his son and grandson. For twenty years after his death (973) the titular
rulers of the Empire were boys and women-regents. At Rome, in Germany,
on the western and eastern frontiers all the beaten factions and
humiliated rivals plucked up courage to make another bid for victory.
The old Empress Adelaide, and her daughter-in-law the Empress Theophano,
divided or disputed the control of the administration until 991; from
that date till 998 the elder woman, freed from interference by the death
of Theophano, exercised a great though a declining influence. Neither
Empress was competent to handle the singular difficulties of the
situation. Adelaide, though true to the German ambitions of her husband,
was guided by personal prejudice in the selection of her ministers.
Theophano, a woman of remarkable abilities and attainments, despised the
monotonous intricacies of German politics, encouraged both her husband
and her son to regard Italy as the worthiest field for the activities of
an Emperor, and in Italy looked rather to Rome and the South than to
Lombardy. It was the church party, both in Germany and in Lombardy,
which in these years kept the subjects of the Empire true to their
allegiance. The German dukes were less disinterested. But the precedents
which Otto I had established proved invaluable when his son was required
to deal with a rebellion, or had the opportunity of appointing to a
vacant dukedom.
The blame for the chimerical ambitions of Otto II and Otto III is
usually thrown upon Theophano, that brilliant missionary of Byzantine
culture and Byzantine political ideas. But the influence which perverted
the judgement of these Emperors, until they became a byeword in Europe,
was something more impalpable than the will-force of a domineering
woman. They were born into the misty morning twilight of the medieval
renaissance, of an age when intellectual curiosity was awakening, when
philosophy, the sciences and Latin literature were studied with a lively
but uncritical enthusiasm, when the rhetorician and the sophist were the
uncrowned kings of intelligent society. The philosophy was little more
than school-logic, derived at second or third hand from Aristotle, the
science a grotesque amalgam of empiricism and tradition. The Latin
classics, apart from their use as a source of tropes and commonplaces,
only served to inspire a superstitious and uncomprehending reverence for
ancient Rome. Of this new learning Otto II and his son were naive
disciples. They could not sufficiently admire the encyclopaedic Gerbert,
the most fashionable and incomparably the ablest teacher of their day.
Otto II and his court listened patiently for hours while Gerbert
disputed with a Saxon rival concerning the subdivisions of the genus
philosophy. Otto III invited Gerbert to come to court and cure him of
"Saxon rusticity"; he deluged the complaisant tutor with Latin verses,
consulted him in affairs of state, and finally promoted him to the
Papacy. Gerbert was in fact a subtle and ambitious politician, who
filled the chair of Peter with no small degree of credit. But his more
serious talents would never have found their opportunity save for his
skill in ministering to the pseudo-classicism of rustic Saxons.
Each of these Emperors turned his back on Germany at the first
opportunity. Each met in Italy with bitter disillusionment and an
untimely fate.
Otto II, in whose idealism there was a trace of his father's concrete
ambition, planned the conquest of South Italy and Sicily. The scheme was
not impracticable as the Hohenstauffen were afterwards to prove. And in
the year 980 it could be justified as advantageous to the whole of
Christian Europe. A new Saracen peril was impending in the Western
Mediterranean. A new dynasty of Mohammedan adventurers, the Fatimites,
had arisen on the coast of Northern Africa and had made themselves
masters of Egypt (969). Five years before that event they had already
occupied Sicily; in 976 they turned their attention to Italy. The south
of the peninsula was divided between the Eastern Empire and Pandulf
Ironhead, the lord of Capua, who had established an ephemeral despotism
on the ruins of Lombard and Byzantine power. Even he could not face the
Arabs in the open field, and his death (981) was followed by the
partition of his lands and bitter strife among his sons. Unless Otto
intervened it was not unlikely that Italy, south of the Garigliano,
would become a province of the Caliphate of Cairo. Otto, however, was
ill-qualified to be the general of a crusade. His military experience
had been gained in petty operations against the Danes and Slavs, and in
an invasion of France vaingloriously begun but ending in humiliation
(978). Full of self-confidence he led a powerful force into Apulia,
intending to expel first the Greeks and then the Arabs. He captured Bari
and Taranto without difficulty; but he had no sooner entered Calabria
than he allowed himself to be entrapped by the Emir of Sicily. On the
field of Colonne (982) he lost the flower of his army and barely escaped
capture by flight to a passing merchant vessel. Next year he died, in
the midst of feverish preparations to wipe out this disgrace. It was
left for the despised Greeks to repel the Arabs from the mainland;
Sicily remained a Mohammedan possession till the coming of the Normans
(1062).
It is easier to sympathise with the policy of Otto II than with the man
himself. The case is reversed when we turn to the career of his son.
Otto III, an infant at his father's death, escaped from female tutelage
in 996, and made his first Italian expedition as an autocrat of sixteen.
He went to free the Papacy from the bondage of a Roman faction, the
party of the infamous John XII, again rearing its head under a new
leader. The boy-ruler suppressed the rebels with some gratuitous
cruelty. But he was not without noble ambitions or the capacity of
appreciating finer natures than his own. Called upon to nominate a Pope
he selected his cousin Bruno, a youth little older than himself, but a
statesman and an idealist, who set himself to assert the authority of
the Holy See over the national Churches, partly no doubt in the
interests of the Empire but more in those of morality and discipline.
Unhappily Bruno died before his influence had eradicated from the
Emperor's character the weaknesses fostered by scheming flatterers and
an injudicious education. Gerbert, who succeeded Bruno with the title of
Sylvester II, encouraged his pupil in a career of puerile extravagances.
While the new Pope extended his jurisdiction and magnified his office,
the young Emperor was planning to revive in Rome the ancient glories of
the Caesars. Otto built a palace on the Aventine; he imitated the
splendour and travestied the ceremonial of the Byzantine court; he
devised pompous legends to be inscribed on his seal and on his crown. In
the year 1000 he made a solemn pilgrimage to Aachen and opened the vault
of Charles the Great; another to Poland, to pray at the shrine of his
martyred friend, St. Adalbert, in Gnesen. Meanwhile the serious business
of the Empire was neglected; the Slavonic states shook off the German
connection; the eastern frontier was unguarded. Even the Romans, whom he
cherished as his peculiar people, despised his vagaries and rose in
insurrection. This was the awakening. Alive at last to the difference
between his dreams and his true position, he quitted the Eternal City to
wander aimlessly in Italy, and died broken-hearted at the age of
twenty-one.
It would obviously be unjust to judge the Holy Roman Empire of the first
Otto by the tragicomic aberrations of his immediate successors. Their
careers illustrate, in an extreme form, the temptations to which an
Emperor was exposed; but neither of them understood the essence of the
institution. Far from idealising the Empire overmuch they did not make
it ideal enough. The true conception of Empire eluded their grasp and
was unaffected by their failure. The policy of Otto the Great is
justified by the fact that he, like Charles the Great, gave to a
national monarchy the character of a religious office and the sense of a
sacred mission. To appreciate his achievement we need only compare the
German monarchy, as it stood in the year 1000, after a generation of
misgovernment had marred the architect's design, with that of the Capets
in France or of the House of Egbert in England. The difference is not
only in size or outward splendour. The Holy Roman Empire stood for a
nobler theory of royal and national Duty.
IV
FEUDALISM
Before discussing the origins or the effects of feudalism it is well to
form a definite conception of the system as we find it in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, when it is the basis of local government, of
justice, of legislation, of the army and of all executive power. In this
period the lawyers have arrived at the doctrine that all lands is held
from the King either mediately or directly. The King is himself a great
landowner with demesnes scattered over the length and breadth of the
realm; the revenues of these estates supply him with the larger part of
his permanent income. The King is surrounded by a circle of
tenants-in-chief, some of whom are bishops and abbots and ecclesiastical
dignitaries of other kinds; the remainder are dukes, counts, barons,
knights. All of these, laymen and churchmen alike, are bound to perform
more or less specific services in return for their lands; the most
important is military service, with a definite quota of knights, which
they usually render at their own charge; but they are also liable to pay
aids (_auxilia_) of money in certain contingencies, to appear regularly
at the King's council and to sit as assessors in his law court. They
hold their lands in fact upon a contract; but the precise obligations
named in this contract do not exhaust their relation to the King. In a
vague and elastic sense they owe him honour (_obsequium_) and loyalty
(_fidelitas_). They must do all in their power to uphold his interests
and exalt his dignity. He on his side is bound to consult them
collectively, in all matters of importance, and to maintain them
individually in the rights and possessions which he has granted to them.
These personal and indefinite ties should not be renounced, on either
side, without some very serious reason--gross treachery, gross neglect
of duty, gross abuse of power or privilege.
These tenants-in-chief have on their estates a number of sub-tenants,
who are bound to them by similar contracts and a similar personal
relation. The homage of the sub-tenant to his immediate lord ought to be
qualified by a reservation of the allegiance which all subjects owe to
the King. Whether this reservation shall be made or, when made, shall
have any practical consequences, will depend upon the King's resources
and personality. Where effective, it means that he can claim from the
sub-tenants the discharge of certain national duties, can call on them
for military service, can judge them in his court, can tax them with the
consent of his council, that is of their lords; on the other hand, it
means that these sub-tenants may not allege the commands of their lord
as an excuse for making war upon the King or committing any breach of
the public peace. Where the general duty of allegiance has lapsed into
oblivion, the tenant-in-chief is in all but name a dependent king, and
the feudal state becomes a federation under a hereditary president, who
occasionally arbitrates between the members of the federation and
occasionally leads them out to war.
The other members of the feudal state group themselves or are forcibly
grouped under the rule of different persons in the feudal hierarchy. In
the open country the soil is partly tilled by small free-holders, who
pay to this or that lord a rent in money, kind, or services. Like the
feudal sub-tenants these free-holders are, for most purposes, subject to
the jurisdiction of their lord; though in the well organised state the
royal judges protect them against the grosser forms of violence. But the
greater part of the land is divided between servile village-communities,
who give up perforce a large proportion of their working-days to the
cultivation of the lord's demesne. The tendency of feudal law is to
treat these peasants as slaves, to deny them the assistance of the royal
law-courts, to regard them as holding their land at the will of their
lord. In practice the lord finds that he cannot insist upon the full
measure of his legal right. Though he has the right to reclaim all
runaways, it is difficult to hunt them down; though he can fix the
measure of his own demands, it is dangerous and unprofitable to arouse a
spirit of mutiny. A judge from whom his serfs have no appeal in matters
that concern their tenure, he finds it politic to make and to observe
definite contracts, which remain unaltered from one generation to
another. Hence the condition of the serfs, though hard, is less
precarious than we might suppose if we only studied what the feudal
lawyer has to say about them. Turning from the country to the towns, we
find that all are subject to a lord or to the King; that some are only
half-emancipated communities of serfs; that in others the burgesses have
the status of small free-holders; that in a minority, but a growing
minority, of cases the burgesses have established the right to deal
collectively with the lord, to be regarded as _communes_ or free
cities. In these cases there is a form of popular self-government under
elected magistrates. Through the magistrates the town pays a fixed rent
to the former lord; usually it claims the special protection of the
King, and comes to hold the position of a tenant-in-chief (_une
seigneurie collective populaire_). No society could be, in spirit and
in organisation, more anti-feudal than the free town of the Middle Ages;
but it can only secure a safe existence by obtaining a definite position
in the feudal hierarchy. In fact, the clergy are the only considerable
class who succeed in resisting the universal tendency to feudalise all
landed property and to find for every man a lord. Even they are
compelled to make large concessions to the spirit of the age. It is only
at the cost of long and ruinous conflicts that bishops and other
prelates establish some distinction between their position and that of
the ordinary tenant-in-chief. Even so it remains the law that the
principal endowments of every religious foundation are fiefs held under
a feudal contract of service. More successful, though not less
difficult, was the struggle against the theory that the parish-priest is
the vassal of his patron and may, by recognising his obligations as a
vassal, acquire the vassal's privilege of passing on his office to his
son.
Such then was feudalism in the concrete. It is the negation of all that
we hold to be most important in the conceptions of the state and
citizenship. In effect, though not altogether in theory, it subordinates
the obligations of the citizen to those which the individual incurs by
entering on a voluntary contract. This contract may or may not be made
with the ruler of the state; in the majority of cases it is made with a
fellow-citizen. Though honourable, according to current ideas, this
contract always leaves to the lord some loopholes for the exercise of
arbitrary and capricious authority; it impairs, if it does not destroy,
the rule of law. Again, the effect of the system is to throw the main
burden of national defence, and the main control of the royal power,
upon a close hereditary caste of landowners. The standard of public duty
is lowered; the government becomes either an absolutism or an oligarchy,
and in either case studies chiefly the interests of a class which
despises industry and holds privilege to be the necessary basis of
society. Under feudalism the powers of the Crown, executive, judicial,
administrative, are often granted away to be held by the same tenure as
the fiefs over which they are exercised. And thus is created the worst
form of civil service that we can conceive; a corps of hereditary
officials, who can only be checked or removed with extreme difficulty,
who render no account of the sums which they collect under the name of
fines or dues, who are seldom educated to the point of realising that,
even in their private interest, honesty is the best policy. If this
system had developed to its logical conclusion, if the principles of
feudal government had not been mitigated by revolt from below and
interested tyranny from above, the only possible end would have been a
state of particularism and anarchy compared with which the Germany of
the fifteenth century, or the Italy of the eighteenth, might be called
an earthly paradise.
The very defects of the feudal system are, however, the best proof that
it was the natural and inevitable product of social evolution. A legal
theory so complex, so repugnant to the best traditions both of Roman and
barbarian government, could not have obtained general recognition, as
part of the natural order of things, unless it had grown up by degrees,
unless it had been the outcome of older usages and institutions. A form
of social organisation so cumbrous and so dangerous could hardly have
survived for centuries unless it had solved difficulties of unusual
urgency and magnitude. Let us then consider, in their historical order,
the antecedents of feudalism and the reasons of state by which it was
justified.
Before the downfall of the Roman Empire the duties of local government
were slipping from the grasp of the imperial executive. With or without
official consent, the great proprietors--already held responsible for
the taxes, the military service, and the good conduct of their
dependents--were assuming rights of jurisdiction. When Gaul was
reorganised by the Merovingians, these private courts of law continued
to exist; and they were even legally recognised (by Clotaire II in 614)
as institutions of public utility. A certain number of great estates
were further protected by special charters of privilege
(_immunitas_) which forbade public officials to enter them for the
purposes of making arrests, of holding courts, of collecting fines and
levying distraints. The owners were obliged to surrender any person
accused of a grave crime, but otherwise did justice at their pleasure.
This system of immunity was greatly extended by the Carolingian
sovereigns, but with two important changes. (1) Henceforward the
privilege was seldom granted to laymen, but was bestowed as a matter of
course on the estates of bishops and of religious houses. (2) The
holders of such ecclesiastical estates were compelled to vest their
powers of police and justice in the hands of laymen (_advocati_)
chosen either by the central power or by some approved form of election.
The intention of these changes was to use the private courts for the
maintenance of public order, to extract the sting from a dangerous
privilege, and to make it a serviceable instrument of royal policy. But
only one half of the scheme was permanent. By the middle of the ninth
century, when _immunitas_ had been granted to all religious foundations,
the Carolingians allowed the right of choosing the _advocati_ to slip
from their feeble grasp. The privileged estates remained, but the royal
control over their internal government was gone. They became
ecclesiastical seignories; whatever checks were imposed upon
the power of their rulers came from the lay-nobles who were their
neighbours, or from the subject population. Partly from respect for
custom and tradition, partly from motives of self-interest, the great
ecclesiastical landowners sided with the Crown, even in the tenth
century, when the fortunes of royalty were at their lowest ebb. But for
this support a price had to be paid; the old privileges were maintained
and even augmented by grants of the power of life and death
(_hautejustice, blut-bann_). Thus came into existence the class of
ecclesiastical princes, who throughout the Middle Ages maintained a
state, and wielded a power, comparable with that of any lay feudatory.
The ecclesiastical _immunitas_, as early as the ninth century, was
in the eyes of all ambitious landowners the model of a privileged
estate. But it was by another road that the layman arrived at the
position of a petty sovereign. Speaking broadly, there are two stages in
his progress. First, he comes into the position of a royal tenant,
holding his lands in exchange for services and fealty. Secondly, he
acquires, by delegation or usurpation, a greater or smaller part of the
royal authority over his own dependents.
(1) The idea of a personal contract between the free warrior and his
lord, by which the former places himself at the disposition of the
latter and promises unlimited service, is one which occurs in many
primitive societies and is peculiar to no one branch of the human race.
Tacitus noticed, as one feature of German life in his time, the free
war-band (_comitatus_) who lived in the house of their chief,
followed him to battle, and thought it the last degree of infamy to
return alive from the field on which he had fallen. The Merovingian
kings maintained a bodyguard of this kind (_antrustions_). Under
the Carolingians such followers appear in the host, in the royal
household, in every branch of the administration. They are the most
trusted agents of the King and possess considerable social consequence.
They are called _vassi_, a name formerly applied to any kind of
dependent, but now reserved for free men rendering free services to the
King or some other lord, and subject to his jurisdiction. So valuableare
these followers that, in the eighth and ninth centuries, the power
of the great is largely measured by the number of _vassi_ whom they
can put into the field.
Various considerations suggested to Frankish rulers and nobles the
expediency of endowing these followers with land, and of granting land
to no tenant unless he would take the vassal's oath. Usually land was
the only form of pay which the lord could give; and it always served as
a material guarantee of faithful service, since it could be resumed
whenever the vassal made default. In days when law and morality availed
little as the sanctions of contracts, the landlord naturally desired to
bind his tenant to him by a personal obligation; and there were obvious
advantages in providing that every tenant should be liable to aid his
lord with arms. The estates granted to vassals were known as benefices
(_beneficia_); they foreshadowed the lay-fief of later times. But
there are some distinctions to be drawn. The benefice was not _de
jure_ heritable; it escheated on the death of either lord or tenant.
The service was not measured with the same precision as in later times.
The military duties of the beneficed vassal were not different in kind
or degree from those of the ordinary freemen. Finally, the idea had not
yet arisen that vassals were superior in status to the rest of the
community. The importance of the vassal depended entirely on his wealth
and his rank in the King's employ. Only in the old age of the
Carolingian Empire, when the class of free landowners, acknowledging no
lord, had been almost ground out of existence by official oppression and
the intolerable burden of military service, was the burden of national
defence thrown entirely upon vassals. Then, as the sole military class
in the community, they acquired the consideration which, in early stages
of social development, is the monopoly of those who are trained to arms.