tracts of land in England and to settle themselves there in
permanent homes. The Angles in the northern and eastern parts
and the Saxons in the southern part of England had weakened
themselves and one another by rivalry and war between their
divided kingdoms. There had been for three centuries an
unceasing struggle among them for supremacy. At the time of
the coming of the Danes (who were prominent in the English
invasion and gave their name to it), the West Saxon kings had
won a decided ascendancy. The Danes, by degrees, stripped them
of what they had gained. Northumberland, Mercia and East
Anglia were occupied in succession, and Wessex itself was
attacked. King Alfred, the great and admirable hero of early
English history, who came to the throne in 871, spent the
first eight years of his reign in a deadly struggle with the
invaders. He was obliged in the end to concede to them the
whole northeastern part of England, from the Thames to the
Tyne, which was known thereafter as "the Danelaw"; but they
became his vassals, and submitted to Christian baptism. A
century later, the Norse rovers resumed their attacks upon
England, and a cowardly English king, distrusting the now
settled and peaceful Danes, ordered an extensive massacre of
them (1002). The rage which this provoked in Denmark led to a
great invasion of the country. England was completely
conquered, and remained subject to the Danish kings until
1042, when its throne was recovered for a brief space of time
by the English line.
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The Normans in Normandy.
Meanwhile the Northmen had gained a much firmer and more
important footing in the territory of the Western
Franks--which had not yet acquired the name of France. The
Seine and its valley attracted them again and again, and after
repeated expeditions up the river, even to the city of Paris,
which they besieged several times, one of their chiefs, Rolf
or Rollo, got possession of Rouen and began a permanent
settlement in the country. The Frank King, Charles the Simple,
now made terms with Rollo and granted him a district at the
mouth of the Seine, (912), the latter acknowledging the
suzerainty or feudal superiority of Charles, and accepting at
the same time the doubly new character of a baptised Christian
and a Frankish Duke. The Northmen on the Seine were known
thenceforth as Normans, their dukedom as Normandy, and they
played a great part in European history during the next two
centuries.
The Northmen in the West.
The northern sea-rovers who had settled neither in Ireland,
England, nor Frankland, went farther afield into the West and
North and had wonderful adventures there. They took possession
of the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Hebrides, and other islands
in those seas, including Man, and founded a powerful
island-kingdom, which they held for a long period. Thence they
passed on to Faroë and Iceland, and in Iceland, where they
lived peaceful and quiet lives of necessity, they founded an
interesting republic, and developed a very remarkable
civilization, adorned by a literature which the world is
learning more and more to admire. From Iceland, it was a
natural step to the discovery of Greenland, and from
Greenland, there is now little doubt that they sailed
southwards and saw and touched the continent of America, five
centuries before Columbus made his voyage.
The Northmen in the East.
While the Northmen of the ninth and tenth centuries were
exciting and disturbing all Western Europe by their naval
exploits, other adventurers from the Swedish side of the
Scandinavian country were sallying eastwards under different
names. Both as warriors and as merchants, they made their way
from the Baltic to the Black Sea and the Bosphorus, and bands
of them entered the service of the Eastern Emperor, at
Constantinople, where they received the name of Varangians,
from the oath by which they bound themselves. One of the
Swedish chiefs, Rurik by name, was chosen by certain tribes of
the country now called Russia, to be their prince. Rurik's
capital was Novgorod, where he formed the nucleus of a kingdom
which grew, through many vicissitudes, into the modern empire
of Russia. His successors transferred their capital to Kief,
and ultimately it was shifted again to Moscow, where the
Muscovite princes acquired the title, the power, and the great
dominion of the Czars of all the Russias.
The Slavonic Race.
The Russian sovereigns were thus of Swedish origin; but their
subjects were of another race. They belonged to a branch of
the great Aryan stock, called the Slavic or Slavonic, which
was the last to become historically known. The Slavonians bore
no important part in events that we have knowledge of until
several centuries of the Christian era had passed. They were
the obscure inhabitants in that period of a wide region in
Eastern Europe, between the Vistula and the Caspian. In the
sixth century, pressed by the Avars, they crossed the Vistula,
moving westwards, along the Baltic; and, about the same time
they moved southwards, across the Danube, and established the
settlements which formed the existing Slavonic states in
South-eastern Europe--Servia, Croatia and their lesser
neighbors. But the principal seat of the Slavonic race within
historic times has always been in the region still occupied by
its principal representatives, the Russians and the Poles.
Mediæval Society.--The Feudal System.
We have now come to a period in European history--the middle
period of the Middle Ages--when it is appropriate to consider
the peculiar state of society which had resulted from the
transplanting of the Germanic nations of the North to the
provinces of the Roman Empire, and from placing the well
civilized surviving inhabitants of the latter in subjection to
and in association with masters so vigorous, so capable and so
barbarous. In Gaul, the conquerors, unused to town-life, not
attracted to town pursuits, and eager for the possession of
land, had generally spread themselves over the country and
left the cities more undisturbed, except as they pillaged them
or extorted ransom from them. The Roman-Gallic population of
the country had sought refuge, no doubt, to a large extent, in
the cities; the agricultural laborers were already, for the
most part, slaves or half-slaves--the coloni of the Roman
system--and remained in their servitude; while some of the
poorer class of freemen may have sunk to the same condition.
How far the new masters of the country had taken possession of
its land by actual seizure, ousting the former owners, and
under what rules, if any, it was divided among them, are
questions involved in great obscurity. In the time of
Charlemagne, there seems to have been a large number of small
landowners who cultivated their own holdings, which they
owned, not conditionally, but absolutely, by the tenure called
allodial. But alongside of these peasant proprietors there was
another landed class whose estates were held on very different
terms, and this latter class, at the time now spoken of, was
rapidly absorbing the former. It was a class which had not
existed before, neither among the Germans nor among the
Romans, and the system of land tenure on which it rested was
equally new to both, although both seem to have contributed
something to the origin of it. This was the Feudal System,
which may be described, in the words of Bishop Stubbs, as
being "a complete organization of society through the medium
of land tenure, in which, from the king down to the landowner,
all are bound together by obligation of service and defence:
the lord to protect his vassal, the vassal to do service to
his lord; the defence and service being based on, and
regulated by, the nature and extent of the land held by the
one of the other." Of course, the service exacted was, in the
main, military, and the system grew up as a military system,
expanding into a general governing system, during a time of
loose and ineffective administration. That it was a thing of
gradual growth is now fairly well settled, although little is
clearly known of the process of growth. It came to its
perfection in the tenth century, by which time most other
tenures of land had disappeared. The allodial tenure gave way
before it, because, in those disorderly times, men of small or
moderate property in land were in need of the protection which
a powerful lord, who had many retainers at his back, or a strong
monastery, could give, and were induced to surrender, to one
or the other, their free ownership of the land they held,
receiving it back as tenants, in order to establish the
relation which secured a protector.
{1020}
In its final organization, the feudal system, as stated
before, embraced the whole society of the kingdom.
Theoretically, the king was the pinnacle of the system. In the
political view of the time--so far as a political view
existed--he was the over-lord of the realm rather by reason of
being its ultimate land-lord, than by being the center of
authority and the guardian of law. The greater subordinate
lordships of the kingdom--the dukedoms and counties--were
held as huge estates, called fiefs, derived originally by
grant from the king, subject to the obligation of military
service, and to certain acts of homage, acknowledging the
dependent relationship. The greater feudatories, or vassals,
holding immediately from the king, were lords in their turn of
a second order of feudatories, who held lands under them; and
they again might divide their territories among vassals of a
third degree; for the process of sub-infeudation went on until
it reached the cultivator of the soil, who bore the whole
social structure of society on his bent back.
But the feudal system would have wrought few of the effects
which it did if it had involved nothing but land tenure and
military service. It became, however, as before intimated, a
system of government, and one which inevitably produced a
disintegration of society and a destruction of national bonds.
A grant of territory generally carried with it almost a grant
of sovereignty over the inhabitants of the territory, limited
only by certain rights and powers reserved to the king, which
he found extreme difficulty in exercising. The system was one
"in which every lord judged, taxed, and commanded the class
next below him, in which abject slavery formed the lowest and
irresponsible tyranny the highest grade, in which private war,
private coinage, private prisons, took the place of the
imperial institutions of government" (Stubbs). This was the
singular system which had its original and special growth
among the Franks, in the Middle Ages, and which spread from
them, under the generally similar conditions of the age, to
other countries, with various degrees of modification and
limitation. Its influence was obviously opposed to political
unity and social order, and to the development of institutions
favorable to the people.
But an opposing influence had kept life in one part of society
which feudalism was not able to envelope. That was in cities.
The cities, as before stated, had been the refuge of a large
and perhaps a better part of the Roman-Gallic free population
which survived the barbarian conquest. They, in conjunction
with the Church, preserved, without doubt, so much of the
plant of Roman civilization as escaped destruction. They
certainly suffered heavily, and languished for several
centuries; but a slow revival of industries and arts went on
in them,--trade crept again into its old channels, or found
new ones,--and wealth began to be accumulated anew. With the
consciousness of wealth came feelings of independence; and
such towns were now beginning to acquire the spirit which made
them, a little later, important instruments in the weakening
and breaking of the feudal system.
Rise of the Kingdom of France.
During the period between the death of Charlemagne and the
settlement of the Normans in the Carlovingian Empire, that
Empire had become permanently divided. The final separation
had taken place (887) between the kingdom of the East Franks,
or Germany, and the kingdom of the West Franks, which
presently became France. Between them stretched a region in
dispute called Lotharingia, out of which came the duchy of
Lorraine. The kingdom of Burgundy (sometimes cut into two) and
the kingdom of Italy, had regained a separate existence; and
the Empire which Charlemagne had revived was nothing but a
name. The last of the Carlovingian emperors was Arnulf, who
died in 899. The imperial title was borne afterwards by a
number of petty Italian potentates, but lost all imperial
significance for two-thirds of a century, until it was
restored to some grandeur again and to a lasting influence in
history, by another German king.
Before this occurred, the Carlovingian race of kings had
disappeared from both the Frank kingdoms. During the last
hundred years of their reign in the West kingdom, the throne
had been disputed with them two or three times by members of a
rising family, the Counts of Paris and Orleans, who were also
called Dukes of the French, and whose duchy gave its name to
the kingdom which they finally made their own. The kings of
the old race held their capital at Laon, with little power and
a small dominion, until 987, when the last one died. The then
Count of Paris and Duke of the French, Hugh, called Capet,
became king of the French, by election; Paris became the
capital of the kingdom, and the France of modern times had its
birth, though very far from its full growth.
The royal power had now declined to extreme weakness. The
development of feudalism had undermined all central authority,
and Hugh Capet as king had scarcely more power than he drew
from his own large fief. "At first he was by no means
acknowledged in the kingdom; but ... the chief vassals
ultimately gave at least a tacit consent to the usurpation,
and permitted the royal name to descend undisputed upon his
posterity. But this was almost the sole attribute of
sovereignty which the first kings of the third dynasty
enjoyed. For a long period before and after the accession of
that family France has, properly speaking, no national
history" (Hallam).
The Communes.
When the royal power began to gain ascendancy, it seems to
have been largely in consequence of a tacitly formed alliance
between the kings and the commons or burghers of the towns.
The latter, as noted before, were acquiring a spirit of
independence, born of increased prosperity, and were
converting their guilds or trades unions into crude forms of
municipal organization, as "communes" or commons. Sometimes by
purchase and sometimes by force, they were ridding themselves
of the feudal pretensions which neighboring lords held over
them, and were obtaining charters which defined and guaranteed
municipal freedom to them. One or two kings of the time
happened to be wise enough to give encouragement to this
movement towards the enfranchisement of the communes, and it
proved to have an important influence in weakening feudalism
and strengthening royalty.
[Image: Europe at the close of the 10th century.]
{1021}
Germany.
In the German kingdom, much the same processes of
disintegration had produced much the same results as in
France. The great fiefs into which it was divided--the duchies
of Saxony, Franconia, Swabia and Bavaria--were even more
powerful than the great fiefs of France. When the Carlovingian
dynasty came to an end, in 911, the nobles made choice of a
king, electing Conrad of Franconia, and, after him (919),
Henry the Fowler, Duke of Saxony. The monarchy continued
thereafter to be elective, actually as well as in theory, for
a long period. Three times the crown was kept in the same
family during several successive generations: in the House of
Saxony from 919 to 1024; in the House of Franconia from 1024
to 1137; in the House of the Hohenstaufens, of Swabia, from
1137 to 1254: but it never became an acknowledged heritage
until long after the Hapsburgs won possession of it; and even
to the end the forms of election were preserved.
The Holy Roman Empire.
The second king of the Saxon dynasty, Otho I., called the
Great, recovered the imperial title, which had become extinct
again in the West, added the crown of Lombardy to the crown of
Germany, and founded anew the Germanic Roman Empire, which
Charlemagne had failed to establish enduringly, but which now
became one of the conspicuous facts of European history for
more than eight hundred years, although seldom more than a
shadow and a name. But the shadow and the name were those of
the great Rome of antiquity, and the mighty memory it had left
in the world gave a superior dignity and rank to these German
emperors, even while it diminished their actual power as kings
of Germany. It conferred upon them, indeed, more than rank and
dignity; it bestowed an "office" which the ideas and feelings
of that age could not suffer to remain vacant. The Imperial
office seemed to be required, in matters temporal, to balance
and to be the complement of the Papal office in matters
spiritual. "In nature and compass the government of these two
potentates is the same, differing only in the sphere of its
working; and it matters not whether we call the Pope a
spiritual Emperor, or the Emperor a secular Pope." "Thus the
Holy Roman Church and the Holy Roman Empire are one and the
same thing, in two aspects; and Catholicism, the principle of
the universal Christian society, is also Romanism; that is,
rests upon Rome as the origin and type of its universality"
(Bryce). These mediæval ideas of the "Holy Roman Empire," as
it came to be called (not immediately, but after a time), gave
importance to the imperial coronation thenceforth claimed by
the German kings. It was a factitious importance, so far as
concerned the immediate realm of those kings. In Germany,
while it brought no increase to their material power, it
tended to alarm feudal jealousies; it tended to draw the kings
away from their natural identification with their own country; it
tended to distract them from an effective royal policy at
home, by foreign ambitions and aims; and altogether it
interfered seriously with the nationalization of Germany, and
gave a longer play to the disrupting influences of feudalism
in that country than in any other.
Italy, the Empire and the Papacy.
Otto I. had won Italy and the Imperial crown (962) very
easily. For more than half a century the peninsula had been in
a deplorable state. The elective Lombard crown, quarreled over
by the ducal houses of Friuli, Spoleto, Ivrea, Provence, and
others, settled nowhere with any sureness, and lost all
dignity and strength, though several of the petty kings who
wore it had been crowned emperors by the Pope. At Rome, all
legitimate government, civil or ecclesiastical, had
disappeared. The city and the Church had been for years under
the rule of a family of courtesans, who made popes of their
lovers and their sons. Southern Italy was being ravaged by the
Saracens, who occupied Sicily, and Northern Italy was
desolated by the Hungarians. Under these circumstances, Otto
I., the German king, listened to an appeal from an oppressed
queen, Adelaide, widow of a murdered king, and crossed, the
Alps (951), like a gallant knight, to her relief. He chastised
and humbled the oppressor, rescued the queen, and married her. A
few years later, on further provocation, he entered Italy
again, deposed the troublesome King Berengar, caused himself
to be crowned King of Italy, and received the imperial crown
at Rome (962) from one of the vilest of a vile brood of popes,
John XII. Soon afterwards, he was impelled to convoke a synod
which deposed this disgraceful pope and elected in his place
Leo VIII., who had been Otto's chief secretary. The citizens
now conceded to the Emperor an absolute veto on papal
elections, and the new pope confirmed their act. The German
sovereigns, from that time, for many years, asserted their
right to control the filling of the chair of St. Peter, and
exercised the right on many occasions, though always with
difficulty.
Nominally they were sovereigns of Rome and Italy; but during
their long absences from the country they scarcely made a show
of administrative government in it, and their visits were
generally of the nature of expeditions for a reconquest of the
land. Their claims of sovereignty were resisted more and more,
politically throughout Italy and ecclesiastically at Rome. The
Papacy emancipated itself from their control and acquired a
natural leadership of Italian opposition to German imperial
pretensions. The conflict between these two forces became, as
will be seen later on, one of the dominating facts of European
history for four centuries--from the eleventh to the
fourteenth.
{1022}
The Italian City-republics.
The disorder that had been scarcely checked in Italy since the
Goths came into it,--the practical extinction of central
authority after Charlemagne dropped his sceptre, and the
increasing conflicts of the nobles among themselves,--had one
consequence of remarkable importance in Italian history. It
opened opportunities to many cities in the northern parts of
the peninsula for acquiring municipal freedom, which they did
not lack spirit to improve. They led the movement and set the
example which created, a little later, so many vigorous
communes in Flanders and France, and imperial free cities in
Germany at a still later day. They were earlier in winning
their liberties, and they pushed them farther,--to the point
in many cases of creating, as at Pisa, Genoa, Florence, and
Venice, a republican city state. Venice, growing up in the
security of her lagoons, from a cluster of fishing villages to
a great city of palaces, had been independent from the
beginning, except as she acknowledged for a time the nominal
supremacy of the Eastern Emperor. Others won their way to
independence through struggles that are now obscure, and
developed, before these dark centuries reached their close, an
energy of life and a splendor of genius that come near to
comparison with the power and the genius of the Greeks. But,
like the city-republics of Greece, they were perpetually at
strife with one another, and sacrificed to their mutual
jealousies, in the end, the precious liberty which made them
great, and which they might, by a well settled union, have
preserved.
The Saxon line of Emperors.
Such were the conditions existing or taking shape in Italy
when the Empire of the West--the Holy Roman Empire of later
times--was founded anew by Otho the Great. Territorially, the
Empire as he left it covered Germany to its full extent, and
two-thirds of Italy, with the Emperor's superiority
acknowledged by the subject states of Burgundy, Bohemia,
Moravia, Poland, Denmark, and Hungary--the last named with
more dispute.
Otho the Great died in 972. His two immediate successors, Otho
II. (973-983) and Otho III. (983-1002) accomplished little,
though the latter had great ambitions, planning to raise Rome
to her old place as the capital of the world; but he died in
his youth in Italy, and was succeeded by a cousin, Henry II.,
whose election was contested by rivals in Germany, and
repudiated in Italy. In the latter country the great nobles
placed Ardoin, marquis of Ivrea, on the Lombard throne; but
the factions among them soon caused his overthrow, and, Henry,
crossing the Alps, reclaimed the crown.
The Franconian Emperors.