And this response to the appeal of Urban the Second was not confined

only to what we should call educated people. It was not simply knights

and princes who were willing to go upon this crusade. Side by side with

the figure of Urban we must put the figure of Peter the Hermit, a type

novel to Europe, albeit a little reminiscent of the Hebrew prophets.

This man appeared preaching the crusade to the common people. He told a

story--whether truthful or untruthful hardly matters in this

connection--of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, of the wanton destruction at

the Holy Sepulchre by the Seljuk Turks, who took it in 1073, and of the

exactions, brutalities, and deliberate cruelties practised upon the

Christian pilgrims to the Holy Places. Barefooted, clad in a coarse

garment, riding on an ass, and bearing a huge cross, this man travelled

about France and Germany, and everywhere harangued vast crowds in church

or street or market-place.

Here for the first time we discover Europe with an idea and a soul! Here

is a universal response of indignation of the story of a remote wrong, a

swift understanding of a common cause for rich and poor alike. You

cannot imagine this thing happening in the Empire of Augustus Cæsar, or

indeed in any previous state in the world’s history. Something of the

kind might perhaps have been possible in the far smaller world of

Hellas, or in Arabia before Islam. But this movement affected nations,

kingdoms, tongues, and peoples. It is clear that we are dealing with

something new that has come into the world, a new clear connection of

the common interest with the consciousness of the common man.

§ 10

From the very first this flaming enthusiasm was mixed with baser

elements. There was the cold and calculated scheme of the free and

ambitious Latin Church to subdue and replace the emperor-ruled Byzantine

Church; there was the freebooting instinct of the Normans, who were

tearing Italy to pieces, which turned readily enough to a new and richer

world of plunder; and there was something in the multitude who now

turned their faces east, something deeper than love in the human

composition, namely, fear-born hate, that the impassioned appeals of the

propagandists and the exaggeration of the horrors and cruelties of the

infidel had fanned into flame. And there were still other forces; the

intolerant Seljuks and the intolerant Fatimites lay now an impassable

barrier across the eastward trade of Genoa and Venice that had hitherto

flowed through Bagdad and Aleppo, or through Egypt. They must force open

these closed channels, unless Constantinople and the Black Sea route

were to monopolize Eastern trade altogether. Moreover, in 1094 and 1095

there had been a pestilence and famine from the Scheldt to Bohemia, and

there was great social disorganization. “No wonder,” says Mr. Ernest

Barker, “that a stream of emigration set towards the East, such as would

in modern times flow towards a newly discovered goldfield--a stream

carrying in its turbid waters much refuse, tramps and bankrupts,

camp-followers and hucksters, fugitive monks and escaped villeins, and

marked by the same motley grouping, the same fever of life, the same

alternations of affluence and beggary, which mark the rush for a

goldfield to-day.”

But these were secondary contributory causes. The fact of predominant

interest to the historian of mankind is this _will to crusade_ suddenly

revealed as a new mass possibility in human affairs.

[Illustration: Map to illustrate the FIRST CRUSADE]

The story of the crusades abounds in such romantic and picturesque

detail that the writer of an Outline of History must ride his pen upon

the curb through this alluring field. The first forces to move eastward

were great crowds of undisciplined people rather than armies, and they

sought to make their way by the valley of the Danube, and thence

southward to Constantinople.

This was the “people’s crusade.” Never before in the whole history of

the world had there been such a spectacle as these masses of practically

leaderless people moved by an idea. It was a very crude idea. When they

got among foreigners, they do not seem to have realized that they were

not already among the infidel. Two great mobs, the advance guard of the

expedition, committed such excesses in Hungary, where the language must

have been incomprehensible to them, as to provoke the Hungarians to

destroy them. They were massacred. A third host began with a great

pogrom of the Jews in the Rhineland--for the Christian blood was up--and

this multitude was also dispersed in Hungary. Two other hosts under

Peter got through and reached Constantinople, to the astonishment and

dismay of the Emperor Alexius. They looted and committed outrages as

they came, and at last he shipped them across the Bosphorus, to be

massacred rather than defeated by the Seljuks (1096).

This first unhappy appearance of the “people” as people in modern

European history was followed in 1097 by the organized forces of the

First Crusade. They came by diverse routes from France, Normandy,

Flanders, England, Southern Italy, and Sicily, and the will and power of

them were the Normans. They crossed the Bosphorus and captured Nicæa,

which Alexius snatched away from them before they could loot it. They

then went on by much the same route as Alexander the Great, through the

Cilician Gates, leaving the Turks in Konia unconquered, past the

battle-fields of the Issus, and so to Antioch, which they took after

nearly a year’s siege. Then they defeated a great relieving army from

Mosul. A large part of the Crusaders remained in Antioch, a smaller

force under Godfrey of Bouillon (in Belgium) went on to Jerusalem.

“After a little more than a month’s siege, the city was finally captured

(July 15). The slaughter was terrible; the blood of the conquered ran

down the streets, until men splashed in blood as they rode. At

nightfall, ‘sobbing for excess of joy,’ the crusaders came to the

Sepulchre from their treading of the wine-press, and put their

blood-stained hands together in prayer. So, on that day of July, the

First Crusade came to an end.”[351]

The authority of the Patriarch of Jerusalem was at once seized upon by

the Latin clergy with the expedition, and the Orthodox Christians found

themselves in rather a worse case under Latin rule than under the Turk.

There were already Latin principalities established at Antioch and

Edessa, and there began a struggle for ascendancy between these various

courts and kings, and an unsuccessful attempt to make Jerusalem a

property of the Pope. These are complications beyond our present scope.

Let us quote, however, a characteristic passage from Gibbon:--

“In a style less grave than that of history, I should perhaps compare

the Emperor Alexius to the jackal, who is said to follow the steps and

to devour the leavings of the lion. Whatever had been his fears and

toils in the passage of the First Crusade, they were amply recompensed

by the subsequent benefits which he derived from the exploits of the

Franks. His dexterity and vigilance secured their first conquest of

Nicæa, and from this threatening station the Turks were compelled to

evacuate the neighbourhood of Constantinople. While the Crusaders, with

blind valour, advanced into the midland countries of Asia, the crafty

Greek improved the favourable occasion when the emirs of the sea coast

were recalled to the standard of the Sultan. The Turks were driven from

the isles of Rhodes and Chios; the cities of Ephesus and Smyrna, of

Sardes, Philadelphia, and Laodicea were restored to the empire, which

Alexius enlarged from the Hellespont to the banks of the Mæander and the

rocky shores of Pamphylia. The churches resumed their splendour; the

towns were rebuilt and fortified; and the desert country was peopled

with colonies of Christians, who were gently removed from the more

distant and dangerous frontier. In these paternal cares we may forgive

Alexius, if we forget the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre; but, by the

Latins, he was stigmatized with the foul reproach of treason and

desertion. They had sworn fidelity and obedience to his throne; but _he_

had promised to assist their enterprise in person, or at least, with his

troops and treasures; his base retreat dissolved their obligations; and

the sword, which had been the instrument of their victory, was the

pledge and title of their just independence. It does not appear that the

emperor attempted to revive his obsolete claims over the kingdom of

Jerusalem, but the borders of Cilicia and Syria were more recent in his

possession and more accessible to his arms. The great army of the

Crusaders was annihilated or dispersed; the principality of Antioch was

left without a head, by the surprise and captivity of Bohemond; his

ransom had oppressed him with a heavy debt; and his Norman followers

were insufficient to repel the hostilities of the Greeks and Turks. In

this distress, Bohemond embraced a magnanimous resolution, of leaving

the defence of Antioch to his kinsman, the faithful Tancred; of arming

the West against the Byzantine Empire, and of executing the design which

he inherited from the lessons and example of his father Guiscard. His

embarkation was clandestine; and if we may credit a tale of the Princess

Anna, he passed the hostile sea closely secreted in a coffin. (Anna

Comnena adds, that to complete the imitation, he was shut up with a dead

cock; and condescends to wonder how the barbarian could endure the

confinement and putrefaction. This absurd tale is unknown to the

Latins.) But his reception in France was dignified by the public

applause and his marriage with the king’s daughter; his return was

glorious, since the bravest spirits of the age enlisted under his

veteran command; and he repassed the Adriatic at the head of five

thousand horse and forty thousand foot, assembled from the most remote

climates of Europe. The strength of Durazzo and prudence of Alexius, the

progress of famine and approach of winter, eluded his ambitious hopes;

and the venal confederates were seduced from his standard. A treaty of

peace suspended the fears of the Greeks.”

We have dealt thus lengthily with the First Crusade, because it displays

completely the quality of all these expeditions. The reality of the

struggle between the Latin and the Byzantine system became more and more

nakedly apparent. In 1101 came reinforcements, in which the fleet of the

mercantile republics of Venice and Genoa played a prominent part, and

the power of the kingdom of Jerusalem was extended. The year 1147 saw a

Second Crusade, in which both the Emperor Conrad III and King Louis of

France participated. It was a much more stately and far less successful

and enthusiastic expedition than its predecessor. It had been provoked

by the fall of Edessa to the Moslems in 1144. One large division of

Germans, instead of going to the Holy Land, attacked and subjugated the

still pagan Wends east of the Elbe. This, the Pope agreed, counted as

crusading, and so did the capture of Lisbon, and the foundation of the

Christian kingdom of Portugal by the Flemish and English contingents.

In 1169 a Kurdish adventurer, named Saladin, became ruler of Egypt, in

which country the Shiite heresy had now fallen before a Sunnite revival.

This Saladin reunited the efforts of Egypt and Bagdad, and preached a

Jehad, a Holy War, a counter-crusade, of all the Moslems against the

Christians. This Jehad excited almost as much feeling in Islam as the

First Crusade had done in Christendom. It was now a case of crusader

against crusader; and in 1187 Jerusalem was retaken. This provoked the

Third Crusade (1189). This also was a grand affair, planned jointly by

the Emperor Frederick I (known better as Frederick Barbarossa), the King

of France, and the King of England (who at that time owned many of the

fairest French provinces). The papacy played a secondary part in this

expedition; it was in one of its phases of enfeeblement; and the crusade

was the most courtly, chivalrous, and romantic of all. Religious

bitterness was mitigated by the idea of knightly gallantry, which

obsessed both Saladin and Richard I (1189-1199) of England

(Cœur-de-Lion), and the lover of romance may very well turn to the

romances about this period for its flavour. The crusade saved the

principality of Antioch for a time, but failed to retake Jerusalem. The

Christians, however, remained in possession of the seacoast of

Palestine.

By the time of the Third Crusade, the magic and wonder had gone out of

these movements altogether. The common people had found them out. Men

went, but only kings and nobles straggled back; and that often only

after heavy taxation for a ransom. The idea of the crusades was

cheapened by their too frequent and trivial use. Whenever the Pope

quarrelled with anyone now, he called for a crusade, until the word

ceased to mean anything but an attempt to give flavour to an unpalatable

civil war. There was a crusade against the heretics in the south of

France, one against John (King of England), one against the Emperor

Frederick II. The Popes did not understand the necessity of dignity to

the papacy. They had achieved a moral ascendancy in Christendom.

Forthwith they began to fritter it away. They not only cheapened the

idea of the crusades, but they made their tremendous power of

excommunication, of putting people outside all the sacraments, hopes,

and comforts of religion, ridiculous by using it in mere disputes of

policy. Frederick II was not only crusaded against, but

excommunicated--without visible injury. He was excommunicated again in

1239, and a third time in 1245.[352]

The bulk of the Fourth Crusade never reached the Holy Land at all. It

started from Venice (1202), captured Zara, encamped at Constantinople

(1203), and finally, in 1204, stormed the city. It was frankly a

combined attack on the Byzantine Empire. Venice took much of the coasts

and islands of the empire, and a Latin, Baldwin of Flanders, was set up

as emperor in Constantinople. The Latin and Greek Churches were declared

to be reunited, and Latin emperors ruled as conquerors in

Constantinople from 1204 to 1261.

In 1212 occurred a dreadful thing, a children’s crusade. An excitement

that could no longer affect sane adults was spread among the children in

the south of France and in the Rhone Valley. A crowd of many thousands

of French boys marched to Marseilles; they were then lured on board ship

by slave traders, who sold them into slavery in Egypt. The Rhineland

children tramped into Italy, many perishing by the way, and there

dispersed. Pope Innocent III made great capital out of this strange

business. “The very children put us to shame,” he said; and sought to

whip up enthusiasm for a Fifth Crusade. This crusade aimed at the

conquest of Egypt, because Jerusalem was now held by the Egyptian

Sultan; its remnants returned in 1221, after an inglorious evacuation of

its one capture, Damietta, with the Jerusalem vestiges of the True Cross

as a sort of consolation concession on the part of the victor. We have

already noted the earlier adventures of this venerable relic before the

days of Muhammad in chap. xxxi, § 2, when it was carried off by Chosroes

II to Ctesiphon, and recovered by the Emperor Heraclius. Fragments of

the True Cross, however, had always been in Rome at the church of S.

Croce-in-Gerusalemme, since the days of the Empress Helena (the mother

of Constantine the Great) to whom, says the legend, its hiding-place had

been revealed in a vision during her pilgrimage to the Holy Land.[353]

The Sixth Crusade (1229) was a crusade bordering upon absurdity. The

Emperor Frederick II had promised to go upon a crusade, and evaded his

vow. He had made a false start and returned. He was probably bored by

the mere idea of a crusade. But the vow had been part of the bargain by

which he secured the support of Pope Innocent III in his election as

emperor. He busied himself in reorganizing the government of his

Sicilian kingdom, though he had given the Pope to understand that he

would relinquish these possessions if he became emperor; and the Pope

was anxious to stop this process of consolidation by sending him to the

Holy Land. The Pope did not want Frederick II, or any German emperor at

all in Italy, because he himself wished to rule Italy. As Frederick II

remained evasive, Gregory IX excommunicated him, proclaimed a crusade

against him, and invaded his dominions in Italy (1228). Whereupon the

Emperor sailed with an army to the Holy Land. There he had a meeting

with the Sultan of Egypt (the Emperor spoke six languages freely,

including Arabic); and it would seem these two gentlemen, both of

sceptical opinions, exchanged views of a congenial sort, discussed the

Pope in a worldly spirit, debated the Mongolian rush westward, which

threatened them both alike, and agreed finally to a commercial

convention, and the surrender of a part of the kingdom of Jerusalem to

Frederick. This indeed was a new sort of crusade, a crusade by private

treaty. As this astonishing crusader had been excommunicated, he had to

indulge in a purely secular coronation in Jerusalem, taking the crown

from the altar with his own hand, in a church from which all the clergy

had gone. Probably there was no one to show him the Holy Places; indeed

these were presently all put under an interdict by the Patriarch of

Jerusalem and locked up; manifestly the affair differed altogether in

spirit from the red onslaught of the First Crusade. It had not even the

kindly sociability of the Caliph Omar’s visit six hundred years before.

Frederick II rode out of Jerusalem almost alone, returned from this

unromantic success to Italy, put his affairs there in order very

rapidly, chased the papal armies out of his possessions, and obliged the

Pope to give him absolution from his excommunication (1230). This Sixth

Crusade was indeed not only the _reductio ad absurdum_ of crusades, but

of papal excommunications. Of this Frederick II we shall tell more in a

later section, because he was very typical of certain new forces that

were coming into European affairs.

The Christians lost Jerusalem again in 1244; it was taken from them very

easily by the Sultan of Egypt when they attempted an intrigue against

him. This provoked the Seventh Crusade, the Crusade of St. Louis, King

of France (Louis IX), who was taken prisoner in Egypt and ransomed in

1250. Not until 1918, when it fell to a mixed force of French, British,

and Indian troops, did Jerusalem slip once more from the Moslem

grasp....

One more crusade remains to be noted, an expedition to Tunis by this

same Louis IX, who died of fever there.

§11

The essential interest of the crusades for the historian of mankind lies

in the wave of emotion, of unifying feeling, that animated the first.

Thereafter these expeditions became more and more an established

process, and less and less vital events. The First Crusade was an

occurrence like the discovery of America; the later ones were more and

more like a trip across the Atlantic. In the eleventh century, the idea

of the crusade must have been like a strange and wonderful light in the

sky; in the thirteenth one can imagine honest burghers saying in tones

of protest, “What! _another_ crusade!” The experience of St. Louis in

Egypt is not like a fresh experience for mankind; it is much more like a

round of golf over some well-known links, a round that was dogged by

misfortune. It is an insignificant series of events. The interest of

life had shifted to other directions.

The beginning of the crusades displays all Europe saturated by a naïve

Christianity, and ready to follow the leading of the Pope trustfully and

simply. The scandals of the Lateran during its evil days, with which we

are all so familiar now, were practically unknown outside Rome. And

Gregory VII and Urban II had redeemed all that. But intellectually and

morally their successors at the Lateran and the Vatican[354] were not

equal to their opportunities. The strength of the papacy lay in the

faith men had in it, and it used that faith so carelessly as to enfeeble

it. Rome has always had too much of the shrewdness of the priest and too

little of the power of the prophet. So that while the eleventh century

was a century of ignorant and confiding men, the thirteenth was an age

of knowing and disillusioned men. It was a far more civilized and

profoundly sceptical world.

The bishops, priests, and the monastic institutions of Latin Christendom

before the days of Gregory VII had been perhaps rather loosely linked

together and very variable in quality; but it is clear that they were,

as a rule, intensely intimate with the people among whom they found

themselves, and with much of the spirit of Jesus still alive in them;

they were trusted, and they had enormous power _within the conscience of

their followers_. The church, in comparison with its later state, was

more in the hands of local laymen and the local ruler; it lacked its

later universality. The energetic bracing up of the church organization

by Gregory VII, which was designed to increase the central power of

Rome, broke many subtle filaments between priest and monastery on the

one hand, and the country-side about them on the other. Men of faith and

wisdom believe in growth and their fellow men; but priests, even such

priests as Gregory VII, believe in the false “efficiency” of an imposed

discipline. The squabble over investitures made every prince in

Christendom suspicious of the bishops as agents of a foreign power; this

suspicion filtered down to the parishes. The political enterprises of

the papacy necessitated an increasing demand for money. Already in the

thirteenth century it was being said everywhere that the priests were

not good men, that they were always hunting for money.

In the days of ignorance there had been an extraordinary willingness to

believe the Catholic priesthood good and wise. Relatively it was better

and wiser in those days. Great powers beyond her spiritual functions had

been entrusted to the church, and very extraordinary freedoms. Of this

confidence the fullest advantage had been taken. In the Middle Ages the

church had become a state within the state. It had its own law courts.

Cases involving not merely priests, but monks, students, crusaders,

widows, orphans, and the helpless, were reserved for the clerical

courts; and whenever the rites or rules of the church were involved,

there the church claimed jurisdiction over such matters as wills,

marriages, oaths, and of course over heresy, sorcery, and blasphemy.

There were numerous clerical prisons in which offenders might pine all

their lives. The Pope was the supreme law-giver of Christendom, and his

court at Rome the final and decisive court of appeal. And the church

levied taxes; it had not only vast properties and a great income from

fees, but it imposed a tax of a tenth, the tithe, upon its subjects. It

did not call for this as a pious benefaction; it demanded it as a right.

The clergy, on the other hand, were now claiming exemption from lay

taxation.

This attempt to trade upon their peculiar prestige and evade their share

in fiscal burdens was certainly one very considerable factor in the

growing dissatisfaction with the clergy. Apart from any question of

justice, it was impolitic. It made taxes seem ten times more burthensome

to those who had to pay. It made everyone feel the immunities of the

church. And a still more extravagant and unwise claim made by the church

was the claim to the power of _dispensation_. The Pope might in many

instances set aside the laws of the church in individual cases; he might

allow cousins to marry, permit a man to have two wives, or release

anyone from a vow. But to do such things is to admit that the laws

affected are not based upon necessity and an inherent righteousness;

that they are in fact restrictive and vexatious. The law-giver, of all

beings, most owes the law allegiance. He of all men should behave as

though the law compelled him. But it is the universal weakness of

mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we

own.

§ 12

The Emperor Frederick II is a very convenient example of the sort of

doubter and rebel the thirteenth century could produce. It may be

interesting to tell a little of this intelligent and cynical man. He was

the son of the German Emperor, Henry VI, and grandson of Frederick

Barbarossa, and his mother was the daughter of Roger I, the Norman King

of Sicily. He inherited this kingdom in 1198, when he was four years

old; his mother was his guardian for six months, and when she died, Pope

Innocent III (1198 to 1216) became regent and guardian. He seems to have

had an exceptionally good and remarkably mixed education, and his

accomplishments earned him the flattering title of _Stupor mundi_, the

amazement of the world. The result of getting an Arabic view of

Christianity, and a Christian view of Islam, was to make him believe

that all religions were impostures, a view held perhaps by many a

stifled observer in the Age of Faith. But he talked about his views; his

blasphemies and heresies are on record. Growing up under the arrogant

rule of Innocent III, who never seems to have realized that his ward had

come of age, he developed a slightly humorous evasiveness. It was the

papal policy to prevent any fresh coalescence of the power of Germany

and Italy, and it was equally Frederick’s determination to get whatever

he could. When presently opportunity offered him the imperial crown of

Germany, he secured the Pope’s support by agreeing, if he were elected,

to relinquish his possessions in Sicily and South Italy, and to put down

heresy in Germany. For Innocent III was one of the great persecuting

Popes, an able, grasping, and aggressive man. (For a Pope, he was

exceptionally young. He became Pope at thirty-seven.) It was Innocent

who had preached a cruel crusade against the heretics in the south of

France, a crusade that presently became a looting expedition beyond his

control. So soon as Frederick was elected emperor (1211),[355] Innocent

pressed for the performance of the vows and promises he had wrung from

his dutiful ward. The clergy were to be freed from lay jurisdiction and

from taxation, and exemplary cruelties were to be practised upon the

heretics. None of which things Frederick did. As we have already told,

he would not even relinquish Sicily. He liked Sicily as a place of

residence better than he liked Germany.

Innocent III died baffled in 1216, and his successor, Honorius III,

effected nothing. Honorius was succeeded by Gregory IX (1227), who

evidently came to the papal throne with a nervous resolution to master

this perplexing young man. He excommunicated him at once for failing to

start upon his crusade, which was now twelve years overdue; and he

denounced his vices, heresies, and general offences in a public letter

(1227). To this Frederick replied in a far abler document addressed to

all the princes of Europe, a document of extreme importance in history,

because it is the first clear statement of the issue between the

pretensions of the Pope to be absolute ruler of all Christendom, and the

claims of the secular rulers.[356] This conflict had always been

smouldering; it had broken out here in one form, and there in another;

but now Frederick put it in clear general terms upon which men could

combine together.

Having delivered this blow, he departed upon the pacific crusade of

which we have already told. In 1239, Gregory IX was excommunicating him

for a second time, and renewing that warfare of public abuse in which

the papacy had already suffered severely. The controversy was revived

after Gregory IX was dead, when Innocent IV was Pope; and again a

devastating letter, which men were bound to remember, was written by

Frederick against the church. He denounced the pride and irreligion of

the clergy, and ascribed all the corruptions of the time to their pride

and wealth. He proposed to his fellow princes a general confiscation of

church property--for the good of the church. It was a suggestion that

never afterwards left the imagination of the European princes.

We will not go on to tell of his last years or of the disaster at Parma,

due to his carelessness, which cast a shadow of failure over his end.

The particular events of his life are far less significant than its

general atmosphere. It is possible to piece together something of his

court life in Sicily. He is described towards the end of his life as

“red, bald, and short-sighted”; but his features were good and pleasing.

He was luxurious in his way of living, and fond of beautiful things. He

is described as licentious. But it is clear that his mind was not

satisfied by religious scepticism, and that he was a man of very

effectual curiosity and inquiry. He gathered Jewish and Moslem as well

as Christian philosophers at his court, and he did much to irrigate the

Italian mind with Saracenic influences. Through him Arabic numerals and

algebra were introduced to Christian students, and among other

philosophers at his court was Michael Scott, who translated portions of

Aristotle and the commentaries thereon of the great Arab philosopher

Averroes (of Cordoba). In 1224 Frederick founded the University of

Naples, and he enlarged and enriched the great medical school at Salerno

University, the most ancient of universities. He also founded a

zoological garden. He left a book on hawking, which shows him to have

been an acute observer of the habits of birds, and he was one of the

first Italians to write Italian verse. Italian poetry was indeed born at

his court. He has been called by an able writer, “the first of the

moderns,” and the phrase expresses aptly the unprejudiced detachment of

his intellectual side. His was an all-round originality. During a gold

shortage he introduced and made a success of a coinage of stamped

leather, bearing his promise to pay in gold, a sort of leather bank-note

issue.[357]

In spite of the torrent of abuse and calumny in which Frederick was

drenched, he left a profound impression upon the popular imagination. He

is still remembered in South Italy almost as vividly as is Napoleon I by

the peasants of France; he is the “Gran Federigo.” And German scholars

declare[358] that, in spite of Frederick’s manifest dislike for Germany,

it is he, and not Frederick I, Frederick Barbarossa, to whom that German

legend originally attached--that legend which represents a great monarch

slumbering in a deep cavern, his beard grown round a stone table,

against a day of awakening when the world will be restored by him from

an extremity of disorder to peace. Afterwards, it seems, the story was

transferred to the Crusader Barbarossa, the grandfather of Frederick II.

A difficult child was Frederick II for Mother Church, and he was only

the precursor of many such difficult children. The princes and educated

gentlemen throughout Europe read his letters and discussed them. The

more enterprising university students found, marked, and digested the

Arabic Aristotle he had made accessible to them in Latin. Salerno cast a

baleful light upon Rome. All sorts of men must have been impressed by

the futility of the excommunications and interdicts that were levelled

at Frederick.

§ 13[359]

We have said that Innocent III never seemed to realize that his ward,

Frederick II, was growing up. It is equally true that the papacy never

seemed to realize that Europe was growing up. It is impossible for an

intelligent modern student of history not to sympathize with the

underlying idea of the papal court, with the idea of one universal rule

of righteousness keeping the peace of the earth, and not to recognize

the many elements of nobility that entered into the Lateran policy.

Sooner or later mankind must come to one universal peace, unless our

race is to be destroyed by the increasing power of its own destructive

inventions; and that universal peace must needs take the form of a

government, that is to say a law-sustaining organization, in the best

sense of the word religious; a government ruling men through the

educated co-ordination of their minds in a common conception of human

history and human destiny.

The papacy we must now recognize as the first clearly conscious attempt

to provide such a government in the world. We cannot too earnestly

examine its deficiencies and inadequacies, for every lesson we can draw

from them is necessarily of the greatest value to us in forming our

ideas of our own international relationships. We have tried to suggest

the main factors in the breakdown of the Roman Republic, and it now

behoves us to attempt a diagnosis of the failure of the Roman Church to

secure and organize the good will of mankind.

The first thing that will strike the student is the intermittence of the

efforts of the church to establish the world City of God. The policy of

the church was not whole-heartedly and continuously set upon that end.

It was only now and then that some fine personality or some group of

fine personalities dominated it in that direction. The kingdom of God

that Jesus of Nazareth had preached was overlaid, as we have explained,

almost from the beginning by the doctrines and ceremonial traditions of

an earlier age, and of an intellectually inferior type. Christianity

almost from its commencement ceased to be purely prophetic and

creative. It entangled itself with archaic traditions of human

sacrifice, with Mithraic blood-cleansing, with priestcraft as ancient as

human society, and with elaborate doctrines about the structure of the

divinity. The gory forefinger of the Etruscan pontifex maximus

emphasized the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth; the mental complexity of

the Alexandrian Greek entangled them. In the inevitable jangle of these

incompatibles the church had become dogmatic. In despair of other

solutions to its intellectual discords it had resorted to arbitrary

authority. Its priests and bishops were more and more men moulded to

creeds and dogmas and set procedures; by the time they became cardinals

or popes they were usually oldish men, habituated to a politic struggle

for immediate ends and no longer capable of world-wide views. They no

longer wanted to see the Kingdom of God established in the hearts of

men--they had forgotten about that; they wanted to see the power of the

church, which was their own power, dominating men. They were prepared to

bargain even with the hates and fears and lusts in men’s hearts to

ensure that power. And it was just because many of them probably doubted

secretly of the entire soundness of their vast and elaborate doctrinal

fabric, that they would brook no discussion of it. They were intolerant

of questions or dissent, not because they were sure of their faith, but

because they were not. They wanted conformity for reasons of policy. By

the thirteenth century the church was evidently already morbidly anxious

about the gnawing doubts that might presently lay the whole structure of

its pretensions in ruins. It had no serenity of soul. It was hunting

everywhere for heretics as timid old ladies are said to look under beds

and in cupboards for burglars before retiring for the night.

We have already mentioned (chap, xxxi, § 5) the Persian Mani who was

crucified and flayed in the year 277. His way of representing the

struggle between good and evil was as a struggle between a power of

light which was, as it were, in rebellion against a power of darkness

inherent in the universe. All these profound mysteries are necessarily

represented by symbols and poetic expressions, and the ideas of Mani

still find a response in many intellectual temperaments to-day. One may

hear Manichæan doctrines from many Christian pulpits. But the orthodox

Catholic symbol was a different one. These Manichæan ideas had spread

very widely in Europe, and particularly in Bulgaria and the south of

France. In the south of France the people who held them were called the

Cathars or Albigenses. Their ideas jarred so little with the essentials

of Christianity that they believed themselves to be devout Christians.

As a body they lived lives of conspicuous virtue and purity in a

violent, undisciplined, and vicious age. But they questioned the

doctrinal soundness of Rome and the orthodox interpretation of the

Bible. They thought Jesus was a rebel against the cruelty of the God of

the Old Testament, and not his harmonious son. Closely associated with

the Albigenses were the Waldenses, the followers of a man called Waldo,

who seems to have been quite soundly Catholic in his theology, but

equally offensive to the church because he denounced the riches and

luxury of the clergy. This was enough for the Lateran, and so we have

the spectacle of Innocent III preaching a crusade against these

unfortunate sectaries, and permitting the enlistment of every wandering

scoundrel at loose ends to carry fire and sword and rape and every

conceivable outrage among the most peaceful subjects of the King of

France. The accounts of the cruelties and abominations of this crusade

are far more terrible to read than any account of Christian martyrdoms

by the pagans, and they have the added horror of being indisputably

true.

This black and pitiless intolerance was an evil spirit to be mixed into

the project of a rule of God on earth. This was a spirit entirely

counter to that of Jesus of Nazareth. We do not hear of his smacking the

faces or wringing the wrists of recalcitrant or unresponsive disciples.

But the Popes during their centuries of power were always raging against

the slightest reflection upon the intellectual sufficiency of the

church.

And the intolerance of the church was not confined to religious matters.

The shrewd, pompous, irascible, and rather malignant old men who

manifestly constituted a dominant majority in the councils of the

church, resented any knowledge but their own knowledge, and distrusted

any thought at all that they did not correct and control. They set

themselves to restrain science, of which they were evidently jealous.

Any mental activity but their own struck them as being insolent. Later

on they were to have a great struggle upon the question of the earth’s

position in space, and whether it moved round the sun or not. This was

really not the business of the church at all. She might very well have

left to reason the things that are reason’s, but she seems to have been

impelled by an inner necessity to estrange the intellectual conscience

in men.

Had this intolerance sprung from a real intensity of conviction it would

have been bad enough, but it was accompanied by a scarcely disguised

contempt for the intelligence and mental dignity of the common man that

makes it far less acceptable to our modern judgments, and which no doubt

made it far less acceptable to the free spirits of the time. We have

told quite dispassionately the policy of the Roman church towards her

troubled sister in the East. Many of the tools and expedients she used

were abominable. In her treatment of her own people a streak of real

cynicism is visible. She destroyed her prestige by disregarding her own

teaching of righteousness. Of dispensations we have already spoken (§

11). Her crowning folly in the sixteenth century was the sale of

_indulgences_, whereby the sufferings of the soul in purgatory could be

commuted for a money payment. But the spirit that led at last to this

shameless and, as it proved, disastrous proceeding, was already very

evident in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Long before the seed of criticism that Frederick II had sown had

germinated in men’s minds and produced its inevitable crop of rebellion,

there was apparent a strong feeling in Christendom that all was not well

with the spiritual atmosphere. There began movements, movements that

nowadays we should call “revivalist,” within the church, that implied

rather than uttered a criticism of the sufficiency of her existing

methods and organization. Men sought fresh forms of righteous living

outside the monasteries and priesthood. One notable figure is that of

St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226). We cannot tell here in any detail of

how this pleasant young gentleman gave up all the amenities and ease of

his life and went forth to seek God; the opening of the story is not

unlike the early experiences of Gautama Buddha. He had a sudden

conversion in the midst of a life of pleasure, and, taking a vow of

extreme poverty, he gave himself up to an imitation of the life of

Christ, and to the service of the sick and wretched, and more

particularly to the service of the lepers, who then abounded in Italy.

He was joined by great multitudes of disciples, and so the first Friars

of the Franciscan Order came into existence. An order of women devotees

was set up beside the original confraternity, and in addition great

numbers of men and women were brought into less formal association. He

preached, unmolested by the Moslems, be it noted, in Egypt and

Palestine, though the Fifth Crusade was then in progress. His relations

with the church are still a matter for discussion.[360] His work had

been sanctioned by Pope Innocent III, but while he was in the East there

was a reconstitution of his order, intensifying its discipline and

substituting authority for responsive impulse, and as a consequence of

these changes he resigned its headship. To the end he clung passionately

to the ideal of poverty, but he was hardly dead before the order was

holding property through trustees and building a great church and

monastery to his memory at Assisi. The disciplines of the order that

were applied after his death to his immediate associates are scarcely to

be distinguished from a persecution; several of the more conspicuous

zealots for simplicity were scourged, others were imprisoned, one was

killed while attempting to escape, and Brother Bernard, the “first

disciple,” passed a year in the woods and hills, hunted like a wild

beast.

This struggle within the Franciscan Order is a very interesting one,

because it foreshadows the great troubles that were coming to

Christendom. All through the thirteenth century a section of the

Franciscans were straining at the rule of the church, and in 1318 four

of them were burnt alive at Marseilles as incorrigible heretics. There

seems to have been little difference between the teaching and spirit of

St. Francis and that of Waldo in the twelfth century, the founder of the

murdered sect of Waldenses. Both were passionately enthusiastic for the

spirit of Jesus of Nazareth. But while Waldo rebelled against the

church, St. Francis did his best to be a good child of the church, and

his comment on the spirit of official Christianity was only implicit.

But both were instances of an outbreak of conscience against authority

and the ordinary procedure of the church. And it is plain that in the

second instance, as in the first, the church scented rebellion.

A very different character to St. Francis was the Spaniard St. Dominic

(1170-1221), who was, of all things, orthodox. He had a passion for the

argumentative conversion of heretics, and he was commissioned by Pope

Innocent III to go and preach to the Albigenses. His work went on side

by side with the fighting and massacres of the crusade; whom Dominic

could not convert, Innocent’s crusader slew; yet his very activities and

the recognition and encouragement of his order by the Pope witness to

the rising tide of discussion, and to the persuasion even of the papacy

that force was no remedy. In several respects the development of the

Black Friars or Dominicans--the Franciscans were the Grey Friars--shows

the Roman church at the parting of the ways, committing itself more and

more deeply to organized dogma, and so to a hopeless conflict with the

quickening intelligence and courage of mankind. She whose one duty was

to lead, chose to compel. The last discourse of St. Dominic to the

heretics he had sought to convert is preserved to us. It is a signpost

in history. It betrays the fatal exasperation of a man who has lost his

faith in the power of truth because _his_ truth has not prevailed. “For

many years,” he said, “I have exhorted you in vain, with gentleness,

preaching, praying, and weeping. But according to the proverb of my

country, ‘where blessing can accomplish nothing, blows may avail.’ We

shall rouse against you princes and prelates, who, alas! will arm

nations and kingdoms against this land ... and thus blows will avail

where blessings and gentleness have been powerless.”[361]

The thirteenth century saw the development of a new institution in the

church, the papal Inquisition. Before this time it had been customary

for the Pope to make occasional inquests or inquiries into heresy in

this region or that, but now Innocent III saw in the new order of the

Dominicans a powerful instrument of suppression. The Inquisition was

organized as a standing inquiry under their direction, and with fire and

torment the church set itself, through this instrument, to assail and

weaken the human conscience in which its sole hope of world dominion

resided. Before the thirteenth century the penalty of death had been

inflicted but rarely upon heretics and unbelievers. Now in a hundred

market-places in Europe the dignitaries of the church watched the

blackened bodies of its antagonists, for the most part poor and

insignificant people, burn and sink pitifully, and their own great

mission to mankind burn and sink with them into dust and ashes.

The beginnings of the Franciscans and the Dominicans were but two among

many of the new forces that were arising in Christendom, either to help

or shatter the church, as its own wisdom might decide. Those two orders

the church did assimilate and use, though with a little violence in the

case of the former. But other forces were more frankly disobedient and

critical. A century and a half later came Wycliffe (1320-1384). He was a

learned doctor at Oxford; for a time he was Master of Balliol; and he

held various livings in the church. Quite late in his life he began a

series of outspoken criticisms of the corruption of the clergy and the

unwisdom of the church. He organized a number of poor priests, the

Wycliffites, to spread his ideas throughout England; and in order that

people should judge between the church and himself, he translated the

Bible into English. He was a more learned and far abler man than either

St. Francis or St. Dominic. He had supporters in high places and a great

following among the people; and though Rome raged against him, and

ordered his imprisonment, he died a free man, still administering the

Sacraments as parish priest of Lutterworth. But the black and ancient

spirit that was leading the Catholic church to its destruction would not

let his bones rest in his grave. By a decree of the Council of Constance

in 1415, his remains were ordered to be dug up and burnt, an order which

was carried out at the command of Pope Martin V by Bishop Fleming in

1428. This desecration was not the act of some isolated fanatic; it was

the official act of the church.

§ 14

The history of the papacy is confusing to the general reader because of

the multitude and abundance of the Popes. They mostly began to reign as

old men, and their reigns were short, averaging less than two years

each. But certain of the Popes stand out and supply convenient handles

for the student to grasp. Such were Gregory I (590-604) the Great, the

first monkish Pope, the friend of Benedict, the sender of the English

mission. Other noteworthy Popes are Leo III (795-816), who crowned

Charlemagne, the scandalous Popes John XI (931-936) and John XII

(955-963), which latter was deposed by the Emperor Otto I, and the great

Hildebrand, who ended his days as Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085), and who

did so much by establishing the celibacy of the clergy, and insisting

upon the supremacy of the church over kings and princes, to centralize

the power of the church in Rome. The next Pope but one after Gregory VII

was Urban II (1087-1099), the Pope of the First Crusade. The period from

the time of Gregory VII onward for a century and a half, was the great

period of ambition and effort for the church. There was a real sustained

attempt to unite all Christendom under a purified and reorganized

church.

The setting up of Latin kingdoms in Syria and the Holy Land, in

religious communion with Rome, after the First Crusade, marked the

opening stage of a conquest of Eastern Christianity by Rome that reached

its climax during the Latin rule in Constantinople (1204-1261).

In 1176, at Venice, the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (Frederick I) knelt

to the Pope Alexander III, recognized his spiritual supremacy, and swore

fealty to him. But after the death of Alexander III, in 1181, the

peculiar weakness of the papacy, its liability to fall to old and

enfeebled men, became manifest. Five Popes tottered to the Lateran to

die within the space of ten years. Only with Innocent III (1198-1216)

did another vigorous Pope take up the great policy of the City of God.

Under Innocent III, the guardian of that Emperor Frederick II, whose

career we have already studied in §§ 10 and 12, and the five Popes who

followed him, the Pope of Rome came nearer to being the monarch of a

united Christendom than he had ever been before, and was ever to be

again. The empire was weakened by internal dissensions, Constantinople

was in Latin hands, from Bulgaria to Ireland and from Norway to Sicily

and Jerusalem the Pope was supreme. Yet this supremacy was more apparent

than real. For, as we have seen, while in the time of Urban the power

of faith was strong in all Christian Europe, in the time of Innocent III

the papacy had lost its hold upon the hearts of princes, and the faith

and conscience of the common people was turning against a merely

political and aggressive church.

The church in the thirteenth century was extending its legal power in

the world, and losing its grip upon men’s consciences. It was becoming

less persuasive and more violent. No intelligent man can tell of this

process or read of this process of failure without very mingled

feelings. The church had sheltered and formed a new Europe throughout

the long ages of European darkness and chaos; it had been the matrix in

which the new civilization had been cast. But this new-formed

civilization was impelled to grow by its own inherent vitality, and the

church lacked sufficient power of growth and accommodation. The time was

fast approaching when this matrix was to be broken.

The first striking intimation of the decay of the living and sustaining

forces of the papacy appeared when presently the Popes came into

conflict with the growing power of the French king. During the lifetime

of the Emperor Frederick II, Germany fell into disunion, and the French

king began to play the rôle of guard, supporter, and rival to the Pope

that had hitherto fallen to the Hohenstaufen emperors. A series of Popes

pursued the policy of supporting the French monarchs. French princes

were established in the kingdom of Sicily and Naples, with the support

and approval of Rome, and the French kings saw before them the

possibility of restoring and ruling the Empire of Charlemagne. When,

however, the German interregnum after the death of Frederick II, the

last of the Hohenstaufens, came to an end and Rudolf of Habsburg was

elected first Habsburg Emperor (1273), the policy of the Lateran began

to fluctuate between France and Germany, veering about with the

sympathies of each successive Pope. In the East in 1261 the Greeks

recaptured Constantinople from the Latin emperors, and the founder of

the new Greek dynasty, Michael Palæologus, Michael VIII, after some

unreal tentatives of reconciliation with the Pope, broke away from the

Roman communion altogether, and with that, and the fall of the Latin

kingdoms in Asia, the eastward ascendancy of the Popes came to an end.

In 1294 Boniface VIII became Pope. He was an Italian, hostile to the

French, and full of a sense of the great traditions and mission of Rome.

For a time he carried things with a high hand. In 1300 he held a

jubilee, and a vast multitude of pilgrims assembled in Rome. “So great

was the influx of money into the papal treasury, that two assistants

were kept busy with rakes collecting the offerings that were deposited

at the tomb of St. Peter.”[362] But this festival was a delusive

triumph. It is easier to raise a host of excursionists than a band of

crusaders. Boniface came into conflict with the French king in 1302, and

in 1303, as he was about to pronounce sentence of excommunication

against that monarch, he was surprised and arrested in his own ancestral

palace, at Anagni, by Guillaume de Nogaret. This agent from the French

king forced an entrance into the palace, made his way into the bedroom

of the frightened Pope--he was lying in bed with a cross in his

hands--and heaped threats and insults upon him. The Pope was liberated a

day or so later by the townspeople, and returned to Rome; but there he

was seized upon and again made prisoner by the Orsini family, and in a

few weeks’ time the shocked and disillusioned old man died a prisoner in

their hands.

The people of Anagni did resent the first outrage, and rose against

Nogaret to liberate Boniface, but then Anagni was the Pope’s native

town. The important point to note is that the French king, in this rough

treatment of the head of Christendom, was acting with the full approval

of his people; he had summoned a council of the Three Estates of France

(lords, church, and commons) and gained their consent before proceeding

to extremities. Neither in Italy, Germany, nor England was there the

slightest general manifestation of disapproval at this free handling of

the sovereign pontiff. The idea of Christendom had decayed until its

power over the minds of men had gone.

Throughout the fourteenth century the papacy did nothing to recover its

moral sway. The next Pope elected, Clement V, was a Frenchman, the

choice of King Philip of France. He never came to Rome. He set up his

court in the town of Avignon, which then belonged not to France, but to

the Papal See, though embedded in French territory, and there his

successors remained until 1377, when Pope Gregory XI returned to the

Vatican palace in Rome. But Gregory XI did not take the sympathies of

the whole church with him. Many of the cardinals were of French origin,

and their habits and associations were rooted deep at Avignon. When in

1378 Gregory XI died, and an Italian, Urban VI, was elected, these

dissentient cardinals declared the election invalid, and elected another

Pope, the anti-Pope, Clement VII. This split is called the Great Schism.

The Popes remained in Rome, and all the anti-French powers, the Emperor,

the King of England, Hungary, Poland, and the North of Europe were loyal

to them. The anti-Popes, on the other hand, continued in Avignon, and

were supported by the King of France, his ally the King of Scotland,

Spain, Portugal, and various German princes. Each Pope excommunicated

and cursed the adherents of his rival, so that by one standard or

another all Christendom was damned during this time (1378-1417). The

lamentable effect of this split upon the solidarity of Christendom it is

impossible to exaggerate. Is it any marvel that such men as Wycliffe

began to teach men to think on their own account when the fountain of

truth thus squirted against itself? In 1417 the Great Schism was healed

at the Council of Constance, the same council that dug up and burnt

Wycliffe’s bones, and which, as we shall tell later, caused the burning

of John Huss; at this council, Pope and anti-Pope resigned or were swept

aside, and Martin V became the sole Pope of a formally reunited but

spiritually very badly strained Christendom.

How later on the Council of Basle (1437) led to a fresh schism, and to

further anti-Popes, we cannot relate here.

Such, briefly, is the story of the great centuries of papal ascendancy

and papal decline. It is the story of the failure to achieve the very

noble and splendid idea of a unified and religious world. We have

pointed out in the previous section how greatly the inheritance of a

complex dogmatic theology encumbered the church in this its ambitious

adventure. It had too much theology, and not enough religion. But it may

not be idle to point out here how much the individual insufficiency of

the Popes also contributed to the collapse of its scheme and dignity.

There was no such level of education in the world as to provide a

succession of cardinals and popes with the breadth of knowledge and

outlook needed for the task they had undertaken; they were not

sufficiently educated for their task, and only a few, by sheer force of

genius, transcended that defect. And, as we have already pointed out,

they were, when at last they got to power, too old to use it. Before

they could grasp the situation they had to control, most of them were

dead. It would be interesting to speculate how far it would have tilted

the balance in favour of the church if the cardinals had retired at

fifty, and if no one could have been elected Pope after fifty-five. This

would have lengthened the average reign of each Pope, and enormously

increased the continuity of the policy of the church. And it is perhaps

possible that a more perfect system of selecting the cardinals, who were

the electors and counsellors of the Pope, might have been devised. The

rules and ways by which men reach power are of very great importance in

human affairs. The psychology of the ruler is a science that has still

to be properly studied. We have seen the Roman Republic wrecked, and

here we see the church failing in its world mission very largely through

ineffective electoral methods.

BOOK VII

THE MONGOL EMPIRES OF THE LAND WAYS AND THE NEW EMPIRES OF THE SEA

WAYS

XXXIV

THE GREAT EMPIRE OF JENGIS KHAN AND HIS SUCCESSORS

(THE AGE OF THE LAND WAYS)

§ 1. _Asia at the end of the Twelfth Century._ § 2. _The Rise and

Victories of the Mongols._ § 3. _The Travels of Marco Polo._ § 4.

_The Ottoman Turks and Constantinople._ § 5. _Why the Mongols were

not Christianized._ § 5A. _Kublai Khan founds the Yuan Dynasty._ §

5B. _The Mongols Revert to Tribalism._ § 5C. _The Kipchak Empire

and the Tsar of Muscovy._ § 5D. _Timurlane._ § 5E. _The Mongol

Empire of India._ § 5F. _The Mongols and the Gipsies._

§ 1

We have to tell now of the last and greatest of all the raids of

nomadism upon the civilizations of the East and West. We have traced in

this history the development side by side of these two ways of living,

and we have pointed out that as the civilizations grew more extensive

and better organized, the arms, the mobility, and the intelligence of

the nomads also improved. The nomad was not simply an uncivilized man,

he was a man specialized and specializing along his own line. From the

very beginning of history the nomad and the settled people have been in

reaction. We have told of the Semitic and Elamite raids upon Sumeria; we

have seen the Western empire smashed by the nomads of the great plains

and Persia conquered and Byzantium shaken by the nomads of Arabia.

Whenever civilization seems to be choking amidst its weeds of wealth and

debt and servitude, when its faiths seem rotting into cynicism and its

powers of further growth are hopelessly entangled in effete formulæ, the

nomad drives in like a plough to break up the festering stagnation and

release the world to new beginnings. The Mongol aggression, which began

with the thirteenth century, was the greatest, and so far it has been

the last, of all these destructive reploughings of human association.

From entire obscurity the Mongols came very suddenly into history

towards the close of the twelfth century. They appeared in the country

to the north of China, in the land of origin of the Huns and Turks, and

they were manifestly of the same strain as these peoples. They were

gathered together under a chief, with whose name we will not tax the

memory of the reader; under his son Jengis Khan their power grew with

extraordinary swiftness.

The reader will already have an idea of the gradual breaking up of the

original unity of Islam. In the beginning of the thirteenth century

there were a number of separate and discordant Moslem states in Western

Asia. There was Egypt (with Palestine and much of Syria) under the

successors of Saladin, there was the Seljuk power in Asia Minor, there

was still an Abbasid caliphate in Bagdad, and to the east of this again

there had grown up a very considerable empire, the Kharismian empire,

that of the Turkish princes from Khiva who had conquered a number of

fragmentary Seljuk principalities and reigned from the Ganges Valley to

the Tigris. They had but an insecure hold on the Persian and Indian

populations.

[Illustration: Map of EUROPE and ASIA about 1200 A.D.]

The state of the Chinese civilization was equally inviting to an

enterprising invader. One last glimpse of China in this history was in

the seventh century during the opening years of the Tang dynasty, when

that shrewd and able emperor Tai-tsung was weighing the respective

merits of Nestorian Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and the teachings of

Lao Tse, and on the whole inclining to the opinion that Lao Tse was as

good a teacher as any. We have described his reception of the traveller

Yuan Chwang. Tai-tsung tolerated all religions, but several of his

successors conducted a pitiless persecution of the Buddhist faith; it

flourished in spite of these persecutions, and its monasteries played a

somewhat analogous part in at first sustaining learning and afterwards

retarding it, that the Christian monastic organization did in the West.

By the tenth century the great Tang dynasty was in an extreme state of

decay; the usual degenerative process through a series of voluptuaries

and incapables had gone on, and China broke up again politically into a

variable number of contending states, “The age of the Ten States,” an

age of confusion that lasted through the first half of the tenth

century. Then arose a dynasty, the Northern Sung (960-1127), which

established a sort of unity, but which was in constant struggle with a

number of Hunnish peoples from the north who were pressing down the

eastern coast. For a time one of these peoples, the Khitan, prevailed.

In the twelfth century these people had been subjugated and had given

place to another Hunnish empire, the empire of the Kin, with its capital

at Pekin and its southern boundary south of Hwangho. The Sung empire

shrank before this Kin empire. In 1138 the capital was shifted from

Nankin, which was now too close to the northern frontier, to the city of

Han Chau on the coast. From 1127 onward to 1295, the Sung dynasty is

known as the Southern Sung. To the northwest of its territories there

was now the Tartar empire of the Hsia; to the north, the Kin empire,

both states in which the Chinese population was under rulers in whom

nomadic traditions were still strong. So that here on the east also the

main masses of Asiatic mankind were under uncongenial rulers and ready

to accept, if not to welcome, the arrival of a conqueror.

Northern India we have already noted was also a conquered country at the

opening of the thirteenth century. It was at first a part of the Khivan

empire, but in 1206 an adventurous ruler, Kutub, who had been a slave

and who had risen as a slave to be governor of the Indian province, set

up a separate Moslem state of Hindustan in Delhi. Brahminism had long

since ousted Buddhism from India, but the converts to Islam were still

but a small ruling minority in the land.

Such was the political state of Asia when Jengis Khan began to

consolidate his power among the nomads in the country between Lakes

Balkash and Baikal in the beginning of the thirteenth century.

§ 2

The career of conquest of Jengis Khan and his immediate successors

astounded the world, and probably astounded no one more than these

Mongol Khans themselves.

The Mongols were in the twelfth century a tribe subject to those Kin who

had conquered Northeast China. They were a horde of nomadic horsemen

living in tents, and subsisting mainly upon mare’s milk products and

meat. Their occupations were pasturage and hunting, varied by war. They

drifted northward as the snows melted for summer pasture, and southward

to winter pasture after the custom of the steppes. Their military

education began with a successful insurrection against the Kin. The

empire of Kin had the resources of half China behind it, and in the

struggle the Mongols learnt very much of the military science of the

Chinese. By the end of the twelfth century they were already a fighting

tribe of exceptional quality.

The opening years of the career of Jengis were spent in developing his

military machine, in assimilating the Mongols and the associated tribes

about them into one organized army. His first considerable extension of

power was westward, when the Tartar Kirghis and the Uigurs (who were the

Tartar people of the Tarim basin) were not so much conquered as induced

to join his organization. He then attacked the Kin empire and took Pekin

(1214). The Khitan people, who had been so recently subdued by the Kin,

threw in their fortunes with his, and were of very great help to him.

The settled Chinese population went on sowing and reaping and trading

during this change of masters without lending its weight to either side.

We have already mentioned the very recent Kharismian empire of

Turkestan, Persia, and North India. This empire extended eastward to

Kashgar, and it must have seemed one of the most progressive and hopeful

empires of the time. Jengis Khan, while still engaged in this war with

the Kin empire, sent envoys to Kharismia. They were put to death, an

almost incredible stupidity. The Kharismian government, to use the

political jargon of to-day, had decided not to “recognize” Jengis Khan,

and took this spirited course with him. Thereupon (1218) the great host

of horsemen that Jengis Khan had consolidated and disciplined swept over

the Pamirs and down into Turkestan. It was well armed, and probably it

had some guns and gunpowder for siege work--for the Chinese were

certainly using gunpowder at this time, and the Mongols learnt its use

from them. Kashgar, Khokand, Bokhara fell and then Samarkand, the

capital of the Kharismian empire. Thereafter nothing held the Mongols in

the Kharismian territories. They swept westward to the Caspian, and

southward as far as Lahore. To the north of the Caspian a Mongol army

encountered a Russian force from Kieff. There was a series of battles,

in which the Russian armies were finally defeated and the Grand Duke of

Kieff taken prisoner. So it was the Mongols appeared on the northern

shores of the Black Sea. A panic swept Constantinople, which set itself

to reconstruct its fortifications. Meanwhile other armies were engaged

in the conquest of the empire of the Hsia in China. This was annexed,

and only the southern part of the Kin empire remained unsubdued. In 1227

Jengis Khan died in the midst of a career of triumph. His empire reached

already from the Pacific to the Dnieper. And it was an empire still

vigorously expanding.

Like all the empires founded by nomads, it was, to begin with, purely a

military and administrative empire, a framework rather than a rule. It

centred on the personality of the monarch, and its relations with the

mass of the populations over which it ruled was simply one of taxation

for the maintenance of the horde. But Jengis Khan had called to his aid

a very able and experienced administrator of the Kin empire, who was

learned in all the traditions and science of the Chinese. This

statesman, Yeliu Chutsai, was able to carry on the affairs of the

Mongols long after the death of Jengis Khan, and there can be little

doubt that he is one of the great political heroes of history. He

tempered the barbaric ferocity of his masters, and saved innumerable

cities and works of art from destruction. He collected archives and

inscriptions, and when he was accused of corruption, his sole wealth was

found to consist of documents and a few musical instruments. To him

perhaps quite as much as to Jengis is the efficiency of the Mongol

military machine to be ascribed. Under Jengis, we may note further, we

find the completest religious toleration established across the entire

breadth of Asia.

[Illustration: The EMPIRE of JENGIS KHAN at his death (1227)]

At the death of Jengis the capital of the new empire was still in the

great barbaric town of Karakorum in Mongolia. There an assembly of

Mongol leaders elected Ogdai Khan, the son of Jengis, as his successor.

The war against the vestiges of the Kin empire was prosecuted until

Kin was altogether subdued (1234). The Chinese empire to the south under

the Sung dynasty helped the Mongols in this task, so destroying their

own bulwark against the universal conquerors. The Mongol hosts then

swept right across Asia to Russia (1235), an amazing march. Kieff was

destroyed in 1240, and nearly all Russia became tributary to the

Mongols. Poland was ravaged, and a mixed army of Poles and Germans was

annihilated at the battle of Liegnitz in Lower Silesia in 1241. The

Emperor Frederick II does not seem to have made any great efforts to

stay the advancing tide.

“It is only recently,” says Bury, in his notes to Gibbon’s _Decline and

Fall of the Roman Empire_, “that European history has begun to

understand that the successes of the Mongol army which overran Poland

and occupied Hungary in the spring of A.D. 1241 were won by consummate

strategy and were not due to a mere overwhelming superiority of numbers.

But this fact has not yet become a matter of common knowledge; the

vulgar opinion which represents the Tartars as a wild horde carrying all

before them solely by their multitude, and galloping through Eastern

Europe without a strategic plan, rushing at all obstacles and overcoming

them by mere weight, still prevails....

“It was wonderful how punctually and effectually the arrangements of the

commander were carried out in operations extending from the Lower

Vistula to Transylvania. Such a campaign was quite beyond the power of

any European army of the time, and it was beyond the vision of any

European commander. There was no general in Europe, from Frederick II

downward, who was not a tyro in strategy compared to Subutai. It should

also be noticed that the Mongols embarked upon the enterprise with full

knowledge of the political situation of Hungary and the condition of

Poland--they had taken care to inform themselves by a well-organized

system of spies; on the other hand, the Hungarians and Christian powers,

like childish barbarians, knew hardly anything about their enemies.”

But though the Mongols were victorious at Liegnitz, they did not

continue their drive westward. They were getting into woodlands and

hilly country, which did not suit their tactics; and so they turned

southward and prepared to settle in Hungary, massacring or assimilating

the kindred Magyar, even as these had previously massacred and

assimilated the mixed Scythians and Avars and Huns before them. From the

Hungarian plain they would probably have made raids west and south as

the Hungarians had done in the ninth century, the Avars in the seventh

and eighth, and the Huns in the fifth. But in Asia the Mongols were

fighting a stiff war of conquest against the Sung, and they were also

raiding Persia and Asia Minor; Ogdai died suddenly, and in 1242 there

was trouble about the succession, and recalled by this, the undefeated

hosts of Mongols began to pour back across Hungary and Rumania towards

the east.

To the great relief of Europe the dynastic troubles at Karakorum lasted

for some years, and this vast new empire showed signs of splitting up.

Mangu Khan became the Great Khan in 1251, and he nominated his brother

Kublai Khan as Governor-General of China. Slowly but surely the entire

Sung empire was subjugated, and as it was subjugated the eastern Mongols

became more and more Chinese in their culture and methods. Tibet was

invaded and devastated by Mangu, and Persia and Syria invaded in good

earnest. Another brother of Mangu, Hulagu, was in command of this latter

war. He turned his arms against the caliphate and captured Bagdad, in

which city he perpetrated a massacre of the entire population. Bagdad

was still the religious capital of Islam, and the Mongols had become

bitterly hostile to the Moslems. This hostility exacerbated the natural

discord of nomad and townsman. In 1259 Mangu died, and in 1260--for it

took the best part of a year for the Mongol leaders to gather from the

extremities of this vast empire, from Hungary and Syria and Scind and

China--Kublai was elected Great Khan. He was already deeply interested

in Chinese affairs; he made his capital Pekin instead of Karakorum, and

Persia, Syria, and Asia Minor became virtually independent under his

brother Hulagu, while the hordes of Mongols in Russia and Asia next to

Russia, and various smaller Mongol groups in Turkestan became also

practically separate. Kublai died in 1294, and with his death even the

titular supremacy of the Great Khan disappeared.

At the death of Kublai there was a main Mongol empire, with Pekin as its

capital, including all China and Mongolia; there was a second great

Mongol empire, that of Kipchak in Russia; there was a third in Persia,

that founded by Hulagu, the Ilkhan empire, to which the Seljuk Turks in

Asia Minor were tributary; there was a Siberian state between Kipchak

and Mongolia; and another separate state “Great Turkey” in Turkestan. It

is particularly remarkable that India beyond the Punjab was never

invaded by the Mongols during this period, and that an army under the

Sultan of Egypt completely defeated Ketboga, Hulagu’s general, in

Palestine (1260), and stopped them from entering Africa. By 1260 the

impulse of Mongol conquest had already passed its zenith. Thereafter the

Mongol story is one of division and decay.

The Mongol dynasty that Kublai Khan had founded in China, the Yuan

dynasty, lasted from 1280 until 1368. Later on a recrudescence of

Mongolian energy in Western Asia was destined to create a still more

enduring monarchy in India.

§ 3

Now this story of Mongolian conquests is surely the most remarkable in

all history. The conquests of Alexander the Great cannot compare with

them in extent. And their effect in diffusing and broadening men’s

ideas, though such things are more difficult to estimate, is at least

comparable to the spread of the Hellenic civilization which is

associated with Alexander’s adventure. For a time all Asia and Western

Europe enjoyed an open intercourse; all the roads were temporarily open,

and representatives of every nation appeared at the court of Karakorum.

The barriers between Europe and Asia set up by the religious feud of

Christianity and Islam were lowered. Great hopes were entertained by the

papacy for the conversion of the Mongols to Christianity. Their only

religion so far had been Shamanism, a primitive paganism. Envoys of the

Pope, Buddhist priests from India, Parisian and Italian and Chinese

artificers, Byzantine and Armenian merchants, mingled with Arab

officials and Persian and Indian astronomers and mathematicians at the

Mongol court. We hear too much in history of the campaigns and massacres

of the Mongols, and not enough of their indubitable curiosity and zest

for learning. Not perhaps as an originative people, but as transmitters

of knowledge and method their influence upon the world’s history has

been enormous. And everything one can learn of the vague and romantic

personalities of Jengis or Kublai tends to confirm the impression that

these men were built upon a larger scale, and were at least as

understanding and creative monarchs as either that flamboyant but

egotistical figure Alexander the Great, or that raiser of political

ghosts, that energetic but illiterate theologian, Charlemagne.

[Illustration: MONGOL States about 1280 A.D. & MARCO POLO’S travels.]

The missionary enterprises of the papacy in Mongolia ended in failure.

Christianity was losing its persuasive power. The Mongols had no

prejudice against Christianity; they evidently preferred it at first to

Islam; but the missions that came to them were manifestly using the

power in the great teachings of Jesus to advance the vast claims of the

Pope to world dominion. Christianity so vitiated was not good enough for

the Mongol mind. To make the empire of the Mongols part of the kingdom

of God might have appealed to them; but not to make it a fief of a group

of French and Italian priests, whose claims were as gigantic as their

powers and outlook were feeble, who were now the creatures of the

Emperor of Germany, now the nominees of the King of France, and now the

victims of their own petty spites and vanities. In 1269 Kublai Khan sent

a mission to the Pope with the evident intention of finding some common

mode of action with Western Christendom. He asked that a hundred men of

learning and ability should be sent to his court to establish an

understanding. His mission found the Western world popeless, and engaged

in one of those disputes about the succession that are so frequent in

the history of the papacy. For two years there was no pope at all. When

at last a pope was appointed, he despatched two Dominican friars to

convert the greatest power in Asia to his rule! Those worthy men were

appalled by the length and hardship of the journey before them, and

found an early excuse for abandoning the expedition.

But this abortive mission was only one of a number of attempts to

communicate, and always they were feeble and feeble-spirited attempts,

with nothing of the conquering fire of the earlier Christian missions.

Innocent IV had already sent some Dominicans to Karakorum, and Saint

Louis of France had also despatched missionaries and relics by way of

Persia; Mangu Khan had numerous Nestorian Christians at his court, and

subsequent papal envoys actually reached Pekin. We hear of the

appointment of various legates and bishops to the East, but many of

these seem to have lost themselves and perhaps their lives before they

reached China. There was a papal legate in Pekin in 1346, but he seems

to have been a mere papal diplomatist. With the downfall of the

Mongolian (Yuan) dynasty (1368), the dwindling opportunity of the

Christian missions passed altogether. The house of Yuan was followed by

that of Ming, a strongly nationalist Chinese dynasty, at first very

hostile to all foreigners. There may have been a massacre of the

Christian missions. Until the later days of the Mings (1644) little more

is heard of Christianity, whether Nestorian or Catholic, in China. Then

a fresh and rather more successful attempt to propagate Catholic

Christianity in China was made by the Jesuits, but this second

missionary wave reached China by the sea.

In the year 1298 a naval battle occurred between the Genoese and the

Venetians, in which the latter were defeated. Among the 7000 prisoners

taken by the Genoese was a Venetian gentleman named Marco Polo, who had

been a great traveller, and who was very generally believed by his

neighbours to be given to exaggeration. He had taken part in that first

mission to Kublai Khan, and had gone on when the two Dominicans turned

back. While this Marco Polo was a prisoner in Genoa, he beguiled his

tedium by talking of his travels to a certain writer named Rusticiano,

who wrote them down. We will not enter here into the vexed question of

the exact authenticity of Rusticiano’s story--we do not certainly know

in what language it was written--but there can be no doubt of the

general truth of this remarkable narrative, which became enormously

popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with all men of active

intelligence. _The Travels of Marco Polo_ is one of the great books of

history. It opens this world of the thirteenth century, this century

which saw the reign of Frederick II and the beginnings of the

Inquisition, to our imaginations as no mere historian’s chronicle can

do. It led directly to the discovery of America.

It begins by telling of the journey of Marco’s father, Nicolo Polo, and

uncle, Maffeo Polo, to China. These two were Venetian merchants of

standing, living in Constantinople, and somewhen about 1260 they went to

the Crimea and thence to Kazan; from that place they journeyed to

Bokhara, and at Bokhara they fell in with a party of envoys from Kublai

Khan in China to his brother Hulagu in Persia. These envoys pressed them

to come on to the Great Khan, who at that time had never seen men of the

“Latin” peoples. They went on; and it is clear they made a very

favourable impression upon Kublai, and interested him greatly in the

civilization of Christendom. They were made the bearers of that request

for a hundred teachers and learned men, “intelligent men acquainted with

the Seven Arts, able to enter into controversy and able clearly to prove

to idolaters and other kinds of folk that the Law of Christ was best,”

to which we have just alluded. But when they returned Christendom was in

a phase of confusion, and it was only after a delay of two years that

they got their authorization to start for China again in the company of

those two faint-hearted Dominicans. They took with them young Marco, and

it is due to his presence and the boredom of his subsequent captivity at

Genoa that this most interesting experience has been preserved to us.

The three Polos started by way of Palestine and not by the Crimea, as in

the previous expedition. They had with them a gold tablet and other

indications from the Great Khan that must have greatly facilitated their

journey. The Great Khan had asked for some oil from the lamp that burns

in the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem; and so thither they first went, and

then by way of Cilicia into Armenia. They went thus far north because

the Sultan of Egypt was raiding the Ilkhan domains at this time. Thence

they came by way of Mesopotamia to Ormuz on the Persian Gulf, as if they

contemplated a sea voyage. At Ormuz they met merchants from India. For

some reason they did not take ship, but instead turned northward through

the Persian deserts, and so by way of Balkh over the Pamir to Kashgar,

and by way of Kotan and the Lob Nor (so following in the footsteps of

Yuan Chwang) into the Hwangho Valley and on to Pekin. Pekin Polo calls

“Cambulac”; Northern China, “Cathay” (= Khitan); and Southern China of

the former Sung dynasty, “Manzi.” At Pekin was the Great Khan, and they

were hospitably entertained. Marco particularly pleased Kublai; he was

young and clever, and it is clear he had mastered the Tartar language

very thoroughly. He was given an official position and sent on several

missions, chiefly in South-west China. The tale he had to tell of vast

stretches of smiling and prosperous country, “all the way excellent

hostelries for travellers,” and “fine vineyards, fields, and gardens,”

of “many abbeys” of Buddhist monks, of manufactures of “cloth of silk

and gold and many fine taffetas,” a “constant succession of cities and

boroughs,” and so on, first roused the incredulity and then fired the

imagination of all Europe. He told of Burmah, and of its great armies

with hundreds of elephants, and how these animals were defeated by the

Mongol bowmen, and also of the Mongol conquest of Pegu. He told of

Japan, and greatly exaggerated the amount of gold in that country. And,

still more wonderful, he told of Christians and Christian rulers in

China, and of a certain “Prester John,” John the Priest, who was the

“king” of a Christian people. Those people he had not seen. Apparently

they were a tribe of Nestorian Tartars in Mongolia. An understandable

excitement probably made Rusticiano over-emphasize what must have seemed

to him the greatest marvel of the whole story, and Prester John became

one of the most stimulating legends of the fourteenth and fifteenth

centuries. It encouraged European enterprise enormously to think that

far away in China was a community of their co-religionists, presumably

ready to welcome and assist them. For three years Marco ruled the city

of Yang-chow as governor, and he probably impressed the Chinese

inhabitants as being very little more of a foreigner than any Tartar

would have been. He may also have been sent on a mission to India.

Chinese records mention a certain Polo attached to the imperial council

in 1277, a very valuable confirmation of the general truth of the Polo

story.

The Polos had taken about three and a half years to get to China. They

stayed there upwards of sixteen. Then they began to feel homesick. They

were the protégés of Kublai, and possibly they felt that his favours

roused a certain envy that might have disagreeable results after his

death. They sought his permission to return. For a time he refused it,

and then an opportunity occurred. Argon, the Ilkhan monarch of Persia,

the grandson of Hulagu, Kublai’s brother, had lost his Mongol wife, and

on her deathbed had promised not to wed any other woman but a Mongol of

her own tribe. He sent ambassadors to Pekin, and a suitable princess was

selected, a girl of seventeen. To spare her the fatigues of the caravan

route, it was decided to send her by sea with a suitable escort. The

“Barons” in charge of her asked for the company of the Polos because

these latter were experienced travellers and sage men, and the Polos

snatched at this opportunity of getting homeward. The expedition sailed

from some port on the east of South China; they stayed long in Sumatra

and South India, and they reached Persia after a voyage of two years.

They delivered the young lady safely to Argon’s successor--for Argon was

dead--and she married Argon’s son. The Polos then went by Tabriz to

Trebizond, sailed to Constantinople, and got back to Venice about 1295.

It is related that the returned travellers, dressed in Tartar garb, were

refused admission to their own house. It was some time before they could

establish their identity. Many people who admitted that, were still

inclined to look askance at them as shabby wanderers; and, in order to

dispel such doubts, they gave a great feast, and when it was at its

height they had their old padded suits brought to them, dismissed the

servants, and then ripped open these garments, whereupon an incredible

display of “rubies, sapphires, carbuncles, emeralds, and diamonds”

poured out before the dazzled company. Even after this, Marco’s accounts

of the size and population of China were received with much furtive

mockery. The wits nicknamed him _Il Milione_, because he was always

talking of millions of people and millions of ducats.

Such was the story that raised eyebrows first in Venice and then

throughout the Western world. The European literature, and especially

the European romance of the fifteenth century, echoes with the names in

Marco Polo’s story, with Cathay and Cambulac and the like.

§ 4

These travels of Marco Polo were only the beginning of a very

considerable intercourse. That intercourse was to bring many

revolutionary ideas and many revolutionary things to Europe, including

a greatly extended use of paper and printing from blocks, the almost

equally revolutionary use of gunpowder in warfare, and the mariner’s

compass which was to release the European shipping from navigation by

coasting. The popular imagination has always been disposed to ascribe

every such striking result to Marco Polo. He has become the type and

symbol for all such interchanges. As a matter of fact, there is no

evidence that he had any share in these three importations. There were

many mute Marco Polos who never met their Rusticianos, and history has

not preserved their names. Before we go on, however, to describe the

great widening of the mental horizons of Europe that was now beginning,

and to which this book of travels was to contribute very materially, it

will be convenient first to note a curious side consequence of the great

Mongol conquests, the appearance of the Ottoman Turks upon the

Dardanelles, and next to state in general terms the breaking up and

development of the several parts of the empire of Jengis Khan.

The Ottoman Turks were a little band of fugitives who fled southwesterly

before the first invasion of Western Turkestan by Jengis. They made

their long way from Central Asia, over deserts and mountains and through

alien populations, seeking some new lands in which they might settle. “A

small band of alien herdsmen,” says Sir Mark Sykes, “wandering unchecked

through crusades and counter-crusades, principalities, empires, and

states. Where they camped, how they moved and preserved their flocks and

herds, where they found pasture, how they made their peace with the

various chiefs through whose territories they passed, are questions

which one may well ask in wonder.”

They found a resting-place at last and kindred and congenial neighbours

on the tablelands of Asia Minor among the Seljuk Turks. Most of this

country, the modern Anatolia, was now largely Turkish in speech and

Moslem in religion, except that there was a considerable proportion of

Greeks, Jews, and Armenians in the town populations. No doubt the

various strains of Hittite, Phrygian, Trojan, Lydian, Ionian Greek,

Cimmerian, Galatian, and Italian (from the Pergamus times) still flowed

in the blood of the people, but they had long since forgotten these

ancestral elements. They were indeed much the same blend of ancient

Mediterranean dark-whites, Nordic Aryans, Semites and Mongolians as were

the inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula, but they believed themselves to

be a pure Turanian race, and altogether superior to the Christians on

the other side of the Bosphorus.

Gradually the Ottoman Turks became important, and at last dominant among

the small principalities into which the Seljuk empire, the empire of

“Roum,” had fallen. Their relations with the dwindling empire of

Constantinople remained for some centuries tolerantly hostile. They made

no attack upon the Bosphorus, but they got a footing in Europe at the

Dardanelles, and, using this route, the route of Xerxes and not the

route of Darius, they pushed their way steadily into Macedonia, Epirus,

Illyria, Yugo-Slavia, and Bulgaria. In the Serbs (Yugo-Slavs) and

Bulgarians the Turks found people very like themselves in culture and,

though neither side recognized it, probably very similar in racial

admixture, with a little less of the dark Mediterranean and Mongolian

strains than the Turks and a trifle more of the Nordic element. But

these Balkan peoples were Christians, and bitterly divided among

themselves. The Turks on the other hand spoke one language; they had a

greater sense of unity, they had the Moslem habits of temperance and

frugality, and they were on the whole better soldiers. They converted

what they could of the conquered people to Islam; the Christians they

disarmed, and conferred upon them the monopoly of tax-paying. Gradually

the Ottoman princes consolidated an empire that reached from the Taurus

mountains in the east to Hungary and Roumania in the west. Adrianople

became their chief city. They surrounded the shrunken empire of

Constantinople on every side.

The Ottomans organized a standing military force, the Janissaries,

rather on the lines of the Mamelukes who dominated Egypt. “These troops

were formed of levies of Christian youths to the extent of one thousand

per annum, who were affiliated to the Bektashi order of dervishes, and

though at first not obliged to embrace Islam, were one and all strongly

imbued with the mystic and fraternal ideas of the confraternity to which

they were attached. Highly paid, well disciplined, a close and jealous

secret society, the Janissaries provided the newly formed Ottoman state

with a patriotic force of trained infantry soldiers, which, in an age

of light cavalry and hired companies of mercenaries, was an invaluable

asset....[363]

[Illustration: The OTTOMAN EMPIRE before 1453.]

“The relations between the Ottoman Sultans and the Emperors has been

singular in the annals of Moslem and Christian states. The Turks had

been involved in the family and dynastic quarrels of the Imperial City,

were bound by ties of blood to the ruling families, frequently supplied

troops for the defence of Constantinople, and on occasion hired parts of

its garrison to assist them in their various campaigns; the sons of the

Emperors and Byzantine statesmen even accompanied the Turkish forces in

the field, yet the Ottomans never ceased to annex Imperial territories

and cities both in Asia and Thrace. This curious intercourse between the

House of Osman and the Imperial government had a profound effect on both

institutions; the Greeks grew more and more debased and demoralized by

the shifts and tricks that their military weakness obliged them to adopt

towards their neighbours, the Turks were corrupted by the alien

atmosphere of intrigue and treachery which crept into their domestic

life. Fratricide and parricide, the two crimes which most frequently

stained the annals of the Imperial Palace, eventually formed a part of

the policy of the Ottoman dynasty. One of the sons of Murad I embarked

on an intrigue with Andronicus, the son of the Greek Emperor, to murder

their respective fathers....

“The Byzantine found it more easy to negotiate with the Ottoman Pasha

than with the Pope. For years the Turks and Byzantines had intermarried,

and hunted in couples in strange by-paths of diplomacy. The Ottoman had

played the Bulgar and the Serb of Europe against the Emperor, just as

the Emperor had played the Asiatic Amir against the Sultan; the Greek

and Turkish Royal Princes had mutually agreed to hold each other’s

rivals as prisoners and hostages; in fact, Turk and Byzantine policy had

so intertwined that it is difficult to say whether the Turks regarded

the Greeks as their allies, enemies, or subjects, or whether the Greeks

looked upon the Turks as their tyrants, destroyers, or

protectors....”[364]

It was in 1453, under the Ottoman Sultan, Muhammad II, that

Constantinople at last fell to the Moslems. He attacked it from the

European side, and with a great power of artillery. The Greek Emperor

was killed, and there was much looting and massacre. The great church of

Saint Sophia which Justinian the Great had built (532) was plundered of

its treasures and turned at once into a mosque. This event sent a wave

of excitement throughout Europe, and an attempt was made to organize a

crusade, but the days of the crusades were past.

[Illustration: The OTTOMAN EMPIRE at the death of Suleiman the

Magnificent 1566 A.D.]

Says Sir Mark Sykes: “To the Turks the capture of Constantinople was a

crowning mercy and yet a fatal blow. Constantinople had been the tutor

and polisher of the Turks. So long as the Ottomans could draw science,

learning, philosophy, art, and tolerance from a living fountain of

civilization in the heart of their dominions, so long had the Ottomans

not only brute force, but intellectual power. So long as the Ottoman

Empire had in Constantinople a free port, a market, a centre of world

finance, a pool of gold, an exchange, so long did the Ottomans never

lack for money and financial support. Muhammad was a great statesman,

the moment he entered Constantinople he endeavoured to stay the damage

his ambition had done; he supported the patriarch, he conciliated the

Greeks, he did all he could to continue Constantinople the city of the

Emperors ... but the fatal step had been taken; Constantinople as the

city of the Sultans was Constantinople no more; the markets died away,

the culture and civilization fled, the complex finance faded from sight;

and the Turks had lost their governors and their support. On the other

hand, the corruptions of Byzantium remained, the bureaucracy, the

eunuchs, the palace guards, the spies, the bribers, go-betweens--all

these the Ottomans took over, and all these survived in luxuriant life.

The Turks, in taking Stambul, let slip a treasure and gained a

pestilence....”

Muhammad’s ambition was not sated by the capture of Constantinople. He

set his eyes also upon Rome. He captured and looted the Italian town of

Otranto, and it is probable that a very vigorous and perhaps successful

attempt to conquer Italy--for the peninsula was divided against

itself--was averted only by his death (1481). His sons engaged in

fratricidal strife. Under Bayezid II (1481-1512), his successor, war was

carried into Poland, and most of Greece was conquered. Selim

(1512-1520), the son of Bayezid, extended the Ottoman power over Armenia

and conquered Egypt. In Egypt, the last Abbasid Caliph was living under

the protection of the Mameluke Sultan--for the Fatimite caliphate was a

thing of the past. Selim bought the title of Caliph from this last

degenerate Abbasid, and acquired the sacred banner and other relics of

the Prophet. So the Ottoman Sultan became also Caliph of all Islam.

Selim was followed by Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566), who

conquered Bagdad in the east and the greater part of Hungary in the

west, and very nearly captured Vienna. His fleets also took Algiers, and

inflicted a number of reverses upon the Venetians. In most of his

warfare with the empire he was in alliance with the French. Under him

the Ottoman power reached its zenith.

§ 5

Let us now very briefly run over the subsequent development of the main

masses of the empire of the Great Khan. In no case did Christianity

succeed in capturing the imagination of these Mongol states.

Christianity was in a phase of moral and intellectual insolvency,

without any collective faith, energy, or honour; we have told of the

wretched brace of timid Dominicans which was the Pope’s reply to the

appeal of Kublai Khan, and we have noted the general failure of the

overland mission of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. That

apostolic passion that could win whole nations to the Kingdom of Heaven

was dead in the church.

In 1305, as we have told, the Pope became the kept pontiff of the French

king. All the craft and policy of the Popes of the thirteenth century to

oust the Emperor from Italy had only served to let in the French to

replace him. From 1305 to 1377 the Popes remained at Avignon; and such

slight missionary effort as they made was merely a part of the strategy

of Western European politics.[365] In 1377 the Pope Gregory XI did

indeed re-enter Rome and die there, but the French cardinals split off

from the others at the election of his successor, and two Popes were

elected, one at Avignon and one at Rome. This split, the Great Schism,

lasted from 1378 to 1418. Each Pope cursed the other, and put all his

supporters under an interdict. Such was the state of Christianity, and

such were now the custodians of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. All

Asia was white unto harvest, but there was no effort to reap it.

When at last the church was reunited and missionary energy returned with

the foundation of the order of the Jesuits, the days of opportunity were

over. The possibility of a world-wide moral unification of East and West

through Christianity had passed away. The Mongols in China and Central

Asia turned to Buddhism; in South Russia, Western Turkestan, and the

Ilkhan Empire they embraced Islam.

§ 5A

In China the Mongols were already saturated with Chinese civilization by

the time of Kublai. After 1280 the Chinese annals treat Kublai as a

Chinese monarch, the founder of the Yuan dynasty (1280-1368). This

Mongol dynasty was finally over-thrown by a Chinese nationalist

movement which set up the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), a cultivated and

artistic line of emperors, ruling until a northern people, the Manchus,

who were the same as the Kin whom Jengis had overthrown, conquered China

and established a dynasty which gave way only to a native republican

form of government in 1912.

It was the Manchus who obliged the Chinese to wear pig-tails as a mark

of submission. The pigtailed Chinaman is quite a recent, and now a

vanished figure in history.

§ 5B

In the Pamirs, in much of Eastern and Western Turkestan, and to the

north, the Mongols dropped back towards the tribal conditions from which

they had been lifted by Jengis. It is possible to trace the dwindling

succession of many of the small Kans who became independent during this

period, almost down to the present time. The Kalmuks in the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries founded a considerable empire, but dynastic

troubles broke it up before it had extended its power beyond Central

Asia. The Chinese recovered Eastern Turkestan from them about 1757.

Tibet was more and more closely linked with China, and became the great

home of Buddhism and Buddhist monasticism.

Over most of the area of Western Central Asia and Persia and

Mesopotamia, the ancient distinction of nomad and settled population

remains to this day. The townsmen despise and cheat the nomads, the

nomads ill-treat and despise the townsfolk.

§ 5C

The Mongols of the great realm of Kipchak remained nomadic, and grazed

their stock across the wide plains of South Russia and Western Asia

adjacent to Russia. They became not very devout Moslems, retaining many

traces of their earlier barbaric Shamanism. Their chief Khan was the

Khan of the Golden Horde. To the west, over large tracts of open

country, and more particularly in what is now known as Ukrainia, the old

Scythian population, Slavs with a Mongol admixture, reverted to a

similar nomadic life. These Christian nomads, the Cossacks, formed a

sort of frontier screen against the Tartars, and their free and

adventurous life was so attractive to the peasants of Poland and

Lithuania that severe laws had to be passed to prevent a vast migration

from the ploughlands to the steppes. The serf-owning landlords of Poland

regarded the Cossacks with considerable hostility on this account, and

war was as frequent between the Polish chivalry and the Cossacks as it

was between the latter and the Tartars.[366]

In the empire of Kipchak, as in Turkestan almost up to the present time,

while the nomads roamed over wide areas, a number of towns and

cultivated regions sustained a settled population which usually paid

tribute to the nomad Khan. In such towns as Kieff, Moscow, and the like,

the pre-Mongol, Christian town life went on under Russian dukes or

Tartar governors, who collected the tribute for the Khan of the Golden

Horde. The Grand Duke of Moscow gained the confidence of the Khan, and

gradually, under his authority, obtained an ascendancy over many of his

fellow tributaries. In the fifteenth century, under its grand duke, Ivan

III, Ivan the Great (1462-1505), Moscow threw off its Mongol allegiance

and refused to pay tribute any longer (1480). The successors of

Constantine no longer reigned in Constantinople, and Ivan took

possession of the Byzantine double-headed eagle for his arms. He claimed

to be the heir to Byzantium because of his marriage (1472) with Zoe

Palæologus of the imperial line. This ambitious grand dukedom of Moscow

assailed and subjugated the ancient Northman trading republic of

Novgorod to the north, and so the foundations of the modern Russian

Empire were laid and a link with the mercantile life of the Baltic

established. Ivan III did not, however, carry his claim to be the heir

of the Christian rulers of Constantinople to the extent of assuming the

imperial title. This step was taken by his grandson, Ivan IV (Ivan the

Terrible, because of his insane cruelties; 1533-1584). Although the

ruler of Moscow thus came to be called Tsar (Cæsar), his tradition was

in many respects Tartar rather than European; he was autocratic after

the unlimited Asiatic pattern, and the form of Christianity he affected

was the Eastern, court-ruled, “orthodox” form, which had reached Russia

long before the Mongol conquest, by means of Bulgarian missionaries from

Constantinople.

To the west of the domains of Kipchak, outside the range of Mongol rule,

a second centre of Slav consolidation had been set up during the tenth

and eleventh centuries in Poland. The Mongol wave had washed over

Poland, but had never subjugated it. Poland was not “orthodox,” but

Roman Catholic in religion; it used the Latin alphabet instead of the

strange Russian letters, and its monarch never assumed an absolute

independence of the Emperor. Poland was in fact in its origins an

outlying part of Christendom and of the Holy Empire; Russia never was

anything of the sort.

§ 5D

The nature and development of the empire of the Ilkhans in Persia,

Mesopotamia, and Syria is perhaps the most interesting of all the

stories of these Mongol powers, because in this region nomadism really

did attempt, and really did to a very considerable degree succeed in its

attempt to stamp a settled civilized system out of existence. When

Jengis Khan first invaded China, we are told that there was a serious

discussion among the Mongol chiefs whether all the towns and settled

populations should not be destroyed. To these simple practitioners of

the open-air life the settled populations seemed corrupt, crowded,

vicious, effeminate, dangerous, and incomprehensible; a detestable human

efflorescence upon what would otherwise have been good pasture. They had

no use whatever for the towns. The early Franks and the Anglo-Saxon

conquerors of South Britain had much the same feeling towards townsmen.

But it was only under Hulagu in Mesopotamia that these ideas seem to

have been embodied in a deliberate policy. The Mongols here did not only

burn and massacre; they destroyed the irrigation system that had endured

for at least eight thousand years, and with that the mother civilization

of all the Western world came to an end. Since the days of the

priest-kings of Sumeria there had been a continuous cultivation in these

fertile regions, an accumulation of tradition, a great population, a

succession of busy cities, Eridu, Nippur, Babylon, Nineveh, Ctesiphon,

Bagdad. Now the fertility ceased. Mesopotamia became a land of ruins

and desolation, through which great waters ran to waste, or overflowed

their banks to make malarious swamps. Later on Mosul and Bagdad revived

feebly as second-rate towns....

[Illustration: The EMPIRE of TIMURLANE]

But for the defeat and death of Hulagu’s general Kitboga in Palestine

(1260), the same fate might have overtaken Egypt. But Egypt was now a

Turkish sultanate; it was dominated by a body of soldiers, the

Mamelukes, whose ranks, like those of their imitators, the Janissaries

of the Ottoman Empire, were recruited and kept vigorous by the purchase

and training of boy slaves. A capable Sultan such men would obey; a weak

or evil one they would replace. Under this ascendancy Egypt remained an

independent power until 1517, when it fell to the Ottoman Turks.

The first destructive vigour of Hulagu’s Mongols soon subsided, but in

the fifteenth century a last tornado of nomadism arose in Western

Turkestan under the leadership of a certain Timur the Lame, or

Timurlane. He was descended in the female line from Jengis Khan. He

established himself in Samarkand, and spread his authority over Kipchak

(Turkestan to South Russia), Siberia, and southward as far as the Indus.

He assumed the title of Great Khan in 1369. He was a nomad of the savage

school, and he created an empire of desolation from North India to

Syria. Pyramids of skulls were his particular architectural fancy; after

the storming of Ispahan he made one of 70,000. His ambition was to

restore the empire of Jengis Khan as he conceived it, a project in which

he completely failed. He spread destruction far and wide; the Ottoman

Turks--it was before the taking of Constantinople and their days of

greatness--and Egypt paid him tribute; the Punjab he devastated; and

Delhi surrendered to him. After Delhi had surrendered, however, he made

a frightful massacre of its inhabitants. At the time of his death (1405)

very little remained to witness to his power but a name of horror,

ruins, and desolated countries, and a shrunken and impoverished domain

in Persia.

The dynasty founded by Timur in Persia was extinguished by another

Turkoman horde fifty years later.

§ 5E[367]

In 1505 a small Turkoman chieftain, Baber, a descendant of Timur and

therefore of Jengis, was forced after some years of warfare and some

temporary successes--for a time he held Samarkand--to fly with a few

followers over the Hindu Kush to Afghanistan. There his band increased,

and he made himself master of Cabul. He assembled an army, accumulated

guns, and then laid claim to the Punjab, because Timur had conquered it

a hundred and seven years before. He pushed his successes beyond the

Punjab. India was in a state of division, and quite ready to welcome any

capable invader who promised peace and order. After various fluctuations

of fortune Baber met the Sultan of Delhi at Panipat (1525), ten miles

north of that town, and though he had but 25,000 men, provided, however,

with guns, against a thousand elephants and four times as many men--the

numbers, by the by, are his own estimate--he gained a complete victory.

He ceased to call himself King of Cabul, and assumed the title of

Emperor of Hindustan. “This,” he wrote, “is quite a different world from

our countries.” It was finer, more fertile, altogether richer. He

conquered as far as Bengal, but his untimely death in 1530 checked the

tide of Mongol conquest for a quarter of a century, and it was only

after the accession of his grandson Akbar that it flowed again. Akbar

subjugated all India as far as Berar, and his great-grandson Aurungzeb

(1658-1707) was practically master of the entire peninsula. This great

dynasty of Baber (1526-1530), Humayun (1530-1556), Akbar (1556-1605),

Jehangir (1605-1628), Shah Jehan (1628-1658), and Aurungzeb (1658-1707),

in which son succeeded father for six generations, this “Mogul (=

Mongol) dynasty,”[368] marks the most splendid age that had hitherto

dawned upon India. Akbar next perhaps to Asoka, was one of the greatest

of Indian monarchs, and one of the few royal figures that approach the

stature of great men.

To Akbar it is necessary to give the same distinctive attention that we

have shown to Charlemagne or Constantine the Great. He is one of the

hinges of history. Much of his work of consolidation and organization in

India survives to this day. It was taken over and continued by the

British when they became the successors of the Mogul emperors. The

British monarch, indeed, now uses as his Indian title the title of the

Mogul emperors, _Kaisar-i-Hind_. All the other great administrations of

the descendants of Jengis Khan, in Russia, throughout Western and

Central Asia and in China, have long since dissolved away and given

place to other forms of government. Their governments were indeed little

more than taxing governments; a system of revenue-collecting to feed the

central establishment of the ruler, like the Golden Horde in South

Russia or the imperial city at Karakorum or Pekin. The life and ideas of

the people they left alone, careless how they lived--so long as they

paid. So it was that after centuries of subjugation, a Christian Moscow

and Kieff, a Shiite Persia, and a thoroughly Chinese China rose again

from their Mongol submergence. But Akbar made a new India. He gave the

princes and ruling classes of India some inklings at least of a common

interest. If India is now anything more than a sort of rag-bag of

incoherent states and races, a prey to every casual raider from the

north, it is very largely due to him.

His distinctive quality was his openness of mind. He set himself to make

every sort of able man in India, whatever his race or religion,

available for the public work of Indian life. His instinct was the true

statesman’s instinct for synthesis. His empire was to be neither a

Moslem nor a Mongol one, nor was it to be Rajput or Aryan, or Dravidian,

or Hindu, or high or low caste; it was to be _Indian_. “During the years

of his training he enjoyed many opportunities of noting the good

qualities, the fidelity, the devotion, often the nobility of soul, of

those Hindu princes, whom, because they were followers of Brahma, his

Moslem courtiers devoted mentally to eternal torments. He noted that

these men, and men who thought like them, constituted the vast majority

of his subjects. He noted, further, of many of them, and those the most

trustworthy, that though they had apparently much to gain from a worldly

point of view by embracing the religion of the court, they held fast to

their own. His reflective mind, therefore, was unwilling from the outset

to accept the theory that because he, the conqueror, the ruler,

happened to be born a Muhammadan, therefore Muhammadanism was true for

all mankind. Gradually his thoughts found words in the utterance: ‘Why

should I claim to guide men before I myself am guided?’ and, as he

listened to other doctrines and other creeds, his honest doubts became

confirmed, and, noting daily the bitter narrowness of sectarianism, no

matter of what form of religion, he became more and more wedded to the

principle of toleration for all.”

“The son of a fugitive emperor,” says Dr. Emil Schmit, “born in the

desert, brought up in nominal confinement, he had known the bitter side

of life from his youth up. Fortune had given him a powerful frame, which

he trained to support the extremities of exertion. Physical exercise was

with him a passion; he was devoted to the chase and especially to the

fierce excitement of catching the wild horse or elephant or slaying the

dangerous tiger. On one occasion, when it was necessary to dissuade the

Raja of Jodhpore to abandon his intention of forcing the widow of his

deceased son to mount the funeral pyre, Akbar rode two hundred and

twenty miles in two days. In battle he displayed the utmost bravery. He

led his troops in person during the dangerous part of a campaign,

leaving to his generals the lighter task of finishing the war. In every

victory he displayed humanity to the conquered, and decisively opposed

any exhibition of cruelty. Free from all these prejudices which separate

society and create dissension, tolerant to men of other beliefs,

impartial to men of other races, whether Hindu or Dravidian, he was a

man obviously marked out to weld the conflicting elements of his kingdom

into a strong and prosperous whole.

“In all seriousness he devoted himself to the work of peace. Moderate in

all pleasures, needing but little sleep and accustomed to divide his

tune with the utmost accuracy, he found leisure to devote himself to

science and art after the completion of his State duties. The famous

personages and scholars who adorned the capital he had built for himself

at Fatehpur-Sikri were at the same time his friends; every Thursday

evening a circle of these was collected for intellectual conversation

and philosophical discussion. His closest friends were two highly

talented brothers, Faizi and Abul Fazl, the sons of a learned

free-thinker. The elder of these was a famous scholar in Hindu

literature; with his help, and under his direction, Akbar had the most

important of the Sanskrit works translated into Persian. Fazl, on the

other hand, who was an especially close friend of Akbar, was a general,

a statesman, and an organizer, and to his activity Akbar’s kingdom

chiefly owed the solidarity of its internal organization.”[369]

(Such was the quality of the circle that used to meet in the palaces of

Fatehpur-Sikri, buildings which still stand in the Indian sunlight--but

empty now and desolate. Fatehpur-Sikri, like the city of Ambar, is now a

dead city. A few years ago the child of a British official was killed by

a panther in one of its silent streets.)

All this that we have quoted reveals a pre-eminent monarch. But Akbar,

like all men, great or petty, lived within the limitations of his period

and its circles of ideas. And a Turkoman, ruling in India, was

necessarily ignorant of much that Europe had been painfully learning for

a thousand years. He knew nothing of the growth of a popular

consciousness in Europe, and little or nothing of the wide educational

possibilities that the church had been working out in the West. His

upbringing in Islam and his native genius made it plain to him that a

great nation in India could only be cemented by common ideas upon a

religious basis, but the knowledge of how such a solidarity could be

created and sustained by universal schools, cheap books, and a

university system at once organized and free to think, to which the

modern state is still feeling its way, was as impossible to him as a

knowledge of steamboats or aeroplanes. The form of Islam he knew best

was the narrow and fiercely intolerant form of the Turkish Sunnites. The

Moslems were only a minority of the population. The problem he faced was

indeed very parallel to the problem of Constantine the Great. But it had

peculiar difficulties of its own. He never got beyond an attempt to

adapt Islam to a wider appeal by substituting for “There is one God, and

Muhammad is his prophet,” the declaration, “There is one God, and the

Emperor is his vice-regent.” This he thought might form a common

platform for every variety of faith in India, that kaleidoscope of

religions. With this faith he associated a simple ritual borrowed from

the Persian Zoroastrians (the Parsees) who still survived, and survive

to-day, in India. This new state religion, however, died with him,

because it had no roots in the minds of the people about him.

The essential factor in the organization of a living state, the world is

coming to realize, is the organization of an education. This Akbar never

understood. And he had no class of men available who would suggest such

an idea to him or help him to carry it out. The Moslem teachers in India

were not so much teachers as conservators of an intense bigotry; they

did not want a common mind in India, but only a common intolerance in

Islam. The Brahmins, who had the monopoly of teaching among the Hindus,

had all the conceit and slackness of hereditary privilege. Yet though

Akbar made no general educational scheme for India, he set up a number

of Moslem and Hindu schools. He knew less and he did more for India in

these matters than the British who succeeded him. Some of the British

viceroys have aped his magnificence, his costly tents and awnings, his

palatial buildings and his elephants of state, but none have gone far

enough beyond the political outlook of this mediæval Turkoman to attempt

that popular education which is an absolute necessity to India before

she can play her fitting part in the commonweal of mankind.[370]

§ 5F

A curious side result of these later Mongol perturbations, those of the

fourteenth century of which Timurlane was the head and centre, was the

appearance of drifting batches of a strange refugee Eastern people in

Europe, the Gipsies. They appeared somewhen about the end of the

fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries in Greece, where they were

believed to be Egyptians (hence Gipsy), a very general persuasion which

they themselves accepted and disseminated. Their leaders, however,

styled themselves “Counts of Asia Minor.” They had probably been

drifting about Western Asia for some centuries before the massacres of

Timurlane drove them over the Hellespont. They may have been dislodged

from their original homeland--as the Ottoman Turks were--by the great

cataclysm of Jengis or even earlier. They had drifted about as the

Ottoman Turks had drifted about, but with less good fortune. They spread

slowly westward across Europe, strange fragments of nomadism in a world

of plough and city, driven off their ancient habitat of the Bactrian

steppes to harbour upon European commons and by hedgerows and in wild

woodlands and neglected patches. The Germans called them “Hungarians”

and “Tartars,” the French, “Bohemians.” They do not seem to have kept

the true tradition of their origin, but they have a distinctive language

which indicates their lost history; it contains many North Indian words,

and is probably in its origin North India. There are also considerable

Armenian and Persian elements in their speech. They are found in all

European countries to-day; they are tinkers, pedlars, horse-dealers,

showmen, fortune-tellers, and beggars. To many imaginative minds their

wayside encampments, with their smoking fires, their rounded tents,

their hobbled horses, and their brawl of sunburnt children, have a very

strong appeal. Civilization is so new a thing in history, and has been

for most of the time so very local a thing, that it has still to conquer

and assimilate most of our instincts to its needs. In most of us, irked

by its conventions and complexities, there stirs the nomad strain. We

are but half-hearted home-keepers. The blood in our veins was brewed on

the steppes as well as on the ploughlands.

XXXV

THE RENASCENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION[371]

(LAND WAYS GIVE PLACE TO SEA WAYS)

§ 1. _Christianity and Popular Education._ § 2. _Europe begins to

Think for Itself._ § 3. _The Great Plague and the Dawn of

Communism._ § 4. _How Paper Liberated the Human Mind._ § 5.

_Protestantism of the Princes and Protestantism of the Peoples._ §

6. _The Reawakening of Science._ § 7. _The New Growth of European

Towns._ § 8. _America Comes into History._ § 9. _What Machiavelli

Thought of the World._ § 10. _The Republic of Switzerland._ § 11A.

_The Life of the Emperor Charles V._ § 11B. _Protestants if the

Prince Wills it._ § 11C. _The Intellectual Under-tow._

§ 1

Judged by the map, the three centuries from the beginning of the

thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century were an age of recession

for Christendom. These centuries were the Age of the Mongolian peoples.

Nomadism from Central Asia dominated the known world. At the crest of

this period there were rulers of Mongol or the kindred Turkish race and

nomadic tradition in China, India, Persia, Egypt, North Africa, the

Balkan Peninsula, Hungary, and Russia. The Ottoman Turk had even taken

to the sea, and fought the Venetian upon his own Mediterranean waters.

In 1529 the Turks besieged Vienna, and were defeated rather by the

weather than by the defenders. The Habsburg empire of Charles V paid the

Sultan tribute. It was not until the battle of Lepanto in 1571, the

battle in which Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, lost his left arm,

that Christendom, to use his words, “broke the pride of the Osmans and

undeceived the world which had regarded the Turkish fleet as

invincible.” The sole region of Christian advance was Spain. A man of

foresight surveying the world in the early sixteenth century might well

have concluded that it was only a matter of a few generations before the

whole world became Mongolian--and probably Moslem. Just as to-day most

people seem to take it for granted that European rule and a sort of

liberal Christianity are destined to spread over the whole world. Few

people seem to realize how recent a thing is this European ascendancy.

It was only as the fifteenth century drew to its close that any

indications of the real vitality of Western Europe became clearly

apparent.

Our history is now approaching our own times, and our study becomes more

and more a study of the existing state of affairs. The European or

Europeanized system in which the reader is living is the same system

that we see developing in the crumpled-up, Mongol-threatened Europe of

the early fifteenth century. Its problems then were the embryonic form

of the problems of to-day. It is impossible to discuss that time without

discussing our own time. We become political in spite of ourselves.

“Politics without history has no root,” said Sir J. R. Seeley; “history

without politics has no fruit.”

Let us try, with as much detachment as we can achieve, to discover what

the forces were that were dividing and holding back the energies of

Europe during this tremendous outbreak of the Mongol peoples, and how we

are to explain the accumulation of mental and physical energy that

undoubtedly went on during this phase of apparent retrocession, and

which broke out so impressively at its close.

[Illustration: EUROPE at the time of the FALL of CONSTANTINOPLE]

Now, just as in the Mesozoic Age, while the great reptiles lorded it

over the earth, there were developing in odd out-of-the-way corners

those hairy mammals and feathered birds who were finally to supersede

that tremendous fauna altogether by another far more versatile and

capable, so in the limited territories of Western Europe of the Middle

Ages, while the Mongolian monarchies dominated the world from the Danube

to the Pacific and from the Arctic seas to Madras and Morocco and the

Nile, the fundamental lines of a new and harder and more efficient type

of human community were being laid down. This type of community, which

is still only in the phase of formation, which is still growing and

experimental, we may perhaps speak of as the “modern state.” This is, we

must recognize, a vague expression, but we shall endeavour to get

meaning into it as we proceed. We have noted the appearance of its main

root ideas in the Greek republics and especially in Athens, in the great

Roman republic, in Judaism, in Islam, and in the story of Western

Catholicism. Essentially this modern state, as we see it growing under

our eyes to-day, is a tentative combination of two apparently

contradictory ideas, the idea of a _community of faith and obedience_,

such as the earliest civilizations undoubtedly were, and the idea of a

_community of will_, such as were the primitive political groupings of

the Nordic and Hunnish peoples. For thousands of years the settled

civilized peoples, who were originally in most cases dark-white

Caucasians, or Dravidian or Southern Mongolian peoples, seem to have

developed their ideas and habits along the line of worship and personal

subjection, and the nomadic peoples theirs along the line of personal

self-reliance and self-assertion. Naturally enough under the

circumstances the nomadic peoples were always supplying the

civilizations with fresh rulers and new aristocracies. That is the

rhythm of all early history. It was only after thousands of years of

cyclic changes between refreshment by nomadic conquest, civilization,

decadence, and fresh conquest that the present process of a mutual

blending of “civilized” and “free” tendencies into a new type of

community, that now demands our attention and which is the substance of

contemporary history, began.

We have traced in this history the slow development of larger and larger

“civilized” human communities from the days of such a Palæolithic family

tribe as that described in Chapter IX. We have seen how the advantages

and necessities of cultivation, the fear of tribal gods, the ideas of

the priest-king and the god-king, played their part in consolidating

continually larger and more powerful societies in regions of maximum

fertility. We have watched the interplay of priest, who was usually

native, and monarch, who was usually a conqueror, in these early

civilizations, the development of a written tradition and its escape

from priestly control, and the appearance of novel forces, at first

apparently incidental and secondary, which we have called the free

intelligence and the free conscience of mankind. We have seen the rulers

of the primitive civilizations of the river valleys widening their area

and extending their sway, and simultaneously over the less fertile areas

of the earth we have seen mere tribal savagery develop into a more and

more united and politically competent nomadism. Steadily and divergently

mankind pursued one or other of these two lines. For long ages all the

civilizations grew and developed along monarchist lines, upon lines of

absolute monarchy, and in every monarchy and dynasty we have watched, as

if it were a necessary process, efficiency and energy give way to pomp,

indolence, and decay, and finally succumb to some fresher lineage from

the desert or the steppe. The story of the early cultivating

civilizations and their temples and courts and cities bulks large in

human history, but it is well to remember that the scene of that story

was never more than a very small part of the land surface of the globe.

Over the greater part of the earth until quite recently, until the last

two thousand years, the hardier, less numerous tribal peoples of forest

and parkland and the nomadic peoples of the seasonal grasslands

maintained and developed their own ways of life.

The primitive civilizations were, we may say, “communities of

obedience”; obedience to god-kings or kings under gods was their cement;

the nomadic tendency on the other hand has always been towards a

different type of association which we shall here call a “community of

will.” In a wandering, fighting community the individual must be at once

self-reliant and disciplined. The chiefs of such communities must be

chiefs who are followed, not masters who compel. This community of will

is traceable throughout the entire history of mankind; everywhere we

find the original disposition of all the nomads alike, Nordic, Semitic,

or Mongolian, was individually more _willing_ and more _erect_ than

that of the settled folk. The Nordic peoples came into Italy and Greece

under leader kings; they did not bring any systematic temple cults with

them, they found such things in the conquered lands and adapted as they

adopted them. The Greeks and Latins lapsed very easily again into

republics, and so did the Aryans in India. There was a tradition of

election also in the early Frankish and German kingdoms.[372] The early

Caliphs were elected, the Judges of Israel and the “kings” of Carthage

and Tyre were elected, and so was the Great Khan of the Mongols until

Kublai became a Chinese monarch.... Equally constant in the settled

lands do we find the opposite idea, the idea of a non-elective divinity

in kings and of their natural and inherent right to rule.... As our

history has developed we have noted the appearance of new and

complicating elements in the story of human societies; we have seen that

nomad turned go-between, the trader, appear, and we have noted the

growing importance of shipping in the world. It seems as inevitable that

voyaging should make men free in their minds as that settlement within a

narrow horizon should make men timid and servile.... But in spite of all

such complications, the broad antagonism between the method of obedience

and the method of will runs through history down into our own times. To

this day their reconciliation is incomplete.

Civilization even in its most servile forms has always offered much that

is enormously attractive, convenient, and congenial to mankind; but

something restless and untamed in our race has striven continually to

convert civilization from its original reliance upon unparticipating

obedience into a community of participating wills. And to the lurking

nomadism in our blood, and particularly in the blood of monarchs and

aristocracies, we must ascribe also that incessant urgency towards a

wider range that forces every state to extend its boundaries if it can,

and to spread its interests to the ends of the earth. The power of

nomadic restlessness that tends to bring all the earth under one rule,

seems to be identical with the spirit that makes most of us chafe under

direction and restraint, and seek to participate in whatever government

we tolerate. And this natural, this temperamental struggle of mankind to

reconcile civilization with freedom has been kept alive age after age by

the military and political impotence of every “community of obedience”

that has ever existed. Obedience, once men are broken to it, can be

easily captured and transferred; witness the passive rôle of Egypt,

Mesopotamia, and India, the original and typical lands of submission,

the “cradles of civilization,” as they have passed from one lordship to

another. A servile civilization is a standing invitation to predatory

free men. But on the other hand a “community of will” necessitates a

fusion of intractable materials; it is a far harder community to bring

about, and still more difficult to maintain. The story of Alexander the

Great displays the community of will of the Macedonian captains

gradually dissolving before his demand that they should worship him. The

incident of the murder of Clitus is quite typical of the struggle

between the free and the servile tradition that went on whenever a new

conqueror from the open lands and the open air found himself installed

in the palace of an ancient monarchy.

In the case of the Roman Republic, history tells of the first big

community of will in the world’s history, the first free community much

larger than a city, and how it weakened with growth and spent itself

upon success until at last it gave way to a monarchy of the ancient

type, and decayed swiftly into one of the feeblest communities of

servitude that ever collapsed before a handful of invaders. We have

given some attention in this book to the factors in that decay, because

they are of primary importance in human history. One of the most evident

was the want of any wide organization of education to base the ordinary

citizens’ minds upon the idea of service and obligation to the republic,

to keep them _willing_, that is; another was the absence of any medium

of general information to keep their activities in harmony, to enable

them to _will_ as one body. The community of will is limited in size by

the limitations set upon the possibilities of a community of knowledge.

The concentration of property in a few hands and the replacement of free

workers by slaves were rendered possible by the decay of public spirit

and the confusion of the public intelligence that resulted from these

limitations. There was, moreover, no efficient religious idea behind the

Roman state; the dark Etruscan liver-peering cult of Rome was as little

adapted to the political needs of a great community as the very similar

Shamanism of the Mongols. It is in the fact that both Christianity and

Islam, in their distinctive ways, did at least promise to supply, for

the first time in human experience, this patent gap in the Roman

republican system as well as in the nomadic system, to give a common

moral education for a mass of people, and to supply them with a common

history of the past and a common idea of a human purpose and destiny,

that their enormous historical importance lies. Aristotle, as we have

noted, had set a limit to the ideal community of a few thousand

citizens, because he could not conceive how a larger multitude could be

held together by a common idea. He had had no experience of any sort of

education beyond the tutorial methods of his time. Greek education was

almost purely _viva-voce_ education; it could reach therefore only to a

limited aristocracy. Both the Christian church and Islam demonstrated

the unsoundness of Aristotle’s limitation. We may think they did their

task of education in their vast fields of opportunity crudely or badly,

but the point of interest to us is that they did it at all. Both

sustained almost world-wide propagandas of idea and inspiration. Both

relied successfully upon the power of the written word to link great

multitudes of diverse men together in common enterprises. By the

eleventh century, as we have seen, the idea of Christendom had been

imposed upon all the vast warring miscellany of the smashed and

pulverized Western empire, and upon Europe far beyond its limits, as a

uniting and inspiring idea. It had made a shallow but effective

community of will over an unprecedented area and out of an unprecedented

multitude of human beings. Only one other thing at all like this had

ever happened to any great section of mankind before, and that was the

idea of a community of good behaviour that the _literati_ had spread

throughout China.[373]

The Catholic Church provided what the Roman Republic had lacked, a

system of popular teaching, a number of universities and methods of

intellectual inter-communication. By this achievement it opened the way

to the new possibilities of human government that now become apparent in

this _Outline_, possibilities that are still being apprehended and

worked out in the world in which we are living. Hitherto the government

of states had been either authoritative, under some uncriticized and

unchallenged combination of priest and monarch, or it had been a

democracy, uneducated and uninformed, degenerating with any considerable

increase of size, as Rome and Athens did, into a mere rule by mob and

politician. But by the thirteenth century the first intimations had

already dawned of an ideal of government which is still making its way

to realization, the modern ideal, the ideal of a world-wide _educational

government_, in which the ordinary man is neither the slave of an

absolute monarch nor of a demagogue-ruled state, but an informed,

inspired, and consulted part of his community. It is upon the word

educational that stress must be laid, and upon the idea that information

must precede consultation. It is in the practical realization of this

idea[374] that education is a collective function and not a private

affair that one essential distinction of the “modern state” from any of

its precursors lies. The modern citizen, men are coming to realize, must

be informed first and then consulted. Before he can vote he must hear

the evidence; before he can decide he must know. It is not by setting up

polling booths, but by setting up schools and making literature and

knowledge and news universally accessible that the way is opened from

servitude and confusion to that willingly co-operative state which is

the modern ideal. Votes in themselves are worthless things. Men had

votes in Italy in the time of the Gracchi. Their votes did not help

them. Until a man has education, a vote is a useless and dangerous thing

for him to possess. The ideal community towards which we move is not a

community of will simply; it is _a community of knowledge and will_,

replacing _a community of faith and obedience_. Education is the adapter

which will make the nomadic spirit of freedom and self-reliance

compatible with the co-operations and wealth and security of

civilization.

§ 2

But though it is certain that the Catholic Church, through its

propagandas, its popular appeals, its schools and universities, opened

up the prospect of the modern educational state in Europe, it is equally

certain that the Catholic Church never intended to do anything of the

sort. It did not send out knowledge with its blessing; it let it loose

inadvertently. It was not the Roman Republic whose heir the Church

esteemed itself, but the Roman Emperor. Its conception of education was

not release, not an invitation to participate, but the subjugation of

minds. Two of the greatest educators of the Middle Ages were indeed not

churchmen at all, but monarchs and statesmen, Charlemagne and Alfred the

Great of England, who made use of the church organization. But it was

the church that had provided the organization. Church and monarchs in

their mutual grapple for power were both calling to their aid the

thoughts of the common man. In response to these conflicting appeals

appeared the common man, the unofficial outside independent man,

thinking for himself.

Already in the thirteenth century we have seen Pope Gregory IX and the

Emperor Frederick II engaging in a violent public controversy. Already

then there was a sense that a new arbitrator greater than pope or

monarchy had come into the world, that there were readers and a public

opinion. The exodus of the Popes to Avignon, and the divisions and

disorders of the Papacy during the fourteenth century, stimulated this

free judgment upon authority throughout Europe enormously.

At first the current criticism upon the church concerned only moral and

material things. The wealth and luxury of the higher clergy and the

heavy papal taxation were the chief grounds of complaint. And the

earlier attempts to restore Christian simplicity, the foundation of the

Franciscans for example, were not movements of separation, but movements

of revival. Only later did a deeper and more distinctive criticism

develop which attacked the central fact of the church’s teaching and the

justification of priestly importance, namely, the sacrifice of the mass.

We have sketched in broad outlines the early beginnings of Christianity,

and we have shown how rapidly that difficult and austere conception of

the Kingdom of God, which was the central idea of the teachings of Jesus

of Nazareth, was overlaid by a revival of the ancient sacrificial idea,

a doctrine more difficult indeed to grasp, but easier to reconcile with

the habits and dispositions and acquiescences of everyday life in the

Near East. We have noted how a sort of theocrasia went on between

Christianity and Judaism and the cult of the Serapeum and Mithraism and

other competing cults, by which the Mithraist Sun-day, the Jewish idea

of blood as a religious essential, the Alexandrian importance of the

Mother of God, the shaven and fasting priest, self-tormenting

asceticism, and many other matters of belief and ritual and practice,

became grafted upon the developing religion. These adaptations, no

doubt, made the new teaching much more understandable and acceptable in

Egypt and Syria and the like. There were things in the way of thought of

the dark-white Mediterranean race; they were congenial to that type. But

as we have shown in our story of Muhammad, these acquisitions did not

make Christianity more acceptable to the Arab nomads; to them these

features made it disgusting. And so, too, the robed and shaven monk and

nun and priest seem to have roused something like an instinctive

hostility in the Nordic barbarians of the North and West. We have noted

the peculiar bias of the early Anglo-Saxons and Northmen against the

monks and nuns. They seem to have felt that the lives and habits of

these devotees were queer and unnatural.

The clash between what we may call the “dark-white” factors and the

newer elements in Christianity was no doubt intensified by Pope Gregory

VII’s imposition of celibacy upon the Catholic priests in the eleventh

century. The East had known religious celibates for thousands of years;

in the West they were regarded with the profoundest scepticism and

suspicion.[375]

And now in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as the lay mind of

the Nordic peoples began to acquire learning, to read and write and

express itself, and as it came into touch with the stimulating

activities of the Arab mind, we find a much more formidable criticism of

Catholicism beginning, an intellectual attack upon the priest as priest,

and upon the ceremony of the mass as the central fact of the religious

life, coupled with a demand for a return to the personal teachings of

Jesus as recorded in the Gospels.