in 1024, the House of Franconia came to the throne, by the
election of Conrad II., called "the Salic." Under Conrad, the
kingdom of Burgundy, afterwards called the kingdom of Arles
(which is to be distinguished from the French Duchy of
Burgundy--the northwestern part of the old kingdom), was
reunited to the Empire, by the bequest of its last king,
Rudolph III. Conrad's son, grandson, and great grandson
succeeded him in due order; Henry III. from 1039 to 1056;
Henry IV. from 1056 to 1106; Henry V. from 1106 to 1125. Under
Henry III. the Empire was at the summit of its power. Henry
II., exercising the imperial prerogative, had raised the Duke
of Hungary to royal rank, giving him the title of king. Henry
III. now forced the Hungarian king to acknowledge the imperial
supremacy and pay tribute. The German kingdom was ruled with a
strong hand and peace among its members compelled. "In Rome,
no German sovereign had ever been so absolute. A disgraceful
contest between three claimants of the papal chair had shocked
even the reckless apathy of Italy. Henry deposed them all and
appointed their successor." "The synod passed a decree
granting to Henry the right of nominating the supreme pontiff;
and the Roman priesthood, who had forfeited the respect of the
world even more by habitual simony than by the flagrant
corruption of their manners, were forced to receive German
after German as their bishop, at the bidding of a ruler so
powerful, so severe, and so pious. But Henry's encroachments
alarmed his own nobles no less than the Italians, and the
reaction, which might have been dangerous to himself, was
fatal to his successor. A mere chance, as some might call it,
determined the course of history. The great Emperor died
suddenly in A. D. 1056, and a child was left at the helm,
while storms were gathering that might have demanded the
wisest hand" (Bryce).
Hildebrand and Henry IV.
The child was Henry IV., of unfortunate memory; the storms
which beset him blew from Rome. The Papacy, lifted from its
degradation by Henry's father and grandfather, had recovered
its boldness of tone and enlarged its pretensions and claims.
It had come under the influence of an extraordinary man, the
monk Hildebrand, who swayed the councils of four popes before
he became pope himself (1073), and whose pontifical reign as
Gregory VII. is the epoch of greatest importance in the
history of the Roman Church. The overmastering ascendancy of
the popes, in the Church and over all who acknowledge its
communion, really began when this invincible monk was raised
to the papal throne. He broke the priesthood and the whole
hierarchy of the West to blind obedience by his relentless
discipline. He isolated them, as an order apart, by enforcing
celibacy upon them; and he extinguished the corrupting
practices of simony. Then, when he had marshalled the forces
of the Church, he proclaimed its independence and its
supremacy in absolute terms. In the growth of feudalism
throughout Europe, the Church had become compromised in many
ways with the civil powers. Its bishoprics and abbeys had
acquired extensively the nature of fiefs, and bishops and
abbots were required to do homage to a secular lord before
they could receive an "investiture" of the rich estates which
had become attached by a feudal tenure to their sees. The
ceremony of investiture, moreover, included delivery of the
crozier and the pastoral ring, which were the very symbols of
their spiritual office. Against this dependence of the Church
upon temporal powers, Gregory now arrayed it in revolt, and
began the "War of Investitures," which lasted for half a
century. The great battle ground was Germany; the Emperor, of
necessity, was the chief opponent; and Henry IV., whose youth
had been badly trained, and whose authority had been weakened
by a long, ill-guardianed minority, was at a disadvantage in
the contest. His humiliation at Canossa (1077), when he stood
through three winter days, a suppliant before the door of the
castle which lodged his haughty enemy, praying to be released
from the dread penalties of excommunication, is one of the
familiar tableaux of history. He had a poor revenge seven
years later, when he took Rome, drove Gregory into the castle
St. Angelo, and seated an anti-pope in the Vatican. But his
triumph was brief. There came to the rescue of the
beleaguered Pope certain new actors in Italian history, whom
it is now necessary to introduce.
{1023}
The Normans in Italy and Sicily.
The settlement of predatory Northmen on the Seine, which took
the name of Normandy and the constitution of a ducal fief of
France, had long since grown into an important
half-independent state. Its people--now called Normans in the
smoother speech of the South--had lost something of their
early rudeness, and had fallen a little under the spell of the
rising chivalry of the age; but the goad of a warlike temper
which drove their fathers out of Norway still pricked the sons
and sent them abroad, in restless search of adventures and
gain. Some found their way into the south of Italy, where
Greeks, Lombards and Saracens were fighting merrily, and where
a good sword and a tough lance were tools of the only industry
well-paid. Presently there was banded among them there a
little army, which found itself a match for any force that
Greek or Lombard, or other opponent, could bring against it,
and which proceeded accordingly to work its own will in the
land. It seized Apulia (1042) and divided it into twelve
countships, as an aristocratic republic. Pope Leo IX. led an
army against it and was beaten and taken prisoner (1053). To
release himself he was compelled to grant the duchy they had
taken to them, as a fief of the Church, and to extend his
grant to whatever they might succeed in taking, beyond it. The
chiefs of the Normans thus far had been, in succession, three
sons of a poor gentleman in the Cotentin, Tancred by name, who
now sent a fourth son to the scene. This new comer was Robert,
having the surname of Guiscard, who became the fourth leader
of the Norman troop (1057), and who, in a few years, assumed
the title of Duke of Calabria and Apulia. His duchies
comprised, substantially, the territory of the later kingdom
of Naples. A fifth brother, Roger, had meantime crossed to
Sicily, with a small following of his countrymen; and, between
1060 and 1090, had expelled the Saracens from that island, and
possessed it as a fief of his brother's duchy. But in the next
generation these relations between the two conquests were
practically reversed. The son of Roger received the title of
King of Sicily from the Pope, and Calabria and Apulia were
annexed to his kingdom, through the extinction of Robert's
family.
These Normans of Southern Italy were the allies who came to
the rescue of Pope Gregory, when the Emperor, Henry IV.,
besieged him in Castle St. Angelo. He summoned Robert Guiscard
as a vassal of the Church, and the response was prompt. Henry
and his Germans retreated when the Normans came near, and the
latter entered Rome (1084). Accustomed to pillage, they began,
soon, to treat the city as a captured place, and the Romans
rose against them. They retaliated with torch and sword, and
once more Rome suffered from the destroying rage of a
barbarous soldiery let loose. "Neither Goth nor Vandal,
neither Greek nor German, brought such desolation on the city
as this capture by the Normans" (Milman). Duke Robert made no
attempt to hold the ruined capital, but withdrew to his own
dominions. The Pope went with him, and died soon afterwards
(1085), unable to return to Rome. But the imperious temper he
had imparted to the Church was lastingly fixed in it, and his
lofty pretensions were even surpassed by the pontiffs who
succeeded him. He spoke for the Papacy the first syllables of
that awful proclamation that was sounded in its finality,
after eight hundred years, when the dogma of infallibility was
put forth.
Norman Conquest of England.
The Normans in Italy established no durable power. In another
quarter they were more fortunate. Their kinsmen, the Danes,
who subjugated England and annexed it to their own kingdom in
1016, had lost it again in 1042, when the old line of kings
was restored, in the person of Edward, called the Confessor.
But William, Duke of Normandy, had acquired, in the course of
these shiftings of the English crown, certain claims which he
put forth when Edward died, and when Harold, son of the great
Earl Godwine, was elected king to succeed him, in 1066. To
enforce his claim, Duke William, commissioned by the Pope,
invaded England, in the early autumn of that year, and won the
kingdom in the great and decisive battle of Senlac, or
Hastings, where Harold was slain. On Christmas Day he was
crowned, and a few years sufficed to end all resistance to his
authority. He established on the English throne a dynasty
which, though shifting sometimes to collateral lines, has held
it to the present day.
The Norman Conquest, as estimated by its greatest historian,
Professor Freeman, wrought more good effects than ill to the
English people. It did not sweep away their laws, customs or
language, but it modified them all, and not unfavorably; while
"it aroused the old national spirit to fresh life, and gave
the conquered people fellow-workers in their conquerors." The
monarchy was strengthened by William's advantages as a
conqueror, used with the wisdom and moderation of a statesman.
Feudalism came into England stripped of its disrupting forces;
and the possible alternative of absolutism was hindered by
potent checks. At the same time, the Conquest brought England
into relations with the Continent which might otherwise have
arisen very slowly, and thus gave an early importance to the
nation in European history.
The Crusades.
At the period now reached in our survey, all Europe was on the
eve of a profounder excitement and commotion than it had ever
before known--one which stirred it for the first time with a
common feeling and with common thoughts. A great cry ran
through it, for help to deliver the holy places of the
Christian faith from the infidels who possessed them. The
pious and the adventurous, the fanatical and the vagrant, rose
up in one motley and tumultuous response to the appeal, and
mobs and armies (hardly distinguishable) of Crusaders--
warriors of the Cross--began to whiten the highways into Asia
with their bones. The first movement, in 1096, swept 300,000
men, women and children, under Peter the Hermit, to their
death, with no other result; but nearly at the same time there
went an army, French and Norman for the most part, which made its
way to Jerusalem, took the city by assault (1099) and founded
a kingdom there, which defended itself for almost a hundred
years. Long before it fell, it was pressed sorely by the
surrounding Moslems and cried to Europe for help.
{1024}
A Second Crusade, in 1147, accomplished nothing for its
relief, but spent vast multitudes of lives; and when the
feeble kingdom disappeared, in 1187, and the Sepulchre of the
Saviour was defiled again by unbelievers, Christendom grew
wild, once more, with passion, and a Third Crusade was led by
the redoubtable Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, of Germany, King
Richard Cœur de Lion, of England, and King Philip Augustus of
France. The Emperor perished miserably on the way and his army
was wasted in its march; the French and English exhausted
themselves in sieges which won nothing of durable advantage to
the Christian world; the Sultan Saladin gathered most of the
laurels of the war.
The Turks on the Scene.
The armies of Islam which the Crusaders encountered in Asia
Minor and the Holy Land were no longer, in their leadership,
of the race of Mahomet. The religion of the Prophet was still
triumphant in the East, but his nation had lost its lordship,
and Western Asia had submitted to new masters. These were the
Turks--Turks of the House of Seljuk--first comers of their
swarm from the great Aral basin. First they had been
disciples, won by the early armed missionaries of the
Crescent; then servants and mercenaries, hired to fight its
battles and guard its princes, when the vigor of the Arab
conquerors began to be sapped, and their character to be
corrupted by luxury and pride; then, at last, they were
masters. About the middle of the ninth century, the Caliph at
Bagdad became a puppet in their hands, and the Moslem Empire
in Asia (Africa and Spain being divided between rival Caliphs)
soon passed under their control.
These were the possessors of Jerusalem and its sacred shrines,
whose grievous and insulting treatment of Christian pilgrims,
in the last years of the eleventh century, had stirred Europe
to wrath and provoked the great movement of the Crusades. The
movement had important consequences, both immediate and
remote; but its first effects were small in moment compared
with those which lagged after. To understand either, it will
be necessary to glance back at the later course of events in
the Eastern or Byzantine Empire.
The Byzantine Empire.
The fortunes of the Empire, since it gave up Syria and Egypt
to the Saracens, had been, on the whole, less unhappy than the
dark prospect at that time. It had checked the onrush of Arabs
at the Taurus mountain range, and retained Asia Minor; it had
held Constantinople against them through two terrible sieges;
it had fought for three centuries, and finally subdued, a new
Turanian enemy, the Bulgarians, who had established a kingdom
south of the Danube, where their name remains to the present
day. The history of its court, during much of the period, had
been a black and disgusting record of conspiracies,
treacheries, murders, mutilations, usurpations and foul vices
of every description; with now and then a manly figure
climbing to the throne and doing heroic things, for the most
part uselessly; but the system of governmental administration
seems to have been so well constructed that it worked with a
certain independence of its vile or imbecile heads, and the
country was probably better and better governed than its
court.
At Constantinople, notwithstanding frequent tumults and
revolutions, there had been material prosperity and a great
gathering of wealth. The Saracen conquests, by closing other
avenues of trade between the East and the West, had
concentrated that most profitable commerce in the Byzantine
capital. The rising commercial cities of Italy--Amalphi,
Venice, Genoa, Pisa--seated their enterprises there. Art and
literature, which had decayed, began then to revive, and
Byzantine culture, on its surface, took more of superiority to
that of Teutonic Europe.
The conquests of the Seljuk Turks gave a serious check to this
improvement of the circumstances of the Empire. Momentarily,
by dividing the Moslem power in Asia, they had opened an
opportunity to an energetic Emperor, Nicephorus Phocas, to
recover northern Syria and Cilicia (961-969). But when, in the
next century, they had won a complete mastery of the dominions
of the Caliphate of Bagdad, they speedily swept back the
Byzantines, and overran and occupied the most of Asia Minor
and Armenia. A decisive victory at Manzikert, in 1071, when
the emperor of the moment was taken prisoner and his army
annihilated, gave them well nigh the whole territory to the
Hellespont. The Empire was nearly reduced to its European
domain, and suffered ten years of civil war between rivals for
the throne.
At the end of that time it acquired a ruler, in the person of
Alexius Comnenus, who is the generally best known of all the
Byzantine line, because he figures notably in the stories of
the First Crusade. He was a man of crafty abilities and
complete unscrupulousness. He took the Empire at its lowest
state of abasement and demoralization. In the first year of
his reign he had to face a new enemy. Robert Guiscard, the
Norman, who had conquered a dukedom in Southern Italy, thought
the situation favorable for an attack on the Eastern Empire,
and for winning the imperial crown. Twice he invaded the Greek
peninsula (1081-1084) and defeated the forces brought against
him by Alexius; but troubles in Italy recalled him on the
first occasion, and his death brought the second expedition to
naught.
Such was the situation of the Byzantines when the waves of the
First Crusade, rolling Asia-ward, surged up to the gates of
Constantinople. It was a visitation that might well appall
them,--these hosts of knights and vagabonds, fanatics and
freebooters, who claimed and proffered help in a common
Christian war with the infidels, and who, nevertheless, had no
Christian communion with them--schismatics as they were,
outside the fold of the Roman shepherd. There is not a doubt
that they feared the crusading Franks more than they feared
the Turks. They knew them less, and the little hearsay
knowledge they had was of a lawless, barbarous, fighting
feudalism in the countries of the West,--more rough and
uncouth, at least, than their own defter methods of murdering
and mutilating one another. They received their dangerous
visitors with nervousness and suspicion; but Alexius Comnenus
proved equal to the delicate position in which he found
himself placed. He burdened his soul with lies and perfidies;
but he managed affairs so wonderfully that the Empire plucked
the best fruits of the first Crusades, by recovering a great
part of Asia Minor, with all the coasts of the Euxine and the
Ægean, from the weakened Turks. The latter were so far shaken
and depressed by the hard blows of the Crusaders that they
troubled the Byzantines very little in the century to come.
{1025}
But against this immediate gain to the Eastern Empire from the
early Crusades, there were serious later offsets. The commerce
of Constantinople declined rapidly, as soon as the Moslem
blockade of the Syrian coast line was broken. It lost its
monopoly. Trade ran back again into other reopened channels.
The Venetians and Genoese became more independent. Formerly,
they had received privileges in the Empire as a gracious
concession. Now they dictated the terms of their commercial
treaties and their naval alliances. Their rivalries with one
another involved the Empire in quarrels with both, and a state
of things was brought about which had much to do with the
catastrophe of 1204, when the fourth Crusade was diverted to
the conquest of Constantinople, and a Latin Empire supplanted
the Empire of the Roman-Greeks.
Effects of the Crusades.
Briefly noted, these were the consequences of the early
Crusades in the East. In western Europe they had slower, but
deeper and more lasting effects. They weakened feudalism, by
sending abroad so many of the feudal lords, and by
impoverishing so many more; whereby the towns gained more
opportunity for enfranchisement, and the crown, in France
particularly, acquired more power. They checked smaller wars
and private quarrels for a time, and gave in many countries
unwonted seasons of peace, during which the thoughts and
feelings of men were acted on by more civilizing influences.
They brought men into fellowship who were only accustomed to
fight one another, and thus softened their provincial and
national antipathies. They expanded the knowledge--the
experience--the ideas--of the whole body of those who visited
the East and who survived the adventurous expedition; made
them acquainted with civilizations at least more polished than
their own; taught them many things which they could only learn in
those days by actual sight, and sent them back to their homes
throughout Europe, to be instructors and missionaries, who did
much to prepare Western Christendom for the Renaissance or new
birth of a later time. The twelfth century--the century of the
great Crusades--saw the gray day-break in Europe after the
long night of darkness which settled down upon it in the
fifth. In the thirteenth it reached the brightening dawn, and
in the fifteenth it stood in the full morning of the modern
day. Among all the movements by which it was pushed out of
darkness into light, that of the Crusades would appear to have
been the most important; important in itself, as a social and
political movement of great change, and important in the seeds
that it scattered for a future harvest of effects.
In both the Byzantine and Arabian civilizations of the East
there was much for western Europe to learn. Perhaps there was
more in the last named than in the first; for the Arabs, when
they came out from behind their deserts, and exchanged the
nomadic life for the life of cities, had shown an amazing
avidity for the lingering science of old Greece, which they
encountered in Egypt and Syria. They had preserved far more of
it, and more of the old fineness of feeling that went with it,
than had survived in Greece itself, or in any part of the
Teutonized empire of Rome. The Crusaders got glimpses of its
influence, at least, and a curiosity was wakened, which sent
students into Moorish Spain, and opened scholarly interchanges
which greatly advanced learning in Europe.
Rising Power of the Church.
Not the least important effect of the Crusades was the
atmosphere of religion which they caused to envelope the great
affairs of the time, and which they made common in politics
and society. The influence of the Church was increased by
this; and its organization was powerfully strengthened by the
great monastic revival that followed presently: the rise of
purer and more strictly disciplined orders of the "regular"
(that is the secluded or monastic) clergy--Cistercians,
Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans, etc.; as well as the
creation of the great military-religious orders--Knights
Templars, Knights of the Hospital of St. John, Teutonic
Knights, and others, which were immediately connected with the
Crusades.
To say that the Church gained influence is to say that the
clergy gained it, and that the chief of the clergy, the Pope,
concentrated the gain in himself. The whole clerical body was
making encroachments in every field of politics upon the
domain of the civil authority, using shrewdly the advantages
of superior learning, and busying itself more and more in
temporal affairs. The popes after Gregory VII. maintained his
high pretensions and pursued his audacious course. In most
countries they encountered resistance from the Crown; but the
brunt of the conflict still fell upon the emperors, who, in
some respects, were the most poorly armed for it.
Guelfs and Ghibellines.
Henry IV., who outlived his struggle with Gregory, was beaten
down at last--dethroned by a graceless son, excommunicated by
a relentless Church and denied burial when he died (1106) by
its clergy. The rebellious son, Henry V., in his turn fought
the same battle over for ten years, and forced a compromise
which saved about half the rights of investiture that his
father had claimed. His death (1125) ended the Franconian
line, and the imperial crown returned for a few years to the
House of Saxony, by the election of the Duke Lothaire. But the
estates of the Franconian family had passed, by his mother, to
Frederick of Hohenstaufen, duke of Swabia; and now a bitter
feud arose between the House of Saxony and the House of
Hohenstaufen or Swabia,--a feud that was the most memorable
and, the longest lasting in history, if measured by the
duration of party strifes which began in it and which took
their names from it. For the raging factions of Guelfs and
Ghibellines which divided Italy for two centuries had their
beginning in this Swabian-Saxon feud, among the Germans. The
Guelfs were the partisans of the House of Saxony; the
Ghibellines were the party of the Hohenstaufens. The
Hohenstaufens triumphed when Lothaire died (1138), and made
Conrad of their House Emperor. They held the crown, moreover,
in their family for four generations, extending through more
than a century; and so it happened that the German name of the
German party of the Hohenstaufens came to be identified in
Italy with the party or faction in that country which
supported imperial interests and claims in the free cities and
against the popes. Whereupon the opposed party name was
borrowed from Germany likewise and applied to the Italian
faction which took ground against the Emperors--although these
Italian Guelfs had no objects in common with the partisans of
Saxony.
{1026}
The Hohenstaufens in Italy.