Produced by Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed
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[Illustration: Jeanne d'Arc stands, banner in hand, during
the coronation of Charles VII before the high altar at
Rheims.
Painting by J. E. Lenepveu.]
THE GREAT EVENTS
BY
FAMOUS HISTORIANS
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| HISTORY, EMPHASIZING THE MORE IMPORTANT EVENTS, AND |
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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
ROSSITER JOHNSON, LL.D.
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
CHARLES F. HORNE, Ph.D.
JOHN RUDD, LL.D.
_With a staff of specialists_
_VOLUME VII_
The National Alumni
COPYRIGHT, 1905,
BY THE NATIONAL ALUMNI
CONTENTS
VOLUME VII
page
_An Outline Narrative of the Great Events_, xiii
CHARLES F. HORNE
_Dante Composes the_ Divina Commedia _(A.D. 1300-1318)_, 1
RICHARD WILLIAM CHURCH
_Third Estate Joins in the Government of France (A.D.
1302)_, 17
HENRI MARTIN
_War of the Flemings with Philip the Fair of France
(A.D. 1302)_, 23
EYRE EVANS CROWE
_First Swiss Struggle for Liberty (A.D. 1308)_, 28
F. GRENFELL BAKER
_Battle of Bannockburn (A.D. 1314)_, 41
ANDREW LANG
_Extinction of the Order of Knights Templars
Burning of Grand Master Molay (A.D. 1314)_, 51
F. C. WOODHOUSE
HENRY HART MILMAN
_James van Artevelde Leads a Flemish Revolt
Edward III of England Assumes the Title of King of
France (A.D. 1337-1340)_, 68
FRANÇOIS P. G. GUIZOT
_Battles of Sluys and Crécy (A.D. 1340-1346)_, 78
SIR JOHN FROISSART
_Modern Recognition of Scenic Beauty
Crowning of Petrarch at Rome (A.D. 1341)_, 93
JACOB BURCKHARDT
_Rienzi's Revolution in Rome (A.D. 1347)_, 104
RICHARD LODGE
_Beginning and Progress of the Renaissance (Fourteenth
to Sixteenth Century)_, 110
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
_The Black Death Ravages Europe (A.D. 1348)_, 130
J. F. C. HECKER
GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO
_First Turkish Dominion in Europe
Turks Seize Gallipoli (A.D. 1354)_, 147
JOSEPH VON HAMMER-PURGSTALL
_Conspiracy and Death of Marino Falieri at Venice
(A.D. 1355)_, 154
MRS. MARGARET OLIPHANT
_Charles IV of Germany Publishes His Golden Bull
(A.D. 1356)_, 160
SIR ROBERT COMYN
_Insurrection of the Jacquerie in France (A.D. 1358)_, 164
SIR JOHN FROISSART
_Conquests of Timur the Tartar (A.D. 1370-1405)_, 169
EDWARD GIBBON
_Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages (A.D. 1374)_, 187
J. F. C. HECKER
_Election of Antipope Clement VII
Beginning of the Great Schism (A.D. 1378)_, 201
HENRY HART MILMAN
_Genoese Surrender to Venetians (A.D. 1380)_, 213
HENRY HALLAM
_Rebellion of Wat Tyler (A.D. 1381)_, 217
JOHN LINGARD
_Wycliffe Translates the Bible into English (A.D. 1382)_ 227
J. PATERSON SMYTH
_The Swiss Win Their Independence
Battle of Sempach (A.D. 1386-1389)_ 238
F. GRENFELL BAKER
_Union of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway (A.D. 1397)_, 243
PAUL C. SINDING
_Deposition of Richard II
Henry IV Begins the Line of Lancaster (A.D. 1399)_, 251
JOHN LINGARD
_Discovery of the Canary Islands and the African Coast
Beginning of Negro Slave Trade (A.D. 1402)_, 266
SIR ARTHUR HELPS
_Council of Constance (A.D. 1414)_, 284
RICHARD LODGE
_Trial and Burning of John Huss
The Hussite Wars (A.D. 1415)_, 294
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
_The House of Hohenzollern Established in Brandenburg
(A.D. 1415)_, 305
THOMAS CARLYLE
_Battle of Agincourt
English Conquest of France (A.D. 1415)_, 320
JAMES GAIRDNER
_Jeanne d'Arc's Victory at Orleans (A.D. 1429)_, 333
SIR EDWARD S. CREASY
_Trial and Execution of Jeanne d'Arc (A.D. 1431)_, 350
JULES MICHELET
_Charles VII Issues His Pragmatic Sanction
Emancipation of the Gallican Church (A.D. 1438)_, 370
W. HENLEY JERVIS
RENÉ F. ROHRBACHER
_Universal Chronology (A.D. 1301-1438)_, 385
JOHN RUDD
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
VOLUME VII page
_Jeanne d'Arc stands, banner in hand, during the
coronation of Charles VII, before the high altar
at Rheims (page 347)_, Frontispiece
Painting by J. E. Lenepveu.
_Richard II resigns the crown of England to Henry,
Duke of Lancaster, son of John of Gaunt, at
London_, 262
Painting by Sir John Gilbert.
AN OUTLINE NARRATIVE
TRACING BRIEFLY THE CAUSES, CONNECTIONS,
AND CONSEQUENCES OF
THE GREAT EVENTS
(FROM DANTE TO GUTENBERG: THE EARLIER RENAISSANCE)
CHARLES F. HORNE
Fifty years ago the term "renaissance" had a very definite meaning to
scholars as representing an exact period toward the close of the
fourteenth century when the world suddenly reawoke to the beauty of the
arts of Greece and Rome, to the charm of their gayer life, the splendor
of their intellect. We know now that there was no such sudden
reawakening, that Teutonic Europe toiled slowly upward through long
centuries, and that men learned only gradually to appreciate the finer
side of existence, to study the universe for themselves, and look with
their own eyes upon the life around them and the life beyond.
Thus the word "renaissance" has grown to cover a vaguer period, and
there has been a constant tendency to push the date of its beginning
ever backward, as we detect more and more the dimly dawning light amid
the darkness of earlier ages. Of late, writers have fallen into the way
of calling Dante the "morning star of the Renaissance"; and the period
of the great poet's work, the first decade of the fourteenth century,
has certainly the advantage of being characterized by three or four
peculiarly striking events which serve to typify the tendencies of the
coming age.
In 1301 Dante was driven out of Florence, his native city-republic, by a
political strife. In this year, as he himself phrases it, he descended
into hell; that is, he began those weary wanderings in exile which ended
only with his life, and which stirred in him the deeps that found
expression in his mighty poem, the _Divina Commedia_.[1] Throughout his
masterpiece he speaks with eager respect of the old Roman writers, and
of such Greeks as he knew--so we have admiration of the ancient
intellect. He also speaks bitterly of certain popes, as well as of other
more earthly tyrants--so we have the dawnings of democracy and of
religious revolt, of government by one's self and thought for one's
self, instead of submission to the guidance of others.
More important even than these in its immediate results, Dante, while he
began his poem in Latin, the learned language of the time, soon
transposed and completed it in Italian, the corrupted Latin of his
commoner contemporaries, the tongue of his daily life. That is, he wrote
not for scholars like himself, but for a wider circle of more worldly
friends. It is the first great work in any modern speech. It is in very
truth the recognition of a new world of men, a new and more practical
set of merchant intellects which, with their growing and vigorous
vitality, were to supersede the old.
In that same decade and in that same city of Florence, Giotto was at
work, was beginning modern art with his paintings, was building the
famous cathedral there, was perhaps planning his still more famous
bell-tower. Here surely was artistic wakening enough.
If we look further afield through Italy we find in 1303 another scene
tragically expressive of the changing times. The French King, Philip the
Fair, so called from his appearance, not his dealings, had bitter cause
of quarrel with the same Pope Boniface VIII who had held the great
jubilee of 1300. Philip's soldiers, forcing their way into the little
town of Anagni, to which the Pope had withdrawn, laid violent hands upon
his holiness. If measured by numbers, the whole affair was trifling. So
few were the French soldiers that in a few days the handful of
towns-folk in Anagni were able to rise against them, expel them from
the place and rescue the aged Pope. He had been struck--beaten, say not
wholly reliable authorities--and so insulted that rage and shame drove
him mad, and he died.
Not a sword in all Europe leaped from its scabbard to avenge the martyr.
Religious men might shudder at the sacrilege, but the next Pope,
venturing to take up Boniface's quarrel, died within a few months under
strong probabilities of poison; and the next Pope, Clement V, became the
obedient servant of the French King. He even removed the seat of papal
authority from Rome to Avignon in France, and there for seventy years
the popes remained. The breakdown of the whole temporal power of the
Church was sudden, terrible, complete.
INCREASING POWER OF FRANCE
Following up his religious successes, Philip the Fair attacked the
mighty knights of the Temple, the most powerful of the religious orders
of knighthood which had fought the Saracens in Jerusalem. The Templars,
having found their warfare hopeless, had abandoned the Holy Land and had
dwelt for a generation inglorious in the West. Philip suddenly seized
the leading members of the order, accused it of hideous crimes, and
confiscated all its vast wealth and hundreds of strong castles
throughout France. He secured from his French Pope approval of the
extermination of the entire order and the torture and execution of its
chiefs. Whether the charges against them were true or not, their
helplessness in the grip of the King shows clearly the low ebb to which
knighthood had fallen, and the rising power of the monarchs. The day of
feudalism was past.[2]
We may read yet other signs of the age in the career of this cruel,
crafty King. To strengthen himself in his struggle against the Pope, he
called, in 1302, an assembly or "states-general" of his people; and,
following the example already established in England, he gave a voice in
this assembly to the "Third Estate," the common folk or "citizens," as
well as to the nobles and the clergy. So even in France we find the
people acquiring power, though as yet this Third Estate speaks with but
a timid and subservient voice, requiring to be much encouraged by its
money-asking sovereigns, who little dreamed it would one day be strong
enough to demand a reckoning of all its tyrant overlords.[3]
Another event to be noted in this same year of 1302 took place farther
northward in King Philip's domains. The Flemish cities Ghent, Liège, and
Bruges had grown to be the great centres of the commercial world, so
wealthy and so populous that they outranked Paris. The sturdy Flemish
burghers had not always been subject to France--else they had been less
well to-do. They regarded Philip's exactions as intolerable, and
rebelled. Against them marched the royal army of iron-clad knights; and
the desperate citizens, meeting these with no better defence than stout
leather jerkins, led them into a trap. At the battle of Courtrai the
knights charged into an unsuspected ditch, and as they fell the burghers
with huge clubs beat out such brains as they could find within the
helmets. It was subtlety against stupidity, the merchant's shrewdness
asserting itself along new lines. King Philip had to create for himself
a fresh nobility to replenish his depleted stock.[4]
The fact that there is so much to pause on in Philip's reign will in
itself suggest the truth, that France had grown the most important state
in Europe. This, however, was due less to French strength than to the
weakness of the empire, where rival rulers were being constantly elected
and wasting their strength against one another. If Courtrai had given
the first hint that these iron-clad knights were not invincible in war,
it was soon followed by another. The Swiss peasants formed among
themselves a league to resist oppression. This took definite shape in
1308 when they rebelled openly against their Hapsburg overlords.[5]
The Hapsburg duke of the moment was one of two rival claimants for the
title of emperor, and was much too busy to attend personally to the
chastisement of these presumptuous boors. The army which he sent to do
the work for him was met by the Swiss at Morgarten, among their mountain
passes, overwhelmed with rocks, and then put to flight by one fierce
charge of the unarmored peasants. It took the Austrians seventy years to
forget that lesson, and when a later generation sent a second army into
the mountains it was overthrown at Sempach. Swiss liberty was
established on an unarguable basis.[6]
A similar tale might be told of Bannockburn, where, under Bruce, the
Scotch common folk regained their freedom from the English.[7] Courtrai,
Morgarten, Bannockburn! Clearly a new force was growing up over all
Europe, and a new spirit among men. Knighthood, which had lost its power
over kings, seemed like to lose its military repute as well.
The development of the age was, of course, most rapid in Italy, where
democracy had first asserted itself. In its train came intellectual
ability, and by the middle of the fourteenth century Italy was in the
full swing of the intellectual renaissance.[8] In 1341 Petrarch,
recognized by all his contemporary countrymen as their leading scholar
and poet, was crowned with a laurel wreath on the steps of the Capitol
in Rome. This was the formal assertion by the age of its admiration for
intellectual worth. To Petrarch is ascribed the earliest recognition of
the beauty of nature. He has been called the first modern man. In
reading his works we feel at last that we speak with one of our own,
with a friend who understands.[9]
THE PERIOD OF DISASTER
Unfortunately, however, the democracy of Italy proved too intense, too
frenzied and unbalanced. Rienzi established a republic in Rome and
talked of the restoration of the city's ancient rule. But he governed
like a madman or an inflated fool, and was slain in a riot of the
streets.[10] Scarce one of the famous cities succeeded in retaining its
republican form. Milan became a duchy. Florence fell under the sway of
the Medici. In Venice a few rich families seized all authority, and
while the fame and territory of the republic were extended, its dogeship
became a mere figurehead. All real power was lodged in the dread and
secret council of three.[11] Genoa was defeated and crushed in a great
naval contest with her rival, Venice.[12] Everywhere tyrannies stood out
triumphant. The first modern age of representative government was a
failure. The cities had proved unable to protect themselves against the
selfish ambitions of their leaders.
In Germany and the Netherlands town life had been, as we have seen,
slower of development.[13] Hence for these Northern cities the period of
decay had not yet come. In fact, the fourteenth century marks the zenith
of their power. Their great trading league, the Hansa, was now fully
established, and through the hands of its members passed all the wealth
of Northern Europe. The league even fought a war against the King of
Denmark and defeated him. The three northern states, Denmark, Norway,
and Sweden, fell almost wholly under the dominance of the Hansa, until,
toward the end of the century, Queen Margaret of Denmark, "the Semiramis
of the North," united the three countries under her sway, and partly at
least upraised them from their sorry plight.[14]
On the whole this was not an era to which Europe can look back with
pride. The empire was a scene of anarchy. One of its wrangling rulers,
Charles IV, recognizing that the lack of an established government lay
at the root of all the disorder, tried to mend matters by publishing his
"Golden Bull," which exactly regulated the rules and formulæ to be gone
through in choosing an emperor, and named the seven "electors" who were
to vote. This simplified matters so far as the repeatedly contested
elections went; but it failed to strike to the real difficulty. The
Emperor remained elective and therefore weak.[15]
Moreover, in 1346 the "Black Death," most terrible of all the repeated
plagues under which the centuries previous to our own have suffered,
began to rear its dread form over terror-stricken Europe.[16] It has
been estimated that during the three years of this awful visitation
one-third of the people of Europe perished. Whole cities were wiped out.
In the despair and desolation of the period of scarcity that followed,
humanity became hysterical, and within a generation that oddest of all
the extravagances of the Middle Ages, the "dancing mania," rose to its
height. Men and women wandered from town to town, especially in
Germany, dancing frantically, until in their exhaustion they would beg
the bystanders to beat them or even jump on them to enable them to
stop.[17]
France and England were also in desolation. The long "Hundred Years'
War" between them began in 1340. France was not averse to it. In fact,
her King, Philip of Valois, rather welcomed the opportunity of wresting
away Guienne, the last remaining French fief of the English kings.
France, as we have seen, was regarded as the strongest land of Europe.
England was thought of as little more than a French colony, whose Norman
dukes had in the previous century been thoroughly chastised and deprived
of half their territories by their overlord. To be sure, France was
having much trouble with her Flemish cities, which were in revolt again
under the noted brewer-nobleman, Van Artevelde,[18] yet it seemed
presumption for England to attack her--England, so feeble that she had
been unable to avenge her own defeat by the half-barbaric Scots at
Bannockburn.
But the English had not nearly so small an opinion of themselves as had
the rest of Europe. The heart of the nation had not been in that strife
against the Scots, a brave and impoverished people struggling for
freedom. But hearts and pockets, too, welcomed the quarrel with France,
overbearing France, that plundered their ships when they traded with
their friends the Flemings. The Flemish wool trade was at this time a
main source of English wealth, so Edward III of England, than whom
ordinarily no haughtier aristocrat existed, made friends with the brewer
Van Artevelde, and called him "gossip" and visited him at Ghent, and
presently Flemings and English were allied in a defiance of France. By
asserting a vague ancestral claim to the French throne, Edward eased the
consciences of his allies, who had sworn loyalty to France; and King
Philip had on his hands a far more serious quarrel than he realized.[19]
In England's first great naval victory, Edward destroyed the French
fleet at Sluys and so started his country on its wonderful career of
ocean dominance. Moreover, his success established from the start that
the war should be fought out in France and not in England.[20] Then, in
1346, he won his famous victory of Crécy against overwhelming numbers of
his enemies. It has been said that cannon were effectively used for the
first time at Crécy, and it was certainly about this time that gunpowder
began to assume a definite though as yet subordinate importance in
warfare. But we need not go so far afield to explain the English
victory. It lay in the quality of the fighting men. Through a century
and a half of freedom, England had been building up a class of sturdy
yeomen, peasants who, like the Swiss, lived healthy, hearty, independent
lives. France relied only on her nobles; her common folk were as yet a
helpless herd of much shorn sheep. The French knights charged as they
had charged at Courtrai, with blind, unreasoning valor; and the English
peasants, instead of fleeing before them, stood firm and, with deadly
accuracy of aim, discharged arrow after arrow into the soon disorganized
mass. Then the English knights charged, and completed what the English
yeomen had begun.
Poitiers, ten years later, repeated the same story; and what with the
Black Death sweeping over the land, and these terrible English ravaging
at will, France sank into an abyss of misery worse even than that which
had engulfed the empire. The unhappy peasantry, driven by starvation
into frenzied revolt, avenged their agony upon the nobility by hideous
plunderings and burnings of the rich châteaux.[21] A partial peace with
England was patched up in 1360; but the "free companies" of mercenary
soldiers, who had previously been ravaging Italy, had now come to take
their pleasure in the French carnival of crime, and so the plundering
and burning went on until the fair land was wellnigh a wilderness, and
the English troops caught disease from their victims and perished in the
desolation they had helped to make. By simply refusing to fight battles
with them and letting them starve, the next French king, Charles V, won
back almost all his father had lost; and before his death, in 1380, the
English power in France had fallen again almost to where it stood at the
beginning of the war.
Edward III had died, brooding over the emptiness of his great triumph.
His son the Black Prince had died, cursing the falsity of Frenchmen.
England also had gone through the great tragedy of the Black Death and
her people, like those of France, had been driven to the point of
rebellion--though with them this meant no more than that they felt
themselves over-taxed.[22]
The latter part of the fourteenth century must, therefore, be regarded
as a period of depression in European civilization, of retrograde
movement during which the wheels of progress had turned back. It even
seemed as though Asia would once more and perhaps with final success
reassert her dominion over helpless Europe. The Seljuk Turks who, in
1291, had conquered Acre, the last European stronghold in the Holy Land,
had lost their power; but a new family of the Turkish race, the one that
dwells in Europe to-day, the Osmanlis, had built up an empire by
conquest over their fellows, and had begun to wrest province after
province from the feeble Empire of the East. In 1354 their advance
brought them across the Bosporus and they seized their first European
territory.[23] Soon they had spread over most of modern Turkey. Only the
strong-walled Constantinople held out, while its people cried
frantically to the West for help. The invaders ravaged Hungary. A
crusade was preached against them; but in 1396 the entire crusading
army, united with all the forces of Hungary, was overthrown, almost
exterminated in the battle of Nicopolis.
Perhaps it was only a direct providence that saved Europe. Another
Tartar conqueror, Timur the Lame, or Tamburlaine, had risen in the Far
East.[24] Like Attila and Genghis Khan he swept westward asserting
sovereignty. The Sultan of the Turks recalled all his armies from Europe
to meet this mightier and more insistent foe. A gigantic battle, which
vague rumor has measured in quite unthinkable numbers of combatants and
slain, was fought at Angora in 1402. The Turks were defeated and
subjugated by the Tartars. Timur's empire, being founded on no real
unity, dissolved with his death, and the various subject nations
reasserted their independence. Yet Europe was granted a considerable
breathing space before the Turks once more felt able to push their
aggressions westward.
THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE
Toward the close of this unlucky fourteenth century a marked religious
revival extended over Europe. Perhaps men's sufferings had caused it.
Many sects of reformers appeared, protesting sometimes against the
discipline, sometimes the doctrines, of the Church. In Germany Nicholas
of Basel established the "Friends of God." In England Wycliffe wrote the
earliest translation of the Bible into any of our modern tongues.[25]
The Avignon popes shook off their long submission to France and returned
to Italy, to a Rome so desolate that they tell us not ten thousand
people remained to dwell amid its stupendous ruins. Unfortunately this
return only led the papacy into still deeper troubles. Several of the
cardinals refused to recognize the Roman Pope and elected another, who
returned to Avignon. This was the beginning of the "Great Schism" in the
Church.[26] For forty years there were two, sometimes three, claimants
to the papal chair. The effect of their struggles was naturally to
lessen still further that solemn veneration with which men had once
looked up to the accepted vicegerent of God on earth. Hitherto the
revolt against the popes had only assailed their political supremacy;
but now heresies that included complete denial of the religious
authority of the Church began everywhere to arise. In England Wycliffe's
preachings and pamphlets grew more and more opposed to Roman doctrine.
In Bohemia John Huss not only said, as all men did, that the Church
needed reform, but, going further, he refused obedience to papal
commands.[27] In short, the reformers, finding themselves unable to
purify the Roman Church according to their views, began to deny its
sacredness and defy its power.
At length an unusually energetic though not oversuccessful emperor,
Sigismund, the same whom the Turks had defeated at Nicopolis, persuaded
the leaders of the Church to unite with him in calling a grand council
at Constance.[28] This council ended the great schism and restored order
to the Church by securing the rule of a single pope. It also burned John
Huss as a heretic, and thereby left on Sigismund's hands a fierce
rebellion among the reformer's Bohemian followers. The war lasted for a
generation, and during its course all the armies of Germany were
repeatedly defeated by the fanatic Hussites.[29]
Another interesting performance of the Emperor Sigismund was that, being
deep in debt, he sold his "electorate" of Brandenburg to a friend, a
Hohenzollern, and thus established as one of the four chief families of
the empire those Hohenzollerns who rose to be kings of Prussia and have
in our own day supplanted the Hapsburgs as emperors of Germany.[30] Also
worth noting of Sigismund is the fact that during the sitting of his
Council of Constance he made a tour of Europe to persuade all the
princes and various potentates to join it. When he reached England he
was met by a band of Englishmen who waded into the sea to demand whether
by his imperial visit he meant to assert any supremacy over England.
Sigismund assured them he did not, and was allowed to land. We may look
to this English parade of independence as our last reminder of the old
mediæval conception of the Emperor as being at least in theory the
overlord of the whole of Europe.
LATTER HALF OF THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
By this time England had in fact recovered from her period of temporary
disorder and depression. King Richard II, the feeble son of the Black
Prince, had been deposed in 1399,[31] and a new and vigorous line of
rulers, the Lancastrians, reached their culmination in Henry V
(1415-1422). Henry revived the French quarrel, and paralleled Crécy and
Poitiers with a similar victory at Agincourt.[32] The French King was a
madman, and, aided by a civil war among the French nobility, Henry soon
had his neighbor's kingdom seemingly helpless at his feet. By the
treaty of Troyes he was declared the heir to the French throne, married
the mad King's daughter, and dwelt in Paris as regent of the
kingdom.[33]
The Norman conquest of England seemed balanced by a similar English
conquest of France. But the chances of fate are many. Both Henry and his
insane father-in-law died in the same year, and while Henry left only a
tiny babe to succeed to his claims, the French King left a full-grown
though rather worthless son. This young man, Charles VII, continued to
deny the English authority, from a safe distance in Southern France. He
made, however, no effort to assert himself or retrieve his fortunes; and
the English captains in the name of their baby King took possession of
one fortress after another, till, in 1429, Orleans was the only French
city of rank still barring their way from Charles and the far south.[34]
Then came the sudden, wonderful arousing of the French under their
peasant heroine, Jeanne d'Arc, and her tragic capture and execution.[35]
At last even the French peasantry were roused; and the French nobles
forgot their private quarrels and turned a united front against the
invaders. The leaderless English lost battle after battle, until of all
France they retained only Edward III's first conquest, the city of
Calais.
France, a regenerated France, turned upon the popes of the Council of
Constance, and, remembering how long she had held the papacy within her
own borders, asserted at least a qualified independence of the Romans by
the "Pragmatic Sanction" which established the Gallican Church.[36]
This semi-defiance of the Pope was encouraged by King Charles, who, in
fact, made several shrewd moves to secure the power which his
good-fortune, and not his abilities, had won. Among other innovations he
established a "standing army," the first permanent body of government
troops in Teutonic Europe. By this step he did much to alter the
mediæval into the modern world; he did much to establish that supremacy
of kings over both nobles and people which continued in France and more
or less throughout all Europe for over three centuries to follow.
Another sign of the coming of a new and more vigorous era is to be seen
in the beginning of exploration down the Atlantic coast of Africa by the
Portuguese, and their discovery and settlement of the Canary Isles. As a
first product of their voyages the explorers introduced negro slavery
into Europe[37]--a grim hint that the next age with increasing power was
to face increasing responsibilities as well.
An even greater change was coming, was already glimmering into light. In
that same year of King Charles' Pragmatic Sanction (1438), though yet
unknown to warring princes and wrangling churchmen, John Gutenberg, in a
little German workshop, had evolved the idea of movable type, that is,
of modern printing. From his press sprang the two great modern genii,
education and publicity, which have already made tyrannies and slaveries
impossible, pragmatic sanctions unnecessary, and which may one day do as
much for standing armies.
DANTE COMPOSES THE "DIVINA COMMEDIA"
A.D. 1300-1318
RICHARD WILLIAM CHURCH
Out of what may be called the civil and religious
storm-and-stress period through which the Middle passed into
the modern age, there came a great literary foregleam of the
new life upon which the world was about to enter. From
Italy, where the European ferment, both in its political and
its spiritual character, mainly centred, came the prophecy
of the new day, in a poet's "vision of the invisible
world"--Dante's _Divina Commedia_--wherein also the deeper
history of the visible world of man was both embodied from
the past and in a measure predetermined for the human race.
Dante's great epic was called by him a comedy because its
ending was not tragical, but "happy"; and admiration gave it
the epithet "divine." It is in three parts--_Inferno_
(hell), _Purgatorio_ (purgatory), and _Paradiso_ (paradise).
It has been made accessible to English readers in the
metrical translations of Carey, Longfellow, Norton, and
others, and in the excellent prose version (_Inferno_) of
John Aitken Carlyle, brother of Thomas Carlyle.
Dante (originally Durante) Alighieri was born at Florence in
May, 1265, and died at Ravenna September 14, 1321. Both the
_Divina Commedia_ and his other great work, the _Vita Nuova_
(the new life), narrate the love--either romantic or
passionate--with which he was inspired by Beatrice
Portinari, whom he first saw when he was nine years old and
Beatrice eight. His whole future life and work are believed
to have been determined by this ideal attachment. But an
equally noteworthy fact of his literary career is that his
works were produced in the midst of party strifes wherein
the poet himself was a prominent actor. In the bitter feuds
of the Guelfs and Ghibellines he bore the sufferings of
failure, persecution, and exile. But above all these trials
rose his heroic spirit and the sublime voice of his poems,
which became a quickening prophecy, realized in the birth of
Italian and of European literature, in the whole movement of
the Renaissance, and in the ever-advancing development of
the modern world.
Church's clear-sighted interpretations of the mind and life
of Dante, and of the history-making _Commedia_, attest the
importance of including the poet and his work in this record
of Great Events.
The _Divina Commedia_ is one of the landmarks of history. More than a
magnificent poem, more than the beginning of a language and the opening
of a national literature, more than the inspirer of art and the glory of
a great people, it is one of those rare and solemn monuments of the
mind's power which measure and test what it can reach to, which rise up
ineffaceably and forever as time goes on marking out its advance by
grander divisions than its centuries, and adopted as epochs by the
consent of all who come after. It stands with the _Iliad_ and
Shakespeare's plays, with the writings of Aristotle and Plato, with the
_Novum Organon_ and the _Principia_, with Justinian's Code, with the
Parthenon and St. Peter's. It is the first Christian poem; and it opens
European literature, as the _Iliad_ did that of Greece and Rome. And,
like the _Iliad_, it has never become out of date; it accompanies in
undiminished freshness the literature which it began.
We approach the history of such works, in which genius seems to have
pushed its achievements to a new limit. Their bursting out from nothing,
and gradual evolution into substance and shape, cast on the mind a
solemn influence. They come too near the fount of being to be followed
up without our feeling the shadows which surround it. We cannot but
fear, cannot but feel ourselves cut off from this visible and familiar
world--as we enter into the cloud. And as with the processes of nature,
so it is with those offsprings of man's mind by which he has added
permanently one more great feature to the world, and created a new power
which is to act on mankind to the end. The mystery of the inventive and
creative faculty, the subtle and incalculable combinations by which it
was led to its work, and carried through it, are out of reach of
investigating thought. Often the idea recurs of the precariousness of
the result; by how little the world might have lost one of its
ornaments--by one sharp pang, or one chance meeting, or any other among
the countless accidents among which man runs his course. And then the
solemn recollection supervenes that powers were formed, and life
preserved, and circumstances arranged, and actions controlled, and thus
it should be; and the work which man has brooded over, and at last
created, is the foster-child too of that "Wisdom which reaches from end
to end, strongly and sweetly disposing of all things."
It does not abate these feelings that we can follow in some cases and to
a certain extent the progress of a work. Indeed, the sight of the
particular accidents among which it was developed--which belong perhaps
to a heterogeneous and wildly discordant order of things, which are out
of proportion and out of harmony with it, which do not explain it; which
have, as it seems to us, no natural right to be connected with it, to
bear on its character, or contribute to its accomplishment; to which we
feel, as it were, ashamed to owe what we can least spare, yet on which
its forming mind and purpose were dependent, and with which they had to
conspire--affects the imagination even more than cases where we see
nothing. We are tempted less to musing and wonder by the _Iliad_, a work
without a history, cut off from its past, the sole relic and vestige of
its age, unexplained in its origin and perfection, than by the _Divina
Commedia_, destined for the highest ends and most universal sympathy,
yet the reflection of a personal history, and issuing seemingly from its
chance incidents.
The _Divina Commedia_ is singular among the great works with which it
ranks, for its strong stamp of personal character and history. In
general we associate little more than the name--not the life--of a great
poet with his works; personal interest belongs more usually to greatness
in its active than its creative forms. But the whole idea and purpose of
the _Commedia_, as well as its filling up and coloring, are determined
by Dante's peculiar history. The loftiest, perhaps, in its aim and
flight of all poems, it is also the most individual; the writer's own
life is chronicled in it, as well as the issues and upshot of all
things. It is at once the mirror to all time of the sins and perfections
of men, of the judgments and grace of God, and the record, often the
only one, of the transient names, and local factions, and obscure
ambitions, and forgotten crimes of the poet's own day; and in that awful
company to which he leads us, in the most unearthly of his scenes, we
never lose sight of himself. And when this peculiarity sends us to
history, it seems as if the poem which was to hold such a place in
Christian literature hung upon and grew out of chance events, rather
than the deliberate design of its author. History, indeed, here, as
generally, is but a feeble exponent of the course of growth in a great
mind and great ideas. It shows us early a bent and purpose--the man
conscious of power and intending to use it--and then the accidents among
which he worked; but how the current of purpose threaded its way among
them, how it was thrown back, deflected, deepened by them, we cannot
learn from history.
It presents a broken and mysterious picture. A boy of quick and
enthusiastic temper grows up into youth in a dream of love. The lady of
his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a wonder
of earth, but as a saint in paradise, and relieves his heart in an
autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction--quaint and
subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with
far too much of genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he closes
it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution of
raising at a future day a worthy monument to the memory of her whom he
has lost. It is the promise and purpose of a great work. But a prosaic
change seems to come over his half-ideal character. The lover becomes
the student--the student of the thirteenth century--struggling painfully
against difficulties, eager and hot after knowledge, wasting eyesight
and stinting sleep, subtle, inquisitive, active-minded and sanguine, but
omnivorous, overflowing with dialectical forms, loose in premise and
ostentatiously rigid in syllogism, fettered by the refinements of
half-awakened taste and the mannerisms of the Provençals.
Boethius and Cicero and the mass of mixed learning within his reach are
accepted as the consolation of his human griefs; he is filled with the
passion of universal knowledge, and the desire to communicate it.
Philosophy has become the lady of his soul--to write allegorical poems
in her honor, and to comment on them with all the apparatus of his
learning in prose, his mode of celebrating her. Further, he marries; it
is said, not happily. The antiquaries, too, have disturbed romance by
discovering that Beatrice also was married some years before her death.
He appears, as time goes on, as a burgher of Florence, the father of a
family, a politician, an envoy, a magistrate, a partisan, taking his
full share in the quarrels of the day.
Beatrice reappears--shadowy, melting at times into symbol and
figure--but far too living and real, addressed with too intense and
natural feeling, to be the mere personification of anything. The lady of
the philosophical Canzoni has vanished. The student's dream has been
broken, as the boy's had been; and the earnestness of the man,
enlightened by sorrow, overleaping the student's formalities and
abstractions, reverted in sympathy to the earnestness of the boy, and
brooded once more on that saint in paradise, whose presence and memory
had once been so soothing, and who now seemed a real link between him
and that stable country "where the angels are in peace." Round her
image, the reflection of purity and truth and forbearing love, was
grouped that confused scene of trouble and effort, of failure and
success, which the poet saw round him; round her image it arranged
itself in awful order--and that image, not a metaphysical abstraction,
but the living memory, freshened by sorrow, and seen through the
softening and hallowing vista of years, of Beatrice Portinari--no
figment of imagination, but God's creature and servant. A childish love,
dissipated by heavy sorrow--a boyish resolution, made in a moment of
feeling, interrupted, though it would be hazardous to say, in Dante's
case, laid aside, for apparently more manly studies, gave the idea and
suggested the form of the "sacred poem of earth and heaven."
And the occasion of this startling unfolding of the poetic gift, of this
passage of a soft and dreamy boy into the keenest, boldest, sternest of
poets, the free and mighty leader of European song, was, what is not
ordinarily held to be a source of poetical inspiration--the political
life. The boy had sensibility, high aspirations, and a versatile and
passionate nature; the student added to this energy, various learning,
gifts of language, and noble ideas on the capacities and ends of man.
But it was the factions of Florence which made Dante a great poet.
The connection of these feuds with Dante's poem has given to the
Middle-Age history of Italy an interest of which it is not undeserving
in itself, full as it is of curious exhibitions of character and
contrivance, but to which politically it cannot lay claim, amid the
social phenomena, so far grander in scale and purpose and more
felicitous in issue, of other western nations. It is remarkable for
keeping up an antique phase, which, in spite of modern arrangements, it
has not yet lost. It is a history of cities. In ancient history all that
is most memorable and instructive gathers round cities; civilization and
empire were concentrated within walls; and it baffled the ancient mind
to conceive how power should be possessed and wielded by numbers larger
than might be collected in a single market-place. The Roman Empire,
indeed, aimed at being one in its administration and law; and it was not
a nation nor were its provinces nations, yet everywhere but in Italy it
prepared them for becoming nations. And while everywhere else parts were
uniting and union was becoming organization--and neither geographical
remoteness nor unwieldiness of number nor local interests and
differences were untractable obstacles to that spirit of fusion which
was at once the ambition of the few and the instinct of the many; and
cities, even where most powerful, had become the centres of the
attracting and joining forces, knots in the political network--while
this was going on more or less happily throughout the rest of Europe, in
Italy the ancient classic idea lingered in its simplicity, its
narrowness and jealousy, wherever there was any political activity. The
history of Southern Italy, indeed, is mainly a foreign one--the history
of modern Rome merges in that of the papacy; but Northern Italy has a
history of its own, and that is a history of separate and independent
cities--points of reciprocal and indestructible repulsion, and within,
theatres of action where the blind tendencies and traditions of classes
and parties weighed little on the freedom of individual character, and
citizens could watch and measure and study one another with the
minuteness of private life.
Dante, like any other literary celebrity of the time, was not less from
the custom of the day than from his own purpose a public man. He took
his place among his fellow-citizens; he went out to war with them; he
fought, it is said, among the skirmishers at the great Guelf victory at
Campaldino; to qualify himself for office in the democracy, he enrolled
himself in one of the guilds of the people, and was matriculated in the
"art" of the apothecaries; he served the state as its agent abroad; he
went on important missions to the cities and courts of Italy according
to a Florentine tradition, which enumerates fourteen distinct embassies,
even to Hungary and France. In the memorable year of jubilee, 1300, he
was one of the priors of the Republic. There is no shrinking from
fellowship and coöperation and conflict with the keen or bold men of the
market-place and council hall, in that mind of exquisite and, as drawn
by itself, exaggerated sensibility. The doings and characters of men,
the workings of society, the fortunes of Italy, were watched and thought
of with as deep an interest as the courses of the stars, and read in the
real spectacle of life with as profound emotion as in the miraculous
page of Vergil; and no scholar ever read Vergil with such feeling--no
astronomer ever watched the stars with more eager inquisitiveness. The
whole man opens to the world around him; all affections and powers, soul
and sense, diligently and thoughtfully directed and trained, with free
and concurrent and equal energy, with distinct yet harmonious purposes,
seek out their respective and appropriate objects, moral, intellectual,
natural, spiritual, in that admirable scene and hard field where man is
placed to labor and love, to be exercised, proved, and judged.
The outlines of this part of Dante's history are so well known that it
is not necessary to dwell on them; and more than the outlines we know
not. The family quarrels came to a head, issued in parties, and the
parties took names; they borrowed them from two rival factions in a
neighboring town, Pistoia, whose feud was imported into Florence; and
the Guelfs became divided into the Black Guelfs, who were led by the
Donati, and the White Guelfs, who sided with Cerchi. It is still
professed to be but a family feud, confined to the great houses; but
they were too powerful and Florence too small for it not to affect the
whole Republic. The middle classes and the artisans looked on, and for a
time not without satisfaction, at the strife of the great men; but it
grew evident that one party must crush the other and become dominant in
Florence; and of the two, the Cerchi and their White adherents were less
formidable to the democracy than the unscrupulous and overbearing
Donati, with their military renown and lordly tastes; proud not merely
of being nobles, but Guelf nobles; always loyal champions, once the
martyrs, and now the hereditary assertors, of the great Guelf cause.
The Cerchi, with less character and less zeal, but rich, liberal, and
showy, and with more of rough kindness and vulgar good-nature for the
common people, were more popular in Guelf Florence than the _Parte
Guelfa_; and, of course, the Ghibellines wished them well.