whom his mother named John, but whom his father, a rich merchant,
who had lately travelled in France, nicknamed ‘Francis’, or ‘the
Frenchman’. St. Dominic had developed his fiery faith in an austere and
intensely religious home; but Francis shared the light-hearted sociable
intercourse of an Italian town, and in boyhood was distinguished only
from his fellows by his generosity, innate purity, and irrepressible
joy in life.
When he grew up, Francis went to fight with the forces of Assisi
against the neighbouring city of Perugia, and was taken prisoner with
some others of his fellow townsmen and thrown into a dungeon. The
grumbling and bitterness of the majority during that twelve months of
captivity were very natural; but Francis, unlike the rest, met the
general discomfort with serene good-humour, even merriment, so that
not for the last time in his career he was denounced as crazy.
On his release and return home, the merchant Bernadone wished his son
to cut some figure in the world; and when the young man dreamed of
shining armour and military glory, he provided him with all he had
asked in the way of clothes and accoutrements and sent him in the train
of a wealthy noble who was going to fight in Naples.
Half-way on his journey Francis turned back to Assisi. God, he
believed, had told him to do so--why he could not tell. He tried to
follow the frivolous life he had led before, but now the laughter of
his companions seemed to ring hollow in his ears. It was as if they
found pleasure in a shadow, while he alone was conscious that somewhere
close was a reality of joy that, if he could only discover it, would
illumine the whole world.
Then his call came; but to the comfortable citizens of Assisi it seemed
the voice of madness. The young Bernadone, it was rumoured, had been
seen in the company of lepers and entertaining beggars at his table.
Almost all the money and goods he possessed he had given away; nay,
there came a final word that he had sold his horse and left his home to
live in a cave outside the town. The people shook their heads at such
folly and sympathized with the old Bernadone at this end to his fine
ambitions for his son.
Pietro Bernadone in truth had developed such a furious anger that he
appealed to the Bishop of Assisi, entreating him either to persuade
Francis to give up his new way of life or else to compel him to
surrender the few belongings he had still left. Francis was then
summoned, and in the bishop’s presence handed back to his father his
purse and even his very clothes. Penniless he stood before Assisi who
had often ridden through the streets a rich man’s heir, and it was a
beggar’s grey robe with a white cross roughly chalked upon it that he
adopted as the uniform of his new career.
His fellow townsmen had been moved by this complete renunciation; but
mingled at first with their admiration was a half-scornful incredulity.
They could understand saints ardent in defence of the Faith against
heresy, fiery in their denunciation of all worldly pleasures, for such
belonged to the religious atmosphere of the Middle Ages; but this son
of Assisi, who raised no banner in controversy, and found an equal joy
of life in the sunshine on a hill-side, in the warmth of a fire, in the
squalor of a slum, was at first beyond their spiritual vision.
Yet Francis Bernadone belonged as truly to the mediaeval world as St.
Dominic or St. Bernard of Clairvaux. In his spirit was mingled the
self-denial of the ‘Poor Men of Lyons’ and the romance of the Provençal
singers. These troubadours sang of knights whose glory and boast were
the life-service of some incomparable lady. Francis exulted in his
servitude to ‘My Lady Poverty’, his soul aflame with a chivalry in
contrast to which the conventional devotion of poets burned dim.
In honour of ‘My Lady Poverty’ the rich merchant’s son had cast away
his father’s affection, his military ambitions, his comfortable home
and gay clothes; and because of the strength and depth of his devotion
the surrender left no bitterness, only an intense joy that found beauty
amid the rags, disease, and filth of the most sordid surroundings.
[Sidenote: The Franciscan Order]
For some time it never occurred to Francis to found an Order from
amongst the men who, irresistibly drawn by his sincerity and joy,
wished to become his followers and share his privations and work
amongst the poor and sick. When they asked him for a ‘rule of life’,
such as that possessed by the monastic foundations, he led them to the
nearest church. In the words of a chronicler:
‘Commencing to pray (because they were simple men and did not know
where to find the Gospel text relating to the renouncing of the
world), they asked the Lord devoutly that He would deign to show
them His will at the first opening of the Book.
‘When they had prayed, the blessed Francis, taking in his hands the
closed Book, kneeling before the Altar opened it, and his eye fell
first upon the precept of the Lord, “If thou wouldst be perfect,
sell all that thou hast and give to the poor and thou shalt have
treasure in Heaven”: at which the blessed Francis was very glad and
gave thanks to God.’
Thus, in dedication to the service of ‘My Lady Poverty’, the Order of
the ‘Lesser Brethren’ (Minorites), or the ‘Poor Men of Assisi’, was
founded and received permission from Innocent III to carry on its work
amongst lepers and outcasts, though it was not till 1223 that formal
sanction for an Order was received from Rome.
Three years later St. Francis died, and the Friars who had lived with
him declared that he had followed Christ so closely that in his hands
and feet were found the ‘stigmata’ or marks of the wounds his Master
had endured in the agony of crucifixion. Tales have been handed down of
his humility and gentleness, of how, in the early days of the Order, he
would go himself and beg the daily bread for his small community rather
than send his companions to encounter possible insults; of how, in an
age that set little store even by human lives, he would rescue doves in
their cages that lads carried about for sale, and set them free; and of
how, because he read something of God’s soul in every creature that had
life, he preached to the birds as well as to men.
Brotherhood to the friar of Assisi meant the union not only of all
human souls but of all creation in the praise of God, and daily he
offered thanks for the help of his brothers, the sun, the fire, and the
wind; and for his sisters, the moon and the water; and for his mother,
the earth. It was his love of nature, most strange to the thirteenth
century, that is one of the strongest bonds between St. Francis and the
men and women of to-day.
‘He told the brother who made the garden’, says his chronicler,
‘not to devote all of it to vegetables, but to have some part for
flowering plants, which in their season produce “brother flowers”
for love of Him who is called “Flower of the Field” and “Lily of
the Valley”. He said, indeed, that Brother Gardener always ought to
make a beautiful patch in some part of the garden and plant it with
all sorts of sweet-smelling herbs, and herbs that produce beautiful
flowers, so that in their season they may invite men, seeing them,
to praise the Lord. For every creature cries aloud, “God made me
for thy sake, O Man!”’
Once the true beauty of St. Francis’s life was recognized, his
followers increased rapidly and no longer had to fear insult or injury
when they begged. Crowds, indeed, collected to hear them preach and to
bring them offerings. Some Franciscans settled in France and Germany,
and others went to England during the reign of Henry III and lived amid
the slums of London, Oxford, and Norwich, wherever it seemed to them
that they could best serve ‘Lady Poverty’.
St. Francis himself before he died had been puzzled and almost alarmed
by the popularity he had never courted, and he confessed sadly that,
instead of living the lives of Saints, some of those who professed to
follow him were ‘fain to receive praise and honour by rehearsing and
preaching the works that the Saints did themselves achieve’.
He was right in his fear for the future. Rules are a dead letter
without the spirit of understanding that gives them a true obedience;
and the secret of his joyous and unassuming self-denial Francis could
only bequeath to a few. Preaching, not for the sake of helping man
and glorifying God, but in order to earn the wealth and esteem their
founder had held as dross--this was the temptation to which the ‘Grey
Brethren’ succumbed, even within the generation that had known St.
Francis himself. Avarice and self-satisfaction, following their wide
popularity, soon led the Franciscans into quarrels with the other
religious Orders and with the lecturers of the Universities and the
secular clergy. These looked upon the ‘Mendicants’ as interlopers,
trying to thieve congregations, fees, and revenues to which they had no
right.
‘None of the Faithful’, says a contemporary Benedictine sourly,
‘believe they can be saved unless they are under the direction of
the Preachers or Minorites.’ The power of the Franciscans, as of
the Dominicans, was encouraged by the majority of Popes, who, like
Innocent III, recognized in their enthusiasm a new weapon with which to
defend Rome from accusations of worldliness and corruption. In return
for papal sympathy and support the Friars became Rome’s most ardent
champions, and in defence of a system rather than in devotion to an
ideal of life they deteriorated and accepted the ordinary religious
standard of their day.
Once more a wave of reform had swept into the mediaeval Church in a
cleansing flood, only to be lost in the ebb tide of reaction. Yet this
ultimate failure did not mean that the force of the wave was spent
in vain. St. Francis could not stem the corruption of the thirteenth
century; but his simple sincerity could reveal again to mankind an
almost-forgotten truth that the road to the love of God is the love of
humanity.
‘The Benedictine Order was the retreat from the World, the Franciscan
the return to it.’ These words show that the mediaeval mind, with its
suspicion and dread of human nature, was undergoing transformation.
Already it showed a gleam of that more modern spirit that traces
something of the divine in every work of God, and therefore does not
feel distrust but sympathy and interest.
To St. Augustine the way to the _Civitas Dei_ had been a precipitous
and narrow road for each human soul, encompassed by legions of evil
in its struggle for salvation. To St. Francis it was a pathway, steep
indeed and rough, but bright with flowers, and so lit by the joy of
serving others that the pilgrim scarce realized his feet were bleeding
from the stones.
In the dungeons of Perugia the mirth of Francis Bernadone had been
called by his companions ‘craziness’, and to those whose eyes read evil
rather than good in this world his message still borders on madness.
Yet the Saint of Assisi has had his followers in all ages since his
death, distinguished not necessarily by the Grey Friar’s robe, but by
their silent spending of themselves for others and their joyous belief
in God and man.
_Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368-73._
Roger Bacon 1214-92
Peter Abelard 1079-1142
Thomas Aquinas 1227-74
Arnold of Brescia (burned) 1155
St. Dominic 1170-1221
The Albigensian Crusade 1209
Louis VIII of France 1223-6
St. Francis of Assisi 1182-1226
Foundation of Franciscan Order 1223
XVII
FRANCE UNDER TWO STRONG KINGS
We have seen that Philip Augustus laid the foundations of a strong
French monarchy, but his death was followed by feudal reaction, the
nobles struggling in every way by fraud or violence to recover the
independence that they had lost.
Louis VIII, the new king, in order to checkmate their designs,
determined to divide his lands amongst his sons, all the younger
paying allegiance to the eldest, but each directly responsible for the
administration of his own province. Perhaps at the time this was the
most obvious means of ruling in the interests of the crown a kingdom
that, in its rapid absorption of Normandy, Anjou, Poitou, and Toulouse,
had outrun the central government. Yet it was in truth a short-sighted
policy for, since these ‘appanages’, or royal fiefs, were hereditary,
they ended by replacing the old feudal nobility with a new, the more
arrogant in its ambitions because it could claim kinship with the House
of Capet.
[Sidenote: Louis IX]
Louis VIII did not live long enough to put his plan into execution;
and Louis IX, a boy of twelve at the time of his accession, though
accepting later the provision made for his younger brothers in his
father’s will, was enabled, partly by the administrative ability of his
mother and guardian, Queen Blanche, partly by his own personality, to
maintain his supremacy undiminished. On one occasion his brother, the
Count of Anjou, had imprisoned a knight, in anger that the man should
have dared to appeal to the king’s court against a judicial decision
he himself had given. ‘I will have but one king in France,’ exclaimed
Louis when he heard, and ordered the knight to be released and that
both he and the count should bring their case to Paris for royal
judgement.
Heavy penalties were also inflicted by Louis on any promoters of
private warfare, while the baronage was restricted in its right to
coin money. At this time eighty nobles besides the King are said to
have possessed their own mints. Louis, who knew the feudal coinage was
freely debased, forbade its circulation except in the province where it
had been minted; while his own money, which was of far higher value,
was made current everywhere. Men and women naturally prefer good coins
to bad in exchange for merchandise; and so the King hoped that the
debased money, when restricted in use, would gradually be driven out of
existence.
If Louis believed in his rights as an absolute king, he had an equally
high conception of the duties that such rights involved. ‘Make thyself
beloved by thy people,’ he said to his son, ‘for I would rather that
a Scotchman came from Scotland and governed my subjects well and
equitably than that thou shouldst govern them badly.’
Royal justice, like the coinage, must be superior to any other justice;
and so the chroniclers tell us that Louis selected as his bailiffs
and seneschals those who were ‘loyal and wise, of upright conduct and
good reputation, above all, men with clean hands’. Knowing the ease
with which even well-meaning officials could be corrupted by money and
honours, he ordered his deputies neither to receive nor give presents,
while he warned his judges always to lean rather to the side of the
poor than of the rich in a case of law until evidence revealed the
truth.
Philip Augustus had followed justice because he believed that it paid,
and his subjects had feared and respected him. His grandson, with his
keen sense of honour, shrank from injustice as something unclean; and
we are told that the people ‘loved him as men love God and the Saints’.
Like nearly all the kings of France, Louis was a devout son of the
Church, and it was under his protection that Innocent IV resided safely
at Lyons when Frederick II had driven him from Rome.[24] Nevertheless
the King’s sincere love of the Faith, that later won him canonization
as a Saint, never hindered his determination that he would be master of
all his subjects, both lay and ecclesiastical. If the clergy sinned
after the manner of laymen he was firm that they should be tried in the
lay courts; and while his contemporary, Henry III of England, remained
a feeble victim of papal encroachments, Louis boldly declared, ‘It
is unheard of that the Holy See, when it is in need, should impose
subsidies on the Church of France, and levy those contributions on
temporal goods that can only be imposed by the King.’
No storm of protest was aroused, for the Papacy in its bitter struggle
with the Empire was largely dependent on French support; while Louis’s
transparent purity of motive in maintaining his supremacy disarmed
indignation. An Italian friar, who saw him humbly sharing the meal
of some Franciscan brethren, described him as ‘more monk than king’.
This assumption was at first sight borne out by his daily life: his
simple diet and love of sombre clothes; his habit of rising from his
bed at midnight and in the early mornings to share in the services of
the Church; his hatred of oaths, lying, and idle gossip; his almost
reckless charity; the eager help he offered in nursing the sick amongst
his Paris slums and in washing the feet of the most repulsive beggars
who crowded at his gate. ‘He was frail and slender,’ says the same
Italian, ‘with an angelic expression, and dove’s eyes full of grace.’
Perhaps, if Louis had not been called to the life of a king, he might
have become a friar; but living in the world he loved his wife and
children, and would sometimes tease the former by protesting, when she
complained how poorly he dressed, that if he put on gaudy clothes to
please her she also must go in drab attire to please him.
Those of his subjects who saw Louis on the battle-field describe him as
‘the finest knight ever seen’, and recount tales of their difficulty
in restraining his hot courage, that would carry him into the fiercest
hand-to-hand conflict without any thought of personal danger. Yet this
king was a lover of peace in his heart. He wished to be friends with
all his Christian neighbours, and, well content with the lands that
already belonged to the French crown, he negotiated a treaty by which
he recognized English claims to the Duchy of Guienne. Less successful
was his effort to act as mediator between popes and emperors; but if
he could not secure peace he determined at least to remain as neutral
in the struggle as possible, refusing the imperial crown when the Pope
deposed Frederick II. Nor would he reap advantage out of the anarchy
that followed on that emperor’s death.
War between Christians was hateful to Louis because it prevented any
combined action against the Turks; for in him, as in Innocent III,
burned the old crusading spirit that had never quite died out in France.
At the beginning of the thirteenth century a French peasant lad,
Stephen, had preached a new crusade, saying that God had told him in a
vision that it was left for Christian children to succeed where their
elders had failed in recovering the Holy Sepulchre. Thousands of boys
and girls, some of them only twelve or thirteen years of age, collected
at Marseilles in eager response to this message. They expected that
a pathway would be opened to them across the sea as in the days of
Moses and the Chosen People, and when they had waited for some time
in vain for this miracle, they allowed themselves to be entrapped by
false merchants, who, though Christian in name, would allow nothing to
stand in the way of the gold that they coveted. Enticed on board ship,
disarmed, bound, and manacled, the unfortunate young crusaders were
sold in the market-places of Egypt and Syria to become the slaves of
the Moslems whom they had hoped to conquer.
When he had first heard of the Children’s Crusade, Innocent III had
exclaimed, ‘The children shame us indeed!’ and St. Louis, the inheritor
of their spirit, felt that his kingship would be shamed unless he used
his power and influence to convert and overthrow the Turk.
[Sidenote: The Seventh Crusade]
One of his subjects, who loved him, the Sieur de Joinville, has left a
graphic personal account of the expedition undertaken against Egypt.
From Cyprus, the head-quarters of the crusaders, a fleet of some one
thousand eight hundred vessels, great and small, sailed to Damietta, at
the mouth of the Nile; and Louis, seeing his ensign borne ashore, would
not be restrained, but leaped himself into the water, lance in hand,
shouting his battle-cry of ‘Mont-joie St. Denys!’
Before the impetuosity of an army inspired by this zeal the town soon
fell; but the mediaeval mind had reckoned little with difficulties of
climate, and soon the unhealthy mists that hung over the delta of the
Nile were decimating the Christian ranks with fever and dysentery,
while many of the best troops perished in unimportant skirmishes into
which daring rather than a wise judgement had led them. The advance
once checked became a retreat, the retreat a rout; and St. Louis,
refusing to desert his rear-guard, was taken prisoner by the Mahometans.
The disaster was complete, for only on the surrender of Damietta and
the payment of a huge ransom was the King released, but his patience
and chivalry redeemed his failure from all stain of ignominy. Instead
of returning to France he sailed to the Holy Land; where, though
Jerusalem had again fallen to the Turks after Frederick II’s temporary
possession of it, yet a strip of seaboard, including the port of Acre,
remained to the Christians.
Louis believed that, unless he persevered in fulfilling his vow,
crusaders of a lesser rank would lose their hope and courage, and so,
enfeebled by disease, he stayed for three years in Palestine, until
the death of his mother, Queen Blanche, whom he had left as regent in
France, compelled him to return home. Joinville relates how on this
voyage, because of the fierceness of the storm, the sailors would have
put the King ashore at Cyprus, but Louis feared a panic amongst the
terrified troops if he agreed. ‘There is none’, he said, ‘that does
not love his life as much as I love mine, and these peradventure would
never return to their own land. Therefore I like better to place my own
person ... in God’s hands than to do this harm to the many people who
are here.’
Louis reached France in safety, but, chafing at his crusading failures,
he once more took the Cross, against the advice of his barons, in 1270.
It was his aim to regain Tunis, and so to free part of North Africa at
least from Mahometan rule. To this task he brought his old religious
enthusiasm, but France was weary of crusades, and many of those who
had fought willingly in Syria and Egypt now refused to follow him,
leaving the greater part of his army to be composed of mercenaries,
tempted only by their pay.
Landing near Carthage, the crusaders soon found themselves outnumbered,
and were blockaded by their foes amid the ruins of the town. Pestilence
swept the crowded, insanitary camp, and one of the first to fall a
victim was the delicate king. ‘Lord, have pity on Thy people whom I
have led here. Send them to their homes in safety. Let them not fall
into the hands of their enemies, nor let them be forced to deny Thy
Holy Name.’
The dying words of the saint are characteristic of his love of the
Faith and of his people; and everywhere in the camp and in France, when
the news of his death reached her, there was mourning for this king
among kings who had sacrificed his life for his ideals. Yet the flame
of enthusiasm he had tried to keep alight quickly flickered out into
the darkness, and his son and successor, Philip III, made a truce with
the Sultan of Tunis that enabled him to withdraw his army and embark
for home. The only person really annoyed by this arrangement was the
English prince Edward, afterwards Edward I, who arrived on the scene
just at the time of St. Louis’s death, thirsting for a campaign and
military glory; but owing to the general indifference he was forced to
give up the idea of war in Africa and continue his journey alone to the
Holy Land.
Philip III of France has left little mark on history. He stands, with
the title of ‘the Rash’, between two kings of dominant personality--his
father, canonized as a saint before the century had closed, and his son
Philip IV, ‘the Fair’, anything but a saint in his hard, unscrupulous
dealings with the world, but yet one of the strongest rulers that
France has known.
Philip IV was only seventeen when he became king. From his nickname
‘le Bel’ it is obvious that he was handsome, but no kindly Joinville
has left a record of his personal life and character. We can only draw
our conclusions from his acts, and these show him ruthless in his
ambitions, mean, and vindictive.
In his dealings with the Papacy Philip’s conduct stands contrasted
with the usual affectionate reverence of his predecessors; but this
contrast is partly accounted for by the fact that, at the end of the
quarrel between Empire and Papacy, Rome found herself regarding France
from a very changed standpoint to the early days of that encounter.
Ever since the time of Gregory VII the Hohenstaufen emperors had loomed
like a thunder-cloud on the papal horizon, but with the execution of
Conradin, the last of the royal line,[25] this threatening atmosphere
had cleared. The Empire fell a prey to civil war during the Great
Interregnum, that is, during the seventeen years when English,
Spanish, and German princes contended without any decisive results
for the imperial crown. Count Rudolf of Habsburg, who at last emerged
triumphant, had learned at least one diplomatic lesson, that if he
wished to have a free hand in Germany he could do so best as the friend
of the Pope, not as his enemy. One of his earliest acts was to ratify a
concordat with Rome in which he resigned all those imperial claims to
the lands belonging to the Holy See that Frederick II had put forward.
He also agreed to acknowledge Count Charles of Anjou, brother of St.
Louis and the Pope’s chief ally, as Count of Provence and King of
Naples and Sicily.
Italy was thus freed from German intervention, but her cities remained
torn by the factions of Guelfs and Ghibellines; and the iron hand of
the French lay as heavily on ‘The Kingdom’ as ever the Hohenstaufen’s
despotic sceptre. The Sicilians, restless under the yoke, began to
mourn Frederick, who, whatever his sins, had been born and bred in the
south, the son of a southern princess; while these French were cruel
with the indifferent ferocity of strangers who despised those whom they
oppressed.
[Sidenote: The Sicilian Vespers]
Out of the sullen hatred of the multitude, stirred of a sudden to
white heat by the assault of a French soldier on a woman of Palermo,
sprang the ‘Sicilian Vespers’, the rebellion and massacre of an Easter
Monday night, when more than four thousand of the hated strangers,
men, women, and children, were put to death and their bodies flung
into an open pit. Charles of Anjou prepared a fitting revenge for
this insult to his race, a revenge that he intended to exact to the
uttermost farthing, for he had little of his brother’s sense of justice
and tender heart; but while he made his preparations a Spanish prince,
Peter III of Aragon, came to the rescue of the Sicilians with a large
fleet. A fierce war followed, but in spite of defeats, treaties that
would have sacrificed her to the interests of kings, and continuous
papal threats, Sicily clung staunch to her new ally, gaining at last
as a recognized Aragonese possession a triumphant independence of the
Angevin kingdom of Naples.
Rome, under a pope who was merely the puppet of Charles of Anjou, had
hurled anathemas at Peter III; but his successors of more independent
mind envied the Sicilians. It was of little use for Rome to throw off
Hohenstaufen chains if she must rivet in their stead those of the
French House of Anjou. This was the fear that made her look with cold
suspicion on her once well-beloved sons the kings of France, whose
relations of the blood-royal were also kings of Naples.
[Sidenote: Boniface VIII]
In 1294 Pope Boniface VIII, sometimes called ‘the last of the mediaeval
Popes’ because any hopes of realizing the world-wide ambitions of a
Hildebrand or of an Innocent III died with him, was elected to the
Chair of St. Peter. His jubilee, held at Rome in 1300 to celebrate the
new century, was of a splendour to dazzle the thousands of pilgrims
from all parts of Europe who poured their offerings into his coffers;
but its glamour was delusive.
Already he had suffered rebuffs in encounters with the kings of England
and France: for, when he published a Bull, _Clericis Laicos_, that
forbade the clergy to pay taxes any longer to a lay ruler, Edward I
at once condemned the English Church to outlawry, until from fear of
the wholesale robbery of their lands and goods his bishops consented
to a compromise that made the Bull a dead letter. Philip IV of France,
on his part, was even more violent, for he retaliated by ordering his
subjects to send no more contributions to Rome of any kind.
A wiser man than Boniface might have realized from his failures that
the growth of nationality was proving too strong for any theories of
world-government, whether papal or imperial; but, old and stubborn, he
could not set aside his Hildebrandine ideals. When one of his legates,
a Frenchman, embarked on a dispute with Philip IV, Boniface told him to
meet the King with open defiance, upon which Philip immediately ordered
the ecclesiastic’s arrest, and that his archbishop should degrade him
from his office. Boniface then fulminated threats of excommunication
and deposition, to which the French king replied by an act of open
violence.
The agent he chose to inflict this insult was a certain Nogaret,
grandson of an Albigensian heretic who had been burned at the stake,
and this man joined himself to some of the nobles of the Roman
Campagna, who had equally little reverence for the Head of Christendom.
Heavily armed, they appeared in the village of Anagni, where Boniface
VIII was staying, and demanded to see him. Outside in the street their
men-at-arms stood shouting ‘Death to the Pope!’
Boniface could hear them from his audience-chamber, but though he was
eighty-six his courage did not fail him. Clad in his full pontifical
robes, his cross in one hand, his keys of St. Peter in the other,
he received the intruders. Nogaret roughly demanded his abdication.
‘Here is my head! Here is my neck!’ he replied. ‘Betrayed like Jesus
Christ, if I must die like Him I will at least die Pope.’ At this one
of the Roman nobles struck him across the face with his mailed glove,
felling him to the ground, and would have killed him had not Nogaret
interfered. It was the Provençal’s mission to intimidate rather than to
murder, and while he argued with the Italians a hostile crowd assembled
to rescue their Vicar, and the French agents were forced to fly.
The proud old man survived the indignities he had suffered only by a
few weeks, and his successor, having dared to excommunicate those who
took part in the scene at Anagni, died also with mysterious suddenness.
No definite suspicion attached to Philip IV, but rumour whispered the
fatal word ‘poison’, and the conclave of cardinals spent ten uneasy
months in trying to find a new pope. At last a choice emerged from the
conclave, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, with the title of Clement V. He
was crowned at Lyons, and never ventured into Italy, choosing as his
residence the city of Avignon in Provence.
Here for just over seventy years, during the ‘Babylonish Captivity’
as it was usually called, a succession of popes reigned under French
influence, having exchanged the imperial yoke for one still more
binding.
Philip IV at once made use of this French Head of Christendom to
condemn the Order of Templars, which from their powerful organization
and extensive revenues he had long regarded with dislike and envy.
The crusades at an end, the Templars had outlived the object of their
foundation; while the self-denial imposed upon them and their roving,
uncloistered life, exposed them to constant temptations to which many
of the less spiritual succumbed. Thus their suppression was probably
wise; but Philip IV, a pitiless enemy, did not merely suppress, he
pursued the Knights of the Temple with vindictive cruelty. Hundreds
were thrown into dungeons, and there tortured into confessing crimes,
the committal of which they afterwards recanted in vain; while their
principal officers were burned at the stake in the market-places of
the large French towns. By papal commands the revenues of the Templars
passed into the exchequer of the Knights of St. John, who still guarded
one of the outposts of Christendom, the island of Rhodes; but the
French king took care that a substantial part of the money confiscated
in France went instead to his own treasury.
Philip was indeed in serious financial straits, for the revenues of
the royal demesnes were proving quite inadequate to meet the expenses
of a government that now extended its sway over the length and breadth
of France. Philip tried many expedients to meet the deficiency, most
of them bad. Such were the frequent debasement of the coinage and the
imposition of the _gabelle_, that is of a tax on the sale of goods.
This was justly hated because instead of encouraging commerce it
penalized industry by adding to the price of nearly every commodity put
on the market. Thus a _gabelle_ imposed on grain would mean that a man
must pay a tax on it three times over, first in the form of grain,
then of flour, and finally as bread.
Worse even than the _gabelle_ was Philip’s method of ‘farming’
the taxes, that is, of selling the right to collect them to some
speculator, who would make himself responsible to the government for
a round sum, and then squeeze what extra money he could out of the
unfortunate populace in order to repay his efforts.
[Sidenote: Government of Philip IV]
It is not, then, for any improved financial administration that the
reign of Philip IV is worthy of praise. His was no original genius,
but rather a practical ability for developing the schemes invented by
his predecessors. Like them he hated and distrusted his insubordinate
baronage; and, seeking to impose his fierce will upon them, turned
for advice and obedience to men of lesser rank, employing as the main
instrument of his government the lawyer class that Philip Augustus
and Louis IX had introduced in limited numbers amongst the feudal
office-holders at their court.
The employment of trained workers in the place of amateurs resulted in
improved administration, so it followed that under Philip IV the French
government began to take a definitely modern stamp and became divided
into separate departments for considering different kinds of work. Thus
it was the duty of the _Conseil du Roi_, or King’s Council, to give the
Sovereign advice; of the _Chambre des Comptes_, or Chamber of Finance,
to deal with financial questions; of the _Parlement_, or chief judicial
court, to sit in Paris for two months at least twice a year to hold
assizes and give judgements.
The _Parlement de Paris_ resembles the English Parliament somewhat in
name; but except for a right, later acquired, of registering royal
edicts, its work was entirely judicial, not legislative. The body in
France that most nearly corresponded to the English Parliament was the
‘States-General’, composed of representatives of the three ‘Estates’ or
classes, of clergy, nobles, and citizens. The peasants of France, who
composed the greater part of her population, were not represented at
all.
Philip IV summoned the ‘States-General’ several times to approve his
suggestions; but, unlike the ‘Model Parliament’ called by his English
contemporary Edward I for similar reasons, it never developed into a
legislative assembly that could act as a competent check upon royal
tyranny, but existed merely as it seemed to accept responsibility
for its ruler’s laws and financial demands, whether good or bad. Its
weakness arose partly from the fact that it often sat only for a day at
a time and so had no leisure to discuss the measures laid before it,
but still more owing to the class selfishness that prevented the three
classes from combining to insist on reforms before they would vote any
taxes.
This was very unfortunate for France, since on the one occasion that
the nobles and burghers actually did combine in refusing to submit to
an especially obnoxious _gabelle_ that hit both their pockets, Philip
IV was forced to yield, reluctantly enough because the loss of the
money led to his failure in a war in Flanders.
Flanders was a fief of the French crown, and because its count, his
tenant-in-chief, had dared to rebel against him, Philip had flung him
into prison and declared his lands confiscated. Then with his queen he
had ridden north to visit this territory now owning direct allegiance
to himself, in the belief that he had nothing to do but to give
orders to its inhabitants and await their immediate fulfilment. The
chroniclers tell us that the royal pair were overcome with astonishment
at the display of fine clothes and jewels made by the burghers of
Bruges to do them honour.
‘I thought that there was only one Queen in France,’ exclaimed Philip’s
consort discontentedly. ‘Here I see at least six hundred.’ The King,
always with an eye to the main chance, regarded the brilliant throng
more philosophically. They seemed to him very suitable subjects
for taxation; but the Flemings had won their wealth by a sturdy
independence of spirit both in the market-place and on the high seas:
they had been indifferent to the fate of their count, but at any time
preferred the risks of rebellion to being plucked like geese by the
King of France.
On the field of Courtrai, where Philip brought his army to punish
their insolence, the Flemish burghers taught Europe, as their Milanese
fellows had at Legnano in the twelfth century, that citizen levies
could hold their own against heavily-armed feudal troops; and though
the King’s careful generalship redeemed this defeat two years later, he
found the victory he obtained barren of fruit. Within a few weeks of
the burghers’ apparent collapse yet another citizen army had rallied to
attack the royal camp, and Philip, declaring angrily that ‘it rained
Flemings’, was driven to conclude a peace.
[Sidenote: Philip IV]
Besides hating the independence of the Flemings, Philip IV grudged
the English supremacy over the Duchy of Guienne that his grandfather
had so willingly acknowledged. To his jealous eyes it ran its wedge
like an alien dagger into the heart of his kingdom; and watching
his opportunity until Edward I was involved in wars with Wales and
Scotland, Philip crossed the borders of the Duchy, and by force or
craft obtained control of the greater number of its fortresses. There
is little doubt that had he lived he would gradually have absorbed
the whole of the southern provinces; but when only forty-six he died,
mourned by few of his subjects, and yet one of the kings who had set
his stamp with the most lasting results upon the government of France.
_Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368-73._
The Children’s Crusade 1212
Philip III of France 1270-85
Edward I of England 1272-1307
Clement V 1305-14
Battle of Courtrai 1302
XVIII
THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR
During fourteen years, from 1314 to 1328, three sons of Philip IV
reigned in rapid succession; but with the death of the last the main
line of the House of Capet came to an end, and the crown passed to his
nephew and namesake Philip of Valois.[26] The latter declared that his
claims were based on a clause of the old Salic Law[27] forbidding a
woman to inherit landed property, because as it happened Philip IV had
left a daughter Isabel, who had married Edward II of England, and their
son Edward III loudly protested that his right to the throne of France
was stronger than that of the Valois. The Salic Law, Edward maintained,
might prevent a woman from succeeding to the throne, but there was
nothing in this restriction to forbid the inheritance passing to her
male heirs.
[Sidenote: Causes of the Hundred Years’ War]
The question of the Salic Law is important because its different
interpretations were the immediate excuse for opening hostilities
between England and France in that long and weary struggle called
the ‘Hundred Years’ War’. There were of course other and far deeper
reasons. One of these reasons was that English kings had never
forgotten or forgiven John’s expulsion from Normandy. They wanted to
avenge this ignominious defeat and also Philip IV’s encroachments in
the Duchy of Guienne, that, united to his policy of supporting the
Scottish chieftains in their war of independence, had been a steady
source of disaster to England since the beginning of the fourteenth
century.
Because of his failure in Scotland and the revolts of his turbulent
barons Edward II was murdered; and Edward III, taking warning from his
father’s fate, welcomed the war with France, not merely in the hope
of revenge and glory, but still more in order to find an occupation
for the hot English blood that might otherwise in the course of its
embittered feuds murder him.
He rode forth to battle, the hero of his court and of the chivalry
of England; but no less, as it happened, the champion of her middle
classes, who cheerfully put their hands in their pockets to pay for
his first campaigns. The reason of their enthusiasm for this war was
that Philip of Valois, in order to annoy his rival, had commanded his
Flemish subjects to trade no longer with the English. Now English sheep
were the best in Europe (so valuable that their export was forbidden
lest another nation should obtain the breed), and English wool was the
raw material of all others on which Flanders depended for the wealth
and prosperity gained by her looms and factories. Before this time
English kings had encouraged Flemish trade, establishing ‘Staple’
markets in certain towns under their protection, where merchants of
both countries could meet and bargain over their wares. Wishing to
retaliate on Philip VI, however, Edward III stopped the export of
wool, though at the same time he offered good terms and advantages to
any of the manufacturers of Bruges and Ghent who might care to settle
in Norfolk or on the East Coast and set up factories there as English
subjects.
Such a suggestion could not satisfy the Flemish national spirit, and
in the large towns discontent with the French king grew daily. At last
one of the popular leaders, Jacob van Artevelde, ‘the Brewer of Ghent’,
began to rouse his countrymen by inflammatory speeches. ‘He showed
them’, says the chronicler, ‘that they could not live without the King
of England’; and his many commercial arguments he strengthened with
others intended to win those who might hesitate to break their oath
of allegiance, assuring them that Edward III was in truth by right of
birth King of France.
Rebellion sprang up on all sides in response; and when, in 1338, Edward
III actually embarked on the war, he had behind him not only the
English wool-farmers, but also the majority of Flemish merchants and
artisans, alike convinced that his victory would open Flemish markets
to trade across the Channel.
The Hundred Years’ War falls into two distinct periods: the first, the
contest waged by the Angevin Edward III against the House of Valois,
a struggle that lasted until 1375; the second, a similar effort begun
by the Lancastrian Kings of England in 1415 after a time of almost
suspended hostilities under Richard II. In each period there is the
same switchback course to the campaigns, as they rise towards a
high-water mark of English successes only to sink away to final French
achievement.
The first of the great English victories was fittingly a naval battle,
destined to avenge long years during which French raiders had harried
the south coast, penetrated up the Solent, and even set fire to large
towns like Southampton. In June 1340, near the entrance to the port of
Sluys, some two hundred English vessels of all makes and sizes came
upon the French fleet, drawn up in four lines closely chained together
so as to form a kind of bulwark to the harbour. On the decks of the
tall ships, the turrets of which were piled with stones and other
missiles, were hundreds of Genoese archers; but the English bowmen
at this time had no match in Europe for long-distance accuracy and
steadiness, and the whistling fire of their arrows soon drove their
hired rivals into hiding and enabled the English men-at-arms to board
the vessels opposite them almost unopposed.
From this moment panic set in along the French lines, and the greater
number of ships, unable to escape because of the chains that bound them
together, were sunk at anchor, with, according to the chroniclers,
twenty-five thousand of their crews and fighting-material.
The English were now masters of the Channel, and Edward III was
enabled to transplant an army to Flanders, but no triumph in any way
corresponding to the victory of Sluys rewarded his efforts in this
field of warfare. The campaign became a tedious affair of sieges; and
the Flemings, cooling from their first sympathies, came to dislike
the English and to accuse Jacob van Artevelde of supplying Edward III
with money, merely in order to forward his personal ambitions. This
charge the Flemish leader stoutly denied, but when, hearing the people
of Ghent hooting him in the street outside his house, he stepped out
on to the balcony and tried to clear himself, the mob surged forward,
and, refusing to listen to a word, broke in through the barred doors
and murdered him. This was ill news for Edward III, but angry though he
was at the fate of his ally, he had neither sufficient men nor money to
exact vengeance. Instead he himself determined to try a new theatre of
war, for, as well as his army in Flanders, he had other forces fighting
the French in Normandy and Guienne.
[Sidenote: Battle of Creci]
Edward landed in Normandy; and at Creci, to the north of the Somme,
as he marched towards Calais, he was overtaken by Philip of Valois in
command of a very large but undisciplined force.
‘You must know’, says Froissart, the famous chronicler of this
first period of the Hundred Years’ War, ‘that the French troops
did not advance in any particular order, and that as soon as their
King came in sight of the English his blood began to boil, and he
cried out to his Marshals, “Order the Genoese forward and begin the
battle in the name of God and St. Denys!”’
These Genoese were archers, who had already marched on foot so far and
at such a pace that they were exhausted; and when, against their will,
they sullenly advanced, their bows that were wet from a thunderstorm
proved slack and untrue. The sun also, that had just emerged from
behind a cloud, shone in their eyes and dazzled them. Silently the
English bowmen waited as they drew near, shouting hoarsely, and then of
a sudden poured into the weary ranks such a multitude of arrows that
‘it seemed as though it snowed’.
The Genoese, utterly disheartened, broke and fled; at which the French
king, choking with rage, cried, ‘Kill me this rabble that cumbers our
road without any reason’; but the English fire never ceased; and the
French knights and men-at-arms that came to take the place of the
Genoese and rode them underfoot fell in their turn with the shafts
piercing through the joints of their heavy armour.
Again, at Creci it was made evident to Europe that the old feudal order
of battle was passing away. Victory fell not to the knight armoured
with his horse like a slowly-moving turret, but to the clear-eyed,
leather-clad bowman, or the foot-soldier quick with his knife or
spear. The French fought gallantly at Creci, and none more fiercely
than Philip of Valois, whose horse was killed beneath him; but courage
cannot wipe out bad generalship, and when at last he consented to
retreat he left eleven princes of the blood-royal and over a thousand
of his knights stretched on the battle-field.
The defeat of Creci took from Calais any hope of French succour, and
in the following year after a prolonged siege it surrendered to the
English and became the most cherished of all their possessions across
the seas. ‘The Commons of England’, wrote Froissart, ‘love Calais more
than any town in the world, for they say that as long as they are
masters of Calais they hold the keys of France at their girdle.’
[Sidenote: The Black Death]
Death at the battle of Creci, decked in all the panoply of mediaeval
warfare, had taken its toll of the chivalry of France and England.
Now, in an open and ghastly form, indifferent alike to race or creed,
it stalked across Europe, visiting palace and castle but sweeping with
a still more ruthless scythe the slum and the hovel. Somewhere in the
far East the ‘Black Death’, as it was later called, had its origin,
and wherever it passed, moving westward, villages, nay, even towns,
disappeared.
More than thirteen million people are said to have perished in China,
India was almost depopulated, and at last in 1347 Europe also was
smitten. Very swift was the blow, for many victims of the plague
died in a few hours, the majority within five days; and contemporary
writers tell us of ships, that left an eastern harbour with their full
complement of crew, found drifting in the Mediterranean a few weeks
later without a living soul on board to take the helm; of towns where
the dead were so many that there was none to bury them; of villages
where the peasants fell like cattle in the fields and by the wayside
unnoticed.
In Italy, in France, in England, there is the same record of misery
and terror. Boccaccio, the Italian writer, describes in his book,
the _Decameron_, how the wealthy nobles and maidens of Florence fled
from the plague-stricken town to a villa without the walls, there to
pass their days in telling one another tales. These tales have made
Boccaccio famous as the first great European novelist; but in reality
not many even of the wealthy could keep beyond the range of infection,
and Boccaccio himself says elsewhere ‘these who first set the example
of forsaking others languished where there was no one to take pity on
them’.
Neither courage, nor devotion, nor selfishness could avail against
the dread scourge; though like all diseases its ravages were most
virulent where small dwellings were crowded together or where dirt and
insanitary conditions prevailed. ‘They fell sick by thousands,’ says
Boccaccio of the poorer classes, ‘and having no one whatever to attend
them, most of them died.’ According to a doctor in the south of France,
‘the number of those swept away was greater than those left alive.’ In
the once thriving port of Marseilles ‘so many died that it remained
like an uninhabited place’. Another French writer, speaking of Paris,
says, ‘there was so great a mortality of people of both sexes ...
that they could hardly be buried.’ ‘There was no city, nor town, nor
hamlet,’ writes an Englishman of his own country, ‘nor even, save in
rare instances, any house, in which this plague did not carry off the
whole or the greater portion of the inhabitants.’
One immediate result of the Black Death was to put a temporary stop
to the war between England and France; for armies were reduced to a
fraction of their former strength and rival kings forgot words like
‘glory’ or ‘conquest’ in terrified contemplation of an enemy against
whom all their weapons were powerless.
Other and more lasting effects were experienced everywhere, for town
and village life was completely disorganized: magistrates, city
officials, priests, and doctors had perished in such numbers that it
was difficult to replace them: criminals plundered deserted houses
unchecked: the usually law-abiding, deprived of the guidance to which
they had been accustomed, gave themselves up to a dissolute life,
trying to drown all thoughts of the past and future in any enjoyment
they could find in the present. Work almost ceased: the looms stood
idle, the ships remained without cargoes, the fields were neither
reaped of the one harvest nor sown for the next. The peasants, when
reproached, declared that the plague had been a sign of the end of the
world and that therefore to labour was a waste of time. ‘All things
were dearer,’ says a Frenchman: ‘furniture, food, and merchandise of
all sorts doubled in price: servants would only work for higher wages.’
In the years following the Black Death the labouring classes of Europe
discovered for the first time their value. They were the necessary
foundation to the scheme of mediaeval life, the base of the feudal
pyramid; and, since they were now few in number, masters began to
compete for their services. Thus they were able to demand a better
wage for their work and improved conditions; but here the governments
of the day, that ruled in the interests of the nobles and middle
classes, stepped in, forbade wages to be raised, or villeins and serfs
to leave their homes and seek better terms in another neighbourhood.
The discontent of those held down with an iron hand, yet half awake to
the possibilities of greater freedom, seethed towards revolution; but
few mediaeval kings chose to look below the surface of national life,
and in the case of England Edward III was certainly not enough of a
statesman to do so.
In 1355 he renewed the war with France, hoping that by victories he
would be able to fill his own purse from French ransoms and pillage
as well as to drug the disordered popular mind at home with showy
triumphs. His eldest son, Edward, the Black Prince, who had gained his
spurs at Creci, landed at Bordeaux and marched through Guienne, the
English armies like the French being mainly composed of ‘companies’,
that is, of hired troops under military captains, the terror of friends
and foes alike; for with impartial ruthlessness they trampled down
corn and vineyards as they passed, pillaged towns, and burned farms and
villages.
[Sidenote: Battle of Poitiers]
Philip of Valois was dead, but his son, John ‘the Good’, had succeeded
him, and earned his title, it must be supposed, by his punctilious
regard for the laws of mediaeval chivalry. His reckless daring,
extravagance, and rash generalship made him at any rate a very bad
ruler according to modern standards. Froissart says that on the field
of Poitiers, where the two armies met, ‘King John on his part proved
himself a good knight; indeed, if the fourth of his people had behaved
as well, the day would have been his own.’
This is extremely doubtful, for the French, though far the larger
force, were outmanœuvred from the first. The Black Prince had the
gift of generalship and disposed his army so that it was hidden amid
the slopes of a thick vineyard, laying an ambush of skilled archers
behind the shelter of a hedge. As King John’s cavalry charged towards
the only gap, in order to clear a road for their main army, they were
mown down by a merciless fire at short range from the ambush; while
in the ensuing confusion English knights swept round on the French
flank and put the foot-soldiers to flight. The Black Prince’s victory
was complete, for King John and his principal nobles were surrounded
and taken prisoners after a fierce conflict in which for a long time
they refused to surrender. ‘They behaved themselves so loyally’, says
Froissart, ‘that their heirs to this day are honoured for their sake’:
and Prince Edward, waiting on his royal captive that night at dinner,
awarded him the ‘prize and garland’ of gallantry above all other
combatants.
Evil days followed in France, where her king’s chivalry could not pay
his enormous ransom nor those of his distinguished fellow prisoners.
For this money merchants must sweat and save, and the peasants toil
longer hours on starvation rations; while the ‘companies’, absolved
by a truce from regular warfare, exacted their daily bread at the
sword-point when and where they chose.
Famous captains, who were really infamous brigands, took their toll of
sheep and corn and grapes; and those farmers and labourers who refused,
or could not give what they required, they flung alive on to bonfires,
while they tortured and mutilated their wives and families. Against
such wickedness there was no protection either from the government or
overlords; indeed, the latter were as cruel as the brigand chiefs,
extorting the very means of livelihood from their tenants and serfs
to pay for the distractions of a court never more extravagant and
pleasure-seeking than in this hour of national disaster.
‘Jacques Bonhomme,’ the French noble would say mockingly of the
peasant, ‘has a broad back ... he will pull out his purse fast enough
if he is beaten.’ The day came, however, when Jacques Bonhomme, grown
reckless in his misery, pulled out his knife instead, and, in the
words of Froissart, became like a ‘mad dog’. He had neither leaders
nor any hope of reform, nothing but a seething desire for revenge; and
in the ‘Jacquerie’, as the peasant rebellion of this date was called,
he inflicted on the nobles and their families all the horrors that
he himself, standing by helpless, had seen perpetrated on his own
belongings. Castles were burned, their furniture and treasures looted
and destroyed, their owners were roasted at slow fires, their wives and
daughters violated, their children tortured and massacred.
This is one of the most hideous scenes in French history, the darker
because France in her blindness learned no lesson from it. The nobles,
who soon gained the upper hand against these wild undisciplined hordes,
exacted a vengeance in proportion to the crimes committed, and fixed
the yoke of serfdom more surely than ever on the shoulders of Jacques
Bonhomme. This was the only way, in their conception, to deal with such
a mad dog; but Jacques Bonhomme was in reality an outraged human being
of flesh and blood like those who loathed and despised him; and during
centuries of tyranny his anger grew in force and bitterness until in
the Revolution of 1789 it burst forth with a violence against both
guilty and innocent that no power in France was strong enough to stem.
[Sidenote: Étienne Marcel]
The outrages of the Jacquerie unfortunately discredited real efforts at
reform that had been initiated in Paris by the leader of the middle
classes, the Provost of Merchants, Étienne Marcel. This Marcel had
demanded that the States-General should be called regularly twice a
year, that the Dauphin Charles,[28] eldest son of King John, who was
acting as regent during his father’s imprisonment, should send away his
favourites, and that instead of these fraudulent ministers a standing
council of elected representatives should be set up to advise the crown.
To these and many other reforms the Dauphin pretended to yield under
the pressure of public opinion; but he soon broke all his promises
and began to rule again as he chose. Marcel, roused to indignation,
summoned his citizen levies, and, breaking into the Prince’s palace,
ordered his men-at-arms to seize two of the most hated ministers and
drag them to the royal presence. ‘Do that quickly for which you were
brought,’ he said to the soldiers; whereupon they slew the favourites
as they crouched at Charles’s feet, their fingers clinging to his robe.
This act of violence won for Étienne Marcel the undying hatred of the
Dauphin and his court, and from this time the decline of his influence
may be traced. In order to maintain his power the popular leader was
driven to condone the excesses of the peasants, in their rebellion,
that had shocked the whole of France, and to ally himself with Charles
the Bad, King of Navarre, to whom he promised to deliver the keys of
Paris in return for his support against the Dauphin.
This was a fatal move, for Charles the Bad did not care at all for the
interests of the middle classes: he only wished to gain some secret
or advantage worth selling, and at once betrayed Étienne to his foes
as soon as the Dauphin paid him a sufficient price. Then a trap was
arranged, and Marcel killed in the gateway of Paris as he was about
to open its strong bars to his treacherous ally. With his death all
attempts at securing a more liberal and responsible government failed.
The country, indeed, had sunk into the apathy of exhaustion; and two
years later the Treaty of Bretigni, that represents the high-water mark
of English power in France, was thankfully signed. In return for Edward
III’s surrender of his claim to the French throne, his right to the
Duchy of Guienne as well as to Calais and the country immediately round
its walls was recognized, without any of the feudal obligations that
had been such a fruitful source of trouble in old days.
[Illustration: The Treaty of BRETIGNI]
Peace now seemed possible for an indefinite period; but, in truth,
so long as two hostile nations divided France there was always the
likelihood of fresh discord; and the Dauphin, who had succeeded his
father, King John, gently fanned the flames whenever he thought that
the political wind blew to his advantage. From a timid, peevish youth,
one of the first to fly in terror from the field of Poitiers, he had
developed into an astute politician, whose successful efforts to regain
the lost territories of France earned him the title of ‘Wise’.
King Edward III and his son professed to despise this prince, who knew
not how to wield a lance to any purpose; but Charles, though feeble in
body and a student rather than a soldier at heart, knew how to choose
good captains to serve him in the field; and one of these--the famous
Bertrand du Guesclin, said to have been the ugliest knight and best
fighter of his time--became the hero of many a battle against the
English, first of all in France, and later in Spain.
It was owing to the war in Spain that the English hold over the south
of France was first shaken; for the Black Prince, who had been created
Duke of Guienne, unwisely listened to the exiled King of Castile,
Pedro the Cruel, who came to Bordeaux begging his assistance against
the usurper of his throne. This was his illegitimate brother, Henry of
Trastamara. The English Prince at once declared that chivalry demanded
that he should help the rightful king. Perhaps he remembered the strong
bond that there had been between England and Castile ever since his
great-grandfather, Edward I, had married the Spanish Eleanor: perhaps
it was the promise of large sums of money that Pedro declared would
reward the victorious troops: it is more likely, however, that the
fiery soldier was moved by the news that Henry of Trastamara had gained
his throne through French assistance and by the deeds of arms of the
renowned Du Guesclin.
[Sidenote: Battle of Navarette]
In 1367 the English Prince crossed the Pyrenees, and at Navarette, near
the river Ebro, his English archers and good generalship proved a match
once more for his foes. Although the Spaniards were in vastly superior
numbers they were mown down as they rashly charged to the attack; and
Henry of Trastamara was driven from the field, leaving Du Guesclin a
prisoner and his brother Pedro once more able to assert his kingship.
The real victors of Navarette now had cause to repent their alliance.
Sickness, due to the heat of the climate and strange food, had thinned
their ranks even more than the actual warfare: the money promised by
Pedro the Cruel was not forthcoming; indeed, that wily scoundrel,
after atrocities committed against his helpless prisoners that fully
bore out his nickname, had slipped away to secure his throne, while
the Black Prince was in no position to pursue him, and could gain
little satisfaction by correspondence. Sullen and weary, with the
fever already lowering his vitality that was finally to cut short his
life, Edward of Wales arrived in Bordeaux with his almost starving
‘companies’. Because he had no money to pay them, he set them free to
ravage southern France, while in order to fill his exchequer he imposed
a tax on every hearth in Guienne.
These measures proved him no statesman, whatever his generalship. In
the early days of the Hundred Years’ War Guienne had looked coldly
on Paris, and appreciated a distant ruler who secured her liberty of
action; now, victim of a policy of mingled pillage and exactions, she
soon came to regard her English rulers as foreign tyrants. Thus an
appeal was made by the men of Guienne to Charles V, and he, in defiance
of the terms of the Treaty of Bretigni, summoned Prince Edward to
Paris--as though he were his vassal--to answer the charges made against
him. ‘Gladly we will answer our summons,’ replied the Prince, when he
heard. ‘We will go as the King of France has ordered us, but with helm
on head and sixty thousand men.’
They were bold words; but the haughty spirit that dictated them spoke
from the mouth of a dying man, and the Black Prince never lived to
fulfil his boast. His place in France was taken by his younger brother,
John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who proved himself an indifferent
general. In 1373 Duke John marched from Calais into the heart of
France, his army burning villages as it went; but though he pressed
deeper and ever deeper into the enemy’s country, he met no open foes
nor towns that he could take without a siege. ‘Let them be,’ said
Charles ‘the Wise’, when his indignant nobles pleaded for leave to
fight a pitched battle; ‘by burnings they shall not seize our heritage.
Though a storm and tempest rage together over a land they disperse
themselves: so will it be with these English.’
Ever since the Treaty of Bretigni Charles had been planning profitable
alliances with foreign rulers that would leave the English friendless;
while, like Henry the Fowler of Germany, he had fortified his cities
against invasion. With the advent of winter Lancaster and his men
could find no food nor succour from any local barons; and when at last
the remnant of his once proud army reached Bordeaux, it was without a
single horse, and leaving a track of sick and dying to be cut off by
guerrilla bands. He had not lost a single battle, but he was none the
less defeated, and had imperilled the English cause in France.
The truce of 1375 that practically closed the first period of the
Hundred Years’ War left to Edward III and his successors no more than
the coast towns of Calais, Cherbourg, Brest, Bayonne, and Bordeaux.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Henry V in France]
When in 1415 Henry V of England formally claimed the throne of France,
and by so doing renewed the war that had languished since 1375, he had
no satisfactory argument save his sword to uphold his demands. Grandson
of John of Gaunt, and son of the royal usurper Henry IV, who had
deposed and killed his cousin Richard II, Henry V hoped by a successful
campaign to establish the popularity of the Lancastrian dynasty. He
wished also, like most mediaeval rulers, to find a battle-ground for
his barons in any territory except his own. It is only fair to add that
of the modern belief that the one possible excuse for shedding human
blood is a righteous cause he had not the faintest conception.
‘War for war’s sake’ might have been the motto of this most mediaeval
of all English sovereigns; but if his purpose is indefensible to-day
in its selfish callousness, he at any rate chose an admirable time in
which to put it into execution; for France, that had begun to recover
a semblance of nationality under the rule of Charles ‘the Wise’, had
degenerated into anarchy under his son Charles ‘the Mad’.
First as a minor, for he was only eleven at the time of his accession,
and later when he developed frequent attacks of insanity, Charles VI
was destined to be some one else’s tool, while round his person raged
those factions for which Louis VIII had shortsightedly prepared when
he set the example of creating appanages.[29] First one ‘Prince of the
Lilies’ and then another strove to control the court and government in
their own interests; but the most formidable rivals at the beginning of
the fifteenth century were the Houses of Burgundy and Armagnac.
The latter centred in the person of the young Charles, Duke of Orleans,
the King’s nephew and a son-in-law of Count Bernard of Armagnac,
who gave his name to the party: the other was his cousin, John ‘the
Fearless’, Duke of Burgundy, who was also by inheritance from his
mother Count of Flanders, and therefore ruler of that great middle
province lying between France and the Empire.
The King himself in his moments of sanity inclined to the side of
Charles of Orleans and the Armagnacs; and it happened that just at
the time when Henry V of England landed in Normandy and laid siege to
Harfleur the Armagnacs controlled Paris. It was their faction therefore
that raised an army and sent it northwards to oppose the invaders,
while John of Burgundy stood aloof, for besides being unwilling to
help the Armagnacs he was reluctant to embroil himself in a war with
England, on whose wool trade the commercial fortunes of his Flemish
towns depended.
At Agincourt Henry V, who had taken Harfleur and was marching towards
Calais, came upon his foes drawn up across the road that he must
follow in such vastly superior numbers that they seemed overwhelming.
The battle that followed, however, showed that the French had learned
no military lesson from previous disasters. The heavily-armed,
undisciplined noble on horseback was still their main hope, and on this
dark October day he floundered helplessly in the mud, unable to charge,
scarcely able to extricate himself, an easy victim for his enemy’s
shafts. The slaughter was tremendous; for Henry, receiving a false
report that a new French army was appearing on the horizon, commanded
his prisoners to be killed, and numbers had perished before the mistake
was discovered and the order could be reversed.
When the news of the defeat and massacre at Agincourt reached Paris,
that had always hated the Armagnacs, the indignant populace broke
into rebellion, crying, ‘Burgundy and Peace!’ but the movement was
suppressed, and it was not till 1418 that John ‘the Fearless’ succeeded
in entering the capital. By this time Henry V, who had returned to
England after his victory, was once more back in France conquering
Normandy; and French indignation was roused to white heat when it was
known that Rouen, the old capital of the Duchy, had been forced to
surrender to his victorious arms.
Even the Duke of Burgundy, who still disliked war with England, felt
that he must take some steps to prevent further encroachments; and,
after negotiations with the enemy had failed owing to their arrogant
demands, he suggested an agreement with the Armagnacs, in order that
France, if she must fight, should at least present a united front to
her foes.
Here was the moment for France’s regeneration; for the head of the
Armagnac faction at this date was the Dauphin Charles, son of Charles
‘the Mad’, and in response to his rival’s olive branch he consented to
meet him on the bridge of Montereau in order that the old rift might
be cemented. In token of submission and goodwill John of Burgundy
knelt to kiss the Prince’s hand; but, as he did so, an Armagnac still
burning with party hate sprang forward and plunged his dagger into his
side. A shout of horror and rage arose from the Burgundians, and as
they carried away the body of John ‘the Fearless’ they swore that this
murder had been arranged from the beginning and that they would never
pay allegiance again to the false Dauphin.
[Sidenote: The Treaty of Troyes]
In the Treaty of Troyes that was forthwith negotiated with the English
they ratified this vow, for Henry V of England received the hand of the
mad king’s daughter Catherine in marriage and was recognized as his
heir to the throne of France.
Two years later died both Henry V and Charles VI, leaving France
divided into two camps, one lying mainly in the north and east,
that acknowledged as ruler the infant Henry VI, son of Henry V and
Catherine; the other in the south and south-west, that obeyed the
Valois Charles VII.
The Treaty of Troyes marks the high-water mark of English power in
France during the second period of the Hundred Years’ War; for, though
the banners that Henry V had carried so triumphantly at Agincourt were
pushed steadily southward into Armagnac territory after this date, yet
the influence of the invaders was already on the wane. The agreement
that gave France to a foreigner and a national enemy had been made only
with a section of the French nation; and some of those who in the heat
of their anger against the Armagnacs had consented to its terms were
soon secretly ashamed of their strange allegiance.
When Charles the Dauphin became Charles VII he ceased to appear
merely the leader of a party discredited by its murder of the Duke of
Burgundy. He became a national figure; and though his enemies might
call him in derision ‘King of Bourges’ because he dared not come to
Paris but ruled only from a town in central France, yet he remained in
spite of all their ridicule a king and a Frenchman. Had he been less
timid and selfish, more ready to run risks and exert himself rather
than to idle away his time with unworthy favourites, there is no doubt
that he could have hastened the English collapse. Instead he allowed
those who fostered his indolence and hatred of public affairs in
order to increase their own power to hinder a reconciliation with the
Burgundians that might have been the salvation of France.
Philip ‘the Good’, son of John ‘the Fearless’, disliked the Dauphin as
his father’s murderer, but he had little love for his English allies.
By marriage and skilful diplomacy he had absorbed a great part of
modern Holland into his already vast inheritance and could assume the
state and importance of an independent sovereign. With England he felt
that he could treat as an equal, and now regarded with dismay the idea
that she might permanently control both sides of the Channel. So long
as John, Duke of Bedford, brother of Henry V, acted as regent for his
young nephew with statesmanlike moderation, an outward semblance of
friendship was maintained; but Bedford could with difficulty keep in
order his quarrelsome, irresponsible younger brother, Humphrey, Duke
of Gloucester, who ruled in England, and with still greater difficulty
quell the sullen discontent of the people of Paris who, suffering from
starvation as the result of a prolonged war, professed to regard a
foreign king as the source of all their troubles.
Only the prestige of English arms retained the loyalty of northern
France. ‘Two hundred English would drive five hundred French before
them,’ says a chronicler of the day; but salvation was to come to
France from an unexpected quarter, and enable the same writer to add
proudly, ‘Now two hundred French would chase and beat four hundred
English.’
[Sidenote: Jeanne d’Arc]
In the village of Domremy on the Upper Meuse there lived at the
beginning of the fifteenth century a peasant maid, Jeanne d’Arc, who
was, according to the description of a fellow villager, ‘modest,
simple, devout, went gladly to Church and sacred places, worked, sewed,
hoed in the fields, and did what was needful about the house.’ Up till
the age of thirteen Jeanne had been like other light-hearted girls, but
it was then that a change came into her life: voices seemed to draw her
away from her companions and to speak to her from behind a brilliant
cloud, and later she had visions of St. Catherine and of St. Michael,
whose painted effigies she knew in church.
‘I saw them with my bodily eyes as clearly as I see you,’ she said when
questioned as to these appearances, and admitted that at first she
was afraid but that afterwards they brought her comfort. Always they
came with the same message, in her own words, ‘that she must change
her course of life and do marvellous deeds, for the King of Heaven had
chosen her to aid the King of France.’
Jeanne d’Arc was no hysterical visionary: she had always a fund of
common sense, and knew how ridiculous the idea that she, an uneducated
peasant girl, was called to save France would seem to the world. For
some time she tried to forget the message her Voices told her; but at
last it was borne in upon her that God had given her a mission, and
from this time neither her indignant father nor timid friends could
turn her from her purpose.
[Illustration: FRANCE in 1429]
Of all the difficulties and checks that she encountered before at last,
at the age of seventeen, she was allowed to have audience with Charles
VII, there is no space to tell here. News of her persistence had
spread abroad, and the torch-lit hall of the castle into which Jeanne
was shown was packed with gaily-clad courtiers, and standing amongst
them the King, in no way distinguished from the others by his dress or
any outward pomp. Every one believed that the peasant-maid would be
dazzled; but she, who had seen no portrait of the King and lived all
her life in the quiet little village of Domremy, showed no confusion
at the hundreds of eyes fixed on her. Recognizing at once the man with
whom her mission was concerned she went straight to him and said, ‘My
noble lord, I come from God to help you and your realm.’
There must have been something arresting in Jeanne’s simplicity and
frankness contrasted with that corrupt atmosphere. Even the feeble
king was moved; and, when she had been questioned and approved by his
bishops, he allowed her to ride forth, as she wished, with the armies
of France to save for him the important town of Orleans that was
closely besieged by the English. She went in armour with a sword in
hand and a banner, and those who rode with her felt her absolute belief
in victory, and into their hearts stole the magic influence of her own
gay courage and hope.
We have often spoken of ‘chivalry’, the ideal of good conduct in the
Middle Ages. The kings, princes, and knights, whose prowess has made
the chronicles of Froissart famous, were to their journalist veritable
heroes of chivalry, exponents of courage, courtesy, and breeding.
Yet to modern eyes these qualities seem often tarnished, since the
heroes who flaunted them were in no way ashamed of vices like cruelty,
selfishness, or snobbery. A King John of France would die in a foreign
prison rather than break his parole, but he would disdainfully ride
down a ‘rabble’ of archers whom his negligence had left too tired to
fight his battles. The Black Prince would wait like a servant on his
royal prisoner, but accept as a brother-in-arms to be succoured a human
devil like Pedro the Cruel; or put a town to the sword, as he did at
Limoges, old men, women, and children, because it had dared to set him
at defiance.
There is nothing of this tarnish in the chivalry of the peasant-maid
who saved France. Pure gold were her knightly deeds, yet achieved
without a trace of the prig or the boaster. Jeanne d’Arc was always
human and therefore lovable, quick in her anger at fraud, yet easily
appeased; friendly to king and soldier alike, yet never losing the
simple dignity that was her safeguard in court and camp. Of all
mediaeval warriors of whom we read she was the bravest; for she knew
what fear was and would often pray not to fall into the hands of her
enemies alive, yet she never shirked a battle or went into danger with
a downcast face. A slim figure, with her close-cropped dark hair and
shining eyes, she rode wherever the fight was thickest, always, in the
words of a modern biographer, ‘gay and gaily glad,’ quick to see her
opportunities and follow them up, joyful in victory, generous to her
foes, pitiful to the wounded and prisoners.
The sight of her awoke new courage in her countrymen, dismay as at the
supernatural in her enemies, who dubbed her a witch and vowed to burn
her.
‘Suddenly she turned at bay,’ says a contemporary account of one
of her battles, ‘and few as were the men with her she faced the
English and advanced on them swiftly with standard displayed. Then
fled the English shamefully and the French came back and chased
them into their works.’
Orleans was relieved and entered, the reluctant, still half-doubting
Charles led to Reims, and there in the ancient capital of France
crowned, that all Frenchmen might know who was their true king. ‘The
Maid’ urged that the ceremony should be followed by a rapid march
on Paris; but favourites who dreaded her influence whispered other
counsels into the royal ear, and Charles dallied and hesitated. When
at last he advanced it was to find that the bridges over the Seine had
been cut, not by the retreating English but by French treachery.
Paris was ripe for rebellion, and at the sight of ‘the Maid’ would have
murdered her foreign garrison and opened her gates. Bedford was in the
north suppressing a revolt, yet Charles, clutching at the excuse of the
broken bridges, retreated southwards, disbanding his army and leaving
his defender to her fate.
Her Voices now warned Jeanne of impending capture and death, but her
mission was to save France, and hearing that the Duke of Burgundy
planned to take the important town of Compiègne she rode to its defence
with a small force. Under the walls, in the course of a sortie, she was
captured, refusing to surrender. ‘I have sworn and given my faith to
another than you, and I will keep my oath,’ she declared; and through
the months that followed, caged and fettered in a dark cell of the
castle of Rouen, exposed to the insults of the rough English archers,
she maintained her allegiance, saying to her foes of the prince who had
failed her so pitiably, ‘My King is the most noble of all Christians.’
Frenchmen (some of them bishops, canons, and lawyers of the University
of Paris), as well as Englishmen, were amongst those who, after the
mockery of a trial, sent Jeanne to be burned as a heretic in the
market-place of Rouen. Bravely as she had lived she died, calling on
her saints, begging the forgiveness of her enemies, pardoning the evil
they had done her. ‘That the world’, says a modern writer, ‘might have
no relic of her of whom the world was not worthy, the English threw her
ashes into the Seine.’
France, that had betrayed Jeanne d’Arc, needed no relic to keep her
memory alive. To-day men and women call her Saint, and one miracle she
certainly wrought, for she restored to her country, that through years
of anarchy had almost lost belief in itself, the undying sense of its
own nationality. ‘As to peace with the English,’ she had said, ‘the
only peace possible is for them to return to their own land.’ Within
little more than twenty years from her death the mission on which she
had ridden forth from Domremy had been accomplished, and Calais, of all
their French possessions, alone remained to the enemies of France.
In summary of the Hundred Years’ War it may be said that from the
beginning the English fought in a lost cause. Fortune, military genius,
and dogged courage gave to their conquests a fictitious endurance; but
nationality is a foe invincible because it has discovered the elixir of
life; and when the tide of fortune turned with the coming of ‘the Maid’
the ebb of English discomfiture was very swift.
In 1435 died the Duke of Bedford, and in the same year Charles VII,
moved from his sluggishness, concluded at Arras a treaty with Philip
of Burgundy that secured his entry into Paris. By good fortune his
young rival in the ensuing campaigns, the English King, Henry VI, had
inherited, not the energy and valour of his father, but an anaemic
version of his French grandfather’s insanity. Even before his first
lapse into melancholia, he was the weak puppet of first one set of
influences, then another; and the factions that strove to govern for
their own interests in his name lost him first Normandy and then
Guienne. Finally they carried their feuds back across the Channel to
work out what seemed an almost divine vengeance for the anarchy they
had caused in France, in the troubled ‘Wars of the Roses’.
Under Charles VII, well named _le bien servi_, France, as she gradually
freed herself from a foreign yoke, developed from a mediaeval into
the semblance of a modern state. Wise ministers, whom in his later
years the King had the sense to substitute for his earlier workless
favourites, built up the power of the monarchy, restored its financial
credit, and established in the place of the disorderly ‘companies’ a
standing army recruited and controlled by the crown.
These things were not done without opposition, and the rebellion of
‘the Praguerie’, in which were implicated nearly all the leading
nobles of France, including the King’s own son, the Dauphin Louis, was
a desperate attempt on the part of the aristocracy to shake off the
growing pressure of royal control. It failed because the nation, as
a whole, saw in submission to an absolute monarch a means, imperfect
perhaps but yet the only means available at the moment, of securing the
regeneration of France.
It is significant that when Louis XI succeeded to Charles VII he
inevitably followed in his father’s footsteps, forsaking the interests
of the class with which he had first allied himself, in order to rule
as an autocrat and fulfil the ideal of kingship in his day.
_Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368-73._
Philip VI of France 1328-50
John II of France 1350-64
Charles V of France 1364-80
Charles VI of France 1380-1422
Charles VII of France 1422-61
Henry V of England 1413-22
Henry VI of England 1422-61
Boccaccio 1313-75
Jeanne d’Arc 1412-30
XIX
SPAIN IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Spain has been rightly described as ‘one of the most cut up portions
of the earth’s surface’. A glance at her map will show the numerous
mountain ranges that pierce into the heart of the country, dividing her
into districts utterly unlike both in climate and soil. Even rivers
that elsewhere in Europe, as in the case of the Rhine and the Danube,
act as roads of friendship and commerce, are in Spain for the most part
unnavigable, running in wild torrents between precipitous banks so as
to form an additional hindrance to intercourse.
Geography thus came to play a very great part in the history of
mediaeval Spain, deciding that though overrun by Romans, Vandals,
Visigoths, and Saracens, no conquest should be ever quite complete,
since the invaded could always find inaccessible refuges amongst the
mountains. A spirit of provincial independence was also fostered, as in
Italy[30]--men learning to say first not ‘I am a Spaniard,’ but ‘I am
of Burgos,’ or ‘of Andalusia,’ or of ‘Barcelona,’ according to their
neighbourhood.
When the Saracens defeated King Rodrigo and his Christian army at the
battle of Guadalete,[31] we have seen that they found the subjugation
of southern and central Spain an easy matter. Rich towns and districts
passed into their hands almost without a blow: the Gothic nobles and
their families who should have defended them, weakened by tribal
dissensions, fled away northwards to the mountains of Leon and
Asturias, while the downtrodden masses that they left behind soon
welcomed their new masters.
It was the policy of the Moors to grant a slave his freedom on his
open acknowledgement of Allah as the one God and Mahomet as his
Prophet, while they allowed those Christians and Jews who refused to
surrender their faith to live in peace on the payment of a poll-tax not
required from Moslems.
[Illustration: The SPANISH KINGDOMS
1263-1492]
[Sidenote: The Caliphate of Cordova]
The capital of the Saracen kingdom, or ‘Caliphate’, that was destined
to survive practically unmolested for some three hundred years, was the
town of Cordova, whose capture the Moors believed had been divinely
inspired by Allah, since as their army under cover of the darkness
swept up to the walls, a terrific hail-storm descended that deadened
the clatter of approaching hoofs. From a treacherous shepherd one of
the captains learned of a part of the fortifications easy to scale;
and, climbing up undetected by means of a fig-tree, he let down his
long turban to assist his fellows until a sufficient number had mounted
to overpower the guards and open the gates to the main army.
To the Spaniards, thus defeated almost in their sleep, Cordova was
a fallen city, disgraced by the presence of infidels; yet these
same infidels were to make her luxury and brilliance rival the
almost fabulous glories of Bagdad and to win for her culture the
grudging admiration of Christian Europe. As we read of her ‘Palace of
Pleasures’, ornamented with gold and precious stones, of her woods of
pomegranate and sweet almond, of her gardens and perfumed fountains, of
her luxurious rest-houses for travellers without the walls, we are back
in the atmosphere of some Eastern fairy tale that clings also around
the history of her Caliphs, tinging with romance their loves, their
hatreds, and their rivalries.
There are other aspects of Moorish Spain hardly less wonderful when
contrasted with the haphazard national development of the rest of
Europe. Here were agriculture and industry deliberately stimulated by
a close and practical study of such branches of knowledge as science
and botany, algebra and arithmetic. Arid soil, that under ordinary
mediaeval neglect would have been left a desert, became through canals
and irrigation a fertile plain, the garden of rice, sugar, cotton, or
oranges. Mathematics applied to everyday needs produced the mariner’s
compass; scientific brains and intelligent workmen the steel blades of
Toledo and Seville, the woven silk fabrics of Granada, and the pottery
and velvets of Valencia.
Yet, though knowledge was consciously applied for commercial purposes,
the Moors did not set up ‘Utility’ as an idol for their scholars
and tell them that only information that brought material wealth in
its train was worth having. Philosophy and literature, as well as
science, had their lecture-halls: Greece and the East were searched
by Caliphs’ orders for manuscripts to fill their libraries; and so
world-famous became Cordovan professors that in the twelfth century
Christian students hastened to sit at their feet; and the translations
of Aristotle by the Arabic professor Averroës became one of the chief
sources of authority for the most orthodox ‘schoolmen’.
In their search after knowledge for its own sake, the Moors accorded
toleration to the best brains of all races. Elsewhere in Europe the
Jews were held accursed, protected by Christian rulers so long as their
money-bags could be squeezed like a sponge, but exposed to insult,
torture, and death whenever popular fury, aroused by a crusade or an
epidemic, demanded an easy outlet for zeal in burning and pillaging
houses.
Christian fanaticism had closed nearly every avenue of life to the Jew
save that of money-lender, in which he found few competitors, since the
law of the Church forbade usury. It then proceeded to condemn him as a
blood-sucker because of the high rate of interest that his precarious
position induced him to charge for his loans. Thus, despised, hated,
and feared, persecution helped to breed in the average Jew the very
vices for which he was blamed, namely, the determination to sweat his
Christian neighbours, and an arrogant absorption in his own race to the
exclusion of all others.
In the cities of the Moors alone the Jew could rise to public eminence,
as in Cordova, where teachers of the race were especially noted for
their researches in medicine and surgery. Many Spanish Israelites
indeed became doctors, and proved themselves so unmistakably superior
in knowledge and skill to the ordinary quacks that rulers of Christian
states were thankful to employ them when their health was in danger.
It would seem at first sight as if this happy kingdom of the Moors,
where culture, comfort, and toleration reigned, must in time succeed in
spreading its civilizing influence over Europe; but there was another
and darker side to Moslem Spain. The Caliphate of Cordova, like other
Moslem states, was the victim of a form of government whose sole
bond was the religion of Islam. Its ruler was a tyrant independent
of any popular control, and could send even his Grand Vizier, or
chief minister, to death by a word. Such an exalted position had its
penalties, and the Caliph must keep continual watch lest he should
find enemies ready to slay him, not merely amongst his servants, but
even more amongst his sons or brothers. Since polygamy prevailed, in
nearly every family there were children of rival mothers, who learned
from their cradles to hate and fear each other. It depended only, as
it seemed, on a little luck or cunning who would succeed to the royal
title, and few scrupled to use dagger or poison to ensure themselves
the coveted honour.
Out of the feuds and plots of the Moorish court and the rise and fall
of Emirs and Sultans in the provinces, Moorish Spain prepared its own
downfall during the three centuries that it dominated southern and
central Spain.
Away in the north, in Asturias, the ‘cradle of the Spanish race’, where
every peasant considers himself an ‘hidalgo’ or noble, in the kingdoms
of Leon and Navarre, in the counties of Castile and Barcelona, the
descendants of the once enfeebled Goths were meanwhile developing into
a race of warriors.
Though ardent in his devotion to Christianity, weaving supernatural aid
around every victory, the Spaniard did not, in what might be called the
first period of ‘the Reconquest’, show any acute dislike of the Moor.
His early struggles were not for religion but for independence, and
often a Prince or Count would join with some friendly Emir to overthrow
a Christian rival. ‘All Kings are alike to me so long as they pay my
price!’ These words of Rodrigo (Ruy) Diaz, the greatest of Spanish
heroes, were typical of his race in the age in which he lived.
[Sidenote: The Cid]
This Ruy Diaz, ‘El Campeador’, or ‘the Challenger’, as the Christians
named him, but more popularly called by his Arabic title ‘Al Said’
or ‘the Cid’, meaning ‘the Chief’, was brave, generous, boastful,
and treacherous. A Castilian by race, he held his allegiance to the
King of Leon, whose wars he sometimes condescended to wage, as in no
way sacred; but when banished by that monarch, who had well-founded
suspicions of his loyalty, proceeded unabashed to fight on behalf of
his late master’s enemy, the Moorish Sultan of Saragossa.
It is evident from the old chronicles and ballads that the Cid himself
could rouse and keep the affection of those who served him. When he
sent for his relations and friends to tell them that he had been
banished by the King of Leon and to ask who would go with him into
exile, we are told that ‘Alvar Fañez, who was his cousin, answered,
“Cid, we will all go with you through desert and through peopled
country, and never fail you. In your service will we spend our mules
and horses, our wealth and our garments, and ever while we live be unto
you loyal friends and vassals”: and they all confirmed what Alvar Fañez
had said.’
Mediaeval Spain was always ready to admire a warrior; and a great part
of the Cid’s charm lay, no doubt, in his prowess on the battle-field,
when, charging with his good sword ‘Tizona’ in hand, none could
withstand the onslaught. To this admiration was added the deeper
feeling of fellowship. Their hero might spill the blood of hundreds
to attain his ambitions, but he was yet no noble after the mediaeval
French type, despising those of inferior rank; rather a full-blooded
Spaniard, keen in his sympathy with all other Spaniards.
As he rode from the town of Burgos on his way to exile the Cid called
Alvar Fañez to his side and said, ‘Cousin, the poor have no part in the
wrong which the King hath done us.... See now that no wrong be done
unto them along our road.’ ‘And an old woman who was standing at her
door said, “Go in a lucky minute and make spoil of whatever you wish.”’
The Cid’s ‘luck’, or perhaps it would be truer to say his admirable
discretion, carried him triumphantly through many campaigns--at times
reconciled with the Christian king and fighting under his banner, at
others laying waste his lands as a Moorish ally. At length he reached
the summit of his fortunes and carved himself a principality out of the
Moorish province of Valencia; and as ruler of this state made little
pretence of being any one’s vassal, but boasted that he, a Rodrigo,
would free Andalusia as another Rodrigo had let her fall into bondage.
This kingly achievement was denied him, for even heroes fail; so that a
time came when he fell ill, and the Moors invaded his land, and because
he could no longer fight against them he turned his face to the wall
and died. Yet his last victory was still to come; for his followers,
who had served him so faithfully, embalmed his body, and they set him
on his war-horse and bound ‘Tizona’ in his hand, and so they led him
out of the city against his foes. Instead of weeping and lamentations
the Cid’s widow had ordered the church bells to be rung and war
trumpets to be blown so that the Moors did not know their great enemy
was dead; but imagining that he charged amongst them, terrible in his
wrath as of old, they broke and fled.
In spite of this victory Valencia fell back under the rule of the
Moors, but she never forgot ‘Ruy Diaz’, and is proud to this day to be
called ‘Valencia of the Cid’.
The second period of the reconquest of Spain by the Christians may be
called the crusading period, and continued until the fall of Granada in
1492. It began not at any fixed date, but in the gradual realization by
the Christian states during the twelfth century that their war with the
Moors was something quite distinct and ever so much more important than
their almost fraternal feuds with one another. This dawning conviction
was intensified into a faith, when the Moorish kingdom, that, owing to
the feebleness and corruption of its government, had almost ceased to
be a kingdom and split up into a number of warring states, was towards
the end of the twelfth century overrun and temporarily welded together
by a fierce Berber tribe from North Africa, the Almohades.
The Almohades, like earlier followers of Mahomet, were definitely
hostile to both Christians and Jews, and so the feeling of religious
bitterness grew; and the war that at first was a series of victories
for the infidel developed its character of a crusade.
Other crusades, we have seen, gained public support; and at the
beginning of the thirteenth century Pope Innocent III, no less alive
to his responsibility towards Spain than towards the Holy Land, sent
a recruiting appeal to all the countries of Europe. This was answered
by the arrival of bands of Templars, Hospitallers, and other young
warriors anxious to win their spurs against the heathen. Spain herself
founded several Military Orders, of which the most famous was the Order
of Santiago, that is, of St. James, called after the national saint,
whose tomb at Compostella in the north was one of the favourite shrines
visited by pilgrims.
[Sidenote: Las Navas de Tolosa]
At the head of the Christian host, when it rode across the mountains to
the plain of Las Navas de Tolosa, where it was destined to fight one
of the most decisive of Spanish battles, was Alfonso VIII, ‘the Good’,
of Castile, who had warred against the Moors ever since his coronation
as a lad of fifteen. With him went his allies, the King of Navarre,
commanding the right wing, and Pedro II, King of Aragon, commanding
the left.
All day long the battle raged; and the Christian kings and their
knights fought like heroes; but in spite of their efforts they were
pressed back and defeat seemed almost certain. ‘Here must we die,’
exclaimed Alfonso bitterly, determined to sell his life at a high
price; but Rodrigo Ximenez, the fiery Archbishop of Toledo, replied,
‘Not so, Señor, here shall we conquer!’ and with his cross-bearer he
charged so resolutely against the foe that the Christians, rallying to
save their sacred standard, drove the Moors headlong from the field.
So overwhelming was the victory that the advance of the Almohades was
completely checked, and the Christian states became the dominating
power in the peninsula.
At first in their battles amongst themselves it had been Navarre that
took the lead amongst the Christian states; but later this little
mountain kingdom, that lay across the Pyrenees like a saddle and was
half French in her sympathies and outlook, lost her supremacy. Spanish
interest ceased to be centred in France, and focused itself instead in
the lands that were slowly being recovered from the Moors. Portugal
declared itself an independent kingdom, Castile broke off the yoke of
Navarre and united with Leon, Aragon absorbed the important province of
Catalonia, with its thriving seaport Barcelona.
[Sidenote: James ‘the Conqueror’]
One of the most famous of Aragonese heroes in the thirteenth century
was James ‘the Conqueror’, son of Pedro II of Aragon, who during the
Albigensian Crusade had died fighting on behalf of his brother and
vassal, the Count of Provence, against Simon de Montfort.[32] James,
who was only six at the time, was taken prisoner by the cruel Count,
but Innocent III insisted that he should be handed back to his own
people, and these gave him to the Templars to educate. It was natural
that in such a military environment the boy should grow up a soldier;
but he was to prove himself a statesman as well, and a lover of
literature, writing in the Catalan dialect a straightforward, manly
chronicle of his reign, and encouraging his Catalan subjects in the
devotion to poetry they had shared from early days with their Provençal
neighbours.
According to contemporary accounts the young king was handsome
beyond all ordinary standards, nearly seven feet tall, and well
built in proportion. Unfortunately he was so attractive that he
became thoroughly spoilt, and was dissolute in his way of life and
uncontrolled in his temper. When in one of his rages he was capable of
any crime, though ordinarily so generous and tender-hearted that he
hated to sign a death-warrant. In his chronicle he tells us how on one
of his campaigns he found a swallow had built her nest by the roundel
of his tent: ‘So I ordered the men not to take it down,’ he says,
‘until the swallow had flown away with her young, since she had come
trusting to my protection.’
The combination of good looks, brains, and chivalry found in James I
appealed to the imagination of the Aragonese, but still more did his
fighting qualities that were typically Spanish. ‘It has ever been the
fate of my race’, he wrote, ‘to conquer or die in battle’; and when
quite a small boy he made up his mind that he would become a crusader.
For many years after he was declared old enough to reign for himself
King James was forced to spend his time and energy in subduing the
nobles who during his long minority had been allowed to become a law
unto themselves. This vindication of his authority accomplished, he led
his armies against the Moors, and under his conquering banner ‘Valencia
of the Cid’ passed finally into Christian hands.
The Moorish kingdom was now reduced to Granada in the south and the
dependent province of Murcia to the north-east that was claimed by the
Castilians, though Alfonso ‘the Learned’ of Castile was quite unable to
make himself master of it.
Hearing of the Aragonese victories in Valencia, Alfonso, who was
‘the Conqueror’s’ son-in-law, asked King James if he would help him
by invading Murcia, a project that first aroused the anger of the
Aragonese because it seemed to them that they were expected to do the
hard work in order that some one else might reap the spoils.
King James was more far-seeing than his subjects and held a different
view. The Moors were weak at the moment; but, owing to the influx of
fresh warriors from North Africa, they had always been able to rally
their power in the past and might do so again. ‘If the King of Castile
happen to lose his land I shall hardly be safe in mine,’ was his shrewd
summary of the case; and with this he invaded and overran Murcia, which
he gave to his son-in-law in 1262.
This date, 1262, though it marked no fresh acquisition of territory
for Aragon, was nevertheless an epoch in her history. Hitherto her
main interest had been identical with Castile’s--namely, the freedom
of Spain from the infidel--but now, owing to the conquest of Murcia,
she was surrounded by Christian neighbours, and what remained of the
crusade had become the business of Castile alone. Early in his reign
also, King James had closed another chapter in Aragonese history, when,
as a result of his father’s defeat and death, he had been forced to
cede all Catalonian claims to Provence, and thus to put away for ever
the prospect of absorbing France that had dazzled his ancestors.
Where, then, should Aragon turn her victorious arms? King James, a true
Aragonese, had already answered this question, when in 1229 he began
the conquest of the Balearic Islands, thus clearly recognizing that his
country’s natural outlook for expansion was neither north nor south,
but eastwards. Already Catalan fishermen and the merchants of Barcelona
were disputing the commercial overlordship of the Mediterranean
with their fellows of Marseilles and the Italian Republics, and
thenceforward Aragonese kings were to take a hand in the game,
supporting commerce with diplomacy and the sword.
[Sidenote: Peter III of Aragon]
James ‘the Conqueror’ did not die in battle-harness, as he had
predicted, but in the robe of a Cistercian monk, expiating in the
seclusion of a monastery the sins of his tempestuous, pleasure-loving
youth. His tradition as a warrior descended to his son Pedro III, under
whose rule Aragon entered on her campaign of Italian conquests.
Both the excuse for this undertaking and the occasion have been
noticed elsewhere in another connexion. The excuse was the execution
of Conradin,[33] last legitimate descendant of the Neapolitan
Hohenstaufen. As he stood on the scaffold calmly awaiting his death,
the boy, for he was little more, had flung his gauntlet amongst the
crowd. The action spoke for itself, the one bitter word ‘revenge’; and
a partisan who witnessed it, kneeling swiftly, picked up the glove and
bore it away to Spain. Here he presented it to Pedro III, to whose wife
Constance, the daughter of an illegitimate son of Frederick II, the
claims of the Italian Hohenstaufen had descended.
Pedro did not forget the glove or its message; and when the Sicilians,
rising in wrath at the Easter Vespers,[34] massacred their Angevin
tyrants, it was Aragonese ships that brought them succour, and Pedro
who defied the anathemas of the Pope and the power of France to drive
him from his new throne.
All the failures and victories of the years that followed, when
Aragonese and Angevin claimants deluged ‘the Kingdom’ and adjoining
island with blood, are more a matter of Italian than Spanish history,
and it is with Castile that the interests of the peninsula become
mainly concerned.
Castile in later mediaeval times consisted of some two-thirds of the
whole area of Spain, stretching from the Bay of Biscay in the north to
the confines of the Moorish kingdom of Granada in the south. As her
name suggests, she was a land of castles, built originally, not like
the strongholds of Stephen’s lawless barons in England--to maintain a
tyranny over the countryside--but as military outposts in each fresh
stage of the reconquest from Islam. Naturally those who lived in such
outposts, and might be wakened any night to take part in a border
foray or to withstand a surprise attack, expected to receive special
privileges in compensation. This was as it should be, and grateful
Kings of Castile, in order to encourage traders as well as knights
and princes to settle on their dangerous southern border, offered
concessions in the form of charters and revenues with a reckless
prodigality at which other European monarchs would have shuddered.
Trouble began when, with the steady advance of the crusading armies,
outposts ceased to be outposts; and yet their inhabitants, naturally
enough again, saw no reason why they should be deprived of the
privileges and riches that they had won in the past. Had they known
how to use their independence, when danger from the Moors diminished,
in securing a government conscious of national needs and aspirations,
Spain might have become the political leader of Europe. Unfortunately
the average Castilian felt only a selfish sense of the advantages
that liberty might afford, without realizing in the least that their
possession entailed heavy responsibilities. Thus he allowed his country
to degenerate into anarchy.
War seemed the natural atmosphere of life to the Castilian of pure
blood, whose ancestors had all been crusaders. Unable to compete in
agriculture or industry with the thrifty Moslems or Jews who remained
behind on the lands that he reconquered, he decided that labour, except
with the sword, was the hall-mark of slaves; and this unfortunate
fallacy, widely adopted, became the ultimate ruin of Spain. It turned
her from the true road of national prosperity, which can be gained
only by solid work, while it prevented nobles and town representatives
from understanding one another, and so rendered them incapable of
common action in the ‘Cortes’, or national parliament. The fallacy
went farther, for it made war between noble and noble seem a natural
outlet for martial zeal when no Moslem force was handy on which to whet
Christian swords.
The part played by the King in this land of independent crusaders and
aristocratic cut-throats was difficult and precarious. Though not so
legally bound by the concessions he had been forced to make as in
Aragon--where no king might pass a law without the consent of his
Cortes and where the ‘Justiciar’, a popular minister, disputed his
supreme right of justice--mediaeval Castilian monarchs were in practice
very much at the mercy of their subjects.
Henry II of England had been able to burn down his barons’ castles and
hang some of their owners, thus paving the way of royal supremacy;
but kings of Castile could scarcely adopt such drastic measures
against subjects usually more wealthy than themselves, whose castles
were required as national fortresses, and whose retainers formed the
main part of Christian armies against the Moors. Instead, custom and
circumstances seemed ever forcing the rulers of Castile to grant new
liberties, and to alienate their lands and revenues in constant rewards
and bribes.
[Sidenote: The ‘Siete Partidas’]
This was one of the failings of Alfonso ‘the Learned’, who in spite of
his boast, ‘Had I been present at the Creation I would have arranged
the world better,’ was certainly not ‘the Wise’, as he is sometimes
called. Alfonso was a great reader and a scientist in advance of
his day; but the best work that he ever did for his kingdom was the
publication of the _Siete Partidas_ (Seven Divisions), a compilation
of all the previous laws of Spain, both Roman and Gothic, drawn up
and arranged in a single code. For the rest, apart from his somewhat
academic cleverness, he was vain, irresolute, and superficial. On one
occasion he divorced his wife; and then, when the new wife he had
chosen, a Norwegian princess, had already arrived at a Spanish port, he
decided to send her away and retain the old. This capriciousness was of
a piece with the rest of his actions.
During the ‘Great Interregnum’[35] Alfonso was one of the claimants for
the imperial crown, but had neither money nor sufficient popularity to
carry through this foolish project, for which he heavily overtaxed his
people. He also planned an invasion of Africa in grand crusading style,
but had to turn his attention instead to struggling against unruly
sons. He died with little accomplished save his reputation for wisdom.
The reign of Alfonso X was a prelude to a century and a half of anarchy
in Castile, a period when few of her kings could claim to be either
‘wise’ or ‘learned’, and when four of them by ill fortune ascended
the throne in childhood, and so presented their nobles with extra
opportunities for seeking their own ambitions at the royal expense.
On one struggle during this century and a half we have already
touched--the bitter feud between Pedro ‘the Cruel’, the Nero of Spain,
and his half-brother, Henry of Trastamara.[36] There is no end to the
list of crimes of which this monster has been accused, from strangling
his rival’s mother, and calmly watching while his half-brother, a twin
of Henry of Trastamara, was pursued and cut down unarmed by the royal
guard, to ordering that the young bride with whom he had refused to
live should be given poisonous herbs that she might die.
Stained, indeed, must the Black Prince have felt his honour when he
discovered what a brother-in-arms he had crossed the Pyrenees to
aid--one who would massacre prisoners for sheer love of butchery,
burn a priest for prophesying his death, and murder an archbishop in
a fit of savagery. It is probably true to describe this worst of the
Spanish kings as mad: many of his atrocities were so meaningless, such
obvious steps to his own downfall, because they alienated those who
tried to remain loyal to his cause. His end, when it came, rejoiced
the popular heart and imagination, for Pedro, according to tradition,
was at last entrapped by the crafty Du Guesclin, lately released from
imprisonment by the Black Prince, and once more in the service of Henry
of Trastamara.