A History of Europe : H. A. L.Fisher (part 1/2) (2024)

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Volume 1/2 of A History Europe : H. A. L.Fisher

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PREFACE

I BEGIN this book with neolithic man and conclude with Stalin and Mustapha Kemal, Mussolini and Hitler. Between these rough and rugged frontiers there are to be found some prospects flattering to human pride which it is a pleasure to recall to memory, the life-giving inrush of the Aryan peoples, the flowering of Greek genius, the long Roman peace, the cleansing tide of Christian ethics, the slow reconquest of classical learning after the barbaric invasions, the discovery idlrough oceanic travel of the new world, the rationalism of the dghtecnth, and the philan- thropy and science of the nineteenth centuries. One intellectual excitement has, however, been denied me. Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen. This is not a doctrine of cynidsm and despair. The fact of progress is written plain and large on the page of history; but progress is not a law of nature. The ground gained by one generation may be lost by the next. The thoughts of men may flow into the channels which lead to disaster and barbarism.

My opening themes are Greece and Rome, barbarism and Qiristianity. The discovery and colonization of the new world, the rise of nation states and the full development of the capital- istic system, belong to a later but still, having regard to the six thousand years of civilized life upon the planet, relatively recent period. Steam and electricity are more recent still. It is possible that two thousand years hence these two sdimtific inventions may be regarded as constituting the “Great Divide^’ in human history. /

Book nX describes The liberal Experiment, using the adjec- dve liberal in no narrow party senses but as denoting the system

Vi PKtFACX

of civil, political fuul reli|^ou8 freedom now firmly established in Britain and the Dominions as well as among riie French, the Dritdi, the Scandinavian and American peoples. And if I speak of liberty in this wider sense as experimental, it is not because I wish to disparage Freedom (for I would as soon disparage Virtue herself), but merely to indicate that after gaining grotmd through the nineteenth century, the tides of liberty have now suddenly receded over wide tracts of Europe. Yet bow caa> the ^read of servitude, by whatever benefits it may have been accompanied, be a matter for congratulation? A healthy man needs no narcodcs. Only when the moral spine of a people is broken may plaster of Paris become a necessary evil.

For extended bibliographies the reader is referred to the Cambridge Andent, Mt^&eval and Modem Histories, to the authorides dted in J. B. Bur3r'8 edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Lavisse’s Histoire de France, Stubbs’ Constitutional History of England, and other standard histories. I have confined myself to drawing attention at the end of each chapter to a few illustrative books, choosing by preference those which are modem and accessible in the English or French languages.

I have to thank my wife, Mr. Leopold Wickham Legg and Mr. David Ogg for their great kindness in reading the proofs; Mr. D. A. Reilly, of All Souls College, for several useful sugges- tions with respect to the opening chapters; and, for much valu- able counsel in the later part of the work, my old friend Sir Richard Lodge, who at eighty years retains unimpaired his rexnarkable gifts of historical judgment and information.

H. A. L. FISHER.

BOOK ONE

ANCIENT AND MEDIAEVAL

INTRODUCTION

Our civilization Hellenic, At present Europe is a creditor, formerly If Ufas debtor, Rome transmits the legacy of Greece, Oriental reiigume penetrate the west, Christianity the white man's religion* Its severance from Judaism* and submission to Greek influence. The Christian testn. Its acceptance by Bulgars, Hungarians, and Finns, its rejection by Jews^ Arabs, and Turks. Civilization of Europe spiritual not racial. The problem of European U9tity,

We Europeans are the children of Flellas. Our civilization, which has its roots in the brilliant city life of the eastern Aegean, has never lost traces of its origin, and stamps us with a character by which we are distinguished from the other great civilizations of the human family, from the Chinese, the Hindus, the Persians, and the Semites. Scholars may explain to us that the languages spoken by the formative races of Europe are akin to Sanscrit and Persian, that the west has borrowed from the east, and the east from the west, and that the interpenetration of east and west has been so complex and subtle and continuous that any attempt to disentangle the European elements in our civilization from thewe which are foreign and adventitious must be a forlorn enterprise. Nevertheless, the broad fact remains. There is an European civil- ization. We know an European when we meet him. It is easy to distinguish him from a native of Pekin, of Benares, or of Teheran,

Our civilization, then, is distinct: it is also all-pervading and preponderant. In superficial area Europe is surpassed by Asia, Africa, and America, in population by the vast stable peasantry of Asia, which outnumbers not Europe only, but the rest of the world put together. Yet if a comprehensive survey of the globe were to be made, it would be found that in almost every cptarter of it there were settlements of European men, or traces of the operation of the European mind. The surviving aboriginal peoples in the western hemisphere are a small, unimportant, and dwindling element in the population. The African negroes have been introduced by white men as an economic convenience. Northern and southern America are largely populated by colonists from Europe. Australasia is British. Tlie political direo

3 A WATOll^Y OF BUBOFE

tioft <*%A 6 ric| ihas faBm, «idi the imUguous CEceptioo <»f U*e ioi/^^rcadhcalaf the Nile, into l^topean hands^ In A$ia, the ca»e ^is not tiissimil^. The political influences of Europe arc apparent; li&vcn where they are not, as in India or Palestine, embodied in direct European control. The ideas of nationality and tesponsiblc government, of freedom and progress, of democracy and demo^ cratic education, have passed from the west to the cast with revo- lutionary and far-reacUng consequences.

It is, moreover, to European man that the world owes die ixh comparable gifts of modern science. To the conqu^t of nature through knowledge the contributions made by Asiatics have been negligible and by Africans (Egyptians excluded) non- existent. The printing press and the telescope, the steam-engine, the internal combustion engine and the aeroplane, the telegraph and telephone, wireless broadcasting and the cinematograph, the gramophone and television, together with all the leading dis- coveries in physiology, the circulation of the blood, the laws of respiration and the like, are the result of researches carried out by white men of European stock. It is hardly excessive to say that the material fabric of modem civilized life is die result tbe intellectual daring and tenacity of the European peoples.

Yet this astounding supremacy in the field of scientific dis- covery has not always existed and may not always continue. Judged by the length of years during which human life has existed on this planet, the intellectual ascendancy of the white European races is a very recent phenomenon. Europe has not always been the tutor, nor Asia always the pupil. There was a time when these relations were re versed, and the men of Europe (the land of the setting sun) were deeply influenced by the far older and more sumptuous civilizations of Babylon and Egypt.

It is not my purpose to discuss the extent to which the civiliza- tion of Hellas was influenced by oriental sources. Let it be suffi- cient to note that an imposing mass of archaeological evidence can now be adduced in support of the proposition that the arts and crafts of the Orient were widely known to the peoples dwell- ing round the Mediterranean basin long before our earliest written records of Ionian civilization. Yet when the dawn of European literature begins to shine it reveals a society which is not oriental. The Homeric poems arc a suflicient proof that round the eastern shores of the Mediterranean there was about 1200 1I.G. a distinctive civilization of tbe wesL

<iakt tMMttokt tiM) ittrvilrtil lal tba fiiuntpmn nUad ma «8NertMi Ube dviliaaxioiiatGiaeoe, a'iddt iMm laoted in th» i^Ug^OQ of die Hometlc age, grew £mib itrength td eticiigdi. It ><|>dled die might o£ Ponta; and when the dtke of Gretoe Were extingais^d by the power of Maoedon the Influence of Helkoiem wae spread eastwards to die Indus by the armies of Alexander.

The mantle of the great Macedonian ultimately devolved on the Roman ^mpire, whidi for four hundred yean defdided western ddltzadon against the dangers which assailed it from the barbarians without. But if the Roman legions could hold the frantien against external foes, they afforded no protecdon against the penetration of the west by oriental belieh. The old classical deides gave ground before die cults of Isis «id Mithras and the Sun Go^ and these in turn ceded to Qirist.

The founder of Christianity was a Galilean, speaking the Aramaic language, and nurtured in die Jewish traditions; but the Christian religion struck no deep roots in the country of its origin. Amost from the first it became a European creed, winning the souls of the poor as well by its simple Galilean piety and demcKratic ideals as by its ardent claim, inherited from the Hebrews, to be the one truth and the sole means of salvation from a terrible and impending doom. A religion springing from a Jewish root, but how quickly in the Hellenic atmosphere of the first century severed from the legal rigours of Jerusalem and woven into the texture of Greek thought! The language of its Scriptures was Gieek. So, too, remains the dis- tinctive vocabulary of its creed, its ritual, its organization — ^the words apostle, evangel, church, diocese, bishop, priest, deacon, and countless others, for the Christian Church, even in Rome, was Greek before it was Latin, Greek in its theology, its official language, its local organization. The oriental rite of circumdsion, which Paul of Tarsus, the greatest Greek writer of his age, re- jected as a fatal obstacle to the spread of the Gospel through the gentile world, drew a clear line of division between two sects which in the Roman mind were at first apt to be confounded. Christian and Jew sprang apart. As time went on, the story of the Crucifixion, told with exquisite simplidty and pathos, and becoming mdely known wherever Christians met together, deepened the gulf, and the crime of a handful of priests and dden in Jerusdem was visited by the Christian Churches upon

■ ^ A Hi8To»T or roRora

iIm Jirwish . lace. It i# thus that St. Marit* ■tiw-i'fiai^kBK

^^•t. aiapeai* to many Jews today as being, although wi^ idMbit itoiTWj the first of the line of anti-Semite authors.

V Hci^ then, in Christianity as sharply distinguished frewm Judaism, was a new test, a new principle of organization £«£uropean society. To be a Christian was to be admitted, as it were, into the fellowship of the European nations. To be a non** Cliristian was to be an outcast and an enemy. Much of European history consists in the secular conflict between cast and west, which, beginning with the wars of Greece and Persia, was re- sumed in the form of the long duel between Christianity and Islam, the most recent phase of which was closed by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. What famous names arc connected with that secular struggle — ^Urban II and Godfrey de Bouillon, Saladin and Richard Coeur de Lion, St. Louis and the Cid, Soleyman the Magnificent and Prince Eugene, Mustapha Kemal and VcnizelosI The action and interaction of the Moslem and Christian world is one of the great themes of European history.

The acceptance of the Christian test as a mark of European fellowship has necessarily determined the relations between the old-established European races and those Asiatic peoples who at one time or another have effected a lodgment in the European continent. The Bulgars, the Hungarians, and the Finns accepted with varying degrees of readiness the European religion. The fact that in language and physical type they bore marks of an oriental and savage origin did not injure them. Religion atoned for an alien origin, and gave them the rights of the European confraternity. It was otherwise with the three oriental races, which continued to maintain upon European soil a non-Christian faith.

The Jews were persecuted, the Arabs by degrees driven from Spain, and the Turks, after a long-drawn struggle, expelled from the Greek mainland and islands, and from all but a small frac- tion of the Balkan peninsula.

Of these three sharply contrasted peoples only one has exercised a major and permanent influence on European life. The Turks have been barren of ideas, and retained until the present genera- don the modes of thought and life appropriate to the nomads of the Asiatic highlands. From the Arab peoples mediaeval Europe learnt something of medicine, science, history, and philosophy,

t«hic:hsm«diti turn lor the moment and is novtvapeneded. But to the Jews Eurc^ owes die Old Testament, which, being trails’ lated into Greek and becoming an accepted part of the Christian canon, has mitered more deeply perhaps than uiy other 'book into the lives of the western peoples. From this great body of sacred literature, some of it rising to heights of sublime moral beauty, while other parts reflect die morals of a barbarous age, generation after generation of European men have drawn their ideas, not only of an historical order governed by divine provi* dence, but of extreme antiquity, and of the lineament! of oriental society in distant rimes. The influence of the Old Testament has not been wholly good. If it has |^ven courage and consolation to the saint, it has too often nerved the arm of the persecutor.

Apart from the power of their sacred literature, and despite the cruel persecutions to which they have been exposed, the Jews have achieved for themselves a singular position in the economy of Europe. Dispersed after the conquest of Palestine by the Roman Emperor Titus in a.d. 70, this shrewd and gifted oriental people have spread themselves through the Christian society of the world, and now number some eleven millions in Europe and four millions in America.

For many centuries the gates of mercy were closed upon them. They were regarded as outcasts, debarred from the most honour- able callings and responsibilities, and constrained to the pesti- lential squalors of the ghetto. Always despised, periodically plundered, and in times of public calamity or fear exposed to the blood lust of murderous and ignorant mobs, the Jews of Europe endured through the middle ages unspeakable miseries. The eighteenth century brought the dawn of happier things. As the sunshine of religious toleration spread through central and western Europe the Jews were admitted to civic rights. The hospitality of the Christian state was amply repaid in noble con- tributions to art, science, and literature. Receiving at last en- couragement from the vigorous and thriving popularionfBt the west, the Jew rose to the level of the society around him, edu- cated himself in its spirit, took on its colour, and ministered to some of its , needs. 'Yet the difference between east and west, between Aryan and Semite, between Jew and Gentile, still re- mained, as sensible after more than eighteen hundred years as when the Hebrews were first driven from their small sunbaked home in Palestine to seek an asylum and a future in the west,

• 4*^ {a |w«n y<Mv u in th® violent •jpatrot.y$ta e£ imSmI

ieHM urtjich has shaken the Germans, to pvc rise to btmtp 0| aavage opprettion.

Race, then, has never entered as a unifying &ctor into Euro* pean history. The races of Europe have always felt themxdros to be different from one another, and have acted as if they weTO •o. Attempts to give to Europe some form of orgamzadtut or coherence have never been based on racial unity, or limited in scope to the geographical area which we have agreod to desoribO as European. The Empire of Alexander stretched to India, the Empire of Rome to the Euphrates, the claims of the Pc^ to the uttermost parts of the earth. The League of Nations, which incidentally supplies Europe with an organization for peace, is so framed as to include Asia and Africa, South America, Canada, and Australasia.

It follows that the kind of civilization which we spedBcally designate as European reposes not upon a foundation of race, but on an inlieritance of thought and achievement and religious aspirations.

To this inheritance every race in Europe has made its distinct and specific contribution. That is why Europe is interesting. Its civilization has a certain character to be distinguished from that of the Semites, the Hindus, or the Chinese, and yet as we examine that character it dissolves under our eyes into a thousand different colours and shades, race differing from race, country from country, shire from shire, the men of Wiltshire sharply opposed in certain particulars to the men of Dorset, and even neighbouring villages eyeing one another as foreigners.

These differences are unresolved. One by one the great attempts to impose a common system upon the energetic self* willed peoples of Europe have broken down. The Roman Empire was foiled by the Germans. The Chiistian Church, by far the most powerful of the influences which in historical times has worked for union, was ruptured first by the quarrel between the Greeks and Latins, and then by the revolt of the Protestant north. Nor has any system oPsecular ideas been more successful in obtaining universal acceptance. Europe refused to be unified by the egalitarian plan of the French Revolution. Equally it now dediiaes to accept the iron programme of Russian Com* munism. Yet ever since the first century of our era the dream of unity has hovered over the scene and haunted the itnaginarijp uit

Iip4 Nor k i^beni any ify^tioB mon ftx^ tiocitc to the fsttire wdfare of the world disn how the natioiw of Europe, whote diSereuces are so nmy $ad so lAvetmte, toay best be omiblued into some stable orgatkizatiim for the pursuit of thdr cmmaon interests and the avoi^ce of strife.

CHAPTER t

ORIGINS

Geographical and climatic changes. Evidence of eratUology. Peasantry of the neolithit and bronse age. The coming of the Aryans. Mixed races of Euro^. The Aegean culture of archaic times. Its debt to Babylon and Egypt. Difference between east and west.

In the last three thousand years there has been little change in the geographical conformation or climatic conditions of Europe. Here and there the sea has gained upon the land, or the land encroached upon the sea. Here and there a harbour has been silted up, a river has changed its course, a hill has subsided. But the broad currents of history have not been and could not be altered by such slight changes as these. In its physical outlines the Europe of the Homeric age was practically the same as the Europe of today.

This has not always been so. Geographical evidence shows that at earlier periods in the world’s history the area which is now described as Europe went through transformations remarkable in scale, though eilected by minute gradations spread over long periods of time. The climate was now much colder, now much warmer, than that which we experience at the present day. At one time herds of reindeer wandered over France and Britain; at another the shy hunter in the forests of western Europe would track the elephant, the hippopotamus, and the sabre-toothed tiger — ^animals now to be found only in the tropical or semi- tropical regions of the world. There was an age during which the Scandinavian peninsula, the British Isles, and the greater part of northern Germany were covered by a vast sheet of ice, an age when men might cross the Irish Sea, the German Ocean, and the British Channel dryshod, and walk into Africa or China without the use of oar or sail. In this long period of human history, extending perhaps for three hundred thousand years, tl^ was a time when Europe pushed out a shelf a hundred miles to the west of its present limits, when the Baltic was a fresh-water lake, and the Atlantic had not yet burst into the Mediterranean, nor the Mediterranean established a marine con-

8

OmXGXKS

9

necddli «ritb the Black Sea. At one point dr other in geolo^cal time it would teem that every part of Europe wore an aspect Wholly at variance with our present experience of it. The islands of the Aegean were eminences in a stretch of land inhabited by the elephant, the rhinoceros, and the mastodon. The plain of Hungary was a waste of salt water stretching to the Caspian; the Harz mountains were an island; Britain was broken up into a number of little pieces floating in an icy inhospitable sea. The site of imperial Rome was hidden beneath a floor of untravell^ waters. Only after many experiments, continued into upper miocene times, were the main lines of Europe, as we now know it, decided.

The new structure of Europe was of capital importance. The waterways opened from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean in the south, and into the Baltic in the north, the establishment of a maritime connection between the Aegean and the Black Sea through the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmora, and the Bosphorus have given to Europe a climate so temperate and subject to such modest variations of heat and cold as to provide the most favour- able physiological stimulus to activity and enterprise. The sea is a source of infinite refreshment. The penetration of the conti- nent of Europe by the long arms of inland seas has not only en- couraged intercommunication, with all its consequences for the development of trade and society, but has prevented, at least in that part of Europe which lies west of the Pripet marshes, the social and political stagnation which prevails in the heart of great land continents. But the favours of nature are distributed unequally. The vast plain of Russia is, save on its southern fringes, too remote from the mitigating influences of a great body of temperate sea water to enjoy the benefits of its western neighbours. The cold, dark winters of the Russian plain are inimical to tlie spirit of activity, vigilance, and criticism. In such a climate man easily becomes the victim of narrowing localism and deadening routine. The gloom of geographical uniformity, combined with a harsh climate, exercises its elTect on the min^ An all-pervading spirit of resignation and acquiescence saps initiative and lames resource.

In the western half of Europe man has been assisted both by climate and by geography. Rolling hills or mountain ranges re- lieve the monotony of the level spaces. Comparatively speaking, the cleansing sea is always a neighbour. Save in northern

lO

A 09 xvftors

Gtmiutcf iMw it ao kmg strecdb of toonottnoiia >

hti<t‘ thtt jdala it coniparadvdy narrow, and boiuvted eta oM aide, by the waters of the Baltic In all this western part of^ Europe, nature seems to have been bent on providing every lotrm of variety calculated to refresh and encourage the human race. Hill and valley are intermingled; mountain ranges axe intersected 1^ passes, and never so high as to oppose an insuper* able barrier to the passage of men. .The plains are well watered. In the Scandinavian north, where the winter cold is extreme, there is always the sea and always the mountains. ^ Greece or Spain, where the summer heat is strongest, it is never, as in India, almost unbearable. Everything facilitates the movement of men, the intermixture of races, and the development of an active habit of thought and enterprise.

Long before the age of history proper, man had made his appearance in Europe. Some think that he came from Africa,

others from southern Russia, others again that the original habitat of tlie human race is to be found in the highlands of Asia. We do not know. But if the origin of man and the course' of his early migrations are wrapped in obscurity, we know something of his physical properties, something of the stages of civilization through which he p.issed, and something of the racial types existing in Europe when he first emerged into the light of history.

At the beginning of the neolithic age, when the great ice sheets had receded from the continent of Europe, and the climate had become tolerable to the human species, it would seem that European men fell into three main types, the Mediter- ranean, the Nordic, and the Alpine; the Mediterranean and tht» Nordic agreeing with one another in the important particular of bring long-headed, but the Nordic, probably tmder the stress of climatic influences, being fairer, slower to achieve maturity, and more muscular than the Mediterranean. In sharp contra- t^tinction to these two long-headed races, the one resembling the modem Berber and the other the modem Swede, is a race of round-headed, thick-set people, sometimes, as in the Illyrian Alps, tall and dark, ekewhere, as in the Swiss and French Alps short and stocky, who appear to have come into Europe frmn’ Ae CMt, Md are known to ethnologists as Alpines from the fact that they arc to be found thickly occupying the mountain chains which divide northern from southern Europe. It is not.

. Id

Ifaeid tiitM 'Mm p bwwn x i of wuf 1ilMid9|KS4 )MAUe twe OMViefoinfiM or cxdvnivttMMu A^Siie laSiiDeidl fii^cljr ib^ordic widi Modtcemcttoui. Almosc

l^Wr^vrhejee we find evidence dE intermediate tjpe», or of «ir> 'vimb bnm an earlier age. Xn the British Isles, for instance, ^ lAte jp(^tdati<m was long-headed, and * intermediate * in char- acter between the two differendated races, tall, gaunt, and datk in parts ot die Scottish Highlands and North Wales, short and almost Mediterranean in parts of South Wales and Ireland, and '^betwixt-and-between ' almost everywhere." In Finland, A^tic broedheads mingled with long-headed men of the Nordic stodt.

In a word, as Eurc^ is a patchwork of differing landscapes, so it is a misceilany of differing phjrdcal types.

As the ice age came to an end, and mile after mile of Europe was retrieved from frosty desolation, the hunting men of t^ south came drifting northwards through the evergreens of bay and myrtle and box, through the thick forests of beech and oak, with their flint arrows and spears in pursuit of game. Homo sapiens had entered upon his long struggle with nature. Peril and want sharpened his wits and gave him reliance. He learned to spin, to weave, to clothe himself against the cold. By degrees he perfected his weapons against the wild beasts in the forests, exdfumging stone for bronze, and bronze for iron. The sail, the wheel, the domestication of animals, three of the mmt im- portant inventions in human history, belong to this unrecorded period. Gradually the hunter acquired the arts of stodt keep- ing and farming, so that thousancb of years before the dawn of history a peasantry was settled upon the soil of Europe, and there, for century after century, bent to the unchanging cyde of the seasons, sowing, ploughing, and reaping, tending the ox, the goat, the sheep, and the pig, practising with sui^ skill as they might command the arts and crafts of weaving and build- ing, carving and pottery, and, since religion is well-nigh uni- versal, worshipping nature in itt manifold forms, whether ter- rible or benignant. Into this passive dvilization of scattered huts and villages there was injected somewhere in the course of the second millennium before Christ a new and disturbing force. Out of hither Asia, we know not by what successive Waves or driblets, there streamed a people who had* tamed the Wild horse to the needs of man and had found in the use df iron the convincing secret of the slariiing sword. With these

t* A BISTORT OS SOSOSS

tvto toiBteani^g adirantages dis new ntoe or otttnbiOSdOB Sf races imposed itself as a dominating authority upon idle Srcbidc Europe of the bronze age and was ^e exciting cause of new and far reaching developments. Not that the newcomers obliterated the old sedentary population of the continent, or that they were aide to e&ce the primitive belief which haunt the ima^nation ' of rustic men. That population, those beliefs, endure to this day, but refashioned and overlaid by the higher and more spirit^ culture of the new tribal aristocracy, which had coipe so ^ and moved so fast. Wliat these new peoples cidled themselves or were called by others when they dwelt in their ori^al home (wher- ever that may have been) and spoke their original tongue is a mystery, for in historical times they were divided into separate races, which had lost the memory of a common origin: but since they share with the Persians and Indians a common lin- guistic pedigree, they are called by philologists Indo-Europeans or Aryans. From the mixture of these conquering intruders with the bronze-using peoples of archaic Europe, the races which bear the burden of European history, the Greeks and Latins, the Celts, Teutons, and Slavs, derive their origin. Purity of race docs not exist. Europe is a continent of energetic mongrels.

In certain regions, and most notably in the eastern Aegean, civilization had touched high points of luxury and craftsman- ship long before the Aryan invasions. The exhumed treasures of Crete and the Cyclades, of Mycenae and the Troad, suffice to show that the human hand has gained nothing in dexterity from the lapse of ages. In Crete, that long and beautiful island, surmounted by the snowy crest of Ida, which of all European islands lies nearest to Egypt, there was for near two thousand years (3000-1400 b.c.) a flourishing civilization which spread its influence far and wide through the lands washed by the Aegean seas or westward to the shores of Sicily.

The ruins of the palace of Minos at Cnossos afford astonish- idU^evidence of the comfort and luxury to be procured in that distant age. The system of heating and draining, and even some of the women’s fashions, as depicted in the frescoes, have a thoroughly modem air. This source of Minoan luxury is not obscure. Cnossos, planted at the northern end of the great south road across the island, received and distributed the mer- chandise of the east. In that distant age this dty, which may have contained a hundred thousand inhabitants, acted as a

13

mtMm of AiGd^fige becw«en tut m4 uut, paring tlie «««»*<; part itt the eopnomy o£ Eurc^pean trade as aterwards devolved on Venice. Hken a siiddea destruction came upon it. The place was burned and sacked, the town was destroyed. The Mtnoan dynasty and the Minoan power pass out of history, leaving tmly among the Greeks a memory of half-ma^cal skiU, luxury, and cruelty.

No clue has been discovered to the Minoan script, nor has any book belonging to this age survived the catastrophe of tbas Gredc conquest. The mysterious people, who worshipped a woman, a man, and a child, and for whom the cross appears to have been a religious symbol, cannot speak to us, and could not, so it would seem, speak to the fair-haired Achaeans, who at Mycenae and elsewhere settled in the shell of their castles and palaces. The break seems absolute. Yet it has been suggested, despite the silence of records, that something precious may yet have been handed down to posterity from this brilliant race. The Minoan gems are of exquisite workmanship, and fragments of the art of that distant age, unearthed by the spade in Hellenic times, may have helped to inspire the aesthetic consciousness of Greece in the greatest period of its artistic achievement.

The secret of this rich Aegean culture is to be found in its contact with the yet older and more advanced civilization in the alluvial valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile. Here it is that we find the first evidence of a developed urban life, of temples and priestly corporations, of written records and correspondence, of schools and codes of law, and of a leisured class raised above the urgency of material wants and dedicated to the pursuit of learning. While all Europe was yet rude and unlettered, geometry, astronomy, engineering, and land-surveying were cultivated by the Sumerians of Mesopotamia. Here, too, more than three thousand years before Christ mankind had carried to a point of perfection, as the most recent investigations at Ur of the Chaldees have shown, the arts of the jeweller, the cainipr. and the cabinet maker. Great centres of culture and wealth are never self-contained. From the Sumerians, shafts of light spread in every direction to the Hittites and Cretans, to the Philistines and Egyptians, and ultimately through many difiEerent chan- nels to the Aryan Greeks. Yet, though the west borrowed from the east, a deep chasm divides the settled hieratic society and theocratic governments of Mesopotamia and Egypt from the

14 *

free ial|w^fi»raiiua»la, aM idvanniiiggii b 4R|pite4 iii the poems o£ Uomex, md out ci whi^ HI wild Omde took to city life* the distinctive dvilixadM

the European world was in due course developed*

CftAPTBR S

THE DAWN OF HEtLAS

ihl* etmhg of Ae Greekt* Tht HUmerie ag*. GeagrufMetS feaHtrn. fiut tiff Absence of theocracy. Sueeetsive ekiget of paiitUei

AenMopmaHt. Athene and Sparta. The Ionian dties. Th* cdlotM mmment.

9 -t «q sst(mi8hing dispensation ol fate the onv people of genius in the annals of die world is the earliest of the European races to emerge into the full light of history. The Greeks of history believed themselves to be one in race, origin, language* and insnttttion, and in all these respects were misled; but the fact that they thought of themselves as one, and as distinguished by a superior culture from the dark background of the barbarian world around them, is more important than the truth, discerned by modem analysts, that like all the great peoples of the world, the Greeks drew their wealth from many quarters. Who they were and whence ultimately they came, are matters rather of learned conjecture than of certain knowledge. We only Imow that when the dawn breaks about looo b.c men of Aryan stock are ^tablished, as a result of a long series of tribal infiltrations, whidi may have lasted many hundred years, in the coastlands of Asia Minor, in the islands of the Aegean, and in the land which b now called Greece.

In the western pordons of this sunlit comer of the Meditar* ranean, in the islands, and on the mainland of Greece, the in- vaders found a civilization long established, and distinguished as for back as the fifteenth century b.g. by an advanced degree of accomplishment in the arts of life. With these older Minoan or Aegean peoples, the Achaeans and Dorians (for such were the names of successive tribal migrations of the Greek-speaking invaders) mingled in varying proportions, taking whatever cui- tiue the autochthonous settlers had to give, but everywhere im- ponng their own rich and flexible language, their polidcal ideas, and their worship of Zeus. But how little do we know of those distant times I No chronicle records the sequence of dbese early migradons (1300-900 B.&) and confused struggles, of this wide- spread displacianent and readjustment of people^ widie the

>5

l6 A JUSTOkV of

A^gc^ diHIbiAtion was broken up undent the pressi^c of gtwts from ^hc north* and the lonians and others were out of mainland Greece and formed settlements on the coast of Asia Minor. We do not even know whether the later sovereigns of" Mycenae were Greek. Legend and conjecture must take the place of true knowledge.

Yet one incomparable monument remains of this period of vast and adventurous agitation. In Greece everything invites to the seafaring life, the scant living to be obtained fjom the sun- baked hills and little level plains, the abundance of small, well- sheltered harbours, the constellation of islands, forming, as it were, a pathway between Greece and Asia Minor. The Greeks took to the sea. They crossed the Aegean, and made settlements on the further shore, they stole up to the mouths of the Helles- pont, challenging, when a challenge was needed, the peoples of hither Asia. One such encounter (1194-84 b.c.), between a great Achaean confederacy and the Phrygian inhabitants of Troy, sup- plied to the minstrels of the Greek world a theme upon which the poetic imagination of many subsequent generations embroidered unending tapestries. In the Iliad of Homer the blind poet of Chios, which embodies, transmutes, and enlarges the poetical material of the Achaean minstrels, the facts of history are ob- scured in a haze of legend. The actors take on heroic form, the gods participate in the struggle and the issue is portrayed as a contest between the gathered strength of Hellas and an Asiatic power. To the modern antiquary the Iliad, w'hich depicts in vivid colours the Aegean civilization of the bronze age, is full of instruction. In the ruins of Tiryns, the port of Mycenae, he discovers the regal halls of Homer; but to ancient Greece this splendid body of epical verse was much more than a repertory of curious detail; it was the Bible of a vanished and more heroic world, the book of books, containing the traditions and beliefs of a race, the testament of that great age of conflict, migration, and discovery, out of which a triumphant civilization was des- tined to emerge.

To us this great Ionian ,pocm is precious not only by reason of its artistic beauty, but also as the earliest surviving specimen of European speech.^ Our common culture derives

‘ Though the Homeric poems seem to have assumed their final form only in the sixth century, the Iliad and Odyssey were probably in exist-* ence 800 B.C. The society which they depict is much earlier-— c. taoo-xioo B.C.

Yttt AAWlf OW ABtLAS 49

fimtt'Homec; In oSrtaitt broad paiticulan hU outlook oa the w(^ hr also ounr. Though it seems firobaUe that he qpent most of 'his life on the Asiatic coast, for the Iliad shows him to he familiar with the landscape round Smytua and Ephesus, and but dimly cogniant of the west, there is no touch of orientalism in the Homeric poems. The scene of acdtai in the Iliad is not laid in the Asiatic hinterland, into whi<h Greek mercenaries had already penetrated, but in the eastern Mediterranean, and always witMn sight of the foaming seas. The joy of life, a sense of the dignity of man, the eager desire for personal pre-eminence, the cheerfulness, curiosity, and love of adventure, which are characteristics of the Greek genius and were destined to make the fortunes of Europe, are to be found in Homer. Man was essentially proud and free, on happy terms with himself, with the world, and with Olympus. The gods were his friends and partners, very human, amusing men and women, not monstrous animals as in Egypt or India. The King was no eastern despot, but the first in an equal company of princes. Speech was free. Agamemnon, the King, was balanced by Thersites the dema- gogue.

The landscape of Greece, one of the loveliest in the world, conceals beneath its manifest seductions of line and colour a harsh discipline for man. In the temperate north the seasons melt into one another by insensible gradations, summer is not too hot, winter is not too cold, and the daily flow of human activities proceeds with little interruption through the year. In such climes rivers flow level, or nearly level, with their banks, and woods of well-grown timber clothe the rounded hills or are interspersed with the tillage and spreading pastures of the plain. Greece offers a complete contrast. Here a winter of piercing cold is sharply distinguished from a practically rainless summer, the heat of which is only tempered by the north-north-east winds which blow at that season. In place of rivers in our northern sense there are torrents rushing and brawling during the winter's rains, a silent bed of dry boulders under the long sum- mer drought. Here and there, amid the tumbled mass of barren mountains, there is a small level plain of cultivated soil. But of forest timber there is little. It is a land of olives and tamarisks, of juniper trees and oleanders. The plane, the lime, apd the oak are less abundant.

A land thus stinted is a perpetual invitation to plunder and

l8 Jk Mti$T0WLT ^)^W

pire( 7 f t»>d|attl9ealioa iw4 iwar. Xfae Gittek acAtlenir ^f^****^ through tiid winter eoJd, bwc widi the fim <if)riBg flowert ing their edjwe life of ojpen air distaissioa and hard agricultonw or meehanidd toil, fek the stxees of a niggard world. Ti» gaietjr of the Gredt scene, its sharp mountain oudines cnt against a sky of azure, did nothing to soften the uphill straggle with the spectre of want. The frontier foray for sheep and goats, leading perhaps to a regular little summer campaign, was, in these early centuries, as common an incident as the raid of a pirate craft or the more lawful quest for wealth by the peaceful methods of trading. The quest of supplies by war or plunder was a necessary supplement to the tillage and pasturage of the community. It was not so much a crime as a part of state economy. Man must eat to live. If crops ran short, he must steal, 6ght, or emigrate.

Before any organized colonizing movement had begun (750 B.C to 550 B.C.) the public life of the Greeks had assumed the form which has given it a permanent value in the education of man. The early settlers had lived in scattered villages, half- nomads, half agriculturalists: but by degrees convenience and defence pointed to concentration. Oties were built, on high, defensible crags, and at a distance from the shore, so that they might not be surprised by a pirate raid; and with a city there was developed a political consciousness of such rare power and intensity that the world has never been able to forget it. The Greek city state owes much to the favouring circumstances of climate and geography. Set in a girdle of hills it lived a life apart from its neighbours, developed its own institutions, and acquired a character so well marked that, despite all the com- mon tics of language and religion, a Spartan, an Athenian, and a Theban could as little be confused as the Marseillais with the Parisian, or the Yorkshire tyke with the Somersetshire yokel.

The aloofness imposed by geography over against the neigh- bour on the other side of the hill was, set off by a closeness of association among the citizens themselves for which we can find no parallel in the northern* latitudes of Etirope. The Greek citizen lived in the public eye. All day during the fine months he was out t>f doors, talking with his neighbours, acting as a juror, sitting in the theatre, or carrying on his employment. Never was there a society so favourable to the clash of intel l ec t s.

-HI

^ # fle*i»M «w <ff ^«thleKt

fi)i#ifk.iw4 dcv^ pfidi^ jKtnrtr ml ii«dibM» ifevoM 4<^|ibilitg ki

impikm, mtu»kmk In caitidim, nvpue pfw m die pemasive ine gte^ advocate* sever a pasttotiem tsois bappily teta- pered, or in io greater momeoa more pandcmate aod attire. Jealoaay and detraction floorisbed sidd by aide wida a degree o{ pedtical ideaium wbich bas sever been aitrpasaed.

It is perhaps a cossequenoe ol this £rat^ <^>es-air existence dmt the Gredcs escaped the paralyzing control of an organized priestcraft. Al't no time were they enslaved to a book or to a church* or embarrassed by the quarrels of dvil with sacerdotal authorities. Neither the mysteries of Eleusis nor die priests of Delphi were able to crush the free curiosity or luxurious imagination of this quick<witted race. Superstition they had in abundance, some of it dark and primitive, but much of it lightly held and sublimated by the genius of poetry, for they found divinities everywhere, in sky and sea, stream and grove, as well as in the half-legendary figures of their distant past, and peopled Olympus with beings of like passions and apperites with themselves. Indeed, whatever seemed to them to be predous, august, or formidable was likely to reedve divine honours — ^the snakes of Aesculapius, w'hich were regarded by the invalid visitors to Epidaurus as sound ministers of health, no less thau the divine Apollo, mediator between earth aod heaven, or Aphrodite, that primitive goddess of love, who, long before the Gredks had touched the Aegean shores, had secured her empire over the hearts of Mediterranean men. But more particularly , was devotion due to the tutelary god or goddess of the city itself.

Religion, then, entered into patriotism, but not to any great extent into politics. The great wars of andent Greece were fought not upon religious but upon secular issues. It was not Athena who brought Athens her enemies, but the jealousy of an imperial and ambitious power felt by her rivals in trade and arms.

So in the miniature states of the Greek world there grew up an art and practice of secular politics which, despite social revolutions such as the abolition of slavery, and great changes of scale and power, has still a meaning for modem men. In that lively and mutable sodety forms of government vnm quickly made, altered, discarded. Every experiment was possible, every

iBo a' bi«to»t or xvkars

idea to discosuon. la die comprehenrive treied^.iro

Pa&dce la a^ch Aristotle sua;is up the experience gain^ rise study o| a hundred and Mty-eight Greek constitutions, the worid has a manual of political wisdom whi^ am never he thsodete. T^e roots of European political philosophy ^ to he {ound in die practice and speculation of this distant age.

Monarchy, aristocracy, plutocracy, and thereafter tyranny .leading to democracy — such, broadly speaking, were the five successive stages in the poUtical development of the Greek city states. A long catalogue, it will be urged, yet n&rked by one instructive omission. Despotism of the old Asiatic type, theo- cratic, hereifitary and absolute, was absent. The typical Greek tyrant did not, like Napoleon afterwards, or like some Sicilian tyrants in ancient times, deave his way to power by arms and violence. Ife came forward as the champion of the oppressed and as the enemy of aristocratic privilege. If he was a despot, he was also a demagogue who broke the crust of custom, pro- moted commerce and wider relations with foreign states and paved the way for democratic freedom. In the development of Athenian culture and liberty, Peisistratus the enlightened tyrant had his contribution to make as well as Solon, the wise legislator who preceded him, and Cleisthenes the founder of Athenian democracy, who rose to power when the absolutism of the Peisistratid fiimily had done its work.

It was a great step forward in the rational ordering of human afiEairs when political decisions came to be taken by a majority vote after a peaceful discussion. This discovery, the root of all civilized political life, was made by the cities of Greece, and most notably by Athens, where the institutions of liberty were earliest and most fully developed. There are;cnany points in Athenian democracy, such as the use of the lot, and the ostracism or banishment of prominent men, the popular law courts and the swift rotation of office and responsibility, which bring a smile to the lips of modem critics. How childish, they exclaim, how amateurish, how inconsistent with efficiency! Yet the more closely these things are examined, the more evident does it become that such wks the necessary price of political freedom. Democracy was a lottery only made attractive by lavish opportmiities of reward. The principle of equal oppor- tunity so logically carried out in Athenian institutions appealed to the sense of justice which is inherent in human nature itself,

pAWH 40T HiKUA«

op for the tacri&ce of primidm passion whidi is vblvcd in the acceptandb of majority rule.

ITp. the general course of polid<^ development which had now been evolved Sparta offered a notable estception. Ever since their victory over the Messehians at the end of the sevdrth century the Spartans had been the foremost people in the Pekh ponnesus. No state enjoyed so high a reputation for the stead- fastness of its temper, the simplicity of its living, or the antiquity and harmony; of its constitution as this old-fashioned, unwalled dty in the rich and secluded valley of the Eurotas. Here it would seem that a great alarm, probably connected with Helot revolts and Messenian risings, had converted a society once easy, luxurious, and artistic to the need of a grim and grinding military discipline founded on the entire abnegation of self. The Spartan citizen, living in the midst of mutinous subjects or hostile serfs, was trained from early childhood to the arts of war. Private luxury was forbidden, weakling children were ex- posed, even the girls were submitted to gymnastic exercises. The whole state was a military barrack governed on communal principles, and taking no account of private tastes and inclina- tions. A community ordered on so clear a plan evoked the en- thusiasm of contemporary philosophers. Here was primitive and heroic virtue preserved and regulated. Here was a pattern of human character exempt from the weakness bred of liberty. But war is not the true end of human life, and being organized solely for war, Sparta had no contribution to make to the arts , of peace. Nor was she apt for far-flung enterprise. The first ' military power in Greece was too keenly alive to her domestic perils eagerly to respond to the attractions of empire or to venture her famous hoplites in distant fields.

It was not, however, either in Sparta or in Athens, but rather in the brilliant necklace of Ionian cities, which had been strung along the coast of Asia Minor as a consequence of the great migration, that the true centre of Greek civilization was to be found in the seventh and sixth centuries before Christ. In art and philosophy, in trade and civilization, Miletus was a pioneer in that astounding development of the human faculties, specula- tive, artistic, and practical, which we recognize as distinctively Hellenic. At a time when the rough tribal invaders o^the north were destroying the old Mycenaean civilization in the mainland of Greece, the lonians of Asia Minor and the islands preserved

The Gkebk World,

li l fif tMnwt m iifeoi<te <!iawi<»44i4 ri»o A|

f^^SlIli^^lltuiJOi^atct mat, detivi&g* fftm the LydiAiM

A lystera o£ astnmdmy £rott Babylon and Egfft, aoade taj^tdi advancsoi in the arts o£ peaco. *

The Crock colonial movement was distingidshed by a feature wbicb marks it off from the emigration of the present age. A Gredc colony was an act of state, often prompted by the desire to rid the city of that part of its population which appeared to be redundant or likely to give trouble, and the colonists were iqped on thefr way, not as individuaf fortune seekers, but as members of a daughter ciiy and with the dtcumstanoe de> manded by a solemn and public enterprise. The t>elphic Oracle gave its sanction and encouragement to an undertaking which without tlie goodwill of Apollo or the information available to her priests might have seemed to err from rashness or impiety, and like the Vatican in later times, or the Concert of Europe, delimited the sphere of competing undertakings. Under such favouring circumstances bodies of Greek citizens were despatched to every quarter of the Mediterranean and Pontic coasts.

A string of colonies from Miletus tapped the rich com lands of southern Russia and the spoils of the fur traders and gold miners of the interior. Gyrene was the key to north Africa, Marseilles to the markets of Gaul, a cluster of thriving colonies, Corinthian Syracuse, Rhodian Gela, Mcgarian Selinus to the limitless fertility of the Sicilian vales. By the middle of the sixth century the Mediterranean and Pontic coasts from the Ebro to the Dnieper were surrounded with a girdle of Greek cities.

For many ccntuiies it was the habit of Europeans, or rather of that small section of European peoples who lived along the shores of the Mediterranean, to consider that they alone consti- tuted the cirilized world. Outside the sacred circle of Hellas they saw nothing but a penumbra of barbaric darkness. Very little was known of further Asia, either in antiquity, or until the voyages of Marco Polo the Venetian were published at the end of the thirteenth century. Even Alexander the Great did not suspect the existence of China. Vast tracts of desert separated the great orderly society of land-owning Chinese from the active mariners and traders of the Mediterranean basin. The two chief civilizations of the planet grew up in mutual

94

Ignbragiafc ' iQbate, refiectittg ilie commoa view hi Hit geo* paphen of the thhteencE century, places Jerusalem at ilie centre of the earth.

CSIAPTER m

GREECE AND PERSIA

Lydia conquered by the Ptisiane, The Carthaginian challenge. The Ionian rwolt. The Persian War. Real significance of the Greek w»c- tary. Rise of the Athenian Empire. PerieUs.

^Ntn. the sixth century was half spent the Greek world had met no peril more formidable thm its own internal dissen^ons. The dispersion of the Greek race had nowhere been seriously contested Their settlements in Sidly and Magna Graecia, in Tripoli and in Egypt, had successfully survived the perils of youth. Even in Asia Minor, with its vast hinterland of barbaric peoples, the Ionian coast towns had been permitted a period of almost unmolested prosperity. On the sea, the Phoenicians, a Semitic people, long familiar with the southern routes of Europe, were compelled to admit a rival On land the Lydia of Alyattes and his son Croesus owned the fascination of a culture more reSned than its own. So long as the Lydian kingdom survived, the hither parts of Asia Minor were probably more open to Greek influence than at any period previous to the conquests of Alexander. Greek travellers fre- quented Sardis, the Lydian capital. Greek oracles were appealed to and lavishly remunerated by the Lydian monarch. Perhaps if another half-century had been conceded to the kingdom of ' Croesus the Lydian, Asia Minor would have been largely hel- lenized. But there supervened one of those catastrophes wliich abound in the violent history of Asia. Suddenly (546 b.c.), to the surprise of the Greeks, the Lydian Croesus, long regarded as a miracle of wealth and authority, was overthrown and his capital stormed and conquered. The victor was Cyrus (Kurush) the Persian, whose vast empire, not long afterwards to be aug- mented by the conquest of Egypt, was built on the ruins bf Assyrian power. With the disappearance of the Lydian buffer state the Greek world was brought face to face for the first time with an organized and aggressive oriental monarchy. For the next two hundred years the Persian menace was a g;oveming foctor in Greek politics. It was a rivalry between east and west, between despotism and liberty, between Iranian fire-worship

as

38

A AS8TOXY or SVROrC

ber oim pos^bdon in the Pe!<^mtesu8 than with measuves to amat the invader on the threshold of Hellas. The Pam of Thermt^lae^ the gateway into eastern Greece, was held not by an army but by a detachment whose valour and unavailing eacrifice are among the immortal memories of Europe.

When the last of the brave Spartans had paid tire toll, the Persians marched into Attica without let or hindrance, for the main body Of the Peloponnesians, instead of contesting their advance, were engaged in building a wall across tl|e isthmus. It was then that the Athenians took one of the great resolutions in history. Unsheltered and unprotected on the landward side, with no assurance of Spartan help and with a very clear deter- mination that they would not share the fate of Miletus, they decided to find their salvation on the sea. The population, save a small garrison left in the acropolis, was embarked, and while the old, the women, and the children, were distributed in the neighbouring islands, the valid men of Athens w’ere with the fleet and eager to try conclusions with the enemy. A cowardly decision to retreat to the isthmus was overcome by the arts of Themistocles, the Athenian. To him it is due that the united navy of the Greek allies sailed out to challenge the Persians in the narrow straits between Salamis and the mainland.

In this battle, in which two hundred Athenian triremes were supported by smaller but still substantial contingents from Sparta and other members of the Confederacy, the Persians, fighting under the eyes of the great King himself, experienced an irreparable disaster. But though Xerxes withdrew to Asia, his army, after a winter in Thessaly, renewed the offensive in 479. The issue was joined at Plataea. Again the Greeks attacked, the Spartans this time bearing the brunt of the battle, and again the orientals were defeated. Outgeneralled and outfought, their leader Mardonius slain, and their numbers depleted, the army of Asia evacuated Greece, and the great peril, which for more than ten years had hung over the country, was finally overpast. The later stages of the war were fought on the sea or on the soil of Asia.

Marathon, Salamis, Plataea have each been accounted among the world’s derisive battles. Decisive indeed they were, but not in the accepted political sense. Had Darius won at Marathon or Xerxes at Plataea, it is difficult to believe that the free and dis- tinctive life of the Greek cities would have suffered a final eclipse.

»9

Susa vm Car ai»ay» and to govern Gioece ftom Su^a would have co^ceedted the resources of any state of the ancient world. The^^ Persians had already seen the wisdom of conferring some form of liberty on the conquered Ionian Greeks, and what was politic in Asia Minor was fax more politic in Europe. It may be assumed that the great King, if victorious, would not have been wanting in an obsequious band of Greek supporters. Darius would have restored die tyrant Hippias to the governance of Athens from which he had been ejected. Xerxes would have discovered Thessalian princes or Boeotian oligarchs amenable to his nod. A loose Persian suzerainty exercised through philo-Persian Greeks might have been compatible with the preservation of many of the essential liberties and institutions of Hellas.

But the real significance of the Greek victories in this great decade is to be found not so much in the field of politics as in the domain of spirit. A tiny people had defeated a great empire. Something spiritual had, by the help of the favouring gods, vanquished wealth, numbers, material strength. Insolence had been curbed; the pride of power had received a fall. The goddess Athena had protected her chosen people in the hour of need. The exaltation which ensued bred great designs and a body of achievement in literature and art so astonishing in its beauty, its variety, and the permanence of its human appeal, that of all the elements which have entered into the education of European man, this perhaps has done most for the liberation of thought and the refinement of taste.

The forty-seven years which succeeded the battle of Plataea are marked by the rise of the Athenian empire and by the opening phases of that great movement of the artistic imagina- tion which has secured for Athens the undying gratitude of mankind. It was in this period that Aescliylus, who fought as a hoplite at Marathon, produced the Persae and afterwards (in 458) his famous trilogy the “Oresteia.” It was now that the genius of Sophocles was first manifested on the Athenian stage. To the Athenians of that golden age everything must have seemed possible after Marathon and Salamis. The Greeks of the Aegean looked to the foremost naval power in Greece for pro- tection, and allowed themselves to be combined in the Con- federacy of Delos, which implied acceptance of Athenian leader- ship and monetary contributions to the support of the fleet. It is given to few victorious peoples to make moderate use of a

yo A at

bdlUaiit la||Pu4>^ «it 4 Atii«a< cmcmt be aoqpiitiedi of cSNwqsft of bavin|g; 'lB i^ie iliteetions ovontiAioed lier atmijtb so ^ ,'othen exetdatd it to oppressioo of her subject etttea. Aik , expec^don to Egypt ended in ineintable failure, and tlie txam*.: ference in 454 of the Confederate Treasury from Deloa to Athena

g yt rise to the well-founded suspicion that die funds the xnfederacy would be spent on the embellishment of the metro* polis. Still, with all deductions it is a brilliant page in the bbtoiy of Greece, The Persians were again beaten by land and sea at the Eurymedon (468) and in 448 brought to the* signature of peace. The acquisidon of Thasos, an island rich in minerals, strengthened the finandal basis of the Empire. To the islanders who grumbled at the tribute, to the prudent who challenged the expense, the dircctop of Athenian policy could reply that, popular or no, the Empire had at last realized its mission. It had made the coasts of the Aegean safe for the Greeks.

Moreover, the conduct of Athenian affairs had from 463 on- wards fallen into the hands of a visionary of genius. Pericles was a democrat and an imperialist, and was therefore in full sympathy with the two main currents of political thought which prevailed in Athens at that time; but he appears to have had also what is a rarer gift — a clear-cut ideal for his stare, not only in its political and economic aspect, but also in relation to human conduct and character and artistic achievement. He wanted the influence of Athens to be widespread, and so planted out Athenian settlers far and wide from the shores of the inhospit- able Euxine to the vine-clad hills of southern Italy; but it was also part of his philosophy that the mother city should occupy a position of commanding pre-eminence from the splendour and beauty of her public monuments. In a moment of inspiration he determined to restore the temples of Athens and Eleusis which had been destroyed by the Persians and to make of this act of restoration a demonstration, not merely of Athenian, but ot Hellenic magnificence. A great architect and a great sculptor were at hand to serve his ambition. The famous statue of Athena has long since been destroyed, but the sculptured frieze of Pheidias may be seen in the British I^useum, and we may still 'admire the genius of Ictinus, who contrived the exquisite pro portions of ^e Parthenon.

SDOfCS WHICA >tAV B& OOM$V{.TBi:>'

<!«B,: iThe 6re«t Persiaii War. iSg^.

R. W. Uvirigstone (arf.); The legacy of Gi«e^. igai, Cjamhfldge Ancient History, VoL IV.

HerodotuSi^ Tr. A. D. Codify. {Loeb Classical Library.) ^ vols«G. Clots and R Cohen: Histotre Grecque. 1925.

E. Cavaignac: HUtoire de t'AntlquItd* 3 vols. X9I3*X9*

CHArrcR IV

ATHENS AND SPARTA .

'•'.■Ckiuses of the 'Pohponnesian War. Athens and Sparta. First decade of war. The Syracusan expedition. The Athenian defeat. Permanent effects. Lustre and fame of Athenian literature. •

Hardly had Athens established herself under the enlightened rule of Pericles as the capital of Hellenic civilization than she was drawn into a war which, though marked by initial success, ultimately led to great disasters and to the extinction of Athenian political influence in the Mediterranean world.

The Athenian empire, the brilliant growth of two generations, shared the fate of every polity which rises by the repression of local liberties. From within it was exposed to the discontents of unwilling subjects, from without to the enmity of jealous rivals. To the more conservative states of Greece there was something alarming in the spectacle of so much power placed at the disposal of a single city. Athens ruled the waves. Her ships convoyed the harvests of the Crimea and Cyprus, of Egypt and Cyrene; they could close and open the Dardanelles, they pressed forward into the waters of the western Mediterranean. The need of finding food for a constantly increasing foreign population enjoined a policy of expansion, and apprehensions such as Japan now in- spires in Australia and New Zealand were entertained by the citizens of Sparta and Corinth when confronted by the marine empire of Periclean Athens, so recent in its origin, so swift in its development, so formidable in its possibilities of pressure or offence.

When a war atmosphere is once created the particular circum- stances out of which war arises are relatively indifferent. A quarrel broke out between Dorian Corinth and her powerful colony Cor- cyra. Both parties appealed to Athens for assistance, and Athens found it in her interest to supjrart Corcyra against a strong com- mercial rival for the markets of the west. A naval battle was fought at Sybota, off the coast of western Greece, in which Athenian ships were engaged on one side and Megarian ships on the other. Then tlte quarrel widened ominously. Megara

3 *

A24& Bl^AATA

aad Gorintli i^re members of the Lacedjsiemonian Coii£edemc])S| i of which Spirta was the honoured chief. Both were grievousl;^) affronted by Pericles. Megara was interdicted from the ports of* the Athenian empire. Corinth was wounded through an attaedfe^ on Potidaea^ a tributary ally of Athens, but also a Corinthian colony which had refused, on the demand of Pericles, to dismiss its Corinthian magistrates or to raze its walls. The obstinacy with which Pericles persisted in these severe courses provided so remarkable a ^contrast to a record of peacefulness spread over fifteen years that strange theories were invented to account for it, as that the w^oman Aspasia was at the bottom of the Megarian decree, or that the great statesman plunged into war to divert the force of a private attack. It is more probable that his patience gave way, and that, deeming war to be inevitable, he chose his own occasion for precipitating the crisis.

It would be hardly possible to imagine a sharper contrast than that which distinguished the two leading states of IlcIIas who were now about to enter upon a twenty-seven years’ war. A deliberate prudence was the mark of the Spartan, a vivacious and enterprising audacity of the Athenian character. The Spartan loved his home, the Athenian sought adventure far and wide in foreign lands. All the oligarchical parties in the Greek cities looked to conservative Sparta as their natural leader and the principal prop and support of the aristocratic cause. To the democrats, on the other hand, whether on the mainland of Greece or in the islands or in the distant cities of Thrace, Sicily, or Asia Minor, Athens stood out, not indeed as the champion of liberty, but as the exponent of equality at home; so that the war between Athens and Sparta, involving as it did not merely a conflict of interests and customs, but an opposition of political principle, in addition to its own evils, raised the temperature of local factions through- out Greece, and led to revolutions, some of which were shamed by great atrocities.

It might have been expected that a war between peoples so opposed to one another in every particular of character and tem- perament would in that age of costly battles have* been sharp and short. But Sparta was a continental, Athens a maritime power. The Athenians had no army capable of mastering the Spartans on land, and Sparta, during the earlier;^ears of thctfWar, possessed no navy strong enough to try conclusions with the Athenians at sea. In effect Athens was an island. Her

34 i '/n or

foodstu)&!,‘h^‘lA6pbiul^ suttriala ciinfe to tm OTedtea#. A levmue'lxonng Empire supported her ^vomk Ibcutic fleet aiid k^t in repair her invulnetabie fottificattona. A Ulmwer so equipped was in a strong position. The oiemy might

!|ftvage the harvests of Attica, but he could neither starve Athens

to submission nor compel her against her wish to acc^t battle ,OB land. At the end of ten years of costly struggle no decisive advantage had been gained. The Athenians had fought a number of successful actions both by sea and land, mainly on the north-western coast of Greece; had established three bases on the Peloponnese, and captured a Spartan force on the island of Sphacteria. These were for Athens important advantages, but they were oifset by severe trials, an annual invasion of Attica by a Spartan army, resulting, through the overcrowding of the city, in tlie great plague of 430, and, six years later, a severe defeat in the plains of Boeotia (battle of Delium) coupled with the loss of Amphipolis, an important and wealthy colony in Chalcidice. Sensible men like Nicias, a wealthy conservative slave-owner, had long seen the folly of a war out of which no material advantage could be gained; but since the death of Pericles in 429 B,a the control of Athenian policy had fallen into the hands of a new type of politician, rougher, more violent, nearer to the common crowd than the wise aristocrat and philosopher who has given his name to an age of literary and artistic triumphs. To Cleon the leather merchant, and Hyperbolus the lampmaker, a popular war fought to a finish was the wine of life. So the war went on, waged some- what reluctantly by Sparta, but as a matter of life and death by Corinth and Athens, until in, an interval of good sense, and ill B.C. through the influence of Nicias, a peace was ultimately signed. But it was one thing to sign a peace and another to secure its observance. Before the ink was dry on the Treaty of Nicias it became clear that some of Sparta’s most important allies, notably Corinth, Megara, and Boeotia, refused to be bound, and that Sparta either could not, or would not, hold them to the bond. Still, had the peace mind really prevailed in Athens it would have been an easy task to avoid giving fresh provocation to the principal enemy. But a new and dazzling star had risen above the political horizon in Athens. Aldbiades was young and beau- tiful, brilliant and persuasive. He had learned from his master Socrates to challen^ accepted conventions, and a gay audacity of thought and speech, blending with the natural grace of his

fcsitiiekt mas^ieeA im» in foK

il|KOinMj||i^^ 3 bi 430 Aldl^dca unM (^es^to be a fenenJt. alyilp It i» pTDKdbly due to his restless spixit that Athois sought afiies in the Pelx^nnese and sent an army into ihe Aigolis ter attack Epidaurus, afterwards a famous health resort, but in this connection solely important as the friend of Sparta. The enter*, pme resulted in failure. The Athenian and Argive armies wote^ ^ routed at Mantinea, and Athens was compelled to look outside ‘ the Peloponnese for her next military adventure.

Prominent among the Greek cities in Sicily, and consequently (he cause of fear and jealousy among its neighbours, was the Corinthian colony of Syracuse. To wound Corinth by the con* quest and occupation of the greatest of her daughter cities was a djought which naturally occurred to the war party in Atheni. What indeed might not follow from the acquisition of so great a prize? The mastery of Syracuse might lead to the control of Sicily, and this in turn to the capture of Carthage and a naval supremacy in the western Mediterranean. In 4.37, moved by the eloquence of Gorgias of Leontini, the Athenians had sent an ex- pedition to Syracuse; but the work was done with half a heart, and nothing came of it. Very different was the response given nine years later to the appeal of another Sicilian city. The glowing imagination of Alcibiades was now at play, and on the call of Segesta the greatest armada yet seen in Greek waters set sail from the Piraeus for the west.

There was nothing desperate in this design. An army of thirty thousand Athenians backed by a large fleet was quite capable of taking Syracuse by a prompt and resolute attack; but the Athenians made the fipital mistake of entrusting the chief com* mand to Nicias, who was as inept in his prosecution of the cam- paign as he was averse from its inception. To his long catalogue of errors, more than to any other cause, the catastrophe which ensued must be ascribed.

There was another blunder which proved to be equally serious. On the eve of the expedition the public mind of Athens had been deeply stirred by the mutilation of certain ancient statues known as the Hermae. To whom, it was asked, was this foul impiety to be ascribed? Aldbiades sailed with the expedition. He had many enemies, he was known to be a freethinker, ^nd during his absoice the cloud of detraction thickened till it was resolved to recall him for trial.

^6 > A HisaroRir ,oF

Alcibiades^ B^tirevcr^ isto teot the man to allow hii]^£ to be

led like a sheepito the slaujgjhter. He lc£i Sicily, nor, Wwejer, fist

Athens but for Spam, and during the next eight yeaiis devoted his great abilities to procuring the humiliation of his native city* It was on his advice that Sparta seized and fortified Deceit, a strong post on the soil of Attica, which enabled her to* deprive Athens of the resources derived from the mines and farms of her territory. It was Alcibiades, again, who told the Spamns that if they wished to save Syracuse they must send a general to conduct the defence. His advice was taken, anef the skill of Gylippus, assisted by the incompetence of Nicias, brought down upon Athens and upon the whole Athenian connection the greatest disaster which they sustained during the w^an

The repercussion of this event was felt throughout the civilized world. Rebellion beginning in Chios spread among the island allies of Athens, but what was even more serious, Persia re- entered the war on the side of Sparta. The scales were now weighted more heavily than ever against the Athenians. While their silver mines were closed, a new source of supply was open to their adversaries. The Spartans had no hesitation in sacri- ficing the Ionian cities to their new allies, and, having discovered in the person of Lysander an admiral distinguished alike for military and political talent, were in a position to drive home their advantage. Meanwhile political and constitutional changes succeeded one another in Athens as the sky lowered or bright- ened. An oligarchy was tried and discarded, and it was under the rule of the demagogues, who declined tw^o fair offers of peace, that Athens experienced that final overthrow of the fleet at

• ^05 B«a Aegospotami which concluded the war. Deprived of her navy

and her foreign possessions, and with her fortifications razed to the ground, the city of Pericles tasted the bitterness of frustrated hopes. The victors imposed a government to their liking, and an oligarchy was established in place of that desperate democratic faction which had played so high for victory and lost the stakes.

The losses of Athens during this long and melancholy struggle were far in excess, having regard to the population of Attica at that time, of those experienced even by the most highly tried country in the great war of 1914-1918. The plague alone is esti- mated to have carried off seventeen thousand soldiers. Forty thousand men were lost in Sicily; and besides these outstanding catastrophes, every year brought its sad tale of casualties, ships

AtaVWS AKD S»‘AKTA

lost by toos uid fives and moiCi and men that died by the dioiuand and ten thousand.” Even if we make allowances for the

III

fact that a considerable proportion of the rowers of the Athenian fleet may have been hired slaves and that there were subject ally contingents and mercenaries in the Athenian army, the casual- ties were formidable. The old aristocratic families which had played so great a part in the Persian war were extinguished in this baser controversy, and aliens in increasing numbers were inscribed upon the civic rolls, so that, in the words of Isocrates, there was in Athens a new people.” When we reflect upon the brilliant contributions to art, letters, and philosophy which wc owe to the Athenians of the fifth century b.c., the destruction through war of a large part of this gifted population must be accounted one of the grave and irretrievable calamities of history.

The needless tragedy of the Peloponnesian war has received more than its fair share of attention from the fact that it forms the theme of one of the world’s great historical masterpieces. The genius of Thucydides has conferred immortality upon many a trifling detail attending the declension of Athenian po^er. The long series of disastrous errors by which the Athenians threw away their great initial advantage is recounted in terms of grave and moving eloquence by this Athenian, writing in exile, but raised above the exile’s narrowness by a native austerity and greatness of soul. The story of the revolution in Corcyra, of the plague at Athens in the second year of the war, of the capture of Sphactcria, and of the Syracusan expedition, and the speeches with whicli the moral issues underlying the conflict are brought before the reader’s mind, give to the pages of Thucydides the colour of a tragic drama. Yet in reality it is not the ruin of Athens in the Peloponnesian War which has been important for mankind, but its survival; not its political failures, but its in- tellectual and artistic triumphs. While the deathly struggle with Sparta was proceeding, Socrates, the stonecutter, was challeng- ing the accepted conventions of mankind, and laying the basis of moral and metaphysical science. It was during this same period of agonizing strain that Athenian audiences were crowd- ing to the open-air theatre of Dionysus to delight in the ex- quisite poetry of Euripides, the rationalist, or the brilliant wit of Aristophanes, the critic of rationalism, demagogy, and Jingoism. It was* in the first year of the struggle that Euripides produced the Medea, in the second that Herodotus completed his History,

o-r somovx

an^'lwMlili'ii^ien than^iEoiirt«en out of the twenty^eeveb

jdie war atie nmilarly memorable in the annals <^.d>e sta^ tt has' been noted that the mo blackest moments were marked Vlhch by the production of plays which still preserve thar fre^ 'ibc9M and brifiiance for the world. In 413, when: .t^^^S|^aj!taaS Ifortified Decdea and the Athenians were ^sastrou^ ’bwtSttt.iB a. great naval action in the harbour of SyracilM, Etp^des ‘duced the Iphigenia in Tauris and: the Electra. The fatal year |P Aegospotami (405) was similarly distinguished. the year^ the Bacchae, the beautiful swan song of Euripit^, and of the Frogs, perhaps the most delightful of ancient comedies;

The services of Athens to the education of Hellas were recog- nized and requited. When her fleet had been destroyed at Aegos- potami at the end of a long and bitter war, Sparta might have

f plied to Athens the same terrible penalty which, in a ^pasm passionate wrath, Athens had meted out to the little idand of Melos. She might have razed the city t» the ground, she might have slaughtered or enslaved its inhabitants. In the fierce hatred inspired by Athenian tyranny these cruelties would have been popular and were, in fact, recommended; but Athens was saved by the respect which even Sparta was compelled to feel for the brightest ornament of Hellenic civilization. The city was spared in consideration of her virtues, and not on one occa- sion only. Seventy years later, when Alexander of Macedon had destroyed Thebes, saving only the house of Pindar, and Athens, which had designed to send help to the Thebans, was exposed to his attack, the same sentiment of homage to the shrine of so much genius mterposed its mediation —

and the repeated air Of sad Electra’s poet had the power To save the Athenian wails from ruin bare.

BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED

Thucydides. Tr. Crawley. (Everyman’s Library.) 1910.

E. 'Abbott: Pericles and the Gk>ldM Age of Athens, j^i.

Grote: A History of Greece.

J. B. Bury: A Ifjstory of Greece. 192a.

A. E. Zimmem: The Greek Commonwealth. 1911.

Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. V.

B. W. Henderson; The Great War between Athens and Sparta. 1927.

CRAPTEIt V

GREECaS AND MACEDON

Greeet. Uactdon, Philip II, Alexander. The keHentstip.

age. ' R^giot^, Pkihsophy. The Epigoni. ' Political legacies of. tkc

eMcedoman age. Empire worship. Bureaucracy. The divisions of, Greece dre the opportunity of Rome. Character of the Greeks. Iletlenie influences on Christianity.

The fourth century, which opens with the condemnation and death of Socrates (399 bx.), is chi^y memorable as the great age of Greek prose writing, and for the rise and spread of the Ma^ donian empire. The accusation preferred against Socrates, that le did not believe in the gods recognized by the city, that he inrib* duced strange supernatural beings, and that he corrupted the youth, marks the honest fears inspired in vulgar minds by the application of free, logical questioning to the loyalties, conven* tions, and traditions of a people. For, indeed, Greece was mov- ing swiftly into a new intellectual climate, in which the indi- vidual counted for more, and the city for less, and old inhibi- tions of custom and religion were fast breaking down. Socrates, who taught that life was an art and knowledge the key to it, was behind these changes, and was condemned to drink die cup of death; but it is idle to suppose that the influence of a great .liberating mind can be stayed by persecution. The glory of Socrates was enhanced by the tragedy of his end. He was revered as a saint of rationalism and virtue; and the beautiful fabric of rite Platonic philosophy is the homage of a pupil to a master, and an imperishable monument to his fame.

Hellenic politics during the sixty-six years which divided the Spartan conquest of Athens from the Macedonian conquest of Greece were marked by a continuation, with some a^ravations, of the old evils of the Peloponnesian War. Factions were as furiotis, fighting was as fierce, but mercenary troops toided to replace citizen levies. So far from profiting from the lessoiu of the past, Sparta repeated all the faults which had been charged against Athens during her period of dominarion, with none of redeeming grac». Hie old ideal of Panhdlenic unity in

39

iO, 4 of EI7K0?ft

Pi^c^i^pii to^Persia scans to have survived chiefly in the o w tions of the v&st Isocrates. All parties were willing to help them* selves from the Persian till and to move at the Persian behest Xenophon, a pupil of Socrates and an accomplished gentleman» dieought it no shame to serve with a band of Spartan mercen- aries under the Persian Cyrus and afterwards even to fight with a Spartan army against Athens, the nursing mother of his inini When Sparta was opposed to Persia, Athens was Persia’s frien^' and an Athenian admiral, commanding a Per^an fleet, and aided by Persian funds, defeated the Spartans at sea and rebuilt the fortifications of his city. When, on the other hand, Sparta made friends with Persia, and even went so far as solemnly to betray to her the interests of the Ionian Greeks (Peace of Antal- cidas, 387), the attitude of Athens was correspondingly reversed. The spirit of the soldier of fortune, snatching at luck, wherever it might be found, dominated the scene.

Isocrates is probably right when he claims that the curse of Hellenic politics at this time was the desire for empire. Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Phocis, all in turn, strove for supremacy, and as each state mounted on the crest of fortune, it was pulled back into the trough by its jealous rivals. Even Epaminondas of 42o?-36$ Thebes, the ablest and the most disinterested soldier of his age, could not see beyond Bocotia, and was incapable of great political combinations.

The solution of the Greek question came from an unsuspected quarter. To the north of Thessaly, in the coastlands round the Thcrmaic gulf, there was established a Greek people, rougher and less civilized than the inhabitants of Athens or Corinth, and regarded by the southern Greeks much as a Parisian views a provincial from Brittany or Languedoc. These were the Mace- donians, deep drinkers, lusty fighters, passionate in pursuit of the bear and the wolf through the forests and glens of tlieir mountain home, and still living in the Homeric stage of civiliza- tion, of whom not much that is important can be related until Philip of the royal house, returning at the age of twenty-four from Thebes, where he had learned the art of war from Epami- nondas, made himself master of his native country. In the whole range of European history few statesmen have been more effective than this strenuous clear-sighted man (359-336). Mace- donia at the time of his accession was poor, but became, through the exploitation of the gold-mines of Mt. Pangacus, the richer

ANJi , . '■;■/#?' '

Atate in Eurc^ Out o6 this coumiy^tyhidh was scait%lymni^<dMli^ a geographical expression (for die wild Ulyrian hillmen^ though nominally vassals of the crown, were as lit;tle. congenial tO; the lowland Greeks as were the highland rievers of the seveht^th v century to the farmers in the vales of Perth or Stirling), Philip made a nation and an army — a nation wholesomely com- pounded, and an army at once national in spirit and professional in aim, and moreover, in its combination of the cavalry with the infantry armband of light with heavy troops, superior to any force which the states of Hellas could , put into the field. The Macedonian phalanx changed the history of the world. It was the creation of Philip. Loyal to their punctual paymaster, the spearmen of Macedonia marched into action in open array and held the enemy while the cavalry charged in upon the wings in wedgelike squadrons and decided the issue.

What would be the attitude of the Greek states towards this new half-barbarian power in the north? Philip was anxious to be friendly. Despite his rough animal nature he reckoned him- self to be a Greek, set a value on culture and knowledge (engag- ing Aristotle of Stagira, the son of a Macedonian court doctor, as tutor to his son), and desired to be accepted as suzerain of a Greek confederacy. A true realist comparing his resources with those of the Greek cities would have advised them to seek his goodwill. Even contemporaries asked whether a captain had not now arisen who could lead the Greeks against Persia, and provide for their hungry and redundant numbers new fields for colonial settlement in Asia Minor. Athens certainly had much to gain from a firm understanding with the master of Mace- donia and Thessaly and the conqueror of Tlirace: but at this juncture of her history Athenian policy was swayed by an orator who saw in the growing power of the Macedonians a menace to the traditional liberties of Hellas, which must be resisted to the death. The speeches of Demosthenes rank among the classics of political liberty, and cannot even now be read without emotion: but they led only to the bloodstained field of Chaeronca. Here Philip, defeating the joint army of Thebes 33 ^ and Athens, made himself by that one blow master of Greece.

Two years later the conqueror fell by the hand of an assassin.

At a synod of Greek cities at Corinth he had apnoimced his intention of making war upon Persia on behalf of Greece and the gods, of liberating the Greek ddes in Asia Minor, and

42 A yiliTOAT QW MVMXUMB

of puabhitig iSht barbarians for acts o£ sacrilege committai’lil* 316 n.c. the reign of Xerxes; and it was on the eve of his departure oh this vast enterprise that the founder of Macedcaiia met his endf Alexander, his son by the violent Olympias, succeeded to his throne and vast ambitions. In a short reign of thirteen years this wonderful young man reasserted the Macedonian authority in Hellas and Thrace, levelled Thebes to the ground, conquere^^ with his small, mobile, and most effective army, Asia MuiOr* Syria, Egypt, and Persia, and marched his Macedonian varans over the Khyber Pass into the plains oMndia. No military career, not even that of his imitator Napoleon, has exercised a wider influence on history, opening out as it did the whole of • hither Asia to Hellenic speech and culture, and bringing to the west a flood of new facts relating to oriental lands and peoples, which is only equalled by those later additions to knowledge which Europe owes to the Crusades. Moreover, it must be re- collected that Alexander embarked upon his enterprise as the elected generalissimo of Greece. Steeped in Greek legends and literature, believing himself to be sprung from Achilles, the fair young Macedonian descended upon Asia as the successor of the heroes who fought against Troy; but if he came as the mis- sionary of Hellas, crovming the statue of Achilles at Troy and founding a temple of Zeus at Sardis, he was a missionary un«touched by fanaticism. Despite the advice of Aristotle he re- fused to regard the orientals as an inferior race, nor did he proscribe their religious beliefs. A wise toleration, social, re- ligious, poliiical, informed the government of his conquered provinces. The great landowning nobles of Persia won from him the sympathy and respect which the spectacle of a gentle- man and a sportsman never fails to evoke in the hearty nature of the open-air man. While he lost nothing of his conviction of Hellenic excellence, founding, as it is said, seventy Greek cities, and carrying the Iliad as the constant companion of his travels, he wedded his Macedonian paladins to the heiresses of Asia, himself married a Persian princess, and assumed the state of an oriental monarch. Iq idea his empire was coterminous with the world and founded' on the doctrine of the equality of man, a universal society designed to conform to a common stan- dard and subjected to a sovereign who, as the supreme bene- factor of mankind, was rightly accorded divine honours, in fine a Holy Greek Empire foreshadowing the Holy Roman Empire

Thb Euni» OF Albundbr na Gsm.

<lS4-23

B.C.

44 I ^ UlBTOkt OF EUaOFC

of later time^ In fact, he created the conditions under whiA Greek civiliz^ion could flourish in Asiatic or north African soil# and gave to Europe a vast new province, comprising Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, which remained subject to Macedonian dyn* asties until it was absorbed by the Roman empire.

The story of the conquests of Alexander, while it falls outside the scope of a history of Europe, contains two connected inci- dents which have a close relation to the fate of the M|dicei> rancan peoples, the destruction of Tyre and the foundsMStt of Alexandria, the one marking the eclipse of Phoenician power, the other the establishment of a new centre of Hellenic culture and commerce on the coast of Egypt, which was destined to vie with Athens herself.

It was not easy for the cities of Hellas to realize the change which was coming over the world. Could it be that these tiny states, which had been so passionately loved, so affectionately adorned, for which men had been willing to sacrifice life and even honour, were finally to lose their independence and their dream of empire? Men w^rc reluctant to believe it. The wdse Aristotle, who was teaching in Athens, under the slopes of Mt. Lycabettus, while his pupil was overrunning Asia, writes of the science of politics as if it were contained in the experience of cities small enough to hear the voice of one herald,” and based on the distinction of slave and free. Even the greatest thinker of antiquity, with a sphere of interests ranging from the anatomy of a fish to the ultimate verities of the human soul, failed to discern in the Macedonian empire the birth of a new era, and the coming of cosmopolitan thought.

The age into which we now pass is still Hellenic, but Flellenic with a difference. It was a great age of sculpture, of mathe- matics, of widespread education. The Attic tongue, prevailing over rival dialects, is the language of international commerce and polite society, spoken from Marseilles to Antioch, from Pella to the Cataracts, penetrating even the Jewish synagogues, and found to be so indispensable by that conservative people that by degrees the Old Testament is rendered into Greek. But the great masters of poetry and philosophy have passed away, having bequeathed to posterity almost every genre of the literary art and an introduction to almost every branch of philo- sophical and scientific enquiry. Their place is taken by writers of popular fiction and by learned poets and specialists congre-

' -i ' ' ' ” ’ ' " ■ ' .

gating , wliere great libraries are to be found and a govermiwmt capable of protecting the studious . from piracy, and the dis* turbance of war. Under the rule of the Ptolemies and Attalids such libmries were founded at Alexandria and Pergamum, the rival capitals of paper and parchment.

Another feature of this age which is called Hellenistic is that, without being fanatical, men and women are feeling everywhere for reU^on. It is the property of polytheism to be tolerant, and whildphe Greeks had preferences in the matter of gods and goddesses, they practised no exclusions. As the old Olympian divinities lost their appeal, new worships and beliefs surged in from the religious east: astrology, magic, the mystery religions with their rites of initiation and purification, the imposing and popular cult, proximately derived from Egypt, of Scrapis and Isis. More particularly significant was the worship of Isis, for two centuries the Holy Mother of the Mediterranean world. Isis “ all-seeing and all-powerful, the star of the sea, the diadem of life, the law giver and saviour,*^ was the woman’s goddess. She was figured as a young matron, crowned with the blue lotus or the crescent moon, bearing the infant Horus in her arms. Not seldom were the statues of Isis made afterwards to serve as images of the Madonna.

For the higher minds there were the religious philosophies of Zeno and Epicurus. In 311 Zeno, a Phoenician from Cyprus, came to Athens and took up the teaching of philosophy in the painted portico or Stoa. He preached the doctrine of a World State ruled by a Supreme Power, all-wise and all-good, of equality and human brotherhood, of conscience and duty, of harmony with the divine purpose only to be obtained through wisdom and virtue, and of an inner peace proof against the outward agitations of fate to be found in a retreat within the fortress of the soul. Little remains of the original writings of this noble thinker, but the hymn of Cleanthes (rendered into English prose by Walter Pater in Plato and the Platonists), the Meditations of Marous Aurelius and the singularly beautiful body of moral teaching which survives in the works of Epictetus, attest the wide and prolonged influence of Stoicism over the best minds and characters of the Pagan world in its decline. Epicurus was the philosopher of happiness, as Zeno of duty. " ^

In the field of politics the Hellenistic period is distinguished by a difference of scale from the centuries which preceded it.

46 A HiaTOft,iir»»

l^Hfc vast cities, greats ship and en|^es o£ ikuV

httfio^g prifate fortunes, are the marks o£ the new age. Thd Creak world waxes prosperous on the pillage of the east and the opening of new markets, despite the fact that the sea is infested by pirates, and that few years pass without fighdng in some part or other of the Macedonian empire. War, infanticide, and pi> haps even malaria take their toll. The true Greek population steadily dwindles, and the cities of Hellas in the first century must have been largely filled by Greek-speaking aliens. ||

Alexander left no will, and the prize of the Macedonian empire fell to be disputed by his marshals. The tie of race counted for nothing widi these able and ambitious adventurers: and the disappearance of the great captain is followed by a long series of wars between Egypt and Syria, and Egypt and Mace, donia, until a new power enters the eastern scene, and the vast estate which the Macedonians had squandered in their quarrels was taken over and administered by Rome. Yet, despite the grave drawback of their civil dissensions, the Macedonian dyn- asts conferred upon European civilization two great services, for the absence of which the world today would be immeasurably the poorer. For a century and a half they defended the fabric of Greek civilization from the Illyrians and Thracians, from the Parthians in the east, and from the pressure of the hungry and savage denizens of the fens and forests of central Europe. Their armour was sometimes pierced: their defence was not always loyal. They had to retreat from India. The Gauls or Galati penetrated to Delphi, crossed into Asia Minor, and at one time threatened to plunge that nourishing region into cltaos. Yet in the end the power of these formidable barbarians was checked and confined within territorial limits by piinces of the Mace- donian house. The Gauls were beaten in Europe by Antigonus jtH 143 Gonaras, " the second founder of Macedonia,” and in Asia by Attains of Pergamum. It is easy to see that the Galatians, to whom St. Paul writes his Epistle, had long been fitted into the fabric of hellcnistic society.

Within the irregular frontier which they thus guarded the descendants of Alexander upheld, and often promoted vigor- ously, the interests of Greek civilization. The Ptolemies, who established themselves in Egypt if they failed to helicnize the country or even seriously to mitigate the violent superstitions of its native inhabitants, developed in the royal quarter of Alex-

AM0* iMAc*«*9>r

’ iniSi^'^A dtecre M teaming and taste Ubidbt tiw oce rd wtid a ^dcal inSnenoe tm the progress of Europe.

Here it waa that the masterpieces of Greek ihoti^t and poetry were collected and stored in a great library, copied by slaves, and aimotated by scholars; here that the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew into Greek, the text of Homer fixed, and the lovoetory and the pastoral added to the categories of western literuxtre. Here, finally, was bom a mystical philosophy founded on Se writings of Plato, which has exercised a profound in** fluence on the theology of the Christian Church.

Nor was the vast Asiatic empire which Seleucus and his descendants ruled from the great pleasure dty of Antioch to be regarded otherwise than as part of a world in which culture and Greek were synonymous terms. If there was no centre in this so^alled Syrian kingdom so predominant in science and letters as Alexandria, there was no part of Egypt so thoroughly hellcn- ized as Syria. The delicate lyrics of Meleager and the simple eloquence of the synoptic gospels attest the vitality of the Creek language in a land whero the speech of the common folk was Aramaic.

The Macedonian sovereigns gave to the world a new principle of authority, which was one of the most important of the means of binding the Roman Empire together in the first two centuries of its existence. Alexander and his descendants claimed and received the worship due to divinity. Since they could find no place in the constitution of the Greek city state, they entered with general acclamation the Greek Pantheon. Where better than in worship could a force be found to bind together a hetero* geneous kingdom and to give sanctity and legitimacy to a usurp- ing rule? The idea of a universal state appealed to die philo- sophers, the worship of the monarch excited and satisfied the mob.

Another element important to the future goventanoe of Europe may be traced back to Macedonian times. Statistics and bureaucracy were familiar in Egypt. In diis archaic civilization exact knowledge, more particularly with regard to revenue, had long been regarded as a perquisite of government. Here was a regular and minute administration depending on an army of scribes and a mountain of documents. The lessons to be derived from such a spectacle were not lost upon the conquerors of l^ypt. If the Romans took their literature from Greece, they

48 A ttCSTOI^Y OF SOROPE

borrowed tlwe cavil service of their Empire from the valley of dys Nik.

It might perhaps have been expected that the Antigonids of Macedonia^ whose state proved to be so useful a protection against the barbarians of the north, would have been able to count upon the support and sympathy of the Greek cities. This was not to be* There was no political sentiment deeper in the Greek mind than aversion from monarchy, and Macedon was a monarchical state. Yet though the underlying sentiment of Greece, too often stimulated by Egyptian gold, was anti-Mace- donian, the Greeks were at no time prepared with a united mind to resist their suzerain. Athens, among whose democratic leaders the spirit of Demosthenes burned brightly, gave up the struggle just when Achaia and Aetolia were prepared to take it up. The civic attachments, jealousies, and passions, which were at once the spiritual force and political weakness of Hellas, continued to the end. The honourable expedient of federation was tried by the Achaeans, and, in a less hopeful form, by the bandit villages of Aetolia. But federation in any full sense involved sacrifices which no member of a Greek League was prepared to make. The Achaean League, which fought Antigonus and his suc- cessor Demetrius II (251-229), was itself the object of a destructive attack by Cleomenes III of Sparta, and neither the brilliance of its leaders nor tlie value of the political principle upon which it was founded won for it the allegiance of a united country or brought to its counsels the wider vision. So Greece, fretting for home rule, but not sufficiently united within itself effectually to throw off the light yoke of Macedonia, waited for a deliverer, and hailed with expectation and delight the growing influence of Rome.

The pco2)lcs who described themselves as Hellenes were quick- witted, hardy, and frugal, and, as Herodotus observed, marked off from the barbarians around them as more intelligent and more emancipated from silly nonsense; but they lived in an in- secure world. The barriers against want, plague, war, and revo- lution were frail and easily oveithrown. At any moment plenty might give way to starvation, peace to war. Merely to keep alive required wit and energy. In such a society some virtues which we find easy were very difficult. The Greeks, though an extra- ordinary people, were not perfect. Tliey exposed their new-born infants. Some of them tortured slaves. Many practised, without

C||1CKC«AKI> MACEPOM

49

adverse comment, vices wtach excite our abhorrence* Their ligion, which was unfettered by a sacred book, was compatible with the belief In magic and with a luxuriant growth of primitive and violent superstitions. A strange callousness to suffering seems to have been accepted as a necessary, if lamentable, part of the human lot. Great as was their wealth in political ideas, they lacked the power of combination, so that the history of their citi^ is a long tale of Action, which was apt to degenerate into that " competition in perfecting the fine art of conspiracies and atrocities” of which Thucydides writes in his account of the sedition in Corey ra. They loved freedom, but from time to time, as in the famous case of Socrates, took fright for the safety of their cherished conventions and persecuted an honest thinker to the death.

Yet almost everything which is to be valued in modem civil- ization is owing to the ancient culture of that part of the Medi- terranean world which spoke and thought in Greek — our science and philosophy, our epic and drama and lyrical poetry, our standards in sculpture and architecture, our medicine and mathe- matics, our theory of humane education, the form of our Chris- tian theology, and that ideal of the rule of law which distin- guislies western from Chinese civilization. The Greeks loved beauty and pursued reason. They lived close to nature. Their taste in art was austere and simple. They thought greatly about great things. The profound question of the ultimate constitution of matter, which vexes the minds of modern physicists, was raised as early as the sixth century b.c. by Thales of Miletus (c. 585), who regarded the four elements as states of one substance. Our theory of numbers is to be traced to Pythagoras, our moral science to Socrates, our biology to Aristotle. The spirit of free enquiry, which we sometimes describe as rationalism because it leads men to search by the light of reason for natural causes rather than to acquiesce in popular superstitions, was distinctively Greek. The curiosity of the Greeks was lively and universal. No problem suggested by tlie contemplation of the mysterious universe was too remote, too sacred, or too abstruse, to abash their refreshing audacity. Centuries before Copernicus discovered the heliocen- tric theory a Greek thinker had inferred that the earth was a globular body revolving round the sun, and had reached conclu- sions, differing Kttle from the reality, as to its exact girth.

It has sometimes been contended that while the science and

ID A or

«#the modem world detitre from^^

^ ^^brope is in its origin essentkdly Jewish* This stitnl- thf ooiltnot^too strongly. Greece has exercised a profound im fluence on religion no less than on sdence and literature. Wo know little of the life of Jesus. His disciples were not chiefly 4tu."? ocmcemed to record it. When at last, more than a generation after the Crudfixion, Mark took up his pen to write, it was not that he mig^t trace the life course of the Master and Pn^het, who had filled his soul with a new enchantment, but that he might reveal Him from the story of the Passion and the Resur* rection, and from the redtal of His many proofe of miraculous power, as a divine and predestined figure, as the Messiah foretold in Jewish Scriptures, who was come to judge the world and tp call sinners to repentance. We cannot, therefore, follow the de* velopment of Christ’s teaching in chronolo^cal order, or recon- struct His life for any given year, month, week, or day. Save for the detailed story of the Passion, we are much at a loss for chronological guidance.

Precious fragments of ethical teaching are contained in the Gospels, and in scattered sayings, some of which have only recently been recovered from a buried library in Egypt; but the sptead of Christianity in the Apostolic age was not so much due to the conviction that only the Christian life was perfect as to the belief that in Christ the divme power was manifested. The disciples did not ask their hearers to imitate Christ, but to accept His Messianic authority. Tliey represented Him as healing the sick, casting out devils, working miracles, and preaching repent- ance, believing in common with many of their generation that the end of the world was at hand and that Jesus was the anointed one, the Man from Heaven, who was sent to recall mankind to righteousness before the Last and terrible Day.

The early disciples did not, then, dream of a permanent uni- versal Church. For them the end of the world was near at hand, the number of the elect necessarily small. They were content to preach the message of their Master in the little Jewish syna- gogues of Palestine.

Paul of Tarsus, who brought Christianity to the Gentiles, was d A.D. * Dispersion. He belonged to a society which spoke

67? and thought in Greek. The Epistles to the Colossians and

Ephesians clearly show that he was acquainted, as indeed could hardly fail to be the case, with the allegories and mysteries of

WM inSiietifltii^ ti^ them} ailtd Kogivft 1^ toemge «m «d 4 t«Medif ttot to tb«levn ot PiOeii^ W to tlie Gentiiet irlbo dciclved tMt caltuire bom Crtinp^ tkc that he was a member o{ two worlds, ol the xutnow Jewish as ot the wider HdUenic brotherhood, served to conunead his message to tho Greek-speaking dty populations of the west. K he never saw Jesus in the flesh, this meant the less for him since in a sudden flash, aJher persecuting Qiristians with Jewish hmatidsm, he had reached the conviction that the spirit of Christ had ottered into possession of his own soul. This burning faith gave wings to his eloquence. Wherever he travelled in his missionary journeys he made converts and established little communities of Christian men and women bound together by ties of worship, self-surrender, and affection. Passing from Asia into Europe, he preached at Salonika, at Athens, at Corinth, and in Rome, everywhere creating intense spiritual excitement, both by his free treatment of the Jewish Law and by the sharp contrast be presented to the current beliefr of pagan society. Under the powerful impulsion of his fervent genius a small Judaic sect, spumed by the priests and scribes of Jerusalem, became a religion so large and human in its appeal that no European race, however rade and brutal, has altogether escaped its spiritual influence.

By the second century the chief seaport towns of the Mediter* rancan basin, and many upland towns also, contained little groups of Cluistians, who weie now, and even as early as a.d. 65, when Nero singled them out for persecution in Rome, recog- nized to be distinct from the Jews, with whom they were at first commonly confounded.

With the Jews, however, they had in common a prophetical and exclusive; religion. They lived a life apart, based on prin- ciples of belief and conduct, upon which they refused to com- promise. "We," wrote Justin Martyr, "who formerly rejoiced in uncleanness of life and now love only chastity; who also used magic arts and have now dedicated ourselves to the good and unbegotten God; we who loved resources of money and possessions more than anything, and now actually share what we have and give to everyone who is in need; we who hated one another and killed one another and would not eat with those of another race, and now since the manifestation of Christ have a common life, and pray for our enemies and try to win over those who hate us without just cause." But while the Christians weiq

d c. 16s

52 A HISTO&T OF tVkOPZ

thus sharply levered from the pagan world it was a source of strength to them that they never regarded their religion as a reversal of human history, but rather as its divinely ordained fulfilment. Christian apologists were equally willing to find authority for their religion in the Jewish Scriptures, in Greek philosophy, and in the prophecies of the Sibyl. It was one of the secrets of the success of the Christian Church that, while it offered salvation to the outcasts of the world, it did not shrink from challenging the wise upon their own ground, nor hesitate to call to its aid the speculations of the ancients. Nothing certain is known of the origin of the Fourth Gospel or of the circumstances in which it was written. The better opinion appears to be that it was composed by John the Presbyter in Ephesus early in the second century. But whether this be so or not, there is little doubt that the author of this wonderful book, without which the substance of Christian belief would be far other than it is, was influenced by St. Paul and perhaps also by the doctrine of Philo of Alexandria, a learned Jew who evolved from the philosophy of Plato a warrant for the truths of his inherited faith. Philo was the first of a long line of theologians and philosophers who believed that Plato was divinely inspired, and addressed themselves to the congenial task of harmonizing the exalted teaching of the Athenian thinker with the Jewish or Christian message. For nearly thirteen centuries the theology of the Christian Church in the west was moulded by the thought of Plato. There followed an age of intellectual disturbance. The metaphysical and physical writings of Aristotle were restored through the Arabians of Spain. Chiistian theology was con- fronted by pagan science, Christian idealism by a philosophy based on experience. There was a moment of anxiety, of free thinking on fundamentals, when even doctors in the Paris Uni- versity dallied with Pantheism and challenged the orthodox view of the ci cation of the world. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, two great Dominican doctors, restored the situation by harnessing the new Aristotle tc the chariot of the Catholic Church. The teaching of Christ was a sublime and original con- tribution to the moral improvement of mankind. But it is doubt- ful whether the Christian religion would have made the conquest of Europe had?t not been of all oriental religions the most Greek and the most nearly akin alike to the best thought of the Greek philosophers and to those popular notions of purgatory and puri-

GItEBCB AKD IttACBOOM 5)

ficadon, of eternal bliss and eternal torment, of a didine me^ator between God and man, and of some sacramental ceremony where* by the sinner might be cleansed of Ms sin and assured of his salvation hereafter, which were already current among the Greeks, and the basis of solemn religious observance over that wide tract of the Mediterranean basin in which Greek civilization prevailed.

CHAPTER VI

ROME AND CARTHAGE

Rist of the Roman Republic. Character of its legal and constitutional growth. The Roman conquest of Italy. Cisalpine Gaul and Carthage. Romans and Etruscans. The Putuc IFarc and conquest of Cisalpine Gaul. Hannibal. P. Cornelius Scipio. Destruction of Carthage, Roman prestige. Growing influence of Rotne in the east. Subjection of Macedonia and Greece. Absence of a predetermined plan of conquest.

Greece looks to the rising, Italy to the setting sun. On the west of the Italian peninsula are wide and fertile plains, ample streams, and sheltered ports. On the east the sti£ spine of the Apennines runs close to an inhospitable coast for the greater part of its course, so that, save for the two good Apulian har< hours of Brindisi and Otranto, there is little shelter for the mariner against the storms of the Adriatic. Thus a sharp differ- ence established itself between the centre and south of the Italian peninsula. While the southern littoral became the scene of a brilliant Greek culture, and of an immigration which has left a still discernible mark upon the character and appearance of the south Italian people, the La'tin heart of tlic country was sheltered from these alien influences. Between Hellas and die yellow waters of the Tiber there was interposed, apart from the Adriatic, a barrier of rude and difficult hills.

Behind that barrier the Roman Republic, originally a small dty state, developed an aptitude for government and war which owed littie to the practice and precepts of Greece. A supremacy, greater than that for which Athens, Sparta, and Tliehes had in turn striven, came to the Romanv as the prize of tenacious war- fare and wise discipline, of moderation and good sense, of sound family life and strwig legal instincts, and of a ceruin stern and simple gravity of bearing, which was rooted in the ancient pieties of the homestead and the soil. A sharp revolution, the expulsion of a dynasty of foreign kings in 510 b.c.. made upon the Roman memory an impression which was all the deeper because revolutions were not in the Roman fashion. The con- stitution of the Republic developed slowly, insensibly adapting

54

tl9Wt9 AN«SS

iMf w swoeenlw duifigM ti aodbl ptcMnm and the fnc^ci^oiw callt q| exfi^ding duty.

A systeut of law gradually developed out of a maaa of pruDi* dvo eustom and iaoerdotal usage, growing vnth die enlaiig^Bg Ufa of the community, helping itself from ^ decrees of popular assendilies, the edicts of praetors, the opinions of jurisconsults, the systems of philosophers, until it became adequate to the practical needs of the civilized world. Inner social and political discords were solved by protest and compromise, by sagacious face^ving expedients and constitutional laws rather tiian by bloodshed or the clash of arms. In the long struggle between the patricians and the plebeians (510087 b.c) the successive victories of the plebeian party appear to have left no mortal wound or implacable resentment. Compelled to surrender privilege after privilege the patricians ne\er went into exile nor yielded their claim to render honourable service to the Roman state. Vital Uberties were early conquered, as early as the Twelve Tables, 450 bx . but the Senate, though partially rectuited from the Plebs, re- mained in essence and outlook a patrician body. Domestic ten- sion was never so grave as to sap the patriotism of the Romans or to weaken them in face of a foreign foe.

One by one all her Italian antagonists were made to acknow- ledge the power of Rome, the Latins of the plain, the mysterious non-Aryan Etruscans within whose kingdom Rome herself was once embodied, the sturdy Samnites of the hills, the formidable Gauls who had sacked Rome in 390, leaving behind them a memory of terror, .md finally the Greek cities of the south aided by the phalanx and the elephants of Pyrrhus the Epirot. By the beginning of the third century b.c. Rome was supreme in Italy. But while other cities of the ancient world had conquered and lost, what Rome conquered in Italy she held and welded into a compact state. Tliere was a method in her aggrandize- ment. She built military roads, such as only the Persian Empire had wimessed, and upon these planted at strategic points fortified cities garrisoned by Roman dtizens. Other Italian communities she united by ties of exclusive alliance and carefully graded privilege to herself.

Yet she was not secure. The Gauls, established in the valley of the Po, occupied the largest and richest plain in the Mediter- ranean basin: but a peril even greater than the Gauls was the naval power of Carthage, disputing the fertile island of Sicily

S6 A HISTOKT OP BUROPX

with the Greeks, contesting Sardiitia, and exercising through her experienced fleets an unchallenged supremacy in the Tyr* rhenian Sea.

With this great Semite power, then the commercial capital of the world, Rome waged a struggle lasting more than too years (264*146 B.C.), which changed the political complexion of Europe. At the end of this desperate contest, conducted on a scale far exceeding all previous experience, Carthage was obliterated from the scroll of history. Her navies were sunk, her empire reft from her, her proud and populous capital was levelled to the ground. Rome, entering the contest without a military navy or a yard of territory beyond the seas, had become by the logic of war a world power. The commerce of the Mediterranean was in her hands. Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, Africa had become Roman provinces. Every part of the widespread Carthaginian Empire in the west had passed into her control.

Character rather than culture supplied the key to the under- standing of these victories. In point of artistic taste and achieve- ment the Etruscans, who invaded Italy from Asia Minor at the end of the ninth century, and reached their highest point of power and prosperity three hundred years later, distanced their rude and virile conquerors. Central Italy is still full of the monu- ments of a gifted and luxurious aristocracy who spoke a non- Indo-European language, which we cannot read, who rode and drove, hunted and farmed, and bequeathed much secret lore concerning the arts of divination to the great Roman families, who were proud to reckon an Etruscan among their ancestors. If there was any Etrusc.-in literature, it has perished long ago, but the Apollo of Vcii and the Orator of Lake Trasimene are among the glories of European statuary. The Romans of the young Republic had nothing which could compare with these masterpieces in terra-cotta, or with the ivories and jewelry of this accomplished people who, while borrowing freely from the art of Assyria, Egypt, and Greece, had nevertheless something distinctive of their own to contribute. It was not then a ba^ baric Italy which ^as subdued by the Romans, but as to a third of its area an Italy already imbued with the arts and crafts of Hellas and the east. But while Rome was united and tenacious, the Etruscans suffered from a fatal lack of combination. The Tarquins were expelled from the Seven Hills on the Tiber (Sio B.&). The Etruscan navy went down before the Greeks at

ftOMI AND CA&THACS 57

Cumae (474). It was permitted that Vdi, a principal shrine o£ Etruscan statuary, should sustain unfriended a war of eighty years against her inveterate enemy. Yet, if Etruria disappeared as an empire, the Tuscans survived as a race, substantially identical with itself through millennia, and now and again, as in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, revealing a genius for beauty which touches the summit of human excellence.

The First Punic War ended after twenty-three years of inter- mittent and disjointed struggle with a peace which transferred the island granary of Sicily from Carthage to Rome. That the 264 949 contest lasted so long and was productive of no more decisive result may be attributed, partly to the conditions under which the war was waged, and also to a certain indistinctness of aim in the minds of each of the combatants. In days when a war- ship must be propelled by oars, when only in the summer months could it safely put to sea, and when, in the absence of long-range weapons, the ship which had not been grappled and boarded might easily escape unharmed, swift decisions vrerc Hot difficult to avoid. Rome had to learn the lessons of salt water; Carthage, experienced at sea, but hampered at home, found diffi- culty in sparing mercenary troops sufficient for the needs of the Sicilian campaign. Neither party was as yet fully resolved upon a war of destruction. The Romans invaded Africa, but left the army of Regulus without support, and made no attempt to retrieve his defeat. Nor did the Carthaginians make use of their sea power to molest the coasts of Italy. In the end the Romans won, because, having learnt from their adversary a disagreeable and unfamiliar technique, they were able by a supreme effort of private patriotism to build a fleet capable of victory at a moment when Carthage was weary of the contest.

Tlicre followed an interval of twenty-three years which has 941-2x8 left its mark upon the history of Europe. In that interval, Rome seized Sardinia, curbed the Illyrian pirates in the Adriatic, effecting in that process, through the conquest of Corcyra, her first lodgment on Grecian soil, and, greatest and most important achievement of all, conquered Cisalpine Gaul and extended her frontiers to the Alps. Not less memorable is the work of Oirthagc during the same period. Apart from the suppression of a serious revolt in Africa it consisted in the establishment of a new empire in Spain.

58 , A KtSTOUT OW S0kQP>

ft^it thm to iDaithage that Spain owe* its mtrodiictipa into Ae poUdcal history o£ Europe. In Spain, with iu wealthy nunes and factories, its fertile littoral, its numerous pt^ulation of hardy and warlike tribes distributed in the high central plateau, where the wind is searching and the sun scorches, and the breed of man is tough and wiry, a Carthaginian of genius descried a new source of power for his state and a new base of operations against Rome. Hamilcar Barca, a soldier well proved in the Sicilian War, had determined to dedicate the remainder of his days to a war of vengeance. The idol of the Carthaginian democracy, he obtained a free hand in the Iberian peninsula, and there, in eight years of crowded and brilliant energy, built up a state, a treasury, and an army. A son-in-law and a son con- tinued and consolidated his worL The son was Ilannibal. To him, inheriting power in 221 b.c, Hamilcar had bequeathed his gifts, his energies, and his revenge.

Among the captains of the ancient world Hannibal alone in point of genius ranks with Alexander the Great. If he lacked the engaging radiance of the Macedonian, he was his superior in sobriety and concentration of purpose. His daring was ex- treme, his resource infinite, and his gifts of personal magnetism were such as in passages of extreme hardship and peril evoke and sustain the devotion of an army. He was quick to discern and to profit by the weakness of an adversary. Nothing was too great or too small for his attentioir.

His plan was simple, audacious, and, had all gone well, of deadly efficiency. It was to pick a quarrel with Rome, which he did' by attacking Sagunium, a Spanish town under nnmap patronage, and then to march vrith his African and Spanish levies overland to Italy, and to strike the Republic at the heart. He was not, of course, so foolish as to suppose that he could accomplish his purpose unjiided. He counted upon the fUsgl p i n f Gauls, still writhing under their, recent defeat, on the dries of Italy presumed to be resentful of Roman dominion, on Philip of Macedon, young, ambitious, headstrong, who might be lured to emulate the career of Pyrrhus under happier drcumstances, and to win from the Romans die control of the south.

Despite an amazing march, followed by three brilliant and annihilating victories, the plan failed. There was no general B-c- rising of the Gauls, no revolt in central Italy, no invasitm from Macedonia, no abatement in the resolution of the Roman Senate

4110 «4|lLy|C4«B

«N#fer tb tnMt icMhi «tt cneatf»tttnding on soil, nor vm

Hunt inm Ourdxage tibat ineaBuxe of support which Hannibal had a lig^t to expect. Yet for years he held the field with his small army of 30,000 in a popidous enemy country and against a foe who had the call on forces more than tlurty-three dmes as numerous as his own.

hi the ruses and stratagems of war, in the handling of cavalry as well as in the moral gift of leadership which inspires the de- voted loyalty of troops, ^nnibal was supreme. A magical aura seemed to surround him. Though he had no siege train, and could never have taken Rome by force, he created in his adver- saries a paralyzing sense of their inferiority. Again and again, after Lake Trasimene, after Cannae, and when it was known that his brother Hasdrubal had crossed the Alps with Spanish reinforcements, a deadly anxiety clutched at the heart of Rome. But Hasdrubal was beaten at the Metaurus. Jn truth, ever since Fabius had discerned that, the best way of dealing with Hannibal was to avoid engaging him, a Roman victory was only a matter of time.

What finally biought the war to a conclusion was the dis- covery by Rome of a gifted commander. While Hannibal was overrunning Italy, P. Coinelius Scipio was engaged in evicting the Carthaginians from Spain The lustre ot this considerable achievement, which has fixed the mould of Spanish civilization, gave to Scipio a unique place in the confidence of the Roman people. He was permitted to conduct an expedition to Africa, the surest way of relieving the Italian peninsula of the incubus of a Punic army; in 204 a c. he crossed the sea, and two years laler, meeting Hannibal on the field of Zama, routed his elephants, his foot, and his horse, and secured a peace (201) which stripped Carthage of her overseas possessions and left her the tributary vassal of Rome.

Still, while Carthage remained, a fortified city on the gulf of Tunis with a population of some 700,000 inhabitants, rich, enter- prising, industrious, resilient, Rome was uneasy. Fear and jealousy possessed her of a rival whose deadly fault wUs a too swift recovery from defeat. "Carthage must be destroyed,” she began to repeat to herself. The incantation worked, pretexts were found, the apolo^es and excuses of compliant Semites were brushed aside. Carthage, it was urged, had attacked Massanissa, the Numidian ally of Rome. So fifty-two years after the field of

6o A HISTORY OF ET7ROPB

Zama another Roman expedition crossed to Africa. This time there was to be no weakness. After a long and terrible siege the city of Carthage was stormed and burned to the ground, and Africa incorporated as a province in the dominions of Rome.

The surprising fortunes of the Roman Republic had long been followed with anxiety and wonder by the intelligent peoples of the cast. An honourable pedigree was invented for this rude community of formidable super-men, and the Romans learned that they were descended through Aeneas from King Priam of Troy, and linked to the most splendid legends of Hellenic anti- quity. As the Punic Wars proceeded, the great qualities of the Roman character, never more brilliantly exhibited than in the dark hours of defeat, impressed themselves with increasing force upon the Greek-speaking world. Was it not to Rome, a Republic, and the inveterate foe of monarchy, that the city states of Greece and Asia Minor might look for the protection of their liberties and the preservation of their alliance, to Rome, which had chastised the Gauls and curbed the Illyrian pirates and was now, after desperate vicissitudes, vanquishing the stub- born oligarchy of Carthage? Such, at least, v/as the view of Polybius the Arcadian, whose wise history is the capital authority for these critical times, when Rome was bringing east and west into the orbit of her controlling power.

It will readily be imagined tliai, *amid the strain and exhaus- tion of the Carthaginian struggle, Rome was in no mood to em- bark upon a course of aggression in the east. Her policy was to foster commercial relations with Egypt, and to grasp the hand of friendship, where it was freely offered, as by the wealthy house of Pergamum, the powerful island state of Rhodes, and the university city of Athens, and by such connections to para- lyze the activities of any power who might be tempted to in- trude on the western theatre of war.

This policy was successful. Neither Antiochus III of Syria nor Philip V of Maccdon was in a position to send a ship or a man to Italy. Each of tiiese eastern friends of Carthage, operating without combination, was defeated in detail and in his own territory, Antiochus in the great slaughter of Magnesia (190 b.c.), Philip in the soldiers' battle at Cynoscephalac. The cumbrous phalanx of spearmen, which had helped Alexander to conquer his vast empire of the east, had shown itself unequal to the Roman legion and the Spanish sabre. Antiochus was compelled

ROME AND CARTUAOS

to witbdirRw behind the Taurus, and the hegemony ot Asia Minor henceforth devolved upon Rome.

Still the Greeks were unhappy. Home rule they had asked for, and home rule they had received. The Macedonians had been expelled from the key fortresses of Greece, the Romans had been acclaimed as liberators; but the harmony and union of Hellas were no further advanced. Roman commissioners were called in to arbitrate Greek quarrels, making enemies as ivcll as friends with every award, and if it be true that unscrupulous Romans fomented Greek discords, it is no less certain that dis- affected Greeks intrigued secretly with Perseus, King of Mace- donia, as they found him steadily drifting into enmity with Rome.

So the final destruction of Macedonian power after the battle of Pydna in i68 b.c. was followed by the deportation to Italy of the leading Greek sympathizers with the vanquished cause. L. Aemilius Paulus was one of the best of Romans, a soldier, a statesman, a friend of good letters, a character raised above pecuniary temptation; but the vengeance which he exacted after his crowning victory at Pydna lacked nothing in completeness. Every Macedonian notable from the king downwards was de- ported to Italy. A great part of the population was enslaved, the country broken into four fragments, and reduced to such a state of helpless misery that its subsequent conversion into a Roman province was by comparison a blessing.

Bui the stern lesson was lost on Greece. An insurrection broke out, cruelly conducted, cruelly suppressed; and when the last desperate rally of the Achaean I-icague had been crushed by L. Mummius on the field of Corinth (146 b.c.), and the men of Corinth had been slain and the women and children sold into slavery, and the city had been razed to the ground, Greece at last had a rest of fifty years under her Roman master. Long before this, war, infanticide and malaria had depleted her popu- lation and carried off the descendants of the men who had given her an immortal name and that burning love of liberty which had brought her to her doom.

The subjection during the space of a single lifetime of the whole inhabited world to the rule of Rome struck contem- poraries as being, which indeed it was, the crowning miracle of history. Yet, while the political power of the Roman Republic was felt from Cadiz to the Euphrates, the limits of its deeper influence were more strictly drawn. Upon Sicily and Spain the

fy ^ A mataxx or nvMorm

image of iioni wa» inefEaceably stamped; but rf ^ Adriatic the peoples of the Mediterranean remained, «they wem before, a #orld apart, half Greek, half oriental, influencmg their conquerors deeply by their refined and more exquisitt TOi- turn, hut receiving nothing in return save a mcMure of order, discipline, and protection, and not until the mediaeval crusades seriously invaded by the I^tin culture of the west.^ ^

It would appear that Rome was drawn into empire not mdecd in a fir of absentmindedness, but half reluctantly and of no set plan. The successive stages of her conquest of Italy were forced upon her because, as England afterwards experienced in India, an orderly power ringed round by turbulence always finds itself compelled to establish peace and security upon its frontiers. The struggle with Carthage indeed began with a moment of popular war fever, but that was short-lived. Rome went to Spain to cut off Hannibal, to Gaul much later that she might keep open her communications with Spain. There is no substance in the view that commercial and financial interests pushed Rome into con- quest and annexation, except possibly in the cases of the destruc- tion of Carthage and Corinth, until the first century b.c., when Pompey’s annexation of Syria was probably due to the influence of the equires, the capitalistic class. More particularly did Rome show great reluctance to annex the Hellenistic kingdoms. She broke their power, practically destroyed their capacity to rule the east, and then shirked the task of administration herself. It is a remaikablc fact that she had been the dominating power in the ea* tem Mediterranean for a hundred and fifty years before she finally, after suffering immense inconvenience from chaos and piracy, took over the direct rule of the whole area.

BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED

T. Mommsen; History of Rome. Tr. W. P. Dickson, s vols. 1894. H. F. Pelham; History of Rome. Outlines of Roman History. 4th Ed. 1905.

D. Randall Molver: The Etruscans. 1927.

G. Dennis: Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria. 1S78.

H. Stuart Jones: A Companion to Roman History. 1913.

W. E. Heitland: Short History of the Roman Republic. 1911.

L. P. Homo; L’ltalie Primitive et les D 4 buts de rimpdrialisme Romain. i9aS-

Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. VIII.

Tenney Frank: An Economic History of Rome till the End of the Republic. 1937.

C!!lAl>t1BR. V0

REPUBLIC AND EMPIRE

T 60 Senate. Flavts in the Repubhcau eonatitution. lU e0tet*

0 / rapid conquest. Maladministration in the provinces. The but cen- tury of the Kepublte. 7 he Gracchi. Idea of Italian freedom. Marhu and Sulla. The challenge of Mithradates. Sulla's victories in the dost and at home. Jiu proscriptions. The unsolved military and pobce problems of the later Republic. Pompey. Hu compact with Caesar and Crassus. Julius Caesar. Early reputation and campaigns in Gaul. Rift with Pompey. Victorus and death. The spirit of hu rule. Its adaptation to the needs of the time.

The form of government under which the Romans conquered Italy and weathered the storms of the Punic Wars was, like many constitutions which are the growth of time, one thing in theory and another in practice. In theory sovereignty rested with the assemblies of the Roman people organized in their i%n> turics or their tribes. In practice government was carried on by die Senate, an aristocracy of biith and service, recruited accord* ing to established rules from men who had held offices of state or had distinguished themselves in war. It is to this remarkable assembly of patriotic and disciplined citizens that we must prin* cipaUy ascribe the successes of republican Rome. Armies might suffer defeat, fleets might be lost at sea, but the Senate, drawn for the most part from the members of patrician or ennobled families, grave, proud, resolute, accustomed to consider dis- honour more terrible than death, never flinched in the hour of danger and created in the Roman colonies and in many of the allied cities of Italy a spirit as courageous and patriotic as their own.

Yet even at this period, when die republican government was working at its best, it was subject to many drawbacks. Of these the gravest was the organization of the executive power, which was neither concentrated in the hands of a single persefn, nor divided between a soldier and " civilian,” nor granted for a term of years. By a singular arrangement, prompted by the strong and continuing fear of monarchy which had existed in Rome «rtr rince the expulsion of its foreign kings, die supreme pHthoiity both in peace and war was con0ded to two annual

A HISTORY OF EUROPE

64

officers known as consuls^ each possessed of plenary power, and each entitled to veto the other’s decisions. The evils of such a system, patent at all times, were specially manifest in times of war* No state is so rich in military talent as to be able to furnish an annual supply of excellent generals. The Romans of the third century before Christ, despite their martial habits, were no ex- ception to this rule, and save on those rare occasions which justified the appointment of a dictator, submitted to a system under which good generals were retired too soon and bad generals appointed too often.

Another defect almost equally serious was the absence of any effective machinery for financial administration and contiol. There was no Board of Finance. The quaestors^ to whom the management of the public Treasury was confided, so far from being the most experienced, were the least experienced members of the official hierarchy. Living on war plunder, the state could afford to dispense with direct taxation and to farm out its public lands to companies of tax farmers.

Upon a state so governed the burden of an empire descended with an almost unbearable shock. The vast plunder of Africa and Asia, of Macedonia and Greece, produced upon the Roman character the evil effects which suddenly acquired wealth always exerts upon minds unprepared to receive it. The old virtues of rustic simplicity and patriarchal discipline, of honest toil and pecuniary integrity, gave way before the overwhelming tempta- tions of tlie new luxury. The flower of the Italian yeomanry had been used up in the armies, slaves were abundant, for every Roman victory brought a fresh consignment of slaves to the Roman market, and slavery, here as elsewhere, produced its de- moralizing results. In the countryside great ranches tilled by pngs of slaves began to supersede the small holdings which pforc the terrible devastations of the Ilanniballic wars had been the pride and mainstay of Italy. In Rome itself a vast slave population, ministering to the necessities and enjoyments of the free, consututed an invitation to idleness, frivolity, and vice. Moreover, as Rome became the capital and chief money-making centre of the world, it acted as a magnet upon the fortune hunters and adventurers of the Levant. To the influences of Greece, as to thme Ota aviJization admittedly superior, the Romans of this and the succeeding centuries were more particularly open, but it was not the highest part of the Greek message which made ihe

RBPam.lC AMD BMRlllS

65'

widest appeal in Italy, but mther the superficial cleverness, the &t|;racttve an4 effeminate vices, and the supple adaptability of conscience for which the average Greek of the period was then noted.

With these demoralizing influences abroad it is little to be wondered at that the first experiment of republican government overseas was attended by calaniitous abuses. It was the custom of the Senate, on the establishment of a Roman province, to lay down in a written document known as the Lex Provinciae the principles in accordance with which the province was to he ad- ministered. In general, however, there was the sharpest opposi- tion between the Provincial Law, which was often enlightened and humane, and the administration, which was for the most part characterized by cruel and shameful extortions. In a very short space of time the proconsuls of the Republic bled the pro- vinces white. They ruined Sicily and the province of Asia and carried their depredations through every part of Greece. Neither the law courts nor the Senate were strong enough to check the evil. A fierce' hatred of the Italian spread round the Mediterranean basin and threatened the new foundations of his rule.

To the disaffection bred of extortion and misgovernment abroad there was added a long catalogue of formidable evils threatening to shatter the fabric of empire which had been built up under senatorial rule: slave revolts in Sicily and Italy, a fierce faction fight in Rome between the popular and senatorial party which widened out into a bitter and destructive civil war, a dan- gerous rebellion of the Italian allies, and, reacting fiercely on domestic politics, the pressure of external enemies on every frontier. The last century of the Roman Republic is an age of violent internal convulsions associated with and exasperated by foreign wars. A succession of great captains, a gift of fortune upon which no community has a right to reckon, saved the state again and again, and maintained and greatly extended the boundaries of Roman rule. Gaius Marius ended the Jugurthine war, and by his two great victories over the Teutons aifd Cimbri saved northern Italy from barbaric invasions for five hundred years. L. Cornelius Sulla reconquered Greece from Mithradates, King of Pontus, and compelled him to restore his Asiatic con- quests. The names of Lucullus and of Pompey are associated with a series of brilliant Asiatic campaigns, which left Rome

66 # 0r»0ROt»E

mistren of Sjrria wnd AtUi Minor. «Dd with no seriotw enony i» the east save the distant monar^y of Parthia. Gaul way oon^ quered, Britain way invaded by Julitu Caesar, yet the age whidb witnessed these dazzling feau of arms was one of the most lUi^ happy and uncomfortable in Roman history. It was marltedt indeed, by a great advance in wealth and luxury, by the growth of huge private fortunes, and by a concern for art, letters, and philosophy which has left an oiduring mark upon dviUzadem. It is the age of Lucretius, of Catullus, and of Cicero. Vet the contemporaries of these three fine human spirits had wimessed the clash of contending armies in the streets of Rome, had heard the cries of Sulla’s victims as they were beheaded in thdr thousands in tlie Campus Martius, and in their walks among the glistening marbles of the sacred city were compelled to endure the grisly spectacle of severed heads, a ferocious but not unusual symptom of a party victory in the last century of the Republic. From these miseries bred of civil discord and external peril Italy was eventually delivered by the foundation of the Empire and by the Augustan Peace.

The first blows in the long domestic struggle were struck by two brothers, well boin, for they were the grandsons of Scipio the cider, and weII-to-<lo, but each touched by the spirit of reform and fated to atone for his dreams and ambitions by a violent end.

Tiberius Giacchus was killed in a vulgar riot by his political enemies of the senatorial party. Ten years later his younger brother Gaius, defeated, disillusioned, and desperate, fell in the rame cause. The programme oi 1 iberius was to restore the decay- ing agiiculturc of central Italy by planting out scitlcrs upon the public lands. His object was admirable, but since the proposals for carrying it out involved a widespread disturbance of vested interests, they were hotly resisted by the Senate. It was now that the vehemtmt Tiberius developed, a procedure, archaic in form but revolutionary in substance, which threatened to undermine the authority of the Senate and to give a new complexion to the Roman constitution

In the course of the struggles between the patricians and plebeians during the fourth century there had bWn developed over and atove the assembly of the whole people votmg by tribes (Comttia Tnbuta) and of the more plutocratically organ- ized assembly of the whole people voting by centuries (Cotnitia

«})kli liad tiw zi^ic of oppoiiidbftg ^ chiof toogl*^ thusK iMiyi^MldAg tbe laws, and of dedding coi the ^uestums of |jld*p^cej, another more democratic legislative body, the eOwCf^'titis fiel^ wbidi vsas served by officers known as tribunes of dbe jpeojde. Each of these assemblies was sovereign, but eadi iiral hampered by arcluuc restrictions, meeting only when con* 'vened by a magistrate, opining only upon questions which the convening magistrate had laid before them, and with character' istic Roman conservatism giving their votes standing and in groups (centuries or tribes) like the primitive armed levies of the Roman people. It was this cumbrous machinery which first Uberius and then Calus set in motion against die Senate. Each was fk. tribune, and saw that in the exercise of the tribunidaa power he could submit measures to the conciltum plehis without teitreacc to the Senate and pass them into law in spite of its resistance. Neither was a srickler for constitutional forms. When the constitution served their purpose it was obeyed; when it pre* sented obstacles it was strained or broken.

Men once embarked on the ocean of political strife are apt to be carried further than they originally intended. In the hands of the younger Gracchus the programme of the popular party went far beyond the agiurian policy which first brought Tibcriirs into the arena against the Senate. Excellent schemes for colon* ization overseas were accompanied by plans in whidi the alloy of polidcal proBt was copiously blended with die gold of philan- thropy. To conciliate the world of commerce and finance, and at the same time to abase the Senate, the equestrian order were put in charge of the Law Courts and accorded the lucrarive privilege of farming the taxes and destroying the prosperity of the province of Asia. The favour of the Italian cities enjoying Ladn rights was sought by the offer of the Roman franchise, that of the Roman proletariat by one of those fatal bribes so easy to offer and so difficult to withdraw, a dole of Sicilian com from the granaries of the state.

Yet despite his skilfully combined programme, his popular gifts, and his ardent industry, the posidon of Gaius Gracchus was essentially insecure. His aedvities had been purely civilian. He had no aimy at his back. He was a tribune of the people, dqtendent for his office, his authority, and his life on the popular vote. He was elected twice. On the third occasion the Comitia turned against him- A private citizen who had made so many

68

A BISTORY or IDROrS

enemies as he could hardly hope to survive in that climate of furious hatred when the luck turned.

The idea of the Italian franchise had a great future. Though &e Italian allies could seldom expea to vote in Roman assem* blies, they learned from the lips of Roman orators to resent their inferior status, and to claim equality with Roman citizens. For a time progress was blocked. The enfranchisement of the de- spised Italian was opposed by all tliat was selfish and narrow in the Senate and people of Rome. At last the Italian allies rose in 91 B.C. revolt, chose a capital, sketched out a constitution, and involved Rome in a serious war; and then only did the Senate concede a privilege which, once asked, should never have been denied. In the history of political enfranchisement one step leads to another. Out of tlie policy originally promulgated by the Gracchi there sprang a long seiies of enfranchising and equalizing measures culminating in the great edict of Caracalla (a.d. 212), which con- ferred Roman citizenship on all freeborn members of the Roman Empire. Yet though in theory political equality was conceded first to Italy and then to the whole Empire, no organ was created through which the provinces could make an effective iwe of their rights. The idea of representative government was foreign to antiquity. The first parliament of united Italy met in 1870.

With this one exception of the Italian franchise nothing so far had been done to increase the stability of republican govern- ment. A new pet il was, in fart, already disclosed, the full bearing of which neither faction could justly measure. The rfile of popular hero, which had been played by the civilian Gains, had now fallen to a soldier, who had recruited a volunteer army from the lowest cl.ass of the community and was universally and rightly regarded as the saviour of his country. Gabs Marius, ro6-roi Jugurthine and Cimbrian Wars, the rude soldier

B.C. from Arpinum, who had been selected to defend Italy from the gravest peril by which it had yet been assailed, and after five years of vigilant soldiering had wiped out the German victories at Arausio on the fields of Aquae Sextiae (102) and Vercellae (loi), had the Roman state in the hollow of his hand.

In the plenitude of tlicir thankfulness for these two crowning triumphs there was no political boon which Rome would h.ive draiecl him. But m the field of home politics Marius was a child with Uttle m his head save the abasement of the Senate through

AKD BMFIRS <^9

the demagogic activities of his turbulent friends, '*so that although he was sevega times eleaed consul, and may thus be regarded as a forerunner of the Emperors, he left no mark on the structure of Roman government. The task which he might have accom* plishcd devolved upon his nephew Caius Julius Caesar.

By a curious accident of history the next great Roman general who might have upset the Republic was a conservative only anxious to preserve it. L. Cornelius Sulla had begun his military career as the lieutenant of Marius in Africa. The two men were opposed to one another in almost every point of circumstance and temper. Marius was a plebeian and a savage, Sulla an aristo- crat of fine culture and licentious manners. The art of politics as understood by Marius was a course of violent demagogy directed to no coherent end. Sulla cherished a distinct scheme, articulated in every part, for the restoration of the Senate to the position of ascendancy which it had enjoyed during the Punic Wars. Each was reckless of bloodshed; but whereas the later cruelties of Marius were tinged with insanity, Sulla’s butchery was done upon a system. A special cause of rancour envenomed the relations of the two soldiers thus differently disposed, for Sulla had procured the betrayal of Jugurtha, which had given Marius his reputation, and lost no occasion to advertise the fact.

Fourteen years after Marius had won his last great victory in the Cimbrian War, Rome was called upon to face a serious danger in the east. Mithradates Eupator, the King of Pontus, was an oriental of remarkable force and laige ambitions who viewed himself as the leader and patron of an Hellenic world burning to free itself from Roman shackles. The territory of this Philhellenic barbarian was attacked by Nicomedes of Bithynia, a client of Rome, and, since satisfaction was refused him, Mithradates declared war upon the Roman Republic, In the challenge of this fiery potentate the Greek cities of the Levant saw an opportunity of wreaking vengeance on the Italians, by whom they had been mercilessly pillaged and oppressed. There was a great massacre in which it is said that a hundred thousand Latin residents in Asia, in Delos, and on the mainland, perished at the hands of outraged or envious Greeks. Asia Minor was won for the King. His armies, generalled by Greeks, occupied Athens and Boeotia. Was the Empire of Alexander the Great to live again and to be ruled from Sinope by an eastern tyrant served by eunuchs and soothed by a harem?

l^i itdDMUi S^iate commissioned Sulla to take up t 3 be UMMitit cottiiiiaiid* and no better choice could have been nUiAba waa in tbe prime of life. His military service had been carted and disdtiguished. As Propraetor in Cilicia he had fought and bargained with orientals. He was the only Roman officer of high mark who had a first-hand knowledge of Asia. But the idea of so great a prire going to a political opponent stirred the fury of the Roman democrats. The tribune Sulpicius Rufus introduced a decree depriving Sulla of his command and appointing Marius, now grown old and impotent, in his place. That was the a^B.cs, signal for civil war. At the head of 30,000 men, Sulla marched to Rome, dispersed the disorderly horde of the Marians, and, having executed many prominent democrats and hunted Marius out of Italy, crossed the sea with five legions to deal with Mithradates.

A lurid light was then thrown upon the extent to which party passion had corrupted the political life of Rome. Sulla’s cam- paign was brilliant. He stormed Athens and the Piraeus, crushed, with infinitesimal loss to himself, the swollen oriental armies of Mithradates in two great battles, and after four years of successful fighting, forced his advcisary to a humiliating 84 B.a peace. Yet in all these operations he was acting, not only with- out the support, but with the active opposition of the govern- ment of Rome, In his absence tbe popiilarcs had seized the helm; and while Sulla was winning victories in the cast, his friends at home were exposed to the remorseless rage of Marius and his associates.

Then Sulla returned to Italy, rirh with spoils and indem- nities, and with a well-paid, seasoned army at his heels to deal with his enemies. Mingling foice with blandishments, defeating one army, seducing anotlier, he marched to Rome, while two able young members of his party, Gnaeus Pompeius and Marcus Crassus, emerging from their hiding places, created diversions in his favour. Yet even the possession of Rome did not end the 82 war. The democrats had appealed to the Samnites for help, and, while Sulla was engaged in Etruiia, an army inspired by the fierce old Samnile spirit marched against Rome, Caius Pontius of Tclcsia, the national leader of these mountain levies, pro- claiming that the tyrant city must be destroyed to her founda- tions and that the Roman wolves, the bane of Italian liberty, would never be got rid of until their land was laid waste. Sulla

muK^Umtits '’tt

btudf^ an4* |wc la dnie» tiiiwir Idi iMuy Utglcnn vgi&m. m the OoUine Gate«That %hl was long and hard; %at itk the end dse veterans of the ^ of

Chfaiistts^ won a decisive victory; o

The proscriptions of the victor, undertaken on a scale and with a fierceness beside which the cruelties of the Marians seemed mild, inflicted an irreparable harm on the senatorial cause. Italy could not be made safe for the Senate either on these or on any other terms. It was easy for Sulla to draw up a new con- stitution, depriving the assemblies of their initiative, the tribun- ate of its importance, the equestrian order of their new judicial privileges, and precluding the continuous exercise of the higher ^offices of the state in order iliat the Senate might shine with an unchallenged lustre. What neither Sulla nor anyone else could do was to fight against the stars in their courses. In quiet times an oligarchical assembly, served by annual magistrates, might survive the jealousy of the populace and the envy of the world of business and finance. An ambitious soldier or a great emer- gency were lethal. Sulla died in 78 b c. Eight years later Pompey and Crassus, each in command of a victorious army, undid his work.

Swiftly, but imperceptibly, the world was slipping into a new phase of history in which the old forms and methods of the Roman Republic were no longer effective. In the days before Marius a Roman army was composed of peasant proprietors en- listed from their farms for a summer campaign and afterwards, when the fighting was over, well content to return to the pleasant livelihood which awaited them at home. I-<cvies so com- posed and so supported constituted no danger to the republican state. But as the march of Roman conquest advanced and the military problems confronting the Republic increased in scale, this old-fashioned domestic way of levying war no longer suf- ficed. The military reforms of Marius marked a revolution. The Roman army became in practice a long-service force of profes- sional soldiers. A vast change was imposed by the stenv pressure of circumstance, the implications of which, since they were costly and unpleasant, wcie, as often happens when novelty is dis- agreeable, never boldly faced. The Senate failed to malize that, unless the Republic controlled the professional armies by mak- ing itself responsible for their pay and pensions, the protesionat

Sa HitTOAX or KOROPS

i

armies would the Republic. It failed to see that, while

an army recruited in the old short-service way from the farms was already provided for, a professional army recruited in the new R^ng-service way was not. It refused to listen to the de- mands which came from the commanders that the soldiers under their command should receive the guerdon of their ser- vices. And since it declined to work out a system of military pensions, it taught the armies to look, not to the state, but to the military chiefs who had promised rewards to the troops under their command, and were alone in a mood and a position to secure them.

One reason, therefore, why the Republic gave way to the Empire was that it provided no solution of the military problem created by the span of its conquests.

Another was its incapacity to police the streets of Rome. The idea of a professional police force, which is at once the friend of the people and the impartial protector of law and order, was alien to the conceptions both of the ancient and of the medi- aeval world. Rome knew nothing of the kind. At no time, how- ever, was the capacity of the government to keep order in the streets at a lower point of cfliciency than during the period which is described in the letters of Cicero. The republican government in its last days was not only unable to control the commanders of the legions, it was not strong enough to put down the armed gangs of the political factions who were strug- gling for power in the streets of the capital itself.

Pompey was not one of those men who swing instinctively tvith the spirit of the masses, or apprehend the approach of great revolutions. By early association he was a member of the optimate, or aristocratic, parry, but he had affiliations with the democrats, and was fitted by a certain moderation of temper and laziness of view to occupy an arbitral position between the two rival factions. He had no taste fojr party management, no base absorption in money getting, none of the eloquence or literary culture which gave to Cicero his unique position in the Senate and the Forum. But he was a soldier, a gentleman, and a patriot, well content to be the servant of the Republic on condition that no rival aspired to be its master.

The great opportunity which was given to this able but some- what enigmatic figure came to him in 67 b.c. He was then called upon by popular acclaim to put down the CiUcian pirates

K£FUBX.tC AK9 EMptRC

73

whose depredations had even caused a lamine in Rome. The tas^ estimated to last three years, was accomplished* brilliantly and once for all in seven months, but on its hctU came a wider and more important commission. The crushing victories of Sulla had failed to satisfy Mithradates of his inferiority. The irrepressible monarch was still in the field, and still capable, despite many reverses, of inflicting upon a Roman army the ignominy of a defeat. Pompey was commissioned to retrieve the situation, and endowed under the Manilian law with the largest powers.

The confidence of the Roman people was not misplaced. The eagles were carried to the Caspian and the Euphrates, Mith- radates was driven into the Crimea. Cilicia, Syria, and Bithynia Pontus were annexed to the Republic. In a short five years Pompey had made Rome mistress of hither Asia, leaving be- hind him the name, not only of a successful general, but of a founder of cities, a friend of civilization, a wise and humane administrator. His work was not seriously disturbed till the coming of Islam.

Fresh from this resplendent achievement, he asked the Senate to confirm his Asian treaties and to make a grant of land to his veterans. His requests were refused. Though he had dis- banded his armies, he was still suspect, confronted by that strong spirit of republican puritanism which has been a force in European politics from Cato to Robespierre, and by the vanity of policicians, unable to measure the size of men and events. But what the Senate had refused, the democratic leaders were prepared, upon terms, to grant. He entered (6o b.c.) into a compact with*Crassus, the millionaire manager of the democratic party, and with Caesar, his brilliant lieutenant. The consideration for Caesar was a year of the consulate to be followed by five years of the Gallic and Illyrian commands.

No one would have predicted that the youngest member of this triumvirate would outrange Pompey in military renown and change the face of Europe. Save for a year's soldiering in Spain, when he was already past forty, Caesar had no experience dn the handling of troops. As an " intellectual " trained under the best Greek masters, as an eloquent advocate in the forum, and a skilful manager of democratic intrigues, he was well known in the capital. His gallantries, his lavish spectacles and entertain- ments, his debts, were famous, and since he was the nephew of

74 A uiutomie ow eukoji^b

hUtAm tfiufi of Ciiina» rumour was prom{»t to fssoctam

itibti 1»ith tvtxf dark plot to upset the Republic* >

Solpetbing of the true scale of the man appeared dutibg W jpA of consulship. He passed a decree to put down extortioil*^ swept aside constitutional fetters, and showed that he meant to have his way in Rome: but it was eight wonderful cam* a.c. paigns in Gaul which revealed for the first time his full range as a soldier and a statesman. Everything he set out to accom- plish was secured. The frontiers of Rome were extended to Ac ocean and the Rhine, and, so defined, the Gaul of Caesar remains graven this day on the heart of France.

It is no deduction from his renown that the Celtic tribes of Gaul were ill armed, ill disciplined, and honeycombed wiA rivalries. Caesar knew bow to avail himself of every weakness* He could cajole as well as threaten, conciliate as well as coerce. In Ac early stages of his Gallic war he was helped by Ac Aedui and Ac Rcmi. Later, when his old allies had turned against him, the Gallic cavalry, in the critical fight before Alesia, was routed by a body of German horsemen, whom, with a prompt seosse of the military value of these giants of the north, Caesar had enlisted in the Roman army. It was perliaps also a fortun- ate incident that he first appeared rather as the defender than as the assailant of the Celtic tribes of Gaul, repelling a great popular migration from Helvetia, and then a formidable intru- sion from the German forests. But no one can read the sober narrative in which Caesar himself dcsciibes his Gallic campaigns without realizing the breadth and audacity of his conceptions, his personal courage, his wonderful combination of patience and velocity, and the fidelity and skill with which he was served. At every extremity of Gaul he gave evidence of Roman power. He crossed Ac Rhine to impress Ac Germans, the Channel twice to overawe the Britons, and built a fleet on the lower waters of Ac Rhine to help the Celtic mariners of the channel to realize that Rome was mistress of Ae seas.' Three great barbarian leaders, Ariovistiis, the German, Cassivclaunus, the Briton, and Vcrcingcr torix, the Arverman noble who headed the last and most formid- able rally of the Gauls, went down before him.

It is easy to conceive Ac Arill of excitement which Aese con- quests must have caused in Ae Roman world. Southern Gaul had long been overnin by Roman farmers and graziers, money- lenders and contractors. But now a vast territory, contiguous to

iRSPVBauie ANH A*

' < ** |mt hitheno little ifeh Itt flodts Md

IbjMdl, BiithiUile lor tillage, abounding in potende} tiavee, and Ittwd^g aintott inexhaustible opportunities for trade and com* ' uneroe* was liud open to the Roman view. And beyond Gaul lay another reservoir of slave labour, the mysterious idand of Britain, long famous for its tin mines, but otherwise litde vidted even by the adventurous seamen of Marseilles, and now ihovirn to be easily accessible to the Roman legions. In comparison with this spectacular development of exploration and conquest at the very door of Italy, the distant triumphs of Pompey lost some* thing of their original lustre.

There was, however, in Rome itself a clique of hard-bitten lepublicans, in whose eyes the very scale of these achievements constituted an offence. The optimates had never trusted the mercurial chieftain of the popular party. They hated his hardy spirit, his mocking defiance of established creeds and customs, his patent contempt for constitutional pedantries, and after the Gallic conquests they feaied the sharp edge of his sword. They were therefore resolved that when, on March i, 49 B.C., the time should come for Caesar to lay down his proconsular command, he should for a time at least be depressed to the station of a private citizen, unprotected by the sacrosanctity of public office, and deprived of all possibility of public harm.

Into these busy machinations Pompey allowed himself to be drawn by men whose party passions were probably a good deal more violent than his own. Detaching himself from Caesar, his father-in-law and former ally, and perhaps influenced by acci- dents of personal history, such as the death of Julia, his wife, and his remarriage to the daughter of a severe republican, Pompey drifted into the headship of the conservative party. As time pro- ceeded, the quarrel became malignant. Clodius, Caesar’s political agent in Rome, was murdered by Milo, the bravo of the opposite faction. A reasonable proposal for compromise was rejected by the Pompeians. It became plain to Caesar that his enemies were implacable and that they wanted his blood. The long renown of the Roman Republic, for Pompey was sole consul and the lawful civil ruler of that ancient state, had no terrors for the master of the Gallic legions. Crossing the Rubicon in January, 49 B.C., he tnaiched his famous veterans, amid the acclamations of the countryside, down the Adriatic coast, drove Pompey out of Italy, and upset the constitution which had served Rome for five

^5 A HISTORT OF EUROPE

hundred years and even yet commanded the passionate loyalty of some of her noblest sons,

IVluch fighting lay still before Caesar. There were enemy legions in Spain, in Epirus, in Africa; and Roman republicans of the iron stamp of Cato were not the men to cede their clierished ideals without a struggle. But at the end of four years the favourite of fortune had triumphed over all his enemies in the field. He had beaten Pompey at Pharsalus, vanquished the republican levies in Africa and Spain, and even found time to dally with Cleopatra in Egypt, and to punish a king of Pontus in his distant home on the Euxine.

Then, in July, 45 b.c., he returned to Rome, bringing to the task of reorganization the greatest civil intelligence which had yet been seen in Europe.

Seven months later, at the age of fifty-eight, he fell by the hands of two repulilican fanatics.

In that brief space of time Caesar laid the foundations of the Roman Empire. There were no proscriptions or confiscations. The new ruler intended himself to be regarded, not as the victorious head of a tindictive faction, hut as the healer of civic wounds, as the master of a united society. All power, civil and military, was concentrated in his hands. The commanders of the legions and the rulers of the provinces were no longer the nominees of the Senate or assemblies, but the legates of the great soldier, who, after the crowning victory of Munda, was also created dictator for life. Yet the old constitution, the centre of so many loyalties and affections, was still in name preserved. The Senate, enlarged and diluted, the Comitia, the republican magis- tracies, continued to function, but as instruments in the hands of a military commander, who at the same time was consul and had the sacrosanctity of a tribune for life. Indications ivere also given that the supreme power so constituted would be used for wise and beneficent ends. Decency was restored to the capital by the dissolution of the factious guilds and the limitation of the corn dole; but with the recognition of the cogent need for discipline went a large vision of the wants of Italy. The generous ideas of the Gracchi were taken up by their political heir, but worked out with greater prudence and on an ampler scale. The fran- chise was granted to Cisalpine Gaul. Every city government in Italy was the better for Caesar’s touch.

SBPVBtlC AND BMPIXB

TJ

The wodd was in need of such a man. There was no outrage to the dvUian conscience in a government which, though created by the sword and contemptuous of republican forms, enthroned the civil above the military power. In our age, the ideals of Caesarism would be sharply challenged by national sentiment and democratic doctrine. Neither of these great fashioning forces existed in the civilized world during this cen* tury. There were no nations, no democracies, not even a general intellectual interest in politics, but on the one side an old- fashioned civic Republic, unable even to police the streets of Rome, and on the other a vast society of men and women hungering for peace that it might meditate on religion or philo- sophy, or taste the sweets of its fast expanding wealth.

BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED

T. Mommsen: History of Rome. Tr. W. P. Dirkson. $ vols. 1894.

H. F. Pelham: History of Rome. Outlines of Roman History. 4th Ed.

• 905-

Sir Charles Oman: Seven Roman Statesmen. 1902.

J. L. Strachan Davidson: Cicero and the Fail of the Roman Republic. ' *894.

Warde Fowler: Julius Caesar, and the Foundation of the Roman System. 1892.

W. E. Heitland: Short History of the Roman Republic. 1911.

Gaston Boissier: Ciceron et ses Amis. 1877.

C. Bailey: Phases in the Religion of Ancient Rome. 1932.

C. Bailey (ed .): The Mind of Rome. 1926.

C. Bailey (ed.); The Legacy of Rome. 1925.

H. D. L(Hgh and W. W. How: History of Rome to the Death of Caesar. 18^.

Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. IX.

T. Rice Holmes: 1 he Roman Republic. 1923.

G. Feneio: Greatness and Decline of Rome. Tr. A. E. Zimmern and H. J. Chaytor. s vols. 1907-09.

Tenney Frank: An Economic History of Rome till the End of the Republic. 1927.

CHAPTER vm

STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

The end ef the CM War. Actium. Augustus and VirgS. Bounds of the imptre. Absence of a fixed rule of successton. Expansion of the Empire. Romanuatton of the provinces. Roman tolerance. The age of the Antonines. The third century. Barbaric pressure and imperial defence. Growth of religious interest. Stoicism, Oriental cults. The Christians. Decay of patriotism. Roman education. Its defects and merits. Absence of sitenlific and technical progress. Gradual im- poverishment. Currency, Decline of the population in numbers and quality. The army: its composition and numbers.

The murdei of Julius Caesar plunged everything once more into chaos and uncertainty. There was a war between the Caesarians and the Republicans, and again a war of succession between the Caesarians themselves. The blood of Cicero, the last prophet of the Roman Republic, the gieatest oiator and humanist of his age, was shed in an otgy of retribution for the crime of the Ides of Marcli. Nor was the quarrel confined to Italy. It extended to every quarter of the Empire, which it threatened to disrupt. Parthians fought at Philippi for'Biutus and Cassius. GreAs commanded the pirate fleet of Sextus Pompeius, which for seven years held die seas for the icpublitan cause. The fleets and treasures of Egypt were thrown into the scale in the last deciding phase of the conflict.

Eventually and by slow dcgiees light broke through the clouds. 6jB.c.- Octavius, the adopted son and great-nephew of Julius Caesar,

A.O. iq vvas at liis great-uncle’s death in his nineteenth year; but though

young in years, and with litde* aptitude for the profession ol arms, he was old in prudence and heir to a famous nain«>- From the first he deterntined to have everything, but from the first was wise enough to see that he was not strong enough to have every- thing at once. Mark Antony, formerly Caesar’s Master of du Horse, was, on the date of his patron’s murder, sole consul and de facto niler of Italy, and, had the brilliance of a soldier beer supported by the gifts of a statesman, his authority would hav< been difficult to shake. But Antony met more than his match is

»««4lf»MA|l ftUWtMM < 79

iifWiiiifMiitied to otabluh otillnii Jbuitdiitiaiu tibe of tho Gies^ Octtvios fovglit Um, treated aith )dm, wed ibliit as an all^ against Bmtus, and tbeti quieted )dm with ^ htteof the east, wl^ hemployed huowUsagadouscaetglet tel ^ problems ol Italy, Spain, and GauL The sedi«;itiomo£ thb Xdemutt worked on the emotional temperament of Antony.

WhDje the prudent Octavius was deepening his hdd on the aifeo> lions of the Italian people, Antony drifted into the vices, the languors, the credulities of the east. Vast, nebulous ambidons Boated before his brain, fostered, perhaps, by Qeopatra, Ids Egyptian siren, who captured his love and for nine years cor* rupted his will. He claimed to be the god Dionysus, and, having mastered the east, to extend his domination to Italy. At the sea fight at Aenum his dream was shattered. Octavius, with a fleet S0pt,j$, organised by his friend Agrippa and all the resources of the west 3 ^ ax. behind him, was stronger than any power which could then be recruited in the Levant. The consequences of his victory were momentous. The presumpuon of Cleopatra was avenged by the annexation of Egypt, with its great wealth, its advanced me&ods of accountancy, business, and finance; and the Roman Empire, which seemed likely to split into an eastern and a western half, was soldered together during those critical centuries, when the establishment of a world state seemed providentially designed to give support to the aspirations for a world religion.

The new government set itself to work to cure the evils which had been bequeathed by two centuries of war. The empire of Augustus, as Octavius now (January 16, 27 a c.) came to be called, stood for peace and clemency, order and justice. It was a symbol of the new era that thirty-two legions were demobilized and re- warded without confiscations. The bonders were defoided by standing armies, the adminisuadon placed upon a business foot* ing by the formadon of a bureaucracy, by a statistical survey, and by the introduction, most probably from Egypt, of a regular system of pubhc accounts. Ignorant amateurs were no longer entrusted with unlimited powers to enrich themselves at the ex- pense of the provinces which had been submitted to their charge.

The legates of Augustus were experts, flanked by independent financial ofificers responsible only to the Emperor, and if they proved themselves worthy were continued in their province. Sc organized the piovindal system of the Roman Empire stood the lest of centuries and stamped itself deeply on the life of Euziqie.

89 A CtlSTORT OP EUROPS

i

It wad part ol the prudence of Augustus to preserve the torms of liberty so dear to a proud and conservative people. If his person was sacrosanct, it was because at stated intervals he solicited and received at the hands of the people the tribunician power; if his authority was unchallenged, it was because the people had given him the legions, the provinces, and the pro- consular authority in Rome itself. His innovations, which were vast, but harmless because they were gradual, were concealed under the guise of a republican restoration, and the master of the civilized world was content to be known as Princeps, the first citizen of a free state.

There has never been a more valuable government than that of this thrifty, respectable, long-headed, and long-lived represen- tative of the Italian middle class. Under Augustus power for the first time became consistently helpful, benign, and even paternal* The odious extortions of the capitalist oligarchy who in the last days of the Republic had ruined the provinces were at an end. The Princeps made war on irrcligion and race-suicide and attempted to restore the wholesome morals and immemorial pieties of the Italian race. It was noted of him that he had a full measure of the countryman's superstitions, that he loved truth and hated flattery, that he was discreet in the choice of counsellors, affable to his friends, and intolerant of pride in his associates. Agrippa, the contriver of his victories, and Maecenas, the discerning patron of the arts,' gave lustre and variety to his court. A society just escaped from the galling trials of civil war was little disposed to quarrel with a prince so accessible and con- siderate, or with a system which afforded to every class in the community an honourable career in the public service. The modest Augustus, who was rightly hailed as a saviour of his country, could not escape the divine honours which had actually been accorded to his brilliant uncle; and the worship of the Emperor, gently insinuated into the family and local cults of Rome and with some ostentation practised in the provinces, was soon regarded as a helpful bond of union in a providential state.

Yet, important as was the achievement of Augustus, it would have meant far less for the world but for the image which the spectacle of Roman greamess created in the minds of two writers of gem'us.

It so happens that Virgil, the inspired poet of Italy, and Livy, the romantic historian of the Roman Republic, were both born

TBJt AOMAM SMPIAB

8 l

in that (Ssalpitut leg^on which had to lately been incojrporatedi in the Koman state^-Virgil at Andes, near Mantua, in 70 B.a, and livy at Padua in 59 b.c. But i£ there was Celtic blood in either writer, it was compatible with an ardour of Italian patriotism so strong as to kindle for all time a sense of Roman virtue and greatness in the imagination of mankind. The beau- tiful landscape of Italy is painted in the Georgies, the historic mission of Rome unfolded in the Aeneid. Upon that age these two wonderful works of a shy poet, nature lover, scholar, savant, patriot, fell with the force of a revelation. A supreme master of Latin letters, inviting comparison with Homer himself, had burst upon the scene, ^ving lessons to grammarians in language, to rhetoricians in eloquence, to ritualists in ceremonial, to poets in music. Moreover, this great artist had a message. He preached the love of Italy, the mission of Rome, the gospel of patriotic duty. He discerned in the rise of the Roman Empire a new hope for the human race, a hope of peace, of order, of civiliza- tion. So long dominant was his gospel in Europe that Dante, writing in the spirit of the great concluding passage of the first Georgic, assigns Brutus and Cassius, the murderers of Julius Caesar, to the lowest pit of the Inferno with Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Christ.

The empire, as it was finally shaped by Augustus, included Spain, Gaul, Italy and the Balkans, the north coast of Africa, Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor. The Mediterranean was a Roman lake. Every people who had contributed to the sum of western civilization was now subjected to Rome. In the north and north-west, the two quarters from which the pressure of the barbarian world was most to be feared, the empire was defended by the Danube and the Rhine, a long river frontier behind which were ranged in uncalculated numbers the valiant tribesmen of Germany. The conquest of this tumultuous people, had it been achieved by Augustus, would have changed the course of Euro- pean history, for a frontier drawn from the Baltic to the Danube by the line of the Elbe and the Morava would have been rela- tively short and easy to defend. But a single military disaster in a German forest was sufficient to deter the Emperor from furtlier a.d. 9 adventures in a difficult, unexplored, and uninviting land.

After the loss of Varus and his legions, Augustus resolved to stand on the defensive. His decision was wise. The world needed

AT m Greatest Extent vsder Trajan,

'$I$U XOIMtAM ||

The JMraiiMu pad 0 caiioa H mu h ioelf a tadc to eini^of ttoe eneigiea of the jinmg j^piie, aad the hi^wu ttatkmeii on the Rhine could not be exiMtcted At one and the seme time to police Gaul and conquer GeiUixanf. Yet, how> enf wise and inevitable it may have been, the determination to st^hainfrom a resolute attempt to include the Germans within the Emjdre was none the less momentous. The long new frontier was not permanently held, and Italy and Gaul were overwhelmed belore Rome had civilized Its Teutonic conquerors. Six centuries of intellectual darkness were the tremendous penalty consequent upon the premature breakdown of the Imperial defences.

The work of Augustus was continued by his stepson and sue* a.d. oessor Tiberius, an excellent soldier and administrator, whose reign of twenty-three years, odious as it appeared to the aristo- cratic frondeurs of Rome, did much to consolidate the Imperial system. That the Empire responded to a general need is suffi- ciently evidenced by its survival despite the almost inconceiv- able crimes and vices of many of its rulers. The three immediate successors of Tiberius were a madman, a pedant, and a monster.

Yet it is probable that the freaks of Caligula, the pedantries of Claudius, and the atrocities of Nero, distasteful as they must have been to the better elements of Roman society, made little impression upon the larger life of the Empire. What was more serious was the absence of any fixed rule of succession. Such was the piejudice against the mere thought of an hereditary mon- archy that despite the manifold evils of a system which often remitted the choice of an Emperor to the clamour of the troops and more than once involved the Empire in civil discords, the idea of Caesarism as an autocracy founded on popular election was never lost sight of. The death of Nero, the lit representa- ^ tive of the Julio-Claudian house, was the signal for the emergence of four rival Emperors and for a year of anarcliy during which a battle was fought in Rome itself which is said to have cost fifty thousand lives. Then ensued a happier century inaugurated by Vespasian (a.d. 69-79), ^ Sabine soldier, and lasting until the death of Marqus Aurelius (a.d. 180), during which the trans- nsisrion of the supreme power was peaceably effected at first

heredity and afmrwards through the sensible practice of adoption. It is to tins last practice that Rome owes the choice of Trajan, the great Spanish conqueror of Dacia, of Hadrian, the universal genius, and of AntmiiauB Pius, the emhodinient of

A HISTORY OF SUROPE

64

the best virtues of the Italian country gentleman. But these 4,D. tgs standards were not maintained. I'he elevation of Perdnax» who was the choice of the Praetorian Guard, set an evil example to every legionaiy camp on the frontier. The diadem became the prize of ambitious soldiers and its transmission the occasion of civil strife. The results were such as might be expected from a system under which military leaders chosen by distant troops and imposed by violence were suddenly called upon to undertake the greatest political responsibility in the world. The rulers of Rome in the third century were often bad and always insecure. Of the twenty-three Emperors wlio preceded Diocletian (a.d. 284), all but three died violent deaths.

^ It was said of the wise Augustus that he left a solemn injunc- tion upon his successors to be content with the existing frontiers of the Empire. All experience, however, shows that nothing is so difficult as to arrest the enterprise of a people once infected with ideas of conquest and exploration. While Christ and His dis- ciples were preaching the gospel of renunciation, the Italians, animated by a spirit as far removed as possible from that of the Galilean, were pushing into new markets, developing new enterprises, exploring new lands, and clamouring for new con- quests. Claudius, the boorish, self-indulgent invalid, yielding to the exalted spirit of his times, began the serious conquest of Britain and added Thrace, Mauretania, and Judea to the Roman provinces. Even under Nero, to whom nothing was serious save his own reputation as an actor and a vocalist, places so far distant as the flats of Anglesca and the highlands of Armenia were subjected by Roman arms. To the Flavian Emperors belongs the credit of seizing the strategical importance of Vienna and of connecting the Danube with the Rhine by a chain of fortified posts.

Nor WM It until the later part of the second century, under the ragn of Marais Aurelius, the noblest of the Emperors, that the Roman guard at length gave way. In i6i a.d. a horde of bar- tonans. the Marcomanni from Bohemia, the Quadi from Moravia, forcing the north-eastern barrier of Italy at its lowest and m^t vulnerable point, besieged Aquileia-^ symptom of ^ tog, .0 com,, and a warning £^4

could no longer count upon the Augustan peace. ^

Meanw^le the Roman legions, defending the Imperial fron- 8 as they did during the two centuries which followed the

THS HUMAN JBMFlHi:

»5

battle o£ Actium, preserved to posterity the priceless gift of Greco-Roman dvilizatioo* It is to the respite from external in- vasion so obtained that wc must ascribe the permanent roman- ization of France and Spain, and that most important though more superficial romanization of Britain which, though almost wholly obliterated by the Saxon conquest of the fifth century, has bequeathed to us the city of London and our Roman roads. Behind die spears and shields of the legions Iberian and Gaulish schoolboys blundered through the Latin Grammar, hence- forward the quickest passport to worldly success, as their parents learnt from the conquering people the manner of its baths and theatres, its meals and festivals, its amphitheatres and law courts, or the empty and elegant ritual demanded by its gods. Behind the buckler of Roman valour the knowledge of Latin spread as English has spread in India, or supersedes for the Greek or Italian immigrant to the United States the use of his native tongue. Latin was the avenue to public employment, public dignity, literary renown. The members of the senatorial order, a kind of imperial peerage, spoke Latin and lived as Latins did. The humble German or Briton who waited upon the rich Roman invalid as he took the cure at Wiesbaden or Bath would doubt- less furnish himself with some scraps of a vocabulary which the student of Terence and Plautus may recognize today; and upon a higher scale, as new towns sprang up and received colonists frbm Rome, men of distinguished talent would come forward, a Seneca or a Lucan from Corduba, an Apuleius from the Roman province of Africa, and add to the splendour of Latin letters.

Grim and terrible as was the process of Roman conquest, it brought happiness and prosperity in its train. If some provinces like Rhaetia and Britain were backward, in others, notably in Gaul and southern Spain, the progress was amazing. Here there was developed during the two hundred years of the Augustan peace a flourishing city life which vied with that of Italy itself. Old towns were expanded and glorified, new towns grew up round legionary camps or in response to the needs of expanding commerce, so that the Empire became a great association of municipalities, tending to be assimilated, so far as their rights and privileges went, to the colonics and municipia of Italy. To the provincials of Lyons or Toledo, of Autun or Saragossa. Rome was the glass of fashion. The amusements, the occupations, the

86 I A 0F

itudiai of the cental iw»e fblloived in the ptovincau If a liook were poimfat inlRonie, copice would be eagerly a^tted by the reading public in Lyons, and many a weD^ppointed villa hi Baedcia or Provence must have afforded to the wealthy Italian visitor a cuisine and a library not wholly unworthy of Ws pleasant country home among the Alban hills.

Tacitus said of his countrymen, " They value the reality of the Empire, but disregard its empty show.” It was part of the Roman strength to mingle diplomacy with force, to make no more disturbance of local customs than was necessary, to attack only such forms of religious belief as, like the worship of the Druids, were political in their object, and to preserve old laws and institutions where, as in Egypt or in Sicily, they adjudged them to be good. When the soldiers had done their butchers* work, military predominance was kept in the background. The legions were employed to make roads, to build amphitheatres and aqueducts, and generally to assist in making as rapidly as possible the material fabric within which the common life of a civilized community could proceed; but they were not ob- truded. The great legionary camps were on the frontiers, and a traveller might voyage from Marseilles to Boulogne without catching the glint of a Roman hclinct. To outward seeming Rome's handsome estate might be held together by nothing but the invisible tics of good humour and good will.

The age of the Antonincs was selected by Gibbon as that in which the state of the human race in the west was happier than at any period either before or since. The full weight of the bar- baric pressure upon the fionticrs had not yet made itself felt The burden of taxation was still light. A large cultivated middle class enjoyed a rich inheritance of literature in circumstances of great material comfoit. Amusements on a lavish scale were pro- vided for tlie many, the chaiiot races in the dreus, the gladiatorial games and combats of wild beasts in the amphitheatre, an easy access to the public baths. A pleasant intercommunion, unvexed by the modern fanaticisms of creed and race, of nationality, lan- guage and colour, spiead from one end of the Empire to the other. In the service of Rome, Syrians and Spaniards, Africans and Britons mingled together without difficulty or wounding dis- crimination. A wide and indulgent tolerance was the mark of the age. The peoples of the Empire were too close to the Romans ^ in race and too quick to assimilate Roman culture ever to be.

■* ^ '

ilk iQf T!ie trate «#>

governing tend mudh to thAiMKdvMb Of inBl|^ m mkIi tfuere was no persecution, for the fioaum I^tattheon was hotf^t* Abie to every god. Sodal customs were embodied Id the grow* ing labiic of Roman law, local languagc^Puidc;, Lycaonian, Celtic-permitted to coesist with lingua franca of the Empire which was Ladn. Cruelty, indeed, existed then at it musts now; but the humanitarian might reflect that the slave trade had died down, that freedmen could win thcdr way to wealth and authority, and that even a slave might exercise an influence as an author in a society where careers were open to talent. Of the ultimate fate of the Empire there were as yet no apprehensions. It was the universal and comforting belief that Roman rule would endure for ever.

A change came with the third century a.d. After the strain of the Marcomaimic War certain ominous S 3 rmptoms made them- selves for the first time increasingly evident. Already in the time of Augustus grave anxiety was felt as to the falling birth- rate of Italy. Legislation was attempted, but while the natality of Jews, Egyptians, and Germans steadily advanced, the Italian birth-rate continued to fall. The wastage of almost incessant warfare, the practice of infanticide, the growth of luxury and self-indulgence, the inability of science, as then conceived, to cope with the sanitary problems of large towns, were among the Causes which contributed to the depletion of the man power in the two leading coimtries in the Mediterranean. By the age of Marcus Aurelius there was little left of the virile population of ancient Greece or of the best breeding stodcs of Rome and Italy. Even among the Emperors and their relations tlie mil to found large families seems to have been absent. And to these unhappy tendencies there was added a series of devastating plagues, begin- ning in i66 A.D. with the return of the troops of Avidius Cassius from the east, and observed to be specially fatal to Italians.

It was idle to expect that the defence of the Empire could be entrusted to Italians only. Nor was this in faa ever the practice. Auxiliary troops, drawn from every quarter of the compass, from Palm 3 rra and the Balearic Islands, from Germany and Illyria. ha<| assisted the legions in their dgils and excursions. But after the Marcomannic War it was found that these measures no longer sufficed to meet the growing difficulties of the state. A policy was then for the fiirst time initiated of directly opening

88 , A SlSTOltV OF COROPB

the Bmpiie to odkmizatiiMi. Blocks of barbarian tmrnors were invited to settle on the waste places behind the Roman frontiers. Once inaugurated, the process of infiltration continued. From the opening of the third century the great traditions of Greek and Roman dvilization were protected almost entirely by troops of alien origin, living with their wives and families a half-civilian life in the standing camps along the confines of the Empire. The most responsible posts in the army and the state might be filled by men devoid of any drop of Italian blood. The two best generals of Marcus Aurelius were Syrians. During the third century one Emperor was a Syrian, another an Arab, a third an African, springing from a family whose familiar speech was Punic. The African was Septimius Severus, who was raised to the purple by the Pannonian legions in 190 a.d., and died in York in ax I A.D. His name should be known in England, for by repairing Hadrian’s wall, between the Solway and the Tyne, he secuied for Britain a century of peace.

The third century of the Christian era is memorable for the work of two great Roman jurists, Ulpian and Papinian, both of Asiatic origin, and for a late and brilliant flowering of Greek literature, illustrated by the profound mystical writings, har- monizing Christian belief with Platonic thought, of the Alexan- drian philosopher Plotinus. It was an age of great distraction and unhappiness, during which the pressure of the barbarian tribes upon the defences of the Empire became increasingly severe, reaching a climax in the middle of the century when the Goths, a northern people of fair-haired giants, sacked most of what was worth plundering in the Balkans, seized the Crimea, and, after pillaging many flouiishing cities in the Euxine and Asia Minor, crowned their pirate course by burning to the ground the great Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. It was an age in which Tarragona, in the hear^ of Spain, was sacked by a wandering band of Franks from Germany, when the Alemanni carried fire and sword through the valleys of the Rhone and Po, and Antioch, the key of Roman power in the east was held, now by a King of Persia, and now by a rebel Queen of the desert city of Palmyra. It was an age also of sharp civil discords, of clashes between rival emperors and rival armies, the main centre of power lying throughout with the Pannonian legions, schooled m the ^rd life of the Danube frontier, and with the Illyrian

T8K kOMAM

BoUIiets whom from time to time it wat tibdbr pleasure lo ruse to the purple. Yet grave as were the dangers which assailed the Roman Empire in the third century, often as it must have teemed likely to contemporaries either that Gaul would fall away on the one side, or that the east would pass out of Roman control on the other, or that the whole Greco-Roman world would be overwhelmed and ruined by the barbarism of the north, the task of defence was in fact accomplished. Advanced pasitions were, indeed, abandoned. From the Black Forest and the plain of Transylvania the legions fell back to the Rhine and the Danube, the old frontiers of Augustus; and it is significant of the increased insecurity that Aurelian, the brilliant soldier, who *7® 5 drove the Germans out of Italy and restored Gaul and the east to a common obedience, thought it prudent to fortify Rome.

Meanwhile in this time of general strain and anxiety the Mediterranean world was becoming increasingly occupied with the thought of a life beyond the grave.

The old paganism of the Roman people, which had still a long life before it in the hill villages of Italy, was a pleasant, un- moral, tolerant creed, free from the control of clerics or the vexation of inquisitors, and easily harmonized with those popular festivals and amusements of which it was, indeed, an integral part; but it had long since ceased to claim the allegiance of the finer natures or the better minds. It responded to none of the deeper needs of conscience. It answered to none of the claims of intellect. To thinking men and women, philosophy, which ever since the days of Zeno and Epicurus had become increasingly occupied with problems of conduct, offered a stronger and more satisfying diet. Before Christianity had be- come a European religion, educated people in the Roman Empire were familiar with the conception of a monotheistic faith and of a dedicated life.

In the society of the second century the philosopher filled a definite place, as a spiritual counsellor, a healer of inward dis- tress, performing many functions which were afterwards dis- charged by the father confessors of the Roman Church. Under the worst of the Roman tyrants Stoic philosophers had been found brave enough to speak their minds and to defend the full dignity of man, and, were reason a sufficient sup^rt for human frailty. Stoicism, the noblest contribution which the pagan

go \ A ov ^urdfs

world had to offer to the art and adeaoe o£ righteous would have secured for itself a permanent influence in ht»i^ society,

To Mediterranean men, athirst for colour^ imagery, and cotF solation, a system of austere monotheism and reasoned ecfases'. could never bring full satisfaction. The Roman world tumod with increasing interest to the ardent cults of the east, like those of Isis and Serapis, and Mithras, the soldier’s god, which offered to all, however humble in station or mean in intellect, the boon of purifying mysteries and the hope of eternal life. It is in reality with these eastern creeds, rather than with the* Olympian gods of Homer, that the eventual battle of Chris- tianity was fought. Ihe worshippers of the Egyptian Isis, the Phrygian Cyhele, and the Persian Mithras shared many beliefs which were afterwards to be found in the Christian system. They believed in a sacramental union with the divine being, either through a ritual marriage, or more simply through a ceremonial caring of the god*s flesh. The old riddle of birth and death, of fertility and decay, of the seed which flowers, and of the flower which letums to seed, was ever present to the religious imagination of the east. A god dying amid wails and lamenta- tions, but resurgent amid cries of welcoming joy, was a central feature in these oriental mystery cults. In such symbolism the devotees of Mithras and of Isis found warrant for a faith in ulti- mate deliverance from the grave,

It is easy, even weic the evidence of monuments less abundant, to account for the wide popularity of such hcliefs. No attempt was made to check them. Maicus Aurelius instituted a temple to Mithras on the Vatican hill. Aurelian made sun-worship the official religion of the state. “ The worship of Isis,” writes Dean Inge, was organized in a manner very like that of the Catholic Church. There was a kind of Pope, with priests, monks, singers, and acolytes. The images of the Madonna were crowned with true or false jewels, and her toilette was dutifully attended to every day. Daily matins and evensong were said in her chief temples. The pficsts were tonsured and wore white linen vest- ments.” Before Rome became Christian, it had become clerical, a city of temples and images, of priests and religious processions,* of cynic philosophers in cowls and coarse woollen gowns like the begging friars of the middle ages, of astrologers and magicians, such as always thrive amid public misfortunes.

^ vilit ^ ,

VRm, under die ndgn o£ Biodedaji^ &mt P i

iwlitical qsipiiai, it wafi not perhafis cBflkult to foteaee mat one **5 ^ dsKf the |>lace of the absent Empetor would be taken by a Eonian priest «.

FtOxn this pagan effervescence the sectaries of the Quristian leii^on stood austerely apart. As a secret society professing pacifist opinions and refusing to do sacrifice to the Emperor, dte Christians were suspect to authority, and from time to time, a$ under Decius and Valerian, were exposed to severe persecu- a.d.»4g- dons. The odium which in many quarters now attaches to the opponent of militarism and blood sports, and in a lesser degree to the feminist and the communist, was easily aroused by the spectacle of these eccentric fanatics, who denounced the cruel abominations of the amphitheatre, claimed equal treatment for the woman and the slave, and, spurning the delights of wealth and comfort, professed themselves the sole depositaries of truth.

A body offering so strong a challenge to the social and political convictions of the world was bound to be unpopular and to be misunderstood. The Christians were accused of atheism because they did not accept the pagan gods, of misanthropy because they denounced the debased amusements of the people, and of immorality because they were not comprehended. Yet the Church grew steadily, fostered rather than hindered by persecu* tion, which was never sufficiently systematic or continuous to be deadly. By the time of Aurelian Christian beliefs had spread widely through the east, and in Rome itself were firmly rooted, a.o. 270^ a rival influence to the established worship of the unconquerable sun,

It is perhaps to this growing concern for religion that we should in part ascribe a curious feature of the life and policy of the Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. The more people thought about the inner life, the less they cared about the out- ward accidents. The more they became involved in the new religious excitements, the less were they attracted by the laborious routine of secular duty. In that mobile cosmopolitan society there was little left of the old flame of jRoman patriotism. A new allegiance was beginning to claim an in- creasing number of earnest and valuable men and women in Gaul, in Italy, and in the Greek world. The state offered careers, hut had ceased to speak to the soul. As outward difficulties UCcumulated, government became more costly, more nervouai

93 A HISTORY EUROPR 4

and exacting. The pressure of the state upon the in-

dividual increased in a steadily diminishing temperature of political obedience. The spirit of evasion, of reluctance to pay the taxes in blood, in money, and in commodities, which the state demanded, spread through all classes. It was found in the peasants, in the traders, in the town councils, and it was met by a policy of repression which converted peasants, traders, and town councillors into the hereditary bondsmen of a servile state.

Tlie educational outlook of antiquity was necessarily coloured by the institution of slavery. Even for the most generous minds a sharp line was drawn between the small number of studies and pursuits which a free man might follow without loss of dignity, and the more utilitarian occupations from which he would properly shrink. Plato thought that retail trade was de- grading. Lucian, while admiring the statues of Praxiteles, was thankful that he had not been called upon to produce them. The conception which most generally prevailed was that the world consisted of a civilized society whose economic needs were provided by slaves and freedmen, foreigners and mechanics, for v/hom nature had ordained a life of service, and who stood out- side the charmed ciicle of the city. It followed that the educa- tion of civilized men concerned itself with those branches of knowledge which ministered to happiness or success in a society thus circumscribed.

In so far as it was not physical, education was concerned with the appreciation of poctiy, philosophy, and the fine arts. It trained taste, afforded a discipline in eloquence, and exhibited the ethical and political lessons of the past. Further it did not go. Nature, history, and religion found no place in the curri- culum. There was nothing in the ordinary education of the Roman clearly calculated to direct his mind to the grave social and economic problems i^hich lay around him. In the first century of the Empire slaves were so abundant that they revolutionized the agrarian economy of Italy; but no attempt was made to measure the productiveness of slave as compared with free labour. Indeed, Varro even goes so far as to advise the landowner to send freemen rather than slaves to work on un- healthy land, as the loss of a freeman would be less crippling than the death of a slave. Again, the steady depreciation of the currency during the third century was produaivc of manifold

t«a SMPtRS 93

evils and of a violent remedial measure in the rdgn of Aurelian, over which men fought and died by- the thousand in the streets of Rome. Yet no one put out a theory of currency or realized that bad money drives out good. So little were the elements of economic science understood that Diocletian, one of the wisest of the Emperors, issued an edict fixing prices ail over the Empire, and found, as many have found since his day, that not all the laws or penalties in the world can prevent men from buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market.

The Eton master of the eighteenth century flogged his boys. The Roman youth of the second and third centuries flogged his masters. A system under which the education of youth is mainly oitrusted to slaves cannot be wholesome; yet under favouring circumstances the literary training of a young Roman was probably as good as that which w'as received by an English boy in the reign of George III. In the sphere of grammar and liter* ary criticism a tradition of scholarly competence long outlived the glories of the Augustan age. The Latin classics were studied with care. An effort, not often successful, was made to teach' Greek as a subsidiary language. Education, however, cannot be carried on with success in airless compartments, but depends for its healthy growth' upon fresh currents of thought and in- terest sweeping in from the active intellectual life of the world outside. If great motives vanish from poetry and prose, they will disappear also from the teaching of the young. The singular decay of Latin language and literature, which set in during the third century, was accompanied by a corresponding decline in the serious effectiveness of western education. Here there was no ferment comparable to that exciting influence of Plato and Aris- totle, which so long sustained the intellectual life of the Univer- sity of Athens. Tlie pagan world of the west was ailing for lack of a popular literature. The Christian movement was regarded by its teachers as vulgar, foreign, and remote. It was, perhaps, a misfortune that the dominant intellectual influence in Latin education was that of a master of golden eloquence, for the ghost of Cicero hovered over every class-room. The imitation of his rounded periods became a schoolboy industry, and when the Empire was starving for statesmen and thinkers, the typical pro- duct of its schools was a shallow rhetorician.

To this narrow literary convention we may perhaps attribute tlie great lack of inventiveness in the praaical arts which is

V

94 i 4 HlstoHY oir «trEOl»x

oi" the Romsm people* There was no science afwf A.0. 117- ttipk of HedriaUt there were no technical improvement* 5^ ISlW in the art of war, so well understood and so brilliantly plractbed for many centuries, the Romans were curiously un* Inventive. Tlic Carthaginians taught them how to handle ships at sea. The Parthians taught them the value of mounted archery, the Balearic Islanders the use of the sling, the CJoths the penetrating power ol heavily armed cavalry. But with the exception of the raven/’ a moving platform constructed to en- able ships to be boarded, which was discovered in the First Punic War, and Greek fire, which was first put to decisive use in the sea fight at Actium, no important innovation in the mechanics of war was discovered by the most warlike of the Mediterranean peoples. The Roman legion inherited a long tradition of discipline. It was sturdier than its batbarian oppo- nents, less subject to wild panics, handier in manoeuvre: but it never enjoyed the mechanical advantages which in modern times have given to European troops a commanding ascendancy against uncivilized armies.

Most curious is the fact, only recently brought out by a French enquirer, that the true ait of harnessing draft horses was unknown to antiquity and only discovered in the west in the age of Charlemagne Much as the Greeks and Romans valued horses, skilful as were their chaiiotcers, they failed to see that no horse can pull its proper weight df the harness presses against the windpipe The industiial consequences of a wrong method of harnessing weie far reaching. The transport of heavy material by road was made eight times as costly as it need have been, and the concentration of material for the purposes of large-scale pro- duction was proportionately hindered.

Although the Roman Empire was an association of towns, the Romans weic never an industrial people. With some few exceptions the cities of Italy, Qaul, or Spain did not produce wealth for the surrounding country, still less did they attempt to supply a world market. Tlie wealth which was squandered in Rome during the first century had not been manufactured in the west, but was derived from the spoils of the conquered cast, A.0. once dissipated, was not replaced. By the reign of Vespasian 79 the impoverishment of the old senatorial class was already marked, and though happier times came under the Antonines, and large fortunes could still be made, the general level of

tlK»»i|*f>t)iS igi

continuoi to ikccead. CijrftdittaUjr tht towns shnuok bt size «&<1 peculation, and baing walled to meet tbe batazds dl tto third century, lost something of the abundance and expand sivenesa of their earlier life. The spreading suburbs, with their pleasant gmdens and marble villas, were no longer appropriate to those grim times. A stern fortress crowned the bill or dotnin* ated^^e plain. And long before the Roman Empire went down, its cides had adopted the mediaeval livery of fear.

The absence of any organized system of indastrial production in Roman society, accompanied as it was by a lack of econmnic forethought, had serious consequences, of which one example may here be given. Tlie devaluation of the coinage duiing d^e third century brought about the ruin of the middle class. In recent times a similar cause has produced a similar effect in one of the most advanced nations in Europe. But deadly as were the immediate effects of the fall of the German mark in 1923, these effects were soon icpaired by the productive energies of the German people assisted by the application of capital to industry. The Roman Empire possessed no such poweis of recuperation. There was no organized system of credit, no elaborate industrial plant, or skilled industiial or commercial leadership. The con* ditions under which a great economic reverse could be promptly retrieved did not exist.

More important was a decline in morale, a loss of heart, evi dedt even in the Senate, the body which should ha\e led the Commonwealth in the civic virtues of honour and independ- ence, courage and patriotism. No contiast can be more tragic than the picture which Livy paints of the Roman Senate in the days of its glory during the Punic Wars, and the image of the same assembly abasing itself in servile adulation before the sombre Tiberius, which Tacitus presents to his readers. In that loss of moral dignity and independence we may read the teriible price which Rome was compelled to pay for the civil wars and proscriptions which had decimated her ruling class, and ex* tingwshed the flame of republican liberty. Demoralization was hot, however, confined to the senators of Rome. Polybius, writing a hundred years before the days of Augustus, had pointed out the disastrous effects of luxury and immorality on the population of Greece. The causes which operated there were present throughout the Mediterranean littoral. Everywhere Save in Egypt there was a dearth of men, and everywheic the im*

^ A UISTOnir OF EUROPr

mediate reasou was the same, a reluctance to bring children into the world.

As the old families which had been the mainstay of the Roman state died out, new stocks came to the front, some of them sound and wholesome, but the greater number bearing little resemblance either in character or mentality to the men who fought in the Sabine or Punic Wars. Even in the first cen- tury, Juvenal had complained of the alien immigration into Rome. “The Orontcs,” he writes, “has flowed into the Tiber.” The evil denounced by the satirist did not diminish. Apart from the slaves and freedmen, who were for the most part non-Italic, Levantine crews manned the commercial navy, bringing Levan- tine usurers and merchants into every western mart where money could be made. By the fourth century much alien blood, Greek Asiatic, Punic, Iberian, must have mingled with the native Italian stiain in Rome and the laigcst cities of Italy. The admixture did not help to preserve a high standard of public duty. We receive the impicssion of an unhappy, superstitious, nervous society, depressed by a sense of calamity, which it has not the calmness or thinking power to diagnose. It is significant A.p. gyo-s that when the armies of Auielian returned to Europe, bringing with them the terrible eastern plague, no attempt was made to explore the cause or to find a remedy. Analysis was bankrupt. In place of thought, superstition indicated imaginary foes and administered its damaging opiates. When political troubles were unusually giavc, as under Decius, it was thought prudent to persecute the Christians.

The fighting spiiit which had made the fortunes of the Republic had already by the age of Hadrian deserted the Italians, They were well content that their battles should be fought by Illyrian and Anatolian highlanders or by barbarian mercenaries from beyond the frontiers. In the old republican days, when the fighting was for the most part under the blue Italian sky, in a land of vines and olives, and campaigns were shoit and plunder was good, war was a national pastime; but life in a legionary camp on the Danube or the Rhine ot by the Roman wall in Britain was a different matter. It did not attract the Latin race. The Italians vanished from the legions, wliich in the fourth century were chiefly composed of and even officered by Germans,

Since the most populous and civilized parts of the Empire had

TStC ROMAI} EMRIRI

97

ceased by the beginiung o£ the third (Xntury to contribute fighting men to the legions, the number of troops available for frontier defence was far smaller than it should have been, having regard to the total population of the Empire, which in the time of Constantine may have reached 70,000,000. A modem state containing 70,000,000 inhabitants might be expected in a great war to put 6,000,000 soldiers in the field. Of such an effort the Empire was incapable. Even after its reorganization by Diocletian and Constantine the total strength of tine Roman army did not exceed 650,000 men, one-third belonging to the mobile force and two-thirds to the garrisons. In view of the length of the frontier to be defended these figures were danger- ously low. As the defending force came in the end to be com- posed mainly of Germans they were such as to lead to inevitable disaster.

CHAPTER B

DlCXaJETIAN AND CONSTANTINE

Reforms of Diocletian. Constantine as soldier and organieer. H< embraces Christianity. Consequences of the Imperial recognition of the Christian faith. Close association of Church and State under Con- stantine. Ills choice of Uyzanlium as a capital. East and west drift apart. Less Greek culture m the west. The continuing influence of Latm classics. Difference between the Roman and the Greek church.

The new despotism was inaugurated by two great Illyrian Emperors, Diocletian and Constantine. To every lover of liberty their work would seem to have grave faults, for it was conceived m a spirit most hostile to individual initiative and executed in an atmospheie poisoned by spies and sycophants. Moreover, the

• 97 * last eight years of Diocletian’s reign are marked by a bitter and

memorable persecution of the Christians.

Yet, despite these shortcomings, few statesmen have been so successful in giving to the woild in which they weie bom what it seemed to want and was content to preserve. The administra* tive system of Diocletian governed eastern Rome for a thousand years. Tlie reformed comage dl Constantine^ lasted till the eleventh centuiy. And the whole course of European history would have been otherwise, had Constantine declined to accept Christianity as an authoiizcd religion, or failed to summon the Council of Nicaea, which defined the doctrine of the divinity of Christ, or had he not, with the instinct of the lughcr strategy, determined to tiansfcr tlie capital of the Empire to that old Greek city on the Bosphorus which still bears his name.

Diocletian, who was raised to supicme power by the Pannonian legions in 284, brought an atmosphere of saving novelty into the management of 0 Hairs. Through his long reign of twenty years he applied the resources of a powerful and restless mind to the tasks of government. To contemporaiies the course of this Dalmatian peasant may liave appealed inconsistent and way- ward, and too often determined by impulse and superstition. He would build and unbuild, enaa and recall his enactment: but

• A gold aureus or solidus, roughly equalling iss. 6d. of our moa^,

98

ptoc<.»ti4)Nr M

fUgitesaot ao the detub w the geoml dfisd of hu troth, «ees ta him a man of ^tun superretdng cm a plan* icM stata Ih: introduced centralization, adminutrative sxd* formlty, die subdivision of powers and provinoea. He saw the ifflp(»tance of severing poUtical and military authority, of a uriot and hierarchical dvil discipline in a society which had lost the gift of political thinking. To him also is due the introduc* tion of those servile forms of cetemonial which for many cen turies afterwards continued to characterize the court life of European princes. In theory the Emperor was still the elected protector of the people, bound by laws which it was his duty to obey. In fact, be was an eastern sultan, claiming divine right, the directing engine of a vast bureaucratic machine with a long and carefully graded hierarchy of officials depending on his nod.

We pass from the Roman to the Byzantine age.

In another respect also the leign of Diocletian maiks an epoch.

He appreciated the fact that the defence of the Empire on four separate fionts could not be supervised by a single man, that defence must be mobile, not stationary, and directed fiom centres near the frontier, and that an end must be put to the system of military pronunctamento':, which had involved the Empire in so much chaos and bloodshed. Ills plan was that the Empire should be governed by two August!, himself and Maxi- mianus, a Thiacian peasant, and that these should be assisted by two younger men to be known as Caesars, who should succeed to the purple when the Augusti resigned, as they undertook to do after twenty years of rule. Rome ceased to be the capitaL The rulers of the Empire held their courts at Treves and Milan, at ffirmlum and Nicomedeia. Diocletian himself selected NicO' medeia, and from that pleasant Asiatic station undertook to police the troublesome east.

Ingenious as was the device of entrusting the management of the Empire to a college of four, it feiled to secure the desired effect. The retirement of the two Augusti in 305 was followed by a period of dvil discord, memorable only at this distance of dme as establishing upon unassailable foundations the name and Ac empire of Constantine Ac Great.

This outstanding man, Ae bastard son of a well-born Illyrian officer by an innkeeper at Nish (in modem Serbia), was upon Ae death of hii faAer Constantius at York proclaimed Emperor k,i>.3o6 by Ae troops— the precise evil which tlic reforms of Dio*

too A HISTOXT OP StTROPX

detian had been framed to avert Disastrous as such dectioDS had too often been, the instinct of the British legionaries sms here justihed. The youth of thirty-two proved himself to be a consummate commander in the field. After a skilful defence of the Gallic frontier, he overthrew, in a succession of brilliant en- gagements, his two rivals, Maxentius, the ruler of Italy, and Lidnius, the Emperor of the East. In all his military career he never suffered a reverse. The speed and energy of his offensives were characteristic of a man to whom physical fears were un- known, and the ever present world of spirits supplied cordials of intoxicating strength. Is it to be wondered that he regarded him- self as the favoured son of the victory-bringing God, or that the despotic system of Diocletian received from his hands additional aggravations?

Only the strictest regard to the principles of justice and economy can save such a system from terrible abuses. The Roman administration in the fourth century, despite many im- provements, was still lamentably deficient in justice and know- ledge. Great wealth was lightly taxed, moderate lortunes were crippled by crushing exactions. Owing to the steady deprecia- tion of the coinage, an important part of the revenue was levied in kind, a system leading on the one hand to irregularity and extortion, and on the other to a forlorn attempt to fix a money value to commodities. Tliese things were bad enough. A vicious fiscal system was not the least among the causes which led to the downfall of the Roman empire; but what was equally serious was the all-pervading system of compulsion, by which the new despotism attempted to secure the upkeep of the state. The landlord was compelled to act as recruiting officer and tax collector for his neighbourhood. The peasant was tied to the soil. The decurion, a town councillor, was made responsible for the contributions due from his municipality and forbidden to leave his birthplace. Even trade was placed in fetters. Free com- mercial associations were turned into hereditary cas tes and Saddled with definite obligations of state service.

More important even than these far-reaching changes were the two decisions which have given to Constantine a place among the small number of men who have changed the course of history. Nobody would be bold enough to contend that this vigorous and capable soldier was a Christian character. If he did not actually, as is attested, throw German captives to the beasts.

DXOOLSTYAV AHD CONSTANTINE tOf

he ctTtainly put to death his wife and his son. But in a violent age crimes of violence are lightly condoned, and the failings of Constantine were soon overshadowed by the great achievement which caused him to be regarded in the eastern Empire as a thirteenth apostle.

In that rude age the truth of a rcli^on was apt to be measured by its results. If it brought victory to its devotees, it was likely to be true; if defeat, it was probably false. It is to the credit of Constantine that at an early point in his long career, while he was policing the frontier of Gaul, he came to the conclusion that the Cross, a symbol alike of Christ and of the Sun God, was the bes tower of victory. In a vision, reported at first hand to Eusebius, and by him recounted, not in his ecclesiastical history, but in a later biography, Constantine saw the standard of the Cioss with the legend *Ei/ rovnp vUa (By this conquer), and, advancing with the Christian monogram on his banner, won four victories in succession against the forces of his rival Maxen<* tius, and made himself master of Italy (a.d. 312). The secular fortunes of the Christian Church were henceforth assured. Though his baptism was delayed till 337, the conqueror of Maxentius threw the full weight of his influence on the side of the religion which had brought him victory at Turin, at Verona, at the Milvian bridge hard by the very gates of Rome. The Christians had given their proofs. They had survived persecu- tion, they were organized. Active and energetic characters had been drawn into their fold. Constantine made up his mind to enlist the support, to control the activities, and to appease the dissensions of this influential society. It is true that the Christians were a small minority.^ Tlie barbarians, the legions, the vast proportion of the civilian population of the west, were still pagan. But there was this difference between paganism and Christianity, that while the pagans, with poly- theistic hospitality, were willing to receive the Christian Goi the Christians regarded the pagan divinities as malignant demons. A Christian bishop could not dispute the power of Apollo to foresee or of Aesculapius to heal. He did no^ contest the reality of these beings, but he contended that they were false and that it was wicked to consult them. Paganism was more tolerant. To a discerning prince a well-organized and convinced

• Bur}* estimates one-fifth, ** History of the Later Roman Empire,*^

p. 366.

m trifttOllY Ot

0)illi«!Wity» fortified by sacred books and a clcar-cut creed, latll seem to be a better ally than a superior number of indulgenl axtd vatiomly minded sectaries.

Yet it would appear that even after the crowning mercy of the 4.0* $i9 Milvian bridge the purpose of Constantine was still indistinct, He believed in Christ, but also in the unconquered sun* He tolerated the Christians but retained the office of Pontifex Maximus. His coins bore on one side the emblem of Chris* tianiiy, on the other an attestation of sun-worship. More than a decade elapsed before soldiers were rebuked for sacrificing to Jupiter or pagan rites were eliminated from official ceremonies.

It can hardly be doubted that the adoption of Christianity as the offidal religion of the Empire gave a powerful impulse to the enlargement of the Christian community. To pass from Pagan- ism to Christianity was not for many professors of the older creed to enter a climate altogether strange nor to experience a revolu- tion altogether sudden. The process of conversion was gentle and assisted by infinite smalJ giadations of feeling and expericnce- Thc sacraments of the new religion recalled the ancient mys- teries, its preaching the newer philosophy. The doctrine of a mediator was familiar alike to the Persians and the Neoplatonics. The conception of a Trinity was a well-known religious idea pro- ceeding from the acknowledged fact that three was the perfect number. Abstinence and pot city, ecstasy and calm, were no novelties to the pious adherents of , the older creeds. Nor was the idea of the last judgment, with all its terrible consequences, a monopoly of the Christian Faith. The believers in Mithras and the professors of Stoicism were united in holding that the world was destined to perish in flame.

Yet when the pagan had completed his journey he found him- self in a world of altered values. Old virtues were disparaged, new virtues, such as chastity, rose in the scale. Poverty was exalted above wealth, faith above works, humility above pride, equality above privilege. The gates of salvation were open to all. A strong inrush of ethical feeling from the underworld pervaded the Empire, dashing itself against the vices and cruelties which were the shadow side of that old civilization, cleansing away many foul impurities, but also obliterating in its passionate course much that in ancient ideals of conduct and expression was noble, temperate, and wise.

From such enthusiasms Constantine, for all his superstition,

StO«t.St«All A«lf» ^ < 9 ^

was exet^iw. Hb motto was tuiUy. A t^ufch lAvided agadtet ittwif Would be of little value to iht state. 8o«though he bad small personal interest in theological discussions^ he was drawn from considerations of policy to he a convener and president of Church councilsj a mediator in Cliurch disputes, an i nfl uence in the determinaiion of Churdi dogma. The defeat of the Dona- dsts (a sect of African Puiitans } at the Western Council at Arles (314) and of the Arians at the far more important Ecumenical Council at Nicaea (325) were signs of a new association between the Catholic Church and the Roman State, which has coloured the destinies of all Christian peoples. The Importance of Con* stantine's decision is clear; its consequences are variously esti- mated. To the friends of institutional religion the sovereign who brought the Roman Empire ovei to Christianity is one of the greatest benefactors of mankind Others see in that dose asso- ciation of church and state a principal source of the secular pride and ambition which for so many centuries has obscured the original candour of the Christian life.

The Second great decision of Constantine was prompted by personal pride blended with military and religious considera- tions. Like Romulus and Alexander he must build a capital. But he was a son of the Balkans. He knew, as the Austiians knew so well at a later time, how lich in recruits were the wild Illyrian hills of his native home. He was aware that for more than a hundred years the chief danger to the Empire had come from the barbarian tiibcsmen north of the Danube, and from the oriental monarchies cast of the Euphrates. If he were well placed for the defence of the Balkans he saw that he would be in the best position to save the Empire. Already Diocletian had realized that on strategical grounds the capital should be near the frontier between Asia and Europe. Guided by a sure instinct, Constantine, when he had defeated his rival, Licinius, at Chryso- polis, decided on Byzantium, than which no town was better defended by nature or by art.

The new city was to be both Christian ar^^t^rin. Christian it remained, Latin it soon ceased to be. The E^^eror may have reflected that it was easier to make a Christitia capital on the Bosphorus than in a great centre of historic paganism like Rome, «where eveiy temple and statue challenged attack or defence. He can as little have foreseen the dominandb> of the Creek language

to4 ^ A BiSTomr otr evropb

m Constantmoplc as that Rome, which he regarded as the chief fortress of paganism, should become the leader of the Christian worldL

The eastern city rose like an exhalation* Palaces and mansions, porticos, law courts, and public baths were constructed with feverish celerity. The whole Empire was ransacked for treasures wherewith to decorate the fame of Constantine. While the ser- pent column reft from Delphi recalled the victory of Plataca, the basilica of the Roman law court crowned with the PersiM dome gave to the new Christian churches their characteristic form, a blend of the eastern and the western spirit. On May x i, 330, the work was complete. The new Rome had been built in less than six years.

The foundation of Constantinople marks the beginning of a new era, during which the Gicek and Roman worlds drift further and further apart until the unity of the Empire becomes nothing more than a theory and a hope. Roman government as reconstructed by Diocletian and Constantine survived in the east and was not seriously shaken until the Frankish conquest of Constantinople in 1204. Far different was the future of western Europe. Here after a hundred and fifty years of weakened and precarious existence the Empire went down under the German invasions, leaving to the Church the office of preserving as best it might the legacy of ancient culture in a bai baric world.

Much of that ancient culture was lost or rejected. The free spirit of rationality which was characteristic of Hellenism dis- appeared in a world which had come to believe with St. Augus- tine that Time was a brief course of passing moments created by God and destined at God’s pleasure in the twinkling of an eye to pass away and to give place to eternity. In this frail, un- certain, and crumbling dispensation, so full of wickedness and misery, the Christian held that all mundane interests paled before the awful problem of the*, soul’s salvation. The reward of the righteous was everlasting blessedness. Sinners (including un- baptized infants) would bum for ever in the fires of hell Sacred books, interpreted by a Providential Church, illumined the path to heaven. Following those lamps, and those alone, and con- straining others to pursue the same course, the believer would be saved. False opinion would mean ruin. He must neither dally with it nor suffer it in others. Had not Jesus said, Compel them

OlOChMTlAV AKp COHATAKTINE %0$

to come in ”? On thU text St, Augustine founded the doctrine of religious persecution which fenced in the mind of Europe during the centuries of Faith.

Though St. Augustine was saturated with the thought of Plato» as later St. Thomas with the speculations of Aristotle, a first-hand knowledge of Greek language and literature died out in the west. Some time in the course of the third century, by an obscure revolution in literary history, Greek ceased to be used by Roman Christians in the celebration of their rites. In time the language fell under suspicion as a vehicle of heresy. Ovid and Terence were taught. Homer and Aeschylus were forgotten, and the knowledge of Greek, the key to the most original and valuable portion of the ancient culture, was not recovered in the west till the fifteenth century. The consequences were serious both for culture and for religion. The effective unity of the Christian Church was broken on the rock of vocabulary and syntax. Greek Christianity, in a climate of Greek metaphysics and imperial despotism, took one course. Latin Christianity, in an undisciplined and barbaric world, but using the language and sharing the spirit of Roman Law, took another. In the east the church was subject to the state; in the west, under the leadership of the Bishop of Rome, it made pretensions to be an indepen- dent, if not a superior authority.

The culture of the I^atin Church in the west was founded p.-iTtly upon the Christian and Jewish Scriptures and partly upon the tradition of Latin learning which was maintained in the schools of rhetoric, and which survived the disappearance of the pagan empire. It is this interfusion of literary influences which characterized the intellectual life of western Europe during the early middle ages, when the Church alone preserved and multi- plied manuscripts and schooled its barbarian pupils in the ele- ments of Latin grammar and style. At no time has European civilization been so deeply in the debt of Virgil and Cicero as during the first fierce and gloomy centuries of the Christian Empire, when almost alone they represented, in a society which but dimly apprehended their greatness, the healing spirit of ancient humanism.

In curious contrast to the rationalistic spirit of ancient Greek philosophy, the Greek Church of the East Roman, and after- wards of the Russian Empire, has felt little temptation to chal- lenge secular power or ecclesiastical tradition. No great liberat*

t*>ti i A ntsrikliT or ftoropE

Inji tiiovcitttati fat the imptorement of the htimaii lot a««ttioeahle to its s^ency. It hu been a department of state, sdl^ ineifetic, constitutional, and conservative, in art no less than ip bdie£ The annals of the Roman Church in the tumultuoua and disorganized west present a very different picture, for here during the long abeyance of the western Empire the Church stood out from the licence of the times as heir to the discipline and influence of Rome.

CnAPTER X

THE GERMANIC INVASIONS

Tv^ currents of mtgratton. The east Germans or Goths, They hecome Afians. The west Gertnans described by Tacitus. Mam charactensUet of German society. The impact of the Hurts. 2 he Visigoths ercts the Danube. Alarte. Dislocation of the western Empire. Continuing preS’ Uge of Rome. Caul in the fifth century. Fall of the Visigothic King’ dom. Vandal conquest of Africa. Atlila, his nse and fall. Depotition of Romulus, Theodonc in Italy. Clovis m Gaul, lie becomes 4 Roman Catholic. The darkest age in Britain. 2 he Savon Conquest. Multiplicity of states. Conversion to Roman Christianity.

So far the history of Europe has been dominated by the three great forces of Hellenic civilization, the Roman empire, and the Christian religion, the first two clearly intei linked, but the last deriving from the east and challenging at many crucial points the conduct, beliefs, and interests of the ancient world. A further influence now comes upon the scene and changes for all subse- quent time the course of European history. The Latin world of the west, after successfully defeatuig and absoibing the conti- nental Celts, is oveicome by the Gcimans.

We know very little of the eaily history of this remarkable race save that they were originally settled in the Scandinavian north, where some remained to foim the patent stock of the present Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish nations, while others wandered through Germany in search of food or waimth, or from mere love of adventure and fighting, until one group of these southward-trending peoples reached the waters of the Rhine, while a second, pursuing a more eastern course, descended ultimately on the Danube and the coast of the Black Sea. It is with these two diverging currents of German migration that the Roman Empire was brought into contact. It was the West Germans who fought witli Maiius and Julius Caesar, who under Augustus defeated Varus and his legions, and whose habits and institutions are descr^d in one of the classics of ethnology, the De Qrtgtne, sttu, monbus et popults Germamae of Tacitus. Finally, it is to two West German peoples, the Saxons and the Franks, that we must ascribe the formation of the mediaeval kingdoms of England and France.

107

A BISTORT or StTROrS

io8

The career of the eastern or Gothic branch of thb vigorous race* differs in certain important particulars from the future of its vrestem cousins. The Goths burst later into the sunlight of history,* struck harder, and built more swiftly, but thdr work, though arresting and spectacular, was ephemeral and soon un- done. Whereas tlie Franks and Saxons have left a permanent memorial of their passage through time in two powerful and ordered modem states, the name Gothic, save where it is used in relation to a form of architecture originating in a region which the Goths never controlled, is synonymous with all t^t is dark, barbaric, and destructive. Yet on two occasions the shaping of Europe seemed likely to be confided to the Goths. In the middle of the third century it might have appeared to contemporaries that the fabric of the Roman Empire was destined to perish under the mighty hammer of this formidable people. With an equal show of probability it might have been contended two hundred years later that from the Gothic kingdoms of Italy and Aquitaine there was destined to proceed a continuous and promising civilization blending the vigour and piety of the Goth with the long inhciited culture of the Roman. Yet each of these predictions, had it been made, would have been falsi- fied in the event. The terrible crisis of the third century (235-268) was mastered by the courage and resource of three Illyrian commanders, Claudius II, Aurelian, and Probus;, and two centuries afterwards, by the, strange irony of fortune, the Goths of the west were undone by their very eagerness to re- ceive the spiritual gifts of the Roman world. The Visigoths who were settled in the Balkan peninsula were the first of all the Ger- man peoples to accept Christianity. Ulfila, a great missionary of Cappadocian extraction, translated the Bible into Gothic and so spread the Christian message among his adopted people that Ostrogoths and Visigoths alike accepted the faith, and attempted, as far as their rough natures permitted, to understand its mean- ing. Unfortunately the sacred message had reached the Goths in its Arian form. The poor barbarians had learned that though Christ was divin*,, he had been created by God and was inferior to his Father. Many pious divines, many famous states- mm, including Constantine the Great himself, had shared these opinions, first promulgated in Alexandria by the presbyter Arius,

• Vandals, Gepids, Burgundians, Lombards, Rugians, etc.

Goths bad reached the Black Sea under Caracalla ( a . d , 314).

tnw OSEMAKIC tUVASIONS

109

as to the nature of Christ The Goths can hardly be blamed if they believed what they were told about a mystery so abstruse by leading oracles of contemporary wisdom. But Arianism, despite brilliant spells of official favour, finished in the blackest dis- grace. It was condemned by the Council of Nicaea, It was con- demned by the Bishop of Rome. It was reprobated by the western clergy in Italy, Gaul and Spain, who represented to congregations unversed in theological subtleties that the Arian was the enemy of Christ ( xpf^rrofiaxo ^ ) and that Arianism was a challenge to Christ’s divinity. In the troubled theological atmosphere of the fifth century, when success in this world and in the world beyond was thought to depend on the accuracy of faith, there was no issue more passionately or widely debated than the nature of the Second Person of the Trinity, which few were fitted to discuss, and none were able to understand.

So the Gothic kingdoms of Italy and Aquitaine, which had been founded by the sword, perished of a heresy, and the more barbarous West Germans, who were con vetted later, but to the orthodox faith, entered upon a long inheritance of power, with the applause and support of the western Church.

Of these West Germans, Tacitus, writing in the time of Trajan, c.iLi>gb has drawn a picture more remaikable perhaps for its moral pur- pose than for its fidelity to fact. It is the aim of the Roman his- torian to contrast the idealized simplicity of the German life with the degenerate luxury of Italian society, and to find in the free ways of the noble savage material for the chastisement of civilized man.

It is probable, therefore, that the virtues of the Germans were here exaggerated, as it is certain that no Roman would willingly have exchanged the vivid life of the forum for the lonely clear- ings, the forbidding forests, and the leaden skies of Germany.

Tacitus, however, was right in thinking that the Germans had something new and valuable to give to European civilization.

He seems to have divined in this barbaric people a refreshing and renovating power, to have seen that they had the secret of political liberty, which Rome had forgotten, the passion for individual initiative which Rome had suppressed, the habit of rearing large families, which Rome had chosen to neglect and despise. The last of these characteristics gave to the Germans a decisive superiority in the struggles which were to come. Again and again in the course of history the Latin world has had cause

fio

A bV SVKb»t

tso tremble faefom th6 irrqprewtble lecuadity of this whdiesmiae end monogamotti race.

Save ihat the West Germans had by the time of Tadtus taken to a settled agricultural life. While the easterners mth thcbr waggons and herds were still trekking through pathless fmrests, one part of the Teuton world much resembled another. The violent, blond, beer*8willing g^ant with fierce blue eyes and long fair hair, drinking and dreaming, fighting and gambling, singer and song lover, his strong loyalty to chieftain and clan only masteted by his still greater passion for warlike adventure, was a type well known in the fourth century to every legionary camp on the northern frontier. It is true that during two centuries of internecine war and forest clearance the clans of Germany had undergone many changes of size, shape, and appellation. Small clans had disappeared, greater aggregations had been formed roimd some heroic figure, or in response to some warlike ncces* sity, and then dissolving, as men died or fell, had entered into new combinations. The little tribes mentioned by Tacitus bad vanished by the age of Constantine, and were replaced by larger people, the Franks, the Saxons, the Alemans of south Germany, But the main characteristics of Ceiman life and society were little changed, and might be found anywhere in central hurope-~the chieftain and his chosen hand of warrior comrades, the popular assembly of free tribesmen, the ancient royal families, fiom whiih kings might be chosen, the great herds of small cattle, the open field tillage of corn and barley, the predial serfs, and the absence not only of towns but even of villages or hamlets with close-set houses and sheltered streets. Yet despite their common origin and similar manners the Germans wen wholly devoid of national feeling. Tribe fought with tribe, family with family. By some the Roman Fmpire was regarded as an enemy, by others as a possible paymaster or host. Accord, ingly the armies which this fecund race could put into the field at any one time were ludicrously disproportionate to its numbers. If the Roman armies weie, as we have seen, dangerously under strength, their German antagonists were not to any marked d^r«more numerous. It is not, then, to a series of conflicts in which some twenty thousand men were involved on eiriier side that we must look for an explanation of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, That great structure was not brought down to tile ground by a frontal attache, but by a process of infiltration

V

VKStadmiig ovtx k huadred je*t$ nrhidi ended by pladiBg the government of Italyv Gaul, ^Mua, and Africa in Gorman bandk

<*■

A wild Mongolian people riding on stout ponies out of central Asia had in the later part of the fourth century made ia way over ijbe steppes into south-eastern Europe. Slaying and plun- dering as they rode, these ugly merciless creatures, known as Htms, swept every obstacle before them lilt«chaff before an eastern gale. Alans, Ostrogoths, and Visigoths felt successively the force of a thrust sprea^ng tremors through the whole Ger- man world, and leading to those great but obscurely chronicled movements of the German peoples, wluch for a time submerged Gaui and Britain, Spain, Africa, and Italy, and bequeathed to mediaeval Germany the heroic memories of the NiebelungenUed.

Ihe first effect of this new disturbing force was felt upon the north-eastern bastion of the Empire. By 376 the Huns had penetrated into Dacia (the beautiful country of Transylvania which has recently passed to the Roumans) and there defeated the Visigoths, who had themselves some years before evicted the descendants of that Roman piovince, from wliich Trajan has obtained an undying renown, and modem Roumania a disputed title.

Uprooted from this pleasant home the Visigotlrs appealed for Roman shelter. They were permitted to cross the Danube and to form an encampment in lower Moesia. Eighty thousand alien immigrants are not easily absorbed even by the best organized community. The Visigoths were uncomfortable, and as discom- fort ripened into suspicion and suspicion into hate, they took up arms against their imperial host. The issue was joined on the field of Adrianople (378), when the mailed cavalry of the in- vaders defeated the imperial army, slew Valens, the Emperor, and established for a thousand years the predominance of the cavalry arm in European warfare.

The man who was called upon to deal with this desperate situation was a fine Spanish soldier, claiming descent from the family of Trajan. Theodosius I, being ready to apply ^rsecu- tion to the support of orthodoxy, has received from ecclesiastical Iwtoinbns the title of “great"; and the Emperor under whose rule the mysteries of Eleusis and the Olympian games were cele- brated for rite last time deserves a special place hi the annals of the Obiistian Church. But the repuution of Theodosius has a

‘ii4 ^ pr

prpprietoiBi was to Paul for the benefit of thfi

Viaigpth^ And Bijirgunfiians. A reluctant host was compelle4 by a mtictam Eippcror tp cede two-thirds of his property to a barbaiian guest/*

The German intruders were well disposed to the polite ficdoxu which disguised pillage under the name of hospitality, and in<» dependence under the respectable banner of federation* To the Visigoths and Burgundians Rome was still a moral power, and Roman civilization an object of ignorant but admiring regard* In the eyes of these baibarians, now faintly tinctured with civility, only a Roman citizen might wear die purple. A Visi^^ goth might marry a Roman princess or acclaim a Roman em- peror, but the imperial diadem was not for the rude brow of an alien. A curious mixture pf superstitious reverence and defiant hoWility marked the relations of Goth and Burgundian to the Roman state. It seemed as if they thought that against Rome there were no talismans other dian those which Rome could supply. So among the trophies carried put of Italy hy Ataulph, A.D.^i/ the founder of the Visigothic kingdom in South-Western Gaul, were two Roman persons, the Princess Galla Placidia, sister of the Rmperor Honoxius, and AttaJus. an obscuie rhetorician, the fir^t designed for the barbarian's bed, the second as a counter empcxor to be used against the court of Ravenna in case of need.

For the lemainder of the kith century and until the great Frankish victory at Vouille in a.d.' 507 the social history of Gaul is dominated by the presence within it of these two states of

£i iendly or ‘ federate ” barbarians. One of the strongest forces in human society is imitation, and once settled in tbeir new homes the Visigoths and Burgundians applied themselves to the study and imitation of the Greco-Roman culture, which nowhere in that age was so fully maintained as in Gaul. The baibarian kings soon discovered that, however much they tnight despise the effeminacy of Mediterranean men, government could not be cairied out in a tin-speaking country without the em- ployment of ministers asnd clerks who spoke the Latin tongup or of legists who knew the Roman law. It does not then appear that life was anywhere made intolerable to the Gallo-Roman provincial who lived in the kingdom,s of Burgundy or Aquitaine. The great noble farmed ei^d bunted, built and gardened, visited his friends ai^ trifled m his library. joying a stately, tmwflM existence, as if there were no barbarians to murder the bpautifu)'

Tub Gothic Kincoous at the Heicut of tbbs Powbk.

Il6 aiSTORY OF EUROPE

Latiti tongue, no need to tliink for the collective life-future of die Empire^ no Social problem or foreign menace, but an un- ending prospect of plenty and elegance for the fortunate and cultured members of the senatorial class. To the poor the yoke of a Thcodoric or a Gondebaud sometimes seemed lighter than the grinding oppression of the imperial taxgatherers.

By this time the Roman world had become so familiar with the German soldier in the legions, the German adventurers at court, and the German immigrant in the fields, that the true drift of the events of the fifth century went unperceived. The cultivated noble of Auvergne feared the defacement of the Latin tongue and the decay of Larin letters. What he did not apprehend was the dissolution of the Roman state. The political consequences of the great clianges in the social texture of the population brought about by German immigration were as little present to his mind as were the lessons ol American immi- gration statistics in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the statesmen in Washington. When once the fust agonies of the settlement were overcome, the Visigoths and the more culti- vated Burgundians were regarded by the older inhabitants of Gaul as instruments rather than as enemies. With the assistance of their barbarian kings, with their robes of skin and their uncouth jargon, great Gallo-Roman nobles might be raised to the purple, and Gothic and Burgundian armies might protect and even ex- tend the Emphe. On a commissiori from Ilonorius, King Wallia led his Visigoths into Spain and reconquered the greater part of that peninsula fiom the Sueves, the Vandals, and the Alans; and later, when Aetius, “the last of the Romans,” rallied the forces of Gaul against King Attila and his Huns, the Visigoth Theodoiic, without whose army success would hardly have been won, laid down his life in the cause of the Empire.

In broad outline, then, the history of Gaul in the fifth century, though opening with a carnival of pillage and destruction, wit- nesses a certain retardation in the advance of intellectual dark- ness.

The Visigoths and Buigiindians turned out to be better than might have been expected. The schools continued to teach, the lawyers to plead, the nobles to write verses, and the bishops to minister to the needs of their congregations. Until Euric, the A.D. 400 - Visigoth, exchanged the policy of religious toleration which his predecessors had pursued for a campaign of active persecution,

TfiS ^lEHMAKIC INVASIONS

iiy

the orthodox Church in Gaul had little to complain of from the presence of two Arian monarchies on Gallic soiL £urict how* ever, was intolerable. That he was the most powerful and aggres* sivc of the Visigoth monarchs, that he attacked the Bretons and conquered the loyalist province of Auvergne, were errors less heinous in that theological age than his aggressive heresy. At Euric’s death whatever store of popularity his house had secured in Aquitaine was effectively squandered, and when the Visigothic army went down before the orthodox Franks on the field of Vouille, the old inhabitants of southern France looked on with indifference and relief.

Seventy-eight years before this, the Roman government suffered a startling reverse in an unexpected quarter. Africa, the principal source of the Roman corn supply and the seat of a flourishing Italian civilization, had already fired the ambition of two Gothic kings, and was now, on the invitation of a Roman governor, invaded by the Vandals of Spain. To the enfeebled strength of the western empire no blow could be more serious. Under the leadership of Gaiseric, the ablest barbarian chieftain of his age, the Vandals advanced from strength to strength. They took Carthage (439), built a fleet, and in a short time made themselves the greatest naval power in the western Mediterranean. For the first time since the close of the Punic Wars the Roman government was faced with the menace of a navy superior to its own, a navy capable of detaching Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, and of bringing an army of pillaging Vandals to loot and ravish, devastate and murder in Rome itself. A succession of treaties (435-442), each more favourable to the invader than the last, failed to convert these Arian barbarians into friendly or even valuable associates of the government in Italy. The Vandals w'ere savages. They destroyed much, they constructed nothing, and of their hundred years of rule in Africa only memories of havoc remain. Yet their intervention in the theatre of European affairs was of critical importance. At the moment when it was most necessary that all the forces of Italy should be concentrated on checking the barbarian advance in Gaul and Britain, they were weakened and dispersed by the necessity of dealing with the formidable pirate state which had established itself in the richest com-bcaring province of the Empire. The consequences were far reaching. They com*

n 8 i'A mitniit

priMi tlie fiftal df Oaul, tiie irithdruwol (449) of tlao I*# Roman gfuirison |rDm Britain!^ dte conquett of tibe south-CMtem portion of the ^dsh island by the Saic{ms» and, aa a lower scale of importance, the exodus of Celtic fugitives from the south-western regions of our island, which has given the dome of Brittany to the ancient Armorican districts of Gauh ,

The Mongolian invasion of eastern Europe, which had been the pnmum mobile in this long chain of shattering experienooS’^ for the Empire, had not yet exhausted its effects. It was one of the secrets of the longevity of the Roman state that it made a practice of recruiting from its most formidable enemies. The Franks were employed to defend the Rhine frontier in 407, the Hims to destroy the Burgundian kingdom of Worms in 435. But this policy, though it might be successful as a makeshift, offered no permanent protection against the hungry appetites of restless and fecund nations. In the middle of the fifth century one of the greatest dangers which assailed the Empire proceeded from the Huns, who a few years earlier had proved themselves to be valuable auxiliaiies. This people, under the guidance of Attila, one of those remarkable leaders who from time to time arise to fashion the destiny of a race, or startle the world by a sudden revelation of violence or power, succeeded in obtaining for themselves for a period of nineteen years (435 to 454) an ascendancy which extended fiom -the Rhine to the Urals. The eastern F.mpire paid them tiibute; the German peoples of central Europe (Gepids, Ostrogoths, Riigians, and Scirians) entered into their confederacy, submitted to their direction, and influenced their manners.

So vast an aggregation of peoples ruled by a powerful and unscrupulous savage sent a thrill of consternation through Europe. Upon whom would the thunderbolt fall? The western Empire, under the rule of Valentjnian, the feeble nephew of the weak Honoiius, offered the most tempting prey, and in 450 Attila made up his mind to seize it.

Then a striking illustration was afforded of the gulf which divides courage from strategy, numbers from science, and true political coherence from the magnetism of a name. Attila was no general. His vast and miscellaneous following was no army. His personal ascendancy was no substitute for the organized institutions of a state. The Mongolian invasion of Gaul in 451,

j

drtoiifitl M ^ ap|)«u«<l ia prospect 104 rejti«i^ct» vm Ii 4 Ib 4 ' wltfu AtdUi'tumed back from Orleans»th«r than attadc a foitified and wdl defended dty; and the batde of Trofes, which indicted severe punishment on the retreating army, confirmed rather than decided the issue of the campaign. Nor was the in* vasioo of Italy in the succeeding year marked by any evidence (4 intelligent design. After a brief spell of pillage and extordooi,

Atdla withdraw north of the Alps, and that so swiftly that the pious have ascribed to the intercession of the Bishop of Rome a course more probably dictated by the prevalence of disease, the hulure of supplies, and the intelligence of an advancing army from the east. Two years later the Hun king was in his grave and his empire broken (battle of Nedao, 454) by an insurrection of its German vassals.

From this moment the germanization of the west steadily proceeded. Ostrogoths poured into the Balkan peninsula, creat- ing by their restless and turbulent activities a problem similar to that which had taxed the resources of the eastern Empire a cen* tury before. In Italy a succession of phantom and ephemeral emperors reached its close with a pathetic figure, named, by the supreme irony of providence, Romulus Augustulus, who was deposed by Odovacar, the East German master of the troops. «.d. 476 Military revolutions were no novelty in the annals of the Roman Empire, and the act of Odovacar bad many precedents. If he assumed the title of king, so, too, had Ataulph and his Visi- gothic successors. If he had risen to power by claiming for his troops a third part of the lands of Italy, he was entitled to in- voke the old practice of hospitality so recently applied in Bur* gundy and Aquitaine. It is true that he deposed Romulus, but the lad was a usurper, unrecognized in Constantinople, and the deed condoned by the bestowal upon its autitor of the high imperial title of patrician. What was original in Odovacar’s action was not that it was revolutionary, but that it was con- servative. He refused to appoint a successor to Romulus, cal- culating that he would have more elbow room in a united Empire governed from Constantinople as in the days of Tlieo- dosius the Great. That unity was in fact and theory preserved until the coronation of Charlemagne as Emperor of the west in

800,

The age immediately succeeding is remarkable for the emer^

190 A HIOtOXT or XOKOFB

gence of two great barbaric figures, Theodoric the Ostrogoth and Qovis the Frank, the first the founder of a short-lived Gothic monarchy in Italy, the second the creator of the medi- aeval monarchy of France. A peculiarity common to each of these dynamic and experienced men, though more clearly marked in the Goth than in the Frank, was a recognition of the continuing authority of the Emperor. Theodoric was sent into Italy to overthrow Odovacar on a commission from the Emperor Zeno, and throughout his long reign (493-536) regarded himself not only as a Gothic king, but also as an Imperial ofiiciaL Clovis received the insignia of the honorary consulship from Anastasius. But there was one critical difference. Theo- doric, by far the more powerful and important figure throughout his life, was an Arian. Clovis became a militant Catholic. To this divergence we may principally ascribe the fact that Theo> doric failed and Clovis succeeded in laying the foundations of an enduring state.

Yet a singular interest attaches to the experiment which failed in Italy. In the legends of Germany, Theodoric figures under the name of Dietrich of Bern as a great leader of the German peoples, the Achilles of a German Iliad playing his heroic part in a tempestuous and memorable age. And such a leader he was recognized to be by the Arian sovereigns, Vandal, Visigoth, and Burgundian, with whom he entered into bonds of alliance. The instinct of a people is never, wholly wrong. There was a bigness of scale about Theodoric which redeemed many of the grosser vices, and may be set against illiteracy, cruelty, and craft. After three years’ hatd fighting he eliminated from Italy the Rugian army of Odovacar, and thereafter gave thirty-six years of golden peace to that much harassed land, enlarging its fron- tiers, encompassing it with a network of protective diplomacy, and holding or winning for it a ciicle of outlying territories, Provence, southern Germany, thp Tyrol, part of Hungary, and Dalmatia, and exercising a kind of suzerainty over Spain. But it is probable that even so he would not have attained to mythical stature but for the fact that he, a German with all the qualities of his race, ruled as the Roman master of Italy, and from that central pivot directed his far-flung operations.

The beautiful city of Ravenna, besides other famous memorials of this age, still shows the tomb of Theodoric the Goth. His court and administration were I^tin. He respected

rsB oimMAnrie imvabiona i»t

the Roman Senate and was studious to restore the andent monu^ ments o£ Italy. The folly of attempting to force the Gothic language upon Italy was far from his mind. It was no part of his policy to make changes in law or government, to force the pace of racial assimilation, or to afEront the religious prejudices of Rome; he did not legislate, or issue coins without the Emperor’s name. He repaired the aqueducts, maintained the public chairs of grammar and rhetoric, and even the Imperial laws which forbade intermarriage between Romans and bar- barians; and it was only in his last years, and as an answer to an outbreak of persecution against his co-religionists in the east, that the Arian in him showed his teeth, and that he com- mitted the crime of passion which is charged against the memory of many good deeds. Boethius, the last of the ancient thinkers and poets, whose De consolatione Philosophtae was one of the best books generally known to the middle ages, was a benefactor of mankind. His judicial murder is a blot on the s.n. 525 fame of Theodoric.

The reign of Clovis, founder of the Merovinpan House and Architect of France (481-jii) is maiked by three great victories, over Syagrius, King of the Romans, at Soissons in 486, over the Alemanns in Alsace ten yeats later, and lastly over Alaric, king of the Visigoths, on the field of VouilM (near Poitiers) in 507.

It was after the first of these tiiumphs, obtained over an officer who was rcpicsenting the Roman cause in Gaul, that Clovis removed from Soissons to Paris, and there established his capital; after the second that he exchanged paganism for the Catholic faith; after the third that he advanced his kingdom to the Pyrenees, driving the main body of his Visigothic enemies to find in Spain the centre of their power. Whether the conver- sion of Clovis was due to the influence of his Catholic wife Clotilda, a Burgundian princess, or to his conviction that Christ had delivered the Alemans into his hands, or to a long-headed calculation of political chances, is of little moment compared with the capital fact that in 496 the leader of the Salian Franks, the most renowned of all the Germanic tribes, became a piotagonist of the Catholic cause.

The long alliance between tlie French monarchy and the Roman Church, which ended in 1830 with the flight of the last Bourbon King from the Paris mob, was baptized in the blood of that Alsatian battlefield more than 1,300 years earlier. It was

IM OP iO«OP«

♦ . ^

a ttinimg point |n tha histoiy of Gaul, and indtod of fioropt^.

when the Catholfc Church was made supreme from the Medi^ ranean to the Channel and from the Atlantic to the Rhine» and a barbarian king accepted under the influence of the Church the machinery of government through bishops, count, and city* which was the legacy of later Rome to mediaeval Franoe* A* wanior chief had placed himself at the head of a militant church; and in the woids atuibuted by the chronicler to GloviSf as he marched against the Visigoths, It vexes me to see these Arians hold part of Gaul Let us attack them with God's aid/ and having conquered them, subject their land," we seem to hear a premonitory blast of the trumpet which called the Fiankish chivalry to the Crusades, sounded the knell of the Albigensian heretics, and led to the Huguenot emigration from France in the seventeenth centuiy, by which the Piotestant countries oi Europe were sensibly enriched

It has been noted that among the consequences of the great tidal wate of Germanic conquest which swept into Gaul at the beginning of the fifth century was the snapping of the connec- tion between Britain and Rome Tlic province was not formally abandoned Thcie was no official decision to relinquish territory which for four liimdicd years had been a source of affluence and pnde to the Einpiie, teiiitoiy coicied by Roman roads, studded with Roman cities and luxurious Aillas, and long prized not only as a maikct foi slases, but £oi its mmcials, its agiiculturc, its watering places aiul us oyster beds The sepaiation ensued from the force of events which Rome was unable to control. The pro- vincials of Riitain weie left to their own resources, and before the double danger of the Piets and the Scots m the noith and of the Saxon pirates in the south the provincials ultimately suc- cumbed. How fierce or protiactcd theii resistance may have been we can only conjecture.

What happened in Britain during the hundred and fifty years which elapsed between the final break with Rome and the A.1X597 coming of St. Augustine is shrouded in the deepest mystery. Theie aie no contemporary chronicles or records or any gleam of authentic light. The spade of the archaeologist indicates ex- tensile burnings in many impoitant towms, such as Canterbury, which are thought to point to a violent contest, but may have othei interpretations The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which belongs

Mil

M a jnudi later data, ccHMikut m mudi d)at i» dearly naytidMl (liM a tioctipra o£ doubt neooMatily attadiM to duiee portioos of lt$ tuuzativo wbich may embody autbeiiitic facta

We cannot therefore reconstitute the chain of events through thia dark period. It may be that a violent and destructive attack, tidning towns and exterminating, enslaving, or chasing away the provincial population, was followed by a quieter period of steady agricultural settlement. Nothing is certain but the result. When the darkness dears away with the coming of St. Augustine, England is a Saxon and a pagan coimtry.

This astonishing change, pointing to some great unchronided catastrophe, was quite consistent with the preservation in Britain of those earlier human types which Julius Caesar and Claudius had found in the island. The dark Iberians, who may be traced back to the neolithic age, the fair-haired Goidelic or Gadic Celts of the Scottish highlands, whose weapons were of brohze, and the later wave (later, as we know, for their weapons were of iron) of the Brythonic Celts, who eventually settled in Wales and Cornwall, survived the shock and aie still constituent dements of the British population. What was obliterated by the Saxon conquest was the living influence of Rome, its speech, its rdig^on, its towns, its institutions.

In the shell of this old Roman province was a raw. Teuton, agricultural sodety, worshipping Odin, spexiking a Germanic tongue, and living a life as far as po'^sible removed from the routine of a provincial townsman under the Roman Empire. The Jutes, the Saxons, and the Angles, the three cognate peoples who are found firmly settled in England at tlie beginning of the seventh century, were quite untouched by Roman influence. Everywhere they lived in townships or villages, cultivated the land in common on the open field system, and retained in their hundred comts those forms of popular government and justice (which had attracted the notice of Tadtus in the first century. Conquest, however, had brought in its train one important de- vdopment. The leader in war had become a king, and traced his pedigree to the gods. He was assisted by a Witan, a body of counsellors.

Yet despite their strong family likeness, the invaders were far from being of the same mind. Vast tracts of marsh and im- penetrable forest kept the settlers apart and obstructed com- munication. The estuary of the Humber was probably in the

134 ' A aiSTORT or BVHOPB

seventh century a greater obstacle between the north and south of &igland than are the Pyrenees today between Spain and Fi ance. East Anglia was an island surrounded by forest and fen. Hie Andredsweald, an intricate tract of marsh and forest, divided the North Downs and the South Downs. In a country so full of natural obstacles many years passed before the descen- dants of the original private adventurers grew together into a state, and many more before any local king dreamed of an all- England monarchy. Accordingly the early history of that part of our island which was colonized by the Saxons is marked by a tangle of internecine wars between various parties of invaders, who, helped by the geography of the country, had formed them- selves into separate slates. Now a kingdom rose, now it declined in the scale of superiority. The little Jutish kingdom of Kent, then as always the garden of England, and of all portions of our island the most advanced in civilization, saw its best days under Ethelberr, the patron of St. Augustine. Northumbria, quickened hy its contact with Celtic Cliristianity, was supreme till 685, Mercia till the death of Offa in 796. It was while the country was thus distracted hy internal rivalries that the Danes opened a new chapter in English history.

Meanwhile England had once again been called into the circle of the Roman Church. Here, as elsewhere, the conversion of the pagan is to be attributed not to any penitential movement of the heart, but to the pressure of the monarchy upon a submissive population. The men of Kent and the Kentish men followed Ethelbcrt into the Christian fold. In Northumbria, in East Anglia, in Mercia, and in Wessex the story was the same. The creed of the king became the creed of the people. A plain, un- questioning, superstitious people was content to take its religious fashions from the court.

The effect of the conversion was not the less profound and far- reaching by reason of its perfunctory and superficial operation on conscience and conduct. Britain was again knit to the T.a»;Ti world, taught the advantage of written law, and fitted with an ecclesiastical organization which was strictly modelled on tlie imperial organization of Rome. The first national aas ^mblies to be held in Britain were church councils. The first code of native laws was drafted in Kent under the influence of Augustine. The parish, which has played so large a part in English li fe , more particularly in the country, was the gift of the Wnman

Tiri; otit&fANio mvAsioMs isjf

chttrchmen to Saxon England. It was diaracterisdc o£ tho down* right practical temper of the race that the Celtic form of Chris* daniry, which had been brought £iom Ireland to Iona, and had thence with ail its wayward graces penetrated to Northumbria, was not able to survive in the competition with its stem Roman antagonists. Both on the continent and in England the Saxons were noted for their submission to the papal see. The Latin education of the inhabitants of this island, which had been inter* mined foi a hundred and fifty years, was now begun again under the ferule of the Roman pnesu

CHAPTER XT

THE AGE OF JUSTINIAN

Belief in the necessary continuance of the Empire^ The Byzantine state, JusUnian and Theodora, Western policy. The reconquest of Italy from the Goths, Effects of the Gothic wars. The destruction of the Gothic kingdom of Italy a mistake. The Lombards. Exhaustion of the eastern Empire at Justiman's death, 1 he causes. Roman law. The MonophysHe heresy and its influence tn the east. Absolutism and orthodoxy of the Emperor,

The barbaiic conquests in the west, which to the modern eye are significant as leading to the replacement of the Roman Empire by other and more vaiied forms ol political life, were \ery dif- ferently regarded by the Christian contemporaries of Clovis and Theodoiic. Learned divines then taught to the full satisfaction of plain men that the world had cntcicd into its sixth and last phase, and that beyond the Roman Empire there was nothing but Antichrist and the final catasttophe of all things. Such was the doctrine of Augustine in the fifth and of Bede in the eighth century, and fiom such teaching it followed cither tliat the triumphs of the barbarians would be succeeded by an imperial restoration or else that they portended the coming of the judg- ment day. The one contingency which was ruled out was that the Roman Empire might perish and the world notwithstanding proceed.

Accordingly it is not surpiising that in the century succeeding this great upheaval in the west, a serious attempt was made to restore the elfecrivc unity of the Empire. While all was fluid and tumultuous in Italy and Gaul, the great fabric of Roman government was still maintained by the civil officials and mw- cenary armies of the eastern Empire. Heie was a corrupt and intriguing court, a centralized but venal bureaucracy, a dty mdb living for the rival factions of the hippodrome, a diurch obscur- antist, influential and umbrageous, and a line of Emperors owing their authority, not as did the barbarian kings to a divine origin, but as often as not to the workings of intrigue and to tlic tumultuous acclamations of the soldiers and the crowd. Amid the upheavals of Europe there was within the cincture of Con-

THIS

mniSxtoiph an assured dviliaatlQii md an atmosphere in the txmditct of affaire so unwholesome^ refined, and pemistent diat under the name of By2antiiusm it survived both the Latin and the Turkish conquests, and was only dispersed by the vigorous blasts of Ottoman nationalism in our own age.

Though it experienced great alternations of fortune, some- times brilliantly victorious, at other times driven to the lowest pit of abasement and misery, the east Roman Empire defended for a thousand years the cause of Greek Christianity in a world of enemies. Goths, Slavs, Avars, Bulgars, Persians, Saracens ravaged and despoiled, but failed to upset this enduring fabric of the ancient world. It persisted through every storm, renoundng nothing which had once been Roman, cherishing hopeless claims and outworn pretensions, and yet, despite its rags and tattere, so vital, that but for the shattering Latin conquest in the thirteenth century, it might have had strength to uphold the Cioss against the Cicsccnt into modem times. For century after century, this state, Roman in name and theory, but in reality part Greek and pait oriental, maintained a standaid of cultured refinement which shone like gold against the surrounding gloom. The classical scholar may smile at the Byzantines, yet they were the channel through which the rudiments of culture and Christi- anity were communicated to the Slavs of Pussia and the Balkans, and the instructois of many rude Asiatic peoples in the ways and institutions of an ordered state.

On the death of the Emperor Anaslasius in 518 the throne of Constantinople passed to an eldeily and illiterate Illyrian soldier, who in later life de\ eloped an unpleasant passion for persecuting Arians. Justin was born in the village of Tauiesium near Uskub, that swiftly contracting region of the Balkans in which Latin still survived as the spoken tongue. Latin, then, he knew, and the soldier's trade, but little else. He had, however, a nephew from the same Latin-speaking region, whom, being childless, he adopted as his heii, and caused to be instructed in all the accom- plishments then thought to be necessary for the formation of the princely mind. Justinian proved worthy of his unclcV regard The young Illyrian peasant was endowed w'ith that rare capacity lor sustained and minute labour which is a suie sign of intel- lectual strength. Long after others were abed this passionate worker would be toiling over his files, or would be found rest- lessly striding down the corridors like a ghost* During Justin’s

Il8 A filStOET OE XVBOTt

reign he was the real ruler. Then in 527, a year after Thco* doric^s death, the heir-apparent, an experienced man in his forty* fifth year, succeeded to his uncle’s place.

Before this he had looked into the gutter for a wife, and picked out a diamond. Theodora was the daughter of a Cypriot bear keeper. She had been an actress and a courtesan, had wandered and suffered, and combined in her person every quality of station and experience certain to give offence to respectable people. But though a tliousand scandals were woven round her name, though she was violent in her passions and vindictive in her hates, she appears to have been in a sense a noble being, beautiful and witty, with a high courage, a statesman’s mind, and the precious gift of womanly compassion. Wlien Constantinople was in the hands of the rioters in 53a, and the Emperor and his councillors were in favour of flight, Theodora came forward and saved her hus- band’s throne. If you wish to protract your life, O Emperor, flight is easy; there are your ships and there is the sea. But con- sider whether, if you escape to exile, you will not wish every day that you were dead. As for me, I hold with the ancient saying that the imperial purple is a glorious shroud.” Her piety was equal to her pluck. The first home for the rescue of fallen women to be erected in Europe is due to this fallen woman, who for twenty-one years shared an Emperor’s throne and swayed his policy.

A peace with Chosroes I of Persia, struck in 532 after three years’ indecisive fighting, released the energies of Justinian for the great task of imperial lecovery in the west. An army under Belisarius, whose shining military talents had been equally proved in the riots at Constantinople and in the Persian War, was sent to Africa to evict the Vandals, and after two pitched battles near Carthage so effectually accomplished his task that nothing more was heard of this barbarous and heretical people, whose fleets had been the terror of the •western Mediterranean, Africa returned nominally to the Roman obedience and to undisputed enjoyment of the orthodox faith. But if Justinian expected to extend to the north African littoral a Roman peace he was soon disabused. The Moors, who had seriously strained the powers of the Vandals, began at once to molest ^e new government in Africa. The western provinces fell into their hands. What re- mained was only held after two exhausting wars which tested the resources of the best generals of the Empire.

turn AOft OF JOSTINtAM

Fot the momeat, however, the Emperor had triumphed beyond all expectations. In a three mont]^* campaign Belisariui had wiped one set of German heretics off the map, and it was reasonable to suppose that with hardly less expenditure of effort he could do equal execution on another. Accordingly the next objective was ^e Gothic kingdom of Italy, which had just lost a capable ruler by the murder of Amalasuntha, the daughter of Theodoric the Great. Since the murderer was Theodahat, the Gothic king whom Amalasuntha in her need for male support had selected as a colleague, and since the victim was a lady friendly to Roman ways and already in secret relation with the Imperial Court, a convenient pretext was offered for a piemedi- tated invasion.

In September, 535, the brilliant Belisarius was despatched to Sicily with a small army of 7,500 men.

There ensued a struggle of twenty-eight years, during which fortune favoured alternately the Roman, the Gothic, and again the Roman cause. At first Belisarius, despite the exiguous force at his disposal, outmatched his opponents. Sicily fell to him almost without a struggle, Naples after a siege. lie found Rome undefended and there successfully maintained himself for a year and nine days against the large but ill-led army of King Vitiges the Goth. So skilful was his management, so well did he com- pensate for inferior numbers by the efficiency of his mailed cavalry, by the command of the sea, and by a clever use of moimted archers that by 540 he appeared to have broken the enemy’s resistance. Vitiges had been trapped into captivity. Ravenna had fallen into the hands of the imperialists. All central and southern Italy was recovered for the Empire. But then, when the Gothic fortunes appeared to be desperate and the great Roman general had returned in triumph to Constantinople, the wheel turned full circle. A young leader of genius, bold, humane, and enterprising, was elected to be king of the Gothic people in 541, and under Totila's inspiring command the Goths recovered all Italy save Ravenna and Ancona, exhibiting qualities of resilience and resource which might have inclined /a less tenacious antagonist to thoughts of peace.

Peace Totila was anxious to have and had more than once offered, for he was willing, like Odovacar, to rule Italy as the servant of the Empire and even to pay tribute. But Justinian was determined on victory, and in 551 sent Narscs, an elderly

5

•S» „ A sctsvosT or s0ikorK

Axmenuavunuch, with a atrong anny of 35,000 men to •ecure it On the field of Gualdo Tadino, a village in Umbria, Narseo, a good soldier and a most prudent statesman, defeated his enemy, using agamst him that combination of dismounted archers and pUtemen which was afterwards employed with success by English commanders against the chivalry of France. Totila was slain in the pursuit, and eleven years afterwards, but not before Italy had been exposed to the horrors of an invasion of Franks and Alemans, the last garrisons of the gallant Gothic army sun rendered Brescia and Verona to the foe.

For Italy this long and bitter struggle was an unrelieved calamity. The armies of Beli-sarius and Narses were Roman only in name, and even more alien to the native population of Italy than the Gothic swordsmen who had been peaceably settled in the country for half a century. Great atrocities weie committed on either side, none more notable than the destruction of the whole adult male population (300,000 according to Procopius) of Milan by the Goths and Burgundians in 539. We have pic* tures, which may perhaps be overdrawn, of the unspeakable misery of the countryside, of populations wasted, of peasants living on chestnuts and grasses and in some instances impelled to acts of cannibalism. For the city of Rome, five times besieged, the icsults of this calamitous struggle were decisive. At the end of the war the teeming capital with its luxurious public baths, its system of food doles and popular amusements had disap- peared. In its place a few thousand impoverished beings, many of them clerics, llugeied on among the monuments of ancient greatness, hencefortli and for many centuries to come to be girdled by imdi ained and malarious wastes. No more was there a Roman Senate. The last circus had been held, the last triumph celebrated, the last consul elected. Trade and commerce were extinct, and since the Goths had cut the aqueducts wliith had given to ancient Rome as good, a water supply as any modem dty can boast, the reign of mediaeval squalor, which Roman example might have corrected, spread without resistance through the western world.

The conquest of Africa and Italy only spurred Justinian’s ambition for further triumphs. "God,” he said, “has granted us to bring the Persians to conclude the peace, to submit the Vandals, the Alemans, and the Moors, to recover all Italy and Sicily, and we have good hopes that the Lord will grant us th*

t«t A6i 99 |t«tlHfAK ^

mt of th«Empke which the Romans formerly extended to the limits of the two oceans and lost through indolence.”

The satisfaction of these vast ambitions was far beyond }us> dnian’s powers. His conquests in Africa, Italy, and Spain (for here too an imperial force was successful in its capture of sea* ports) were as impossible to matnuin as the recov^ of Gaul and Britain was impossible even to initiate.

Moreover, the whole policy of uprooting die Goths from Italy was a great disaster. A better course, both for Italy itself and for the Balkan peninsula, would have been to have supported this hrave Teutonic people, as a bulwark against the ruder nations beyond the alpine barrier. As a Gothic envoy said to Bclisarius,

“ We have observed the laws and constitutions of the Empire as faithfully as any of the Emperors of the past. Neither Theodoric nor any of his successors has ever enacted a law. We have shown scrupulous respect for the leligion of the Romans. No Italian has ever been forcibly converted to Arianism, no Gothic convert has been forced to return to bis old creed. We have reserved all the posts in the Civil Service to the Italians.” A Gothic monarchy thus respectful of Italian sentiment and tradi* tion might have saved Italy from the long series of invasions and dvil wars to which that unfortunate land was condemned.

The Goths were a virile race. They were capable of supplying to the defence of the peninsula those qualities of martial energy which the native population had lost for centuries. It was a profound error to destroy them. Had they been left in peace there might have been no Lombard invasions, no papal state, no revival of the Empiie in the west, and tlte political unity which Italy so painfully achieved in the reign of Queen Victoria might have been realized in the icign of Ethelbert.

Had the Emperor been able to establish a stiong government in Italy, the elimination of tlie Gotlis might have been effected without evil results. But at no time was the Exarch at Ravenna master of the whole coimtry or able to defend its frontiers against attack. The Lombards, the last great wave of conquer- ing Teutons to sweep down upon the Roman Empire, poured into Italy imder their King Alboin and effected a permanent a.d. 5U lodgment in the cotmtry. little good can be said of these fierce Arlan barbarians at this early suge of their history, but like all the Teutons they had in 'them the seeds of discipline and decency, and if the Italian borders had been guarded by Gothic

A BISTORT OF SOROFR

13%

spears the Lombards might have been deflected to the Balkan peninsula. In that event the face of history might have worn a different aspect. With a population largely Teutonic estab* lished in the Balkans the eastern question would have assumed another and perhaps easier form.

The ambitious western wars of Justinian were conducted by a state which w^as never safe from hazards and humiliations. During the reign of this laborious monarch the Huns nearly took Constantinople, the Slavs captured Adrianople, and the Persians sacked the brilliant city of Antioch. The government which was ready to send an army to Spain and even cherished gigantic designs on Gaul and Britain could not secure a Balkan village against marauding barbarians. Wlicn every effort should have been concentrated on domestic defence much was fruit- lessly expended on distant ventures involving, if Procopius is to be trusted, a loss of ten million lives in Italy and Africa alone. And so Justinian, dying in 565 at the age of eighty-three, left his Empire poorer, weaker, and less Roman than it was when he mounted the throne thirty-eight years before.

It seems that the Cypriot Theodora took a sounder view of the needs of the political situation than her Latin>$pcaking husband. She saw that the strength of the eastern Empire depended upon the degree to which it could command the resources of Asia Minor, of Syria, and of Egypt, and^that no conquests in the west were likely to compensate the government of Constantinople for the loss of the Anatolian highlanders, the Egyptian harvests, and the wealth and sparkling talents of Syria. Yet the maladies of the reign must not wholly be traced to errors of policy. In many respects the Emperor showed a true perception of the problems of his day, and made a courageous and indeed imaginative attempt to cope with them. Realizing the weakness of the barbarians in siege operatipns, he covered his Asiatic and European dominions with castles, forts, and lines of defence. Since armies were costly and money was difficult to raise, he tried every device which diplomacy could suggest to cajole, to divide, or to undermine his opponents. To some barbarians he would pay regular tribute. Others he would enrol as "federates” in his army or load, perhaps unwisely, with sumptuous hos- pitality and costly gifts. Lombards were set against Gepids, Avars against Huns, Greek missionaries were scattered far and

THS Aav or JUSTINIAN I33

wide against the heathen* Yet even so the government whidbi began in a blaze of glory steadily declined in strength.

The causes of this progressive exhaustion were partly natural, the great plague of 542, which is reputed to have carried ofiE a third of the population, and the declining energies of the Emperor himself during the last two decades of his long life* But there was a third evil which, being moral, was more serious. The government was cheated by all its agents. Two-thirds of the revenue extorted from the taxpayers failed to find its way to the Treasury. The evil was apparently incurable: against the peculation of his tax-collectors the good laws of Justinian were so ineffectual that a reign begun with promise and continued with ambition closed in an atmosphere of opprobrium and grinding discontent.

Yet there are few rulers in Europe whose work is still so widely remembered as the sovereign who commissioned the building of St. Sophia and that great series of legal compilations, the Codex, the Digest, the Institutes, and afterwards the Novellae, through which the legacy of Roman law has been transmitted to posterity. The numerous buildings, ecclesias* deal, municipal, and military, with which Justinian en- deavoured to secure or embellish his dominions have been described by the secretary Procopius, to whose brilliant narra- tive we are also indebted for our principal knowledge of the campaigns of Belisarius his master. Many of these buildings have perished, but there survive a sufficient number both in Europe and hither Asia to impress the traveller with a sense of grandeur and force. The mosaics at Ravenna arc famous. More renowned is St. Sophia, whose vast low dome crowning the lovely city of Constantinople exceeds the masterpieces of the Moslem architects who found in its mysterious proportions a challenge to their highest genius.

The final systematization of Roman law by Justinian exercised an immediate and continuous influence in the east and in those regions of Italy which remained under Byzantine control. It was not, however, until the foundation of the famous school of glossators at Bologna at the end of the eleventh century that the study of Justinian's civil code became an active influence in the intellectual liistory of western Europe. From that moment it would be difficult to overestimate its power as a factor in the moulding of intellectual, social, and political life. The Roman

A ftlSTOUT tvnopt

m

law expressed the ideas of a society more civilized and mature than the western Europe of the early middle ages< It wax a society which had evolved clear-cut ideas about private property and possession, family rights and the sanctity of contract, ana had come to regard law as a reasoned and intelligible system adapted to the needs of humanity as a whole. A great state with commercial dealings all over the world evolves a law capable of meeting the manifold occasions of its life. The Roman law though influenced by philosophy was close to reality. It was built up not 80 much by legislation as by custom and by the answers of jurisconsults upon the cases real and imaginary which were submitted to them. And so as western Europe emerged from mediaeval darkness it found in the Corpus Juris of Justinian a revelation of the great thing which European civilization had once been and might again become. The fer- ment of the mind thus occasioned was immense. Perhaps a faint analogy may be found in the exciting influence at a later stage of human development of Rousseau's Contrat Social or Darwin’s Origin of Species.

All this lay in the future. For the moment the intellectual life of the eastern Empire was not legal but theological. The Council of Nicaea had failed to quench the curiosity of the Greek world as to the difficult problem of the Incarnation. Other questions in connection with this high mystery suggested them- selves to ingenious minds, and, being involved in the pretensions of rival sees or attached to the proclivities of different races, excited the fiercest and most intolerant passions. If Nicaca had affirmed the divinity of Chiist, it had left open for further examination the delicate matter of determining how the divine substance was related to the human nature. Was there one Nature or two? Was Mary the mother of the human Christ only or of the human and divine as well? In the fifth century no question was more passionately discussed than this of the single or dual nature of Christ, or than the formula by which that union of natures should be most coirectly expressed. The controversy lasted long after its oiiginal protagonists, Cyril of Alexandria and Ne.siorius of Constantinople, were laid in their graves, influencing the debates of four Councils of the Church, and continuing, even after the Council of Chalcedon had decided, under the joint influence of Pope and Emperor, for the dual nature in 451, to envenom the impressionable peoples of

f ^iQ>r INI All 135

tSie ciAit* It followed that however orthodogt the Smpeior might desire to be, he was forced, if he were a wise man, to take account of the strong bodies of monophysite^ opinion which were to be found in Constantinople, in Mesopotamia, in Syria, and in ®SyP^* Some Emperors essayed compromising formulae, others like Anastasius a policy of toleration. No statesman could be in- difEerent to a question which even excited the dangerous mobs of the hippodrome and threatened to disrupt the Empire.

Justinian was an orthodox bigot against whom it must be remembered not only that he closed the schools of Athens and silenced the voice of philosophy in the Greek world, but that he spent the concluding years of his life in stciile theological specu- lations and stem repression of heresies. Yet theology was a subject in which the beautiful Theodora had also her opinions. Her sympathies were monophysite, her interests oriental, her political sense enlisted on the side of a theological entente with a movement which defied persecution and was proving in*- creasingly attractive to the peoples of the east. Justinian listened to the counsels of his wife. A substantial measure of toleration was extended to the monophysites, and to the delight of the anti-Roman party a miserable captive Bishop of Rome was com- pelled in a Council at Constantinople to condemn certain theses which had won the approval of the hated Council of Chalcedon. It was wise of Justinian thus to endeavour to plaster over the cra'cks which this heresy was driving through the eastern half of his Empire. Yet the cracks remained and steadily widened, weakening the sentiment of allegiance to Constantinople, more especially in Egypt and Syria, preparing, maybe, the way for the Saracen conquests, and so permanent that the Coptic Church in Egypt today stands on the ancient rock of the monophysite faith.

To Justinian it was given to display upon a great theatre and to an admiring world the two spectacles, not hitherto combined, of Roman absolutism and ecclesiastical tyranny. He was, says Agathias, “ the first of the Roman Emperors to show himself by word and deed the absolute master of the Romans.” Yet>a man 80 jealous, vain, and irresolute, a man for whom no design was too great, no detail too small, no superstition too absurd, and no subject irrelevant or remote, cannot excite admiration. With almost infinite resources of skill and industry he appears to have

• /.e*, in favour of the single nature of Christ.

U6 A BISTORT OF EOROFI

lacked tlie higher gifts of statesmanship, the energetic will, the true sense of proportion, the capacity for taking unpleasant dedsions. Few men, whose personality is so uncertain, fill a greater place in history. As for a moment we tread beside him through the corridors of the past we seem to see the shades of night battling with the blood-red sunset of imperial Rome.

C3IAFTER Xn

ISLAM

Early obscurity of Arabia, The Arah conquests of the seventh century, Muhammad, his life attd teaching. Rise and progress of Moslem dvU lieation. The mystics of Islam. Shiites and Sunnites. The defence of Europe against Islam by Leo the Isaurian and Charles Martel.

We have now reached a point at which the history of Europe becomes complicated by the victories of the Moslem religion. For the first six centuries of the Christian era no European statesman had occasion to remember the existence of Arabia. It was a land of mystery, doing a little trade with Syria and Egypt and contributing some mercenaries to the Persian and Byzantine armies, but otherwise as remote and inhospitable as tlie frozen north. Nothing likely to be reported from this scorch- ing wilderness would be calculated to disturb the bazaars of Damascus or Alexandria. Arabian society was still in the tribal stage, and the hawk-eyed Bedouin tribes might be confidently expected to rob and massacre each other till the crack of doom. Nowhere was there a vestige of an Arabian state, of a regular army, or of a common political ambition. The Arabs were poets, dreamers, fighters, traders; they were not politicians. Nor had they found in religion a stabilizing or unifying power. They practised a low form of polytheism, so low that some finer minds among them, touched perhaps by vague influences from Christianity or Judaism, had begun quietly to challenge it At Mecca, their principal trading town, only fifty miles removed from the great highway of the Red Sea, they appeared to worship a black stone placed in a temple, called the Caba, or Cube. Such were the impressions likely to prevail about the population of Arabia in the year in which Heraclius, the Byzan- tine Emperor, concluded his Persian wars.

A hundred years later these obscure savages had achieved for themselves a great world power. They had conquered Syria and Egypt, they had overwhelmed and converted Persia, mastered western Turkestan and part of the Punjab. They had wrested Africa from the Byzantines and the Berbers, Spain from

• 37

138 A iii8To%:r or soeopx

the Visigoths. In the west they threatened France, in the cast Constantinople. Their fleets, built in Alexandria or the Syrisui ports, rode the abaters of the Mediterranean, pillaged the Greek islands and challenged the naval power of the Byzantine Empire. Their successes had been won so easily, the Persians and the Berbers of the Atlas mountains alone offering a serious resistance, that at the beginning of the eighth century it must have seemed an open question whether any final obstacle could be opposed to their victorious course. The Mediterranean had ceased to be a Roman lake. From one end of Europe to the other the Christian states found themselves confronted with the chal- lenge of a new oriental civilization founded on a new oriental faith.

To what causes are we to attribute this sudden and extra- ordinary outpouring of the Arab race? An answer which is often given is that the Arabs were piopelled into the uttermost parts of the earth by the ferment within them of their new religion, and that they rode, battled, and conquered to extend the faith. But this explanation docs not accord with the fact that, during the early years of the Arab expansion, the con- querors weie at no particular pains to make converts. On the contrary, their success in government largely consisted in the wise policy of toleiation which they practised towards Jews and Christians, presenting in this respect the happiest contrast to the persecuting practices of their 'Successors. But if religion was not the primary motive which underlay this extraordinary movement, still less can it be ascribed to consistent design. The Bedouin horsemen did not tide out of Arabia with a clear-cut scheme for the conquest of the world and the establishment of new states. They made their empire as otlicr states have mad^ empires after them, blindly, without set purpose and with no near and immediate project other than plunder. They began by making plundering raids into • Palestine and Irak at a time when the defences of those provinces were at their lowest point of efficiency, and finding victory easy and booty rich, they cxr tended their operations. Success, beyond the utmost dreams of ambition, attended their attacks. In 636 they beat the last army of Heraclius at the Yarmak and conquered Syria. In 637 they entered Ctesiphon and mastered Mesopotamia. In 639 they im vaded Egypt, and three years later entered Alexandria. Having discovered the weakness of the Empire, they were resolved to

i

m

it «nd to hold, admixiister, and extend their conquem. Not otherwise did the Elizabethan buccaneers throw them* selves upon the wealth of the western hemisphere. Yet if reli*» gion was not the originating force in the expansion of Arabia* it gave to it a degree of animation and permanence which it would otherwise have lacked. Without the bond of a common religion the Arab horsemen would have lacked the cohesion foiling which victories can seldom be won and never secured. Without some inspiration higher than mere appetite they could never have commended their rule to Syrians and Egyptians* Persians and Berbers. No small part of their success was due to the fact that there had been evolved in the heart of Arabia a form of religion which satisfied then, as it continues to satisfy now, the souls of men and women living under the burning skies of Asia and Africa, and that of this religion the Arabs were the armed and exultant missionaries.

The Hedjaz was that part of Arabia most exposed, by reason of its trade, to foreign influences. Here Jews and Christians might sometimes be found, more especially in Mecca, which was the commercial centre of the district and a town of pil- grimage, or at Yathrib, two hundred miles north, one of the few areas in that waterless land where the arts of agriculture were practised by a settled population.

Muhammad (c. 570-632) was bom at Mecca of a family neither rich nor distinguished, but of the Kuraishitc tiibe, which con- trolled the local sanctuary. As a young man he entered the com- mercial house of Kadija, a wealthy widow, whom he subse- quently married, nor perhaps is it irrelevant to his spiritual development that the pursuit of his calling involved caravan journeys across the desert and opportunities of converse with Christians and Jews, Muhammad was one of those men of whom religious history offers many examples, in whom a passionate animal nature is combined with the temper of a visionary. In many of the conventional virtues of western society he was wholly deficient. He was cruel and crafty, lustful and ignorant, lacking in physical courage and the gift of self-criticism; but despite these grave faults, which became intensified with age and success, he -had the ardour of the mystic, the zeal of the ethical reformer, and that absorbing preoccupation with the things of the soul which comes most easily to men in the soli- tary places of the world. By degrees the mind of this Arab met-

140 A HISTORY or ROROPE

chant became possessed of certain large religious and ethical ideas. He went into trances, and in these trances visions appeared to him«He had a vision of the one God, of a future life, of the sensual delights of paradise, of the material torments of hell, and of an impending day of retribution in which sinnets would be punished. These visions, crude, vigorous, animated, he began to recite (Koran), first of all privately to a circle of intimates, then more widely. Mecca was sharply critical. Was he a madman, an impostor, a poet? Nevertheless he persevered, winning adherents by the flow and vehemence of his invective, by his apocalyptic threats of impending doom, and by the large and attractive appeal of the monotheistic faith and the practice of brotherly love. That he was influenced by Judaism and Christianity is certain; but his information with regard to these two religions, being derived from oral sources only, was dim, fragmentary, and confused. He regarded Christ as a prophet, born of a virgin mother, but neither had the story of the cruci- fixion reached him, nor yet does he appear to have been aware of the difference between the Jewish and Christian creeds. The Koran is a collection of utterances of an unlettered prophet preaching the message of God to the Arab race.

From the mockeries of his native town Muhammad escaped in 622 to Yathrib, henceforth known as Medinat en Nabi, the city of the Prophet. This is the famous Hegira, or flight, which is taken to mark the beginning of the Moslem era. In Medina, which was tormented by rival factions, the Prophet continued his pious labours, preaching the welcome doctrine of concord, of submission {islam) to the will of God {Allah) and developing many of those practical precepts which govern the conduct of the Moslem world to this day, the five daily prayers, the fasting in the month of Ramadan, the yearly pilgrimage, the absten- tion from wine. In all this side of his teaching the Prophet showed a shrewd insight into •Arab nature. It would be an anachronism to ascribe to him tfie idea of attempting to impose upon Arabia a universalist religion. With that strong, practical sense which was in him so strongly combined with religious exaltation and self-hypnotism, he aimed at reform rather than at revolution. He did not attempt to change everything, but tolerated polygamy and slavery, institutions too secure to be assailed with success, and even temporized with the symbols of polytheism. Returning to Mecca in 631, after a long struggle

141

marked by acts of brigandage and wholesale murder, he adopted the black stone, and declared that the Caba was the temple of Abraham. Before he died he had founded a little state by the sword, for in the last analysis his Universal God was an Arab, and Mecca was his Holy City.

The new religion had from the first a great political value. Into the wild, lawless, infinitely divided Arab world it brought unity of belief, submission to authority, a tranquillizing daily ritual of prayer and that abstinence from strong drinks which has given to Moslem armies throughout history a special ad- vantage. Moreover, the monotheism of Islam was not so far removed from the monophysite forms of Christianity which were popular in Syria and Egypt as to interpose an obstacle in the way of the Arab conquest of those lands.

So the Moslem civilization spread. Under the Ummayyads its political centre was Damascus, under the Abbasids Bagdad, under the Fatimites Cairo. Syrians and Persians, Turks, Berbers, and Spaniards contributed to bring about the great age of Moslem literature and art which, for four centuries while the European mind was deep sunk in ignorance and sloth, gave to the peoples of Islam the intellectual leadership of the world. The memory of that epoch still survives. Still the Palestinian Arab proudly contrasts the literature of his golden age with the scrip- tures of the Jew. Still the Nigerian Emir dreams of the pilgrimage to Mecca, and of the day when all the world will acknowledge the true faith. Still from the Atlantic Ocean to the Himalayas the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer at sun- rise and sunset, the mosques fill with shoeless worshippers, the little children learn the Koran by heart, and in the shaded alcoves of the great Cairene University of A 1 Azhar groups of white-robed students, seated on the floor, swing back and forth in a mood of fanatical ecstasy, as they intone the sacred words of the polygamous Prophet to whom all wisdom and all modern science were miraculously revealed.

Islam is a religion of warriors and shepherds, which, albeit without a clergy or a regular liturgy, has persisted for 1,300 years and now is thought to number some 300,000,000 adherents. Asceticism after the early Christian manner was not encouraged by the Prophet, who is reputed to have said that two prostra- tions of a married Moslem are worth more than seventy of a celibate.” Nevertheless Islam, like Christianity, reckons its

A SISTOKT or KO&OPS

14a

fratcsnutlei of ascetics, its enraptured mystics, its ttoAcmv formist sectaries. The harsh creed of the Arabian desert fuia taken colour and content from the richer civilizations of Syrik and Egypt, of Persia, India, and Spain, from whidi, at differoat times, it has drawn its votaries. The crude outpourings of the Koran do not exhaust its message. There is in Islam a body of mystical literature, which, in the purity of its religious emotion, vies with the spiritual masterpieces of the Jewish or Christian faith.

The period which succeeds the death of the Prophet, while distinguished for many dazzling achievements in war and policy, is also memorable for the emergence of that deep rift witltin the Moslem world which still envenoms the relations of the Shiite and the Sunnite sects. Under the able rule of Omar, A.n 6 j 4 - the second of the Caliphs or Vicars and the true founder of the 13 Arab state, the voice of discontent was silenced by the victories of the Arab generals. But his successor, Othman, was less for- tunate, less able, le-ss industrious, and perhaps also, since his

• .n. 643- government was hotly blamed for its extortions, less well served.

A campaign was set on foot in favour of Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet, which resulted in the assassination of Othman, and in the elevation of Ali to the caliphate in his place. From that moment the Moslem world was sharply sundered into two irro- concilable factions. The title of Ali was disputed by the experi- enced Moawya, the cousin of the murdered caliph and a member of the Ummayyad house, who, having ruled Syria for seventeen years, was in no mood to surrender the throne of power to the nominee of Medina.

The Shiites or partisans of Ali were strong in Arabia and Av 661 Sunnites adhered to Moawya in Syria and Egypt. The

muidcr of Ali and later of his second son, Hosein, left in the hearts of their votaries a long memory of passionate regret such as has coloured the annals of Ireland and Serbia; but the strength lay with the caliphs of the Ummayyad house who ruled at Damascus. At the cost of two dvil wars they cstablislied (69a) their supremacy over die Arab world.

The divisions betwem the Shiites and the Sunnites, while temporarily arresting the Moslem offensive, brought no per- manent relief to the Byzantine Empire. Its position was chal- lenged in Asia Minor and in the islands. Its capital was exposed to the risk of capture. The defection of those of its

ikhb acaclted tto ^ibh^iiie ar o^pjfHjsed to the human *^de of Ohrbt was to be a{>|>refaend6d«Meanwhile no p^tBt

figOte appeared upon thh B^zantinO scene between the death df Heraclius in 641 and the accession of Leo the Isaurian in 711 7. Emperor succeeded emperor, assassination followed assassina- tion. But though the state was shaken by palade revolutions and civil war and its annals stained by fratricidal intrigues, Asia Minor and Constantinople were held. The subdivision of the Empire into military districts or themes, garrisoned by army divisions and under entire subjection to military officers, may have helped to this end.

It is a commonplace of history to remark that the Saracen expansion in Europe was ultimately checked by the victory won by the Frankish sovereign, Charles Martel, over the great army of the Viceroy Abdur Rahman on the field of Poitiers in 732. The numbers engaged on either side in that famous conflict were high, the conflict betweeii the huge Frankish footmen and the fiery cavalry of Spain and Africa was fierce and long, the victory of the Christian army was complete and decisive. But in the scale of importance the victory of Poitiers docs not rank with the successful repulse by Leo the Isaurian of the formid- able Saracen attacks on Constantinople in 717 and 718, not only because Constantinople was closer to the centre of Mosleih pow'er and therefore more likely, if taken, to be retained, but also because the Saracens once established in the Byzantine capital would have found among the rude and imperfect Christians of eastern Europe a free field for Moslem propaganda. If the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in the fifteenth cen- tury spread the Moslem creed far and wdde through the Balkan peninsula, we may imagine the success which would have attended a Saracen conquest 700 years earlier, at a time when the peoples of Russia and the Balkans had received but a faint initial tincture of Christianity, and were still in a rude disorder of institutions and beliefe.

In the west the Saracens were confronted by an organized Christian society inheriting something of the strength/ of the Roman Empire, and even had they won the day at Poitiers, would still have been far removed from the conquest and con- version of France. In eastern Europe it was otherwise. Here in Russia and Hungary, or among the Bulgarians and Slavs of the Balkan peninsula, there was no centre of moral and physical

144 A BISTORT OV RUROPS

resistance comp;irable to the Gallo-Roman Church or to the Frankish monarchy. Had Leo the Isaurian failed to beat off the imposing arm^a of Moslemah, the Moslem faith might have spread like a prairie fire through the Balkans and the plain of Hungary and northwards and eastwards to the Urals. From this danger the great defence of Constantinople in 718, con- ducted by a young and capable Emperor, with the aid of stout fortifications, a superior navy, Greek fire, and the timely assist- ance of a Bulgar army, delivered European civilization. The name of Leo should be remembered. That the Russian Church is Greek and not Moslem today is one of the results, how fortun- ate we dare not say, which may, without a great stretch of probabilities, be attributed to his great and resounding triumph.

CHAPTER xra

THE FRANKISH EMPIRE

hong^ duration of the house of Meroveus. Sources of its authority. Survival of Latin culture in Gaul. Its disappearance in Britain. De- composition of public power under the Merovingians. Survival of the idea of Frankish unity. Rise of the Carolings. Charles Martel. Chris- tian missions in Germany. The Papacy quarrels with the Greeks and Lombards and invokes the Franks. Pippin and Pope Stephen. Charles the Great. First visit to Rome. Coronation in a.d. 8oo. Its impor- tance. The Carolingian renaissance. The debt to Ireland and England. Alcuin. The Saxon wars. Central Europe secured for the Latin Church. Strength and weakness of the Frankish Empire. Its dissolution in the ninth century.

The descendants of King Clovis the Frank were for the most part either cruel and treacherous barbarians or enfeebled debauchees. Yet, despite their atrocities and lusts, their fratri- cidal enmities and purposeless civil wars, the house of Meroveus endured for nearly 300 years (481-716). outlasting the Valois or die Bourbons, the Stuarts or the Hanoverians, and in this point of endurance presenting the sharpest contrast to die short-lived ruling families of imperial Rome. So strong was the prestige attaching to the stock of Clovis that for seventy-eight years after all effeedve power had passed into the hands of the mayors of the palace, members of the Merovingian house were still solemnly crowned and accorded honours of a phantasmal royalty. “Nothing,” says Einhard, writing of this last period of their rule, “ was left the King, except the name of King, the flowing locks, the long beard. He sat on his throne and played at government, gave audience to envoys, and dismissed them with the answers which he had been schooled, or rather com- manded, to give. He had nothing to call his own except one estate of small value where he had a residence and a not very numerous retinue. He travelled, when occasion required it, in a waggon drawn by oxen, and driven like a farmer’s cart by a cowherd. In this guise he came to the palace or to the annual assembly of his people. The Mayor controlled the administra- tion and decided all issues of policy at home or abroad.”

The explanation of this extraordinary reluctance to terminate

145

14^ A ntstoRlr df kuEopI

the life o£ a bad dynasty is to be chiefly found in tSie field religion. If the Merovingians were kings, they were also priests^ If they were wicked, they were also holy. No steel must shear their flowing locks, for were they not, as the Frankish song writers knew, descended from the sea god or sea monster begat Meroveus? An aura of sanctity, far older than Christian* ity, clung about this national priesthood of the Franks. They did not need the consecration of a Christian bishop to establish their authority, or to commend them to the loyalty of their Frankish warriors. Not that they failed to derive substantial and continuing advantages from the fact that Clovis, the founder, had adopted the faith and obtained the support of the Roman Church. Thereby they were free from the obstacles which con- fronted the Arian Ostrogoths or I^ombards in Italy, or the Visi- goths during their government of Toulouse and the first here- tical period of their Spanish rule. The only organized and educated body of men. surviving the 'wreck of the Empire in the west, instead of being inimical, was an ally. They could beat down the Arian and the Jew with the plaudits of the Church, and count every victory as a triumph of the orthodox, of the Roman faith.

Moreover, despite their Teuton origin, the early Merovingian kings were prone to regard themselves as the generals or magis- trates of Rome. They accepted Roman insignia, made use of Roman coins, and appear, in the. true imperial spirit, to have recognized no frontiers to the extension of their rule. In Con- stantinople they were, from time to time, regarded as auxiliaries. The Emperor Maurice, in 590, alluding to the ancient concord between the Franks and the Roman people, invoked the aid of Childebert II against the Lombards in Italy.

It is, therefore, easy to see how, despite the Teutonic origin of Its Frankish conquerors, the land which Is now known as France has remained part of fhe Latin world. The Franks, tliough they effected an occupatron of Gaul, did not enter upon Iheir inheritance as the enemies of the Gallo-Roman population, but rather as the foes of the Arian Visigoths and Burgundians. It was against these, or against one another, that Clovis and his descendants were chiefly concerned to turn their arms, not against the Roman Church, which they regarded as a friend, nor the Gallo-Roman population which accepted their yoke, nor the Roman Emperor, who, from his distant throne on the Bos-

tmm #jiA«is;t«iK 147

phofiMB, was *Si»p09GA td re^d them as potendal allies. After a vay fow years the Church imposed its Latin culture on the conquerors. Chilperic» the grandson of Clovis, described by Gregbry of Tours as the Nero and Herod of his age, composed Latin verses, and in the pride of his new won knowledge, added four Greek letters to the alphabet.

That the continuity of Latin civilization should have been thus secured in Gaul while it was broken in Britain is explained w^hen we consider the comparative weight of the Roman influence in the two countries and the "differ- ing circumstances attending their conquest. In Gaul the Roman cities were numerous and comparatively large; in Britain they were few (some fifteen or sixteen in number) and exceed- ingly small. In the one country the Church was affluent and influential; in the other, as the tiny basilica in Silchester seems to indicate, it was weak and poor. The correspondence of Sidonius Apollinaris, taken in conjunction with the later evi- dence of Gregory of Tours, proves that in Gaul there was both bclore and after the Frankish invasion an influential country aristocracy of Gallo-Roman descent. No such aristocracy sur- vived in those parts of Britain which weie effectually conquered by the Saxons. But what was equally important was the con- trasted character of the two invasions, in Gaul accepted by the larger part of the native population, in Britain fiercely contested, and leading to the replacement of the Latin-speaking Celts of England by their heathen and Teutonic conquerors, to the sub- mergence of the Christian religion and the loss of the Latin speech.

With the Franks, as with the other Teutonic peoples, the old institutions of tribal liberty had failed to survive the ordeal of war. The popular assemblies were no longer held. The king's will, in so far as it was not contested in practice by the nobles, was law. Yet nothing was done to turn these initial advantages to account. The Merovingian kings had no idea of political responsibility or historical tradition. They applied to tlic Frankish monarchy the principles which in Teutonic ^society governed the regulation of private property. The inheritance was divided among the sons, and since the sons invariably quarrelled, the country was plagued for five generations by use- less civil war.

From these contests, which were inspired by no principle

148 A HISTOAT 07 SUAOPB

higher than the violent appetites of an ill-conditioned child may supply, one consequence plainly followed, a progressive degenent' tion in the art and system of government. As we study the his* tory of Gaul in the Merovingian age we are sensible of a steady decomposition of public power. Privileges are freely granted oi freely taken, whi^ are inconsistent with the exercise of state authority.

The tendencies which Sir Henry Spelman, an English jurist of the seventeenth century, stunmarized under the phrase “ the feudal system,” begin to make themselves increasingly apparent. The administration of justice, the levy of taxes, the obligation of raising fighting men for the army or the host, tend to fall into the han^ of great landed proprietors, civil or ecclesiastical. Grants of “ immunities ” are made to churches or abbeys, which in effect exclude them from the normal responsibilities and duties of the citizen. The count, who is the public official in the city, may not enter the " immunized ” territory to levy taxes, or to administer justice, or to raise men for the host. These functions, if they are still to be performed, belong henceforth to the territorial lord, upon whom, under the vague and ill-defined suzerainty of the king, the exercise of political power is in effect devolved. By the end of the Merovingian period a great part of the land of Gaul had fallen into the hands of the Church.

While this slow decompo.sition was taking place in the body politic of Frankish Gaul, while tire monarchy was becoming weaker, the Church more wealthy, and in consequence more barbarous and corrupt, and the nobility more independent, the fabric of Christian society in the west was menaced by the Saracens, the Avars, and the Slavs. The pressure of foreign danger was sufficient to maintain in the ill-soldered Frankish dominions a sense of unity which the partitions and civil wars of the Merovingian kings were unable to destroy. The frontiers were defended. A term was placed on fresh Teutonic invasions. The strong provincial feelings of- Burgundy and Aquitaine, of Neustria and Amtrasia (as the western and eastern parts of northern France had by 561 come to be termed), were not allowed altogether to efface the historic image of Rome. Even the fifty years of decadence and disorder which followed the death of Dagobeit (638), the last Merovingian king to rule over a united country, failed to obliterate the idea of an undivided monarchy.

THE FEAKSfSH EMPIRE

149

Christian, Roman, aiid Frankish, governing the vast area which was once Gaul.

A new epoch opens with the rise to power of that vigorous and remarkable Teutonic dynasty which obtains an immortal lustre from the great name of Charlemagne. From being weak and contemptible the Frankish monarchy became, under the Carolings, the strongest instrument for government and con- quest which Europe had seen since the great days of the Roman Empire. The whole landscape of public affairs was transformed by the strenuous activities of the Austrasian or eastern Franks. The Saracens were driven back into Spain, the Avars blotted from the map, and Pannonia, their latest home, made bare for the reception of the Hungarian people. A Papal state was created in Italy at the expense of the defeated Lombards, with the three im- portant consequences of preventing, until 1 870, the establishment of a unified Italian state, of widening the rift between Rome and Byzantium, and of giving to the Papacy a position of political independence, which was thought by some to be a temptation to worldliness and corruption, by others to be essential to its spiritual freedom and authority. These changes were important. To this day we experience their effects. But more important still was the conversion to Christianity of Frisia and Germany and the acceptance by Cliaricmagnc of the Imperial crown from the hands of Pope Leo III on Christmas day, 800. A new world in central Europe was called into the Christian and Roman fold to redress the losses in Syria and Egypt, in Africa and Spain. A con- quest for Rome greater than any single conquest since the days of Julius Caesar had been achieved by the co-operation of English and Irish missionaries, Frankish soldiery, and papal encourage- ment and support.

The Carolings sprang from the border land which has been disputed for centuries between the Latin and Teutonic races. Among the grandees who were prominent in the politics of Austrasia at the beginning of the seventh century were a certain Pippin of Landen in Brabant, and a certain Arnulf, a duke, and subsequently a bishop of Metz. Pippin, who became mayor of the palace, and dc facto ruler of Austrasia in 622, married his daughter to the son of Arnulf, and seldom can there have been

ijo A mntowLT OF' suRaFS

a grander alliaxxse in Austrasia than th^ union ih^

daughter o£ its foremost statesman and the son of a man V 9 h 0 was in turn a duke, a bishop, and a saint, but most specially distinguished, if his genealogy can be trusted, for his connec- tions with a Roman senatorial family in Narbonne. The child of this marriage won for himself a place in world history.^

Pippin II, Mayor of Austrasia in 68 1, master of Neustria in 687, a valiant fighter, and a zealous friend of missionary enter- prise among the Germans and Frisians, was the father of Charles Martel and the great-grandfather of Charlemagne* Such in brief was the lineage of the illustrious Emperor, who is claimed as a national hero both by the Germans and by the French, but who was in truth neither German nor French as we now understand these terms, but an Austrasian Frank, Teutonic, no doubt, in origin and sentiment, but Latin in dis- cipline, and regarded by himself and his contemporaries as the captain of Roman Christianity in the western world.

Charles Martel, or Charles " the Hammer,” the bastard son of Pippin II, reigned over the two kingdoms of Austrasia and Neustria for twenty-six years, defeating all his neighbours in battle, and earning his title of the Hammer by his drastic and probably not iinnecded handling of the Gallo-Roman Church* The tall, mail-clad infantry from the cast who brought him victory on so many fields had not been softened by the luxuries of the town, and restored to the Frankish name a military lustre which had been lost since the days when Clovis first loosed his untamed Teutons on the fields of Gaul. Of the Hammer's achievements, one, though most insufficiently de- scribed, is specially memorable. On an October Sunday in 732 he defeated near Poitiers a great Moslem army under Abdur Rahman, the Arab Governor of Spain, with a loss to the in- vaders, if the figures of Paul the Deacon can be trusted (as they can nor), of 375,000 lives. This . resounding victory, though it did not prevent fresh Arab incumons into Gaul, for three years later the Arabs took Arles and Avignon, from each of which cities they were evicted by the Hammer, was nevertheless a dedsive deliverance.

It is true that the Arabs would not have been strong enough to capture, still less to hold Gaul, and that quite apart from the ' Genealogical Table A, p, 417,

■vnu ’wmAvxtnm ttutmw, 151

eompifacjiea sad imrigcMs adiidi tat the wdb and woof odental poUtics, they were confronted with troubles from the» Berbers in Africa and the Christians in Spain. Still, if they could not have conquered, they could have persisted in destruc- tive raids. In particular they could have opposed a serious obstacle to the prosecution of the greatest of all the improve- ments which was then, with the Hammer's material help, being carried out in Europe.

The conversion of Germany could never have been accom- j^lished by the Frankish clergy in the state to which it had been reduced under the Merovingian regime. It is to the missionaries of Ireland and England, where Christianity shone with a purer light, that we must ascribe the spiritual impulse which prompted the German mission and revived the religious tone of the western Church. We have now reached the time when the British peoples, emerging from their northern mists, make their first great contribution to the advancement of civilized life in the larger world. The long roll of great Englishmen opens at the beginning of the eighth century with the names of a scholar and a missionary. Thus early did the Anglo-Saxons evince their passion for the improvement of mankind through religion and knowledge. The Ecclesiastical History of Bede, a Northumbrian monk, who took all knowledge for his province, retained for at least four centuties a pre-eminent place in the Larin literature of Europe, and is still valued as our prime source of information on the development of Christian society and institutions in Britain. Almost an exact contemporary of this famous polymath was Wynfrith, better known under his later name of Boniface, the apostle of Germany. The work of a missionary among barbarous people, living in dense and distant forests, may leave but little trace on the written memorials of his time. But the salient facts in the career of Boniface are eloquent of ardour and persistence, of capacity and success. Despatched by Pope Gregory II in 7 19 <m a mission to the heathen in Germany, he put himself to school with his compatriot Willibrod, who was engaged upon the con- version of the Frisians; and it was in Frisia, after thirty-five years of unremitting toil, that Boniface found a martyr's death. Mean- while, labouring always in the service of the apostolic see, but also with the powerful assistance of the Frankish kings, he converted the Hessians and Thuringians, organized the Church in Bavaria,

ts* * BltTOKT OF KVROFX

and being appointed to the Archbishopnc of Mainz in 748, xexerdsed a general supervision over the Christian communides which, mainly through his efforts, had been hishioned in southern and central Germany. That he was assisted by other valiant workers does not detract from his achievement. In the task of binding Germany to Rome he was a pioneer, and his the decisive and dynamic influence.

In one important particular the conversion of Germany differs from the far earlier movement for the introduction of Christi- anity into Gaul. The humble Syrian traders who first brought the Christian message to Marseilles came into a highly civilized Roman province. Votaries of an obscure oriental sect, they could offer neither poetry nor metaphysics, neither law nor science, to a society far better instructed in all these matters than they. What they had to propound was a revolutionary way of life round which a new literature, wider and more practical than the old, and offering a fresh range of moral interests, was gradually built up in Creek and Latin. To the cultivated gentlemen of Gaul, even as late as the fifth century, Virgil was more melodious than Prudentius, Cicero more eloquent than Augustine. The new theology had a rival in the old literature, which to many a pious mind seemed to be dangerous just because it was seductive. But in Germany there was no such dualism. There the Christian missions did not at any point conflict with allegiance to an ancient and splendid literature, for Boniface and his fellow- workers preached to rude, unlettered barbarians. It was indeed to the missions and monasteries that Germany owed its knowledge of Latin and an introduction into the culture of the ancient world

While the Venerable Bede was writing his immortal work in his cell at Jarrow and Boniface was preaching Christ to the wild Thuringians, and Charles the Hammer, but also the missionary, was hammering the bishops and abbots of Gaul, and secularizing their property, events were preparing a fresh rift within the Christian fold, and working up to that alliance between the Papacy and the Frankish kings which transformed the politics of western Europe.

It is part of the wisdom of the Roman Church to accept what it cannot prevent. It accepts and subordinates to its system the Ineradicable polytheism of Mediterranean man. The pagan genius became the Christian angel, the pagan Isis the Christian Madonna, the pagan hero became the Christian saint, the pagan festival the Christian feast. And while canonizing this deep-seated popular craving for spiritual helpers and mediators, the Roman Church also welcomed the material modes, be they low or lofty, in which expression was sought to be given to these needs. It accepted statues and paintings, the worship of relics and the pilgrimage to shrines in which relics were placed. In the general debasement of mind and morals which characterized the seventh century this material or superstitious side of the Christian religion was greatly developed. Image worship was prevalent in the Roman, it was still more prevalent in the Byzantine Church. It was open to the critic to observe that the cult of a single God had been left to the Moslem and the Jew.

Such critics were to be found in plenty in the highlands of Armenia and Anatolia. The Paulicians, so called because they appealed to the authority of St. Paul, acknowledged only those principles of conduct for which they found a warrant in the Scriptures. They repudiated the commentaries of the Fathers. They denied the authority of the Church. They rejected the sacraments, the veneration of the Cross, the adoration of the Virgin. In the rigour of their puritanism they anticipated the Protestant rcfoimers of the sixteenth century. It would seem that the Emperor Leo III, who came from the regions in Asia Minor where such beliefs prevailed, was impressed by the message of these highland sectaries. To his austere and soldierly mind the practices which may be summarized in the term " image-worship ” were corrupting to the fibre of the body politic. The Empire was not to be saved from the Moslem by monks, relics, and incantations, but by civilian discipline and military valour. In 726 the Isaurian Emperor issued an edict command- ing the destruction of images throughout his dominions.

At once a storm arose in Italy. To the many causes of dissen- sion between Greek and Roman churches, the quarrel over the single Nature, the quarrel over the single Will, the claim that the Patriarch of Constantinople was on an equal footing with the Pope of Rome, there was now added the embittering circum- stance that a Greek tyrant was seeking to deprive the Italian people of their cherished religious images. A revolt broke out in Ravenna, a Greek exarch was killed; in a council of Italian

154 ivxoPB

bi$ho{)9 auannaiifed in 731 by Gnegory III the konodastt vm excommunicated* The defiance of Rome was bold, p<^pu!ai'> dangerous. Hopdessly at issue with the Empire, the Popes were compelled to look elsewhere for material support.

The stream of history would have run in different channels i( at this juncture, the Papacy had elected to ally itself stea<Kly with the Lombard monarchy. There was much to be said for such a course. The Lombards, after the first great explosion of cruelty which marked their original settlement in Italy, had shown some aptitude for civilization. They liad abjured Arianism and reduced some of their laws to writing, and under the rule of the enlight* ^**■43 ened Liutprand were making swift advances in the arts of life. Moreover, in a contest with the Greeks, Lombard 83rmpathy could be counted on in advance. From their first entry into Italy in 568 until the peace of 680, the principal thread in Lombard history had been the prosecution of a quarrel with the Greek Empire. Thar antagonism, though intermitted for the time, was still an underlying condition of Italian politics. No Lombard king could rest content while an inch of Italian soil was held by the Empire, and no Emperor could look upon the Lombards as other than pestilent inttuders upon bis sacred preserves. A doubt can never have existed in the papal curia but that the I/>mbards would prove to be zealous and effective allies against the Greek iconoclasts.

Yet the Papacy, showing that fine instinct for secular diplo- macy which belongs in a special degice to Italian statesmanship, decided, after some fluctuations of policy, that the Lombards, despite their Catholicism and their impiovcments in the arts and thor hatred of the Greeks, wcie to be tieated not as friends but as enemies. Pavia was too near Rome. If the Lombards became uncontested masters of Italy, the Papacy would be degraded to a Lombard bishopric. Rather than rest upon the support of these warlike neighbours, the Popes decided to appeal to the distant and powerful Franks. In 739 Gregory III sent the keys of St Peter’s tomb to Charles Martel, and asked him to replace the Emperor in the governance of Rome. That offer Charles de- clined, and two years afterwards the three great political figures on the stage— Leo, Gregory, and Charles — were dead.

The men changed, the policies continued. By the steady suc- tion of circumstance the Pope of Rome and the Frankish king

i«ii t$s

mm 4mmi bim fatefU cnmUi»tK»ik the Short, the

yotuiger son of Charles, and after the retirement of his elder brother to a monastery the effefctive ruler of France, was the &iend of Boniface the Englishman. To the mayor of the palace, as to the missionary, it was important to venerate the apostolic see, to promote the German missions, and to administer a muclv needed correction to the Gallic Church. The piety of Pippin, whether real or assumed, met with its reward. In response to a prudent enquiry as to whether it was right that the real should not also be the nominal ruler, he was assured by Pope Zachary that he might depose the last of the Merovings and assume the crown himself. Pippin acted on that advice. In the cathedral at Soissons, Boniface, the Englishman, anointed him king.

For the enormous services of legalizing the Carolingian monarchy, the Pope was soon in a position to claim a comment surate recompense. The new Lombard king, Aistulf, was distin- guished by an imprudent and intemperate ambition to conquer at one and the same time the exarchate and the Roman patri- mony. Ilis aimies, directed against the imperialists, met with such success as to inspire the liveliest apprehensions in the heart of the Pope. At the invitation of Pippin, and possibly also with the connivance of the Emperor, Pope Stephen crossed the Alps 7SJ and made a memorable bargain with the Frankish king. He con- ferred upon him the imperial title of Patrician, anointed him afresh together vi ith his two sons, and boimd the Franks to choose their future kings from his descendants alone. In return. Pippin engaged to tiansfei the cities which the Lombard kings had taken from the Empeior, not to theii lawful but iconoclastic master, but to the Roman Republic and to St. Peter. What the Frank promised he pcrfoimed. In two brief campaigns he wrested from the Lombard all tlie country which they had won since the death of Liutprand, and made it over to the Papal See.

Thus was founded that extraordinary polity, governed for over eleven hundred years by clerics, and presenting over most of that long period an almost continuous spectacle of disorder. Such was the origin of the Papal States, so long a fatal obstacle to Italian unity and a perpetual invitation to foreign invasion and intrigue.

It is perhaps reasonable to conjecture that even in the eighth century some scrupulous minds may have been exercised by the valid^^fff * title resting on nothing better than two violent con-

15^ A UtBTlOnr 09 XtfItOPS

quests. If 80, a pious and timely forgery allayed such misgivings. It was discovered that the Emperor Constantine had, upon his conversion, made a donation to Pope Sylvester of all Italy and the west. The extravagance of the legend was no bar to its accept- ance, even after many centuries, and by men violently hostile to the mundane ambitions of the Church. It is thanks to the forged donation that Constantine is eloquently denounced alike in Hell and Paradise by Dante, the imperialist, more than five hundred years after the pious forger had been sent to his last account.

Pippin died in 768. Among the blessings vouchsafed to Charles, his eldest son, was, as a pious monk once reminded him, the removal by death three years later of his younger brother Carloman. For forty-three years the deadly system of partition, which even Pippin had not been strong enough to discard, was interrupted by fate, and the stage was cleared for the unimpeded action of a powerful character. Charles was worthy of his oppor- tunity. He was bold and yet deliberate, genial and yet exact, popular and yet formidable. A vast appetite for animal enjoy- ment was combined in liim with the cardinal gifts of statesman- ship, a spacious vision, strong common sense, a Sawicss memory, and a tenacious will. It was part of his strength that he attempted nothing impossible, and asked no more of his people than they were able to accomplish. To Lis Frankish warriors he was the ideal chief, tall and stout, animated and commanding, with flashing blue eyes and aquiline nose, a mighty hunter before the Lord. That he loved the old Frankish songs, used Frankish speech, and affected the traditional costume of his race — the high-laced boots, the cioss-gartered scarlet hose, the linen tunic, and square mantle of white or blue — that he was simple in his needs, and sparing in food and drink, were ingratiating features in a rich and wholesome character. Yet if in the habits of daily life he was a Frank to the marrow, in all matters pertaining to culture and religion he was prepared to obey the call and to extend the influence of his Roman priests.

Not many years elapsed before the same political logic which brought about the close conjunction of Pippin with the Papacy worked to a similar conclusion for Charles. Again a Lombard king made an incursion into papal territory. Again a Pope appealed to the Frankish monarch for help, and again that help

YHB FRANKISH SMFIRR 157

was accorded. In the second act of the drama, however, the incidents appeared to be heightened and intensified, the actors to be stronger, the ddnouement to be more decisive. Didier the Lombard and Charles the Frank were already estranged before Didier made his attack on Ravenna and the Pentapolis and menaced the walls of Rome. Charles had married, and on grounds of personal aversion divorced, the daughter of the Lorn* bard king. Didier had given shelter to the infant nephews and possible rivals of Charles, and pressed the Pope to crown them. Nothing, however, was furthei fiorn the mind of Pope Hadrian, a proud and steadfast Roman noble, than to purchase by a dis- honouring alliance with the hated Lombard the dangerous enmity of the Frank. He appealed to Charles the Roman Patrician (773) and his appeal was not in vain. A great Frankish army marched into Italy and drove Didier off his throne. Nothing was wanting to the completeness of the Fiankish triumph, neither the cchpse of the royal line of Lombards after two hundred years of lule in Italy, nor the assumption by Charles, the conqueror, of the Lombard crown, nor the final act of scorn which relegated the last of the Lombard kings to a life- long imprisonment in a monastery.

In the midst of his Italian campaign Chailes was solemnly received by the grateful and submissive ecclesiastics of Rome. He was then thirty-tuc years of age; upon his fresh and ex- periencing, but naively superstitious, mind the marvels of Rome, its wealth in churches and wonder-working relics, its finished priestcraft, its Gregorian chants and well-ordered ritual, made a profound impression. A visit to Rome more than seven hundred years later drove Luther from the Catholic fold. Upon Charles the reaction of this extraoi dinary city was otherwise. He found it rich and incomparable in the signs of the favour of God. Here the awestruck visitor would be shown the very ark of the covenant and the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul. Here he could inspect two phials of blood and water from the side of Christ, the purple robe worn by the Saviour of mankind, and part of the cradle in which He lay when the Magi came to adore Him. ^Here was the very table at which He ate His Last Supper, here His portrait painted by the hand of Luke the Evangelist, or perhaps even, as some were bold to conjecture, by the divine brush of the Creator Himself Moreover, the whole art and science of

Ijfi A SISYOftT OF

Benrtng God was laere better tmdiBrstood than any whem in tfaem northern lands with which Charles was familiar. The sing^i^ was more beautiful, the ritual more perfect, the churches tidb^ and more numerous. Charles determined to bring this Romaiju art and science of priestcraft into his Frankish world. Making a lifelong friend of the Pope, he confirmed, perhaps with additions, that donation of mid-Italian territory by whdeh his father had founded the Papal State.

Twenty-six years afterwards a yet graver problem connected with the Papacy brought Charles again to Rome. If a Pope were accused by his enemies of simony, adultery, and perjury; if he were set upon by his enemies in the streets of Rome (as was the fate of Leo III on April 25, 799) and beaten within an inch of his life; if then he were rescued by his friends and escorted to the great Frankish king as he held coutt at Paderbom, who was competent to try the issue? To what power was entrusted the solemn duty of passing judgment on the vicar of Christ?

Cettninly, in the view of the wise men of the west, that func- tion did not belong to the beautiful Athenian lady who, having caused her son Constantine VI to be blinded and imprisoned, now leigned supreme in Constantinople. Irene, despite her addic- tion to images, and the enthusiasm of her monkish following, was no more fit to try the Pope of Rome than her wretched, image-bieaking boy. A woman, least of all a homicidal Greek woman, could not be Roman Emperor. Thus, in 800, men awoke to the fact that in the wi<le world there was neither a valid Emperor nor yet a valid Pope.

To the mind of that age a world so destitute was given over to ruin &nd chaos. Someone theie must be to uphold the Cliristian Faith, to safeguard the Roman tradition, to preside over the trial of the dubious Pope, to balance the brilliant and menacing power of Abdur Rahman, the Caliph of Bagdad, and to maintain in a comprehensive bond the sacred unity of dviliva- lion. That person could only be Charlemagne. It is an illustra- tion of his wide renown that the Patriarch of Jerusalem, despairing of protection from the eastern Empire, despatched to him the keys of the Holy Places.

So when, in the late autumn of 800, Charles descended into Italy, we cannot doubt that over and above the mgent need of clearing the reputation of the Pope, there was pxesea^ his

tut tjs§

ntiwii nioaitotouB T<dd in ilbe, Ronxtta Empire. A Pope man be purged tnd an Emperor must be crowned. Yet the precise taedbdd of readiing these two 'ends may have been left to chance. On Decem&r 33 Pope Leo asserted his innocence by a solemn oath taken on the Gospels in the Basilica of St. Peter's, to the satisfaction of a great synod of Roman and Frankish clergy. Two days later, as Charles was rising from his knees at the end of the Christmas Mass, the Pope placed upon his head the imperial crown, and the congregation at St. Peter’s, appar- ently not unprepared, shouted, “ Karolo piissimo Augusto a Deo coronato vita et victoria.” Once more there was a Roman Emperor in western Europe.

It b possible that Charles was chagrined, as his biographer hints, by the sudden mode of his coronation, for no Emperor in the west had ever yet received his crown from the Pope. But the supcrstiucnire of papal pretensions built upon that Christ- mas Day ceremony was in the distant future. What mattered at the time was not the mode, but the fact, of the coronation. The imperial title brought with it neither treasure nor territory. It did not give to Charles authority in Spain, or Britain, or Africat once flourbhing provinces of the Roman Empire; nor a yard of Lombardy, of which he was already king and master; nor yet on tlie strength of it could he command the service of an addi- tional soldier or ship of war. Yet the levival of the Roman Empire in the west was none the less important, for through it that deep inner sense of unity which persists at the heart of European turmoils, and has given rise to such institutions as the Concert of Europe and the Lrague of Nations, receivtgd for many centuries its secular embodiment.

It is one of the highest titles of Charlemagne td fame that he used his great authority to promote the revival of intellectual life on the illiterate continent of Europe. The Carolingian Renaissance lacks all the qualities of charm, freedom, and audacity which distinguished the'.|gmt l^Metating movement of the human spirit in the ego divides Petrarch from

Galileo. To the ortbwdoe ‘ittind of Charles literature was <diiefly to be valued as tbenpmdmaid of faith. The learned men who were attracted eB quarters to hb court were not expected to discover Verities for the service of man. The Holy Scrip- circulatiug in corrupt and mbleading texts.

A KISTORY OF RUROPB

contained the wkole key to the truth, the sovereign guide to conduct. These it was the province of the scholar to copy out# and if needful, to amend, to understand himself and to make clear to his pupils; and that a supply of men qualified to per- form this learned office might never be lacking, every diocese and monastery of the realm was expected to take up the work of education.

The value of this intellectual movement must not be judged by the quality of Carolingian literature. This, with the excep- tion of Einhard’s Life of Charles, does not rise above medi- ocrity, and shines only by contrast with the preceding dark- ness. What is important to notice is the new place which, with the advent of Charles, learning and education are made to take in the life of the court and the country, the concentration of foreign men of learning round the person of the king, the travelling academy or school of the palace which follows him even on his campaigns, the equal terms on which he associates with his scholar fiiends, his strong insistence on literacy as a qualification for a clerical career and for preferment in the Church, the establishment of diocesan and monastic schools, and the encouragement given to the multiplication, correction, and gathering together of books. Far reaching novelties were not to be expected in that age. There was no idea of science, no close observation of the outer world, no instinct for discovery. The prime necessity of the moment was not to invent, but to recover what had been lost, to preserve what had been found, and to reconstitute in the midst of barbarism a literate society.

The task would have been rendered by many degrees more difficult but for the fact that there was one corner of western Europe in which the lamps of learning and literature were still burning with a relative brightness. The islands of Ireland and Britain, though far from peaceful, had been for a century im- mune from many of tht grave calamities which had afflicted the continent. At Armagh and Iona, at Jarrow and York, know- ledge and piety shone with a clear, if intermittent, lustre. In these two islands a scholar possessed of a good deal of Latin, a little Greek, and possibly some fragments of Hebrew was not altogether unknown. More particularly in Northumbria, where Roman and Irish influences ivere found in combination or in conflict, was the care for letters specially evident It is probable

tuu MMWtAK

• * *

th»t ax the date of Chailemagac^s accession tlie heat store ol bocdca north of the Alps \ta» ^he library at York.

It was from York that Charles took his spiritual counsellor. To Alcuin, a Northumbrian of noble lineage, bom and educated In that city, there was vouchsafed the greatest educational oppor* tunity ever opened to an Englishman. lie was called in to pro* scribe for the intellectual wants of a great empire fallen from civilization to barbarism. To this task he brought a pure and ardent character, a communicative zeal, and a gift of eloquent but unoriginal writing. He composed compiimcntaiy Latin veises, moral and pedagogic treatises, and an extended contto- versial reply to those Spanish heretics who maintained that Christ was adopted by God. Nobody now reads the tedious writings of Alcuin. Yet he was one of those valuable men who, without being gifted with discovering genius, create by their energy, sociability, and enthusiasm an atmosphere favourable to intellectual advance. His school of the palace set a new stan dard of cultuie. To the influence of this robust, studious, and convivial Englishman we may fairly trace the legislation which defines the educational responsibilities of the Church and the episcopal and monastic schools which resulted fiom it. To him also is due the initiation of that immense labour in the transcription, the emendation, and the pieservation of manu- scripts, the best and most peiin.inent contribution which that age was able to make to rlie relief of man’s estate. The eailiest copies of twelve of the great Latin classics aie due to the scribes of the Carol ingian Renaissance.

Notable among the achievements of a famous reign was the final inclusion of Germany within the of the

Frankish nation and the Roman Church. Siooe fwus Caesar conquered Caul theie had been no such au^entation of Latin influence in Europe. Einhard, whose brief biography of Charles is justly accounted a model, says not Only that he almost doubled the Empire which he r«:eived from his father, but that all the tribes between the Klune and the Vistula were sub- jected to his rule. Th«pattiOular mode of his operation was to batter down with a {^vsistence which no rebuff could weaken the two principal Obstacles which arrested the advance of Christianity In central Europe Tlicse were the Saxon block in West^haQii and the Avars, whose barbarous power, enriched

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^ 4BflDI^ y ^ Wg^mi^lk *"• •-■ —■• % — MMi ACBM^H MMMUflUVdM^MK iB^BlHilHiHfia^H:

i7')P*mg|^!l» ismtMf Off iroiiwurtfiiBiiiiw ^ ^

tmf!<«%* olMtittatv, and d»id,

nt haird l^dd^Wce necessajff to the reduction Und fpitclli M| | ▼erdon o| iliie Sjixons, dght campaigns to the destruction wjfl^ Avars* whose horded 'treasures are said to have raised thdr querors from prbsperity to affluence. But once done, the trOrhd Iffl not require to be done again. The Saxons passed into ihe'ChrhD^ ian fold, the Avars vanished from the map, and the tide ol^ Frankish influence, bearing with it the seeds of Christian ano^ Latin culture, swept slowly but surely eastwards into lauifit which afterwards came to be known as Poland and Bohemia^tt

Austria and Hungary. i

Even had he desired to do so, Charlemagne could never haviy

latinized Get many as Caesar latinized Gaul. That branch the Saxon race which had not passed into Britain preserved *> among their untamed forests a fieice attachment to the faith of, their ancestors. Under Widukmd, their national leader, thOf offeied a desperate resistance to the armed missionaries of the Christian Faith. In tlie end they sulTered a decisive defeat. Their idols were broken, their sacred groves were burned; their independence was foifeit; they were compelled to accept the odious creed of their conquerors at the point of the sword. But notwithstanding they remained true to type. Wotan was nearer tlian Chiist. The Latin outlook on the world, clear, orderly.

predse, was never theirs. They preserved their language, and with it the spirit, vague, passionate, and tumultuous, whidt distinguishes the German fiom the Latin character. '

L no failure here as some French authors have SUr* mised,kuMjiy|M^ military eneigy of this extraordinary reign was nb«Iwi^fj^iqpendcd. The purpose of the wars of Charle- magne, of his ll^^^^hrce campaigns fought upon every front, Danish, Slav, Sax^i, Avar, Dalmatian, Lombard, Spanish, was not to give lessons ia |^^X>atin, spirit, but to defend the ortho- dox Christians of th^^pW^iqgainst the enemies who assailed them on every side. limt one between Latin and

Teuton, Gallo-Roman and J?etween the Latin

Christians of the west, Germans, Catl^^^iPwDs, Spaniards, and the enciirling forces of the anti-Chri«fe|'t jvorld. In that struggle Charlemagne emerged the victor, l|HM|^de centra} Europe safe for the Roman Church. By admitri^ aMbBrnrii n^r^ \

m

Li

I ift %liih. and «wo nifib^ a «v4irSe at t, ^ „ , , . , in the pass of Roncesvalles, his nine ttiott glwy than many victories through the tnabdEpihti^tl^ br W!«^endt which gave to his campaign in the Ebtti ^aSSfejf Itripre of a crusade, and wove round the name of the laUeO land interminable garlands of song.

J> When the great Emperor passed away, his vast dominions

• ,1^11 asunder, and in their severance gave rise to the nations of

^^the west. He did not succeed, foinmately perhaps for Europe* •'tn cheating a centralized government strong enough to functiOtt ^^in the absence of a dominating mind. His permanent achieve* L^dtents must be sought elsewhere. Mounting the throne at a i l^e when the political future was dark and troubled, when the Idea of authority had grown faint, and the lamps of learning dnd literature were flickeimg to extinction, he called a vigorous . htdt to the forces of paganism, anarchy, and ignorance. To him the domain of Latin Christianity owes the geographical shape which it has since retained. To his vigorous impulsion is due a remarkable revival of intellectual activity. The idea of a strong civilized government, concerned to promote reli^on, to secure justice, to listen to the complaints of all its subjects, to Spread education, and to conserve learning, was brought back into western Europe by this eager, vital, and capacious spirit. The central institutions which he alone could infuse with energy did not long survive him; but under the protectitm d£ his lengthy reign, dukes and counts and other private foi tunes and built up for themselve|d||H||M^ local gOvt^mment and authority, little states cajjmSBS^ themselves against hostile attack, and some part

of the legacy of Greece, of Syria, and The keynote of Charlemagne’s personal authority

but not despotbm. A ptdd regular army or

a bureaucracy or a 8etld||||||npi3ilf^ in coin may exer* tise a widespread ||Sj||H||^W^4tisnnot play the t^ant. At the great periodical jMKpi^ of notables, the placita Generalia, when enqui riy||Sm PB<3 into the public needs, it was Charle* magne wj^yHePBated the people at large, and not the officials were too often oppressed. Moreover, without

164 A tllSTdaV OF SOHOFB

t

organization no large ^tate can be tyrannically gpveirned, and the Frankish £m|>xre, like every other mediaeval polity, was na* organized. Some necessary steps in decentralization were taken^ The government of Italy was handed over to one son (Pippin), tliat of Aquitaine to anothei (Lewis). But the Civil Service, if this phrase may be used of administrators who did not regard themselves as belonging to a professional corps, was deficient in numbers, skill, and honesty. The business was unclassified, and since the king insisted on looking into e^eiything, some grave matters passed unnoticed while iiixialitics attracted an earnest regard. This iundamental absence of method meant tliat the kingdom was undei governed, that the imperial edicts or capitu- laries were impcitecrly c\ecutcd, and that the bishops and counts who concliKied the local government were inadequately controlled. For a time the commanding energy of the Emperor mitigated the foite of the e evils. Constantly travelling fxom vill to vill, asking questions, redressing giievanccs, showing him- self open and hospitable to all, and when he was unable himself to be present, sending imperial commissaiics to reptesent him, the popular soveieign kept the august fact of government before the eyes of liis subjects. Yet all thiough his reign tendencies, dcstiiictive as contcmpoiaiy nationalism to the workings of effective cmpiie, wcie gathering in strength. Fiefs, awarded on concliiioii of public service, weic becoming hei edi- tary estates. Vassals weie becoming independent chieftains. The pious or politic benefactions of the soveieign were build- ing up for tlic Get man chinch a basis of material pow'^cr so great as permanently to influence the balance of political forces in that country* It is to this leign that we tiacc the lise of the great abbeys which played so laige a pan in the development of German agriculture, commerce, and learning. It is to the munincence of Charlemagne that the Aichbishops of Koln, Trier, and Mainz owed their princely estates and a position of worldly power and independence which lasted till tlte days of Napoleon.

Out of the ene»gctic movement of the Frankish Empire Europe emeiges in its mediaeval shape. Over against the Greek world ruled from Byzantium, and the Saracen world governed from Bagdad and Cordova, is the vast territory of Latin Christianity sti etching from the Ebro to the Carpathians and

Empire At Accession of ChArfomo^^, South German Wan

CH.\RL£ttAGN£’S EmPIRB AND (INSBT) THB PaRTITIOK OP VbRDUN.

adknowieisgiiig ti^ i(vle of die E^kislt Empire ttnd dat of Rome. The ^ermaxu ate now Christians, having heat *' tized in tribes and are submitted to Roman bishops,

Czechs of Bohemia are drawn within the orbit of FrankM^ trade and Roman missionaries. Italy has become a geogTaphkai|m expression, linked to the Franks through the Lombard kingdon:^ and possessing in its very heart the paralyzing structure of the Papal Stare. In Roman Gaul the races are now fused, the little* ' dark, prehistoric peoples of the Mediterranean littoral, the descendants of the Roman emigrants, the lively Celts, the vigorous Franks, in a common allegiance to the faith and dis- cipline of the Church of Rome Saracen Spam is no longer a conquering power, but stands on the defensive against the Christian colonies of the March out of which in after years grew the famous fighting kingdoms of Navaire and Aragon.

After the death of Charlemagne a break up of the Frankish Empiie was in some shape inevitable and wholesome. Territories so vast could never, save in exceptional times and under an ex- ceptional man, be governed from one centre There are, how- ever, various ways in which authority may lie devolved and territories partitioned, and more than one manner in which devolution may be combined with the retention of some appro- priate measure of central authoiity. But of all manneis of sub- dividing an empire, the descendants of Charlemagne, who were mediocre where they weie not degeneiate, chose the worst. They adhered to the b id old system of family partitions, which had bdpil'iho curse of Frankish politics from the first. As if no lessons derived from history, they treated their king-

doms as priVsTO Restates to be bequeatlicd and subdivided as family affection or <!0|tvenience might dictate To this disastrous custom many of the e«41i| which affected western Europe during the ninth century may 1^ clearly traced. Louis le D^bonnaire would have been spared wrajj^ons and a long spell of humiliating civil war if he ha4 ^ri^nytti^pted to make, at the expense of his elder sons, a terrhdlm^jpnilldon for Charles the Bald, the son of his old age.

To suppose that the policy of these 80verd||^]|^ in any way influenced by the principle of nationality wotug If i|)(iimport into the politics of the ninth century ideas belonging til'Jintense.

imm

Test ’ll nim ttet III tw CarollAgian panitiwi of ilie tihitti iWjtntty m *My discern the emergence o£ the MtJotw of ®f|pb|>is. After the death p£ Louis Ic Debonnaire in 840, pitil war hroltc out between his sons^ Charles the Bald, who ruled in Kcuatria, combining with Lewis the German, who ruled east of the Rhine, against Lothair their elder brother, who had been plotted Austrasia, Burgundy, and Italy. After the great battle at S*ontenay, at which Lothair was defeated w'ith huge losses, the $ 4 ^ three brothers came together at Veidun and agreed to divide their father’s in}]eritance. To Charles the Bald was allotted Neustria, Aquitaine, and the Spanish March, a territory mainly, though not entirely, Romance in speech, and comprising all that part of modern France which is west of the Rhone and the SaSne. Lewis the German received Austrasian Fiancia cast of the Rhine, Bavaria, Swabia, Saxony, and Rhaetia, aM sa\e the last German- speaking districts, and all sa\e the last comprised in the modem German Reich, while Lothair was assigned a long, inter- mediate, heterogeneous region comprising the two capitals of Aix-la-Chapclle and Rome, and stretching from Friesland to the border of Calabria. It would be possible to contend that Lewis the German ruled over a nation. It would be a tenable proposi- tion to make the same claim for Charles the Bald, despite the fact that he exercised no real authority cither in Brittany or in Aquitaine. But the shaie of the Emperor Lothair, with its mix- ture of Teutonic and Latin populations, is a flat contradiction of the racial principle and a pi oof that veiy little importance was attached to it by the memhers of the Carolingian house.

A subdivision of the Frankish dominions, regarded as permanent, would have served of good

government. The Partition of Verdun was these things.

It was provisional, liable to change at eve|yiiTOth in the family, and vitiated by the fact that each of |l|i pjinitioning brothers regarded himself as king of the Friu|Kl# Ite a potential claimant to the undivided inheritani* authority of Charle-

magne. Thus, althoujg^|^1^^1umty survived, it vyas in the form most calculatt ' efiectivc rule. The Partition of

Verdun, so far laugurating an era of peaceful govern- ment, was new partiuons and fratricidal wars, by

a steady ded|^tS^ the power of the Frankish kings, and a cone- spoSiditf||ypB^se in the power of the nobles.

1(58 «HtSTOEt OF SUBOFS

in the western Bnd middle kingdoms the anarchy was tsppaV ling. In East Frsneia or Germany, where the inhabitants were of one stock and language, where tlie level of civilization was uniform and low, where there was still a large class of free- holders, and the institutions of feudalism were in an early stage of development, the prospect of strong government should hav^ been more favourable. Yet government was no stronger in ^ Germany than it was in France. The tribes of Germany, de- spite their common oiigin and speech, were as little prepared to live together in amity as the Athenians and the Spartans. The Saxons, the Franconians, the Bavarians, and the Alemans lived their own law, went their own ways, and were as ready to quarrel among themselves as to follow the king against Danes and Slavs. The kingdoms were paititioncd and repartitioned. Even the impeiial crown failed to biing good foitune to its holder or to restore the lost sentiment of a common allegiance. There is no more significant fact in the Europe of the ninth century than the fate of Charles the Fat, the third son of Lewis the German. Upon this incompetent descendant of Charlemagne fortune showeicd every blessing. He v^as ciouncd Emperoi by the Pope. A chapter of convenient lamily accidents made him king of Italy, Germany, and France; a ruler, on paper at least, such as Europe had not seen for seventy years. But the man was a craven, his authority a figment, and on his deposition in 887 there was a final break-up of the Caiolingian Empire, and save for the bastard Arnulf, a grandson of i.ewis the Geiman, who was chosen to rule in East Francia, an end to the long spell of authority cxeicised by the Carolingian house.

In fairness to these later Fiankish kings it should be remcm- betcil that all through the ninth century they weie assailed by extcinal dangers from the Saiacens. the Slavs, and the North- men. The outskirts of Rome itself were burned by the Saracens in 847. To these pirates who had succeeded in breaking clown the guard of the Byzantines and in making themselves masters of Sicily the reply should have been t }»4 formation of a strong Frankish navy. Nothing of the kind WW attempted; but to I’opc 1^0 IV is due the credit of giving to the Vatican suburb that girdle of foi tifications which has earned it the name of the leonine City. The achievement of the Pope lives in the memory of tlie Italian people, while the well-meant endeavours of the

THI FB^NKIStl XMFIKt l6^

Irankisli Emperor Louis 11 to rid southern Italy o{ its Saracen pests are only known, and that imperfectly, to a handful ol learned men.

171 A DISTORT OF EUROPE

her wealth, her victories in war; but passing over all these, I bless her because Paul, when living, wrote to the Romans, and loved them so much, and was among them, and spoke to them, and there ended his life. Whence also the city is more renowned for this than for all else; and like a gieat and mighty body, she has two eyes, the bodies of those two saints. The heaven is not so bright when the sun shoots foith his rays as the city o£ the Romans, shedding foirh the light of these two lamps throughout the woild. Thence shall Paul he caught up, thence Peter shall rise. Consider and be amazed 1 What a sight shall Rome then behold, when Paul suddenly shall arise with Peter from the tomb, and be caught up to meet the Lord. What a rose shall Rome send foiih to Christ! What diadems aic those two, \^ilh which the city is Clowned, wMih wliat ( hains of gold it is gilded; what fountains it hath! It is for tins that I admiic the city, not for its much gold, for its columns or any other phantasy, but because of these tw^o pillais of the Church. Who will grant me to embrace the body of Paul, to cling to his scpulchie, and to see the dust of that body which * filled up what was wanting' to Christ, which bore Ills stigmata, and sowed Ills teaching evcrywheie!

Had tlie enipeiors continued to reign in Rome the guardians of the Pelt me iiiulition would haidly ha\c escaped the servile destiny ol the By/antine pariiarchs. 1 he Popes would have been the agents ot the emperors, and would lia\c lost the moral auihonty which always alt ichcs to the asseitioii of spiiitual in- dependence. Ficjin this dciiigei, liowcv^'i, the Papacy was de- livered by the two great political events which concuircntly changed the face of western Euiopc — the breakdown of the im- pel ial government and the barbaiic invasions. As the emperor vanished from the west, the empty place was taken by the de- scendant of St. Peter. It was to the Pope that a bishop, con- demned by a provincial council, was encouraged by the Fathers at Saidica (^43) to appeal; it was the Pope and not the empeior who stood out as the champion of Italian civilization against the Huns and the Saiarens, who defended Rome from the attacks of the Lombards, and upon whom neCOssarily devolved the pow^ei of writing leitcis or decretals on ecclesiastical issues which had the force of law. In the dark and troubled age of the bar- baiic invasions, in the days of Leo I and Gregory the Great,

• Ilom, 32 in Rom., 2, vol. ix., p 678 (757). C/, Chapman, Studies

in the Iiarly Papacy,” p. 97.

TBX ROMAN CHURCH

m

the see of St. Peter stood out in western Europe like a lighthouse in a storm.

The early Christians, though sharply opposed to many ancient practices, never set out to reform mankind. It is a mistake to imagine that any modern political label can be safely attached to them. They were neither socialists, nor communists, nor indi- vidualists. They had no philosopliy of the state or belief in the regeneration of society through institutions. The idea that the framework of Roman politics or society could be transformed by the agency of tl^eir small and uninflueniial congregations would never have occuiied to them. They knew that the world was wicked, for they had learnt that man was fallen from grace and merited eternal torment, and rather than act wickedly some of them were willing to face a martyr’s death. But they held that this evil world was not destined to endure for long. At the second corning of Christ, which many believed to be imminent and none thought would be long delayed, righteousness would be en- throned upon earth and all the flaws, wickedness, and imperfec- tions of mankind be cleansed away. Why, then, should the Christian labour to abolish sla\ery. oi war, or trade, or these great engines of physical force, which sustained the weight of the Roman Empiie? All this was fated soon to vanish, and meanwhile each individual soul was confronted with the prob- lem, at once awful and instant, of bow best to avoid the ever- lasting torment which wms the reiiibiition of God for the original sin of Adam in the garden.

The Christians, then, accepted what they could not change. They offered up prayers for the Roman Emperor, tliough they refused to burn incense to his image. They accepted and con- doned slavery. So far were they from generally repudiating force, that war among Christians became a melanchc^ly feature of European society Irom the fifth century onwards. In none of their activities is it possible to discern any trace of class-con- scious motives. Though the Christians of the apostolic age were poor, their religion spread SO swiftly through evefy class that before the end of the first century it had even penetrated into the circle of the Emperor’s family.

One grave danger the new Christian community was enabled to avoid through the worldly wisdom of a bishop of Rome. CalUstUS (j:&i9-aa3) showed himself prepared to absolve the foriii- ly yijd ^adulterer from sin. His decision, though it ran counter

174 f HISTORT otr StIKOPE

to A large body of Christian {eeling» was epoch-making l|a 4ts conse()uences. Based on exclusive doctrine a Church is strongs limited by exclusive morality it is weak. Many will subscribe to a test. Few will lead the life of virtue. A Church conBned in its membership to the saints and offering nothing to the sinners would never have effected the conquest of Euiope.

The position of the clergy in w'cstern society was greatly changed by the influx into the Roman Empire of wave after wave of Teutonic barbarism. In the tragical eclipse of lay education and culture the intellectual advantages of the Church became for the first time conspicuous. The cleric could at least read and write, was familiar w'ith I^atin, had enough arithmetic to calculate the date of Easter and was oltcn accustomed to the sedentary toil which is nc(es‘?aiy to the regiilai despatch of business. Moreover, as the attractions of the impciial service had fallen away, the Churcli had begun to diaw men of the highest social standing into its service. In Gaul the bishops of tiic filth, sixth, an<l seventh rcntuiics weie often noblemen of ancient lineage, of great wealth and widespicad influence, who found in the dischaige of official duties the only opportunity for the exercise of administrative gifts or the satisfaction of a public conscience. Accordingly ir is not sui prising that the Franks in Gaul and the Visigoths m Spahi made a free use of this service- able profession, Ihe Teutonic sovereigns had a rich capacity for the pursuit of the boar auvl the stag and for the slaughter and pillage of then enemies. Witliout the aid of the Church they could nor have governed.

TThe Uvely narrative ot Gregory of Tours is suITicicni to warn us against the temptation to idealize the Callican Church in the sixth century. Yti COITuptions were numerous and flagrant. But comprising as it did all tlie little that was good in the French society of that time, It performed valuable functions which would not otherwise ha'Vft b®en rendered. The fusion of the Latin and Teutonic elemetilS in the state could not hav^e been accomplished without the ChmxfcL whole v\ork of educa- tion was in its hands. If a river wa^ embanked or an

aqueduct was to be built, it was generally^ bishop who sup- plied the initiative and controlled the fimdsiA Despite much evidence of a cowardly compliance with wicki^AblK^ a bishop from time to time found the courage to rebuke CO overawe a transgressing ruler. Nor in that agE

iru* tyfl

wAii tiEicrc elsewhere than in the CSiurch a ptxitecticd'* tot the poor> the helpless, and the oppressed.

^ It is, indeed, to the circumstances of thesje turbulent cen- turies that we must ascribe the present position and authority of the priestly profession. The chaos of the Empire was the opportunity of the Church, the childish ignorance of the bar- barian prepared the triumph of the priest. In an age when books were rare, everything depended on the voice and example of the teacher. The simple and superstitious baiharian was leady to tolerate a degree of intcifeience in his piivate life which the cultivated Roman lady or gentleman would have resented as a vulgar intrusion. As the task of educating the baibarian world in tlie rudiments of the Christian Faith unfolded itself in all its vast and despeiate propoit'ons, the clergy became of necessity, like the school teachers of the United States during the spate of immigration fiom Einope, a well-marked and influential pro- fession. In the sixih century it was oulained that the Latin clergy should wcai a distinctive dress. While the German kept his tunic shott and his hair long, the priest pic'-crved the long robe and shoit ban of the ancient Roman.

The century which followed the conversion of Constantine is marked by the spiead of monastic ism thiough western Europe. Asceticism is a common feature of religious movements, and in Egypt, the original home of monkeiy, was apt to assume extravagant foims of self tortuic and abasement. The good sense of the west av'^oided the eccentricities of the Egyptian solitary who, perched upon a pillar or a tree, the

charms of his pious emaciation and scjualoj: thtt admiring

pilgrim. The Latin genius was more pnMCl|i<!^dl» itss speculative than the Greek. The lulc of Sr. Benedict df Nursia (480-5 the great Italian vi-jionary, who founded monasteries of Subiaco and Monte Cassino, enjoined the m^ggrmingling of manual labour with study and devotioi^ and as it became gcneial

through the west, enabiSi|lp^^ which might otherwise

have wrought notb||A||j!l^Ut ifevil, to make a positive contribution to human progn^ It k to the credit of the Benedictine monks that they tillage and reclaimed waste land, that they

under work of relieving the poor, and that by pre- a^^tt|fc|^wCOpying manuscripts they rendered an important service to European culture. During the darkest

176 4 HISTORY OF EUROPE

age of Teutonic barbarism there was perhaps no other way in which the gentler natures of society might be turned to useful account.

The diffusion oC Benedictine monastciies through the countries of the west proceeded during the next two centuries with a rapidity so amazing as to suggest that there must have been some special feature in the ciicumstances of that age to impel men and women to embrace in such great numbers a life of sheltered asceticism. I'heir motives, no doubt, were com- pounded of many elements, ranging from exaltation and hcioic piety to cowardice, evasion, and hope ot ease; but we can hardly doubt that what chiefly ojieiated upon the imagination of those who were then drawn into the monastic movement was the difficulty of leading a CliiiMian life in a woild racked and dis- turbed by the haihaiiau invasions, a wx)rid of crime, lust, violence, and steadily iiurcasing chaos. Their asceticism is in- telligible; discerning little hope of improvement thioiigh human agencies, tliey wiihdicvv fiom the daikness and turmoil around them into the tiaiujuil light of the Christian paradise.

BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED C, Coie: Jesus ot Na/.ucth. iq?c).

E. Bevan • ('‘hiistianity (Home Unuoisit\ Lihiary). 1*^2.

E. Be\an: 'uul 1921.

L. Battifol; rihniti%e C'athviluism. iqii.

J. Chapman t Studies in the Larlv rip'u\ 1^28

F. H. Dudden: Gregory the Gieat -His Plate in Histoiy and J hou^tjht.

IQOS.

H. H. Milman: The History of l^alin Chiistianity. i8f»7.

Gil/bon: Decline and Fall of the Roman E» i[)ire EtK Bury. 1896-1900. C. Bicq. 1 he Oni*ins of Cheistianitv. 1009.

C. Bigg . The Church's Task under the Roman Empire. 1905.

aUPFER XV

THE NORSEMEN

Norse ctillure. The Norsemen on the Ihuiper, Viking raids in the u>est.^ Danes and Norweiltans. Raids on Ireland, England, France. Rise of H’eiifK. Alfred and hts sukcssois Danish Conquest of England,

Canute leads .SLandmaiia into the Christian fold, hdaard the Con- fessor, llie Normans in Normandy. lhe,r aueplance of I aim culture,

'I he Normans in .Sicily, iiplcndour of Roger 11, Exhaustion and poverty of Scandinavia.

One branch of the Noidic race, hitherto wlthdiawn from the zone of Latin and 'liutouic innnence, now made a violent inupiion into the politual scene, and lot more than two cen- turies filled the woild with noise and fuiy. The Norsemen weie pagans. The ideas of conscience and sin, of lirtiic in the Chris- tian sense of that tcim, vveie foieign to their ways of thinking.

There was notlnng in the cult of Then, the God of Thunder, of Odin, the Lore! ot Wat and the insentor of song, ot of Fiey, the God of Fertility, that might bung shame to the niurdcier, the adullerei, or the pnate. The Noiscmen loved war and women, wassail and song, pillage and slaughter. Their mythology, which was lominon to all the Noidic races, was distinguished lor a sjiiiit of fatalism, licit e as the northern seas, grave as the aictic skies. The gods they icgaided not as guides to disciplined (oncluct, foi ot this they had no sense, but as fi lends and allies in a gieat adventure, leading, if a man was brave and fortunate, to death in battle and tU a passage into the halls of Valhalki, whcie hcioes slain in combat fight and feast to the end of time. Of false optimism there is no trace in the prose sagas which vvcie vviittcn down in Iceland many ccntuiics a.d tr^o later. The Noiscmen knew too much about the wild elements ‘‘'So of nature and the furious passions of man to ask of life nioie than life could give. And so the old Norse liieiatuie. in whiih the record of this pagan dvilization is faithfully picscrved, 'stands out among the literatures of the woild for its fieedom fiom rhetoric and sentiment, its closeness to the facts of life, its abstinence from moral comment or litcr.iry embellishment, but abow all for the picture which it gives of a society at once

iSo 4 IIliSTOJtY OF V^VIlQPiC r

Ireland* Thereafter, when their long clinker-built boau ^ st6tit Norwegian oak had been well tested in violent seas, these wonderful mariners performed feats more daring still, and never surpassed in the annals of seafaring men. Iceland and tiie Faroes were claimed and settled. The Atlantic ivas crossed. From Iceland as a base, the long Viking warships, driven by oar and sail, planted colonics on the bleak shores of Greenland and, six hundred years before the voyage of Columbus, explored the North American coast — the Vineland of Icelandic saga.

Apart from their skill in navigation the Vikings possessed the further advantage of alone iindeistanding the value of swift movement in warfare. They would row up the Thames or the Loire, and, suddenly landing on some quiet inland field, seize the horses from the fauns and scamper rhiough the country burning, slaying, an<l robbing as they went, and be gone long before the slovv-looicd countrymen could combine to offer an effective resistance.

The long period of time during which these raids were suc- cessfully repeated, the innnciisc ba\oc which they caused, and the panic which prevailed not on the seaboard only but in the heart of the continent, are a sufficient measure of the dis- organization into which western Europe had fallen after the death of Chailcinagne. Society seemed paialy/cd before an enemy so fierce, so mobile, and sc* ubiquitous as within the space of a few years to attack Cadiz and»Sc\ille, Hamburg and Bor- deaux, Valence and Pisa.

It i$ foolish to imagine that everyrhlag which happens on a great scale in this world is for good. 1 he raids of the Vikings were purely d^fstnictive. In the first half of tlie tenth century they went neat to bringing down in complete ruin tlie whole fabric of civilization itt western Europe. The old Irish culture, once so distinctive and brilliant, never recovered from their widespread and persistent depredations, and with the sack of Iona, tlie princijval channd through which Irish Christianity had flowed into England was finally ohatructed. Yet such is human nature that gieat calamities proVoklQ in the end counter- vailing efforts, and are found in the last account to have some compensations. I'he piracies of the Vikings led through con- quests to settlements. If the Norsemen sacked thife Jrish monas- teries, they founded the Irish trading towns. If they desi^royed Armagh, they created Dublin and Wexford, WateriEQatd

THS , i$t

Umeridc Uor were their insults to the GaeliMpcaking High- lands barren of distant benefits. By their control of the Western Isles and the Irish Sea a barrier v^as interposed between Ireland and Scotland, preventing migiation, obstructing fusion, and promoting the union of the Scottish people under a Scottish king.

An even deeper impression was left by the Danish dealings with England and Fiance, by the startling shock of their ter- rible raids, by their conquest first of a Danelaw in England, then of a Danelaw to be known as Noimandy in France, and finally by that critical peiiod in the annals of our own country (1013-1042) during which England was ruled by Danish kings and became part of a gicat Scandinavian Empire. The North- men, like the Anglo-Saxons and the Franks, w^ere a Teutonic people. In essentials of character they resembled the Saxons and so much of the population of northern Fiance as was Teutonic and not Celtic in origin. For this reason the effects of the Danish settlement of eastern England and of Normandy arc of more enduiing importance than the Moorish settlement of Spain. The conqueiors and conqucied influenced one another in a permanent way, not because they wcie unlike, but because they were like, and at one in the impoitant particular of being intelligent and rcccplite. The Danes in Noimandy became Frenchmen, the Danes in England became Englishmen. The conqueiois accepted Chiistianity and the Latin culture which went w^ith it. What they gave in return was an assemblage of spirited qualities, which, wlicn once the fiist passion ot destruc- tiveness had been exhausted, made fust of the N^iHinans and then of the English the two leading peoples world.

To the student of English institutiojfMl tbo fundamental similarity betw^een Saxon and Dane is l;h<! key to many riddles. The Anglo-Saxon people was disungtltshed above all other branches of the Teutonic family fot a copious and continued output of written law. Stream which was eventually to

broaden out into the gtwt rfver of the English common law began under Etijelbfert of Kent, at a time when Romarv juris- prudence was sjpi^kitig its valediction in the Institutes of Jus- tinian, and Received substantial additions to its volume under the kin^ Wessex. But the last and most compi ehcnsive Cpdn ot tMir island law, issued before the Normaa Conquest, .TMlSt wotJc of no Saxon but of Canute the Dane. Xo him as to

ibe atmquanimir orto^aiy it deaiiy seemed that vriam tm ^Ijn ences^iXii custom liiltween Dane and $axon were supeidldiAl l||j xtism\hltma» were profound. The word law is Norse; so that |N»sion for litigation which is a distinctive feature ci English character; but each race was accustomed to public triats^ to a procedure by oath helpers and ordeals, and to a taiiS o| compensations for acts of violence to be paid in whole or^ia part to the injured party. If the juiy of inquisition is a Norman innovation it has analogies in the practice of the Saxons and the Danes.

A further consequence following the Danish invasions of France and England was a strengthening of the state in each of these countries by the emergence of a dynasty of efficient rulers. In France, after many weary decades of weakness and disorder, the house of Capet, first springing lo eminence through its defence of Paiis against the Northmen, superseded the effete epigoni of Charlemagne, and started upon a long career of modest but steady aggrandizement. Not very dissimilar was the course of events in England. Here at the climax of their de- structive energies, with English government broken in North* umbria, East Anglia, and Meicia, and the fate of Saxon civillza* tion trembling in the balance, the Danes met in the monarchs ot the house of Egbert a series of stubborn and valiant oppo- nents. The contest was long, savage, and mailed by abrupt vicissitudes, but not wholly sterile. From it emerged the idea of a national monarchy, centred in Wessex, the sole surviving Teutonic power in the island which had escaped destruction at the

It wa$ ra the Danish raids on England, which for

thirty-two yeahllH|i^ been steadily gathering in strength and destructiveness, wem,tf|db^ for a definite policy of conquest. In a brilliant and mttdm^ptnpaign Hingwar, the son of Ragnar Lothbrok, one of the m^ftaiotis pirates of his age,, cairied everything before him f njmt ^ Clyde. The weak

kingdoms of Nortbnmbiia and mP|pmftbpumb1cd under his hammer blows. lie took Notting^lawl^MM^ed Dumbarton, and when he crossed over to Ireland in Halfdan, his

brother, to continue his work, it seemed a$ Ull^llKJlole island might swiftly become a Danish prize.

There was, however, in the kingdom of We98<g|i^'^^|| pfc |ipw extended from Land’s End to the North Sea, a slow

4£ Jiollkjr pea«imfs«l*ycli wu

j $tr 6 ng leadership a native king of oSeriing^ iMv$ dog^d resistance to the enemy. It was in 871* when fho les were in the heart of his country, that Alfred at the age if twenty-three succeeded to the formidable responsibilities of the West Saxon kingship. Everything which relates to the life of great national figure is of interest to Englishmen: his early visits to Rome; his delight in the songs and literature of his people; his concern for education; his encouragement of learn- ing through the translations which he commissioned of the most popular I^tin books of the time, such as the De Consolatione of Boethius or the Pastoral Cure of Gregory the Great; his patronage of foreign artists, craftsmen, and divines; his interest m travel and geography; his widespicad international relations; his intrepidity in war; his zest in hunting; his zeal, carried almost to the point of moibidity, in tlie cult of relics and the exercises of religion. But what makes his caieer significant is not this evidence of width and versatility, but the fact that he drove the Danes out of Wessex, and that in saving Wessex he secured the survival of Anglo-Saxon civilization and laid the foundations of a national state in Britain.

The triumph of Wessex under the leadership of Alfred is thus memorable for two distinct reasons. It was the first serious check to the great heathen onslaught from the noith, and the begins nlng of that reverse process which led to the Christianization o£ the Scandinavian races and ihcir acceptance as members of the polity of Europe.

This is the ecumenical significance of Alfri also a landmark in the history of Engl;

Wessex has a claim on the loyalty of speech. Without any formal ciocumem^ events, he became the ruler of all was not by express treaty cede 4 fleet, the law, the capi in his policies. He Mercian, and and incorpon

Moreover&^i

from

t It IS

iviour of g the Saxon the march of ktt of England which to the Danes. The seem to be prefigured issued a code based on Saxon, restored a devastated Lpndon ms dominions.

served as a foundation. From Wessex, as ^ tded base, Alfred's son Edward reconquered the his grandson Athelstan repulsed a combined Ireland and Scotland in a battle so moving in its

i 84 A^XSTOa^ OF EVHOFB

incidents and wide!n its appeal (Brunanburh, 937) that It haa ^ inspired a great Anglo-Saxon poem and supplied a ihcme to one of the finest of the Icelandic Sagas. By 954 the king of WesseX , ruled all England from the Channel to the Clyde.

So for seventy-seven years after the death of Alfred the Great the West Saxon monarchy preserved its predominance, extend*- ing its influence by steady degrees, ruling the Danelaw with a light liand, and with the help of the Church surviving the perils of a minority. Yet the unity of England, though proclaimed in ^ theory, was still for various reasons insecure, and so remained till the consolidating work of the Norman Conquest. The Danish armies encamped and settled east of Watling Street, and the Norwegian armies who had established themselves in North- umbria were neither at one with one another nor completely fused with the Saxon population. The eailier tiaditions of the heptarchy were not altogether forgotten and under weak govern- ance might again revive.

The crisis came under the long unhappy reign of Ethelied the Rcdeless (979-1016). The Danes now revived tlieir attacks upon a countiy which aftei seventy-six years of compaiative peace must, in contradistinction to the prevailing miser) of the conti- nent, have presented a spectacle of rare and tempting prosperity. To buy off these terrible enemies the government weakly re- sorted to the expedient of a danegcld, a tax so crushing in amount and so ficquently imposed that imdcf its weight the rural popu- lation lost Its early charactei of ficcdom and, save in Danish East Anglia* sank into a condition of picdial seivitude. Some taxes are so heavy M to change the face of soc iety, some are so lucra- tive that retain them long after the oiiginal occa-

sion for their imposition has passed away. The danegcld be- longed to both these categories. It promoted the development of feudalism and predial Sei*vjtude. It was retained by Canute and William the Conqueror, and was the chief iinancial buttress of the Norman monarchy.

Heavy as was the danegcld it contd not avert bur only post- pone a Danish conquest of England. Under Canute, the son of Sweyn, and the inheritor of his conquests, Britain became part of a Scandinavian empire, which ultimately included Denmark, Norway, and the Hebrides. A state divided by so wide a waste of stormy water could hardly hold together for long, and ivi|may dismiss from the region of historical probabilities the

tnn NoitssMXN

Britain as a {Permanent part of a greater Scandinavia* The reign of Canute was but an interlude, more important for Scandi- navian than for British history. Not for the first time did the conquered peoples make a captive of their conqueror. In becom- ing a Christian Canute crossed from the Nordic into the Latin world. He made a pilgrimage to Rome, he married Norman Emma, the widow of Ethelred, his Saxon piedecessor, and ruled England not as a foreign, but as a native, king. To a man of his forcible common sense theic could be no comparison between the fertile plains of England, with their gentle full-brimincd rivers, their rich harvests and thiiving merchant settlements, and the wild mountain scenciy of Noiway, or the wind-swept un- dulations of Denmaik. Biitain was the pleasanter, the more cultivated land. Canute made Britain his centre, and from it determined to bring the religion of civilized men into his Scandi- navian dominions. In this effort he wms not a pioneer. As early as 830, St. Anschar, a Pic aid trained in the monastery of Corvey, voyaged through Denmaik, Norway, and Sweden preaching the Gospel, a gallant adventure soon overpowered by the might of the pagan tradition. At the gieat temple of Upsala in Sweden worship continued to be rendcied to Odin, Thor, and Frey, with an immense sacrificial slaughter, in every ninth year, of animals and men. Then, at the end of the tenth century, the miracle of the Roman Empire began to uoik among the wild peoples of the north. The Scandinavians of the Danelaw, who had gone over en bloc to tlie new faith at the Peace of Wedmore in 878, sub- mitted themselves in increasing measure to the ministrations of the Saxon Church, so that traders from Norw|^^.|Uld Sweden found in out English ports Christian men itlSr OWn speech and blood. From such encounters son>e seafarers were

actually convened; in others the hostile 4)drii?|udice against ChrLs- tianity was broken down. A demand MDse for English priests. By one of those consentaneous movements of policy, which through the force of imitation happen from time to time in history, the reign of Canute coincided with a development of Christian propaganda in Norway and Denmark, initiated by two kings, Olaf the 6it|nt and Olaf Scxitkonning, who owed their conversion to EngHsh missionaries, and cairied on their work with EngUljti help.

That Canute should have thrown his weight into the same iKnle is of critical importance. Of all Scandinavians he

m

by reason o£ h|s masteity of England the richer powerfuL iHad he fisted baptism and appealed to the resenrea of pagan sentiment in the hamlets of Norway Sweden, he might have greatly retarded the settlement of EurofM).^ He took the opposite course. In every way he was determined to show himself more Saxon than the Saxon, more Roman than the Pope, a pious and loyal member of the Chiistian polity. He restored St. Edmund’s Bury in honour of the hero king who had been slain by the Danes, and sent English priests to Denmark to help the Danish Church. Though Thor and Odin were slow to die, his policy marks an end of the Scandinavian menace to Latin Christianity.

The historian will observe that the conversion of Europe to Christianity was, afiei the first heioic age of poverty and en- thusiasm, mainly the result of material calculation or political pressure. The Goihs, the Franks the Saxons, the Scandinavians went over to Cliristianity, not as individuals directed by an inner light, but as peoples subject to mass suggestion and under the direction of political chiefs. That in c\ciy generation there were religious enthusiasts touched by the moral beauty of the Chris- tian virtues or exalted by the contemplation of the Divine Nature will not be denied There were con\cisions of tlie heart and of the mind. But tlie great mass of those who, under the Roman Empire or in the early middle ages, passed from Paganism to Christianity were little moved by considerations of pure re- ligion or morality, and expcrienc cd no change of heart on con- version. It is well to remember that the acceptance of Chiistian beliefs by baibanan woild entailed no such piofound and sudden the word convcision may seem to imply,

Europe still the scene of fierce passions, animal lusts,

and degrading supWlll^CIKtis. The great task of educating a savage society in the Christl^|’1^}^tics was hardly begun, and after cen- turies of toil is still mtm^Cted .Yet even in the rude society of mediaeval Europe aacrifice was stamped out, poly-

gamy forbidden, and slavery pint

The Anglo Danish kingdom was pmo^ tO Canute. His sons were not of the calibre to sustain so difStult a structure. Our island, which had led Euiope in culture in the dgfe^h century, lost nothing of its native character under the brilliant reverted A D to 49 ^oon after his death to its ancient loyalties and son

66 of Ethelrcd from his Norman exile. The charactaTflP^i^Wd

^ttlessor was ntirhtr so saixit3y nor so wesk as it has l^riEraycd by monkish chroniclers. He was an honest, wdt ^ lataning, mediocre man, handicapped by a youth spent abroad,* foreign ways, and by a foreign speech, and confronted by f^powerful factions fostered under Danish rule, which he had neither the force to control nor the subtlety to undermine. Moreover, lie was childless. The uncertainty attaching to the succession, enteiing as an exciting clement into the manoeuvres of tlie time, increased the difficulties of government. To whom Vrould the Witan allot the prize? Would it send abroad for the infant grandson of Edmund Ironside? Would it place the crown upon the brows of Harold, the son and heir of the most powciful and ambitious noble of the realm, Godwin Earl of Wessex? Or would foreign ambitions play a part in deciding the fate of the masterless land? There were two vigoious aliens to whom the throne of England was a matter of close personal interest. The first of these was Haiold Hardrada of Norway, the second was William the Bastaid, Duke of Normandy, a man of devouring energy and ambition, who, through the marriage of his aunt Emma to the father of King Edward, could claim a family rela- tionship with the house of Egbert.

The Viking dispersion which in England, Ii eland, and Russia quickened the life of commcice and the growth of towns, and led in the remote valleys of Iceland to a wondeiful flowering of original literature, also gave Normandy to Europe. The Nor- mans, as the Northmen settled since 91 1 in the Seine v^iUcy and its neighbourhood came to be called, grew to ttnost bril-

liant of Euiopcan races. All the virile ener| 5 jy|BpSw northern origin they letained, much of the polish raccjs with

whom their descendants mingled in acquiring.

Paganism was exchanged for Christ^^Mp^ Danish for French, the tumultuous memories of the the defined traditions

of the Latin world. TheyJc^l^ intone masses and to build churches, they listened as he recited the Chanson

de Roland, and in verses never to be heard wit^hout

emotion the tra|||^^l6&t}i of the Paladin of Charlemagne. To the marine skill ipif Scandinavians they added all that was then known warfare and the poliorcetic art. The pastures

of like those of ancient Elis, were rich in horses. The

IsiMHM fook as much pleasure in a horse as in a ship. So

|88 A ttl$TOIlT OIP EtJROPB

combative was their disposition that when they were not en» gaged in fighting a real enemy, they would slay one another, with the exhilaration of schoolboys at play, in the mailed en- counters of the tourney.

Among the nominal subjects of the king of France none ^^8 so powerful as the leader of this strong and receptive race. The dukes of Normandy from their capital at Rouen were in a posi- tion to contend on even terms with the kings of France, whose headejuarters were now fixed in Paris. Many a battle was fought over the Vexin, the disputed boiderland between Normandy and the lie de France, but the ambitions of the Normans were not confined within the borders of the duchy. A passion for adven- ture was blended with their gift for close and cautious calcula- tion. In the eleventh century they conquered Sicily and England, in the fifteenth they discovered the Canary Isles, and two cen- turies later the Norman voyagers were tlie first to descend the mysterious waterways of the Mississippi.

By the middle of the eleventh century Normandy had become, under a dynasty of vigorous dukes, the strongest and most coherent principality in western Europe. Here, as nowhere else at that time so fully, feudalism was organized and controlled for ptddic ends. Military service was fi.\cd by custom and ren- dered in respect of the tenure of land by fciulal vassals. Private war was limited, castle building conceded only under ducal licence, the coinage made a ducal riionopoly, the local adminis- tration entrusted to a vi( etonics, or sbcriil, who represented the ducal or public, as opposed to the feudal or local, interest. Even the Church, seldom more powerful in Europe than in the eleventh century, was in Normandy controlled by the duke. Nor did the old leaven of aristocratic anarchy, which was characteristic of Norse society, finally prevail against the dominance of the ducal house. The last formidable rebellion of the Norman nobles was broken by William the Bastard on the field of Val es Dunes in 1047.

It is the more important to no«these facts, because the slow rebuilding of Europe into an organized society after the cata- clysm which succcetled the death of Cliarlcs the Great was ren- dered possible only by the development of small, well-organized feudal stares. Of these Normandy was the earliest and best example. The practice of Normandy was carried over the Chan- nel to England, and to all those regions of France wnidh the

THE NORSEMEN 189

kings of J^Ogland and dukes of Normandy acquired by conquest or marriage. It spread to Maine and Anjou, to Aquitaine and Gascony, as well as to the islands of Scotland. In any part of this wide area, the Norman Empire as we may perhaps call it, justice came in the twelfth centiiiy to be administered with an eye to common principles and in a fonn of provincial French which would have been intelligible to every lawyer from the Forth to the Garonne.

That the Normans had become Frenchmen for at least half a century before tlie battle cf Hastings was of great moment for the reconstruction of Euiope. Had they retained their Norse language and ways and remained an insoluble element in the social fabric of Fiance, they would have exeicised as little general influence as the Basejucs or the Bretons, the Irish or the Welsh. As it was they can led with them in all their enterprises the attractive stamp of Latin civilization.

It is characteristic of this advcnruions people that lialf a cen- tuiy before their concjucst of England they had begun to hunt for fortune under an Italian sky. Norman pilgiims returning from the Holy Scpukhie in 1015 learnt that in the feuds which distracted southern Italy tlicie was an opening for the surplus energies of many a younger son impatient of the dullness or poverty of home, and anxious for travel, su‘=tenancc, and renown. The news spread rapidly. Norman knights drifted southwards, took their part in the local struggles of south Italy, and proved their worth as figlitiiig men. In 1030 the Duke of Naples accorded to his valiant corps of Not man mercenaries the county of Aversa. In his craft, courage, and domineering ambition, in his lust for gain and munificence in spending, in his industry iind endur- ance, in his love of gaudy clothes and cotnitldtid of eloquent words, but above all in his inasrery of the whole technique of fighting, the Norman knight appeared tO the motley south Italian population, Greeks, Lombards, Saracens, Italians, and Jews, to be at onc e a figure of glittering brilliance and a paragon of efficiency. The prestige of these adventurers was out of all proportion to their numbers. The conquest of south Italy and Sicily was effected by a few hundred knights under the Icfadcr- ship of the twelve stalwart sons of Tancreci of Hauievillc.*

There are few more curious pages of mediaeval history than those which recount the rise of this famous house, which wrested

^ Genealogical Table B, p. 418.

fpo UpSTOStT or OOJtOPE

south Italy from the Gteeks, Stdly froea the ^araoeiui» from the Turks, And challenged the might of the Byaandfi# Empire. The figures of Robert Guiscard, **Si man of gfett counsel, talent, generosity, and daring,” an expert cattle tbi^ and a born leader of horse, and of his youngest brother, Roger; the conqueror of Sicily, tall, handsome, eloquent, ambitious, live again in the pages of a Sicilian chxoniclcr, \;ho delights in abrupt^ vicissitudes of fortune. To this pious enthusiast it matters little’' that the sons of Tancred were capable of every devilry. The rough warfare of the Normans was redeemed by the possession of the Latin Faith, Though they handsomely defeated a palpal army which was sent against them (1053), they made amends by the elaborate respect which they accorded to a captive legate. Tlie Pope was quick to discern the advantage which might be derived from an alliance with this formidable body of muscular Christians, how they might lid Italy of the Giccks, redeem Sicily for the Faith, and make the Holy Father secure upon the Roman throne. A treaty was struck in 1058. Under the convenient authority of tlie forged donation of Constantine, Giiiscard was accorded the duchy of Apulia as a papal fief. Forty years later his brother Roger received as the reward of his Sicilian crusade # the singular honour of heieditaiy apostolic legate in that island.

So under the full glow of papal benediction these freebooters of die north laid the foundations of a civilized state in Mediter** ranean wateis. With Norman flexibility the descendants of Tancred proved themselves equal to the lesponsibilities of con- ducting organized go\cinment under new and difficult con- ditions aWA ^ iQiiiginal lines. In the kingdom ol Roger II, who united the NdWte territories on either side of the Stiaits of Messina, EuroplA IVlAMSsed a polity half-oriental, half-western, providing a shelter Crock, I,atin, Mooi, and Jew, and better organized, seeing that st |XPSaervc 4 the tradition of its Greek and Saracen past, than any o^USar European government of that age. Among the orange gnyves of PaiNtQo, Roger, the descendant of the Vikings, sat upon liis throne, tobe 4 io the dalmatic of the apostolic legate and the imperial costuttHT’C*^ Byzantium, his ministers part Greek, part English, his atfixf composed as to half of Moors, his fleet officered by Gredbt lSi»q«elf a Latin Christian, bur, in that balmy climate of the in

hal£-£yzantine, half-oriental state, with a harem

,tDtB tot

ci ^ Ic^y i«laDt4» shared then as ever fietivetai east and west.

^'llme has dealt kindly with this dynasty of ^fted pirates. rMosaics, the best which Greece could provide, still embellish the ■Walls of the noble cathedral of Monreale, which looks down upon the flowers and orchards of the Conca d’Oro. In that same 'earthly paradise an exquisite cloister still invites to repose, and the visitor, noting what he there sees of building and sculpture, of jewelry and decoration, must admire the splendour of the Norman princes now sleeping in tombs of daik porphyry, who in the twelfth century brought about so great an assemblage of the arts and crafts of their age.

Very different was the Scandinavian scene from which the Vikings had sallied forth to slay, to burn, and to conquer. No Monrcale, or Caen, or Durham rose in the solitary valleys of Norway. There the Viking aristocracy bled to death in civil war. By the thirteenth century Scantlinavia was empty of per- sonal eminence. The days of hei influence were over. A rude, unletteicd peasantry extracted a sorry living from a barren soil.

BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED

C. F. Kcai>: Vikinijs in Wostotn Chi istendom.

B. S. Philpotts: Ldda and S.'ja (Home Un'i\cisit> I.ibiary.) 193X. Axel Olrik; Viking Cisihs ifon. Ed. H. Elkkilde. 1930.

Saxo Giainm.iticus. 7 r. O Elton. 1894.

T. D. Kendiitk: History of the Vikings. 1930.

Sir Charles Oman: A History of England befoic thw jj^tWilian Conquest >910. , .

C. Plummer: The Life and Times of Alfred tiMiplwttt 1902.

G. M. Trevelyan: History of England, igat L , ‘

C H. Hasluns: The Noim.ms in Europsatt |||wOcy. 1915.

C. H. Haskins: Noi man Institutions. S9'|S.

CHAPTEU XVI

SAXONS AND SALIANS

Europe t»i 900. Germany and the Huns. Henry the Fowler and Otto I. 1 oiindalion of the Holy Fontan Empire of the German Sation in 9f>2. Its siftntficance for Germany. Limitations to imperial power. Quarrel with the Church. Revival of the Papacy after 10^6. Leo IX. Hilde- brand. The H’ar of Invcililiires and the Concotdal of H'orms. The Hildehrandine controversy. Its consequences for political thought. German colonising movements on the noithern plain and middle Danube, The Empire fails to profit, 'I he hard Geimany and the soft. No Franco- German problem in the middle ages.

While the Northmen were thus assailing its outer fringes, Europe began to detcIo[) those divcrsilied political character- istics which led in modern times to the formation of the separate nationalities of Germany, Italy, and rrance. At the beginning of the tenth century no one of these countries pos- sessed the organization proper to a state, and still less the con- scious personality essential to a nation. 'I'here was a king of the western Franks but uo France, a king of the eastern Franks but no Germany, a king of the Lombards but of Virgilian Italy only a rcmlnisccnte. What is now known as France was a collec- tion of fiefs, one of which, the Tic de France with its capital at Paris, wap destined to devour its neighhours until its power was co-extensive with the fionticrs of tlie picsent state. Germany, bounded on the cast by the Elbe, w’as a loose assemblage of tribal duchies-— Saxon, Franconian, Bavarian, Swabian — under the nominal rule of an elective king. The Italiiins, once the proud and privileged members of a gj-*at empire, were parcelled out into a congeries of dissimilar polities, a papal patrimony much diminished by usurpation, a Byzantine province, Lombard fiefs, independent cities. No Gascon or Breton would have pretended to owe allegiance to France. No Venetian or Genoese would have fell bound to follow the banner of a Marquis of Ivrca or a Duke of Benevento. The Germans were more homogeneous. Yet this violent and romantic forest folk, now so submissive to authority, exhibited through the middle ages a surprising appe- tite for discord and rebellion.

19J

SAXONS AND SAHANS

• 93

Unlike France and England, Germany suffered little from the Northmen. For her the Magyars, a Mongolian race who had slipped into the empty Pannonian plain, dividing the northern from the southern Slavs, constituted at the beginning of the tenth century a more serious menace. Again and again these formidable horse archers cariicd their devastations into the heart of Europe, piercing even to tlie plains of Italy and France and beyond to Andalusia. But as Wessex and Alfred stemmed the onrush of the I'lancs in England, so Saxony and Henry the Towler gave a check to the Magyais. The Saxon hero was not, like llic West Saxon, a man of comprehensive genius and vivid sympathy, but a good methodical Gcimaii soldier who, confronted with a novel form of attack, set himself down to devise the best means of defence, and found in the construction of well-garrisoiied vvoodeti fotts and the use of the cavalry arm the piopcr reply to \hc swift-moving levies of his enemy. Henry’s victory at the Unstiut in c;^3 bi ought glory to his house and pur a new hcait in his people. He was succeeded by a yet gi eater son, Otto I, whose victoiy on the Lecdi in 955 finally liberated his country fioni the Magyar jiest. What the soldier began, the priest completed. In 1000 the wild Hungarian people followed its royal shcpheid into the Cdiiistian fold and, alter many centuiics had elapsed, fonned the south eastern bastion of the Latin faith against the concj.icring tides of Islam. ^

In spite of these days of confusion the conception of an organized woild state coextensive with tlie dc^main of a world religion still lloaied vaguely in the miiuL cJ men Even before the victoiy on the Lech Otto had a claim higher than that of any conteinpoiary to he regarded as the temporal chief of Latin Chiistianity. The tribal duchies of Gcimany had been brought, not without fighting, to acknowledge his authority. He had obtained the submission of Bohemia and had strengthened the German povveis of defence and offence along the Slavonic frontier. Moreover, finding in 951 a pretext to intervene in Italian affairs, he had assumed the Italian crovvm and had appointed a deputy, Bcrcngar of Ivrca, to represent hijn in absence. To these striking achievements the great triumph over the Hungarians furnished an impressive complement. Though he came of a race which had never been included within the Roman Empire and had only recently been admitted within

^ Genealogical Table C, p. 419.

194 A HISTOUV OF EUROPE

the Christian fold, few would now dispute Otto's claim to be Roman Emperor should he care to advance it, for since Charles raagne no ruler had held a position of such widespread influence and prestige. Accordingly uhen in 962 Otto marched to Rome at the request of Pope John XII, and was by that unscrupulous pontiff crowned Roman Empcroi, the world accepted the fact without a piotest. So correspondent was his entcj prise with the needs and ideals of society that the Holy Roman ihnpire of the German nation lasted till the ninctcciuh century, the embodi- ment of that aspiiaiion after order and haimony which the reason o£ man is always pleased to entertain and his perversity as sutely to fiustiatc.

So the Holy Roman Empire was lounded; to some German writets a matter of pride, to othcis ol poignant icgict. Theic are those who reflect wiili scntiniciits (A cxiiJiaiion upon an in- stiiution wliich in its mid-coiiise excited the enthusiasm of Uaiiic, in its decline the amused obseivaiion oi Goethe. To such it is pleasant to recall how, when western Euiope had reached the nadir oi disorganization, the scene of the first con- ceited defence and political recovery was laid in Saxony by Henry the Fowler, how after that valiant prince had given security to his people, Otto, his still greater son, led all the German i:ucs against the Hungarians, ledccmcd Italy from de- giadation and helped to icstoie the Papacy to the respect of the western woild. To this school oi historical interpretation the revival ol the Kiwpiie was not only a Euiopcan but a German necessity, ihey dispute the notion that Germans were sacrificed to Italian intiucnccs. 'They coniend that the iinpciial title ga\e to the German king a new picsilgc with tribes other ilian his own, that it developed national feeling and stieiigthened national pride, and that it wa^ a means of securing for the serviee of the German monardiy the indispensable loyalty of the German Chuich.

With greater cogency it can be argued that the revival of the western Empire was unfortunate for the Germans. The area of Germany even in the days of Henry the Fowler was greater than that which a mediaeval monarch could conveniently con- trol. The addition of Italy to thar area meant that any real government of cither country became impossible. The lesults of framing the permanent policy of the state upon a scheme too ambitious to be realized aic what might be expected. Wherctis

196 A HISTORY OF EUROPE

in the tenth century there was no part of the Carolingian Empire which seemeti more likely to be united under a single monarchy, three centuries later Germany had become an anar- chical federation of princip.Tlities and republics.

A contributory cause of this great political calamity was the elective character of the German monarchy. In England and France, where the elective was succeeded by the hereditary principle, the development of the state proceeded more or less u[)on a continuous plan. In Fiance the monarchy assumed an absolute, in England a coiistiiiiiional form, but in both countries the kingship remained a fn.cd centre, and, being identified with the govcrnineiit, exercised a loimaii\e influence on the national life. In Germany things took a dilTcrcnl turn. It vtas not con- venient either for the Pope or for the tribal dukes and great prelates in Get many that the monarchy should receive the power which tlie adopiicjtt of the hereditary principle would confer. Election, then, was retained. No dynasty was allowed to take deep root. The Saxons ncie succeeded by the Salians and these by the Ilohensiaufens. Only after many vicissitudes, during which the imperial capital was transferred to points as distant as Palcinio and Piague, was a centre found in Vienna and a loiig-li\cd dynasty in the Austrian Ilabsburgs.

The East Roman Emperor ruled over an organized state, a strongly foitificd capital and a subject church. No one of these achaniages belonged to (^tto and his immediate successors. The Holy Roman EmjK’ioi wris a \\auclercr. His court moved from farm to farm, fiom town to town, and as he ti a veiled, adminis- tering such justiic as he might with the aid ol his attendanr clergy and noble®, his distant capital on tlic Tiber w’as in the hands now of the Pope but 11101 c often of a ca mat ilia of tur- bulent Roman nobles.

In theory the Empire was conceived of as tvoild-widc; hut no Holy Roman Empcior exercised aiillioriiy in Fiance or Spain, in Britain or Scandinavia, in Russia or the widcspiead dominions of tlie Byzantine Empire. Ihe influence of Otto’s revival was correspondingly circumsciihed. For the unity of the German and Italian peoples, for the fortunes of the Papacy, for the growth of political rhought in Europe, and for the fate of the Slavs in the Baltic plain, the rc\ival of the Empire as a German institution was of the greatest moment. In central Europe events and political speculations were for many centuries

8AXONS AND SALIANS I97

fashioned or capriciously influenced by this singular institution. Elsewhere its light shone with a fainter glow and the Holy Roman Emperor was regarded as but a foreign sovereign whose pretensions were remotely correspondent with his powers

Grave as these disabilities were, they might hut for one cir- cumstance have been surmounted. In the middle of the eleventh century the Empire came into collision with the Papacy over two critical questions affecting the life of the Christian church and the administration of the German state, the celibacy of the clergy and the right of investiture. It had been part of the policy of Charlemagne to endow the German church with a lavish hand and to lean upon its help in the tasks of govern- ment. That policy was renewed by Otto and his successors. With a liberality not unmingled with prudence they piled gift on gift upon the German prelates, expecting in return that from these royal and submissive nominees entertainment would be provided for the royal court, subsidies for the royal treasury, and a full complement of men-at-arms whenever the royal host might take the field.

A very mundane Church of fighting archbishops and bishops suited the convenience of a German king, and was indeed the chief pillar upon which his government was based. More securely than upon any tribal duke or feudal lord could he count upon the secular assistance of German prelates for the conduct of his administration upon either side of the Alps.

To this policy the Clmich, as soon as a clerical spirit revived in Europe, w^as bound to take violent exception: and to such a revival the Emperors themselves contributed. Secular though these sovereigns might be in their use of ecclesiastical patronage, they were nevertheless devout according to the measure of their age, some, like the Saxon Henry II and the Salian Henry III, attaining to a higli level of personal piety. Moreover, they con- ceived it to be their duty as advocates and defenders of the church to protect the Papacy against violence and indignity, and if necessary to intervene when the pressure of turbulent nobles or the choice of the clergy and people of Rome had raised an unworthy man to the Papal Chair. In the interests of the Holy See Otto I had hanged thirteen Roman nobles, and Otto III, his grandson, a lad in his teens, had made two papal appointments, one of which, though of a young man of twenty- three, was respectable, while the other was Sylvester II, the most

A HISTORY OF KUROI^B

1048^54

t^lO

198

distinguished savant of his age. But no Ern^peror rendered more service to the Papacy than the devout Henry III. vfho at the Synod of Sutri in 1046 deposed two or perh-j^pg three bad Popes and then proceeded in succession to appoint good ones.

The effect of these four appointments was* ^Icar the Papacy from the scandals which had attached to it,, jq restore to it the moral leadership of the Church, and to precipitate a quarrel with the Empire which, lasting with intermi^ioos for two hun- ched years, consigned Italy and Germany to crhnturies of political confusion and helplessness. If it be asked /’v.qw effects so far- reaching could he pioduccd by the appointt:^^^ot of a succession of elderly men to the bishopiic of Rome, answer is to be found in the fact that Leo IX and his suy(^.(^.essors brought to the discharge of their office a doctrine ol explosive power,

long prevalent in Europe and capable pap^l direction of

becoming a political force of the first order. \ were Climiacs.

They belonged, that is to say, to a motcmci;^^ which, starting in the Burgundian monastery ot Cluny more ihV..» 1 century before as a campaign for chastity, piety, and disciji^inc in the monas- teries, had widened out, as such mcncmcnis arc apt to do, into a comprehenshe programme of church reform. The earlier Cluniacs had been content to prcacli the sublime virtues of purity, self-disc ipline, and peace, and to intioduce into the mechanism of their order a system of central supervision and contTol for the protection of these frail flowers of the Christian spirit. The later Cluniacs w’eie more ambitious. For them the teaching of Chilsi would never he established on earth save through the niodiiiin of an inde[)cndeiit Church governed by an omnipotent Pope. There were, indeed, differences of opinion. Some were moderate, others extienre, but the general spirit of the movement, which was passionate and unequivocal, was to exalt the papal power and to insist upon a clear-cut professional standard for the clergy. In Lorraine, on the Rliine, in Bavaria, in North Italy, such ihcccratic ideas of every degree of refine- ment and crudity fermented in clerical brains, but more par- ticularly among the monks, who, like the miners of modem industry, lived a life apart and were thus peculiarly prone to the acceptance of contracted doctrines in an enthusiastic form.

To this mass of exalted opinion the Papacy under the com- pulsion of Leo IX now gave the support of its authority. Leo was a Cluniac. To the discharge of his high duties he brought

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the spirit of the autocrat, the cosmopolitart, and the reformer. He regarded the Papacy, not, as so many of his predecessors had done, in the light of a local and lucrative dignity, but as a great international institution of unlimited authority and complete independence which had been entrusted with the spiritual mis- sion to inspect, to reform, and to inspire. It was a symptom of his wide outlook and active spirit that he made Cardinals of foreigners, that he held synods in France and Germany, that he secured the South Italian Normans for his allies, and that under his rule papal legates were despatched far and wide through Europe on disciplinary missions. His immediate successors trod the same path of high papal doctrine. They supported the pataiia or popular anti German movement in Milan. They de- nounced heresy and lay patronage. In 1059 by a clever stroke of policy advantage was taken of an imperial vacancy to confide to the College of Cardinals the choitc of a new Pope. The high clerical proteedings of the Curia were from that date inspired by the genius, at on<c fcivenr and subtle, of a squat, ill favoured Tuscan |)eas:inr, first known to history as Cardinal Hildebrand and after his election to tlie Paj>acy in 1073 as Gregory VII.

To this stern and imjilacahle idealist we may principally ascribe the spread through Europe of a theocratic philosophy as menacing to the nascent stale life of the eleventh century as in our own limes Is the communism of I.enin to the capitalism of Wall Stieet. With imperious courage Hildebrand concei^cd of the woild as a single Christian polity governed by an omnipoicuT and infallible Pope, a Pope bound by no la\Ns, by whom an ofTcndiiig prince might be driven from his throne, cut off from the sacraments of the chinch, and severed from the allegiance of his subjects. Believing that the time had now come to reconstruct the militia of tlie Catholic church, he preached the doctrine of a celibate clergy under the undivided control of the Vicar of Christ. At one and the same time he was prepared in the interests of an autonomous clerical profes- sion to break up the family life of the German clergy and to sap the power of the German king. His claims were exorbhant. The church was to retain its temporal possessions, its palaces and farms, its cattle and its money. No fragment of the vast wealth which made it in Germany the indispensable servant of the state was to he surrendered. But it was to be independent, an Empire within an Empire. As the soul was nobler than the

300 A IIJSTORY OF EUROPE

body, as the sun outshone the moon, so was the spiritual superior to the temporal power. In a Roman synod held in Lent of 1075 the right of the lay prince to invest a prelate of the Church with the symbols of his ofPee was denounced as an in- tolerable inversion of the divine law.

It seems certain that Hildebrand, who was perfect in all the parts of the ecclesiastical diplomatist, did not advance without carefully measuring his ground. lie must have known that in openly denouncing lay investiture be was challenging the basis of imperial rule in two countries, he must have foreseen that his challenge would be taken up. he must nevertheless have counted on success. Nor was his calculation unnatural. Henry IV had only just succeeded to his father’s throne after a long 10^6^ n ()6 minority, which had fostered all the elements of disobedience in his kingdom. He was young, incxpeiicnced, headstrong. At the outset of his reign he was called on to confront a serious rising of the Saxon peasants who could not be brought to see by what right a Swabian prince pretended to establish a capital among their pleasant hills and to hold down a free poj)uIation with his Swabian garrisons. He had won a victory, but still had many enemies on eitlier side of tlie Alps, monks, peasants, princes, the anti German rahh'lc of the Lombard towns, w^ho might under pa[)al leadership be combined into a formidable coalition. In that age of superstition the Church possessed powers ovei the soul more mighty, than armies. If it denied the validity of sacraments administered by mairied priests, if it threatened excommunication, if it proceeded in the last resort to depose a temporal soveieign, hcaits were troubled, loyalties impaired, a great body of opinion was swiing from its moorings. On all these harassing circiim'itant es Hildebrand must have counted when lie threw his fateful challenge to Henry IV.

The contest began with an exchange of blows wliich at once revealed the disparity hctw'cen the moral resources at the di.s- posal of the rival poweis. 'flic Emperor deposed the Pope and the Pope replied by deposing and excommunicating the Emperor; but wlic cas Gregory VII was little the worse for Henry’s deposition of him, the consequences of excommunica- tion were serious for a sovereign whom many of his more power- ful subjects were already anxious to abase. At a diet of German princes JIcnry was flatly informed that unless he were absolved in the spring when the Pope was expected in Germany, his

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throne was forfeit. He knew better than to wait for a Roman judgment delivered in an atmosphere of German mutiny. Swallowing his pride and steeling his courage, he crossed the Alps in the dead of winter, sought out the Pope in the moun- tain fastness of Canossa, and doing penance there and receiving absolution returned to confound and amaze his enemies.

But the German princes were already too far gone in sedition to retreat. They proceeded to elect Rudolf of Swabia as anti- king, and when Rudolf fell fighting on the Elster (October, 1080), pursued the Emperor with their hatred to the end, replacing Rudolf by Hermann of Luxemburg, and finally, when Hermann was in his grave and Henry was old and grey, stirring up his two sons to unfilial rebellion. A German civil war contrived for the deposition of such a man as Henry could not fail to enlist the sympathy and, after no long interval, the active support of Hildebrand. Rudolf the anti-king was acknowledged by the Pope. Wibert, an anti-Pope, was set up by the Emperor. Instantly all Germany and Italy were ablaze. On the imperialist side were ranged the peasants and priests of the south-west, the lesser nobles of Franconia and Swabia, and the main body of the German townsmen. But Saxony, the most warlike of Ger- man provinces, under Otto of Nordheim, the most redoubtable of German nobles, rose against the Emperor, and only after the stiff Saxon neck had been again bowed beneath the Swabian yoke was Henry free to cross the Alps and to place his con- siderable military talents at the disposition of his Italian friends.

Little comfort did Italy derive from his intervention. Four times did he lay siege to Rome and as often was comj)ellcd to acknowledge failure. But neither had Hildebrand cause for gratification. To save his capital fiom the Emperor he invoked the aid of the South Italian Normans. The Saracen levies of Robert Guiscard were as little famous for clemency as was the Roman population for the Christian virtues of meekness and patience. The allies of the Pope met whh a furious resistance in the streets of Rome and exacted a terrible revenge. To Hildebrand, dying in exile at Salerno (May 25, 1085), the ways of Providence must have seemed strange and bitter, for no Goth or Vandal had brought such destruction upon the city of St. Peter as this priest who had devoted a life to its service.

The war of the Investitures, outlasting Hildebrand and Henry, was brought to an end in 1122 by a compromise (the

201

A IIlATORt OF ROROPF

Concordat of Worms) anticipated sixteen years before in the cooler atmosphere of Britain, under which the secular prince, while continuing to exact homage for the temporal possessions of the Church, consented to renounce the investiture by ring and staff, which were the symbols of spiritual authority. Each party claimed a victory. It was the cause of civil government in Germany and Italy which suffered a ruinous defeat from this protracted struggle.

There was nothing new in the Ilildebrandine philosophy. The virtues of chastity and humility, of love and justice, had been continually preached to unheeding ears. The theory that the Roman Church, being founded by God, was the mother and mistress of all Christianity,’^ that it was infallible in doc- trine, universal in dominion, and the sole means of salvation for erring and straying men, was no novelty in western Europe. Nor was Hildebrand the fiist to maintain that the Bishop of Rome was the siipieme and autocratic ruler of the Catholic Church, What was novel in this extraordinary man was the ardour, the courage, and the persistence with which he carried on a critical camjtiign against the deep-seated corruptions of his age. It was not a battle of clergy against laity. Tlie priests w'ho w'cre enjoined to break up their families, put aw^av their wives, or abjure their concubines, were as much incensed against the Pope as the prelates who were subjected to his niimite and harassing supervision. In Get many, where papal interference was at its maximum, the greater part of the cleigy were Opposed to the passionate crusade of the purifau autocrat. How can we be surprised? Celibacy is a haid viitue, the conciuest of the natural love of woman a poignant human sacrifice darkening the sunlight of young manhood. The battle to which Hilde- brand summoned his clergy was so long and desperate that victory was not finally won till the later years of the sixteenth century. But it may be asked whether it would Itave been won even then, if at one of the darkest hours of the Churcirs history, when the clergy Were sunk deep in worldlincss and vice, a great moral genius, commanding all the resources of the Papal Chair, had not forced upon his clergy, without fear or favour, and in defiance of the strongest secular power in Europe, the austere ideals of the celibate life*

Out of the Hildebrandinc controversy rose a political debate

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which continues to this day. The clerical party contended that righteousness was set above material power, that temporal sovereignty was founded on contract, and that the unrighteous king might lawfully be deposed. The imperialist advocates argued otherwise. They disputed the social contract, denied the papal supereminence, and claimed for the Emperor an indefeas- ible, hereditary, and absolute authority. Few now read the rival tracts of Manegold, the papal, and Petrus Crassus, the im- perialist, pamphleteer. Yet in these dry pleadings there is still a living core of interest. Is the state all in all? Is material power alone to be worshipped, or does Christianity divide the alle- giance of the ciriren? Less courageously than in the eleventh century, but still audibly, these questions are asked in Germany today 0934 )-

Meanwhile a great task was awaiting the German people which under happier auspices might have been turned to the advantage of the German monarchy. From the Elbe to the Niemen stretched a long level plain, now gleaming with thriving tillage and well built towns and villages, hut then a w^aste of forest, lake, and marsh, sparsely occupied by tribes speaking a strange Slavonic tongue and worshipping lieathcn gods, such as Triglav of the triple head, and Redigast, and Svantovit, whose shrine at Arcona in Riigen overlooks the dark wMters of the Baltic. To the bishops, the nobles, and the husbandmen of Saxony these vast mysterious spaces, whose eastern limit no traveller could fix, were as alluring as the plateau of the North American continent to the frontiersmen of Virginia and Massa- chusetts. Ileie beyond the Elbe was rich land to be had for the asking, forests to be cleared, marshes to he drained, villages to be built, and a heathen population to be converted, taxed, tithed, and reduced to bondage. “The Slavs,” so runs a pro- clamation of the leading bishops and princes of Saxony, “are an abominable people, but their land is very rich in flesh, honey, grain, birds, and abounding in all produce of fertility of the earth when cultivated so that none can be compared with it. So say they who know. Wherefore O Saxons, Franks, Lothar- ingians, men of Flanders most famous, here you can both save your souls and if it please you acquire the best of land to live in.”

The colonization of this northern plain was perhaps the principal achievement of the German people during the middle

204 A HISTORY OF EUROPE

ages. Not without rebuffs, husbandry and commerce, church building and town building followed behind the axe of the Ger- man frontiersmen. By slow degrees at convenient spots along the bleak sea coast little fishing villages grew into great trading towns and ultimately into the powerful Hanseatic League, which covered the Baltic with its shipping and made of it the second commercial highway of the mediaeval world. Frisians, Flem- ings, and Walloons, hearing of the new empty country, in which farmers might live at their ease, pressed forward to share the advantages of ihc German pioneers.

Naer Oostland willen wy ridon Naor Oostland willen wy mee,

A1 over die groene heiden,

Frist'h over die heiden,

Diier issor een better e stee AIs wy binnen Oostland komen A1 under dat hoeger huis,

Daer wot den wy binnen gel:v/en Kiisth over die heiden;

Zy hceten uns willekiimen s\n.

'I o the Rastland we will ride,

To the Eastland we’ll go too.

All over the green fields,

Gailv ovei the fiekis!

There is a better place When to Eastland we are come Right under the l»*gh wall,

'there we shall!>e let in,

Gail> over the fields I 'Khev will hid w'elcome.

Tt is not to be pictendcd that this long and exubeiant adventure was unattended by seiioiis evils. The Saxon frontiers- man of the middle ages, to whom rough nature imparted some- thing of her own asperity, was as little disposed to be tender to the Abodiitcs and Wends as was the New England settler of the seventeenth century to tho Red Indians who from time to time raided his holding. Only in Pomerania, where the native population were peaceably brought over to Christianity by Otto of Bamberg, one of the best of the German missionaries, was the onward march of the German people unaccompanied by the use of force. At no lime, however, have great colonizing movements, involving the displacement of a weaker by a stronger population, been accomplished without serious injustice. The struggle between North German Christianity and Slavonic

SAItONS AND SALIANS 205

heathendom exhibits many, if not all the abuses which in a later age characterized the colonization by the W'hite races of the western hemisphere. There was murder and treachery, ex- propriation and enslavement. The Slavs were not always patient under the hand of the despoiler. From time to time they rose in revolt (as in 983, 1018, and 1066) and overwhelmed the German settlements w'ith fire and sword.

A similar colonizing movement, though more narrowly con- tracted, went forward in the milder climate of the middle Danube. Here the Bavarian pioneers were confronted by the stubborn strength of the Magyar nation and the hardly less in- tractable wilderness of forest and hill which on either side flanked their eastern advance. The conditions of the problem governed the mode by which it was attacked. The Bavarian Ostmark, established by Charlemagne against the Avars, re- ncw'cd by Otto I against the Hungarians, extended by the cam- paigns of Henry III, was a military colony divided among nobles, bishops, and abbots, who were pleclgcd to defend it, and popu- lated for the most part by their Bavarian seifs. Thus while the vast spaces of the north-east were mainly w^on by free adven- turers of the Saxon race, a greater mcasine of military organiza- tion was necessary for the making of tliat far smaller German territory w'hich is knowm as Austria. The modern traveller who pursues his journey from the Dutch to the Russian frontier passes through a country peopled, save for a few Wendish villages, by Germans speaking the German tongue and penetrated by the German spirit. Only the ethnologist and antiquarian can bring to his notice the surviving relics of a diffcicnt population long submerged or violently exterminated. In the south it is different. Whether the attack was softer or the resistance harder, the enemy was not absorbed. Not all the seductions of Vienna, for so many centuries the centre of German illumination in that backward corner of Europe, not the prestige ol the Austrian Empire, nor the intolerance of the Catholic Church, nor the dominion of a German bureaucracy have broken the stubborn heart of the Czech and the Slovak, the Magyar and the Slovene. To this day they cherish a non-German mind and speak a non-German speech. Had the German monarchs of the middle ages been free from the distractions of Italian politics, they might, one would imagine, have secured for themselves an accretion of strength through the direction of these colonizing movements. This

306

A HISTORY OF EUROPE

opporuinity was not taken. No part of the territories wrested from the Slav was reserved for the domain of the German king. It fell to the Margraves of Brandenburg and the Bavarian Ost* mark to reap the advantages which but for a long train of untoward circumstances, the acceptance of the imperial crown by Otto I, the war of the Investitures, the successful resistance of the Saxons to the attempt of Henry III and his son to estab- lish in Srixony the scat of the German monarchy, might have been secured for the German state. In modern times the leadership of Germany has been shared between two great land colonies, Prussia and Austria. The growth of the movement out of which these states arose has little connection with tlie spectacular Italian and papal wars which form the central theme of mediaeval German history. Yet w'liat in the German past can be more important than iliis immense and secular migiation, this moving frontier of stalwart peasant families steadily advancing east- wards, clearing fore^'ts, reclaiming land, diaining marshes, bringing in with their heavier ploughs a more intensive method of cultivation, and followed by monk and piicst, trader and mason, peddling Jew and ingenious craftsman, the outpouring of a fecund and vigorous people, v\liich has left enduring traces on tlie history ol mankind?

A French liisroiian has pertinently contrasted the eastern and western front of the German Enjpirc during the middle ages— in the cast the lighting Margraves on the Elbe, in the west the pi chiles and piicsis of the Rhine; in ihc east the German race at its hardest, its Leicest, its most enterprising, in the w'est the same people softened hy clerical government or municipal aflliicncc. As the tides of Germanism swept forw^aid towards the cast they receded in the wvst. 'Hie long intermediate teriiiory which in the division of tlie Carolingian Empiic among the sons of Louis Ic Debonnair had been assigned to Loihaii, and had fiom him taken the name of Lothaiingia, was an unstable compound, soon dissolved into a number of separate fiefs, principalities, and cities, of which some were Latin, otlicis Teutonic, but all in the middle of the elevcmh century included within the Holy Roman Empire. To this Empire belonged Alsace and Loiiainc and the territories which arc familiar as Switzerland, Franvhc Comte, and the Low Countries. Moreover, partly by bequest, paitly by ^034-39 conquest, the Emperor Conrad II had come into possession of tlie kingdom of Arles, which comprised Provence, Dauphine,

SAXONS AND SALIANS % 0 ^

and Savoy, some of the inosi classic ground of Latin civilization. But the hold of the German Empire on such part of this western area as was peopled by the Latin race was slight and precarious. As the French monarchy increased in strength, the Empire began by slow degrees to give ground, until by the end of the fifteenth century the valley of the Rhone, save for Avignon, had passed from the German to the French allegiance.

These changes were effected without great shock. A Franco- German war was not in the middle ages a political possibility. The German emperors, when they weic not engaged in putting down rebellion in their own dominions, were occupied with Italy or the eastern advance. Tlie eyes of the German people were turned towards the east where land was empty and conquest easy, and not towards the west where these conditions were re- versed. Nor was there present that condition of geographical contiguity whicli is provocative of friction in the modern world. Between France and Germany ran a belt of principalities, duchies, and counties across which the two countries, though little Jove was lost between them, might shake hands. I’o these reasons may be added one yet more powerful. Fiance was occupied in the west. For the better part of the middle ages she was involved with England in the greatest civil war ol mediaeval history.

BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED

C. R. L Flotclier: The Making of W'cslein Europe. 1012-14.

II. H. Mil man: TTie History of Latin Christianity. 1867.

J. Bryce: The Holy Roman Enif/ue. 1004.

W. von Giescb edit: Gesihlilifi* der clcutschrn Kaisei/df i88i. A, Hau* k; Kirchengest hidite Doutschlands. 4 vols. 190.^20 Canihiidc^e Mediae\al History, Vot. V.

Zeller: Hibtuire d’Allciiiagne. 1890,

aiAPTER x\^n

THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLISH GOVERNMENT

Prostration of France tn the tenth century. Ri^e of the Capelians, Sources of their authority. Ihe Norman Conquest of England. Its com* pleieness, England becomes a province of the Latin u^orld. Liigland*s debt to William the Conqueror. Preservation of Saxon customs. Con* iolidation under Henry JJ. brench interests divert England from its proper tasks.

Nothing in the condition of France during the tenth century indicated the siiength or the unity which she was afterwards to attain. To the not therners who spoke the bn^ue d'oil, the langue d'oc of Provence and Aquitaine was only one dcgiec less foieign than the Celtic of Biittany or the Norse of Bayeux. The countiy, which had become a chaos of waning liels, was rendered miser- able by pillage, turbulence, and inset uiity. Even in the north the Carolingian monaichs, though enjoying the superstitious prestige of legitimacy, were confronted by many vassals as poweiful as themselves and little disposed to respect their authotity. In Aquitaine and Gasf'ony, or in the counties of Barcelona atid Toulouse, the value 6f these phantom kings as guaulians of peace or diiettors of policy wms exactly zero.

From this state of political piostraiion Fiance was ultimately rescued by a new royal dynasty which possessed, together with other valuable qualities, the met it of furnishing for a period of three hundred years a lawful male heir to the throne. Theie was among the vassals of the king a ceitain family which shone out above others for a remarkable tale of public service performed on a critical occasion and at a ci ideal spot. Robert the Strong, Coni of Pat is. fought for ten years against the Northmen and died on the field of ’ title. Tlie rccotd of Elides, his son, the hero of the famous defence of Paris against a great Scandinavian armada, was equally illustrious. For this exploit Eudes was rcwaided by the dukedom of France, a dignity which the saviour of his country might in such an age of violent ambitions be emboldened to exchange for the monarchy it.self. But the Robenonians were as distinguished for caution as for courage.

3o8

THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLISH GOVERNMENT 209

More than a hundred years passed during which the most powerful man in the kingdom was content to serve and wait. Then in 987 it so chanced that Louis V, the last surviving male in the direct line of the royal house, met with a fatal accident in the cliasc. Hugh Capet, with the encouragement and help of Adalbert, Arclibishop of Rheiins, seized the occasion and founded a dynasty which lasted eight hundred years. pro- mise," he swore, " to grant to the people entrusted to my care justice according to their rights."

From the long duration of this famous house it might be tempting to conclude that its stability was never in serious danger. This w'as not so. The Capetians, indeed, enjoyed two great advantages over any feudal competitor. They held Paris and Orleans, and were thus stationed on the waters of the Seine and the Loire. No feudal vassal could boast of a domain so central or of a capital so populous, convenient, and easy to defend. The island city of Paris proved to be the key to suprem- acy, and this key valour and piudence had secured for the Cape- tians. But the election of Hugh, the most powerful by far of the French nobles and generally favoured by the Chinch, was not unanimous. The Counts of Flanders and Toulouse and the Duke of Aquitaine refused their recognition, a cloud in the sky fore- shadowing the defiant ambitions and jealousies which continued to surround the ihione of France.

A second resource, however, the Capetians possessed, the value of which became increasingly evident w^ith the lapse of lime. They wcie kings. By comparison with some of their feudatories they might be poor and weak, subjected to the humiliating de- fiance of robber barons even within the precincts of their own domain and hard put to it to make a living from their farms, but they had a reservoir of power peculiar to themselves. The King of France was the heir of the Roman tradition of empire,

" the eldest son ot the church and most Christian king," the head of that new feudal society which was at first so inimical to monarchy but afterwards, as its customs became defined, a source of regal prerogatives unknown to the ancient world. Upon each of these three foundations it was possilile for the theorist to erect an imposing fabric of regal prerogative. To the feudal lawyer the king was the suzerain of suzerains, entitled to the homage and allegiance, the aid and counsel of his vassal, and tlic overlord from whom all land was immediately or mediately

A niStOHY OF EUROPE

dio

held. To the churchman consecration was an eighth sacrament» establishing the religion of loyalty. To the Roman lawyer there was no limit to his prerogative. When Philippe de Remi, Sire de Beauvoisis» jurist and poet, wrote his Couluvics de Beauvoisis in the thirteenth century, he echoed the famous maxim of imperial Rome that the princes* picasuie must be taken as law.

Length of life, coupled with tlie wise piactice of their house always to crown the son in the lifetime of the fathers, give to the g 8 y-iJo 8 first four monarchs of the Capetian house tlie belter part of their claim to be counted among the benefactors of their country. They escaped the tempest of tlie War of Investitures, for the Pope, having the Germans on his hands, was too wise to force Prance into the ranks of his enemies by an over-close scrutiny of practices which wcie undoubtedly simoniacal. If these rulers achieved nothing sensational, at least they held their ground, governing mainly through the hi* hops, but themselves also active in a succession of miniature canipa«gns. One unfortunate calcu- lation, to be asciihed to Henry I, had lar-rcaching consequences. In the struggle between GeolTicy Martel of Anjou and Duke William of Normandy, the King of France took the weaker side and was defeated on the fields of Mortimer and Varaville (1054 and io«f8). Those weie the first exchanges in a duel which lasted neatly four hundred years.

The Chuich had helped to set up the new French monarchy. It was now to gi\e its blessing to the cstahlishmcnt of a throne in England, uhidi mote sciiously than any other powder threat- ened the distuption of mediac\al Fiance. WiHiain l)uke of Nor- 1027 'r-8} mandy cannot be described as one ol nature’s clergymen. The rule of piiesrs he 1 cl used to toleiarc cither in Normandy or in England; hut, like other sratesmcn-c(»nqiicrois, he neglected no influence, however remote, wliich was likely to aclvancc his ambitions. The Roman Curia w^as offended with the condition, at once lethargic and indepcmlenr, of the Anglo-Saxon Church. William, remote he was from the acceptance of Ilildcbrandine ideas, saw in the i'ope a comcnient ally in an enterprise long and profoundly meditated, and the ronquest and pillage of England by the Normans w^as carried out under the banner and sanctified by the authority of the Vicar of Christ.

In all particulars of military and political organization our island duiing the long reign of the monkish Edward had been

THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLISH GOVERNMENT 211

allowed to fail behind the duchy of Normandy. There authority was concentrated in the hands of the duke, here the ambitions of the great carls of Wessex and Mercia, Northumbria and East Anglia filled the political stage. The Normans were skilled in the use of cavalry and bowmen. The English, a!)sorbed in their own affairs and possessed by the sluggish spirit of conservatism which was then so characteristic of the national character, had failed to develop proficiency in either of these arms. The con- sequences of this disparity in preparation wete astonishing. The force at the disposal of William the Noiman for the subjection of a brave population of a million and a half can baicly have exceeded twelve thousand. Yet after Harold’s army, which was largely drawn fiom tlic south-eastern counties of England, had been defeated in the battle ot Hastings and its commander slain, to66 England, save lor a few local revolts, ili-coinbined and speedily suppressed, lay prostrate bcncarli the heel of the conquerors.

No countiy has been more completely subjugated. If the English poj)uIation expected to receive from William the measure of indulgence which had characterized the Danish conquest of the island fifty ycais before they were grievously deceived. The volunteer ad\cntuicrs liom Normandy and Anjou, Biittany and Flanders, who flocked to William’s standard, were not so much on the duke’s errand or the Pope's as on their own. If they donned their mail to put a Noiman bastard on the throne of England it was in the confident hope that a handsome share of English land and loot would be available for themselves. They were not disappointed. As the island w^as conquered bit by bit, the propcrtic*^ of the Saxon thanes w’cre dealt out to the hard- headed gentlemen adventurers from abroad. A new French- speaking aristocracy, in comparison with their Saxon predeces- sors most formidable, cruel, and versatile, cliagooneci the wretched peasants to its imperious ends, dominated the countryside, and gave from its imposing castles a new impulsion to the national life.

England became once more a province of the Latin wot Id.

In the palace and castle, in the law court, and on the hunting field, wherever the ruling class wxre brought together for 'busi- ness or amusei .enr, the speech was that of northern France.

The chance that this island, which had slipped out of the grasp ot Rome in the fifth century, might develop without foreign admixture an Anglo-Saxon life of its own, or play a

dll A HliStORY or EUROPr

part as a member of a Scandinavian empire, was now gone. The Norman conquest drew England once more into full com- munion with the inheritors of Rome, with their theology, their architecture, their poetical literature, their law, their social and political organization, with all that was moving in the Roman Curia or in the law school at Pa\ia, or among the active monas- teries of Normandy, Burgundy, and Lorraine. Tw^o great Italians, Lan franc of Pavia and Anselm of Aosta, held in suc- cession the see of Canterbury, bringing to England standards of scholarship, discipline, and philosophy to which the country had long been a stranger. The cruelty of the conquest was miti- gated by the cultutc of the conquerors. From the soil of the plundered coiintiy vast cathedrals rose to the heavens, erected by the labour of a subject pca'^antry and in scale as novel to the Saxon ploughman as is the hist towering vision of modern New York to a poor lad fiesli funn a humble cabin in Connemara.

By what may seem to be a paradox the completeness of William's dc potism in England was a blessing in disguise. The great evil whidi afTcctcd the life of Euiope in the eleventh cen- tury and indeed tlirougliout the middle ages was anarchy and private war. The Roman system of government having been broken d< vvn and the Carolingian system having also failed, notliing cITcctual bad by the time of the Norman conquest of England been found to lejiiace them. The Church indeed em- ployed siuh influence as it possessed to relieve the society of Europe from the incubus of peipcuial war. It initiated local “pacts of peace” and on a mote gencial scale the Tiuce of God for the piotcctic^ii of Sunday and the high feasts of the Church. But influence is not goxcriiment, and until the thicc cardinal piinciples of govcinmcnt — a defined svsicm of law administered and enforced, a money rcxcniic ascertained and collected, a loyal force adequate to defence — had been reintroduced into Europe the seeds of liberty would not flourish.

Such a government, harsh, despotic, but in the long run salutary, England '^wed to William the Conqiieic/r. With an even liand he crushed Saxon rebels and Noiinan mutineers. The great English earldoms were bioken up, and the estates of the Normans, w’hcthcr by chance or prevision, were so widely scattered as greatly to reduce the dangers of feudal opposition. If, then, feudalism was promoted in the sphere of tenure, it was deprived of its worst evdls in the sphere of government. As in

THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLISH GOVERNMENT ClIJ

Normandy, the barons held their land of the king and owed him military service in respect of their tenures; yet the main work of governing the country was never allowed to be monopolized by the nobility. The king vms supreme. His commissioners travelled the shires. His sheriffs presided over the county courts. The Doomsday Survey, compiled in 1086 for the purpose of collecting the Danegeld, shows with what meticulous curiosity every source *of revenue was explored by the agents of the Nor- man fisc. In the local jury the Normans possessed an instru- ment inherited from Carol ingian times, which was soon show'n to be serviceable not only in those fiscal encjuirics to which it was first applied, but also in the determination of judicial issues. When the royal court in the reign of Henry IT began to apply the jury to cases of disputed possession, the most frequent form of legal action in violent and uncertain times, its popularity was assured. Litigants frequent the court which promises them cheap and effectual redress. Such redress the Curia Regis in the twelfth century found and applied, and thus gathering to itself the main part of the legal business of the country, built up that imposing system of the Common Law by which the Anglo- Saxon woild on cither side of the Atlantic is to this day content to be governed.

The roots of that system lie deep in tlic soil of Teuton anti- quity. It was a part of William’s strength that be regarded him- self as the lawful heir of Edward the Confessor, that he was crowned by the Witan, and worked through the old popular courts of the hundred and the shire. The primitive ideas of English citizenship, such as that men were bound to attend the courts, to follow the hue and cry after malefactors, to serve in the fyrd or militia, and to help with the biidges, the roads, and the forts were too essential to be discarded. Norman Eng- land could no more be governed without the active co-operation of the English people than British India can be administered without a numerous body of Indian olficials. As Hindu caste survives under the British raj, the fabric of Anglo-Saxon law and custom has continued, despite some Norman innovations, and all the more effectually by reason of that taut systcrh of centralization wnich the Normans introduced, to shape the life of tlic English people.

The task of centralizing the government was rendered easier by the fact that Norman England was a small country. Wales,

214 A HISTORY OF EUROPR

Scotland, and Ireland lay outside the confines of Williani^s dominion. Northumbria, as a penalty for rebellion, was reduced to a wilderness. In an area so contracted the Norman sheriffs, who were the agents of the king, carried out the royal pleasure.

So, during the century which followed the Norman conquest, the foundations were laid for the construction of a free and well-governed state. Normans and English intermarried. Under the shelter of a government strong enough to keep the baronage in its place a rural middle-class, that valuable feature which most sharply distinguishes mediaeval England from its contb nental neighbours, maintained itself in rude comfort and re- spectability and in due course of time became a principal pillar of constitutional government in our island. Progress, indeed, was not continuous. There was tyianny under Rufus, anarchy under Stephen; but the tyranny of Rufus was contested by Anselm, the anarchy under Stephen was teiminated by the strong rule of Henry II. Bcfoic this sovcicign, whose brilliant power of fhoiigI)t and action amounted to genius, had finished his work, royal judges were going on assize as they have ever since continued to do, representing the authority of the king and the majesty of the law, the jury vas fast superseding archaic metliods ol piool, such as tlic oidcal and the duel, and the king had established his position as fountain of justice and guardian of the public peace. Racialism was dead. In the old national militia, which was now lecieatcd ami revi\ed, the King of Eng- land posscs«;cd a defenre force more reliable tlian the feudal levies, cheaper and more popular than a mercenary force. In the exactitude of its treasiny control only the Noiman island of Sicily could stand comparison w'ith the England of Henry II. Not a sixpence was allowed to go astray. In compaiison wdth the loose financial methods of Germany and France tlie English exchequer was a marvel of efficiency.

In becoming King of England ♦William the Bastard did not cease to remain Duke of Normandy. Neitlter to him nor to his followers or descendants was there any anomaly in the existence of a French-speaking state lying athwart the Channel. If Sicily went with Apulia, England could w^ell go with Normandy. The King of England was in respect of his Norman Duchy a vassal of France. Many of his tenants-in-chief possessed lands, all possessed relatives, on the continent. To no one of them, in search of military advcniure, were the hills of Wales, the moors

THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLISH GOVERNMENT at5

Scotland, or the bogs of Ireland as attractive as the familiar fields of France. So long, then, as any part of France remained annexed to England it acted more powerfully than even the Electorate of Hanover in the time of George II as a magnet upon English policy. But many years were destined to pass before the ruler of England could regard himself as an island king. Even after Normandy was lost in the reign of John, and together with this great province, Anjou, Touraine, and Maine, England still retained possession of Guienne, Auvergne, and Aquitaine, the important provinces in the south-west of France which Queen Eleanor, the divorced wife of Louis VII, had brought with her hand to Henry Planiagcnct.

From this geographical interlocking, as also from the quarrels of seamen and traders, there resulted a chronic state of hostility between the Kings of England and France which lasted with some intermissions until the middle of the fifteenth century. Beginning as a Frenrh civil war the struggle developed into a clash between two distinct and self-conscious nations. No great armies were employed, no long campaigns were fought, no new philosophies were developed in this protracted and desultory struggle. Mediaeval warfare was partly a social convention, partly an amusement, parti j’' a financial speculation, when it was not a crusade or the fruit of perstmal piejue or injured pride. But however slight and frivolous this mediaeval fighting may seem measmcfl against tlie sacrifice and slaughter of modern war, the wars between England and France in the middle ages had far-reaching consefpjcnces for both count lies. Out of this struggle tw^o nations emerged as sharply distinguished in social structure and personal temperament as they were opposed by a long tradition of envenomed hostiliiy. France was victorious, bur failed for many centuries to turn lier victory to enduring account. England was defeated. She lost Rouen in 1204, Bor- deaux in 1453, Calais in 1552. Every yard of French soil was surrenderee!, every end for which she had been fighting was sacrificed. The tombs of the Conqueror and Henry II lay in an alien land. Yet only after she had suffcied this staggering reverse did she by slow stages find her way to the great Tasks which were awaiting her, the union of the British Isles, the conquest of an Empire across the seas. Engaged in her struggle with France she had been blind to the true line of her advance. OppoiTunities had been neglected. Nothing had been carried

2i6

A HISTORY OF EUROPE

through with persistence. Even Wales, conquered by Edward I, was not finally incorporated until the reign of Henry VIII. Not till after Charles Edward had been defeated at Cullodcn (1745) were the Scottish Highlands made truly subject to the British Crown. The spirit of the Irish Celt, often assailed, remains to this day defiant and insoluble.

BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED C, PetU Du Taillis: La Monarchic Fcodale en France et en Angleterie.

iSc)C).

H. W. C. Da\is; England under the Normans and Ani;e\ins. 1905.

W. SlLihhs: Constitutional History of England. 1S80.

Mis. J. K. Green: Hinrv 11 . 1888.

F. Pollot k and F, W. Mail land * History of En^jlish Law befoie Edward I. 2 vols. iSgS.

Chronicles of Bcnedictus Abbas. (Rolls So* ies) 1807

F. W. Mxiitland ' Memoranda de Pailiamenlo (KoIK Sciics) tSqj.

A. F. Pollaid: The Evolution of Parli.imc nt.

McKechnie: Mn«;na Caita. 1905.

T. F. Tout: Edwaid 1 . 1893.

E. Lavisso: Histone de France, Vol H 1903.

Bain\i!Io: Histone de Fiance.

CHAPTER xvra

THE EARLY CRUSADES

of Hie eastern Empire uutler the Macedonians, 867-io5<). Points of weakness tn liysanline civilfalion. Rise of the Seliulzs. Mansikert, 1071. Alexius Cotnnenus appeals to the west. Urban II and the Holy Places. Schism between the Greek and Roman Churches. Aims of the Sicilian Norman\. Effects of Christian disunion. Circumstances m western Europe favouring the First Crusade. Its success. Increasing friction between Greeks and Franks. R6le of the Italian cities. Franks and Syrians m Palestine. Fall of Edessa and the Second Crusade. Im- perfect concert between Greek Empire and the Kingdom of ferw-alem. Conquests of Saladin and the 'I bird Crusade. Results of Crusading movement.

WiHLE tlie house of Egljcrt was struggling to preserve an Anglo- Saxon nation in Britain, a dynasty hardly less remarkahic was engaged at the other end of Europe in defending the Byzantine Empire against the ring of enemies who threatened to destroy it. The resources at the disposal of the Macedonian Emperors (867-1056) were far superior to those which were at that time enjoyed hy any soveicign in the west. They had a capital superbly foitificd and inhabited by a population more numerous than the Paiis of Philip Augustus or the London of Charles II, a trained civil service, an organized system of finance and law, an army widely recruited and strengthened by a well-disciplined force of axemen from the north, a navy which could draw upon the inherited maritime skill of the Levant, and a gold coinage (the bezanc) which went the round of the world. But perhaps the most important characteristic distinguishing this old civilized government from the newer and ruder stares of the west was its skill and experience in diplomacy. No European politicians were so well posted in barbarian psychology, no foreign office so well versed in the art of dealing with half- savage princes and people. In no caftltal of the world were diplomatic relations so numerous and extended as in the city in which Asia antt Europe unite. And among the diplomatists who even more than the soldiers maintained the Empire must be numbered the missionaries of the Greek Church, exercising a compelling force upon barbarous minds not only by the con-

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A HISTORY OF EUROPE

218

tent of tliclr teaching but by the elaborate splendour of the Greek liturgy, with its appeal to every sense through incense and music, vestments and candles. Some barbarians were kept loyal by gifts and pensions, others by marriages arranged with ladies of the Greek aristocracy, others by high-sounding titles. Upon all such as might be attracted to the capital it was hoped that an elaborate court ceremonial devised to exhibit the Em- peror as a divine autocrat raised high above the common clay of humanity would make a suitable impression. Nothing cer- tainly was more remarkable in this old and civilized government than the «jkill with which it contrived to protect itself by distant and outlying friendships and understandings, the knowledge which it succeeded in acquiring of the wild peoples of the steppes, and the promptitude with which it was able to em- barrass its enemies by biinging into the Held against them an unsuspected ally.^

Moreover, the government, inheriting as it did the imposing tradition of the Roman Empire, coukl never fail, when it fell into vigorous liands, to cherish exalted ambitions. The four fighting Emperors of the Macedonian house — Basil I, Nice- phorus Phocas, John Zimisces, and Basil II — were soldiers whose Spartan tem[)cr and inflexible will were well adapted to the necessities of those iron times, laking the offensive on every front, they gave to the boundaries of the Empire an extension such as it had not known since the days of Justinian. The robber island of Crete was rescued from the Saracens by Nice- phoiiis Phocas. Cili<ia, Syria, and Palestine were overrun by the armies of John Zimisces. Antioch and South Italy were recovered, the distant mountain country of Armenia incor- porated in the Empire. But of all the triumphs of this strenuous dynasty none vvas so vital to the continued existence ol the F67-/056 Byzantines as the reduction, after rhiity years of fierce fighting and adroit diplomacy, of the Bulgarian Empire by Basil 11 , When Basil the Bulgai -slayer died in 1025, after wisely con- ceding to his conquered enemies their cherished customs, he left his state stronger, iicher, more influential, and better defended than any state in Europe.

Byzantine history is a tissue of sharp and disappointing con- trasts. Spells of high military energy are succeecled by periods oi civil turmoil and base intrigue. Learning and culture are ^ Genealogical Table D, p. 420.

rnS fiARLY CRUSADES

often found combined in one and the same person with mani- fest cruelty or connivance in crime. We read of an Emperor whom we are prepared to admire for his activity, his learning, and his patronage of the arts, and then we are told that this cultivated Byzantine composed scurrilous verses to be branded nith red-hot irons on the foreheads of three condemned heretics. We study the works of a learned princess, who was familiar with most of the Greek classics, who idolized her father, and com- posed an elaborate history in his honour, but was yet concerned in a plot to assassinate her brother. The state whose craftsmen wrought the mosaics of Ravenna and the gorgeous miracle of St. Mark's at Venice, whose politicians were theologians and whose theologians were politicians, whose poets were still haunted by the echoes of Meleager or Callimachus, and whose scholars were still dominated by the shade of Homer, produced the most violent city mob in Europe and descended to the basest mutilations — the blinding of the eyes, the cutting off of the band, the ear, and the nose — in the punishment of its ciiminals or political offenders

The modern critic, then, finds much to icprchend in the Byzantine Empire. Its oiganization had defects. It lacked the liberal institutions which arc alone capable of giving to a popu- lation habits of sclf-ieliance and initiative. Despite much well- meant legislation it was unable to protect its agricultural popu- laiioA from the suc tion of the town or the lalijiindia of the acqui- sitive landlord. It suffered o\crmiich from the tempestuous pres* sure of monks and mobs. But in the ninth and tenth centuries Byzantium was the undisputed queen of European culture. Even in the eleventh ccntiny, though the west was then fast drawing level, it could show a society easily supeiior to that of any western city in art, learning, and civilized habits. Moi cover, it performed a great office in policing a vast raisc'ellany of races, most various in quality and many of them vile, savage, and dirty. It was, therefoie, a calamity that the death of Basil II in 1025 should have been followed by fifty-seven years of feeble government and civil strife during which the army was allowed to dwindle through neglect. The results were serious. The Empire lost all its holdings in south Italy to the Normans. More important still, it was defeated by a new enemy, the Seljukian Turk.

Towards the end of the tenth century a body of Turkisli free-

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A HISTORY OF EUROPE

hooters, under the leadership of the sons of a certain Seljuk, rode out of the steppes of Turkestan with the'.r short bows and curved scimitars to seek their fortunes by war and pillage. Embracing Islam with neophyte intensity and prospering in all their under- takings, the Scljuks grew from a company into a tribe and from a tribe into a people. So swift was their onward march to power that in 1055 Togrul Beg, their leader, having already conquered Khorassan and Persia, was proclaimed Sultan in Bagdad and loaded by the effete Abbasid Caliph with all the titles and honours which are indicative of secular pre-eminence in the Moslem world. The course of Turkish victories so brilliantly inaugurated by Togrul was continued by Alp Arslan, his succes- sor. Syria and Jerusalem were wrested from the weak hands of the Fatimite Caliphs of Egypt, after which tlie invaders threw themselves upon the one formidable power which was left in Asia and gained an overwhelming victory. On the field of Manzi- kert (1071), north of Lake Van, in Armenia, the flower of the Byzantine army w’as mown down by Alp Arslan’s liorse archers, the Emperor Romanus Diogenes was taken captive, and all Asia Minor was laid prostrate befoie a pitiless foe.

The Byzantines had suffered many defeats at the hands of barbarous enemies, but none so serious as Manzikert, for the force of the Empire depended upon its control of those Asiatic provinces whic h a single battle had now delivered into the hands of the infidels. It was from tlie Anatolian provinces of Asia Minor that the Emperor had obtained his stoutest soldiers and most brilliant generals, fiom the Asiatic littoral that he had derived the best pair of his fighting marine. Nowhere was the spirit of adventure more lively than on the frontiers of the Asiatic themes, nor a prouder tradition of service than among the great barons of Asia Minor, whose well-armed retainers and large resources, wlicn nor employed in mutiny, had constituted a powerful clement in imperial defence. All these sources of power were now^ summarily cut off by the Sultans of Rum,' who, establishing themsc'ves first at Nicaea and then at Iconium, spread a belt of desolation across the fairest province of the Greek Empire.

To this tremendous challenge there was no immediate reply from Byzantium. The battle of Manzikert, which had been pre- ceded by civil strife and unwise military reductions, was followed

• A shortened form of Rumania, or tlic East Roman Empire.

THE EARLY CRUSADES

22t

by a decade of political paralysis. Then, in io8i, a happy revolu- tion brought to the Byzantine throne a man whose qualities were exactly fitted to restore an almost desperate situation. Alexius Comnenus, who belonged to one of the great soldier families of Asia Minor, was as resourceful as he was cultivated and courage- ous. In him the taste for theological disquisition was blended with the zeal of the educational reformer, the energy of the general, and the craft of the diplomatist. Finding disorganization in every department of the state, menaced by a Norman inva- sion from the west and by the devastating raids of barbaric tribes from the north, this tcmpeiatc long-headed young sovereign brought tc hear upon all the difiicult foreign and domestic piohlcms by which he was confronted the precise measure ol skill which was ner cssary to solve them. Only when these preliminary obstacles had been overcome, when the army and navy had been to some extent rc-cicatcck wlicn Robert Guis- card had been manocuvicd out of Dalmatia and the nomad hordes were driven back across the Danube was Alexius fiec to address liimsclf to the grave menace of the Scljuks. He deter- mined to appeal to the Latin west to come to the succour of the Christian Fanpirc and suflciing churches of the east. Jerusalem, Antioch, Edessa were already in the hands of the infidel. Con- stantinople w^ould he their next objective. So a letter w'as written to Pope Urban II which had the effect of unloosing the First Crusade.

Twenty-one years eailicr. Pope Giegory VII, in response to a similar rec^ucsi from an eastern ernperor, had conceived with characteristic cncigv and passion of such an cnici prise. But the plan of a crusade derives not from By/antium but from Rome.

The object of Alexius was to obtain western soldiers for the re- conqiiest of the Asiatic dominions of the Byzahiine Empire.

The principal interest of Uil)an II, the theme of the great speech which he delivered at tb.c Council of Clermont, the leading /095 motive of the many orations which he alter wards addressed to his lively French compatriots, wa«the recovery of Jenisalcin and the Holy Places. The two objects w^erv not incompatible, but since each might be separately pursued there was froin the first the danger that the recovery of the Holy Places, appealing as it did more powerfully to the imagination of the Frankish chivalry, might be prefciicd to the clefciice of the Byzantine Empire.

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A HISTORY OF EUROPE

The danger was aggravated by the fact that, eighteen ycai$ before ManEikert, the eastern and western Churches had form- ally broken off relations. It is a common characteristic of tlie great quarrels of history that the deepest causes of variance are not those which are most openly disclosed. The rift between the Greek and the Roman Churches was ostensibly theological. Whilst both Churches accepted the fundamentals of the Chris- tian Faith as laid dowm in the Ecumenical Councils, the Greeks objected against the Latins that they had added words to the Creed which described the Holy Ghost as proceeding from the Son as well as from the Father, that they used unleavened bread, that they fasted on Saturday, and that they caused their priests to shave their beards. But these grounds of dissension, favourable as they were to the pioduction of interminable treatises, did not stand alone. Other causes rooted in political and ecclesiastical ambition, as well as in circumstances of national temperament and character, tended to envenom the quarrel and to frustrate every one of tlie thirty sepanate effoits which were made to compose if. The contempt of the Latin for the Greek, old as the days of Juvenal, had survived the barbaric conquest of the west and was jcpaid by tlie scorn of the virtuoso for the philistine, of the legitimist for the upstart. The Byzantines legardcd them- selves as the heirs not only of ancient Hellas but of imperial Rome. For them the Franks, the Normans, the Germans were members of the barbaric w'^oild, and the western empire of Charlemagne an impertinent usurpation to which llie Popes of Rome had impropeily lent their authority. A cert«ain primacy they might be willing to concede to the Sec of St. Peter. Roman legates might be received in Constantinople, the judgment of the Roman Curia might occasionally be invoked; but the claim of Rome to exact obedience and to exercise disciplinary jurisdic- tion over the church was one which no Patriarch of Constanti- nople w^ould for a moment admit. Nor is this unintelligible. The ninth and tenth centuries, which witnessed the obscuration of the Roman Papaf v, w»ere illustrious in the annals of the Greek church. Then it was that two Greek missionaries, Cyril and Methodius, translated the Scriptures into the Slavonic language and made them available in the Glagolitic script, that the Greek church was organized in Russia, and the Bulgarians rescued from the subtle invasion of tlic Latin rite. For a hundred and fifty years the Patriarchs ol Constautinoplc piofiied by the brillianr

THE EARtT CRUSADES

conquests of the Macedonian emperors. Greek priests and Greek monks followed the victorious march of Greek armies to Apulia, to Cilicia, to the Armenian highlands, to the Danube, and, though the Macedonian dynasty came to an end and was fol- lowed by a pciiod of political confusion and disaster, the proud spirit of empire still survived in the Patiiarchs of Constantinople. To Leo IX, speaking the autocratic mind of the revived Papacy of the west, the Patiiarch Michael Ceiularius reaffirmed (1054) the autonomy of his Church and its dciestation of the corrupt practices of Rome.

To the Latin world, then, Byzantium naturally appeared in a double aspect. On the one hand it was a Christian power con- fronted by nomChristian enemies and therefore dcser\iiig of Christian support. But on the other hand it was tainted by heresy, contumaciou '.ly defiant of Rome, and the loe of eveiy Roman missionaiy cntcipiisc in south-eastern Euiopc. That the schism beiwxcn the two Clxiirches w^a^ a misloitune, and that steps should be taken to bung it to an end, was a punciplc which the Greek and Latin clcigy wxre always willing to salute, but for which they wcic never disposed to make any heatty sacrifice of picjudice 01 piidc. The Latins, however, held that there were two avenues to theological peace — the w^ay of agreement, diffi- cult, but not under }K>iitical prcssuie impossible; and the way of conquest. To tlic Noimans in particular it seemed from the first that the shortest and most satisfactoiy method of dealing with the Giecks was to dethrone the Enipcior, to capture Con- stantinople, and lo subject the Gicek Empire by foice to Latin rule. That was the theoiy of Robcit Guiscaid, of Bohemond his son, of Roger II and William II of Sicily his kinsmen — in fact, of this whole lacc of noithcin robbers wJio had turned the Giecks oiii of soutlicin Italy and dieadcd uorhing so much as a war of rc\cnge. It was a doctiine wliuh won reciuits in many quarters, among the met chants of Venice, who saw in the Gieek Empire incomparable occasions for commcicc and loot, among vehement Latin theologians like St. Beiiiard, among monkish statesmen like Suger. There were even occasions (as for instance in 1 108 and 1281) when the Pope was himself prepared to pro- mote the destruction of the Christian Empire of the east.

It is difficult to exaggerate the disastrous eflect of this profound csiiaiigemcnt Irerw^cen the two hahes of the Christian world. The failure ol the Crusaders to retrieve hither Asia fiom the

224 A UiSTORY OF EUROPE

Moslems needs no other explanation. It was to tliis inveterate animosity, compounded of racial and religious feelings and cjuickcncd by political ambition and economic rapacity, that we must ascribe the most disgraceful act of mediaeval history, the diversion of the Fourth Crusade to the conquest of Constanti- nople and the mutilation and pillage of the richest and most civilized of the European states. In 1261, after nearly fifty years of Larin rule, the Greeks returned to Constantinople. If they had little love for the Latins before the conquest of their capital, it may be imagined with what sentiments of aggravated passion they viewed the authors of their bitter humiliation. It was in vain that piety and prudence counselled a union of Christian forces before the advancing menace of the Ottoman Turks. What was proposed by high dignitaries in ecclesiastical councils, as at Lyons in 1274 or at Ferrara and Florence in 1438, was violently rcpiidiarcd by the monks and clergy of Constantinople. Great Latin victories o\cr a common foe might bate stifled their in- veterate misgivings; but such victories were not forthcoming. The gulf which had been dug in 1054 by the rival challenges of Pope and Patiiarth remained unl)ridged to the end. Thanks to the divisions oi the Christian world the Turks csrahlishcd them- selves on Emopcan soil, carried their arms to the Danube, con- quered Greece and its islands, and finally in May, 1453, seized the last prize of political ambition, the unconquered city of Constantinople itself. Here, by grace of these same rivalries, the Turk is still jiciinitted to rule.

These dark shadows, however, were not within the field of vision at the first excited and lumuliuous launching of the Crusade. At rare moments of hisroiy the feeling of Christian fellowship overmasters the jealousies and hatreds by which the church of Christ is ever liable to he rent asunder. In the bril- liant prospect of common action -and common sacrifice for a cause held to be great and sacred, dividing memories are laid aside and petty susnicions arc discarded. "I'hat such an exalted emotional experience was vouchsafed to the chivalry of western Europe as it took the Cross in response to the J\)pe's appeal is established by evidence and may he inferred from probabilities. For the time had now come when Europe, wliich had so long been exposed to barbarian attacks, could carry the war into the enemy cjuaitcrs. The Saracens had been expelled from Sicily

THE EARLY CRUSADES

MS

and Crete, the navies of Venice and Genoa and Pisa ruled the Mediterranean, the overland route to Constantinople had been opened by the conversion of the Hungarians to Christianity and by the incorporation of Bulgaria into the Byzantine state.

In Spain the Christians had conquered Toledo, from Sicily the Normans had assaulted the Saracens of Africa; and while the massive eastward movement of the Germans was rolling back the worshippers of Triglav and of Svantovit, Scandinavia, long the torment of the continent but now emptied of its unruly sons, had withdrawn into the backwaters of history, where she lay becalmed till Gustavus Adolphus came forward to give to the i6jo-a Protestant cause in Germany the glory of his sword and of his name.

It is also to be remembered that in France, which more than any other country was the soul of the Crusades, the Church had already succeeded in giving to the military caste something of its own code of aspiiation. The institution of chivalry, as it was developed at the end of the eleventh century, had the great merit of laying stress upon the responsibilities attaching to the possession of force. The young knight was initiated into his knighthood with all the solemnities tvhich the pious imagina- tion of those days could devise. lie must take a ritual bath, spend a night of solitary prayer, make confession of his sins and partake of the sacrament. The duties of knighthood were rehearsed to him in a sermon. He must protect the Church, the widow^s and the orphans, the desolate and the oppressed. lie was already, in all but name, enlisted as a Crusader.

Tiie first military enterprise of united Europe was dis- tinguished for its absence of oiganization. The Crusaders who, in a wild fit of enthusiasm, first left tlicir homes for the east were empty of all that it most conceined them to know. They knew nothing of the geography, climate, or population of the countries through which they pioposed to travel. They were short of commissariat, cumbered by crowds of non-combat- ants, ignorant of hygiene, and contemptuous of discipline.

These large bodies of enthusiasts, recruited from noi th-ea^tern France, Lorraine, and Germany, rushed off without leaders by the land route to Constantinople and suffered a terrible penalty for their violent marauding. Decimated during their passage through Bavaria and Hungary, they were annihilated by the Seljuks soon after they had set foot upon the Asiatic shoic.

8

226

A IllSTOXtY OP EUPOPX

The great muster o£ western feudalism which started for Coo** stantinople by four different routes in August^ ioq 6, exhibited^ though in a lesser degree, the same deficiencies. There was no unity of command. There was an abounding ignorance of geography. The armies were burdened with long trains of camp followers and disgraced by undisciplined pillaging. But here there was a core of experienced soldiers, horse and foot, serving under chieftains of skill and authority such as Godfrey of Bouillon and his brother Baldwin, who led the men of Lorraine; Bohemond, son of Guiscard, the captain of the Apulian Nor- mans, with his brilliant nephew Tancred; and Raymond of Toulouse, whose Provcn^il followers were of all that concourse the best equipped. To this circumstance we must attribute the surprising fact that the First Crusade succeeded in attaining its objects, that the four armies, though not without serious wastage, did actually meet before Constantinople, that being conveyed across the Bosphorus they were able with Greek assistance to ra[)rure the Moslem capital of Nicaea and to restore to the Greek Empire not only the littoral but much of the in- terior of Asia Minor, that despite the molestation of the enemy they accomplished in their leather coats and heavy chain armour tlie long and thirsty march through Iconium to Antioch, that they besieged and took that strongly fortified and famous city and beat ofl a formidable attempt to recapture it, and that these acliic\emeuts weie ultimately 'crowned by the capture of Jerusalem itself. No succeeding Crusade rivalled these remark- able exploits. The armies ot Gudtrey and Bohemond founded the Latin principalities ot the east, which, though they have now been extinguished for more than 650 years, are recalled to the reader by the genius of Tasso and Walter Scott and to the traveller by the siipcih shell of many a giant fortress, standing proud and lonely among the pink hills of Palestine.

To these successive blows delivered by the Frankish chivalry on the Tuiks and Saracens, the Byzantine Empire owes its con- tinued existence for a further period of three bundled years. It is seldom, however, that the allies in a coalition for war, even if that war should prove to be successful, are inspired at the con- clusion of iheir operations by feelings of gratitude for the help that has been rendered or of satisfaction for the results that are achieved. The Latins owed much to Alexius. Without the help of Greek convoys, Greek supplies, and Gieek guidance they

tnt £ari;t crusades

•UCnild never have accomplished their difficult; journey from the 4 &Etlkans to Syria. Equally great, if not greater, was the debt of Alexius to the western army, which drove the Turks from a Capital (Nicaca) within easy reach of Constantinople, restored many flourishing provinces to his empire, and dispelled the haunting fear of a Seljuk conquest of European Thrace. Yet neither party was satisfied with the other. The Latins complained that the Greek Emperor had made use of the advantage which belonged to him as the head of a wealthy and experienced government to exact from their chiefs an oath of fcaliy. They accused him of having failed to give them a stipulated measure of military support, and with some reason aveircd that but for the timely arrival of sea-borne supplies from Europe, their victorious army would have perished ignominiously of famine when encamped before the walls of Antioch. Every victory they ascribed to their own valour, every leveise or miscalculation to the perfidy of the Greeks. A popular idea, widely disseminated in the west and reinforced by every subsc<}ucnt disaster to crusading armies, was that the Greeks, out of the fear and hatred which they entertained for the Latins, deliberately made their overland pas» sage to the cast as difficult and dangerous as possible. Alexius on his side had good grounds for distrust and dissatisfaction. His first campaign as Emperor liad been fought against the Apulian Normans who had occupied Durazzo and were openly bent on driving him from the throne. That Bohemond, the fierce Norman leader, had experienced a real change of heart was most improbable. The inlcrcnce to be drawn from his conduct, as from that of most of his associates, was that they were far more concerned to achieve principalities for themselves than con- quests for the Empire. It was natural, tlien, that Alexius should endeavour to secure, as far as security could be obtained from oath or treaty, that territories once belonging to the Greek Empire and hereafter recovered by the Crusaders should be returned to their former allegiance. The oaths were reluctantly sworn, the treaty (for treaty there appears to have been) was reluctantly signed. Oaths and treaty were alike disregarded, when Bohemond seized Antioch for himself and Godfrey of Lorraine was installed by his followers as the first Defender of the Holy Sepulchre. In the maintenance of states which had been thus created the Latins could not count upon Greek assist- ance.

fna/tsh Miies

Europe at the Time of the First Crusadb.

THE EARLY CRUSADES S»9

The bold experiment of the Crusaders in founding Christian States under a Syrian sky, though it was favoured at the time by the dissensions of the Moslem emirs, must, but for one cir- cumstance, have broken down without delay. The great Italian republics were passionately interested in the extension of their eastern trade. Navies from Venice, Genoa, and Pisa co-operated in the sieges of the coast cities of Syria and were mainly instru- mental in effecting their reduction. Yet even so the Christian states were in a precarious position. The Italians had no in- terest beyond the Syrian ports, the pilgrims from overseas no broader concern than a safe access to the Holy Places. The vital importance of conquering from the Moslem the whole of Syria up to its natural frontiers does not seem to have been appre- hended and could not, in view of the slender numbers at the disposal of the Frankish princes, have been accomplished with- out permanent reinforcements from Europe. Such reinforce- ments were not forthcoming. For lack of numbers the vigorous Kings of Jerusalem were compelled to leave the eastern frontier in enemy hands and on that undefended and indefensible fron- tier were always exposed to attack.

The knights-errant who founded the kingdom of Jerusalem, the principality of Antioch, and the smaller counties of Edessa and Tripoli organized their new states upon a system of military feudalism such as they had known in France, but to which they were compelled by tlie special need of martial vigilance to impart an adcliiional austerity. The Assizes of Jerusalem, a col- lection of customs compiled by John of ibelin, a Cypriot lawyer of the thirteenth century, presents the picture of a society as rigorously dedicated to war as was ancient Sparta. In no instru- ment of the middle ages is the theory of feudal society so elaborately stated or the duties of military tenure so stringently defined. Institutions, however, depend upon the spirit of the men who work them. Under the seductive influences of an eastern climate, the rigidity of the Latin settlers insensibly re- laxed. Syrian women, Syrian dishes, Syrian ways of life, began to appeal to these rude adventurers from the west and temper their fanaticism. In Syria they found a society strange, to some extent abhorrent (for the Moslem women went veiled), but in many respects more refined and dignified than their own. Friendships were made between Frankish and Arab chieftains* The fierce religious intolerance of the Christian was softened by

SJO «RISYORT 07 XOltOPB

the tpectacte of pagan valour and courtesy. Even the military, half-monastic Orders of the Knights Hospitallers and the Knights Templars, which had been specially created for the protection of the Holy Land, wcie not exempt from the insidious infection of the east. The cuiious autobiography of Ousama, an Arab prince, whose society was much affected by the Templars, shows how deep by the middle of the twelfth century had become the gulf between die polite and cynical

R»suns OF THF First Crusade.

tolerance of the permanent settler and the raw enthusiasm of the newly ai lived pilgrim from the west.

So long as the Frankish states were confronted with a ring of small Moslem emus, each acting independently of the other, they were able, slender as were their resources in men and money, to maintain an existence. But this advantage was not destined to endure. Thiee capable Moslem rulers, coming one after the other, altered in the course of half a century all the weighu and balances of the near east. Zanghi of Mosul cOn«

tnt KAiXtr GftVSADtS

qaend Aleppo and Edessa. His son Noureddin made hiittself Piaster fim of Damascus and later of Egypt, and finally, when Noureddin died in 1173, his place was taken by Saladin the Kurd, to whose brilliant and effortless gift of leadership the whole east between the Tigris and the Nile was in time made submissive.

The fall of Edessa in 1144, the first stage in this swift series of accumulating dangers, provoked an immense movement of agitated feeling in Europe. Edessa was a place in the imagina- tion of the Christian world only less sacred than Jerusalem itself. That this home of early Christianity, tlie first of the new Latin states to be created as a result of the Crusades and the outlying bulwark of the Latin position in Syria, should be taken by the infidel, was regarded as terrible in itself and even more terrible for what it might portend. In an atmosphere of all- pervading excitement which the fiery eloquence of St. Bernard contributed greatly to inflame, Conrad III of Germany and Louis VII of France took the Cross and conducted their respec- tive armies, still much encumbered by non-combatants, by the land route towards the east. A modest reinforcement of capable knights conveyed overseas in Venetian galleys would have been infinitely more effective than these imposing armaments led by the two principal sovereigns of the west.

The German army, save for a small fragment, wasted away in Asia Minor before it reached its destination. Of the French, who unwisely pursued the long and difficult coast route and were severely routed by the Tuiks in southern Phrygia, only the mounted knights, being transported by sea from Attalia, reached the scene of action. The Second Crusade was an un- relieved failure, marked by the needless wreck of two fine armies and the siege of Damascus, undertaken with half a heart and broken off after a few days by Baldwin II of Jerusalem, to the disgust of the princes from the west and to the infinite detri- ment of the Christian cause.

The west having thus signally failed to restore the situation in the east, it was natural that in due course the King of Jeru- salem should look for aid to Constantinople. The Greeks, should they care to exert themselves, might with their money, their fleet, and their greatly improved army, supply exactly that addi- tional force which was necessary to check the rising power of Noureddin. But Manuel Comnenus, their new ruler, was not too

aja A HISTORY OF EUROPE

anxfbus to place the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem in a position of security. So long as he could recover Antioch, the prime object of his south-eastern policy, he was well content that the King of Jerusalem, to whom he had given a niece in marriage, should be kept quiet by the Arab on his flank. Seldom can there have been a keener sense of disappointment among the Latin residents in the east than when, in the summer of 1159, this showy and ambitious Greek Emperor marched a large army in and out of Syria without so much as a skirmish with the enemy. That Manuel preferred to treat with Noureddin rather than to fight him is piobably to be explained by the fact that Antioch had been already surrendered to his rule.

Still, the Byzantine alliance was too valuable to be lightly thrown away. Amaiiry, who succeeded to the kingdom of Jerusalem in 1163. instead of concentrating his efforts upon the ccmquest of Aleppo and Damascus, was much taken with the idea of the conquest of Egypt and upon one of his four separate expeditions against that country received the assistance of an imperial fleet. His siege of Dainietta in 1169 was a failure, but memorable for two reasons, alike as the last co-operative enter- prise of Greek and Latin in the Crusades and as the first triumph of Saladin, the new Vizier of Egypt.

No Greek blood was shed in the battle of Hiitin (i 187), which sealed the fate of the short-lived Frankish kingdom of Jeru- salem. The Greek Empiie. to which the dynasty of the Com- neni had given a century of piestige, had fallen once more upon evil times. Its main army had been defeated (1174) with huge losses by the Sultan of Iconium. It had c|uariellcd with Venice. In a mood of fierce suspicion against Mary of Antioch, the widow of Manuel and the Empiess regent, it had disgraced itself by a pogrom against the French and Italian colony in Constan- tinople, and wlicn Saladin’s war cloud was leady to burst upon Syria, it was exposed to a deadly attack from the Normans, still faithful to their original thesis, that only a Latin power en- throned in Constantinople could finally settle with the Moslem world. There were no Greeks then on the field of Hittin. Only a force of some 1,300 Frankish knights and some 15,000 foot could be gathered together to oppose the great cavalry army of Saladin. What avail was brilliant courage against overwhelming numbers? The Larins were annihilated, the Holy Cross was captured, and the Holy Sepulchre, the dream of centuries and

THE EARLY CRUSADES

^33

the first great prize of united Christendom, passed once ndore into paynim hands (1187) and so for 731 years remained.

At the news of this tremendous disaster a Crusade was organ- ized, no longer by the Pope, but by the three foremost sovereigns of the west, Frederick Barbarossa of Germany, Philip Augustus of France, and Richard Cocur-de-Lion of England. But from these royal preparations, elaborated with all the improved know- ledge and technique which a century of contact with the east had now made available, there was no result but the capture of Acre

and a truce with Saladin granting to the Chri«?lian pilgrims free access to the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. Here, indeed, was a shameful conclusion to an ambitious prelude and a damaging commentary upon the power of the Christian motive to fiinc^thc energies of western Christendom and to direct them to a common end. In extenuation it may be said that the Tliird Crusade suffered one grave misfortune in the death through drowning in Cilicia of Frederick Barbarossa. Had that great German captain, the foremost soldier of the west, who had conducted his

234 A uxsTony or soitorv

army across Asia Minor with conspicuous skills and with an absence of casualties contrasting most favourably with the ex- perience of preceding armies, survived to measure swords with Saladin, the result might have been different* As it was the Crusade served but to exhibit the national jealousies of France and England, the ill-will between Genoa and Pisa, and the intrigues and counicr-intrigiies of Conrad of Montferrat and Guy de Lusignan, the rival claimants for the shadowy throne of Jerusalem. Against this dark background of petty and para- lyzing spite the military prowess and generous nature of Richard Coeur-de-Lion shines with ineffectual glory.

What remained of the conquest of the First Crusade was a line of Syrian ports of which Acre was the queen. These the strong material interests of Italian commerce were sufficient for a century to preserve. When Marco Polo started on his famous voyage to China the Italian mariner, as he approached the shores of Palestine, could still see the banner of the Cross floating from the citadel of his predestined port and hear across the waters the familiar salutation of the Christian bells.

Had the Crusaders been brought into contact with the best that Asia could give, and had they been able to absorb it, the Persian poetry of Omar Khayyam, the finest mind of the eleventh cen- tury, would have passed into the intellectual currency of Europe long before the days of Edward Fitzgerald. The Crusaders, how- ever, never pierced to the best and most cultured peoples of the cast. They saw nothing of the Persians, the Chinese, or the Indians. Tlicir dealings were with the children of the steppes or the deserts, with the l^urks or the Saracens, and with those softer peoples of the Levant who had suffered under Turkish or Saracen rule. Yet these limitations notwithstanding, the enlargement through the Crusades of western experience and matei ial wealth was immense. Arts and crafts of the Oricnr, rich, intricate, and costly, strange lands and peoples w'^re made familiar to a society, limited and largely barbarized by a long series of public calami- ties and only just emerging from the dominion of anarchy and fear. The new wealth of the east flooding into the Italian cities and thence distributed to northern Europe gave fresh strength and importance to the towns. Gains there were doubtless in the field of the spirit, a sense of the religious unity of Christendom which, once excited, was never wholly lost, a quickening of the romantic motive in vernacular literature, something of Arabic

Yllt 'EARLV CftO$ADE8

m

medidne, chemistry and accotmtancy, a larger and more exact appreciation of the non-Christian world than had hitherto pre- vailed. 0£ geographical knowledge, either directly resulting from die Crusades or indirectly from the missionary journeys to the far east to which the Crusades gave rise, there was a notable increment, The task of government, too, was perhaps made easier by the diversion of many turbulent spirits upon this distant quest. What, however, of the Christian religion? Can- dour compels the admission that the main effect of this vast movement of adventure and piety, curiosity and greed, was not to bring Christ nearer to man but to found die commercial empire of Venice in the Levant.

BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED

Sir Chailes Oman: A?Iistory of the Art of War in the Middle Ages* 1024.

W, Heyd: Histoire du Commerce du I-evanl au Moyen Age. 1885.

O. Delarc: Les Normands en Italic. 1883.

C. H. Haskins: The Normans in European History, 1915.

H. Deienbourg: Ous^ma ibn Moiiikidh: Un Emir Syrien au Premier SiMe des Croisades 1885.

J. Gay: L’ltalie M( 5 ridionale ot I’Empirc By/anlin (867-1071). 1904.

G. Finlay: History of Greece, B.c. 146 to a.d. 1004. Ed, H. F. Tozer. 1877.

Cambridge Mediaeval History, Vol. IV.

F. Chalandon: Histoire de la Domination Norznande en Italic et en Sicile. 1907.

CHAPTER yax

FREDERICK BARBAROSSA

Blow to German unitv through election of Lothair. Origin of feud between Guelph and C^ibelline, hredertck Rarbarossa unites the rival factions, but makes no contribution to perinanent German consolidation. His struggles with the Lombards and the Pope. Ilts quarrel with Henry the Lion. A German federation based on respect for law alien to ideas of the time. Union of Germany and Sicily in u86. Large ambitions and early death of Henry VI.

It was no good omen for the stability of the German state when, upon the death of Henry V, Lothair of Supplinburg was placed upon the vacant throne. Four generations of Franconians had succeeded four generations of Saxons, the crown passing from father to son by election during the father’s lifetime with the unbroken concurrence of prelates and princes. And then in 1 125, when it might have been expected that the principle of hereditary succession would have taken root in the political soil, the opposite principle, which placed the disposal of the crown in the hands of the great chieftains, was emphatically affirmed. So strong did the current now continue to flow in favour of free election that in 1156 the Princes Electois are spoken of as a substantive and important body in the state.

A yet greater mislortunc, hrst maitifcsting itself under Lothair but growing to most formidable proportions under his successor Conrad III, was the feud between the Welf and Hohenstaufen families.* Of this historic quarrel which convulsed two nations and into which the most far-reaching issues of principle and policy were absorbed, the cause is no more dignified than the dis- appointed ambition of a south German clan. The Hohenstaufen were a powerful Swabian family who had good grounds for hoping that Henry \ would be succeeded by the head of their house. In this hope they were bitterly disappointed. Lothair of Supplinbuig, a Saxon united by friendship and afterwards by marriage with the influential family of Welf (or Guelf), was pre- ferred to Frederick of Swabia, the near relative of the late king, ^ Genealogical Tabic £, p. 421.

236 >»'

FREDERICK BARBAROSSA 237

the executor of his will, and the heir of his private estates. From such a decision Frederick of Hohenstaufen and his brother Con- rad appealed to the arbitrament of arms. In pursuance of their ambition they did not scruple to involve their country in the familiar miseries of a civil war. Eventually, but not before every man, woman, and child in Augsburg had been destroyed, the king prevailed over the Hohenstaufen rebels. An interval of peace was procured, which, upon the death of Lothair, was fol- lowed by a renewal of the struggle. But now the parts were re- versed. The Hohenstaufen were in power, the Welfs were in opposition, and it might seem that the resources at the disposal of the crown should have been sufficient to decide the issue. But if Conrad III was King of Germany, Henry the Proud was Duke of Saxony and Bavaria. What the king might do to abase the most powerful of his subjects, that Conrad endeavoured to con- trive for the humiliation of Henry the Proud. He deprived him of Bavaria; he endeavouied to strip fiom him his duchy of Saxony. But there was an obstacle which Conrad, for all his Hohenstaufen btuvura, could never o\ercome. The Saxon nation, which had little reason to love a Swabian, stood solid and staunch for the Welfs. E\cn when Henry the Proud suddenly died, leav- ing a lad of ten as his heir (Henrtcus Leo, Dux Saxoniac et Bavariae, as he afterwards styled himself), the people and princes of Saxony stood together to keep their duchy in the Welfic house. Conrad was compelled to acknowledge the unpalatable fact that his enemy was too strong to be broken and that only by a com- promise peace, conceding Saxony but withholding Bavaria, could the country obtain relief from its domestic discords. The peace was struck (1142), but the <animositics remained, casting a dark shadow over this unfortunate reign and threatening, unless some higher wisdom supervened, the disruption of the kingdom.

It was the great recommendation of Frederick Barbarossa, Conrad’s nephew and successor, that his mother ludith was a Wclf. With the blood of both factions running in his veins Frederick seemed marked out by destiny to bring the ruinous schism to an end. And this for a time he succeeded in doing, making friends with his cousin Henry the Lion and restoring to him the duchies of Saxony and Bavaria.

A chorus of praise surrounded the red-bearded king during his lifetime and has been echoed in tones of varying enthusiasm by subsequent historians. All the qualities most generally admired

938 A niSTOAlr OF EUROPE

in the age of chivalry, courage, energy, good cliecr, joy in battle» and love of adventure, the rough justice which goes with hearty common sense, and the geniality which accompanies superb physical health, belonged to Fiederick, No German sovereign since Charlemagne possessed qualities so well fitted for the governance of the German people. lie could both frighten and charm. Churchmen, nobles, peasants were prepared to regard him as the perfect knight.

To the modern mind it seems incredible that a ruler, succeed- ing to the government of a great country after a period of grave domestic struggles, should permit himself to be lured into distant enterpiises of immense and unmeasured difficulty from which his subjects could not under any circumstances expect to derive a profit. But the German people did not then so jteason. They were not disposed to blame a king who left his country to receive the imperial crown in Rome. To them the military ex- peditions of Frederick into Italy, costly as they were in blood and treasure, were no more reprehensible than the last quixotic crusading voyage undertaken in old age which led to the death of their sovereign in a distant Cilician stream. No German com- plained of Frcdeiick that he governed too little. If in order to obtain assistance for his Italian wars he made reckless and ex- travagant coiircssioiis to the princes, setting up, for example, a duchy of Austria endowed with cxoibitant privileges, no domestic critic raised a protest in the interests of central control. Frederick was the child of bis age. 11 he moved in a mist of archaic romance, musing over Latin classics, fancying that he could revive the Roman Einpiic without the Roman legions, if he fcailed to appreciate the triple foiccs of the Lombard communes, the revivccl Papacy, and the Sicilian kingdom which were arrayed against him, he was not alone. The Germans, wdto would not have exchanged their brilliant knight-errant for the best organ- izer in the world, gave him their aclmiring confidence to the end.

In Italy the appearance of a German army was at no time regarded as an unmixed blessing. To Frederick it probably seemed a simple part of inherited duty that he should rescue the Pope from the newborn and violent republic of Rome, that he should receive the imperial crown, that he should put down his enemies and encourage his friends, and that he should recover for the Empire such fiscal rights as might have lapsed through the carelessness of his predecessor. But if he expected tliat these

««r»;£OSEICX BAEBAXOSSA a3j||

objects could be obtained easily and without resistance he was disillusioned on his first Roman journey. Then he learnt with what faint respect the republicans of Rome were prepared to treat the Emperor who had betrayed and the Pope who had burned Arnold of Brescia, their chosen leader. Hardly had the ftss imperial coronation taken place when the German army was furiously attacked in the Leonine city and compelled to execute a retreat.

But it was during his second Italian visit that Frederick pro*^ voked the great struggle with the Lombard communes which, beginning with the decrees of the Diet of Roncaglia in 1158, lasted until at the Peace of Constance in 1183 the Emperor was in effect compelled to acknowledge defeat. It is the practice of writers zealous for Italian nationality to represent this famous contest as marking the first stage in the growth of Italian liberty. Certainly a fine spirit of heroism and deteimination was shown in the struggle not only by Milan, wdiith was a populous city, but by many a small Italian town which faced the formidable engines of the imperial army. The mere fact that Frederick at the head of his German chivalry was in 1176 routed by the towns- men of Milan on the field of Legnano was a notification to Europe that a new age was approaching in which statesmen would have to reckon with the military power of a middle class. Moreover, it was a novelty that a large number of Italian cities should combine in a league and enter into relations, as did the Lombards, with the Pope, with Sicily, with Byzantines and Venetians. Such a combination, even had it been unsuccessful, would have furnished a striking illustration of the weight to be attached to urban communities in the politics of Europe. But it is a mistake to suppose that this long-drawn struggle was at the time regarded as a contest between the German and Italian nations. The Italians, many of whom, especially among the northern aristocracy, were still conscious of tlicir German origin, were divided. Some towns stood for the Emperor, others for the Pope. Nor would it have been fair to urge that the claims put forward by Frederick were those of a German usurper. The jurists of Bologna had affirmed that what Frederick demanded of the communes at Roncaglia was due to him as the heir of the Roman Emperors.

Closely mingled with the war of the Immbard League was a quarrel with the Papacy hardly to be avoided so long as Hildc-

340 A HISTORY 07 EUROPE

brandine ideas survived in the Roman Curia and a resolute German Emperor was desirous of governing in Italy. At bottom the issue was always the same, “ Which was supreme, Pope or Emperor?'" or, as it was apt to be put in the feudal language of that time, **Did the Emperor hold his office as a fief from the Pope?” It is the part of wisdom in politics to avoid asking the largest questions, but as soon as this ultimate issue was raised a swarm of minor differences on points of procedure, of adminis- trative convenience, of current Church policy came to life, as flies in the summer heat. Was the Emperor bound to lead the Pope's palfrey and to hold his stirrup? Could he nominate bishops or despoil their sees on vacancies? Could he claim pro- vender for his armies or hospitality for his legates? On the first principle the German prijues were of one mind. When at the Council of Besan^on in October, 1157, Caidinal Roland, the eminent canon lawyer, acting as legate for Pope Hadrian IV, asked from whom did the Emperor hold his Einjure if not from the Pope, the lasli ecclesiastic barely escaped with his life.

Two years later this same cardinal, being known for his strong papal views, and having been concerned in biinging about a friendship between the Curia and Sicily, was elc^^ied Pope by part of the college and assumed tlie name of Alexander III. Other cardinals, either because they had been influenced by Gcimany or feared Roland and the Sicilians, elected the im- perialist Cardinal Octa\ian, who took the name of Vidor TV. Both Popes appealed to Frederick and by him were invited to submit their claims to a synod at Pavia.

And now Alexander III showed the w^oild that the spirit of Hildebrand was still ali\c. He refused to attend the synod at Pavia. He declined to admit by liis presence that the Emperor had any right to preside over a counril of the Church or to dispose of the See of St. Peter. To the excommunication of the anti-pope, he replied by excommunicating the Emperor, by re- leasing his subjects from their allegiance, and by throwing him- self upon the sympathy and hospitality of France.

The stars fought in their courses for this staunch and resource- ful ecclesiastic. The Lombards rose against the oppressive Ger- man administration to which they had been submitted, with Venice, Sicily, Byzantium, and the Pope actively encouraging. The walls of Milan, which Frederick had razed to the ground, were rebuilt, the population which he had dispersed was re*

FREDERICK BARBAROS8A S4t

called. Then in the critical summer of 1167 a crowning mercy was vouchsafed to the Church. Frederick had descended into Italy with a large army, determined to strike at the two nerve centres of rebellion, Rome, from which Alexander was now guiding his coalition, and Sicily, which nourished the movement with funds. At first fortune smiled on the imperialists. The Romans were heavily defeated; the German army stormed into St. Peter’s; the Pope fled; the Emperor was crowned by his anti- pope. A Pisan fleet appearing in the Tiber announced the im- pending conquest of Sicily. But in the course of a few hours the August sun gave to Alexander an unexpected revenge. A sudden fever struck the German army. Alone and unarmed Frederick recrossed the Alps, leaving the flower of his chivalry dead and withered on the Roman plain.

From this blow of fate Fiedcrick never recovered. The army W’hich he brouglit into Italy upon his fourth expedition was too small to rc-csiahlish his authority over an enemy which had enjoyed seven years of respite from German attack. A small force of German knights went down before the numerous cavalry and pikemen of Milan upon the field of Legnano, and their leader, leading the omens aright, dciermined lo treat with the Pope and to admit his claim. The meeting of Frederick and Alexander in Venice on July 24, 1177, is commemorated by three slabs of red maiblc in the poich of the cathedral of St. Mark’s indicating the spot where the Emperor knelt to the Pope and received tlie kiss of peace. The scene made a deep impres- sion. Not only to the Venetian crowd on the piazza did it seem emblematic of the vanity ol material force and of the triumph of the spiritual piinciple in human affairs. Yet in truth Frederick, while conceding no point of vital substance, had gained the great advantage of peace.

From the decisive field of Legnano there was one important absentee. For twenty-four years Henry the Lion had been per- mitted to govern his immense territories of Saxony and Bavaria without let or hindrance from the Emperor. But now a cloud of difference had arisen between the two men. Was it ^that Frederick had bouglit Welf estates in Tuscany and Bavaria which Henry coveted? Or that Henry was sated with Italian adventures and preferred to be left free to deal with his own difficult tasks in the north, where as a conspicuous tamer of Wendish heathendom he has left a mark on the life of those

$4^ A HISTORY or EUROPE

regions? Whatever the cause may be, Henry refused to help his sovereign, and Frederick in consequence suffered the bittcj> ness of defeat.

From this open variance there followed after an interval of gathering hostility one result big with consequence for German history. There were among the clergy and princes of Saxony those who hated the imperious Lion and were waiting for an occasion to pull him to the ground. A pretext was found, a charge was levelled, but rather than appear before a hostile court, Henry resorted lo civil war. Sicrn punishment followed upon his inevitable defeat and ultimate submission. He was banished the country, and save for the two cities of Brunswick and Luneburg stripped of his possessions. The great tribal duchies were shared among lesser men, one of whom, Otto of Wittelsbach, receiving part of Bavaria, founded a dynasty which lasted till the Gciinan Revolution of 1918.

A tear of American learning falls upon the grave ol ducal Saxony. Ihe vision of a German federal state, simple, orderly, based upon the great tribal duchies each duly conserving its customary law {land recht or state rights) and anticipating in the heart of mediaeval Europe the principles of the American republic, flatters the fancy of the transatlantic student. But such ideas were foreign to the age of the Lion and the Redl:)eard. The Lion was a great noith German figure, honoured in the sunset ol his life, when bis fighting days were over and he was allowed to return Irom exile, as a patron of art and letters and as the builder of the great cathedral of St. Blaise which still enchants the visitor to Brunswick; but he was no more careful of the rights of others than were the enemies who combined to pull him down. Nor had Barharossa, tlioiigh his hand was heavy on malefactors, and his rule was disiinguislied for its penal legislation, a gift for creating institutions. When his brilliant figure left the stage it was seen that his long reign of stem repression and lavish gifts was but a disguised approach to feudal chaos.

A wonderful glamour shines upon Frederick’s last stage in Europe through the marriage (January 27, 1186) of his son Henry to Constance, the heiress presumptive of the Sicilian kingdom. The rich and powerful island state which it had been

FItftDSAICl; BAKBAnOSaA 043

Kinpcror’s dream to conquer by arms was now to pass into the Hohenstaufen family on the easy terms of a marriage con- tract. Here, unexpectedly emerging from the diplomatic heaven, was the answer to the humiliations which Frederick had en- dured at the hands of the Romans and the Lombards, the Venetians and the Pope. Master of Germany in the north with its warlike feudal nobility, and of Sicily with its full treasury, its powerful fleet, its well-schooled Saracen army, the next Emperor would be well placed for imposing his will on refrac- tory Popes and communes. But the very considerations which arrayed this conjunction in colours so pleasing to the Hohen- staufen made it a vital concern for the Papacy that their dynasty should be destroyed. The struggle once engaged was long and bitter. The Popes achieved their end. The offending dynasty was uprooted. But the cost of victory was a sub- servience to France which led through the Avignon captivity to an incalculable decline in papal prestige and so on to the Protestant Reformation.

The union of two countries so distinctive as Germany and Sicily, and divided from one another by the whole length of the Italian peninsula, presented a new range of difficult prob- lems to the statesman. In Sicily the monarchy was hereditary, in Germany it was elective. In Sicily the King had acknow- ledged the Pope as his feudal superior; in Germany the claim of the Pope to be the feudal superior of the Emperor was hotly repudiated. It was now the established prerogative of the Arch- bishop of Cologne to crown the King of Germany. The Sicilian King was crowned by the Archbishop of Paleimo. If it were deeply distasteful to the Sicilians to submit to a German sovereign, it was equally offensive to German pride to reflect that a time might come when their king might prefer the palms and orange groves at Palermo to the temperate climate of Aachen or Cologne, when the affairs of the Empire might be conducted by Saracens or Greeks, Englishmen or eunuchs, and German interests fatally postponed to those of a distant island.

That many of these difficulties were present to the acute/ in- telligence of Henry VI is clear from some remarkable proposals which he made to the princes of Germany and to Pope Celes- tinc III. His plan was that princes and Pope should agree to confer upon the Hohenstaufen dynasty an hereditary right to the German throne and that the Pope should crown his infant

244 A HISTORY OF EUROPE

son Frederick King of the Romans. In return for these favours he proffered concessions — to the lay princes of Germany that their fiefs should be hereditary in the female and collateral line; to the prelates the renunciation of the fas spolii; and to the Pope, most important of all, an acknowledgment that the Empire was held as a fief from the Vicar of Christ. The rejec- tion of this bold plan by princes and Pope effectually destroyed the project of an indissoluble union of the German and Sicilian crowns.

The historian is at once attracted and repelled by this hard and crafty son of the Red Beard who passed with his contem- poraries as a scholar and died in 1197 after only seven years of rule, having already done many things that were wise, as well as others that were base and cruel, and who seems both in the scale of his ambitions and the novelty of his expedients to belong to the rank of creative politicians. But what principally matters in the context of c\cnts is not Henry's conquest of Sicily and designed conquest of Constantinople, nor his pacifica- tion of the Wclfs, nor the meanness with which he exploited the captivity of Richard I to get money and power, nor that he sought the friendship of the l\>pe and planned a Crusade, but that he died young, leaving an infant to succeed him. During the long minority of Fredcilck II the political complexion of the w^oild was profoundly altered.

BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSItli Kd C ambticjge Mpdiov.i! Histoiv, Vol. V.

E. A. Fieeman: Historical Essays. (Eicclcrkk Batbarossa ) 1802.

W. \on Giesebrethl: Ooschiihle dcr deutstiien K.iisei /eit. 1881-8. Gregorovius: History of Rome in the Middle Ages. Tr. A. HaniiUon.

i8<>4-ic)oo.

F. W. Thompson: Feudal Germany. 1928.

T. b. Tout: The Empire and the Papacy. i<)03.

W. Stubbs: Getman\ the Eaily Middle Ages. Ed, A. Hassall. 1908. A. L,. Poole: Henry the Lion. Lothian HLtojical Es&ay. 1912.

CHAPTER XX

INTELLECTUAL AND MONASTIC MOVEMENTS

Renaissance in the twelfth century. Medical studies at Salerno. Re- vival of Roman Law. Eni^hsh Common Imio. Universities of Bologna and Paris. Origins of Oxford. Mediaeval university movements. The Monasteries.

WiHLE the Crusades were thus powerfully affecting commerce and policy, another change, more profound in its effects, was coming over tlic intellectual life of western Europe. Tlic twelfth century witnessed a renaissance of the European mind which, though mote contracted in scope, is comparable in energy and creativeness with that great cnlaigcment of custom and taste which divides the modern from the mediaeval world. Tlie study of law and medicine, of logic and rheology, received a new and powerful impetus. As conditions became ntorc settled, travelling more secure, and the superfluities of life more ea.sy to obtain, the thirst for knowledge, which is one of the primal appetites of man, began to as.sert itself afresh. Wandering students ranging from hoys in their teens to grey-haired men might be seen on the roads travelling to such centres as were known to be distin- guished by the presence of attractive teachers. Guilils were formed of learners as at Bologna, of int>tructois as at Paris, and after the manner of their kind evolved a body of rules and regu- lations for their guidance. From such associations arose the University, an institution which some metliaeval writers did not scruple to rank with the Papacy and Empire as an international force appointed by God for the direction and improvement of mankind.

It is a paradox that Italy, the seat of the Papacy, has been of all western countries throughout history the most secular. In contradistinction to the universities of the north, which gfew up out of cathedral schools and developed their principal activities in the .sphere of philosophical theology, the universities of Italy were founded by secular agencies and were mainly, though not exclusively, concerned with the prosecution of secular studies. The ancient University of Salerno was famous for a

1. 45

246 ti fllSTORY OF fiOEOPB

body of medical teaching based upon the writings of Hippo- crates and Galen and the later experience of Jewish mediOal science. We may smile at this mediaeval medicine. It was devoid of the faintest knowledge of experimental anatomy. It was combined with astrology. It was prefaced by a careful study of the writings of Aristotle. Yet this is the principal root from which the science of the Renaissance was destined to grow. Nor can all value be denied to a course of training which gave to Dante his profound knowledge of Aristotelian philosophy and to Galileo his epoch-making interest in the stars.

More important in its immediate results was the revived study of Roman law (not that in Italy such learning had ever been allowed to die out) which is traced to the teaching of Irnerius during the early years of the twelfth century. The mediaeval expositions of the Digest, though characterized by learning and subtlety, wcie hardly more scientific, since they w'ere devoid of historical background, than the contemporary science of the human body. Yet of all the intellectual influences affecting the politics and society of that time Roman juris- prudence was the most powerful, not only by reason of the in- fusion of its piinciplcs into the developing science of the canonist, not only by reason of the improvement which it was the means of introducing into the legal customs of Germany and France, but also because it was an arsenal of autocratic maxims. The great jurists of Bologna did not scruple to apply to the office of the Holy Roman Emperor the high prerogative which the lawyers of a long past age had asciibed to Diocletian or Constantine. In the struggle between the Empire and the papacy the civilian lent the weight of his learning to the sup- port of the imperial cause; nor was there a sovereign in Europe who was not prepared upon occasion to have recourse to those convenient maxims of absolute power which the learned doctors of the civil law were always so rcaxly to supply.

There was, however, one striking limitation to the influence of this imposing system of jurisprudence. In England the teach- ing of practising lawyers was carried on, not at the universities, where both the Civil and the Canon Law were taught, but at professional schools, known as the Inns of Court, which were first set up in London in the reigns of the Edwards. To this circumstance we may principally ascribe the fact that the Common Law of England not only preserved its substantive

SlirTI&|LI.«OTtXAL MOMTASTIC MOVEMENTS it47

existence, but was upon the whole a force making for liberty father than for absolutism.

The University of Bologna, which in the twelfth century became pre-eminent as a law school, was managed by a guild of students, who hired the teachers, often failing to pay them their wages, and reduced them, in Dr. Rashdall’s words, “ to a most humiliating degree of servitude.” ”The professor,” continues Dr. Rashdall, ” was lined if he was a minute late for lectures, if he went beyond the time for closing, if he skipped a difficult passage or failed to get through in a given time the portions of the law-texis provided by the University. A committee of students — the denunciatores doctorum — watched over his con- duct and kept the rectors informed of his irregularities. If the doctor wanted to be married a single day of absence was graciously allowed him but no honeymoon.” From this iron and niggardly discipline the University was eventually rescued by the intervention of the city. Salaried chairs were established for professors chosen by the city, who being regularly and sufficiently paid came in time to monopolize the teaching. The civic university became popular in the prevailing secular atmo- sphere of Italy. By the end of the middle ages few considerable Italian states could afford to dispense with it.

Very different was the character and organization of the great University of Paris, which provided a model for the universities of the north. Here the prevailing study was not law but theology, the directing authority a guild not of students but of teachers. Originating from the cathedral school and subsist- ing under the shadow of the cathedral, the ” Universitas ” or guild of Paris masters was long treated with suspicion as an un- lawful society, conspiring to undermine the authority of the bishop, his chancellor, and the chapter. For this suspicion some warrant may perhaps be found in the wild ferment of opinion which was excited by the free and fiery dialectic of Peter Abelard, the great Breton teacher (1079-1142), who first estab- lished the fame and popularity of Paris as a centre of thought and enquiry.

In truth, however, the orthodox Church had little to fear in that age from the speculations of academic philosophers. The voice of an isolated heretic was soon silenced in the lifetime of St. Bernard. Abelard was driven to recantation and a monastery, and when in the middle of the thirteenth century all the works of

24S A HISTORY OF.€OROPE

Aristotle were made available for study in the west, this immense mass of ancient thought and knowledge was by a long process of devout and laborious gymnastic wrought into an exact and authoritative confirmation of the Catholic Faith.

Oxford derives from Paris, Cambridge from Oxford. If we would recall the turbulent life of those early gatherings of students and teachers out of which our universities arose, wc must exclude from our field of vision the imposing buildings, the colleges, the libraries, the lecture rooms which now give to a university its fixity in space. The student of the twelfth cen- tury was like the Crusader, a pilgrim, travelling light and travel- ling often in quest of the Holy Grail of knowledge. Since there were no endowments to chain him to a particular place, since teaching was oral, and l^atin the common language of the clerk all over the western world, teachers and pupils alike would wander from town to town and country to country. Sometimes they w’ould voyage singly, sometimes in small groups, and some- times, at the command of a sovereign or in a movement of protest or indignation, just as a modern trades union strikes against an employer, they would transfer themselves in large droves. Not seldom such a migration was the seed of a new university.

Such, at least, appears to have been the case at Oxford, though the evidence is not altogether complete. Wc know' that in 1167-1168 a large body of English teachers and students were brought back from Paris by order of King Henry II as a result of his quarrel with the King of France; and it is clear that when later, in 1185, Giirddus Cainbiensis read his Topographia Htbernica in Oxfoid there was already picsent in the city that organized body of teachers which is the sign of a studium generale or univ'ersiry. We have no direct evidence that the teachers and scholais who were brought back to England from Paris settled in Oxford. Yet it is probable that they did so and that the close and remarkable correspoiidcnce between the organi- zation of the Universities of Oxford and Paris was due to this cause. Oxford, like Paiis, was under the control of a bishop's chancellor, like Pans was originally organized in four nations with four proctors, and in time like Paris developed a system of residential colleges. Both universities were pre-eminent in scholastic philosophy and attractive to students from every part of Europe.

Compared with these two giants in the intellectual life of

INTELLECTUAL' ANP^ MONASTIC MOVEMENTS 249

mediaeval Europe^ Cambridge, founded by a secession from Oxford in 1209, and even Orleans and Montpellier, the one re- nowned for law and the other for medicine, were of secondary importance.

In the ancient world culture and high birth went together. It was the grave misfortune of Europe in the middle ages that tliese two qualities admired of man were sharply dissociated. The business of tlie knight was to fight and hunt; the duty of the clerk was to pray and learn. The universities of the middle ages were not designed to civilize the fierce aristocracies into whose hands the conduct of European affairs was consigned as a con- sequence of the barbaric invasions. Rather they were the result of a spontaneous popular movement carried out under the shelter and direction of the Church and partly as a response to the growing need for doctors, lawyers, and an educated clergy. With all this clerkly hum and bustle, this busy talk about the real and the nominal, universal and particular, the fighting and hunting nobleman had little to do. The students who flocked in their thousands to the universities came, as they have always mainly come, from the middle and lower ranges of society. The poor and ambitious saw in the university a free career to talent. But how many ejidured to the end of the long course of five or six years in the arts and of twelve or thirteen years in theology which were required for graduation? The failed M.A.'s and D.D.’s of mediaeval Europe must have been almost as numerous as the failed B.A.’s of C'alcuita University. Yet something was gained. A thin layer ot education, a smattering of Latin and logic was widely spread.

Moreover, the university mo\cment had the virtue of a steady growth in recognized importance and volume. It became the theory that it was the special and, indeed, sole privilege of the Pope or the Emperor to grant the jus uhique docendt which was asserted to be the hallmark of a studium generate or university. The age of apostolic poverty was succeeded by the age of lavish endowments. In 1252 Robert de Sorbon, the chaplain of Louis IX, founded the first of the sixty colleges which in the middle ages were built for the reception of university students in Paris. ^ A few years later his example was followed by Walter de Merton at Oxford. The visitor to Paris may still see on the left bank of the Seine the Rue de Fouarre where Dante may have heard lectures. He may still enter the curious little Church of Sl

215^ A HXST6JIT t>r* tUROPft

Julien Ic Pauvrc where the first Masters of Arts of the Paris Uifi* versity used to hold their meetings. But only a name attached to an uncouth modern building recalls the memory of the Sox^. bonne, and of the sixty mediaeval colleges of Paris not a stone remains. England h<as been more fortunate, and in the splendid collegiate foundations at Oxford and Cambridge preserves a memorial of the munificence and piety of a vanished age.

The European monasteries of the middle ages were often criticized and often reformed. In the west, Order followed upon Order, Chartreux after Cluny, Citeaux after Chartreux, Prfi- montrd after Citeaux, but always with the same tale of high initial ardour and enthusiasm giving place to spells of laxity and imperfection. Yet the possible loss to society through the enforced celibacy of many of the best men and women in every generation was never a matter of comment in an age which regarded celibacy as the first and the hardest of the human virtues. Particular monasteries were assailed, now on grounds of moral scandal, now as haid and grasping landlords. To no one since Rutilius Namatianus in the fifth century did it occur to dispute the value of the monastic life or to regard it as squalid and degrading to man.

The reason is clear. Apart from the shelter which they afforded to devout and peace-loving natures against the rough gales of mediaeval life, the monasteiies renilered services which we have now either ceased to require or can obtain more effici- ently from other souices. In many cases the monastery was a missionary establishment, sometimes a bank of deposit, a hostelry for the refreshment of wayfarers, an improving land- lord, a centre of education and scholarship, as well as of those arts and crafts which are enlisted in the conduct of any great estab- lishment, a collector and recorder of current news, a storehouse of manuscripts, a depository of political knowledge, foreign and domestic, an organ for the reclamation of waste land and for the planting of civilization in barbarous and pagan tracts. The ser- vices performed by ilie great German monasteries of Fulda and Corvey or by the Cistercian monks in Spain and northern Eng- land were of this pioneering character. They were at once mis- sionaries, educators, and landlords. The expansion of civilized life in these regions is not a little due to the powerful and often ruthless impulsion of these organized bodies of dedicated men.

IKTSLtECTtTAt. AX)r0 MOKAETlO IfOVSMBNtS ^51

We owe mach of our knowledge of the early middle ages to Latin chronicles compiled by monks. After the beginning of the thirteenth century historical writing escapes from the cloister and laymen begin to describe in the vernacular language the things which they have seen and the persons whom they have met. We have Villehardouin’s sparkling history of the Fourth Crusade and Joinville's exquisite Life of St. Louis, and later the flowing chronicles of Froissart the Fleming and of Villani the Florentine. With the fourteenth century, too, we may dip into the English year-books or legal records and there come across a store, unexampled in volume, of the authentic talk of English litigants in the provincial French which was then the language of the law couits. But the chronicling of the age which lies between the barbaric invasions and the rise of the universities in the later half of the twelfth century was left mainly to the monks. Then the scriptorium of the abbey was the only secure centre for literary work and the monkish scribe the chief pillar of learning. If much of his work was poor, scanty, and unintel- ligent, some chronicles were vivacious and well informed, and here and there the monasteries produced a real historian. Pos- terity must not repudiate its debt to the mediaeval monasteries, to Monte Casino and Bobbie, to Reichenau and St. Gall, to Cc/rt'cy and Fulda, to Bee and Mont St. Michel, to Jarrow and later to St. Albans. Much of our scholarship, not a little of our historical knowledge, is founded on the diligence of scribes, many of them nameless, who have toiled over crabbed manuscripts by a feeble rushlight in unw'armcd cells in the hope that the labour of their pens might be acceptable to the Lord.

Anti now Europe has passed into a stage of civilization in which abbeys, while they may still live and function, are dif- ferently related to the facts of the age. No longer is the endow- ment of an abbey by prince or noble regarded as a short and simple road to the soul’s salvation. No longer do men go to the abbey for news, for they have the daily press and the wire^ less; no longer for refreshment and shelter, for there is the inn and the casual ward. The task of education is performed by the uni- versities and schools. Gone, too, is the function of the scrip- torium, for the piinting press multiplies books and the libraries store them; and gone the ministration of charitable relief. Long ago the temporal rulers have turned elsewhere for political counsel. It is with difficulty that the traveller, as he surveys the

A niSTOHy OF EUROPE

252

shell of some ancient abbey, standing ruined and forlorn among the sweet English pastures, can recapture in imagination thef distant hours of monastic influence when in a society much simpler than our own and for a population less numerous the abbey was a busy centre of social life and its strongest link with the great world beyond.

Modern society is more willing to avail itself of the gratuitous social service rendered by nuns. In Catholic countries religious sisterhoods still perform much of the humanitarian work which was expected of them in mediaeval times. They nurse the sick, tend the poor, teach the young, console the dying. The education of girls is largely in their hands. That which was purest and best in mediaeval monasticism survives in these devoted women.

HOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED

H. Rashdall: Universities of Europe in the Middle Atjes. 1805.

R. L. Poole: Illustrations of the Ilislor> of Mediaeval TlKnij^ht and Learninf;. 1020.

C. Mallet: Tlistorv of the Uni\ersitv of Oxford. 1024.

J. B Mullinf(er: 'J'he Univer.sity of Cambridf^o from the Eailiest Times,

C. 11 . IlasUins: Studies in Mediaeval Culture. 1029.

C. H. Haskins: The Rennissame of the twelfth Century. 1927.

Helen Waddell; The Wandeiin^ Stholars. 1927.

C». G. Coullon; Monastic Schools in the Middle Ar^es. 1913.

G. O. Coulton: Five Centuiies of Religion. 1923-7.

G. G. Coulton; Mediae ^al Studies. 1905-21.

G- G. Coulton: Tlie Mediaeval Secne. 1930*

CHAPTER XXI

MUNICIPAL GROWTH

Growth and emancipation of towns. Civic fends. Groivth of commerce. Differing municipal development in different paits of Europe. Ihe German JIansc and the Scandinavian countries.

By the beginning of the twelfth century the trade and Industry of western Europe liad sunicicntly recovered from the interrup- tion caused by the Saracens to permit of a sensible growth in municipal liberties. The great historic cities of the Roman Empire, whose population had been depleted through the de- struction of sea-borne commerce, begrm to recover something of their former numbers and affluence. Villages grew into walled towns. Suhuibs of merchants and craftsmen spread themselves round castle or borough. In France we hear of villeneuves, sauvelcs, bastides, names which denote the movement towards new urban aggregations which was proceeding through the country. From such detelopmcnts followed two consequences of gicat importance. The met chants and craftsmen organized themselves in guilds and began to demand conditions under which money could be .salely made. In broad outline they claimed to be pcimitted to compound for their own farm or taxes (the firtna burpri), to be permitted to make their own bye-laws, to be iclicved of onerous feudal servitudes, to have their civil suits tried in their own courts and w'ithin their own walls, to be able to select tbeir own oflicers, and that serfs resident for a year and a day within a town or borough should be regarded as free. Such is a rough epitome of the liberties and privileges which with infinite varieties of detail and liberality arc to be found inscribed in the towTi charters of the twelfth century. It is less important to consider by what means such charters were obtained, whether as at Laon by a revolutionary struggle or as in London by a monetary transaction or by a peaceful process of permitted growth, than to note the point that in some way or other all the large and most of the small towns in Europe had by the end of the twelfth century obtained a position of special

»S3

354 A HlSTOUY OF EUROPE ^

privilege. At one end of the scale were urban republics, such as Venice or Marseilles and to a slightly lesser degree London: at the other end little country towns which had obtained no more than the right to compound for their taxes.

Man is an imitative animal. The privileges liberally accorded to one city were soon demanded by others less plentifully en- dowed; and the third estate, once it had arrived and had begun to organize its forces, steadily grew in power and influence.

Being small and insecure (London, a Leviathan among our English cities, can hardly have numbered more than twenty thousand inhabitants), mediaeval towns were everywhere fortified and organized for defence. M. Pirenne, writing more particu- larly of the Low Countries, tells us that up to the close of the middle ages a sum never falling short of five-eighths of the com- munal budget was expended on purposes connected with the maintenance of the walls and the provision of instruments of war- In Italy, despite the fact that she was now fast securing for herself the leadeiship of the world in craftsmanship and inter- national commerce, the warfare of city with city was almost perpetual. Cities would fight about diocesan boundaries and feudal rights. o\ci tolls and markets, for the extension of their powers over the contado or suriounding country, or in pursuance of the long inherited feuds of the nobles within their walls. Mere contiguity was a potent cause of fiery and enduring hatreds. If Florence took one side in a quarreij it was sufficient for Pisa, Siena, and Genoa to take the other; if Milan entered into an alliance with othci cities, it would not at least be with Cremona and Pavia; and so long as the exploitation of Coisica and Sar- dinia was an open question betw^een them, Genoa and Pisa were inveterate in rivalry. Accordingly no large principle of policy decided the alignment of the Italian cities in the great quarrel between Empire and Papacy. Since Florence was papal or Guelf, her neighbour Siciia was naturally, imperialist or Ghibelline; since Cremona was Ghibelline, Crema must be Guelf. The quarrel between the Empire and the Paj)acy enlisted, but did not create, the civic feuds of Italy. These animosities, the vendetta of the consorzeria or Lombard clan, the feud of aggrandisement and commercial jealousy, the feud arising out of personal slights, were active all over Italy before that universal issue was raised. The great political struggle of the middle ages only gave a new colour and intensity to rivalries already so sharp and w'arlike that

MUNXCXPAX. GROWTH 255

in every city the inhabitants were organized as a militia of horse RUd foot.

Nevertheless trade and industry made steady progress. In the government arsenals of Venice and Genoa fleets were built lor military and commercial purposes upon a scale and with a rapidity which would have astounded the generation that pre- ceded the First Crusade. A constant stream of merchants from every corner of w'cstern Europe found their way to the six fairs of Champagne which by the middle of the twelfth century had established themselves as tlie chief northern centres for the ex- change of goods and the settlement of international debts. The Charter of St. Onicr in i lay, the first of a long scries, marks the rising affluence of the Flemish towns. The wool of England, the cloth of Frisia, the fustians of Augsburg, the silks of Paris were beginning to obtain their international renown. Though the science of political economy was still in the far distance, the Counts of Flanders vv^ere shrewd enough to discern the value of a fixed coinage and a single standard of weights and measures. Ghent and Binges, Cologne and Hamburg were rising into prominence. Liiherk was founded in 1143. Even to an Italian visitor tlie wealth and importance of the city magnates in London seemed in the icign of Stephen to be imposing. The Danube and the Rhine, the Rhone and the Seine were bring- ing the civilized world into a commercial relationship. The out- lines of the European economic system, as it persisted until the discovery of America, were now fixed.

Very various was tlie ultimate fate of the cities of Europe, which in the twelfth century, thanks to the principles of self- help and free association, were making such progress in the arts of life. It was the destiny of the English boroughs to be incor- porated in a national parliamentary system whicli, wdiile it limited their independence, enlarged their usefulness. In France the communal movement, born of revolution, ended in royal control. But in Germany and Italy a strong central government was lacking. Here there was no monarch to control, no parlia- ment to canalize and direct the manifold energies of urban life. It is accordingly in these two countries that the power and auto- nomy of the mediaeval city is most conspicuously illustrated, that cities grow into imperial stales, form leagues for commerce and war, and are capable of subjecting the Emperor himself to a decisive defeat. And who, when he considers the variety and

A HISTORY OF EUROPR'^

256

brilliance of Italian city life or the vigorous contribution of the Ilanseatic League to the commerce and architecture of northern Germany, will be prepared to say that the breakdown of central government was in these regions an unmixed misfortune for the human race?

The flowering time of the Hanseatic League lies in the fotir^ Tcenth century, before the discotery of the New World had revolutionized the commerce of Europe or the English had developed a mercantile marine, and while the dominant mer- chant guilds in the Baltic cities were as yet unsliaken by mutiny from below. Then a golden opportunity to become the common carrier of the noith was spread bcfoie the German trader. While the Edwards were ruling in England, many a North Ger- man merchant throve on the carriage of wool and cloth, of corn and wine, of fabiics and furs for the wealthy or of pickled her- ring for all tlic vvoild. Indeed long bcfoie the century had begun, the Easterling was a well-known figme in London, so affluent and long established in the Ham bouse or Guild Hall and so im- portant as a factor in the foicign tiadc of the island, that Easterling in its shortened form of stciling came to denote the standard coin of the British realm.

Not that business in those days was a safe and easy matter for the Nojih German trader. There weie piiatcs on the high seas, bandits and toll-exacting nobles on the roaiis. More par- ticiilaily theic was the windy peninsula of Denmark, always an uncomfoi tabic blot on the German landscape, since it controlled the Sound which is the channel between the North Sea and the Baltic, and was therefore in a position to woik much mischief among the fishing fleets or trading vessels of the mainland. IIow best to handle these troublesome Danes, to secure privi- leges foi German factories in the Scandinavian countiies and in England, or to safeguard Geiman fishiiig and commcice, were problems too difficult for any one city to solve for itself. Self- help and combination were imperative, for the Emperor was distant and powerless, and the Saxon house which had once been great had >one down with Henry the Lion. At last the great mercantile oligarchies listened to the call of circumstance, t24i There was a union between Liibeck and Hamburg which was by degrees so widened out that cvci*y important northern town from Novgorod to Bruges was included within its orbit. It w^as a league of merchants. No noble or craftsman exercised power

MUNlUlPAiU GKOWPH

^57

in these trading republics, nor did any man of high political genius cmcigc trum their parliaments. Tiic merciianis ot the Hanse were only by accident politicians. There is no reason to think that they ever contemplated the onerous burden of a permanent federation for the political control of the Baltic. It was sufficient if, meeting at irregular times and with varying numbers, they w^erc able to deal with the piessing commercial problems o£ the moment. Once only did the Hanseatic traders, coming into sharp collision with a tiresome Danish king, threaten to play a decisive part in the politics of the north. The two wars of the League with Waldemar III are famous in Hanseatic annals. The Treaty of Stralsund (1370), which gave to the victorious mei chant republics the control of the Sound and the fisheries and a voice in the selection of the Danish King, appeared to point to the establishment of a traders' empire on the Baltic. Liibcck, wrote Aeneas Sylvius, a gifted Italian traveller, in 145S, “possesses such wealth and such power that Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are accustomed to elect and depose kings upon a sign from her.’' Nothing great came of it. llic HcUise produced no Robert Clive. The temperature of co- operation in mediaeval Germany could nowhere and at no time be kept at a steady and ellective level.

During the later half of the fifteenth century the League began slowly to decline in power and influence. The herrings, turning their dainty noses from the Baltic to the British coast, provitlcd a gainful livelihood for genet at ion after generation to English and Scottidt fisheimcn. The Easterling was ousted from the British carrying tiacic. As the century advanced political development assumed a shape which was unfavourable to the ‘'general company of German merchants." The prince out- topped the city. Loyalty to the teiiiroriai sovereign proved to be more potent than attachment to a leagtie of merchant towns which, while they liacl several common interests, were always in the last resort rivals in trade. Brandenburg, Burgundy, Sweden, in their separate spheres of territorial mfluence, overshadowed the League. By the end of the century the cities on the inland ' seas had had their day.

To all this mediaeval development of North German trade, the Scandinavian kingdoms, had they been linked in a durable union, might have offered a serious counterpoise. But when has there been a real Scandinavia? Even when Denmark, Sweden,

9

258 A HISTORY OF EUROPE

and Norway were brought together under the Danish Crown at the Union of Kalmar (1397-1523) Danish rule was never effectual or uncontested in Sweden. At last the yoke was violently thrown, off, in circumstances calculated to brand deeply upon the popular mind of Sweden a horror of the Danes. “The blood bath of Stockholm” contrived by King Christian 11 (of that German house of Oldenburg which had ruled in Copenhagen since 1448) was the attempt of a hasty tyrant to found by the pitiless massacre of his enemies a government which was lack- ing in every element of popular confidence and esteem. The crime was speedily avenged. A young Swede came forward to rally the peasants of his native land against the alien. His name was Gustav Eriksson and he was afterwards known as Custavus Vasa. The war of liberation (1520-1523) led by this Swedish counterpart of William Wallace of Scotland gave to Sweden a national dynasty and ushered in the heroic period of her history.

nooKS WHICH may be consulted

W. J, Ashley: Economic Organisation of England. ic)i4.

H. Piieime: Mediaeval Citieb, their Oiigin and the Revival of Tiade. Tr, H. P. Halsey. 1925.

C. Gio^s; The Gild Men bant, iSc^o.

H. Zhninern: Ihe llansa Towns. 1889.

R. Lodge: The Close of the Middle Ages. 1923,

D. Schaefer: Die Hanse. 190^.

H. Pirenne: Histoire de Belgique. 1909,

J. C. L. Sismondi; History of the Italian Republics. (Everyman’s Library.) 1907.

aiAPfER xxn

THE PONTIFICATE OF INNOCENT III

Zenith of the papal poiver under Innocent III. The evangelical revhaL St, Francis. Challenge to the Papacy from the Albtgenses. St. Dominie. Franciscans and Dominicans, The heresies of joachtm of Flora and Siger of Brabant. The Church masters its critics.

As we crobs the threshold of the thirteenth century the dream ot world dominion, which had died with an Emperor, springs to life again in the policy of a Pope. We come to Innocent III, the pi Olid Roman patrician and trained canonist, who, reaching the Papal Chair at the early age of thirty-seven years and profit- ing by a temporary eclipse of the Empire, brought the Papacy to the summit of its power. This is the Pope under whose rule tlic western Church was imposed on Constantinople, who dared to place England and France under interdict, who launched the most successful of the Spanish Crusades, who exacted from the rulers of England, Aragon, and Portugal the surrendei of their respective countries as fiefs to be held of the Holy See, and did not scruple first to excommunicate King John, and then, when the Lulprit had made an abject submission, to set aside the Magna Carta and to excommunicate the batons by w‘hom it was supported. It was this energetic ruler who cleared the Ger- mans out of central Italy and Sicily, made himself master of Rome, preserved against dangerous opposition the Sicilian inheritance of his ward, the child Ficd crick, fomented a terrible civil war in Germany, and then made and unmade Emperors on terms most favourable to the Roman Church, and lastly crushed out the formidable Albigeusian heresy in southern France, and with it the civilization of a brilliant people.

The bare catalogue of these wide-ranging temporal activities suggests a tlieocracy tyrannically worked and slavishly accepted. Such an inference, however, would be false to history. There was indeed no limit to the claims which Innocent was prepared to make on behalf of his exalted office. It was his view that the Pope was the Vicar of Christ, that he was as Mclchisedec, prince

• S9

26 o a histoky of europs

and king in one, that he had the “plenitude potestaris/* and that he had the right, seeing that a Pope had transferred the Empire from the Greeks to the Franks, to exercise his own dis- cretion in the choice of emperors, Bui to the contemporaries of Innocent there was nothing outrageous or tyrannical in these opinions. It was common ground that the spiritual was above the temporal power, that the Pope was supreme Head of the church and the ultimate authority on all matters of faith and ecclesiastical discipline. That he could excommunicate a sovereign, that he could shake the basis of social order in a state by releasing its citizens from their allegiance, or impose upon it the extreme penalty of the interdict was not denied. The men of the thirteenth century were agreed on the principle of a scat of authority in religion, a supreme spiritual arbiter in temporal affairs, an institution professing the rule of sanctity and justice, an ultimate tiibunal before which they might lay their causes. The great multiplication of appeals to the Papal Curia under Innocent III is proof that tl)e Roman Court met the needs of the time. Against all manner of local tyrannies and oppiessions theie was in the last resort an appeal to Rome.

Yet under this apparent concord there was much variety of belief and experience. The middle ages were neither so virtuous, nor so ortliodox, nor so stupid as is often supposed. There w^as bestial immorality as well as stem asceticism, fantastic heresy as well as compliant accc})tance of the, orthodox faith, and an in- tellectual ingenuity which, had it been directed to the cross- exaininatioii of iiaiuie, would have anticipated by many cen- turies the benefits of modern science.

The problem before the Papacy in the thirteenth century was bow best to control a society greatly enriclicd in its experience through the Crusades, moie travelled, more acquisitive, more pleasure-loving, but also, partly by reason of this opening-out of the near eastern world and the tumultuous development of lay interests which followed in its train, and partly owdng to the revival of intellectual life, more distuibed in its beliefs. The pontificate of Innocent III corresponds with a brilliant develop- ment of vernacular poctiy in Germany and France; a poetry owing its impulses no doubt to the romance of the Crusades, though its greatest themes arc found in earlier history, and giving ideal expression to the sentiments of chivaliy which then prevailed in the lay world.

TIIS PONTIFICATE OF INNOCENT 111 iz6t

It is during these years that the Minnesingers of Germany and the troubadours of Provence produced some of their best work, that Wulfram of Eschenbach wrote Parsifal, that Gottfried of Strasburg wrote Tristan and Isolde, and that the spirit of far-off German history is recaptured in the great epic of the Niebelungcnlied.

The expression of the lay spirit in vernacular literature was one aspect of the sense of liberation which was now coming into Europe. An evangelical revival was another, a strong develop- ment of positive heresy was a third.

The evangelical revival, which starts with St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic the Castilian, was one of those profound and sacrificial movements of the heart, which long after its original purity of intention and practice has disappeared, continues to affect the lives of men. St. Francis, the son of a rich cloth mer- chant in a small Umbrian town, was born in i iSi or 1 182. As a youth he was gay, careless, open-handed, in love with chivalry and ambitious of a soldier’s career. Then he experienced a conversion. An illness contracted in prison in Perugia (for he was captured by the forces of that neighbour town in a skirmish) brought out the latent powers of an original religious genius, so loving, naif, delicate and gay, so swift and instinctive in its response to suffering, so full of chivalry and poetic symbolism that it provides the soveieign chaim whicli unites Christians of all denominations. One day meeting a leper he dismounted from his horse and kissed him. Later a voice ordered him to repair a ruined chapel near Assisi, lie became a hermit, broke with his family, and li\ed on alms, rebuilding with his own hands the dcdcrted chapels in the neighbourhood. Then on February 24, 1208, he licard the lesson of the day in the church of Portiuncula (Matt x.): “As ye go, pieach, saying. The kingdom of hca\en is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, fieely give. Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in youi purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves: for the workman is worthy of his hjre.” The words struck home. Barefoot he went out into the world to preach repentance.

The religious prospect was troubled and uncertain. The great monastic foundations of the twelfth century, Grammont, Clair- vaux, Premontrd, once the early fervour had died away, had

262 . Jk HiaXaKT QF EVnOPV-

settled down to the management of their estates, the sale oC their wool, and the discharge of the multifarious responsibilities which worldly endowments bring in their train.

The most powerful of the Popes was carrying out a great secular design, not without much effusion of blood. The contrast between primitive Christianity and the Church as it had become, rich, secure, worldly, ambitious, affected many minds. Prophecies floated about that a new age was at hand, an age of love, dominated by the Holy Ghost in succession to the past dispensation of law and of grace. Plercsics were springing up among poor, unlearned folk — there were said to be seventeen hereticjil sects in Milan — ^I'ly way of protest against sacerdotal claims and even against matter itself, thought to be the creation of the evil principle. Italy, racked by civil war and hatred, was asking for something \\liich the Roman Curia, so learned and wise in Canon Law and so scrupulous in its judgments, but also so remote fiorn ilie pool and humble, had not yet been able to give.

It was, then, wise of Innocent III to sanction, as after some demur he did, the rule of St. Fiancis and to submit the saint to the ecclesiastical tonsure. A great religious foice which might otherwise have been lost to the Churcli was now brigaded in its ranks. Tlie poor brothers of St. Francis (Fratres Minores, Minorites, Grey Friars) wandered thiough Italy, preaching in Italian as simple folk to simple folk, and going everywhere, as well into remote hamlets as into tlie poor c|uariers of large towns, with their call to povcity and repentance. The move- ment was the more effective because the early disciples were neither churchmen nor sthoolmcn. The illiterate multitude could understand a message, j>iire of all subtlety or artifice, and delivered in the vulgar tongue by men and women w^bo prac- tised the doctrines of povcity and con ‘ntment, love and humility, which they preached to others. By such manifest en- thusiasm those who wcic merely orthodox before were tempted to become religious now, and those who were heretical discarded their heresies. That italy was saved an Albigcnsian crusade may be ascribed to the influence of St. Francis and his followers, who gave in a form acceptable to the Church the satis- faction which many Italians were disposed to find in open revolt.

Unlike Francis the founder of the Dominican Order was

Tn«FOKT»ICAarX ov inkocekt hi 1163

trained for the CSiurch and already a cathedral dignitary in Spain* when a sudden turn was given to his life by an accidental encounter with a heretic in Toulouse. To defend the orthodox faith against the impassioned votaries of the Catharan or Albi- gensian heresy which was sweeping everything before it in southern France became henceforth the central passion of his life. During the eleven critical years (1205-1216) when the papacy was at grips with this movement, Dominic was in the centre of the fray, expounding doctrine, disputing heresies, and gathering roimd him a band of preachers like-minded with him self.

At an early stage of these operations the ardent Spaniard was convinced that the enemy was only to be met by a moral force equal to his own. The Cathari professed and to a large degree practised an extreme form of asceticism. In the consolamentum or rite of initiation, the initiate, who was invested like a Brahmin with a sacred thread, stvore to renounce the works of Satan and the Holy Catholic Church. Believing that matter was inherently evil, he condemned marriage, practised vege- tarianism, and refused to countenance the shedding of blood cither in peace or war. Perfection in this hard school of mystical self-discipline was not given to all, but it was attainable by a few who upon death would assume a spiritual body without the intervening delays of purgatory; and these elect and purified souls it was the duty of the whole Church to venerate. Dominic saw that the austere mystic of southern France would always prevail over the soft-living legates and aT>bots who endeavoured to convert him. Accordingly he took upon himself a life of voluntary poverty and inculcated it upon his associates, not out of mystical enthusiasm, but in his hard-headed Castilian way as a means of influence. Meeting Francis later in Italy, he was no doubt confirmed in his view that the renunciation of worldly goods was, not in southern France only, where it could be em- ployed as an instrument of war against an heretical Puritanism, but everywhere, a source of unusual spiritual influence. He determined to found an Order of Preachers bound by vows of poverty and owing obedience only to the head of their Order and to the Pope. To this project, too. Innocent III accorded his assent.

The army which was then enlisted in the service of the Papacy was an army very different from any which had

264 A HISTORY OP EUROPE

previously been enrolled under its banner. The begging Friars were ready to go everywhere and to do anything. No mission was too distant or too dangerous for these dedicated men, who stood outside every diocese and were independent of every bishop save only the Bishop of Rome. There was no country in Europe into which the Friar did not penetrate, bringing w'ith him the stir of a religious ic\i\<il. For w^ork in heathen countries no missionary was more available. He was to be found in Morocco and Tunis. He preached to the motley crowds in Syrian seaports. He voyaged to Persia and India and to the distant parts of China. Nor were his energies wholly expended on the tasks oi the missionary and revi\alist. Dominic, nghtly seeing that the time had now come when the faith must be defended against intellectual antagonists, was resolved that his Order should be studious. The old obligation of manual labour was replaced by the unfamiliar call to learning. The Dominican was charged to equip himself for intellectual combat and posted to the scenes of intellectual danger and activity. After a biief interval, the Franciscan, discaiding the pious prejudice of liis founder, elected to tread the same path of education and know- ledge. He too iiequentcd univeisitics and made bis contiibution to theological science. If the Dominicans can boast of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, the most original of mediaeval thinkers was a Franciscan from Oxford. So daring were his speculations and experiments, so forAvard reaching and compre- hensive his mind, that it is a moor question to whicli of the two founders the genius of Roger Ikicon w'ould ha\c been more dis- concerting, to St. Francis, who distrusted the pride of learning, or to St. Dominic, who hated the poison of enquiry.

In theory the Friars were not permitted to own property. In practice bequests of land, houses, and money were made for their use to the Holy See, to the comrnunincs of towns, and to private indit idiials. Some endowment, bitterly as the principle of property was denounced by “the spirituals” of the move- ment, was probablv essential to the effective and steady dis- charge of apostolic duty, more particularly in the cities; but wealth brought its familiar dangers. Before the end of the thirteenth century the Friars w’crc sometimes accused of luxury and avarice. Nor were these the only charges. Popular preach- ing, no less than material wealth, has its special dangers. In his desire to impress and amuse, the travelling Friar often took

TBE PONTIFICATE OF INNOCENT 111 365

leave of good sense and sound learning. The monks might be lazy, the parish priests might be dull, but in the eyes of the steadier villagers the Friar was a vagabond, an intruder, and a charlatan.

BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED

Cambridge Mediaeval History, Vol. VI.

Sabatier: Vie de St Fran(^ois d’Assise. 1931 J. E. Renan: Etudes d’histoire R^ligicuses i8!;8.

H. C. Lea . History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages. 3 vols. 1906. E. Gcbhart: LTtalie M>&tique. 1906.

cHArTER xxnr

THE FOURTH CRUSADE

Crusading policy of Innocent III. The Venetians divert the Crusade, Latin conquest of Constantinople. Weakness of the Latins. Rivalry between Venice and Genoa. Opportunity for spreading Greek culture squandered. Decline in religious motives and theocratic ideas.

No'hung seems better to illustrate the limitations of papal power in the thirteenth century than the fate which befell the foreign policy of Innocent III. The object closest to the heart of that great Pope was the recovery of the Holy Land by a Crusade launched and directed hy the Vicar of Christ. All quarrels were to be composed, all schisms ended. The joint force of the reunited Greek and Roman Chutrhes was to he gathered together for the general overthrow of the Moslem power.

Of this ambitious programme, pursued throughout the whole course of his pontificate, nothing was accomplished. Europe was never united. The Holy Sepulchre remained in pagan hands, and the great Crusade which was set on foot to recover it was against the Pope’s expiess injunction diverted by the Venetians for the rapture of Constantinople. But peihaps the fact which is most striking is not that the strongest of the Popes failed to realize his hopes of the Crusade, hut the obvious decline in the power of the religious inoti\e which his fnihne implied. “You advise me,” replied Richaid to Fulk de Ncuilly, the promoter of the Fourth Crusade, " to dismiss my three daughters, pride, avarice, and incontinence: I bequeath them to the most deserving: my pride to the Knights Templars; my avarice to the monks of Cireaux; and my incontinence to the prelates.” Neither Richard I of England nor Philip Augustus of France, nor the two contending Guelf and Ghibclline champions in Germany could be enticed to exchange their domestic interests for this distant adventure. By a chapter of accidents the task of directing the course of the Crusade lapsed to the Republic of Venice, upon whose good offices the valiant nobles of France and Flanders who had responded to the Pope’s appeal were dependent for their conveyance across the sea. The atmosphere

tns BovKtn cnvBAvn

of the Rialto was very different from that of the Vatican. The Venetians, as the leading merchants of the Levant, had made too much money out of infidels actively to desire their destruc- tion, and to the religious indifference aitd avarice of trade united the pride of a republic which had freed itself from Byzantium and was little disposed to accept dictation from Rome. In the necessities of the Crusaders who were short of money for their passage Enrico Dandolo, the aged 'doge, de- scried a piospect of more than ordinary advantage to his fellow-citizens.

The first idea of the Crusaders was to attack Egypt, from the conquest of which, seeing that it was the centre of Moslem power in the near east, the recapture of Palestine could be ex- pected to ensue. The Venetians, however, thought otherwise. With Egypt they were so little disposed to quarrel, that they made a treaty with the Sultan under which they were assured a number of valuable privileges in the Egyptian markets. It was desirable tltcii that the Crus'ulcis should at all costs be headed off Egypt. A far more profitable objective from the Venetian angle was an expedition to overthrow Alexius III, the Greek Emperor who had been so unwise as to penalize the Venetian colony in Constantinople while lavishing privileges upon their hated riviils of Pisa. Fortunately tlie attack upon this Christian monarch, whicli was, in truth, but an extension of the com- mercial rivalry between two Italian cities, was capable of being represented in a specious guise to the simple minds of the Crusaders. Alexius III was vulnciablc. lie had imprisoned and blinded his brother Isaac Angclus, under whose negligent rule the Greek Empire had sunk to the last abyss of decrepitude. Tlic son of Isaac, called, like his usuiping uncle, Alexius, was on tour in the w^est, seeking to obtain suppoit for the restoration of his father. The young Byzantine piince had little difficulty in enlisting the sympathies of Philip of Swabia, the King of the Romans, and of Boniface of Montferrat, the chosen leader of the Crusade. It cost this enterprising youth nothing to make promises flattering at once to the avarice of the traveller and the piety of the pilgrim. He would distribute 200,000 Silver marks, would serve on crusade himself, supply 10,000 men for the reconquest of Palestine, and a perpetual force of 500 knights for the protection of the Christian establishments in the cast. Buoyed by such glittering expectations, the leaders fell in with

cnAnER xxni

THE FOURIH CRUSADE

Crusading policy of Innocent III. The Venetians divert the Crusade. Lattn conque\t of Constantinople. Weakness of the Latins. Rivalry between ( enice and Genoa. Opportunity for spreading Greek culture squandered. Decline in religious motives and theocratic ideas.

Nchhinc seems better to illustrate the limitations of papal power in the thirteenth century than the fare which befell the foreign policy of Innocent 111. The object closest to the heart of that gieat Pope was the rccotcry of the Holy Land by a Crusade launched and directed hy the Vicar of Christ. All tjuarrels were to be composed, all schisms ended. Tlie joint force ol the reunited Greek and Roman Churches was to he gathered together for the general overthrow of the Moslem power.

Of this ambitious progiamme, pursued throughout the whole course ol his poutiheate, nothing was accomplished. Europe was never united. The Holy Sepulchre leinained in pagan hands, and the gieat Crusade which was set on foot to recover it was against the Pope’s e.\ptcss injunction diverted hy the Venetians for the rapture of Constantinople. But peihaps the fact which is most striking is not that the snongest of the Popes faded to rcali/c his hopes of the Crusade, hut the obvious decline in the power of the religious motive which his failuie implied. “You advise me,” replied Richaid to Fulk de Neuilly, the promoter, of the Fourth Ciusade, “to di.smiss my three claughters, pride, avarice, and incontinence; I bequeath them to the most deserving: my pride to the Knights Templars; my avarice to the monks of Citeaux; and my incontinence to the pielates.” Neither Richard I of England nor Philip Augustus of France, nor the two contending Guelf and Ghihelline champions in Germany could be e.uiccd to exchange their domestic interests for this distant adventure. By a chapter of accidents the taaV of directing the course of the Ciusade lapsed to the Republic of Venice, upon whose good offices the valiant nobles of France and Flanders who had responded to the Pope’s appeal were dependent for their conveyance across the sea. The atmosphere

^ns FOURTH Clt0SA0B

of the Rialto was very different from that of the Vatican. The " Venetians, as the leading merchants of the Levant, had made too much money out of infidels actively to desire their destruc- tion, and to the religious indifference and avarice of trade united the pride of a republic which had freed itself from Byzantium and was little disposed to accept dictation from Rome. In the necessities of the Crusaders who were short of money for their passage Enrico Dandolo, the aged 'doge, de- scried a prospect of more than ordinary advantage to his fellow-citizens.

The first idea of the Crusaders was to attack Egypt, from the conquest of which, seeing that it was the centre of Moslem power in the near east, the recapture of Palestine could be ex- pected to ensue. The Venetians, however, thought otherwise. With Egypt they were so little disposed to quarrel, that they made a treaty with the Sultan under which they were assured a number of valuable privileges in the Egyptian markets. If was desirable then that the Crusaders should at all costs be headed off Egypt. A far more profitable objective from the Venetian angle was an expedition to overthrow Alexius III, the Greek Emperor who had been so unwise as to penalize the Venetian colony in Constantinople while lavishing jirivileges upon their hated rivals of Pisa. Fortunately the attack upon this Christian monarch, which w^as, in truth, but an extension of the com- meicial rivalry between twx) Italian cities, was capable of being represented in a spedou*^ guise to the simple minds of the Crusaders. Alexius III was vulnciable. lie had imprisoned and blinded liis brother Isaac Angelus, under whose negligent rule the Greek Empire had sunk to the last abyss of decrepitude. The son of Isaac, called, like his usurping uncle, Alexius, was on tour in tlie wrest, seeking to obtain support for the restoration of his father. The young Byzantine prince had little difficulty in enlisting the sympathies of Philip of Swabia, the King of the Romans, and of Boniface of Montferrat, the chosen leader of the Crusade. It cost this enterprising youth nothing to make promises flattering at once to the avarice of the traveller and the piety of the pilgrim. He would distribute 200,000 silver marks, would serve on crusade himself, supply 10,000 men for the reconquest of Palestine, and a perpetual force of 500 knights for the protection of the Christian establishments in the cast. Buoyed by such glittering expectations, the leaders fell in with

a68 A HisTbRY or europe

the Venetian scheme and resolved to dethrone the offending Emperor.

At first everything prospered for the imposing Venetian armada in the Bosphorus. Constantinople was taken, the cowardly Alexius found safety in flight, and Isaac and his son were solemnly crowned. Tlie first objective of the Crusaders hav- ing been thus secuied, it might seem that they should now have been free to accomplish the real purpose of tlieir enterprise. But the expectation that the Greeks would rally round two piinccs, the one blind and incompetent, the other the reckless author of his country’s recent humiliation, and both elevated to power by a hateful and insolent enemy, was too wild to lie realized. A fierce rebellion broke out against the Larins and their proteges. A second siege of Constantino})lc was followed t904 by a second captuie, and fiom that moment the foundation of some kind of Latin state on the Bosphorus became in- evitable.

Had it been possible to impait to the new polity something of the concentrated vigour which England and Sicily received from their Norman conquerors, the mam purpose of the Crusade might still have been achie\cd

But the Latin masteis of Constantinople were as little capable of promoting the papal policy as the effeminate Greeks whom they had so violently di<^placed Weak in numbers, divided among themselves, hard picssed by the Bulgarians and by a Greek despot ot Epnus in Europe, and confronted in Asia Minor not only by the Moslem power of the Sultan of Rum, but by the Gteck states of Nicaea and Ticbizond, the Latins of Constantinople, so far from being able to contiibute to the rescue of Palestine, weic only with great exertion enabled to maintain a piecarioiis existence in the crumbling shell of the Greek Empire. Forces which might otheiwise have been directed to Syria were rcquiied for, the support of this new and unsteady creation. So perilous wa^ the position that in 1209 Henry of Flanders, the second Latin Emperor of the east, allied himself with the Moslems of Rum against the Greeks of Nicaea.

Slender, too, was the satisfaction to be derived from the so- called union of the Greek and Latin Churches. That a Venetian nobleman should be Patriarch of Constantinople and that the Latin rite should be celebrated in Santa Sophia ministered to

THB rOUBTH CEUSADS 269

the pride of the Roman Curia. But there was no real reconcilia- tion. The Archbishop of Athens and the principal Greek pre- lates, rather than acknowledge the Pope, surrendered their sees and fled to the welcoming court of Theodore Lascaris at Nicaea. From that not very distant exile the leaders of the Orthodox Church sustained the courage, the bigotry, and the hatred of their co-rcligionists.

The substantial profits of the enterprise w^ere reaped by Venice, its chief artificer. In the division of the spoils the Republic of St. Mark received thiee-eighths of the city of Con- stantinople and there set up side by side with the much har- assed administration a commercial establishment extending its filaments throughout Romania,^ and governed by a podesta who described himself as despot and lord of a fourth and a half of the Empire. All the impoitant maritime points which commanded the route to the Crimea in the north or to Egypt in the south, Zante and Ccphalonia, the ports of Modon and Coron in the Morca, the Cyclades, Gallipoli, Crete fell by degrees into the hands of the Republic or of its adventurous nobles. The voyager among the isles of Greece may still admire the imposing fortifications wliich commemorate the harsh and soulless government ol Venice, the first colonial power to establish itself in Einopc dining the middle ages.

Indeed, the key to tlic history of the Levant is the contest of lival Italian cities tor commercial ascendancy, for as the Latin Empire was made by the Venetians, so nearly fifty years later, for motives of the same strictly commercial character, it was upset by a Greek restoration relying on the indispensable help of their rivals the Genoese.

Not a single Greek manuscript is known to have been brought to Europe as a consequence of the Latin occupation of Con- stantinople and Athens, of Corinth and of Thebes. It would never have occurred to a Crusader, any moie than it occurs to the modern Turk, that there is something to be learned from the literature of ancient Greece. A wonderful opportunity was there- fore lost of opening out for the instruction of the west the splen- did remains of Hellenic poetry and thought, and though some scattered rays of that great illumination penetrated to Europe during the thirteenth century they came not from Greece, but by the helpful mediation of the Arabs in Spain.

• As the Eastern Empire was then commonly called.

270 A HT8TORT OF SUROPS

There is nothing so easy to follow as a bad example. Tb» capture of the Fourth Crusade by the Venetians familiarized Europe with tlie idea that Crusades could be launched against a Christian and European power as well as against an Asiatic infidel. The seductive notion made rapid progicss. The Sara* ccns of Palestine and Egypt were not the only enemies who dis- turbed the peace of Innocent III. That active pontifE had theo- logical enemies like the heathen Piussians, the Spanish Arabs, the heretical Albigenses, and he had also secular enemies like King John of England, who had lefuscd to accept Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury. Again*»t all these oppo- nents of Roman theocracy Innocent found it convenient to preach a Crusade. Had the laws of currency been familiar to the thirteenth centuiy, so astute a statesman can hardly have refrained lioin leflccting that indulgences, like bank-notes, may be over-issued and that no paper piomise is apt more rapidly to depreciate than that of which theie is an unlimited supply.

One thing was plain. Europe was not prepared to accept a theocracy. The trend of events was towaids the making of national states, not towaids the acceptance of a papal super- state. The great French vicloiy of Boutines (July 27, 1214) which enabled Innorent to crush Otto IV, the Guelf who had turned Ghibcllinc, helped to consolidate the national state of France, and since at the same time it loiled John's ingenious plan for the reco\eiy of his lost French dominions, W’as good for the coustiuitional piogress of England. To outward seeming the Pope had triumphed in his last duel with a hostile Emperor. Otto was down, renounced by Germany, routed by France. On his German throne was now seated that young Fiederick of Hohenstaufen, who had been the Pope’s ward, and tiom w'hom Innocent had lately exii acted those laigc cont» sslons with respect to the go\einment of the German Church and the separate posi- tion of Sicily which he was wont to demand from candidates for the imperial thione. Yet beneath this brilliant surface there was muttering, challenge, uncertainty. There w^cie Germans who asked what business the Pope had to intcifcre in their concerns. There were Englishmen who, de^-pite the Pope's support of the versatile King John, were determined to defend their great charter; and there were Ficnchmcn who, notwithstanding the recent affair of Bouvines, were prepared to help them. Finally,

tJBK FabftTtt CKU8ADE 271

there wa$ the enigma of Frederick, master of Germany and Shaly, heir to the Norman and Ghibelline tradition. Despite all his paper promises, was it possible to believe that this half- Sicilian prince would act as a Guelf? The answer to this question was prompt, decisive, and important.

BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED Cambtidge Mediaeval IINtory, Vol. VI.

G, de Villehni douin: La Conquetc de Constantinople, Ed, Bouchet. 2 vols., i8qi.

L. Br<^hier: L’figlise et TOrient au Mo}cn Age. 1907.

A. Luchaire: Innocent III. 1005-8.

W. Miller: The Latins in tlie Levant. iqoS.

E. Peais; The Fall of Constantinople. 1885.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE FALL OF THE HOIIENSTAUFEN

Frederick U. His greatness and influence. Opposed by Gregory IX and Innocent IV. Goes on crusade, llis Stciltan government and anti- papal propaganda. Deposed by Innocent IV. His dynasty destroyed. Consequences of the struggle. The interregnum in Germany. Loss of prestige to the Papacy, lioniface VIIJ chcdkuges France and England. The Papacy destroys the Hohenstaufen only to become the captive of France.

From the cloud of contemporary detraction, the figure of Frederick II, the last of the mediaeval emperors, emerges tem- peramental and challenging, to a point of dazzling eminence. He was fluent in six languages, a lyric poet in the warm Sicilian manner, a munificent patron of architecture, sculpture, and learning, a skilful soldier, a statesman of infinite subtlety and resource but also of much careless hardihood. A passionate in- tellectual eagerness carried him into the fields of philosophy and astrology, of geometry and algebra, of medicine and natural history. He wrote a treatise on hawking, which marks the begin- ning of experimental science in the west, and travelled in the company of an elephant, dromedaries, and other arresting fauna from the tropics. The traditional inhibitions of his age, so strong in St. Louis, were no fettets for a man who had been nurtured amid the cl.tsh of race and creed in Sicily and could use and appreciate the Saracen and the Jew, though to gain political sup- port he tvould burn a heretic as freely as a Dominican friar. The world marvelled at a prince who talked Arabic with his Saracens, supported a numerous harem, and was so detached from popular prejudice as to challenge the common Ijelicf in the ritual murder of children by the Jewish community. Had he not, it was rumoured, written a book entitled De Trihus Im- postoribus, in which Moses, Mohammed, and Christ were branded as imposiois? There was something uncanny in the prodigious energy of this realist in politics, this exquisite in art, this half-oriental at once mystical and sceptical, this daring revo- lutionary in method and opinion. His contemporaries called hitn the Wonder of the World, and so despite the lapse of centuries he remains.

37a

THE FALL OF THE HOHENSTAUFEK ayS

Yet among the great men of history he is peculiar in this — that he belongs nowhere. Barbarossa means much to Germany* Sl Louis and Napoleon to France, Simon de Montfort to Eng- land. No nation can rightly claim Frederick as part of its in- heritance, neither Germany, though the instrument which founds German power among the heathen Prussians dates from his reign (1229), nor Sicily, though he chased the Moslems from the island. His work was undone, his dynasty uprooted. The greatest single human force in the middle ages passes in and out of history like a comet which shines and is gone. Only perhaps in the sphere of literature was his influence of enduring importance. Pro- vencal troubadours fleeing from religious peisecution found wel- come in the toleiant court of Palermo and fired the emulation of Sicilian artists. Descending fiom the poetic circle which sur- rounded the poet king a lill of delicate Sicilian verse broadens out and deepens, and gaining richness fiom the Tuscan speech in its noithwaid course, swells into the solemn music of the Divine Comedy.

The source of this comparative failure is to be found in the opposition of two rcmaikable Popes, Gregory IX and Innocent IV, the first a fiery zealot, the second a Genoese noble, learned in canon law, skilled in finance, and in the fierce excitements of conflict unbiiidcned by scruple. The object of Frederick was to make of Italy and Sicily a united kingdom within the Empire. The settled purpose of the Papacy, supported by a revived and enlaiged league of Lombaid towns, wms to frustrate this design. In tlie end the Papacy won the battle. The man was defeated by the institution, and with him passed away the last chance of an cflectivc Roman Ernpiie in central Europe or for many centuries of a united Italian kingdom.

The quarrel first broke out over a crusade whi«^h Frederick had in the enthusiasm of youth vowed to undertake, but re- peatedly posiponcd. To the modern mind it seems strange that a young lulcr, retuining after an absence to a state disordered by a long minoiity, should be expected at once to depart upon a costly expedition ovciscas. So too it appeared to Frederick. Only after he had organized government in Sicily, brofight Saracens, nobles, and cities to heel and founded the State Uni- versity of Naples did he set sail for Palestine. He had already been excommunicated by Gregory IX for his delays. He was now excommunicated for his departure (1228). A crusade was even

^74 A KISTORY 09 SUROPS

preached against the Crusader in his absence. He returned to the black displeasure of the Church. Yet what he accomplished, despite the papal opposition which was carried from Italy into Syria, was remarkable. Without waste of time, treasure, or blood, this most lukewarm but clear-sighted Crusader obtained from his friend, the Sultan, a treaty according to Christian pilgrims free access to the Holy Places for ten years. Such are the fruits of statesmanship when humanity and good sense are allowed tor a moment to replace the blind fury of religious and racial hatred.

What Frederick had to offer to Italy was a cultivated and intelligent despotism on the model which he had succeeded in establishing in his Sicilian regno. There he had taken full control of criminal justice, had curtailed the liberties of the nobles, the cleigy, and the towns, and built up a royal system of government only to he paralleled in Angevin England. In both couniiies theie was the same concentration of power, the same efficient oigan for the collection of taxes, the same system of itinerant royal judges, the same salutary intermixture of classes in the tasks of government. Indeed, the parliaments or general couits of Frederick II, with their lepreseniation of nobles, clergy, and townsmen, anticipate the later parliamentary de- velopment in England. But there was one significant difference bet\^een the two best governed states of the thirteenth century. Whcieas the power of the English king rested in the last resort upon the suppoit of a native militia, Frederick relied upon a standing army of Saracen and German mercenaries.

But in the passionate atmosphere of the Italian struggle the merits of this higher iorni of government were never appraised. The Lombaid cities saw' in Frederick the enemy of their libeities; the Pope viewed him as an apostate bent on undermining the authoiity of the Church. The Lombaids had to be fought with an army. Against the Pope it was necessary to be equipped with a doctrine. The counsels of the Roman lawyer were reinforced by the dt earns of the visionary and the astrologer. With true political instinct Fii.derick divined that to combat the material and woildly pretensions of the Papacy an instrument lay ready to his hand in the Franciscan doctrine of poverty. “It is upon poverty and simplicity,” wrote this luxurious and intricate con- troversialist in 1227, “that the primitive Church was built in those days wdien he was the fruitful mother of saints. No one

< klLLJai

THE FAXt 01^ Tmm tfOHSNETAUFEN ^7S

may presume to lay other foundations for men than those appointed by the Lord Jesus.” As the contest proceeded, becom- ing fiercer and more bitter, with the Emperor capturing a General Council, and the Pope plotting, as was believed, the Emperor’s murder, Frederick threw out dark hints of a new and better imperial Church to replace the corruptions of Rome. Was it nothing that he had been born at a town called Jesi, and was not his chief minister, Pierre de la Vigiie, the true rock, fore- figured in Scripture, upon which the Chinch of the Christ was to be built? The idea of a mendicant Chuich governed by an autocratic Empire was not one to appeal to the mediaeval mind- From his retreat in Lyons, Innocent deposed his antagonist and offered his crown with a patient and inveterate hatred to Robert of France, to a prince of Denmark, to Ilakoii of Nor- way, and ultimately to Henry of Thuringia and William of Holland.

The Hohenstaufen name still counted for much in Germany. Despile the activity of papal agents, the German princes and clergy, sw’eetened by concessions so la\ish as to consort ill with the effective maintenance of loyal power, remained loyal to the house and to the two young princes, Henry and Conrad, who were successively called upon to govern for their absent father. When the worthless Henry ichelled, Fredciick had the main part of the country behind him in leducing the rebel to order. Even after the Council of Lyons in 1245 had solemnly de- posed him, only a section of the German Church was induced to supj)ort the pupal candidates, Hcniy of Thuringia and William of Holland, who w'crc in turn put forward and elected kings.

The struggle was still proceeding when Frederick died in 12^0, leaving behind Inin a reputation as great and as controversial as Napoleon’s. To the Fraticclli the hammer of the Roman Church ” was a hero. By these ardent and revolutionary dis- ciples of St. Francis, the great Emperor was remembered not as the luxurious halt-oriental sovereign whose cause was supported by Saracen mercenaries in the south and wicked Italian despots in the north, not as tlie sceptic, the astrologer, the passionate love poet, but as the protagonist of a return to primitive Christianity. To the more orthodox he was Antichrist. Dante consigns him, alone among the Roman Emperors, to tlic pit of helL

a76 A uisToKk of Europe

Nobody can outstrip his contemporaries at every point Frederick, the most modem and wide-ranging of mediaeval sovereigns, was both in material resources and intellectual out- look the prisoner of his age. His largest army, which was smaller than a modern British division, was ill-matched against any well-defended Lombard town. Faenza, a city of the second class, defied him for eight months, Milan effectually spoiled his design for a united Italy. With pietensions which acknowledged no geographical boundaries, and with interests so wide that he has been called the first European, he was nevertheless unable to master even the Lombard plain. Again, though qualities belonged to him which in any age arc remarkable — an immunity from the prejudices of colour and race, which puts most moderns to shame, an inexhaustible curiosity as to the operations of nature, and a strong sense of causality in the affairs of men — he combined with these lational promptings the superstitions com- mon to his lime, a blind belief in the orat les of astrology, an un- due dcfeicnce to the voice of sages, and an inabilitv to distinguish between the type of question which can or can not admit of a precise scientific answer. I'hus while some of Frederick’s ques- tions led to the discovery of truth, others could only be answered by an imaginati\e religious poet. *‘IIow many Hells are there? Who arc the spirits who dwell in them? And by wdiat names are they called? Where is Hell, and Purgatory whcic? Does one soul know another in the next life? And can a soul return to this life to speak and show itself to anyone?” To such question- ings Dante was later to offer a confident reply.

Eighteen years elapse between the death of Frederick “ Stupor Mundi ” and the extinction of his dynasty through the cruel 1^68 muicicr of his young grandson Coniadin afiei the field of Taglia- cozzo. During this tormented period the fierce duel between Guelf and Ghibelline continued to rage through Italy, dividing cities, classes, and families, but always dominated by the stern purpose of the Papacy to destroy the Hohenstaiifen and to avert for ever the menace which such a power as thciis presented to the free expansioL of the papal state. It is significant of the strength of Sicily under Manfred, Frederick s bastard son, and of the divided state of Italian feeling, that ihe Papacy was com- pelled to rely upon the foreigner for the means of bringing the 126/ ^ successful end. After two papal armies, financed by

English money, had failed. Urban IV, the first Frenchman to

THB FALL OF THS UMOBEN STAUFE N E77

sit upon the papal throne, offered the Sicilian crown to Charles of Anjou, the younger brother of Louis IX. To that wealthy and ambitious prince the Sicilian kingdom was attractive not only for itself, but as a stepping-stone to the conquest of the Greek Empire. Under Clement IV, yet another French Pope, the con- tract was scaled, with the result that a French army, superior in skill, discipline, and leadership to the levies which Manfred and later Conradin were able to bring against it, secured for the Papacy its final triumph, for the Guelf party a clear ascendancy, and for Charles of Anjou the Sicilian throne.

The effects of tliis long struggle may now be biicfly summar- ized. Italy was lost to the Empire. The splendid civilization of Norman Sicily, which had been one of the glories of Europe, was destroyed by the Fiench tyranny of Charles of Anjou, by a tyranny so odious and penetrating that it led to the terrible insurrection known as the Sicilian Vespers and afterwards to ^jijarch the severance of the island from the French kingdom of Naples 30) and to its progressive decline in the scale of political influence.

The French troops who had been called in by the Papacy to give the final blow to the Ilohenstaufcn drove the German mer- cenaries and officials, upon whom the imperial system had been supported in Italy, north of the Alps; but though this was a real service, the cause of popular liberty was not thereby advanced.

Out of the incessant warfare which was at once the plague, the amusement, and the occupation of Italy, there arose that peculiar feature of Italian life, the civic despotism, often cruel and oppres- sive, but often distinguished for an enlightened patronage of literature and art.

German unity was gone past recall. The long absences of the Emperor Frederick, the lavish concessions which he had been compelled to make in 1220 and in 1231 to the prirces, lay and ecclesiastical, and finally the fmioiis civil war stirred up by the Pope which had darkened the concluding years of his reign, precluded the hope of any effective restoration of imperial authority in Germany. How little concern was now felt by the German princes for the Empire as an instrument of German government was showm after the murder of William of Holland in 1256. By a train of circumstances, which is still not entirely clear, the choice of the King of the Romans had now become vested in a college of seven electors, three ecclesiastics, and four laymen. To these cynical dignitaries no qualities were more

%j8 A nisTdTiir OT eueops

desirable in a candidate for the Roman crown than that he should be a rich and negligent foreign absentee, knowing the value of a German vote, and able and willing to pay the price, Ihe electors were divided, the majority deriding for Richard of Cornwall, the wealthiest man in England, the minority for Alfonso of Castile, the grandson, through his mother, of Philip of Swabia, and the favourite of France and the Papacy. Each of these princes was by his supporters declared to be duly elected as King of the Romans. Of the Englishman it may at least be said that his bribes were handsome, that he spent his money like an open-handed prince of w'hom much was expected, and that he made himself welcome among the Rhenish cities. The Castilian was wisely persuaded to remain in Castile. What the election proves is tlie fixed determination of the German princes to have no strong king over them and to treat the greatest piece of secular patronage in Europe as an occasion of private gain and international intrigue.

The terrible anarchy which pievailed in the land under the phantom rule of this English absentee might have been ex- pected to suggest some doubts as to whether the real interests of Germany were served by its costly association wmh the Holy Roman Empire, When Richard of Cf>rnwall died in 1271 it was open to the (Jermans to bring the Empii e to an end and to attempt to found upon the model of their Ficnch and English neighbours a strong German state, llie conservatism, the pride, the self- interest of the electors stood in the way. The question of ending tlic Empire tvas nor even raised. After two kingless years the choice of the electors fell upon Rudolf of Ilabsburg, a Swiss nobleman from the Aargau, adjudged to be harmless but des- tined to be the founder of that famous house to w^hose mistakes in policy the Prussian critic ascribes the severance of Holland and Switzerland from tlie German Reich, the catastrophe of the Thirty Years’ War and the outbrctak of the great struggle of our own century wdiich brought the Prussian and Austrian Empires to the ground.

In this dark an«< distracted period of German history there arc only two points of bright light, the town leagues formed on the Rhine for the preservation of peace and on the Baltic for the promotion of trade, and the steady advance of German civilization eastward into Silesia, Bohemia, and at the expense of the rude and primitive Prussian race.

rnn P 4 kt% or itn% HOiiENdTAVPSK 279

The papal victory had been won at a cost. Forced payments in support of international institutions, however valuable they may be. are always unpopular. If the problem of financing the regular work of the Papacy was grave, far more invidious was the task of procuring the resources necessary to the conduct of a papal war. Innocent IV shrank from no expedient likely to suggest itself to the rancorous fiscality of a hard-headed Genoese. To purchase influence he filled English benefices with Italian absentees and pliiralisrs. To obtain money he laid crush- ing burdens on the clergy of England and France. In the pages of Matthew Paris, one of the best and most vigorous of English chroniclers, it is possible to trace the rising tide of indigi'iation which these unprincipled extoitions piovokcd in the land of all others famed for its obedience to the Holy See. Even Louis of France, whose country was more gently treated, reminded the Pope in a grave letter of piotcst that “ he who squeezes too hard draws blood.” The English clergy appealed in 1246 to a General Council. Though the plenitude of the papal power was still un- disputed, the old spirit of affection and reverence had given place to anger and mistrust.

Hildehrandine thunders no longer wwked the old miracle. When they were repeated by Boniface VlTI, in whom the pur- suit of lainily advantage was so flagiant that he actually preached a ciiisade against the Colonna, his piivate enemies, the Pope met with stern and immediate icsi stance in England and France. Neither Edward I not Philip the Fair would for a moment listen to the doctrine that a king was not entitled to levy a tax upon his c Icigy beyond the feudal aids (Clericis Laico^), or that it was ncccssaiy for salvation that he should be subject to the Pope. Each sovereign, in the most drastic manner avail- able to him, made it clear that he was resolved to be master in his own house, and in this resolve was supported by his people. Even when Philip the Fair, in a transport of exaspera- tion, sent his agent Nogarct to Rome, to kidnap the fiery old Pope and to bring him a prisonei to France, not a murmur of protest was heard from the subjects of the most Christian King. Six years later (1309) the Gascon Bertrand de Got, better known as Clement V, having through French influence been elected to the Papacy, set up his residence in Avignon and in- augurated the shameful chapter in papal history during which the Popes moved to the order of the King of Fiance.

S4

1201

J303

A HISTORY OR fcOROPE

280

BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED

Knntorowicz: Fiederirk the Second. Tr. E. O. Lorimer. 1931. Huillard Br^holles: Historia Diplomatica Frederici Secundi. 185261, T. S. R. Boase: Boniface VIII 1Q33.

E. Boutaric: La Frame sou$ de Philippe le Bel. 1801.

CHAPTER XXV

THE CAraOLIC MIND

St. Augustine, Stger of Brabant, Albert the Great, Aquinas. Dante,

At the beginning of the thirteenth century the fabric ot Christian belief in the west still retained the mould which it had received fiom the mind of St. Augustine. The City of God stood out sharply against the city of man, eternity against time, peifection against sin. The piiesthood alone, while performing the miracle of their priestly function, paiticipated in the blessed- ness of the angels, but as the century advanced, new intel- lectual and spiritual movements made themselves felt. Men of very different temper and intellect began to feel that the sharp contrasts ol the great African father might not after all be .so absolute, that even to fallen man it might be given to reach per- fection on earth, that the spirit was more important than outward institutions, and faith and intellect than the sacraments or formu- laries of the Church. Had not Joachim ol Flora, the Calabrian visionatv (dted 1202), ptoclaitned that the final stage of the world histoiy was soon to open, when the Papal Church, which l>elongcd to the age of the Son, would give way to the Spiritual Church, which belonged to the age of the Holy Ghost, when popes, priests, and sacraments would be unnecessary, and the Holy Spirit would fill every heart? Such dreams, in the enthusiasm created by the Franciscan movement, ran through Italy, inspiimg among the Fiaticclli the widest and most pas- sionate hopes.

Philosophers, trav'clling by a different route, were reaching conclusions equally perilous to the sacei dotal order. Aristotle, now for the first time fully known and closely studied in thew'est, had become the serious concern of the University of Paris — Aristotle, who believed in everlasting time and uncreated mind, and in a divine intelligence working in man — and so we have eager Aristotelians like Siger of Brabant and his school main- taining such bold propositions as that the human intellect is etcinal and the source of such perfection as is permitted to man,

aSi

^S2 A HISTORY OF bOroPS

and that '* a man directed to understanding is entirely disposed to eternal bliss,”

These doctrines^ the one of the self-sufficiency of individual faith, the other of the self-sufficiency of tlie individual intellect, struck hard at the heart of papal authority and discipline. Both were overcome by the forces of orthodoxy. The spiritualism of the Fraticelli, the metaphysics and psychology of Aristotle, were caught and harnessed to the chariot of the Church. But because the crisis was eventually mastered, because the doctors of Paris (1277) condemned the speculations of Siger, and because theologians were prepared to show that Aristotle was compat- ible with the Faith, it must not be imagined that the great opening out and agitation of the human mind which marks the thirteenth century was a matter of secondary consequence. The crisis was grave. Tlie intellect of Europe was on tl)C march. The tender conscience of spiritually minded men was stirred. Papal authority had not as yet been so sharply challenged. Many of the antecedents of the Reformation were already visible. If the Hundred Years’ War had not supervened, arresting the de- velopment of the European mind and throwing back the progress of culture in the most advanced countries of the west, the forces making lor freedom in education and politics would have captured new frontiers in the line of their advance.

At the critical moment Albert of Cologne (1193-1280) and his pupil, Thomas of Aquino (1226-1274), threw their massive in- tellects into the Catholic scale. These two Dominicans, the first a German, the second a South Italian, profited by the intellectual excitement created by the recovery of the physical and meta- physical works of Aristotle to biiilcl round the Calliolic Church a powerful philosophic defence. The German was a vast encyclopaedia of knowledge, dominating by its mass. The Italian had a keener edge, a closer grip, a clearer method. Both wel- comed the new knowledge, both* believed that the essentially expciimental philosophy of the pagan thinker could be recon- ciled with the cardinal doctrines of their Church. The w^eighty learning of the one, the close argumentation of the other, the vigorous orthodoxy and high character of each, impressed their thoughtful contemporaries. The intellect of the west capitulated to their combined attack.

In that age it was not expected of a philosopher that he

>rtrT««AT-ifOt.te miwd

»«3

should approach the acc^ted doctrines of the Church with an open mind. Aquinas maintained that since faith and reason were both gifts of God, they must necessarily agree. The truths of revelation might transcend reason but could not contradict it. Faith was the assent of the intelligence at the bidding of the will to propositions which were seen to be possible and good to believe. Of the body of truth contained in revelation, truth in- accessible to reason but not incompatible with it, part only had been committed to writing. The remainder had been handed dotvn by the Apostles, at the intimate prompting o£ the Holy Ghost, for the observance of the Church. By these unwritten apostolic precepts many a practice lacking scriptural authority, such as the worship of images, was justified. Nothing, then, which in the popular beliefs of that day was held to be ortho- dox awoke the rational misgivings of St. Thomas, neither the doctrine of transiibst an nation, since a rational account could be given of the miracle, nor the eternal torments of the damned, for so did God cause the angels and saints to rejoice as they contemplated His justice and realized the evils which they had escaped. The grim doctrine of a fiery and everlasting punish- ment handed down from the Jews of the first century had lost none of its popular appeal with the lapse of time.

It was cardinal with Sr. Thomas that the possession of the true faith was necessary for salvation. Extia ecclcsiam nulla salu,s. Salvation was neither for the unhaptized nor yet, save after confession and absolution by a lawfully ordained priest, for mortal sinners. The drunkard out of reach of the ministra- tions of the Ghurch suffered the anguish of everlasting flame. Yet all was not thus dark and terrible in the religious landscape which presented itself to the mind of this laborious Friar. Visions of radiant beauty, forms of flawless saintliness and vir- tue, shone out amid the gloom and attested the goodness of the Creator. Prefigured in Aristotle’s distinction of form and matter were the angels. On these consoling objects of philosophical speculation “ the Angelical doctor ” disserted with eager and enjoying prolixity.^

The third great figure in the Catholic firmament was a poet. Italy during the lifetime of Aquinas was in the throes of the political convulsion which tore the Hohenstaufen dynasty from its roots and led to the establishment under papal patronage

• See Appendix, p. 425.

A lIlSTOitr OF EUROFB

284

of the Angevin house in Naples and Sicily. In that fierce struggle Florence, then a city of some 30,000 souls, and noted for its craftsmanship and advanced democratic feeling, espoused the papal side, expelled its Chibelline or imperialist nobles, and after some sharp changes of fortune passed under the control of the Guelfic or papal party. The harmony of the victors was of no long duration. A personal feud imported from Pistoia clove the Guclfs into rival factions. There were White Guclfs and Black Guelfs.

That the Blacks eventually triumphed over the Whites with the help of the Papacy and the French is a matter only to be remembered because among many victims who were driven into exile by reason of that victory was the great figure of Dante Alighieri.

Dante, who was then thiity-six, was aheady the author of a body of Italian lyrics, which marked him out as a poet ot original genius. He had written the Can7onicre and com- memorated his burning passion for Beatrice in the Vita Nuova. He had also mingled with chaiacteristic vehemence and seriousness in the political feuds of the city and as one of the Pnors of the Aits had home a pait in its government. His neigh- bours might note a man proud, reserved, studious, patriotic, and, since 1290 when Beatrice died, bring under the shadow of a settled grief.

Exile delivered him from the clutch of Florentine politics and liberated his mind for continuous meditation. His reading was voracious and piofound. Tlie romances of chivalry and the lyrics of Provence, while they enchanted his im igination, failed to satisfy his deeper needs. He absorbed the philosophy of Aquinas, the histoiy of Oiosius, the astronomy ot Ptolemy, the epics of Viigil and Statius. On problems of style, language, and metre he wrote more sense than anyone since the clays of Horace and Quintilian, making himself the responsible cham- pion of Italian as a literary language superior to Provcnt^al, and deserving the encouragement of all men of patriotic will. In a passage of the l)c Vulgari Eloquentia, which has often been on the lips of Italian patriots, he urged that because Italy lacked a king she was not necessarily without a court. Her language was a kingdom in itself. Four centuries and more before Dr. Johnson, the bold truth was proclaimed that the greatness of a country depends upon its authors.

THB CATHOLIC MIND 985

The Divina Commedia, the religious epic which Dante called a comedy mainly by reason of its style, but in part also for its happy ending, was perhaps suggested by the lovely pas- sage of the Sixth Book of the Aeneid in which Virgil recounts tJtie appearance of Dido to Aeneas as he moves through the underworld of shades. Dante, too, would see his love again. Beatrice would meet him in Paradise, and there, typifying divine theology, explain the hidden mysteries of God. To reach her he would descend to the nethermost pit of Hell and climb to the summit of Purgatory, guided in these two first stages of his visionary pilgrimage by Virgil, his master in poetry, and the supreme patiem, as it seemed to the men ol that age, of earthly understanding.

Dante is not, then, the first, but is tlie most remarkable in that long list of apocalyptic writers (among whom Biinyan mu*?t be mentioned) who thiongh the allegory of an imaginary voyage or vision have attempted to depict the destiny of the soul. The Divine Comedy owes much to the Dieam of Scipio and to the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, but the theme of a descent into the nether w»oild was neither oiiginal with Virgil nor was it piincipalJy confined to wiitcrs of pagan antiquity. There w'as aKGrTa7:?<7o-/9 of lleiarles and a of Orpheus

as wxll as that KardfSacri^ of Ody'^^eus upon wiiich the descent of Aeneas was modelled. On the Chiislian side the Pastor of IJcrmas, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Pistis Sophia, all of them belonging to the second century, exhibit, though with very notable diffei cnees, the same root ol devotional enquiry into the mysteiies of the future life which lies at the base of the Divine Comedy. The visions of the later middle age, such as the Visio Wettini in 824, the Vision of Alheric ol Monte Cassino in 1107, and of tlie Monk of Evesham in 1196, arc sufficiently numerous and widespread to dispel the notion that there is anything original in the ground itica of the Divine Comedy. The oiiginality of the Divine Comedy docs not consist in its apocalyptic character but in its genius, in the beauty of its language, the technique of its metre, the depth of its thought, the range and glow of its imagination. Of' the mediaeval apocalyptic writers Dante alone was to any appreci- able degree influenced by Virgil, and it is this fusion of the Virgilian spirit with mediaeval apocalyptic which, informing as it does the whole poem with a tenderness and humanity (not

ft86

A aiSTOftT OF ftUROPS

to speak o£ the learning) quite alien to the outpourings of the modish visionary, gives to the Commcdia its unique place in literary history.

Like all writers of the mediaeval period, Dante draws no clear line between ancient mythology and true history. Charon and Achilles, Tiresias and Nimrod, are to him as real as Cavalcanti, Virgil, or St. Francis; the miracles recorded by Livy and Lucan arc true evidence that the work of the Roman Empire was divinely assisted. Ancient poetry was not history to be dissected but mystery to be divined. lie conceived that allegory was a necessary quality of gieat poetry, or in Boccaccio's words that

poetical creations are not vain and simple marvels, as many blockheads suppose, but that beneath them are hidden the sweetest fruits of historical and philosophical truth, so that the conceptions of the poets cannot be fully undei stood without history and moral and natural philosophy."

This allegorizing and uncritical tendency makes much of Dante’s epic remote and obscure to ik.

The poet was without humour. Part of a famous speech delivered by Beatrice to Dante in the paiadisal moon runs thus:

"If you take three mirrors and put two of them at an even distance from the eyes and the third is placed between the two others just at a little gieater distance, and you wdll place a candle behind you, you will see that if the largeness oi the light reflected by these thiee mirrors is not the same, the intensity is.”

Now this passage, the versification of which is a wonderful piece of dexterity, is pure prose. No modern poet would dream of introducing a chilly slab of scientific lectuiing into the body of a passionate and mystical poem. But all through his poem, and more especially \n the Paradiso, Dante docs this frequently.

But if there is prose in the Divine Comedy, as there is violence, obscenity, and gtotesqueness, there is no feebleness. Dante is never lax and talkative. He may be drv, tedious, diffi- cult; it w'ill never occur to the critic to describe him as pompous or veibosc. The dulness of Dante is not due to a spell of intel- lectual fatigue, a mood of listless inattention, or to decay of interest, but always to the homiletic quality of a mind which

CAT^OUC MIND iSy

sometimes found its lessons in difficult allegory, and sometimes in |at*^fetched interpretations of acted life. And it is a sufficient proof of this proposition that there is no part of the Commedia which has not tor some quality or other attracted the admiration of good judges.

"lie was bom,” says Ruskin (" Stones of Venice,” ix, 175), "both in the couniiy and at the time which furnished the most stern opposition of honor and beauty and permitted it to be written in the cleaicst lines. And there! ore though there are passages in the ‘Infcino* which it would be impossible for any poet now to wiite, 1 look upon it as all the more perfect for them . . . and therefore I think that the 21st and 22nd book of the ‘Inferno* are the most perfect poitraituies of the fiendish nature which we possess.**

Among mediaeval poets Dante stands closest to Virgil for the delicacy and minuteness of his obsertaiion. 1 he siorm crashing tlirough the foicst, the frogs slipping into the water from the snake, the lizard which ciosses the road like a flash of lightning, the fiteflics seen by the peasant in the gloaming, the old cobbler narrowly eyeing his needle, the boxers, their bare bodies gleam- ing with oil as they stand w^atching one another for their point of vantage, the duck dipping to escape the falcon, the mother who cliiK hes licr child on the alarm of fne, the gamesters ciowd- ing round th< winnei — luie are pictuics painted fiesh from the life. And it is to the fiogs, cranes, lizaids, ducks, and falcons, to the sheen of lish gliding to their food in a tank of pure and still water, to the peasant who liscs grumbling in a hoar frost, and then a few' hours later when the world has changed its face» takes his ciook and leads his flocks afield, it is to such pictures of the unobtrusive aspects of Italian countiy life only to be paralleled in Viigil that the poetical posterity of Dante owes its principal debt. He showed that no piece of real nature, if strictly observed, is alien to the making of poetry.

In common with Oiosius, his master in history, Dante held the view that the Roman Empiie was the divinely appointed instrument of government on earth, and that this was clearly proved by the double fact that Christ was born in the reign of Augustus and that during the same reign the w'orld for the

A HISTORY OF EUROPK

288

first time enjoyed universal peace. The Dc Monarchia is a Latin treatise written to prove, first, that a universal monarchy is a god-ordained necessity for man, second, that the Roman Empire was providentially designed to exercise this universal monarchy, and finally that the Roman Emperor held his title directly from God and was in no way subject to the Papacy. To modern eyes the reasons brought forward in support of these propositions may seem too far removed from the realities of political life to weigh with any sensible mind. But when we divest the argument of its scholastic integument and come down to the fundamental thoughts in Dante’s mind we shall find tliat it is capable of being translated into the terms of an ideal which the world has never relinquished. That the highest activity of man is intellectual and that intellectual progress is arrested by war, ttiat universal peace is the supreme end in politics, that it can be made secure only by the reduction of the whole world under a single government, that in every community there must be lodged somewhere a sovereign power, and that great evils have proceeded and will continue to proceed fiom the temporal ambition of spiritual rulers, these tenets would not be regarded as absurd, though they might be hotly disputed, by modern politicians. The universal monarchy of Dante is no more chimerical than Tennyson’s Parliament of Man or than Maz- zini’s dream of the Republic. Aspirations, however distant they may be, play their part in the shaping of human affairs, and Dante’s treatise w^as used as a controversial weapon in the next generation (when the quarrel broke out between Louis of Bavaria and John XXII) and received the honour of burning at the hands of a legate of the Pope.

Nevertheless, Dante’s theory of the Empire postulated an order of things which every change in European affairs was involving in darker shades of obsolescence. The last faint hope of an Italy united under the imperial power vanished with the death of Frederick II in 1250, fifteen years before Dante’s birth; and the lifetime of the poet synchronizes with a scries of political changes every one of whicii was separately injurious to the restoration of imperial control. The downfall of the Ilohenstaufen dynasty, the introduction of Charles of Anjou into southern Italy, the transfer of the imperial crown first to an Austrian and then to a Luxemburger, the steady growth in the territorial ambitions of the Papacy, and of the commercial strength of the Italian

TRS CATHOLIC MINO 389

towns, these among other causes tended to loosen the bond which clasped Italy to the Empire and to confirm the political divisions of the country.

Amid much that is part of the civilized aspiration of every age, and much that was already archaic and obsolete in his own time, there is one characteristic of Dante's political thought and temperament which alternately loses and gains for him the favour of intellectual men. He was by temperament an aristocrat, by conviction an imperialist. It was not the Roman Republic which he idealized but the Roman Empire, not liberty but Jaw. Critics have often noticed that neither in the Commedia nor in any of his scattered wiitings is there any sign of sympathy for the poor as a class, of such sympathy, for instance, as suffuses the earnest pleading of Piers Plowman or the early literature of the Franciscan movement.

But in claiming Dante for the aristocrats, the student should remember that to the mind principally occupied with the re- ligious ordering of the universe, the competing claims of class and class which form the matter of political rivalry and medita- tion become specks of infinite insignificance. The arbitrament of God which peoples the circles of the Inferno and the Mount of Purgatory and the stars of Paradise falls with an equal hand on prince and ploughman. Great office does not screen the offender in that high court (for while there arc several Popes in Dante's Hell, there is but one in Paradise), so that to the Italian of that age reading or listening to the Commedia the supreme impression must have been the vanity of all worldly things when measured against the divine graces of the soul. The Catholic Church is a great democracy. To Dante its power for good had been immeasurably injured by its lust for tem- poral dominion. As the city of Florence had fallen away from its days of early simplicity when ladles sat at the spindle and the flax and their husbands went in a skin jerkin, so the Church had been corrupted by wealth and power. In the beautiful eleventh canto of the Paradiso where St. Thomas recounts the life of St. Francis, the emphasis is laid upon the marriage of the saint with the Lady Poverty, who, reft of her first husbrfnd, the Church, had for a thousand years and more stood " despised and obscure, without invitation."

In such passages as these Dante confesses his enthusiasm for poverty as a religious ideal, hard and heroic, and yet never to

10

h HISTORY OR tVftOPB

be lost sight of if the Church was to be kept pure of oSenos* The great epic of mediaeval Catholicism b the work of a humanist who was abo a scholastic, of a mystic who was also a politician, of a churchman orthodox in belief but ardent m the cause of a puritan reformation.

aiAPlER XXVI

THE GROWTH OF MONARCHY IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND

Divergent consttluUonal developments of France and England. Growth of centraltsatton in England, Contracted authority of French Crown, Louis VII and Henry II. Imperfect untficalton of trance under Philip Augustus. Importance of the rural middle class in England. Parlia- ment and Statcs-General. Lethal development tn England and France, Louts IX and Philip le Bel, Absolutist tendencies tn trance. Constitu- tional tendencies tn England. Magna Carta. Simon de Montfort, Edward I.

How sharply, despite all the unifying foices of civilization, are France and England now divided! The one a land of peasant propiietois, of small highly skilled craftsmen, of a large hour* geoisie, cultuied, economical, and sclf-centied, with little or no interest beyond the fionueis of their own beloved country, the other a countiy of large landowners and tenant farmers, of big inoubtrialists and crowded factoiy woiLers, of business men having interests all over the world, and with a population so much given to tiavel and adventuic that few families cannot claim a relation who is settled beyond the ocean.

In the twelfth and thirteentli centuries the contrast between the two counttics was less evident and of a different character. The Norman Conquest had made of England a province of French civilization. The language of the aristocracy, of the government, of the law courts, was French. It was from the He de France that England derived its Gothic architecture. A great part of France, first Normandy, then the Angevin Empire of Henry Plantagenet, was, until the beginning of the thirteenth century, ruled by English kings. Feudalism, chivalry, the Cru- sades, were French. The university movement, so far at least as England was concerned, originated in Paris. The general ideas about law and government, about society and religion, which prevailed on one side of the Channel were no less familiar on the other. So intermingled were the two countries that many English towns received charters upon a French model, and some of the terms most closely connected with the growth of English muni- cipal Uberties, such as mayor and commune, were imported from France. A traveller passing from one country to the other in the

39^ A niSTOItT OF EUROPX

reign of King John would hnve found no very palpable contrast between the French and the English scene. He would see majestic cathedrals rising in cither countiy, and would find upon examina* tion that they were being built by corporations of master masons under the direction of a bishop or an abbot. He would find monasteries in cither country obedient to a French rule, farm- ing wide acres, and dispensing lavish hospitality; would meet monks travelling to fair, market, or tourney, or come across a knot of gaping rustics listening to the eloquence of a travelling Friar. England he would piobably pronounce to be at once the rougher and richer country. But so indistinct were the spiritual frontiers between these two remarkable peoples that the barons of the chaiter did not scruple lo invite the heir to the French throne, afterwards Louis VIII, to take the English crown, and that Simon de Montfort, the leader of the national revolt against Henry III, and the great popular hero of English liberty, was the son of the Ficnch nobleman who crushed the Albigcnsian Crusade. To the Ficnchman of this period the German was a foreigner and almost intolerable. England was diffeicnt. Though the commonalty spoke an unintelligible tongue, and for lack of vineyards were driven to a disgraceful beverage, the gentry were of a familiar w^oild and could make themselves intelligible in their provincial French.

France, however, was not the only country by whom England w^as now influenced. The bulk of the English population was throughout the middle ages to be found in London, in Essex, and in East Anglia. It is in this region, as the Doomsday Survey shows, that a ficc agricultural population managed most easily to main-^ tain itself throughout the economic disturbances consequent upon the Norman Conquest. Here was not only the most populous but the richest, and perhaps for this very reason the most liberty-loving section of the English people; for it was the quarter from which in after times Simon de Montfort and Oliver Cromwell drew their strength. But the bulk of the trade of London and Fast Anglia was not with France but with the Low Countries and Cologne, Scandinavia and the Baltic. Indeed, the greatest of all English mediaeval trades w^as done with Flan- ders. It was in the Flemish towns, in Bruges and Ghent, that wool from our famous English downs and pastures was worked up into cloth, and sent far and wide through Europe. Thus, while our aristocratic and literary connections were with a Latin

TffS iCONAJtCHY IN FEANCS AND BNCIiAND 393

people, our trading connections were mainly — though the trading connection with Rouen and Bordeaux was always important--* with peoples of the same Teutonic stock as ourselves. In this area our English speech must have been always a better com- mercial language than French, and for that reason well worth keeping up in our trading towns which attracted then, as they continue to attract with even greater potency now, the most vigorous and enterprising sons of the village. It is significant that Chaucer, the father of English poetry, was a I^ondoner and a Commissioner of Customs.

The fact of the Norman Conquest, while bringing England fully within the zone of Fiench civilization, was one of the causes which ultimately led England and France to pursue different lines of constitutional development. William I m<*ide of England a single state. That work was so well done that it was never un- done. The period of feudal anarchy under Stephen was repaired under Henry II, to whose great series of administrative and judicial reforms England owes a centralization of justice for which France had to wait for many centuries. By the time of Henry IFs death four great lessons had been instilled into the English people. They had been taught to pay taxes, a lesson which the French monarchy never succeeded in reaching the French people, and which e\cn now is not fully learned. They had been taught that crime was an ofience against the king’s peace of which the king’s court desiied to have exclusive cognizance, save where benefit of clergy was claimed, in which case the ecclesiastical court tried the offender, but handed him over to the secular arm for punishment in the case of a convic- tion. They had learned that there was one law for the whole country, administered by one supreme court, theCuria regis, with its judges going on ciicuits through the country, and every- where, when on these official ei lands, representing the power of the king. And, finally, they had become habituated to the dis- agreeable duty of co-operating in the task of government, cither as tenants called upon to render knights' service in the wars, or as citizens called upon to follow the hue and cry, or as jurors for the assessment of taxes, the punishment of criminals, or'the adjudication of civil suits in the county courts. The system continued to work under an absent king, like Richard, or under a bad king, like John, who in nothing more fully show'ed his remarkable ingenuity than in his capacity for extracting fleets.

994 «ftistoET or E 0 ROFr

mcu, and money from the national administration which bad ^ been bequeathed to him by better men. froo-jir Very different was the position of the King of France at the^ beginning of the twelfth century. All that Louis VI could call bis own was a small domain on the middle waters of the Seine and the Loire. Amiens was in Vermandois, Calais and Boulogne in Artois, Lyons was impel ial. Whereas in England there was a national government, in France the King was confronted by great fiefs (Flanders, Normandy, Burgundy, Guienne, Gascony,* Toulouse, and Barcelona) nominally subject to the French Crown, but in fact independent. It is significant of the political weights and measures of the country that Louis VI wisely concentrated his energies upon the police of that little territory which was diiectly under his own control. For him feudalism was the enemy. In a modest way this active ruler was the founder of that system of goveinincnt thiough officials drawm from tlie middle class, which, despite all subsequent political changes, has been found congenial to the needs of F'rance. His chief minister was a monk of the name of Sugei, a tuigid hisioiLan, but as a man of affairs, honest, capable, and trusted.

All this piogiess was put to the hazard in the succeeding reign. Louis VII, pious, charming, chivalrous, ineffectual, was bril- liantly mairied to a lady who brought him as her dower the Duchy of Aquitaine: but their tempeis proved to be incompat- ible, and after fifteen years of married life Eleanor was divorced. There have been few greater political blunders in the history of mediaeval France. Elcanoi married lleniy Plantagcnet, Count of Anjou, and in accoi dance with the disastrous notions of that feudal age, a vast area of south-western France (Guienne, Auvergne, and Aquitaine) was now transfeired from the con- trol of her first to that of her second husband Wlien Henry became King of England and Duke of Normandy, T-ouis was confronted wdth a hostile kingdom sti etching from the Cheviots to the Pyrenees, and in every point of niaterial stiength stronger than his own. “Your Lord, the King,” he observed to Walter Map, " wants nothing — ^men, horses, gold, silk, diamonds, game, fruits: he has aff in abundant plenty. We in France have only bread, wine, and gaiety.” A w^ar broke out between the two rival powcis which was waged in the intermittent feudal manner for a hundred years.

• Genealogical Table F, p. 422.

tmt uoiAsk^cmt in ahu skoianx) tgjf

One advantage belonged to t/Oiut VII which could not be claimed for his adversary. All through life the French King lived in the sunshine of clerical favour. In the struggle between Frederick Barbarossa and Alexander III Louis ranged himself on the side of the Pope, received him as guest, allowed him to behave as if he were the ruler of France, and in return for his submissive piety was presented with the gift of a golden rose.

His aureole shone the more brightly by contrast with the dark disfavour with which Henry II was regarded by all the priests and monks of Europe. The English King who scribbled or chatted during Divine Service, who laid down that criminous clerks, if convicted, should be handed over to the secular arm to be punished, and that no appeals should go to Rome without the royal assent, who was for many years violently embroiled with Becket, his Archbishop of Can tei bury, and commonly suspected of having directed his murder by the altar steps of his own cathedral, was regarded as the embodiment of the lay spirit in statesmanship, and of all that was most dangerous to clerical prerogative. The contrast between the pious and un- fortunate Louis and the wicked, clever, prosperous Angevin presented the immortal problem of the equity of fate. Why were such things possible? Afterwaids, when the English were driven out of Normandy by Philip II, the legend grew up that the murdered Becket liad appeared to an ecclesiastic in his dreams, saying that he had chosen Pliilip to avenge his death.

Of this Philip, remembered after his death as Augustus, it may be said that he possessed the larcst of all c|ualities in a mediaeval ruler, concentration on the possible. Living in a world not of dreams, but of realities, he allowed nothing to diven him from the gieat object of driving the Plantagcnets out of France, and of extending the boundaiies of his kingdom. Ampliavat fines regni is the epitaph on this long-headed, un- attractive figure who planted French power on the Channel and the Atlantic, gaining Veimandois by diplomacy, Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine by war, and finally destroying on die famous field of Bouvines the army of an Anglo-German coali-^ 1214 tion, which would have robbed him of these conquests.

From this point the territorial formation of France proceeded without interruption until in tJie fourteenth century Edward III challenged the French crown. The English remained firmly 1557

A HXSTOStT OF SUROFS

planted in Gascony: but Languedoc fell to France as the fruit of the Albigensian Crusade, Champagne, La Marche, and Angoul&me a little later, and Lyons in 13

The making of France under the Capetian monarchs was wholly unlike the process by which political unity had been imposed on England through the policy of William the Con- queror. Even where the extension of the royal domain involved fighting, as when Philip Augustus evicted John from Nor- mandy, it entailed none of those revolutionary consequences which followed upon the Norman conquest of England, neither transfer of property, nor the intrusion of a new nobility, nor the depression of the rural population. When the towns and castles governed by the troops of the English king had been taken, the province passed from England to France without further change, and, so to speak, with its soul intact. But in general tliere was no figliting. The King was felt to be the champion of order and justice, the defender of the weak and the poor against the wicked and the strong, the protector of religion from the Channel to the Pyrenees, and in a vague, unanalyzed way the suzerain and master of France, Even under Ijouis VII a sentiment of devotion to the monarchy is clearly apparent. The successful Philip watered the tender plant, and by an adroit exercise of his rights as a feudal suzerain extended the influence of the French Crown in the territories of his feudal vassals.

From this manner of growth by accretion, it followed that France was never in the middle ages so completely unified as England. The great fiefs were too much a part of the common heritage of France to be subjugated or tiaii'-formcd by the pres- sure of an iron despotism. They retained, therefore, even when annexed to the French Crown, much of their former independ- ence, and as appanages created in favour of the younger members of the royal family, were more than once sources of peril to the monarchy itself,

A consequence of the greater measure of authority thus en- joyed by the great frudal nobles in France was the absence in that country of a rural middle class burdened by public respons- ibilities. In England the main tasks of local government were discharged by knights of the shire or country gentlemen of moderate fortune, who attended the county courts, presented criminals to the judges, bore the record of the country to West*

tmn MONARCKT IN FRANCS AND BNOLANO

minster, where the doings of the shire court were diallenged, acted as jurors in dvil suits, and ultimately came to represent their respective counties in the national Parliament. In France there was no such amateur class of local jurors, justices, and administrators as the knights of the shire, and no such popular local institutions as the shire courts. The administration of the French monarchy was carried out by professionals. It was the achievement of Philip Augustus to have created in the office of Bailli or Seneschal an official of the royal government who, hold- ing his post at the King’s pleasure, might be trusted to do his will.

Here is the explanation of the fundamental difference between the development of France and England. In both countries the monarchy manifested itself as the chief construc- tive principle of the state, and in the thirteenth century de- veloped representative institutions round the central nucleus of a royal council. In both countries these assemblies owe their being not to any abstract theory, but rather to the pressure of financial needs, or because business was thtis most conveniently discharged, or as a means of reinforcing the crown in times of crisis.

In both countries insistence is laid upon the essential principle that the representative has full power to bind his constituents.

But here resemblance ceases. In the great English councils of the thirteenth century, the Pailiaments, as from the reign of Henry III they come to be called, knights of the shire took tai 6 - 7 t their place with burgesses and representatives of the lower clergy, and worked side by side with the prelates and barons, who were summoned by individual writ. The strength of this English body, the feature which gave it a permanent and con- tinuous r61e in English government, was that it was in the main an assemblage of persons of an intermediate social tank, who were accustomed to the discharge of public business in their separate localities. The French Statcs-General was not thus rooted in local government, nor closely fused by the presence of a class of representatives who, while they shared the country tastes and pursuits of the noble, were, in point of wealth and station, more nearly akin to the burgess. Consisting of thtw distinct orders, the nobles, the cler^, and the burgesses, the States-General failed to play a decisive and formative part in the moulding of French policy. So far from furnishing any

39$ l|«0TORt dr Edtops

ccmtinuotis rattaint upon the exercise of absolute power, the^ cumbrous assemblies met at rare and infrequent intervals and then spoke with a divided voice. It is significant that the total number of States-Geneials known to have been sum<f moned between 1300 and 1789 exceeds by two only the num- ber of Parliaments summoned in the single reign of Edward III. The size of France was inimical to parliamentary centrali- zation, and suggested the superior convenience of provincial assemblies.

There was no French common law. The great boon of legal unity secured to England thiough the judicial reforms of Henry II was not achieved in France till the days of Napoleon. Yet the first steps were taken on the road to legal improvement when the Par- liament of Paris acquired in the reign of St. Louis a substantive and continued existence not many years after the foundation of the Inns of Court in London. This was not a political assembly, as the name might seem 10 imply, but a judicial corporation, the members of which in course of time acquired their positions by purchase or bequest. A great role both in law and politics was played by this legal institution, which numbered many illustrious intellects, and endured until, like all other privileged corpoiations, it was swept away by the French Revolution; but it was not the role of the English common lawyers who in the seventeenth century stood for Parliament against the King. The French lawyer of the island city breathed the air of Roman juiisprudence, and on every occasion might be trusted to support the preiogativc of the Crown. Under the influence of the Papal Inquisition, the old Teutonic system of public trial which existed in France and continued to survive in England gave place to a secret pro- cedure, better adapted perhaps to the detection and punishment of crime, but offering fewer guarantees to the accused and easily lending itself to the basest purposes of tyranny. Among the circumstances serving to differentiate the history of these two neighbouiing peoples none peihaps is more important than the fact that the Papal Inquisition which was created in France never crossed the Biitish channel.

Philip Augustus may perhaps be called the second founder of Paris. He authorized and supported the University, built the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and gave to the city pavements and hospitals, aqueducts and an enlarged circuit of fortifications. Alter his reign theie was no question but that Paris must be

) MOKA«leri(t fitr^ A«ro sisreiAiirB «j||||

lihies oentre of Freodi govtmmcnt But how was France to he ^ed? Louis IX, who attained to his majority in 1236, was a , *AAint and mystic. No ruler of his time was more fully pene- trated with theocratic ideas, more ardent in self-sacrifice, or, in matters where heresy was not concerned, readier to hearken to the voices of equity and mansuetude. It may be added that his personal courage was high and stainless, and that being exempt from many of the passions of his time, he often brought a shrewd and balanced judgment to the aflairs of state. But ihe respect which we feel for St. Louis as a man must not blind us to his faults as a statesman and a strategist. On two critical occasions he left his country to go upon crusade. One good army was lost among the canals of the Egj^ptian delta, another in the torrid heat of Tunis. Neither sanctity, nor self-sacrifice, nor the administration of patriarchal justice under the oak of Vincennes could replace the advantages of a good and steady administrative routine, nor shield his subjects from extortion and misery. The good King returned fiom his Egyptian campaign to learn of the stem repression of the Pastoreaux, poor country t»$g folk, maddened with poverty and inflamed with injustice, who wreaked their liatrcd of the social ordei upon the prosperous bodies of the priests. The exquisite art of La Sainte Chapelle shone against a background of social wretchedness.

The moral beauties of St. Louis, better suited to a knight- errant than to a statesman, added lustic rather than strength to the Capetian house. It was given to Philip the Fair, his enigmatic grandson, to supjfly the ruthless and daring qualities which aie absent in the composition of a saint. St. Louis was a feudal, Philip a national, soveicign. The one issued edicts for his domain, the other promulgated ordinances for France, The spirit of tlie grandfather was profoundly ecclesiastical. The civil order founded by Philip was pre-eminently lay, and '‘ven anti- clerical. St. I.ouis kept two grand objects constantly befoie his eyes, peisonal holiness and the happiness of his subjects, im- perfectly as he was able to adjust his means to the achievement of that latter end. In Philip the two great problems were always.

Ho matter at what cost, power and wealth.

There is accordingly ^something violent and revolutionary about the procedure of this energetic ruler, whose reign coin- cides with the final conquest of Syria by the Mamelukes and rapr with the eclipse of all the hopes and aspirations which had

300 A history or eurofe

been connected with the great age of the Papacy, and with the launching of the Crusades. Frederick of Swabia had captured a General Council, Philip the Fair, backed by his civil lathers, did not scruple to lay hands upon the Pope himself. Nothing is more eloquent of the altered spirit of the time than the fact that when Boniface VIII ventured to interfere with the King's right to tax his clergy, and proceeded, as tempers rose, to claim supremacy over the secular power, Philip was able without affronting his people to have the Pope's person seized by violence, his Bulls publicly burnt, and to appeal to the States- General for its support against an inteifering Bishop of Rome.

The same spirit of ruthless "laicity” characterizes Philip’s dealings with the Templars. The King was needy, the Templars were rich. In that single circumstance is the explanation of an act of cruelty which prefigures, if it does not surpass, the robberies of the Reformation and the massacres of the Jews. For wealth was not the only crime of this famous Order, which had so long fought for the Christian cause under the Syrian sky, and was now fulfilling the oflicc of banker to the King. The Templars incurred the even graver charge of general un- popularity, It is the liabit of vulgar and excitable minds to find the explanation of great popular calamities in the treason of leading men. Again and again in French history the cowardly cry ** Nous soinmes trahis ” has gone up in the hour of humiliation. It went up now. The Templars, it was said, had betrayed the Christian cause, which it was their special duty to defend. They had conspired with the Saracens. They were here- tical, stained with nameless vices, devoted to secret and un- mentionable riles. It was rumoured that they spat upon the Cross. Once let loose, the public imagination poured itself out in an unmeasured torrent of innuendo and attack. The Templars were deprived of an opportunity u{ reply. Many of them were tortured until from agony they made false confes- sions. Many were sent to the stake. With the disgraceful con- nivance of the Pope the Order was dissolved, and its vast re- sources in money ana land were lor the most part annexed to the use of the Crown.'

The want of money, which led to this, as to many other acts of unjust extortion, and notably to repeated debasements of the

• The Hospitallers, to whom the property was nominally assigned,

obtained in France a vej^ small part of it.

THE MONARcar IN FRANCE AND ENOtAND

coinage, was a sign that the King of France was now attempting to govern liis country. A study of the not altogether consistent legislation of the reign reveals Philip's underlying purpose; to draw money from the clergy, from the men-at-arms, from the nobles, and to administer the nation with the aid of lawyers of humble birth. Crown officials multiply their numbers, the organs of central government become differentiated as in England — the Parliament for legal, the Cour des Comptes for financial business, and at the end of the reign, the States-General, as an exceptional measure for the association of the three great orders in the state with momentous acts of royal policy. The government of this king was harsh, irregular, odious. The taxes were mostly farmed out with the inevitable result that the treasury received but a small fraction of the sums which were extracted from the taxpayer. The officials were indifferently and inter- mittently supervised. Still, despite all its defects on the side of publicity, and control, and fiscal science, there now emerges into the light of history a government of France, lay, auto- cratic, and, in so far as the conditions of that age permitted, centralized in the person of the King.

While the French monarchy was thus tending towards absolut- ism, England was set upon an opposite course. The Norman nobles who had conquered and pillaged this wealthy island did not long remain an alien and exclusive caste. They intermarried with the Saxons, merged with a population too vigorous to be permanently subjected, and came in the course of a century to regard themselves not as Noimans but as Englishmen. After if 74 the last great feudal revolt had been crushed by Henry II, they were compelled to accept the national government of the crown as an established institution, in the working of which they were called upon equally with the knights of the shire and representa- tives of the towns to bear a part.

With this transformation in the character of the nobility from the position of an alien caste to that of a native aristocracy, the principal obstacle to the growth of an English nation disappeared.

The tyranny of a bad king was sufficient to provoke a nation;il opposition in which churchmen, barons, and townsmen wTre alike involved. The Magna Carta, extracted from King John, ranks as the first of our English statutes and is rightly regarded jzxs as the corner-stone of English liberties. That document, which played so important a r61c in the parliamentary struggles of the

Soa utisTOKY OP Euaopa

fevEiiiteentll century, was no revolutionary or philosopbidd ^ jcaainifesto, but a re-statement of the rights and privileges wbidi Were already assumed to belong to the Church, the nobles, the townsmen, and the community of all the land.” The barons of the charter were not concerned to make new law, but to prevent the violation by the Crown of existing rights. They had no theory of liberty as such. Tlie liberties which they were con- cerned to defend w'eie feudal, ecclesiastical, or municipal privi- leges. Against royal capiice they ofiEcred the bulw^ark of legal custom.

A later age saw in the charter the foundation of parliament and the jury system. The charter does not mention the word parliament, which first came into use in the succeeding reign, but lays down that no extraordinary aids or scutages are to be levied by the Crown save with the consent of the common council of the realm, an assembly of pi elates, barons, and tenants in chief. Nor yet does it mention the word jury. Wliat it says, however, in effect is that no free man should be imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, or exiled save by the judgment of his peers or by tl)c law of the land. Those were lofty principles, and since the old methods of piooE by ordeal and battle had been falling into dis- repute, and were banned by the I^teran Council in 1215, they implied recourse to the criminal jury, an institution which may perhaps have its roots in the standing body of jurois sw^orn to accuse no man fabely, of whom we read in the dooms of an Anglo-S.ixon king.

Much of thi*- lamous document, so largely conccincd with the oppressions of the royal odiceis and with abstruse points of feudal law and custom, has now only an aniicjuarian intciest. The im- portance of the charter is due to the fact that it is the first example in our history of a national protest against a had govern- ment. The shape which the protest assumed, the details which it comprised, the manner in which it wa& drafted, are of less account than the co-operation of Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Can- terbury, of the Mayor of London, and of the most politically minded barons of the land in a common effort to bring the King to account, and to force him to obey the laws and to study the interests of his people. The barons were in grim earnest. In the event of an infraction of the charter they were ready to carry their opposition to the point of civil war, and in proof of their resolute intent appointed twenty-five of their number to safe*

yUM f%Amn

j^ard lt$ piovisions and to constrain the King. i£ necessary liy ^ihe utmost use of force, to observe themu

This high example of constitutional obedience lived on in the national memory. The charter^ in support of which a section of the baronage was even willing to put the English crown upon the head of a Frenchman, became a watchword. It was three times revised in the first decade of Henry Ill's reign. Its three forest clauses were amplified into a separate charter for the relief of those abuses of the forest law, which, of all the innovations of the Norman Conquest, were felt by the country folk of Eng- land to be the most oppressive. During the minority of the young King his wise counsellors, William Marshall and Hubert de Burgh, ruled in its spiiit. But Henry III, once he had reached man's estate, showed himself strangely insensitive to the work- ings of the national mind. Devout, refined, artistic, the builder of Westminster Abbey was, like Chailes I, in matters of public policy, blind, obstinate, and untrustworthy. The country hated the foreign fa\ourites, Savoyards and Poitevins, upon whom he lavished power and wealth. It resented his subservi- ence to the Pope. It saw no substantial advantage to English interests, but on the contrary a source of intolerable exaction in the King's ambitious project for securing the Sicilian crown for his young son Edmund. As the clergy weic bled white to feed the ambitions of Pope and King, the tide of indignation mounted steadily. At Iasi Ilcniy was told plainly that ledress must pre- cede supply. At a parliament at Oxford (1258) he was compelled to accept a scheme of government which placed the conduct of affairs in the hands of the baronial party.

Had the Prov^isions of Oxford been observed in the letter and the spirit, there would have been no Barons' War. Henry never proposed to observe tliem. He could count upon the Pope obligingly to relieve him of an oath taken under duress in the papal cause. But he was now confronted with an opposition which was both widely supported and ably led. “The community of the bachelory of England,” as the smaller landed gentry arc called by a chronicler, was as ready to protest against the lukewarmness of the baronage as later to correct the backslid- ings of the King. The better part of the clergy, the students of Oxford, the burgesses of the diartcrcd towns, joined hands with this section of the landed gentry in the movement to protect the country against arbitrary rule. Franciscans carried the popular

A HUtORY OP EUROPE

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message through the towns and villages and acted as missionaries of the cause. When the quarrel ripened into civil war, Simon de Montfort, the alien Earl of Leicester, stood out as the champion of the national interest. On the high down above Lewes he routed the royal army (1264), and captured the King and Prince Edward, his heir. Yet it is characteristic of the moderation of the English civil war that the outcome of this brilliant victory was not the deposition of the sovereign, but an attempt to bind him in the eyes of the nation assembled in parliament to act on the advice of a baronial council.

Nothing is more calculated to strike the public imagination than the political employment of a victory in the field. Simon's Westminster Pailiamcnt (January, 1265) marked an epoch. No assembly had been summoned for so grave a purpose. None had been so widely representative, for in addition to the clergy and barons, the first numerously, and the second more sparsely sum- moned, every shire was invited to send two knights and many boroughs two burgesses. The representation of the towns was apparently an innovation. Upon the receptive mind of Prince Edward, who was constrained in this widely representative gathering of the constitutional party to swear to an unpalatable peace, the lesson of such a gathering and of the strength to be derived from it made an impression of enduring value to the nation. The work of Simon, which seemed to be frustrated by his defeat and death on the field of E\ esham. was carried forward by his conqueror and disciple, the more judiciously, and doubt- less the moic securely, since the legend of Simon as the hero and sainted martyr of liberty and justice survived in the memory of the English people.

Edward I is the English Justinian. His reign is marked by such legislative activity as this country has only twice witnessed (in the reign of Henry VIII, and again under the Commonwealth) before the Reform Act of 1832 opened wide the floodgates. The Statute dc Donis Conditionalibus, which settled our law of entail the Act of Mortmain, curtailing ecclesiastical endowments, the Statute of Quia Emptores, which forbade subinfeudation, and so limited the importance of tenure in chief, arc among the legis- lative monuments of this clear-headed and industrious ruler. The greatest, however, of Edward's titles to fame is that in his reign parliament assumed its completed form and became an established instrument for the transaction of public business.

' Tils MOKARCUT IN FRANCS AND SNCSLAND 305

The grounds of this momentous change are not to be found in any development of political theory, or special distemper of the public mind, but in the practical convenience of dealing upon a national scale with national questions through a gathering representative of the nation. The development of trade and com- merce, the expansion of public policy, the growing demands upon government for justice, police, and administration, had now far outrun the slight and dwindling capacity of the feudal revenue. The paltry income to be derived from aids and scutages, marriages and reliefs was an anachronism in an age when a London merchant buying wine in Bordeaux, or selling wool in Ghent, might out-top the rent roll of a baron or an earl. In his need for money Edward could no more afford to neglect the mercantile community than to spare the broad acres of the Church. To obtain a national revenue he found himself in- creasingly compelled to the expedient of summoning national parliaments.

The form of these conferences was for a long time fluid and uncertain; the word parliament, which means a talk or inter- change of views, was originally applied to any meeting of the King’s Great Council, and only by degrees confined to such meet- ings as were reinforced by representatives from the borough and the shire. The Model Parliament” of 1295 was attended by prelates, earls, barons, and judges, summoned by individual writ, and by two knights from every shire, two citizens from every city, and rw^o burgesses from every borough, summoned through the sheriff, and by representatives of the lower clergy, summoned under the terms of the writs addressed to the two archbishops. By degrees the lower clergy ceased to attend, having other and more pressing duties to perform. It was a lay House of Com- mons which voted the Reformation Statutes.

But there was no House of Commons in the reign of Edward I, nor yet that familiar procedure by which bills are drafted in the form of statutes, introduced, debated, and voted on in two Houses, and finally receive the royal assent in the House of Lords, as the Clerk looks over his shoulder at Mr. Speaker, humbly standing at the bar with his following from the lower House, and intones the magic formula Le roy le veult^ at which the red-robed peers, representing the sovereign, simultaneously re- move their archaic cocked hats. The division between the two Houses belongs to the fourteenth, the procedure by bilk to the

d06 ^ OF BOFOFK <<

filtScenili, century. The main business of an Edwardian pnrlia* ment was not so xnudi to legislate as to vote supplies and handle petitions.

A vast miscellany of subjects, some important and others trivial, was bi ought by way of petition to the notice of this great inquest of the nation, which was termed a parliament. The judges were at hand to deal with such petitions as might involve issues of law. Matters of finance were naturally referred to the officials of the exchequer. I'he meeting of parliament afforded an opportunity of liquidating the current business of the kingdom. Here local grievances were ventilated and private wrongs re- dressed, arrears of pay settled, quarrels composed, foreign ambas- sadors received, and treaties drafted. Much of the work done in a parliament was legal, for the King's Council was still the highest court of justice in the land. The consequences were important. It is common knowledge that lawyers in a parliament of amateurs exert moic than their fair share of influence. A mediaeval par- liament was full of men learned in the law; and our statute book, which is singularly free from idle rhetoric or hysteria, bears the imprint of the most cautious, die most consci vati vc, and the most insular ol professions.

In the closing years of this great King's reign an impressive demonstration was given of that respect for law and constitu- tional usage which was fast becoming an ingrained political tradition of the people. Edward was a strong, straightforward, and, in the main, a popular ruler; but he was exacting and ambitious, and none too scrupulous in his methods. In the year 1^97 he found himself at issue wiUi the cleigy, who had been told by the Pope that they were to pay no taxes without Rome's con- sent, with the general body of the nation, who groaned under the lash of his taxgathcrers, and with certain pre-eminent mem- bers of the baronage who flatly refused to serve in aims beyond the seas. The King then learned that there were limits to his prerogative which he could not transgress without danger. He was compelled to confirm the charters, to permit amendments in his administration, and to admit that he could not inciease the established customs on meichandise or raise aid or subsidy with- out parliamentary assent*

‘ *11 ’

^ ^ tfis IM f *A)Mr6f; AKO XK«S.A»tl» ^

i

BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED

H. W. C. Davis: England under the Normans and Angevins. 1905.

^ C. Potit-Du taillis: La Monarchie F^odale en France et cn Anglcterrc. , ' 1899.

W. Stubbs: Constitutional History of England. 1880.

E. Lavisse: Histoire de France. 190'^.

F. W. Maitland: Memoianda de Parliainento. (Rolls Series.) 1893. McKechnle: Magna Carta. 1905.

T. F. Tout: Edward I 180*5

W. H. Hutton ■ Philip Augustus. 1896.

F. Perry: Louis IX. 1901

A. Luchaire: Social France at the lime of Philip Augustus. Tr, B* Krebhiel. 1912.

C31APTES XXVH

WALES. SCOTLAND, IRELAND

Predominance of England in Wales secured hy Edward I. Quarrel com- posed by Henry Tudor. Forces making for AngloScottish Union. Policy of Edward I. Growth of national feeling in Scotland. True greatness of Scotland follows the union with England. The tragedy of Ireland. Effect of the Scottish invasion and the French War.

Edward I was the first of our English kings to place in the fore- front of his policy the reduction of Wales and Scotland. For a comparatively brief interval (1259-1338) between two centuries of profitless fighting in France, the union of the British peoples under the English crown became an object worthy of steady attention. In Wales the strategy of Edward was brilliant and successful. The great mountain fastness of Snowdonia was sur- rounded and $ub(lued. An English principality, created in favour d. 1340 of the heir to the throne, divided into shires on the English plan, and protected by a system of formidable castles, replaced the north Welsh principality of Gwynnedd, which ever since the days of Llewellyn the Great had been the heart of tribal Wales and the principal sanctuary of the Celtic tradition. A political predomin- ance of England in this wild land of narrow valleys and knotted hills was thus secured; but no more than a predominance. The Celtic tribes continued to fight among themselves in their moun- tain fastnesses and from time to time would carry fire and sword through valleys up which the Lords Marchers, themselves often married to Welsh women, were steadily pushing the tillage and the tongue of the Saxon race. The Welsh uplands remained much as Giraldus Cambrensis, himself half Welsh and half Norman, had described them at the end of the twelfth century. “ These people are light and active, hardy rather than strong, and entirely bred up to the use of amis; for not only the nobles, but all the people are trained to war, and when the trumpet sounds the tribesman rushes as eagerly from his plough as the courtier from his court. They live more on flesh, milk, and cheese than bread, pay little attention to commerce, shipping, or manufactures, and devote their leisure to the chase and mar- tial exercises. They earnestly study the defence of their country and their liberty. For these they fight, for these they undergo

WALESt SCOTLAND^ IRELAND

3 ^

hardships, and for these they willingly sacrifice their lives. They esteem it a disgrace to die in bed, an honour to die on the field of battle.”

The victory of Edward, though it was followed by wise measures for the pacification of the country, was powerless to alter the stubborn spirit of the Welsh people. In all essentials the Welshman remained as Giraldus describes him, warlike and flighty, jealous and eloquent, sensitive on points of family honour, quick to take up a quarrel and avenge an insult, tem- perate in food and drink, tricky and versatile in intrigue, and passionately devoted to poetry and song. It is true indeed that Anglo-Norman civilization, spreading from the great Welsh monasteries, and from the castles of the Marcher Lords, exer- cised an influence on this race of quarrelsome nightingales. English and Welsh families on the border mingled their blood. Welsh bowmen fought side by side with the yeoman farmers of England in the French wars of the fourteenth century, and contributed not a little, since the long bow was a Welsh inven- tion, to secure victory for the King of England. Welsh gentle- men attended the University of Oxford, or, like Owen Glcndower, learned their law at the Inns of Court. Wales took what England had to give, but yet remained as different from England as mountain is different from plain.

Long after England had adopted an orderly way of life, the little mountain land upon her flank remained a cauldron of seething and primitive passions. Just as the overspill of our modern Irish factions almost brought English politics to the point of civil war, so the fighting spirit of the Welsh Marcher Lords counted for much in the Wars of the Roses. But the quarrel between England and Wales was finally composed by Henry Tudor’s victory on Bosworth field. A Welsh dynasty ^ 4^5 ruled over England for a century, incorporated Wales in the English parliamentary system, and made of England a Pro- testant country. It was a Welsh Prime Minister who brought the British Empire in triumph out of the great war.

The problem of Scotland was different in one important par- titular. All Scotland south and cast of the highland line might equally, so far as its racial composition, its mode of government, and its legal customs were concerned, have been accounted part of English Northumbria. Saxons, Danes, Norsemen, with an

53

t2qo

310 it or soKori

mf imon o£ CJclw, stroagcr no doubt in the northern than Ia &i 0 i Itouthem rcgion«but both north and south of the Cheviots rub* ordinate to these stronger strains, constituted the population alike of Northumbria and of the Scottish kingdom. Anglo^ Norman nobles held lauds on cither side of the border; Anglo- Norman law and Anglo-Norman legal textbooks were as much respected at Edinburgh as in London. It had been part of the policy of David I, one ol the ablest of Scottish kings, and him- self the son of an English princess, to imbue his rude subjects with some tincture of the more advanced civilization of the south. In this design he had been successful. The traveller who reached Edinburgh from York in the middle of the thirteenth century would have found little in the speech, appearance, and manners of the people, 01 in their military and ecclesiastical architecture, to apprise him that in the course of his ride he had crossed a frontier between deadly enemies.

A political union between Scotland and England was there- fore m itself a natural ariangcmcnt, more natural than the union of England with Wales, Ireland, or Gascony. It was Edward’s object to accomplish it. By the Treaty of Brigham it was arranged that Edward’s son and heir should marry Margaret of Norway, the heiiess to the Scottish throne, and that the two kingdoms should be brought together in a personal union, each conserving its own rights and customs. Few mediaeval treaties arc wiser than this far-sighted transaction, which, could it have been cat lied into^effect, would have saved Britain from centuries of bolder warfare, and Scotland from the giinding po\eity of its pioud and dcspciate isolation. But it was not to be. The Maid of Norway died at sea, the Ticaty of Biighain became waste pa pci, and Edward was driven to achieve his object by other and more questionable mcans.^

What followed altoided a signal instance of the characteristic weakness of every mediae\ al go\ernment, its inability to con- trol the rapacity and maladministration of distant agents. A dispute having arisen as to the claims of thirteen rival candL dates tor the Scottish throne, Edward was invited to the in- vidious task of arbitiation. lie decided, apparently without sinister intent, tliat John Baliol had a better claim than Robert Bruce. ]ohn Baliol was accordingly crowned king But the successful candidate had little cause to bless his benkactor. He ^ Genealogical Table G, p 433.

^ mntAviD 311

t^^redi as the puppet of his English overlord. Indignation drove him to rebellion, and rebellion brought down upon Scot- land the heavy hand of the English King. The land was con- 'quered and governed as a province of the English kingdom.

And so, but for the tyranny and oppression of Edward’s agents, Scotland might have remained. To the leading men of the country, whether lay or ecclesiastical, there was nothing in itself oppressive in the English connection. There was no literature of Scottish nationalism. In no respect was the southerner so alien as the Highlander from Argyll or Inverness. But oppression released new forces in the Scottish nature. The common people rose against the invacleis and found in William Wallace, a man from nowheie, an inspired leader of revolt.

The birth of this little Scottish nation is justly accounted one of the cardinal facts of British history. The two founders, William Wallace, the guerilla leader, and Robert Bruce, the royal statesman, are acclaimed by their compatiiots to this day as the architects of Scottish greatness. Bur to the critic who asks what use Scotland made of the independence so bravely won, so triumphantly secured on the field of Bannockburn (1314), the answci is less reassuring. The history of mediaeval Scotland is a tangle of savage bioils and convulsions. Measured by the greatness of its statesmen and soldieis, its thinkers and divines, its authors and its artists, the greatness of Scotland belongs not to the era of mediaeval liberty and isolation, but to that less unhappy and disti acted period which, following the personal union of the two kingdoms under the house of Stuart, witnessed the steady advance of the Scottish people in all the arts and accomplishments of peace.

Irish history is a tragedy. Often invaded Init never subdued, the Irish have not been permitted either to build up an inde- pendent civilization out of their native stock of thought and feeling, nor yet forced to receive the discipline of a power stronger and more cultivated than themselves. Again and again the fatal words half-conquest arc inscribed upon the annals of this gifted and unfortunate people. The Romans stopped dt Anglesea. It was part of their prudence never to cross St. George’s Channel, part of Ireland’s misfortune that she lacked the convenience of Roman roads and never tasted of Roman

A SlSTOKT OF XUROPB

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ordtt. Centuries passed. The Irish received Christianity from St. Patrick (43a), and from their new religion acquired an im- pulse which at the darkest hour of European history brought them to the forefront of Christian culture. But Ireland was not long permitted to be a centre of world-wide illumination. Night again descended with the Danish invasions, when all that was brilliant and attractive in the social life of the people was obliterated by a new barbarism; save for the Danish seaport towns, nothing was left but an untamed wilderness. Then came an event which was destined to exert an enduring influence on the fate of the Irish people. England was conquered by a race gifted beyond all others with the power of organizing conquest and of turning it to civilized ends. But the Normans had no eyes for the island across St. George’s Channel. Sicily, Nor- mandy, Anjou, distracted their attention; and when at last, with the formal encouragement of Pope Hadrian IV (the only English Pope), it was resolved to conquer the island, the enter- prise was not undertaken by King Henry II. who was far too busy with the affairs of his wide Angevin Empire, but left to the courage and appetite of private adventurers. Again the con- quest was not complete.

1169-71 The Anglo-Normans who followed Richarrl dc Clare, the Earl of Pembroke, upon his Irish quest were brilliant soldiers. The native Irish, divided among themselves by tribal jealousies, and unprotected by body armour, were easily mastered by a picked force of mailed knights trained in the best school of contem- porary warfare. The Ostman towns passed into English hands. But then the real difficulties began. The conquerors settled down as Irish landlords. Many of them married Irish women. Most of them learned something of the Irish language. Sur- rounded by the sights and sounds of Ireland, the Butlers and Fitzgeralds, the De Courceys and De Burghs, took colour from their environment and began to acquire Irish characteristics. The old story of the victor taken captive by his victim was now repeated. The ancient Ireland, with ks tribal law and customs its language and literature, its evU leaven of a savage and aboriginal population, hut shorn of its ancient pride, continued to exist.

These fundamental things the Anglo-Norman invasion had done little to alter. What it did was to give to Ireland a new aristocracy, which could hardly be described as fully English or

WALES, SCOTLAND, IRELAND

$n

as fully Irish, but which partook of the qualities ol both natious and occupied an intermediate position between them.

The overlord was an absent-minded absentee. Of our mediaeval kings Richard II alone was even disposed to treat Ireland seriously. The English settlers and traders in the sea- port towns, the Anglo-Irish nobility, the native Irish tribes, formed three separate communities, which only the wisest and most consistent statesmanship, and perhaps not even that, could have brought into stable and harmonious relations.

During the reign of Edward I, when England was free from continental entanglements, some progress was made in the development of Irish commerce and the spread of the shire system, the chief political export of the mediaeval Englishman.

A century of peaceful penetration might have ended with the establishment of Irish unity. But again Ireland was dogged by misfortune. In the year after Bannockburn, Edward Bruce, the Ot5 brother of Robert, seeking to cause the utmost annoyance to the hated Englishman, made a violent irruption into the island.

In the next year he was joined by his brother. The invasion of the Bruces let loose upon the unfortunate country a war of savages. The tender plant of Irish prosperity withered away, the English influence was rolled back within the narrow compass of the Pale, and the progress of a century was suddenly arrested. These disasters were not repaired. With the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War the attention of the English government was diverted from the needs and bogs of Ireland to the more attractive and splendid quest of the French crown. Ireland sank back into its western mists, and when, in the sixteenth century, a serious effort was again made to reconquer the country for English civilization, there was added to existing sources of division the new and deadly fact of religious schism. England became Protestant, while Ireland remained true to the Roman Faith.

BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED

P. Hume Brown: History of Scotland. 1899-1909.

A. Lang; History of Scotland. 1900-07.

Owen Edwards; Wales. 1901.

A, G, Little: Mediaeval Wales.

G. M. Trevelyan: History of England. 1926.

Mrs. J. R. Green: The Making of Ireland and its Undoing,

J. £. Lloyd: History of Wales. 2 vols. 1911.

CHAPTER XXVra

THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR

The French War and English opinion. The EngUih army. SUength and weakness of France. The campaign of 1346. The Black Death. The terrible decade. The Treaty of Calais, trench recovery under Charles V. French relapse. Burgundians and Atmagnacs. Richard II. The Lancastrians. Henry V and Agtncourt. Treaty of Troyes. Defec- tion of Burgundy. Joan of Arc. End of the war. Spirit and con- sequences. The IVars of the Roses. March of English genius.

The Hundred Years’ War, which appears ro a distant posterity as a tissue of calamitous follies, was regaulcd with very different eyes by the English subjects of Edward III anrl Henry V. To our forefathers there was nothing fantastic in the idea that an English King should claim tlte crown of France, or endeavour to subject that country to his dominion. They made no protests against the initiation of the war, nor demanded, even when success appeared to be hopeless, a pacifist government to bring it to a conclusion. The fountains of theii wrath were reserved, as in the popular risings in 1381 and 1450, for ministers who were thought to he responsible for failure abroad or extortion at home. Parliament met frequently, for without parliaments the King could not obtain the taxes wheiewilh to nourish the war; but no parliament refused the taxes. No ciitic rose to point out tliat England was neglecting the tasks which lay to her hand in Wales, Scotl.tnd, and Ireland to pursue a desperate and sterile quest in Fnmce. A war with the French became part of the national background, and, in the public mind of England, though intenspersed with taxes, almost assumed the aspect of an ordinance of fate.

That it was thus po{)ular may be asprihed to the fact that the English, who were the aggressors, pursued their quarrel upon enemy soil. While France sustained all the calamities of in- vasion, England enjoyed the advantages of successful rapine in a bountiful land beyond the sea. The burden of heavy taxation was offset for the commonalty of our island not only by the glamour of foreign victory, but by the conviction that the war was good for trade, that it enabled England to sell her wool in

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THir YSAKlft* WAft 315

Bni^s and Ghent, to buy her wine from Bordeaux, and to find a tOntinental market for her tin, her iron, and her hides. And . national and middle-class sentiment about the war was re*

' inforced by the character of the English armies. The old feudal forces, based on tenure, were now discarded for a long-service ^ army, raised by commissions of array, and so far as the infantry arm was concerned composed of English yeomen and of Welsh archery. An English army of the fourteenth century, unlike its French counterpart, was the mirror of a nation, not of a class. The cavalry was no longer the sole or even the most important arm. There now appeared for the first time upon the battle* fields of the continent that steady British infantry, drawn from the humbler regions of society, which again and again has dis- concerted the calculations of brilliant commanders. In the four- teenth century these stalwart countrymen were entrusted with a weapon which in range and hardiness outstripped all com- petitors, and in the use of which they had attained by devoted practice upon the village green an unequalled skill. The British yeomen who decided the day at Cre^y and Agincourt were armed with the long bow, and, as the famous heavy cavalry of France advanced to the charge, aimed at the horses. A cloud of arrows brought the assault to a sudden standstill, and before a blow had been exchanged, the dismounted riders were floundering on the ground in their heavy armour, an easy prey to their assailants.

In the fijst decades of the fourtccntli century France showed all the piomise of a great nation. Her soil was rich, her vegeta- tion was varied, her peasants and burgesses were economical and laborious. In no part of Europe, save perhaps in Venice, was the art of civilized life so well understoocl or so happily practised. The French were more refined than the English, more comfort- able than the Germans, more open to world influence than the Spaniards, less afflicted by the violence of domestic discord than the citizens of Italy. For the last two centuries no country had given so many patterns to European thought as the land of Abelard and St. Bernard, of the Crusades and the Troubadours, of chivalry and scholasticism. Much also she owed to good fortune. The Capetian house, which for three hundred years had never failed of a male heir, had spared her the evils of palace revolutions and disputed successions. She had given dynasties to England and Sicily, and later had sent princes of

A ttlSTOET OF K17ROFE

$l6

the house of Anjou to reign in Hungary and Naples. The quixotic King of Bohemia thought that no place in the world 1310-46 was comparable to Paris. Even the Papacy had become French, for a French Pope, surrounded by a college of cardinals in which France exercised a predominant influence, was estab- lished at Avignon, and divided only from French territory by the breadth of the Rlione.

From this position of apparent strength there were three im- portant deductions. The convenient shelter of the Capetian dynasty was not destined to be immortal. In 1316 Louis, the son of Philip IV, died, leaving only a daughter, but no male heir. He was followed by his brothers Philip V and Charles the Fair, the French lawyers obligingly discovering that, since females were excluded from the succession to a certain form of property under the law of the Salian Franks, tliey were incapable of sitting on the French throne. Then, in 1328, Charles died without male issue, and was succeeded by his cousin Philip of Valois. The title of the founder of the Valois dynasty was not accepted without challenge, for Edward III of England was the grandson of Philip the Fair by his mother Isabella, and claimed that a female, if she could not herself reign in France, was entitled to transmit the regal dignity to her male heir. Not for three hundred years had such a doubt been cast upon the legitimacy of a King of France.^

The second drawback was even more serious. All through the fourteenth century the nobility of France lived in a kind of feudal honeymoon, learning nothing, ^forgetting nothing, and foreseeing nothing. They waged private war, as if the state were not in danger. They oppressed their villeins, as if it were not through their labour that the life of the country was sus- tained. I'hcy were blind to the strength which came to their antagonists from tlic social fusion, which exposed the richest English barons and the poorest English yeomen to the equal perils of a soldier's life. Though the pov\:r of plebeian infantry to defeat the most aristocratic cavalry in the world had been demonstrated again and again, at CoUrtrai in 1302 and later on the moonlit field of Cre^y, it was necessary for a French king to he brought as a pri-’-mer to I^ondon, and for an English king to receive the crown of France in Paris, before the lesson was taken to heart. It is a curious illustration of the inability of a military caste to receive the teaching of experience that, ^ Genealogical Table H, p. 423.

THE HUNBItSP TEAKS* WAR 317

although the English brought artillery upon the field of Cre^y, it was not until the battle of Formigny 104 years later that the French were able to produce a culverin which outranged the flight of the English arrow.

Another source of weakness was so inveterate that only the con- vulsion of the French Revolution was able to effect a radical cure. The French people, for all their brilliance, could neither impose a good tax nor pay a bad one. Even under the best of her mediaeval kings the fiscal system of France was deplorable. The taxes were farmed, with the familiar result that more was wrung from the taxpayer than ever found its way into the coffers of the state. The gabellCt a salt tax, was crushing for the poor. The traders were oppressed by an impost on sales, by constant tampering with the coinage, and, under Charles V and his successors, by a ruinous system of internal customs duties. The sale of offices, carrying fiscal exemptions, was a vicious expedient invented by Philip the Fair and revived!)y Charles V; and the poison of favours and exemptions, once sanctioned, spread like a gangrene through the tvhole system. It is characteristic of the fiscal weakness of the country that the large ransom demanded by England for King John of France, who was captured at the battle of Poitiers, could not be otherwise met than by the sale of a French princess to Galcazzo Visconti, the upstart and opulent Duke of Milan,

The struggle between France and England, which might easily have been occasioned by a sailors^ quarrel in a Channel port, or by a foray across the border of Aquitaine, or, since French aid w^as now’^ (>33^) openly given to the party of David Bruce and the cause of Scottish independence, by some incident in the course of that northern warfare, did, in fact, arise from an event in Flanders. In 1336 all Englishmen travelling or resi- dent in that country w'cre, by the orders of Count Louis acting upon instructions from Paris, arrested and cast into prison. Tlie outrage produced a reply from England which threatened to bring the flourishing industries of Flanders toppling to the ground. The export of English wool was forbidden, and the English market was closed to the import of Flemish cloth.

At this critical juncture the course of western policy was determined by the vigour and resolution of a Flemish brewer. Jacob van Artcvelde of Ghent preferred economic prosperity in free alliance with England to economic ruin in feudal subjection

JlS A OF FOROPB

to Philip of France. He forced a rupture, and to quiet scruples of the Flemings prevailed upon Edward 111 to claim ^0 crown of France.

The first serious action in the war was an English naval victory at Sluys, so complete that for a space of thirty years it gave to England the mastery of the Channel. Yet for six years no effort was made to exploit this advantage. Why should England invade France seeing that the danger to the English trade with Flanders had been averted, and the power of the French to land forces in England was, for the time being, effectively broken? But the embers of this quart el were widely spicad, and the flame which died down in one quarter spurted up in another. A disputed succession to the Duchy of Biittany brought England and France into the field in suppoit of rival claimants. Pliilip stood for Charles of Blois, and Edwaid for John of Montfort, the cham- pion of that part of the duchy which was Celtic in speech and race, and therefore most strongly opposed to the invasive in- fluences of the French.

The outlines of a great panorama of war were now defined. In Flanders, in Biittany, in Aquitaine, in Scotland, the power of France and England stood opposed. The idea of an English converging movement from Normandy, Brittany, and Aquitaine outlined itself in the mediaeval manner, not very distinctly or with any close attention to detail, but ncvertlielcss in such a way as to make 1346, the year in which the English sacked Poitiers, won Creqy, besieged Calais, and routed the Scots at Neville's Cross, an annus mirahihs in the war. Yet from all these far-flung victories there resulted only one point of permanent advantage to the victors. Calais became an English town in 1347, and so remained until it was lost under Queen Mary in the sixteenth century.

The year of the capture of Calais was maikcd by the advent of a calamity more destructive than a. century of mediaeval war- fare. The Black Death, a bubonic plague originating in the far cast, swept along the lines of mediaeval traffic into e\cry part of Europe. It was conveyed from Asia Minor into Italy and Spain, entered France by Marseilles, England through Dorsetshire, and swept eastwards through Germany and the Scandinavian coun- tries into Poland, Austria, and Russia. Mediaeval figures, upon the basis of which it has been calculated by a modern writer that

WAX

cnie<louith of the population of Europe perished of this plague, are notoriously untrustworthy. We hare no complete means of cheddng the statement of contemporaries that a hundred thousand lives were lost in Venice, Florence, Paris, and London, sixty thousand in Avignon, fifty-seven thousand in Norwich, or that the death roll of Germany, which admittedly suffered less than Italy and France, reached a figure of one and a quarter million. But there can be no doubt that the mortality was upon such a scale as to produce in its train those grave moral disorders and far-reaching social consequences always to be expected when mankind is overwhelmed by some vast natural calamity wliich it is unable to forecast, to measure, or to mitigate.

It was observed of the plague that it sought out by preference the young and the strong. Sometimes the enemy was merciful, and slew by a sudden stroke: more often the patient was con- demned to a few hours of hopeless agony. In Avignon, where the plague raged for seven months, a creditable but forlorn attempt was made to diagnose the cause of the malady. Bodies were exhumed and examined by order of the Pope. But the disease pursued its deadly course, woiking havoc among the narrow, unclean mediaeval streets, and upon the decks of ships, so that they drifted over the waters without guidance from their lifeless crews, and stripping the fields of the labour which should drive the plough, reap the harvest, or tend the cattle.

Among the moral results of this disaster the most shameful was a scries of attacks upon the ]ewish population, who at Mainz and other German-speaking towns wcie burned in their hundreds or thousands by an infuriated mob in the belief that the plague was a malignant device of the Semitic race for the confusion of the Catholic creed. One consequence of some si^ificance for Europe ensued from this outburst of w«tern b^barism. The Tews who were persecuted in the Rhenish cities found now, as an asylum in Poland Canm.r ,hu Grm took occasion to renew the |irotection which a predecessor had ^r^o this community in ,260: and the high P^'"^ f be fcund in modem Poland is not a little due to h» S^tod policy, pursued a, a momirn. when no western Jew

"”0^ f cSnTir

j pie.«-

3aO A HISTORY OF SUROPS

moment. Others, like the flagellants, who marched in melanr choly penitential processions, flogging themselves with rods of iron, fell into ecstasies of religious emotion. There were those^ again, who took to a life of reckless brigandage. But beyond these passing excesses, which disappeared with their exciting cause, the plague exercised certain durable effects, so that when it died down in 1350 (to be renewed at intervals by minor visita- tions), and men resumed their normal habits of mind, European society was not quite what it had been before.

The change was not catastrophic. Rather it would be true to say that the sudden destruction of life (which was specially evi- dent in the monasteries) had set in motion a series of small shift- ings, which, in their accumulated and accumulating effects, amounted to a revolution. In England, perhaps, the changes were more noticeable than elsewhere: in the monasteries a marked decline in literary activity and discipline; in the im- poverished country parishes empty rectories and absentee priests; in the grammar schools the substitution, with a new race of teachers, of English for French; in architecture the spread of the Perpendicular style, simpler than the older forms of Gothic, more easily standardized, and better adapted to the capacity of a diminished band of travelling masons; and finally, in agricul- ture a marked acceleration of that process of converting labour services into money payments, which led in time to the dis- appearance of an unfrcc village population and to the break-up of the mediaeval system of tillage.

The last of these changes, which is not peculiar to England, was due to the fact that owing to the dearth of labour the peasant was able to demand a higher price for his toil, and the lord of the manor was no longer always in a position to secure the work- ing of his demesne land save by the novel expedient of labour hired from outside. The revolutionary possibilities of such a situation gave great alarm to the governing class both in France and England. In France workmen were forbidden to take more than a third of their former wage. In England, Parliament called labourers and artisans to their old rate of wage and forbade them to move from one county to another. Political economy, like nature, may be expelled with a fork, but it always returns. The legislation of the Edwardian parliaments was unavailing to arrest a process grounded in the economic necessities of the time. As the value of labour services to the lord steadily diminished.

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321

the convenience of a mobile labour supply, remunerated by money payments, became by sure degrees more clearly apparent. So the old manorial economy was gradually sapped by new forces, and as the villein became detached from his bondage to the soil, and began to sell his labour freely in the market, voices were raised challenging the whole social order and asking the question which in every virile generation is put to society by equalitarian men:

‘ When Adam delved, and Eve span.

Who ^as then the fjentleinan?”

The tragedy of the plague neither sobeied the frivolity nor mitigated the ardour ot the rival aristocracies of France and England. The national quarrel was revived at the earliest moment and prosecuted at the expense of the miserable peasantry of Fiance with a barbarous and animated zest. The ten years (1350-1360) which follow the accession of John the Bountiful to the throne of France were written in flame and blood on the annals of his distracted kingdom. Pctiarch, uho travelled through the country four or five years after the battle of Poitiers, said that it had been so wrecked and ravaged by the English armies that he could scarce pcisuade himself that this was the same flourishing land which he had previously known. Arson and pillage, murders and lape, burning crops and mutilated cattle, marked the pi ogress of the pioud island rate and their continental levies. In these methods of barbarism the Black Prince won a pre-emineme wiiicli has secured for him an abiding place in the popular memory of western France.

The experience of this teniblc decade was the first impressive indication to the world that the remote inhabitants of England, whose defeat at the hands of the yet more savage Scots upon the field of Bannockburn was no distant memory, had now become a great military nation. In a series of unexpected victories, some- times, as at Poitiers, obtained against overwhelming odds, these strange people had overthrow'll the ancient military glory of France. One English army led by the King had appeared before the walls of Rheims and Paris. Another, advancing from Bor- deaux, had carried fire and sword through the olive groves and vineyards, the gardens and the tilth of Languedoc, wasting the richest revenue-producing areas under the French monarchy and involving it in the greatest embarrassment and distress.

II

A HZSTORV OF EUROPE

3^2

It is difficult to imagine any form of humiliation to which this nation, only a generation before esteemed to be the proudest in Europe, was not now subjected. The King of France was a prisoner in England. A ciushing tribute was imposed upon his people for a ransom. The disbanded marauders of the wars, gathered into free companies, pillaged the countryside, and dared to levy blackmail on the Pope. Even the patient tillers of the field, upon whose broad shoulders had fallen the principal burden of these cruel wars, rose at last against their enemies the nobles in a formidable revolt. The Jacquerie of 1358, which was characteripcd, as every rising of the desperate poor is apt to be, by great ferocity, was put down with ease; but the country was no stionger for that bitter victory, nor for the terrible social chasm which it left behind it. Save for one circumstance which impeached the completeness of the Englisli triumph, France was prostrate. Paris had e:»rapcd the clutch of the enemy, and so long as Paris was Freiic h, France was not English. Yet even here a popular revolution, fomented by patriotic fury, public dis- tress and disloyal intrigue, nearly succeeded in displacing the Dauphin by Charles of Navarre, that smooth and perfidious Intriguer, who was the tool of England and pledged by a secret instrument to hold the crown of France as a vassal of the English King.

When at last the French had made the discovery that by the avoidance of pitched battles they could tire the patience of their enemy, it became part of British prudehce to accept a peace. The Treaty of Calais, 1360, assigned Normandy to France, Aquitaine, Calais, and Ponthieu to England, an arrangement deeply humiliating to Ficnch pride, but permitting Fiance to enjoy a few years of necessary bieathing space. When the quarrel was renewed the balance was no longer tilted in favour of England.

-5o Charles V, now ruler of France, was a very different man from his prodigal and thriftless father. If a bad financier can ever be described as a good king, Charles the Wise merited that descrip- tion. He had seen too much of mob rule during the evil days which followed the disaster of Poitiers to he enamoured of popular government, and it was not through the Staies-General, which he summoned once only during his reign, that he pro- posed to restore the fortunes of France. His main merit was that he divined the essential elements of victory, a navy which could dispute the seas with England, an army which would harass

A HISTORY OP EUROPE

1350^64

i404

3*4

without engaging the enemy, and a people recalled to sentiments of loyalty and hope. First of all the French kings he endeavoured to give his subjects a sense of the sea, visiting himself, and caus- ing others to visit, the ports and dockyaids in order that money might be more freely spent on the ships. Privileges for the towns, titles for the townsmen, economy in administration con- ciliated the general favour. The country was rid of the plague of the free companies or marauding soldiers from the dis- banded armies, who were sent over the Pyrenees to die in a Castilian civil war. As for the army, it was placed under the Breton Bertrand du Guesclin, a great master of Fabian tactics, who, in the campaign of 1369-1375, stripped England of all her overseas possessions save Bayonne, Bordeaux, and Calais. Before the end of the reign of this prudent and successful king, the French sailors were ravaging the English coast, and a Spanish navy had appealed in the Thames. Edward III and the Black Prince wcie dead. In 1380 Richard II was a lad of thirteen. The good fortune of the French monarchy seemed to be assured. Indeed, but for the fact that King Charles had embarked upon an attempt to conquer Brittany before he had finished with England, the soil of France might have been completely cleared of enemy occupation during his reign.

But llien followed one of the most disastrous periods in the history of France, during which all the gains which had marked the later yeats of Charles V's reign w’^ere thrown away and the continued existence of the French nation was again imperilled. The source of this extiaordinary relapse is to be found in an accumulation of unexpected evils — a long minority, a mad king, a spirit of fierce rivalry and faction among the princes of the blood and their noble followers, and finally in the formidable circumstance that for sixteen years England could rely upon the active co-opeiation of the most powerful subject of the French Crown.

It has already been noted that the kings of France had acquired the habit of clearing appanages or great territorial domains for the princes of the blo<'d, a method of decentralization often con- venient but sometimes dangerous. Such an appanage John the Bountiful, in his light-hearted and short-sighted way, had created for his youngest son Philip, who had earned for himself by his courage on the field of Poitiers the title of IjC Hardi. To him was accorded the Duchy of Burgundy, a splendid fief in itself,

THE HUNDRED TEARS* WAR

3^5

famous for its wines and cookery, and French to the core, but destined by reason of three fortunate marriages to be joined to territories richer and more populous than itself, and for the most part estranged from France by race and language and by the potent affiliations of trade and politics. In a word, Philip espoused the heiress of Flanders and married two children into the Bavarian house of Wittelsbach, which ruled the greater part of the country now known as the kingdom of Holland. These were fateful alliances. It was doubtless the calculation of Charles V that the Burgundian dukes would bring the rich Flemish cities into the orbit of French influence. What happened was the opposite. Rich Flanders proved to be a more powerful magnet than poor Burgundy, Brussels a more attractive capital than Dijon, the preservation of English goodwill a more im- portant consideration than a close friendship witli France. As time went on the dukes of Burgundy began to feel the effects of their new environment. They became less French and more Flemish, and behaved as the ambitious masters of an inde- pendent and rival state established on the eastern flank of France.

If Charles V had been succeeded by a strong man no great evil might have resulted from the rise of this new power; but his successor, who ascended the throne in 1380, was an un- balanced and vicious boy, who, soon after reaching his majority, lapsed into a state of acute mania. The incapacity of Charles VI ultimately left the government of France to be disputed between Louis of Orleans, the King’s youngest brother, and John of Burgundy, his powerful cousin. Louis was young, attractive, and through his Italian wife, Valentina Visconti, touched by tlie spirit of the Renaissance. John the Fearless was violent and of a rougher mould. The first stood for an energetic course of action against the hereditary foe, the second prudently recognized the economic interdependence of Flanders and England. On every question which divided France, and notably on the schism in the Church which was caused by the election of rival Popes, these two leaders took opposite sides. Louis stood for Benedict, the French Pope at Avignon; more wisely, since the support of the capital was vital, the passionate Burgundian espoused a policy of neutrality, which brought him the favour of the doctors, the students, and the rabble of Paris.

1404-1^

JItS A dlSTORT OF EUBOPE

Then occurred one of those startling political crimes which in periods of great tension announce that patience is exhausted. One night in 1407 Orleans was murdered in a Paris street. There is no mystery about the oiigin of this crime, since it was avowed by tlic Duke, and defended by a don, nor any doubt of its importance, seeing that it split France sharply into two halves so furiously estranged that, by reason of their divi- sions, northern France, including Paris, passed into the control of an English king.

It was a sinister fact, which has often been repeated in the course of French history, that the full violence of the party contest was nowhere so fully felt as in Paris. Tlie capital, which should have been the scat of order, was, on the contrary, the centre of the storm. It was so after the disaster of Poitiers, when the cause of constitutional reform was ruined by terror and treason; it was so again after the murder of the Duke of Orleans, when the intellectual proletariat of the University, in strange aliianrc with the powerful corporation ol butchers, and supported by the Duke of Burgundy, besieged the Bastille and attempted to secure the persons of the royal family, enacting a series of revolutionary scenes which anticipate in many curious particulars the events of the French and luoie recently of the Spanish Revolution.

Neither in England had the course of politics run smoothly 1577 99 since the death of Edward III. The reign of Richard 11 , the son of tlie Black Prince, vras happy only by reason of the fact that in it peace was e\entually made and maintained with France. In other icspccts it was an uneasy reign, inaiked by fierce fac- tions and by abrupt vicissuiidcs of policy, by wiclc^piead social discontent, and by a disquieting growth of heresy which chal- lenged the whole fabric of the papal Church. But of all the issues which wcic calculated to endanger national peace none was so grave as the danger to the constitutional liberties of the country which disclosed itself in thcriast two years of Richaid’s reign Whether it was by reason of his second marriage to Isabella of France and to the influence of French example, for, as we have seen, the French Statcs-General met only once during Chailes’ reign, or from a strange fit of impatience and exaspera- tion, such as may seize hold of temperamental natures, Richard in the last two years of his life showed a plain intention to discon- tinue parliamentary government. In this he seriously miscalcu-

THE HUKBRBD TEARS’ WAR

3«7

latcd the temper of his countrymen. All through the French war, parliament, which had come in the course of the reign of Edward III to be divided into two houses, had been accustomed to meet and to vote supplies. The claim of the baronage and of the prelates, and, in a lesser degree, of the burgesses and knights, to take a hand in the burden of national affairs had by this time become established; and it was too late now to reverse the engines. Edward II had been deposed because he governed too little, Richard II was deposed because he attempted to govern too much. Without any serious convulsion in the national life, the last of the Plantagcnets was displaced by Henry of Lancaster and murdered in prison, a lone, courageous, extravagant figure, more humane and enlightened than the fierce Gallophobe nobles around him, but pledged to a strange and unpopular cause.

The house of Lancaster stood for two principles which appealed to the Englishman of that time, religious orthodoxy and constitu- tional government. The policy of toleration which had permitted so great a heretic as John Wycliffc to die in his bed was ex- changed for a course of persecution, which, in a very short time, frightened learning and respectability away from Lollardy, and reduced the movement to obscurity and ignorance. But while speculative liberty was suppressed, Pailiamcnt took full advan- tage of the new dynasty to press for the control of legislation and finance. The constitutional advance, which is marked under the Lancastrian dynasty, was not indeed maintained, for liberty depends upon the preservation of order, and the main characteristic of English governments in the fifteenth century was their failure to maintain the law. Yet the precedents first established by the Lancastrian parliaments were not forgotten, for it was to them that the common lawyers made their appeal in the great struggle between Crown and Parliament in the seventeenth century.

England has never been an easy country to govern. "A wondrous and fickle land is this,’" said Richard II as he lay in the Tower, “ for it hath exiled, slain, or mined so many kings, rulers, and great men, and is ever tainted, and toileth with strife, variance, and envy and Henry IV, a cheerless, cold-blooddd ^ 399 - soldier, somewhat worn by his early campaigns in Pmssia and Hungary, and soon falling ill of an incurable malady, found that the governance of England was no easy matter, what with

A BISTORT OF EUROPE

328

the Lollards and the Scots, the Welshmen rebelling under Owen Glcndower, and the Percies making such trouble on the north that they had to be beaten in a pitched fight at Shrewsbury. A prudent statesman succeeding to the heritage which Henry IV left behind him might well have concluded that what was truly needed for the establishment of the new dynasty was peace abroad. Henry V, hotvever, was not built for prudent courses, but was all flame and maitial ardour, as he lives in M Shakespeare’s veise. If England were not easy to govern, she presented in contiast to the divi^^ions of Fiance the spectacle of a united people. Tlie baronage and clergy supported the Crown, the schism in the Papacy v^as no schism in England. Whatever inner dangers existed — and there was a parly hungry for the property of the Chinch — vicre o\ercome by the animating pros- pect of war in France. Henry negotiated simultaneously both with tlie Ihirgundian and witli the Orlcanist or Armagnac factions. He was ready to ofler himself to the highest bidder. Encouiagcd by the divisions of Fiance he never for a moment doubted of victory.

1^15 The capture of Ilaifleur and the battle of Agincourt were the first icsults of the young King’s resolve to renew the glories of Cre<;y and Poitiers, and to show that in point of military prowess the house of Lancaster was worthy to succeed the Planragcncts. The French had neither aimy nor navy to resist the invaders, A section of tlic French nobility, almost entirely diawn fiom the Armagnac faction, saciificed themselves vainly on the field of Agincoiut, as Ficmh nobles had sacrificed them- selves at Creejy and Puitieis, and later, fighting against the I'lirks, at the great slaughter of Nicopolis in 1396. But neither tlicse victojies nor Henry’s later cont|uest of Normandy would have led anywhere had it not been for the vendetta between the rival parties in France itself. The Burgundians, wlio had stood aloof lioni the Agincourt campaign, and watched with uncon- cern the fall of Rouen, weie swept into the war on the English side by a grave political crime. In 1419 John the Fearless was trcachciously murdered on the bridge of Montereau by Tanneguy de Chastel, one of the Dauphin’s intimates, and the flames of civil discord burst out afresh. For the Burgundians and also for the city of Paiis, the Dauphin was hence- forward impossible. They vowed to exclude him from the succession, and secured for llcniy V of England (Treaty of

THE HUNDRED TEARS* WAR 3^

Troyes, 1420) the regency of France and the hand of a French princess.

All through the war with France the Englfsh had in great measure owed their military successes to French, Breton, and Flemish allies. The famous army of the Black Prince which won the battle of Poitiers was largely recruited from Gascony. One of the best of its captains was a Gascon nobleman. And now when Henry V had revived the association of France and England under a common crown, the governing factor in the situation was again the friendship of a continental faction. Everj»'thing depended upon the continued alliance of that party in the French state to whom no Englishman could he so odious as an Armagnac. So long as Philip the Good of Burgundy found ir to his interest to support the l^anrastrian cause, the small English garrisons which were posted to the towns of northern France were regarded as auxiliaries of a local faction, rather than as alien instruments of a usurper's rule. But when Burgundy clianged sides (Treaty of Arras, the whole com-

plexion of affairs was altered. It was thcncefoi waul no longer a question whether England could maintain her footing in France, Without French suppoit her position was untenable. Only the pace of her reluctant withdrawal remained to be settled.

Behind the great altar of the abbey church at Rheims lay the tomb of St. Remi and within the tomb a dove-shaped rdi- quary. In tliat reliquary was a crystal vase containing the sacred oil^which a dove from Heaven had brought down for the con- secration of Clovis, the first Christian King of the Fianks. With this holy fluid, always by a miraculous dispensation maintained at its original volume, St. Charlemagne and St. Louis, and many Kings of France less illustrious than they, had been anointed, and at the solemn ceremony of their consecration had sworn to rule their subjects with justice and merry. In the eyes of the pious it was a matter of doubt whether a King of France could be regarded as in a complete sense a lawful king if he had not undergone in the cathedral at Rheims this immemorial rite.

Henry V was never consecrated. He died prematurely in the full tide of his manhood (1422), poisoned, as the English soldiers maintained, by the magic verses of the Armagnacs, and leaving

A tflSTORT or EVROPB

Ua%

1439

330

an heir of nine months, whose tender years would long preclude him from taking the solemn engagements of a newly conse- crated King of France. The way was clear for the Dauphin Charles, chief of the Armagnacs and eleventh child of the mad king, a sickly, timid, pious youth, frightened of the English, still more frightened of the violent passions which raged around him as he held his fugitive court at Bourges, Poitiers, or Chinon, but still the head of the Valois house and the descendant of the Capets.

Joan of Arc divined that Charles must be consecrated at Rhelms. Celestial voices spoke to the peasant girl as she plied her household tasks or tended her father’s sheep at Domrdmy, bidding her ride out of I^rraine into France and there relieve the city of Orleans which was besieged by the English, after which she must conduct the Dauphin to his consecration at Rheims. With a sublime simplicity of purpose Joan accom- plished these two missions. Nine days after her arrival before its walls, Orleans, which had already endured a siege for more than seven moutlis, was a free city. I'o the Dauphin, who doubted even his own legitimacy, she brought the warrant of her inspired confidence, and the political credentials which the rite of consecration could alone supply. It is idle to pretend that this girl of eighteen was a military expert. Good soldiers were at her side. Her strategy was spiritual. Ardent herself and clear of hesitations, she gave courage and elation to a disheartened cause.

The fear and hatred which she inspired among her opponents is a measure of her success. Wliilc the Armagnacs legarded her as a saint and a heroine, she appeared to the whole Burgundian and English interest to be a very wise sorceress and an un- questioned heretic. How else could they explain the sudden transformation of the whole war, the relief of Oilcans, the defeat of Patay, the capture of Troyes, the coronation of Rheims, the threat to Paris, the exchange in the ranks of their enemies of a feeling of dejection for one of conhdenre and hope? A prophcte.ss could only bring such victories to a bad cause if she were inspired by the Evil One. The University of Paris, which was Burgundian to the core, and had not scrupled to de- fend its Burgundian opinions by a pretorian band of butchers, was convinced that Joan was a witch.

After the consecration her task was accomplished. The work

THE RUNOEED TEARS* WAR

33 *

of Rational delivoranoe to which she had given so strong an impulse could proceed without her. Having fallen into the bands of the enemy at Compiegnc, she was handed over to the English chieftains, who, with the active and enthusiastic help of Pierre Cauclion, the Bishop of Beauvais, and of the doctors of the Paris University and of other notable French divines, burned her to death as a witch in the market place of Rouen. It is to be remarked that Charles VII, who owed everything to this girl, never raised his finger to help her in her extremity. A young male peasant from the Gevaudan, professing also to be a visionary of pure and saintly life, had promised to bring Charles victory whenever he appeared, and the assistance of Joan was no longer indispensable. To her English enemies, whose views are enshrined in Shakespeare’s “ Henry VI,” she was a wicked sorceress employed by bad men to make trouble for good, honest, valiant Englishmen who in a fair fight could always beat the “ Coue,” but were ill matched against the magic of a wizard.

The martyrdom of Joan gave to France a sense of moral unity such as the country had never yet known. One by one England was divested of all those advantages which had belonged to her in the earlier stages of the conflict. The Bur- gundians made their peace with France in 1435. Paris went over to the enemy in 1436. And mcanw'hilc Chailes, growing in prudence as he advanced in age, and being well served by able men of the middle class, such as Jacques Coeur the financier and Jean Bureau the first Fiench expert in artillery, the arm with which Napoleon frightened all Europe, constructed an eflicient instrument of government.

Under the Ordonnance sur la Gendai meric of 1439, set up a regulai force under royal officcis, to be financed by a royal tax, the faille, while at the same time he struck hard at the inveterate lawlessness of the nobility, who wcie forbidden to tallage their demesnes, or to raise troops without royal licence, or to levy private war. It is characteristic of the great nobles of France that they rose in rebellion against a scheme of reform so essential to the strength and security of the French nation. The Pragueric was crushed. The Royal Army of France, cavalry, infantry, artillery, was formed in defiance of the feudal traditions of the Ancicn Regime, and in the last campaign of this long war (* 449-^453) niadc its first riiumphant appearance

A HISTORY OF EUROPR

33a

on the battlefields of Europe, announcing that the age of artillery was come. Rouen, Bayonne, Bordeaux, fell in turn before the organized patriotism of France. Calais alone of all her French possessions remained to England after the peace was signed in

• 453 -

A curious feature of this long war was the persistence, despite cruel atrocities, of the spirit of the tournament. War, which was in practice an orgy of arson and pillage, was at the same time conceived of as the sport of kings, the matching of champions, and the ordeal of God. Edward III challenged Philip VI, Henry V challenged I^ouis the Dauphin to put all to the test of single combat. The display of personal courage and the observance of the conventions of chivalry were deemed to be obligations more binding upon the great Anglo-French military brotherhood than the obscurer virtues of clemency or discipline. On the evening of Poitiers, the Black Prince, who did not scruple to butcher the population of Limoges without regard to sex or age, waited at ial3]e upon the captive King John with ostentatious ceremony. Tlie high-bred camaraderie between noblemen who spoke the same language, enjoyed the same sports, worshipped according to the same rites, and obeyed the same canons of social behaviour, brought some mitigation to the conflict, save only where it was w^aged by rough sailors on the unchivalrous sea. It is significant of the spirit of those times that in the year after Cre^y the French widow of Earl Aymer of Pembroke founded a college at Cambridge, wherein French students were to receive a preferential claim to appointments, and that when the news came to Paris of Edward Ill's death, the King of France coTnin«inded a solemn service to be held in the Sainte Chapclle to the memory of a great hero, who was also his most dangerous and persistent foe.

A necessary effect of the long war was to end that close inter- penetration of France and England which had helped through the Norman Conquest to fashion England and through the Angevin Empire to mould the administration of France, and had brought so much good and evil to both countries. In England the French language had given place to the native tongue in literature and the law courts, in parliament and the pulpit, in the official correspondence of kings and in the private letters of cultivated persons. The great contribution which English writers had made to the common literature of the two

THE HUNDRED YEARS* WAR

553

peoples was now brought to a standstill, French and English writers went their several ways, the English acknowledging the spell of French models, but also, under Chaucer’s leadership, listening for the first time to Dante and the Italians, Between the two nations a steady feeling of bitterness and estrangement replaced the old relations of tolerance, which are reflected in the amusing chronicles of Froissart. The feudal age, leaving in Sir Thomas Malory’s prose romance of Morte d’Arthur (1470) an imperishable after-glow, had passed away, and was now replaced by the clash of states.

A great war cannot proceed without far-rcaching consequences for human life. Thcie is nothing so ellicacious in breaking the hard crust of custom as a sudden enlargement in the scale of state expenditure. The need for state money creates new prob- lems, opens new horizons, establishes new claims, brings new men to the forefront of affairs, disnubs the economic relations of classes. Tlie fiscal necessities of Edward III were the financial opportunities of the Floicntinc bankers and the constitutional opportunities of the English parliament. Out of the fear of war risks the Englissh took to the manulacture of cloth and so estab- lished the fiijjt of their capitalistic industiies, A fall in the value of money and a corresponding rise in prices was the natural effect of the disastrous currency policy pursued by the French kings under the pressure of war, and produced, not for France only, all ihe emhariassincnts which inflation inevitably brings in its train. As the existing taxes became insuSicient, new sources of revenue had to be discovered; as price levels rose, the relations between the employer and the employed, the tradesman and the customer, the landlord and the peasant became difficult and embittered. In the decade between 1375 and 1385 a wave of popular discontent passed over western Europe. It was felt in Flanders, in northern France, m Ghent, and most seriously in the English peasant rising of 1381. Every- where the ruling class was for a moment seriously alarmed. A new force had made itself manifest and given a shake to the obdurate fabric of European caste. The w^arrior aristocracy could no longer ignore the great underworld of thrusting ambi- tions which was now helping to shape society. It is significant that the English government which proposed the poll tax of 1381 was under the impression that all the wealth of the king- dom had passed into the hands of the artisans and labourers.

A ttlSTORT or EUROPE

334

There was a further unexpected effect of these economic dis- turbances. Monetary inflation presented to the Popes of Avignon a problem of extraordinary difficulty. Whence were they to obtain the revenue necessary to support that imposing establishment which in the thirteenth century had supplied to Europe its active organizing piinciple, and was still regarded as a necessity of civilized life by Latin Christians? John XXII, the Frenchman from Cahorsin, invented Annates. That ingenious financier and theologian took the first year's revenue from every benefice. Other engines of extoition, notably the habit of papal provisions, were invoked in aid of the apostolic budget, and cieated, more paiticularly in England, deep lesentment and formal opposition. The effects were far-reaching. Long before it had occurred to the common man to challenge the faith or impugn the credendals of the Papacy, the moral authority of papal goternment was giavely impaired thioughout north- ern Europe by its coir up t and demoralizing methods of finance.

The English epilogue to this long French drama was the suicide of the feudal nobility in the Wars of the Roses. The nobles, to whom it had become a second nature to fight in the fields of France or among the hills of Wales, and for whom an affray at arms was little more seric>us than the pursuit of the deer and the fox, w'erc not easily accommodated to the hum- drum ways of peace. Many of them commanded little armies of liveried retainers, who could be entrusted to intimidate a jury, to despatch an enemy, or to help themselves without ceremony to the purse of the travelling merchant or to the goods of neighl)ours poorer and weaker than themselves. Against this eril of the “ovet mighty subject ” the weak govern- ment of Henry VJ was entirely unable tu cope.

So two aristocratic factions, led by rival pretenders to the Planta genet inheritance, fought out their public and private quarrels amid a people either heartily indifferent to the issue or honestly perplexed as whether its interests were likely to be best served under the Red Rose of Lancaster or the ’W hite Rose of York. It was fortunate for England tliac this should be so. It was well that no question wortliy to engage the passions of a great people was involved in this blood-letting of the old aristocracy. The two great movements which during th«

THB HVNDREO YEARS’ WAR

S35

fifteenth century made for the welfare of the English nation, the growth of industrial and mercantile prosperity and the advancing cause of peasant freedom, were unaffected by the vendetta of the country houses. When the storm finally blew itself out it was found to have occasioned little damage. Rather the state profited by the elimination of forces which ob- structed the working of government and the observance of law.

'fhough the loss of the French dominions was the subject of many bitter regrets, the English neither felt nor had reason to feel that they were inferior to their neighbours. They still cherished the belief that some day the glories of Cre9y and Agincourt could be revived. They learnt from Sir John Fortcscue to congratulate themselves upon the free constitution which it was their privilege to inherit, and to contrast the well- being and plenty of the English cottagers with the harsh lot of the French peasantry under their noble taskmasters. If they lost the long war, they none the less emerged a proud nation, hungry for action and consumed with restlessness within the boundaries of their small island. Nor had their development been confined to the arts of war. The contemporaries of Cre^y and Agincourt had shown many forms of excellence more enduring than the prowess of their bowmen. They had developed a language so rich and flexible, and so happily compounded of Latin and Teutonic elements, that none is more fitted to express the thoughts and feelings of a poetic, imaginative, and humorous people. They had discovered in Chaucer and Langlaiid two poets of genius. They had built the beautiful chapels of Win- chester and New College. In needlework and the illumination of manuscripts, as also in the arts of the goldsmith and the carver, they had given evidence of possessing in addition to those robust and virile qualities by which they were generally known the rarer attributes of delicacy and taste. Nor had they shrunk from the arduous work of consistent philosophic think- ing. John Wycliffe, writing without fear in the reign of Richard II, had drawn in anticipation the whole map of Pro- testant tliought and belief.

336

A HISTORY OF EUROPE

BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED

A. Luc'haire: Manuel des Institutions Frnnc^aises. 1892.

E. Lavisse: Ilistoire de France. 1903.

W. Stubbs: Constitutional History of En inland. 1880.

Anatole France: Vie de Jeanne d’Arc. iqo8.

Sir Charles Oman: The (ireat Revolt 1381. igo6.

Sir Charles Oman: A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ai^es, 1924.

Sir Charles Oman: Waiwick (he Kinj^ Maker. 1891.

S. A. Armitaj^e Sinilh: John of Gannl. i<>o4.

Sir John Fortestue: 'fhe Govei nance of England. Ed, C. Plummer. 1885.

Shakespeare: Richard IL Shakespeare; He ir> VI.

Bernard Shaw: Saint Jcian. J023.

N. Valois: l.a Fraiuo ot le Grand Schisme d’Oteddent. 1896.

Froissart: C'hronii Ics. (ICver vnian’.s Library.)

K. II. Virkers; FiJt»l'uid in the La(er Middle Ages. 1913.

Bainvillc: Ilistoiie de France.

CTIAPTER XXIX

GERMANS AND SWISS

Foundations of the Ilahshurg poiver, Louis of Bavaria, Growth of German towns. Decline of German literature. Emancipation of the Swiss. The Ilabsburgs lose Switzerlatid for Germany, hut gain the Empire for themselves. Nullity of the liabsburg Emperor when the Turks take Constantinople.

The election of Rudolf of Habsburg to be King of the Romans in 1273 marks the opening of a new era in the history of cen- tral Europe, llie old imperial game of attempting to unite under a single effective sovereignty two countries so large and so dissimilar as Italy and Germany had come to an end with the death of the last scion of the last of the great imperial families, and the iip-Jtart SwisvS noble who found himself sud- denly lifted to the highest dignity in Europe fell no romantic or antiquarian scruples in abandoning to the Pope the Romagna, the Exarchaic, the imperial claims in Tuscany, and the suzerainty over Sicily. Rudolf was not interested in Italy. The achievement of his vig</rous reign was to wrest Austria from Ottokar of Bohemia (battle of the Marchfield, 1278) and to found the power of the liabsburg house in the valley of the Danube, where it remained an imposing and dominating in- fluence till the world war.^

Political disunion nevertheless continued to be a prevailing feature of German life. The \igorous and intelligent Teutonic stock which had overrun tlie Roman Empire and given dynasties to Italy and Spain, France and England, and even to Russia, was stricken by a palsy at the heart and deprived of all weight and initiative in the affairs of Europe. The old principles of racial patriotism which promised in earlier days to supply some measure of moral coherence were now almost wlioliy effaced. Saxony and Bavaria had been dismembered by Barbarossa, the Duchy of Swabia bad foundered during the minority of Frederick 11 . Germany was not so much a state as a field in which princes, prelates, and imperial cities, and thousands of small nobles claiming to hold immediately of the empire, pursued their separate ambitions with just so much political combination as might furnish the illusion of national ^ Genealogical Table I, p. 424.

337

33^ A a;iSTORY OP EUROPE

greatness, and just too little sacrifice of personal convenience to enable the illusion to become a reality. Everybody fought for his own hand. So faint was the spirit of German patriotism that the crown was even offered to Edward III of England (who was prevented by his parliament from taking it), and that for a space of fifty years after 1346 the German people were content to have their affairs managed from the Bohemian capital of Prague.

The prime source of all these evils is to be found in the selfish policy of the College of Electors. For them every election pre- sented a golden opportunity for rapacity and intrigue. If a candidate was uninfluential, if he was not heir to the last Emperor, if he was acceptable to France and the Papacy, if he had no great teiritorial position in Germany, and, above all, if he was lavish in his promises, then he was likely to be accept- able to the Electoral College. In these circumstances it is not surprising that the highest secular office in Europe sank steadily during the fourteenth century in dignity and repute.

There was but one exception to the general rule otherwise ob- served till 1 742 against the choice of an Emperor with a great Ger- man territorial position. Louis of Bavaria was Emperor from 1314 to 1347. His election was disputed, and his reign embittered by civil war, by a long contest with the Avignon Popes, and by humiliating surrenders to Fiance. Despite some engaging merits and a great territorial position, for the Rhenish palatinate, the counties ol Holland and Hainault, the Tyrol and Brandenburg were, in aildition to Bavaria, governed by the Wittelsbach house, this unfortunate prince died excommunicated by the Pope and deposed by the electors. Centuries passed by before the imperial dignity was again held by a prince whose terri- torial possessions were wholly situated within the confines of Germany. Charles IV and his son Wenzel were first and fore- most Kings of Bohemia, Sigismiind, the younger brother of Wenzel, was primarily King of Hungary. The long line of Habsburg Emperors from 1438 onwaids were only as to the smaller part of their territories rulers of German-speaking people. It suited the convenience of the electors that the Emperor should be pushed into the uttermost corners of the Reich and closely occupied with non-German ambitions. For Germany itself they wanted not a national monarch, but an elective piesident of a Diet dependent on their favours.

CBRMANd AND SWISS

m

It follows that the real interest of German history during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries lies not so much in the action of the central royal government, which within the proper limits of Germany was seldom able to discharge even the most ele- mentary duties of taxation and police, as in the rich and varied life of the people, in the growth of territorial principalities, in the free activities of great cities like Nuremberg and Augsburg, in the vast development of trading activity on the Rhine and in the cities of the Hanseatic League, or in the colonization and conquest of Prussia by the knights of the Teutonic order. The lack of political discipline, which is characteristic of this age, was consistent with a steady and indeed remarkable growth of material wealth. Aeneas bilvius, who visited Germany in 1458, reported that nothing more magnificent or beautiful could be found in all Europe than Cologne with its wonderful churches, city halls, towers, and palaces, that some of the houses of Strasburg citizens were so proud and costly that no king would disdain to live in them, that the Kings of Scotland would be glad if they were as well housed as the moderately well-to-do buighers of Nuremberg, that Augsburg was not surpassed in riches by any city in the world, and that Vienna had some palaces and churclies which even Italy might envy.

The picture of the Italian visitor is the more remarkable when we reflect that in Germany private war was chronic, that no convoy of merchandise could travel safely without an armed escort, and that the imperial cities had only been able to win and maintain tlieir prosperity by the armed vigilance of their citizens. In such circumstances an intense civic patriotism was strongly developed. The citizen of Augsburg, of Cologne, of Lubcck, or Magdeburg cared little for the claims of remote im- perialism, but very greatly for the grandeur of his own city. For this his kinsmen had shed their blood, and for this he was prepared, if need be, to repeat the sacrifice. Beside such near and urgent loyalties his sentiment for the German Reich was faint and distant.

As often happens in an age of fierce violence and expanding wealth, the civilization of the German people was in the four- teenth century distinguished by an energetic materialism. It has been remarked by Dollingcr that when I-ouis of Bavaria was ^ engaged in his long-drawn controversy with the Popes, he was compelled, by reason of the lack of native jurists or theologians

340 A HISTORY OF EUROPE

or of any German university, to call upon Englishmen and Italians to conduct his literary campaigns. No German poet was comparable with Chaucer for sweetness or humour, with Villon for passion, with Petrarch for elegance, or with the Minnesinger of the age of chivalry. The solid German middle- class inaugurated its conquest of a place in the sun by a salvo of inharmonious prose which the world has been content to forget. In a country so broken and disordered a standard or general level of excellence was not to be expected; but the soil of German human nature was nevertheless ricli in its capacities, and from its confused but retarded vegetation rare plants emerged — here a mystic, there an inventor, an architect, a craltsman of virtuosity. The beer was excellent, the folk music good, and the people v^hich stood so low in the scale of states- manship and literal me produced the tw’o discoveries which have done most in modern times to revolutionize human society. Gunpowder and the printing press came from Germany.

The crowming proof of Imperial weakness and impolicy in the later middle ages is tlic cinaiicipaiion of Swii/ciland. The idea of secession was never present to the loyal hearts of this moun- tain people. The Swiss did not rise against the Emperor. On tlie contrary, they wished to be immediately dependent on him and to sweep away tlic intcivcning feudal lyiannics which plagued their lives and obstructed their access to his throne of justice. In all the Swiss leagues, from tile first union of the three Forest Cantons in 1291 to the Treaty of Rasel, February 22, 1499, which closed the iinal war of lihciation, the lights of the Em- peror and the Empire were expressly reserved. But (German statesmanship was wholly unable to harness the loyalty of this valiant people. Even when the Swiss pikemcn and halberdiers had shown themselves again and again t > he tlte most formid- able fighters in Europe, as at Morgarten (1315), Sempach (1386), and Nafels (1388), even when they had fought on even terms with riie French and defeated the Burgundians, and had be- come the one great C' nire of military energy in the German Reich, so that it might have seemed to be a prime object of policy to assign them a large and important part in the govern- ing confederation, they were treated with studied neglect. The strongest community in the Empire had no voice in its counsels; and, so far as the imperial constitution went, might never have

Th*» three ongtna.! Co'^^ons

Candors added bt/ the end the Hth ^ en^-ury

The Growth of Switzerland,

A aiSTORT OF EUROPE

34 *

Stepped into the sunlight of history. It is a curious commentary upon Imperial unwisdom that when, at the Diet o£ Worms in

• 495» a real and necessary effort was made to improve the im-

perial constitution by introducing a common system of taxation and an imperial court of justice (Reichs Kammergericht) the Swiss were simply left out of account. The burghers and cow- herds of the cantons learnt they would now be expected to pay " the common penny ” and to submit to die decrees of a dis- tant court as members of a federation which they had no share in directing. “ They want to give us a master ” was the natural interpretation placed upon these one-sided proposals coming from an external body, and a master they were resolutely deter- mined to reject. The Swabian war of 1499. marked by an un- interrupted series of Swiss victories, is in effect, though not in name, the IJelveiian war of independence. Aficr that the free- dom of Switzerland was in substance secured.

Deep-seated social differences explain the antagonism which led to this result. In the first half of the fifteenth century the Swiss inspired something of the fear and contemptuous disgust

• 934 which is now Icll by conservative hou'^cholds in France and

England for the Russian communist. The struggles in Switzer- land had not merely been directed against the tyrannous agents of the Ilabsburgs, l)ut also against the local nobility. Tliere had been social as well as political manifestations of the new power of urban and rural democracy against the feudal rights and privilege of an older time. The conservatism of the German nobility was profoundly alarmed by this new and dangerous portent of Swiss dcmociaty “liquidating” the aristocracy in its area. The contagion might spiead. The peasants of Germany might wish to become Swiss, to foim leagues, to fight battles, to dispute the long-descended pii\ilcgcs of their lords. Every Ger- man noble felt that his order was menaced by this unmannerly rout of cowkeepers and tiadcsmcn wdio, by sale, mottgage, or force of arms, had made it cleat that Switzerland was not safe for aristocracy. Nor did the Emperor Maximilian misrepre- sent the feelings of his well-born subjects when in a public pro- clamation he referred to the Swiss as “ an ill-conditioned, rough, and bad peasant-folk in whom there is to be found no virtue, no noble blood, and no moderation, but only disloyalty and hatred towards the German nation.”

The liberation of the Swiss, which marks the first triumph of

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343

the democratic principles in Europe over an area larger than the city state, was the more remarkable by reason of the prevailing drift towards princely power and authority- The Swiss had no superfine ideas to give to the world. Their civilization was in- finitely poorer than that of Italy, Germany, or France. They had contributed nothing then, as they have contributed but little since, to the stock of European science or culture. Yet few historical events have been more beneficial than the establish- ment of Swiss freedom by the valour and energy of a subject race and a divided people.

The Swiss not only gave lessons in the military art to all the armies of Europe: they helped to restore to the continent of Europe the idea of political liberty. This they showed to be a force capable of welding together peoples differing in speech and race and ultimately even in religion. And so through the age of despotism Switzerland remained the pattern of a parvenu state, governing its own affairs without the assistance of nobles or kings, and reminding Europe that the catalogue of political ex- periments was not yet exhausted. Here men could breathe freely and hither resort for the fearless discussion of questionable matters. Long before the loveliness of snow-flakes was discovered, and while its mountains were regarded with universal horror and aversion, Switzerland had become a place of refuge for the un- easy, anticipating on a miniature scale the later role of the United States, but with a greater influence on religious life.

The enemy in conflict with whom the Swiss cantons won their earliest and latest triumphs w^as the house of Habsburg. The cruelty of Albert I, the son of Rudolf of Habsburg, and of his oppressive agents, called into life the original league of the forest cantons. It was Habsburg pride which was abased on the fields of Morgarten. of Sempach, and of Nafels, and a century later in the last and decisive conflict of the Swabian war. All through the formative years of the Confederacy, the Swiss could count upon the steady hostility of this Austrian family, which, having sprung from a Swiss root, regarded the rebels with a peculiar and local malevolence.

If then the Habsburgs are the makers of Austria, they are also the makers, or from the German point of view the losers, 6f Switzerland. This was the great rebuff experienced by a family whose territorial aggrandizement and fortunate Empire-winning marriages have passed into a proverb. Save for this, everything

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on a long view turned out well for these steady, rather dull, acquisitive men. Even their failure to o])tain the imperial crown between the death of Rudolf of Habsburg in 1291 and the eleva- tion of Albert V to the Empire in 1437 was a blessing in disguise, for during that centuiy and a half, undisturbed by imperial claims and duties, they built up for themselves the position of being the largest territorial holders in Germany. So when the Emf)ire returned to them with Albert they were able to keep it with one brief intermission (1742-1744) until the end.

There was something in the racial and geographical condi- tions of the Danube valley which seemed to demand such a ^440-93 dynasty, firm, steady, unintellertual. Frederick III, the first Emperor to show the famous Habsburg lip, and the last Empeior to be crowned in Rome, was as great a nullity as ever played an imjiortant part in histoiy. Without any of the engaging gifts of Edward II of England, Fiedcrick was just as little fitted as that unfortunate monarch for the despatch of business. A clever Italian diplomat like Aeneas Sylvius could iwnst him round his little finger. Yet this dull, obstinate bigot ruled in Vienna for more than thirty years, leaving no piiiit ol mind or will upon the conduct of affairs. The Turks conquered Constantinople and overran Hungary. The role of Austria as the chief remaining bulwark of Christianity against the Ottoman Turk became charged with a new significance, which could hardly escape the meanest intelligence. But no event, however startling, could rutile the placidity of Fiedcrick, no problem however grave could excite his sluggish mind, or the most alarming prospect inflame liis torpid imagination. Inertia was tlie principle of his life. I'he most important station in Europe at one ol the most critical moments in her history was occupied by a blocklicad.

BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED

Coxc: History of the llr^se of Austria, 1847. j. Hryte: Holy Roman Lmpire. 1904.

J, F. Kirk: Hibtoiy of Chailos the Hold. 3 vols. 18(13-8,

Aeneas Sylvius Hiccoloinini: De icbus ct gtstis Tiedeiici III. Ed A. F, Kollei.

K. Dandliker: Short History of Switzerland. Tr. Salisbury, 1899.

\V. T, Waugh: A History of Eiiiope, 1378-1^94. 1932.

CHAPTER XXX

CRITICS AND REFORMERS

Political ideas of Dante, Growth of scientific interest. The Papacy at A 7 *tgnon. The Great Schism, 1378-1417. The Conciliar idea launched in the unhersiiies. Mystical movements of the fourteenth century, Wycliffe, Survival of Lollard y tn Entiland. Influence of Wycliffe on Bohemia. Progress of that country under the house of Luxemburg. Charles IV and the Golden Bull. 7 he University of Prague and John Jius. Bohemian Puritanism. The Hussite 1417-1431. Compact of Jglau, 1436.

Mixture of racial and religious animosities in the Hussite movement. Effort to reform the Church from within. The Conciliar Movement. Its failure. The Papacy triumphant over its critics. 1450,

With the advance of the fourteenth century the idea of a Chris- tian Society organized under the joint authority of Pope and Emperor, though it still continued to haunt the imagination of men as part of tlie ultimate purpose of God, became increasingly divorced from die realities of European life. Tlie Empire had ceased to command. The Popes in exchanging Rome for the pleasant letrcat of Avignon had incurred the suspicion of every state in Europe which at one time or another was brought into opposition to the government of France. The age of pan-Euro- pean movements was passing away. A new era of national consolidation had set in. To the sacerdotal pretensions of Boni- face VIlI Elngland and France replied with a national manifesto, and the Hundred Years’ War, the supreme political fact of the century, was the first of the national wars of Europe. Out of it emerged the two leading states of the west, each sharply con- scious of its own superiority and of the other’s deficiencies, and each inveterate in its rivalry with the other. In this long and cruel contest, the Papacy, ingeminating and enjoining peace, but always su.spect of French sympathies, played a useful but mosdy ineffectual role.

We have already seen how, in his Divine Comedy, as also in his Latin treatise on Monarchy, Dante sums up the regrets of a poet and a moralist upon a world which had swung away from its anchorage in the divine purpose. He saw the Papacy corrupted by wealth, the Empire broken and humiliated, his beloved Italy enslaved by foreigners. The universal monarchy designed for the rightful ordering of human society had been challenged and

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despoiled by the ivickcdncss of men. Only in an imperial re- storation and in the purification of the Church by the Franciscan spirit of evangelical poverty did he discern the hope of improve- ment. But the principle upon which it had been sought to organize the Christian world in the thirteenth century had now gone beyond recall. New men, new ideas, new forces, were pressing forward. The clergy no longer held the monopoly of learning and culture. The layman was coming into his own. Though European society still remained mainly agricultural, a w’calthy middle class had been developed from the commerce of the towns, and was now beginning to patronize art and letters. We have reached the age of Chaucer, Froissart, and Boccaccio.

Even in those regions where thought was icebound in theology we become conscious, as w'e advance in the fourteenth century, of genial currents setting towards the illimitable ocean of scientific discovery. Led by the original genius of Duns Scotus, the Franciscans of Oxford, no home then of lost causes, but on the contrary conspicuous for its pioneering enterprise, challenged the power of the human mind to accommodate the claims of faith and reason. The mysteries of tdigion they pronounced to be unintelligible, tlie laborious travail of theology and philo- sophy to be an idle exercise of the spirit. Vain was the celebrated fabric of scholastic logic, vain the imposing and ingenious w^ork of St. Thomiis, harmonizing the ncw^Iy found Aristotelian learn- ing with the text of Holy Writ, as at the Cairene University of A1 Azhar the Moslem doctor of today finds all science in the words of the Prophet. The human mind must feed on other pastures. The Oxford Franciscans and their French disciples of the University of Paris turned from the pursuit of theological subtleties to the science of ob‘»crvation and experiment. They touched upon psychology and optics: they aflirmed that the celestial and terrestrial bodies w^ere composed of the same matter and governed by the same mechanical laws. Tlicy made ap- proaches towards a theory of gravity: To Nicholas Oresme, the Frenrh pupil of William of Ockham, belongs the credit of sug- gesting that our earth moved with the planets, and of contribut- ing the first page to the vast body of scientific literature on the subject of cui-rency.

Suddenly the warm current of lively scientific curiosity, after flowing freely for half a century, froze and was lost. The old scholastic logic resumed its sway at Oxford, as the quarrel of

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tbx: orthodox Church with the Lollard heresy spread through the life of the English people; nor was it until the middle of the seventeenth century that the spirit of Roger Bacon and William of Ockham lived again among the gardens and quadrangles of Oxford, with Boyle and Mayow, Wilkins and Wren, Hooke, Petty, and Evelyn, and that the status of English science was secured by the foundation of the Royal Society.

It would be an exaggeration to say of the seven French Popes who ruled at Avignon from 1309-1378 that they were wholly untrue to the conception of their office. In France at least they worked for peace, in the near cast fruitlessly for a Crusade. If they made the machinery of papal government odious by their exactions, they left it a good deal more effective than it had previously been. One of them was learned in theology, two were austere in conduct, a fourth organized an expedition against the Turkish corsairs, and by a rare act of courageous toleration at a time when the Jews were suspected of contriving the Black Death, extended his protection to these innocent but unpopular people.

But it would be idle to deny that the Papacy greatly suffered in public esteem by reason of the Avignonese captivity. All over Italy these French Popes were unpopular, first because they were Frenchmen, who filled the College of Cardinals witli their compatriots, and secondly because they had deseited Rome for a city which, though not technically in France, adjoined the dominions and was exposed to the influence of the French king. The splendour and luxury of the papal court, to which the artists and scholars of Italy and France were attracted, the shameless nepotism with which the highest positions in the Church were lavished on the relatives of the Popes, and even upon boys, the grinding exactions of the papal tax collectors for the support of this magnificence, and for the prosecution of the temporal aims of the Papacy in the Italian peninsula, shocked scrupulous minds all over Euorpe. Even critics not remarkable for austerity commented on the clerical fortune-hunters, who crowded the streets of Avignon, whence all church patronage was dispensed, and where every office, so it was reputed, might be had for a price. '

The flight of the Papacy to Avignon had been justified by the turbulence and insecurity of Rome. The return to Rome was prompted by the discovery that Avignon itself was not secure.

34® A FIISTORY OF EUROPE

but exposed to the ravages of the dangerous hands of hungry mercenaries, who, after the Peace of Bretigny in 1360, were loosed on the suffering population of France; and the return was under- taken the more readily sinre the papal state, which had now been reconquered, was awaiting a master, and might not wait indefinitely if the master failed to come. To the joy of every pious and patiiotic Italian heart the move so vehemently advo- cated by St. Catherine of Siena w'as undei taken by Gregory XI, a Frenchman and the creator of eighteen French cardinals, in 1377. In the following year Gregory was dead.

Then ensued the Great Schism, which, lasting from 1378-1417, and dividing the Roman Church into two opposing camps, came near to destroying the unity of the Latin west. The real ques- tion had nothing to do with religion. The Italians wanted the Papacy for Italy, they wanted its money, its influence, its prestige. The French intended that the Pope, whether established in Rome or ruling in Avignon, should continue to he, as he had been during three-quai ters of a century, the servant of their particular interests. The technical question as to which of the two rivals. Urban VI or Clement VII, was the rightful Pope was never sub- mitted to dispassionate analysis. It was sufficient that Urban VI was the Italian, and Clement VII the Ftench candidate. National passions and political alliances determined in each man s case wliich of the rivals was in ttuth the Vicar of Christ. France, Scotland, Savoy, and later Castile and Aragon were C'lemcntinc; England, Bohemia, Hungary, and later Portugal weie Urbanist. The essentially political character of the struggle v/as illustrated by the fact that Clement endeavoured to entice the FreiH h to c'onquer Italy, and that with this endeavour in view he arranged the marriage of the Duke of Orleans, the brother of Charles VI, with Valentina Visconti of Milan, and caused Queen Joan of Naples to adopt as her heir Louis of Anjou. In these two transactions were rooted the French claims upon Naples and Milan, which, more than a century letter, led to the French in- vasion of Italy by Charles VIIL

At this crisis Ear pe for the first time experienced the weight in public affairs of an organized body of academic opinion. The Univ'^ersity of Paris, led by two vigorous and broadminded ecclesiastics, Jean Gerson and Pierre D’Ailly, was deeply concerned with the grave scandal which was undermining the discipline and affecting the honour of the

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Church. In a sermon preached before King Charles VI of France (June, 1391), Gerson urged that if the schism could not be ended by the simultaneous resignation of the two Popes, or by arbitration between them, there was no method open but the summoning of a General Council of the Church. Once pur abroad, and with the failure of each successive attempt to accommodate the rival obediences, the idea of a General Council attracted adherents, and as it grew in favour, became in the mind of its protagonists something a great deal bigger than a mere expedient for healing the schism. They saw in the General Council a divine instrument for the reformation of the Church in its head and members, and a means of subjecting the Pope to a permanent system of constitutional control.

The time was ripe for reform, for on this topic of the true ordering of the Christian Church Eun)pe had long been full of uneasy questions. Was the Church, as the Fraticelli proclaimed, '*the Great Babylon,'^ and the Pope in truth Antichrist? Were the Apostles, as the Franci«‘cans affirmed at Perugia (1322), empty of all earthly possessions, and should the Vicar of Christ tread in the same path of saintly piety? One such Pope had sat in the chair of Sr. Peter, Celcsiine V was an old, simple, destitute hermit. He had been driven from the throne by Boniface VIII, to whose ambitious secular policies it was customary to trace the abasement of the Papacy at Avignon. To the passionate idealists of Italy Celestine stood foi all that was good, as did Avignon for all that was evil, in the Christian Chuich. It was not apparent to these simple men that institutions have value, and that they need for their support money and wisdom.

The Church has always found room for idealists and mystics; and the fact that in the fouiteenth century mystics like John Eckhait and John Tauler conformed to its cliscipline, while repudiating its methods, has been put down to the -^redit of Catholic charity. But outside the Church, and in spite of the piti- less working of the Inquisition, the heresies of the puritan and mystical temperament flourished abundantly, taking different forms and colours (Catharists in Corsica and Bosnia, the Vaudois in the Alpine valleys and among the hills of Naples and Sicily, the Beghards in Germany), but united in their challenge to th^ pomp and ambition of the papal see, to its sacraments and cere- monies, and to the claim of the priesthood to a special measure of divine authority.

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More important than these scattered and unlettered move- ments was English Lollardy. This was a protest against the whole system of mediaeval Church teaching and practice, launched by a great divine, and supported during its formative years by the influence of Oxford, then the most free and power- ful University in Europe, yet, despite its unsentimental appeal to the scholarly intellect, carrying a simple message to the hearts of humble folk, and a promise which all might under- stand of a regenerate society. We know little of the outward history of John WyclifTe, the prophet of this movement for the reform of the English Church. He was born in Yorkshire in 1324, he taught in Oxford, where he became for a time Master of Balliol, and, on being expelled from the University in 1382, returned to Liitrerworth, his cure of souls in Leicestershire, where he lived quietly until his death two years later. Within these limits of time, Wycliffe anticipated all the main positions of the Protestant Reformation.

He was one of those high-minded, energetic radicals who owe nothing to the graces but everything to character. As he con- templated the manifold scandals of the Church, his plain, mas- sive Yorkshire brain was stirred by a sombre moral indignation to the issue of a long succession of tracts and sermons in Latin and English, often exaggerated in language, but stamped with a cotirage and integrity which mark their writer as one of the first English apostles of free thinking and plain speaking. His great academic position in Oxford, 'won by a complete com- mand of the intricate dialectical art, then much affected by learned men, gave him a prestige ^^vluch the monks and friars were unable, save with the outside help of king and arch- bishop, seriously to impair. But his message was not only, or indeed mainly, to the wise. He believed in English preaching and in an English Bible, in preaching based on Scripture, and in Scripture made available for all. An order of poor preachers, schooled by his models, spicad the message through the country- side. llie English Bible which bears his name was translated in the circle of his discip'es.

His first entrance into national politics was as the expert ally of John of Gaunt, w^ho, like many otltcr parliament men at that time, wished to see the Church disendowed and its broad acres returned to the nobles and gentry. For this violent course many plausible reasons could be assigned. Hie country was harassed

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by taxation for an unsuccessful French War. The Church was reported to possess a third of the land in the country. Many of its ocst benefices were under the odious system of Provisions, and, in defiance of the law, conferred by the connivance of King and Pope on non-residenc Italians. Much of its wealth was drained away from the country by papal taxation. From the remainder it was contended that the state exacted an insufficient toll. The disendowment of the Church, then, was urged as a measure, not only good for clerical ethics, but also calculated to relieve the laity from a crushing burden, and to strengthen the fiscal revenues of the Crown. With these arguments based on national convenience Wyclifle was in accord. Ilis outlook, which was that of a patriotic English Erastian, was strongly opposed to the cosmopolitan theory of the mediaeval Church. In a pamphlet entitled De Officio Regis he claimed for the national sovereign powers of ecclesiastical control and discipline in terms which would have satisfied King Henry VIII.

Once embarked upon a criticism of the Church as he saw it at work in the reign of King Edward HI, Wycliffe was drawn on further and further until there was hardly a part of the structure which escaped his censure. The bishops, the Caesarean clergy, as he called them, were too much engaged in affairs of state to attend to their proper clerical duties. Monastic life was not so much abominable as useless. The Friars lowered the whole tone of the Church by the sale of indulgences for sin, by their style of empty, sensational preaching. From his de- nunciations of the secular occupations of the Episcopate he was led on by an easy transition to condemn prelacy and to advocate a form of Church government differing little from what was subsequently known as Presbyterianism. From the authority of the Church he appealed to the authority of Scripture, and finally launched an attack upon the central mystery of the Catholic Faith. In an interesting treatise, De Ctvili Dotninio, Wycliffe argues with a logic impregnated with feudal concep- tions, that dominion ” or power is founded on grace, or, in plain language, that the claim to exercise any form of authority is grounded on virtue, and disappears where virtue is not. From these premises it followed that an unworthy priest could not administer the sacraments, that the authority of the Pope be- longed to him only in so far as he showed himself possessed of the Grace of God, and that the claims made on behalf of the

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ecclesiastical hierarchy as an institution possessing independent validity were invalid. By 1380 he had reached the position mat Transubstantiation was a false doctrine, and that the priest had no magic whereby he could transform the substance of bread into the body of Christ.

It will be seen that the idea of a Christian Church which Wycliffe had gradually built up for himself was in abrupt con- tradiction to the world of belief and practice into which he had been born. Protestant in the fullest sense it w^as not, for WyclifEe retained his faith in purgatory, and did not refuse to the Virgin Mother a special place in the veneration of mankind. But in its repudiation of popery and prelacy, in its appeal to the authority of Scripture, in its denial of the miracle of the Mass, and of the special claim of the clergy to be endowed with spiritual power, as well as in the rationalizing contempt with which lie handled such established practices as compulsory confessions and prayers for the dead, pilgrimages and the worship of relics, the doctrine of Wycliffe was indistinguishahlc from that of the Puritan divines of the seventeenth century. Moreover, in the southern and more civilized parts of England these tenets were popular. Oithodoxy was still supreme, but ever since the Nor- man Conejuest a stubborn vein of anticlericalism ha^l been mani- fest in the English people. With this feature of the national character Wycliffe’s teaching was in haimony.

Thus we may explain the fact that I^ollardy survived ilie condemnation and cleath of its founder and outlived the perse- cution of the Lancastrian age. With the loss of Oxford, which was easily recovered for oithodoxy and once recovered w’as kept under an iron heel, the movement was deprived of the learned character wdiich originally belonged to it, and became a religion of humble unlettered men and women, who met in secret to ponder Holy Writ, or to listen to the voice of a travelling preacher; but as such a religion it persisted until the sixteenth century, when it was merged in the ‘tidal wave of the Protestant Reformation. We find it alive in I.ondon and East Anglia, among the poor clia^coal burners of the Chiltcrn becchwoods, and in the country tow»ns and villages of the w^est. Though there w’as yet no printing press to multiply copies of the Bible, or the tracts and sermons of Wycliffe, tliough transcription was a slow process and the possession of transcripts might lead to a fiery death, the English Lollards went on unsubdued, handling

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down from father to son tlie tradition of their simple Christian faith, and cherishing the memory of their heroic martyrs. We may conjecture that for every devoted member of this pro* scribed communion there were hundreds of an easier and more compliant temper who, while making their peace with the established order, had long ceased to render it a real allegiance. The English are a race slow to move. That they moved so far and so fast in the sixteenth century is due to the fact that for the first time since the conversion of the island to Christianity a religious alternative to the faith of Rome had been pro- pounded by Wycliffe, and that, being in essentials congenial to the national temper, it had found adherents in many classes of society. Such is the justification for saying that the Protestant Reformation in England springs not from a German but from a native root.

The most important consequence of this English movement has now to be recounted. The kingdom of Bohemia was in- habited by a Slavonic people who had first received Christianity from an eastern and Slavonic source, but afterwards, coming under German influence, were compelled to accept the discipline of the Roman Cliurch. Racial characteristics arc deeply graven on this stalwart peasantry. The Czech, in becoming a Roman Catholic, retained, with the mysticism and excitability of the Slav, that aversion to the Teutonic temperament which is persistent in men of Slavonic blood. The Roman Church, alien in itself, and for its pomp open to the criticism of simple folk, was not made more acceptable by its association with the Ger- mans. In the thirteenth century Bohemia was noted for its puritan heresies. In the later half of the fourteenth protests against the corruptions of the Church culminated under the quickening impulse of Wycliffe's waitings in a great national movement, the first of its kind in Europe, for a new organiza- tion of the Christian religion.

In the thirteenth century little general notice would have been taken of the inner turmoil of a small obscure country on the confines of Europe. But the native line of the Pfemyslids came to an end in 1306, and a new era opened for Bohemia with the advent of a foreign dynasty. The monarchs of the house 'of Luxemburg came from a region on the borders of France and Germany. They were members of that brilliant and adventurous French-speaking aristocracy, which had filled Europe with their

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feme during the Crusades, and in the fourteenth century fuiy nished to Froissart the principal material for his vivacious chronicle.^

The first of the family to rise to eminence is the brave and chivalrous Henry, one of the most accomplished knights of his i 308^13 age, who, being elected King of the Romans in 1308 (his brother

being Archbishop of Tieves and therefore an elector) and after- wards crowned Emperor in the Lateran palace at Rome, appeared to Dante to be the ideal ruler appointed to bring peace and order to Italy. Only Barbarossa among the mediaeval Ger- man Emperors was more pas^^ionatcly loved and bitterly lamented than this valiant prince, who died suddenly, as he was marching against the King of Naples, poisone

d, it was said, 1310-46 in sacramental wine through the malice of Florentine Guclfs, His son, John of Bohemia (for he had married the Slavonic heiress of that country), a blind Don Quixote, ever engaged in forlorn and perilous adventures, fought with the chivalry of France in the Hundred Years’ War, and left his bones on the ^ 34 ^ 7 ^ field of Crc<;y.

Charles IV, the son of John, though in a different fashion, was also remaikable. As prudent as his father was reckless, as concentrated as his father was dispersed, this hard-headed scholar of the Paris University was perhaps the first of medi- aeval monarchs to sec the world through plain glass. He also was present on the field of Cre^y, but icsolvcd that no vain sacrifice should wreck a promising career. To make sacrifices was not in his nature. The history of the mediaeval Empire had been a long tale of sacrifices, of German rcsoiiiccs wasted uselessly in the endeavour to rule Italy fiom a northern throne, to compose Italian differences, to checkmate the remorseless opposition of Italian Popes. For such sacrifices Charles, becoming King of the Romans and in due com sc Emperor through papal favour, was not prepared. It was not for him to spend his energies upon the senseless feuds of Guclf iind Ghihclline by which Italy was torn to pieces. Nor did he essay an impossible and heroic operation upon ihe complicated texture of the German Reich. A strong German monarchy was now impos*.il)le, and Charles knew it. On the other hand, a state of irredeemable anarchy in Germany was possible, and that Charles knew also, and by a wise piccaution endeavoured to pi event. The Golden ^ Genealogical Table J, p. 424.

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Bui! of 1356, which is Charles' gift to the constitutional develop- ment of Germany, recognized the unhappy fact of German division, but by defining the College of Electors and securing that the electorates should be indivisible and should descend by the rule of primogeniture, minimized the evils incidental to this situation. Charles then refused to be drawn into heroic and forlorn adventures by the glamour of his imperial title. He declined to play the role of a mediaeval Emperor, distracted by the confluence of a thousand calls proceeding from every quar- ter of his vast dominions. What he attempted was the more limited but practical task of making his hereditary kingdom of Bohemia the strongest state of central Europe. In this he was successful. No matter what test be applied, Bohemia advanced in power and influence under the fostering care of Charles IV. Its territories touched the Danube in the south, and a point not far distant from the Baltic Sea in the north. Its expanding trade attracted German immigrants. Its capital became a centre of art, learning, and letters, the seat of an archbishopric, and of an academy which drew students from Poland and from every part of Germany.

The University of Prague, founded in at a time when there was no comparable institution in any German land, gave to the movement of religious reform in Bohemia a force and consistency which would otherwise have been larking to it. One of the teachers in this University was a priest of humble origin, whose memory is the greatest national possession of the Czech race. John Hus was born in 1369. He was a man of rare purity and depth of character, studious, patriotic, of great eloquence as a preacher, who set him- self in the first instance to attack the manifold corruptions of the Bohemian Church. The proclivities of his mind and nature drew him to the philosophy of WyclifFe, w'hicli for many years had been studied and admired in Prague. ‘‘O Wycliffe, Wyclifle,” he exclaimed, you will trouble the heaits of many.” Eloquent sermons delivered in the Bohemian language, the character of which he greatly contributed to form, spread abroad the doc- trines of the English teacher. The strength of Hus lay in the fact that he had no misgivings. When once he had grasped the idea that the ultimate test of Faith was Scripture, that only s6 far as he acted in accordance with Scripture was the Pope to be obeyed, everything else seemed to follow, the acceptance of clerical poverty, the doctrine of predestination, the condemna-

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lion of indulgences. These truths seemed so patent to him that he could not persuade himself that, once explained, they would not be equally compelling for others. He stoutly denied that he was a heretic. How could one be a heretic who persistently appealed to the very words and authority of Christ? The Council of Constance, to which he had been enticed by the safe conduct of King Sigismund of Hungary, decided to burn him. He went to the stake like a hero, kindling by his death the first of a long series of religious wars.

Bohemian Puritanism, while full of religious mobility and vigour, was closely bound up with national pride, and with the ambition for political independence. It was a movement partly for the reform of a profligate, idle, and ignorant clergy, but partly, also, for a Bohemian Church on a national basis, and for the expulsion or subordination of the Germans. A light is thrown tipon this last aspect of the struggle by a decree of King Wen7cl in 1409, which tran^sferred the control of the University of Prague from the Germans to the Bohemians. So passionate was the pride of the German masters and students that, rather than submit to the domiiuon ol the Slavs, they emigrated in a body, founded the University of Leipzig, and spread far and wide through Germany their violent abhorrence of the Bohemian cause. The bitterness of the religious war was deepened by that intense racial animosity which is found when two mutually un- congenial races are intermingled in the same geographical area, and maddened by tlie jars of daily intercourse.

Even before the martyrdom of Hus, events had been rapidly moving towards a violent Ineach with Rome. Two scenes in par- ticular which were enacted in Prague marked the rising feeling of the contending factions, the first the public burning, under tlic authority of a papal Bull, of 200 Wycliffite books, the second the execution of three young men, who, when the papal Com- missary had set up a mart for the sale of indulgences in the city, had the audacity to denounce indulgences as an organized lie. That more blood was not then shed may in part be due to the policy of King Wenzel, who shielded the Hussites from the extreme measures of their antagonists.

In condemning Hus to the stake the Fathers of Constance roused the soul of a nation. The Bohemian nobles banded them- selves together in defence of the new-found liberty of preaching. The grant of the chalice in the sacrament to the laity became a

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warciy rallying every type of Puritan opinion. A fierce feeling that Christians had been deprived of their sacramental rights by the malignant jealousy of the priesthood was mingled with the denunciation of clerical wealth, in some cases prompted by the rapture of the ascetic, in others by the vulgar land hunger of the acquisitive squire. In 1419 the first blow was struck in the terrible twelve years' war which secured for Puritan Bohemia a special place in the Christian commonwealth. John Ziska,

Rhinoceros Ziska,” as Carlyle calls him, a nobleman of Wenzel’s court, marched to the town hall of the Neustadt in Prague, butchered the burgomaster, and “defenestrated” his Catholic associates.

Ziska was one of nature’s generals. Under the rigid discipline of this stern and disinterested commander an army was formed of a type hi then o unknown in Europe. The followers of Ziska were religious and racial enthusiasts. They condemned games and dancing, music and diunkenness. To their fierce and sombie temper the flute, the drum, and the trumpet were as obnoxious as a foul oath, a loose woman, a rich wardrobe, or a German burgess. As they marched into action, with their huge flails and roaring the Ziska psalm behind the sacred chalice, they struck terror into armies whose inner moral principle was weaker than their own. The resourcefulness of their leader lent additional power to the stern enthusiasm of his ragged Puritan following. Ziska was the first European commander to make full use of the artillery arm, or to see the ^alue of a mobile barricade of waggons as a factor contributing to the steadiness of a peasant army. Since Prague was too moderate to be relied on. he established a military capital on the lofty hill of Austi, which in the biblical phraseology of his followers was kriowm as Tabor. So long as Ziska lived to lead them, the Taborites were invincible.

The Bohemians were right in thinking that only by arms and terror would they be able to secure the right to worship God and order Tlis Church to their own liking. No help was forth- coming from the patronage of royal personages. Wenzel, the friendly but incompetent debauchee, died in 1419. His brother Sigismund, King of Hungary and King of the Romans, proved to be no friend but a bitter enemy, who had to be driven out of Bohemia by force of arms. The crown was offered to Poland, but the sovereign of that bleak and barren region refused from cowardice an opportunity, never destined to recur, of form*

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ing a great Slavonic confederacy, which might claim, with the help of Bohemian principles, the common allegiance of those who followed the Greek and Roman rites. In reluctant isolation, fighting as a reluctant republic with improvised generals and an improvised army, the Bohemians withstood five crusades, routed one undisciplined imperial army after another, carried fire and sword into the heart of Germany, and eventually compelled the Roman Church for the first time in its long history to sign a capitulation.

Against the Papacy and the German world the Hussites pre- sented a united front. They asked that the word of God should be freely preached, and that the Communion should be ad- ministered in both kinds, that the temporal power of the Pope should be abolished, and priests be made to return to the apostolic life, and that the clergy should be subjected to secular penalties for ci iincs and misdemeanours (I'he Four Articles of Prague, 1420). But behind this common programme were vio- lent divergencies of sentiment and opinion. The Utraquists or Calixttnes^ were moderate, the Taborites were extreme. The Utraquists accepted all seven saciaments, the Taborites only Baptism and the Eucharist. For the Utraquists any settlement with Rome would be tolerable under which a Bohemian layman might receive the Communion in both kinds. Tlie Taborite went much further. He condemned prayers to the Virgin and the saints, he allowed laymen, and even women, to occupy the pulpit, he acknowledged no hierarchy in the priesthoocl. In one respect both parties were alike. Elocjucntly as they preached the doctrine ol libcriy, they practised against diflering opinions a savage and consistent intolerance.

Two years after the death of Ziska in 1424 Bohemia was paralyzed by internal discord. Then from the ranks of the Taborites there emerged a figure hardly less remarkable for native military science and power of organization than Ziska himself. Procopius the Great was a.priest, and, as a priest, took no active part in fighting, but, like Carnot, he was an organizer of victory. Moreover, he was clear-sighted enough to realize that the best defensive for Bohemia was an offensive on every front. Peace could be secured only by victory. At the battle of Tauss, August, 1431, the Taborites inflicted on the papal forces of

• So called because they claimed that the laity should receive the Com-

munion in both kinds, the chalice as well as the paten.

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Cesarini a defeat so thorough as to convince that great ecclesi* astical statesman that only by the way of peace could the Bohemian question be finally settled. So, on November 26, 1436, after protracted and arduous discussions, a compact was signed at Iglau, and the Church for the time being recognized the Utraquists. At last Rome had been brought to concede a place in her system for an Evangelical Church, founded on the free preaching of the Gospel-

In the course of the struggle the Hussites had neglected no means of placing their case before the public eye of Europe. Their pamphlets were read far and wide, they had sympathizers in many lands. The spectacle of Rome defied in a series of savage battles exercised a profound and terrible impression upon Europe; but for the victors themselves the struggle was a great tragedy. In a wild outburst of vandalism the Taborites destroyed the wonderful monasteries and churches with which Bohemia had been endowed by the inimificcncc of preceding ages. Wasted and impoverished, the little counny faced an unfriendly future.

Years before the last shot had been fired in this civil war the early enthusiasm of the sectaries had died away. The famous Taboritc army, its losses replenished by soldiers of fortune, had ceased some time before the peace with Rome to represent all that was best in the religious thought of Bohemia. In the long and bloody battle of Lipan (1434) it was annihilated by the Calixtines, and with it there passed out of Bohemian life that element of competent and fiery fanaticism which made the Bohemian name terrible and odious throughout Europe.

The Hussite wars, while they should primarily be regarded as the prelude to the Protestant Reformation, arc also important as marking the reaction of a Slavonic race against the onward pressure and dominating influence of the Germans. The quarrel of Bohemia will not be understood unless we can enter into the emotions of a small people struggling to preserve its soul against a race more numerous and more advanced than itself. Passion- ate discipline and willing sacrifice made the Bohemians masters of their destiny; but the fruits of victory were snatched by a greedy nobility, and lost in 1620 at the battle of the White Hill, when tlie Protestant cau.se was overwhelmed, and the little country with its girdle of mountains was caught in the Austrian and Catholic net, from which it was only delivered after much fretting and uneasiness by the flashing scimitar of the great war.

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The immense diflBculty of getting Europe to work together for a common end, which is felt so keenly today at Geneva, was illustrated in a most signal manner during the fifteenth century by the failure of the Conciliar Movement to reform the Church. No reasonable person in that age denied that the Church was in urgent need of reform. Most educated people gravely feared the onward march of heresy. All were agreed that the schism in the Papacy was a scandal which should be ended without delay. To the deeper thinkers the lesson of the age seemed to be that the papal supremacy, which had been so flagrantly abused at Avignon, should henceforth be subjected to some system of regular supervision and control through the Councils of the Church. Accordingly councils met at Pisa, at Constance, at Pavia, and at Basel. The movement which began with divines ended by exciting the interest of statesmen. I'he questions to be discussed speedily outranged the otiginal difficulty of two rival Popes each supported by a separate "obedience," and neither willing to give way to the other. And as the problems were numerous and grave, the attendance came to be representa- tive and weighty, so that the assemblies of Constance and Basel wore at times the air of being not so much meetings of divines as congresses of statesmen and diplomatists gathered for the settlement of European affairs. Small, however, was the benefit which resulted from the stir and bustle of these famous gatherings. The council of cardinals summoned to Pisa in 1409 was not even able to put an end to the schism. So far from securing a vacancy in the papal oflice, it left Europe shamed by three competing Popes in place of two. It is to the credit of the larger and more repiescntative assembly of Constance that it did eventually succeed in deposing two Popes and securing the resignation of a third. The schism was ended. There was at last a vacancy in the papal office. A golden opportunity seemed to have offered itself for the reformation of the Church, and for the imposition of such limitations as.it might seem expedient to impose upon the power of the Pope. But the opportunity was not seized. When the council was called upon to decide whether it should reform the Church before it elected a Pope, or elect a Pope before it proceeded to reform the Church, it resolved, England and Germany dissenting, to postpone reform. This decision was just the kind of blunder which an assembly not very profoundly moved by moral issues was likely to make. Tlie

CRITIC^ AND REFORMERS

36*

reform of the Church through a general council, difScult enough during a papal vacancy, would clearly be rendered far more arduous by die election of a Pope. By its choice of Odo Colonna. who took the title of Martin V, the council raised up a formid- able rival who, alike as an Italian politician and as heir to the long tradition of papal autocracy, was bound to work for the frustration of its constitutional aims.

So the plan for a general reform of the Church fell to the ground. Tlie Fathers of Constance burnt Hus and Jerome of Prague, and issued decrees providing for decennial meetings of general councils, for a council in five years' time, and for the convocationof a council always and automatically on the occasion of a schism; but as for reform it had capitulated to the Pope, whose main interest was in the establishment of his Italian prin- cipality, and who preferred to make provisional concordats with separate states rather than to work thioiigh the maclnaery of a rival authority.

The Council of Basel which met in 1431 was no more success- ful. All the main influences which combined to thwart the reforming zeal of the Fathers of Constant e wcjc equally power- ful at Basel. Martin V, the Roman noble, had been succeeded by the Venetian Eugeniiis IV. To Eugenius, as to Martin, a general council, endeavouring to set itself above the Pope, to reform his finances and to limit his patronage, was abhorrent. From the first the Council of Basel could count upon the per- sistent hostility of the Pope. Moreover, though the Fathers of Basel did not, like the earlier council, divide themselves into nations, so that it was easier for the lower clergy to assert their influence and to put forward plans of radical reformation, the national spirit in Europe was as strong in 1431 as it had been in 1417. The Fieiich and the Spaniards were as reluctant as ever to countenanre the idea of reform, and Eugenius, no less than Martin, saw that his best interest lay in coming to an agreement with national sovereigns rather than with the general council of the Church.

Yet it would not he fair to deny that one considerable adiieve- ment may be ascribed to the Council of Basel. It provided a theatre in which the theological differences bewcen the Hussites and Catholics could be, and were, examined and discussed. The theological debate between the leaders of the Hussite cause and the theologians of Basel is one of the most creditable cpi-

A mSTORT or EOSOPE

362

sodes in a violent and intolerant age, and the council may he given the credit of having at last succeeded in securing a com- promise-settlement, which, though violently resented by the Taboiites, was acceptable to the main body of Bohemian opinion. In no other respect, however, was the Council of Basel able to advance the cause of Church reform or to limit the prerogatives of the Pope. This was through no lack of radical ambition. The council put out comprehensive decrees, such as that a general council should not be dissolved without its own consent, that an appeal from a general council to a pope was heretical; it attacked papal patronage, and by its denial of annates or firstfruits threatened the ruin of pripal finances. It even went as far, in 1439, as to depose Eugenius, its enemy, and to elect a wealthy widower with seven children, who was both a duke and a hermit, to the papal chair.

In these proceedings the council clearly outstepped the limits of prudence, llie public opinion of Europe was nor prepared for so grave a reduction in the prerogatives of the papal power, and the prospect of a new schism added to the unpopularity of the council, Eugenius was not a clever man, but rash, head- strong, and limited. Nevertheless, he was clever enough to profit by the mistakes of his adtersaries at Basel, and, circum- venting the council, to treat with the Fiench and Germans. It is significant of the new tendencies in European politics, of the growing influence of nationalism, and of the declining influence of the mediaeval Church unity, that the foundation of the liberties of the Gallican Church w^as laid in while the

Council of Basel was sitting and behind its back, by a treaty between the Papacy and the King of France, known as the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, and that in the follo^ving year a similar treaty was made with the Germans at Mainz. The final and decisive blow to the authoiity of the council came in 1445, when Frederick III, King of the Romans, sold the liberties of the German Church to the Pope in exchange for a promise of the imperial crown.

The Councils of Constance and Basel had been largely pro- ^ 4 ^ 37 moted by the Emperor Sigismund. That mercurial and flighty statesman had been anxious to shine in the eyes of the world as a Church reformer, a cosmopolitan ruler, a pacifier of dis- sensions civil and ecclesiastical. He had espoused the Conciliar Movement in the hopes of arresting the spread of the Bohemian

CMITICB AND K«FOKM£aS 3^3

heresies, and of facilitating his assumption of the Bohemian crown, and so long as the Emperor sto^ by the councils, even though his authority was not undisputed in Germany, the councils were a serious power confronting Rome. Accordingly the treaties made between the Pope and Frederick III were of the utmost importance. The one secular authority from which the council might have expected effective assistance dealt a shattering blow to all its policies. By the final compact of 1448 Frederick restored to the Pope his revenue from annates and most of the rights of patronage of which he had been deprived by the stringent decrees of Basel. It was a crowning victory. The forces of reform were routed. The attempt of the Church to set its house in order through the medium of general councils had been frustrated by the underlying political differences of Europe, and most fundamentally by the opposition of the Pope, by the appetite of an Emperor, and by the determination of Italy never to accept the dominion of the barbarians of the north.

Once more the Italians were restored to their control of the papal office. With Martin V begins the long line of Pontiffs for whom the cares incidental to the management of an Italian state are a primary consideration. Martin V placed the Papacy before the Church, Italy before Europe, his Colonna kinsmen before everybody. His business it was to restore order to the city of Rome, which had been exhausted by civil war, to purge the Campagna of brigands, and to recall the distant provinces of the Church to a sense of obedience to the papal see.

The Papacy did not easily or at once adapt itself to the savage conditions of its old Italian home. If to some the papal restora- tion w^as a source of pride and profit, by others it was viewed with feelings of the strongest hostility and distrust. The Roman republicans hated the idea that the proud city of the Scipios should be placed under the humiliating governance of priests. They drove Eugenius IV into exile; they rose in arms against his successor Nicholas V. And the nobles of Rome and the Campagna, in whom generations of anarchy and bloodshed had made of disobedience a second nature, were even more dangerous than the Roman mob. The Restoration Popes did trot feel themselves precluded by sentiments of Christian piety from applying to these disorders the harshest treatment which the refined cruelty of their mercenary captains and executioners

364 A HlSTdRY or EUROPE

could supply. They slew, tortured, hanged their opponents. Palestrina, the principal home of the Colonna family, was levelled to the ground by Vitelleschi, whose odious cruelties, cxerci&ed in the service of Eugenius IV and branded in the pages of Lorenzo Valla, cast a deep shadow of gloom over the rebirth of the papal state.

Thus sternly delivered from their local troubles the Popes advanced with a sense of triumph to meet the future. Tlie diffi- culties, which ever since the schism had seemed so menacing to the continued authority of the Papacy, were now overcome. The Council of Basel, long a much reduced and discredited body, was finally dissolved in 1449; Felix V, the elderly antipope, had resigned. The German Empire under the lame and venal guid- ance of Frederick III had made its peace, renouncing the hard road of reform, accepting papal finance, patronage, and authority. The Bohemians, who had filled Europe with the terror of their name, were now quiet and apparently composed. No one mur- mured tlie name of WyclifTc. At the jubilee of 1450, Nicholas V, a scholar Pope, who had made of his court the principal centre of Italian learning and letters, and is famous as the founder of the Vatican Library, looked out, as it appeared, upon a subject wwld. It w'as the year in which the Spaniard, Torquemada, pub- lished a famous treatise {Siitntna contra hostes ecclcsiae) which concentrated the orthodox reply to all the errors which had been afflicting the Christian commonwealth.

The great attack upon the fortress of papal power had been decisively repelled. Few would then have predicted that half a century later the onslaught would be renewed on a wider scale, with added power, and w^ith results fatal to the unity of the Latin Church.

BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED

G. M. Trevcivan; Enpjland in the Age of Wyi 'i(Te. 1009.

J. Lo«!crth: WyclifTe and Hus. Tr, M. J. Evans. 1S84.

M. Creighton: History of the Papacy dudng the Reformation. 1882.

R. 1 .. Poole; \V\clifTo’s Tractatus de ci\ill Dominio. 1885.

Rank*; Ilistoiy of the Popes. Tr. S. Austin. 1847.

Gregorenius: Hi^'tory of Rome in the Middle Ages. Tr. A. Hamilton. 1894-1900,

W. R. Inge: Christian Myslicism. i8<)9.

Lechler: John Wycliffe and his English Pi ecursnrs. Tr. P. Lorimer. 1884.

A. S. Turbervillc: Mediaeval Heresy and the Inquisition. 1920.

E. Denis; Huss ct la Guerre des Hussites. 1S78.

CHAPTER XXn

MEDIAEVAL SPAIN

Struggle of Christians and Moslems. Splendour of Cordova under the Ummayad Caliphs. The Christian opportunity tn the eleventh century. Absence of Chmtian unity. The Keconqmsta, 1086-1266. Almoravides and Almohades. Long suspension of religious struggle. Iberian localism. Debt of mediaeval Spain to Prance.

The history of Spain during the middle ages is that of a country in which two sharply contrasted civilizations, one Christian in religion and Celtiberian, Roman, or Visigothic in race, the other Moslem, Arab and Berber, arc confronted with one another, and condemned despite much mutual influence and attraction to a long struggle for ascendancy. Fiom this contest, which was closed only when, in 1492, the yeai ol the discovery of America, Ferdinand and Isabella conquered the little state of Granada, the Christians emerged viaorious. The Jews, and later the Moriscoes, were driven from Spain. By a singular act of intoler- ance, to be ascribed as much to the bigotry oi the Christian mob as to the dark fanaticism of the queen, the country was rid of that part of its population which was most likely to minister in- telligently to the advancement of its material needs, so that the way might be cleared for the undisputed predominance of the Catholic Church. Such was the praeparatto evangclica for a great period of conquest and colonization during which the aims of Spain were employed in the old woild and the new for the defence and propagation of the Roman Faith. And it is from this close association of royal polity with religious intolerance that some are disposed to derive the decline and fall of the Spanish Empire.

For more than two hundred and fifty years the emirs and 755 - caliphs of the Ummayad house administered, from their popu- lous capital of Cordova, a state which appreciated the values and possessed the luxuries of civilized life, llic visitor to Cordova/in the tenth century travelled through a land which bore abundant signs of the supervision of an improving government concerned to promote the interests of agriculture, trade, and industry. lie

36s

A HISTORY OF EUROPE

1/95

368

half monastic and half military, which provided, in the cam- paigns that were to follow, the shock troops of the Spanish Cru- sades. The Order of Santiago, dillercntly affiliated and even more illustrious, springs from the same motive.

While the Christians of the north were receiving a fresh im- pulse from the general stir of crusading enthusiasm, the position of affairs in southern Spain was completely transformed by two successive waves of immigration from Africa. If the Arabs of Cordova had lost much of their primal fierceness in the tem- perate warmth of an earthly paradise, the Berbers on the other side of the Straits of Gibraltar retained a full measure of Moslem zeal and baibaric courage. On the appeal of their Spanish co- religionists a powerful body of Almoravidcs from the Sahara swept into Mohammedan Spain and soon established a complete ascendancy over the Arab tribes who vere disputing for its mastery. At the battle oi Zallaca (October 23, 1086) Alfonso VI, the victor of I'olcdo, received a severe check at the hands of Yussuf-uKFashvin, the Almoravid. Much that had recently been gained for the Cross was now suircndered to the Crescent; and had the Almoravidcs been allowed to consolidate their position these territories would have been safely retained in hloslem hands. But there followed a second wave of immigration from Afiica. The Almohacles (Unitarians) of the Atlas mountains were even fiercer and more intolerant than the Berber tribes of the dcscit who had preceded them into the land of promise. They coiKjucicd Moiocco, burst into Spain, subdued the Alniora- vidcs, and in the later pan of the twelfth century rolled back the tide of the Christian advance. At the battle of Alarros, Alfonso VITI of Castile was louied by an army of these formid- able Berber niotmtaineers. Equally with the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin eight years earlier, Alarcos served to remind Chris- tian Europe how imperfect was its organization for the conduct of a sacred war.

The intolerance of the new" invaders of Spain had one beneficial but undesigned effect. The more intelligent of the Jewish and Mozarabic communities, who set a value upon intellectual free- dom, fled into Christian territory and were welcomed by the enlightened sovereigns of Castile and Arag{)n. Among the learned fugitives from the puritan bigotry of these Beibcr w"an- derers were some, like Averrhoes and Maimonides, who were destined to exercise a worldwide influence as disseminators of

MEDIAEVAL SPAIN

369

philosophical thought. Others were content with pei forming a more humble, but, at that stage of the woild’s knowledge, a most important intellectual function. By their translations iiom the Arabic they made available to the Latin west the science of the ancient world. It is not least among the titles of Alfonso VI that he encouraged the Jews of Toledo, a city which contrived under Christian rule to preserve its oriental character, to address them- selves to this valuable task.

It is immensclv to the credit of Innocent III that he ne^er ceased to uige upon the little Christian kingdoms of Spain that they should lay aside their animosities and combine in a gicat forward ino\cment against the enemy. In this endeavour he was ultimately sure cssful. The forces of Aiagon, Navarre, and Castile acting under the direction of Alfonso VIII, illustrated the value even of the most temporary coaliimn by winning the gitai victory

370 A HISTORY OP EUROPE

of Las Navas dc Tolosa (July i 6 , 1212) which secured the pre- ponderance of the Christian cause in Spain. There followed fifty-four years, the most brilliant and critical in the military annals of the country, during which under the direction of James I of Aragon and St. Ferdinand of Castile victory after victory crowned the arms of the Christian Crusaders. To the prowess of Aragon there fell Valencia and the Balearic Isles; to that of Castile, Cordova, Jaen, Seville, Xeres, Cadiz, Murcia. Save for Granada, sheltered behind its lofty mountains, all Spain was by 1266 reclaimed for the Roman Church.

The long desperate struggle of five hundred years was now suspended. It had been a war of raids and devastation, waged for the most part without supplies, strategy, or discipline, by light cavalry over difficult and barren country, where “ large armies starve and small armies are beaten.” Major engagements were few and far between. The Castilian cavalry, mounted on jennets or light coursers, would hover loiind their swift and elusive enemy, harassing him with darts and javelins, in the hope of breaking his formation and completing his discomfiture by a sudden charge. Loyalty was imperfect, desertion frequent, and unless the prospect of booty was good, the Christian cabal- Icro would not scruple to ride for home. The consequences of tins inconclusive and ill-conducted war, carried on over vast inhospitable distances, were inscribed on the society of Castile. As the fields were insecure from Moorish forays, the population began to swarm into the walled towms, and there developed advanced forms of democratic self-government and self-suffici- ency. I'hc shepherd was more important than the ploughman, the townsman than the countryman, the soldier and the priest than the tradesman or the artisan.

The contempt of tlic Spaniard for agriculture and his calamit- ous belief in gold as the sole true form of wealth have been traced to the wars of the Reconquista, which intensified the already formidable difficulty of tilling the barren plateau of central Spain.

In the age of crusading zeal it seemed a possibility that Chris- tian Spain might be able to overcome the deep divergencies which separated its several units, that the lesson of Las Navas de Tolosa might be learnt, and that, if unity was out of the question, some loose form of Christian confederation might be possible. The opportunity was not taken. The kingdoms of Portugal and Castile, of Aragon and Navarre, went their several

MEDIAEVAL SPAIN

37 *

ways, developed divergent interests, and were too busily occupied with internal discords or foreign ambitions to conceive plans for Spanish or Pan-Iberian unity. Navarre, which lay astride the Pyrenees, had its heart in France. Tlie heart of populous Aragon was in Sicily, Naples, and Sardinia, in the Balearic Islands, in the promotion of its Mediterranean trade, in its manifold connections of culture and commerce with Provence, ' but not in the acquisition of Granada (divided from it by Murcia, now a strip of Castile) nor yet in the politics of its western neigh- bour. Portugal was an Aragon on the Atlantic, Lisbon a western, but far less flourishing Barcelona. The little country lay behind its moiuitains, its back turned on central Spain, and, therefore, although often united by family bonds with the Castilian royal family, only slightly by reason of that forbidding frontier associated with the Castilian people.

As for Castile it stood apart, central, isolated, proud, priest- ridden, digesting as best it might its spreading conquests, and those burdensome legacies of its long ci usade, the vast estates of the military orders, the prepondeiant position of the Church, to- gether with the Jews, the Moslems, the Mo^arabs, whose presence in a crusatling state (now out of business) was to a nation of proud and courageous aristocrats an unwelcome necessity. To tire difficult tasks of stich a government the Castilian kings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were plainly unequal. So ill- ruled was their country that the only effective force for the maintenance of order was a league or brotherhood (Hermanrlad) of cities. The student of language, literature, and art finds much to excite his interest and admiration in the manifold energies of the Castilian i»eople during this period, in the gradual perfec- tion of an aristocratic language, in the profusion of ballads and of pro.se romances, Libros dc Caballeria, reflecting the manners and feelings of a knightly class, or in the great Gothic cathe- drals which rose under the direction of French architects. But what historian can examine the reign of Pedro the Cruel, when French and English were called in to take part in a fratricidal civil war, or study the turbulent reigns of his three successors with any expectation of the renown which was awaiting Castilian statecraft? It is not from these dreary struggles that the greatness of Spain was to proceed, but from the work of obscure cartographers in Catalonia and Majorca (the most illustrious were Jews) who laid the basis of an oceanic emynre.

373

A HISTORY OF EUROPB

The Moslem civilization of mediaeval Spain can only to an inconsiderable degree be ascribed to the genius of the Arabian people. The small band of bloodthirsty orientals who enabled Turk and Moslem to conquer Spain did not come into a waste or barbarous country, but into a land long settled by the Romans which still, despite the shock of the barbaric conquest, ♦bore abundant signs of ancient opulence. Into this mould of established civilization the invaders injected currents of in- tellectual influence from Damascus, from Cairo, and from Bag- dad. They introduced into Spain the Arab language and liter- ature. They imposed the Koran. They weie the means of re- connecting Europe with the eastern centres of art and scholar- ship at a time when the western channels between cast and west were blocked. It was, however, the strength of the Moslems that their civilization was not racial but religious. The invaders of Spain, though they were cruel and licentious, were never so foolish as to attempt an exclusive ascendancy of the Arab race. It was not from Arabia that fresh Moslem immigrations were to be expected, but from the African Bet hers who were close at hand; nor was it from Arabia that the Arab emirs furnished their haicins, but from the households of Christian Spain, which it was their habit to raid twice a year for treasure and slaves. Purity of race, therefore, was ne\er an object entertained or pursued by the Moslem conquerors of Spain. They married Spanish virgins, employed Jewish doctors, and were not ashamed TO go to Byzantium for the artists and craftsmen wd'io decorated their mosques and palaces. For the tillage of the soil they relied upon a native peasantry, whose j)cdigrcc, in Andalusia at least, must have reached back to Roman days.

As for Christian Spain, so rich in noble churches and monasteries, it was, in most of the arts, a province of France. In the eleventh century the Spanish religious houses obejcted the rule of Cluny, later they were subject to the house of Citeaux. In all sacred architecture, save where, as in Catalonia, it was influrtTced by Byzantine or Lombard w’orkmanship, French influence is prcdoiiiinant. The gicat cathedrals of Burgos, of Toledo, of Leon, were built by French artists after French designs. The Spaniards gave the commissions and paid the bills, lliough a vast amount of building was done in Spain during the middle ages, it was only towards the end of the fifteenth century that Spanish architects became prominent. As for the decorative arts, carving and gilding, glazing and painting, these (without a twinge of self-reproach) the Spaniard was content to concede to the alien, Later, when Madrid (which was only a hunting lodge in the middle ages) became the capital of a great empire, the patronage of foreign artists was extended upon a lavish scale by the sovereigns of the Habsburg house. Great models were then proposed for the imitation of the Spaniards. Titian could be seen at Madrid. El Greco worked at Toledo.

But whether it was from some native vulgarity, which undervalued paint and canvas for their cheapness, or because of a certain strict and sombre religiosity in the Spanish temper, defining certain subjects only as worthy of the brush, there was no popular flowering of the painter’s art in Spain. Perhaps there can be no such flowering save when thought and fancy can play in freedom. Velasquez was an exception, preaching no doctrine. 1599- constrained by no convention, and daring, a solitary among Spaniards of his age, to paint only what he saw.

• Royall Tyler, ** Spain, a Study of her Life and Art.”

BOOKS WTIICTI MAY RL CONSULTED

R. Altamira y Crevea: Historia cle E«;paha y de la Chili/a(ion Espnfiola.

U)02.

S. de Madariaga: Spain. (Nations of llie Modt'rn Woild Sotios.) 1030- Louis Bertiaiid and Charles IVlric: The lliHioiy of Spain. 1034.

H. Ilavelorli KJlis: The Soul of Spain. it^oS.

Cambridge Modlacval History.

R. Tyler: Spain A Study of her Life and .Arts. 1009.

Dozy: Histoire dos Musulniaiis d’Espat?ne jusiju’.A la Conqut-te de TAndalousie par l#-s Almoravid'-s. iXfii.

R. B. Mcriinian: Ris»e of the Spanish Empire. 25.

CTTAPTER XXXn

MEDIAEVAL RUSSIA

The aloofness of Russia^ The Greek colontes. The Norsemen on the Dnieper, Vladtmir and Christianity, Influence of the Greek Church* Work of the Norsemen, Tatar invasion. The rule of the Golden Horde, Its lasting effects. The Grand Dukes of Moscow, Rise of Lithuania, Tatar defeat at Koultkovo, 1380, and birth of a Russian nation, Ivan the Great, i4<)2-i505, and the Byzantine heritage.

The barbarous populations of tbe Russian plain were far with- drawn from the thoughts, ideals, and activities which, during the middle ages and afterwards, moulded the life of the Latin and Teutonic races. In this wild, half-Asiatic country there was no use of Latin or scholastic philosophy, no mediaeval analogue to the University of Paris or the Parliament of Westminster. The great movements which shook the west meant nothing to Russia. Here I^opes did not quarrel with Emperors, setting alight in the process a flame of political discussion which laid bare the origins and credentials of the state. Here was no re- naissance of classical learning, quickening into new life the in- tellectual ardour of a cultured people, no Protestant Reforma- tion backed by princes and breaking and transforming the Catholic Church. And as the Russians pursued their way with- out liiitin or scholasticism, without parliament or university, without a literature of political debate or a sustained challenge to religious tradition, so they were spared the wars of religion which for two centuries moulded the life and fashioned the moral being of western Europe. In these decisive spiritual ex- periences of the west, “Holy Russia,” slumbering in oriental seclusion, had no share.

In part geogiaphy offers an explanation. The vast inclement country, alternately parched by the summer sun, or buried under a pall of arctic snow, constituted a world sufffeient to itself, uninviting to others. Unfriendly nature had here im- posed a task so rigorous as to leave little energy over for the refinements of life or the higher typu of social organization. In the forest zone there was no corn, in the arable zone no umber, in the zone of the arable steppes a treeless waste of

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spring pasture. The goal set before the mediaeval Russian was the settlement and colonization of a land so vast that it always seemed empty, and so fiat that it offered a perpetual temptation to movement, which only the invention of serfdom was able to arrest. How that goal was reached, we can but conjecture. The valiant labour of innumerable spades and axes goes un«chronicled. Generation followed generation to the grave without leaving a mark upon the written page; yet in each generation forests were cleared, villages and towns were built of wood (stone being unobtainable in that unmountainous land), and burned down in some high gale and built again; rough lumbermen plied their trade upon the waterways, village communities tilled the rich black soil, which had been the granary of the ancient world, herdsmen galloped on rough little ponies over the heav- ing grasses of the southern steppes, war was waged upon the wolf, the bear, and the beaver, and a coarse, violent, emotional race of men lived, bred, toiled, quarrelled, and died.

The dawn of history in Russia broke on the shores of the Euxine. Here was a chain of Greek colonics (Olbia, Cherson, Pantirapacum, etc.), and in these a vivid life of commerce and art which did much for the culture of the rude Scythian tribes of the hinterland. But all this brilliant civilization which had left monuments of its taste extending over 800 years (400 B.c. to A.D. 400) was blotted out by successive rides of barbaric inva- sion. After the Sarmatians and Avais, the Goths and the Huns had done their worst and passed westward, who would have suspected that Homer had been recited, and Demosthenes de- claimed by Greek, and probably also by Scythian, schoolboys in the ruined cities of the Euxine coast? The contact of the rude north with the literature and art of the classical age was abruptly broken and never renewed.

The Russian of to-day, then, owes nothing but a treasury of museum pieces to these ancient Greek colonies of the Euxine. The influences which first made a rudimentary state among the Russian Slavs were not Greek but Scandinavian, the sphere of their operation not the sea coast, but the great w^aterways which connect the Baltic with the Euxine. Here it would seem that German traders as early as the first century had built themselves stations, and here, after circuitous wanderings from south Russia to the Danube, and from the Danube to the Carpathians, the main body of eastern Slavs was by the eighth century col-

376 A illSTORY OF EUROPE

lected, and engaged in the marketing of forest produce. The real story of Russia begins from the moment that the city states on the Neva and Dnieper, menaced in their trade by Turkish nomads, but also paralyzed by internal dissensions, called in a body of well armed warriors from Sweden to collect their taxes and defend their caravans.

The coming in 862 of Ruric and his Norsemen (or Ruotsi as the Finns called them) was decisive. The rivers and lakes from the Baltic to the Black Sea fell into the keeping of this valiant race of merchant warriors. They established themselves in Novgorod and Kiev, carried on an extensive slave trade, organized fleets, armies, and principalities, and plunging for the highest stakes, launched six attacks on Constantinople, and attempted the conquest of Bulgaria. The passive Slavs of the west were content to be called Russ, after the name of these convenient auxiliaries, who convoyed their cargoes down the seven cataracts of die lower Dnieper, enabled them to market their honey and their furs, and were of the mettle to beard the Emperor in his capital, and to extort commercial concessions from Constantinople at the point of the snord. From the Ruotsi or Varangians, they learnt the elements of state life, and by them were introduced to the sobering discipline of a state religion.

The conversion of Russia to Christianity w^as effected, it would seem, by a monster of cruelty and lust. That Vladimir (980- 1015) was a fratricide, who maintained 3,500 crmcuhines, has not prevented his canoni'/atioii as a saint. All sins were forgiven to the man who made Kiev a Christian city and of tlie Russians a people obedient to the Christian rites. It is said that at some point in his violent career it occurred to this capable barbarian to examine tJie credentials of the leading religions. The Moslem creed, since it condemned strong drink, was rejected offhand.

Drinking," observed Vladimir, " is the joy of the Russes. We cannot exist without that pleasure." A papist who had the mis- fortune to observe that “ whatsoever one eats or drinks is all to the glory of Cod” was curtly dismissed wiih "Our fathers accepted no such principle." When the Jewish apologist was compelled to confess that Jerusalem w^as in alien hands, the Varangian prince pertinently observed. “ If God loved you and your fathers, you would not be thus dispersed in foreign lands. Do you expect us to accept that fate also?" There remained

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the Church of the Byzantine Empire, with its images and mosaics, its solemn music and swinging censers, its resplendent vestments and ordered ritual. A commission of enquiry, thrilled by the brilliance of a service such as only St. Sophia could provide, reported strongly in favour of the Greek religion. “When we journeyed among the Bulgarians, we beheld how they worship in their temple called a mosque, while they stand upright. The Bulgarian bows, sits down, looks hither and thither like one possessed, and there is no happiness among them, but instead only sorrow and a dreadful stench. Their religion is not good. Then we went to the Germans and saw them performing many ceremonies in their temples; but we belield no glory there. Then we went on to Greece and the Greeks led us to edifices where they worship their God and we knew nor whether we were in heaven or on earth.”

The objective once determined, the business of conversion was carried through with the high hand of a pirate. Seizing Cherson, a jewel in the Byzantine crown, Vladimir threatened destruction to its inhabitants unless he was given the hand of a Byzantine princess. The blackmail wsis successful. The reluctance of a woman was overcome by the stern reason of state, and in that old Greek city the pirate from the north was wedded to Anne, the sister of the long descended Emperors Basil and Constantine (988). Returning to Kiev, the zealous neophyte submitted Ncrun, the most popular idol of the Slavs, to a handsome flogging at the hands of twelve stalwart men, commanded the collective baptism of his subjects in the waters of the Dnieper, and set himself to make of Kiev a city of Christian churches and one of the architectural glories of the Byzantine world.

The acceptance of the Greek instead of the Latin form of Christianity is an event of capital importance for the history of Russia. In the Latin west, ecclesiastical was separated from secular power; in the Greek world, the church was a depart- ment of the state. Ideas of liberty were generated by the colli- sion between church and state in the west. A passive subser- vience to Caesar was the fruit of all Byzantine teaching. The Greek Church brought with it many undoubted benefits, the music, literature, and architecture of a civilized people, a more developed conception of the state, the advanced notions of criminal law which were to be found in the codes of Justinian

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and Basil, as well as those lofty ethical ideas, so sharply opposed to Russian practice, which arc distinctive of Christianity in all its forms. That the uphill battle against Russian polygamy was waged with a certain measure of success is to be attributed wholly to the influence of the Greek Church. There was, too, having regard to the backward civilization of the inhabitants- an advantage in a church which used the native language in its liturgy, and was admittedly national and not worldwide. But for these advantages a heavy price was paid, in the isolation of Russia, in its severance from the Slavs of Poland and Bohemia, but above all in the failure of the Russian Church to educate within the souls of the nation the power or the desire to resist the despotism of its rulers or to fight the battle of the downcasts and outcasts of society.

To the piratical rulers of the house of Ruric, princely power over the new city states was an indivisible family heritage, dis- trinuted on a rota according to seniority. The older the member the higher and more lucrative his coifimaiid, so that at every change in the personnel of the ruling fatnily there were promo- tions and occasions of heartburning and dispute. On such terms it was hopeless to expect the construction of a stable polity on the Dnieper.

After the death of Jaroslav the legislator in 1054, we enter upon a period of endless family wars, mainly waged for the purpose of deciding which among the large number of Ruric’s descendants was at the lime the eldest, and consequently en- titled to rule at Kiev as Grand Prince of the local confederacy. In the course of these struggles Kiev itself, the city of 400 churches, was stormed, sacked, and ruined of malice prepense (1169) by a member of the princely family, who was resolved to remove the scat of power from the turbulent republic of the Dnieper to a town of his own choosing in the heart of his forests. The name of Andrew Bogoliouski of Souzdal is worth recording. He is the founder of Vladimir, the second of the Russian capitals, and was himself the first of a long line of Russian autocrats. With him Russia makes a new start upon the poor clay soil of the remote forests of the central plain, whither the population of the west had been steadily trekking in search of security from nomad raids.

With the fall of Kiev the first period of Russian history comes to a close. The Vikings had achieved much and attempted mora

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They had founded in the principality of Kiev a great Russian state, waged war against the Greeks and Bulgarians, against the barbarous Polovtsi or Kumans in southern Russia, and most persistently among themselves, and though Greek fire had again and again repulsed them from the Bosphorus, and the sword of John Zimisces, the first captain of his age, had decided once for all that there was to be no Norman conquest of Bul- garia, the fame of their exploits lived on in the ballads of the Russian Slavs. A fragment from the tale of the Armaments of Igor (1185) may be taken as emblematic of the age when the Varangian war bands, buccaneers and boatmen, controlled the western waterways of Russia and Kiev was the queen of Russian cities. “My own brother, my own bright light, thou Igor I We arc both sons of Sviatoslav. Brother, saddle thy swift horses, mine are ready for thee saddled at Kursk beforehand. And my men of Kursk are experienced fighters, nursed amid trumpets, rocked in helmets, fed at the spear blades. Well known to them are the paths; familiar are the ravines; their saddle bows are strong; their quivers are open and their sabres are whetted. They themselves gallop like grey wolves on the field, taking honour for them- selves and for their pnnee glory.” Unlike the Normans the Varangians of the Dnieper never became landlords, but re- mained to the end fighters and tiadcrs, danegeld collectors and slave-dealers, following their occasions on land and water.

While the strength of the house of Ruric was wasting away in the internal snuggles of a series of hostile principalities, Russia was invaded by the Tatars. Few catastrophes so great or so enduring in their effects have overwhelmed a young and struggling country. The Tatars were no undisciplined horde of feckless barbarians, but a force of some half a million trained light horsemen, representing an empire which in the lifetime of Jingis Khan, its creator, had been extended from Manchuria to the Caucasus at a cost of more than eighteen million lives. No empire had ever occupied so large a portion of the earth^s sur- face as that of Jingis, or had been the cause of so much human suffering in the winning. No army had yet invaded Europe which in point of numbers and skill could compare with the cavalry of Baton, the grandson of Jingis and the nephew and lieutenant of the Great Khan Ogotai, who, in 1227, had suc- ceeded to the throne of his father.

The princes of Russia, acting without combination or the

380 A HISTOAT of EUROPE

support of an armed peasantry, were no match for the hammer blows of these formidable orientals. The Russian chivalry of the south, of the centre and the north-west, was defeated in detail at the battles of Kalka (1224), the Oka, and the Sit (1238), and every important Russian town, Novgorod excepted, was burned or put to the sack. Not until they had ravaged Moravia and Silesia, had taken Cracow and Pesth, and menaced Vienna, was a check administered to these terrible adversaries of the west. I’he credit for precipitating the Mongol retreat has been variously assigned to the death of the great Khan Ogotai (December 11, 1241), to the valour of the Czechs, the Poles, and the Germans, who, if they did not win victories, at least offered resistance, or to the Russians, who had absorbed the main part of the shock and paid the chief part of the penally. The real cause was geograpliical. The deliverance of central Europe from its great peril may be safely ascribed to distance and desolation.

^ The colossal empire of Jingis was shattered; not so the rule of the Golden Horde, which Batou had founded in the south- eastern steppes of Russia. For a space of two hundred years the Tatars of the Golden Horde, shaking themselves free of the Great Khan who succeeded to the power of Jingis, and em- bracing the Moslem Faith, continued from their capital of Sarai on the lower Volga to dominate the politics of Russia. The small Russian principalities and city republics were permitted to survive and to retain their customs, but on a footing of debasing subservience to their Asiatic masters. Compelled to seek investiture at the court of the Khan, to pay him a capita- tion tax in furs and money, and to furnish infantry contingents to his anny, the Christian princes of Russia sank to the lowest depths of degradation. Even Alexander Nevski (1252-1263), famous for his victories over the Livonian knights, the Swedes, and the Finns, saw to it that Novgorod and Souzdal paid tribute to the Horde.

This long spell of soul-destroying servitude left a deep mark on the Russian people. It is to this period that wc must trace the final estrangement of Russia from western Europe, and a retardation of culture which has never been repaired. It is now that the gloomy and pitiless despotism of the grand princes of Moscow was erected among the pine forests of central Russia, and that the last embers of Russian freedom were stamped out by the joint oppression of church and state. Only the monks

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and priests, being exempted from the Tatar capitation tax, profited from the general misfortunes of the country and built up for themselves, in that atmosphere of superstition and terror a position of territorial wealth and power, such as only the shattering convulsions of the latest Russian revolution could destroy.

No episode in tfie history of this tempestuous people is more shameful than the rise of the Muscovite power. The grand princes of Moscow overcame their neighbours and rivals, not by the vigour with which they attacked the enemy of their race, but by the success with which they courted his favour.

If holy Moscow has grown into a great city from the small village in Souzdal, of which we first hear in 1147, it is because its princes in the fourteenth century obtained the assistance of Tatar armies against their Russian rivals, and constituted them- selves the tax-gatherers and police agents for the Tatar Khans.

It was the acquisition of this last lucrative but debasing mono- poly which enabled Ivan Kalita (Ivan, the money bag) to i32S^ii distance all his rivals and neighbours and make a new central Russia in the heart of the great plain after the earlier and apparently more promising western Russia on the Dnieper had fallen into dissolution. The publican or tax farmer is an odious figure in every age, but it was reserved for Ivan Kalita, the first grand prince of Moscow, to distance all tax farmers in infamy by petitioning to discharge this invidious office for the benefit of the heretic oppressors of his race. This Ivan was a realist. lie sought power where power lay, in the camp of the Great Khan, and determined that no other should share his prize. " It shall be for me to know the Horde,’" he said, “ and not for thee.” In the gallery of melancholy and formidable tyrants who built up the Muscovite power, this plodding, money- chasing man, who steadily extended his domains by purchase, seizure, colonization, or treaty, who did not scruple to use Tatar troops against his enemies, but who kept the peace and put down robbers, is a typical figure.

We cannot ignore him. By his policy of servile compliance he secured for his country fifty years of respite from Tatar raids.

Under him Moscow, which was now at tlie very centre of die new colonial populace, became the seat of the Metropolitan of the Russian Church and the political capital of the country.

He is one of the makers of the Russian state, dying after his

382 A HISTOKT OF EUROPB

career of extortions and economies in the habit of a monk with a tonsured head, like every other prince of his mediocre but service- able line.

This Muscovite or colonial Russia was built on an agricultural foundation, and was therefore more enduring than the com- mercial confederacy of Kiev. The Viking princes of the west were military auxiliaries or condottieri, engaged by a chain of river republics, and limited by the appetites and traditions of an alien race already trained to the arts of civic government. These conditions did not prevail in central Russia. When the descendants of St. Vladimir trekked eastward into the forest lands of the Volga basin they found no ready-made cities, but a number of isolated river stations, freshly established in virgin soil by pioneering colonists and screened by vast spaces of im- penetrable forest from the terrible nomads of the southern steppes, whose depredations had been the prime cause leading to the establishment of the Viking power on the Dnieper. In this environment of industrious and remote tillage the prince threw off his character of soldier, slave-trader, and bandit and assumed the cjuality of a colonizing landlord. The rota system of succession was abandoned as inapplicable to dispersed hold- ings and settled landed interests. The princely power descended in the direct line, and when it had become the practice of the Muscovites to assign to the eldest son the lion’s share of the inheritance, the ground was cleared for the creation of a stable and expanding state.

Meanwhile a vast political change was overtaking all that western side of Russia, over which the Varangians in earlier days had established their power. Among the forests and marshes of the Niemcn a fragment of the ancient and pagan Lithuanian race had contrived to escape the conquering thrust of the military monks of Germany, and to nurse, in solitary independ- ence, the flame of political ambition. Suddenly this small nation sprang into the forefront of history', under the impulsion of four capable and enterprising rulers. The conquests of Cudimin (1315-1340) and of 01g(i^d, his son (1345-1377), brought Lithuania to the Dnieper, made of Kiev a Lithuanian city, and subjected western Russia to the control of a powder established in the distant Lithuanian capital of Vilna. A divided and prostrate people, still reeling under the shock of the Tatar invasion, was not in a position to make an effective resistance to these pagan

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idvaders from the west The Greek Christians bowed the neck to the worshippers of Perkiin, the God of Thunder, and preferred the lax finance of the Lithuanian savage to the penetrating ex* tortions of the Tatar.

It may be asked how so small a people was able to sustain the burden of an empire thus widely spread and rapidly acquired. The answer is that the Lithuanians were not long unaided. A personal union of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania with the kingdom of Poland was effected in 1386 under Jagellon I, who at the same time abjured his paganism and was received into the Roman Church. Henceforward the Lithuanian empire rested upon Polish swords and Roman missionaries.

So by the end of the fourteenth century, if we exclude the nomad population of the southern steppes, two Russias stood face to face: the Russia of the west, Lithuanian and Polish in its political direction, Roman, Jewish, and Creek in its creed; and the Russia of the east, all of a piece and Muscovite and Byzan- tine to the core. The conflict between these two Russias, between the Muscovite or Great Russia and the Lithuanian or Little Russia, is one of the great themes of Russian history. From it was generated that bitter antagonism between the Russian and the Pole, which, surviving into modem times, brought a Polish army within reach of Kiev, and a Russian army of retaliation to the very outskirts of Warsaw, while Pilsudski was at the head of Poland and Lenin still master of the Russian state.

Planted between the Roman heresy of the west and the Tatar heresy of the cast, ‘‘Holy Moscow” steadily extended its in- fluence. Churches, monasteries, convents, multiplied rapidly. The metropolitan of Moscow stood side by side with the prince, corroborating and exalting his authority, and placing at the disposal of the temporal power the tremendous engine of religious fear. At last the time came when a Muscovite prince, breaking a long tradition of dishonourable subservience to the Tatars, struck a blow for Russian freedom. In 1380 Dimitri Donskoi [of the Don], already renowned for domestic victories and for his repulse of a Polish and Lithuanian invasion, smote a great Tatar army on the field of Koulikovo. The spell was broken. Though the Tatars returned soon afterwards and put the inhabitants of Moscow to the sword, it was shown that the annies of the Horde were not invincible. The field of Koulikovo witnessed the birth of a Russian nation, and of a new patriotism

tQ2t

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largely founded on the possession of a common religious creed and owing much to the teaching of the Greek Church, which had fused together the Slavs and Finns and all the minor tribes and families of men who lived obscurely in the great dark plain. Animated by this common spirit and equipped for the first time in 1389 with cannon, the Muscovite forces were henceforth a match for their oriental adversaries.

It is, however, to Timur, the great Tatar conqueror, even more than to Dimitri, with his army of a hundred and fifty thousand men, that the emancipation of Muscovy was princi- pally due. Timour was not content with Christian adversaries, but pillaged and disorganized the Golden Horde. After his destructive invasions (1390 and i394)» the task of the Muscovites was easier and their success assured.

The Grand Dukes of Muscovy were the heirs at once of the Tatar Khans and of the Byzantine Caesars, lb the Khans they owe an example of tyranny, a method of finance, and oppor- tunities of emolument and power throughout that vital part of the Russias which is drained by the Volga and its tributaries. From Byzantium they derived the support of an ordered Church and that profound doctrine of imperial authority which was the legacy of the Roman Empire to the mediaeval world. So when Constantinople fell into the hands of the Turks and the last of the Palacologi perished fighting for his throne, Moscovr became from the force of circum.>tancc the capital of the Greek Church in Europe, and its prince .the heir to the Byzantine Caesars. Was theie not, it was asked, a divine dispensation in accordance with which thiec cities were chosen in turn to be the centres alike of a world empire and a w^oild faith? Rome liad been followed by Constantinople. The high privilege and awful responsibility now devohed upon Moscow. Such were the beliefs and aspirations of the monks and priests of the Russian Church, and such the historical logic which led I\an the Great (1462- 1505) to call himself Tzar or Caesar, to take in marriage a Byzantine piincess and to blazon the two-headed eagle of the ciiipire on the arms of Muscovy. Here was a romance of history and a dream of empue, running counter to the tumultuous liberties of an earlier Russia, but destined to sustain a long course of ambitious policy, which w^as shattered only by the disasters of igj7 the great war and the well-knit dogmatism of a Jewish Com- munist from Germany.

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BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED A. Rambaud: Histoire de la Russie. 18S4.

V. Kluchcvbky: History of Russia. Tr. C. J. Hogarth. 1911-31, Donald Mackenzie Wallace: Russia. 1912.

Makecf and O’Hara: Russia. {Nations of the Modem World Seiles.) 1925.

CKAPIER XXXm

RISE OF THE ITALIAN DESPOTS

Italian disunion. Commerce and •mar. Condotiieri. The five states* Milan and the Visconti, Venice. Florence. The Albizzi. Rise of the Medici. Naples Union of Naples, FJotence, and Milan.

Wmi the disappearance of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, Italy lost its last shred of political unity. Henceforward the visits of the Emperor were rare and fleeting, and had as little influence upon the government of the Italian people as the wing of the flying osprey upon the waves below. 'I'he country which was now left to find its own salvation was, if we except the kingdom of Naples and the papal domain, a medley of city states, each cherishing with a passionate tenacity its individual life and special commercial and political ambitions, making wars and alliances as the interest of the moment might dictate, and never scrupling to change its allegiance with a shift of the wind. In this scene of ardent rivalries and unstable combinations the fortunes of cities would mount and fall, now riding on the crest of the wave, now sunk into the trough, so that in the course of a single year the Venetians, being besieged by Genoa, were so desperate that they talked of lefoundihg their lepublic in Crete, and again so exuberant that theie was no bound to their am- bition. And what was tiuc of each city was true also of the living and turbulent factions within it. The picturesejue towers of San Gemignano recall the days when the family feuds of the local nobility were waged within the city with a lordly disregard of vulgar convenience.

This amazing combativeness was the index of a vitality which found its expression in so great ^n outburst of commercial, artistic, and literary activity as to raise Italy far above any other European country iv the scale of civilization. The northern visitor to the Lomhaid plain was astounded by the network of canals, the busy trade, the highly developed finance and skilled craftsmanship, the number of populous and wealthy cities stationed at so small a distance the one from the other, and by the many signs of public and private splendour. In the first haU

386

Rism OF THK ITALIAN D&SPOTS 387

of the thirteenth century Fra Bonvesin da Riva, one of the early poets who wrote in the vulgar tongue, describes Milan as a city with two hundred thousand inhabitants, with fifty thousand men able to bear arms, with four hundred notaries, two hundred doctors, two hundred jurisconsults or judices, eighty school- masters, fifty copiers or sellers of books, sixty noblemen’s houses^ a hundred and fifty castles in the contado with dependent villages, with three hundred butchers and as many bakers, and a thousand farmers to cater for the population. The name of Lombard Street in the city of London records the tact that the Lombards were pioneers in banking, and that there was a time when the hankers and money-changers of Europe were called by this name.

The Italian despot was the necessary product of these two incompatible conditions of commerce and combativencss. Sooner or later every city felt the need of a strong hand either to avert some definite danger, or to keep the spirit of faction within bounds, or to maintain and extend its industry and commerce. Sometimes it would invoke the help of a successful soldier, some- times that of a civilian magistrate from some other city, who, being unconnected with local feuds, might be trusted to act with impartiality. At first, since the spirit of liberty was vivacious and strong, these experiments were made wiih a tentative caution. The podesta was appointed for a yeai. or for a short term of years; but the convenience of having, more especially in difficult times, an authority capable of taking prompt action, of evading the restrictions of a popular constitution framed lor narrow and local needs, and of exercising a vigorous policy, was found to be so great that the institution, once adopted, became rooted in the political morals of the country.

The despot who commands the Italian scene in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the podesta made permanent and hereditary. One of the earliest members of his class was Can Grande della Scala of Verona, whose father was elected Capitano del Popolo for life, and who shines in history as the patron of Dante and Giotto, and as the pioneer in that distinctively Italian association of a stern tyranny, a sumptuous court, and a liberal, and indeed munificent, patronage of the arts.

The increasing concentration upon the arts of peace which produced as one of its results the podesta and the hereditaxy despot, also led to the substitution of merccnarv for civic armies*

^88 A HISIORY OF EUROPE

The Italian condoltieri played their appointed part in the pro- gress of civilization. They announced the advent of a new philo- sophy which regarded war no longer as the pride and privilege of the ruling class, bur as butcher’s work to be delegated to specialists. The merchanr, relieved of his military obligations, was able to attend to the improvement of his fortunes and the goveriunent of his city, while the disfrancliised noble — for under the consiitutions of most Italian city states the nobility were excluded from any part or lot in the government — found in the life oi the condottiere a congeniallield for his tastes and activities. The development, thcicfore, of these mercenary armies, so far from being a sign of decadence, was an indication that in Italy, at least, a new and truer scale of human values was making itself apparent. It was lealizcd that war was a necessary part of the political conditions ol the age, but nor so important that it should absoib the energies of men who were better employed in the amassing of fortunes, the building of churches, the painting of pictures, or the governing of states. Later on the system lent itself to abuses, to wars, which the well-paid combatants on either side had no interest in concluding, to expensive but bloodless battles, and to that general relaxation of civic and military fibre ccnsuicd by the patriotic Machiavelli wliich, fiom the end of the fifteentli century, exposed Italy <igain and again to the insolence of foreign invasion.

Thcie have been many instances in history of a despotism which nmnhs and abases the spirit of a subject population; but the Italian dc‘poti‘*nis, though daikly stained by cruelly, craft, and caprice, do not appeal to have stunted the free expression of the human spirit, or to have intioduced habits of servility and abasement. 'J’lic age of the despots in Italy is one of the flowering times of the liinnan genius, during whicli, quite apart from the wonderful achievements of elect iiidividu:ils, the energy of the popular will was still unimpaired and formidable, and those despots w^erc most successful who, like the Medici in Florence, stood vlosc to the people and understood their needs.

The process by whicl i number o£ inrlepcndcnt city states were gradually merged into laige units cannot be traced in a gexieral history. It here must suflic'c to say that by the beginning of the fifteenth century the political affairs of Italy were regulated by the relations of five principal powers — the kingdom of Naples, the papal states, the republic of Venice, the despotism of Milan

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and Florence, which, though nominally republican, was in truth directed by the power of the AJbizzi family. The long duel between Genoa and Venice for the dominion oC the seas had been decided in the war of Chioggia (137S-1381) in favour of Venice by one of the most complete and sudden reversals of military fortune. Henceforward Genoa, always rent by internal factions, and narrowly confined between the sea and the moun- tains, is more important in the Bosphorus than in Italy.

In this complex of powers the central fact was the persistent rivalry of Venice and Milan, the first enriched by the trade of a great overseas Empire, the second by agriculture, by an incom- parable breed of horses, by flourishing silks and embroideries, by its frontier at the base of a great commercial route across the Alps, and lastly by an industry in arms and armaments, which ctjuipped fighting men all over the world and irrespective of creed. The master of such a city could easily make himself the richest man in Europe.

This is exactly what happened to the great Ghibelline family (Frankish in origin as was indicated by their ruddy hair and fair complexion) who obtained political control of Milan and absorbed most of northern and much of central Italy into their territory. The Visconti became the richest family in Europe, so rich that a Visconti bride was the most brilliant prize in the marriage market of Europe, and so successful in their royal marriages that they are connected through the female line with the five royal houses of Valois, ITabsburg, Tudor, Stuart, anil Hanover; though whether it should ever have been a source of pride to point to a Visconti descent may be doubted, for, while some piinces of that family were men of integrity, others were cruel, treacherous, cowardly, and profligate.

Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the most conspicuous figure of the dynasty (1378-1402), was one of those fortunate men whose per- sonal ambition, pursued without moral scruple but alw'ays with pertinacity, chimed in wdih the public interest at the moment. It suited well with the needs of a city, whose upper class was divided into the Guelf and Ghibelline factions, that tliere should be one master hand to compose disputes. It was agreeable to ilic merchants, the craftsmen, and the peasantry of the contado to enjoy the protection of a strong government; and though the cities under Milanese dominion might regret their independence, they were consoled by the solid advantages of a more economical

3<X> A RX^TOHT OF EUEOFB

administration and a more prosperous trade. Moreover, since it had become the habit of the Lombard nobles to live in the dty, the master of Milan, as Commincs observed, was the master of the state.

Theie was a certain bigness of vision in this fair-haired noble- man, tlie first hereditary Duke of Milan, which fixes the attention of posterity. He divined the foreign peril, and saw that without a strong and compact state in northern Italy, such as he proposed to found, Italian independence was insecure. Fine sentiments can hardly be attributed to a man whose cliaractcr is deeply stained by craft and cruelty; but at least it will be cojicedcd that Gian Galeazzo was a shrewd judge of political opportunity, who saw tliat with the Pajjacy distracted by schism, and Naples paralyzed by internal discords, the field was clear of the two most formidable obstacles which might tlnvart the expansion of his state. He had also, combined with the mean treacheries of his nature, the not uncommon ideal ol a civilized and princely grandeur. He built bridges, castles, palaces. 1 he Certosa and the University of Pavia aie tokens of his ambition to shine as the pation of teligion and learning.

As to his victories, they weic due to no military skill of his own, for Gian Galeazzo was not a campaigner, but to Facino Cane, the very skilful leader of his mercenary army. Decisive and most alarming rlicse victories were to the two neighbours who were most concerned to check his progress. Vicenza and Padua were wrested fiom Venice. The republic of Florence, despite tlic services of Sir john Hawkwood, a famous English condottiere whose monument may he seen in the Duomo, W’as caught in a noose of cities, Siena, Perugia, Assisi, Pisa, which found the road to safety in tlic acceptance of Milanese rule.

The half-century of northern Italian history which follows the death of Gian Galeazzo in 1402 is filled with the wars of Milanese ambition and Venetian and Florentine defence. The precious and I! redeemable years during which it would have been possible, had there been a con .ricd Italian effort, to save Europe from the Turks, were consumed by three ol the wealthiest and most advanced communities in the world in a contest which had no significance for civilization. I'hc five w^ars between Milan and Venice, the last of which was protracted for seven years, effectu- ally paralyzed concerted effort in the cast, and when at last peace

KtSB or T 9 B ITALIAN DESPOTS 39I

was made at Lodi in 1454 it was too late* The Turk was already master of Constantinople.

Neither did the Milanese realize their ambition. Even if there had been no Pope in the background, Venice and Florence were sufficiently wealthy, and therefore sufficiently powerful, to pre- vent the establishment of a northern Italian kingdom centred in Milan. Despite the skill of Filippo Maria Visconti, who after an intervening period of anarcliy restored and enlarged his father’s duchy, it was still very far from being the kingdom of his dreams, for Venice and Florence barred the way, and at Filippo's death in 1447 were holding a winning advantage.

The story of Venice, though marked by sharp reverses on sea and land, had been one of so much material prosperity and domestic peace as to give the impression of an almost miraculous sagacity in the management of affairs. No other Italian state seemed to be so contented or so fully assured of a stable and equable life. A blessed immunity from the two great plagues of Italy, exiles plotting ruin to the constitution or family feuds bringing storms and bitterness into politics, marked her out from less fortunate cities. Cheap and efficient justice, taxation beating lightly on the poor, a brilliant round ot spectacles and amuse- ments, and a number of small, self-supporting, and self-sufficient trade guilds to keep the people happy and occupied, and to pro- vide a modest theatre for the display of talent, were other elements making for harmony and content. Nor were these blessings pur- chased at the expense of national strength. The life appointment of the Doge was a guarantee of continuity, the wide powers accorded to the Council o£ Ten a pledge of administrative firm- ness. There was even a note of tyranny in the elaborate system of detection and espionage by which the government felt the pulse of the city and guarded itself against unpleasant surprises; but if a tyranny, the rule of the Doge was of all tyrannies the most paternal and benignant. As an example of the enlighten- ment of Venetian legislation we may note that children were forbidden to work in dangerous trades, and that there was a compulsory load line for ships, provisions which were not until late in the nineteenth century introduced into the statute book of Great Britain, then the leading industrial and sea-going country of the world.

Nature had placed Venice in a key position between east and west, and, using the favours of nature with skill, she outdistanced

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Genoa and Aragon, her nearest rivals. The main part of the carrying trade of Europe was done in Venetian bottoms. Her galleys brought sugar and spices to England, supplied Flemish weavers with English wool, and Mediterranean towns with Flemish cloth. The long conflict with Genoa was not, like many mediaeval wars, frivolous and unnecessary, but a deadly, inexor- able struggle for markets. Commerce shaped Venetian policy, and empire when it came was not so much an end in itself as an incident of expanding business. The sea was the element upon which the whole fortune of Venice was embarked and the excit- ing cause of all generous ambitions. The young Venetian noble- men went into the navy as the natural avenue to fame and fortune. Six fleets, each appointed to serve in a diflerent area, hut all built on a common pattern, so that the consul in every port could keep and provide spare parts, attested the enterprise and forethought of the Venetian government in everything which pertained to the administration of the marine.

More specifically tlie foreign policy of Venice had been long shaped by the triple need of securing the Dalmatian coast, of winning for herself a safe agricultural base in Italy, and a control of such alpine passes as were necessary for her convoys of mer- chandise, In the pursuit of these objects the republic had been brought into contact at different times with the Hungarian monarchy and with the masters of Padua and Verona; but in 1412-4^ the first half of the fifteenth century her one dangerous adversary was Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan, who, with the aid of his famous condottieie general, Fianccsco Carmagnola, had by 1421 acquired for himself a dominating position in northern Italy.

Could Venice sit still while t 1 )is ambitious rival consolidated his power? Could she trust him nor to attack Verona at the moment most appropriate to himself? Was not attack the truest form^jf defence, tmd the extension of the Venetian rule over the Lombard plain the one sufficient guarantee of security? The case Tor the preventive war was vehemently urged in 1421 by the young Foscari anrl rountcred by the old Doge Mocenigo with arguments such as the wise in every age have brought against this immoral doctrine; and so long as that w^ise old man lived the preventive war was averted. But in 1423 Mocenigo died and Foscari took his place as Doge. The voice of peace was no longer predominant in the counsels of the Venetian Government; and

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with Florence pressing for war and Carmagnola deserting to her side, Venice entered the lists against Filippo Maria.

The republic of San Marco had little reason to be satisfied with her decision. There were in the military market other swords besides that of Carmagnola, and notably the sword of one Fran- cesco Sforza, the son of a distinguished condotticre from the Romagna, himself a man of immense animal vigour an 4 endur- ance, who was to prove himself in these long wars a fine and resourceful soldier as well as one of the most adroit politicians of his age. Carmagnola was no match for such an antagonist, and after some initial victories attracted the dangerous suspicions of his paymasters. When the Venetian fleet was destroyed in the Po in 1431, the government wished to know what their turn-coat general was doing, decoyed him to Venice, and there caused him to be secretly tried and publicly executed as a traitor. The iron courage of Venice in thus solemnly destroying a famous and popular condoltiere chief was widely admired as evidence of an almost inhuman resolve to place the civil above the military power; but it brought neither victories nor wisdom in its train. When Filippo Maria died in 1447, leaving no male heir, prudence would have directed overtures of friendship to the new republican government, as yet weak and uncertain, which %vas set up in Milan, But in an evil hour, and under the impulsion of the same headstrong party which had been the source of all the trouble, Venice decided to strike down her rival. She had reckoned with- out the crafty condoltiere, who had taken the precaution to wed the only daughter of the last Visconti, and this mistake was Sforza’s opportunity. Coming forward as the defender of the young republic, he first defeated the Venetians on land and sea, and then, wlicn Venice was so humiliated as to crave his alliance, turned against his old friends and employers and made himself master of the Milanese state. At the end of twenty-five years of almost incessant fighting Venice was faced with a Duke of Milan in comparison with whom Filippo Maria Visconti was an infant in subtlety and force.

It may be doubted whether Sforza could have accomplished his coup d^etat but for the sudden revolution of policy in Flor- ence. The Milanese condoltiere was assisted by the long purse of his friend Cosimo de’ Medici, a Florentine man of business, who in 1434 had been recalled from exile and had then made himself the de facto ruler of his state. It was the opinion of this cool

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obserirer that Venice, rather than Milan, was the true enemy of Florentine commerce.

Florence, the spiritual capital of Italy, the birthplace of Dante, of Petrarch's family, and of Boccaccio, was upon its material side renowned for banking, commerce, and the manufacture of cloth* In the great quarrel between the Guelfs and the Ghibcllines, the Florentines, to whom the conception of imperialism in any form was anathema, embraced the papal, and consequently also the French side. And since Florence did not live on religious and political aspirations only, but had an eye to the main chance, she made money out of lier papalism by becoming banker to the Roman Curia. To be a banker on a great scale is to be a diplo- niatist and a statesman. The banking business of Florence brought her into political relations with many governments in many lands. The great banking family of the Acciaiuoli, who may be described as the Rothschilds of the fourteenth century, provided a prime minister to Naples, a seigneur to Malta, a despot to Corinth, and a dynasty of Florentine dukes to Athens. Yet despite the development of cosmopolitan finance and big business, the spirit of the Florentine people had remained passionately and enviously equalitarian. While no family would admit the superiority of another, every family was ambitious to be first.

These fickle, jealous, and aspiring moods were reflected in a constitution which was entirely incompatible with efficient government. There was a rage for check's and counterchecks, for cicciion and the lot, for short teims of office, and lor the restric- tion of leal power to the greater guilds or mercantile com- munities. If it were not that the nobles and the working class were alike <lisfranchised, one might describe the old Florentine constitution as a democracy doctrinaire to the point of insanity, llie Gonfalonier of Justice, head of the signoria or cabinet, was allowed to hold office for two months only. Nor could any proposal of the signoria pass into law until it had secured a two- thirds majority in each of five separate committees or assemblies. It would be difficult ro conceive provisions more calculated to impair the quality and check tlic momentum of govern- ment.

At the first serious test such a constitution inevitably broke down. When Florence began to be sensible of the menace of her neighbours, and as the conception began to prevail that the

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dty itself was not enough, but that the acquisition of the sur- rounding country was necessary if trade connections were to be secured, the elaborate precautions of the old constitution, which was so popular that no one dared to propose to discard it, had simply to be evaded. The Parte Guelfa, a party organization, was the first body outside the constitution which seriously addressed itself to the task of violating the spirit, while observ- ing the letter, of Florentine democracy. There was not much delicacy about the methods of this organization, which antici- pated some of the worst practices of American gangsters. But Florence was never a tame or submissive city. The outrageous practices of the Parte Guelfa, combined with industrial griev- ances, produced the great popular revolution of the Ciompi (*378), which secured for the Arti Minori or Lesser Guilds a place within the pale of the constitution. But though the Parte Guelfa was henceforward stripped of the inllucncc which it had abused, the constitution still remained popular and im- possible, and the need for circumventing it correspondingly urgent.

At this juncture in Florentine history the control of affairs passed through a counter-revolution into the hands of a patriotic Florentine business family, who knew how to maintain and keep an effective measure of authority without manifest injustice or public odium. Maso and Rinaldo Albi/zi were uncrowned rulers of Florence from 1382 to 1434. Their powers of efficient decision, their knowledge of trade, their enthusiasm for art and letters, their combination of liberality to the poor with their ruthlessness to dangerous men, their studious care 10 behave as ordinary cKtizens, and to conceal the springs of power, made them acceptable to Florence and her subject cities. Moreover, there was public danger. The rule of the Albizzi synchronizes with the development of the Milanese menace, when the con- dottieri of Gian Galeazzo and Filippo Maria were in the field, and a strong hand was needed at the helm.

Meanwhile another family, less oligarchic, more wealthy, but ever since the revolution of 1378 noted for its attachment to popular causes, was gradually coming to the front. The Medici were bankers. The opulence, the knowledge, the widespread in- fluence in foreign courts and capitals which come to the great cosmopolitan banker, belonged in full measure to this gifted and remarkable Florentine family. So indispensable did tlicir

39^ A HISTORY OF EUROPE

financial services ultimately become, that it was a generally recog* nized maxim that a failure of the Medici banks would mean a collapse of the whole fabric of European credit. But while banking supplied the economic foundation upon which the Medici built up their rule in Florence, it was only one among niany explanations of their success. If the Medici were bankersg they were also farmers, who could talk beasts or crops with the Tuscan husbandmen, connoisseurs in literature and art, and experts alike in the larger and more generous aspects of states- manship, as in tlie sordid minutiae of political intrigue. Every- thing which had been done under tlie Albizzi was carried forward upon a greater scale and with a higher degree of imagination by a more gifted family. The taxes were still used to help friends and injure enemies. The elections were still jerrymandcjcd. I'he letter of the constitution was still kept, while its whole drift and s[)irit were ingeniously frustrated. However frccjucnily elections might be held, the result was invariably the return of the Mediccan candidates. To these manifest irregu- larities the democracy c^f Florence turned a blind eye. A high capacity for government, a splendid court, a liberal and intelli- gent patronage of the arts, coupled with simple and popular manners, secured for Coslmo dc* Medici and Lorenzo his grand- son a brilliant period of substantial power.

Among the Italian stales none should have been more power- ful, but none was in fact less cflcciive, than the military kingdom of Naples. The destiny of stales has little connection with the charm of their cliniate, the romance of their scenery, or the long descent of their inhabitants. A political tragedy seems to brood over the lovely Italian land, “ the favoured home of bandits and brigands," which was first touched by the sunlight of Greek civilization. Notliing has greatly prospered there for any long period of time. The soil is a palimpsest of broken and luxurious civilizations, of great acliievemcnts which have no sequel. The Normans were leplaccd by the Hohensiaufen, under whom Naples became perhaps of all the countries of Europe the most advanced and cllKicnt’ v governed. But the power of the Hohen- staufen was broken, and the iw’o Sicilies were transferred by the Pope to the alien rule of Charles of Anjou. From that date forward misfortune followed misfortune. Charles was a selfish and worthless tyrant. The Sicilians, with a spirit characteristic of their island, rose against him, massacred his officers, and

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placed their country under the house of Aragon, which could claim descent through the female line from Manfred, the bastard son of Frederick II.

Thenceforward Aragon was pitted against Anjou. The war was fierce, long, and, from the point of view of the Neapolitan Angevins, a failure. The island remained with Aragon, ilie thiid strongest naval powder in the Mediterranean. But this was not the end of the troubles which continued to distract southern Italy. The Angevins W'cre an ambitious and shallow race, more inrciesicd in show than in government. They were not content with the kingdom of Naples in addition to their French county of Provence. The elder branch of the family went to rule in Hungary, while the younger branch remained in Italy; and since no combination of terri- tories was too fantastic for an Angevin, Lewis of Hungary in- vaded Naples in the hopes of uniting the kingdoms under his own sceptre. Even when this foolish project had been renounced, and Naples had been permitted to settle down under a cadet branch of the Angevin family (Charles III of Durazzo and his son Ladislas and his daughter Joanna II, 1382-1435), who, having no French possessions, were able more closely to identify them- selves with Neapolitan interests, the monarchy rested upon uncertain foundations. The claims of the Durazzo house were disputed in Sicily and in Provence, and the sovereign was con- fronted with a baronage which found its interests best served by intrigue with a foreign pretender. In these circumstances the tasks of monarchy, which in England and France had been a source of national power, were gravely obstructed. A foreign dynasty, a succession of indifferent kings and bad queens, a distracting uncertainty and unrest arising from the disputed succession gave to Neapolitan politics under the house of Anjou an air of ruffianly melodrama. At last (1435) wise and

charming Alfonso V of Aragon Naples found a statesman for its ruler, a true prince of the Renaissance, firm, munificent, cul- tured, and for the moment powerful. Alfonso saw that only by a close union with Florence and Milan could his house be securely protected against the French. That union he succeeded in effecting. It was the one triumph of Neapolitan statesman- ship in the fifteenth century, its one contribution to the political wefeare of Italy. After Alfonso's death the combination was broken by the treachery of Milan, and thereupon there was opened up a new chapter of troubles for Italy and for Naples,

598 A ntSTORY OF EUROPE

SO vast 111 its comcqucnres ihat for some historians it has bcaa held to mark the watershed between the mediaeval and the modern world.

BOOKS WHICH may be consulied

Janet Trevelyan: History ot Italy. 1928,

J. A. Symondb; The Ronaissante in Italy (The of the Despots). 7 vols. i875-8h.

E. Armstrong:;: Loienro de’ Mcditi and Florence in the Fifteenth Ontury. iSoh.

Horatio Brown: Venice: A Historical Sketch of the Republic. 1893.

C, M. Ady; A History of Milan under the Sforzas. Ed, K. Aimstrong. 1007.

P. Villani: Hie Two Fust Ccnhirics of Floicntine History. Tr, L. Villani. iSoj 5.

O. Villani: Chronh les. Selections tr, R. E. Selfe. 1896.

W. F. T. Butler: 'J ho Loiiibard Communes. 1006.

J. C. L. Sismondi; History of the Italian Republics. (Everyman’s Libiary.) 1907.

aiAPTER XXXIV

TIIE OrrOMAN TURKS

Weakness of the restored liysantine Empire. The Catalan Company, Rtse of the Ottoman Turks. The Janissaries. The Serbs. Kossovo. The intervention of Timur. Angora. The Hungarians. Early triumphs and final defeat of Uunyades. Christian disunion and fall of Con- stantinople.

The Byzantine Empire, which for centuries had stood as the bulwark of European civilization against the Orient, was shaken beyond recovery by the Latin conquest. The Greek restoration of 1261, though productive of a late flowering of scholarship and literature, was followed by no revival of Gieek power. The Em- perors ol the house of Palaeologus re-entered upon a shrunken and divided heritage, the acknowledged weakness of which was a perpetual invitation to insolent attack. While the great Ana- tolian recruiting grounds of the old Byzantine Empire had long passed under the control of the Turcoman Sultan of the house of Scljuk, who ruled at Iconium, the major part of the Balkan peninsula was in tiie hands of the Bulgars. Greece, save for a province in the Peloponnesc, was a medley of Frankish fiefs. What remained to the Empire was a narrow strip of the Asiatic littoral, Constantinople and western 7 ’hrace, Thessalonica and the Thracian Chalciclice, the despotat of Mistra (in the Pelopon- nese), and a few islands in the Aegean. Tliese, even if they were as valuable as Rhodes, which was taken by the Knights of St. John in 1310, the Emperor was unable to defend against serious attack.

I’hcrc can be no better illustration of the deep-seated weak- ness of the Byzantine Empiie dining the eaily years of the fourteenth century than the strange story of the great Catalan Company. Eierything relating to this fierce body of mercenaries seems charged with weighty premonitions of the future. It was recruited from that needy and ambitious nobility of Spain which was later destined to fill the world with its military renown. It was schooled in the wars of Sicilian independence (1282-1302) to meet on even terms the chivalry of Italy and France, and on the conclusion of that bitter struggle it embraced the service of the Byzantine Emperor. It was led by Roger de Flor, a pirate (in-

399

400 A HISTORY OF EUROPE

cidcntally the son of Frederick IFs German falconer by an heiress from Brindisi), who was made a grand duke and even a Caesar, and was married to a Bulgarian princess. But com- pliments, which were cheap in Constantinople, meant little to these proud and quarrelsome strangers. The Catalans took the measure of their Greek employers, and came to the conclusion that no insolence was too gross for a government so weak and nerveless. Instead of settling down to a laborious campaign against the Scljuks, the Company preferred to quarrel with the Genoese of Galata, who supplied ships to the navy, and to fight the Alans, who were the corps d'elite in the army of their em- ployer. Nor did they quit imperial territory until they had seized Gallipoli, the key fortress of the Hellespont, and beaten the Emperor himself in a pitched fight.

Meanwhile (*308) the Duchy of Atlicns, whicli had prospered for a century under the mild rule of a Burgundian family, had fallen to Walter of Brienne, the fiery son of a brood famous for its adveniurcs in many lands.

In a moment as calamitous for himself as it was fortunate for the Emperor, the new Duke of Athens called upon the help of the great Company. The Catalans, who, when not quarrelling with others, quarrelled among themselves and were fresh from the butchery of eleven colonels, descended into Greece, fought for a year, and seeing that the land was fair, refused to accept their discharge, save on terms which the duke was unable to concede. As the traveller from Athens descends the hills into the lovely vale of the Cephissus, he beholds on his right the battlefield (1310) which brought death to Walter of Brienne and gave his duchy into the hands of the Aragonese for seventy-four years. The Catalans, six thousand four hundred strong, were stationed among the green March corn some way bark fiom the coast road, a tempting mark for the supciior numbers of their adversary. But between the Duke and his enemy lay a marsh, concealed and artificial, and here Brienne and his horsemen were baicheicd by the long Catalan knives as they lay engulfed and helpless on the so^t Icn ground. The armies of Xerxes and Darius were civilized in comparison with the new Catholic masters of tlic Parthenon.

Beyond the Hellespont among the Birhynian hills there were men of a certain Turkish tribe who ruminated on this strange

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Spanish portent. What marvels could not a small force of resolute men achieve, if only the infantry were disciplined! The Spanish lesson was not lost upon the grave and receptive Otto- mans. The time was not far distant when they too would fashion an infantry army, seize Gallipoli, beat the Imperials, and tread the sacred soil of the Acropolis as masters.

The history of the Ottoman Turks is one of a family of simple shepherds and herdsmen, gradually gathering power and in- fluence, and by patience and justice, mingled with a persevering course of cruelty and craft, attracting the most heterogeneous elements to its service until it was in a position to make rapid and gigantic conquests, and to fashion and support a mighty Empire. Othman, the founder from whom the race derives its name, piefigured, albeit upon a small scale, some characteristic features of the future policy of his line. The scene of his life work was the ill-defended frontier province of Bithynia, where he engaged in a guerilla warfare with the Greek Christians, first as an emir under the Seljuk Sultan, and after 1307 as an in- dependent prince. Ilis religion was deep and unaffected, his policy adjusted to tlic counsels of the holy men of his faith, his administration of justice remarkable in those venal and violent times for impaitiality. But passionate as were his Moslem beliefs, he had the vision to discern that while the Moslem religion miglit be the creed of a great state, a Turkish tribe could not suffice for its foundation. Marriage, enslavement, the attraction of military renown must win adherents. So he chose his wife from Cilicia, seized a Christian damsel for his son, and employed as his alter ego in war Michael of the Forked Beard, a Greek apostate from the Christian faith.

The conquest of Bithynia which was begun by Othman was completed by Orclian, his eldest son. Tlie two famous cities of Nicomedia and Nicaca passed at the cost of one inconsiderable battle against an imperial army into the hands of the Ottomans.

So inexpensive were these conquests, so shameful had been the conduct of the imperial campaign that a mere soldier would have been tempted to pursue his military advantage and to attack the European possessions of his feeble enemy. But Orchan was no mere soldier. The twenty years following the victory of Pclc- ^3^9 49 kanon, perhaps the most fruitful in the history of the Ottoman people, were spent at the beautiful Birhynian capital of Brusa in the organization of a state. Instead of leading his Ottomans

A nxstdHT ftURorie

4o%

against the emirs of the Asiatic coasts or the populations of the Balkan peninsula, the wise Orchan and his advisers employed themselves in building mosques and colleges, hospitals and cara^ vanseties, in the establishment of a coinage, the prescription of a national headdress (a plain cap of ivhite felt), and, most im- portant of all, in the organization of an army. It is to the period of this momentous halt at Brusa that wc must ascribe the founda- tion of those distinctive military institutions which made the Ottoman Turk for many centuries the terror of eastern Europe — ^the akindji or light skirmishers, the feudatory cavalry, the Sultan’s guard, and above all the famous infantry force, which has now to be described.

The “janissaries,” or new soldiers, were Christian children, taken by force from their homes, and brought up as Moslems in seminaries designed to efface ail trace of their earlier affections and affinities, and to make of them the pliable instruments of the Ottoman state. Some, and these the most unfortunate, were drafted off to serve as pages in the palace, others were employed in the civil service, but the main body passed into an infantry corps, so brave and devoted that no Turkish army with a stiffening of janissaries failed to give an excellent account of itself on the field. The janissary was a slave. The affections which sweeten the character, the interests which expand the mind, the ideals which give elevation to the will, were denied him. An iron discipline effaced the past and impoverished the future. He was made to forget father and mother, brothers and sisters, lie could never hope for wife or children. The barrack was his home, fighting his trade, the Koran his religion, and he went fortli to slay the enemies of the Sultan and of Allah with the inflamed and contracted fanaticism of a monk.

The suggestion that this force should be recruited by a tribute of Christian children is said to have come from Black Habil, the proud Vizier of Orchan, and it is clear that without such la tribute a regular recruitment could not have been maintained. It followed, as a consequence, that the Ottoman Empire was made and maintained, not only, or even mainly, by men of the Ottoman race, but by the slave children of Christian parents, who had issued through the seminaries of the janissaries, with the appointed stamp of military subservience and the Moslem faith. The most distinguished men of the Ottoman Empire

THE OTTOMAN TORKA

will be fduttd to have passed from Christian homes through these institutions.

While an Ottoman State was thus forming on a new mould in hither Asia, a new power, profiting by the civil wars and corruption of the Greeks, had manifested a raw vehemence in the Balkans. A competent modem writer has described the Serbs as the Celts and the Bulgats as the Lowland Scots of the Balkan peninsula; and everything in Serbian history announces a brave, spirited, but temperamental people. Under Stephen Dushan, one of those great men who give aspirations to a race—- ^333 55 a soldier, a legislator, and a statesman — the dominion of Serbia was extended from the Danube to the Aegean by the seizure of Albania, Epirus, and Thessaly, triumphs which, though they arc deeply printed on the national memory of the Serbs, failed to satisty the impatient leader of an impatient people. With an ambition which expanded with success, Stephen assumed the imperial title, and proposed as the goal of his endeavours the su])jcction of the Greeks.

A year after Stephen's death, with his last dream unaccom- plished — it was the year in which Fiance and England struggled 1356 at Poitiers — Suleiman, the heir and successor of Orchan, crossed the Hellespont under a harvest moon and founded on the Galli- poli peninsula the first Turkish settlement on European soil*

A little later, while he was flying his hawks in a field nea^

Bulair, Suleiman died from his horse's stumble, and was buried where he fell. ‘‘ For a hundred years,” says Von Hammer, ** he was the only Ottoman prince who lay buried in European earth; and his tomb coiitinuallv imited the races of Asia to perform their pilgrimage to it with the sword of concjiicst. Of all the hero-tombs which have been hitherto mentioned in connection with Ottoman history, there is none more renowned or more visited than that of the second Vizier of tlie Einpiie, the for- tunate Caesar of the Hellespont, who laid the foundation of the Ottoman power in Europe.”

With the accession of Suleiman’s brother, Murad I, Europe ^359 at last discovered, what Iwforc it had not even suspected, tlie mighty force which had been steadily accumulating for more than a generation in the small Ottoman state beyond the Hellespoiit.

Murad crossed to the Gallipoli peninsula and found himscif invincible. Thessalonica and Adrianoplc, next to the capital the two principal cities of the Greek Empire, passed into his hanck /j 6 /

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with such case as to suggest that the last day of the Greek Empire was at hand. But as Orchan was cautious so was Murad. A pause was necessary to consolidate the European conquests, to convert Adrianople into a Moslem capital, and to set up that system of military fiefs which was necessary for the supply of the cavalry arm. When these objects had been achieved, and the supremacy of the Sultan had been established in Asia Minor, an advance might be made on Constantinople and Bel- grade. The Emperor was pliant. The spirit of the Greeks was low and submissive. It was only in the north-west, on the side of Serbia, that the Christian cause was likely to find an effec- tive champion, Stephen Dushan was dead, but something of his spirit still survived in the breast of King Lazarus, his son, so while the Sultan was engaged in a victorious campaign against his "rurkisli adversaries in Asia, a great confederacy of the Christian peoj>lcs of south-eastern Europe was organized under ' the leadcrsliip of the Seibian King for the destruction of the Mussulman power. Seibs and Bulgars, Bosnians and Albanians, Poles, Hungarians, and even Mongols from the Dobrudja, but nobody of the older European nations, not a Latin nor a Greek, gathered together in the Christian camp. It may be safely assumed that an improvised army, in wdiich seven languages arc spoken, will always, liowever high be the courage of its in- dividual members, prove inferior to an experienced force which long and arduous discipline has fus^d into a unit. So it proved ^ 3^9 on the famous and hard-fought field of Kossovo, which is com- memorated in the heroic poetry of the Serbs. The Turks were victors, l)ut in the hour of victory Murad fell by the hand of a Serbian patriot.

Twelve years of continuous success followed the abasement of the Christian Slavs, years maikcd by the transfer of many loyalties, by the annihilation of a great crusading army from the west (Nicopolis, September 28, 1396), and by the extension of the Ottoman borders to the Danube and the Euphrates. 7 'he pitiless Bayazid, whose first public act had been the murder of the brother who had shared with him on the previous day the perils of Kossovo, seemed by the opening of the fifteenth century to have reached the climax of human fortune. Wherever the blood-red flag had waved, whether on the European or on the Asiatic front, it had brought victory. As the Sultan surveyed the scene from his voluptuous court at Brusa, as he reflected

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upon his vast harem, upon his Christian auxiliaries and slaves, upon the subjection of the Seljuks and the pusillanimity of the Greeks, and upon the strong network of his power, now extended over two continents, he felt that the time had come for one last inconsiderable operation, the replacement, whether in peace or war, of the Greek in Constantinople. In 1400 he ordered the Emperor out of the city, and meeting with a noble defiance, was preparing to deliver the lethal blow.

The impending stroke was averted in mid-air. A catastrophe supervened, which for many centuries made of Bayazid the standing example of the mutability of human fortune, and secured fifty years of respite for Constantinople. Timur (or Tamerlane) the Mongol, an old white-haired cripple from the far east, an intellectual specialist in chess, theology, and conquest, and perhaps the greatest artist in destruction known in the savage annals of mankind, was now approaching the confines of the Ottoman dominions at the head of his mammoth army of horsemen. Bayazid was rash enough to provoke the indignation of the master of Delhi and Samarcand, of Bagdad and Damas- cus, and paid the penalty for his presumption. On the wide plain of Angora the famous Ottoman army, the instrument of so many conquests, was enveloped and destroyed by an over- whelming force of Mongol cavalry. Bayazid was made a prisoner, and as he proceeded in a dosed litter upon his melan- choly journey to Samarcand, the victors streamed westward to wreck his capital, and to ravage his country to the brink of the Hellespont and the Aegean.

The recovery of the Ottoman Empire after this overwhelming disaster is as remarkable as the inability of the Christian powers to turn it to account. When wc consider that the Ottomans had lost all their Asiatic possessions, that their Sultan was a captive, and that his sons were fighting one another for his mhcritance, the situation might well have seemed desperate. But what was lost in Asia was saved in Europe. Adrianoplc was now a Moslem city, in which were concentrated the resources of experience, courage, and perseverance necessary for the restoration of the state. Here for forty years was the nucleus of an effective govern- ment. Here were civil servants and soldiers, lawyers and der- vishes, jurymen and law courts, seminaries for the education of janissaries, and leaders imbued with the old spirit of military pride. It was a good centre for the levying of Christian slaves;

4o6 a history of suropb

and it was, in fact, from this capital of Adrianopk, which the Greek Emperors neglected to assault, that Mohammed I and Murad II issued forth to restore their Empire.

It is characteristic of the unorganized state of western Europe that no serious effort was made to deal with the Ottoman prob- lems until forty years after the battle of Angora. The golden moments, when the enemy was without soldiers or Sultan, were allowed to slip by. Nor was it until Murad II had recruited the army and refashioned the state, and was making life in Hungary intolerable by his slave-raiding aggiessions, that western Europe woke up once more to its serious responsibilities in connection with the eastern danger.

The protagonist in the new Crusade was the nation which had most reason to fear and resent the revived power of the Ottomans. TJic Hungarians are among the bravest and most stalwart of tlie fighting races of Europe, exhibiting the stead- fast qualities of the Turk, with whom they are racially allied, as well as others which belong to the more gilted and imagina- tive peoples. Under the rule of two spirited Angevin monarchs (1309-1382) this valiant but backward nation had advanced in military cohesion and in the arts of peace. Charles Robert and his successor, Lewis the Great, supplied exactly that form of stimulus which was best calculated to excite and regiment the disordered energies of a proud aristocracy. These princes, part French, part Neapolitan, introduced into Hungary much of the chivalry of Ftanc'c and something of the retinement of Italy. They set up a court, held tournaments, created a feudal army, and by the establish men t ot military orders, and the lavish bestowal of rewards, attracted to the service of their persons the wayward loyalties of their Magyar nobles. But the government of Hungary, which demanded the undivided energies of a vigorous man, was, soon after the death of Lewis, transferred to a son-in-law, who, of all the princes of Europe, was the least capable of concentrating his attention upon the necessary task of Hungarian defence.

Sigismund (1387-143 ), husband of Mary of Hungary, was far too much distracted by the affairs of Bohemia and the Empire to give to Hungary the attention which a country “so dangerously placed in relation to the advancing power of the Ottoman Turks ” imperiously demanded. After the disaster of Nicopolis, his policies in this area were half-hearted, shamefaced, and inter-

THE OTtOMAN TtlEES 07

mittent. He continued to rule, but ceased to govern, and the forces of Hungary, which, under a vigorous King, would have b^n deployed against the Turks, when their power had been shaken by the blows of Timur, were left unused.

With the death of Sigismund in 1437 the scene was changed by the appearance of a genius. It so happened that while Murad was engaged in his wars of recovery the Hungarians discovered a great soldier in John Hunyadi, reputed to be the natural son of King Sigismund by a Hungarian mother. The high military qualities of Hunyadi, which were exhibited in many a small afEray with the Turks, attracted general attention. He was placed in command of the army of a confederacy so wide as to include not only Hungary and Poland, Serbia and Wallachia, but the Duchy of Burgundy, Genoa and Venice, the Pope in Rome, and the Emperor in Constantinople. While a fleet of Italian and Flemish galleys was despatched to the Hellespont, Hunyddi, at the head of the army of the league, crossed the Danube, chased the Turks out of Serbia, and routed them so handsomely both south and north of the Haemiis, that for the first time in their history the Ottomans were compelled to sue for im peace.

This was the critical moment in the history of the near east.

Two smashing victories had been won by the Christian army, which was now south of the Haemus, and within an easy march of the Turkish capital. The mountaineers of Albania were rising in rebellion under George Castriotis, soon to become famous as Scandcr Beg. Scljuk emirs w^ere causing trouble in Asia Minor. It was the ob\ious duty of the Hungarian com- mander to press forward to Adrianople, and to clinch his triumph before the enemy had recovered from the stunning effect of his unexpected success. No such opportunity had yet been given to the Christian powers of the west to turn the Turk out of Europe, and 477 years were fated to go by before an occasion, equally favourable, was once more presented and declined.

In spite of his winning advantages, Hunyadi decided to break off the campaign and treat with his enemy. Whether he was influenced, as some say, by a Turkish bribe, or was acting und^r the impulsion of the Serbs, or whether there were other personal or military factors of the case, he gave to his shaken opponent the exact respite which was needed to assist his fortune. After

A BISTORT OF EUROPE

408

that unhappy choice, made in the dead of winter, things went ill for a while with the great Hungarian commander. He con- nived at the perfidious breaking of a treaty, which, though in- sufficient, had nevertheless been signed and sworn to by King Ladislas of Hungary, and so provided the Turk, for this time only, with the rare advantage of the better cause. Late in the year he advanced again to the Danube, and before the walls of Varna (November 10, 1444) experienced a decisive defeat. But though his army was routed and his sovereign killed, the spirit of Hunyadi was still undaunted. Four years afterwards he was again in the field at the head of a small but well-appointed army of Hungarians and Wallachians: but the curse of Balkan dis- union was upon him. At a critical moment in a three days' battle, the Wallachians went over to the enemy on that very field of Kossovo wliich had crushed out the liopes of Serbian freedom. For a decade Hungary was eliminated from the ranks of powers capable of taking effective offensive action against the Porte.

We have now reached the last stage in that long course of persevering ambition, which, starting in an obscure fastness among the Bithynian hills, ended in the palace of the Caesars. Constantinople was still a Greek and an imperial ci»y. Its forti- fications, though less strong than of old, had yet sufficed to fend off an attack by Murad II, and since the city had never been taken, a belief prevailed that it could never fall. Cities, however, arc not defended by beliefs, but by will and material power. Had the Greeks been resolute and united, had the navies of Genoa and Venice been placed at the disj)osition of the imperial government, had there been among the Greek and Italian peoples a common will to save Constantinople, saved it would have been. But there was no such will. To most Greeks the red hat of a Roman cardinal was even more odious than the Turkish fez, to most Latins the heresy of the unmanly Greek was less pardonable and more to be condemned than the false worship of the concpiering Ottoman. And while theological animosities were strono^ religious zeal was at a low ebb. To the merchants of Ragusa, of Genoa, and of Venice, the rise of this new Ottoman Empire piescnted itself not as a calamity to the Christian Faith, but as an incomparable occasion for lucrative commercial concessions. How could these astute traders afford to quarrel with a state already so powerful and likely for many

THE OTTOMAN TURKS

409

years to control the political destiny of Asia Minor and the Balkans?

While Mohammed II was besieging Constantinople the Genoese merchants of the Calata suburb, who had all to lose in the Euxine, were negotiating arrangements for preferential trade in the Ottoman Empire.

Constantine XI, the last of the Caesars, though the nominee * 44 ^ 53 of Murad and his vassal, shines out in the final crisis of the Empire as a statesman and hero, prepared alike for compromise and for sacrifice. The Greek population of Constantinople, for whom the ouarrels of monks were always more important than the clash cf races, were unworthy of such a leader. While Mohammed’s artillery was battering at the walls the public opinion of the capital was inflamed by denunciation of the Emperor who, in the desperate hope of winning the west to his side, had dared to recognize the Roman Church and to permit the celebration of Roman rites in the church of St. Sophia. To these wretched theological preoccupations we may perhaps ascribe the fact that the main part of the defence of the city was undertaken, not by the Greeks, but by Spaniards, Germans, and Italians. And as the defending force was not principally Greek, so the attacking army was not wholly 1 urkish. The levies of Mohammed were largely recruited from men of a Greek and Christian stock. So it happened that on May 29, 1453, by default of the Christians, the great city was breached and stormed, the last of the Byzantine Emperors perishing honourably in the death agony of the Empire.

The conquerors were Asiatic nomads and so remained. Sir Charles Eliot, describing the interior of the house of a Turkish gentleman in the nineteenth century, observes that it contained no more furniture than could be carried off at a moment’s notice on a waggon into Asia.' A certain dignity of bearing, coupled

• “ The very aspect of a Turkish house seems to indicate that it is not

intended for a permanent residence. The ground floor is generally occupied by stables and stores. From this a staircase, often merely a ladder, leads to an upper storey, usually consisting of a long passage, from which open several rooms, the entrances to which are closed by curtains and not by doors. There are probably holes in the planking of the passages and spiders’ webs and swallows’ nests in the rafters.

The rooms themselves, however, are beautifully clean, but bare and unfurnished. . . . The general impression left on a European is that a party of travellers have occupied an old barn and said, ‘ Let us make the place clean enough to live in; it’s no use taking any more trouble about it. We shall probably be off again in a week.’ ”

4>0 A BISTORT OF EVROFS

with a grave exterior polish and a sense of humour and irony, were noted by western observers as favourable traits in Turkish character, an abstinence in food and drink as a commendation in their armies. But the culture of the west not valued. The Turk remained an alien in Europe, having no part or lot in its traditions, and limited in his notions of im- perial government to the philosophy of a slave-owning oligarchy in a world ot potential slaves.

i 9 S'

CHAPTER XXXV

NEW PERSPECTIVES

General lack of scientific progress in the middle ages. Growth of geo- graphical knowledge- The realization of China. The circumnavigation of Africa.

We have now reached a point in European history distant by some two thousand six hundred years from the civilization described in the Homeric poems. During that long period the mind of man had produced noble literature, great buildings, imposing systems of philosophy and religion, statues and pictures which have never lost their appeal. It had asked questions of the soul, the heart, the brain, the senses, of everything but nature, or if a question was sometimes put to nature, the chal- lenge was not followed up, but remained as an example of a fruitless and brilliant intuition. Accordingly little progress was made in those arts and discoveries which increase man’s power over the blind forces of matter and raise the general standard of well-being. I^ocomotion remained where it had always been. Three thousand years had not supplemented the speed of a horse or the force of the wind which filled the sail. The vast majority of Europeans continued to live in stifling cabins, their experience circumscribed by narrow boundaries, their lives shortened by malnutrition or disease. For any serious addition to the great prehistoric inventions such as the wheel, the sail, the plough, the wot Id was condemned to wait until the age of steam, petrol, and electricity.

Yet in one important respect the Europeans had made a notable advance in knowledge since the period of the Cnisadcs. They had obtained a fuller and more accurate acquaintance with the earth and the sea. It was now known that the earth was round, and that far away at the other end of Asia a traveller would find China, Japan, and the spice islands. The Genoese had crossed the Sahara to the Sudan and in 1336 had a settlement in southern China. The Portuguese, who had learned their sea- craft from Genoa, were feeling their way down the western coast' of Africa. The sailors of the Mediterranean, ever since the eaily years of the fourteenth century, when the Venetians launched their "Flanders galleys,” had been taking to the Atlantic in

4 «

4ia A HISTORT OF EUROPE

increasing numbers. Seacraft had become a branch of exact knowledge, and in the Italian and Catalan portolani of the fourteenth century had provided the mariners with scientific charts.

This expansion of geographical knowledge was due not only, or perhaps chiefly, to the spirit of adventure and curiosity which is characteristic of Europeans, but also to the lure of wealth. The cast supplied luxuries, which once tasted were ever afterwards objects of insistent pursuit. From the east came silk and spices, silk which as early as the fourth century had become so popular through the Roman Empire that even the poorest women would not go without it, and spices (cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg), a precious cargo in a small bulk, which raised cookery to an art and gave to appetite a new incentive.

In the middle of the sixth century the silkwoim was smuggled into the Roman Empiie. What tveighty consequences hung upon the tran^iplantation of this trivial animal! A flourishing silk industry was established first in Syria, then in Sicily, and afterwards in Italy and Spain. In respect of this important com- modity P'urope was rendered independent of China, and de- prived of one of the principal motives which otherwise might have impelled her upon a course of far-eastern adventure.

As for the spices, they came indeed to Europe, hut at what a price! First the Indians, then the Arabs and Abyssinians, who as early as the third century had closed the Red Sea route to the Roman navigators, and after these the Mamelukes of Egypt, exacted their toll before the precious w^ares reached the counters of the Venetian merchant. To eliminate the exorbitant profits of these oriental middlemen by the establishment of some direct means of contact with the cast became an inevitable object of economic desire.

The overland route across Asia was 7,500 miles long, and for much of the way difficult and dangerous, but it had been opened for European travellers for more tl^an a century by the tolerant wisdom and policy of the Mongol Khans. During the hundred years of the Tatar pf ice (1264-1368) technicians and missionaries from the w'cst were w^elcome in China. Then the veil suddenly fell. The Mongol power was broken, the missionary stations were obliterated, and with central Asia once more plunged in chaos, China retreated into impenetrable darkness and the sternest isolation. But the secret was out. The wonderful story.

NEW PERSPECTIVES

413

published in 1299, in which Marco Polo recounted his Asiatic voyages and his seventeen years' residence and travel in China, made an intellectual revolution in Europe, quite as Important as that great expansion of human knowledge whicli two centuries later proceeded from the discoveries of Columbus.

It was now realized that the habitable globe was altogether unlike what it had been imagined to be, and that there was at the further end of Asia a country distinguished for its vast popu- lation, its imposing opulence, its paper currency, and for a standard of civilization and public order which equalled, if it did not suipass, the culture of Italy.

Such a discovery opened an endless series of suggestions and possibilities. In 1428 Don Pedro of Portugal procured in Venice a copy of Marco Polo’s travels, and presented it to his brother Prince Henry the Navigator, under whose intelligent direction (1415-1461) Portugal was fast taking the lead in oceanic explora- tion.

Meanwhile the idea of the circumnavigation of Africa was beginning to claim iiic reasing attention. It was no new project. The feat had been achieved by the Phoenicians, if vve may trust Herodotus, in the sixth century before Christ; and achieved it would have been again, we can hardly doubt, under the Roman Empire, but for the fact that the Romans, having the command of Egypt and the Red Sea route, hail no compelling economic motive to attempt it. But from the turn of the thiricenih cen- tury there was one city in the Mediterranean which experienced the force of such motives to the fullest extent. Genoa was the rival of Venice for the eastern trade. Venice was in league with Egypt, and by her compact with the Mamelukes possessed a monopoly in the distribution of such oriental wares as were con- veyed to Europe by the Red Sea route. Of that monopoly she could be dispossessed only by one of two ways. Either her power might be destroyed in battle, or her wealth might be sapped at the source. The first method had been tried, and in the wai of Chioggia had met with signal failure. There remained the second. A ship might sail round Africa and without let or hindrance from Arab or Turk fetch the spices overseas to Europe. This plan was first attempted from Genoa. In May; 1291, Ugolino di Vivaldo, a citizen of that republic, set out with two galleys to find his way to India by the ocean route.

Vivaldo was lost at sea off the African coast. The fourteenth

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF ROMAN EMPERORS FROM 37 B.C. TO A.D. 476.

Ytar

At.\,e^ston»

Fittptf ors.

Year 0f

Accestztn*

H (

Au}4ustus

•••

27

Tiberius

H

Cali}4ula

•••

37

Claudius

...

4>

Nero

...

54

Galba, Otho, Viielliiis, Ves-

pnsian

... . •

68

Titus

...

Domitian

••• ...

Si

Ncr\a

... ...

c^b

Trajan

...

<)'^

Hadrian

•••

Antoninus Pius

...

1 ’yS

Mai CHS Aurelius

... ...

ibi

Commodus

...

I. So

Perlinax

... ...

103

Didius Julianus

... ...

103

Niger

...

103

Septimius S(*v<‘tus

...

10^

Caracalla, Gi'ta

... . .

2II

Opilius Mairinus,

Diadu-

menian

...

2T7

Elagabalus

...

2 iS

Alexander .Se\crus

...

222

Maximin

235

I'he two Gordians,

Maximus

Pupienus, Ealhinus

2^7

The thiid Gordian

. .

2 58

Philip

...

241

Decius

...

240

Hostilian, Gallus

... ...

25 T

V'olusian

... ...

252

ZBmilian, Valerian,

Gallienua

253

Gallienus alone

... ...

260

Claudius 11

... ...

268

Aurelian

...

270

Tacitus

...

275

Florian

••• •••

276

Probu*^

•••

276

Cams

...

282

Carinus, Numerian

284

Dioclptian ... 284

Maximian, a‘;socjafcd with Diocletian ... ... 286

Constantiub, Galeiius ... 305

Severus ... ... ... 306

Con«Jtantine (the Great) ... 306

Licinius 307

Mnximin 308

Constantine, Galerius, Li- cinius, Maximin, Maxen- tius, and Maximian leif^n- ing jointly . . . 30Q

Constantine (the Great) aV>ne 323 C'onstantini* II, Const.iiitius II, Constans ... ... 337

Maj^nentius.

Constantius alone 353

Juli.in 30 1

Jtivian ... ... ... ... 3^3

Valens and Valentinian 1 ... 364

Gratian and Valentinian I .. 3O7

Gratian and Valentinian 1 1 .. 375

'1 heodtisius .. . 379

Arradius (in the east), llun- oriiis (in the W< si) ... 303

Theodosius IT (E ) ... ... 408

Valentinian III (W.) ... 424

M«»rcuin (E) 450

Maximus, .-\vilus fW.) ... 455

Majofihn (W.) 455

Lc<» I (E ) 4'i7

Se\eius (W .) ... ... ... 4t)i

Vatanev (W.) ... ... ... 41)5

Anthemius (\V.) ... ... 467

Olylirtus (\V.) ... ... ... 472

Glvreijus (W.) 473

Julius Nepos (W.) ... ... 474

I-eo II, Z eno, Edsilisi ns (all

E.) . ■ . ... 474

Romulus Aui^ustuliis (W.) . . 475

End ^of the Western line in Romulus Auj^ustiis . 476

(Tlenieforth, till ad. 800, retj^ntng at i otv- siu/iti/wplc).

416

A.— CHARLEMAGNE^S ANCESTRY

Pippin,

Mayor of Austrasia; cf* 639.

Befiga, jw. Atisegisel*

Pippin,

Mayor of Ansltasia, Neustria and Burgundy; d, 714.

Chari Martel,

Mayor of all Kin«;doms; d. 741.

I’ippin,

Ma>or of Neiistria, 741; King of P'ranks, 752.

i

Oharleniagne

4^7

X 4

B.— HOUSE OF TANCRED OF HAUTEVILLE

Tiancred of HauteviUe.

William of the Di ogo, Humphrey, Robert Roger I,

Iron Arm, Count of Count of Guibcard, Count of Sicily; Loid of Anuha; Apulia; Apulia; Duke of Apulia; d, iioi. d. 1046. d. 1051. d, 1057«d. 1085. I

Roger, Duke of Apulia;d* iiii. William, Duke of Apulia; d, 1127.

Roger II,

King of Sicily, and Duke of Apulia; d, 1154.

Roger,

Duke ol Apulia.

Tanciecl of Lecce (ilkg), r/. 1194.

William I (the Bad); d. 1166.

William II (the Good) (d. ii8q),

m. Joanna, daughter of Ileniy II of England.

Constance, m. Hem y VI; d. 1167.

Ficdeiick II; d. 1250.

n *■

Roger III; d. X194.

William III, Albina,

deposed by m, Walter of Hemy VI, IT9|. Biieiine

418

C.— SAXON AND SALIAN EMPERORS

Henry I (the Fowler), Duke of the Saxons, King of Germany^ 9x6-9.^6»

Otlo 1.

936-973. ,

1. w. (i) Kdith

of England,

1

Henry,

Duke of Bavaria, fn. daughter of Ai nulf of Bavar la.

1

r

Bruno,

Archbishop of Cologne,

Otto II,

973-983-

Liutgarde, ni. Conrad,

Duke of Loriainc.

1

Henry II,

Duke of Bavaria.

1

Otto III,

983 1003

1

1 Heniy II,

1 Emperor (the Saint

1 ioo2-r^a4»

0»^to

1

1

Henry

I

Com ad II (the Salic),

1024 io3g.

H<my III, ic 3 g-ro> 0 .

1

Heniy IV,

1 106.

1

Com ad,

Anti Cat ir;

( i , iioi.

1

IUm> V,

I iff) I ttt M ililda of I ngland.

Agii “S, w*. Frederick. Duke of Swabia (u/nts/pr oj lloheni^iaujen)

419

D,— MACEDONIAN EMPERORS

Babil I, 867-886,

Leo VI (the Philosopher), Alexander,

886 9x2. 9x2-913.

ConstanUnc VII,

Poi phyrogcnitub,

912-959.

Romanus II, iw. (i) Thcoj^Iiaiio; (2) Niccphoru’^ Phocas,

959-963- I 963-969

Thcoph 1110, m, Otto II.

Bisil II, 963.1025.

Coiiblaniinc VIII, 963-1028.

^1

Theodoia, w, John Zinitsces 969 976.

Zoe, </. 1050, Tlicodon,

Iff. (i) Roiiiaiuis III, 1028 10^4; 1054 1056,

(j) Mich.tol IV, io'54 lofi ,

(3) Constantine IX, 1042 1054.

E.— THE GUEI-FS AND HOHENSTAUFEN

Welf IV, Duke of Bavaria;

Henry IV; d. iio6.

Welf V, Henry Frederick w. (i) Agnes; (2) Leopold of Babcnberg, the Black, of Swabia | Margrave of Austria.

Countess Duke of

Matilda.

Bavaria.

1

Henry

the

Proud

Welf

VI.

1

Judith w. Frederick Duke of Swabia.

Henry

the

Lion

1

Welf

Vll.

Frederick I (Hari)arossa), 1152-1190.

Otto IV, d, 1218.

Conrad III, Heiiry Otto, ii 38“II52. Jasoniirgott, Baron of I>ukc of Freising. Aiibtria.

r"

Henry VI, w. Constance 1 190- 1 197. of Sicily.

Frederick II.

1212-1250

Conrad IV, i250i-’54-

Cuui adin; d. 1 263.

Philip of Swabia; d, 1208.

Beatrice, m,

Ferdinand III of Castile.

I

Alfonso X of Castile.

421

F,—

THE KINGS OF ENGI.AND FROM 1066-14B5

William I, 1066-87.

William II, 1087-1100.

Henry I, 1100-35, brother of William II.

(1 ) / Stephen, 1 135-54.

'2) l^Matilda.

llenry 11, 1154-89.

Richard I, 1189-99.

John, 1190-1216, bi other of Richard I.

Henry III, 1216-1272.

isi

Edward I, 1272-1307.

Edward II, 1307-27.

Edward HI, 1327-77.

Richaid IT, 1377-99* grand- son of Edward III.

(4) Heniy IV, 1399-1413.

Henry V, 1413-22.

Henry VI, 1432-1461,

(5) Edward IV, 1461-83.

Edward V, 1483.

Richard HI, 1483-85.

(1) Grandson of the Conciueior through his daughter Adda, married to Stephen, Count of Illois.

(2) Ilaughter of Henrv I.

(3) Grandson of Henry I throiu^h his daughter Matilda, by her mar- riage with (aeoffrc'V Plant , C'oiint of Anjnu, and husba^nd to Eleanor, divorced wife of Poms VII of Fiame and heiiess of Acjuitaine.

(4) Grandson of Kdwa’d 111 , thiovu^h his ihiid son John of Gaunt.

( 5 ) Gtandsun of Kdniund, Duke of Yoik, fourth son of Edwaid HI.

THE KINGS OF FRANCE FROM 0<^7-3r)R0

Hugucs Capet, 987-906. Rt>l)eit, 9C)6 -io3I.

Homy 1 , 1031-T060,

Plnhp I. 1060-1108.

Poms VI, 1108-1137.

Pouis VIT, 1137-1180.

Philip II (.\iigustus), 1180- 1223.

Pouis VIII, 122^-1226.

Pouis IX, I22tj 1270,

Philip HI, 1270-12S5.

Philip IV, i2S--i:\i4.

Pouib X, I ^1 j i3it».

Pliilip V, I3i()-Jt22 Charles IV, 1322-132S.

(1) Philip VI, 1328-1350. John, 1330-1364.

Charles \, 1364-1^80. Chirks VP 1380-1422. C hai les \'II, 1422-1461. Pout*. XI, 1461-1483

Charles VlII, 1483-1498.

(2)

Pouis xn,

1498-1515.

i^)

kVancis I,

> 5 i 5 -i 5 - 17 -

(l)

ll<nr\ 11,

PS* 17 *JS 59

/ Fiam IS 1 1

[, 1559-1560.

1 C h It les 1 ]

1500-1574.

( 5 )

^ Hem V I II

» *S 7 4 -ksh 9 .

M.ti garet =

= llLur V IV, son

Anthony of Bout bon.

(1) Son of Cli.rrks, Count of Valoi-, second son of Philip 111 . First monarch of the \ -ilois House.

(2) .Son of Charles, Duke of Oik axis, am' husband of Jeanne, the sister of Charles VHP Afterwards mauled to Anne, Duchess of Brittany.

(3) of Charles, Cemnt of Angoul^mc, mairied to Claude, daughter of Poais XII.

(4) Married to Cathoij*^e de’ Moditis

(5; Childien of Henry ii and C'atheiine de Medicis.

422

G.— THE SCOTTISH ROYAL LINE

Malcolm HI.

Edgar. Alexander I. David I, 1124-1153.

Hciuy; d, 1152*

Malcolm III, 115:3-1165. WiJha'm I, 1165-1214.

I ,

Ale\andei II, I2i4-i24(). Alcxanclei III, 1249 1286.

Margaret,»i. Eric II of Noiway.

M iigaict, the Maid of Noiway; d. 1290.

CLAIMANTS TO FRENCH THRONE IN 1328 \M1LN MAIN CAPET LINE ENDED

Philip III.,

1270-85.

Plulip IV Chailes of Valois; Louis of

(the hail). d. 1325. Esrciix.

I I

Louis X; I sabella, m. d, 1316. Ed^xaid 11 of England.

Philip V, ChailcsIV Philip VI, Philip, w Jeanne d. 1322. (UieF.iii); 132b, I olNavane,

I d. 1328. daughtcrof

I Louis X.

Edward III Jeanne, iw. Eudes IV

ol

Bui gundy.

Chailes (fic Bad of Navaiie.

423

I,— THE HOUSE OF HABSBURG FROM 1273-1519

Rudolf I, Emperor, 1273-1291.

Albert I, tw. Elizabeth of Tyrol.

Frederick, Albert II; if. 1 358-

tit iilar King of Romans; d, 1330,

Albert III, rules over Austria,

Albeit* IV; d. i.jiiA.

Albert V, King <»f llic Romans, 1438-1440.

Ladislas Postumns, Duke of Austria, King of Boliomia and Huugaiy. (No heir.)

Letjpold, rule*; over all other j ILibsbiitg land's.

Finest Frederick, rules ovei

(d. 1424), Tyrol and Swabian

rules over SI VI i:i lands,

and Cat int Ilia. |

I Sigisinuiid: if . 1496.

Fredeiiclc III, (No heii.)

King of the Romans,

1440-1493.

Maximilian T, ni, Mary of Burgundy Unite'* all Habbburg lands,

1493- 1519-

J. HOUSE OF LUXEMBURG AND SUCCESSION

IN BOHEMIA

Bohemia, Wenzel I.

OttoUar,

WciLcl II,

I

WcnWl III; €t. Without heir^ 1306,

Luxcmhtit

Henry VII, Emperor, 1308-1313.

Elizabeth, fw. John of Luxemburg, King of Bohemia, 1310-134O.

Charles IV, Empeior, >34<>-.i378-

Wenzel, King o'* Romans and of Bohemia;

d, 1419.

424

Sigisniund,

King of Hung.ary and Emperor,

1410 1437.

Elizabeth m. Albert V (Habsburg),

APPENDIX

A Cathouc friend, eminent in Thomist studies, comments as follows upon Chapter XXV:

“ The Catholic student will have reason to be grateful for more than one passage in this chapter, with its challenging title of The Catholic Mind, but he will also dissent from certain of the judg- ments expressed or implied. Y ou refer to Siger de Brabant. Surely the views which he is supposed to have supported were destruc- tive of human personality and in the last resort of moral teaching. It was St. Thomas in the de Unitate Intellectus who defended the individual intellect and its rights against Siger. From your words his attitude towards reason might, I think, be easily mistaken. Though it is perfectly true that he held that faith and reason could not conflict, I am fairly sure that there is no place in his works where you will find him forcing his reason to follow faith against the evidence, liis philosophy stands or falls on reason, and the best testimony to this is that modern scholars have agreed to accept him as one of the world’s great thinkers, and they praise him for having accomplished a synthesis of the past, of Greek and Roman and Christian wisdom which has stood the test of time to the present day. You, I fear, may seem to hide the amplitude of his thought by giving as illustrations of it transubstantiation and the rejoicing of the angels and saints over the torments of the damned. I have no space to show tliat tlie philosophy of transubstantiation is not the crude, unscientific hocus-pocus one might suppose, but a piece of reasoning of the highest quality. The rejoicing of the saints over the sufferings of the damned has served as a gibe against Aquinas on more than one occasion. It is worth while looking at the chapter or* article in which the subject is treated. There St. Thomas asks himself the question whether they rejoice over the suffering of the damned and urges first that it would be a horrible thing to take pleasure in the suffering of others. But he goes on to say that though this is true and no one should take pleasure in the pains of others as such, it is possible and even right to be glad

425

APPENDIX

426

that a villiun, for instance, is suffering the punishment deserved for his crimes. We all observe this distinction and are glad if the kidnapper and murderer of children is caught and punished. Why, therefore, this doctrine of Aquinas is held up for reproba- tion always puzzles me. I think the reason must he that many think in their hearts that the middle ages must have been cruel and superstitious and quite inferior to ourselves in thought and conduct, and so they seize on this text without reflection. Even you say of Dante that ‘ like all writers of the mediaeval period ’ he ‘draws no clear line between ancient mythology and true history,’ forgetting the kind of scholarship required for the verdict on the de Causis. If St. Thomas be representative there was a great passion for truth in his time, and it is this passion and the <lcsirc for reconciliation of the many-sided aspects of life rather than * a feeling that the spirit was more imporiant than outward institutions, and faith and intellect than the sacraments or formularies of the Church,’ which lay behind the movements and current tendencies.”

BOOK TWO

RENAISSANCE, REFORMATION, REASON

CHAPIEK I

THE NEW EUROPE

ilediaeval and modern times. The wider wotld, Nationaliitn. Captlaliitn. Artillery. The Protestant Reformation, Catholic rivalries. Rapid spread of the Reformation. The age of religious wars. Their effect on France and Germany compared. Fretuh diplomacy and German Protestantism. Absence of religious war in England. Dying down of the religious motive in politics during the eighteenth century.

No single date can be chosen to divide the mediaeval from the modern world. The change was gradual and uneven, swifter and more complete in one place than in another, and never so com- plete over the whole field as not to leave behind it mediaeval patches, just as in the middle ages themselves we may find here and there flashes of the human mind which appear to be strangely unmediacval. and to anticipate in ways which are al- most uncanny the spacious outlook and complex sentiments of the modern world.

Mankind is slower to move than city dwellers in the western countries are always willing to allow. Modes of life and thought rooted in deep antitjuity still exercise their empire in certain places and on certain minds. The belief in magical charms and necromancy, in astrology and witchcraft is not yet extinct. Some superstitions perpetuate themselves by a native and ineradicable vitality in peasant homes; others are specially embalmed in reli- gious rites. The elementary mysteries of nature, the waxing and waning of the moon, the processsion of the heavens, the secret forces of reproduction and growth have from time immemorial shaped the mythology of the European peasant. In Catholic Churches swinging censers still wave their incense round the coffin, as once they did, to chase away the demons who would waft the soul of the dead to eternal fires. Still as in the middle ages wonder-working miracles invite the pilgrim to be healed of his rheumatism, his gout, or his broken limb. If the present age has new shrines and other modes of locomotion, and Lourdes has replaced Compostella and Canterbury, if the pilgrim no longer trudges staff in hand, or rides at ease upon a palfrey, but is whirled in excursion trains or motor-cars to his pious destina-

4*9

430 A HISTORY OF EUROPS

tioii, the mentality o£ the votary remains unchanged. The mechanical conveniences of modern science convey a survivor from the mediaeval world.

In matters social, political and economic vestiges of this earlier period arc hardly less notable. There is perhaps no part of Europe which has moved further from the middle ages than Great Britain, yet it was not until 1835 that the mediaeval con- stitutions of the English towns were reformed out of existence with all tlieir pictuicsque and con\i\ial abuses and made to give jdace to the common democratic pattern which suits an indus- trial and levelling age. Nor is the face of our rural landscape altogether cleared of mediaeval features. Here and there the traveller may still come acioss the open fields and scattered strips which were characteristic of mediaeval tillage, but which in England, earlier and more completely than elsewhere, gave place to the enclosures of im])roving landlords. And if such traces of mediaeval usage can be found in Britain, how much more numerous are they in the backward eastern parts of Euroj>e where the pricstliood has been long sunk in ignorance and sloth. Nor until the ninctcentJi century did the downtrodden peasantry of Galicia or the Balkans begin to experience any sensible change or improvement in their condition or mode of life. Within liv- ing memory the Piince of Montenegro would dispense a patri- archal justice to his subjects, sitting under a tree like Sr. Louis of old. Still the Albanian goes armed like the Afghan and lives the life depicted in the J/iarl. Still do the Bulgarian villagers practise rites and superstitions which may have brought a smile to tlie lips of Kiiiipidcs. A fine observer of modern Greece re- ports that the real spiiitual ocjuipinent of the Greek people to- day consists in a number of ideas and superstitions, some of which are ‘‘disguised uiuler a thin veil of Christian assimila- tion,'* while others may “ still vrear the classic garb unaltered.” Gifts of money and salt and bread still propitiate the three Fates. Charon’s obol is still placed on the lips of the dead. Nereids and vampires, goblins and demons still haunt the streams and moun- tains or send the mariner to a watery grave.^

In the fabric of peasant society in Europe there is thus even yet many an antique pattern which has been little altered by the lapse of time. Bur if the modern scene is not all rational illumin- ation, neither was the mediaeval wholly black with superstition*

> Rennell Rodd, The Customs and Lore of Modern Greece*

ras NEW EUROPE

431

There was Roger Racon, the Oxford Franciscan, who laid down the axiom that nothing could be fully known without experi-i ment, and first insisted upon a knowledge of chemistry as ncccs^ sary to the training of a physician. There was Chaucer, whose close and whimsical observation of human eccentricities of char- acter seems to prefigure the genius of Charles Dickens, and Villon, robber, murderer, and poet, in whose poignant lyrics, more than in Victor Hugos Notre Dame de Paris, mediaeval Paris lives again with its irony and laughter, its sentiment and sensuality, its brooding melancholy and mingled moods of crime and penitence, wildness and culture, cruelty and romance. Life was uncomfortable for men of original genius in the middle ages. Bacon spent ten years in prison, Petrarch was prosecuted as a wizard at the instance of a cardinal for his undue addic- tion to Virgilian studies, but the spirit of modern science lived in Bacon as the spirit of modem humanism may be found in Petrarch, Even in the fouiteenth centtiiy there were men so brave as in secret to dissect the human body. The great Vesalius, acknowledged patent of modern anatomy, had more than one obscure precursor in the age of Faith.

Yet, despite the inevitable gradualness of change, the broad contiast between the mediaeval and the modern emerges with sufficient plainness. A society divided between lay and cleric gave place to a society divided into rich and poor, an atmosphere hosr tile to free enquiry to one in which science could live and mature. During the early middle ages the Church was the sole depository of culture, the one supreme agency by which the barbaric tribes could he indue ted into the great tratlition of Christian and Roman civilization, the real inheritor of the political tradition of the shattered Empire of the West, Language, literature, politics, law, were all conditioned by the common educational mould which had survived the wreckage of the secular power. The use of Latin was universal among the literate class, and Latin was the lingua franca of western Europe. The spirit of the ancient Roman jurists lived on in the canon law, which was enforced by ecclesiastical courts in every quarter of Latin Christianity. The thinking of Europe, whether in the schools and universities or outside them, was carried on by tonsured clerks over a field of experience which was strictly confined by the sacred texts and their ancillary literature. Old knowledge was lost, and new knowledge was not acquired. Without the ballast of natural

A HISTORY OF EUROPE

433 ^

science, the human intellect fell a prey to extremes of rashness or timidity. To write in a vernacular language was felt to be a condescension which needed an apology. Even Petrarch pre- ferred the Africa, a dull epic written in Latin, to the charming Italian sonnets which are his chief claim to immortality.

The political theory of the middle ages was shaped by the sur- viving prestige of the Roman Empire and the overpowering authority of the Roman Church. It is true that the original unity of the Roman Empire had been broken by the shock of the barbaric invasion of the west. There was a western Empire which was Latin and an eastern Empire which was Greek. But the idea of an Imperial and Christian unity continued to survive. If the Greek and Latin churches could not be reconciled — and the hope that they might be reconciled was never wholly aban- doned — the Latin church of the west was at least regarded as one indissoluble and immortal whole. Tlie Pope was the supreme guardian upon earth of faith and morality. Above the chaos and violence of the temporal world his was the final oracle call- ing rulers and subjects alike to practise justice, to ensue peace, and to abide by the truths of revealed religion. In a poor and ignorant society mainly composed of soldiers, priests, and peas- ants, such a view of human governance found acceptance, the more readily since Christians lived for the most part in the shell of the ancient Roman Empire and were almost unconscious of the existence of wide tracts of the globe into which the name of Rome had never penetrated.

To this Roman and clerical outlook upon the world, the six- teenth century, the first age which may be regarded as distinc- tively modern, offers the sharpest contrast. The lay mind, forti- fied by the free use of the vernacular languages and by the full recovery of Greek and Hebrew, had come into its own. The close interrogation of nature, which was to lead to the develop- ment of modern science, had begun. Painters examined the human frame, surgeons dissected it. Verrocchio, the sculptor, was

• 473^^543 also an anatomist. The discovery made by Copernicus, a Polish

astronomer, that the earth revolved round the sun, steadily se- cured adherents. A new lay culture, aristocratic in origin, for it had chiefly grown up in the luxurious courts of the Italian des- pots, was made a general possession through the invention of printing. Strong and continuous as were the theological in-

THE NEW EUROPE

433

tercsts, they were now balanced by an exciting body of new knowledge, having no connection with theology, and the fruit of mental processes which theology was unable to turn to account. With a sharp gesture of impatience Europe turned away from the vast literature of commentaries and glosses, which the pedants of the later middle ages had inscribed “ in letters of opium on tablets of lead.”

An important part of this new knowledge was geographical. The Portuguese conquest of Ceuta on the African coast in 1415 had been the first step in that long and wonderful series of marine adventures which led to the circumnavigation of Africa by Vasco da Gama, to the foundation of the Portuguese Empire in the east, and to the discovery by Christopher Columbus, the Genoese sailor, of the new w^orld beyond the Atlantic. The Mediterranean ceased henceforth to be the centre of the civil- ized world. The sceptre of commerce passed from the cities of Italy to the nations having easy access to the Atlantic Ocean, first to Portugal, then in succession to Spain, the Netherlands, France and England. A civilization which had sprung up in the river basins of the Euphrates and the Nile, and had spread round the littoral of the Mediterranean, was now carried far and wide on ocean-going ships to distant lands. Europe began to enter into that new phase of its existence, which is marked by the foundation of colonics and empires beyond the ocean, and by the gradual spread of European influences throughout the habitable globe.

The discovery of the new world, coinciding with the swift dif- fusion of printed books, taught the Europeans that “ Truth ” in Bacon’s noble phiase “is the daughter not of authority but of time.” The inhabitants of this continent had long known that the earth was round, and that if they sailed far enough to the west they would find the Indies. Noiliing, however, had pre- pared them for the emergence of an intermediate land-mass of incalculable vastness and resources. If their expectations of the shape of the planet were confirmed, their estimate of its size was rudely overthrown. The world was far bigger than they had thought. The old notions of geography, taught for centuries by learned clerks and believed in all the universities, were suddenly shown to be in sharp contradiction to established facts.

The consequences were farther reaching than the additions

1499

434 A HISTORY OF EUROPE

tto posilive koowlcdgc resulting from the geographical dis* coveries. Insensibly mankind acquired a new attitude towards knowledge itself. Authority no longer went unchallenged. The past was no longer supreme. As the planet unfolded its unend- ing wonders, generations grew up for whom truth was not a complete thing already given in ancient books, but a secret yet to be retrieved from the womb of time.

Not that among the many visions of the future which were excited by the first impact of America there was present the thought that some day this new continent would become the receptacle for the overspill of Europe. America would have many uses. It would bring a new spiritual Empire to the Catholic Church and new temporal dominions to the masters of Spain and Portugal. The mariner, the treasure hunter, the trader, and the missionary would be drawn across the Atlantic. Digni- fied Spanish noblemen would administer law and justice among the native Indians, and lepresent the majesty of the Spanish Crown in its overseas provinces. But nothing either in the travel tales of returned sailors or in the economic state of Europe dur- ing the early half of the sixteenth century encouraged the ex- pectation that great blocks of European settlers would find new homes in America. Even after a century of Atlantic voyaging Francis Bacon, who was the prophet of scientific metliod and the father of physical geography, warned his compatriots against American colonization. If English emigrants there must be» Ireland, that little neglected island across St. Geoige's Channel, had the prior claim upon their attentions.

Meanwhile the political framework of the mediaeval Empire had given way before tlte growth of national states. A universal monarchy, supported by a universal church, though it corre- sponded to the aspirations of Europe dining many centuries, was never closely adjusted to its needs or respected by its obser- vance. The Empire had never secured a general allegiance. The claims of the Papacy bad often been* countered by the will of piinces. By slow and painful steps, as feudal licence was brought under the control of central power, national states were formed, first of all in England, where the conditions were favourable, then in the Christian states of the Iberian peninsula, in France, and in the larger principalities of the German federation. By the end of the fifteenth century national governments had been established, not without the assistance of the new invention of

THB KEW EUROPE

435

gunpowder, in England, France, and Spain. In England the suicide of the old feudal nobility in the Wars of the Roses was the prelude to the establishment of Tudor rule.

Framed against the background of mediaeval licence, tlie type of government which was now coming into vogue was remark*^ able for strength; judged by modern standards it was pitiably weak. The resources, moral, intellectual, and material at the disposal of the most powerful monarchs of the sixteenth century were indeed paltry when we measure them against the dis^ ciplined social conscience, the organized national education, the powerful instruments for the accumulation and concentration of knowledge, the great military and naval establishments and vast revenues which support the fabric of a mo^lern state. The papers which nourished tlie machine of English government during the whole reign of Queen Elizabeth would probably be outweighed in a month by the accumulations of the least important of our modern government offices. The strongest army put into the field by Francis I would have withered away before a single division of the army of Petain or Foch. Even in the most ad- vanced states of the sixteenth century the go\ eminent lived from hand to mouth, improvising armies and navies to suit particular occasions, and driven to the most desperate expedi- ents for finance. To recruit, to pay, to feed a national army were feats not only beyond the power of any go\crnment to execute, but hevond the scope of any statesman to conceive. Charles VII of France had asked o£ every parish in France that it should maintain an archer for the wars. The scheme broke down ar once. His successor, Louis XI, fell back on a force of foreign mercenaries. The chronic insolvency of Charles V, judged to be the most powerful monarch of his time, is sympto- matic of a weakness which afllicted all governments alike.

Nevertheless it is to this age, which witnessed the disruption of Latin Christianity, that we may ascrilxj the clear emergence of that more efficient form of social and political communion which claims the free yet disciplined loyalties of a nation. In the sixteenth century Europeans began, in larger measure than be- fore, to think in nations, to act in national groups, and to render to the head of the national state some part of the loyalty which had previously been paid to the undivided Church. Roger Ascham, the schoolmaster and educational reformer who taught Queen Elizabeth, is a typical figure in the new lay educational

43^ A HISTORY OF EUROPE

movements which gave support to vernacular literature and national pride.

The formation of the strong continental monarchies ushers in a period of acute diplomatic rivalry which w^as governed by tlic con- ception of the balance of power. While the mediaeval sense of a common European interest had faded away, no country had ac- quired a measured estimate of its own strength and resources. Romantic ambitions, the legacy of the Roman and Carolingian ages, filled the minds of rulers who would have been better occu- pied in attending to the welfare of their subjects. Statecraft was still immature, political economy had not been invented, and the art of domestic comfort was neither understood nor intelligently pursued. In the absence of exact statistics the vaguest notions pre- vailed as to the wealth and population of the European States. It was a common belief tliat dazzling conquests might still be made and held within tlic old framework of European society.

Whether international states had international obligations was a question which no one at the opening of the sixteenth century was much concerned to ask or answer. Travel was difficult, tlic relations between governments wetc rare and intermittent. Every state tried to overreach its neighbour and to extend its borders. The greatest opportunity offered to Europe to undertake a grand work of co-operative civilization was thrown away. The dis- covery of the New World, which under wise direction and a happier temper of the public mind might have led to a har- monious subdivision of the new continent between the interested powers was, on the contrary, made the signal for an outburst of cruel war and piracy on the high seas which lasted for genera- tions. All this tvas taken for giantcd. No political thinkers rose to the size of the vast events which wxre changing the face of the world. Sir Thomas More surrendered himself to the pleasant fancies of Utopia, while Machiavelli, the great Florentine publicist, had eyes for no bigger thing than an Italy liberated from barbarians.

Money, which has always been a po\ver in human affairs, had become more plentiful in the later middle ages, and was destined to become more abundaur still through the importation of Peru- vian silver before the sixteenth century had run its course. In all the progressive countries of the west the growth of trade and commerce, which had received its first important stimulus dur- ing the Crusades, had created an influential middle class whose

TBE NEW EUROPE

437

material interests were opposed to the continuance of feudal disorder. Capital was coming into its own. Great merchants and bankers, a Jacques Coeur of Bourges, a Fugger of Augsburg, a Dick Whittington of London, a Roberto Strozzi of Florence, out-topped many a great feudal noble in their command of free capital, and rose to positions of political influence. For many years the Empire was financed from Augsburg, while the Italian enterprises of France depended upon the support of the Strozzi Bank of Florence, with its branches in Lyons, Venice, and Rome. Capital then must be counted as a force in aid of those monarch- ical nation states whose consolidated power is one of the new facts distinguishing the Europe of the sixteenth century from the conditions of the feudal age.

Upon such a Europe, kindled by new knowledge and new horizons, and charged with the spirit of national pride and inde- pendence, fell the spark of the Protestant Reformation. A challenge to Roman doctrine was no new thing. It had been made by Wycliffe in England and by IIus in Bohemia. The problem how best to reform the manifest abuses of the Church had ever since the first schism engaged the attention of serious minds through- out Christendom. Councils had met, delihciatcd, and dispersed, without effecting any serious improvement. The Pope, for whose sovereign authority no menace seemed to be more formidable than the recognition of a General Council as a regular and established organ of Church government, had been able to cir- cumvent the conciliar movement by entering into separate and direct concordats with national governments, "i he ill-organized and tumultuous deliberations of an international assembly, whose members were divided from one another by race, language, and allegiance, were no match for the experienced diplomacy of the Roman Curia. A combination of the Papacy on the one hand, and the temporal powers on the other, might always be relied on to frustrate the endeavours of an ecumenical council. The Pro- testant Reformation, however, was neither initiated nor assisted by councils of the Church. It arose out of a passionate sense of the contrast between the simplicity of the Apostolic age and the wealth and fiscal exactions of the Roman Church; it was shel- tered by the help and assisted by the appetites of certain tem- poral princes. And finally, in those regions of northern Europe in which it succeeded in securing a foothold, it was protected against the forces of Catholic reaction by a widespread confisca-

4.38 A HISTORY OF EUROPE^

tion of abbey lands and the creation of a vested interest in the spoils of the plundered church, which was in certain regions so deeply rooted that neither war nor revolution was able to disturb it.

This great religious convulsion divided Christian Europe at a time when the Ottoman Turks had completed their conquest of the Balkan peninsula, acquired Egypt, and created a formidable navy. Yet so faint was the Christian motive as a shaping power in politics, during the first half of the sixteenth century, that Francis I and his son Henry II of France did not scruple to ally themselves with the Ottomans against Charles V at the very time when tlic head of the llabsburg house stood out as the protagonist of Catholic orthodoxy against the heresy of Luther. Indeed, it is to these national and dynastic rivalries, more acute and powerful in tlie early part of the sixteenth century than in any previous age, that wc must ascribe the victory of Pro- testantism over a large part of northern Europe. It is a mistake to suppose that persecution never succeeds. Persecution crushed the Albigenses and the Lollards, and stamped out the seeds of Protestantism in Spain, Italy, and Bohemia. If the temporal powers of Europe had been united to put down the lAithcrans of Germany or the Calvinists of Geneva there is no reason to think that they would have failed in their work. But they were not united. The great duel between the house of Valois and the house of Hahsbuvg was the dominating issue of tlie age. The heresies of Germany were far too embarrassing to Charles V to he otherwise than welcome to Francis I, under whom was first established that long French tradition of fostering heretics abroad and suppressing them at home, without which all Ger- many might have been reclaimed for the Roman Church.

The course of the Reformation in England was similarly governed by the great continental rivalry of the age. In the critical year, when the continued allegiance of England to

the Papal See depended upon the Pope’s acquiescence in Henry VIIFs repudiation of ratharinc of Aragon, the Pope was in con- sequence of the Franco-Imperial war a prisoner in the hands of Charles V, who was Catharine’s nephew. Even had he wished to be compliant, and there were papal precedents for the action wliich was urged upon him by the English Court, Clement VII was no free agent. He could not give his consent. The same

T»S NSW SVROPE

439

Habsburg and Valois livaliy, wluch ultimately helped to make north Germany Protestant^ precipitated the breach between England and Rome during the reign of Henry V 1 II» and again sheltered the young Anglican Church from overthrow during the perilous days of Queen Elizabeth*

The religious disruption of western Europe was not effected without a terrible struggle. During the first half of the sixteenth century the great Habsburg-Valois rivalry absorbed the energies of the two leading Catholic powers on the continent. Protestant beliefs spread far and fast. They conquered the greater part of Germany and Switzerland; they were received into the Scandina- vian kingdoms, penetrated into Italy and Spain, carried all be- fore them in Scotland and Bohemia. According to the Cardinal of Lorraine, two-thirds of the inhabitants of France were in- fected with the new heresy in the reign of Henry 11 . For the ^ 547^59 space of a century the movement continued to gather force, and as happens when religious movements become popular and appeal to the plain man’s jealousy of ostentatious power and ill- used wealth, the original core of true religious ardour was sur- rounded by a wide penumbra of selfishness, carelessness, and greed.

Then came a reaction. In 1559 Henry II of France, renouncing his dream of Italian conquests, and sobered, no doubt, by the defeat of his army on the field of St. Quentin, signed the Treaty of Gateau Cambresis with t^ic Imperialists, and resolved to devote himself to the extirpation of heresy at home. A new era opens.

The dynastic struggle is suspended. The religious wars begin.

Could the Lutherans hold Germany? Could the Calvinists win France? The Paj)acy, aided by the recently established order of Jesuits, embarked upon a systematic endeavour to reconquer the territory which had been lost to the Roman Faith.

The religious war in France lasted, with intermissions, from 1560 until the Edict of Nantes in 1598 secured for the Protestant Huguenots toleration and a privileged position, an tmperiiim in imperio, within the French kingdom. It was fought with great bitterness and marked by many acts of mob violence and mili- tary atrocity; but it left no deep scar upon the social well-being of the French nation. At the end of her religious wars, Frfmcc emerged more powerful than she had ever been before. Her army was the strongest in Europe, her diplomacy the best in- formed, her court the most resplendent. The»evcutccnth cen-

440

A HISTORY OF EUROPE

tury marks the zenith of the French monarchy. It was under Richelieu and Mazarin that the foundations were laid for the 1643-1715 long, imposing dominion of Louis XIV,

Far otherwise was the effect of thirty years of religious war upon the disjointed federation of Germany, When the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 put a term to the quarrel,' settling frontiers for the rival confessions which have ever since been substantially maintained, Germany was a ruin. Her population was depleted, her treasuries were drained, her establishments of education and learning were grievously injured, and her pride and confidence sapped and impaired by a long succession of ruinous reverses and humiliations. It is no fantastic conjecture that the Thirty Years’ War put the civilization of Germany back by two hun- dred years, or that the ease with which a people so virile was subjected to the yoke of Napoleon in the first decade of the nine- teenth century was due to the depressing effects of this tremen- dous calamity.

After a series of spectacular successes the Catholic movement for the rcconquest of Europe had been brought to a sudden and general halt. The reunion of Latin Christendom under the Pope of Rome had vanished from the category of possible things. Too much blood had been shed, too many interests had been created, competing loyalties had been too deeply engaged. The Peace of Westphalia, the hard-won prize of a savage conflict, inscribed the religious schism on the map of Europe. Catholics and Protestants, their differences unbridged, thcii animosities unappeased, remained entrenched in their war positions.

The result is the more surprising since Austria, Spain, and France, the three leading countries in Europe, were true to the ancient faith. Had these powerful States, each orthodox, each anxious for the maintenance and promotion of Catholicism, chosen to act in combination against tlie Piotestants, can we doubt but that they would have succeeded in imposing some kind of religious unity, however mechanical and unieal, upon the Continent? Heresy had been stamped out in Austria and Spain, in Bohemia a*id Poland. Against a resolute and com- bined effort of the Catholic powers, could it have survived in north Germany or the Netherlands? But the Catholic powers were not combined. At the critical moment France, under the guidance of Cardinal Richelieu, set herself to thwart first im

Catholic and Protestant Europe, i6xo.

449

A BISTORT OF EUROPE

directly, later (after 1635) directly, but always most effectually, the forces of the Counter-Reformation which manoeuvred under the direction of the Habsburg rulers of Austria and Spain.

The Cardinal of the Huguenots ” was one of those rare men whose life is dominated by the idea of the Slate. He saw his country menaced on every frontier by the formidable com- bination of the Habsburg powers. That combination in tiie interests of his sovereign master he was resolved in every way possible to weaken and abase. No consideration founded on religion or morality could deflect his iron will or arouse emotion in his chilly heart. Though on his accession to power as Secretary of Foreign Affairs to Louis XIII (1624) he had no regular army or navy, though the Huguenot nobles and bur- gesses in their fortified towns constituted a State within a State, though his life w'as menaced by domestic intrigue, he never relaxed in his sleepless opposition to the two great secular agencies of the Catholic priesthood. At home he crushed the political strength of the Huguenots, while according them re- ligious freedom. Abroad he financed the Protestant cause, fought its battles and ensured its success. Now he w'as at work obstructing the Valtelline, the corridor between the Spanish Milanese and Austria. Now he wjis supporting by force of arms a French candulate for the Duchy of Mantua. At a dark hour in the Protestant fortunes the Swedish army of Gustavus Adolphus was set in motion by Fiench subsidies. If the con- tinent of Europe is partly Protestant tod.iy, the cause is possibly to be found in the persistent diplomacy of a Roman cardinal.

The final episode in the long and tragical conflict between the Protestant and Catholic principles in Europe was destined to exercise a far-reaching influence upon the balance of power in the world. The Huguenots weie among the most industrious and deserving subjects of I^ouis XIV. In commerce and marine ad- venture, as in all branches of industry such as the weaving of silk, which in that age demanded a high measure of technical skill, these Protestant Frenchmen distanced their Catholic fellow- citizens. But in the eyes of Louis XIV and Madame dc Maintenon, his fanatical wife, these people, by reason of their religious views, had no place in a Catholic state. No technical skill, no contribu- tion to the material well-being of the community, atoned for the deadly fact of religious heresy. The Huguenots were first perse-

ttfs K£W 443

cured and then expelled The protection which had been assured them under the Edict of Nantes was withdrawn in 1685^ and a community, which, if it had prevailed, might have given to France the lead in colonial development, transferred its know- ledge and skill to the more congenial soil of her Protestant rivals* The fortunate island of Britain was spared the religious con- vulsions which tormented the continent. In the southern part of the island a national Church, Erastian in government, Roman in ritual. Calvinist in theology, was set up and firmly secured by the end of the sixteenth century, not indeed without some blood- shed and local disturbance, but upon the whole with an astonish- ing measure of tranquil acquiescence on the part of an essentially untheological people. The chance of a successful Catholic re- action, which was never very great after the nobles and squires of England had been glutted with the abbey lands, vanished al- together with the ruin of the Spanish Armada. The Civil War of the seventeenth century was fought, not over the issue of Catholic and Protestant, though the fears of Rome, as a dark, malignant, unscrupulous power, haunted the imagination of the Roundheads, and gave a sinister meaning to every ritualistic practice, but over parliamentary liberties and Anglican cere- monial. It is only in the later part of the seventeenth century, when Louis XIV was beginning his persecuting career, that the danger of a Catholic reconquest ol the island became once more an important factor in politics. Charles II was a secret, James II an open, Papist. Botli kings worked, the first with subtlety and reserve, the second with gross and blatant unwisdom, for a Catholic restoration in England to be established with the assistance ol an army fiom France. But the plot was de- feated. It is permissible to doubt whether, even with the assist- ance of French bayonets, the Catholics of England could have prevailed against the strong Protestantism of the City of London, of the eastern counties, and of the fleet. When the final test came, not a man was found to risk his skin for King James.

The revolution of 1688 which brought William of Orange to the English throne was glorious because it was bloodless, and bloodless because the country stood so solid for the Protestant cause that it could afford to be clement. ,

The defeat of the Counter-Reformation in England ushered in a new period of European history. In the eighteenth century the rivalry of England and France continued, but tended to be fought

444 A HISTORY OF EUROPE

across the ocean, in Canada and India, rather than upon the con- tinent of Europe. Colonies and commerce became more impor- tant as motives of public policy than religious affiliations and dynastic alliances. The Puritan of the second generation was apt to be a shrewd, money-making man of business. Conservatism — or, as it was then called, Whiggism — in politics, rationalism in philosophy, an easy-going comfort in social life, were the mottoes of the Hanoverian age. The wealth, the prosperity, and the liberty of England began to attract the attention of foreigners. Though the genius of Shakespeare was still a mystery, the idea began to get abroad that much could be learned from the country which had been the spearhead of the Protestant resistance to Louis XIV. Voltaire was the pupil of Bolingbroke. To Montesquieu it ap- peared that the English had discovered the secret of political freedom. The philosophy of Newton and Locke passed as a formative element into the guiding minds of eighteenth-century France. The small island l^ecame once more for a few decades what it had been during the flowering time of mediaeval Oxford, the preceptress of Europe.

Such is the general trend of the story which has now to be re- counted. A religion widely held and strongly entrenched in the social and political tradition of western Europe is roughly chal- lenged by new spiritual forces and over a large part of Euiope compelled to accept defeat. A “totalitarian" conception of the social order loses colour and actuality as the Chiistian com- munity of the West dissolves into fragments which it is unable to re-absorb. Views of life based upon freedom of thought, upon the rights of the individual conscience, upon the self-determina- tion ol states and even of small religious sects, corrode the ancient fabric of the all-embracing church and give rise to trains of revolutionary thought which in the end transform the institu- tions of Europe and shape the life of the modern world. The more vigorous north falls away from, Rome. The less vigorous south, though only after inner convulsions, stands firm in the ancient ways. In the long dispute which bathes Europe in blood, the basest and noblest motives are incradicably blended. Cran- mcr's Prayer-book and Milton’s Paradise Lost, Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises and Pascal's Pensees, the Catholic music of Palestrina and the Protestant music of Bach, may be taken as illustrations of the depth of emotion aroused in religious men of genius on

THE NEW EUROPE

445

cither side of this great controversy. But the great mass of the European people has never been in any true sense religious. The dominant figures in the period of Europe’s religious wars are the statesmen, soldiers, and adventurers, who make use of the raw enthusiasm of the masses to achieve their secular ends. A Wallenstein in Bohemia, a Marlborough in England, rises above the storm, shapes policies, directs armies, amasses wealth, and fills Europe with the fame and fear of his prowess. A China- man of the period, had he been in a position to survey the turbu- lent European scene during the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies, might well have asked himself whether the art of living was not better understood by a people which had no religious quarrels because they had no religion but only an ethical code of deportment, whether the vast liberation of human forces brought about by the Protestant Reformation with all its in- finite consequences for art and music, science and letters, was worth the price of long and savage wars, and whether an atti- tude of mind towards the ultimate mysteries less aspiring, less heroic and less confident than that which prevailed among western Christians was not in effect more conducive to human comfort.

BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED

Excellent short bibliographies for the greater part of the ground covered by this volume may be found in A. j. Grant, A History of Europe from 1494 to 1610 (1931), and in D. Ogg, Europe in the Seventeenth Century (1925). For more extended bibliographies see The Cambridge Modern History and the standard national Histories — c.g., Lavisse for France, and for England Froude, Gardiner, Macaulay, G. M. Trevelyan, and the composite Histories published respectively by Messrs. Longmans and Methuen.

CHAPTER n

TIIE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE

Bfasons why the Renaisiance befian in Italy. The place of Florence, Versatility of the great artists. Religious and lay motives in Italian art. Humanism. J.A>renzo Valla. Niccolo dc’ Riccoli. Vitlonno da h'eltre. The Renaissance Popes. Vetuce. The aristocratic character of Italian humanism. Sharp contrasts in Italian life. Spread of Italian Influence. The Prince and The Courtier. Limitations of Itahan influence.

The fifteenth century, which is intellectually so barren in England, witnessed the effulgence of the Italian Renaissance. During two hundred years (1340-1540) the cities of Italy pro- duced an output of art, scholarship, and literature such as the world had not seen since the glory of ancient Athens. But when Italy passed under the political domination of Spain, and was subjected to the religious rigours of the Catholic reaction, with its Jesuits’ Order, its Holy Inquisition, and its Index of prohibited books, the broad and prodigal stream of Italian imagination, which had flowed so powerfully and so long, shrank into a feeble channel. A sickly mystical sentiment replaced the robust virility of the creative age. The great painters, who at Venice longer than elsewhere continued to sustain the highest traditions of their art, were not replaced as they passed away, and Italy, after liaving to an incalculable degree enridied the intellectual life of Europe, and earned for herself the permanent gratitude of mankind, descended from her place of pre-eminence. The prose of France, the poetry and drama of England, the music of Germany, henceforth meant more to the world than all the studios and academies of Florence and Venice.

It is natural that the rebirth of European art and letters should have taken place in a land where the marbles of antiquity still gleamed among the cypresses and olives, and the tradition of humane learning, dtacending from classical times, had never been wholly interrupted. Here too was the eager rivalry of com- peting cities and luxurious courts, and many a patron who would pay high for a picture, or a manuscript, a secretary, or a tutor. Here finally were ruins, inscriptions, coins, and me^s, inviting,

416

TQS tXAhlAU ttBKAlS9ANCB 447

and since the days of P«trard]k attracting, the enquiry of (he scholar.

The humanist movement, which bad been gathering strength ever since the middle of the fourteenth century, acquit cd an astounding and brilliant velocity during the period of almost un- broken peace which divides the Treaty of Lodi in 1454 from the French invasion of Italy under Charles VIII forty years after- wards. While luorenzo dei Medici was master of Florence, and an effective if uneasy accord between the four leading Italian states preserved Italy from foreign aggression, art and letters advanced with great strides. More particularly was this true of Lorenzo's own capital on the Arno, which was already famous for the names of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Ileie was gathered together a constellation of illustrious men wlio made Florence the artistic and intellectual capital of Europe. When we consider that a catalogue of great Florentines born and working during these forty years would include the names of Michael Angelo, Donatello, Fra Filippo Lippi, and Sandro Botticelli, that to these great artists must be added Machiavelli the publicist, Guicciar- dini the histoiian, Ficino the Platoiiist, and Politian the Latin scholar, that Luca della Robbia and Domenico Ghirlandaio were Florentines, as well as Verrocchio, Perugino, and Leonardo da Vinci, and that Lorenzo himself showed genius alike as a poet, a statesman, and a virtuoso, we can foim some faint impression of the blinding splendour of a society so led and quickened. It was a source of stiength that the aitists of tlie Italian Renaissance were not too highly specialized* In Florence, for instance, painters and sculptors belonged to the same corporation as the doctors and apothecaries, and were often instructed by jewellers, who combined science with trade and a wide acquaintance with the arts and crafts. Prodigies of versatility were not inficquent. Men passed and repassed from painting to sculpture, fiom sculpture to architecture and metalwork, and from these forms of energy to poetry, philosophy, and natural science. The classical examples of this omnicompetence arc Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Alberti. The first is not only to be icmembcrcd for his statues and frescoes, but as a man whose skill in fortification de- fended Florence during a famous siege, as a man who took cap- tive the heart of his host in Bologna through his readings of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and finally as one who, having passed the age of 70* composed a series of somiets, whose note of

448 A HISTORY OF EUROPE

rare and exalted passion had not been heard in Italy since the death of Dante. Leonardo, again, was not only the painter of Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, but architect, mechanician, and man of science as well. His notebooks reveal a mind eager to grapple with all knowledge and experience, curious as to the orbit of the sun and moon, theorizing on marine fossils found among the crags of the Apennines, concerned with problems of linear perspective and anatomy, and investigating the ultimate truths of mechanics. The same wide competence and curiosity were characteristic of Alberti, the first athlete and horseman of his age, who composed melodics, painted pictures, built churches, wrote a comedy, and expounded the science of aichitccture in ten books, written in a prose so pure and elegant that it may be read with pleasure to this day. No branch of applied science seemed to be alien to Alberti, who devised machinery for raising sunken ships, and is said to have anticipated some modern dis- coveries in optics. Alberti’s gifts are his own, but a spacious curiosity was a note common to the creative artists of his time.

The art of the Italian Renaissance, in its earliest Florentine as well as in its later Venetian manifestations, continued, since the Church was the greatest of patrons, to conform to a Christian tradition. For one subject taken from the classics, twenty were chosen from the Bible, Some distinguished painters, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Fra Bartolomeo, w'^ere friars. But as time went on the painting of religious subjects lost much of the spiritual character which had originilly belonged to it. The figures became less ascetic, less conventionally hieratic, and closer to the flesh and blood of human life. The Madonna of Titian was a handsome model, not an idealized vision of holy mother- hood. On this, as in other branches of Italian activity, the lay and sceptical spirit of the age, nowhere stronger than in Rome itself, left its decisive imprint.

A love of personal glory was a feature of the age. Rich men commissioned portraits and statues and called upon painters and sculptors to give them an immortality in art. How magnificent and how swiftly rcp Avned was Florentine sculpture, English- men who have never seen a statue of Donatello or Michael Angelo under an Italian sky may learn by a visit to Westminster Abbey, where the tomb of Henry VII carved by the chisel of Torregiano invites their admiration. And as the patron sought immortality from the artist, so the artist desired immortality for

THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 449

himself. The days of anonymous architecture, of Gothic cathedrals built by generation after generation of nameless craftsmen, were past. The architect of the Renaissance, basing his craft on the doctrines of Vitruvius, expected within his own lifetime to reap a harvest of fame from his completed work.

It is characteristic of the force and individuality of the Italians of the Renaissance that their architecture, though profoundly influenced by the writings of Vitruvius, was never a pedantic or servile imitation of ancient models. The Italians, while respect- ing the rules of their Roman master, were sensitive to the promptings of personal taste. The forms of the antique were adapted to modem usage, its rigours tempered to a new softness and luxuriance. A garden would enter into an architectural design, and complete, with its level parterres, its straight terraces, its rectangular lakes, and solemn lines of cypress or yew the imposing facade of the country house. Even Palladio of Vicenza, whose four books on architecture obtained a great authority througli Europe, was not able to constrain to his severe classical proportions and measurements the profuse imagination of his compatriots, llte Italian passion for decoration struggled with the stern canons of classical construction, and uhimately, in the baroque churches of the seventeenth century, obtained a mastery.

The architecture of the Renaissance, spreading outward from Rome, which was its centre, and claiming in tlie new St. Peter’s its chief ecclesiastical triumph, covered Europe in the course of the sixteenth century with palaces and houses no longer built for defence but for the convenience and enjoyment of their owners. Azay le Rideau and Fontainebleau, Hatfield and Knole, announce the advent of a more luxurious age, when the fortified castle gave place to the country house, when town building began to sprawl at case beyond the ci^y w^alls, and the archi- tecture of fear, which sprang from the barbarian invasions of the third century, yielded before the new social possibilities of composure, magnificence, and delight.

In the field of literature the main feature of the Italian Re- naissance was a falling away from the scholastic and theological interests of the middle ages, and a compensating development, of a passionate concern in the life and letters of pagan antiquity. Not all of this great movement of the human spirit was of equal value. Some who might have written passably in their native Tuscan thought it necessary to express themselves in frigid and

15

45^ A HISTORY OF EUROPl

pretentious imitations of Cicero. Others threw ethics and religion to the wind. In general an excessive value was placed upon an easy command of Latin eloquence, Aeneas Sylvius, whose Artis fhetoricae precepta was written in 1456, rose to the Papacy on the strength of his Latin oratory. The humanist of the fifteenth century, like the Greek sophist or the mediaeval friar, was ex- posed and often succumbed to the temptations which in every age beset the popular preacher. So long as the classics existed in manuscript, only the humanist in possession of a codex held the key to knowledge, and could open or close the casket of marvels at his will. The travelling scholar, who lectured on Plato or Homer, read out the text and supplied the comment. It was through his brain and voice alone that his audience obtained access to the ancient mysteries. And when have audiences been more emotional, more ready to learn, or easy to lead? The humanist was orator, poet, scholar, teacher. The general would take him to the camp that he miglit deliver Ciceronian addresses to the troops; tlie government would employ him on solemn em- bassies, or to write despatches, or to make public orations upon occasions of state; the prince would receive him into his castle as wit, instructor, librarian, companion; men and women of every rank crowded to his lectures, wept at his eloquence, and lived upon his ideas. In such conditions profound and thorough scholarship was not to be expected.

Yet the achievement of the Italian humanists, despite the shal- lowness and artificiality of their l.a'tin writings, was of great value. They led the way to the lediscovery of tlic true meaning and beauty of the ancient woild, fust of the Latin classics, and then of Greek literature itself. To them western Europe owes the recovery of Plato and a vast addition to its knowledge of classical texts. Having discovcreil that the past is as real as the present, and that the future will view the present as the picsent views the past, they began to tliink about posterity, and to imagine how their own age would look in* the centuries to come. The great school of klorentine publicists and historians is distin- guished by this new sense of historical continuity, leading back- ward to the past and forward to the future.

1403-7^ So fast was the influx of new manuscripts (Cardinal Bessarion brought over 800 Greek codices from Constantinople) that there seemed no bounds to the possibilities of the future. Anything might come to light: the lost books of Tacitus, the lost plays

tUM ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 45I

of Sophocles, the lost decades of Livy; and the cKcirement was intensified by the difficulties of interpretation. A whole apparatus criticus had to be constructed from the beginning in the case of Greek, and nearly from the beginning in the case of Latin. Grammars, dictionaries, treatises on ancient art and archaeology, disquisitions on the meaning of terms, all the technical aids to culture were combined with the exposition of the rhetorical beauties of the new literature.

In this sudden crowding in of new tastes and fresh points of view, a place was found for scientific historical criticism. Its parent was Lorenzo Valla, whose bold treatise criticizing the 57 authenticity of the Donation of Constantine opened a new epoch in European scholarship. Valla first of all argued on general grounds that neither would Constantine have made, nor Pope Sylvester have accepted, the Donation. He then proceeded to point out that if the Empire of the Western World had really been surrendered to the Pope, the gift would have lx:cn evidenced by the existence of papal coins. He observed that Eutropius, writing early after the alleged event, made no men- tion of this momentous transaction, that the oiiginal text had never been produced, and finally that the document was of a barbarous Laiinity, betraying so clearly the system of the pap.il chancery as to bear upon its outer surface all the signs of an interested forgery. It is a rcmaikablc evidence of the toleration which then prevailed in Italy that the author of this audacious attack upon one of the cherislied privileges of the Papacy him- self became the secretary oi Pope Nicholas V.

In such an atmosphere of leisure and freedom the lives of scholars became interesting to others. The world, which has always been attracted by the doings of kings and captains, was now invited to read the biograpliics of men wliosc sole title to the regard of posterity was that they loved hooks and manu- scripts and lived the life of disinterested culture. Here is a picture from Vespasiano of Niccolo de’ Niccoli, whose private libraiy of eight hundred manuscripts was one of the glories of Florence.

“ First of all he was of a most fair presence, lively, for a srnile was ever on his lips, and very pleasant in his talk; he wore clothes of the fairest crimson cloth, reaching to die ground; he never married in order that he might not be impeded in his studies; a housekeeper provided for his daily needs; he was.

A HISTORY OF EUROPE

45 «

above all men, the most cleanly in eating and also in all other things. When he sat at table he ate from fair antique vases, and in like manner all his table was covered with porcelain and other vessels of great beauty. The cup from which he drank was of crystal or of some other precious stone. To see him at table, a perfect model of the men of old, was in truth a charm- ing sight. He always willed that the napkin set before him shouUi be of the whitest, as well *ts all the linen. Some might wonder at the many vases that he possessed, to whom I answer that things of that soit were neither so highly valued then nor so much regarded as they have since become, and Niccoli having friends everywhere, anyone who wished to do him a pleasure would send him marble statues, or antique vases, carv- ings, inscriptions, pictures from the hands of distinguished masters, and mosaic tablets. He had a most beautiful map on whiclt all the parts and cities of the world wore marked, others of Italy and S})ain, all painted. Florence could not show a house more lull of ornaments than his, or one that had in it a greater number of graceful objects, so that all who went there found innumerable things of worth to please varieties of taste.”

It is now too that we begin to hear the praise of the best abuvsed and most deserving servant of society. Vespasiano, who has painted for us the rounded culture of the scrupulous, old- w'orld Florentine bachelor, has bequeathed to us also the por- JJ96 J-//6 trait of a schoolmaster. Vittorino da Feltre stands as the pioneer of the educational movement which has resulted in the founda- tion of our English training in the liumanilics. lie was a small, spare, gay man of a naruie that seemed to be always laughing, a good horseman and gymnast, an indefatigable and devoted trainer of body, mind, and character. Ilis school became famous through Italy, and among his posthumous disciples vre may include Colct and Wolscy, John Milton and Charles Kingsley, and all our modern head-masters, so far as they seek to train mind and character through the instrument of fine litera- ture music, and art, and combine with this generous curriculum a care for the dcvclo^'ment of the body.

The rulers of Rome could hardly be indifferent to the lustre which slione upon the secular courts of Italy through the patron- age of art and letters. The papal office, which had lost much of its spiritual prestige during the schism and the Avignonese cap-

THE ITALIAN EENAISSANCE 453

tivity, was now usefully employed on the promotion of learning, the collection of artistic treasures, and the embellishment and restoration of a famous but long-neglected capital. Nicholas V, the scholarly son of a poor bell-ringer, founded the Vatican r^^7-55 library, and gave commissions to Fra Angelico, Bcnoz7o Gozzoli, and Piero della Francesca. The brilliant Aeneas Sylvius, who built the Piccolomini Palace at Siena, brought to the Holy See the engaging gifts of a traveller, a man of letters, a diplomatist, and a virtuoso, and even recovered as Pope Pius II much of the 145^-64 antique zeal of a crusader.

To Paul II his successor, who collected gems and bronzes with ^ 464 - 1 ^ ilie ardour and knowledge of a Venetian connoisseur, is due the restoration of the arches of Septimius Severus and Titus. And so the Popes of the Renaissance continued, building, restoring, decorating, collecting, and in pursuit of these cultivated tastes, spending and taxing, until with the accession of Leo X of the liouse ot Medici in 1513 the papal patronage of the arts soared to a climax of munificence and splendour, and with the crusliing cost of the new St. Peter s staggered the loyalty of half Chris- tendom.

The visitor to Rome who enjoys the collections and buildings of that age will find it difficult to condemn the Popes of the Renais- sance for such enlightened, if expensive, activities. What is open to censure is the naked and unscrupulous ambition by which some of the Renaissance popes endeavoured to extend their tem- poral dominion^ at the expense of their Italian neighbours. When we consider the gravity and imminence of the Tuikish peril, and the urgent need for the political combination of the Italian States, the policy of a Pope like Sixtus IV, viho in his ambition to found a temporal monarchy built up a scientific system of nepotism, and twice embarked upon war, stands high in the scale of poli- tical iniquity. Not least among the causes of the revolt from Rome was the widespread feeling in northern Europe that the Popes were Italian princes, to whom the advancement of their temporal power was a more important interest than the further- ance of the spiritual welfare of Christendom.

For meanwhile the republic of Venice was confronted with the new and formidable fact of the Turkish conquest of Constan- tinople. A short-lived peace (1454-63), more expeditious than glorious, was followed by the outbreak of a difficult war from which Venice emerged shorn of Dalmatia, Lemnos, and Morea,

454 A HISTORY OF EUROPE

and condemned to pay an annual tribute to the Sultan. The proud and adventurous aristocracy of Venice was not prepared tamely to acquiesce in so humiliating a conclusion. What had been lost in the east might be regained in the west. The disaster which had befallen Venetian arms in the Aegean might be re* paired at the expense of Milan, Ferrara, or Naples. In a restless search for compensations Venice ultimately decided to inflame the appetites and invoke the ambitions of France.

Yet despite these political agitations the last half of the fifteenth century is memorable in the history of the Venetian renaissance. The Basilica of St. Mark, begun in 830 and completed in 1484, pre- serves more perfectly than any existing building in the territories once belonging to the eastern Empire the quintessential spirit of Byzantine art. It was a noble reply to the barbarous devastations of the Turk to complete upon the free soil of Venice a building which might serve as a perpetual memorial of the splendour and taste of the vanished Christian Empire of the east. But there was another side to the artistic and intellectual life of Venice which was not rcpiesented by Byzantine mosaics or by jewels recalling the designs of the Scythian goldsmith of antiquity. Venice was on the frontier of two woilds, Greek and I-.atin. St. Mark's is Greek. The exquisite art of John Bellini, one of the pioneers of Venetian painting, is wholly associated with the Italian schools.

The invention of printing, which in the north was destined to spread Luther's fiery prose through the length and breadth of Germany, was characteristically employed by the Italian race to further classical studies. The hero of Italian printing was Aldus Manutius (i 449 -* 5 * 4 )» critic, grammaiian, literary historian, moralist, the founder of the Aldine Press at Venice. In the annals of Italian humanism there is no finer or nobler figure. Aldus had suffered from one of the worst plagues of youth, a thoroughly bad school book. A platonist and educationalist, he came to sec that the improvement of Italian education principally depended upon a supply of good and cheap* literature. So he settled in Venice, a city which was secure from war alarms, where he could find a cultured society and count on the assistance of Greek immigrants, and there set up a printing press, which issued in swift succession classic after classic, in editions so cheaply and beautifully executed, so trim and handy, that they are still a pleasure to consult. The doom of the vast and cumbrous folio was pronounced. The Venetian gentleman slipping down the

T8«ITALIAN KENAISSANCE 455

Grand Canal in his graceful gondola could drink in the beauties of Homer from a tiny volume of the clearest print.

The humanism of the Renaissance^ unlike those mediaeval types of piety or heroism which are embodied in the Gothic cathedrals or the Chansons de Geste, was not popular but aristo- cratic. The message of the humanist was to the elect. The soul of a people will never be greatly stirred by the religion of the artist or the savant. Philosophy^ erudition, the critical examina- tion of texts, the passionate pursuit of art for art’s sake, these activities will always be confined to a small intellectual minority of the human race. So it is now, so it was then. If the humanist of the Renaissance elevated taste, he also enlarged the distance between man and man.

The Italian Renaissance, like most great movements of the human spirit, was the achievement of a comparatively small minority of gifted and creative men working in a sensitive and intelligent society. What they accomplished would have been impossible without the vivid Court life of Italy, the patronage of the Chuich, or the widespread Italian appetite for the enjoy- ments or the eye and the ear. In no other European country would the shops have been shut when a popular poet was reciting his verses or an aitist’s virtuosity have been peiraitted to condone a murder. Only in Italy was it expected of a nobleman that he should turn out a sonnet, appraise a picture, or read the classics.

By comparison the French aristocracy, till Francis I showed a better way, were barbarians, dedicated to tlic camp, the tourney, and the chase. Not that Italian life, for all its civility, was cither comfortable or secure. The country was unpoliccd. Every man went armed against the sudden animal hatreds of his neighbours.

Every palace, however resplendent with maibles and pictures, was a fortress, cold as the tomb in winter, and with few of those comforts which even the most modest householder in Islington or Putney now demands as his due. The autobiography of Ben- 1500*71 venuto Cellini depicts a society in which crimes of violence and acts of atrocious cruelty and trcacheiy were almost too common to be seriously regarded. Such was the Italian temperament, as swift to anger and cruel revenge as it was sensitive to the subtlest enchantments of form and sound.

From this flowering of talent in Italy the fighting aristocracies beyond the Alps derived a new range of interests. Transalpine noblemen, their rusticity tempered by Italian tiavcl, took to the

45^ A UlSTORY OF SUROPX

encouragement of art and letters. The gulf which divided medi- aeval society into lettered clerk and illiterate fighting man began to close up. Even for noblemen it became a fashion before the end of the fifteenth century to frequent universities, to open books, and, in the adornment of their homes, to study mag- nificence.

Ihere was, for instance, in the England of the Wars of the Ruses no figure more generally detested for his rutliless cruelties than John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester (1427-1470), the instrument (for he held the office of Constable) of King Edward IV’s sharp revenges. He was known as “ the butcher of England ” and “ tlie fierce executioner and behcader of men.” Yet his cruelty, after the Italian fashion, was blended with a high degree of cultivation. Few Latini.sts in tlie island were more accompllsbed than this ruthless aristocrat who had been educated at Bnlliol and had afterwards mingled with the humanists of Padua and rifled the bookshops of Florence. I'ipioft was a precursor. A long line of Italianate Englishmen followed in his steps, “ devils incarnate ” as it was the fashion in the days of Queen Elizaheih to describe them, but having derived from their Italian distipleship, together with many moial poisons, a range of taste, knowledge, and experience which permanently enriched the culture of their country.

Two ideas, destined to exert an enduring influence in the sphere of politics and education, were bequeathed to Euiope by the Italy of the Renaissance. The fiist. that of the pure politician, was contained in The Prince of Machiavelli, written in 1513, and the second, that of the scholar-gentleman, in Castigiione’s Courtier, which was composed three years later. Machiavelli was a Florentine diplomatist and an Italian patriot who employed an exile’s involuntary leisure in depicting the kind of ruler best suited to liberate the soil of Italy from the profane presence of barbarian invaders an<l to restore the glories of Ancient Rome. What was startling in tliis brilliant treatise was its objectivity. The Prince is an aiti&t in “pow'er politics,” using without scruple and remorse such measure of force or fraud as may enable him to extend and secure his conquests. A realist who sees life through plain glass, a close student of contemporary fortes ex- pecting nothing better of life than life can give, the Prince of Machiavelli was far removed from the saintly ghosts who figured in the manuals of mediaeval churclimen. The naked doctrine of

THB ITALIAN RSNAISSANCS 457

power politics stated without concealment or reserve, but repre- senting what was in fact the practice of the age, came as a shock to public opinion. The world was not accustomed to a political treatise in which there was nothing either of morality or religion. That its hero was Cesare Borgia, the “ nephew of Alexander VI, an assassin Pope, and himself, despite brilliant personal accom- plishments, widely known for successful assassinations and treacheries added to the challenge a further note of audacity.

Equally characteristic of the Italian spirit of that age was Count Baldassare Castiglione's Cortegiano or Courtier. The author, who had received his impressions of a highly cultivated Italian court under Duke Guidobaldo of Urbino, drew a picture of the ideal courtier which obtained a wide popularity through Europe. The courtier must be trained in the school not only of the court, but of the camp. He must be a man-at-arms and a sportsman, an athlete and an intellectual, a virtuoso in the arts and a citizen in the w^orld, well read in Greek, Latin, and Italian, with some practical knowledge of drawing and music and a superiicial and apparently effortless mastery of all the fashionable graces and accomplishments of his time. Such a conception of education chimed in witli the mode of the age. The Cortegiano was rendered into many languages. To Sir Thomas Hoby's charming English version (1561) Milton's view of a generous education as that wdiich “fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices both private and public of peace and war,” is plainly indebted.

To the Greek orthodox world, whether living under the Sultan or the Tsar, all this prodigal outpouring of Italian genius was of no significance. The Italian Kcnaissancc meant nothing either to the Russians or to the Turks. Save for a few scattered borrowings, a Venetian poitrait in the Seraglio at Constantinople, the Kremlin in Moscow (taken from Milan), and some skilful touches in Agra and Delhi, the operation of Italian taste and intellect was con- fined within the limits of Latin Christianity. Russia was a world apart and not until the eighteenth ccntuiy a factor to be reckoned with in European politics.

BOOKS WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED

Trenchard Cox: The Renaissance in Europe (i4f>o-i6oo). 1033. Examples taken from the works of art in London Museums and Galleries.

45 ^ A HISTORT OF EUROPX

M. Creighton: History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reforma- tion. 1S82-94.

fanet Trevelyan: A Short History of the Italian People. 1929.

E. Armstrong: Lorenzo de’ Medici and Florence in the Fifteenth Century. 1896.

P. Villari: Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola. Tr. L. Viliari. 2 vols. 1807-8.

G. Vasari: Lives of Italian Painters, Sculptors and Architects. 8 vols.

1900.

B. B<Tcnsen: Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance. 1897.

B. Berensen: North Italian Painters of the Renaissance. 1907.

B. Berensen: Venetian Painters of the Renaissance. 1894.

M. von Wolff: Lorenzo Valla. 1893.

L. B. Alberti: Opere volgari. Ed, A. Bonucci. 1843-9.

L- von. Ranke: History of the Popes. Tr, S. Austin. 18^7.

H. A. Taine: Philosophic de I’Art en Italic. 1865.

Machiavolli: Piincipe. Ed. L. A. Burd. 1891.

Vespesiano Da Bisticci: Vite do uomini illustri del serolo XV. Ed. L. Frali. 1S92.

Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I.

J. Burckliardt: Die Cultur dor Renaissance in Italicn. 1869.

J. Morlc>: Marhiavelli. Romanes Lecture. 1897.

J. Zeller: Italic et Renaissance. 1S83.

H. Brown: The Venetian Printing Press. 1891.

J. A. Symonds; The Renaissance in Italy, Vols. IV and V. 1875-86.

A. F