‘History repeats itself,’ it is sometimes said; and certainly the fate

that the Carolingian ‘Mayors of the Palace’ had meted out to their

Merovingian kings their own descendants were destined to receive again

in full measure.

In 987 died Louis ‘the Good-for-nothing’, the last of the Carolingian

kings, leaving as heir to the throne an uncle, Charles, Duke of

Lorraine. In his short reign Louis had shown himself feeble and

profligate; and the nobles of northern France, weary of a royal House

that like Ethelred of England preferred bribing the goodwill of

invaders to fighting them, readily agreed to set Charles on one side

and to take in his place Hugh Capet, Duke of Paris, descendant of the

famous Odo.

‘Our crown goes not by inheritance,’ exclaimed the Archbishop of Reims,

when sanctioning the usurper’s claims, ‘but by wisdom and noble blood.’

[Sidenote: The House of Capet]

The unfortunate Duke of Lorraine, captured after a vain attempt to

gain his inheritance, perished in prison, and with him disappeared the

Carolingians. The House of Capet, built on their ruin, survived in the

direct line until the fourteenth century, and then in a younger branch,

the Valois, until France in modern times was declared a republic.

Under the Capets France became not merely a collection of tribes and

races as under the Merovingians, nor a section of a European Empire as

under the House of Charlemagne, but a nation as we see her to-day, with

separate interests and customs to distinguish her from other nations.

This process of fusion was slow, and King Hugh and his immediate

successors appeared in their own day more as powerful rulers of the

small district in which they lived than as overlords of France. When

they marched abroad at the head of a large army, achieving victories,

outlying provinces hastily recognized them as suzerains, or overlords,

but when they turned their backs and went home, the commands they had

issued would be ignored and defied.

Amongst the most formidable neighbours of these rulers of Paris were

the Dukes of Normandy, descendants of a certain Viking chief, Rollo

‘the Ganger’, so called because on account of his size he could find

no horse capable of bearing him and must therefore ‘gang afoot’. This

Rollo established himself at Rouen, and because Charles ‘the Simple’,

one of the later Carolingians,[5] was unable to defeat him in battle

he gave him instead the lands which he had won, and created him Duke,

hoping that like a poacher turned gamekeeper he might prove as valuable

a subject as he had been a troublesome foe. In return Rollo promised

to become a Christian and to acknowledge Charles as his overlord. One

of the old chronicles says that when Rollo was asked to ratify this

allegiance by kissing his toe, the Viking replied indignantly, ‘Not

so, by God!’ and that a Dane who consented to do so in his place was

so rough that he tumbled Charles from his throne amid the jeers of his

companions.

This is probably only a tale, for in reality Rollo married a daughter

of Charles and settled down in his capital at Rouen as the model ruler

of a semi-civilized state, supporting the Church, and administering

such law and order that it was said when he left a massive bracelet

hanging on a tree and forgot he had done so, that the ornament remained

for three years without any one daring to steal it.

[Sidenote: William the Conqueror]

The rulers of the new Duchy were nearly all strong men, hard fighters,

shrewd-headed, and ambitious; but the greatest of the line was

undoubtedly William, an illegitimate son of Duke Robert ‘the Devil’.

William’s ambition was of the restless type of his Scandinavian

forefathers, and his duchy in northern France seemed to him too small

to match his hopes. When he noted that England was ruled by Edward ‘the

Confessor’, a feeble son of Ethelred ‘the Rede-less’, who had gained

the throne on the death of Cnut’s two sons, he determined shrewdly that

his conquests should lie in this direction. Many things favoured his

cause, not the least that Edward the Confessor himself, who had been

brought up in Normandy and who had no direct heirs, was quite willing

to acknowledge William as his successor.

The national hero of England at the time Edward died, and who promptly

proclaimed himself king, was Harold the Saxon, a member of the powerful

family of Godwin that had for years controlled and owned the greater

part of the land in the south.

Unfortunately for Harold the north and midlands were mainly governed by

the House of Morkere and their friends, who hated the family of Godwin

as dangerous rivals far more than they dreaded a Norman invasion.

Thus any help that they or their tenants proffered was so slow in its

rendering and so niggardly in its amount that it proved of very little

use.

In addition to jealousies at home, Harold, at the moment that he heard

William, Duke of Normandy, had indeed landed on the south coast, was

far off in Yorkshire, where he had just succeeded in repelling an

invasion of Danes at the battle of Stamford Bridge. At once he started

southwards, but as he marched his army melted away, some of the men

to enjoy the spoils taken from the Danes, others to attend to their

harvests.

The deserters could claim that they were following the advice of the

Father of Christendom, since Pope Gregory VII had given William a

banner that he had blessed and had denounced Harold as a perjurer.

One of the reasons for Gregory’s anger with the Saxons was that Harold

had dared to appoint as Archbishop of Canterbury a bishop of whom he

did not approve, while further the crafty William had persuaded him

that Harold, who as a young man had been wrecked upon the Norman coast,

had sworn on the bones of some holy saint that he would never seize the

crown of England. He had been a prisoner in William’s power and only

on this condition had he been set free to return to his native land.

The exact truth of events so long ago is hard to reach; but Harold,

at any rate, fought under a cloud of suspicion and neglect, and

not all his reckless daring, nor the devotion of his brothers and

friends, could save his fortunes when on the field of Senlac, standing

beneath his dragon-banner, he met the shock of the disciplined Norman

forces. Chroniclers relate that the human wall of Saxon archers and

foot-soldiers remained unshaken on the hill-side until William, setting

a snare, turned in pretended flight. The ruse was successful; for

as the Saxons, cheering triumphantly, descended from their position

in pursuit, the invaders faced round and charged their disordered

ranks. Only Harold and the men of his bodyguard remained firm under

the onslaught, until at the last an arrow fired in the air struck the

Saxon King in the eye as he looked up, so that he fell down dead. All

resistance was now at an end and William, Duke of Normandy, was left

master of the field and ruler of England.

Here rose the dragon-banner of our realm:

Here fought, here fell, our Norman-slandered king.

O garden blossoming out of English blood!

O strange hate-healer Time! We stroll and stare

Where might made right eight hundred years ago.

These lines of Tennyson on ‘Battle Abbey’ recall the fact that just

as the Danes and Saxons were fused into one race, so would the Norman

invaders mingle with their descendants, until to after-generations

William as well as Harold should appear a national hero.

[Sidenote: Domesday Book]

In his own day ‘the Conqueror’ struck terror into the heart of the

conquered. In 1069, when the North of England, too late to help Harold,

rose in revolt, he laid waste a desert by sword and fire from the

Humber to the Tees. When the Norman barons and English earls challenged

his rule he threw them alike into dungeons. What seemed to the Saxon

mind even more wonderful and horrible than his cruelty was the record

of all the wealth of his kingdom that he caused to be compiled.

This ‘Domesday Book’ contained a close account not only of the great

estates, lay and ecclesiastical, but of every small hamlet, and even of

the number of live stock on each farm.

‘So very narrowly did he cause the survey to be made,’ says the

_Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, ‘that there was not a single hide nor a rood

of land, nor (it is shameful to relate that which he thought no shame

to do) was there an ox, or a cow, or a pig, passed by that was not set

down in the account.’

William, it can be seen, was thorough in his methods, both in war and

peace, and through this very thoroughness he won the respect if not

the affection of his new subjects. Ever since the death of Cnut the

Dane, England had suffered either from actual civil war or from a weak

ruler who allowed his nobles to quarrel and oppress the rest of the

nation. As a result of the Norman Conquest the bulk of the population

found that they had gained one tyrant instead of many; and how they

appreciated the change is shown by the way, all through Norman times,

the middle and lower classes would help their foreign king against his

turbulent baronage.

This is what a monk, an Anglo-Saxon, and therefore by race an enemy of

the Conqueror, wrote about him in his chronicle:

‘If any would know what manner of man King William was ... then

will we describe him as we have known him.... This King William

... was a very wise and a great man, and more honoured and more

powerful than any of his predecessors. He was mild to those good

men who loved God, but severe beyond measure to those who withstood

his will.... So also he was a very stern and wrathful man, so that

none durst do anything against his will, and he kept in prison

those Earls who acted against his pleasure. He removed bishops from

their sees ... and at length he spared not his own brother Odo.

‘Amongst other things the good order that William established must

not be forgotten; it was such that any man who was himself aught

might travel over the kingdom with a bosom full of gold unmolested,

and no man durst kill another, however great the injury he might

have received from him.’

A few lines farther on the chronicler, having mentioned the peace that

William gave, sadly relates the tyranny that was the price he extorted

in exchange:

‘Truly there was much trouble in these times and very great

distress; he caused castles to be built and oppressed the poor....

He was given to avarice and greedily loved gain. He made large

forests for the deer, and enacted laws therewith, so that whoever

killed a hart or a hind should be blinded ..., he loved the tall

stags as if he were their father. He also appointed concerning the

hares that they should go free. The rich complained and the poor

murmured, but he was so sturdy that he recked nought of them; they

must will all that the king willed if they would live.... Alas that

any man should so exalt himself.... May Almighty God show mercy to

his soul!’

The monk wrote after September 1087, when the Conqueror lay dead. Not

in any Viking glory of battle against a national foe had he passed to

his fathers, but in sordid struggle with his eldest son Robert who,

aided by the French king, had rebelled against him. His crown was at

once seized by his second son William Rufus, and with him the line of

Norman kings was firmly established on the English throne.

The adventurous spirit of the Northmen had led them from Denmark and

Scandinavia to the coasts of England and France; and from France

their descendants, driven by the same roving instincts, had crossed

the Channel in search of fresh conquests. Other Normans in the

eleventh century sailed south instead of north. Their talk was of a

pilgrimage to Rome, perhaps to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; but

when they found that the beautiful island of Sicily had been taken by

the Moslems, and that South Italy was divided up amongst a number of

princes too jealous of one another to unite against any invaders either

Christian or pagan, their thoughts turned quite naturally to conquest.

[Sidenote: Norman Conquests in Italy]

An Italian of this time describes the Normans as ‘cunning and

revengeful’, and adds: ‘In their eager search for wealth and dominion

they despise whatever they possess and hope whatever they desire.’ Such

an impression was to be gained by bitter experience; but not knowing

it, Maniaces, the Greek governor of that part of South Italy that

still maintained its allegiance to the Eastern Empire, invited these

Northern warriors in the eleventh century to help him win back Sicily

from the Saracens. They agreed, attacked in force, gained the greater

part of the island, but then quarrelled with Maniaces over the spoils.

Outraged by what they considered his miserly conduct, they invaded the

province of Apulia, made themselves master of it, and established their

capital at Melfi.

The head of the new Norman state was a certain William de Hauteville,

who with several of his brothers had been leaders in the Italian

expedition.

‘No member of the House of Hauteville ever saw a neighbour’s lands

without wanting them for himself.’ So says a biographer of that

family; and if this was their ideal it was certainly shared by William

and his numerous brothers. Since other people’s possessions were

not surrendered without a struggle, even in the Middle Ages, it was

fortunate for them that they had the genius to win and hold what they

coveted.

Pope Leo IX, like his predecessors in the See of Peter ever since

Charlemagne had confirmed their right to the lands of the Exarch of

Ravenna,[6] looked uneasily on invaders of Italy, and he therefore

attempted to form a league with both the Emperors of the East and West

that should ruin these presumptuous usurpers. The league came into

being, but the Pope’s allies failed him, and at the battle of Civitate

he was defeated and all but taken prisoner.

Here was a chance for Norman diplomacy, or, as Italians would have

called it, ‘cunning’, and the conquerors promptly declared that it

had been with the utmost reluctance that they had made war on the

Father of Christendom, and begged his forgiveness. His absolution was

obtained, and a few years later, through the mediation of Hildebrand,

then Archdeacon of Rome and later as Pope Gregory VII, one of the

leading statesmen of Europe, a compact was arranged by which the

Normans recognized Pope Nicholas II as their overlord, while he, on his

part, acknowledged their right to keep their conquests. Both parties

to this bargain were pleased: the Pope because he had gained a vassal

state however unruly, the Normans since they felt that they no longer

reigned on sufferance, but had a legal status in the eyes of Europe.

Neither had any idea of the mine of trouble they were laying for future

generations.

The fortunes of the House of Hauteville, thus established, mounted

steadily. William died and was succeeded by a younger brother, Robert,

nicknamed ‘Guiscard’ or ‘the Wise’. During his reign he forced both the

Greek governor and the independent princes who held the rest of South

Italy to surrender their possessions, while he even carried his war

against the Eastern Empire to Greece itself. Only his death put an end

to this daring campaign.

Robert Guiscard, as master of South Italy, had been created Duke of

Apulia; his nephew, Roger II, Count of Sicily, who inherited his

statecraft and strength, induced the Pope to magnify both mainland and

island into a joint kingdom, and thereafter reigned as King of Naples.

‘He was a lover of justice’, says a chronicler of his day, ‘and a most

severe avenger of crime. He hated lying ... and never promised what

he did not mean to perform. He never persecuted his private enemies,

and in war endeavoured on all occasions to gain his point without

shedding blood. Justice and peace were universally observed through his

dominions.’

Roger II of Naples was evidently a finer and more civilized character

than William of England; but in both lay that Norman capacity for

establishing and maintaining order that at first seems so strange an

inheritance from wild Norse ancestors. Clear-sighted, iron-nerved,

an adventurer with an instinct for business, the Norman of the Early

Middle Ages was just the leaven that Europe required to raise her out

of the indolent depression of the ‘Dark Ages’ that followed the fall of

Rome.

_Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368-73._

The Emperor Lothar 840-55

Massacre of St. Brice’s Day 1002

William, Duke of Normandy 1035-87

William, King of England 1066-87

Edward the Confessor 1042-66

Domesday Book 1086

Pope Leo IX 1048-54

Battle of Civitate 1053

Pope Nicholas II 1058-61

Robert, Duke of Apulia 1060-85

Roger II, King of Naples 1130

X

FEUDALISM AND MONASTICISM

FEUDALISM

Wherever in the course of history men have gathered together they have

gradually evolved some form of association that would ensure mutual

interests. It might be merely the tribal bond of the Arabians, by

which a man’s relations were responsible for his acts and avenged his

wrongs; it might be a council of village elders such as the Russian

‘Mir’, making laws for the younger men and women; it might be a group

of German chiefs legislating on moonlit nights, according to the

description of Tacitus, by their camp fires.

In contrast to primitive associations stands the elaborate government

of Rome under Augustus and his successors; the despotic Emperor,

his numberless officials, the senators with their huge estates,

the struggling _curiales_, the army of legions carrying out the

imperial commands from Scotland to the Euphrates. When Rome fell, her

government, like a house whose foundations have collapsed, fell also.

Barbarian conquerors, established in Italy and the Roman provinces,

took what they liked of the laws that they found, added to them their

own customs, and out of the blend evolved new codes of legislation. Yet

legislation, without some method of ensuring its execution, could not

save nations from invasion nor the merchant or peasant from becoming

the victim of robberies and petty crimes.

Mediaeval centuries are sometimes called the Age of Feudalism, because

during this time feudalism was the method gradually adopted for dealing

with the problems of public life amongst all classes in nearly all the

nations of Europe. There are two chief things to be remembered about

feudalism--first that it was no sudden invention but a growth out of

old ideas both Roman and barbarian, and next that it was intimately

connected in men’s minds with the thought of land. This was natural,

for after all, land or its products are as necessary to the life of

every individual as air and water, and therefore the cultivation of the

soil and the distribution of its fruits are the first problems with

which governments are faced.

Feudalism assumed that all the land belonging to a nation belonged in

the first place to that nation’s king. Because he could not govern or

cultivate it all himself he would parcel it out in ‘fiefs’ amongst the

chief nobles at his court, promising them his protection, and asking

in return that they should do him some specified service. This system

recalls the ‘villa’ of Roman days with its senator, granting protection

to his tenants from robbery and excessive taxation, and employing them

to plough and sow, to reap his crops, and build his houses and bridges.

In the Middle Ages the service of the chief tenants was nearly always

military: to appear when summoned by the king with so many horsemen

and so many archers fully armed. In order to provide this force the

tenant would be driven in his turn to grant out parts of his lands to

other tenants, who would come when he called them with horsemen and

arms that they had collected in a similar way. This process was called

‘sub-infeudation’. Society thus took the form of a pyramid with the

king at the apex, immediately below him his tenants-in-chief, and below

them in graded ranks or layers the other tenants.

This brings us to the base of the pyramid, the people who could not

fight themselves, having neither horses nor weapons, and who certainly

could not lend any other soldiers to their lord’s banner. Were they to

receive no land?

In the Roman ‘villa’ the bottom strata was the slave, the chattel with

no rights even over his own body. Under the system of feudalism the

base of the pyramid was made up of ‘serfs’, men originally free, with

a customary right to the land on which they lived, who had lost their

freedom under feudal law and had become bound to the land, _ascripti

glebae_, in such a way that if the land were sub-let or sold they would

pass over to the new owner like the trees or the grass. In return for

their land, though they might not serve their master with spear or bow,

they would work in his fields, build his bridges and castles, mend his

roads, and guard his cattle.

From top to bottom of this pyramid of feudal society ran the binding

mortar of ‘tenure’ and ‘service’; but these were not the only links

which kept feudal society together. When a tenant did ‘homage’ for his

land, and ‘with head uncovered, with belt ungirt, his sword removed’,

placed his hands between those of his lord, and took an oath, after

the manner of the thegns of Wessex to their king, ‘to love what he

loved and shun what he shunned both on sea and on land’, there entered

into this relationship the finer bond of loyalty due from a vassal to

his overlord. It was the descendant of the old Teutonic idea of the

_comitatus_ described by Tacitus,[7] the chief destined to lead and

guide, his bodyguard pledged to follow him to death if necessary.

Put shortly, then, feudalism may be described as a system of society

based upon the holding of land--a system, that is, in which a man’s

legal status and social rank were in the main determined by the

conditions on which he held (i.e. possessed) his land. Such a system,

to return to our example of the pyramid, grew not only from the apex,

by the sovereign granting lands, as the King of France did to Rollo

‘the Ganger’, but from the middle and base as well.

One of the chief feudal powers in mediaeval times was the Church, for

though abbots and bishops were not supposed to fight themselves, yet

they would often have numbers of lay military tenants to bring to the

help of the king or their overlord. Some of these tenants were men

whom they had provided with estates, but others were landowners who

had voluntarily surrendered their rights over their land in return

for the protection of a local monastery or bishopric, and thus become

its tenants. A large part of the Church land was, however, held, not

by military or lay tenure, but in return for spiritual services, or

free alms as it was called, i.e. prayers for the soul of the donor.

Perhaps a landowner wished to make a pious gift on his death-bed, or

had committed a crime and believed that a surrender of his property

to the Church would placate God. For some such reason, at any rate,

he made over his land, or part of it, to the Church, which in this

way accumulated great estates and endowments, free from the usual

liabilities of lay tenure. All over Europe other men, and even whole

villages and towns, were taking the same steps, seeking protection

direct from the king, or a great lord, or an abbot or bishop, offering

in return rent, services, or tolls on their merchandise.

Feudalism at its best stood for the protection of the weak in an age

when armies and a police force as we understand the terms did not

exist. Even when the system fell below this standard, and it often fell

badly, there still remained in its appeal to loyalty an ideal above and

beyond the ordinary outlook of the day, a seed of nobler feeling that

with the growth of civilization and under the influence of the Church

blossomed into the flower of chivalry.

I made them lay their hands in mine and swear

To reverence the King as if he were

Their conscience, and their conscience as their King:

To break the heathen and uphold the Christ,

To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,

To speak no slander; no! nor listen to it,

To honour his own word as if his God’s,

To live sweet lives in purest chastity.

Such are the vows that Tennyson puts in the mouth of Arthur’s knights,

who with Charlemagne and his Paladins were the heroes of mediaeval

romance and dreams. King Henry the Fowler, who ruled Germany in the

early part of the tenth century, instituted the Order of Knighthood,

forming a bodyguard from the younger brothers and sons of his chief

barons. Before they received the sword-tap on the shoulder that

confirmed their new rank, these candidates for knighthood took four

vows: first to speak the truth, next to serve faithfully both King and

Church, thirdly never to harm a woman, and lastly never to turn their

back on a foe.

Probably many of these half-barbarian young swashbucklers broke their

vows freely; but some would remember and obey; and so amid the general

roughness and cruelty of the age, there would be established a small

leaven of gentleness and pity left to expand its influence through the

coming generations. It is because of this ideal of chivalry, often

eclipsed and even travestied by those who claimed to be its brightest

mirrors, but never quite lost to Europe, that strong nations have been

found ready to defend the rights of the weak, and men have laid down

their lives to avenge the oppression of women and children.

Of the evil side of feudalism much more could be written than of the

good. The system, on its military side, was intended to provide the

king with an army; but if one of his tenants-in-chief chose to rebel

against him, the vassals who held their lands from this tenant were

much more likely to keep faith with the lord to whom they had paid

immediate homage than with their sovereign. Thus often the only force

on which a king could rely were the vassals of the royal domain.

Again, feudalism, by its policy of making tenants-in-chief responsible

for law and order on their estates, had set up a number of petty

rulers with almost absolute power. Peasants were tried for their

offences in their lord’s court by his bailiff or agent, and by his

will they suffered death or paid their fines. Except in the case of a

Charlemagne, strong enough to send out _Missi_[8] and to support them

when they overrode local decisions, the lord’s justice or injustice

would seem a real thing to his tenants and serfs, the king’s law

something shadowy and far away.

As Duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror had been quite as powerful

as his overlord the King of France. When he came to England he was

determined that none of the barons to whom he had granted estates

should ever be his equal in this way. He therefore summoned all

landowning men in England to a council at Salisbury in 1086, and made

them take an oath of allegiance to himself before all other lords.

Because he was a strong man he kept his barons true to their oath or

punished them, but during the reign of his grandson Stephen, who

disputed the English throne with his cousin Matilda and therefore tried

to buy the support of the military class by gifts and concessions, the

vices of feudalism ran almost unchecked.

‘They had done homage to him and sworn oaths,’ says the Anglo-Saxon

chronicler, ‘but they no faith kept ... for every rich man built

his castles and defended them against him, and they filled the land

with castles.... Then they took these whom they suspected to have

any goods by night and by day, seizing both men and women, and

they put them in prison for their gold and silver, and tortured

them with pains unspeakable.... I cannot and I may not tell of all

the wounds and of all the tortures that they inflicted upon the

wretched men of this land; and this state of things lasted the

nineteen years that Stephen was king and ever grew worse and worse.’

Stephen was a weak ruler struggling with a civil war; so that it might

be argued that no system of government could have worked well under

such auspices; but if we turn to the normal life of the peasant folk

on the estates of the monastery of Mont St. Michael in the thirteenth

century, we shall see that the humble tenants at the base of the feudal

pyramid paid dearly enough for the protection of their overlords.

‘In June the peasants must cut and pile the hay and carry it to the

manor-house ... in August they must reap and carry in the Convent

grain, their own grain lies exposed to wind and rain.... On the

Nativity of the Virgin the villein owes the pork due, one pig in

eight ... at Xmas the fowl fine and good ... on Palm Sunday the

sheep due ... at Easter he must plough, sow, and harrow. When there

is building the tenant must bring stone and serve the masons ... he

must also haul the convent wood for two deniers a day. If he sells

his land he owes his lord a thirteenth of its value, if he marries

his daughter outside the lord’s demense he pays a fine,--he must

grind his grain at the lord’s mill and bake his bread at the lord’s

oven, where the customary charges never satisfy the servants.’

Certainly the peasant of the Middle Ages can have had little time

to lament even his own misery. Perhaps to keep his hovel from fire

and pillage and his family from starvation was all to which he often

aspired.

‘War’, it has been said, ‘was the law of the feudal world’, and all

over Europe the moat-girt castles of powerful barons, and walled towns

and villages sprang up as a witness to the turbulent state of society

during these centuries. To some natures this atmosphere of violence of

course appealed.

I, Sirs, am for war,

Peace giveth me pain,

No other creed will hold me again.

On Monday, on Tuesday,--whenever you will,

Day, week, month, or year, are the same to me still.

So sang a Provençal baron of the twelfth century, and we find an echo

of his spirit in Spain as late as the fifteenth, when a certain noble,

sighing for the joys and spoils of civil war, remarked, ‘I would there

were many kings in Castile for then I should be one of them.’

[Sidenote: The Truce of God]

The Church, endeavouring to cope with the spirit of anarchy, succeeded

in establishing on different occasions a ‘Truce of God’, somewhat

resembling the ‘Sacred Months’ devised by the Arabs for a like purpose.

From Wednesday to Monday, and during certain seasons of the year, such

as Advent or Lent, war was completely forbidden under ecclesiastical

censure, while at no time were priests, labourers, women, or children

to be molested.

The defect of such reforms lay in the absence of machinery to enforce

them; and feudalism, the system by which in practice the few lived at

the expense of the many, continued to flourish until foreign adventure,

such as the Crusades, absorbed some of its chief supporters, and

civilization and humanity succeeded in building up new foundations of

society to take its place. It would seem as if the lessons of good

government had to be learned in a hard school, generally through bitter

experience on the part of the governed.

MONASTICISM

If the study of feudalism is necessary to a knowledge of the material

life of the Middle Ages, its spirit is equally a closed book without

an understanding of monasticism. What induced men and women, not just

a few devout souls, but thousands of ordinary people of all nations

and classes from the prince to the serf to forsake the world for the

cloister; and, far from regretting this sacrifice, to maintain with

obvious sincerity that they had chosen the better part? If we would

realize the mediaeval mind we must find an answer to this question.

Turning to the earliest days of monasticism, when the ‘Fathers of the

Church’ sought hermits’ cells, we recall the shrinking of finer natures

from the brutality and lust of pagan society; the intense conviction

that the way to draw nearer God was to shut out the world; the desire

of a Simon Stylites to make the thoughtless mind by the sight of his

self-inflicted penance think for a moment at any rate of a future

Heaven and Hell.

Motives such as these continued to inspire the enthusiastic Christian

throughout the Dark Ages following the fall of Rome; but, as Europe

became outwardly converted to the Catholic Faith, it was not paganism

from which the monk fled, but the mockery of his own beliefs that he

found in the lives of so-called Christians. The corruption of imperial

courts, even those of a Constantine or Charlemagne, the cunning cruelty

of a baptized Clovis, the ruthless selfishness of a feudal baron or

Norman adventurer fighting in the name of Christ: all these were hard

to reconcile with a gospel of poverty, gentleness, and brotherhood.

Even the light of pure ideals once held aloft by the Church had begun

to burn dim; for men are usually tolerant of evils to which they are

accustomed, and the priest who had grown up amid barbarian invasions

was inclined to look on the coarseness and violence that they bred as

a natural side of life. As a rule he continued to maintain a slightly

higher standard of conduct than his parishioners, but sometimes he fell

to their level or below.

The great danger to the Church, however, was, as always in her history,

not the hardships that she encountered but the prosperity. The bishops,

‘overseers’ responsible for the discipline and well-being of their

dioceses, became in the Middle Ages, by reason of their very power and

influence, too often the servants of earthly rulers rather than of

God. Far better educated and disciplined than the laymen, experienced

in diocesan affairs, without ties of wife and family, since the Church

law forbade the clergy to marry, they were selected by kings for

responsible office in the state. Usually they proved the wisdom of

his choice through their gifts of administration and loyalty, but the

effect on the Church of adding political to ecclesiastical power proved

disastrous in the end.

Their great landed wealth made the bishops feudal barons, while

bishoprics in their turn came to be regarded as offices at the disposal

of the king; a bad king would parcel them out amongst his favourites or

sell them to the highest bidders, heedless of their moral character.

Thus crept into the Church the sin of ‘simony’ or ‘traffic in holy

things’ so strongly condemned by the first Apostles, and, following

hard on the heels of simony, the worldliness born of the temptations of

wealth and power. The bishop who was numbered amongst a feudal baronage

and entertained a lax nobility at his palace was little likely to be

shocked at priests convicted of ignorance or immorality, or to spend

his time in trying to reform their habits.

It was, then, not only in horror of the world, but in reproach of the

Church herself that the monk turned to the idea of separation from man

and communion with God. In the earliest days of monasticism each hermit

followed his special theory of prayer and self-discipline; he would

gather round him small communities of disciples, and these would remain

or go away to form other communities as they chose, a lack of system

that often resulted in unhealthy fanaticism or useless idleness.

[Sidenote: St. Benedict]

In the sixth century an Italian monk, Benedict of Nursia (480-543),

compiled a set of regulations for his followers, which, under the

name of ‘the rule of Benedict’, became the standard Code of monastic

life for all Western Christendom. Benedict demanded of his monks a

‘novitiate’ of twelve months during which they could test their call to

a life of continual sacrifice. At the end of this time, if the novice

still continued resolute in his intention and was approved by the

monastic authorities, he was accepted into the brotherhood by taking

the perpetual vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity, the three

conditions of life most hostile to the lust of possession, turbulence,

and sensuality that dominated the Middle Ages. To these vows were added

the obligation of manual labour--seven hours work a day in addition to

the recitation of prayers enjoined on the community.

The faithful Benedictine at least could never be accused of idleness,

and to the civilizing influence of the ‘regulars’, as the monks were

called because they obeyed a rule (_regula_), in contrast to the

‘secular’ priests who lived in the world, Europe owed an immense debt

of gratitude.

Sometimes it is said contemptuously that the monks of the Middle Ages

chose beautiful sites on which to found luxurious homes. Certainly they

selected as a rule the neighbourhood of rivers and lakes, water being

a prime necessity of life, and in such neighbourhoods raised chapels

and monasteries that have become the architectural wonder of the world.

Yet many of these wonders began in a circle of wooden huts built on a

reclaimed marsh, and it was the labour of the followers of St. Benedict

that replaced wood by stone and swamps by gardens and farms.

Where the barbarian or feudal anarchist burned and destroyed, the

monk of the Middle Ages brought back the barren soil to pasturage or

tillage; and just as he weeded, sowed, and planted as part of his

obligation to God, so from the produce of his labours he provided for

the destitute at his gate, or in his cloister schools supplied the

ignorant with the rudiments of knowledge and culture. The monasteries

were centres of mediaeval life, not, like the castles, of death. In

his quiet cell the monk chronicler became an historian; the copyist

reproduced with careful affection decaying manuscripts; the illuminator

made careful pictures of his day; the chemist concocted strange healing

medicines, or in his crucibles developed wondrous colours.

‘Good is it for us to dwell here, where man lives more purely, falls

more rarely, rises more quickly, treads more cautiously, rests more

securely, is absolved more easily, and rewarded more plenteously.’ This

is the saying of St. Bernard, one of the later monastic reformers;

and his ideal was the general conception of the best life possible as

understood in the Middle Ages. To the monasteries flocked the devout

seeking a home of prayer; but also the student or artist unable to

follow his bent in the turbulent world, and the man who despised or

feared the atmosphere of war. Even the feudal baron would pause in

his quarrels to make some pious gift to abbey or priory, a tribute

to a faith he admired but was too weak to practise. Sometimes he

came in later life, a penitent who, toiling like his serf, sought in

the cloister the salvation of his soul. ‘In the monasteries,’ says a

mediaeval German, ‘one saw Counts cooking in the kitchen and Margraves

leading their pigs out to feed.’

Monasticism, with its belief in brotherhood, was a leveller of class

distinctions; but, like the rest of the Church, it found in the popular

enthusiasm it aroused the path of temptation. Men, we have seen,

entered the cloister for other reasons than pure devotion to God;

and the rule of Benedict proving too strict they yielded secretly to

sins that perhaps were not checked or reproved because abbots in time

ceased to be saints and became, like the bishops, feudal landlords with

worldly interests. In this way vice and laziness were allowed to spread

and cling like bindweed.

Throughout the Middle Ages there were times of corruption and failure

amongst the monastic Orders, followed by waves of sweeping reform and

earnest endeavour, when once again the Cross was raised as an emblem of

sacrifice and drew the more spiritual of men unto it.

[Sidenote: Foundation of Cluni]

In 910 the monastery of Cluni was founded in Burgundy, and, freed from

the jurisdiction of local bishops by being placed under the direct

control of the Pope, was able to establish a reformed Benedictine

Order. Its abbot was recognized not only as the superior of the

monastery at Cluni but also of ‘daughter’ houses that sprang up all

over Europe subject to his discipline and rule.

Other monastic Orders founded shortly after this date were those of the

Carthusians and Cistercians.

In their desire to combat worldliness the early Carthusians, or monks

of the monastery of Chartreux, carried on unceasing war against the

pleasures of the world. Strict fasting for eight months in the year;

one meal a day eaten in silence and alone; no conversation with other

brethren save at a weekly meeting; this was the background to a life of

toil and prayer.

The monastery of Citeaux in southern France, from which the Cistercians

take their name, was another attempt to live in the world but not of

it. ‘The White Monks’, so called from the colour of their woollen

frocks, sought solitudes in which to build their houses. Their churches

and monasteries remain among the glories of architecture; but through

fear of riches they refused to place in them crosses of gold and silver

or to allow their priests to wear embroidered vestments. No Cistercian

might recite the service of the Mass for money or be paid for the cure

of souls. With his hands he must work for his meagre fare, remembering

always to give God thanks for the complete self-renunciation to which

he was pledged by his Order.

[Sidenote: St. Bernard of Clairvaux]

Chief amongst the Cistercian saints is Bernard (1090-1153), a

Burgundian noble, who in 1115 founded a daughter monastery of his Order

at Clairvaux, and as its head became one of the leaders of mediaeval

thought. When he was only twenty he had appeared before the Abbot of

Citeaux with a band of companions, relations and friends whom his

eloquence had persuaded to enter the monastery with him. Throughout his

life this power over others and his fearlessness in making use of this

influence were his most vivid characteristics. ‘His speech’, wrote some

one who knew him, ‘was suited to his audience ... to country-folk he

spoke as though born and bred in the country, and so to other classes

as though he had been always occupied with their business. He adapted

himself to all, desiring to gain all for Christ.’

In these last words lie his mission and the secret of his success.

Never was his eloquence exerted for himself, and so men who wished

to criticize were overborne by his single-minded sincerity. Severe

to his own shortcomings, gentle and humble to his brethren, ready to

accept reproof or to undertake the meanest task, Bernard was fierce and

implacable to the man or the conditions that seemed to him to stand in

the way of God’s will.

‘I grieve over thee, my son Geoffrey,’ he wrote to a young monk who

had fled the austerities of Clairvaux.... ‘How could you, who were

called by God, follow the Devil, recalling thee?... Turn back, I

say, before the abyss swallows thee ... before bound hand and foot

thou art cast into outer darkness ... shut in with the darkness of

death.’

To the ruler of France he sent a letter of reproof ending with the

words: ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God

even for thee, O King!’ and his audacity, instead of working his ruin,

brought the leading clergy and statesmen of Europe to the cells of

Clairvaux as if to some oracle’s temple, to learn the will of God.

From his cell St. Bernard preached the Second Crusade, reformed abuses

in the Church, deposed an Anti-Pope, and denounced heretics. In his

distrust of human reason, trying to free itself from some of the

dogmatic assertions of early Christian thought, he represented the

narrow outlook of his age: but in his love of God and through God of

humanity he typifies the spiritual charm that like a thread of gold

runs through all the dross of hardness and treachery in the mediaeval

mind.

‘Do not grieve,’ he wrote to the parents of a novice ... ‘he goes

to God but you do not lose him ... rather through him you gain many

sons, for all of us who belong to Clairvaux have taken him to be a

brother and you to be our parents.’

To St. Bernard self-renunciation meant self-realization, the laying

down of a life to find it again purified and enriched; and this was the

ideal of monasticism, often misunderstood and discredited by its weaker

followers, like all ideals, but yet the glory of its saints.

XI

THE INVESTITURE QUESTION

We have said that in ‘the Oath of Strasbourg’[9] it was possible to

distinguish the infant nations of France and Germany. This is true--yet

Germany, though distinct from her neighbours, was to remain all through

the Middle Ages rather an agglomeration of states than a nation as we

understand the word to-day.

One reason for the absence of any common policy and ambitions was that

Charlemagne, though he had conquered the Saxons and other Germanic

tribes, had never succeeded in welding them into one people. Under

his successors the different races easily slipped back into regarding

themselves rather as Saxons, Franconians, or Bavarians than as Germans:

indeed the Bohemians relapsed into heathendom and became once more

altogether uncivilized.

This instinct for separation was aided by the feudal system, since

rebel tenants-in-chiefs could count on provincial feeling to support

them against the king their overlord. It is hardly surprising, then, if

the struggle that broke out in Germany as elsewhere in Europe between

rulers and their feudal baronage was decided there in favour of the

baronage.

Perhaps if some strong king could have given his undivided attention

to the problem he might have succeeded, like William I of England,

in making himself real master of all Germany; but unfortunately the

rulers of the German kingdom were never free from foreign wars. Just as

the Norsemen had descended on the coasts of France, so Danes, Slavs,

and Hungarians were a constant menace to the civilization of Germany;

hordes of these barbarians breaking over the frontiers every year, and

even pillaging districts as far west as the Rhine.

German kings, in consequence of this external menace, had to rely

for the defence of their frontiers upon the military power of their

great vassals. They were even forced to create large estates called

‘Marks’ (march-lands) upon their northern and eastern borders to act

as national bulwarks. Over these ruled ‘Margraves’ (‘grafs’ or Counts

of the Mark) with a large measure of independence. Modern Prussia was

once the Mark of Brandenburg, a war state created against the Slav;

Austria the Mark placed in the east between Bavaria and the Hungarians;

Schleswig the Mark established to hold back the Danes.

Yet another cause told for disruption: the fact that when the

Carolingian line came to an end in Germany early in the tenth century

the practice sprang up of electing kings from among the chief princes

and dukes. Though this plan worked well if the electors made an honest

choice, yet it gave the feudal baronage a weapon, on the other hand, if

they wished to strike a bargain with a would-be ruler or to appoint a

weakling whose authority they could undermine.

[Sidenote: Henry ‘the Fowler’]

The first of the elected kings of Germany was Conrad of Franconia,

during whose reign the feudal system took strong root, and who ruled

rather through his barons than in opposition to their wishes. On his

death-bed he showed his honest desire for the welfare of Germany. ‘I

know,’ he declared, ‘that no man is worthier to sit on my throne than

my enemy Henry of Saxony.... When I am dead, take him the crown and the

sacred lance, the golden armlet, the sword, and the purple mantle of

the old kings.’ The princes, who followed his advice, found their new

ruler out hawking on the mountain side, and under the nickname Henry

‘the Fowler’ he became their king and one of Germany’s national heroes.

In his untiring struggle against invaders Henry I recalls the

Anglo-Saxon Alfred ‘the Great’, and like Alfred he was at first forced

to fly before his enemies. To the disgust of the great dukes he bought

a nine years’ peace from the Hungarians by paying tribute; but when

the enemy went away he at once began to build castles or ‘burgs’, and

filled them with soldiers under the command of ‘burgraves’. These

castles were placed all along the frontiers, and gradually villages

and towns gathered round them for safety.

In the tenth year the Hungarians came as usual to ask for the tribute

money, but Henry ordered a dead dog to be thrown at their messenger’s

feet.

‘In future this is all your master will get from us,’ he exclaimed, and

the answer, as he expected, provoked an immediate invasion. Instead

of being able to lay waste the countryside as of old, however, the

Hungarians now found ‘burgs’ well fortified and provisioned that they

could neither take nor leave with safety in their rear. When at last

they met Henry in pitched battle, they broke and fled before his

onslaught, declaring that the golden banner of St. Michael, carried at

the head of his troops, had by some wizardry contrived their ruin.

Besides repulsing invaders, Henry the Fowler imposed his will to

a considerable extent over his rebellious baronage. In another

chapter[10] we have noticed how he instituted ‘the order of

knighthood’ as a way of harnessing to his service the restless energy

of the younger sons of the nobles: he also tried to strengthen the

middle classes as a counterpoise to the baronage by encouraging the

construction of walled towns for the protection of merchants, while

he would hold his councils rather in towns than in the woods like

his predecessors, in order to attract people to settle there. Many

of the Marks owe their origin to Henry’s policy of strengthening the

border provinces; and in this and in his determination to subdue the

Hungarians he found an able successor in his son Otto I.

[Sidenote: Otto ‘the Great’]

Otto’s reign might from one aspect be called a history of wars. First

there were foreign wars--the subjugation of Denmark, whose king became

a German vassal; the reconquest and conversion of Bohemia; and also a

series of campaigns against the Hungarians, resulting at last in 955 in

a victory at Augsburg so complete that never again the hated invaders

dared to cross the border save in marauding bands.

But besides fighting against foreign neighbours Otto had a continual

struggle at home in order to reassert the authority of the crown over

the great duchies such as Lotharingia and Bavaria. When he was able to

do so he would replace the most turbulent of the dukes by members of

his own family, or he would make gifts of large estates to bishops,

hoping in this way to provide himself with loyal tenants-in-chief. In

this, however, he was not successful, for he found the feudal bishops

amongst his worst enemies; so that he turned at last for help to the

new type of Churchman, bred by the Cluniac reform movement--men of

learning and culture, monks in their religious observances, statesmen

in their outlook. These were at one with him in his desire for a united

Germany and a purer Church; but Otto was faced by a great problem when

he wished to reform and control his bishops. How far were the German

clergy under his jurisdiction? How far did they owe obedience only to

Rome, as they claimed if he tried to exert his authority over them?

Charlemagne had been able to deal easily with such difficulties, for

the Pope had been his ally, almost it might be said his vassal, and so

they could have but one mind on Church matters. By the time of Otto the

Great, however, German kings had long ceased to be emperors, and the

imperial title, bandied about from one Italian prince to another, had

become tarnished in the world’s eyes. Was it worth while, then, for a

German king to regain this title in order to gain control over the See

of St. Peter?

Students of history, able to test mediaeval policy by its ultimate

results, will answer ‘No’, seeing that German kings would have done

well to resist the will-of-the-wisp lure of the crowns of Lombardy and

Rome; but to Otto the question of interference in Italy bore a very

different aspect. Too great to be dazzled by the title of Emperor, too

busy to invade Italy merely for the sake of forcing the Pope to become

his ally, Otto found himself faced by the necessity of choosing whether

he would make himself lord of the lands on the other side of the Alps

or see one of his most powerful subjects, the Duke of Bavaria, do so

instead.

The occasion of this choice was the murder of Count Lothair of

Provence, one of the claimants to the throne of Italy. Lothair’s

widow, Adelaide, a Burgundian princess, appealed to Germany to avenge

her wrongs--a piece of knight-errantry with such prospects of profit

that several of the German princes and notably the Duke of Bavaria,

whose lands lay just to the north of the Alps, were only too willing

to undertake it. In 951 Otto the Great, anticipating their ambitions,

crossed the Alps with an army, rescued Adelaide from her husband’s

murderer, married her himself, and was crowned King of Italy at Pavia.

Recalled to Germany by foreign invasions, he appeared again in Italy

ten years later, and in February 962 was crowned Emperor by the Pope

at Rome. His successors, dropping the title ‘King of Germany’, claimed

henceforth to be ‘Kings of the Romans’ on their election and, after

their coronation by the Pope, ‘Holy Roman Emperors’--temporal overlords

of Christendom, as the Popes claimed to be spiritual viceroys.

This coronation of Otto the Great was a turning-point in the history

of Germany, though at the time it caused little stir. To Otto himself

it was merely the culminating success of his career, enabling him to

undertake without interference the reform of the German Church that he

had planned, and also to issue a charter that, while confirming the

Popes in their temporal possessions, insisted that they should take an

oath of allegiance to the Emperor before their consecration. By this

measure the Papacy became in the eyes of Europe merely the chief see

in the Emperor’s dominions; and under Otto’s immediate successors this

supremacy was not seriously disputed by the Popes themselves. In some

cases they were German nominees, ready to acknowledge the sceptre that

secured their election; but, even where this was not the case, there

was a general feeling that Rome had less to fear from the tyranny of

Emperors beyond the Alps than from the encroachments of the petty lords

of Italy.

The Dukes of Spoletum, Counts of Tuscany, and Barons of the Roman

Campagna had no respect at all for the head of Christendom except as

a pawn in their political moves. One of the most unscrupulous and

dissolute families in the vicinity of Rome, the Crescentii, who claimed

the title of Patrician, once granted by Eastern Emperors to Italian

viceroys, secured the Papacy for three successive members of their

house. Under the last of these, Benedict IX, a boy of twelve at the

time of his election, vice and tyranny walked through the streets of

Rome rampant and unashamed. The young Pope, described by a contemporary

as ‘a captain of thieves and brigands’, did not scruple to crown his

sins by selling his holy office in a moment of danger to another of his

family. As his excesses had already led the people of Rome to set up an

Anti-Pope, and as he himself withdrew his abdication very shortly, the

disgraceful state of affairs culminated in three Popes, each denouncing

one another, and each arming his followers for battle in the streets.

[Sidenote: Synod of Sutri]

The interference of the Emperor Henry III (a member of the Salian

House of Saxony) was welcomed on all sides, and at the Synod of Sutri

the rival Popes were all deposed and a German bishop, chosen by the

Emperor, elected in their place.

Henry III has been described by a modern historian as ‘the strongest

Prince that Europe had seen since Charlemagne’. Not only did he

succeed in subduing the unruly Bohemians and Hungarians, but he also

built Germany into the temporary semblance of a nation, mastering

her baronage and purifying her Church. His influence over Italy was

wholly for her good; but by the irony of fate his cousin Bruno, whom

he nominated to the See of St. Peter under the name of Leo IX, was

destined to lay the foundations of a Papacy independent of German

control.

Bruno himself insisted that he should be elected legally by the clergy

and people of Rome and, though of royal blood, he entered the city

barefoot as a penitent. Unlike the haughty Roman nobles to whom the

title ‘Pope’ had merely seemed an extra means of obtaining worldly

honour and pleasure, he remained after his consecration gentle and

accessible to his inferiors, and devoted his whole time to the work of

reform. At his first council he strongly condemned the sin of simony,

and he insisted on the celibacy of the clergy as the only way to free

them from worldly distractions and ambitions.

In order that his message might not seem intended for Italy alone, he

made long journeys through Germany and France. Everywhere he went he

preached the purified ideal of the Church upheld by the monks of Cluni;

but side by side with this he and his successors set another vision

that they strove to realize, the predominance of the Papacy in Italy as

a temporal power.

It was Leo IX who, dreading the Norman settlements in southern Italy

as a menace to the states of the Church, formed a league against the

invaders, but after his defeat at their hands, followed shortly by his

death, his successors, as we have seen, wisely concluded a peace that

left them feudal overlords of Apulia and Calabria.[11] Realizing that

to dominate the affairs of the peninsula they must remain at home,

future Popes sent ambassadors called ‘Legates’ to express and explain

their will in foreign countries; while in 1059, in a further effort

towards independence, Pope Nicholas II revolutionized the method of

papal elections. Popes, it was decreed, were no longer to be chosen

by the voice of the people and clergy of Rome generally, but only by

the ‘Cardinals’, that is, the principal bishops of the city sitting in

secret conclave. This body, the College of Cardinals, was to be free of

imperial interference.

[Sidenote: Pope Gregory VII]

Behind Pope Nicholas, in this daring policy of independence, stood one

of the most powerful figures of his age, Hildebrand, Archdeacon of

Rome. The son of a village carpenter, small, ill formed, insignificant

in appearance, he possessed the shrewd, practical mind and indomitable

will of the born ruler of men. It is said that in boyhood his

companions found him tracing with the chips and shavings of his

father’s workshop the words, ‘I shall reign from sea to sea’, yet he

began his career by deliberately accepting exile with the best of the

Popes deposed by the Council of Sutri; and it was Leo IX, who, hearing

of his genius, found him and brought him back to Rome.

Gradually not only successive Popes but the city itself grew to lean

upon his strength, and when in 1073 the Holy See was left vacant, a

general cry arose from the populace: ‘Hildebrand is Pope.... It is the

will of St. Peter!’

Taking the name of Gregory VII, Hildebrand reluctantly, if we are to

believe his own account, accepted the headship of the Church. Perhaps,

knowing how different was his ideal of the office from its reality,

he momentarily trembled at the task he had set himself; but once

enthroned there was no weakness in his manner to the world.

In his ears the words of Christ, ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I

will build my Church’, could never be reconciled with vassalage to

any temporal ruler. To St. Peter and his successors, not to emperors

or kings, had been given the power to bind or loose, and Gregory’s

interpretation of this text did not even admit of two co-equal powers

ruling Christendom by their alliance. ‘Human pride has created the

power of kings,’ he declared, ‘God’s mercy has created the power of

bishops ... the Pope is master of Emperors and is rendered holy by the

merits of his predecessor St. Peter. The Roman Church has never erred

and Holy Scripture proves that it never can err. To resist it is to

resist God.’

Such a point of view, if put to any practical test, was sure to

encounter firm if not violent opposition. Thus, when Gregory demanded

from William of Normandy the oath of fealty alleged to have been

promised by the latter to Alexander II in return for the Papal blessing

upon the conquest of England, the Conqueror replied by sending rich

gifts in token of his gratitude for papal support, but supplemented

them with a message as uncompromising as the Pope’s ideal: ‘I have

not sworn, nor will I swear fealty, which was never sworn by any of

my predecessors to yours.’ William thereupon proceeded to dispose of

benefices and bishoprics in his new kingdom as he chose, and even

went so far as to forbid the recognition of any new Pope within his

dominions without his leave, or the publication of papal letters and

decrees that had not received his sanction.

Perhaps if England had been nearer to Italy, or if William had misused

his authority instead of reforming the English Church, Gregory VII

might have taken up the gauntlet of defiance thus thrown at his feet.

Instead he remained on friendly terms with William; and it was in the

Empire, not in England, that the struggle between Church and State

began.

The Emperor Henry III, who had summoned the Synod of Sutri, had been

a great ruler, great enough even to have effected a satisfactory

compromise with Hildebrand, but, though before he died he succeeded

in securing his crown for his son Henry, a boy of six, he could not

bequeath him strength of character or statesmanship. Thus from his

death, in 1056, the fortunes of his House and Empire slowly waned.

It is difficult to estimate the natural gifts of the new ruler of

Germany, for an unhappy upbringing warped his outlook and affections.

Left at first under the guardianship of his mother, the Empress Agnes,

the young Henry IV was enticed at the age of eleven on board a ship

belonging to Anno, the ambitious Archbishop of Cologne. While he was

still admiring her wonders the ship set sail up the Rhine, and though

the boy plunged overboard in an effort to escape his kidnappers he was

rescued and brought back. For the next four years he remained first the

pupil of Archbishop Anno, who punished him for the slightest fault with

harsh cruelty and deprived him of all companionship of his own age, and

then of Adalbert, Archbishop of Bremen, who indulged his every whim and

passion.

At length, at the age of fifteen, handsome and kingly in appearance,

but utterly uncontrolled and dissolute in his way of life, Henry

was declared of age to govern for himself, and straightway began to

alienate his barons and people. He had been married against his wish

to the plain daughter of one of his Margraves, and expressed his

indignation by ill-treating and neglecting her, to the wrath of her

powerful relations: he also built castles on the hill-tops in Saxony,

from which his troops oppressed the countryside: but the sin for which

he was destined to be called to account was his flagrant misuse of his

power over the German Church.

At first, when reproved by the Pope for selling bishoprics and

benefices, Henry was apologetic in his letters; but he had no real

intention of amending his ways and soon began to chafe openly at Roman

criticism and threats. At last acrimonious disputes came to a head in

what is called the ‘Investiture Question’, and because it is a problem

that affected the whole relations of Church and State in the eleventh

century it is important to understand what it exactly meant to Europe.

Investiture was the ceremony by which a temporal ruler, such as a

king, transferred to a newly chosen Church official, such as a bishop,

the lands and rights belonging to his office. The king would present

the bishop with a ring and crozier and the bishop in return would

place his hands between those of the king and do him homage like a lay

tenant-in-chief.

The Roman See declared that it was not fitting for hands sacred to the

service of God at His altar to be placed in submission between those

that a temporal ruler had stained with the blood of war. Behind this

figure of speech lay the real reason, the implication that if the ring

and crozier were to be taken as symbols of lands and offices, bishops

would tend to regard these temporal possessions as the chief things

in their lives, and the oath of homage they gave in exchange as more

important than their vow to do God’s service.

Gregory VII believed that he could not reform the Church unless he

could detach its officials from dependence on lay rulers who could

bribe or intimidate them; and in the age in which he lived he could

show that for every William of Normandy ready to ‘invest’ good

churchmen there were a hundred kings or petty rulers who only cared

about good tenants, that is, landlords who would supply them faithfully

with soldiers and weapons.

As a counter argument temporal rulers maintained that churchmen who

accepted lands and offices were lay tenants in this respect, whatever

Popes might choose to call them. The king who lost the power of

investing his bishops lost control over wealthy and important subjects,

and since he would also lose the right to refuse investiture he might

find his principal bishoprics in the hands of disloyal rebels or of

foreigners about whom he knew nothing.

The whole question was complicated, largely because there was so much

truth on both sides; Gregory, however, forced the issue, and early in

1075, in a Synod held at Rome, put forth the famous decree by which

lay investiture was henceforth sternly forbidden. Henry IV, on the

other hand, spoiled his case by his wild disregard of justice. In the

same year he appointed a new archbishop to the important See of Milan

and invested him without consulting Gregory VII at all; he further

proceeded to appoint two unknown foreigners to Italian bishoprics.

Angry at the letter of remonstrance which these acts aroused he called

a church council at Worms in the following year, and there induced the

majority of German bishops very reluctantly to declare Gregory deposed.

‘Henry, King not by usurpation but by God’s grace, to Hildebrand,

henceforth no Pope but false monk....’ Thus began his next letter to

the Roman pontiff, to which Hildebrand replied by excommunicating his

deposer.

‘Blessed Peter ... as thy representative I have received from God

the power to bind and loose in Heaven and on earth. For the honour

and security of thy Church, in the name of God Almighty, I prohibit

Henry the King, son of Henry the Emperor, ... from ruling Germany

and Italy. I release all Christians from the oaths of fealty they

may have taken to him, and I order that no one shall obey him.’

This decree provided occasion for all German nobles whom Henry IV had

alienated to gather under the banner of the papal legate, and for the

oppressed Saxon countryside to renew the serious revolt which had

broken out two years before. Even the German bishops grew frightened of

the part they had played in deposing Gregory, so that the once-powerful

ruler found himself looked upon as an outlaw with scarcely a real

friend, save the wife he had ill-treated, and no hope save submission.

In the winter of 1066, as an old story tells, when the mountains were

frozen hard with snow and ice, he and his wife and one attendant

crossed the Alps on sledges, and sought the Pope in his castle of

Canossa, built amidst the highest ridges of the Apennines.

Gregory coldly refused him audience. The King, he intimated, might

declare that he was repentant, he had done so often in the past, but

words were not deeds. Putting aside his royal robes and clad in a

penitent’s woollen tunic, Henry to show his sincerity remained barefoot

for three days like a beggar, in the castle yard. Then only on the

entreaty of some Italian friends was he admitted to the presence of the

Pope, who at his cry of ‘Holy Father, spare me!’ raised him up and gave

him formal forgiveness.

The scene at Canossa is so dramatic in its display of Hildebrand’s

triumph and the Emperor’s humiliation that it has lived in the world’s

memory: yet it was no closing act in their struggle, but merely an

episode that passed and left little mark. Henry IV, as soon as he could

win himself a following in Germany and Italy, returned to the practice

of lay investiture, and Gregory VII, who had never believed in his

sincerity, continued to denounce him and plan the coronation of rival

emperors.

Imperial ambitions at last reached their height, for Henry IV

succeeded in inducing German and Italian bishops to depose Gregory

once more and even appoint an Anti-Pope, in whose name imperial armies

ravaged Lombardy, forced their way as far south as Rome, and besieged

Hildebrand in the castle of St. Angelo. From this predicament he was

rescued by the Normans of South Italy under Robert Guiscard; but these

ruthless vassals of the Church massacred and looted the Holy City

directly they had scaled the walls, and when they turned homewards,

carrying Gregory VII with them, they left half Rome in ruins.

Gregory VII died not long afterwards, homeless and deposed, but

with unshaken confidence in the righteousness of his cause. ‘I have

loved justice and hated iniquity,’ he said, during his last illness,

‘therefore I die in exile.’ ‘In exile thou couldst not die,’ replied

a bishop standing at his bedside. ‘Vicar of Christ and His Apostles,

thou hast received the nations for thine inheritance and the uttermost

parts of the earth for thy possession.’ Future history was to show that

Hildebrand in defeat had achieved more than his rival in victory.

Henry IV outlived his enemy by twenty-one years, but they were bitter

with disillusionment. Harassed by Gregory VII’s successors who

continued to advocate papal supremacy, faced by one rebellion after

another in Germany and Italy, Henry IV yielded at last to weariness and

old age, when he found his sons had become leaders of the forces most

hostile to him. Even in his submission to their demands he found no

peace, for he was thrust into prison, compelled to abdicate, and left

to die miserably of starvation and neglect.

In the reign of his son, Henry V, a compromise on the ‘Investiture

Question’ was arranged between Church and Empire. By the Concordat

of Worms it was agreed first that rulers should renounce their claim

to invest bishops and abbots with the ring and crozier. These were

to be given by representatives of the Church to candidates chosen

and approved by them; but the second point of importance was that

this ceremony must take place in the presence of the king or his

representative, to whom the new bishop or abbot would at once do homage

for his lands and offices.

Almost a similar settlement had been arrived at between Church and

State in England some fifteen years earlier, arising out of the refusal

of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, to do homage to Henry I, the

Conqueror’s son. In this case there was no clash of bitterness and

dislike, for the old archbishop was perfectly loyal to the king at

heart, though prepared to go to the stake on a matter of conscience, as

this question had become to earnest churchmen. His master, on his side,

respected Anselm’s saintly character and only wished to safeguard his

royal rights over all his subjects.

Compromise was therefore a matter of rejoicing on both sides, and

with the decisions of the Council at Worms investiture ceased to be a

vital problem. Its importance lies in the fact that it was one of the

first battles between Church and State and, though a compromise, yet

a formal victory for the Church. The dependence of the Papacy on the

imperial government that Europe had considered natural in the days of

Charlemagne, or of Otto the Great, was a thing of the past, for the

acknowledgement of ecclesiastical freedom from lay supremacy, one of

the main issues for which Hildebrand had struggled, schemed, and died,

had been won by his successors following in his steps.

_Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368-73._

Pope Benedict IX 1033-48

Pope Leo IX 1048-54

Pope Nicholas II 1058-61

XII

THE EARLY CRUSADES

The imperial standards of Constantinople were designed with a

two-headed eagle typifying Constantine’s rule over the kingdoms of

East and West. Towards the end of the eleventh century this emblem had

become more symbolic of the Emperor’s anxious outlook upon hostile

neighbours. With Asia Minor practically lost by the establishment of a

Mahometan dynasty at Nicea within one hundred miles of the Christian

capital, with the Bulgarians at the gates of Adrianople, and the

Normans and the Popes in possession of his Greek patrimony in Italy,

Alexius Commenus, when he ascended the throne of the Caesars, found

himself master of an attenuated Empire, consisting mainly of strips of

Grecian seaboard.

Yet in spite of her shorn territories Constantinople remained the

greatest city in Europe, not merely in her magnificent site and

architecture, nor even in her commerce, but in the hold she preserved

over the imagination of men.

Athanaric the Goth had exclaimed that the ruler of Constantinople

must be a god: eleventh-century Europe accepted him as mortal, but

still crowned the lord of so great a city with a halo of awe. It was

Constantinople that had won the Russians, the Bulgars, and the Slavs

from heathenism to Christianity, not to the Catholicism of Western

Europe but the Greek interpretation of the Christian faith called

by its believers the ‘orthodox’. It was Constantinople whose gold

coin, ‘the byzant’, was recognized as the medium of exchange between

merchants of all nations. It was Constantinople again, her wealth, her

palaces, her glory of pomp and government, that drew Russian, Norse,

and Slav adventurers to serve as mercenaries in the Emperor’s army,

just as auxiliaries had clamoured of old to join the Roman eagles.

Amongst the ‘Varangar’ bodyguard, responsible for the safety of the

Emperor’s person, were to be found at one time many followers of Harold

the Saxon, who, escaping from a conquered England, gladly entered the

service of a new master to whom the name ‘Norman’ was also anathema.

Alexius Commenus was in character like his Empire--a shrinkage from the

dimensions of former days. There was nothing of the practical genius

of a Constantine in his unscrupulous ability to mould small things

to his advantage; nothing of the heroic Charlemagne in his eminently

calculating courage. Yet his daughter, Anna Commena, who wrote a

history of his reign, regarded him as a model of imperial virtues;

and his court, that had ceased to distinguish pomp from greatness and

elaborate ceremonial from glory, echoed this fiction. It was this

mixture of pretension and weakness, of skill and cunning, of nerve and

treachery, so typical of the later Eastern Emperors, that made the

nations of Western Europe, while they admired Byzantium, yet use the

word ‘Byzantine’ as a term of mingled contempt and dislike.

The Emperor, on his part, had no reason to love his Western neighbours.

The Popes had robbed him of the Exarchate of Ravenna: they had set up

a Headship of the Church in Rome deaf to the claims of Constantinople.

When in the eighth century the Emperor Leo, the Isaurian,[12] earned

the nickname of ‘Iconoclast’, or ‘Image-breaker’, by a campaign of

destruction amongst devotional pictures and images that he denounced as

idolatrous, Rome definitely refused to accept this ruling on behalf of

Western Christendom.

This was the beginning of the actual schism between the Eastern and

Western Churches that had been always alien in their outlook. In the

ninth century the breach widened, for Pope Nicholas I supported a

Patriarch, or Bishop of the Eastern Church, deposed by the Emperor and

excommunicated his rival and successor, while subsequent disputes were

rendered irreconcilable in the middle of the eleventh century when the

Patriarch of Constantinople closed the Latin churches and convents in

his diocese and publicly declared the views of Rome heretical.

Besides the Pope at Rome the Eastern Empire possessed other foes in

Italy. Chief of these were the Normans, who, not content with acquiring

Naples, had, under the leadership of Robert Guiscard and his son

Bohemund, captured the famous port of Durazzo on the Adriatic and

invaded Macedonia. From this province they were only evicted by Alexius

Commenus after wearying campaigns of guerrilla warfare to which his

military ability was better suited than to pitched battles or shock

tactics.

[Sidenote: The Venetian Republic]

More subtly dangerous than either Pope or Normans was the commercial

rivalry of the merchant cities of the Mediterranean, Pisa, Genoa,

and Venice. It was Venice who from behind her barrier of islands had

watched Attila the Hun lead away his armies in impotent rage.[13] It

was Venice again who of the North Italian states successfully resisted

the feudal domination of Western Emperors and kept her own form of

republican government inviolate of external control. It was the young

Venice, the ‘Queen of the Adriatic’ as her sons and daughters proudly

called her, that could alone in her commercial splendour and arrogance

compare with the dying glory of Constantinople.

Alexius Commenus in his struggles against Robert Guiscard had been

compelled to call twice upon Venice for the assistance of her fleet;

but he paid dearly for this alliance in the trading privileges he was

forced to grant in Eastern waters. Wherever in the Orient Venetian

merchants landed to exchange goods they were quick to establish a

political footing; and the world mart on the Adriatic, into which

poured the silks and dyes, the sugar and spices of Asia, built up under

the rule of its ‘Doges’, or Dukes, a national as well as a commercial

reputation.

In 1095 necessity spurred Alexius Commenus to appeal not merely to

Venice for succour but to Pope Urban II and all the leading princes of

Western Europe.

‘From Jerusalem to the Aegean,’ he wrote, ‘the Turkish hordes

have mastered all: their galleys, sweeping the Black Sea and the

Mediterranean, threaten the imperial city itself, which, if fall it

must, had better fall into the hands of Latins than of Pagans.’

These Turks, or ‘Tartars’, to whom he referred, were the cause of

the Eastern Empire’s sudden danger. Descendants of a Mongol race in

central Asia, of which the Huns were also an offshoot, they turned

their faces westward some centuries later than the ancestors of Attila,

fired by the same love of battle and bloodshed and the same contempt

for civilization. To them the wonderful Arabian kingdom, moulded by

successive Caliphs of Bagdad out of Eastern art, luxury, and mysticism,

held no charm save loot. Conquered Greece had endowed Rome with its

culture, but the inheritance of Haroun al-Raschid bequeathed to its

conquerors only the fighting creed of Islam.

Mahometans in faith, the Turkish armies, more dangerous than ever

because more fanatical, swept over Persia, Syria, Palestine, and Asia

Minor, subjugating Arabs and Christians until they came almost to the

straits of the Bosporus. Here it was that they forced Alexius Commenus

to realize his imminent danger and to turn to his enemies in Europe for

the protection of his tottering Empire.

The Latins, or Christians of the West, to whom he appealed, had reasons

enough of their own for answering him with ready promises of men and

money. From the early days of the Church it had been the custom of

pious folk, or of sinners anxious to expiate some crime, to set out in

small companies to visit the Holy Places in Jerusalem where tradition

held that Christ had preached, prayed, and suffered, that there they

might give praise to God and seek His pardon. These ‘pilgrimages’, with

their mixture of good comradeship, danger, and discomfort, had become

very dear to the popular mind, and, if not encouraged by the Mahometan

Arabs, had been at least tolerated. ‘Hospitals’, or sanctuaries, were

built for the refreshment of weary or sick travellers, and pilgrims on

the payment of a toll could wander practically where they chose.

On the advent of the Turks all was changed: the Holy Places became

more and more difficult to visit, Christians were stoned and beaten,

mulcted of their last pennies in extortionate tolls, and left to die of

hunger or flung into dungeons for ransom.

[Sidenote: The First Crusade]

Tradition says that a certain French hermit called Peter, who visited

Jerusalem during the worst days of Turkish rule, went one night to the

Holy Sepulchre weeping at the horrors he had seen, and as he knelt in

prayer, it seemed to him that Christ himself stood before him and bade

him ‘rouse the Faithful to the cleansing of the Holy Places’. With this

mission in mind he at once left the Holy Land and sought Pope Urban II,

who had already received the letter of Alexius Commenus and now, fired

by the hermit’s enthusiasm, willingly promised his support.

Whether Urban was persuaded by Peter or no is a matter of doubt, but he

at any rate summoned a council to Clermont in 1095, and there in moving

words besought the chivalry of Europe to set aside its private feuds

and either recover the Holy Places or die before the city where Christ

had given his life for the world. It is likely that he spoke from mixed

motives. A true inheritor of the theories of Gregory VII, he could not

but recognize in the prospect of a religious war, where the armies of

Europe would fight under the papal banner and at the papal will, the

exaltation of the Roman See. Was there not also the hope of bringing

the Greek Church into submission to the Roman as the outcome of an

alliance with the Greek Empire? Might not many turbulent feudal princes

be persuaded to journey to the East, who by happy chance would return

no more to trouble Europe?

Such calculations could Urban’s ambitions weave, but with them were

entwined unworldly visions that lent him a force and eloquence that no

calculations could have supplied. Wherever he spoke the surging crowd

would rush forward with the shout _Deus vult_, ‘It is the will of God,’

and this became the battle-cry of the crusaders.

‘The whole world,’ says a contemporary, ‘desired to go to the tomb

of our Lord at Jerusalem.... First of all went the meaner people,

then the men of middle rank, and lastly very many kings, counts,

marquesses, and bishops, and, a thing that never happened before,

many women turned their steps in the same direction.’

The order is significant and shows that the appeal of Urban and of

Peter the Hermit had touched first the heart of the masses to whom the

rich man’s temptation to hesitate and think of the morrow were of no

account. Corn had been dear in France before the Council of Clermont

owing to bad harvests; but the speculators who had bought up the grain

to sell at a high price to those who later must eat or die found it

left on their hands after the council was over. The men and women of

France were selling not buying, regardless of possible famine, that

they might find money to fulfil their burning desire to go to the Holy

Land and there win the Holy Sepulchre and gain pardon for their sins as

Pope and hermit had promised them.

The ordinary crusading route passed through the Catholic kingdom of

Hungary to Bulgaria and thence to Constantinople, where the various

companies of armed pilgrims had agreed to meet. It was with the

entry into Bulgaria, whose ‘orthodox’[14] king was secretly hostile

to the pilgrims, that trouble began. Food and drink were grudged

by the suspicious natives even to those willing to pay their way;

whereupon the utterly undisciplined forces could not be prevented from

retaliating on this inhospitality by fire and pillage. A species of

warfare ensued in which Latin stragglers were cut off and murdered by

mountain robbers, while the many ‘undesirables’, who had joined the

crusaders more in hope of loot and adventure than of pardon, brought an

evil reputation on their comrades by their greed and the brutality they

exhibited towards the peasants.

Reason enough was here to account for the pathetic failure of the

advance-guard of crusaders, the poor, the fanatic, the disreputable,

drawn together in no settled organization and with no leaders of

military repute.

Alexius Commenus, who had demanded an army, not a rabble, dealt

characteristically with the problem by shipping these first crusaders

in haste and unsupported to Asia Minor. There he left them to fall a

prey to the Turks, disease, and their own inadequacy, so that few ever

saw the coasts of their native lands again.

If the First Crusade began in tragedy it ended in triumph, through the

arrival in Constantinople of a second force from the West, this time of

disciplined troops under the chief military leaders of Europe. Alexius

Commenus had good cause to remember the prowess of his old enemy,

Bohemund, son of Robert Guiscard, who rode at the head of his Sicilian

Normans, while other names of repute were Godfrey de Bouillon, Duke of

Lorraine, and Robert, the eldest son of William the Conqueror, with

Archbishop Odo of Bayeux, his uncle.

‘Some of the crusaders’, wrote Anna Commena, ‘were guileless men

and women, marching in all simplicity to worship at the tomb

of Christ; but there were others of a more wicked kind, to wit

Bohemund and the like: such men had but one object--to obtain

possession of the imperial city.’

These suspicions, perhaps well founded, were natural to the daughter

of the untrustworthy Alexius Commenus, who trusted nobody. Hating to

entertain at his court so many well-armed and often insolent strangers,

yet fearing in his heart to aid their advance lest they should set up

a rival kingdom to his own, the Emperor, having cajoled the leaders

into promises of homage for any conquests they might make, at length

transported them and their followers across the Hellespont.

The Christian campaign began with the capture of Nicea in 1097,

followed by a victorious progress through Asia Minor. For nearly a

year the crusaders besieged and then were in their turn besieged in

Antioch, enduring tortures of hunger, thirst, and disease. When courage

flagged and hope seemed nearly dead, it was the supposed discovery,

by one of the chaplains, of the lance that had pierced Christ’s side

as he hung upon the Cross that kept the Christians from surrender.

With this famous relic borne in their midst by the papal legate, the

crusaders flung the gates of Antioch wide and issued forth in a charge

so irresistible in its certainty of victory that the Turks broke and

fled. The defeat became a rout, and Antioch remained as a Christian

principality under Bohemund, when the crusaders marched southwards

along the coast route towards Jerusalem.

They came in sight of this, the goal of their ambitions, on 7th June,

1099, not garbed as knights and soldiers but barefooted as humble

pilgrims, kneeling in an ecstasy of awe upon the Mount of Olives. This

mood of prayer passed rapidly into one of fierce determination, and on

15th June Godfrey de Bouillon and his Lorrainers forced a breach in

the massive walls, and, hacking their way with sword and spear through

the streets, met their fellow crusaders triumphantly entering from

another side. The scene that followed, while in keeping with mediaeval

savagery, has left a shameful stain upon the Christianity it professed

to represent. Turks, Arabs, and Jews, old men and women, children

and babies, thousands of a defenceless population, were deliberately

butchered as a sacrifice to the Christ who, dying, preached

forgiveness. The crusaders rode their horses up to the knees in the

blood of that human shambles. ‘There might no prayers nor crying of

mercy prevail,’ says an eyewitness. ‘Such a slaughter of pagan folk had

never been seen nor heard of. None knew their number, save God alone.’

Their mission accomplished, the majority of crusaders turned their

faces homewards, but before they went they elected Godfrey de Bouillon

to be the first ruler of the new Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, with

Antioch and Edessa in the north as dependent principalities.

Godfrey reigned for almost a year, bearing the title ‘Guardian of the

Holy Grave’, since he refused to be crowned master of a city where

Christ had worn a wreath of thorns. His protest is typical of the

genuine humility and love of God that mingled so strangely in his veins

with pride and cruelty. When he died he left a reputation for courage

and justice that wove around his memory romance and legends like the

tales of Charlemagne.

[Sidenote: The Military Orders]

His immediate successors were a brother and nephew, and it is in the

reign of the latter that we first hear mention of the Military Orders,

so famous in the crusading annals of the Middle Ages. These were the

‘Hospitallers’ or ‘Knights of St. John’, inheritors of the rents

and property belonging to the old ‘Hospital’ founded for pilgrims in

Jerusalem, and the ‘Templars’, so called from their residence near the

sight of Solomon’s Temple.

Both Orders were bound like the monks by the vows of poverty,

obedience, and chastity; but the work demanded of them, instead of

labour in the fields, was perpetual war against the infidel. ‘When the

Templars are summoned to arms,’ said a thirteenth-century writer, ‘they

inquire not of the number but of the position of their foe. They are

lions in war, lambs in the house: to the enemies of Christ fierce and

implacable, but to Christians kind and gracious.’

Yet a third Order, that of the Teutonic Knights, was founded in the

twelfth century, arising like that of the Knights of St. John out

of a hospital, but one that had been built by German merchants for

crusaders of their own race. At the end of the thirteenth century the

Order removed to the southern Baltic, and on these cold inhospitable

shores embarked on a crusade against the heathen Lithuanians. It is of

interest to students of modern history to note that in the sixteenth

century the last Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights became converted

to the doctrines of Luther, suppressed his Order, and absorbed the

estates into an hereditary fief, the Duchy of Brandenburg. On the

‘Mark’[15] and Duchy of Brandenburg, both founded with entirely

military objects, was the future kingdom of Prussia built.

The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem (1099-1187) survived for more than

three-quarters of a century. That it had been established with such

comparative ease was due not only to the fighting quality of the

crusaders, but also to the feuds that divided Turkish rulers of the

House of Seljuk. The Turks far outnumbered the Christians, and whenever

the Caliphs of Bagdad and Cairo should sink their rivalries, or one

Moslem ruler in the East gain supremacy over all others, the days of

the small Latin kingdom in Palestine would be numbered. In the meantime

the Latins maintained their position with varying fortune, now with the

aid of fresh recruits from Europe and Genoese and Venetian sailors,

capturing coast towns, now losing land-outposts there were insufficient

garrisons to protect.

It was the loss of Edessa that roused Europe to its Second Crusade,

this time through the eloquence of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who

persuaded not only Louis VII of France and his wife, Queen Eleanor,

but also the at first reluctant Emperor Conrad III, to bind the Cross

on their arms and go to the succour of Christendom. ‘The Christian who

slays the unbeliever in the Holy War is sure of his reward, more sure

if he is slain.’

The pictures of the glories of martyrdom and of earthly conquests

painted by the famous monk were so vivid that on one occasion he was

forced to tear up his own robes to provide sufficient crosses for the

eager multitude, but the triumph to which he called so great a part

of the populations of France and Germany proved the beckoning hand of

death and failure.

Both the King and Emperor reached Palestine--Louis VII even visited

Jerusalem--but when they sailed homewards they had accomplished nothing

of any lasting value. Edessa remained under Mahometan rule and the

Christians had been forced to abandon the siege of Damascus that they

had intended as a prelude to a victorious campaign. What was worse was

that Louis and Conrad had left the chivalry of their armies in a track

of whitening bones where they had retreated, victims not merely of

Turkish prowess and numbers but of Christian feuds, Greek treachery,

the failure of food supplies, and disease.

The Byzantine Empire owed to the first crusaders large tracts of

territory recovered from the Turks in Asia Minor; but, angered by

broken promises of homage on the part of Latin rulers, the Greeks

repaid this debt in the Second Crusade by acting as spies and secret

allies of the Mahometans. On occasions they were even to be found

fighting openly side by side with the Turks, yet more merciless than

these pagans in their brutal refusal to give food and drink to the

stragglers of the Latin armies whom they had so basely betrayed.

The widows and orphans of France and Germany, when their rulers

returned reft both of glory and men-at-arms, reviled St. Bernard as a

false prophet; but though he responded sternly that the guilt lay not

with God but in the worldliness of those who had taken the Cross, he

was sorely troubled at the shattering of his own hopes.

‘The Sons of God’, he wrote wearily, ‘have been overthrown in the

desert, slain with the sword, or destroyed by famine. We promised

good things and behold disorder. The judgements of the Lord are

righteous, but this one is an abyss so deep that I must call him

blessed who is not scandalized therein.’

[Sidenote: Fall of Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem]

For some years after the Second Crusade Western Europe turned a deaf

ear to entreaties for help from Palestine, and the Latin kingdom

of Jerusalem continued to decline steadily not only in territory

but in its way of life. The ennervating climate, the temptations

to an unhealthy luxury that forgot Christian ideals, the almost

unavoidable intermarriage of the races of East and West: all these

sapped the vitality and efficiency of the crusading settlers; while

the establishment of a feudal government at Jerusalem resulted in the

usual quarrels amongst tenants-in-chief and their sub-tenants. In these

feuds the Hospitallers and Templars joined with an avaricious rivalry

unworthy of their creed of self-denial.

By 1183 Guy de Lusignan, who had succeeded in seizing the crown of

Jerusalem by craft on the failure of the royal line, could only

count on the lukewarm support of the majority of Latin barons. Thus

handicapped he found himself suddenly confronted by a union of the

Turks of Egypt and Syria under Saladin, Caliph of Cairo, a leader so

capable and popular that the downfall of divided enemies was inevitable.

At Hattin, near the Lake of Tiberias, on a rocky, waterless spot, the

Christians and Mahometans met for a decisive battle in the summer of

1187. The Latins, hemmed in by superior numbers, and tortured by the

heat and thirst, fought desperately beneath the relic of the True Cross

that they had borne with them as an incitement to their courage; but

the odds were too great, and King Guy himself was forced to surrender

when the defeat of his army had turned into a rout.

In the autumn of the same year Jerusalem, after less than a month’s

siege, opened her gates to the victor. Very different was the entry

of Saladin to that of the first crusaders; for instead of a general

massacre the Christian population was put to ransom, the Sultan and his

brother as an ‘acceptable alms to Allah’ freeing hundreds of the poorer

classes for whom enough money could not be provided.

[Sidenote: The Third Crusade]

Europe received the news that the Holy Sepulchre had returned to the

custody of the infidel with a shame and indignation that was expressed

in the Third Crusade. This time, however, no straggling bands of

enthusiasts were encouraged; and though the expedition was approved by

the Pope, neither he nor any famous churchman, such as Peter the Hermit

or St. Bernard of Clairvaux, were responsible for the majority of

volunteers.

The Third Crusade was in character a military campaign of three great

nations: of the Germans under the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, or the

‘Red Beard’; of the French under Philip II; and of the English under

Richard the ‘Lion-Heart’. Other princes famous enough in their lands

for wealth and prowess sailed also; and had there been union in that

great host Saladin might well have trembled for his Empire. He was

saved by the utter lack of cohesion and petty jealousies of his enemies

as well as by his statecraft and military skill.

While English and French rulers still haggled over the terms of an

alliance that would allow them to leave their lands with an easy

mind, Frederick Barbarossa, the last to take the Cross, set out from

Germany, rapidly crossed Hungary and Bulgaria, reduced the Greek

Emperor to hostile inactivity by threats and military display, and

began a victorious campaign through Asia Minor. Here fate intervened to

help the Mahometans, for while fording a river in Cilicia the Emperor

was swept from his horse by the current and drowned. So passed away

Frederick the ‘Red Beard’, and with him what his strong personality

had made an army. Some of the Teutons returned home, while those who

remained degenerated into a rabble, easy victims for their enemies’

spears and arrows.

In the meantime Richard of England (1189-99) and Philip of France had

clasped the hand of friendship, and, having levied the Saladin Tithe,

a tax of one-tenth of the possessions of all their subjects, in order

to pay their expenses, set sail eastwards from Marseilles. Both were

young and eager for military glory; but the French king could plot and

wait to achieve the ultimate success he desired while in Richard the

statesman was wholly sunk in the soldier of fortune.

To mediaeval chroniclers there was something dazzling in the

Lion-Heart’s physical strength, and in the sheer daring with which he

would force success out of apparently inevitable failure, or realize

some dangerous enterprise.

‘Though fortune wreaks her spleen on whomsoever she pleases, yet

was he not drowned for all her adverse waves.’

‘The Lord of Ages gave him such generosity of soul and endued him

with such virtues that he seemed rather to belong to earlier times

than these.’

‘To record his deeds would cramp the writer’s finger joints and

stun the hearer’s mind.’

Such are a few of the many flattering descriptions the obvious

sincerity of which paints the English king as he seemed to the men who

fought beside him.

A clever strategist, a born leader in battle, fearless himself, and

with a restless energy that inspired him when sick to be carried on

cushions in order to direct the fire of his stone-slingers, Richard

turned his golden qualities of generalship to dust by his utter lack

of diplomacy and tact. Of gifts such as these, that are one-half of

kingship, he was not so much ignorant as heedless. He ‘willed’ to do

things like his great ancestor, the Conqueror, but his sole weapon was

his right hand, not the subtlety of his brain.

‘The King of England had gallows erected outside his camp to hang

thieves and robbers on ... deeming it no matter of what country

the criminals were, he considered every man as his own and left no

wrong unavenged.’

This typical high-handed action, no doubt splendid in theory as a

method of discouraging the crimes that had helped to ruin previous

campaigns, was, when put into practice, sufficient alone to account for

the hatred Richard inspired amongst rulers whose subjects he thus chose

to judge and execute at will. The King of France, we are told, ‘winked

at the wrongs his men inflicted and received,’ but he gained friends,

while Richard’s progress was a series of embittered feuds, accepted

light-heartedly without any thought of his own future interests or of

those of the crusade.

Open rupture with Philip II of France was brought about almost before

they had left the French coasts through Richard’s repudiation of his

ally’s sister, to whom he had been bethrothed, since the English king

was now determined on a match with Berengaria, the daughter of the King

of Navarre.

In South Italy he acquired his next enemies in both claimants then

disputing the crown of Sicily, but before he sailed away he had

battered one of the rivals, the Norman, Tancred, into an outwardly

submissive ally after a battle in the streets of Messina. The other

rival, Henry, son of Frederick Barbarossa, and afterwards the Emperor

Henry VI, remained his enemy, storing up a grudge against him in the

hopes of a suitable opportunity for displaying it.

From Cyprus Richard, pursuing military glory, drove its Greek ruler

because he had dared to imprison some shipwrecked Englishmen; and thus,

adding an island to his dominions and the Eastern Emperor to his list

of foes, arrived at last in Palestine, in the summer of 1191, just in

time to join Philip II in the siege of Acre.

‘The two kings and peoples did less together than they would have done

separately, and each set but light store by the other.’ So the tale

runs in the contemporary chronicle; and when Acre at last surrendered

the feuds between the English and French had grown so irreconcilable

that Philip II, who had fallen sick, sulkily declared that he had

fulfilled his crusading vow and departed homewards. Not long afterwards

went Leopold, Archduke of Austria, nursing cold rage against Richard

in his heart because of an insult to his banner, that, planted on an

earthwork beside the arms of England, had been contemptuously flung

into the ditch below.

The Lion-Heart was now master of the enterprise in Palestine, a terror

to the Turks, who would use his name to frighten their unruly children

into submission; but though he remained fourteen months, the jealousies

and rivalries of his camp, with which he was not the man to contend,

kept him dallying on the coast route to Jerusalem, unable to proceed by

open warfare or to get the better of the wily Saladin in diplomacy.

News came that Philip II and the Emperor Henry VI were plotting with

his brother John for his ruin at home, and Richard, weary at heart and

sick in health, agreed to a three years and eight months’ truce that

left the Christians in the possession of the seaports of Jaffa and

Tyre, with the coastal territory between them, and gave pilgrims leave

to visit Jerusalem untaxed. He himself refused with tears in his eyes

even to gaze from a distant height on the city he could not conquer;

but, vowing he would return, he set sail for the West in the autumn of

1192, and with his departure the Third Crusade ended.

There were to be many other crusades, but none that expressed in the

same way as these first three expeditions the united aspirations of

Western Europe for the recovery of the land of the Holy Sepulchre.

National jealousies had ruined the chances of the Third Crusade, and

with every year the spirit of nationality was to grow in strength and

make common action less possible for Europe.

There is another reason also for the changing character of the

Crusades, namely, the loss of the religious enthusiasm in which they

had their origin. Men and women had believed that the cross on their

arms could turn sinners into saints, break down battlements, and

destroy infidels, as if by miracle. When they found that human passions

flourished as easily in Palestine as at home and that the way of

salvation was, as ever, the path of hard labour and constant effort,

they were disillusioned, and eager multitudes no longer clamoured to go

to the East. The Crusades did not stop suddenly, but degenerated with a

few exceptions into mere political enterprises, patronized now by one

nation, now by another: the armies recruited by mere love of adventure,

lust of battle, or the desire for plunder.

If Western Christendom had gained no other blessing by them, the early

Crusades at least freed the nations at a critical moment from a large

proportion of the unruly baronage that had been a danger to commerce

and good government. England paid heavily in gold for the Third

Crusade; but the money supplied by merchants and towns was well spent

in securing from the Lion-Heart privileges and charters that laid the

foundations of municipal liberty.

In France the results of the Second Crusade had been for the moment

devastating. Whole villages marched away, cities and castles stood

empty, and in some provinces it was said ‘scarce one man remained to

seven women’. In the orgy of selling that marked this exodus lands

and possessions rapidly changed hands, the smaller fiefs tending to

be absorbed by the larger fiefs and many of these in their turn by

the crown. Aided also by other causes, the King of France with his

increased demesnes and revenues came to assume a predominant position

in the national life.

Perhaps the chief effect of the Crusades on Europe generally was the

stimulus of new influences. Men and women, if they live in a rut and

feed their brains continually on the same ideas, grow prejudiced. It

is good for them to travel and come in contact with opposite views

of life and different manners and customs, however much it may annoy

them at the time. The Crusades provided this kind of stimulus not only

to the commerce of Mediterranean ports but in the world of thought,

literature, and art. The necessity of transport for large armies

improved shipbuilding; the cunning of Turkish foes the ingenuity

of Christian armourers and engineers; the influence of Byzantine

architecture and mosaics the splendour of Venice in stone and colour.

Western Europe continued to hate the East; but she could not live

without her silks, spices, and perfumes, nor forget to dream of the

fabulous wonders of Cathay. Thus the age of the Crusades will be seen

at last to merge its failures in the successes of an age of discovery,

that were to lay bare a new West and another road to the Orient.

XIII

THE MAKING OF FRANCE

Amongst those who took the Cross during the Second Crusade had

been Louis VII of France and his wife, Queen Eleanor. They were an

ill-matched pair, the King of mediocre ability, weak, peace-loving, and

pious; Eleanor, like all the House of Aquitaine, to which she belonged,

imperious, fierce-willed, and without scruples where she loved or

hated. Restless excitement had prompted her journey to Palestine; and

Louis was impelled by the scandal to which her conduct there gave rise,

and also by his annoyance that they had no son, to divorce her soon

after they returned home.

The foolishness of this step from a political point of view can be

gauged by studying a map of France in the middle of the twelfth

century, and remembering that, though king of the whole country in

name, Louis as feudal overlord could depend on little but the revenues

and forces to be raised from his own estates. These lay in a small

block round Paris, while away to the north, east, and south were the

provinces of tenants-in-chief three or four times as extensive in area

as those of the royal House of Capet. By marrying Eleanor, Countess of

Poitou and Duchess of Aquitaine, Louis had become direct ruler of the

middle and south-west of France as well as of his own crown demesnes,

but when he divorced his wife he at once forfeited her possessions.

[Sidenote: Henry II of England]

Worse from his point of view was to follow; for Eleanor made immediate

use of her freedom to marry Henry, Count of Anjou, a man fourteen years

her junior, but the most important tenant-in-chief of the King of

France and therefore, if he chose, not unlikely to prove that king’s

most dangerous enemy. This Henry, besides being Count of Anjou, Maine,

and Touraine, was also Duke of Normandy and King of England, for he was

a grandson of Henry I, and had in 1154 succeeded the feeble Stephen,

of the anarchy of whose reign we gave a slight description in another

chapter.[16]

Before dealing with the results of Henry’s marriage with the heiress

of Aquitaine it is well to note his work as King of England, for this

was destined to be the greatest and most lasting of all the many tasks

he undertook. In character Henry was the exact opposite of Stephen.

Where the other had wavered he pressed forward, utterly determined to

be master of his own land. One by one he besieged the rebel barons, and

levelled with the ground the castles they had built in order to torture

and oppress their neighbours. He also took from them the crown lands

which Stephen had recklessly given away in the effort to buy popularity

and support. When he found that many of these nobles had usurped the

chief offices of state he replaced them as quickly as he could by men

of humble rank and of his own choosing. In this way he appointed a

Londoner, Thomas Becket, whom he had first created Chancellor, to be

Archbishop of Canterbury; but the impetuous choice proved one of his

few mistakes.

Henry was so self-confident himself that he was apt to underrate the

abilities of those with whom life brought him in contact and to believe

that every other will must necessarily bow to his own. It is certain

that he found it difficult to pause and listen to reason, for his

restless energy was ever spurring him on to fresh ambitions, and he

could not bear to waste time, as he thought, in listening to criticisms

on what he had already decided. Chroniclers describe how he would

fidget impatiently or draw pictures during Mass, commending the priest

who read fastest, while he would devote odd moments of his day to

patching his old clothes for want of something more interesting to do.

[Illustration: FRANCE

in the reign of HENRY II]

Henry II was so able that haste in his case did not mean that his work

was slipshod. He had plenty of foresight, and did not content himself

with destroying those of his subjects who were unruly. He knew that he

must win the support of the English people if he hoped to build up

his estates in France, and this, though destined to bear no lasting

fruit, was ever his chief ambition. Henry II was one of the greatest of

English kings, but he had been brought up in France and remained more

of an Angevin than an Englishman at heart.

Instead of driving his barons into sulky isolation Henry summoned

them frequently to his _Magnum Concilium_, or ‘Great Council’, and

asked their advice. When they objected to serving with their followers

in France as often as he wished, he arranged a compromise that was

greatly to his advantage. This was the institution of ‘Scutage’, or

‘Shield-money’, a tax paid by the barons in order to escape military

service abroad. With the funds that ‘scutage’ supplied Henry could

hire mercenary troops, while the feudal barons lost a military

training-ground.

Besides consulting his ‘Great Council’, destined to develop into our

national parliament, Henry strengthened the _Curia Regis_, or ‘King’s

Court’, that his grandfather, Henry I, had established to deal with

questions of justice and finance. The barons in the time of Stephen had

tried to make their own feudal courts entirely independent of royal

authority; but Henry, besides establishing a central Court of Justice

to which any subject who thought himself wronged might appeal for a new

trial, greatly improved and extended the system of ‘Itinerant Justices’

whose circuits through the country to hold ‘Pleas of the Crown’ had

been instituted by Henry I.

This interference he found was resented not only by the feudal courts

but also by the Sheriffs of the County Courts, the Norman form of the

old ‘shire-moots’, a popular institution of Anglo-Saxon times. Of late

years the latter courts had more and more fallen under the domination

of neighbouring landowners, and in order to free them Henry held an

‘Inquest’ into the doings of the Sheriffs, and deposed many of the

great nobles who had usurped these offices, replacing them by men of

lesser rank who would look to him for favour and advice.

Other sovereigns in Europe adopted somewhat similar means of exalting

royal authority; but England was fortunate in possessing such popular

institutions as the ‘moots’ or ‘meetings’ of the shire and ‘hundred’,

through which Henry could establish his justice, instead of merely

through crown officials who would have no personal interest in local

conditions.