his life are far less significant than its general atmosphere. It is
possible to piece together something of his court life in Sicily. He
was luxurious in his way of living, and fond of beautiful things. He
is described as licentious. But it is clear that he was a man of very
effectual curiosity and inquiry. He gathered Jewish and Moslem as well
as Christian philosophers at his court, and he did much to irrigate the
Italian mind with Saracenic influences. Through him the Arabic
numerals and algebra were introduced to Christian students, and among
other philosophers at his court was Michael Scott, who translated
portions of Aristotle and the commentaries thereon of the great Arab
philosopher Averroes (of Cordoba). In 1224 Frederick founded the
University of Naples, and he enlarged and enriched the great medical
school at Salerno University. He also founded a zoological garden. He
left a book on hawking, which shows him to have been an acute observer
of the habits of birds, and he was one of the first Italians to write
Italian verse. Italian poetry was indeed born at his court. He has
been called by an able writer, “the first of the moderns,” and the
phrase expresses aptly the unprejudiced detachment of his intellectual
side.
A still more striking intimation of the decay of the living and
sustaining forces of the papacy appeared when presently the Popes came
into conflict with the growing power of the French King. During the
lifetime of the Emperor Frederick II, Germany fell into disunion, and
the French King began to play the rôle of guard, supporter and rival to
the Pope that had hitherto fallen to the Hohenstaufen Emperors. A
series of Popes pursued the policy of supporting the French monarchs.
French princes were established in the kingdom of Sicily and Naples,
with the support and approval of Rome, and the French Kings saw before
them the possibility of restoring and ruling the Empire of Charlemagne.
When, however, the German interregnum after the death of Frederick II,
the last of the Hohenstaufens, came to all end and Rudolf of Habsburg
was elected first Habsburg Emperor (1273), the policy of Rome began to
fluctuate between France and Germany, veering about with the sympathies
of each successive Pope. In the East in 1261 the Greeks recaptured
Constantinople from the Latin emperors, and the founder of the new
Greek dynasty, Michael Palæologus, Michael VIII, after some unreal
tentatives of reconciliation with the Pope, broke away from the Roman
communion altogether, and with that, and the fall of the Latin kingdoms
in Asia, the eastward ascendancy of the Popes came to an end.
COSTUMES OF THE BURGUNDIAN NOBILITY: FLEMISH WORK OF THE FIFTEENTH
CENTURY
COSTUMES OF THE BURGUNDIAN NOBILITY: FLEMISH WORK OF THE FIFTEENTH
CENTURY
In 1294 Boniface VIII became Pope. He was an Italian, hostile to the
French, and full of a sense of the great traditions and mission of
Rome. For a time he carried things with a high hand. In 1300 he held
a jubilee, and a vast multitude of pilgrims assembled in Rome. “So
great was the influx of money into the papal treasury, that two
assistants were kept busy with the rakes collecting the offerings that
were deposited at the tomb of St. Peter.” [1] But this festival was a
delusive triumph. Boniface came into conflict with the French King in
1302, and in 1303, as he was about to pronounce sentence of
excommunication against that monarch, he was surprised and arrested in
his own ancestral palace at Anagni, by Guillaume de Nogaret. This
agent from the French King forced an entrance into the palace, made his
way into the bedroom of the frightened Pope—he was lying in bed with a
cross in his hands—and heaped threats and insults upon him. The Pope
was liberated a day or so later by the townspeople, and returned to
Rome; but there he was seized upon and again made prisoner by the
Orsini family, and in a few weeks’ time the shocked and disillusioned
old man died a prisoner in their hands.
COSTUMES OF THE BURGUNDIAN NOBILITY: FLEMISH WORK OF THE FIFTEENTH
CENTURY
COSTUMES OF THE BURGUNDIAN NOBILITY: FLEMISH WORK OF THE FIFTEENTH
CENTURY
This series is from casts in the Victoria and Albert Museum of the
original brass statuettes in the Rijks Museum, Amsterdam
The people of Anagni did resent the first outrage, and rose against
Nogaret to liberate Boniface, but then Anagni was the Pope’s native
town. The important point to note is that the French King in this
rough treatment of the head of Christendom was acting with the full
approval of his people; he had summoned a council of the Three Estates
of France (lords, church and commons) and gained their consent before
proceeding to extremities. Neither in Italy, Germany nor England was
there the slightest general manifestation of disapproval at this free
handling of the sovereign pontiff. The idea of Christendom had decayed
until its power over the minds of men had gone.
Throughout the fourteenth century the papacy did nothing to recover its
moral sway. The next Pope elected, Clement V, was a Frenchman, the
choice of King Philip of France. He never came to Rome. He set up his
court in the town of Avignon, which then belonged not to France but to
the papal See, though embedded in French territory, and there his
successors remained until 1377, when Pope Gregory XI returned to the
Vatican palace in Rome. But Gregory XI did not take the sympathies of
the whole church with him. Many of the cardinals were of French origin
and their habits and associations were rooted deep at Avignon. When in
1378 Gregory XI died, and an Italian, Urban VI, was elected, these
dissentient cardinals declared the election invalid, and elected
another Pope, the anti-Pope, Clement VII. This split is called the
Great Schism. The Popes remained in Rome, and all the anti-French
powers, the Emperor, the King of England, Hungary, Poland and the North
of Europe were loyal to them. The anti-Popes, on the other hand,
continued in Avignon, and were supported by the King of France, his
ally the King of Scotland, Spain, Portugal and various German princes.
Each Pope excommunicated and cursed the adherents of his rival
(1378-1417).
Is it any wonder that presently all over Europe people began to think
for themselves in matters of religion?
The beginnings of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, which we have
noted in the preceding chapters, were but two among many of the new
forces that were arising in Christendom, either to hold or shatter the
church as its own wisdom might decide. Those two orders the church did
assimilate and use, though with a little violence in the case of the
former. But other forces were more frankly disobedient and critical.
A century and a half later came Wycliffe (1320-1384). He was a learned
Doctor at Oxford. Quite late in his life he began a series of
outspoken criticisms of the corruption of the clergy and the unwisdom
of the church. He organized a number of poor priests, the Wycliffites,
to spread his ideas throughout England; and in order that people should
judge between the church and himself, he translated the Bible into
English. He was a more learned and far abler man than either St.
Francis or St. Dominic. He had supporters in high places and a great
following among the people; and though Rome raged against him, and
ordered his imprisonment, he died a free man. But the black and
ancient spirit that was leading the Catholic Church to its destruction
would not let his bones rest in the grave. By a decree of the Council
of Constance in 1415, his remains were ordered to be dug up and burnt,
an order which was carried out at the command of Pope Martin V by
Bishop Fleming in 1428. This desecration was not the act of some
isolated fanatic; it was the official act of the church.
[1] J. H. Robinson.
XLVIII
THE MONGOL CONQUESTS
But in the thirteenth century, while this strange and finally
ineffectual struggle to unify Christendom under the rule of the Pope
was going on in Europe, far more momentous events were afoot upon the
larger stage of Asia. A Turkish people from the country to the north of
China rose suddenly to prominence in the world’s affairs, and achieved
such a series of conquests as has no parallel in history. These were
the Mongols. At the opening of the thirteenth century they were a horde
of nomadic horsemen, living very much as their predecessors, the Huns,
had done, subsisting chiefly upon meat and mare’s milk and living in
tents of skin. They had shaken themselves free from Chinese dominion,
and brought a number of other Turkish tribes into a military
confederacy. Their central camp was at Karakorum in Mongolia.
At this time China was in a state of division. The great dynasty of
Tang had passed into decay by the tenth century, and after a phase of
division into warring states, three main empires, that of Kin in the
north with Pekin as its capital and that of Sung in the south with a
capital at Nankin, and Hsia in the centre, remain. In 1214 Jengis
Khan, the leader of the Mongol confederates, made war on the Kin Empire
and captured Pekin (1214). He then turned westward and conquered
Western Turkestan, Persia, Armenia, India down to Lahore, and South
Russia as far as Kieff. He died master of a vast empire that reached
from the Pacific to the Dnieper.
His successor, Ogdai Khan, continued this astonishing career of
conquest. His armies were organized to a very high level of
efficiency; and they had with them a new Chinese invention, gunpowder,
which they used in small field guns. He completed the conquest of the
Kin Empire and then swept his hosts right across Asia to Russia (1235),
an altogether amazing march. Kieff was destroyed in 1240, and nearly
all Russia became tributary to the Mongols. Poland was ravaged, and a
mixed army of Poles and Germans was annihilated at the battle of
Liegnitz in Lower Silesia in 1241. The Emperor Frederick II does not
seem to have made any great efforts to stay the advancing tide.
Map: The Ottoman Empire before 1453
“It is only recently,” says Bury in his notes to Gibbon’s _Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire_, “that European history has begun to
understand that the successes of the Mongol army which overran Poland
and occupied Hungary in the spring of A.D. 1241 were won by consummate
strategy and were not due to a mere overwhelming superiority of
numbers. But this fact has not yet become a matter of common
knowledge; the vulgar opinion which represents the Tartars as a wild
horde carrying all before them solely by their multitude, and galloping
through Eastern Europe without a strategic plan, rushing at all
obstacles and overcoming them by mere weight, still prevails. . . .
“It was wonderful how punctually and effectually the arrangements were
carried out in operations extending from the Lower Vistula to
Transylvania. Such a campaign was quite beyond the power of any
European army of the time, and it was beyond the vision of any European
commander. There was no general in Europe, from Frederick II downward,
who was not a tyro in strategy compared to Subutai. It should also be
noticed that the Mongols embarked upon the enterprise with full
knowledge of the political situation of Hungary and the condition of
Poland—they had taken care to inform themselves by a well-organized
system of spies; on the other hand, the Hungarians and the Christian
powers, like childish barbarians, knew hardly anything about their
enemies.”
Map: The Empire of Jengis Khan at his death (1227)
But though the Mongols were victorious at Liegnitz, they did not
continue their drive westward. They were getting into woodlands and
hilly country, which did not suit their tactics; and so they turned
southward and prepared to settle in Hungary, massacring or assimilating
the kindred Magyar, even as these had previously massacred and
assimilated the mixed Scythians and Avars and Huns before them. From
the Hungarian plain they would probably have made raids west and south
as the Hungarians had done in the ninth century, the Avars in the
seventh and eighth and the Huns in the fifth. But Ogdai died suddenly,
and in 1242 there was trouble about the succession, and recalled by
this, the undefeated hosts of Mongols began to pour back across Hungary
and Roumania towards the east.
Thereafter the Mongols concentrated their attention upon their Asiatic
conquests. By the middle of the thirteenth century they had conquered
the Sung Empire. Mangu Khan succeeded Ogdai Khan as Great Khan in
1251, and made his brother Kublai Khan governor of China. In 1280
Kublai Khan had been formally recognized Emperor of China, and so
founded the Yuan dynasty which lasted until 1368. While the last ruins
of the Sung rule were going down in China, another brother of Mangu,
Hulagu, was conquering Persia and Syria. The Mongols displayed a bitter
animosity to Islam at this time, and not only massacred the population
of Bagdad when they captured that city, but set to work to destroy the
immemorial irrigation system which had kept Mesopotamia incessantly
prosperous and populous from the early days of Sumeria. From that time
until our own Mesopotamia has been a desert of ruins, sustaining only a
scanty population. Into Egypt the Mongols never penetrated; the Sultan
of Egypt completely defeated an army of Hulagu’s in Palestine in 1260.
After that disaster the tide of Mongol victory ebbed. The dominions of
the Great Khan fell into a number of separate states. The eastern
Mongols became Buddhists, like the Chinese; the western became Moslim.
The Chinese threw off the rule of the Yuan dynasty in 1368, and set up
the native Ming dynasty which flourished from 1368 to 1644. The
Russians remained tributary to the Tartar hordes upon the south-east
steppes until 1480, when the Grand Duke of Moscow repudiated his
allegiance and laid the foundation of modern Russia.
TARTAR HORSEMEN
TARTAR HORSEMEN
_(From a Chinese Print in the British Museum) _
In the fourteenth century there was a brief revival of Mongol vigour
under Timurlane, a descendant of Jengis Khan. He established himself
in Western Turkestan, assumed the title of Grand Khan in 1369, and
conquered from Syria to Delhi. He was the most savage and destructive
of all the Mongol conquerors. He established an empire of desolation
that did not survive his death. In 1505, however, a descendant of this
Timur, an adventurer named Baber, got together an army with guns and
swept down upon the plains of India. His grandson Akbar (1556-1605)
completed his conquests, and this Mongol (or “Mogul” as the Arabs
called it) dynasty ruled in Delhi over the greater part of India until
the eighteenth century.
Map: The Ottoman Empire at the death of Suleiman the Magnificent, 1566
A.D.
One of the consequences of the first great sweep of Mongol conquest in
the thirteenth century was to drive a certain tribe of Turks, the
Ottoman Turks, out of Turkestan into Asia Minor. They extended and
consolidated their power in Asia Minor, crossed the Dardanelles and
conquered Macedonia, Serbia and Bulgaria, until at last Constantinople
remained like an island amongst the Ottoman dominions. In 1453 the
Ottoman Sultan, Muhammad II, took Constantinople, attacking it from the
European side with a great number of guns. This event caused intense
excitement in Europe and there was talk of a crusade, but the day of
the crusades was past.
In the course of the sixteenth century the Ottoman Sultans conquered
Bagdad, Hungary, Egypt and most of North Africa, and their fleet made
them masters of the Mediterranean. They very nearly took Vienna, and
they exacted it tribute from the Emperor. There were but two items to
offset the general ebb of Christian dominion in the fifteenth century.
One was the restoration of the independence of Moscow (1480); the other
was the gradual reconquest of Spain by the Christians. In 1492,
Granada, the last Moslem state in the peninsula, fell to King Ferdinand
of Aragon and his Queen Isabella of Castile.
But it was not until as late as 1571 that the naval battle of Lepanto
broke the prick of the Ottomans, and restored the Mediterranean waters
to Christian ascendancy.
XLIX
THE INTELLECTUAL REVIVAL OF THE EUROPEANS
Throughout the twelfth century there were many signs that the European
intelligence was recovering courage and leisure, and preparing to take
up again the intellectual enterprises of the first Greek scientific
enquiries and such speculations as those of the Italian Lucretius. The
causes of this revival were many and complex. The suppression of
private war, the higher standards of comfort and security that followed
the crusades, and the stimulation of men’s minds by the experiences of
these expeditions were no doubt necessary preliminary conditions. Trade
was reviving; cities were recovering ease and safety; the standard of
education was arising in the church and spreading among laymen. The
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were a period of growing,
independent or quasi-independent cities; Venice, Florence, Genoa,
Lisbon, Paris, Bruges, London, Antwerp, Hamburg, Nuremberg, Novgorod,
Wisby and Bergen for example. They were all trading cities with many
travellers, and where men trade and travel they talk and think. The
polemics of the Popes and princes, the conspicuous savagery and
wickedness of the persecution of heretics, were exciting men to doubt
the authority of the church and question and discuss fundamental
things.
We have seen how the Arabs were the means of restoring Aristotle to
Europe, and how such a prince as Frederick II acted as a channel
through which Arabic philosophy and science played upon the renascent
European mind. Still more influential in the stirring up of men’s
ideas were the Jews. Their very existence was a note of interrogation
to the claims of the church. And finally the secret, fascinating
enquiries of the alchemists were spreading far and wide and setting men
to the petty, furtive and yet fruitful resumption of experimental
science.
And the stir in men’s minds was by no means confined now to the
independent and well educated. The mind of the common man was awake in
the world as it had never been before in all the experience of mankind.
In spite of priest and persecution, Christianity does seem to have
carried a mental ferment wherever its teaching reached. It established
a direct relation between the conscience of the individual man and the
God of Righteousness, so that now if need arose he had the courage to
form his own judgment upon prince or prelate or creed.
As early as the eleventh century philosophical discussion had begun
again in Europe, and there were great and growing universities at
Paris, Oxford, Bologna and other centres. There medieval “schoolmen”
took up again and thrashed out a series of questions upon the value and
meaning of words that were a necessary preliminary to clear thinking in
the scientific age that was to follow. And standing by himself because
of his distinctive genius was Roger Bacon (circa 1210 to circa 1293), a
Franciscan of Oxford, the father of modern experimental science. His
name deserves a prominence in our history second only to that of
Aristotle.
His writings are one long tirade against ignorance. He told his age it
was ignorant, an incredibly bold thing to do. Nowadays a man may tell
the world it is as silly as it is solemn, that all its methods are
still infantile and clumsy and its dogmas childish assumptions, without
much physical danger; but these peoples of the middle ages when they
were not actually being massacred or starving or dying of pestilence,
were passionately convinced of the wisdom, the completeness and
finality of their beliefs, and disposed to resent any reflections upon
them very bitterly. Roger Bacon’s writings were like a flash of light
in a profound darkness. He combined his attack upon the ignorance of
his times with a wealth of suggestion for the increase of knowledge.
In his passionate insistence upon the need of experiment and of
collecting knowledge, the spirit of Aristotle lives again in him.
“Experiment, experiment,” that is the burthen of Roger Bacon.
Yet of Aristotle himself Roger Bacon fell foul. He fell foul of him
because men, instead of facing facts boldly, sat in rooms and pored
over the bad Latin translations which were then all that was available
of the master. “If I had my way,” he wrote, in his intemperate fashion,
“I should burn all the books of Aristotle, for the study of them can
only lead to a loss of time, produce error, and increase ignorance,” a
sentiment that Aristotle would probably have echoed could he have
returned to a world in which his works were not so much read as
worshipped—and that, as Roger Bacon showed, in these most abominable
translations.
AN EARLY PRINTING PRESS
AN EARLY PRINTING PRESS
_(From an old print) _
Throughout his books, a little disguised by the necessity of seeming to
square it all with orthodoxy for fear of the prison and worse, Roger
Bacon shouted to mankind, “Cease to be ruled by dogmas and authorities;
_look at the world!_” Four chief sources of ignorance he denounced;
respect for authority, custom, the sense of the ignorant crowd, and the
vain, proud unteachableness of our dispositions. Overcome but these,
and a world of power would open to men: —
“Machines for navigating are possible without rowers, so that great
ships suited to river or ocean, guided by one man, may be borne with
greater speed than if they were full of men. Likewise cars may be made
so that without a draught animal they may be moved _cum impetu
inœstimable_, as we deem the scythed chariots to have been from which
antiquity fought. And flying machines are possible, so that a man may
sit in the middle turning some device by which artificial wings may
beat the air in the manner of a flying bird.”
So Roger Bacon wrote, but three more centuries were to elapse before
men began any systematic attempts to explore the hidden stores of power
and interest he realized so clearly existed beneath the dull surface of
human affairs.
But the Saracenic world not only gave Christendom the stimulus of its
philosophers and alchemists; it also gave it paper. It is scarcely too
much to say that paper made the intellectual revival of Europe
possible. Paper originated in China, where its use probably goes back
to the second century B.C. In 751 the Chinese made an attack upon the
Arab Moslems in Samarkand; they were repulsed, and among the prisoners
taken from them were some skilled papermakers, from whom the art was
learnt. Arabic paper manuscripts from the ninth century onward still
exist. The manufacture entered Christendom either through Greece or by
the capture of Moorish paper-mills during the Christian reconquest of
Spain. But under the Christian Spanish the product deteriorated sadly.
Good paper was not made in Christian Europe until the end of the
thirteenth century, and then it was Italy which led the world. Only by
the fourteenth century did the manufacture reach Germany, and not until
the end of that century was it abundant and cheap enough for the
printing of books to be a practicable business proposition. Thereupon
printing followed naturally and necessarily, for printing is the most
obvious of inventions, and the intellectual life of the world entered
upon a new and far more vigorous phase. It ceased to be a little
trickle from mind to mind; it became a broad flood, in which thousands
and presently scores and hundreds of thousands of minds participated.
One immediate result of this achievement of printing was the appearance
of an abundance of Bibles in the world. Another was a cheapening of
school-books. The knowledge of reading spread swiftly. There was not
only a great increase of books in the world, but the books that were
now made were plainer to read and so easier to understand. Instead of
toiling at a crabbed text arid then thinking over its significance,
readers now could think unimpeded as they read. With this increase in
the facility of reading, the reading public grew. The book ceased to be
a highly decorated toy or a scholar’s mystery. People began to write
books to be read as well as looked at by ordinary people. They wrote
in the ordinary language and not in Latin. With the fourteenth century
the real history of the European literature begins.