nephew Frederick I., called Barbarossa, because of his red
beard. The long reign of Frederick, until 1190, was mainly
filled with wars and contentions in Italy, where he pushed the
old quarrel of the Empire with the Papacy, and where,
furthermore, he resolutely undertook to check the growing
independence of the Lombard cities. Five times during his
reign he led a great army into the peninsula, like a hostile
invader, and his destroying marches through the country, of
which he claimed to be sovereign, were like those of the
barbarians who came out of the North seven centuries before.
The more powerful cities, like Milan, were undoubtedly
oppressing their weaker neighbors, and Barbarossa assumed to
be the champion of the latter. But he smote impartially the
weak and the strong, the village and the town, which provoked
his arrogant temper in the slightest degree. Milan escaped his
wrath on the first visitation, but went down before it when he
came again (1158), and was totally destroyed, the inhabitants
being scattered in other towns. Even the enemies of Milan were
moved to compassion by the savageness of this punishment, and
joined, a few years later, in rebuilding the prostrate walls
and founding Milan anew. A great "League of Lombardy" was
formed by all the northern towns, to defend their freedom
against the hated Emperor, and the party of the Ghibellines
was reduced for the time to a feeble minority. Meantime
Barbarossa had forced his way into Rome, stormed the very
Church of St. Peter, and seated an anti-pope on the throne.
But a sudden pestilence fell upon his army, and he fled before
it, out of Italy, almost alone. Yet he never relaxed his
determination to bend both the Papacy and the Lombard
republics to his will. After seven years he returned, for the
fifth time, and it proved to be the last. The League met him
at Legnano (1176) and administered to him an overwhelming
defeat. Even his obstinacy was then overcome, and after a
truce of six years he made peace with the League and the Pope,
on terms which conceded most of the liberties that the cities
claimed. It was in the reign of Frederick that the name "Holy
Roman Empire" began, it seems, to be used.
Frederick died while on a crusade and was succeeded (1190) by
his son, Henry VI., who had married the daughter and heiress
of the King of Sicily and who acquired that kingdom in her
right. His short reign was occupied mostly in subduing the
Sicilian possession. When he died (1197) his son Frederick was
a child. Frederick succeeded to the crown of Sicily, but his
rights in Germany (where his father had already caused him to
be crowned "King of the Romans"--the step preliminary to an
imperial election) were entirely ignored. The German crown was
disputed between a Swabian and a Saxon claimant, and the
Saxon, Otho, was King and Emperor in name, until 1218, when he
died. But he, too, quarreled with a pope, about the lands of
the Countess Matilda, which she gave to the Church; and his
quarrel was with Innocent III., a pope who realized the
autocracy which Hildebrand had looked forward to, and who
lifted the Papacy to the greatest height of power it ever
attained. To cast down Otho, Innocent took up the cause of
Frederick, who received the royal crown a second time, at
Aix-la-Chapelle (1215) and the imperial crown at Rome (1220).
Frederick II. (his designation) was one of the few men of
actual genius who have ever sprung from the sovereign families
of the world; a man so far in advance of his time that he
appears like a modern among his mediæval contemporaries. He
was superior to the superstitions of his age,--superior to its
bigotries and its provincialisms. His large sympathies and
cosmopolitan frame of mind were acted upon by all the new
impulses of the epoch of the crusades, and made him reflect,
in his brilliant character, as in a mirror, the civilizing
processes that were working on his generation.
Between such an emperor as Frederick II. and such popes as
Innocent III. and his immediate successors, there could not
fail to be collision and strife. The man who might, perhaps,
under other circumstances, have given some quicker movement to
the hands which measure human, progress on the dial of time,
spent his life in barely proving his ability to live and reign
under the anathemas and proscriptions of the Church. But he
fought a losing fight, even when he seemed to be winning
victories in northern Italy, over the Guelf cities of
Lombardy, and when the party of the Ghibellines appeared to be
ascendant throughout the peninsula. His death (1250) was the
end of the Hohenstaufens as an imperial family. His son,
Conrad, who survived him four years, was king of Sicily and
had been crowned king of Germany; but he never wore the crown
imperial. Conrad's illegitimate brother, Manfred, succeeded on
the Sicilian throne; but the implacable Papacy gave his
kingdom to Charles of Anjou, brother of King Louis IX. of
France, and invited a crusade for the conquest of it. Manfred
was slain in battle, Conrad's young son, Conradin, perished on
the scaffold, and the Hohenstaufens disappeared from history.
Their rights, or claims, in Sicily and Naples, passed to the
Spanish House of Aragon, by the marriage of Manfred's daughter
to the Aragonese king; whence long strife between the House of
Anjou and the House of Aragon, and a troubled history for the
Neapolitans and the Sicilians during some centuries. In the
end, Anjou kept Naples, while Aragon won Sicily; the kings in
both lines called themselves Kings of Sicily, and a subsequent
re-union of the two crowns created a very queerly named
"Kingdom of the Two Sicilies."
{1027}
Germany and the Empire.
After the death of Frederick II., the German kings, while
maintaining the imperial title, practically abandoned their
serious attempts to enforce an actual sovereignty in Italy.
The Holy Roman Empire, as a political factor comprehending
more than Germany, now ceased in reality to exist. The name
lived on, but only to represent a flattering fiction for
magnifying the rank and importance of the German kings. In
Italy, the conflict, as between Papacy and Empire, or between
Lombard republican cities and Empire, was at an end. No
further occasion existed for an imperial party, or an
anti-imperial party. The Guelf and Ghibelline names and
divisions had no more the little meaning that first belonged
to them. But Guelfs and Ghibellines raged against one another,
more furiously than before, and generations passed before
their feud died out.
While the long, profitless Italian conflict of the Emperors
went on, their kingship in Germany suffered sorely. As they
grasped at a shadowy imperial title, the substance of royal
authority slipped from them. Their frequent prolonged absence
in Italy gave opportunities for enlarged independence to the
German princes and feudal lords; their difficulties beyond the
Alps forced them to buy support from their vassals at home by
fatal concessions and grants; their neglect of German affairs
weakened the ties of loyalty, and provoked revolts. The result
might have been a dissolution of Germany so complete as to
give rise to two or three strong states, if another potent
influence had not worked injury in a different way. This came
from the custom of equalized inheritance which prevailed among
the Germans. The law of primogeniture, which already governed
hereditary transmissions of territorial sovereignty in many
countries, even where it did not give an undivided private
estate, as in England, to the eldest son of a family, got
footing in Germany very late and very slowly. At the time now
described, it was the quite common practice to divide
principalities between all the sons surviving a deceased duke
or margrave. It was this practice which gave rise to the
astonishing number of petty states into which Germany came to
be divided, and the forms of which are still intact. It was
this, in the main, which prevented the growth of any states to
a power that would absorb the rest. On the other hand, the
flimsy, half fictitious general constitution which the Empire
substituted for such an one as the Kingdom of Germany would
naturally have grown into, made an effective centralization of
sovereignty--easy as the conditions seemed to be prepared for
it--quite impossible.
Free Cities in Germany and their Leagues.
One happy consequence of this state of things was the
enfranchisement, either wholly or nearly so, of many thriving
cities. The growth of cities, as centers of industry and
commerce, and the development of municipal freedom among them,
was considerably later in Germany than in Italy, France and
the Netherlands; but the independence gained by some among
them was more entire than in the Low Countries or in France,
and more lasting than in Italy.
Most of the free cities of Germany were directly or
immediately subject to the Emperor, and wholly independent of
the princes whose territories surrounded them; whence they
were called "imperial cities." This relationship bound them to
the Empire by strong ties; they had less to fear from it than
from the nearer small potentates of their country; and it
probably drew a considerable part of such strength as it
possessed, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, from their
support. Their own power was being augmented at this period by
the formation of extensive Leagues among them, for common
defense, and for the protection, regulation and extension of
their trade. In that age of lawless violence, there was so
little force in government, everywhere, and so entire a want
of co-operation between governments, that the operations of
trade were exposed to piracy, robbery, and black-mail, on
every sea and in every land. By the organization of their
Leagues, the energetic merchants of north-western Europe did
for themselves what their half-civilized governments failed to
do for them. They not only created effective agencies for the
protection of their trade, but they legislated, nationally and
internationally, for themselves, establishing codes and
regulations, negotiating commercial treaties, making war, and
exercising many functions and powers that seem strange to
modern times. The great Hansa, or Hanseatic League, which rose
to importance in the thirteenth century among the cities in
the north of Germany, was the most extensive, the longest
lasting and the most formidable of these confederations. It
controlled the trade between Germany, England, Russia, the
Scandinavian countries, and the Netherlands, and through the
latter it made exchanges with southern Europe and the East. It
waged successful war with Denmark, Sweden and Norway combined,
in defiance of the opposition of the Emperor and the Pope. But
the growth of its power engendered an arrogance which provoked
enmity in all countries, while the slow crystalizing of
nationalities in Europe, with national sentiments and
ambitions, worked in all directions against the commercial
monopoly of the Hansa towns. By the end of the fifteenth
century their league had begun to break up and its power to
decline. The lesser associations of similar character--such as
the Rhenish and the Swabian--had been shorter-lived.
The Great Interregnum.
These city-confederations represented in their time the only
movement of concentration that appeared in Germany. Every
other activity seemed tending toward dissolution. Headship
there was none for a quarter of a century after Frederick II.
died. The election of the Kings, who took rank and title as
Emperors when crowned by the Pope, had now become the
exclusive privilege of three prince-bishops and four temporal
princes, who acquired the title of Electors. Jealous of one
another, and of all the greater lords outside their electoral
college, it was against their policy to confer the scepter on
any man who seemed likely to wield it with a strong hand. For
twenty years--a period in German history known as the Great
Interregnum--they kept the throne practically vacant. Part of
the Electors were bribed to choose Richard, Earl of Cornwall,
brother of the English King Henry III., and the other part
gave their votes to Alfonso, King of Castile. Alfonso never
came to be crowned, either as King or Emperor; Richard was
crowned King, but exercised no power and lived mostly in his
own country. The Empire was virtually extinct; the Kingdom
hardly less so. Burgundy fell away from the imperial
jurisdiction even more than Italy did. Considerable parts of
it passed to France.
{1028}
Rise of the House of Austria.
At last, in 1273, the interregnum was ended by the election of
a German noble to be King of Germany. This was Rodolph, Count
of Hapsburg,--lord of a small domain and of little importance
from his own possessions, which explains, without doubt, his
selection. But Rodolph proved to be a vigorous king, and he
founded a family of such lasting stamina and such self-seeking
capability that it secured in time permanent possession of the
German crown, and acquired, outside of Germany, a great
dominion of its own. He began the aggrandizement of his House
by taking the fine duchy of Austria from the kingdom of
Bohemia and bestowing it upon his sons. He was energetic in
improving opportunities like this, and energetic, too, in
destroying the castles of robber-knights and hanging the
robbers on their own battlements; but of substantial authority
or power he had little enough. He never went to Rome for the
imperial crown; nor troubled himself much with Italian
affairs.
On Rodolph's death (1291), his son Albert of Austria was a
candidate for the crown. The Electors rejected him and ejected
another poor noble, Adolphus of Nassau; but Adolphus
displeased them after a few years, and they decreed his
deposition, electing Albert in his place. War followed and
Adolphus was killed. Albert's reign was one of vigor, but he
accomplished little of permanent effect. He planted one of his
sons on the throne of Bohemia, where the reigning family had
become extinct; but the new king died in a few months, much
hated, and the Bohemians resisted an Austrian successor. In
1308, Albert was assassinated, and the electors raised Count
Henry of Luxemburg to the throne, as Henry VII. Henry VII. was
the first king of Germany since the Hohenstaufens who went to
Italy (1310) for the crown of Lombardy and the crown of the
Cæsars, both of which he received. The Ghibelline party was
still strong among the Italians. In the distracted state of
that country there were many patriots--the poet Dante
prominent among them--who hoped great things from the
reappearance of an emperor; but the enthusiastic welcome he
received was mainly from those furious partisans who looked
for a party triumph to be won under the new emperor's lead.
When they found that he would not let himself be made an
instrument of faction in the unhappy country, they turned
against him. His undertakings in Italy promised nothing but
failure, when he died suddenly (1313), from poison, as the
Germans believed. His successor in Germany, chosen by the
majority of the electors, was Lewis of Bavaria; but Frederick
the Fair of Austria, supported by a minority, disputed the
election, and there was civil war for twelve years, until
Frederick, a prisoner, so won the heart of Lewis that the
latter divided the throne with him and the two reigned
together.
France under the Capetians.
While Germany and the fictitious Empire linked with it were
thus dropping from the foremost place in western Europe into
the background, several kingdoms were slowly emerging out of
the anarchy of feudalism, and acquiring the organization of
authority and law which creates stable and substantial power.
France for two centuries, under the first three Capetian
kings, had made little progress to that end. At the accession
(1103) of the fourth of those kings, namely, Louis VI., it is
estimated that the actual possessions of the Crown, over which
it exercised sovereignty direct, equalled no more than about
five of the modern departments of France; while twenty-nine
were in the great fiefs of Flanders, Burgundy, Champagne,
Normandy, Brittany, Anjou, Vermandois, and Boulogne, where the
royal authority was but nominal; thirty-three, south of the
Loire, were hardly connected with the Crown, and twenty-one
were then dependent on the Empire. The actual "France," as a
kingdom, at that time, was very small. "The real domain of
Louis VI. was almost confined to the five towns of Paris,
Orleans, Estampes, Melun, and Compiegne, and to estates in
their neighbourhood." But the strengthening of the Crown was
slightly begun in the reign of this king, by his wise policy
of encouraging the enfranchisement of the communes, as noted
before, which introduced a helpful alliance between the
monarchy and the burgher-class, or third estate, as it came to
be called, of the cities, against the feudal aristocracy.
But progress in that direction was slight at first and slowly
made. Louis VII., who came to the throne in 1137, acquired
momentarily the great duchy of Aquitaine, or Guienne, by his
marriage with Eleanor, who inherited it; but he divorced her,
and she married Henry Plantagenet, who became Henry II., King
of England, being at the same time Duke of Normandy, by
inheritance from his mother, and succeeding his father in
Anjou, Maine and Touraine. Eleanor having carried to him the
great Aquitanian domain of her family, he was sovereign of a
larger part of modern France than owned allegiance to the
French king.
French recovery of Normandy and Anjou,
But the next king in France, Philip, called Augustus (1180),
who was the son of Louis VII., wrought a change of these
circumstances. He was a prince of remarkable vigor, and he
rallied with rare ability all the forces that the Crown could
command. He wrested Vermandois from the Count of Flanders, and
extorted submission from the rebellious Duke of Burgundy.
Suspending his projects at home for a time, to go crusading to
the Holy Land in company with King Richard of England, he
resumed them with fresh energy after Richard's death. The
latter was succeeded by his mean brother John, who seems to
have been hated with unanimity. John was accused of the murder
of his young nephew, Arthur of Brittany, who disputed the
inheritance from Richard. As Duke of Normandy and Anjou, John,
though King of England, was nevertheless a vassal of the King
of France. Philip summoned him, on charges, to be tried by his
peers. John failed to answer the summons, and the forfeiture
of his fiefs was promptly declared. The French king stood well
prepared to make the confiscation effective, while John, in
serious trouble with his English subjects, could offer little
resistance. Thus the Norman realm of the English kings--their
original dominion--was lost beyond recovery, and with it Anjou
and Maine. They held Guienne and Poitou for some years; but
the bases of the French monarchy were broadened immensely from
the day when the great Norman and Angevin fiefs became royal
domain.
{1029}
The Albigenses.
Events in the south of France, during Philip's reign, prepared
the way for a further aggrandisement of the Crown. Ancient
Latin civilization had lingered longer there, in spirit, at
least, than in the central and northern districts of the
kingdom, and the state of society intellectually was both
livelier and more refined. It was the region of Europe where
thought first showed signs of independence, and where the
spiritual despotism of Rome was disputed first. A sect arose
in Languedoc which took its name from the district of Albi,
and which offended the Church perhaps more by the freedom of
opinion that it claimed than by the heresy of the opinions
themselves. These Albigeois, or Albigenses, had been at issue
with the clergy of their country and with the Papacy for some
years before Innocent III., the pontifical autocrat of his
age, proclaimed a crusade against them (1208), and launched
his sentence of excommunication against Raymond, Count of
Toulouse, who gave them countenance if not sympathy. The
fanatical Simon de Montfort, father of the great noble of like
name who figures more grandly in English history, took the
lead of the Crusade, to which bigots and brutal adventurers
flocked together. Languedoc was wasted with fire and sword,
and after twenty years of intermittent war, in which Peter of
Aragon took part, assisting the Albigeois, the Count of
Toulouse purchased peace for his ruined land by ceding part of
it to the king of France, and giving his daughter in marriage
to the king's brother Alphonso,--by which marriage the
remainder of the country was transferred, a few years later,
to the French crown.
The Battle of Bouvines.
Philip Augustus, in whose reign this brutal crushing of
Provençal France began, took little part in it, but he saw
with no unwillingness another too powerful vassal brought low.
The next blow of like kind he struck with his own hand. John
of England had quarreled with the mighty Pope Innocent III.;
his kingdom had been placed under interdict and his subjects
absolved from their allegiance. Philip of France eagerly
offered to become the executor of the papal decree, and
gathered an army for the invasion of England, to oust John
from his throne. But John hastened now to make peace with the
Church, submitting himself, surrendering his kingdom to the
Pope, and receiving it back as a papal fief. This
accomplished, the all-powerful pontiff persuaded the French
king to turn his army against the Count of Flanders, who had
never been reduced to a proper degree of submission to his
feudal sovereign. He seems to have become the recognized head
of a body of nobles who showed alarm and resentment at the
growing power of the Crown, and the war which ensued was quite
extraordinary in its political importance. King John of
England came personally to the assistance of the Flemish
Count, because of the hatred he felt towards Philip of France.
Otho, Emperor of Germany, who had been excommunicated and
deposed by the Pope, and who was struggling for his crown with
the young Hohenstaufen, Frederick II., took part in the melee,
because John was his uncle, and because the Pope was for
Philip, and because Germany dreaded the rising power of
France. So the war, which seemed at first to be a trifling
affair in a corner, became in fact a grand clearing storm, for
the settlement of many large issues, important to all Europe.
The settlement was accomplished by a single decisive battle,
fought at Bouvines (1214), not far from Tournay. It
established effectively in France the feudal superiority and
actual sovereignty of the king. It evoked a national spirit
among the French people, having been their first national
victory, won under the banners of a definite kingdom, over
foreign foes. It was a triumph for the Papacy and the Church
and a crushing blow to those who dared resist the mandates of
Rome. It sent King John back to England so humbled and
weakened that he had little stomach for the contest which
awaited him there, and the grand event of the signing of Magna
Charta next year was more easily brought about. It settled the
fate of Otho of Germany, and cleared the bright opening of the
stormy career of Frederick II., his successor. Thus the battle
of Bouvines, which is not a famous field in common knowledge,
must really be numbered among the great and important battles
of the world.
When Philip Augustus died in 1223, the regality which he
bequeathed to his son, Louis VIII., was something vastly
greater than that which came to him from his predecessors. He
had enhanced both the dignity and the power, both the
authority and the prestige, of the Crown, and made a
substantial kingdom of France. Louis VIII. enlarged his
dominions by the conquest of Lower Poitou and the taking of
Rochelle from the English; but he sowed the seeds of future
weakness in the monarchy by creating great duchies for his
children, which became as troublesome to later kings as
Normandy and Anjou had been to those before him.
Saint Louis.