allowed for, there remains in Islam, this faith he imposed upon the
Arabs, much power and inspiration. One is its uncompromising
monotheism; its simple enthusiastic faith in the rule and fatherhood of
God and its freedom from theological complications. Another is its
complete detachment from the sacrificial priest and the temple. It is
an entirely prophetic religion, proof against any possibility of
relapse towards blood sacrifices. In the Koran the limited and
ceremonial nature of the pilgrimage to Mecca is stated beyond the
possibility of dispute, and every precaution was taken by Muhammad to
prevent the deification of himself after his death. And a third
element of strength lay in the insistence of Islam upon the perfect
brotherhood and equality before God of all believers, whatever their
colour, origin or status.
These are the things that made Islam a power in human affairs. It has
been said that the true founder of the Empire of Islam was not so much
Muhammad as his friend and helper, Abu Bekr. If Muhammad, with his
shifty character, was the mind and imagination of primitive Islam, Abu
Bekr was its conscience and its will. Whenever Muhammad wavered Abu
Bekr sustained him. And when Muhammad died, Abu Bekr became Caliph (=
successor), and with that faith that moves mountains, he set himself
simply and sanely to organize the subjugation of the whole world to
Allah—with little armies of 3,000 or 4,000 Arabs—according to those
letters the prophet had written from Medina in 628 to all the monarchs
of the world.
XLIV
THE GREAT DAYS OF THE ARABS
There follows the most amazing story of conquest in the whole history
of our race. The Byzantine army was smashed at the battle of the Yarmuk
(a tributary of the Jordan) in 634; and the Emperor Heraclius, his
energy sapped by dropsy and his resources exhausted by the Persian war,
saw his new conquests in Syria, Damascus, Palmyra, Antioch, Jerusalem
and the rest fall almost without resistance to the Moslim. Large
elements in the population went over to Islam. Then the Moslim turned
east. The Persians had found an able general in Rustam; they had a
great host with a force of elephants; and for three days they fought
the Arabs at Kadessia (637) and broke at last in headlong rout.
The conquest of all Persia followed, and the Moslem Empire pushed far
into Western Turkestan and eastward until it met the Chinese. Egypt
fell almost without resistance to the new conquerors, who full of a
fanatical belief in the sufficiency of the Koran, wiped out the
vestiges of the book-copying industry of the Alexandria Library. The
tide of conquest poured along the north coast of Africa to the Straits
of Gibraltar and Spain. Spain was invaded in 710 and the Pyrenees
Mountains were reached in 720. In 732 the Arab advance had reached the
centre of France, but here it was stopped for good at the battle of
Poitiers and thrust back as far as the Pyrenees again. The conquest of
Egypt had given the Moslim a fleet, and for a time it looked as though
they would take Constantinople. They made repeated sea attacks between
672 and 718 but the great city held out against them.
Map: The Growth of the Moslem Power in 25 Years
Map: The Moslem Empire, 750 A.D.
The Arabs had little political aptitude and no political experience,
and this great empire with its capital now at Damascus, which stretched
from Spain to China, was destined to break up very speedily. From the
very beginning doctrinal differences undermined its unity. But our
interest here lies not with the story of its political disintegration
but with its effect upon the human mind and upon the general destinies
of our race. The Arab intelligence had been flung across the world
even more swiftly and dramatically than had the Greek a thousand years
before. The intellectual stimulation of the whole world west of China,
the break-up of old ideas and development of new ones, was enormous.
In Persia this fresh excited Arabic mind came into contact not only
with Manichæan, Zoroastrian and Christian doctrine, but with the
scientific Greek literature, preserved not only in Greek but in Syrian
translations. It found Greek learning in Egypt also. Every-where, and
particularly in Spain, it discovered an active Jewish tradition of
speculation and discussion. In Central Asia it met Buddhism and the
material achievements of Chinese civilization. It learnt the
manufacture of paper—which made printed books possible—from the
Chinese. And finally it came into touch with Indian mathematics and
philosophy.
JERUSALEM, SHOWING THE MOSQUE OF OMAR
JERUSALEM, SHOWING THE MOSQUE OF OMAR
_Photo: Lehnert & Landrock_
Very speedily the intolerant self-sufficiency of the early days of
faith, which made the Koran seem the only possible book, was dropped.
Learning sprang up everywhere in the footsteps of the Arab conquerors.
By the eighth century there was an educational organization throughout
the whole “Arabized” world. In the ninth learned men in the schools of
Cordoba in Spain were corresponding with learned men in Cairo, Bagdad,
Bokhara and Samarkand. The Jewish mind assimilated very readily with
the Arab, and for a time the two Semitic races worked together through
the medium of Arabic. Long after the political break-up and
enfeeblement of the Arabs, this intellectual community of the
Arab-speaking world endured. It was still producing very considerable
results in the thirteenth century.
VIEW OF CAIRO MOSQUES
VIEW OF CAIRO MOSQUES
_Photo: Lehnert & Landrock_
So it was that the systematic accumulation and criticism of facts which
was first begun by the Greeks was resumed in this astonishing
renascence of the Semitic world. The seed of Aristotle and the museum
of Alexandria that had lain so long inactive and neglected now
germinated and began to grow towards fruition. Very great advances
were made in mathematical, medical and physical science. The clumsy
Roman numerals were ousted by the Arabic figures we use to this day and
the zero sign was first employed. The very name algebra is Arabic. So
is the word chemistry. The names of such stars as Algol, Aldebaran and
Boötes preserve the traces of Arab conquests in the sky. Their
philosophy was destined to reanimate the medieval philosophy of France
and Italy and the whole Christian world.
The Arab experimental chemists were called alchemists, and they were
still sufficiently barbaric in spirit to keep their methods and results
secret as far as possible. They realized from the very beginning what
enormous advantages their possible discoveries might give them, and
what far-reaching consequences they might have on human life. They
came upon many metallurgical and technical devices of the utmost value,
alloys and dyes, distilling, tinctures and essences, optical glass; but
the two chief ends they sought, they sought in vain. One was “the
philosopher’s stone”—a means of changing the metallic elements one into
another and so getting a control of artificial gold, and the other was
the _elixir vitœ_, a stimulant that would revivify age and prolong life
indefinitely. The crabbed patient experimenting of these Arab
alchemists spread into the Christian world. The fascination of their
enquiries spread. Very gradually the activities of these alchemists
became more social and co-operative. They found it profitable to
exchange and compare ideas. By insensible gradations the last of the
alchemists became the first of the experimental philosophers.
The old alchemists sought the philosopher’s stone which was to
transmute base metals to gold, and an elixir of immortality; they found
the methods of modern experimental science which promise in the end to
give man illimitable power over the world and over his own destiny.
XLV
THE DEVELOPMENT OF LATIN CHRISTENDOM
It is worth while to note the extremely shrunken dimensions of the
share of the world remaining under Aryan control in the seventh and
eighth centuries. A thousand years before, the Aryan-speaking races
were triumphant over all the civilized world west of China. Now the
Mongol had thrust as far as Hungary, nothing of Asia remained under
Aryan rule except the Byzantine dominions in Asia Minor, and all Africa
was lost and nearly all Spain. The great Hellenic world had shrunken to
a few possessions round the nucleus of the trading city of
Constantinople, and the memory of the Roman world was kept alive by the
Latin of the western Christian priests. In vivid contrast to this tale
of retrogression, the Semitic tradition had risen again from
subjugation and obscurity after a thousand years of darkness.
Yet the vitality of the Nordic peoples was not exhausted. Confined now
to Central and North-Western Europe and terribly muddled in their
social and political ideas, they were nevertheless building up
gradually and steadily a new social order and preparing unconsciously
for the recovery of a power even more extensive than that they had
previously enjoyed.
We have told how at the beginning of the sixth century there remained
no central government in Western Europe at all. That world was divided
up among numbers of local rulers holding their own as they could. This
was too insecure a state of affairs to last; a system of co-operation
and association grew up in this disorder, the feudal system, which has
left its traces upon European life up to the present time. This feudal
system was a sort of crystallization of society about power.
Everywhere the lone man felt insecure and was prepared to barter a
certain amount of his liberty for help and protection. He sought a
stronger man as his lord and protector; he gave him military services
and paid him dues, and in return he was confirmed in his possession of
what was his. His lord again found safety in vassalage to a still
greater lord. Cities also found it convenient to have feudal
protectors, and monasteries and church estates bound themselves by
similar ties. No doubt in many cases allegiance was claimed before it
was offered; the system grew downward as well as upward. So a sort of
pyramidal system grew up, varying widely in different localities,
permitting at first a considerable play of violence and private warfare
but making steadily for order and a new reign of law. The pyramids
grew up until some became recognizable as kingdoms. Already by the
early sixth century a Frankish kingdom existed under its founder Clovis
in what is now France and the Netherlands, and presently Visigothic and
Lombard and Gothic kingdoms were in existence.
The Moslim when they crossed the Pyrenees in 720 found this Frankish
kingdom under the practical rule of Charles Martel, the Mayor of the
Palace of a degenerate descendant of Clovis, and experienced the
decisive defeat of Poitiers (732) at his hands. This Charles Martel
was practically overlord of Europe north of the Alps from the Pyrenees
to Hungary. He ruled over a multitude of subordinate lords speaking
French- Latin, and High and Low German languages. His son Pepin
extinguished the last descendants of Clovis and took the kingly state
and title. His grandson Charlemagne, who began to reign in 768, found
himself lord of a realm so large that he could think of reviving the
title of Latin Emperor. He conquered North Italy and made himself
master of Rome.
Map: Area more or less under Frankish dominion in the time of Charles
Martel
Approaching the story of Europe as we do from the wider horizons of a
world history we can see much more distinctly than the mere nationalist
historian how cramping and disastrous this tradition of the Latin Roman
Empire was. A narrow intense struggle for this phantom predominance
was to consume European energy for more than a thousand years. Through
all that period it is possible to trace certain unquenchable
antagonisms; they run through the wits of Europe like the obsessions of
a demented mind. One driving force was this ambition of successful
rulers, which Charlemagne (Charles the Great) embodied, to become
Cæsar. The realm of Charlemagne consisted of a complex of feudal
German states at various stages of barbarism. West of the Rhine, most
of these German peoples had learnt to speak various Latinized dialects
which fused at last to form French. East of the Rhine, the racially
similar German peoples did not lose their German speech. On account of
this, communication was difficult between these two groups of barbarian
conquerors and a split easily brought about. The split was made the
more easy by the fact that the Frankish usage made it seem natural to
divide the empire of Charlemagne among his sons at his death. So one
aspect of the history of Europe from the days of Charlemagne onwards is
a history of first this monarch and his family and then that,
struggling to a precarious headship of the kings, princes, dukes,
bishops and cities of Europe, while a steadily deepening antagonism
between the French and German speaking elements develops in the medley.
There was a formality of election for each emperor; and the climax of
his ambition was to struggle to the possession of that worn-out,
misplaced capital Rome and to a coronation there.
The next factor in the European political disorder was the resolve of
the Church at Rome to make no temporal prince but the Pope of Rome
himself emperor in effect. He was already pontifex maximus; for all
practical purposes he held the decaying city; if he had no armies he
had at least a vast propaganda organization in his priests throughout
the whole Latin world; if he had little power over men’s bodies he held
the keys of heaven and hell in their imaginations and could exercise
much influence upon their souls. So throughout the middle ages while
one prince manœuvred against another first for equality, then for
ascendancy, and at last for the supreme prize, the Pope of Rome,
sometimes boldly, sometimes craftily, sometimes feebly—for the Popes
were a succession of oldish men and the average reign of a Pope was not
more than two years—manœuvred for the submission of all the princes to
himself as the ultimate overlord of Christendom.
But these antagonisms of prince against prince and of Emperor against
Pope do not by any means exhaust the factors of the European confusion.
There was still an Emperor in Constantinople speaking Greek and
claiming the allegiance of all Europe. When Charlemagne sought to
revive the empire, it was merely the Latin end of the empire he
revived. It was natural that a sense of rivalry between Latin Empire
and Greek Empire should develop very readily. And still more readily
did the rivalry of Greek-speaking Christianity and the newer
Latin-speaking version develop. The Pope of Rome claimed to be the
successor of St. Peter, the chief of the apostles of Christ, and the
head of the Christian community everywhere. Neither the emperor nor
the patriarch in Constantinople were disposed to acknowledge this
claim. A dispute about a fine point in the doctrine of the Holy
Trinity consummated a long series of dissensions in a final rupture in
1054. The Latin Church and the Greek Church became and remained
thereafter distinct and frankly antagonistic. This antagonism must be
added to the others in our estimate of the conflicts that wasted Latin
Christendom in the middle ages.
STATUE OF CHARLEMAGNE IN FRONT OF NOTRE DAME, PARIS
STATUE OF CHARLEMAGNE IN FRONT OF NOTRE DAME, PARIS
The figure is entirely imaginary and romantic. There is no
contemporary portrait of Charlemagne
_Photo: Rischgitz_
Upon this divided world of Christendom rained the blows of three sets
of antagonists. About the Baltic and North Seas remained a series of
Nordic tribes who were only very slowly and reluctantly Christianized;
these were the Northmen. They had taken to the sea and piracy, and
were raiding all the Christian coasts down to Spain. They had pushed
up the Russian rivers to the desolate central lands and brought their
shipping over into the south-flowing rivers. They had come out upon
the Caspian and Black Seas as pirates also. They set up principalities
in Russia; they were the first people to be called Russians. These
Northmen Russians came near to taking Constantinople. England in the
early ninth century was a Christianized Low German country under a
king, Egbert, a protégé and pupil of Charlemagne. The Northmen wrested
half the kingdom from his successor Alfred the Great (886), and finally
under Canute (1016) made themselves masters of the whole land. Under
Rolph the Ganger (912) another band of Northmen conquered the north of
France, which became Normandy.
Canute ruled not only over England but over Norway and Denmark, but his
brief empire fell to pieces at his death through that political
weakness of the barbaric peoples—division among a ruler’s sons. It is
interesting to speculate what might have happened if this temporary
union of the Northmen had endured. They were a race of astonishing
boldness and energy. They sailed in their galleys even to Iceland and
Greenland. They were the first Europeans to land on American soil.
Later on Norman adventurers were to recover Sicily from the Saracens
and sack Rome. It is a fascinating thing to imagine what a great
northern sea-faring power might have grown out of Canute’s kingdom,
reaching from America to Russia.
To the east of the Germans and Latinized Europeans was a medley of Slav
tribes and Turkish peoples. Prominent among these were the Magyars or
Hungarians who were coming westward throughout the eighth and ninth
centuries. Charlemagne held them for a time, but after his death they
established themselves in what is now Hungary; and after the fashion of
their kindred predecessors, the Huns, raided every summer into the
settled parts of Europe. In 938 they went through Germany into France,
crossed the Alps into North Italy, and so came home, burning, robbing
and destroying.
Finally pounding away from the south at the vestiges of the Roman
Empire were the Saracens. They had made themselves largely masters of
the sea; their only formidable adversaries upon the water were the
Northmen, the Russian Northmen out of the Black Sea and the Northmen of
the west.
Map: Europe at the death of Charlemagne—814
Hemmed in by these more vigorous and aggressive peoples, amidst forces
they did not understand and dangers they could not estimate,
Charlemagne and after him a series of other ambitious spirits took up
the futile drama of restoring the Western Empire under the name of the
Holy Roman Empire. From the time of Charlemagne onward this idea
obsessed the political life of Western Europe, while in the East the
Greek half of the Roman power decayed and dwindled until at last
nothing remained of it at all but the corrupt trading city of
Constantinople and a few miles of territory about it. Politically the
continent of Europe remained traditional and uncreative from the time
of Charlemagne onward for a thousand years.
The name of Charlemagne looms large in European history but his
personality is but indistinctly seen. He could not read nor write, but
he had a considerable respect for learning; he liked to be read aloud
to at meals and he had a weakness for theological discussion. At his
winter quarters at Aix-la- Chapelle or Mayence he gathered about him a
number of learned men and picked up much from their conversation. In
the summer he made war, against the Spanish Saracens, against the Slavs
and Magyars, against the Saxons, and other still heathen German tribes.
It is doubtful whether the idea of becoming Cæsar in succession to
Romulus Augustulus occurred to him before his acquisition of North
Italy, or whether it was suggested to him by Pope Leo III, who was
anxious to make the Latin Church independent of Constantinople.
There were the most extraordinary manœuvres at Rome between the Pope
and the prospective emperor in order to make it appear or not appear as
if the Pope gave him the imperial crown. The Pope succeeded in
crowning his visitor and conqueror by surprise in St. Peter’s on
Christmas Day 800 A.D. He produced a crown, put it on the head of
Charlemagne and hailed him Cæsar and Augustus. There was great
applause among the people. Charlemagne was by no means pleased at the
way in which the thing was done, it rankled in his mind as a defeat;
and he left the most careful instructions to his son that he was not to
let the Pope crown him emperor; he was to seize the crown into his own
hands and put it on his own head himself. So at the very outset of
this imperial revival we see beginning the age-long dispute of Pope and
Emperor for priority. But Louis the Pious, the son of Charlemagne,
disregarded his father’s instructions and was entirely submissive to
the Pope.
The empire of Charlemagne fell apart at the death of Louis the Pious
and the split between the French-speaking Franks and the
German-speaking Franks widened. The next emperor to arise was Otto,
the son of a certain Henry the Fowler, a Saxon, who had been elected
King of Germany by an assembly of German princes and prelates in 919.
Otto descended upon Rome and was crowned emperor there in 962. This
Saxon line came to an end early in the eleventh century and gave place
to other German rulers. The feudal princes and nobles to the west who
spoke various French dialects did not fall under the sway of these
German emperors after the Carlovingian line, the line that is descended
from Charlemagne, had come to an end, and no part of Britain ever came
into the Holy Roman Empire. The Duke of Normandy, the King of France
and a number of lesser feudal rulers remained outside. In 987 the
Kingdom of France passed out of the possession of the Carlovingian line
into the hands of Hugh Capet, whose descendants were still reigning in
the eighteenth century. At the time of Hugh Capet the King of France
ruled only a comparatively small territory round Paris.
In 1066 England was attacked almost simultaneously by an invasion of
the Norwegian Northmen under King Harold Hardrada and by the Latinized
Northmen under the Duke of Normandy. Harold King of England defeated
the former at the battle of Stamford Bridge, and was defeated by the
latter at Hastings. England was conquered by the Normans, and so cut
off from Scandinavian, Teutonic and Russian affairs, and brought into
the most intimate relations and conflicts with the French. For the next
four centuries the English were entangled in the conflicts of the
French feudal princes and wasted upon the fields of France.
XLVI
THE CRUSADES AND THE AGE OF PAPAL DOMINION
It is interesting to note that Charlemagne corresponded with the Caliph
Haroun-al-Raschid, the Haroun-al-Raschid of the _Arabian Nights_. It is
recorded that Haroun-al-Raschid sent ambassadors from Bagdad—which had
now replaced Damascus as the Moslem capital—with a splendid tent, a
water clock, an elephant and the keys of the Holy Sepulchre. This
latter present was admirably calculated to set the Byzantine Empire and
this new Holy Roman Empire by the ears as to which was the proper
protector of the Christians in Jerusalem.
These presents remind us that while Europe in the ninth century was
still a weltering disorder of war and pillage, there flourished a great
Arab Empire in Egypt and Mesopotamia, far more civilized than anything
Europe could show. Here literature and science still lived; the arts
flourished, and the mind of man could move without fear or
superstition. And even in Spain and North Africa where the Saracenic
dominions were falling into political confusion there was a vigorous
intellectual life. Aristotle was read and discussed by these Jews and
Arabs during these centuries of European darkness. They guarded the
neglected seeds of science and philosophy.