European revival. Let us turn now to the influence of the Mongol
conquests. They stimulated the geographical imagination of Europe
enormously. For a time under the Great Khan, all Asia and Western
Europe enjoyed an open intercourse; all the roads were temporarily
open, and representatives of every nation appeared at the court of
Karakorum. The barriers between Europe and Asia set up by the
religious feud of Christianity and Islam were lowered. Great hopes were
entertained by the papacy for the conversion of the Mongols to
Christianity. Their only religion so far had been Shumanism, a
primitive paganism. Envoys of the Pope, Buddhist priests from India,
Parisian and Italian and Chinese artificers, Byzantine and Armenian
merchants, mingled with Arab officials and Persian and Indian
astronomers and mathematicians at the Mongol court. We hear too much
in history of the campaigns and massacres of the Mongols, and not
enough of their curiosity and desire for learning. Not perhaps as an
originative people, but as transmitters of knowledge and method their
influence upon the world’s history has been very great. And everything
one can learn of the vague and romantic personalities of Jengis or
Kublai tends to confirm the impression that these men were at least as
understanding and creative monarchs as either that flamboyant but
egotistical figure Alexander the Great or that raiser of political
ghosts, that energetic but illiterate theologian Charlemagne.
One of the most interesting of these visitors to the Mongol Court was a
certain Venetian, Marco Polo, who afterwards set down his story in a
book. He went to China about 1272 with his father and uncle, who had
already once made the journey. The Great Khan had been deeply impressed
by the elder Polos; they were the first men of the “Latin” peoples he
had seen; and he sent them back with enquiries for teachers and learned
men who could explain Christianity to him, and for various other
European things that had aroused his curiosity. Their visit with Marco
was their second visit.
ANCIENT BRONZE FIGURE FROM BENIN, W. AFRICA
ANCIENT BRONZE FIGURE FROM BENIN, W. AFRICA
Note evidence in attire of knowledge of early European explorers
_(In the British Museum) _
The three Polos started by way of Palestine and not by the Crimea, as
in their previous expedition. They had with them a gold tablet and
other indications from the Great Khan that must have greatly
facilitated their journey. The Great Khan had asked for some oil from
the lamp that burns in the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem; and so thither
they first went, and then by way of Cilicia into Armenia. They went
thus far north because the Sultan of Egypt was raiding the Mongol
domains at this time. Thence they came by way of Mesopotamia to Ormuz
on the Persian Gulf, as if they contemplated a sea voyage. At Ormuz
they met merchants from India. For some reason they did not take ship,
but instead turned northward through the Persian deserts, and so by way
of Balkh over the Pamir to Kashgar, and by way of Kotan and the Lob Nor
into the Hwang-ho valley and on to Pekin. At Pekin was the Great Khan,
and they were hospitably entertained.
ANOTHER ANCIENT NEGRO BRONZE OF A EUROPEAN
ANOTHER ANCIENT NEGRO BRONZE OF A EUROPEAN
_(In the British Museum) _
Marco particularly pleased Kublai; he was young and clever, and it is
clear he had mastered the Tartar language very thoroughly. He was
given an official position and sent on several missions, chiefly in
south-west China. The tale he had to tell of vast stretches of smiling
and prosperous country, “all the way excellent hostelries for
travellers,” and “fine vineyards, fields, and gardens,” of “many
abbeys” of Buddhist monks, of manufactures of “cloth of silk and gold
and many fine taffetas,” a “constant succession of cities and
boroughs,” and so on, first roused the incredulity and then fired the
imagination of all Europe. He told of Burmah, and of its great armies
with hundreds of elephants, and how these animals were defeated by the
Mongol bowmen, and also of the Mongol conquest of Pegu. He told of
Japan, and greatly exaggerated the amount of gold in that country. For
three years Marco ruled the city of Yang-chow as governor, and he
probably impressed the Chinese inhabitants as being little more of a
foreigner than any Tartar would have been. He may also have been sent
on a mission to India. Chinese records mention a certain Polo attached
to the imperial council in 1277, a very valuable confirmation of the
general truth of the Polo story.
The publication of Marco Polo’s travels produced a profound effect upon
the European imagination. The European literature, and especially the
European romance of the fifteenth century, echoes with the names in
Marco Polo’s story, with Cathay (North China) and Cambulac (Pekin) and
the like.
EARLY ITALIAN ENGRAVING OF A SAILING SHIP
EARLY ITALIAN ENGRAVING OF A SAILING SHIP
_(In the British Museum) _
Two centuries later, among the readers of the Travels of Marco Polo was
a certain Genoese mariner, Christopher Columbus, who conceived the
brilliant idea of sailing westward round the world to China. In
Seville there is a copy of the Travels with marginal notes by Columbus.
There were many reasons why the thought of a Genoese should be turned
in this direction. Until its capture by the Turks in 1453
Constantinople had been an impartial trading mart between the Western
world and the East, and the Genoese had traded there freely. But the
“Latin” Venetians, the bitter rivals of the Genoese, had been the
allies and helpers of the Turks against the Greeks, and with the coming
of the Turks Constantinople turned an unfriendly face upon Genoese
trade. The long forgotten discovery that the world was round had
gradually resumed its sway over men’s minds. The idea of going
westward to China was therefore a fairly obvious one. It was
encouraged by two things. The mariner’s compass had now been invented
and men were no longer left to the mercy of a fine night and the stars
to determine the direction in which they were sailing, and the Normans,
Catalonians and Genoese and Portuguese had already pushed out into the
Atlantic as far as the Canary Isles, Madeira and the Azores.
Yet Columbus found many difficulties before he could get ships to put
his idea to the test. He went from one European Court to another.
Finally at Granada, just won from the Moors, he secured the patronage
of Ferdinand and Isabella, and was able to set out across the unknown
ocean in three small ships. After a voyage of two months and nine days
he came to a land which he believed to be India, but which was really a
new continent, whose distinct existence the old world had never
hitherto suspected. He returned to Spain with gold, cotton, strange
beasts and birds, and two wild- eyed painted Indians to be baptized.
They were called Indians because, to the end of his days, he believed
that this land he had found was India. Only in the course of several
years did men begin to realize that the whole new continent of America
was added to the world’s resources.
The success of Columbus stimulated overseas enterprise enormously. In
1497 the Portuguese sailed round Africa to India, and in 1515 there
were Portuguese ships in Java. In 1519 Magellan, a Portuguese sailor
in Spanish employment, sailed out of Seville westward with five ships,
of which one, the _Vittoria_, came back up the river to Seville in
1522, the first ship that had ever circumnavigated the world.
Thirty-one men were aboard her, survivors of two-hundred-and- eighty
who had started. Magellan himself had been killed in the Philippine
Isles.
Printed paper books, a new realization of the round world as a thing
altogether attainable, a new vision of strange lands, strange animals
and plants, strange manners and customs, discoveries overseas and in
the skies and in the ways and materials of life burst upon the European
mind. The Greek classics, buried and forgotten for so long, were
speedily being printed and studied, and were colouring men’s thoughts
with the dreams of Plato and the traditions of an age of republican
freedom and dignity. The Roman dominion had first brought law and
order to Western Europe, and the Latin Church had restored it; but
under both Pagan and Catholic Rome curiosity and innovation were
subordinate to and restrained by organization. The reign of the Latin
mind was now drawing to an end. Between the thirteenth and the
sixteenth century the European Aryans, thanks to the stimulating
influence of Semite and Mongol and the rediscovery of the Greek
classics, broke away from the Latin tradition and rose again to the
intellectual and material leadership of mankind.
L
THE REFORMATION OF THE LATIN CHURCH
The Latin Church itself was enormously affected by this mental rebirth.
It was dismembered; and even the portion that survived was extensively
renewed.
We have told how nearly the church came to the autocratic leadership of
all Christendom in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and how in the
fourteenth and fifteenth its power over men’s minds and affairs
declined. We have described how popular religious enthusiasm which had
in earlier ages been its support and power was turned against it by its
pride, persecutions and centralization, and how the insidious
scepticism of Frederick II bore fruit in a growing insubordination of
the princes. The Great Schism had reduced its religious and political
prestige to negligible proportions. The forces of insurrection struck
it now from both sides.
The teachings of the Englishman Wycliffe spread widely throughout
Europe. In 1398 a learned Czech, John Huss, delivered a series of
lectures upon Wycliffe’s teachings in the university of Prague. This
teaching spread rapidly beyond the educated class and aroused great
popular enthusiasm. In 1414-18 a Council of the whole church was held
at Constance to settle the Great Schism. Huss was invited to this
Council under promise of a safe conduct from the emperor, seized, put
on trial for heresy and burnt alive (1415). So far from tranquillizing
the Bohemian people, this led to an insurrection of the Hussites in
that country, the first of a series of religious wars that inaugurated
the break-up of Latin Christendom. Against this insurrection Pope
Martin V, the Pope specially elected at Constance as the head of a
reunited Christendom, preached a Crusade.
Five Crusades in all were launched upon this sturdy little people and
all of them failed. All the unemployed ruffianism of Europe was turned
upon Bohemia in the fifteenth century, just as in the thirteenth it had
been turned upon the Waldenses. But the Bohemian Czechs, unlike the
Waldenses, believed in armed resistance. The Bohemian Crusade
dissolved and streamed away from the battlefield at the sound of the
Hussites’ waggons and the distant chanting of their troops; it did not
even wait to fight (battle of Domazlice, 1431). In 1436 an agreement
was patched up with the Hussites by a new Council of the church at
Basle in which many of the special objections to Latin practice were
conceded.
PORTRAIT OF LUTHER
PORTRAIT OF LUTHER
_(From an early German engraving in the British Museum) _
In the fifteenth century a great pestilence had produced much social
disorganization throughout Europe. There had been extreme misery and
discontent among the common people, and peasant risings against the
landlords and the wealthy in England and France. After the Hussite
Wars these peasant insurrections increased in gravity in Germany and
took on a religious character. Printing came in as an influence upon
this development. By the middle of the fifteenth century there were
printers at work with movable type in Holland and the Rhineland. The
art spread to Italy and England, where Caxton was printing in
Westminster in 1477. The immediate consequence was a great increase
and distribution of Bibles, and greatly increased facilities for
widespread popular controversies. The European world became a world of
readers, to an extent that had never happened to any community in the
past. And this sudden irrigation of the general mind with clearer
ideas and more accessible information occurred just at a time when the
church was confused and divided and not in a position to defend itself
effectively, and when many princes were looking for means to weaken its
hold upon the vast wealth it claimed in their dominions.
In Germany the attack upon the church gathered round the personality of
an ex-monk, Martin Luther (1483-1546), who appeared in Wittenberg in
1517 offering disputations against various orthodox doctrines and
practices. At first he disputed in Latin in the fashion of the
Schoolmen. Then he took up the new weapon of the printed word and
scattered his views far and wide in German addressed to the ordinary
people. An attempt was made to suppress him as Huss had been
suppressed, but the printing press had changed conditions and he had
too many open and secret friends among the German princes for this fate
to overtake him.
For now in this age of multiplying ideas and weakened faith there were
many rulers who saw their advantage in breaking the religious ties
between their people and Rome. They sought to make themselves in
person the heads of a more nationalized religion. England, Scotland,
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, North Germany and Bohemia, one after another,
separated themselves from the Roman Communion. They have remained
separated ever since.
A MAJOLICA DISH PAINTED IN COLOURS
A MAJOLICA DISH PAINED IN COLOURS
An allegory of the Church triumphant over heretics and infidels.
Italian (Urbino), dated 1543
_(In the Victoria and Albert Museum)_
The various princes concerned cared very little for the moral and
intellectual freedom of their subjects. They used the religious doubts
and insurgence of their peoples to strengthen them against Rome, but
they tried to keep a grip upon the popular movement as soon as that
rupture was achieved and a national church set up under the control of
the crown. But there has always been a curious vitality in the
teaching of Jesus, a direct appeal to righteousness and a man’s
self-respect over every loyalty and every subordination, lay or
ecclesiastical. None of these princely churches broke off without also
breaking off a number of fragmentary sects that would admit the
intervention of neither prince nor Pope between a man and his God. In
England and Scotland, for example, there was a number of sects who now
held firmly to the Bible as their one guide in life and belief. They
refused the disciplines of a state church. In England these
dissentients were the Non- conformists, who played a very large part in
the polities of that country in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. In England they carried their objection to a princely head
to the church so far as to decapitate King Charles I (1649), and for
eleven prosperous years England was a republic under Non- conformist
rule.
The breaking away of this large section of Northern Europe from Latin
Christendom is what is generally spoken of as the Reformation. But the
shock and stress of these losses produced changes perhaps as profound
in the Roman Church itself. The church was reorganized and a new
spirit came into its life. One of the dominant figures in this revival
was a young Spanish soldier, Inigo Lopez de Recalde, better known to
the world as St. Ignatius of Loyola. After some romantic beginnings he
became a priest (1538) and was permitted to found the Society of Jesus,
a direct attempt to bring the generous and chivalrous traditions of
military discipline into the service of religion. This Society of
Jesus, the Jesuits, became one of the greatest teaching and missionary
societies the world has ever seen. It carried Christianity to India,
China and America. It arrested the rapid disintegration of the Roman
Church. It raised the standard of education throughout the whole
Catholic world; it raised the level of Catholic intelligence and
quickened the Catholic conscience everywhere; it stimulated Protestant
Europe to competitive educational efforts. The vigorous and aggressive
Roman Catholic Church we know to-day is largely the product of this
Jesuit revival.
LI
THE EMPEROR CHARLES V
The Holy Roman Empire came to a sort of climax in the reign of the
Emperor Charles V. He was one of the most extraordinary monarchs that
Europe has ever seen. For a time he had the air of being the greatest
monarch since Charlemagne.
His greatness was not of his own making. It was largely the creation
of his grandfather, the Emperor Maximilian I (1459- 1519). Some
families have fought, others have intrigued their way to world power;
the Habsburgs married their way. Maximilian began his career with
Austria, Styria, part of Alsace and other districts, the original
Habsburg patrimony; he married—the lady’s name scarcely matters to
us—the Netherlands and Burgundy. Most of Burgundy slipped from him
after his first wife’s death, but the Netherlands he held. Then he
tried unsuccessfully to marry Brittany. He became Emperor in
succession to his father, Frederick III, in 1493, and married the duchy
of Milan. Finally he married his son to the weak-minded daughter of
Ferdinand and Isabella, the Ferdinand and Isabella of Columbus, who not
only reigned over a freshly united Spain and over Sardinia and the
kingdom of the two Sicilies, but over all America west of Brazil. So
it was that this Charles V, his grandson, inherited most of the
American continent and between a third and a half of what the Turks had
left of Europe. He succeeded to the Netherlands in 1506. When his
grandfather Ferdinand died in 1516, he became practically king of the
Spanish dominions, his mother being imbecile; and his grandfather
Maximilian dying in 1519, he was in 1520 elected Emperor at the still
comparatively tender age of twenty.
He was a fair young man with a not very intelligent face, a thick upper
lip and a long clumsy chin. He found himself in a world of young and
vigorous personalities. It was an age of brilliant young monarchs.
Francis I had succeeded to the French throne in 1515 at the age of
twenty-one, Henry VIII had become King of England in 1509 at eighteen.
It was the age of Baber in India (1526-1530) and Suleiman the
Magnificent in Turkey (1520), both exceptionally capable monarchs, and
the Pope Leo X (1513) was also a very distinguished Pope. The Pope and
Francis I attempted to prevent the election of Charles as Emperor
because they dreaded the concentration of so much power in the hands of
one man. Both Francis I and Henry VIII offered themselves to the
imperial electors. But there was now a long established tradition of
Habsburg Emperors (since 1273), and some energetic bribery secured the
election for Charles.
At first the young man was very much a magnificent puppet in the hands
of his ministers. Then slowly he began to assert himself and take
control. He began to realize something of the threatening complexities
of his exalted position. It was a position as unsound as it was
splendid.
From the very outset of his reign he was faced by the situation created
by Luther’s agitations in Germany. The Emperor had one reason for
siding with the reformers in the opposition of the Pope to his
election. But he had been brought up in Spain, that most Catholic of
countries, and he decided against Luther. So he came into conflict
with the Protestant princes and particularly the Elector of Saxony. He
found himself in the presence of an opening rift that was to split the
outworn fabric of Christendom into two contending camps. His attempts
to close that rift were strenuous and honest and ineffective. There
was an extensive peasant revolt in Germany which interwove with the
general political and religious disturbance. And these internal
troubles were complicated by attacks upon the Empire from east and west
alike. On the west of Charles was his spirited rival, Francis I; to
the east was the ever advancing Turk, who was now in Hungary, in
alliance with Francis and clamouring for certain arrears of tribute
from the Austrian dominions. Charles had the money and army of Spain
at his disposal, but it was extremely difficult to get any effective
support in money from Germany. His social and political troubles were
complicated by financial distresses. He was forced to ruinous
borrowing.
THE CHARLES V PORTRAIT BY TITIAN
THE CHARLES V PORTRAIT BY TITIAN
_(In the Gallery del Prado, Madrid)
Photo: Anderson_
On the whole, Charles, in alliance with Henry VIII, was successful
against Francis I and the Turk. Their chief battlefield was North
Italy; the generalship was dull on both sides; their advances and
retreats depended mainly on the arrival of reinforcements. The German
army invaded France, failed to take Marseilles, fell back into Italy,
lost Milan, and was besieged in Pavia. Francis I made a long and
unsuccessful siege of Pavia, was caught by fresh German forces,
defeated, wounded and taken prisoner. But thereupon the Pope and Henry
VIII, still haunted by the fear of his attaining excessive power,
turned against Charles. The German troops in Milan, under the
Constable of Bourbon, being unpaid, forced rather than followed their
commander into a raid upon Rome. They stormed the city and pillaged it
(1527). The Pope took refuge in the Castle of St. Angelo while the
looting and slaughter went on. He bought off the German troops at last
by the payment of four hundred thousand ducats. Ten years of such
confused fighting impoverished all Europe. At last the Emperor found
himself triumphant in Italy. In 1530, he was crowned by the Pope—he
was the last German Emperor to be so crowned—at Bologna.
Meanwhile the Turks were making great headway in Hungary. They had
defeated and killed the king of Hungary in 1526, they held Buda-Pesth,
and in 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent very nearly took Vienna. The
Emperor was greatly concerned by these advances, and did his utmost to
drive back the Turks, but he found the greatest difficulty in getting
the German princes to unite even with this formidable enemy upon their
very borders. Francis I remained implacable for a time, and there was
a new French war; but in 1538 Charles won his rival over to a more
friendly attitude after ravaging the south of France. Francis and
Charles then formed an alliance against the Turk. But the Protestant
princes, the German princes who were resolved to break away from Rome,
had formed a league, the Schmalkaldic League, against the Emperor, and
in the place of a great campaign to recover Hungary for Christendom
Charles had to turn his mind to the gathering internal struggle in
Germany. Of that struggle he saw only the opening war. It was a
struggle, a sanguinary irrational bickering of princes, for ascendancy,
now flaming into war and destruction, now sinking back to intrigues and
diplomacies; it was a snake’s sack of princely policies that was to go
on writhing incurably right into the nineteenth century and to waste
and desolate Central Europe again and again.