man than himself, though not a good king, for he was weak and
untruthful in character, though amiable and probably
well-meaning. He held the throne for fifty-six years, during
which long time, after his minority was passed, no minister of
ability and honorable character could get and keep office in
the royal service. He was jealous of ministers, preferring
mere administrative clerks; while he was docile to favorites,
and picked them for the most part from a swarm of foreign
adventurers whom the nation detested. The Great Charter of his
father had been reaffirmed in his name soon after he received
the crown, and in 1225 he was required to issue it a third
time, as the condition of a grant of money; but he would not
rule honestly in compliance with its provisions, and sought
continually to lay and collect heavy taxes in unlawful ways.
He spent money extravagantly, and was foolish and reckless in
foreign undertakings, accepting, for example, the Kingdom of
Sicily, offered to his son Edmund by the Pope, whose gift
could only be made good by force of arms. At the same time he
was servile to the popes, whose increasing demands for money
from England were rousing even the clergy to resistance. So
the causes of discontent grew abundantly until they brought it
to a serious head. All classes of the people were drawn
together again, as they had been to resist the aggressions of
John. The great councils of the kingdom, or assemblies of
barons and bishops (which had taken the place of the
witenagemot of the old English time, and which now began to be
called Parliaments), became more and more united against the
king. At last the discontent found a leader of high capacity
and of heroic if not blameless character, in Simon de
Montfort, Earl of Leicester. Simon de Montfort was of foreign
birth,--son of that fanatical crusader of the same name, who
spread ruin over the fair country of the Albigeois. The
English earldom of Leicester had passed to his family, and the
younger Simon, receiving it, came to England and became an
Englishman. After some years he threw himself into the
struggle with the Crown, and his leadership was soon
recognized. In 1258, a parliament held at London compelled the
king to consent to the appointment of an extraordinary
commission of twenty-four barons, clothed with full power to
reform the government. The commission was named at a
subsequent meeting of parliament, the same year, at Oxford,
where the grievances to be redressed were set forth in a paper
known as the Provisions of Oxford. From the twenty-four
commissioners there were chosen fifteen to be the King's
Council. This was really the creation of a new constitution
for the kingdom, and Henry swore to observe it. But ere long
he procured a bull from the Pope, absolving him from his oath,
and he began to prepare for throwing off the restraints that
had been put upon him. The other side took up arms, under
Simon's lead; but peace was preserved for a time by referring
all questions in dispute to the arbitration of Louis IX. of
France. The arbiter decided against the barons (1264) and
Montfort's party refused to abide by the award. Then followed
the civil conflict known as the Barons' War. The king was
defeated and taken prisoner, and was obliged to submit to
conditions which practically transferred the administration of
the government to three counsellors, of whom Simon de Montfort
was the chief.
Development of the English Parliament;
In January, 1265, a memorable parliament was called together.
It was the first national assembly in which the larger element
of the English Commons made its appearance; for Montfort had
summoned to it certain representatives of borough towns, along
with the barons, the bishops and the abbots, and along,
moreover, with representative knights, who had been gaining
admittance of late years to what now became a convocation of
the Three Estates. The parliamentary model thus roughly shaped
by the great Earl of Leicester was not continuously followed
until another generation came; but it is his glory,
nevertheless, to have given to England the norm and principle
on which its unexampled parliament was framed. By dissensions
among themselves, Simon de Montfort and his party soon lost
the great advantage they had won, and on another appeal to
arms they were defeated (1265) by the king's valiant and able
son, afterwards King Edward I., and Montfort was slain. It was
seven years after this before Edward succeeded his father, and
nine before he came to the throne, because he was absent on a
Crusade; but when he did, it was to prove himself, not merely
one of the few statesmen-kings of England, but one large
enough in mind to take lessons from the vanquished enemies of
the Crown. He, in reality, took up the half-planned
constitutional work of Simon de Montfort, in the development
of the English Parliament as a body representative of all
orders in the nation, and carried it forward to substantial
completion. He did it because he had wit to see that the
people he ruled could be led more easily than they could be
driven, and that their free-giving of supplies to the Crown
would be more open-handed than their giving under compulsion.
The year 1295 "witnessed the first summons of a perfect and
model parliament; the clergy represented by their bishops,
deans, archdeacons, and elected proctors; the barons summoned
severally in person by the king's special writ, and the
commons summoned by writs addressed to the sheriffs, directing
them to send up two elected knights from each shire, two
elected citizens from each city, and two elected burghers from
each borough" (Stubbs).
{1034}
Two years later, the very fundamental principle of the English
Constitution was established, by a Confirmation of the
Charters, conceded in Edward's absence by his son, but
afterwards assented to by him, which definitely renounced the
right of the king to tax the nation without its consent. Thus
the reign of Edward I. was really the most important in the
constitutional history of England. It was scarcely less
important in the history of English jurisprudence; for Edward
was in full sympathy with the spirit of an age in which the
study and reform of the law were wonderfully awakened
throughout Europe. The great statutes of his reign are among
the monuments of Edward's statesmanship, and not the least
important of them are those by which he checked the
encroachments of the Church and its dangerous acquisition of
wealth.
At the same time, the temper of this vigorous king was warlike
and aggressive. He subdued the Welsh and annexed Wales as a
principality to England. He enforced the feudal supremacy
which the English kings claimed over Scotland, and, upon the
Scottish throne becoming vacant, in 1290, seated John Baliol,
as a vassal who did homage to him. The war of Scottish
Independence then ensued, of which William Wallace and Robert
Bruce were the heroes. Wallace perished on an English scaffold
in 1305; Bruce, the next year, secured the Scottish crown, and
eventually broke the bonds in which his country was held.
Edward I. died in 1307, and his kingly capability died with
him. He transmitted neither spirit nor wisdom to his son, the
second Edward, who gave himself and his kingdom up to foreign
favorites, as his grandfather had done. His angry subjects
practically took the government out of his hands (1310), and
confided it to a body of twenty-one members, called Ordainers.
His reign of twenty years was one of protracted strife and
disorder; but the constitutional power of Parliament made
gains. In outward appearance, however, there was nothing to
redeem the wretchedness of the time. The struggle of factions
was pushed to civil war; while Scotland, by the great blow
struck at Bannockburn (1314), made her independence complete.
In 1322, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, whose descent was as royal
as the king's, but who headed the opponents of Edward and
Edward's unworthy favorites, was defeated in battle, taken
prisoner, and brought to the block. This martyrdom, as it was
called, embalmed Lancaster's memory in the hearts of the
people.
Edward III. and his French Claims.
The queen of Edward II., Isabella of France, daughter of
Philip the Fair, made, at last, common cause with his enemies.
In January, 1327, he was forced to formally resign the crown,
and in September of the same year he was murdered, the queen,
with little doubt, assenting to the deed. His son, Edward
III., who now came to the throne, founded claims to the crown
of France upon the rights of his mother, whose three brothers,
as we have seen, had been crowned in succession and had died,
bringing the direct line of royalty in France to an end. By
this claim the two countries were plunged into the miseries of
the dreadful Hundred Years War, and the progress of
civilization in Europe was seriously checked.
Recovery of Christian Spain.
Before entering that dark century of war, it will be necessary
to go back a little in time, and carry our survey farther
afield, in the countries of Europe more remote from the center
of the events we have already scanned. In Spain, for example,
there should be noticed, very briefly, the turning movement of
the tide of Mahometan conquest which drove the Spanish
Christians into the mountains of the North. In the eighth
century, their little principality of Asturia had widened into
the small kingdom of Leon, and the eastern county of Leon had
taken the name of Castella (Castile) from the number of forts
or castles with which it bristled, on the Moorish border. East
of Leon, in the Pyrenees, there grew up about the same time the
kingdom of Navarre, which became important in the eleventh
century, under an enterprising king, Sancho the Great, who
seized Castile and made a separate kingdom of it, which he
bequeathed to his son. The same Navarrese king extended his
dominion over a considerable part of the Spanish March, which
Charlemagne had wrested from the Moors in the ninth century,
and out of this territory the kingdom of Aragon was presently
formed. These four kingdoms, of Leon, Navarre, Castile, and
Aragon, were shuffled together and divided again, in changing
combinations, many times during the next century or two; but
Castile and Leon were permanently united in 1230. Meantime
Portugal, wrested from the Moors, became a distinct kingdom;
while Navarre was reduced in size and importance. Castile,
Aragon, and Portugal are from that time the Christian Powers
in the Peninsula which carried on the unending war with their
Moslem neighbors. By the end of the thirteenth century they
had driven the Moors into the extreme south of the peninsula,
where the latter, thenceforth, held little beyond the small
kingdom of Granada, which defended itself for two centuries
more.
Moorish Civilization and its Decay.
The Christians were winners and the Moslems were losers in
this long battle, because adversity had disciplined the one
and prosperity had relaxed and vitiated the other. Success
bred disunion, and the spoils of victory engendered
corruption, among the followers of Mahomet, very quickly in
their career. The middle of the eighth century was hardly
passed when the huge empire they had conquered broke in twain,
and two Caliphates on one side of the Mediterranean, imitated the
two Roman Empires on the other. We have seen how the Caliphate
of the East, with its seat at Bagdad, went steadily to wreck;
but fresh converts of Islam, out of deserts at the North, were
in readiness, there, to gather the fragments and construct a
new Mahometan power. In the West, where the Caliphs held their
court at Cordova, the same crumbling of their power befell
them, through feuds and jealousies and the decay of a sensuous
race; but there were none to rebuild it in the Prophet's name.
The Moor gave way to the Castilian in Spain for reasons not
differing very much from the reasons which explain the
supplanting of the Arab by the Turk in the East.
{1035}
While its grandeur lasted in Spain,--from the eighth to the
eleventh centuries--the empire of the Saracens, or Moors, was
the most splendid of its age. It developed a civilization
which must have been far finer, in the superficial showing,
and in much of its spirit as well, than anything found in
Christian Europe at that time. Its religious temper was less
fierce and intolerant. Its intellectual disposition was
towards broader thinking and freer inquiry. Its artistic
feeling was truer and more instinctive. It took lessons from
classic learning and philosophy before Germanized Europe had
become aware of the existence of either, and it gave the
lessons at second hand to its Christian neighbors. Its
industries were conducted with a knowledge and a skill that
could be found among no other people. Says Dr. Draper: "Europe
at the present day does not offer more taste, more refinement,
more elegance, than might have been seen, at the epoch of
which we are speaking, in the capitals of the Spanish Arabs.
Their streets were lighted and solidly paved. Their houses
were frescoed and carpeted; they were warmed in winter by
furnaces, and cooled in summer with perfumed air brought by
underground pipes from flower beds. They had baths, and
libraries, and dining halls, fountains of quicksilver and
water. City and country were full of conviviality, and of
dancing to lute and mandolin. Instead of the drunken and
gluttonous wassail orgies of their northern neighbors, the
feasts of the Saracens were marked with sobriety."
The brilliancy of the Moorish civilization seems like that of
some short-lived flower, which may spring from a thin soil of
no lasting fertility. The qualities which yielded it had their
season of ascendancy over the deeper-lying forces that worked
in the Gothic mind of Christian Spain; but time exhausted the
one, while it matured the other.
Mediæval Spanish Character.
There seems to be no doubt that the long conflict of races and
religions in the peninsula affected the character of the
Spanish Christians more profoundly, both for good and for ill,
than it affected the people with whom they strove. It hardened
and energized them, preparing them for the bold adventures
they were soon to pursue in a new-found world, and for a
lordly career in all parts of the rounded globe. It embittered
and gave fierceness to a sentiment among them which bore some
likeness to religion, but which was, in reality, the
partisanship of a church, and not the devotion of a faith. It
tended to put bigotry in the place of piety--religious rancor
in the place of charity--priests and images in the place of
Christ--much more among the Spaniards than among other
peoples; for they, alone, were Crusaders against the Moslem
for eight hundred years.
Early Free Institutions in Spain.
The political effects of those centuries of struggle in the
peninsula were also remarkable and strangely mixed. In all the
earlier stages of the national development, until the close of
the mediæval period, there seems to have been as promising a
growth of popular institutions, in most directions, as can be
found in England itself. Apparently, there was more good
feeling between classes than elsewhere in Europe. Nobles,
knights and commons fought side by side in so continuous a
battle that they were more friendly and familiar in
acquaintance with one another. Moreover, the ennobled and the
knighted were greatly more numerous in Spain than in the
neighboring countries. The kings were lavish of such honors in
rewarding valor, on every battlefield and after every campaign.
It was impossible, therefore, for so great a distance to widen
between the grandee and the peasant or the burgher as that
which separated the lord and the citizen in Germany or France.
The division of Christian Spain into several petty kingdoms,
and the circumstances under which they were placed, retarded
the growth of monarchical power, and yet did not tend to a
feudal disintegration of society; because the pressure of its
perpetual war with the infidels forced the preservation of a
certain degree of unity, sufficient to be a saving influence.
At the same time, the Spanish cities became prosperous, and
naturally, in the circumstances of the country, acquired much
freedom and many privileges. The inhabitants of some cities in
Aragon enjoyed the privileges of nobility as a body; the
magistrates of other cities were ennobled. Both in Aragon and
Castile, the towns had deputies in the Cortes before any
representatives of boroughs sat in the English Parliament; and
the Cortes seems to have been, in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, a more potent factor in government than any
assembly of estates in any other part of Europe.
But something was wanting in Spain that was not wanting in
England and in the Netherlands, for example, to complete the
evolution of a popular government from this hopeful beginning.
And the primary want, it would seem, was a political sense or
faculty in the people. To illustrate this in one particular:
the Castilian Commons did not grasp the strings of the
national purse when they had it in their hands, as the
practical Englishmen did. They allowed the election of
deputies from the towns to slip out of their hands and to
become an official function of the municipalities, where it
was corrupted and controlled by the Crown. In Aragon, the
popular rights were more efficiently maintained, perhaps; but
even there the political faculty of the people must have been
defective, as compared with that of the nations in the North
which developed free government from less promising germs.
And, yet, it is possible that the whole subsequent failure of
Spain may be fully explained by the ruinous prosperity of her
career in the sixteenth century,--by the fatal gold it gave
her from America, and the independent power it put into the
hands of her kings.
Northern and North-eastern Europe.
While the Spaniards in their southern peninsula were wrestling
with the infidel Moor, their Gothic kindred of Sweden, and the
other Norse nations of that opposite extremity of Europe, had
been casting off paganism and emerging from the barbarism of
their piratical age, very slowly. It was not until the tenth
and eleventh centuries that Christianity got footing among
them. It was not until the thirteenth century that unity and
order, the fruits of firm government, began to be really fixed
in any part of the Scandinavian peninsulas.
{1036}
The same is substantially true of the greater Slavic states on
the eastern side of Europe. The Poles had accepted
Christianity in the tenth century, and their dukes, in the
same century, had assumed the title of kings. In the twelfth
century they had acquired a large dominion and exercised great
power; but the kingdom was divided, was brought into collision
with the Teutonic Knights, who conquered Prussia, and it fell
into a disordered state. The Russians had been Christianized
in the same missionary century--the tenth; but civilization
made slow progress among them, and their nation was being
divided and re-divided in shifting principalities by
contending families and lords. In the thirteenth century they
were overwhelmed by the fearful calamity of a conquest by
Mongol or Tartar hordes, and fell under the brutal domination
of the successors of Genghis Khan.
Latin Conquest of Constantinople.
At Constantinople, the old Greek-Roman Empire of the East had
been passing through singular changes since we noticed it
last. The dread with which Alexius Comnenius saw the coming of
the Crusaders in 1097 was justified by the experience of his
successors, after little more than a hundred years. In 1204, a
crusade, which is sometimes numbered as the fourth and
sometimes as the fifth in the crusading series, was diverted
by Venetian influence from the rescue of Jerusalem to the
conquest of Constantinople, ostensibly in the interest of a
claimant of the Imperial throne. The city was taken and
pillaged, and the Greek line of Emperors was supplanted by a
Frank or Latin line, of which Baldwin, Count of Flanders, was
the first. But this Latin Empire was reduced to a fraction of
the conquered dominion, the remainder being divided among
several partners in the conquest; while two Greek princes of
the fallen house saved fragments of the ancient realm in Asia,
and throned themselves as emperors at Trebizond and Nicæa. The
Latin Empire was maintained, feebly and without dignity, a
little more than half a century; and then (1261) it was
extinguished by the sovereign of its Nicæan rival, Michael
Palæologus, who took Constantinople by a night surprise,
helped by treachery within. Thus the Greek or Byzantine Empire
was restored, but much shorn of its former European
possessions, and much weakened by loss of commerce and wealth.
It was soon involved in a fresh struggle for life with the
Turks.
The Thirteenth Century.
We have now, in our general survey of European history, just
passed beyond the thirteenth century, and it will be
instructive to pause here a moment and glance back over the
movements and events which distinguish that remarkable age.
For the thirteenth century, while it belongs chronologically
to mediæval times, seems nearer in spirit to the
Renaissance--shows more of the travail of the birth of our
modern mind and life--than the fourteenth, and even more than
the greater part of the years of the fifteenth century.
For England, it was the century in which the enduring bases of
constitutional government were laid down; within which Magna
Charta and its Confirmations were signed; within which the
Parliament of Simon de Montfort and the Parliaments of Edward
I. gave a representative form and a controlling power to the
wonderful legislature of the English nation. In France, it was
the century of the Albigenses; of Saint Louis and his judicial
reforms; and it stretched within two years of the first
meeting of the States-General of the kingdom. In Switzerland,
it was the century which began the union of the three forest
cantons. In Spain, it was the century which gave Aragon the
"General Privilege" of Peter III.; in Hungary, it was the
century of its Golden Bull. In Italy it was the century of
Frederick II.,--the man of modern spirit set in mediæval
circumstances; and it was the century, too, which moulded the
city-republics that resisted and defeated his despotic
pretensions. Everywhere, it was an age of impulses toward
freedom, and of mighty upward strivings out of the chaos and
darkness of the feudal state. It was an age of vast energies,
directed with practical judgment and power. It organized the
great league of the Hansa Towns, which surpassed, as an
enterprise of combination in commercial affairs, the most
stupendous undertakings of the present time. It put the
weavers and traders of Flanders on a footing with knights and
princes. In Venice and Genoa it crowned the merchant like a
king. It sent Marco Polo to Cathay, and inoculated men with
the itch of exploration from which they find no ease to this
day. It was the century which saw painting revived as a living
art in the world by Cimabue and Giotto, and sculpture restored
by Niccola Pisano. It was the age of great church-building in
Italy, in Germany and in France. It was the century of St.
Francis of Assisi, and of the creation of the mendicant orders
in the Church,--a true religious reformation in its spirit,
however unhappy in effect it may have been. It was the time of
the high tide of mediæval learning; the epoch of Aquinas, of
Duns Scotus, of Roger Bacon; the true birth-time of the
Universities of Paris and Oxford. It was the century which
educated Dante for his immortal work.
The Fourteenth Century.
The century which followed was a period of many wars--of
ruinous and deadly wars, and miserable demoralizations and
disorders, which depressed all Europe by their effects. In the
front of them all was the wicked Hundred Years War, forced on
France by the ambition of an English king to wear two crowns;
while with it came the bloody insurrection of the Jacquerie,
the ravages of the free companies, and ruinous anarchy
everywhere. Then, in Italy, there was a duel to the death
between Venice and Genoa; and a long, wasting contest of
rivals for the possession of Naples. In Germany, a contested
imperial election, and the struggle of the Swiss against the
Austrian Dukes. In Flanders, repeated revolts under the two
Artevelds. In the East, the terrible fight of Christendom with
the advancing Turk. And while men were everywhere so busily
slaying one another, there came the great pestilence which
they called the Black Death, to help them in the grim work,
and Europe was half depopulated by it. At the same time, the
Church, which might have kindled some beacon lights of faith
and hope in the midst of all this darkness and terror, was
sinking to its lowest state, and Rome had become an unruled
robbers' den.
There were a few voices heard, above the wailing and the
battle-din of the afflicted age, which charmed and comforted
it; voices which preached the pure gospel of Wycliffe and
Huss,--which recited the great epic of Dante,--which syllabled
the melodious verse of Petrarch and Chaucer,--which told the
gay tales of Boccaccio; but the pauses of peace in which men
might listen to such messages and give themselves to such
delights were neither many nor long.
{1037}
The Hundred Years War.
The conflict between England and France began in Flanders,
then connected with the English very closely in trade. Philip
VI. of France forced the Count of Flanders to expel English
merchants from his territory. Edward III. retaliated (1336) by
forbidding the exportation of wool to Flanders, and this
speedily reduced the Flemish weavers to idleness. They rose in
revolt, drove out their count, and formed an alliance with
England, under the lead of Jacob van Arteveld, a brewer, of
Ghent. The next year (1337) Edward joined the Flemings with an
army and entered France; but made no successful advance,
although his fleet won a victory, in a sea-fight off Sluys,
and hostilities were soon suspended by a truce. In 1341 they
were renewed in Brittany, over a disputed succession to the
dukedom, and the scattered sieges and chivalric combats which
made up the war in that region for two years are described
with minuteness by Froissart, the gossipy chronicler of the
time. After a second truce, the grimly serious stage of the
war was reached in 1346. It was in that year that the English
won the victory at Crécy, which was the pride and boast of
their nation for centuries; and the next season they took
Calais, which they held for more than two hundred years.