Mohammedan advance; the signal for the First Crusade was given by the
successes of the Seljuk Turks under Alp Arslan and Malik Shah
(1071-1092). These uncivilised and fanatical usurpers of the caliphate
of Bagdad overran the whole of Asia Minor and of Syria in twenty years;
they dealt a heavy blow to the Eastern Empire on the field of Manzikert
(1071), and founded in Asia Minor the sultanate of Roum; they
established smaller principalities in Syria. The rulers of
Constantinople sent urgent appeals for help to the West; and pilgrims
returning from the Holy Places complained loudly of the insults and
persecutions by which the conquerors manifested their hostility to the
Christian faith. Gregory VII, immediately after his election, was moved
to plan an expedition for the defence of the Eastern Empire, which he
justly regarded as the bulwark of Europe against Islam. He issued a
general appeal to the princes of Europe for help and personal service;
he even proposed to accompany the relieving force. But Gregory, though
not without imagination, lacked the power of firing popular enthusiasm,
and aroused mistrust by the admission that he intended using the Crusade
in the first instance against the Normans of Lower Italy. Few volunteers
were forthcoming, and his own energies were diverted to another channel
by the outbreak of the War of Investitures. It was left for Urban II to
revive Gregory's project, in another and more popular form, at a moment
when Henry IV seemed a beaten and a broken man, and the unity of the
Seljuk power had been shattered by the death of Malik Shah. In reality
the danger from the Turks was then a thing of the past; but, even if
Urban was correctly informed of their weakness, it needed little
knowledge of history to warn him that one aggressive movement of Islam
only died away to be succeeded by another. Like Gregory, he desired to
strengthen the Eastern Empire; but his plan was new--to found a Latin
state in Palestine for the defence of Jerusalem and the south-east
Mediterranean. As with the First Crusade, so with the Second and the
Third; each was a response to new victories of Mohammedan princes. The
Second Crusade (1147) was proclaimed in consequence of the fall of
Edessa, the north-east outpost of the Latin Kingdom. The Third (1189)
was designed to recover Jerusalem and to cripple the sultanate of Egypt,
which, under Saladin, seemed on the eve of absorbing not only Syria, but
also Asia Minor and the Euphrates valley. The signal failure of an
expedition for which armies were raised by the Emperor, the Kings of
France and England, and many lesser princes, left the power of Egypt an
object of almost superstitious awe. The Fifth Crusade (1217) and the
Seventh (1248) expended their best energies in fruitless and disastrous
descents on the Nile Delta.
To this view of the Crusades, as a business of high political
importance, the best of the laymen who led the Christian armies were
sincerely attached. Many others, equally sincere but governed more by
sentiment than reason, were moved by the desire to see the Holy Places
and secure them as the common property of Christendom. But the most
pertinacious and successful of the commanders went eastward, as their
kinsmen went across the Elbe or the Alps or the Pyrenees, to carve out
for themselves new principalities at the expense of Byzantine or
Saracen, it did not matter which. Naturally the sovereign princes who
took the Cross do not fall into this category. For them an expedition
might be either an adventure, or the grudging fulfilment of a penance,
or a bid for the esteem of their subjects; but it was often a conscious
sacrifice of self-interest and national interests to a higher duty.
However low their motives, it would not have paid them to turn aside
from the task enjoined upon them by European opinion. Even Frederic II,
the least Christian of Crusaders, who only accomplished his vow to put
the Pope his adversary in the wrong, fulfilled his undertaking to the
letter before he ventured to return. But a Crusade controlled by men of
lower rank tended to be a joint-stock company of freebooters. For every
Crusade the Pope was, to a certain point, responsible. He issued the
appeal, he tuned the pulpits; he invited contributions from the laity
and exacted them from the national churches; he provided for the
enforcement by ecclesiastical censures of all Crusading vows. In the
choice of leaders, and in the preliminary councils of war, he had a
claim to be consulted. One or more of his legates normally accompanied
the armies. But, if the generals chose to ignore his suggestions and to
override his representatives, after the march had once begun he was
powerless. Usually, it is true, his views would appeal to the rank and
file, exempt as they were from the temptations presented to their
leaders. But the Common soldiers could only leave the host if they had
the means of paying for themselves the expenses of the homeward journey.
Often they protested against the uses to which their arms were put; but
very seldom were they able to enforce a change of policy.
[Illustration: The Crusaders]
These general statements may be illustrated from the First and Fourth
Crusades.
Godfrey of Bouillon and his fellow-leaders, when they passed through
Constantinople (1097), did homage to the Emperor Alexius for any lands
that they might conquer. The transaction may not have been voluntary;
this homage was the price demanded for a safe-conduct through the Greek
dominions. But later events proved that the chief Crusaders were
resolved not to hold their conquests as fiefs from the Holy See, for
which they were nominally fighting. As they drew near to the Holy Land,
it became clear that the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre was a subordinate
consideration with them. At Tarsus and at Antioch there were fierce
disputes between rival claimants to the conquered territories. Baldwin
separated from the main army to found a seignory for himself at Edessa.
Bohemund remained behind, when Antioch was once assigned to him, for
fear that any rival should rob him of his prize. Raymond of Toulouse
turned aside to reduce Tripoli, and was with the greatest difficulty
constrained to continue the march. The final result of a war in which
the loss of men must be reckoned by tens of thousands was the
establishment of the four states of Jerusalem, Edessa, Antioch, and
Tripoli. To extend the boundaries of these colonies, and to consolidate
them under the suzerainty of the Crown of Jerusalem, was the work of
their rulers for the next eighty years. These princes were esteemed as
champions of the Cross; to assist them in the defence of their
territories the military orders of the Temple and the Hospital were
founded under the sanction of the Church; apart from the great relieving
expeditions, such as those of 1101 and 1147 and 1189, annual fleets of
soldier-pilgrims arrived to take part in the operations of the year. But
there is little to show that either the Kings of Jerusalem or their
great vassals ever justified their position by pursuing an unselfish
policy. That the dominions which they ruled were imperfectly colonised
cannot be made a reproach against them; only for knights and merchants
had the Holy Land any attractions. But the inevitable weakness of the
Frankish states was aggravated by their feuds and reciprocal ill-faith.
More than a hundred years elapsed before another expedition of this kind
started for the East. The Second Crusade, inspired by St. Bernard acting
as the half-reluctant spokesman of the Holy See, was ill-organised,
ill-directed, and so disastrous a failure that it was followed by a
perceptible reaction against the idealistic policy of which it was the
outcome. It revealed to Europe the inefficiency of forces raised with
more regard to the pious motives than to the efficiency of the recruits,
and laid bare the calculating selfishness of the Latin principalities.
But the principal leaders, Louis VII of France and the Emperor Conrad
II, could not be charged with insincerity. They made gross mistakes, but
were faithful to the purpose with which they set out. Similarly in the
Third Crusade, though part of the failure can be directly attributed to
the national jealousies of the various contingents, and to the quarrels
of Richard I with the more important of his colleagues, the recovery of
Jerusalem remained from first to last the dominants object of the army.
There were cases of petulance, of unnecessary meddling in the squalid
disputes of the Latin settlers, of readiness to depart on the first
honourable excuse. But there was no disposition to make the pilgrimage a
commercial undertaking. It was otherwise in 1203 when the soldiers of
the Fourth Crusade set out from Venice, leaving behind them the papal
legate and openly defying the injunctions of Innocent III, whose appeal
to Christendom was nominally the warrant for their venture.
No kings sailed with them; from the first the movement had been in the
hands of turbulent feudatories, inspired by chivalry rather than
religion. Their leader, Boniface of Montferrat, the patron of all the
troubadours and knights-errant of the South, was a sworn friend of the
Pope's worst enemy, Philip of Suabia, the brother and successor of the
Emperor Henry VI. Boniface had been elected to the command without the
sanction of the Pope; and from an early date was in league with Philip
to turn the Crusade against Constantinople. This plan was for a time
concealed from the army, in which a majority of the common soldiers were
bent upon recovering the Holy Sepulchre. But the nobles, with whom lay
the last word, were ready for whatever adventure the course of events
might suggest. Their original hope was to conquer Egypt,--an infinitely
more tempting prey than Palestine, where the chief fruits of any success
would be claimed by the remnants of the standing garrison. To obtain
ships from Venice they undertook on her behalf the siege of Zara; their
first feat of arms was the conquest of a Christian city, the only
offence of which was that it disputed the Venetian supremacy in the
Adriatic. At Zara they were invited by Philip's envoys to attack
Constantinople, to overthrow the Emperor Alexius III, and to substitute
for him another Alexius, son of the deposed Isaac Angelus and
brother-in-law to Philip. The proposal received enthusiastic support
from the Venetians, whose great commercial interests in the Greek
capital had been often assailed by the fanaticism of the city-populace.
The Venetians held the key of the situation, since, if they withdrew
their transports, the army could neither go forward nor return in
safety; and the nobles, who needed little persuasion, were able to
convince the more earnest pilgrims that Philip's offer must of necessity
be accepted, though Alexius III was on friendly terms with the Pope and
had been expected to assist the Crusade. To palliate the flagrant
treachery a promise was exacted from the pretender that, when installed
as Emperor, he would help in the conquest of Egypt with men, money, and
supplies.
On July 17th, 1203, the army entered Constantinople, after a short
siege. Alexius III escaped by flight and Alexius IV was installed in his
place. Still the Crusaders lingered in a city the outward splendour of
which appealed irresistibly to their imagination and their avarice. The
winter, they said, was approaching, and their candidate far from secure
upon the throne; they would wait for the spring. Before that date, and
in spite of their countenance, he had fallen before a nationalist
rebellion (January 1204); and the army hailed the opportunity of
reuniting the Greek Church to Rome and partitioning the Greek Empire
among themselves. An agreement was made with the indispensable Venetians
for the election of a Latin Emperor, to be endowed with one-fourth of
the provinces; the booty of Constantinople and the remaining lands of
the Empire were to be divided equally between the Venetians and the
remaining leaders. For the second time Constantinople was carried by
storm; a fire destroyed a large part of the city; and the Crusaders
completed the devastation by three days of indiscriminate plunder and
massacre. Neither the treasures of the churches nor the priceless
monuments and statues of the public places were spared. The sum-total of
the booty was thought to be equal to all the wealth of Western Europe;
but when it came to the official division all that the knights obtained
was twenty marks apiece; ten were the portion of a priest, and five of a
foot-soldier. The other articles of the treaty, which had been referred
for form's sake to the Pope, were executed without awaiting his reply.
The Venetian candidate, Count Baldwin of Flanders, was elected to the
Empire and received the Asiatic provinces. Boniface of Montferrat
obtained, as a solatium, the kingdom of Thessalonica, embracing roughly
the modern provinces of Thessaly and Macedonia; his followers were
allowed to establish themselves by degrees in Central Greece and the
Morea. The Venetians took the islands of the Ionian Sea, the Cyclades,
and Aegina and Negropont; the provinces of Albania, Acarnania, and
Aetolia; the city of Adrianople with the adjacent territories, and other
possessions of less note.
The Pope, compelled to recognise accomplished facts, merely demanded
three concessions: that the Latin faith should be established as the
official religion of the Empire; that the possessions of the Greek
Church should be handed over to the Latin clergy; and that the Crusaders
should continue their pilgrimage at the end of a year. Only the first of
these points was conceded. The Crusade of Innocent III ended, like that
of Urban II, in the creation of a string of feudal states and commercial
factories. But in 1204 there was hardly the attempt to justify what had
been done in the name of religion. The Venetians behaved from first to
last as commercial buccaneers; a fickle and frivolous ambition, rather
than calculating villainy, characterised their highborn associates.
Plainly, these were the only materials available for a Crusade; the
collapse of the Crusading policy was near at hand.
A few romantic careers illuminate the monotonously sordid annals of the
Latin Empire, threatened from within by the feuds of the rival baronial
houses, from without by the Bulgarians, the Greek despots of Epirus, and
the Greek Emperors of Nicaea. Henry of Flanders, the second Latin
Emperor (1205-1216), the one constructive statesman produced by the
Crusade; William of Champlitte, who overran the Morea with but a hundred
knights, was hailed by the oppressed Greeks as a liberator, and founded
the Principality of Achaea (1205-1209) only to lose it through the
treachery of a lieutenant; Niccolo Acciajuoli (+1365), the Florentine
banker, who rose to be Lord of Corinth, Count of Malta, and
administrator of Achaea--these were men who on a greater stage might
have achieved durable renown. But the subject Greeks were not to be
Latinised by a handful of energetic seigneurs and merchants; one by one,
as opportunities occurred, the provinces of the Latin Empire deserted to
the allegiance of Nicaea. Adrianople and Thessalonica were lost in 1222,
the Asiatic territories by 1228; in 1261 Michael Palaeologus recovered
Constantinople, which was to remain the possession of his family until
the capture by the Turks (1453). In Greece and the islands the colonists
maintained a foothold long after the fall of the Latin Empire. But the
last of the Frankish Dukes of Athens fell, with all his chivalry,
fighting against the Catalan Company (1311), a horde of freebooters
half-Christian and half-Turkish in its composition. Achaea, after years
of ignominious subjection to the Angevins of Naples, was similarly
conquered by the Company of Navarre (1380). In a maimed condition the
two states survived these calamities; but the Greeks and the Venetians
were enabled to absorb the richest parts of the peninsula; the last
traces of Frankish blood and institutions were swept away by the Turkish
conquerors of the fifteenth century. Before these grim invaders the
Venetians and the Knights of St. John, the last representatives of
Western power, slowly evacuated the Eastern Mediterranean.
The story of this brilliant and ephemeral episode in the expansion of
Europe is closed by the Venetian peace of 1479 with the Sultan, and by
the fall of Rhodes, the stronghold of the Knights, before the Turkish
arms (1522). But in Malta, down to the commencement of the ninteenth
century, might be seen the strange and scandalous spectacle of a
Crusading Order, emancipated from the old vows and obligations, yet
still allowed to exercise a medieval tyranny in memory of the services
which their remote predecessors had rendered to the Cross. The other
Orders had vanished, not less ignominiously, at earlier dates. The
Templars, who had evacuated Syria to live on their European estates and
ply the trade of bankers, were proscribed on charges of heresy, by Pope
Clement V (1312), to gratify the brutal greed of a French king. The
Teutonic Knights, better counselled by their Grand Master, Hermann of
Salza (1210-1239), looked about for a new field of conquest; they found
it on the lower Vistula, where they settled with the countenance of the
Pope, the Emperor, and the King of Poland to reduce the heathen Slavs.
But, embroiled with their Polish protector by their territorial
ambitions, they were reduced, after 1466, to narrow boundaries in East
Prussia; and hardly a voice was raised in their favour when the last
Grand Master, a Hohenzollern by birth, became a Protestant and
bequeathed the lands of the Order to his own family (1525).
From the adventures of the Frankish colonists we turn with relief to
notice the last expiring flashes of enthusiasm in the armies equipped
for their relief. The Germans and Hungarians of the Fifth Crusade (1217)
showed more sincerity than worldly wisdom in delegating the chief
command to a papal legate, and in following to the bitter end his
reckless plan of campaign. Inspired with the hope of expelling Islam
from the Eastern Mediterranean, they would neither be content with
Damietta, which they conquered, nor with the Holy Land, which was
offered in exchange by the Sultan of Egypt. They would have all or
nothing, and they lost even Damietta in the end. Their discomfiture by
the Nile floods, which they had forgotten to take into their reckoning,
was a tragi-comic ending to a campaign in which greed and discord had
been expiated by extraordinary daring. St. Louis, in his Crusades of
1248 and 1270, flew in the face of common prudence and was thought a
pious fool, even by the barons who were too loyal to disobey his call.
But it is such follies that make history something better than a Newgate
Calendar of the crimes of common sense. He was no general; his attack on
Egypt was foredoomed to failure, and was made more disastrous by neglect
of ordinary precautions; that on Tunis, undertaken in the heat of an
African summer, ended, as might have been expected, in his own death and
the decimation of his followers by disease. Even as an example these
expeditions were all but fruitless. Yet, when the worst has been said of
the Crusades and those who led them, there are moments in the quixotic
career of St. Louis which haunt the fancy and compel our admiration: his
bearing when, a captive of the Egyptian Sultan, he refused, even under
threats of torture, to barter a single Christian fortress for his
freedom; his lonely watch in Palestine, when for three years he
patiently awaited the reinforcements that were never sent; his
death-bed, when he prayed for strength to despise good fortune and not
to fear adversity. Ideals may fade, but the memories of those who
realise them are the world's abiding possession.
If we ask what results of a more tangible sort remained from the
Crusades, when the service of the Holy Sepulchre had become a legend,
and the name of Crusade a byeword for whatever enterprises are most
impractical and visionary, the answer must be, that they affected Europe
chiefly in a negative sense and through indirect channels. They helped
to discredit the conception of the Church militant; they relieved Europe
of a surplus population of feudal adventurers; and they accelerated the
impoverishment of those other feudal families which took an occasional
part in the Holy War. It has never been proved that they led to
wholesale emancipation of serfs, or wholesale enfranchisement of towns;
though it is true that all such expeditions meant an increased demand
for ready money. To Western civilisation they contributed very little,
the truth being that there was little to be learned from the Mohammedans
in Syria. It is through Palermo and Toledo, where Christianity and Islam
met and mixed in peaceful intercourse, that the knowledge of Arab
science and philosophy filtered into Europe. The Fourth Crusade was an
exception to the general rule; it is no accident that Venetian art and
architecture developed rapidly when the republic was brought into close
and friendly relations with Constantinople. Through these relations, and
through studying the masterpieces brought home by the Crusaders,
Venetian artists recovered the antique feeling for pure form, and
founded a school which was classical in spirit, Christian only in
external and unessential features. The learning and literature which the
Eastern Empire inherited from Rome and Athens had no attraction for
Venetian merchant princes. But north of the Alps, and especially at
Paris, the thirteenth century saw an increasing interest in the Greek
language, and in Greek books, so far as they were useful to theologians
or scholastic disputants. Politically the Fourth Crusade is memorable
for its effect upon the Italian balance of power. It gave Venice an
advantage over her commercial rivals, Pisa and Genoa, which she never
lost; it gave her also a unique position as an intermediary between East
and West; and it placed her at the head of an empire comparable to those
of Athens and of Carthage, the great sea-powers of antiquity. But the
nation-states of Northern Europe, who had borne the burden and heat of
the Crusades, were less affected by them, politically or otherwise, than
were the city-states of Italy.
IX
THE FREE TOWNS
Scattered broadcast over the territory of every medieval state are towns
endowed with special privileges, and ruled by special magistrates. Some
of these towns--particularly in Italy, Southern France, and the
Rhineland--stand on the sites, and even within the walls, of ancient
_municipia_, those miniature Homes which the statecraft of the
Empire had created as seats of government and schools of culture. But,
even in Italy, the medieval town is indebted to classical antiquity for
nothing more than mouldering walls and aqueducts and amphitheatres and
churches. The barbarians had ignored the institutions of the
_municipium_, though it often served them as a fortress or a royal
residence or a centre of administration. The citizens were degraded to
the level of serfs; they became the property of a king, a bishop, or a
count, and were governed by a bailiff presiding over a seignorial court.
Only at the close of the Dark Ages, with the development of handicrafts
and a commercial class, was it found necessary to distinguish between
the town and the manorial village; and to a much later time the small
town preserved the characteristics of an agricultural society. Many a
burgess supplemented the profits of a trade by tilling acres in the
common fields and grazing cattle on the common pastures; pigs and
poultry scavenged in the streets; the farmyard was a usual adjunct of
the burgage tenement. Whether small or great, the town was a phenomenon
sufficiently unfamiliar to vex the soul of lawyers reared upon Teutonic
custom. They recognised that they were dealing with a new form of
community; but they were not prepared to define it or to generalise
about it. They preferred to treat each town as _sui generis_, an
awkward anomaly, a privileged abuse.