 Drama, 25, 65, 374-75. 409. 593. 602 Drawbridge, 248 Dreams, 69, 408, 517 Dresden, 307 Dress, see Costume Dreux, 267 Drinking, in antiquity, 37-38; early German, 43, 45; forbidden by Mohammed, 175; at Cordova and Almeria, 186; by Charlemagne, 199; of monks, 175, 206; feudal, 249; of medieval students, 391-92; in Beowulf, 400; by St. Louis, 495; by Wenzel, 539 Dublin, 487 Ducat, 583 Duke, 135, 156, 169, 193, 196, 203, 221, 227, 259, 262, 264, 341, 351, 488, 534, 624 , . . V, Dungeons, feudal, 249; of Louis XI, 624 Durazzo, 314 Durham Cathedral, 423 Dutch language, 398-99 Dutch people, 544, 612 Dutch towns, 365, 371-72 Duumvirs (duumviri or duoviri), 26 Dwarf gallery, 421-22, 428 Dwelling, see House Dyes, 388, 469 Dynasties, see Abbassids, Anjou, Capetian, Carolingian, Comnenian, Fatimite, Hapsburg, Hohenstaufen, Jagellons, Lancastrian, Macedon- ian, Merovingian, Ommiads, Plan- tagenet, Theodosian, etc. Ealdorman, 221, 276 Earl, 276-77, 481, 484 Early English architecture, 430-31, 487 Earthquakes, 87, 143 East Anglia, 220 Eastern Church, see Church Easter, 14, 167, 199, 264, 375, 468 East Franks, 189, 213, 227, 261-62, 305. 399 East Goths, 55, 75-76, 79, 87, Chap. vii, 128, 136, 140 East Indies, 393 East Prussia, 544, "546, 552 654 INDEX Ecclesiastical courts, see Church courts Ecclesiastical History, of Bede, 159, 168, 171 Ecclesiastical States, 264, 269, 467, 534. 618 Economic conditions, 5; Roman, 30- 31, 33-37, 39, 66, 70-71; medieval, 123, 203, 212, 217-18, 312, 469, 572, 576, 587, 594, 614, 616, 631-33; and see Business, Capital, Commerce, Industry, Interest, etc. Eddas, 42, 46, 217, 400 Eden, Garden of, 413 Edessa, 316, 318, 320 Edgar the Peaceful, King of England, 221, 275 Edict of Theodoric, 122 Edmund, son of Henry III of Eng- land, 470, 482 Edrisi, 382-84, 393-94 Education, American, 7; Spartan, 25; of Mithridates, 54; of Augustine, 96, 114; early Christian, 113; early medieval, 124, 133; of Justin and Justinian, 128; of a Gothic prince, 136; of Gregory the Great, 154; monastic, 163-64; moral, by Peni- tentials, 169; Mohammedan, 181, 185, 188; Charlemagne and, 210, 214-15; feudal, 252; at Cluny, 281; of Gregory VII, 286; Cister- cians and, 298; crusades and, 324; medieval, 374-92; by vernacular literature, 408; of Dante, 411; of Frederick II, 468; of Philip Augus- tus, 493; of St. Louis, 495; of his children, 496; of William Langland, 516; of Joan of Arc, 527, 529; of Spanish clergy, 574; of the Italian Renaissance, 592; effect of printing on, 594; of Charles V, 638; and see Learning, Universities Edward the Confessor, King of Eng- land, 275-76, 474 Edward I, King of England, 483-89, 499, 503-04, 5", 538 Edward II, 484-85, 488-89, 499 Edward III, 484-85, 511-14, 517-18, 525, 563, 628 Edward IV, 511, 530,618,621, 628- 30 Egbert, King of the West Saxons, 202, 220 Egypt, 3, 19-23, 28-29, 34-35, 60-61, 63-64, 70; Christian, 109-10, 149- 51; Mohammedan, 177-78, 180, 183-84, 190, 318, 321-22, 358, 365, 549, 557, 609; modern, 191; and see Coptic Einhard, 199, 209 Elbe River, ir, 17, 202, 209, 216,218, 228, 305, 307, 398 Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, 278, 457, 492 Elections, of early German kings, 49; ecclesiastical, 120, 134, 291-92, 295, 456-59, 463, 471, 573; papal, 207-08, 285-87, 299, 352, 434, 503, 505-06, 565-68; imperial, 290, 462, 532-33, 537-40, 615; of doge of Venice, 342, 344; of other Italian magistracies, 347, 581-85; in towns north of the Alps, 357, 365, 370; of kings in Scandinavia and central Europe, 488-89, 546, 551-53, 571, 615 Electors, Seven, 532-33, 538 Elements, 63, 379, 388 Ely Cathedral, 423 Emancipation, 67, 187, 255, 327-31, 335, 344, 347, 352, 358, 361, 370, 372, 516 Emir, 180, 318, 321 Emperor worship, 29-30, 62, 72, 103, 106, 115, 435 Empires, see Alexander the Great, Attila, Byzantine, Charlemagne, Prankish, Holy Roman, Latin, Mohammedan, Mongol, Roman Enamels, Byzantine, 147; of Limoges, 366 Encyclopaedias, 24, 125, 148 Engineering, Roman, 32, 35; Byzan- tine, 185; Renaissance, 605-06 England, 12, 16, 29; early history, 85, 159-60, 164, 167, 202, 206, 210, 220-23, 225-26; feudal, 235, 241- 42, 246, 261, 270, 274-78, 283, 287, 292-93, 295, 297-98, 312, 314, 321 ; towns and, 328, 330-31, .33^, 352, 358, 366-68; medieval civilization in, 383-84, 387, 389, 398-400, 406, 409, 423, 430; national develop- ment, 434, 436, 444, 448, 450, 457- 60, 466, 470, 472, chap. XXV, 490, 492-501, 503, 506, 508, chap, xxvii, 532-33, 537, 543-44, 556, 560, 562- 63, 565-66, 568, 593, 595, 609, 612, 614, 618, 623, 627-30, 632-34, 637, 639-40; and see Britain English Channel, 12, 166, 226, 267, 297, 475, 487, 514, 530 English language, 7, 222, 399, 474, 563 English literature, 400, 487, 516; and see Anglo-Saxon Entertainment, right of, 243 Enzio, 470 Ephesus, "Robber Council" of, 108 Ephthalites, 140 Epic poetry, 400-01, 406-07 INDEX 655 Epicureans, 62 Epirus, 79, 554 Equestrian statues, 604 Erfurt, University of, 390 Eric, King of Sweden, 218 Erigena, see John of Ireland Erythrean sibyl, 1 14 Erzerum, 550 Escheat, 241, 253, 354, 491 Esquire, 252, 486 Estates, 488, 490, 494, 500; provin- cial, 501-02, 519-21, 627; of Lan- guedoc, 501 Estates-General, 498, 501-02, 504, 519-21, 527, 538, 622-23, 625, 627 Este, House of, 580 Esthonia, 184, 544, 547 Ethelbert, King of Kent, 164 Ethelred II, King of England, 478 Ethics, 22, 389 Etymologies of Isidore, 125, 127 Euboea, 465 Eucharist, loi, 569; and see Mass Euclid, 383 Eudes, Duke of Aquitaine, 179 Eudes II, Count of Bloisand Chartres, 270 Eugenius, Roman Emperor, 78 Eugenius IV, Pope, 573 Eugippius, 116 Euphrates, 3, 184, 308, 316, 318; and see Tigris- Euphrates Euric, King of the West Goths, 118, 122 Euripides, 65, 98-99 Europe, 10-12, 14-17, 19, 24, 30, 40, 58, 71, 75, 114, 166,189-91, 230, 233-34, 245-46, 260-62, 282, 287, 303, 308, 318, 330, 335, 341-42, 352, 367, 375. 377. 390, 393-95. 397- 99, 405. 434, 443. 448, 45 1. 455. 466, 469, 474-75, 489, 514-15, 546, 549. 554. 556, 558-59, 566, 573, 576, 583, 585, 587-88, 594, 608, 610-12, 614, 621, 632, 637-38 Europe, central, 140, 233, 355, 548 Europe, eastern, 12, 139, 314, 466, chap, zxix Europe, northern, 376, 583 Europe, southern, 546 Europe, western, 27, 72, 152, 161, 164, 190, 223, 233, 261, 269, 301, 308-12,322, 325,355, 373, 377, 397, 419, 430, 434, 459, 488, 532, 543, 546, 549-50, 561, 614, 633 Evidence, 205, 446-47, 477 Exarch and Exarchate, 135-36; and see Ravenna Exchequer, 492; Court of the, 476 Excommunication, 108, 288-91, 293, 297, 302, 314. 352, 441, 444, 447, 458-60, 463-65, 467-70, 505-06, 562, 568 Exile, 291, 348, 411, 578 Experiment, 13,388-89,397, 419, 598, 604, 606 Exploration, see Geography and Voy- ages of discovery Exports, from France forbidden, 503 Exposure of infants, 38, 46, 175 Extreme unction, 439, 564 Eyck, Van, 604 Eyeglasses, invention of, 388, 587 Ezekiel, Book of, 381 Ezzelino, 473 Fabliaux, 408-10, 414-15, 426, 515 Fagade, cathedral, Romanesque, 421- 22; Gothic, 428-29; Early English, 430; Italian Gothic, 431; Renais- sance, 600 Fairs, 327, 364, 366-68, 372, 500 False Decretals, 280 Fame, love of, 578 Family, 31, 46, 48, 57, 338-39, 346, 348, 464, 560, 630 Family names, origin of, 324 Famine, 187, 312-13, 316 Faroe Islands, 220, 395 Fatimites, dynasty of, 180, 188, 229, 318, 321 Favorites, royal, 482-83, 485, 497, 519, 522-23, 527, 623 Fealty, see Fidelity, oath of Federigo, King of Naples, 636; and see Montefeltro Fehm, see Vehm Fenestration, see Windows Ferdinand, King of Aragon, 574, 630- 34, 636-38, 640 Ferrara, 352, 580, 593, 603; Council of, 573, 591 Ferrante I, King of Naples, 586, 634- 35 Ferrante II, 635 Festivals, see Amusements Fetish worship, 45 Feud, 52, 172, 263, 348, 534, 628 Feudal aids, 243, 257, 477, 480-81 Feudal courts and law, 242, 256, 259, 268-69, 275, 277-79, 294, 319, 336, 475-76,488, 491,497,507 Feudalism, 181, chaps, xiii, xiv, 280, 295, 301, 309, 370, 434, 469-70; Church and, 281-85, 287, 291-93, 302, 438, 441, 444-45, 455-56, 459- 61, 464, 467, 499; crusades and, 311-12, 314-15, 319, 321, 324-25. 417, 466; towns and, 327-30, 335. 346-48, 350, 354; literature and, 379, 397, 401-04, 407; in France, 357- 64. 490-502, 504, 507-08, 512-14, 656 INDEX 520-21, 528, 623-24; in Nether- lands, 617; in England, chap, xxv, 523; in Germany, 534, 536-37, 541, 552, 615, 620 Feudal register, 255, 271 Feudal states, chap, xiv, 472, 507; and see Feudalism Fidelity, oath of, 242, 255, 280, 293, 315, 455-56 Fief, 241-46, 333; and see Feudalism Finance, see Banking, Business, Chambre des Comples, Exchequer, Taxation Finns, 11, 40, 224 Finland, Gulf of, 546 Fire company, Roman, 35 Firmicus Maternus, Julius, 69-70, 106 First Crusade, 311-18, 376-77, 440 Fisheries, 19, 342, 369, 543-44: and see Purple Flamen, 4, 115 Flamininus, Titus, 2 Flanders, 167, 227, 269-70, 275, 314, 321, 358, 364-67, 423, 442, 448, 458, 485, 491, 493-94. 498-99, 501, 503, 512-14, 521, 524-25, 531, 543. .566, 604, 616-17; and see Flemings, Flemish Fleets, see Shipping Flemings, 260, 306, 308, 434; and see Flanders Flemish language, 119, 269, 398 Flemish origin of Reynard the Fox, 407 Flemish painting, 604 Flemish towns, 364-67, 372, 514, 524, 618 Florence, 334, 340, 354-55, 371, 410, 435, 524. 578, 584-85, 587-88, 590- 91. 593-94. 596, 598, 599, 601-05, 607, 610, 634, 636-38; Council of, 573, 591 Florent, St., 274 Florentines, see Florence Flying buttress, 424-26, 428, 431, 433, 435 Folk-courts, 50, 203-05 Folk-lore, 307, 397 Font, baptismal, 423, 539 Fontenay, 213 Food, see Diet Food-supply, 583; and see Grain Fools, see Jesters Forest Cantons, 541-42, 547 Forest rights, 485; and see Hunting Forfeiture, 241, 253 Fornovo, Battle of, 636 Forum, 33 Foulques Nerra, 274 Fourth Crusade, 409, 453, 464-66, 553 Fourth Lateran Council, 436, 440, 452-53, 466 France, geography, 11-12; 14, 16, 19, 23. 33. 39. 85, 114, 218, 219, 269; in feudal period, 225, 235, 241, 245-46, 250, 260-61, 266, 269-75, 279-80, 286, 292-93, 297-99; towns of, 303, 308, 311-14, 320-22, 324, 327-28, 331, 333, 339. 352, 357-58, 363, 365-67, 369, 372; medieval culture of, 389, 393, 399, 401, 408-09, 417, 424, 430-31 ; further history of, 437, 444-45. 450, 457. 459-6o, 464, 466, 471-72, 479, 483, 488, chaps, xxvi, xxvii, 532, 538, 541, 556, 560-^1, 566, 568, 573-74, 586; spread of Renaissance to, 595, 606, 614, 616, 618-27, 630, 632-40; and see Gaul, French France, central, 314, 333, 358, 444, 501 France, northern, 271, 314, 359, 363- 64, 383, 399, 402-03, 405-06, 423, 438, 442, 444, 464, 498, 501, 521, 524 "France," restricted medieval sense of the word, 266, 627 France, southern, 10, 19, 33, 88, 147, 218, 246, 260, 271-72, 303, 314, 323, 333, 336, 357-58, 360, 399, 402-05, 410, 421-22, 442-44. 450-51. 454, 456, 492, 495, 501, 510, 522, 530, 570 Franche Comte, see Burgundy, County of Francis I, King of France, 634, 638 Francis, St., of Assisi, 448-52, 454, 495, 561, 602 Franciscans, 448, 450-51; and see Spiritual Franconia, 227, 262, 539 Frankish Church, 168-69 Prankish Empire, 224, 256, 261, 474, 477 Frankish principalities in Greece, 553 Franks, 54, 77, 81, 84, 88-90, chap, vii, 136, 140, 149, 156-57, 159, 164, 167-71, 179, 190, chap, xi, 219, 222, 232, 238, 272-73, 402; and see East, West, Ripuarians, Salians Fraticelli, 561 Frederick I, er Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor, 297, 321, 349-54, 356, 362, 368, 377, 461-62, 468, 470 Frederick H, 322-23, 368, 384, 389, 410, 461-63, 467-73, 538, 544, 577 Frederick HI, 540-41, 548, 614-15, 620, 639 Frederick HI, Count of Hohenzollern, 540 Frederick VI, Count of Hohenzollern, 540 Frederick of Austria, 539 Frederick of Tyrol, 568 INDEX 657 Free cities, 368, 534, 536, 615 Freedmen, 41, 52 Freedom, 21, 217, 307, 327, 330, 335: and see Emancipation Freeholders, 477-78, 486 Freemen, 47-48, 169-70, 217-18, 221, 238, 480-81, 534, 617; and see Citi- zenship Freiberg, 306 Freiburg Cathedral, 432 French invasions of Italy, 614, 633— 38, 640 French language, 119, 21 1, 260j 269, 272, 399-400. 423, 474, 487, 510, 562 French literature, 401-09, 493 French Revolution, 521 Frescoes, 113, 432, 597, 599 ; of Giotto, 601; of Masaccio, 602 Freshmen, 392 Friars, 393, 448-52, 454, 486-87, 562- 63, 634-35 Friezes, 25, 66, 600, 603 Frisia, 167-69, 194, 213, 270, 39S, 488 Friuli, 156, 171, 203, 265 Froissart, 513 Frontiers, Roman, 29, 40, 43, 53, chap, v; Byzantine, 138; Frankish, 192, 198, 200, 202, 209, 218; others, 305, 308-09, 435, 620, 638 Fulda, 264 Fulk the Black, Count of Anjou, 274 Fulk V, 275 Funeral monuments, 604 Funerals, 41, 335-36 Furniture, 234, 338 Future life, see Immortality Gabelle, 499, 501 Gabriel, angel, 175 Gaelic, 398 Gaeta, 341 Gaetano, Peter, 503 Gaiseric, King of the Vandals, 83, 119-20 Galen, 23, 385, 589 Galerius, Roman Emperor, 104 Galicia, in central Europe, 551-52 Galicia, in Spain, 273, 304, 410 Galla Placidia, 82-84, 129, 147 Gallican, see Church Gallic language, 398 Gallipoli, 556 Gallo-Romans, 122, 198, 213, 272 Gama, Vasco da, 611-13, 633 Gargoyles, 429, 433 Garonne River, 12, 17, 218, 272 Gascony, 272-73, 278, 367, 434, 485, 497. 506, 508, 517-18 Castaldo, 344 Gattamelata, 604 Gaul, 29, 34, 39-43. 52, 54. 75. 78-79, 81-86, 88-93, 111-12, 115, chap, vii, 149. 155. 157. 159-60, 166-69, 171, 179, 196, 223, 227-28, 278, 283, 328, 375-76, 383, 398,_ 402 Gauzelin, Bishop of Paris, 219 Gelimer, King of the Vandals, 135 Genealogies, 324 Genoa, 313, 318-19, 321, 341, 343-45. 353. 394. 467. 470, 514, 553-54, 566, 583, 609, 636-37 Geoffrey Martel, Count of Anjou, 274 Geoffrey the Fair, Count of Anjou, 275. 278, 384 Geoffrey, brother of King John of England, 457 Geography, i; of Europe, 11-12, 17; and history, 12-13; of Roman Em- pire, 19, 39; of Gaul, 88-89; Frank- ish, 215; of southern France, 271- 72; of Venice, 342-43; influence of, 24, 56, 232, 258, 260; study of, 183, 188, 224, 383-84, 386, 550, 591, 610-11; exploration and discovery, 393-95, 587, 633 Geology, i Geometry, 124 George, see Podiebrad, George of, and St. George, of Donatello Gepidse, 140, 150 Gerbert, 375-76, 396 German-American, 6 German Empire, modern, 40, 540 Germania of Tacitus, 41 German kingdoms in the West, chap. vii German language, 53, 119, 398-99, 552 German law, early, 4, 41-42, 48-49, 50-52, 119, 122-23, 169-70, 204, 294, 535 German literature, 42, 44, 401, 405- 07, 409, 415 Germans and Germany, geography, lo-ii, 14-15; early, 33, 39, 40-55, 57-59, 68, chap. V, 102, 109; 139-40, 167-69, 171, 194, 202, 204, 209, 211, 213, 217-18, 228, 233-34, 242, 246, 252, 256; feudal, 260-65; ecclesias- tical, 280, 283, 285-87, 289-92; ex- pansion, 305-09; and the crusades, 314, 320-21, 323, 326; towns and gilds, 331, 336, 340, 342, 345, 349- 50, 352, 356, 363, 368-69, 372; learning, 375-76, 389-90, 402; ar- chitecture, 422-23, 431 ; further his- tory, 436, 442, 450, 457, 460-63, 467-70, 472, 474, 513, 524, chap. »cviu, 552-53, 556-57, 560-61, 566- 72, 595, 614-17, 633, 638 Ghent, 365-67, 498, 512, 524, 618 658 INDEX GhibelHnes, 350, 364 Ghiberti, 603 Ghirlandajo, 605 Gian Galeazzo, see Visconti Gibbon, Edward, 115, 128 Gibraltar, 19, 135, 179, 188, 304, 394 Gilbert of England, 387 Gild houses, 339, 599 Gilds, Roman, 35, 331; medieval, 327; merchant, 330; of artisans, 331-35, 340; Venetian, 344; Lombard, 347- 48; Tuscan, 354; French, 362, 494; Parisian, 363; of Bruges, 366-67; German, 368; scholastic, 390; plays given by, 409; Black Death and, 515; Italian, 577, 584, 604; of Liege, 618 Giotto, 432, 598, 601-02 Girls, singing-, 184; dancing-, 320 Gladiators, 33, 38, 126, 132 Glanville, Ranulf, 476 Glarus, 542 Glass, 234, 339, 388; and see Stained glass Gloss and glossators, 377, 381 Gnosticism, 102 God, 3, 51, 65, 69-70, 97-100, 102, 106, 145, 158, 160, 163, 174-75, 183, 206, 208, 287, 299, 312, 323, 380, 382, 404, 413, 416, 429, 440, 442-43, 449-50, 455-56, 564. 635 Godfrey of Bouillon, 314, 318 Godwine, Earl of Wessex, 276 Gog and Magog, 549 Goidels, 398 Golden Bull, 533, 539. 547 Golden Fleece, Order of, 617-18 Golden Horde, 549, 55 1. 556, 608 Goldsmiths, 598, 604 Gonzaga, House of, 580 "Good-for-nothing" kings, 192-93 Good Parliament, 522 Gorm, the Old, King of Denmark, 218 Gospel and Gospels, chap, vi, 166, 210, 442, 449, 455 Gothia, Marquis of, 272 Gothic architecture, 16, 147, 401, 418, 420, 423-33, 487, 513, 586, 599, 601, 622 Gothic History, of Jordanes, 127 Gothic language, 55, 398 Goths, 54-55. 58, 93. 96, 119. 633; and see East Goths, West Goths Gotland, island of, 369, 543 Government, Roman, 27, 68, 70, 75, 78, 80; early German, 47-50; no- madic, 57; ecclesiastical, 102, 105, 155, 198; of German kingdoms, 117, 120-22, 169-70; of Justinian, 129, 131, 140, 149; Mohammedan, 178, 181, 186-87; Prankish, 192-94,202- 04, 206-07; its disintegration, 219, 225-26, 232-33, 256; of feudal pe- riod, 257-59, 264, 268-69; Norman, 275, 277; self-, 307-08, 335, 538, 578; niunicipal, 334-36, 342-54, chap, xix; growth of national, 457, 459-60, 472, chaps. XXV, xxvi, 518- 27: lack of imperial, 536; in Renais- sance Italy, 576-86; at close of the Middle Ages, chap, xxxiii Grain supply, 35, 126, 141, 149-50 Grammar, 124, 158, 168, 211, 375, 378, 590-91 Granada, 189, 304-05. 453. 630-31 Grand jury, 477-78 • Granson, battle of, 621 Gratian, Roman Emperor, 76, 78, 95 Gratian, monk at Bologna, 295, 377- 78, 382 Great Britain, 10, 261; and see British Isles Great Charter, see Magna Carta Great Council, see Council Great Khan, see Khan Great Mother, worship of, 64 Great Schism, 565-68, 575 Great Wall of China, 548 Greece, 4, li, 19-25, 36, 60-61, 67, 80, 151, 172, 217, 310, 328, 453, 466, 553-54. 558, 591 Greek, alphabet, letters of the, 44, 55 Greek art, 21, 23-25, 32-33, 66, 600, 603 Greek Church, 135; and see Church, Eastern Greek civilization, 20-26, 39-40, 46- 47,53-54,60-61,78,152, 217,249, 310 Greek Empire, 87, 465, 553; and see Byzantine Greek language, 10, 21, 23, 44, 53, 151, 154, 164, 210-11, 407, 590-93 Greek literature, 9, 21, 65-66, 113, 148, 166, 404, 590-92 Greek monasteries. III Greek mythology, 21, 45, 407 Greek race, 52 Greek philosophy and science, 21-22, 62, 379, 388, 390, 393, 397, 587, 589 Greek, translations of, 96, 182-83, 378, 384-86 Greeks, medieval, 14, 177, 181, 196, 345, 383 Greenland, 223-24, 395, 453 Gregorian chants, 158 Gregorian reforms, 308 Gregory the Great, Pope, 113, chap. ix, 175, 207, 222, 233, 283, 373 Gregory II, 195-96 Gregory VI, 286 Gregory VII, (Hildebrand), 286- INDEX 659 93, 300, 310-12, 341, 459, 462, 471, 502-03 Gregory IX, 468, 470 Gregory XI, 565 Gregory XII, 567-68 Gregory of Tours, 119, 125, 127, 159 Grimoald, 193-94 Grotesques, 422, 426, 433 Guadalquivir River, 17, 186, 305 Guelders, 618 Guelfs, 350, 462 Guesclin, Bertrand du, 522 Guicciardini, 578, 594 Guienne, 497, 508, 512, 518, 626, 637; and see Aquitaine Guinea, 609 Guipuzcoa, 304 Guiscard, see Robert and Roger Gundobad, King of the Burgundlans, 122 Gunpowder, invention of, 16, 388, 570, 587 Gutenberg, 594 Haarlem, 594 Hades, 412 Hadrian, Roman Emperor, 291 Hadrian I, Pope, 208 Hainault, 167, 270, 365, 616 Hakam II, Caliph of Cordova, 188 Hall, of castle, 249; largest vaulted, 354; university, 391 ; of thegns, 400; cathedral used as, 417 Hamburg, 334, 369, 546 Hamlet, 365 Hanse, 330, 367 Hanseatic League, 369, 532, 542-47, 551 Hapsburg, House of, 15, 537-42, 553, 571, 614-15, 621-22, 638 Harald Hardrada, see Harold Harbiyah quarter, 184 Hare, quoted, 371 Harfleur, 526 Harmony of Conflicting Canons, 377- 78, 382 ^ Harold Fair-Hair, Kingof Norway, 2 1 8 Harold, Hardrada, 230, 276 Harold, King of England, 276 Hastings, battle of, 276 Health, 38, 154, 173, 337738, 45o; and see Disease, Medicine, Plague, Sanitation Hebrew, 114, 407 Hebrides, 166, 220 Hedwig, Queen of Poland, 552 Hegira, 14, 174 Heidelberg, University of, 390 Hell, 157, 412 Hellas, Hellenes, and Hellenic, see Greece, Greeks, and Greek Hellenistic civilization, 22-23, 98, l8l Hellespont, 556 Heloise, 381 Henoticon, 108 Henry I, King of Germany, 227-28, 262, 305 Henry II, Holy Roman Emperor, 265, 270, 285 Henry III, 264, 285-86, 288, 300 Henry IV, 285-91, 293, 314, 341 Henry V, 291 Henry VI, 302, 322, 461-63, 468, 470 Henry VII, 538, 540-41 Henry, son of Frederick II, 467, 469 Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, 305, 307, 349, 462 Henry I, King of England, 274, 278, 293. 296, 380-81, 475, 480 Henry II, 260, 278, 295-98, 352, 363, 384, 457, 475-80, 487, 492-93 Henry III, 470, 481-83, 496-97, 499, 537 Henry IV, 511,525, 565 Henry V, 511, 525-27 Henry VI, 511, 525, 527, 529, 627-29 Henry VII, 530, 628-30, 634, 640 Henry VIII, 298, 530, 630, 632, 637 Henry of Burgundy, Count of Por- tugal, 303 Henry the Navigator, Prince of Por- tugal, 394, 608-09 Heraclius, Byzantine Emperor, 150- 53, 177 Heraldry, 44, 252, 324 Hereditary succession, 195 Heresy, early, 101-02; Justinian and, 134; Gregory the Great and, 157- 58; under Mohammedan rule, 177, 190; medieval, 294, 323, 338, 405, 442-48, 450-51, 454, 464, 467-68, 470, 504. 529, 534, 561, 565, 567, 573, 632, 636; and see Arians, Gnosticism, Montanism, Mono- physites, Cathari, Waldensians, Lollards, J-Iussites, etc. Hermandad, Holy, 631 Hermann the Lame, 376 Hermits, 64, 109-11, 160-61, 516 Herodotus, 21, 45 note Hero-worship, 3, 6 Herzegovina, 453, 558 Hesse, 168, 539 Hide, 233, 235 High German, 398-99 Hildebrand, see Gregory VII, Pope Hilderic, King of the Vandals, 135 Hindu-Arabic numerals, 183, 386 Hippo, 95-96 Hippodrome, 130, 132-33, 148, 153, 196 Hired laborers, agricultural, 486 66o INDEX History, chap, i, 21, 41, 82,96, 119, 159. 163, 172, 224, 375-76, 401-02, 406-10, 412, 424, 578, 586, 591, 594, 596, 609, 639; and see Ammianus Marcellinus, Blok, Dio Cassius, Froissart, Gibbon, Gregory of Tours, Guicciardini, Herodotus, Jordanes, Machiavelli, Orosius, Otto of Frei- sing, Polybius, Psellus, Stubbs, Suetonius, Tacitus, etc.; and see Sources History of Animals, of Aristotle, 22 Hofrecht, 279, 370 Hogue, La, 513 Hohenstaufen, House of, 341, 349, 461, 470-72, 482, 532, 537, 54<^4i. 633 Hohenzollern, House of, 540, 547 Holidays, 333 Holland, 270, 306, 365, 616 Holstein, County of, 305-06 Holy City, see Jerusalem Holy Family, 605 Holy Grail, 406 Holy Hermandad, 631 Holy Inquisition, see Inquisition Holy Lance, discovery of, 316 Holy Land, 267, 270, 311, 314, 320- 21, 323, 467, 544; and see Palestine Holy League, 637 Holy Roman Empire, 262-65, 269-71, 279-80, 285, 288, 292, 302, 305, 321- 22, 329, 341, 346, 349-54, 356, 368, 389, 412, 414, 461-63, 469-71, chap, xxviii, 548, 552-53. 560, 565. 577. 614-15, 620, 622, 638-39 Holy Sepulcher, 312, 318, 409 Holy Spirit, 98, 284 Holy water, 441 Homage, ceremony of, 242, 255, 512 Home life, see Family, House Homer, 4, 21, 24, 590; quoted, 9, 69 Honoria, 82 Honorius, Roman Emperor, 78, 80- 82, 84-85 Honorius III, Pope, 468 Hospitals, 185, 583, 632 Hospitalers, 303, 507, 559 Hours, of labor, 333; of students, 391 House, 12, 43, 47, 149, 234, 337-40, 367, 369, 516; and see Palaces of the Renaissance House of Commons, see Commons House of Lords, see Lords Household officials, see Court, cere- monial officials Hrosvita, 374-75 Hruodland, 200; and see Song' of Ro- land Hubert de Burgh, 458, 476 Hubert Walter, 481 Hufe, 235 Hugh Capet, 266-67 Hugh the White, 267 Hugo of Provence, 261 Humanism, 574, 587-95, 598, 603, 606 Humanities, 6, 592 Humanity, 31, 38 Hundred, 127, 221, 476-79 Hundred Years War, chap, xxvii, 548, 616, 622, 627, 630 Hungary, 11, 140, 227-31, 263, 287, 301, 308-09, 314, 322, 327, 336, 367, 390, 445, 450, 453, 455-56, 465-66, 532, 537. 546, 549, 551-53, 556-58, 561, 566, 568, 571, 583, 615-16; and see Magyars Huns, 55-59, 75-77, 80, 84-85, 87-88, 117, 139. 179. 218, 301, 548-49, 554 Huntmg, 43, 199, 206, 252, 268, 379, 475, 563 Hunyadi, John, 558 Huss, John, 568-70 Hussites, 553, 568-73 Hussite Wars, 553, 570-72, 575 Hymns, 113, 210, 299, 392 Hypocausts, 249 lazyges, 53 Ibn Jubair, 326 Iceland, 12, 42, 46, 217, 223-24, 226, 395, 400-01, 453, 455, 546, 610 Iconium, 344 Iconoclasm, 148, 195, 214 Idyll, 593 Ignatius, lOO He de France, 266 Illumination of manuscripts, 166, 432 Illyria, 80 Illyricum, 155, 196 Images, veneration of, 195, 207 Immorality, ancient, 37, 57, 63, 93, 96-97, 99, 103; medieval, 159, 168, 172, 192, 199, 289, 293, 313, 506; clerical, 561-63; Renaissance, 577- 80, 582, 635-36, 638 Immortality, 63, 65, 98, lOO, 175, 197, 386 Immunity, 232, 255-56, 276; and see Land system Impeachment, 522-23 Imperator, 28 Imperial cities, 368, 534, 615 Imperial court of justice, 615, 622 Imprisonment, 447, 578, 625-26; and see Dungeons, Jail, Penalties Incantations, 36, 45, 64, 184, 387-88 India, 20, 22, 34, 40, 58, 180, 183, 394, 407, 551. 556, 587, 609, 611 Indian Ocean, 608, 61 1, 633 Indies, 609; and see East and West Indo-European languages, 4, 10. 42, 53. 139. 177 INDEX 66i Indo-Germanic, see Indo-European Indulgences, 311-13,323, 440-41,446, 561-63, 568 Industrial Revolution, 340 Industry, 2, 12; of Roman Empire, 35-36, 67, 71, 73; Byzantine, 149; monastic, 161, 163; Mohamme- dan, 185-86; early medieval, 192, 237, 327; medieval, chap, xvii, 344, 364-65, 368, 388, 434, 487, 498, 631-32; and see Gilds Inferno, Dante's, 412-13, 588 Ingeborg of Denmark, 460 Innocent III, Pope, 304, 434-39, 444- 45, 447-67, 471, 478-79, 488, 493. 502-03 Innocent IV, 323, 470-71 Inquisition, 444, 446-48, 454, 477, 506, 561; Spanish, 574, 631-32 Insanity, 525-26, 633 Inscriptions, 4, 32, 44 Institutes, of Gaius, 143; of Justinian, 143; of Cassian, 11 1 Interdict, 438, 441, 454, 458, 464, 546 Interest, attitude toward taking, Roman, 35; medieval, 294, 355 Intermarriage, Germans and Romans, 213, 348; forbidden Jews and Chris- tians, 123; Europeans and Syrians, 320; between royal and feudal houses, 491, 533; of Spanish king- doms, 630 Interregnum, 470, 537-38 Invasions, see Germans, Nomads, Franks, Alamanni, Burgundians, Goths, Lombards, Anglo-Saxons, Bulgars, Avars, Arabs, Northmen, Magyars, Slavs, Almohades, Almo- ravides. Moors, Mongols, Turks, French invasions of Italy, etc. Inventions, 324, 375, 388, 587, 606 Investiture struggle, 283-S7, 289, 291-93, 300, 305, 341, 346, 471 lona, 166-67, 220 Ireland, 40, 111-12, 164-70, 220, 225, 261, 276, 278, 376, 398, 401, 434, 487 Irish Channel, 223 Irene, Byzantine Empress, 207 Irnerius, 377 Iron age, 4, 42 Iron-clad wagons, 570 Isabella, Queen of Castile, 574, 630- 33, 640 Isaurians, 79, 86-87, 128 Isidore of Seville, 125, 127, 211, 373 Isis, 63 Islam, chap, x, 216, 302, 309, 320, 324, 550, 554; and see Mohammedan- ism, Moslems Israel, Children of, 322 Istria, 342 Italian Lakes, 542 Italian language, 260, 399, 411, 562, 588 Italian literature, 405, 410-15, 586- 88, 593-94, 596 Italian Renaissance, 210, 423, 432, 574, chaps. xxTj, xxxii, 633, 639 Italy, II, 15, 19; ancient, 23-24, 26- 28, 33, 36, 53-54. 60-61, 67-68, 72; during the invasions, 78-81, 85-87, 90, 96, 109, III; early medieval, chap, vii, 128, 133, 136-40, 146-47, 150, 154-57, 166, 169-71, 180, 192, 194-98, 208, 210, 212-13, 222, 226- 27; feudal, 260-63, 265, 271, 279- 80, 292, 295, 305, 310; rise of cities, 313, 318-19, 322, 324-25- 331. 335- 36, 339-40, chap, xviu, 357, 362, 365--66, 369; medieval culture of, 374, 376-77. 389-90, 395, 401, 405, 410, 423, 431-32; in thirteenth cen- tury, 434, 450, 461-64, 467-68, 470- 72, 482-83, 503; in fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, 505-06, 515, 532. 538, 540-41. 560-61, 565-68, 573-74, chap. XXXI, 599, 601-02, 604-05, 614, 622, 632, 633-38, 640 Italy, central, 155, 196, 213, 227, 351, 421, 448, 461-63, 605 Italy, northern, 3-4, 42, 136, 170, 197, 213, 283, 289, 314, 341-42. 349-50, 352-53, 377, 399. 421, 580, 605, 637- 38 Italy, southern, 10, 20, 23, 60, 81, 138, 155; Byzantine, 196, 209, 265, 327; Lombard, 196; Saracen, 216, 226- 27; Norman, 225-26, 287, 289, 291, 301-02, 314, 343, 350, 377; Hohen- staufen, 461-63, 466-67, 469; An- gevin, 4.71, 497 Itinerant justices, 475-76, 492 Ivan III of Russia, 544, 551 Ivory carvings, 147 Jacobite Church, 184 Jacquerie, 521, 524 Jagello, 552-53 Jagellons, dynasty of, 552-53 Jails, Mohammedan, 185; and see Im- prisonment James I, King of Aragon, 304 Janizaries, 554 Japan, 183 Java, 393 Jean de Meun, 408 Jeanne d'Arc, see Joan of Arc Jenghiz Khan, 548 Jerome, St., 11-13, 154. 157 Jerome of Prague, 568-69 Jerusalem, 103, 106, 150, 152, 156, 662 INDEX 177, 180, 190,301,311,318-23,413, 440, 466, 469; Kingdom of, 318-20, 322, 467 Jesters, 562 Jesus Christ, 14, chap, vi, 125, 175, 195, 209, 296, 299, 311, 313, 316, 318, 380, 413, 439, 442, 447-48, 517, 561, 569, 572; Order of, 608 Jews, 97-98, 103, 123-24, 158; in Mohammedan world, 174, 176, 184, 186; in Western Christendom, 123- 24, 178, 195, 325, 355, 358, 370, 372, 485, 494, 500, 560, 632; in eastern Russia, 230; and see Juda- ism Joan of Arc, 336, 528-29, 531 Joanna I, Queen of Naples, 586 Joanna II, 586 Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, 633-34 Jobst, imperial claimant, 539 John X, Pope, 227 John XXII, 561 John XXIII, 567-68, 572, 604 John, King of England, 444, 457-60, 466, 479-81, 487-88, 493-94, 509, 519, 562-64 John II, or the Good, King of France, 511, 517, 519, 522, 525 John II, King of Aragon, 586 John II, King of Portugal, 609, 632- 33 John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, 526 John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, 523, 525, 563, 628 John of Cappadocia, 129, 132 John of Ireland, or Erigena, 211, 373- 74 ^ . John of Monte Corvmo, 394 John of Piano Carpini, 393 John, see Hunyadi, Huss, Wyclif, etc. John, Gospel of, 107 note Jonas, the monk, 159 Jordanes, 119, 127 Journeyman, 331-32 Jousts, 252 Jubilee, 504, 561 Judaism, 98, 103, 172, 175; and see Jews Judas, 413 Juliers, 88 Julius II, Pope, 607, 634, 636-37 Julius Caesar, see Caesar Julius Firmicus Maternus, see Fir- micus Jupiter, priest of, 4 Jura Mountains, 12, 17, 542 Jurists, Roman, 30-31; medieval, 434 Jury, trial by, 206, 477-78, 627, 629 Just price, 332-33; and see Prices Justiciar, 458 Justin, 128, 131, 133 Justinian, chap, viii, 155, 178, 190, 206, 260, 342, 377, 413, 589 Jutes, 85, 118, 164 Juvenal, 39, 66, 99 Kaaba, 174, 176 Kalmar Union, 547 Karakorum, 393 Keep, of castle, 247 Kent, 164, 167, 169, 220-21 Khalid, 176 Khan (or, Khagan), 57-58, 393, 548- 51 Khazars, 230 Kiev, 224, 230, 344, 549 King of the Romans, 615 Kings, 49, 120; Frankish, 192, 194, 202-07; Anglo-Saxon, 221-22; in feudal period, 256, 259; and pa- pacy, 287, 455-63, 466; their anger, 349; and communes in France, 361, 363; and universities, 391 ; Norman and Angevin, 459; French, 401; Scandinavian, 546-47, 577; and see Absolutism, Government, Royal King's Bench, Court of, 476 Kinship, in ancient city, 24; among early Germans, 47 Knighthood, 251-52, 297, 303, 308, 312, 324, 347, 349, 514; German, 534, 539, 591 Knight service, 242, 257, 277 Knights of the Round Table, 406 Knights of the shire, 477-78, 482-84, 486, 488, 501; and see Dobrzin, Golden Fleece, Hospitalers, Rob- ber Knights, Templars, Teutonic Knights, etc. Koran, 172-73, 181, 191, 320 Korea, 183 Kosovo, 556 Kublai Khan, 550 Kumanians, 548-49 Laborers, Statute of, 518, 523-24 Labrador, 223 Laconia, 151 Ladislas I, Posthumous, King of Bo- hemia and Hungary, 571, 615 Ladislas II, 571, 615 Lady Chapels, 430 Laity, demand a greater share in the Church, 562, 569 Lake-dwellers, 3-4 Lambert of Hersfeld, 376 Lancaster, House of, 525, 531, 618, 627-29 Lancelot Malocello, 394 Lancet windows, 431 INDEX 663 Landgraves, 534 Land-peaces, 538 Landscape painting, 605 Land system, of Roman Empire, 36- 37; of early Germans, 44; allot- ments to veterans, 29; to barbarian settlers, 67; to German invaders, 87, 119-20; effect of the barbarian invasions, 92-93; the great land- holder, 120, 123, 162, 170, 193, 204, 214; church lands, 105, 155, 283; their distribution by Charles Mar- tel, 194; Mohammedan Spain, 187; feudal period, 232-46, 254-55, 301, 329, 521; England, 277, 477, 484, 523-24, 630; German northeast, 305-06; Lombardy, 346-47; Scan- dinavia, 546; Low Countries, 617; France, 622; and see Agriculture, Manor, Peasants, Serfdom, Villa Lanfranc, 376 Langland, William, 400, 516 Langton, Stephen, 458-59 Languages, and history, 4, 6-7; and race, 9-10; in Mithridates' empire, .54; effect of invasions on, 119, 474; in church service, 120; medieval, 260, 371, 397-400; modern, 16, 415, 587; and see Aryan, Celtic, English, French, German, Greek, Indo-Euro- pean, Italian, Latin, Slavic, etc. Languedoc, 272-73, 442, 445, 497, 501, 524, 627 Langue d'oc, and langue d'oil, 399 Laon, 219, 360-62, 376, 380, 438, 524 Lapland, 223 Lapps, II Las Siete Par Mas, 410 Last judgment, 412 Last Judgment, of Michelangelo, 607 "Later Roman Empire," 87 Lateran Palace, 198, 286-87, 452; and see Fourth Lateran Council Latin, Christendom and Church, see Papacy Latin cross, 83, 147, and see Cruciform churches Latin Empire, at Constantinople, 453, 465-66, 553, 583 Latin language, literature, and learn- ing, 7, 10, 24, 49, 53; decline of, 65-66, 86, 92, 114, 122, 124, 143, 152, 157, 164, 182; Carolingian, 210-11, 222-23, 272, 294; in tenth and eleventh centuries, 348, 374, 376; in twelfth and thirteenth cen- turies, 377-412, 419, 435, 474, 487; in the later Middle Ages, 562-63; of Italian Renaissance, 588-93 Latin population and race, 24, 52, 119. 213 Latin states in Syria, 310, 318-22, 554, 607 Laura, Petrarch's, 588 Laurentian Portolano, 395 Law and laws, including legal and legislation; of ancient city-state, 26; of nature, 31, 99; international, 114; Carolingian, 203-06; of United States, 206; English, 206, 241; feu- dal, 278-79; royal, 279, 519, 521, and see Royal Courts; of medieval towns, 335-36, 341, 357, 362, 364, 475; Merchant, 335-36, 475; medi- eval diversity of, 336, 475, 490; of Frederick II in Sicily, 469; of Ed- ward I in England, 484; of Parlia- ment under Edward III, 518; Rus- sian, 549, 551; Polish, 552; Vene- tian, 582; French, 627; Spanish, 631; and see Anglo-Saxon, Canon, Common, German, and Roman law Law-speakers, 50 Lay investiture, see Investiture strug- gle League of Cambrai, 637 League of the Public Welfare, 624-25 League of Venice, 636 Leagues, feudal, 495-97. 502, 526, 539 Leagues, of towns, 362,^ 372, 524, 539, 541 ; and see Hanseatic, Holy, Lom- bard, Rhine, Swabian Leagues, and Swiss Confederation Learning, Hellenistic, 22-23; early medieval, 124-25; Arabian, 181-83, 188; Carolingian, 199; Anglo-Saxon, 168, 222-23; medieval, 299, 325, Chap. XX, 407, 434, 449, 475, 482, 487, 515; Renaissance, 576; and see Greek, Latin, Humanism, Scholas- ticism Lechfeld, battle of, 228 Legai, see Law Legates, papal, 108, 280, 286, 289, 297, 314, 436, 444-45. 453. 461, 465-66, 481, 504, 513, 546, 558, 562, 568 Legislation, see Assemblies, Law Legnano, battle of, 353, 356 Lehnrecht, 279 Le Mans, see Mans Lenses, invention of magnifying, 388 Lent, 202, 495 Leo I, Byzantine Emperor, 86 Leo III, 195-96, 302 Leo I, or the Great, Pope, 85, 107-08, 115 Leo III, 208 Leo IX, 286, 302 Leo X, 115, 634, 638, 640 Leon, Kingdom of, 188, 273, 302, 304, 630 664 INDEX Leonardo of Pisa, 386; and see Vinci, Leonardo da Lepers, 449-50, 495 Les villes neuves, 363-64 Lesser Armenia, see Armenia Letters of, Cassiodorus, 119, 124; Gregory the Great, 155; Gregory VII, 289; Psellus, 309; crusaders, 310; Gerbert, 375; Innocent III, 434, 454; Asiatic travelers, 550; Petrarch, 588, 596; and see Paston Letters Letters of credit, 325, 355 Letts, 139, 532, 544 Levant, 401 Libraries, largest ancient, 22; monas- tic, 125, 163, 167, 375; Arabian, 182, 188-89; early medieval, 381; uni- versity, 391; Charles the Wise's, 521 ; Vatican, 574; effect of printing .on, 594 Libyans, 79; and see Berbers, Moors Liege, 270, 618; bishopric of, 365, 524, 618 Lille, 365 Limburg, Duchy of, 616 Limoges, 218, 366 Limousin, 272, 510 Lincoln, Abraham, 16 Lincoln Cathedral, 432 Lindisfarne, 166-67 Lippi, Fra Lippo, 598 Lisbon, 188, 366, 394, 610-11 Literary criticism, 590 Literature, 16; Arabian, 182; of feu- dalism, 251, 253, 327-28; and pope, 288; and crusades, 310; and towns, 328, 337, 364, 367, 371; medie- val, 325, chap, xxi, 434, 475, 515, 521,586; Renaissance, 576, 611,626, 634; and see Greek, Latin, Patris- tic, Anglo-Saxon, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Proven- gal, etc. Lithuania, 139, 544-46, 551-53, 5^8 Little Armenia, see Armenia Liturgy, 374 t ^ , Liutprand, King of the Lombards, 196-97 Liutprand, historian, 375 Liverpool, 220 Lives of Illustrious Men, 38, 597 Lives of the Painters, 597 Lives of the Saints, 109, 113, 1 16, 159, 170, 409, 432, 563 Lives of the Twelve Ccesars, 39 Livonia, 184, 544 Local government. Prankish, 203, 219; Anglo-Saxon, 221-22, 474; English, 476-78, 516; French, 490, 627; Ger- man, 533-36; Spanish, 631-32 Loches, 624 Lodi, 352 Logic, 22, 124-25, 379-80, 393, 592 Loire River, 12, 17, 85, 88, 90, 198, 271,273-74, 358, 372, 401,408, 494, 517, 527 Lollards, 564-65 Lollianus, 70 Lombard communes, 346-56, 368, 468-70, 473 Lombard League, 352-53, 362, 461, 469-70 Lombard, Peter, see Peter Lombard Street, 355 Lombards, 118, 122, 136, 140, 150, 154-57, 159-60, 169-70, 192, 195- 97, 199-200, 207-08, 212, 226, 240, 260, 265, 341, 348, 375, 471, 633; as bankers, 355, 500 Lombardy, 170-71, 213, 227, 341, 349- 50, 353-54, 375, 442, 464, 468, 605 London, 220, 276, 355, 367-68, 482, 517, 523, 543, 562 Long bow, 514 Lordship, theories of, feudal, 259; Wyclif's, 563 Lords, House of, 484-86, 501, 522 Lord's Prayer, 387 Lord's Supper, 569; and see Mass Lorraine, 213, 262, 270, 314, 508, 528, 538, 620-21, 625 Lorris, 372, 408 Lot, election by, 585 Lotario de Segni, see Innocent III, Pope Lothair, Frankish Emperor, 204, 212- 13 Lotharingia, 213, 262 Louis, or Clovis, 90; and see Clovis Louis the Pious, 204, 209-10, 212, 280 Louis the German, King of the E^st Franks, 212-13 Louis II, Frankish Emperor in Italy, 227, 261 Louis the Child, King of the East Franks, 227, 262 Louis V, last reigning Carolingian, 266 Louis VI, or the Fat, King of France, 267-68, 274, 360-61, 491-92, 494 Louis VII, King of France, 278, 297, 320, 352, 492-94 Louis VIII, 445, 494-95 Louis IX, or Saint, 322, 445, 495-500, 507, 510 Louis X, 502, 517 Louis XI, 511, 614, 618-21, 623-27, 629, 634, 640 Louis XII, 634, 636-37 Louis IV, of Bavaria, Holy Roman Emperor, 539-40, 561, 575 INDEX 665 Louis, King of Hungary and Poland, 552-53 Louis of Orleans, 525-26 Love, 37, 126, 392, 403, 405, 408, 41a- 11.588 Low Countries, 11, 365-66, 448, 617- 20; and see Belgium, Flanders, Netherlands Low German, 398-99 Lubeck, 306, 334, 369, 546 Lucca, 354, 566, 584 Lucerne, canton of, 542 ; Lake of, 541- Lucifer, 413 Lucius, 63 Lunatics, 516, 565 note; and see sanity Lute, 404 Luther, Martin, 115, 638 Lutterworth, 564 Luxemburg, Duchy of, 616, 620 Luxemburg, House of, 538-40, 552 Luxeuil, 166-67 Luxury, prehistoric, 4; ancient, 41, 61 ; of declining Roman Empire, 92-94; early medieval, 126; early Arabian, 172; of Mohammedan courts, 182; trade in, 225; of courts of southern France, 404; of St. Francis's youth, 448-49; of the Italian Renaissance, 599 Luzern, see Lucerne Lyons, 333, 443, 506; Council of, 470- Lyric poetry, Greek, 21; medieval, 403-06, 410; Renaissance, 593 Macedon and Macedonia, 22-23, 79, 151. 554. 556 . „ . Macedonian dynasty, in Byzantme Empire, 309 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 578-80, 594, 596, 635-36, 640 Machicolations, 247 Machinery, Roman, 35 ; Byzantine, 185 Macon, 510 Madagascar, 393 Madeira Islands, 394, 609—10 Madonnas, 605 Magdeburg, 368; Archbishop of, 307 Magic, in Roman religion, 4; in Ro- man Empire, 33, 36; in ancient medicine, 38; in early German reli- gion, 45, 400; and Neo-Platonism, 65; transformations, 114; in Salic Law, 127; Arabian, 183, 387; Norse, 216; reputations, 375, 384, 412; and science, 387; in literature, 400-01, 406-07 ; and see Witchcraft Magna Carta, 459, 479-81, 485, 488- 90, 500, 533 Magyars, 11, 58, 216, 227-32, 262, 301. 308, 548, 556; and see Hun- gary Main River, 42 Maine, County or Duchy of, 276, 457, 494, 497, 508, 626 Mainz, 264-65, 368, 422, 594; Synod at, 285; archbishop of, 532 Major domus, see Mayor of the Palace Majorian, Roman Emperor, 91-92 Malacca, 608 Malaga, 189 Malaria, 60 Malatesta, Gismondo, 580 Malocello, Lancelot, 394 Mamelukes, 549, 557 Man, age of, 3; and see Brotherhood of, Manfred, 470-71 Manichaeism, 96, 442-44 Manners, 315, 348, 405, 587, 592, 594, 607, 623, 636, 638 ; and see Chivalry, Courtesy, Knighthood, Social con- ditions Manor, 235-38, 259, 327, 333, 337, 344, 348, 486, 508, 515, 630; and see Villa Manorial court, 235, 237, 259, 278-79, 330. 336. 475, 486, 563 Mans, Le, 280 Mansus, 233, 235; indominicatus, 236 Mantes, 363 Mantua, 352, 580, 603; Synod of, 287 Manufactures, see Industry Manuscripts, 7, 55, 162-65, 167, 185, 211, 223, 375, 382, 399..588-89, 594, 601; and see Illumination Manzikert, battle of, 309 Maps, 394-96, 587, 610 Marble, 72-73, 145, 217, 421, 599 Marcel, Etienne, 519-21 March, or Mark, 200, 203, 264 Marcian, Roman Emperor, 85-86 Marco Polo, 393-94, 396, 550, 607 Marcomanni, 53 Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor, 53, 62, 67, 97-98 Mare, Peter de la, 522 Margaret of York, 618 Margraves, 203, 534 Marianus Scotus, 376 Maries, Three, 409 Marignano, battle of, 638 Mariner's compass, invention of, 16, 223, 388, 394, 396, 587 Maritime, see Shipping and Voyages Mark, see March, St. Mark Markets, 25, 184-85, 327, 337, 358, 362, 365, 367, 494 Marmora, Sea of, 138 Marne River, 266 666 INDEX Marquis, 265 Marriage, by capture, 4, 47; among early Germans, 46; of the clergy, 106, 193, 282-83, 287-88; of serfs, 235; on the manor, 237, 330; feudal, 243. 253, 403-04, 494; sacrament of, 294, 439; of gild members, 335; monastic attitude toward, 375; and see Divorce, Intermarriage, Polyg- amy Marseilles, iii, 149, 321, 357, 467 Marsiglio of Padua, 561-62, 575 Martin, St., of Tours, 109, iii, 159, 218, 366 Martin V, Pope, 568, 572-73 Martyrs, 100, 102, 104, 106, 109, 158, 274. 297, 375. 430, 443. 569 Mary of Burgundy, 620-21, 632 Mary Magdalene, 99 Marzocco, of Donatello, 603 Masaccio, 602 Mass, sacrament of, 77, 380, 439-40, 443. 495, 564 Masses for the dead, 158, 335, 440, 443. 563 Massif central, le, 88, 272 Masterpiece, 332 Master-workman, 331-33, 338, 390, Maternus, see Firmicus Mathematics, Arabian, 182; medieval, 383. 386, 389, 609 Matilda, Queen of England, 278, 293 Matilda, Countess of Tuscany, 290, 354. 462 Matins of Bruges, 499 Matthew, Gospel of, 107 note Matthias Corvinus, King of Hun- gary, 558, 571, 615 Mauretania, 83, 135, 178; and see Moors Maurice, Byzantine Emperor, 150, 156, 159 Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, 82-83, 147 Mavortius, 70 Maximilian, Emperor of Germany, 540, 615, 620-21, 626, 632, 634, 636- 38 Maxims of Frederick III, 614-15 Mayence, see Mainz Mayor of commune, 358 Mayor of the Palace, 179, 193-94 Maypoles, origin of, 45 Meaux, 266, 270 Mecca, 172-174, 176 Mecklenburg, 307, 546 Medallions, 66, 600 Medici, Cosimo de', 584-85, 596, 603 Medici, House of, 636-38; and see Pope Leo X Medici, Lorenzo de', 585, 593, 596, 607, 634, 638, 640 Medici, Piero de', 634 Medicine, ancient, 23, 38; early medi- eval Christian attitude toward, 159-60; Arabian, 183, 320; Anglo- Saxon, 223; medieval, 376-77, 385, 387-89. 393, 590, 632 Medieval Empire, see Holy Roman Empire Medina, 174-76, 180 Aleditatiotts, of Marcus Aurelius, 62 Mediterranean race, 10, 272 Mediterranean Sea, 11-12, 19-24,26- 27, 30, 34, 40, 60, 83, 88-90, 138, 184, 186, 188, 190, 192, 266, 271-72, 303-05, 318, 322, 327, 335-36, 341, 343, 357, 395, 497, 508, 515, 5i7, 519, 583, 608, 612, 620 Meissen, 228 Menander, 21, 24 Mendicant Friars, see Friars Mercenaries, medieval, 278, 301, 492, 514, 518, 521, 554, 604, 623, 627; and see Condottieri Merchant, see Law Merchant Merchants, see Commerce Mercia, Kingdom of, 169, 220; Earl- dom of, 276 Merlin, 406 Merovingian, monarchs, 125, 127, 192-94, 261 ; commerce, 149; monu- ments, 126 Merseburg, Bishopric of, 375 Mersen, Treaty of, 213 Mesopotamia, 69, iii, 151, 177, 556 Messina, 226 Metal-workers of medieval Paris, 334 Metamorphoses, of Apuleius, 63 Metaphysics, of Aristotle, 385, 592 Methusaleh, 114 Metropolitan, see Archbishop Metz, 85; cathedral of, 430 Meuse River, 119 Michael Scot, 384 Michelangelo, 605-07, 636 Middle Ages, defined, 13-16; early, 233; later, 511; close of, 612, 614, 639 Middle class, 67-68, 614, 621-23, 629-30, 632; and see Bourgeoisie Middle English, 400 Middle High German, 399, 552 Milan, Roman, 85, 96; medieval, 350- 53, 468, 470; Renaissance, 580, 583, 590, 606, 620, 634, 636-38; Arch- bishop of, 77-78, 134, 580 Military Orders, 303, 307-08, 320, 323- 24, 608, 631 Mines, 73; silver, 306; and copper, 616 INDEX 667 Miniatures, 432, 601 Ministeriales, 246, 255, 279, 288 Minnesingers, 405-06 Minorites, see Franciscans Minorities, 192, 271, 285, 288, 461, 481, 491, 495, 523-24, 527, 571, 627 Minstrels, 251 Miracle Plays, 409, 415, 426 Miracles, pagan, 63; of Jesus, 98; of early Christians, 100; early medie- val, 158-69, 170-71, 374; of Mo- hammed, 176; of the crusades, 310; of the Mass, 439-41, 564; 528 Miran Mirza, 557 Mirror of Perfection, 454 Missal, 210 Missi, 203-05, 222, 475, 492 Missions, Christian, 27, 55, 100-01, 109, 111-12, 134, 149, 152, 160, 163-71, 194, 233, 393-94, 435, 450, 550 Mithra, worship of, 64, 113 Mithridates, 54 Model Parliament, 484 Modena, 352, 603 Moesia, 75-77 Mohammed, the Prophet ,151, chap. x. Mohammed II, Sultan of Turkey, 558-59 Mohammedanism, 5, 14, 145, chap, x, 200, 223, 226, 273, 301-04, 309-12, 320, 322-24, 385, 402, 453, 466, 549, 558, 608, 611, 630; and see Arabs, Islam, Moslems, Saracens Moldavia, 140, 554 Mombasa, 611 Monasticism (including monasteries, monks, nunneries, etc.), 2, 16, 92, 109-12, 116, 123, 125, 134, 152, 154, 167-68, 171, 175, 182, 184, 194-95, 199, 206-07, 210, 212, 218, 220, 223, 229, 232-33, 240, 274, 281-86, 291- 93, 295, 298-300, 303, 307-08, 320, 327-28, 337, 363, 365, 370, 375-77. 381, 392, 412, 418, 427, 435-36, 450-52, 456, 458, 490, 492, 495, 501, 515. 544. 546, 569. 572, 592, 601- 02; and see Abbot, Asceticism, Friars, Military Orders, Rule Money, see Banking, Capital, Coin- age, Interest Money fiefs, 243-44 Money payments on the manor, 486 Mongols, 58; their invasions and Em- pire, 393, 548-51, 554, 556, 559, 608 Mongolia, 393, 550 Monks, see Monasticism Monophysites, 128, 133, 195 Monopolies, 616, 633 Montanism and Montanus, loi Mont Cenis Pass, 353, 356 Monte Cassino, 160, 377 Montefeltro, Federigo di, 580 Montenegro, 453 Montferrat, Marquis of, 265, 464, 466, 580 Montfort, see Simon de Monthery, battle of, 625 Montpellier, 357, 456, 508, 519 Moors, 54, 79, 121, 126, 135, 182, 273, 373. 630-33; and see Berbers, Lib- yans, Mauretania, Morocco Moral Essays, of Plutarch, 38 Moral standards, 20, 38, 93, 98, 162, 574 Moralia, of Gregory the Great, 158 Morality Plays, 375 Morat, battle of, 621 Moravia, 307, 537, 551 Moravians, religious sect, 571 Morea, Duchy of, 466 Morgante Maggiore, 593 Morgarten, battle of, 542 Morocco, 135, 180 Mosaic Law, 95 Mosaics, Roman, 32; at Ravenna, 83, 129, 146-47, 420; of St. Sophia, 145; of Cordova, 186; at Pisa, 421; stained glass and miniatures com- pared with, 426-27, 432; at Venice, 599; in Italy, 601 Moscow, 549, 551 Moselle River, 620 Moslems, chap, x, 195, 200, 226-27, 233. 273, 302-04, 309-10, 312, 320- 23, 326, 366, 550, 554, 558, 574 Mosques, 180, 185-87, 189, 558 Mosquitoes, 60, 184 Mother-goddess, 63-64 Mountains of Europe, 11-12 Mozambique, 611 Mummeries, 409 Mundus, 133 Municipalities, of Roman Empire, 26-27, 39. 66; survival in early Middle Ages, 115, 121; governing bodies of, disappear, 123, 327-28; and see Communes, Towns Murad I, Sultan of Turkey, 556 Murad II, 557 Musa ibn Nusair, 178-79 Museums, 7, 25, 125, 147-48, 225, 417 Music, 124-25, 140, 183-84, 375, 392, 403-04, 410, 598, 606 Muslimin, 174; and see Moslems Myriobiblos, of Photius, 148 Mysteries or Mystery Plays, 334, 375, 409, 415, 426 Mysticism, 64, 311, 411 Mystic significance of numbers, 142 Mythology, Greek, 21-24, 62, 97, 112, 166, 586, 589, 591; Oriental, 64; Norse, 45-46, 59, 397, 400 668 INDEX Nafels, battle of, 542 Nancy, battle of, 621 Naples, 156, 216, 226, 341, 389, 565- 66, 635; Kingdom of, 471-72, 553, 566-68, 586, 588, 593, 626, 634, 636 Napoleon, 129, 540 Narbonne, 82, 179, 272, 333, 357, 561, 568; Archbishop of, 273, 504 Narses, 129-32, 136, 138 Narthex, 146 Nassau, see Adolf of Nationality, 212, 256, 260-61, 457, 472, 488, 490, 528, 530, 533, 566, 569, 612, 614-15, 622, 630, 633, 639; and see Government, growth of national "Nations" in medieval universities, 389, 552; at the Council of Con- stance, 567-68 Natural history, I Natural History, of Pliny the Elder, 24 Natural law, 31 Natural science, see Science Nature, in medieval literature, 400- 01, 405, 408; in Renaissance art, 601-03; and see Landscape paint- ing, Scenery Navarre, 273, 304, 321, 366, 405, 410, 517, 520, 522, 566, 630, 637 Navas de Tolosa, battle of, 304, 453 Nave, 146, chap, xxii, 600 Navigation, see Shipping Navigation laws of Venice, 345 Navy, see Shipping Nebuchadnezzar, no Negro, a medieval, 360 Nemours, Duchy of, 625-26 Neo-Platonism, 64-65, 96, 106 Nepos, Roman Emperor, 86 Nepotism, papal, 463-64, 503, 506 Nestorians, 109, 133, 184, 195, 550 Netherlands, 15, 40, 340, 365, 512, 594, 616-18, 638 Neustria, 118, 168, 179, 192-94, 198, 213, 261 Nevers, County of, 525, 616 Neville's Cross, battle of, 514 New England, 223 Newfoundland, 223 New Monarchy, 629 New World, 610-12, 638 New York, 394 Nibelungenlied, 42, 46, 400-01, 415 Nicsea, 315-16; Councils of, 55, 105, 207 Niccola Pisano, 601-02 Nicholas II, Pope, 285-87, 302 Nicholas y, 573-74. 592 Nicomedia, 465 Nicopolis, battle of, 553, 556-57 Nika revolt, 132-33, 143 Nile River, 3, 20, no, 138, 322, 608 Nimes, 90 Nimrod, 591 Noah, 114, 409 Nobility, 47, 52, 92, 94; of German invaders, 1x9-21, 123, 178; Ara- bian, 181, 189; Prankish, 193-94, 202-04; Anglo-Saxon, 222; in Ger- many, 287^90; of towns, 346-48, 354, 357; discussed by Dante, 411; Italian, 154, 160, 434, 578; Eng- lish, 459; represented in Estates, 488; Scandinavian, 546; Bohemian, 569-72; Venetian, 581-82: Floren- tine, 584-85; passing of the medie- val, 614, 616, 622-31; and see Feu- dalism, Barons, Lords, Counts, Dukes, Earls, Landgraves, Mar- graves, Marquis, etc. Nocera, 566 Nogaret, 505 Nomads, Asiatic mounted, 55-59, 139-40, 216, 228, 301, 309, 548, 554; and see Avars, Bulgars, Huns, Magyars, Mongols, Turks Nomads, of Arabia, 172, 176; and see Arabs Nomads, of Sahara, 178, 328; and see Berbers, Moors Nominalism, 379-80 Norbert, 298, 307 Noricum, 53, 79, 84, in, 136 Norman architecture, 422-23, 487 Norman conquest of England, 206, 223, 225, 246, 275-77, 398, 400, 483, 511 Norman conquest of Sicily and south- ern Italy, 225 Normandy, 206, 219, 225-26, 246, 256, 259, 270, 274-78, 292, 297-98, 314, 321, 329-31, 376, 378, 384, 406, 423, 457, 460, 488, 494, 497, 501, 508-09, 513, 526-27, 530, 625-27 Norman French, 400 Normans, 219, 230-31, 286-87, 289, 291, 300-02, 314, 325, 343, 350, 352, 377, 383-84, 389, 406, 459. 461, 474. 480, 487, 633 North Cape, 223 North Mark, see Brandenburg Northern race, 10, 42 Northmen, 202, 212, 216-26, 232-33, 239, 275-76, 301, 327. 369, 395. 397, 474; and see Danes, Normans, Scandinavians, Swedes North Sea, 12, 17, 40, 88, 213, 218, 226, 275, 369, 543, 617, 620 Northumbria, Kingdom of, 166-69; 220; Earldom of, 276 Norway, 12, 40, 42, 218, 270, 275-76, 395. 532, 543, 546 INDEX 669 Norwegiars, 217, 220, 223 Norwich, cathedral of, 423; bishop of, 458 Notitia dignitatutn, 74 Notre Dame, cathedral, 432 Nova Scotia, 223 Novella, 593 Novels, of Justinian, 143 Novgorod, 224, 230, 532, 543-44, 549, 551 Noyon, 360 Numbers, see Hindu-Arabic, Roman, Mystic Numidia, 83 Nurnberg, 140, 289, 340, 369, 532, 539-40 Nyrawegen, 270 Oath and oath-helpers, early German, 47. 50-51. 205, 208; 250-51, 294, 535; and see Absolution, Fidelity, Strassburg Occult virtues, in nature, 33, 387-88; in relics, 159 Occupations, in Roman Empire, 37; medieval, 334, 516-17, 584 Ocean currents, 544 Oder River, 11, 17, 228, 305, 307, 398, 551 Odo, Count of Paris, 219 Odoacer, 86-87, 94, 109 Of the Buildings of Justinian, 1 53 Offices, sale of, 284, 289, 485, 560-61, 563; and see Simony Oil painting, 604 Ointment, 38, 99 Oise River, 266 Olaf, St., 230 Old English, 400; and see Anglo-Saxon Old High German, 399 Old Irish, 164 Old stone age, 261 Oligarchy, 26, 483, 581, 584; and see Feudalism, and Nobility Olive, 34, 186 Omar, 180 Ommiad dynasty, 180, 198 Oporto, County of, 303 Optics, 386, 389 Orestes, 86 Orange, 33 Ordeal, 51, 205, 447, 469, 478 Ordination, 439, 443 Orient and Oriental, 20, 22-23, 46, 54, 63-64, 74, 147, 181-85, 224, 320, 324. 369, 383. 386, 401,407, 515, 549, 611; and see Asia, China, India, Persia Origen, 103 Orkney Islands, 166, 220, 276, 395 OrUmdo Innamorato, 593 Orleans, 85, 149, 267, 366, 376, 510; siege of, 527-28; House of, 525-26, 625, 636 Orleanists, 525-26 Ormuz, 551 Orosius, 96, 222 Orphans, 185, 540, 515; and see Ward- ship Or San Michele, 603 Osma, 448 Osman, 554 Ostrogoths, see East Goths Other-worldliness, 64, 100, 109, 412, 414 Otranto, 559 Otto I, or the Great, Holy Roman Emperor, 228, 260-63, 265, 280, 285, 305, 308, 374 Otto II, 265, 375 Otto III, 265, 329, 375 Otto IV, of Brunswick, 457, 462-63 Otto of Freising, quoted, 347-49 Ottocar II, King of Bohemia, 537-38, 552, 559 Ottoman Turks, 653-59, 607-08 Outlawry, 51-52, 503. 534 Ouvriers, 331 Overlordship, see Feudalism, Kings, Papacy Oviedo, 273 Oxford, University of, 389, 563-64; Provisions of, 482 Oxus River, 140 Pachomius, iio-ii Padua, 352, 354, 561, 580, 603-04 Paganism, survival of, 95, 105-06, 114, 116, 119-20, 125, 134, 308, 385, 392, 592 Pain, ancient callousness to, 38; Norse contempt for, 217 Painting, in catacombs, 113; Byzan- tine, 147-48; monastic, 163, 166; medieval, 426, 432, 448; Renais- sance, 587, 597-99, 601-02, 604-07 Palaces of the Renaissance, 599-600; and see Vatican Palatinate of the Rhine, 265, 533, 539 Palazzo della Ragione, at Padua, 354 Palermo, 226-27, 303, 383 Palestine, 98, 150, 322, 405, 468, 605; and see Holy Land Pallium, 436 Palos, 610 Pamiers, 504 Pampeluna, 366 Pandects, see Digest Panegyrics, 92, 126 Pannonia, 53, 69, 75-76, 136, 138, 140 Pantheism, 62 Pantheon, 143, 601 670 INDEX Pantomime, 65, 126 Papacy, early history, 5, 78, 106-09, 115, 120, 128, 131, 133-34, 152-53, chap, ix, 190; relations with Pepin and Charlemagne, 194-97, 200, 206-10; in feudal period, 262-63, 268, 271, 274, 276, chap. XV, 301- 04, 354; and the crusades, 311-15, 320, 322-24, 417; and Barbarossa, 349-53; and Italian bankers, 355; and culture, 387-88 391, 393, 410, 412, 414; under Innocent III, chaps, xxiii, xxiv; and England, 481-83, 496, 518-19, 525; and France, 491, 496-98, 502-07, 514, 529; and Ger- many, 540-41 ; and eastern Europe, 556, 558; and its opponents, chap. XXX; and Italian politics, 577, 584, 586, 634-38; and Italian Renais- sance, 589-90, 592, 596-97, 611, 622 Papal court, 295-96, 434-36, 438, 458, 463, 560-61, 566-67, 634 Papal infallibility, 288 Papal Inquisition, see Inquisition Papal patrimony, under Gregory the Great, 155 Papal States, 197, 208, 265, 567, 573, 580, 637; and see Patrimony of St. Peter Paper, introduction of, 185 Papinian, 30, 122 Papyrus, 185 Paradise, Mohammedan, 175; Dante's, 412-13 Parallel passages, 575 Parchment, 185 Pardoners and Pardons, see Indul- gences Paris, during the invasions, 90, 1 18, 179, 219; Capetian, 260, 266-67, 270, 274, 334, 363-64, 366, 370, 423, 492-94, 497, 510; during the Hun- dred Years War, 513, 519-21, 524, 526-27, 529; University of, 379, 381, 385, 389-90, 434, 458, 546, 561, 567; cathedral of Notre Dame, 432; and see Parlement of Paris Parish, church and priest, 237, 282, 437-38, 451-52, 484, 562, 564, 569; as a political unit, 623 Parlamento, 348, 483 Parlement, of Paris, 483, 492, 497, 521, 627 Parlements, local, 627 Parliament, 368, 483-86, 488-90, 498- 501, 504, 518, 522-25, 533, 538, 562-63, 565, 627, 629-30 Parma, 352, 638 Parsifal, 407 Parthenon, 558 Parthian Kingdom, 40, 53, 69 Partition of fiefs, 245-46, 253 Party strife, in Italian cities, 348, 360, 410, 461, 464, 577; and see Bur- gundians, Orleanists, Lancastrians, Yorkists Paschal II, Pope, 291 Fasten Letters, 630 Pastoral Rule, 158, 222 Patarins, see Cathari Patriarch, 106-09, 156, 190, 195-96; and see Alexandria, Antioch, Con- stantinople, Jerusalem Patrician, title of, 86, 208, 350 Patrick, St., 111-12, 164 Patrimony of St. Peter, 464 Patristic Literature, 21, 65, 92-93, 95-97, 100, 102, 106, 112-14, 116, 157-59, 163, 373-74, 381-82, 385, 397, 593 Patron saints, 335 Patrons, of art, 482, 521, 597; of churches, 282, 437; of learning and literature, 384, 389, 410, 475, 482, 521, 594; of the Italian Renais- sance, 574, 577-78, 585, 592-93, 603 Patzinaks or Petchenegs, 229-30, 309, 310 Paul the Apostle, 99-100, 106, 211 Paul the Deacon, 159 Paulus, the Roman jurist, 122 Pavia, 85, 265, 352-53, 377; Council of, ,258 Paynims, 320 Peace, Roman, 27, 29, 98; German tribal, 51; king's, 268; in Flanders, 269; Anglo-Saxon local, 478; land, 534, 538; Castilian local, 631 Peace of Constance, see Constance Peasants, 24, 139-40, 232-39, 241, 243-44, 250, 254, 266, 270, 278-79, 338, 344, 488, 517, 527, 529-30, 546, 570, 572, 578, 585, 616, 622-23, 631 ; and see Emancipation "Peasants' King," 552 Peasants' Revolts, 228, 329, 521, 523- 24, 531, 562, 564, 617 Peking, 393-94, 548, 550 Penalties, 32, 49, 121, 127; monastic, 161, 166; Byzantine, 195-96; of Charlemagne, 202, 206-07; of town courts, 336, 411; of the Inquisition, 447; of the Vehm, 534-35; of Italian despotisms, 578; of Louis XI, 624- 26; and see Burning at the stake. Imprisonment, Jails Penance, 77, 169, 274, 289-90, 298, 323, 437, 440, 446, 495 Pendentives, 144 Penitentials, 169, 440 INDEX 671 Pensions, 583 People, Roman, 27-28; early German, 47-48; Byzantine, 128, 131-33; Slavic, 152; medieval, 313, 347, 409, 417, 440-42, 444-45, 524; English, 459. 522, 563-64. 627, 630; mob of Paris, 520-21; French, 527, 625; sovereignty of, proclaimed, 562; Italian, 578, 582, 585, 635; Spanish, 631 Pepin I, of Landen, 193, 198 Pepin II, of Heristal, 194, 198 Pepin III, King of the Franks, 169, 179, 194-200, 208, 210 Pepin V, King of Aquitaine, 212 Pepin VI, King of Aquitaine, 213 Perfected, of the Cathari, 443 Perigord, 272, 510 Perigueux, 376 Periods of history, 13-15; and see Old stone age, Bronze age, Iron age, Middle Ages, etc. Peronne, 366, 625, 640 Perpendicular architecture, 431 Perpignan, 568 Persecution, of Christians, 100, 104, 114, 116, 187; by Christians, 104- 06, 124, 133, 138, 444.. 5.61, 564. 632; and see Heresy, Inquisition Persia, 40, 58, 64, 69, 76, 109, in, 128, 134. 139-40. 143, 150, 154. 176-78, 180-81, 184, 309, 407, 549, 556, 608 Persian Gulf, 551, 608 Persian language, 10, 407 Persian wars, 128, 139, 150 Personal character of early German law, 52 Perspective, 601, 604 Perugia, 566 Perugino, 598, 605-06 Petchenegs, or Patzinaks, 229-30, 309 Peter the Apostle, 106-07, I97. 208, 286, 440 Peter, King of Bulgaria, 229 Peter II, King of Aragon, 445, 455-56, 488 Peter of Abano, 388, 590 Peter the Hermit, 313-15 Peter Lombard, 382, 439 Peter Waldo, see Waldo Peterborough Cathedral, 423 Petitions of Commons, 485-86, 522 Petrarch, 96, 560, 576, 587-88, 590, 593. 596. 598, 601 Pharaohs, 28 Philanthropy, in Roman Empire, 27; Mohammedan, 185, 188; medieval, 281, 440, 450, 495; and see Patrons Philip, King of Macedon, 22 Philip I, King of France, 267, 270, 314 Philip II, or Augustus, 321, 444, 457, 459-60, 463, 466, 493-94, 498, 502, 508 Philip III, 497-98 Philip IV, or the Fair, 483, 498-508, 512, 538 Philip V, 502 Philip VI, 511-13. 519. 522 Philip II, or of Swabia, Holy Roman Emperor, 461-62, 466 Philip of Dreux, 437 Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, 525 Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, 527, 618, 624, 639 Philip, Archduke of Austria, 632-33 Philology, 590 Philopoemen, 21 Philosophy, ancient, 21, 24, 31, 61- 62, 64, 99, 1 12-14, 124-25, 134; Mohammedan, 181, 189; medieval, 378-82, 384-86, 389, 393, 411, 442, 606; and see Greek philosophy Phocas, Byzantine Emperor, 150, 159 Phoenicia, 20, 60, 183 Photius, 148 Phrygia, 64 Physics, 22, 386 Piacenza, 352, 638 Picards, 389 Picts, II, 40, 84, 166 Piedmont, 580 Piers, Romanesque, 420, 423; Gothic, 424-25, 431 Piers, see The Vision of, the Ploughman Pietro Orseolo II, Doge of Venice, 342 Pilaster strips, 421 Pilate, Pontius, 296 Pile villages, 3-4, 54 Pilgrims, Mohammedan, 174, 176; Christian, 189, 200, 270, 301, 311- 12, 318, 320, 326, 366, 441, 492, 504, 560, 563; pretended, 516 Pinnacles, 429, 435 Piracy, ancient, 25, 31; of Vandals, 83; of Saracens, 189, 226; medieval, 238, 329. 342. 345 Pisa, 313, 318-19, 340-41, 343. 345, 354, 435, 464, 467, 583-84, 601; cathedral of, 421 ; Council of, 567 Pisano, see Niccola Pius II, Pope, 574 Placidia, see Galia Plague, 67, 149, 154-55, I57. 3^3. 3i6, 443, 468, 514-16, 518, 570 Plains of Europe, 11-12 Plantagenet dynasty, 278, 384, 456- 57, 460, 492^3 Plato, 22, 64, 70, 134, 378, 380, 385 Plessis, 624 Pliny the Elder, 24 Plotinus, 64-65, 96 672 INDEX Plough-Penny, 488 Plumbing, invention of, 337-38, 388, 587 Plurality, 588 Plutarch, 2, 38-39, 99, 597 Po River, 12, 17, 342 Podesta, 351-52, 354, 357, 577, 599 Podiebrad, George of. King of Bo- hemia, 558, 571, 615 Poema del Cid, 410 Poet laureate, 588 Poetics, of Aristotle, 22 Poetry, see Arabian, Literature, etc. Poggio, 589 Poisoning, 268, 566, 578, 626, 635 Poitevins, 260 Poitiers, 179, 366, 376, 422; battle of, 517, 519-20, 522 Poitou, 272, 278, 457, 482, 494, 497, 508, 510, 518 Poland, 228, 263, 307, 336, 390, 453, 532, 544-47, 651-53, 556, 558, 561, 566, 568, 571 Police, 50, 188, 238, 484, 494 Politian, 590 Politics, 5, 24; and see Government Politics, of Aristotle, 22 Poll taxes, 523-24 Polo brothers, 344, 394; and see Marco Polo Polonius, 365 Polybius, 9, 18 Polygamy, 57, 172, 174-75, 188 Pomerania, 307, 546 Pomerelia, 544, 546 Pontifex Maximus, 95 Pontus Steppe, 53-54, 139, 229 Poor Brethren of the Hospital of St. John, see Hospitalers Poor Catholics, 450 Poor Clares, 450 Poor priests, 563 Poor students, 392 ; and see Poverty Popolo, 347, 577, 584 Population (including Depopulation and Overpopulation), of Roman Empire, 36, 58, 60, 67, 92; effect of invasions on, 119; of Byzantine Africa, 135; Constantinople, 149; Balkan peninsula, 151; Slavs, 139, 228; Cordova, 185; Scandinavia, 217; in feudal period, 236, 249, 301, 309, 312, 327; of medieval towns, 328, 334, 341, 367, 370; England and France, 367; effect of Black Death, 515; effect of Hundred Years War, 530; of Tabriz, 551; of Bur- gundian possessions, 617 Porphyry, 379 Portals, cathedral, 422, 428-29, 433 Portcullis, 248 Portolani, 395 Portrait painting and sculpture, 604- 05 Portugal, 303-05, 323, 366, 394, 456, 566, 574, 608-14, 632-33, 637 Portuguese language, 399, 410 Postal service, 34, 141, 550 Poverty, 155, 175, 516-17, 562 Prcemunire, Statute of, 518, 562 Proesides, 71 Praetorian guards, 29, 69 Praetorian prefects, 71, 80 Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, 573, 638 Prague, University of, 389, 552, 568; Archbishop of, 571; and see Jerome of Prague Prato, 603 Preaching, 439, 443,446, 562-63,568- 69, 634; of the friars, 449-51; and see Sermons Precarium, 240-41 Predestination, 564 Pregadi, 581 Prehistoric period, 3-4 Premonstratensians, 298, 308 Premontre, 298 Presbyter, 100 Presentation, right of, 282 Pressburg, Treaty of, 615 Prevot, or provost, 268, 363, 492, 494 Prices, 70, 332-33. 336, 516, 603, 608 Priesthood, Oriental and Greek, 21; early German, 48-49; Roman, 95; Jewish, 98; Christian, 105, 439-41, 564 Primate, 296 Primogeniture, 241, 533 Prince, The, of Machiavelli, 578-80, 596, 635, 640 Prince of Wales, 488, 519; and see Black Prince Printing, invention of, 16, 391, 587, 594-95 Priories, Cluniac, 281-82 Priors, Six, of Florence, 410, 584 Private war, 263, 520, 534, 538, 631; and see Feudalism Privileged towns, 358, 363 Privileges, academic, 391 ; of crusaders, 323; and see Clergy Privy Council, 492 Procopius, 130, 140, 145-46, 149, 153; and see Secret History Prophecy, Hebrew, 98 ; early German, 46, 400; early Christian, 100-01; Mohammed and, 174-75; 549. 607, 635-36 Prose, earliest medieval, 399; sagas, 401 ; first French, 409; Spanish, 410; English, 563 INDEX 673 Jr'rotestantism, 5-6, 15, 299, 443, 544, 563, 573-74. 639 Prouille, 450 Provengal language and literature, 272-73. 399. 404-05. 410-11 Provence, 90, 118, 136, 213, 261, 271, 303, 357, 442, 467. 482, 496-97, 586, 626-27, 634 Provinces, Roman, 29, 39, 61, 68, chap, v; medieval survivals of, 114, 121, 474; French, 502, 521 Provincial estates, see Estates Provins, 364 Provisions or Provisors, papal, 471; Statute of, 518, 562 Provisions of Oxford, 482 Prussia, 260, 323, 537, 540, 544, 546; and see East, and West Psalmist, quoted, 429 Psalter, 210 Psellus, 148, 309 Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, 280 Psychology, of the past, 6; early Ger- mans, 44-45; early medieval, 159; monastic, 162; Oriental, 172; North- men, 216-17; troubadours, 404-05, of thirteenth and sixteenth centu- ries, 639 Ptolemy, 23, 413, 589 Ptolemies, 28 Public debt, 343, 583 Pulci, 593 Purgatory, 412-13, 440-41. 564 Purple, 20, 34, 229 Pyrenees, 17, 43, 79, 90, 179, 200, 266- 67, 272-73, 278, 303-04, 367, 632, 634. 638 Pythagoras, 21 Quadi, 53, 79 Querci, 510 Questions about Nature, 383 Quinisext or Trullan Council, 195 Race, 9-1 1, 53; in southern Italy, 196; and feudal states, 232, 258-60, 348; 570, 611; and see Invasions Ramon (Raymond) Berengar IV, Count of Barcelona and Provence, 303 Ransom, feudal, 243, 250, 322, 517 Raoul Glaber, 375-76 Raphael of Urbino, 605-07 Raspe, Heinrich, 470 Ravenna, 80, 82-83, 87, 121; Arch- bishop of, 157, 290; churches of, 126, 129, 146-47, 212,420-21; Exarchate of, 136, 155-57, 171, 195-96, 462 Raymond Berengar, see Ramon Raymond Berengar V, Count of Pro- vence, 496 Raymond IV, Count of Toulouse, 314; 318 Raymond VI, 444-45 Raymond VII, 445-46, 497 Reading, historical, 7-9, and close of every chapter Realism, 379-80, 426, 432, 601-05 Red Sea, 172, 318-19, 322, 551, 608- 09 Reform movements in the Church, 282-85, 289, 291-92, 298, 300, 435- 36, 452, 546, 563-65, 567-70, 572- 74. 607, 631, 634-36 Reformation, 593, 595, 639 Regalia, 351, 353 _ Reginald, sub-prior of Canterbury, 458 Reichenau, 376 Reichstag, of Denmark, 488; of Ger- many, see Diet Relics of saints and martyrs, 158-59, 195, 197, 226, 274, 297-98, 441, 478 Relief, feudal, 241, 243, 257, 480 Religion, history of, 4-5; nature and, 12; of city-state, 25; Roman, 29- 30, 97, 115; early German, 45, 48, 400-01; change in Roman Empire, 61-65, 74, 99; of German kingdoms in West, 120; of early Arabia, 172; and civilization, 65, 164, 313, 324, 530, 605; and see Christianity, Church, Clergy, Crusades, Heresy, Mohammedanism, Monasteries, Pa- ganism, Wars of, etc. Renaissance, see Italian, "Carolin- gian" Rene, King, of Anjou or Provence, 586, 626, 634 Representation, 26, 479-86, 488-90, 494. 572, 615 Republics, Italian, 578-80, 584-85, 590 Retainers, 627 Rethel, County of, 525, 616 Revelation, Book of, 103 Revenue, see Taxation Reynard the Fox, Romance of, 407-08, 415 Rhaetia, 53, 84, 136 Rheims, 366, 375-76, 524, 528; Arch- bishop of, 270, 436; cathedral of, 420, 430, 432 Rhenish architecture, 422, 431 Rhetoric, in late Latin literature, 92- 93, 96, 124, 374-75, 383, 416, 590 Rhine League of cities, 369, 539, 541 Rhine River, 11-12, 17, 23, 42-43, 54, 75. 78-79, 88, 1 18-19, 167-68, 194, 209, 213, 247, 266, 314, 328, 366-69, 398, 422, 430-31, 621; and see Rhenish, Palatinate 674 INDEX Rhodes, 150, 177, 559 Rhone River, 12, 17, 82, 88, 90, 179, 213, 216, 261, 271-72, 367, 506, 519, 538 Rhyme, 403-04 Rialto, 342 Richard I, or Coeur de Lion, King of England, 321-22, 437, 457-58, 462, 475. 479, 493 Richard II, 511. 523-25, 565 Richard III, 628 Richard, brother of Pope Innocent III, 463-64 Richard of Cornwall, brother of Henry III of England, 496, 537 Richmond, Earl of, see Henry VII of England Ricimer, 86 Riga, 544 Right of spoil, 463 Rigord, 493 Rimini, 353, 580 Ripuarian Franks, 88-90, 119, 121, 213 Ritual, of Oriental cults in Roman Empire, 63-64; early Christian, loi ; simplicity of Mohammedan, 175 Rivers, of Europe, 11-12; as trade- routes, 329 Roads, Roman, 32, 366; medieval, 348 Robber barons and knights, 249, 302, 329, 408, 437, 442, 534 Robber Council, see Ephesus Robbia, Luca della, 603 Robert the Strong, Count of Paris, 219 Robert I, King of France, 270 Robert of Flanders, 270 Robert the Devil, Duke of Normandy, 275 Robert, son of William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, 480 Robert Guiscard, ruler of Sicily and southern Italy, 289, 291, 302, 310, 312, 377, 384 Robert, Count of Artois, brother of Louis IX, 497 Robert of Geneva, see Pope Clement VII Robert, King of Naples, 588 Rochelle, La, battle of, 522 Roderick, King of the West Goths, 179 Roger Bacon, see Bacon Roger Guiscard, 312 Roger II, King of Sicily, 383-84 Roland, 402, 593; and see Song of Rollo, Duke of Normandy, 219, 275 Romagna, 461, 464, 637 Roman Catholic, 6, 16, 115, 120, 135, 193, 282, 386, 411, 452, 454, 550, 556, 566, 569, 571, 639; and see Church, Papacy Romance, 3, 311 Romance languages, 251, 399, 401- 02, 407, 409, 418 Romance peoples, 225 Romance of the Rose, 408, 411, 415 Romances, Arabian, 182; medieval, 198, 211, 251, 321, 402-03, 406-08, 410, 415, 515; Italian, 593 Roman de Rou, 219 Roman Empire, civilization, 13, chap, ii; compared with early German civilization, 40-50, 62; decline of, 15, 54, chap, iv, 85-86, 90, 109, 1 13; barbarians and, 23, 40, 53-55, 61, chaps. V, vii; and Christianity, 64, 95, 100, 102-08; influence upon and comparison with the Middle Ages, 114-15, 117, 131, 139, 164, 181, 190, 198-99, 205, 209, 212, 233-34, 238, 249, 257, 282, 285, 291, 293, 301, 327-29, 348, 368, 387, 393, 397-99, 416, 418-19, 435, 474, 477, 493, 554, 577, 590, 616, 621 Romanesque architecture, 147, 418- 25, 431, 433, 586, 599 Romanic, see Romanesque Roman law, 27, 30-31, 39, 48, 50, 70, 86, 115; in early Middle Ages, 122- 23, 240, 272, 294; revival of, 351, 377, 381, 390, 393. 475-76, 491, 586-87, 589 Roman numerals, 183, 386 Romantic epic, see Romances Romantic love, 403 Romantic movement in literature, 424 Rome, Bishop of, see Papacy Rome, Church of, see Church Rome, city of, early history, 4, 26-28, 52, 54, 81, 97, 115; imperial, 2, 29, 34-36, 54, 69; sacked by Alaric, 80- 81, 95-97, 1 12-13, 115, 291; sacked by the Vandals, 83, 85, 291 ; medie- val, 126, 133, 135, 149, 154-56, 160, 172, 196, 200, 207-09, 212-13, 226, 260, 265, 280, 285-86, 289-90 ; sacked by the Normans, 291, 300; 295, 302, 322; commune, 350; 355; romances of, 406-07; churches of, 421; under Innocent III, 435, 445, 450, 452, 455, 462-64; in the later Middle Ages, 467, 503-06, 518, 541, 548, 560-61, 565-66; during the Renais- sance, 588, 597, 599-600, 603, 607, 635 Romulus, Roman Emperor, 86 Roncaglia, Diet of, 351, 354, 377 Roncesvalles, 402 INDEX 675 Roofs, basilican, 146; Romanesque, 420; at Pisa, 421; Rhenish, 422; Norman, 423; English, 431 ; and see Vaulting Roosebek, battle of, 524 Ros, 224 Rose, see Romance of Rose window, 428-30 Roses, see Wars of the Rosetta, 608 Rothenburg on the Tauber, 340 Rouen, 219, 340, 364, 524, 529; cathe- dral of, 432 Rouergue, 510 Roumania, 39, 151, 229, 554, 556 Round Table, of King Arthur, 406 Rousseau, 96 Roussillon, 273, 634 Royal courts, 268, 277, 296-97, 336, 476, 497, 523 Royal domain, 193, 267, 275, 288, 477, 493-94, 497, 5o8, 625, 627 Royal grants of land, 240, 256, 267, 276, 303 Royal writs, 476 Roye, 366 Rudder, invention of, 345, 487 Rudolf of Hapsburg, Holy Roman Emperor, 637-38, 541-42 Riigen, Island of, 305 Ruins, 2-4, 32-33, 36, 135, 246, 249, 261, 416, 557, 599 Rules, monastic, 96, lio-ii, 160-62, 166, 168, 171 Runes, 44 Rupert, imperial claimant, 439 Rural communes, 362-63, 541 Rural deans, 438 Rurik, Grand Prince of Russia, 224 Russ, see Ros Russia, 11-12, 14, 40, 58, 139-40, 183- 84, 223-26, 229-31, 233, 308, 369, 393, 543-44, 548-49, 551-52, 568, 608 Rustication, 600 Saale River, 398 Sabbath, Jewish, 99; Christian, 160 Sacraments, of Oriental cults, 63-64; Christian, 101, 439-42, 452, 454, 562, 564, 572 Sacrosancta, 572 Safe conduct, 569, 625 Sagas, 42, 216-17, 230, 401, 415 Sages, Sixteen, of Venice, 581 Sahara Desert, 328 Saints, veneration of, 158; patron, 335; statues of, 337; of Italian cities, 371; days, 392; in Gothic art, 426-29; of Joan of Arc, 528; Louis XI and, 624 St. Gall, 167, 542, 589 St. George, of Donatello, 604 St. Gotthard Pass, 542 St. James, shrine of, see Compostella St. Mark, church of, 148, 343, 599 St. Martin, church of, 164 St. Ouen, church of, 432 St. Paul, church of, 226 St. Peter, church of, 200, 208, 226-27, 455-56, 462, 600-01 St. Pol, Count of, 625-26 St. Quentin, 360 St. Sebaldus Kirche, 539 St. Sophia, church of, 134, 143-46, 195, 558, 601 St. Truth, 517 Saintonge, 494, 508, 510 Saladin, 321, 469 Salerno, 291, 377 Salian Franks, 88-90, 119, 213 Salic law, 122-23, 127, 211 Saloniki, 77, 229, 314, 557 Salvian, 93-94, 238 Salzburg, 167 Samaria, 99 Samarkand, 185, 551, 557 Samnites, 53 San Gemignano, 340 San Salvador, 610 San Vitale, church of, 147, 212 Sanitation in medieval towns, 337-38 Sanskrit, 10 Sant' Angelo, castle of, 291 Sant' Apollinare in Classe, church of, 146 Sant' Apollinare Nuovo, church of, 146 Saone River, 88 Sappho, 21 Saracens, 172, 189, 192, 2l6, 226-27, 232, 265, 30i-«2, 308, 312-13, 316, 318, 342, 383, 402, 467; and see Mo- hammedans, Moslems, Paynims Saragossa, 189 Sardika, Council of, 107 Sardinia, 83, 118, 135-36, 155, 313, 342, 464, 470 Sarmatians, 53-54, 58 Sarto, Andrea del, 598 Satire, medieval, 392, 404, 408-09, 516-17 Satires, of Juvenal, 39 Saumur, 274 Savages, 5, 13-14 Savonarola, 607, 634-36, 640 Savoy, 88, 271, 435, 482, 620, 624, 626 Saxons, in England, 85, 118, 164, 166- 67, 202; on the Continent, 122, 194, 198-204, 206, 212-14, 289, 323, 375, 435, 552; and see Anglo-Saxons Saxony, Duchy of, 227, 262, 305, 349, 533, 540, 616 676 INDEX Scaliger, House of, 580 Scanderbeg, 558 Scandinavia, lo-ii, 40-41, 192, 217, 224-25, 301, 398, 448, 453, 546-47, 561, 566 Scenery, outside castle and town, 249, 338; in Giotto's paintings, 602; Italian, 605; and see Landscape Schaffhausen, 340 Scheldt, 119 Scheltberger, Hans, 557 Schisms, religious, 108-09, I34; papal, 285, 287, 290-91, 297, 299, 352, 540, 565-68 Scholasticism, 381-82, 393, 515, 563, 589-90, 592 Schools, see.Education, Learning, Uni- versities Schwyz, canton of, 541-42 Science, and history, 3; Hellenistic, 23; scientific character of Roman law, 30; and Christianitv, 1 12-14, 159, 168; Koran and, 181; Anglo- Saxon, 223; medieval, 375, 379, 383, 385-89, 393. 396, 408, 413, 442, 587, 599, 606, 611 Scipio Africanus, 588 Scotch Highlands, 398 Scotch-Irish, 6 Scotland, 11-12, 40, 166, 168, 220, 225, 276, 278, 484-85, 487-88, 499, 503-04, 512, 514, 566-68, 623 Scots, 84, 166 Scriptorium, 163 "Scrutiny," 585 Sculpture, ancient, 2, 21-25, 32; its decline, 66, 95; early Christian, 113; Byzantine, 147-48; Gothic, 426-30; other medieval, 248, 337, 408, 422-23, 432-33; Renaissance, 587, 598-607, 636 Scutari, 558 Scythians, 53-54, 58 , Sea power, see Shipping Second Crusade, 320-21, 323, 492 Secret History, of Procopius, 128-31, 135, 141. . Secular spirit, rise of, 373 Seigneur, 235, 275 Seigneurial exploitation and regime, 235, 241, 277, 363 Seine River, 12, 17, 219, 266, 275, 363- 64, 513, 526 Self-help, 50-51, 127, 535 Seljuk Turks, 309-10, 313, 318, 549 Semitic, 177 Sempach, battle of, 542 Senate, Roman, 26-28, 86, 95, 121, 125; in medieval Italian towns, 343, 347, 350, 581 Seneca, 24, 65, 374 Senegal, 278, 609 Seneschals, 507-10 Senlac, battle of, 276 Senlis, 266-67, 5io Sens, 510 Sentences, of Peter Lombard, 382, 439 Septimania, 90, 179, 200, 213 Serbia, 229, 453, 455, 549, 554-58 Serbs, 151-52, 308 Serena, 404 Serfdom, 47, 73, 93, 123, 155, 187, 210, 233-38, 241, 246, 259, 277, 301, 305, 486, 523, 534, 546, 572; and see Coloni, Emancipation Sermons, 8, 65, 157-58, 495; and see Preaching Servia, see Serbia Seven crusades, 321 Seven deadly sins, 413 Seven electors, see Electors Seven liberal arts, 124 Seven planets, 413 Seven sacraments, 439 Severinus, St., 11, 116 Seville, 125, 186, 189, 304, 328 Sforza, Francesco, 580 Sforza, Lodovico, 634, 636 Sheriff, 221, 277, 477, 492, 627 Shetland Islands, 12, 166, 220, 276, 395 Shipping, ancient, 19, 34, 73; of the barbarians, 44, 54, 83, 151; Mo- hammedan, 184, 186; Northmen, 218; medieval, 226-27, 3^3, 3i8, 322, 325, 341-43, 345-46, 364, 367, 465, 467-68, 513, 522, 543-44, 581, 583; in the Atlantic, 394-95, 5ii, 608-11, 617; and see Piracy Shires, 221, 276-77, 476, 478-79, 481, 484, 488 Shops, 35, 184-85, 338-39 Siam, 393 Sib, 47, 52 Siberia, 56, 557 Sibyls, 607; and see Erythrean Sic et Nan, 381-82 Sicilian Vespers, 471, 499 Sicily, ancient, 19-20, 23, 26, 60; dur- ing the invasions, 81, 83, 118; By- zantine, 133, 136, 138, 154-55, 157, 196, 209; Mohammedan, 180, 216, 226-27, 313; Norman, 225-26, 289, 302, 312; miscellaneous references, 260, 321, 324, 341, 343, 383-84, 401, 410, 497; Kingdom of, 302, 461-63, 466-73, 482, 496, 586, 626, 630 Sidonius Apollinaris, 124 Siebenbiirgen, 308 Siegfried, 401 Siena, 286, 354, 584, 603, 605 Sierra Leone, 609 INDEX 677 Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor, 539-41, 553, 556, 567-71, 603, 615 Sigismund of Hapsburg, 621 Signorelli, 605 Silesia, 307, 551-52 Silk, 149, 383 Silverius, Pope, 133 Simon Magus, 284 Simon de Montfort, 445, 450 Simon de Montfort, son of the above, 483-84 Simony, 283-85, 287, 292, 471, 504, 562-63 Sinai, Mount, 608 Sion, bishop of, 542 Siricius, Pope, 107 Sirmium, 151 Sistine Chapel, 606-07 Sites of castles and towns, 247, 328- 29, 337 Sixtus IV, Pope, 607 Skaldic poetry, 42 Skeletons, 4, 43 Skulls, 3, 9-10; towers of, 557 Slavery, ancient, 26, 31, 35-37, 63, 67; among early Germans, 43, 47, 52; among nomads, 57; invasions and, 91, 112, 123; early medieval, 155, 164; among Arabs, 172, 174-75, 178, 185, 187, 189; Slavs and slave- trade, 225, 228, 345; 233, 360, 370, 551. 557 Slavs, 10, 40, 87, 117, 139-40, 150-51. 153, 189, 199, 202, 216, 224-25, 228, 262-63, 305, 307, 323, 398 Slavonians, 314 Slavonic languages, Scriptures in, 152, 224 Sloth, Sin of, 563 Sluys, battle of, 513 Social conditions, Roman Empire, 37- 38; early Germans, 43-44, 46-47; Asiatic nomads, 56-57; declining Empire, 66-68, 72-73, 77-78, 91- 94; early Christians, 100, 103; Ger- man kingdoms, 123, 126; Byzan- tine, 132, 141, 148-49, 152-53; monasteries, 161-63; early Ara- bian, 172; Mohammedan, 178, 181- 82, 184-89; Prankish, 212; early Norse, 217-18; manorial, 237; feu- dal, 249-53, 272, 325; in towns, 346- 48, 357, 360, 365-66, 371 ; as reflected in literature, 404-06, 408, 516-17; in Germany, 616; in Spain, 631-32 Socialism, 616; and see Peasants' Re- volts Societies, 30, 35, 104, 335; learned, 590; religious, 598 Sociology, 5 Socrates, 22, 70, 382 Sofia, 556 Soil, exhaustion of, 60 Soissons, 90, 118, 362, 372 Somerset, House of, 628 Somme River, 88, 513, 526, 620, 626 Song of Roland, 200, 402-03, 415 Sonnet, origin of, 410, 588, 593 Sorbian Mark, 203 Sorbs, 305-06 Sources, historical, 2-4, 7, 20; for Roman Empire, 33, 38-39; for early Germans, 41-42; for decline of Rome, 60, 68-70, 72, 74; for Oriental cults, 64; for German in- vasions and kingdoms, 94, 1 18-19; Byzantine, 130, 148, 309; for Slavic settlements in the Balkan penin- sula, 151; monastic, 162-63; about Mohammed, 172-73; Carolingian, 194, 198-99; for early Russia, 224; for early Balkan states, 229; for life of peasants, 237; for the year 1075, 289; for the crusades, 310-11; for the rise of towns, 327-28; about Innocent III, 434; for the Cathari, 442; for St. Francis and St. Domi- nic, 448, 454; for political geography of medieval France, 510; for Hun- dred Years War, 513; after the Black Death, 516; for Swiss confed- eration, 541 ; Venetian, 583; Floren- tine, 594; for artists of the Renais- sance, 597-98, 606; for voyages of discovery, 609 South America, 610 Southampton, 368 South Seas, 189 Spain and the Spanish peninsula, 4, lo-ii, 14-15, 19; Roman, 23, 34; 53-54. 79. 81, 83, 86, 90-91, 96, 1 1 1 ; Visigothic, chap, vii, 160, 169; By- zantine, 128, 138, 150; Mohamme- dan, 178-80, 182-90, 198, 200, 209, 212, 223, 227; feudal, 270-73, 287; Christian expansion in, 302-05, 312, 320, 323-34; towns and trade, 327- 28, 336, 358, 366; learning in, 384, 387, 389, 395; language and litera- ture, 399, 401-02, 410; Gothic art in, 430; in the time of Innocent III, 448, 450, 453, 466; pilgrimage of Louis VII to, 492; in the later Mid- dle Ages, 506, 522, 550, 561, 567-68, 574, 609-12, 614, 630-33 Spanish Inquisition, 448 Spanish language, 126, 399, 410 Spanish March, 200, 203, 213, 273 Sparta, 25, 79, 140 Speaker of House of Commons, 522 Spectacles, see Amphitheaters, Amuse- ments, Circus, Eye-glasses 678 INDEX Speyer, 368, 422 Spice Islands, 611 Spices, 342, 409, 611 Spiritual Franciscans, 561 Spoleto, Duchy of, 156, 169, 171, 196, 462 Squires, 252 Stabat Mater, 392 Stained glass, 424, 426-28, 430, 432- 33, 435. 587, 601 Stamford Bridge, battle of, 276 Stanze, of Raphael, 607 Staple, Statute of the, 518 Star Chamber, Court of, 629 Statistics, 583 Statutes, 484; and see Laborers, Prozmunire, Provisors, Staple, Trea- son, De hceretico comburendo, etc. Steelyard, 543 Stephen, King of England, 278, 293, 474-75 Stephen, St., King of Hungary, 228, 301, 456 Stephen VI, King of Serbia, 554 Stilicho, 77-80, 82, 85-86 Stoics, 22, 31, 62, 97, 99, 115 Stourbridge, 368 Strassburg, growth of commune, 368- 70. 538; cathedral, 430, 432 Strassburg Oaths, 211, 399 Streets, of ancient city, 25-26, 36; of Bagdad, 184-85; for Slavs in Ger- man towns, 307; gilds and, 331; of the medieval town, 337-38, 340; fights in, 348; of "New Towns," 363; paving, 367, 494; of German towns, 368 Stubbs, Bishop, quoted, 511, 639 Student life, 392, 396 Sttidium and studium generate, 390 Style, literary, 589-90 Styria, 307, 537-38 Suabia, see Swabia Subinfeudation, 244-45, 253, 257, 259 Sub- vassals, 245, 257, 259, 268, 271, 274-75, 277 Suetonius, 39, 103 Suevi, 79, 81, 91, 118 Suger, Abbot, 267-68 Suidas, 148 Sulla, 70 Sultan, 309-10, 344, 468, 549, 554 Sumatra, 393 Sun-worship, 70, 72, 106 Superstition, ancient, 33, 39, 64; early German, 127; Norse, 216-17; in Italian cities, 371; in medieval learning, 387; of Louis XI, 624, 629 Sussex, 220 Swabia, 262, 539, 541; and see Ala- mannia Swabian Alps, 540 Swabian league of cities, 539, 541 Sweden and Swedes, 40, 217-18, 223- 24, 228, 369, 532, 543, 546 Swein, King of Denmark and Eng- land, 275 Swiss, Swiss Confederation, and Swit- zerland, 167, 340, 532, 537, 541-42, 547, 568, 620-23, 626, 631, 637-39 Sworn inquest, 205-06, 222, 477-78 Syagrius, 88-90, 118 Sylvester I, Pope, 198 Sylvester II, 375; and see Gerbert Symbolism in Christian art, 113, 148, 432, 601-02 Symbols of ecclesiastical office, 284 Symeon, King of Bulgaria, 229 Symeon Stylites, 111-12 Sympathetic attitude in history, 6, 489, 590-91 Synesius of Cyrene, 106 Synod of Whitby, 167; for other sy- nods, see Church councils Syracuse, 26, 226 Syria, 19, 23, 64, 79, iii; Byzantine, 143, 150-51; Mohammedan, 176- 77, 180-81, 184, 190; during the crusades, 308-09, 313, 316-18, 320- 22, 324-26, 357, 401, 453, 465-66, 549, 554, 557 Syriac, 182, 407 Syrians, 181; in Bagdad, 184; in Spain, 187; Christian, 320 Taboo, 4, 175 Taborites, 569-72 Tabor, Mount, 570-71 Tabriz, 550 Tacitus. 41-49, 53, 58, 66, 103, 252 Taille, 623, 629 Tamerlane, see Timur Tarik, 178-79 Tarsus, 150 Tartars, 58, 224, 548, 550, 557; and see Mongols Tasso, 593 Taxation, 5; Roman, 29, 34, 66, 71, 73, 91-92, 105, 155; German, 49, 121-22; Byzantine, 135, 141, 195; prankish, 193, 203-04; Moham- medan, 177-78, 186-87; in Scan- dinavia, 218, 546; feudal, 257; Nor- man, 277, 479; in towns, 334, 362- 64, 367, 498, 582, 585; in Sicily, 469; papal, 455-56, 471, 496, 560- 61, 567, 573; English, 481-82, 485, 518, 523-24, 629; French, 494, 496, 498-503, 519-21, 524, 623; by Es- tates, 488; German, 533, 538, 540, 615, 622 ; Mongol, 551 ; Burgundian, 617-18 INDEX 679 Teaching of history, 8 Tell, William, 541 Templars, 303, 320, 494, 500-01, 506- 07 Temples, Greek, 21, 25, 33, 113, 600; Roman, 33; heathen, 160, 166 Tenants-in-chief, 297, 479-80, 501 Terence, 24, 374 Terra-cottas, 603 Testaments, law of, 52, 294 Testry, battle of, 194 Teutones, 42, 53 Teutonic folk epic, 400-01 Teutonic languages, 10, 55, 170, 211, 398-99 Teutonic races, 217 Teutonic Knights, 308, 323, 532, 537, 544-47. 552, 608 Teutons, 397, 570 Thales of Miletus, 21 Theater, ancient, 25, 33; Christian attitude toward, 93, 97; Byzantine, 132 Thebes, 407 Thegns, 240, 276, 400, 478 Themistocles, 21 Theocritus, 21 Theodora, Byzantine Empress, 129- 33, 147 Theodore of Tarsus, 167 Theodoric, King of the West Goths, 85 Theodoric, King of the East Goths, 87, 90, 94, 109, chap, vii, 129, 342 Theodosian Code, 72-74, 82, 91, 105, 131, 142, 293 Theodosian dynasty, 107 Theodosius, general under Valen- tinian I, 75-76 Theodosius I, or the Great, Roman Emperor, 76-79, 85, 123 Theodosius II, 72, 80, 82, 84, 131 Theology, 124, 128, 134; Moslem, 181-82, 189; 206, 211, 309, 374, 380-83, 385-86, 389, 411, 434, 437- 38; friars and, 451; decline in, 515, 589, 592, 635; and see Patristic lit- erature Theophilus, the monk, 427 Thermopylae, 84 Thessalonica (and see Saloniki), 77- 78, 466 Thessaly, 310, 554, 556 Theve, la, 266 Thietmar, 342, 375 Third Crusade, 321-22, 462, 493 Thrace, 76-77, 79, 151, 229, 310, 465 Thuringians, 88, 122, 194, 213 Thurout, 366 Tiber River, 52, 80, 462 Tibet, 393, 407 Tigris-Euphrates, 20, 40, 172 Tigris River, 177, 184-85 Timur, 556-57, 559, 608 Tin, 48, 337 Titus Flamininus, see Flamininus Tiu, 45, 48 Toledo, 179, 187-89, 302, 312 Toleration, 30, 177, 187-88, 303, 320, 551, 558 Tolls, 258, 307, 319, 348, 351, 358, 372, 467 Tome, of Pope Leo the Great, 108 Tortona, 350 Tortosa, 186 Torture, 32, 38, 114, 123-24, 447, 506, 629 Toscanelli, 610 Tostig, 276 Totila, King of the East Goths, 136 Toulouse, town and county, 81, 260, 272, 358, 444-46, 450, 456, 492, 497. 510. 517 Touraine, 457, 494. 497. 5o8 Tournai, 88, 366, 422, 498 Tournaments, 238, 252, 324 Tours, 109, III, 119, 125, 159, 179, 218, 366, 510 Towers, Roman, 33; at Ravenna, 83, 146; along south Italian coast, 226; feudal, 239, 247; Norman, 277; of medieval towns, 335, 339, 348, 353, 464, 600; Romanesque, 421-23; Gothic, 428, 431-33; Early English, 430; human, of Timur, 557; and see Campanile Town-halls, 339, 353-54 Towns, 218, 220, 226, 261, 272, 301, 306-08, 311, 318-19, 324-25, chaps, xvii, rviii, xix, 408, 434, 441-42, 444, 461, 532, 535, 537-39. 552. 587, 599, 616-17, 621-23, 631; and see City-state, Communes, Estates, Leagues of, Parliament, Walled towns Trade, see Commerce Trade routes, 12, 366, 550-51. 608, 611-12 Trajan, 35, 66, 435 Transepts, 147, chap, xxii Transubstantiation, 380, 439, 564 Transylvania, 308-09 Transylvanian Alps, 548 Travel, history and, 6-7, 9; 29, 34, 183, 192-93. 249. 252, 324. 376, 383, 393-94, 442, 516-17, 550, 557, 608, 624 Treason, 533, 583 Treason, Statute of, 518 Treaties, 213, 286-87, 512, 620, 633: and see Arras, Bretigny, Corbeil, Mersen, Paris, Pressburg, Troyes, Verdun 680 INDEX Trebizond, 344, 550, 554, 558 Treves, 88, 94, 212, 620; Archbishop of, 532 Treviso, 352 Trial by jury, see Jury Tribonian, 129, 132, 142, 148 Trier, see Treves Triforium, 420, 424, 431, 433 Trinity, 97, 124, 379, 413, 428 Tripoli, in Africa, 118, 177 Tripoli, County of, in Syria, 318 Tristan, 407 Triumphal arches, Roman, 32, 435 Trojan War, 4 Troubadours, 238, 403-05, 410, 414- 15. 444. 594; "God's," 450 Trouveres, 405-06 Troy, 4, 97, 407 Troyes, 85, 270, 363-64, 471; Treaty of, 527 Truce of God, 250-51 Trullan or Quin'sext Council, 195, 283 note Truth, history and, 6; scholastic method of reaching the, 381-82; St., 517 Tschad, Lake, 184 Tudor dynasty, 628-30 Tunis, 180, 322-23 Turin, 353 Turkestan, 55, 549 Turkey, 558 Turks, II, 58, 140, 145, 184, 229, 309- II, 314-18, 322, 324, 328, 405, 548, 574, 583, 591, 623, 635; and see Ottoman, Seljuk Tuscany, 265, 286, 290, 354-55. 421, 461, 470, 584, 605 Tuscan League, 461, 464 Twelve Tables, 30 Tyrol, 140, 538-39. 568, 616 Ulfilas, 55, 398 Ulpian, 30, 69, 122, 142 Ultramontane, 565 Umayyad, see 0mm iad Umbria, 461, 464, 605 Unam sane tarn, 505 Unity of the Church, 102 Universitas, 390 Universities, 16, 92, 260, 378, 381, 389-92, 451, 487, 546, 587, 616; and see Bologna, Oxford, Paris, Prague Unterwalden, canton of, 541-42 Upsala, University of, 546 Ural-Altaian, see Altaian Ural Mountains, 12, 17 Urban II, Pope, 311-13, 323, 326,440 Urban IV, 470-71 Urban VI, 565-67 Urbino, 580 Uri, canton of, 541 Usury, see Interest Utraquists, 569-71, 573 Utrecht, 167, 365, 543 Uzzano, Niccolo da, 604 Vaeringjar, or Varangians, 224 Vagabonds, 313-14, 516 Valais, 542 Valencia, 188-89, 304, 366, 405, 410, 488 _ Valenciennes, 365 Valens, Roman Emperor, 75-76, 114 Valentinian I, Roman Emperor, 75-76 Valentinian II, 78 Valentinian III, 82-83, 85 Valets, 331 Valla, Lorenzo, 593 Valois, House of, 512, 531 Valvassores, 346 Vandals, 77, 79, 81; in Africa, 83-85, 91. 93, 96, III, chap, vii; conquered by Justinian, 128, 135-36; 178, 291, 398 . Varangians, 224 Varna, battle of, 558 Vasari, 597-98, 603-04, 606, 613 Vasco da Gama, see Gama Vascones, 272; and see Basques and Gascony Vassal, 242-45; and see Feudalism Vatican, 227, 565, 574, 607 Vaulting, Roman, 32; at Padua, 354; Romanesque, 420-22; Gothic, 424- 26, 429; Early English, 430-31; 600 \'ehm. Courts of the, 534-35, 540 Venice, 138, 148, 209, 226, 319, 341- 47, 352-53. 356, 367, 369, 393-94, 435, 463-66, 470, 553-54, 557-58, 580-84, 591, 599, 603-04, 607, 611, 634, 636-37 Verdun, Treaty of, 213 Vergil, 24, 114, 412-13 Vermandois, 488, 501, 510 Verona, 352, 411, 580 Verrochio, 606 Vespucci, Amerigo, 610 Vestments, movement against ecclesi- astical, 570 Vicarii, 71, 141 Vicars, 577 Vicenza, 352 Victor II, Pope, 286 Victor III, 352 Victory, statue of, 95 Vienna, University of, 390 Vigilius, Pope, 133-34 Vikings, 216, 223, 225, 230, 401 Villas, Roman, 33 ; medieval, 233, 236- 38, 244-45, 268, 301, 305, 479 Villehardouin, 409 INDEX 68 1 Villeins, 237, 254, 337, 480, 486, 523- 24 Vilna, 552 Vinci, Leonardo da, 602, 605-06 Vinland, 223, 230, 395 Virgate, 235 Virgin, the, 624; and see Madonnas Visconti, House of, 580 Visconti, Bianca, 580 Visconti, Gian Galeazzo, 590 Visconti, Valentine, 636 Viscount, 269 Visigoths, see West Goths Vision of Piers the Ploughman, 516-17, 562-65 Vistula River, 17, 42, 139, 308, 544 Vita Nuova, 411, 415 Viterbo, 464 "Voices," of Joan of Arc, 528 Volga River, 17, 58, 549, 556 Vosges Mountains, 12, 17, 88, 166 Voyages of Discovery, 394, 609-14, 633 Vulgate, 113, 593 Wager of battle, 51, 205, 469, 497 Wages, 498, 516, 523 Waiblingen, 350 Waldensians, 443, 448, 450 Waldo, Peter, 443, 450 Wales, 12, 29, 164, 167, 222, 398, 406, 484, 487-88, 519; and see Welsh Walid, Caliph, 180. Wallace, Sir William, 488 Wallachia, 140, 453, 554, 556, 558 Walled towns, 24; gates, 33; Rome walled again, 54, 226-27; barbarian invaders, and, 83, 91, 135, 152, 179; medieval, 315, 327, 329-30, 337, 367-69, 451, 494, 505, 518, 578, 629 Walloons, 269 Walsingham, 368 Walter of Brienne, 466 Walter the Penniless, 315 Walther von der Vogelweide, 406 Wapentake, 221, 478 Wardship and marriage, 243, 257, 277, 480 Warfare, and history, 2, 5, 9; and geography, 12; and citizenship, 26; Roman, 28; among early Germans, 43, 46-47, 127; of mounted nomads, 57; early Christian opposition to, 104; Mohammedan, 176; chief pur- suit of Charlemagne, 199; feudal, 249-52, 256, 274; crusades, 315, 324; interurban in Italy, 348, 576; literature of, 400, 402; of Philip Augustus, 493; of the fourteenth century, 531; of the Hussites, 570; of the condottieri, 576-77, 580; and see Army, Invasions, Knights, Mercenaries, Private War Wars of Religion, 339, 544 Wars of the Roses, 614, 628-29 Warwick, the King-Maker, 628 Welf, House of, 349-50 Welsh dialect, 398 Welsh people, 434, 630 Wends, 216, 228, 544 Wenzel, Holy Roman Emperor, 639, 553, 570 Wergeld, 47, 52, 123 Wessex, Kingdom of, 220 West Franks, 213, 219, 261, 266, 399 West Goths, 4, 55, 76-85, 87-90, in, chap, vii, 128, 138, 149-50, 157, 160, 169, 178-79, 187, 554 West Indies, 610 Westminster, 476 Westminster Abbey, 430 Westphalia, 534, 539 West Prussia, 546 West Saxons, 202, 220 Wettin dynasty, 540 Whitby, Synod of, 167 White Huns, see Ephthalites White Sea, 12, 17, 223 "White Shirt" (Greenland), 223 Widows, 46, 92, 173-74; feudal, 243, 270-71, 491; of gild members, 331; 515 Widukind, 375 Will, see Langland William I, or the Conqueror, King of England, 246, 270, 275-77, 292-93, , 295, 312, 376, 459, 474, 477-79 William 1 1, or Rufus, 293, 314, 380, 480 William V, Duke of Aquitaine, 273 William VIII, Duke of Aquitaine, 272 William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, 405 William, Count of Holland, 470 William of Conches, 378-79, 384-85 William of Lorris, 405 William of Roches, 508 William of Rubruk, 393, 452 Willibrord, 167 Wills, 52, 294, 460 Winchester, 368; cathedral, 423 Windows, house-, 339, 369, 388; splayed, 422 ; rose-, 428 ; lancet, 43 1 ; in Renaissance buildings, 600; and see Clear-story, Stained glass Winfrith, see Boniface, St. Wisby, 369, 543 Wissendi, 534 Witan, 222, 276 Witchcraft, 528-29, 534 Wittelsbach, House of, 539 Woden, 45 Wolsey, 530 Woman, position of, in Roman law, 682 INDEX 31; among early Germans, 43, 46, 52; among mounted nomads, 57; during invasions, 82, 92; monasti- cism and, 112, 154, 166; Byzantine, 130-33. 148; Mohammedan, 175, 183-84, 320; in feudalism, 243, 252- 53, 286-87, 313; in literature, 402- 406, 409, 415, 588; in politics, 457, 460, 495-96, 512, 525, 527-29. 552- 53, 586, 618-21, 626, 628, 630-36; and see names of individual women Wood-carving, 427, 433 Wooden forts of Northmen, 217 Wool trade, 366-67, 514 Worms, 289, 368, 422 Writing, see Alphabet, Inscriptions, Literature, Manuscripts, etc. Wiirzburg, 167, 368-69 Wyclif, John, 663-65, 568-69, 575 York, Archbishop of, 164, 436 York, House of, 618, 628 Ypres, 365-66, 498 Zalaca, battle of, 303, 312 Zara, 465 Zeeland, 616 Zeno, Byzantine Emperor, 86, 108 Zeus, 62, 69 Zion, 429 Ziska, John, 570 Zollern, 540 Zug, 542 Zurich, 538, 542 \ COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 0030167078 940.1 T39- C.2 00 o (M ^*5ocoS%' s o OH' I— 'W>^'? 2 2 1957