as a feudal council, composed of the prelates and barons who held their
lands and dignities directly from the Crown. But that of France was,
before the twelfth century, seldom convened, sparsely attended, and
generally ignored by the greater feudatories, a conference of partisans
rather than a parliament. In England the Great Council of the Norman
dynasty, inheriting the prestige and the claims of the Anglo-Saxon
Witenagemot, held from the first a more respectable position. Even a
William I or a Henry II scrupulously adhered to the principle of
consulting his magnates on projects of legislation or taxation; under
the sons and grandson of Henry II the pretensions of the assembly were
enlarged and more pertinaciously asserted. The difficulties of the Crown
were the opportunity of Church and Baronage. The Great Council now
claimed to appoint and dismiss the royal ministers; to withhold
pecuniary aid and military service until grievances had been redressed;
to limit the prerogative, and even to put it in commission when it was
habitually abused. In fact the English nobility of this period, thwarted
as individuals in their ambitions of territorial power, found in their
collective capacity, as members of the opposition in the Council, a new
field of enterprise and self-aggrandisement. In France there was no such
parliamentary movement, because the fundamental presupposition of
success was wanting; because it was hopeless to appeal to public
opinion, against a successful and venerated monarchy, in the name of an
assembly which had never commanded popular respect. Under these
circumstances it was natural that very different consequences should
ensue in the two countries, when the reformation of their national
assemblies was taken in hand by Edward I and his contemporary, Philippe
le Bel. The problem before the two sovereigns was the same--to create an
assembly which should be recognised as competent to tax the nation. The
solutions which they adopted were closely alike; representatives of the
free towns were brought into the Etats Generaux, of free towns and
shires into the English Parliament; in each case a Third Estate was
grafted upon a feudal council. But the products of the two experiments
were different in temper and in destiny. The States General, practically
a new creation, neither knew what powers to claim or how to vindicate
them. They turned the power of the purse to little or no account; they
discredited themselves in the eyes of the nation by giving proofs of
feebleness and indecision in the first great crisis with which they were
called to deal, the interregnum of anarchy and conspiracy that ensued
upon the capture of King John at Poitiers (1356). The result was that
the States General, occasionally summoned to endorse the policy or
register the decrees of the monarchy, remained an ornamental feature of
the French constitution. In England, on the other hand, the Commons
accepted the position of auxiliaries to the superior Estates in their
contests with the Crown; and the new Parliament pursued the aims and the
tactics of the old Great Council, with all the advantages conferred by
an exclusive right to grant taxation. For more than two hundred years it
was a popular assembly in form and in pretension alone. The most active
members of the Lower House were drawn from the lower ranks of the
territorial aristocracy; and the Commons were bold in their demands only
when they could attack the prerogative behind the shield of a faction
quartered in the House of Lords. But the alliance of the Houses
transformed the character of English politics. Before Parliament had
been in existence for two centuries, it had deposed five kings and
conferred a legal title upon three new dynasties; it had indicated to
posterity the lines upon which an absolutism could be fought and ruined
without civil war; and it had proved that the representative element in
the constitution might overrule both monarchy and aristocracy, if it had
the courage to carry accepted principles to their logical conclusion.
Even in England a medieval Parliament was scarcely a legislature in our
sense of the word. Legislation of a permanent and general kind was an
occasional expedient. New laws were usually made in answer to the
petitions of the Estates; but the laws were framed by the King and the
Crown lawyers, and often took a form which by no means expressed the
desires of the petitioners. The most important changes in the law of the
land were not made, but grew, through the accumulated effect of judicial
decisions. The chief function of Parliaments, after the voting of
supplies, was to criticise and to complain; to indicate the shortcomings
of a policy which they had not helped to make. Except as the guardians
of individual liberty they cannot be said to have made medieval
government more scientific or efficient. In the fifteenth century the
English Commons criticised the government of the Lancastrian dynasty
with the utmost freedom; but it was left for Yorkist and Tudor despots
to diagnose aright the maladies of the body politic. Englishmen and
Frenchmen alike were well advised when, at the close of the Middle Ages,
they committed the task of national reconstruction to sovereigns who
ignored or circumvented parliamentary institutions. A parliament was
admirable as a check or a balance, as a symbol of popular sovereignty,
as a school of political intelligence. But no parliament that had been
brought together in any medieval state was fitted to take the lead in
shaping policy, or in reforming governmental institutions.
VIII
THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE--THE CRUSADES
Neither the internal development of the medieval state nor the
international politics of medieval Europe can be explained without
constant reference to class distinctions. First, there is a sharp line
dividing each state horizontally and marking off the privileged few from
the unprivileged many, the rulers from the ruled. Below the line are the
traders, artisans, and cultivators of the soil; above it the landlords,
the officeholders, and the clergy. If an industrial community, here and
there a Milan or a Ghent, succeeds in asserting political independence,
the phenomenon is regarded as anomalous and revolutionary; still graver
is the head-shaking when mere peasants, like the Swiss, throw off what
is called their natural allegiance. And such cases of successful
rebellion are rare. It is true that in England, in France, and in the
Spanish kingdoms there are privileged towns which receive the right of
representation in national assemblies; but this concession to the power
of the purse is strictly limited; the spokesmen of the burgesses are not
invited to express opinions until asked for subsidies or military aid.
Government is the affair of the King and the privileged classes. But
again there is a division within the privileged classes, a vertical line
of cleavage between the various grades of the lay and clerical
aristocracies. The prelate and the baron, the knight and the priest,
harmonious enough when it is a question of teaching the unprivileged
their place, are rivals for social influence and political power, are
committed to conflicting theories of life. The ecclesiastic, enrolled in
an order which is recruited from every social grade, makes light of
secular rank and titles; he claims precedence over every layman; he
holds that it is the business of the Church to command, of princes to
obey. The lay feudatory, born into a hereditary caste of soldiers,
regards war as the highest vocation for a man of honour, is impatient of
priestly arrogance, and believes in his heart that the Church ought not
to meddle with politics. It would be a mistake to think of the two
privileged classes as always at strife with one another and their social
inferiors. But the great wars of Pope and Emperor, the
fourteenth-century revolts of French and English peasants, are not
events which come suddenly and unexpectedly; each such outbreak is like
the eruption of a volcano, a symptom of subterranean forces continually
in conflict. The state of peace in medieval society was a state of
tension; equilibrium meant the unstable balance of centralising and
centrifugal forces. And this was one reason why wars, condemned in the
abstract by the Church, were frequently regarded with favour by sober
statesmen and by idealists. In more ways than one a successful war might
serve to heal or salve the feuds of rival classes. It offered an outlet
for the restless and anarchic energies of feudalism; sometimes it ended
in conquests with which the landless could be permanently endowed. It
might offer new markets to the merchant, a field of emigration to the
peasant, a new sphere of influence to the national clergy. Better still,
it might evoke common sentiments of patriotism or religion, and create
in all classes the consciousness of obligations superior to merely
selfish interests.
Such statecraft may perhaps seem rude and barbarous to us. The idea of a
nation as a system of classes, and of national unity as a condition only
to be realised when all classes combine for some purpose extraneous to
the everyday life of the nation, is foreign to our thought. We believe
that by making war upon class privileges we have given to the State a
less divided and more organic character. We maintain that the State
exists to realise an immanent ideal, which we express by some such
formula as "the greatest good of the greatest number." But we are still
so far from a reconciliation of facts with theories that we must
hesitate before utterly condemning the medieval attitude towards war. In
place of classes we have interests, which are hard to unite and often at
open variance. Our statesmen balance one interest against another, and
consider war legitimate when it offers great advantages to the interests
most worth conciliating. Nor have we yet succeeded in giving to the
average citizen so elevated a conception of the purpose for which the
State exists that he can think of national policy as something different
from national selfishness. It is easier to criticise the enthusiasts who
urged medieval nations to undertake "some work of noble note," remote
from daily routine, than it is to discover and to preach a nobler
enterprise on behalf of a less visionary ideal. It helps us to
understand, though it does not compel us to accept, the medieval theory,
when we find modern poets and preachers glorifying war as a school of
patriotism or of national character.
Wars of conquest were less frequent in the Middle Ages than we might
expect, and were usually waged on a small scale. Their comparative
infrequency, in an age of militarism, must be explained by reference
both to current morality and to economic conditions. For an attack upon
a Christian power it was necessary that some just cause should be
alleged. Public opinion, educated by the Church to regard Western
Christendom as a single commonwealth, demanded that some respect should
be shown to the ordinary moral code, even in international relations.
Furthermore the medieval state, loosely knit together and bristling with
isolated fortresses, showed in defeat the tenacious vitality of the
lower organisms, and could not be entirely reduced without an
expenditure, on the invader's part, which the methods of medieval
state-finance were powerless to meet. Edward I failed to conquer the
petty kingdom of Scotland; and the French provinces which were ceded to
Edward III escaped from his grasp in a few years. The profitable wars
were border wars, waged against the disunited tribes of Eastern Europe,
or the decadent Moslem states of the Mediterranean. And such wars were
of common occurrence, sometimes undertaken by the nationalities most
favourably situated for the purpose, sometimes by self-expatriated
emigrants in search of a new home.
Thanks to the teaching of the Church, a large proportion of the border
wars were converted into Crusades for the propagation of the faith or
the extermination of the unbeliever or the defence of holy places. Often
enough the religious motive was introduced as an afterthought, and gave
a thin veil of respectability to operations which it would otherwise
have been difficult to excuse. In some cases, however, those who
enlisted as the soldiers of the Church were sacrificing their material
interests for the good, as they supposed, of their own souls and the
Christian commonwealth. There was nothing essentially Christian in this
spirit of self-devotion; it had long been epidemic in the Mohammedan
world, and accounts for the most successful encroachments of Islam upon
Europe and the Eastern Empire. The impulse affected Western Christendom
for a relatively short period of time, only once or twice producing
movements at all commensurable with those which had emanated from
Arabia, Asia Minor, and Africa, and leading to no conquests that can
rank in magnitude with the caliphates of Bagdad, Cordova, and Cairo. But
the Christian Crusade is in one sense more remarkable than the
Mohammedan Jehad. Western Europe had long ago emerged from the nomadic
stage, and even the ruling classes of Western Christendom, cosmopolitan
as they may seem to us, were attached to their native soil by many ties.
If the upheaval was smaller in the West than in the East, the material
to be set in motion was more stubborn and inert, the prizes to be held
before the eyes of the believer were more impalpable and dubious. There
were ventures near at hand for which the Church could find volunteers
without the slightest difficulty. But those which she was more
particularly bent on forwarding were distant, hazardous, and irksome;
the majority of the men who went on her great Crusades had no prospect
of any temporal advantage. In the end those enterprises to which she
gave her special countenance proved the least successful. It was not in
the Eastern Mediterranean but in Spain, in Lower Italy, and in Central
Europe, that the frontiers of Western Christendom were permanently
advanced. For the historian, however, the failures have an interest not
inferior to that of the more productive enterprises.
The age of border wars and border colonies begins long before the
appearance of a true crusading spirit. In German history the movement of
expansion dates from Henry the Fowler; when he captured Brandeburg (928)
and annexed the heathen tribes between the Elbe and Oder, he inaugurated
a policy of settlement and colonisation which the German Margraves of
those regions were to pursue, slowly and methodically for more than two
hundred years. In its later stages the policy was sometimes assisted by
Crusaders; from the first it made many converts to Christianity, and was
furthered by the foundation of frontier sees and churches subject to the
German archbishops of Hamburg and Magdeburg. But the men who directed
the policy were purely secular and selfish. The greatest of them, Henry
the Lion, Duke of Saxony from 1142 to 1180, and Albert the Bear,
Margrave of Brandenburg from 1134 to 1170, concentrated their energies
upon the development and extension of their principalities, exploited
the Slavs, plotted against one another and their Christian neighbours,
neglected national interests, and frankly made the Church the instrument
of their ambitions. Yet in the craft of state-building they showed
exceptional sagacity, enlisting as their allies the traders of the
Baltic, the peasants of North Germany and the Low Countries. Under their
rule and that of their most successful imitators, the Teutonic Knights
in Prussia, cities such as Lubeck (founded 1143) and Dantsic (colonised
1308) became centres of German trade and culture; while the open country
in the basins of the Elbe and Oder was covered with newly settled
villages of German immigrants. The effects of this colonisation have
extended far beyond the lands immediately affected and the limits of
medieval history. The new colonies laid the foundations of modern
Prussia and modern Saxony. To their existence is due the connection of
Poland and Bohemia with the state system of medieval Europe, and the
consequent division of the Slavonic peoples into a western and an
eastern group; the westward expansion of the Russian Empire was
forestalled and prevented by these early pioneers of German and of Roman
influence. Only less important was the German advance along the Danube,
from the river Inn to Vienna and the Hungarian frontier, which was
mainly directed by successive heads of the family of Babenberg
(971-1246), first as Margraves and afterwards as Dukes of Austria. The
Hapsburg power, like that of the Hohenzollerns, is partly an inheritance
from medieval frontiersmen who drove a German wedge into the heart of a
Slavonic territory.
The history of these German colonies often reminds us how naturally such
business ventures came to be regarded as a species of crusade. In 1147 a
large body of German pilgrims, enlisted for the Second Crusade, were
allowed to fulfil their vows by serving against the Slav in the armies
of Saxony and Brandenburg. The Babenberg dukes, grown weary of their
monotonous work on the Danube, roamed eastward to conquer Egypt or
Palestine, westward to exterminate the Albigensians of Languedoc and the
infidels in Spain. And when we turn from Germany to the Spanish
peninsula, the alliance between religious fervour and commercial
enterprise is still more striking. The Christian reconquest of Spain and
Portugal began two or three generations before the Council of Clermont;
but, from the first, the southward advance against the rulers of Cordova
foreshadows the age of the Crusades. In Spain, as in the German marks,
the pioneers of Christendom were often ruffianly, and always fought with
an eye to the main chance. Among them are mere desperadoes like the Cid
Campeador (_d._ 1099), who serves and betrays alternately the Christian
and the Moorish causes, founds a principality at the expense of both
religions, but is finally claimed as a hero and a martyr by his native
Castile, because he has the good fortune to die in her allegiance. Many
_conquistadores_ of more reputable character settled down contentedly
amongst a tributary and unconverted Moorish population, whose manners
and vices they adopted. But in Spain the racial antipathies of Moors and
Christians were always aggravated by religious zeal. Several times it
seemed as though Spanish Christianity was in danger of complete
extinction. In the tenth century two great rulers of Cordova,
Abderrahman III and Al Mansur, drove back the Castilians to the northern
mountains and raided the inmost recesses of the Christian territories.
Somewhat later the Wild Berber hordes of the Almoravides and the
Almohads, crossing from Africa to usurp the Ommeiad dominions and carry
on the holy war with greater energy, aroused new fears and provoked in
the threatened kingdoms a fanaticism equal to their own. The Spanish
Christians appealed for help to their northern neighbours; armies of
volunteers from Normandy, from Aquitaine, and from Burgundy, poured over
the Myrenees to strike a blow for the Cross against the Crescent, and
incidentally to gain rich spoils or found a colony. The movement was
early taken under the patronage of Rome. Gregory VII offered papal
commissions to the immigrants, on condition that they would hold their
conquests as vassals of the Holy See (1073). And thenceforth each new
enterprise against the Moors was officially recognised as a service to
the Catholic Church.
Still, even in Spain, the tendency was for material ambitions to gain
the upper hand. All classes in the Christian kingdoms benefited by the
wresting of a new province from the infidel. The nobles received new
fiefs; the burghers flocked into the cities evacuated by the Moors, or
were encouraged, by large grants of privileges, to build new cities;
round the cities clustered communities of peasants, who joyfully
exchanged the barren security of the northern uplands for the risks and
the prizes of the river valleys. No kings were so popular as those who
planned and carried to a successful conclusion these ventures for the
common good. One such ruler, James the Great of Aragon, has left us in
his memoirs a faithful and instructive account of the use to which he
and his subjects turned one of these so-called Crusades. At six years of
age he had succeeded to a divided kingdom and the shadow of a royal
prerogative. At fourteen he began a hard struggle, for the mastery of
his rebellious barons and cities, which lasted five years and earned for
him more credit than substantial success. When at length the rebels sued
for peace, he was obliged to grant it without exacting compensation; the
Crown remained as poor after the victory as before it. A little later he
conceived the idea of attacking the Moors in the Balearic Isles, "either
to convert them and turn that kingdom to the faith of our Lord, or else
to destroy them." He propounded his plan to the Cortes (1229); and in a
moment dissension was changed to harmony, civil indifference to loyal
enthusiasm. The barons said that to conquer a Saracen kingdom set in the
sea would be the greatest deed done by Christians for a hundred years.
They would give an aid, they would find contingents, they would serve in
person; always on the understanding that each should share in the spoils
proportionately to the size of his contingent. The Archbishop of
Tarragona, speaking for the clergy, said that now at last his eyes had
seen the salvation of the Lord. He could not serve; he was too old for
that; but his men and his money were the King's for this sacred
undertaking, and he would gladly give a dispensation to any bishop or
abbot who would go with the King; always provided that the clerical
Crusaders were to share in the booty on the same terms as the laymen. To
the same purpose, with the same stipulation, spoke the trading-cities.
The expedition was a brilliant success. Majorca was reduced by the
efforts of the whole expedition; Minorca capitulated without a struggle;
and the Archbishop of Tarragona, by special licence from the King,
conquered Ivica for himself. But the Moors were neither extirpated nor
converted. Those of Majorca became the tenants of the Crusaders between
whom that island was divided. Those of Minorca paid an annual tribute to
the King. In both islands they were guaranteed the use of their native
customs and religion. Surveying the Crusade many years after it was
completed, James expresses the highest satisfaction with the results.
From Minorca he receives not only the agreed tribute, but whatever else
he chooses to demand. As for Majorca, the Lord has so increased it that
it produces twice as much as in the days of Moorish rule.
We are now in a position to understand the complex nature of the motives
which animated the preachers, the generals, and the soldiers of the
Crusades; for these enterprises are a continuation on a greater scale of
the German, Spanish, and Norman wars of conquest.