The history of the more highly organized empires of the horse and iron

period, the empires of roads and writing, shows Arabia thrust like a

wedge between Egypt, Palestine, and the Euphrates-Tigris country, and

still a reservoir of nomadic tribes who raid and trade and exact tribute

for the immunity and protection of caravans. There are temporary and

flimsy subjugations. Egypt, Persia, Macedonia, Rome, Syria,

Constantinople, and again Persia claim some unreal suzerainty in turn

over Arabia, profess some unsubstantial protection. Under Trajan there

was a Roman province of “Arabia,” which included the then fertile region

of the Hauran and extended as far as Petra. Now and then some Arab chief

and his trading city rises to temporary splendour. Such was that

Odenathus of Palmyra, whose brief career we have noted in chap. xxxi, §

2, and another such transitory desert city whose ruins still astonish

the traveller was Baalbek.

After the destruction of Palmyra, the desert Arabs began to be spoken of

in the Roman and Persian records as Saracens.

In the time of Chosroes II., Persia claimed a certain ascendancy over

Arabia, and maintained officials and tax collectors in the Yemen. Before

that time the Yemen had been under the rule of the Abyssinian Christians

for some years, and before that for seven centuries it had had native

princes professing, be it noted, the Jewish faith.

Until the opening of the seventh century A.D. there were no signs of any

unwonted or dangerous energy in the Arabian deserts. The life of the

country was going on as it had gone on for long generations. Wherever

there were fertile patches, wherever, that is, there was a spring or a

well, a scanty agricultural population subsisted, living in walled towns

because of the Bedouin who wandered with their sheep, cattle, and horses

over the desert. Upon the main caravan routes the chief towns rose to a

certain second-rate prosperity, and foremost among them were Medina and

Mecca.[320] In the beginning of the seventh century Medina was a town of

about 15,000 inhabitants all told; Mecca may have had twenty or

twenty-five thousand. Medina was a comparatively well-watered town, and

possessed abundant date groves; its inhabitants were Yemenites, from the

fertile land to the south. Mecca was a town of a different character,

built about a spring of water with a bitter taste, and inhabited by

recently settled Bedouin.

Mecca was not merely nor primarily a trading centre; it was a place of

pilgrimage. Among the Arab tribes there had long existed a sort of

Amphictyony (see chap. xxii, § 1) centring upon Mecca and certain other

sanctuaries; there were months of truce to war and blood feuds, and

customs of protection and hospitality for the pilgrim. In addition there

had grown up an Olympic element in these gatherings; the Arabs were

discovering possibilities of beauty in their language, and there were

recitations of war poetry and love songs. The sheiks of the tribes,

under a “king of the poets,” sat in judgment and awarded prizes; the

prize songs were sung through all Arabia.

The Kaaba, the sanctuary at Mecca, was of very ancient date. It was a

small square temple of black stones, which had for its corner-stone a

meteorite. This meteorite was regarded as a god, and all the little

tribal gods of Arabia were under his protection. The permanent

inhabitants of Mecca were a tribe of Bedouin who had seized this temple

and constituted themselves its guardians. To them there came in the

months of truce a great incourse of people, who marched about the Kaaba

ceremonially, bowed themselves, and kissed the stone, and also engaged

in trade and poetical recitations. The Meccans profited much from these

visitors.

All of this is very reminiscent of the religious and political state of

affairs in Greece fourteen centuries earlier. But the paganism of these

more primitive Arabs was already being assailed from several directions.

There had been a great proselytizing of Arabs during the period of the

Maccabeans and Herods in Judea; and, as we have already noted, the Yemen

had been in succession under the rule of Jews (Arab proselytes to

Judaism, _i.e._), Christians, and Zoroastrians. It is evident that there

must have been plenty of religious discussion during the pilgrimage

fairs at Mecca and the like centres. Naturally enough Mecca was a

stronghold of the old pagan cult which gave it its importance and

prosperity; Medina, on the other hand, had Jewish proclivities, and

there were Jewish settlements near by. It was inevitable that Mecca and

Medina should be in a state of rivalry and bickering feud.

§ 2

It was in Mecca about the year A.D. 570 that Muhammad, the founder of

Islam, was born. He was born in considerable poverty, and even by the

standards of the desert he was uneducated; it is doubtful if he ever

learnt to write. He was for some years a shepherd’s boy; then he became

the servant of a certain Kadija, the widow of a rich merchant. Probably

he had to look after her camels or help in her trading operations; and

he is said to have travelled with caravans to the Yemen and to Syria. He

does not seem to have been a very useful trader, but he had the good

fortune to find favour in the lady’s eyes, and she married him, to the

great annoyance of her family. He was then only twenty-five years old.

It is uncertain if his wife was much older, though tradition declares

she was forty. After the marriage he probably made no more long

journeys. There were several children, one of whom was named Abd

Manif--that is to say, the servant of the Meccan god Manif, which

demonstrates that at that time Muhammad had made no religious

discoveries.

Until he was forty he did indeed live a particularly undistinguished

life in Mecca, as the husband of a prosperous wife. There may be some

ground for the supposition that he became partner in a business in

agricultural produce. To anyone visiting Mecca about A.D. 600 he would

probably have seemed something of a loafer, a rather shy, good-looking

individual, sitting about and listening to talk, a poor poet, and an

altogether second-rate man.

About his internal life we can only speculate. Imaginative writers have

supposed that he had great spiritual struggles, that he went out into

the desert in agonies of doubt and divine desire. “In the silence of the

desert night, in the bright heat of noontide desert day, he, as do all

men, had known and felt himself alone yet not in solitude, for the

desert is of God, and in the desert no man may deny Him.”[321] Maybe

that was so, but there is no evidence of any such desert trips. Yet he

was certainly thinking deeply of the things about him. Possibly he had

seen Christian churches in Syria; almost certainly he knew much of the

Jews and their religion, and he heard their scorn for this black stone

of the Kaaba that ruled over the three hundred odd tribal gods of

Arabia. He saw the pilgrimage crowds, and noted the threads of

insincerity and superstition in the paganism of the town. It oppressed

his mind. The Jews had perhaps converted him to a belief in the One True

God, without his knowing what had happened to him.

At last he could keep these feelings to himself no longer. When he was

forty he began to talk about the reality of God, at first apparently

only to his wife and a few intimates. He produced certain verses, which

he declared had been revealed to him by an angel. They involved an

assertion of the unity of God and some acceptable generalizations about

righteousness. He also insisted upon a future life, the fear of hell for

the negligent and evil, and the reservation of paradise for the

believer in the One God. Except for his claim to be a new prophet, there

does not seem to have been anything very new about these doctrines at

the time, but this was seditious teaching for Mecca, which partly

subsisted upon its polytheistic cult, and which was therefore holding on

to idols when all the rest of the world was giving them up. Like Mani,

Muhammad claimed that the prophets before him, and especially Jesus and

Abraham, had been divine teachers, but that he crowned and completed

their teaching. Buddhism, however, he did not name, probably because he

had never heard of Buddha. Desert Arabia was in a theological backwater.

For some years the new religion was the secret of a small group of

simple people, Kadija, the prophet’s wife, Ali, an adopted son, Zeid, a

slave, and Abu Bekr, a friend and admirer. For some years it was an

obscure sect in a few households of Mecca, a mere scowl and muttering at

idolatry, so obscure and unimportant that the leading men of the town

did not trouble about it in the least. Then it gathered strength.

Muhammad began to preach more openly, to teach the doctrine of a future

life, and to threaten idolaters and unbelievers with hell fire. He seems

to have preached with considerable effect. It appeared to many that he

was aiming at a sort of dictatorship in Mecca, and drawing many

susceptible and discontented people to his side; and an attempt was made

to discourage and suppress the new movement.

Mecca was a place of pilgrimage and a sanctuary; no blood could be shed

within its walls; nevertheless, things were made extremely disagreeable

for the followers of the new teacher. Boycott and confiscation were used

against them. Some were driven to take refuge in Christian Abyssinia.

But the Prophet himself went unscathed because he was well connected,

and his opponents did not want to begin a blood feud. We cannot follow

the fluctuations of the struggle here, but it is necessary to note one

perplexing incident in the new prophet’s career, which, says Sir Mark

Sykes, “proves him to have been an Arab of the Arabs.” After all his

insistence upon the oneness of God, he wavered. He came into the

courtyard of the Kaaba, and declared that the gods and goddesses of

Mecca might, after all, be real, might be a species of saints with a

power of intercession.

His recantation was received with enthusiasm, but he had no sooner made

it than he repented, and his repentance shows that he had indeed the

fear of God in him. His lapse from honesty proves him honest. He did all

he could to repair the evil he had done. He said that the devil had

possessed his tongue, and denounced idolatry again with renewed vigour.

The struggle against the antiquated deities, after a brief interval of

peace, was renewed again more grimly, and with no further hope of

reconciliation.

For a time the old interests had the upper hand. At the end of ten years

of prophesying, Muhammad found himself a man of fifty, and altogether

unsuccessful in Mecca. Kadija, his first wife, was dead, and several of

his chief supporters had also recently died. He sought a refuge at the

neighbouring town of Tayf, but Tayf drove him out with stones and abuse.

Then, when the world looked darkest to him, opportunity opened before

him. He found he had been weighed and approved in an unexpected quarter.

The city of Medina was much torn by internal dissension, and many of its

people, during the time of pilgrimage to Mecca, had been attracted by

Muhammad’s teaching. Probably the numerous Jews in Medina had shaken the

ancient idolatry of the people. An invitation was sent to him to come

and rule in the name of his God in Medina.

He did not go at once. He parleyed for two years, sending a disciple to

preach in Medina and destroy the idols there. Then he began sending such

followers as he had in Mecca to Medina to await his coming there; he did

not want to trust himself to unknown adherents in a strange city. This

exodus of the faithful continued, until at last only he and Abu Bekr

remained.

In spite of the character of Mecca as a sanctuary, he was very nearly

murdered there. The elders of the town evidently knew of what was going

on in Medina, and they realized the danger to them if this seditious

prophet presently found himself master of a town on their main caravan

route to Syria. Custom must bow to imperative necessity, they thought;

and they decided that, blood feud or no blood feud, Muhammad must die.

They arranged that he should be murdered in his bed; and in order to

share the guilt of this breach of sanctuary they appointed a committee

to do this, representing every family in the city except Muhammad’s

own. But Muhammad had already prepared his flight; and when in the

night they rushed into his room, they found Ali, his adopted son,

sleeping, or feigning sleep, on his bed.

The flight (the Hegira[322]) was an adventurous one, the pursuit being

pressed hard. Expert desert trackers sought for the spoor to the north

of the town, but Muhammad and Abu Bekr had gone south to certain caves

where camels and provisions were hidden, and thence he made a great

detour to Medina. There he and his faithful companion arrived, and were

received with great enthusiasm on September 20, 622. It was the end of

his probation and the beginning of his power.[323]

§ 3

Until the Hegira, until he was fifty-one, the character of the founder

of Islam is a matter of speculation and dispute. Thereafter he is in the

light. We discover a man of great imaginative power but tortuous in the

Arab fashion, and with most of the virtues and defects of the Bedouin.

The opening of his reign was “very Bedouin.” The rule of the One God of

all the earth, as it was interpreted by Muhammad, began with a series of

raids--which for more than a year were invariably unsuccessful--upon the

caravans of Mecca. Then came a grave scandal, the breaking of the

ancient customary truce of the Arab Amphictyony in the sacred month of

Rahab. A party of Moslems, in this season of profound peace,

treacherously attacked a small caravan and killed a man. It was their

only success, and they did it by the order of the Prophet.

Presently came a battle. A force of seven hundred men had come out from

Mecca to convoy home another caravan, and they encountered a large

raiding party of three hundred. There was a fight, the battle of Badr,

and the Meccans got the worst of it. They lost about fifty or sixty

killed and as many wounded. Muhammad returned in triumph to Medina, and

was inspired by Allah and this success to order the assassination of a

number of his opponents among the Jews in the town who had treated his

prophetic claims with a disagreeable levity.

But Mecca resolved to avenge Badr, and at the battle of Uhud, near

Medina, inflicted an indecisive defeat upon the Prophet’s followers.

Muhammad was knocked down and nearly killed, and there was much running

away among his followers. The Meccans, however, did not push their

advantage and enter Medina.

For some time all the energies of the Prophet were concentrated upon

rallying his followers, who were evidently much dispirited. The Koran

records the chastened feelings of those days. “The _suras_ of the

Koran,” says Sir Mark Sykes, “which are attributed to this period, excel

nearly all the others in their majesty and sublime confidence.” Here,

for the judgment of the reader, is an example of these majestic

utterances, from the recent orthodox translation by the Maulvi Muhammad

Ali.[324]

“Oh, you who believe! If you obey those who disbelieve, they will turn

you back upon your heels, so you will turn back losers.

“Nay! Allah is your Patron, and He is the best of the helpers.

“We will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve, because

they set up with Allah that for which He has sent down no authority, and

their abode is the fire; and evil is the abode of the unjust.

“And certainly Allah made good to you His promise, when you slew them by

His permission, until when you became weak-hearted and disputed about

the affair and disobeyed after He had shown you that which you loved; of

you were some who desired this world, and of you were some who desired

the hereafter; then He turned you away from them that He might try you;

and He has certainly pardoned you, and Allah is Gracious to the

believers.

“When you ran off precipitately, and did not wait for anyone, and the

Apostle was calling you from your rear, so He gave you another sorrow

instead of your sorrow, so that you might not grieve at what had escaped

you, nor at what befell you; and Allah is aware of what you do.

“Then after sorrow he sent down security upon you, a calm coming upon a

party of you, and there was another party whom their own souls had

rendered anxious; they entertained about Allah thoughts of ignorance

quite unjustly, saying: We have no hand in this affair. Say, surely the

affair is wholly in the hands of Allah. They conceal within their souls

what they would not reveal to you. They say: Had we any hand in the

affair, we would not have been slain here. Say: had you remained in your

houses, those for whom slaughter was ordained would certainly have gone

forth to the places where they would be slain, and that Allah might test

what was in your breasts and that He might purge what was in your

hearts; and Allah knows what is in the breasts.

“As for those of you who turned back on the day when the two armies met,

only the devil sought to cause them to make a slip on account of some

deeds they had done, and certainly Allah has pardoned them; surely Allah

is Forgiving, Forbearing.”

* * * * *

Inconclusive hostilities continued for some years, and at last Mecca

made a crowning effort to stamp out for good and all the growing power

of Medina. A mixed force of no fewer than 10,000 men was scraped

together, an enormous force for the time and country. It was, of course,

an entirely undisciplined force of footmen, horsemen, and camel riders,

and it was prepared for nothing but the usual desert scrimmage. Bows,

spears, and swords were its only weapons. When at last it arrived amid a

vast cloud of dust in sight of the hovels and houses of Medina, instead

of a smaller force of the same kind drawn up for battle as it had

expected, it found a new and entirely disconcerting phenomenon, a trench

and a wall. Assisted by a Persian convert, Muhammad had entrenched

himself in Medina!

This trench struck the Bedouin miscellany as one of the most

unsportsmanlike things that had ever been known in the history of the

world. They rode about the place. They shouted their opinion of the

whole business to the besieged. They discharged a few arrows, and at

last encamped to argue about this amazing outrage. They could arrive at

no decision. Muhammad would not come out; the rains began to fall, the

tents of the allies got wet, and the cooking difficult, views became

divergent and tempers gave way, and at last this great host dwindled

again into its constituent parts without ever having given battle (627).

The bands dispersed north, east, and south, became clouds of dust, and

ceased to matter. Near Medina was a castle of Jews, against whom

Muhammad was already incensed because of their disrespect for his

theology. They had shown a disposition to side with the probable victor

in this last struggle, and Muhammad now fell upon them, slew all the

men, nine hundred of them, and enslaved the women and children. Possibly

many of their late allies were among the bidders for these slaves. Never

again after this quaint failure did Mecca make an effective rally

against Muhammad, and one by one its leading men came over to his side.

We need not follow the windings of the truce and the treaty that finally

extended the rule of the Prophet to Mecca. The gist of the agreement was

that the faithful should turn towards Mecca when they prayed instead of

turning towards Jerusalem, as they had hitherto done, and that Mecca

should be the pilgrimage centre of the new faith. So long as the

pilgrimage continued, the men of Mecca, it would seem, did not care very

much whether the crowd assembled in the name of one god or many.

Muhammad was getting more and more hopeless of any extensive conversion

of the Jews and Christians, and he was ceasing to press his idea that

all these faiths really worshipped the same One God. Allah was becoming

more and more his own special God, tethered now by this treaty to the

meteoric stone of the Kaaba, and less and less the father of all

mankind. Already the Prophet had betrayed a disposition to make a deal

with Mecca, and at last it was effected. The lordship of Mecca was well

worth the concession. Of comings and goings and a final conflict we need

not tell. In 629 Muhammad came to the town as its master. The image of

Manif, the god after whom he had once named his son, was smashed under

his feet as he entered the Kaaba.

Thereafter his power extended, there were battles, treacheries,

massacres; but on the whole he prevailed, until he was master of all

Arabia; and when he was master of all Arabia in 632, at the age of

sixty-two, he died.

Throughout the concluding eleven years of his life after the Hegira,

there is little to distinguish the general conduct of Muhammad from that

of any other welder of peoples into a monarchy. The chief difference is

his use of a religion of his own creation as his cement. He was

diplomatic, treacherous, ruthless, or compromising as the occasion

required and as any other Arab king might have been in his place; and

there was singularly little spirituality in his kingship. Nor was his

domestic life during his time of power and freedom one of exceptional

edification. Until the death of Kadija, when he was fifty, he seems to

have been the honest husband of one wife; but then, as many men do in

their declining years, he developed a disagreeably strong interest in

women.

He married two wives after the death of Kadija, one being the young

Ayesha, who became and remained his favourite and most influential

partner; and subsequently a number of other women, wives and concubines,

were added to his establishment. This led to much trouble and confusion,

and in spite of many special and very helpful revelations on the part of

Allah, these complications still require much explanation and argument

from the faithful. There was, for example, a scandal about Ayesha; she

was left behind on one occasion when the howdah and the camel went on,

while she was looking for her necklace among the bushes; and so Allah

had to intervene with some heat and denounce her slanderers. Allah also

had to speak very plainly about the general craving among this household

of women for “this world’s life and its ornature” and for “finery.” Then

there was much discussion because the Prophet first married his young

cousin Zainib to his adopted son Zaid, and afterwards, “when Zaid had

accomplished his want of her,” the Prophet took her and married

her--but, as the inspired book makes clear, only in order to show the

difference between an adopted and a real son. “We gave her to you as a

wife, so that there should be no difficulty for the believers in respect

of the wives of their adopted sons, when they have accomplished their

want of them, and Allah’s command shall be performed.” Yet surely a

simple statement in the Koran should have sufficed without this

excessively practical demonstration. There was, moreover, a mutiny in

the harem on account of the undue favours shown by the Prophet to an

Egyptian concubine who had borne him a boy, a boy for whom he had a

great affection, since none of Kadija’s sons had survived. These

domestic troubles mingle inextricably with our impression of the

Prophet’s personality. One of his wives was a Jewess, Safiyya, whom he

had married on the evening of the battle in which her husband had been

captured and executed. He viewed the captured women at the end of the

day, and she found favour in his eyes and was taken to his tent.

These are salient facts in these last eleven years of Muhammad’s career.

Because he too founded a great religion, there are those who write of

this evidently lustful and rather shifty leader as though he were a man

to put beside Jesus of Nazareth or Gautama or Mani. But it is surely

manifest that he was a being of a commoner clay; he was vain,

egotistical, tyrannous, and a self-deceiver; and it would throw all our

history out of proportion if, out of an insincere deference to the

possible Moslem reader, we were to present him in any other light.

Yet, unless we balance it, this insistence upon his vanity, egotism,

self-deception, and hot desire does not complete the justice of the

case. We must not swing across from the repudiation of the extravagant

pretensions of the faithful to an equally extravagant condemnation. Can

a man who has no good qualities hold a friend? Because those who knew

Muhammad best believed in him most. Kadija for all her days believed in

him--but she may have been a fond woman. Abu Bekr is a better witness,

and he never wavered in his devotion. Abu Bekr believed in the Prophet,

and it is very hard for anyone who reads the history of these times not

to believe in Abu Bekr. Ali again risked his life for the Prophet in his

darkest days. Muhammad was no impostor, at any rate, though at times his

vanity made him behave as though Allah was at his beck and call, and as

if his thoughts were necessarily God’s thoughts. And if his bloodstained

passion with Safiyya amazes and disgusts our modern minds, his love for

little Ibrahim, the son of Mary the Egyptian, and his passionate grief

when the child died, reinstate him in the fellowship of all those who

have known love and loss.

He smoothed the earth over the little grave with his own hands. “This

eases the afflicted heart,” he said. “Though it neither profits nor

injures the dead, yet it is a comfort to the living.”

§ 4

But the personal quality of Muhammad is one thing and the quality of

Islam, the religion he founded, is quite another. Muhammad was not

pitted against Jesus or Mani, and his relative stature is only a very

secondary question for us; it is Islam which was pitted against the

corrupted Christianity of the seventh century and against the decaying

tradition of the Zoroastrian Magi with which the historian has the

greater concern. And whether it was through its Prophet, or whether it

was in spite of its Prophet, and through certain accidents in its origin

and certain qualities of the desert from which it sprang, there can be

no denying that Islam possesses many fine and noble attributes. It is

not always through sublime persons that great things come into human

life. It is the folly of the simple disciple which demands miraculous

frippery on the majesty of truth and immaculate conceptions for

righteousness.

A year before his death, at the end of the tenth year of the Hegira,

Muhammad made his last pilgrimage from Medina to Mecca. He made then a

great sermon to his people of which the tradition is as follows. There

are, of course, disputes as to the authenticity of the words, but there

can be no dispute that the world of Islam, a world still of three

hundred million people, receives them to this day as its rule of life,

and to a great extent observes it. The reader will note that the first

paragraph sweeps away all plunder and blood feuds among the followers of

Islam. The last makes the believing Negro the equal of the Caliph. They

may not be sublime words, as certain utterances of Jesus of Nazareth are

sublime; but they established in the world a great tradition of

dignified fair dealing, they breathe a spirit of generosity, and they

are human and workable. They created a society more free from widespread

cruelty and social oppression than any society had ever been in the

world before.

“Ye people: Hearken to my words; for I know not whether, after this

year, I shall ever be amongst you here again. Your lives and property

are sacred and inviolable amongst one another until the end of time.

“The Lord hath ordained to every man the share of his inheritance; a

testament is not lawful to the prejudice of heirs.

“The child belongeth to the parent; and the violator of wedlock shall be

stoned.

“Whoever claimeth falsely another for his father, or another for his

master, the curse of God and the angels and of all mankind shall rest

upon him.

“Ye people! Ye have rights demandable of your wives, and they have

rights demandable of you. Upon them it is incumbent not to violate their

conjugal faith nor commit any act of open impropriety; which things if

they do, ye have authority to shut them up in separate apartments and to

beat them with stripes, yet not severely. But if they refrain therefrom,

clothe them and feed them suitably. And treat your women well, for they

are with you as captives and prisoners; they have not power over

anything as regards themselves. And ye have verily taken them on the

security of God, and have made their persons lawful unto you by the

words of God.

“And your slaves, see that ye feed them with such food as ye eat

yourselves, and clothe them with the stuff ye wear. And if they commit a

fault which ye are not inclined to forgive, then sell them, for they are

the servants of the Lord, and are not to be tormented.

“Ye people! hearken to my speech and comprehend the same. Know that

every Moslem is the brother of every other Moslem. All of you are on the

same equality.”

This insistence upon kindliness and consideration in the daily life is

one of the main virtues of Islam, but it is not the only one. Equally

important is the uncompromising monotheism, void of any Jewish

exclusiveness, which is sustained by the Koran. Islam from the outset

was fairly proof against the theological elaborations that have

perplexed and divided Christianity and smothered the spirit of Jesus.

And its third source of strength has been in the meticulous prescription

of methods of prayer and worship, and its clear statement of the limited

and conventional significance of the importance ascribed to Mecca. All

sacrifice was barred to the faithful; no loophole was left for the

sacrificial priest of the old dispensation to come back into the new

faith. It was not simply a new faith, a purely prophetic religion, as

the religion of Jesus was in the time of Jesus, or the religion of

Gautama in the lifetime of Gautama, but it was so stated as to remain

so. Islam to this day has learned doctors, teachers, and preachers; but

it has no priests.

It was full of the spirit of kindliness, generosity, and brotherhood; it

was a simple and understandable religion; it was instinct with the

chivalrous sentiment of the desert; and it made its appeal straight to

the commonest instincts in the composition of ordinary men. Against it

were pitted Judaism, which had made a racial hoard of God; Christianity

talking and preaching endlessly now of trinities, doctrines, and

heresies no ordinary man could make head or tail of; and Mazdaism, the

cult of the Zoroastrian Magi, who had inspired the crucifixion of Mani.

The bulk of the people to whom the challenge of Islam came did not

trouble very much whether Muhammad was lustful or not, or whether he had

done some shifty and questionable things; what appealed to them was that

this God, Allah, he preached, was by the test of the conscience in their

hearts a God of righteousness, and that the honest acceptance of his

doctrine and method opened the door wide in a world of uncertainty,

treachery, and intolerable divisions to a great and increasing

brotherhood of trustworthy men on earth, and to a paradise not of

perpetual exercises in praise and worship, in which saints, priests, and

anointed kings were still to have the upper places, but of equal

fellowship and simple and understandable delights such as their souls

craved for. Without any ambiguous symbolism, without any darkening of

altars or chanting of priests, Muhammad had brought home those

attractive doctrines to the hearts of mankind.

§ 5

The true embodiment of the spirit of Islam was not Muhammad, but his

close friend and supporter Abu Bekr. There can be little doubt that if

Muhammad was the mind and imagination of primitive Islam, Abu Bekr was

its conscience and its will. Throughout their life together it was

Muhammad who said the thing, but it was Abu Bekr who believed the

thing. When Muhammad wavered, Abu Bekr sustained him. Abu Bekr was a man

without doubts, his beliefs cut down to acts cleanly as a sharp knife

cuts. We may feel sure that Abu Bekr would never have temporized about

the minor gods of Mecca, or needed inspirations from Allah to explain

his private life. When in the eleventh year of the Hegira (632) the

Prophet sickened of a fever and died, it was Abu Bekr who succeeded him

as Caliph and leader of the people (Kalifa = Successor), and it was the

unflinching confidence of Abu Bekr in the righteousness of Allah which

prevented a split between Medina and Mecca, which stamped down a

widespread insurrection of the Bedouin against taxation for the common

cause, and carried out a great plundering raid into Syria that the dead

Prophet had projected. And then Abu Bekr, with that faith which moves

mountains, set himself simply and sanely to organize the subjugation of

the whole world to Allah--with little armies of 3000 or 4000

Arabs--according to those letters the Prophet had written from Medina in

628 to all the monarchs of the world.

And the attempt came near to succeeding. Had there been in Islam a score

of men, younger men to carry on his work, of Abu Bekr’s quality, it

would certainly have succeeded. It came near to succeeding because

Arabia was now a centre of faith and will, and because nowhere else in

the world until China was reached, unless it was upon the steppes of

Russia or Turkestan, was there another community of free-spirited men

with any power of belief in their rulers and leaders. The head of the

Byzantine Empire, Heraclius, the conqueror of Chosroes II, was past his

prime and suffering from dropsy, and his empire was exhausted by the

long Persian War. Nor had he at any time displayed such exceptional

ability as the new occasion demanded. The motley of people under his

rule knew little of him and cared less. Persia was at the lowest depths

of monarchist degradation, the parricide Kavadh II had died after a

reign of a few months, and a series of dynastic intrigues and romantic

murders enlivened the palace but weakened the country. The war between

Persia and the Byzantine Empire was only formally concluded about the

time of the beginning of Abu Bekr’s rule. Both sides had made great use

of Arab auxiliaries; over Syria a number of towns and settlements of

Christianized Arabs were scattered who professed a baseless loyalty to

Constantinople; the Persian marches between Mesopotamia and the desert

were under the control of an Arab tributary prince, whose capital was at

Hira. Arab influence was strong in such cities as Damascus, where

Christian Arab gentlemen would read and recite the latest poetry from

the desert competitors. There was thus a great amount of easily

assimilable material ready at hand for Islam.

And the military campaigns that now began were among the most brilliant

in the world’s history. Arabia had suddenly become a garden of fine men.

The name of Khalid stands out as the brightest star in a constellation

of able and devoted Moslem generals. Whenever he commanded he was

victorious, and when the jealousy of the second Caliph, Omar, degraded

him unjustly and inexcusably,[325] he made no ado, but served Allah

cheerfully and well as a subordinate to those over whom he had ruled. We

cannot trace the story of this warfare here; the Arab armies struck

simultaneously at Byzantine Syria and the Persian frontier city of Hira,

and everywhere they offered a choice of three alternatives: either pay

tribute, or confess the true God and join us, or die. They encountered

armies, large and disciplined but spiritless armies, and defeated them.

And nowhere was there such a thing as a popular resistance. The people

of the populous irrigation lands of Mesopotamia cared not a jot whether

they paid taxes to Byzantium or Persepolis or to Medina; and of the two,

Arabs or Persian court, the Arabs, the Arabs of the great years, were

manifestly the cleaner people, more just and more merciful. The

Christian Arabs joined the invaders very readily and so did many Jews.

Just as in the west, so now in the east, an invasion became a social

revolution. But here it was also a religious revolution with a new and

distinctive mental vitality.

[Illustration: The BEGINNINGS of the MOSLEM POWER]

It was Khalid who fought the decisive battle (634) with the army of

Heraclius upon the banks of the Yarmuk, a tributary of the Jordan. The

legions, as ever, were without proper cavalry; for seven centuries the

ghost of old Crassus had haunted the east in vain; the imperial armies

relied upon Christian Arab auxiliaries, and these deserted to the

Moslems as the armies joined issue. A great parade of priests, sacred

banners, pictures, and holy relics was made by the Byzantine host, and

it was further sustained by the chanting of monks. But there was no

magic in the relics and little conviction about the chanting. On the

Arab side the Emirs and sheiks harangued the troops, and after the

ancient Arab fashion the shrill voices of women in the rear encouraged

their men. The Moslem ranks were full of believers before whom shone

victory or paradise. The battle was never in doubt after the defection

of the irregular cavalry. An attempt to retreat dissolved into a rout

and became a massacre. The Byzantine army had fought with its back to

the river, which was presently choked with its dead.

Thereafter Heraclius slowly relinquished all Syria, which he had so

lately won back from the Persians, to his new antagonists. Damascus soon

fell, and a year later the Moslems entered Antioch. For a time they had

to abandon it again to a last effort from Constantinople, but they

re-entered it for good under Khalid.

Meanwhile on the eastern front, after a swift initial success which gave

them Hira, the Persian resistance stiffened. The dynastic struggle had

ended at last in the coming of a king of kings, and a general of ability

had been found in Rustam. He gave battle at Kadessia (637). His army was

just such another composite host as Darius had led into Thrace or

Alexander defeated at Issus; it was a medley of levies. He had

thirty-three war elephants, and he sat on a golden throne upon a raised

platform behind the Persian ranks, surveying the battle, which throne

will remind the reader of Herodotus, the Hellespont, and Salamis more

than a thousand years before. The battle lasted three days; each day the

Arabs attacked and the Persian host held its ground until nightfall

called a truce. On the third day the Arabs received reinforcements, and

towards the evening the Persians attempted to bring the struggle to an

end by a charge of elephants. At first the huge beasts carried all

before them; then one was wounded painfully and became uncontrollable,

rushing up and down between the armies. Its panic affected the others,

and for a time both armies remained dumbfounded in the red light of

sunset, watching the frantic efforts of these grey, squealing monsters

to escape from the tormenting masses of armed men that hemmed them in.

It was by the merest chance that at last they broke through the Persian

and not through the Arab array, and that it was the Arabs who were able

to charge home upon the resulting confusion. The twilight darkened to

night, but this time the armies did not separate. All through the night

the Arabs smote in the name of Allah, and pressed upon the shattered and

retreating Persians. Dawn broke upon the vestiges of Rustam’s army in

flight far beyond the litter of the battlefield. Its path was marked by

scattered weapons and war material, abandoned transport, and the dead

and dying. The platform and the golden throne were broken down, and

Rustam lay dead among a heap of dead men....

Already in 634 Abu Bekr had died and given place to Omar, the Prophet’s

brother-in-law, as Caliph; and it was under Omar (634-643) that the main

conquests of the Moslems occurred. The Byzantine Empire was pushed out

of Syria altogether. But at the Taurus Mountains the Moslem thrust was

held. Armenia was overrun, all Mesopotamia was conquered and Persia

beyond the rivers. Egypt passed almost passively from Greek to Arab; in

a few years the Semitic race, in the name of God and His Prophet, had

recovered nearly all the dominions it had lost to the Aryan Persians a

thousand years before. Jerusalem fell early, making a treaty without

standing siege, and so the True Cross which had been carried off by the

Persians a dozen years before, and elaborately restored by Heraclius,

passed once more out of the rule of Christians. But it was still in

Christian hands; the Christians were to be tolerated, paying only a poll

tax; and all the churches and all the relics were left in their

possession.

Jerusalem made a peculiar condition for its surrender. The city would

give itself only to the Caliph Omar in person. Hitherto he had been in

Medina organizing armies and controlling the general campaign. He came

to Jerusalem (638), and the manner of his coming shows how swiftly the

vigour and simplicity of the first Moslem onset was being sapped by

success. He came the six-hundred-mile journey with only one attendant;

he was mounted on a camel, and a bag of barley, another of dates, a

waterskin, and a wooden platter were his provision for the journey. He

was met outside the city by his chief captains, robed splendidly in

silks and with richly caparisoned horses. At this amazing sight the old

man was overcome with rage. He slipped down from his saddle, scrabbled

up dirt and stones with his hands, and pelted these fine gentlemen,

shouting abuse. What was this insult? What did this finery mean? Where

were his warriors? Where were the desert men? He would not let these

popinjays escort him. He went on with his attendant, and the smart Emirs

rode afar off--well out of range of his stones. He met the Patriarch of

Jerusalem, who had apparently taken over the city from its Byzantine

rulers, alone. With the Patriarch he got on very well. They went round

the Holy Places together, and Omar, now a little appeased, made sly

jokes at the expense of his too magnificent followers.

Equally indicative of the tendencies of the time is Omar’s letter

ordering one of his governors who had built himself a palace at Kufa, to

demolish it again.

“They tell me,” he wrote, “you would imitate the palace of

Chosroes,[326] and that you would even use the gates that once were his.

Will you also have guards and porters at those gates, as Chosroes had?

Will you keep the faithful afar off and deny audience to the poor? Would

you depart from the custom of our Prophet, and be as magnificent as

those Persian emperors, and descend to hell even as they have

done?”[327]

§ 6

Abu Bekr and Omar I are the two master figures in the history of Islam.

It is not within our scope here to describe the wars by which in a

hundred and twenty-five years Islam spread itself from the Indus to the

Atlantic and Spain, and from Kashgar on the borders of China to Upper

Egypt. Two maps must suffice to show the limits to which the vigorous

impulse of the new faith carried the Arab idea and the Arabic

scriptures, before worldliness, the old trading and plundering spirit,

and the glamour of the silk robe had completely recovered their

paralyzing sway over the Arab intelligence and will. The reader will

note how the great tide swept over the footsteps of Yuan Chwang, and how

easily in Africa the easy conquests of the Vandals were repeated in the

reverse direction. And if the reader entertains any delusions about a

fine civilization, either Persian, Roman, Hellenic, or Egyptian, being

submerged by this flood, the sooner he dismisses such ideas the better.

Islam prevailed because it was the best social and political order the

times could offer. It prevailed because everywhere it found politically

apathetic peoples, robbed, oppressed, bullied, uneducated, and

unorganized, and it found selfish and unsound governments out of touch

with any people at all. It was the broadest, freshest, and cleanest

political idea that had yet come into actual activity in the world, and

it offered better terms than any other to the mass of mankind. The

capitalistic and slave-holding system of the Roman Empire and the

literature and culture and social tradition of Europe had altogether

decayed and broken down before Islam arose; it was only when mankind

lost faith in the sincerity of its representatives that Islam too began

to decay.

[Illustration: The GROWTH of the MOSLEM POWER in 25 years]

The larger part of its energy spent itself in conquering and

assimilating Persia and Turkestan; its most vigorous thrusts were

northwardly from Persia and westwardly through Egypt. Had it

concentrated its first vigour upon the Byzantine Empire, there can be

little doubt that by the eighth century it would have taken

Constantinople and come through into Europe as easily as it reached the

Pamirs. The Caliph Moawiya, it is true, besieged the capital for seven

years (672 to 678), and Suleiman in 717 and 718; but the pressure was

not sustained, and for three or four centuries longer the Byzantine

Empire remained the crazy bulwark of Europe. In the newly Christianized

or still pagan Avars, Bulgars, Serbs, Slavs, and Saxons, Islam would

certainly have found as ready converts as it did in the Turks of Central

Asia. And though, instead of insisting upon Constantinople, it first

came round into Europe by the circuitous route of Africa and Spain, it

was only in France, at the end of a vast line of communications from

Arabia, that it encountered a power sufficiently vigorous to arrest its

advance.

From the outset the Bedouin aristocrats of Mecca dominated the new

empire. Abu Bekr, the first Caliph, was in an informal shouting way

elected at Medina, and so were Omar I and Othman, the third Caliph, but

all three were Meccans of good family. They were not men of Medina. And

though Abu Bekr and Omar were men of stark simplicity and righteousness

Othman was of a baser quality, a man quite in the vein of those silk

robes, to whom conquest was not conquest for Allah but for Arabia, and

especially for Mecca in Arabia, and more particularly for himself and

for the Meccans and for his family, the Omayyads. He was a worthy man,

who stood out for his country and his town and his “people.” He was no

early convert as his two predecessors had been; he had joined the

Prophet for reasons of policy in fair give and take. With his accession

the Caliph ceases to be a strange man of fire and wonder, and becomes an

Oriental monarch like many Oriental monarchs before and since, a fairly

good monarch by Eastern standards as yet, but nothing more.

[Illustration: The MOSLEM EMPIRE, 750 A.D.]

The rule and death of Othman brought out the consequences of Muhammad’s

weaknesses as clearly as the lives of Abu Bekr and Omar had witnessed to

the divine fire in his teaching. Muhammad had been politic at times when

Abu Bekr would have been firm, and the new element of aristocratic

greediness that came in with Othman was one fruit of those politic

moments. And the legacy of that carelessly compiled harem of the

Prophet, the family complications and jealousies which had lurked in the

background of Moslem affairs during the rule of the first two Caliphs,

was now coming out into the light of day. Ali, who was the nephew, the

adopted son, and the son-in-law of the Prophet--he was the husband of

the Prophet’s daughter Fatima--he had considered himself the rightful

Caliph. His claims formed an undertow to the resentment of Medina and of

the rival families of Mecca against the advancement of the Omayyads. But

Ayesha, the favourite wife of the Prophet, had always been jealous of

Fatima and hostile to Ali. She supported Othman.... The splendid opening

of the story of Islam collapses suddenly into this squalid dispute and

bickering of heirs and widows.

In 656 Othman, an old man of eighty, was stoned in the streets of Medina

by a mob, chased to his house, and murdered; and Ali became at last

Caliph, only to be murdered in his turn (661). In one of the battles in

this civil war, Ayesha, now a gallant, mischievous old lady,

distinguished herself by leading a charge, mounted on a camel. She was

taken prisoner and treated well.

While the armies of Islam were advancing triumphantly to the conquest of

the world, this sickness of civil war smote at its head. What was the

rule of Allah in the world to Ayesha when she could score off the

detested Fatima, and what heed were the Omayyads and the partisans of

Ali likely to take of the unity of mankind when they had a good hot feud

of this sort to entertain them, with the caliphate as a prize? The

world of Islam was rent in twain by the spites, greeds, and partisan

silliness of a handful of men and women in Medina. That quarrel still

lives. To this day one main division of the Moslems, the Shiites,

maintain the hereditary right of Ali to be Caliph _as an article of

faith_! They prevail in Persia and India. But an equally important

section, the Sunnites, with whom it is difficult for a disinterested

observer not to agree, deny this peculiar addendum to Muhammad’s simple

creed. So far as we can gather at this length of time, Ali was an

entirely commonplace individual.

To watch this schism creeping across the brave beginnings of Islam is

like watching a case of softening of the brain. To the copious

literature of the subject we must refer the reader who wishes to learn

how Hasan, the son of Ali, was poisoned by his wife, and how Husein, his

brother, was killed. We do but name them here because they still afford

a large section of mankind scope for sentimental partisanship and mutual

annoyance. They are the two chief Shiite martyrs. Amidst the coming and

going of their conflicts the old Kaaba at Mecca was burnt down, and

naturally there began endless disputation whether it should be rebuilt

in exactly its ancient form or on a much larger scale.

In this and the preceding sections we have seen once more the inevitable

struggle of this newest and latest unifying impulse in the world’s

affairs against the everyday worldliness of mankind, and we have seen

also how from the first the complicated household of Muhammad was like

an evil legacy to the new faith. But as this history now degenerates

into the normal crimes and intrigues of an Oriental dynasty, the student

of history will realize a third fundamental weakness in the world

reforms of Muhammad. He was an illiterate Arab, ignorant of history,

totally ignorant of all the political experiences of Rome and Greece,

and almost as ignorant of the real history of Judea; and he left his

followers with no scheme for a stable government embodying and

concentrating the general will of the faithful, and no effective form to

express the very real spirit of democracy (using the word in its modern

sense) that pervades the essential teaching of Islam. His own rule was

unlimited autocracy, and autocratic Islam has remained. Politically

Islam was not an advance, but a retrogression from the traditional

freedoms and customary laws of the desert. The breach of the pilgrims’

trace that led to the battle of Badr is the blackest mark against early

Islam. Nominally Allah is its chief ruler--but practically its master

has always been whatever man was vigorous and unscrupulous enough to

snatch and hold the Caliphate--and, subject to revolts and

assassinations, its final law has been that man’s will.

For a time, after the death of Ali, the Omayyad family was in the

ascendant, and for nearly a century they gave rulers to Islam.

The Arab historians are so occupied with the dynastic squabbles and

crimes of the time, that it is difficult to trace the external history

of the period. We find Moslem shipping upon the seas defeating the

Byzantine fleet in a great sea fight off the coast of Lycia (A.D. 655),

but how the Moslems acquired this victorious fleet thus early we do not

clearly know. It was probably chiefly Egyptian. For some years Islam

certainly controlled the eastern Mediterranean, and in 662 and again in

672, during the reign of Muawiya (662-680), the first great Omayyad

Caliph, made two sea attacks upon Constantinople. They had to be sea

attacks because Islam, so long as it was under Arab rule, never

surmounted the barrier of the Taurus Mountains. During the same period

the Moslems were also pressing their conquests further and further into

Central Asia. While Islam was already decaying at its centre, it was yet

making great hosts of new adherents and awakening a new spirit among the

hitherto divided and aimless Turkish peoples. Medina was no longer a

possible centre for its vast enterprises in Asia, Africa, and the

Mediterranean, and so Damascus became the usual capital of the Omayyad

Caliphs.

Chief among these, as for a time the clouds of dynastic intrigue clear,

are Abdal Malik (685-705) and Walid I (705-715), under whom the Omayyad

line rose to the climax of its successes. The western boundary was

carried to the Pyrenees, while to the east the domains of the Caliph

marched with China. The son of Walid, Suleiman (715), carried out a

second series of Moslem attacks upon Constantinople which his father had

planned and proposed. As with the Caliph Muawiya half a century before,

the approach was by sea--for Asia Minor, as we have just noted, was

still unconquered--and the shipping was drawn chiefly from Egypt. The

emperor, a usurper, Leo the Isaurian, displayed extraordinary skill and

obstinacy in the defence; he burnt most of the Moslem shipping in a

brilliant sortie, cut up the troops they had landed upon the Asiatic

side of the Bosphorus, and after a campaign in Europe of two years

(717-718), a winter of unexampled severity completed their defeat.

From this point onward the glory of the Omayyad line decays. The first

tremendous impulse of Islam was now spent. There was no further

expansion and a manifest decline in religious zeal. Islam had made

millions of converts, and had digested those millions very imperfectly.

Cities, nations, whole sects and races, Arab pagans, Jews, Christians,

Manichæans, Zoroastrians, Turanian pagans, had been swallowed up into

this new vast empire of Muhammad’s successors. It has hitherto been the

common characteristic of all the great unifying religious initiators of

the world, the common oversight, that they have accepted the moral and

theological ideals to which the first appeal was made, as though they

were universal ideals. Muhammad’s appeal, for example, was to the

traditional chivalry and underlying monotheistic feelings of the

intelligent Arabs of his time. These things were latent in the mind and

conscience of Mecca and Medina; he did but call them forth. Then, as the

new teaching spread and stereotyped itself, it had to work on a

continually more uncongenial basis, it had to grow in soil that

distorted and perverted it. Its sole textbook was the Koran. To minds

untuned to the melodies of Arabic, this book seemed to be, as it seems

to many European minds to-day, a mixture of fine-spirited rhetoric

with--to put it plainly--formless and unintelligent gabble. Countless

converts missed the real thing in it altogether. To that we must ascribe

the readiness of the Persian and Indian sections of the faith to join

the Shiite schism upon a quarrel that they could at least understand and

feel. And to the same attempt to square the new stuff with old

prepossessions was due such extravagant theology as presently disputed

whether the Koran was and always had been co-existent with God.[328] We

should be stupefied by the preposterousness of this idea if we did not

recognize in it at once the well-meaning attempt of some learned

Christian convert to Islamize his belief that “In the beginning was the

Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”[329]

None of the great unifying religious initiators of the world hitherto

seems to have been accompanied by any understanding of the vast

educational task, the vast work of lucid and varied exposition and

intellectual organization involved in its propositions. They all present

the same history of a rapid spreading, like a little water poured over a

great area, and then of superficiality and corruption.

In a little while we hear stories of an Omayyad Caliph, Walid II

(743-744), who mocked at the Koran, ate pork, drank wine, and did not

pray. Those stories may have been true or they may have been circulated

for political reasons. There began a puritan reaction in Mecca and

Medina against the levity and luxury of Damascus. Another great Arab

family, the Abbas family, the Abbasids, a thoroughly wicked line, had

long been scheming for power, and was making capital out of the general

discontent. The feud of the Omayyads and the Abbasids was older than

Islam; it had been going on before Muhammad was born. These Abbasids

took up the tradition of the Shiite “martyrs,” Ali and his sons Hasan

and Husein, and identified themselves with it. The banner of the

Omayyads was white; the Abbasid adopted a black banner, black in

mourning for Hasan and Husein, black because black is more impressive

than any colour; moreover, the Abbasids declared that all the Caliphs

after Ali were usurpers. In 749 they accomplished a carefully prepared

revolution, and the last of the Omayyad Caliphs was hunted down and

slain in Egypt. Abul Abbas was the first of the Abbasid Caliphs, and he

began his reign by collecting into one prison every living male of the

Omayyad line upon whom he could lay hands and causing them all to be

massacred. Their bodies were heaped together, a leathern carpet was

spread over them, and on this gruesome table Abul Abbas and his

councillors feasted.[330] Moreover, the tombs of the Omayyad Caliphs

were rifled, and their bones burnt and scattered to the four winds of

heaven. So the grievances of Ali were avenged at last, and the Omayyad

line passed out of history.

There was, it is interesting to note, a rising on behalf of the Omayyads

in Khorasan which was assisted by the Chinese emperor.

§ 7

But the descendants of Ali were not destined to share in this triumph

for long. The Abbasids were adventurers and rulers of an older school

than Islam. Now that the tradition of Ali had served its purpose, the

next proceeding of the new Caliph was to hunt down and slaughter the

surviving members of his family, the descendants of Ali and Fatima.

Clearly the old traditions of Sassanid Persia and of Persia before the

Greeks were returning to the world. With the accession of the Abbasids

the control of the sea departed from the Caliph, and with it went Spain

and North Africa, in which, under an Omayyad survivor in the former

case, independent Moslem states now arose. The centre of gravity of

Islam shifted across the desert from Damascus to Mesopotamia. Mansur,

the successor of Abul Abbas, built himself a new capital at Bagdad near

the ruins of Ctesiphon, the former Sassanid capital. Turks and Persians

as well as Arabs became Emirs, and the army was reorganized upon

Sassanid lines. Medina and Mecca were now only of importance as

pilgrimage centres, to which the faithful turned to pray. But because it

was a fine language, and because it was the language of the Koran,

Arabic continued to spread until presently it had replaced Greek and

become the language of educated men throughout the whole Moslem world.

Of the Abbasid monarchs after Abul Abbas we need tell little here. A

bickering war went on year by year in Asia Minor in which neither

Byzantium nor Bagdad made any permanent gains, though once or twice the

Moslems raided as far as the Bosphorus. A false prophet, Mokanna, who

said he was God, had a brief but troublesome career. There were plots,

there were insurrections; they lie flat and colourless now in the

histories like dead flowers in an old book. One other Abbasid Caliph

only need be named, and that quite as much for his legendary as for his

real importance, Haroun-al-Raschid[331] (786-809). He was not only the

Caliph of an outwardly prosperous empire in the world of reality, but he

was also the Caliph of an undying empire in the deathless world of

fiction, he was the Haroun-al-Raschid of the _Arabian Nights_.

Sir Mark Sykes[332] gives an account of the reality of his empire from

which we will quote certain passages. He says: “The Imperial Court was

polished, luxurious, and unlimitedly wealthy; the capital, Bagdad, a

gigantic mercantile city surrounding a huge administrative fortress,

wherein every department of state had a properly regulated and

well-ordered public office; where schools and colleges abounded; whither

philosophers, students, doctors, poets, and theologians flocked from all

parts of the civilized globe.... The provincial capitals were

embellished with vast public buildings, and linked together by an

effective and rapid service of posts and caravans; the frontiers were

secure and well garrisoned, the army loyal, efficient, and brave; the

governors and ministers honest and forbearing. The empire stretched with

equal strength and unimpaired control from the Cilician gates to Aden,

and from Egypt to Central Asia. Christians, Pagans, Jews, as well as

Moslems, were employed in the government service. Usurpers, rebellious

generals, and false prophets seemed to have vanished from the Moslem

dominions. Traffic and wealth had taken the place of revolution and

famine.... Pestilence and disease were met by Imperial hospitals and

government physicians.... In government business the rough-and-ready

methods of Arabian administration had given place to a complicated

system of Divans, initiated partly from the Roman, but chiefly taken

from the Persian system of government. Posts, Finance, Privy Seal, Crown

Lands, Justice, and Military affairs were each administered by separate

bureaux in the hands of ministers and officials; an army of clerks,

scribes, writers, and accountants swarmed into these offices and

gradually swept the whole power of the government into their own hands

by separating the Commander of the Faithful from any direct intercourse

with his subjects. The Imperial Palace and the entourage were equally

based on Roman and Persian precedents. Eunuchs, closely veiled ‘harems’

of women, guards, spies, go-betweens, jesters, poets, and dwarfs

clustered around the person of the Commander of the Faithful, each, in

his degree, endeavouring to gain the royal favour and indirectly

distracting the royal mind from affairs of business and state. Meanwhile

the mercantile trade of the East poured gold into Bagdad, and

supplemented the other enormous stream of money derived from the

contributions of plunder and loot despatched to the capital by the

commanders of the victorious raiding forces which harried Asia Minor,

India, and Turkestan. The seemingly unending supply of Turkish slaves

and Byzantine specie added to the richness of the revenues of Irak, and,

combined with the vast commercial traffic of which Bagdad was the

centre, produced a large and powerful moneyed class, composed of the

sons of generals, officials, landed proprietors, royal favourites,

merchants, and the like, who encouraged the arts, literature,

philosophy, and poetry as the mood took them, building palaces for

themselves, vying with each other in the luxury of their entertainments,

suborning poets to sound their praises, dabbling in philosophy,

supporting various schools of thought, endowing charities, and, in fact,

behaving as the wealthy have always behaved in all ages.

“I have said that the Abbasid Empire in the days of Haroun-al-Raschid

was weak and feeble to a degree, and perhaps the reader will consider

this a foolish proposition when he takes into consideration that I have

described the Empire as orderly, the administration definite and

settled, the army efficient, and wealth abundant. The reason I make the

suggestion is that the Abbasid Empire had lost touch with everything

original and vital in Islam, and was constructed entirely by the reunion

of the fragments of the empires Islam had destroyed. There was nothing

in the empire which appealed to the higher instincts of the leaders of

the people; the holy war had degenerated into a systematic acquisition

of plunder. The Caliph had become a luxurious Emperor or King of Kings;

the administration had changed from a patriarchal system to a

bureaucracy. The wealthier classes were rapidly losing all faith in the

religion of the state; speculative philosophy and high living were

taking the place of Koranic orthodoxy and Arabian simplicity. The

solitary bond which could have held the empire together, the sternness

and plainness of the Moslem faith, was completely neglected by both the

Caliph and his advisers.... Haroun-al-Raschid himself was a wine-bibber,

and his palace was decorated with graven images of birds and beasts and

men....

“For a moment we stand amazed at the greatness of the Abbasid dominion;

then suddenly we realize that it is but as a fair husk enclosing the

dust and ashes of dead civilizations.”

Haroun-al-Raschid died in 809. At his death his great empire fell

immediately into civil war and confusion, and the next great event of

unusual importance in this region of the world comes two hundred years

later when the Turks, under the chiefs of the great family of the

Seljuks, poured southward out of Turkestan, and not only conquered the

empire of Bagdad, but Asia Minor also. Coming from the northeast as they

did, they were able to outflank the great barrier of the Taurus

Mountains, which had hitherto held back the Moslems. They were still

much the same people as those of whom Yuan Chwang gave us a glimpse four

hundred years earlier, but now they were Moslems, and Moslems of the

primitive type, men whom Abu Bekr would have welcomed to Islam. They

caused a great revival of vigour in Islam, and they turned the minds of

the Moslem world once more in the direction of a religious war against

Christendom. For there had been a sort of truce between these two great

religions after the cessation of the Moslem advance and the decline of

the Omayyads. Such warfare as had gone on between Christianity and Islam

had been rather border-bickering than sustained war. It became only a

bitter fanatical struggle again in the eleventh century.

§ 8

But before we go on to tell of the Turks and the Crusaders, the great

wars that began between Christendom and Islam, and which have left a

quite insane intolerance between these great systems right down to the

present time, it is necessary to give a little more attention to the

intellectual life of the Arabic-speaking world which was now spreading

more and more widely over the regions which Hellenism had once

dominated. For some generations before Muhammad, the Arab mind had been,

as it were, smouldering, it had been producing poetry and much religious

discussion; under the stimulus of the national and racial successes it

presently blazed out with a brilliance second only to that of the Greeks

during their best period. From a new angle and with a fresh vigour it

took up that systematic development of positive knowledge which the

Greeks had begun and relinquished. It revived the human pursuit of

science. If the Greek was the father, then the Arab was the

foster-father of the scientific method of dealing with reality, that is

to say, by absolute frankness, the utmost simplicity of statement and

explanation, exact record, and exhaustive criticism. Through the Arabs

it was and not by the Latin route that the modern world received that

gift of light and power.

Their conquests brought the Arabs into contact with the Greek literary

tradition, not at first directly, but through the Syrian translations of

the Greek writers. The Nestorian Christians, the Christians to the east

of orthodoxy, seem to have been much more intelligent and active-minded

than the court theologians of Byzantium, and at a much higher level of

general education than the Latin-speaking Christians of the west. They

had been tolerated during the latter days of the Sassanids, and they

were tolerated by Islam until the ascendancy of the Turks in the

eleventh century. They had preserved much of the Hellenic medical

science, and had even added to it. In the Omayyad times most of the

physicians in the Caliph’s dominions were Nestorians, and no doubt many

learned Nestorians professed Islam without any serious compunction or

any great change in their work and thoughts. They had preserved much of

Aristotle both in Greek and in Syrian translations. They had a

considerable mathematical literature. Their equipment makes the

contemporary resources of Saint Benedict or Cassiodorus seem very

pitiful. To these Nestorian teachers came the fresh Arab mind out of the

desert, keen and curious, and learnt much and improved upon its

teaching.

But the Nestorians were not the only teachers available for the Arabs.

Throughout all the rich cities of the east the kindred Jews were

scattered with their own distinctive literature and tradition, and the

Arab and the Jewish mind reacted upon one another to a common benefit.

The Arab was informed and the Jew sharpened to a keener edge. The Jews

have never been pedants in the matter of their language; we have already

noted that a thousand years before Islam they spoke Greek in Hellenized

Alexandria, and now all over this new Moslem world they were speaking

and writing Arabic. Some of the greatest of Jewish literature was

written in Arabic, the religious writings of Maimonides, for example.

Indeed, it is difficult to say in the case of this Arabic culture where

the Jew ends and the Arab begins, so important and essential were its

Jewish factors.

Moreover, there was a third source of inspiration, more particularly in

mathematical science, to which at present it is difficult to do

justice--India. There can be little doubt that the Arab mind during its

best period was in effective contact with Sanskrit literature and with

Indian ideas, and that it derived much from this source.

The distinctive activities of the Arab mind were already manifest under

the Omayyads, though it was during the Abbasid time that it made its

best display. History is the beginning and core of all sound philosophy

and all great literature, and the first Arab writers of distinction were

historians, biographers, and quasi-historical poets. Romantic fiction

and the short story followed as a reading public developed, willing to

be amused. And as reading ceased to be a special accomplishment, and

became necessary to every man of affairs and to every youth of breeding,

came the systematic growth of an educational system and an educational

literature. By the ninth and tenth centuries there are not only

grammars, but great lexicons, and a mass of philological learning in

Islam.

And a century or so in advance of the west, there grew up in the Moslem

world at a number of centres, at Basra, at Kufa, at Bagdad and Cairo,

and at Cordoba, out of what were at first religious schools dependent

upon mosques, a series of great universities. The light of these

universities shone far beyond the Moslem world, and drew students to

them from east and west. At Cordoba in particular there were great

numbers of Christian students, and the influence of Arab philosophy

coming by way of Spain upon the universities of Paris, Oxford, and North

Italy and upon Western European thought generally, was very considerable

indeed. The name of Averroes (Ibn-rushd) of Cordoba (1126-1198), stands

out as that of the culminating influence of Arab philosophy upon

European thought. He developed the teachings of Aristotle upon lines

that made a sharp division between religious and scientific truth, and

so prepared the way for the liberation of scientific research from the

theological dogmatism that restrained it both under Christianity and

under Islam. Another great name is that of Avicenna (Ibnsinā), the

Prince of Physicians (980-1037), who was born at the other end of the

Arabic world at Bokhara, and who travelled in Khorasan.... The

book-copying industry flourished at Alexandria, Damascus, Cairo, and

Bagdad, and about the year 970 there were twenty-seven free schools open

in Cordoba for the education of the poor.

“In mathematics,” say Thatcher and Schwill,[333] “the Arabs built on the

foundations of the Greek mathematicians. The origin of the so-called

Arabic numerals is obscure. Under Theodoric the Great, Boethius made use

of certain signs which were in part very like the nine digits which we

now use. One of the pupils of Gerbert also used signs which were still

more like ours, but the zero was unknown till the twelfth century, when

it was invented by an Arab mathematician named Muhammad-Ibn-Musa, who

also was the first to use the decimal notation, and who gave the digits

the value of position. In geometry the Arabs did not add much to Euclid,

but algebra is practically their creation; also they developed spherical

trigonometry, inventing the sine, tangent, and cotangent. In physics

they invented the pendulum, and produced work on optics. They made

progress in the science of astronomy. They built several observatories,

and constructed many astronomical instruments which are still in use.

They calculated the angle of the ecliptic and the precession of the

equinoxes. Their knowledge of astronomy was undoubtedly considerable.

“In medicine they made great advances over the work of the Greeks. They

studied physiology and hygiene, and their _materia medica_ was

practically the same as ours to-day. Many of their methods of treatment

are still in use among us. Their surgeons understood the use of

anæsthetics, and performed some of the most difficult operations known.

At the time when in Europe the practice of medicine was forbidden by the

Church, which expected cures to be effected by religious rites performed

by the clergy, the Arabs had a real science of medicine. In chemistry

they made a good beginning. They discovered many new substances, such as

alcohol,[334] potash, nitrate of silver, corrosive sublimate, and nitric

and sulphuric acid.... In manufactures they outdid the world in variety

and beauty of design and perfection of workmanship. They worked in all

the metals--gold, silver, copper, bronze, iron, and steel. In textile

fabrics they have never been surpassed. They made glass and pottery of

the finest quality. They knew the secrets of dyeing, and they

manufactured paper. They had many processes of dressing leather; and

their work was famous throughout Europe. They made tinctures, essences,

and syrups. They made sugar from the cane, and grew many fine kinds of

wine. They practised farming in a scientific way, and had good systems

of irrigation. They knew the value of fertilizers, and adapted their

crops to the quality of the ground. They excelled in horticulture,

knowing how to graft and how to produce new varieties of fruit and

flowers. They introduced into the west many trees and plants from the

east, and wrote scientific treatises on farming.”

One item in this account must be underlined here because of its

importance in the intellectual life of mankind, the manufacture of

paper. This the Arabs seem to have learnt from the Chinese by way of

Central Asia. The Europeans acquired it from the Arabs. Until that time

books had to be written upon parchment or papyrus, and after the Arab

conquest of Egypt Europe was cut off from the papyrus supply. Until

paper became abundant, the art of printing was of little use, and

newspapers and popular education by means of books was impossible. This

was probably a much more important factor in the relative backwardness

of Europe during the dark ages than historians seem disposed to

admit....

And all this mental life went on in the Moslem world in spite of a very

considerable amount of political disorder. From first to last the Arabs

never grappled with the problem, the still unsolved problem, of the

stable progressive state; everywhere their form of government was

absolutist and subject to the convulsions, changes, intrigues, and

murders that have always characterized the extremer forms of monarchy.

But for some centuries, beneath the crimes and rivalries of courts and

camps, the spirit of Islam did preserve a certain general decency and

restraint in life; the Byzantine Empire was impotent to shatter this

civilization, and the Turkish danger in the north-east gathered strength

only very slowly. Until the Turk fell upon it, the intellectual life of

Islam continued. Perhaps it secretly flattered itself that it would

always be able to go on in spite of the thread of violence and unreason

in its political direction. Hitherto in all countries that has been the

characteristic attitude of science and literature. The intellectual man

has been loath to come to grips with the forcible man. He has generally

been something of a courtier and time server. Possibly he has never yet

been quite sure of himself. Hitherto men of reason and knowledge have

never had the assurance and courage of the religious fanatic. But there

can be little doubt that they have accumulated settled convictions and

gathered confidence during the last few centuries; they have slowly

found a means to power through the development of popular education and

popular literature, and to-day they are far more disposed to say things

plainly and to claim a dominating voice in the organization of human

affairs than they have ever been before in the world’s history.

XXXIII

CHRISTENDOM AND THE CRUSADES

§ 1. _The Western World at its Lowest Ebb._ § 2. _The Feudal

System._ § 3. _The Frankish Kingdom of the Merovingians._ § 4. _The

Christianization of the Western Barbarians._ § 5. _Charlemagne

becomes Emperor of the West._ § 6. _The Personality of

Charlemagne._ § 7. _The French and the Germans become Distinct._ §

8. _The Normans, the Saracens, the Hungarians, and the Seljuk

Turks._ § 9. _How Constantinople Appealed to Rome._ § 10. _The

Crusades._ § 11. _The Crusades a Test of Christianity._ § 12. _The

Emperor Frederick II._ § 13. _Defects and Limitations of the

Papacy._ § 14. _A List of Leading Popes._

§ 1

Let us turn again now from this intellectual renascence in the cradle of

the ancient civilizations to the affairs of the Western world. We have

described the complete economic, social, and political break up of the

Roman imperial system in the west, the confusion and darkness that

followed in the sixth and seventh centuries, and the struggles of such

men as Cassiodorus to keep alight the flame of human learning amidst

these windy confusions. For a time it would be idle to write of states

and rulers. Smaller or greater adventurers seized a castle or a

countryside and ruled an uncertain area. The British Islands, for

instance, were split up amidst a multitude of rulers; numerous Keltic

chiefs in Ireland and Scotland and Wales and Cornwall fought and

prevailed over and succumbed to each other; the English invaders were

also divided into a number of fluctuating “kingdoms,” Kent, Wessex,

Essex, Sussex, Mercia, Northumbria, and East Anglia, which were

constantly at war with one another. So it was over most of the Western

world. Here a bishop would be the monarch, as Gregory the Great was in

Rome; here a town or a group of towns would be under the rule of the

duke or prince of this or that. Amidst the vast ruins of the city of

Rome half-independent families of quasi-noble adventurers and their

retainers maintained themselves. The Pope kept a sort of general

predominance there, but he was sometimes more than balanced by a “Duke

of Rome.” The great arena of the Colosseum had been made into a

privately-owned castle, and so too had the vast circular tomb of the

Emperor Hadrian; and the adventurers who had possession of these

strongholds and their partisans waylaid each other and fought and

bickered in the ruinous streets of the once imperial city. The tomb of

Hadrian was known after the days of Gregory the Great as the Castle of

St. Angelo, the Castle of the Holy Angel, because when he was crossing

the bridge over the Tiber on his way to St. Peter’s to pray against the

great pestilence which was devastating the city, he had had a vision of

a great angel standing over the dark mass of the mausoleum and sheathing

a sword, and he had known then that his prayers would be answered. This

Castle of St. Angelo played a very important part in Roman affairs

during this age of disorder.

Spain was in much the same state of political fragmentation as Italy or

France or Britain; and in Spain the old feud of Carthaginian and Roman

was still continued in the bitter hostility of their descendants and

heirs, the Jew and the Christian. So that when the power of the Caliph

had swept along the North African coast to the Straits of Gibraltar, it

found in the Spanish Jews ready helpers in its invasion of Europe. A

Moslem army of Arabs and of Berbers, the nomadic Hamitic people of the

African desert and mountain hinterland who had been converted to Islam,

crossed and defeated the West Goths in a great battle in 711. In a few

years the whole country was in their possession.

In 720 Islam had reached the Pyrenees, and had pushed round their

eastern end into France; and for a time it seemed that the faith was

likely to subjugate Gaul as easily as it had subjugated the Spanish

peninsula. But presently it struck against something hard, a new kingdom

of the Franks, which had been consolidating itself for some two

centuries in the Rhineland and North France.

Of this Frankish kingdom, the precursor of France and Germany, which

formed the western bulwark of Europe against the faith of Muhammad, as

the Byzantine Empire behind the Taurus Mountains formed the eastern, we

shall now have much to tell; but first we must give some account of the

new system of social groupings out of which it arose.

§ 2

It is necessary that the reader should have a definite idea of the

social condition of western Europe in the eighth century. It was not a

barbarism. Eastern Europe was still barbaric and savage; things had

progressed but little beyond the state of affairs described by Gibbon in

his account of the mission of Priscus to Attila (see vol. i, p. 557).

But western Europe was a shattered civilization, without law, without

administration, with roads destroyed and education disorganized, but

still with great numbers of people with civilized ideas and habits and

traditions. It was a time of confusion, of brigandage, of crimes

unpunished and universal insecurity. It is very interesting to trace how

out of the universal mêlée, the beginnings of a new order appeared. In a

modern breakdown there would probably be the formation of local

vigilance societies, which would combine and restore a police

administration and a roughly democratic rule. But in the broken-down

western empire of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, men’s ideas

turned rather to leaders than to committees, and the centres about which

affairs crystallized were here barbaric chiefs, here a vigorous bishop

or some surviving claimant to a Roman official position, here a

long-recognized landowner or man of ancient family, and here again some

vigorous usurper of power. No solitary man was safe. So men were forced

to link themselves with others, preferably people stronger than

themselves. The lonely man chose the most powerful and active person in

his district and became _his_ man. The freeman or the weak lordling of a

petty territory linked himself to some more powerful lord. The

protection of that lord (or the danger of his hostility) became more

considerable with every such accession. So very rapidly there went on a

process of political crystallization in the confused and lawless sea

into which the Western Empire had liquefied. These natural associations

and alliances of protector and subordinates grew very rapidly into a

system, _the feudal system_, traces of which are still to be found in

the social structure of every European community west of Russia.

This process speedily took on technical forms and laws of its own. In

such a country as Gaul it was already well in progress in the days of

insecurity _before_ the barbarian tribes broke into the empire as

conquerors. The Franks when they came into Gaul brought with them an

institution, which we have already noted in the case of the Macedonians,

and which was probably of very wide distribution among the Nordic

people, the gathering about the chief or war king of a body of young men

of good family, the companions or _comitatus_, his counts or captains.

It was natural in the case of invading peoples that the relations of a

weak lord to a strong lord should take on the relations of a count to

his king, and that a conquering chief should divide seized and

confiscated estates among his companions. From the side of the decaying

empire there came to feudalism the idea of the grouping for mutual

protection of men and estates; from the Teutonic side came the notions

of knightly association, devotion, and personal service. The former was

the economic side of the institution, the latter the chivalrous.

The analogy of the aggregation of feudal groupings with crystallization

is a very close one. As the historian watches the whirling and eddying

confusion of the fourth and fifth century in Western Europe, he begins

to perceive the appearance of these pyramidal growths of heads and

subordinates and sub-subordinates, which jostle against one another,

branch, dissolve again, or coalesce. “We use the term ‘feudal system’

for convenience’ sake, but with a degree of impropriety if it conveys

the meaning ‘systematic.’ Feudalism in its most flourishing age was

anything but systematic. It was confusion roughly organized. Great

diversity prevailed everywhere, and we should not be surprised to find

some different fact or custom in every lordship. Anglo-Norman feudalism

attained in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a logical completeness

and a uniformity of practice which, in the feudal age proper, can hardly

be found elsewhere through so large a territory....

[Illustration: Map of EUROPE about 500 A.D.]

“The foundation of the feudal relationship proper was the _fief_, which

was usually land, but might be any desirable thing, as an office, a

revenue in money or kind, the right to collect a toll, or operate a

mill. In return for the fief, the man became the _vassal_ of his lord;

he knelt before him, and, with his hands between his lord’s hands,

promised him fealty and service.... The faithful performance of all the

duties he had assumed in homage constituted the vassal’s right and title

to his fief. So long as they were fulfilled, he, and his heir after him,

held the fief as his property, practically and in relation to all

under-tenants as if he were the owner. In the ceremony of homage and

investiture, which is the creative contract of feudalism, the

obligations assumed by the two parties were, as a rule, not specified in

exact terms. They were determined by local custom.... In many points of

detail the vassal’s services differed widely in different parts of the

feudal world. We may say, however, that they fall into two classes,

general and specific. The general included all that might come under the

idea of loyalty, seeking the lord’s interests, keeping his secrets,

betraying the plans of his enemies, protecting his family, etc. The

specific services are capable of more definite statement, and they

usually received exact definition in custom and sometimes in written

documents. The most characteristic of these was the military service,

which included appearance in the field on summons with a certain force,

often armed in a specified way, and remaining a specified length of

time. It often included also the duty of guarding the lord’s castle, and

of holding one’s own castle subject to the plans of the lord for the

defence of his fief....

[Illustration: Area more or less under FRANKISH dominion in the time of

CHARLES MARTEL]

“Theoretically regarded, feudalism covered Europe with a network of

these fiefs, rising in graded ranks one above the other from the

smallest, the knight’s fee, at the bottom, to the king at the top, who

was the supreme landowner, or who held the kingdom from God....”[335]

But this was the theory that was superimposed upon the established

facts. The reality of feudalism was its voluntary co-operation.

“The feudal state was one in which, it has been said, private law had

usurped the place of public law.” But rather is it truer that public law

had failed and vanished and private law had come in to fill the vacuum.

Public duty had become private obligation.

§ 3

We have already mentioned various kingdoms of the barbarian tribes who

set up a more or less flimsy dominion over this or that area amidst the

débris of the empire, the kingdoms of the Suevi and West Goths in Spain,

the East-Gothic kingdom in Italy, and the Italian Lombard kingdom which

succeeded the Goths after Justinian had expelled the latter and after

the great pestilence had devastated Italy. The Frankish kingdom was

another such barbarian power which arose first in what is now Belgium,

and which spread southward to the Loire, but it developed far more

strength and solidarity than any of the others. It was the first real

state to emerge from the universal wreckage. It became at last a wide

and vigorous political reality, and from it are derived two great powers

of modern Europe, France and the German Empire. Its founder was Clovis

(481-511), who began as a small king in Belgium and ended with his

southern frontiers nearly at the Pyrenees. He divided his kingdom among

his four sons, but the Franks retained a tradition of unity in spite of

this division, and for a time fraternal wars for a single control united

rather than divided them. A more serious split arose, however, through

the Latinization of the Western Franks, who occupied Romanized Gaul and

who learnt to speak the corrupt Latin of the subject population, while

the Franks of the Rhineland retained their Low German speech. At a low

level of civilization, differences in language cause very powerful

political strains. For a hundred and fifty years the Frankish world was

split in two, Neustria, the nucleus of France, speaking a Latinish

speech, which became at last the French language we know, and

Austrasia, the Rhineland, which remained German.[336]

We will not tell here of the decay of the dynasty, the Merovingian

dynasty, founded by Clovis; nor how in Austrasia a certain court

official, the Mayor of the Palace, gradually became the king _de facto_

and used the real king as a puppet. The position of Mayor of the Palace

also became hereditary in the seventh century, and in 687 a certain

Pepin of Heristhal, the Austrasian Mayor of the Palace, had conquered

Neustria and reunited all the Franks. He was followed in 714 by his son,

Charles Martel, who also bore no higher title than mayor of the palace.

(His poor little Merovingian kings do not matter in the slightest degree

to us here.) It was this Charles Martel who stopped the Moslems. They

had pushed as far as Tours when he met them, and in a great battle

between that place and Poitiers (732) utterly defeated them and broke

their spirit. Thereafter the Pyrenees remained their utmost boundary;

they came no further into Western Europe.

Charles Martel divided his power between two sons, but one resigned and

went into a monastery, leaving his brother Pepin sole ruler. This Pepin

it was who finally extinguished the descendants of Clovis. He sent to

the Pope to ask who was the true king of the Franks, the man who held

the power or the man who wore the crown; and the Pope, who was in need

of a supporter, decided in favour of the Mayor of the Palace. So Pepin

was chosen king at a gathering of the Frankish nobles in the Merovingian

capital Soissons, and anointed and crowned. That was in 751. The

Franco-Germany he united was consolidated by his son Charlemagne. It

held together until the death of his grandson Louis (840), and then

France and Germany broke away again--to the great injury of mankind. It

was not a difference of race or temperament, it was a difference of

language and tradition that split these Frankish peoples asunder.

That old separation of Neustria and Austrasia still works out in bitter

consequences. In 1916 the ancient conflict of Neustria and Austrasia had

broken out into war once more. In the August of that year the present

writer visited Soissons, and crossed the temporary wooden bridge that

had been built by the English after the Battle of the Aisne from the

main part of the town to the suburb of Saint Médard. Canvas screens

protected passengers upon the bridge from the observation of the German

sharpshooters who were sniping from their trenches down the curve of the

river. He went with his guides across a field and along by the wall of

an orchard in which a German shell exploded as he passed. So he reached

the battered buildings that stand upon the site of the ancient abbey of

Saint Médard, in which the last Merovingian was deposed and Pepin the

Short was crowned in his stead. Beneath these ancient buildings there

were great crypts, very useful as dug-outs--for the German advanced

lines were not more than a couple of hundred yards away. The sturdy

French soldier lads were cooking and resting in these shelters, and

lying down to sleep among the stone coffins that had held the bones of

their Merovingian kings.

§ 4

The populations over which Charles Martel and King Pepin ruled were at

very different levels of civilization in different districts. To the

west and south the bulk of the people consisted of Latinized and

Christian Kelts; in the central regions these rulers had to deal with

such more or less Christianized Germans as the Franks and Burgundians

and Alemanni; to the northeast were still pagan Frisians and Saxons; to

the east were the Bavarians, recently Christianized through the

activities of St. Boniface; and to the east of them again pagan Slavs

and Avars. The “Paganism” of the Germans and Slavs was very similar to

the primitive religion of the Greeks; it was a manly religion in which

temple, priest, and sacrifices played a small part, and its gods were

like men, a kind of “school prefects” of more powerful beings who

interfered impulsively and irregularly in human affairs. The Germans

had a Jupiter in Odin, a Mars in Thor, a Venus in Freya, and so on.

Throughout the seventh and eighth centuries a steady process of

conversion to Christianity went on amidst these German and Slavonic

tribes.

[Illustration: ENGLAND in 640 A.D.]

It will be interesting to English-speaking readers to note that the most

zealous and successful missionaries among the Saxons and Frisians came

from England. Christianity was twice planted in the British Isles. It

was already there while Britain was a part of the Roman Empire; a

martyr, St. Alban, gave his name to the town of St. Albans, and nearly

every visitor to Canterbury has also visited little Old St. Martin’s

church, which was used during the Roman times. From Britain, as we have

already said, Christianity spread beyond the imperial boundaries into

Ireland--the chief missionary was St. Patrick--and there was a vigorous

monastic movement with which are connected the names of St. Columba and

the religious settlements of Iona. Then in the fifth and sixth centuries

came the fierce and pagan English, and they cut off the early Church of

Ireland from the main body of Christianity. In the seventh century

Christian missionaries were converting the English, both in the north

from Ireland and in the south from Rome. The Rome mission was sent by

Pope Gregory the Great just at the close of the sixth century. The story

goes that he saw English boys for sale in the Roman slave market, though

it is a little difficult to understand how they got there. They were

very fair and good-looking. In answer to his inquiries, he was told that

they were Angles. “Not Angles, but Angels,” said he, “had they but the

gospel.”

The mission worked through the seventh century. Before that century was

over, most of the English were Christians; though Mercia, the central

English kingdom, held out stoutly against the priests and for the

ancient faith and ways. And there was a swift progress in learning upon

the part of these new converts. The monasteries of the kingdom of

Northumbria in the north of England became a centre of light and

learning. Theodore of Tarsus was one of the earliest archbishops of

Canterbury (669-690). “While Greek was utterly unknown in the west of

Europe, it was mastered by some of the pupils of Theodore. The

monasteries contained many monks who were excellent scholars. Most

famous of all was Bede, known as the Venerable Bede (673-735), a monk of

Jarrow (on Tyne). He had for his pupils the six hundred monks of that

monastery, besides the many strangers who came to hear him. He gradually

mastered all the learning of his day, and left at his death forty-five

volumes of his writings, the most important of which are ‘The

Ecclesiastical History of the English’ and his translation of the Gospel

of John into English. His writings were widely known and used

throughout Europe. He reckoned all dates from the birth of Christ, and

through his works the use of Christian chronology became common in

Europe. Owing to the large number of monasteries and monks in

Northumbria, that part of England was for a time far in advance of the

south in civilization.”[337]

In the seventh and eighth centuries we find the English missionaries

active upon the eastern frontiers of the Frankish kingdom. Chief among

these was St. Boniface (680-755), who was born at Crediton, in

Devonshire, who converted the Frisians, Thuringians, and Hessians, and

who was martyred in Holland.

Both in England and on the Continent the ascendant rulers seized upon

Christianity as a unifying force to cement their conquests. Christianity

became a banner for aggressive chiefs--as it did in Uganda in Africa in

the bloody days before that country was annexed to the British Empire.

After Pepin, who died in 768, came two sons, Charles and another, who

divided his kingdom; but the brother of Charles died in 771, and Charles

then became sole king (771-814) of the growing realm of the Franks. This

Charles is known in history as Charles the Great, or Charlemagne. As in

the case of Alexander the Great and Julius Cæsar, posterity has

enormously exaggerated his memory. He made his wars of aggression

definitely religious wars. All the world of north-western Europe, which

is now Great Britain, France, Germany, Denmark, and Norway and Sweden,

was in the ninth century an arena of bitter conflict between the old

faith and the new. Whole nations were converted to Christianity by the

sword just as Islam in Arabia, Central Asia, and Africa had converted

whole nations a century or so before.

With fire and sword Charlemagne preached the Gospel of the Cross to the

Saxons, Bohemians, and as far as the Danube into what is now Hungary; he

carried the same teaching down the Adriatic Coast through what is now

Dalmatia, and drove the Moslems back from the Pyrenees as far as

Barcelona.

Moreover, he it was who sheltered Egbert, an exile from Wessex in

England, and assisted him presently to establish himself as King in

Wessex (802). Egbert subdued the Britons in Cornwall, as Charlemagne

conquered the Britons of Brittany, and, by a series of wars, which he

continued after the death of his Frankish patron, made himself at last

the first King of all England (828).

[Illustration: ENGLAND at the Treaty of Wedmore 878]

But the attacks of Charlemagne upon the last strongholds of paganism

provoked a vigorous reaction on the part of the unconverted. The

Christianized English had retained very little of the seamanship that

had brought them from the mainland, and the Franks had not yet become

seamen. As the Christian propaganda of Charlemagne swept towards the

shores of the North and Baltic seas, the pagans were driven to the sea.

They retaliated for the Christian persecutions with plundering raids and

expeditions against the northern coasts of France and against Christian

England. These pagan Saxons and English of the mainland and their

kindred from Denmark and Norway are the Danes and Northmen of our

national histories. They were also called Vikings,[338] which means

“inlet-men,” because they came from the deep inlets of the Scandinavian

coast. They came in long black galleys, making little use of sails. Most

of our information about these wars and invasions of the pagan Vikings

is derived from Christian sources, and so we have abundant information

of the massacres and atrocities of their raids and very little about the

cruelties inflicted upon their pagan brethren, the Saxons, at the hands

of Charlemagne. Their animus against the cross and against monks and

nuns was extreme. They delighted in the burning of monasteries and

nunneries and the slaughter of their inmates.

Throughout the period between the fifth and the ninth centuries these

Vikings or Northmen were learning seamanship, becoming bolder, and

ranging further. They braved the northern seas until the icy shores of

Greenland were a familiar haunt, and by the ninth century they had

settlements (of which Europe in general knew nothing) in America. In the

tenth and eleventh centuries many of their sagas began to be written

down in Iceland. They saw the world in terms of valiant adventure. They

assailed the walrus, the bear, and the whale. In their imaginations a

great and rich city to the south, a sort of confusion of Rome and

Byzantium, loomed large. They called it “Miklagård” (Michael’s court) or

Micklegarth. The magnetism of Micklegarth was to draw the descendants of

these Northmen down into the Mediterranean by two routes, by the west

and also across Russia from the Baltic, as we shall tell later. By the

Russian route went also the kindred Swedes.

So long as Charlemagne and Egbert lived, the Vikings were no more than

raiders; but as the ninth century wore on, these raids developed into

organized invasions. In several districts of England the hold of

Christianity was by no means firm as yet. In Mercia in particular the

pagan Northmen found sympathy and help. By 886 the Danes had conquered a

fair part of England and the English king, Alfred the Great, had

recognized their rule over their conquests, the Dane-law, in the pact he

made with Guthrum their leader. A little later, in 912, another

expedition under Rolf the Ganger established itself upon the coast of

France in the region that was known henceforth as Normandy (=

Northman-dy). But of how there was presently a fresh conquest of England

by the Danes and how finally the Duke of Normandy became King of

England, we cannot tell at any length. There were very small racial and

social differences between Angle, Saxon, Jute, Dane, or Norman; and

though these changes loom large in the imaginations of the English, they

are seen to be very slight rufflings indeed of the stream of history

when we measure them by the standards of a greater world. The issue

between Christianity and paganism vanished presently from the struggle.

By the Treaty of Wedmore the Danes agreed to be baptized if they were

assured of their conquests; and the descendants of Rolf in Normandy were

not merely Christianized, but they learnt to speak French from the more

civilized people about them, forgetting their own Norse tongue. Of much

greater significance in the history of mankind are the relations of

Charlemagne with his neighbours to the south and east, and to the

imperial tradition.

§ 5

[Illustration: EUROPE at the death of CHARLEMAGNE--814.]

Through Charlemagne the tradition of the Roman Cæsar was revived in

Europe.[339] The Roman Empire was dead and decaying; the Byzantine

Empire was far gone in decay; but the education and mentality of Europe

had sunken to a level at which new creative political ideas were

probably impossible. In all Europe there survived not a tithe of the

speculative vigour that we find in the Athenian literature of the fifth

century B.C. There was no power to postulate a new occasion or to

conceive and organize a novel political method. Official Christianity

had long overlaid and accustomed itself to ignore those strange

teachings of Jesus of Nazareth from which it had arisen. The Roman

Church, clinging tenaciously to its possession of the title of _pontifex

maximus_, had long since abandoned its appointed task of achieving the

Kingdom of Heaven. It was preoccupied with the revival of Roman

ascendancy on earth, which it conceived of as its inheritance. It had

become a political body, using the faith and needs of simple men to

forward its schemes. Europe drifted towards a dreary imitation and

revival of the misconceived failures of the past. For eleven centuries

from Charlemagne onwards, “Emperors” and “Cæsars” of this line and that

come and go in the history of Europe like fancies in a disordered mind.

We shall have to tell of a great process of mental growth in Europe, of

enlarged horizons and accumulating power, but it was a process that went

on independently of, and in spite of, the political forms of the time,

until at last it shattered those forms altogether. Europe during those

eleven centuries of the imitation Cæsars which began with Charlemagne,

and which closed only in the monstrous bloodshed of 1914-1918, has been

like a busy factory owned by a somnambulist, who is sometimes quite

unimportant and sometimes disastrously in the way. Or rather than a

somnambulist, let us say by a corpse that magically simulates a kind of

life. The Roman Empire staggers, sprawls, is thrust off the stage, and

reappears, and--if we may carry the image one step further--it is the

Church of Rome which plays the part of the magician and keeps this

corpse alive.

And throughout the whole period there is always a struggle going on for

the control of the corpse between the spiritual and various temporal

powers. We have already noted the spirit of St. Augustine’s _City of

God_. It was a book which we know Charlemagne read, or had read to

him--for his literary accomplishments are rather questionable. He

conceived of this Christian Empire as being ruled and maintained in its

orthodoxy by some such great Cæsar as himself. He was to rule even the

Pope. But at Rome the view taken of the revived empire differed a little

from that. There the view taken was that the Christian Cæsar must be

anointed and guided by the Pope--who would even have the power to

excommunicate and depose him. Even in the time of Charlemagne this

divergence of view was apparent. In the following centuries it became

acute.

The idea of the empire dawned only very gradually upon the mind of

Charlemagne. At first he was simply the ruler of his father’s kingdom of

the Franks, and his powers were fully occupied in struggles with the

Saxons and Bavarians, and with the Slavs to the east of them, with the

Moslem in Spain, and with various insurrections in his own dominions.

And as the result of a quarrel with the King of Lombardy, his

father-in-law, he conquered Lombardy and North Italy. We have noted the

establishment of the Lombards in North Italy about 570 after the great

pestilence, and after the overthrow of the East Gothic kings by

Justinian. These Lombards had always been a danger and a fear to the

Popes, and there had been an alliance between Pope and Frankish King

against them in the time of Pepin. Now Charlemagne completely subjugated

Lombardy (774), sent his father-in-law to a monastery, and carried his

conquests beyond the present north-eastern boundaries of Italy into

Dalmatia in 776. In 781 he caused one of his sons, Pepin, who did not

outlive him, to be crowned King of Italy in Rome.

There was a new Pope, Leo III, in 795, who seems from the first to have

resolved to make Charlemagne emperor. Hitherto the court at Byzantium

had possessed a certain indefinite authority over the Pope. Strong

emperors like Justinian had bullied the Popes and obliged them to come

to Constantinople; weak emperors had annoyed them ineffectively. The

idea of a breach, both secular and religious, with Constantinople had

long been entertained at the Lateran,[340] and in the Frankish power

there seemed to be just the support that was necessary if Constantinople

was to be defied. So at his accession Leo III sent the keys of the tomb

of St. Peter and a banner to Charlemagne as the symbols of his

sovereignty in Rome as King of Italy. Very soon the Pope had to appeal

to the protection he had chosen. He was unpopular in Rome; he was

attacked and ill-treated in the streets during a procession, and obliged

to fly to Germany (799). Eginhard says his eyes were gouged out and his

tongue cut off; he seems, however, to have had both eyes and tongue

again a year later. Charlemagne brought him back and reinstated him

(800).

Then occurred a very important scene. On Christmas Day, in the year 800,

as Charles was rising from prayer in the Church of St. Peter, the Pope,

who had everything in readiness, clapped a crown upon his head and

hailed him Cæsar and Augustus. There was great popular applause. But

Eginhard, the friend and biographer of Charlemagne, says that the new

emperor was by no means pleased by this coup of Pope Leo’s. If he had

known this was to happen, he said, “he would not have entered the

church, great festival though it was.” No doubt he had been thinking and

talking of making himself emperor, but he had evidently not intended

that the Pope should make him emperor. He had had some idea of marrying

the Empress Irene, who at that time reigned in Constantinople, and so

becoming monarch of both Eastern and Western Empires. He was now obliged

to accept the title in the manner that Leo III had adopted as a gift

from the Pope, and in a way that estranged Constantinople and secured

the separation of Rome from the Byzantine Church.

At first Byzantium was unwilling to recognize the imperial title of

Charlemagne. But in 810 a great disaster fell upon the Byzantine Empire.

The pagan Bulgarians, under their Prince Krum (802-814), defeated and

destroyed the armies of the Emperor Nicephorus, whose skull became a

drinking-cup for Krum. The greater part of the Balkan peninsula was

conquered by these people. (The Bulgarian and the English nations thus

became established as political unities almost simultaneously.) After

this misfortune Byzantium was in no position to dispute this revival of

the empire in the West, and in 812 Charlemagne was formally recognized

by Byzantine envoys as Emperor and Augustus.

So the Empire of Rome, which had died at the hands of Odoacer in 476,

rose again in 800 as the “Holy Roman Empire.” While its physical

strength lay north of the Alps, the centre of its idea was Rome. It was

therefore from the beginning a divided thing of uncertain power, a claim

and an argument rather than a necessary reality. The German sword was

always clattering over the Alps into Italy, and missions and legates

toiling over in the reverse direction. But the Germans could never hold

Italy permanently, because they could not stand the malaria that the

ruined, neglected, undrained country fostered. And in Rome, as well as

in several other of the cities of Italy, there smouldered a more ancient

tradition, the tradition of the aristocratic republic, hostile to both

Emperor and Pope.

§ 6

In spite of the fact that we have a life of him written by his

contemporary, Eginhard,[341] the character and personality of

Charlemagne are difficult to visualize. Eginhard lacks vividness; he

tells many particulars, but not the particulars that make a man live

again in the record. Charlemagne, he says, was a tall man, with a rather

feeble voice; and he had bright eyes and a long nose. “The top of his

head was round,” whatever that may mean, and his hair was “white.” He

had a thick, rather short neck, and “his belly too prominent.” He wore a

tunic with a silver border, and gartered hose. He had a blue cloak, and

was always girt with his sword, hilt and belt being of gold and silver.

He was evidently a man of great activity, one imagines him moving

quickly, and his numerous love affairs did not interfere at all with his

incessant military and political labours. He had numerous wives and

mistresses. He took much exercise, was fond of pomp and religious

ceremonies, and gave generously. He was a man of very miscellaneous

activity and great intellectual enterprise, and with a self-confidence

that is rather suggestive of William II, the ex-German Emperor, the

last, perhaps for ever, of this series of imitation Cæsars in Europe

which Charlemagne began.

The mental life that Eginhard records of him is interesting, because it

not only gives glimpses of a curious character, but serves as a sample

of the intellectuality of the time. He could read probably; at meals he

“listened to music or reading,” but we are told that he had not acquired

the art of writing; “he used to keep his writing-book and tablets under

his pillow, that when he had leisure he might practise his hand in

forming letters, but he made little progress in an art begun too late in

life.” He had, however, a real respect for learning and a real desire

for knowledge, and he did his utmost to attract men of learning to his

court. Among others who came was Alcuin, a learned Englishman. All

those learned men were, of course, clergymen, there being no other

learned men, and naturally they gave a strongly clerical tinge to the

information they imparted to their master. At his court, which was

usually at Aix-la-Chapelle or Mayence, he maintained in the winter

months a curious institution called his “school,” in which he and his

erudite associates affected to lay aside all thoughts of worldly

position, assumed names taken from the classical writers or from Holy

Writ, and discoursed upon theology and literature. Charlemagne himself

was “David.” He developed a considerable knowledge of theology, and it

is to him that we must ascribe the addition of the words _filioque_ to

the Nicene Creed (see chap, xxx, § 8), an addition that finally split

the Latin and Greek Churches asunder. But it is more than doubtful if he

had any such separation in mind. He wanted to add a word or so to the

creed, just as the Emperor William II wanted to write operas and paint

pictures,[342] and he took up what was originally a Spanish innovation.

Of his organization of his empire there is little to be said here. He

was far too restless and busy to consider the quality of his successor

or the condition of political stability, and the most noteworthy thing

in this relationship is that he particularly schooled his son and

successor, Louis the Pious (814-840), to take the crown from the altar

and _crown himself_. But Louis the Pious was too pious to adhere to

those instructions when the Pope made an objection.

The legislation of Charlemagne was greatly coloured by Bible reading; he

knew his Bible well, as the times went; and it is characteristic of him

that after he had been crowned emperor he required every male subject

above the age of twelve to renew his oath of allegiance, and to

undertake to be not simply a good subject, but a good Christian. To

refuse baptism or to retract after baptism was a crime punishable by

death. He did much to encourage architecture, and imported many Italian

architects, chiefly from Ravenna, to whom we owe that pleasant Byzantine

style that still at Worms and Cologne and elsewhere delights the

tourist in the Rhineland.[343] He founded a number of cathedrals and

monastic schools, did much to encourage the study of classical Latin,

and was a distinguished amateur of church music. The possibility of his

talking Latin and understanding Greek is open to discussion; probably he

talked French-Latin. Frankish, however, was his habitual tongue. He made

a collection of old German songs and tales, but these were destroyed by

his successor Louis the Pious on account of their paganism.

He corresponded with Haroun-al-Raschid, the Abbasid Caliph at Bagdad,

who was not perhaps the less friendly to him on account of his vigorous

handling of the Omayyad Arabs in Spain. Gibbon supposes that this

“public correspondence was founded on vanity,” and that “their remote

situation left no room for a competition of interest.” But with the

Byzantine Empire between them in the East, and the independent caliphate

of Spain in the West, and a common danger in the Turks of the great

plains, they had three very excellent reasons for cordiality.

Haroun-al-Raschid, says Gibbon, sent Charlemagne by his ambassadors a

splendid tent, a water clock, an elephant, and the keys of the Holy

Sepulchre. The last item suggests that Charlemagne was to some extent

regarded by the Saracen monarch as the protector of the Christians and

Christian properties in his dominions. Some historians declare

explicitly that there was a treaty to that effect.[344]

§ 7

The Empire of Charlemagne did not outlive his son and successor, Louis

the Pious. It fell apart into its main constituents. The Latinized

Keltic and Frankish population of Gaul begins now to be recognizable as

France, though this France was broken up into a number of dukedoms and

principalities, often with no more than a nominal unity; the

German-speaking peoples between the Rhine and the Slavs to the east

similarly begin to develop an even more fragmentary intimation of

Germany. When at length a real emperor reappears in Western Europe

(962), he is not a Frank, but a Saxon; the conquered in Germany have

become the masters.

It is impossible here to trace the events of the ninth and tenth

centuries in any detail, the alliances, the treacheries, the claims and

acquisitions. Everywhere there was lawlessness, war, and a struggle for

power. In 987 the nominal kingdom of France passed from the hands of the

Carlovingians, the last descendants of Charlemagne, into the hands of

Hugh Capet, who founded a new dynasty. Most of his alleged subordinates

were in fact independent, and willing to make war on the king at the

slightest provocation. The dominions of the Duke of Normandy, for

example, were more extensive and more powerful than the patrimony of

Hugh Capet. Almost the only unity of this France over which the king

exercised a nominal authority lay in the common resolution of its great

provinces to resist incorporation in any empire dominated either by a

German ruler or by the Pope. Apart from the simple organization dictated

by that common will, France was a mosaic of practically independent

nobles. It was an era of castle-building and fortification, and what was

called “private war” throughout all Europe.

The state of Rome in the tenth century is almost indescribable. The

decay of the Empire of Charlemagne left the Pope without a protector,

threatened by Byzantium and the Saracens (who had taken Sicily), and

face to face with the unruly nobles of Rome. Among the most powerful of

these were two women, Theodora and Marozia, mother and daughter,[345]

who in succession held the Castle of St. Angelo (§ 1), which

Theophylact, the patrician husband of Theodora, had seized with most of

the temporal power of the Pope; these two women were as bold,

unscrupulous, and dissolute as any male prince of the time could have

been, and they are abused by historians as though they were ten times

worse. Marozia seized and imprisoned Pope John X (928), who speedily

died under her care. She subsequently made her illegitimate son pope,

under the title of John XI. After him her grandson, John XII, filled the

chair of St. Peter. Gibbon’s account of the manners and morals of John

XII takes refuge at last beneath a veil of Latin footnotes. This Pope,

John XII, was finally degraded by the new German Emperor Otto, who came

over the Alps and down into Italy to be crowned in 962.[346]

This new line of Saxon emperors, which thus comes into prominence,

sprang from a certain Henry the Fowler, who was elected King of Germany

by an assembly of German nobles, princes, and prelates in 919. In 936 he

was succeeded as King by his son, Otto I, surnamed the Great, who was

also elected to be his successor at Aix-la-Chapelle, and who finally

descended upon Rome at the invitation of John XII, to be crowned emperor

in 962. His subsequent degradation of John was forced upon him by that

Pope’s treachery. With his assumption of the imperial dignity, Otto I

did not so much overcome Rome as restore the ancient tussle of Pope and

Emperor for ascendancy to something like decency and dignity again. Otto

I was followed by Otto II (973-983), and he again by a third Otto

(983-1002).[347]

The struggle between the Emperor and the Pope for ascendancy over the

Holy Roman Empire plays a large part in the history of the early Middle

Ages, and we shall have presently to sketch its chief phases. Though the

Church never sank quite to the level of John XII again, nevertheless the

story fluctuates through phases of great violence, confusion, and

intrigue. Yet the outer history of Christendom is not the whole history

of Christendom. That the Lateran was as cunning, foolish, and criminal

as most other contemporary courts has to be recorded; but, if we are to

keep due proportions in this history, it must not be unduly emphasized.

We must remember that through all those ages, leaving profound

consequences, but leaving no conspicuous records upon the historian’s

page, countless men and women were touched by that Spirit of Jesus which

still lived and lives still at the core of Christianity, that they led

lives that were on the whole gracious and helpful, and that they did

unselfish and devoted deeds. Through those ages such lives cleared the

air and made a better world possible. Just as in the Moslem world the

Spirit of Islam generation by generation produced its crop of courage,

integrity, and kindliness.

§ 8

While the Holy Roman Empire and the kingdoms of France and England were

thus appearing amidst the extreme political fragmentation of the

civilization of Western Europe, both that civilization and the Byzantine

Empire were being subjected to a threefold attack: from the Saracen

powers, from the Northmen, and, more slowly developed and most

formidable of all, from a new westward thrust of the Turkish peoples

through South Russia, and also by way of Armenia and the Empire of

Bagdad from Central Asia.

After the overthrow of the Omayyads by the Abbasid dynasty, the strength

of the Saracenic impulse against Europe diminished. Islam was no longer

united. Spain was under a separate Omayyad Caliph, North Africa, though

nominally subject to the Abbasids, was really independent, and presently

(969) Egypt became a separate power with a Shiite Caliph of its own, a

pretender claiming descent from Ali and Fatima (the Fatimite Caliphate).

These Egyptian Fatimites, the green flag Moslems, were fanatics in

comparison with the Abbasids, and did much to embitter the genial

relations of Islam and Christianity. They took Jerusalem, and interfered

with the Christian access to the Holy Sepulchre. On the other side of

the shrunken Abbasid domain there was also a Shiite kingdom in Persia.

The chief Saracen conquest in the ninth century was Sicily; but this was

not overrun in the grand old style in a year or so, but subjugated

tediously through a long century, and with many set-backs. The Spanish

Saracens disputed in Sicily with the Saracens from Africa. In Spain the

Saracens were giving ground before a renascent Christian effort.

Nevertheless, the Byzantine Empire and Western Christendom were still

so weak upon the Mediterranean Sea that the Saracen raiders and pirates

from North Africa were able to raid almost unchallenged in South Italy

and the Greek Islands.

[Illustration: FRANCE at the close of the 10th Century]

But now a new force was appearing in the Mediterranean. We have already

remarked that the Roman Empire never extended itself to the shores of

the Baltic Sea, nor had ever the vigour to push itself into Denmark. The

Nordic Aryan peoples of these neglected regions learnt much from the

empire that was unable to subdue them; as we have already noted in § 4,

they developed the art of shipbuilding and became bold seamen; they

spread across the North Sea to the west, and across the Baltic and up

the Russian rivers into the very heart of what is now Russia. One of

their earliest settlements in Russia was Novgorod the Great. There is

the same trouble and confusion for the student of history with these

northern tribes as there is with the Scythians of classical times, and

with the Hunnish Turkish peoples of Eastern and Central Asia. They

appear under a great variety of names, they change and intermingle. In

the case of Britain, for example, the Angles, the Saxons, and Jutes

conquered most of what is now England in the fifth and sixth centuries;

the Danes, a second wave of practically the same people, followed in the

eighth and ninth; and in 1013 a Danish King, Canute, reigned in England,

and not only over England, but over Denmark and Norway. For a time,

under Canute and his sons, it seemed possible that a great confederation

of the Northmen might have established itself. Then in 1066 a third wave

of the same people flowed over England from the “Norman” state in

France, where the Northmen had been settled since the days of Rolf the

Ganger (912), and where they had learnt to speak French. William, Duke

of Normandy, became the William the Conqueror (1066) of English history.

Practically, from the standpoint of universal history, all these peoples

were the same people, waves of one Nordic stock. These waves were not

only flowing westward, but eastward. Already we have noted (chap, xxix,

§ 4), a very interesting earlier movement of the same peoples under the

name of Goths from the Baltic to the Black Sea. We have traced the

splitting of these Goths into the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths, and the

adventurous wanderings that ended at last in the Ostrogoth kingdom in

Italy and the Visigoth states in Spain. In the ninth century a second

movement of the Northmen across Russia was going on at the same time

that their establishments in England and their dukedom of Normandy were

coming into existence. The populations of South Scotland, England, East

Ireland, Flanders, Normandy, and the Russias have more elements in

common than we are accustomed to recognize. All are fundamentally Gothic

and Nordic peoples. These “Russian” Norsemen travelled in the

summer-time, using the river routes that abounded in Russia; they

carried their ships by portages from the northward-running rivers to

those flowing southward. They appeared as pirates, raiders, and traders

both upon the Caspian and the Black Sea. The Arabic chroniclers note

their apparition upon the Caspian, and give them the name of Russians.

They raided Persia, and threatened Constantinople with a great fleet of

small craft (in 865, 904, 941, and 1043).[348] One of these Northmen,

Rurik (_circa_ 850), established himself as the ruler of Novgorod and

Kief, and laid the foundations of modern Russia. The fighting qualities

of the Russian Vikings were speedily appreciated at Constantinople; the

Greeks called them Varangians, and an Imperial Varangian bodyguard was

formed. After the conquest of England by the Normans (1066), a number of

Danes and English were driven into exile and joined these Russian

Varangians, apparently finding few obstacles to intercourse in their

speech and habits.

Meanwhile the Normans from Normandy were also finding their way into the

Mediterranean from the West. They came first as mercenaries, and later

as independent invaders; and they came mainly, not, it is to be noted,

by sea, but in scattered bands by land. They came through the Rhineland

and Italy partly in the search for warlike employment and loot, partly

as pilgrims. For the ninth and tenth centuries saw a great development

of pilgrimage. These Normans, as they grew powerful, discovered

themselves such rapacious and vigorous robbers that they forced the

Eastern Emperor and the Pope into a feeble and ineffective alliance

against them (1053). They defeated and captured and were pardoned by the

Pope; they established themselves in Calabria and South Italy, conquered

Sicily from the Saracens (1060-1090), and under Robert Guiscard, who had

entered Italy as a pilgrim adventurer and began his career as a brigand

in Calabria, threatened the Byzantine Empire itself (1081). His army,

which contained a contingent of Sicilian Moslems, crossed from Brindisi

to Epirus in the reverse direction to that in which Pyrrhus had crossed

to attack the Roman Republic, thirteen centuries before (275 B.C.). He

laid siege to the Byzantine stronghold of Durazzo.

[Illustration:

The EMPIRE of

OTTO

the GREAT

]

Robert captured Durazzo (1082), but the pressure of affairs in Italy

recalled him, and ultimately put an end to this first Norman attack upon

the Empire of Byzantium leaving the way open for the rule of a

comparatively vigorous Comnenian dynasty (1081-1204). In Italy, amidst

conflicts too complex for us to tell here, it fell to Robert Guiscard to

besiege and sack Rome (1084); and Gibbon notes with quiet satisfaction

the presence of a large contingent of Sicilian Moslems amongst the

looters. There were in the twelfth century three other Norman attacks

upon the Eastern power, one by the son of Robert Guiscard, and the two

others directly from Sicily by sea....

But neither the Saracens nor the Normans pounded quite so heavily

against the old empire at Byzantium or against the Holy Roman Empire,

the vamped-up Roman Empire of the West, as did the double thrust from

the Turanian centres in Central Asia, of which we must now tell. We have

already noted (chap. xxix, § 5) the westward movement of the Avars, and

the Turkish Magyars who followed in their track. From the days of Pepin

I onward, the Frankish power and its successors in Germany were in

conflict with these Eastern raiders along all the Eastern borderlands.

Charlemagne held and punished them, and established some sort of

overlordship as far east as the Carpathians; but amidst the enfeeblement

that followed his death, these peoples, more or less blended now in the

accounts under the name of Hungarians, led by the Magyars,

re-established their complete freedom again, and raided yearly, often as

far as the Rhine. They destroyed, Gibbon notes, the monastery of St.

Gall in Switzerland, and the town of Bremen. Their great raiding period

was between 900 and 950. Their biggest effort, through Germany right

into France, thence over the Alps and home again by North Italy, was in

938-9.

Thrust southward by these disturbances, and by others to be presently

noted, the Bulgarians, as we have told in § 5, established themselves

under Krum, between the Danube and Constantinople. Originally a Turkish

people, the Bulgarians, since their first appearance in the east of

Russia, had become by repeated admixture almost entirely Slavonic in

race and language. For some time after their establishment in Bulgaria

they remained pagan. Their king, Boris (852-884), entertained Moslem

envoys, and seems to have contemplated an adhesion to Islam, but finally

he married a Byzantine princess, and handed himself and his people over

to the Christian faith.

[Illustration: The COMING of the SELJUKS.]

The Hungarians were drubbed into a certain respect for civilization by

Henry the Fowler, the elected King of Germany, and Otto the First, the

first Saxon emperor, in the tenth century. But they did not decide to

adopt Christianity until about A.D. 1000. Though they were

Christianized, they retained their own Turko-Finnic language (Magyar),

and they retain it to this day.

Bulgarians and Hungarians do not, however, exhaust the catalogue of the

peoples whose westward movements embodied the Turkish thrust across

South Russia. Behind the Hungarians and Bulgarians thrust the Khazars, a

Turkish people, with whom were mingled a very considerable proportion of

Jews who had been expelled from Constantinople, and who had mixed with

them and made many proselytes. To these Jewish Khazars are to be

ascribed the great settlements of Jews in Poland and Russia.[349] Behind

the Khazars again, and overrunning them, were the Petschenegs (or

Patzinaks), a savage Turkish people who are first heard of in the ninth

century, and who were destined to dissolve and vanish as the kindred

Huns did five centuries before. And while the trend of all these peoples

was westward, we have, when we are thinking of the present population of

these South Russian regions, to remember also the coming and going of

the Northmen between the Baltic and the Black Sea, who interwove with

the Turkish migrants like warp and woof, and bear in mind also that

there was a considerable Slavonic population, the heirs and descendants

of Scythians, Sarmatians, and the like, already established in these

restless, lawless, but fertile areas. All these races mixed with and

reacted upon one another. The universal prevalence of Slavonic

languages, except in Hungary, shows that the population remained

predominantly Slav. And in what is now Roumania, for all the passage of

peoples, and in spite of conquest after conquest, the tradition and

inheritance of the Roman provinces of Dacia and Mœsia Inferior still

kept a Latin speech and memory alive.

But this direct thrust of the Turkish peoples against Christendom to the

north of the Black Sea was, in the end, not nearly so important as their

indirect thrust south of it through the empire of the Caliph. We cannot

deal here with the tribes and dissensions of the Turkish peoples of

Turkestan, nor with the particular causes that brought to the fore the

tribes under the rule of the Seljuk clan. In the eleventh century these

Seljuk Turks broke with irresistible force not in one army, but in a

group of armies, and under two brothers, into the decaying fragments of

the Moslem Empire. For Islam had long ceased to be one empire. The

orthodox Sunnite Abbasid rule had shrunken to what was once Babylonia;

and even in Bagdad the Caliph was the mere creature of his Turkish

palace guards. A sort of mayor of the palace, a Turk, was the real

ruler. East of the Caliph, in Persia, and west of him in Palestine,

Syria, and Egypt, were Shiite heretics. The Seljuk Turks were orthodox

Sunnites; they now swept down upon and conquered the Shiite rulers and

upstarts, and established themselves as the protectors of the Bagdad

Caliph, taking over the temporal powers of the mayor of the palace. Very

early they conquered Armenia from the Greeks, and then, breaking the

bounds that had restrained the power of Islam for four centuries, they

swept on to the conquest of Asia Minor, almost to the gates of

Constantinople. The mountain barrier of Cilicia that had held the Moslem

so long had been turned by the conquest of Armenia from the northeast.

Under Alp Arslan, who had united all the Seljuk power in his own hands,

the Turks utterly smashed the Byzantine army at the battle of Manzikert,

or Melasgird (1071). The effect of this battle upon people’s

imaginations was very great. Islam, which had appeared far gone in

decay, which had been divided religiously and politically, was suddenly

discovered to have risen again, and it was the secure old Byzantine

Empire that seemed on the brink of dissolution. The loss of Asia Minor

was very swift. The Seljuks established themselves at Iconium (Konia),

in what is now Anatolia. In a little while they were in possession of

the fortress of Nicæa over against the capital.

§ 9

We have already told of the attack of the Normans upon the Byzantine

Empire from the west, and of the battle of Durazzo (1081); and we have

noted that Constantinople had still vivid memories of the Russian sea

raids (1043). Bulgaria, it is true, had been tamed, but there was heavy

and uncertain warfare going on with the Petschenegs. North and west, the

emperor’s hands were full. This swift advance of the Turks into country

that had been so long securely Byzantine must have seemed like the

approach of final disaster. The Eastern Emperor, Michael VII, under the

pressure of these convergent dangers, took a step that probably seemed

both to himself and to Rome of the utmost political significance. He

appealed to the Pope, Gregory VII, for assistance. His appeal was

repeated still more urgently by his successor, Alexius Comnenus, to Pope

Urban II.

To the counsellors of Rome this must have presented itself as a supreme

opportunity for the assertion of the headship of the Pope over the

entire Christian world.

In this history we have traced the growth of this idea of a religious

government of Christendom--and through Christendom of mankind--and we

have shown how naturally and how necessarily, because of the tradition

of world empire, it found a centre at Rome. The Pope of Rome was the

only Western patriarch; he was the religious head of a vast region in

which the ruling tongue was Latin; the other patriarchs of the Orthodox

Church spoke Greek, and so were inaudible throughout his domains; and

the two words _Filioque_, which had been added to the Latin creed (see

chap. xxx, § 8, and chap. xxxiii, § 6), had split off the Byzantine

Christians by one of those impalpable and elusive doctrinal points upon

which there is no reconciliation. (The final rupture was in 1054.) The

life of the Lateran changed in its quality with every occupant of the

chair of St. Peter: sometimes papal Rome was a den of corruption and

uncleanness, as it had been in the days of John XII; sometimes it was

pervaded by the influence of widely thinking and nobly thinking men. But

behind the Pope was the assembly of the cardinals, priests, and a great

number of highly educated officials, who never, even in the darkest and

wildest days, lost sight altogether of the very grand idea of a divine

world dominion, of a peace of Christ throughout the earth that St.

Augustine had expressed. Through all the Middle Ages that idea was the

guiding influence in Rome. For a time, perhaps, mean minds would prevail

there, and in the affairs of the world Rome would play the part of a

greedy, treacherous, and insanely cunning old woman; followed a phase of

masculine and quite worldly astuteness perhaps, or a phase of

exaltation. Came an interlude of fanaticism or pedantry, when all the

pressure was upon exact doctrine. Or there was a moral collapse, and the

Lateran became the throne of some sensuous or æsthetic autocrat, ready

to sell every hope or honour the Church could give for money to spend

upon pleasure or display. Yet, on the whole, the papal ship kept its

course, and came presently into the wind again.

In this period to which we have now come, the period of the eleventh

century, we discover a Rome dominated by the personality of an

exceptionally great statesman, Hildebrand, who occupied various official

positions under a succession of Popes, and finally became Pope himself

under the name of Gregory VII (1073-1085). We find that under his

influence, vice, sloth, and corruption have been swept out of the

Church, that the method of electing the Popes has been reformed, and

that a great struggle has been waged with the Emperor upon the

manifestly vital question of “investitures,” the question whether Pope

or temporal monarch should have the decisive voice in the appointment of

the bishops in their domains. Hitherto the Roman clergy had been able to

marry; but now, to detach them effectually from the world and to make

them more completely the instruments of the church, celibacy was imposed

upon all priests....[350]

Gregory VII had been prevented by his struggle over the investitures

from any effectual answer to the first appeal from Byzantium; but he had

left a worthy successor in Urban II (1087-1099); and when the letter of

Alexius came to hand, Urban seized at once upon the opportunity it

afforded for drawing together all the thoughts and forces of Western

Europe into one passion and purpose. Thereby he might hope to end the

private warfare that prevailed, and find a proper outlet for the immense

energy of the Normans. He saw, too, an opportunity of thrusting the

Byzantine power and Church aside, and extending the influence of the

Latin Church over Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. The envoys of Alexius

were heard at a church council, hastily summoned at Piacenza (=

Placentia), and next year (1095), at Clermont, Urban held a second great

council, in which all the slowly gathered strength of the Church was

organized for a universal war propaganda against the Moslems. Private

war, all war among Christians, was to cease until the infidel had been

swept back and the site of the Holy Sepulchre was again in Christian

hands.

The fervour of the response enables us to understand the great work of

creative organization that had been done in Western Europe in the

previous five centuries. In the beginning of the seventh century we saw

Western Europe as a chaos of social and political fragments, with no

common idea nor hope, a system shattered almost to a dust of

self-seeking individuals. Now in the dawn of the eleventh century there

is everywhere a common belief, a linking idea, to which men may devote

themselves, and by which they can co-operate together in a universal

enterprise. We realize that, in spite of much weakness and intellectual

and moral unsoundness, to this extent the Christian Church has _worked_.

We are able to measure the evil phases of tenth-century Rome, the

scandals, the filthiness, the murders and violence, at their proper

value by the scale of this fact. No doubt also all over Christendom

there had been many lazy, evil, and foolish priests; but it is manifest

that this task of teaching and co-ordination that had been accomplished

could have been accomplished only through a great multitude of

right-living priests and monks and nuns. A new and greater amphictyony,

the amphictyony of Christendom, had come into the world, and it had been

built by thousands of anonymous, faithful lives.