From Chiefs to Kings
The early chief a fighter.—The club the sign of power.—Free men
led by a chief of their own choosing.—The first
slaves.—Barbarians conquer civilized nations.—A ruling class
among conquered people.—All men no longer free and equal.—The
value of arms and armor.—The robber chiefs.—How kings first
came.—Treaties between tribes follow constant wars.—Tribes unite
for protection against enemies.—A king is chosen for the time
being.—Some kings refuse to resign their office when the danger
is past.—New generations grow up which never knew a kingless
state.—The word “king” becomes sacred.
The chiefs of the invading tribes knew no law except the rule of
the sword. If they saw anything which they wanted, they took it.
Rich cities were plundered at will. They did not admit any man’s
ownership of anything. In the old days when the tribes were
roaming around, there was no private ownership of land.
Everything belonged to the tribe in common. Each man had a vote
in the council of the tribe.
Among these invaders, as with all barbarous tribes, there was no
such thing as an absolute rule. A chief was obeyed because the
greater part of his people considered him the best leader in war.
Often, no doubt, when a chief had lost a battle and the majority
of the tribe had lost confidence in him, he resigned and let them
choose a new chief. (For the same reason we frequently hear today
that the prime minister, or leader of the government, of some
European country has resigned.) In spite of the fact, then, that
the chief was stronger than any other man in the tribe, if the
majority of his warriors had combined against him to put another
man in his place he could not have withstood them. Government, in
its beginning, was based upon the consent of the governed. All
men in the primitive tribe were equal in rank, except as one was
a better fighter than another, and the chief held the leadership
in war only because the members of his tribe allowed him to keep
it.
[Illustration: A Frankish Chief.]
It must be remembered that in these early days, the people had no
fixed place of abode. Their only homes were rude huts which they
could put up or tear down at very short notice; and so when they
heard of more fertile lands or a warmer climate across the
mountains to the south they used to pull up stakes and migrate in
a body, never to return. It was always the more savage and
uncivilized peoples who were most likely to migrate. The lands
which they wished to seize they generally found already settled
by other tribes, more civilized and hence more peaceful, occupied
in trade and agriculture, having gradually turned to these
pursuits from their former habits of hunting and fighting.
Sometimes these more civilized and peace-loving people were able,
by their better weapons and superior knowledge of the art of
fortifying, to beat back the invasion of the immigrating
barbarians. Oftener, though, the rougher, ruder tribes were the
victors, and settled down among the people they had conquered, to
rule them, doing no work themselves, but forcing the conquered
ones to feed and clothe them.
[Illustration: Movable Huts of Early Germans]
History is full of instances of such conquests, and they were
taking place, no doubt, ages before the times from which our
earliest records date. The best examples, however, are to be
found in the invasions of the Roman Empire by the Germanic tribes
to which we have referred above. The country between the Rhine
River and the Pyrenees Mountains, which had been called Gaul when
the Gauls lived there, became France when the Franks conquered
the Gauls and stayed to live among them. In like manner, two
German tribes became the master races in Spain. The Burgundians
came down from the shores of the Baltic Sea and gave their name
to their new home in the fertile valley of the Saône (Sōn); the
Vandals came out of Germany to roam through Spain, finally
founding a kingdom in Africa; while the Lombards crossed the Alps
to become the masters of the Valley of the Po, whither the Gauls
had gone before them, seven hundred years earlier.
[Illustration: Goths on the March]
[Illustration: Franks Crossing the Rhine]
The island now known as Great Britain, which was inhabited two
thousand years ago by the Britons and Gaels, Celtic peoples, was
overrun and conquered in part about 450 A.D. by the Saxons and
Angles, Germanic tribes, after whom part of the island was called
Angleland. (The men from the south of England are of the same
blood as the Saxons in the German army, against whom they had to
fight in the great war.) Then came Danes, who partially conquered
the Angles and Saxons, and after them, in 1066 A.D., the country
was again conquered by the Normans, descendants of some Norsemen,
who, one hundred and fifty years before, had come down from
Norway and conquered a large territory in the northwestern part
of France.
[Illustration: Men of Normandy Landing in England.]
In some cases, the conquered tribes moved on to other lands,
leaving their former homes to their conquerors. In this way the
Britons and Gaels gave up the greater part of their land to the
Angles and Saxons and withdrew to the hills and mountains of
Wales, Cornwall, and northern Scotland. In other cases, the
conquered people and their conquerors inhabited the same lands
side by side, as the Normans settled down in England among the
Anglo-Saxons.
In the early days of savagery, one tribe would frequently make a
raid upon another neighboring tribe and bring home with it some
captives who became slaves, working without pay for their
conquerors and possessing no more rights than beasts of burden.
(This custom exists today in the interior of Africa, and was
responsible for the infamous African slave trade. Black captives
were sold to white traders through the greed of their captors,
who forgot that their own relatives and friends might be carried
off and sold across the seas by some other tribe of blacks.)
When these slaves were kept as the servants of their conquerors,
their number was very small as compared with that of their
masters. When, on the other hand, a tribe settled among a people
whom they had conquered, they often found themselves fewer in
numbers, and kept their leadership only by their greater strength
and fighting ability.
Here there had arisen a new situation: all men were no longer
equal, led by a chief of their own choosing, but instead, the
greater part of them now had no voice in the government. They had
become subjects, working to earn their own living and also, as
has been said, to support in idleness their conquerors.
This ability of the few to rule the many and force them to
support their masters was increased as certain peoples learned
better than others how to make strong armor and effective
weapons. Nearly five hundred years before the time of Christ, at
the battle of Marathon (Măr′ȧ thŏn), the Greeks discovered
that one Greek, clad in metal armor and armed with a long spear,
was worth ten Persians wearing leather and carrying a bow and
arrows or a short sword. One hundred and sixty years later, a
small army of well-equipped Macedonian Greeks, led by that
wonderful general, Alexander the Great, defeated nearly forty
times its number of Persians in a great battle in Asia and
conquered a vast empire.
[Illustration: Alexander Defeating the Persians]
In later times, as better and better armor was made, the question
of wealth entered in. The chief who had money enough to buy the
best arms for his men could defeat his poorer neighbor and force
him to pay money as to a ruler. Finally, in the so-called “Middle
Ages,” before the invention of gunpowder, one knight, armed from
crown to sole in steel, was worth in battle as much as one
hundred poorly-armed farmers or “peasants” as they are called in
Europe.
In the “Dark Ages,”[2] after all these barbarians that we have named
had swarmed over Europe, and before the governments of modern times
were fully grown, there were hundreds of robber chiefs, who, scattered
throughout a country, were in the habit of collecting tribute at the
point of the sword from the peaceful peasants who lived near. This
tribute they collected in some cases, regularly, a fixed amount each
month or year, just as if they had a right to collect it, like a
government tax collector. It might be money or food or fodder, or fuel.
The robber chiefs were well armed themselves and were able to give good
weapons and armor to their men, who lived either in the chief’s castle
or in small houses built very near it. They likewise plundered any
travelers who came by, unless their numbers and weapons made them look
too dangerous to be attacked. But the regular tribute forced from the
peaceful farmers was the chief source of their income. The robber chief
and his men lived a life of idleness when they were not out upon some
raid for plunder, and the honest, industrious peasants worked hard
enough to support both their own families and those of the robbers.
[2] The “Dark Ages” came before the “Middle Ages.” They were called
“dark” because the barbarians had extinguished nearly all civilization
and learning.
[Illustration: A Knight in Armor]
These robber chiefs had no right but might. They were outlaws,
and lived either in a country which had no government and laws,
or in one whose government was too weak to protect its people.
They were no worse, however, than the so-called feudal barons who
came after them, who oppressed the people even more, because they
had on their side whatever law and government existed in those
days.
Now let us stop to consider how first there came to be kings. In
the early days of the human race and also in later days among
barbarous peoples, the land was very sparsely settled. The reason
lay in the chief occupations of the men. A small tribe might
inhabit a great stretch of territory through which they wandered
to keep within reach of plenty of game. As time went on, however,
the population increased, and, as agriculture took the place of
hunting, and homes became more lasting, tribes found themselves
living in smaller and smaller tracts of land, and hence nearer to
their neighbors. In some cases, constant fighting went on, just
as Caesar tells us that two thousand years ago, the Swiss and the
Germans fought almost daily battles back and forth across the
Rhine. In other cases, the tribes found it better for all
concerned to make treaties of peace with their neighbors, and if
they did not exchange visits and mix on friendly terms, at least
they did not attack each other.
Finally, one day there would come to several tribes which had
treaties with each other a common danger, such as an invasion by
some horde of another race or nation. Common interest would drive
them together for mutual protection, and the chief of some one of
them would be chosen to lead their joint army. In this way, we
find the fifteen tribes of the Belgians uniting against the Roman
army led by Julius Caesar, and electing as king over them the
chief of one of the tribes “on account of his justice and
wisdom.” Five years later, in the year 52 B.C., we find
practically all the inhabitants of what is now France united into
a nation under the leadership of Vercingetorix (Vẽr sin jet′ō
riks) in one last effort to free themselves from Rome. Five
hundred years later, the Romans themselves were driven to join
forces with two of the Germanic tribes to check the swift
invasion of the terrible Huns.
In some cases, these alliances were only for a short time and the
kingships were merely temporary. In other cases, the wars that
drove the tribes to unite under one great chief or king lasted
for years or even centuries, so that new generations grew up who
had never lived under any other government than that of a king.
Thus when the wars were ended, the tribes continued to be ruled
by the one man, although the reason for the kingship had ceased
to be. In the days of the Roman republic, from 500 to 100 B.C.,
when grave danger arose, the senate, or council of elders,
appointed one man who was called the dictator, and this dictator
ruled like an absolute monarch until the danger was past. Then,
like the famous Cincinnatus, he gave up the position and retired
to private life. The first lasting kingships, then, began, as it
were, by the refusal of some dictator to resign when the need for
his rule was ended.
By this time, the custom of choosing the son of a chief or king
to take his father’s place was fairly well settled, and it did
not take long to have it understood as a regular thing that at a
king’s death he should be followed by his oldest son. Often there
were quarrels and even civil wars caused by ambitious younger
sons, who did not submit to their elder brothers without a
struggle, but as people grew to be more civilized and
peace-loving, they found it better to have the oldest son looked
upon as the rightful heir to the kingship.
As kingdoms grew larger, and more and more people came to be
busied in agriculture, trade, and even, on a small scale, in
manufacture, the warriors grew fewer in proportion, and people
began to forget that the king was originally only a war leader,
and that the office was created through military need. They came
to regard the rule of the king as a matter of course and stopped
thinking of themselves as having any right to say how they should
be governed. Kings were quick to foster this feeling. For the
purpose of making their own positions sure, they were in the
habit of impressing it upon their people that the kingship was a
divine institution. They proclaimed that the office of king was
made by the gods, or in Christian nations, by God, and that it
was the divine will that the people of the nations should be
ruled by kings. The great Roman orator, Cicero (Sĭs′erō), in a
speech delivered in the year 66 B.C., referring to people who
lived in kingdoms, says that the name of king “seems to them a
great and sacred thing.” This same feeling has lasted through all
the ages down to the present time, and the majority of the people
in European kingdoms, even among the educated classes, still look
upon a king as a superior being, and are made happy and proud if
they ever have a chance to do him a service of any sort.
Questions for Review
Why was it that in barbarian tribes there was no private
ownership of land?
What is meant by saying that government was based upon the
consent of the governed?
Was there anything besides love of plunder that induced the
German tribes to move southward?
Explain the beginnings of slavery.
Explain the value of armor in early times.
What is meant by the “Dark Ages”?
What is meant by saying that the fighting men were parasites?
When the first kings were chosen was it intended that they
should be rulers for life?
Is it easy for a man in power to retain this power?
Why is it that most Europeans bow low before a king?