THE RETURN OF BARBARISM: THE MIDDLE AGES
Of this kind of "reflux" Vico mentions and examines only one instance:
the period of European history which had in his own days for the first
time been marked out definitely by historians and given the name
(though Vico does not use it) of the "Middle Ages."
That this was a period of decadence and barbarism was certainly not
a new thought for consciousness: for, especially in the humanistic
period, a general feeling of estrangement and repulsion had been felt
towards these centuries of "middle and low Latinity" in which the
treasures of the classical literatures were neglected and scattered,
and humane studies either lost their vigour or disappeared completely.
This consciousness, general on the part of cultivated Europe, was
especially full and vivid in Italy; for that country could never forget
that though for other peoples the Middle Ages had seen the rise of
their fortunes, power and civilisation, for her they had meant the end
of Rome's greatness, the humiliation of her name before the arrogant
Vandal, Visigoth and Lombard, the devastation of rich cities, and
the destruction of majestic monuments whose miserable wreckage could
be seen on every hand. Machiavelli had opened his _Histories_ with
a famous and striking picture of the general change which followed
the fall of the Western Empire. But to pass in review the ruins or
to collect the antiquities of the Middle Ages was not the way to
penetrate into the spirit of the period, any more than to note a
man's faults and the marks which distinguish him from another is the
same thing as understanding the soul of either. Vico was the first to
understand the soul of the Middle Ages, that is to say, the mental,
social and cultural constitution of the period.
Though living in a part of Italy rich not only in documents but in
survivals of the Middle Age, Vico confesses that this second period
of barbarism is much more obscure to him than the first, and that
it is only the first that has enabled him to throw light upon the
second. This he expressed by the mere fact that he named the period
"the second barbarism," or the "return" or "reflux" of barbarism,
and thus considered it as an instance of his ideal law of reflux.
The Middle Ages seemed to him both a representation of the primitive
conditions of life, and in consequence a reproduction of the social
process developing out of them. It was a view as original as it was
rich in truth: and it is no objection to it to say that Vico reveals
the generic characters rather than the particular traits of the Middle
Ages, because we know that the problem he set before himself was
precisely the investigation of generic characters or uniformities, and
that he avoided history properly so called in order to escape a dilemma
between science and faith, between the purely immanental conception of
history, excluding revelation and miracle, and the purely transcendent
conception, miraculous and therefore difficult to treat in a scientific
manner. Even in our own times, it is a fact worth noticing that we have
seen a recrudescence of this attempt to harmonise religion and history
by abstracting from the individual aspect of events and reducing
history to a history of institutions and uniformities.[1] In this
position assumed by the problem in Vico's mind we may see the reason
for the fact, which some have thought very strange in a Catholic, that
he lays no stress on Christianity, and when he encounters it at the
outset of the Middle Ages dismisses it in a few words; saying that God,
having by superhuman ways shown clearly the truth of the Christian
religion, when he opposed the virtue of the martyrs to the power of
Rome, and the doctrine of the Fathers, together with the miracles,
to the empty wisdom of Greece, and knowing that armed nations must
arise on every hand ready to fight for the divinity of that religion's
author, permitted the birth of a new order of civilisation among the
nations, in order that the true religion might be established according
to the natural course of human affairs.
We must be content then with the resemblances observed by Vico between
mediaeval society and that of the early centuries of Greece and Rome,
and not take offence if his exemplifications and proofs very often seem
fallacious and fanciful. His main historical thought as we know already
is robust enough to pass over the errors or to live in the midst of
them unimpaired.
We see (to reconstruct his story or picture, with some rearrangement)
in the Middle Ages groups of dwellings everywhere springing up on the
mountains, each dominated by its fortress as in the divine age of
the "Cyclopes"; for the unhappy people, ground down by the violence
of barbarian invasions and intestine strife, had no other means of
defence. The most ancient cities built in the Middle Ages and almost
all capitals of states are as a matter of fact placed upon heights;
all new seigneuries formed at the time were called "castella" by the
Italians; and this perhaps is also the reason why nobles were called
men "born in a high or conspicuous position" (_summo, illustri loco
nati_) while the plebeians living in the plains below were "born in a
low or obscure place" (_imo, obscuro loco nati_). We find asyla or
sanctuaries again open especially with the ecclesiastical lords, who
were in humanity in advance of their savage times; here took refuge the
oppressed and the terrified, to seek protection for person or property.
Hence in Germany, a country which must have been wilder than the other
parts of Europe, there remained almost more ecclesiastical than secular
lords. A famous example of these political formations was the Abbey
of St. Laurence at Aversa in the kingdom of Naples, with which was
incorporated that of St. Laurence at Capua. This monastery governed
either directly or by abbots or monks dependent upon it no less than a
hundred and ten churches in Campania, Samnium, Apulia and the ancient
Calabria, from the river Volturnus to the gulf of Tarentum; the abbots
of St. Laurence were lords or barons of almost the whole of this
country. The small chapels which they built in mountainous and remote
places for the celebration of the mass and other religious offices
became natural sanctuaries for the population, and they built their
houses round them: and this is the reason why in Europe so many cities,
lands and castles bear the names of saints, and why the churches are
the most ancient monuments of this period. Consequently we also find
feudalism, not establishing itself in Europe for the first time, but
appearing once more. It has been mistakenly believed to be a relic of
Roman law after its destruction by the barbarians (such is the theory
of Oldenorp and all other jurists) whereas really Roman law itself
arose out of the ruins of the feudalism of early Latin barbarism, and
mediaeval feudalism was not a new law of the European nations, but
a very ancient law renewed by the last barbarism. This feudalism is
far from being the "vile matter" which Cujas calls it: it is a heroic
matter, one worthy to be celebrated by the most erudite and profound
learning of Greece and Rome. And to what is it due, if not to this
essential unity of nature, that the choicest expressions of Roman law,
which Cujas himself allows to mitigate the barbarism of feudalistic
learning, are so precisely adequate to express the properties and
attributes of the system that no better terminology could be desired?
With the Middle Ages, then, we return to the fundamental division
between heroes and slaves, between _"viri"_ or "barons" ("_varones_" is
the word still used for men, _"viri"_ in Spanish) and mere "_homines_"
as the vassals were called: between _"patres"_ or "patrons" and
serfs. The learned students of feudalism who translate _"feudum"_
by _"clientela"_ are really giving something, much more than a good
linguistical equivalent; they are unawares giving a historical
definition of the feoff. The first feoffs of the Middle Ages were
necessarily personal, like the first _clientelae_ of Romulus: a form
of vassalage still extant in Vico's time in the north, especially in
Poland, where the _"kmet"_ were a kind of slaves who were often used
as stakes in their lord's games, and passed with their families into
the hands of the winner. Then came rustic feoffs, real in character
and consisting in uncultivated land assigned by the victors to the
conquered for their sustenance, while they themselves kept the
cultivated land: these feoffs were called by the feudalists, with
a new elegance of Latinity and an equally sound historical truth,
_"beneficia."_ The ancient "_next_" were the new "liege" or bound men,
who were compelled to join in all the friendships and quarrels of their
lord, and supplied what in Rome was called _"opera militaris,"_ and in
the Middle Ages _"militare servitium."_ The feudal bond extended itself
to larger political relations, and just as conquered kings became
allies or _socii_ of Rome and "upheld the majesty of the Roman people,"
so there were sovereign feoffs subordinated to higher sovereignties
whose representatives, the great kings and lords of large kingdoms and
numerous provinces, took the title of "majesty."
Republics became aristocratic once more in government if not in
constitution: this is admitted by political writers, among others
by Bodin, who even says that his own kingdom of France was purely
aristocratic in constitution under the Merovingian and Capetian
dynasties. Till the end of the sixteenth century living witnesses
to the past remained in the aristocratic kingdoms of Sweden and
Denmark; and Poland, mentioned above, preserved the same constitution
down to Vico's own time. The first state parliaments of Europe must
have consisted like Romulus's senate of the elders of the nobility
(_seniores,_ hence _seigneurs_); and were armed courts of barons
or peers like the _comitia curiata_ of old. In these parliaments
were decided feudal causes concerning rights or successions or the
devolution of feoffs through felony or default of heirs: which causes,
confirmed many times by these judgments, formed the customs of
feudalism. Vico saw a relic of these parliaments in the Sacred Royal
Council at Naples, the president of which assumed the title of "Sacred
Royal Majesty," as the councillors did the title of _"milites,"_ and
whose sentences admitted of no appeal to any other tribunal, but only a
request for revision by the Council itself.
The governments, beside being aristocratic, were enveloped in an
atmosphere of religion to such an extent that not only were bishops
and abbots very often, as we saw, feudatories, but feudatories and
sovereigns adorned themselves freely with religious insignia; Catholic
kings everywhere, in order to defend the Christian religion whose
protectors they were, wore the dalmatic of the diaconate, consecrated
their persons (whence the title "Sacred Royal Majesty"), and took
rank in the church, as Hugh Capet took the title of Count and Abbot
of Paris; thus as we see from the earliest documents the French lords
called themselves dukes and abbots or counts and abbots simultaneously.
These early Christian kings were the first to institute armed
religious orders, by the help of which they defended Catholicism
against Arians, Saracens and other infidels. _"Pura et pin bella"_
returned once more as in the heroic period; the globe surmounted by
the cross worn by the Christian potentates on their crowns recalls
the cross upon the standards in the holy wars or crusades. Heroic
slavery returns, and lasts a long time among Christian nations because,
considering war as the judgment of God, the victors believed the
vanquished to be abandoned by God and held them no better than beasts
(thus the Christians called the Turks "dogs" and were in turn called
"pigs" by them). The ancients deprived the conquered of all things
human and divine. The new barbarians on occupying a city endeavoured
above everything to search out and carry off the tombs or relics of
saints, which the peoples of that time buried and concealed with all
possible care; and thus almost all translations of relics took place
at this time. A trace of this custom survives in the rule by which a
conquered nation must buy back from the victorious generals all the
bells in the cities they have taken.
Analogous resemblances may be found in the juridical regulation of
property. The primary division of property in feudal law is that
into feudal goods and allodial goods. Allodial tenure was in origin
a highly secure right, unencumbered by any external charge, even a
public one; and applied to property directly acquired or conquered by
the patricians or barons. Feudal tenure required the approval of the
lord by whom it had been granted. Allodial tenure thus corresponded to
quiritary _ex optimo iure,_ and feudal to bonitary; and it was only
when later in modern Europe as previously in ancient Rome a new census
and treasury were formed, and when allodial property was made subject
to public charges, that it could be contemptuously described as "goods
of the spindle" as opposed to feudal, "goods of the lance." Thus, to
take an example, the provinces which were later incorporated into the
French kingdom had formerly been sovereign principalities feudally
dependent upon the ruler of the said kingdom; their sovereign princes
being free from all public charge in the tenure of their (allodial)
possessions. Later, when through succession, rebellion or failure of
heirs these provinces became part of the kingdom, the property was
made liable to taxation and tribute; the tenure _ex optimo iure_ was
confused with private non-feudal tenure subject to these charges, and
allodials in the noble sense of the word were identified with allodials
in the common sense. The later students of feudalism missed the point
of the primitive distinction just as the late Roman jurists forgot
the meaning of tenure _ex optimo iure._ To the feudal tenure belonged
emphyteosis (so that the allodial right ultimately signified both what
the vassal paid to the sovereign and the planter to his immediate
lord): "commendations," identical with the ancient _clientela_: the
"census" by which the vassals were bound to serve their lords in war
(the tributaries, _angarii_ or _perangarii,_ being equivalent to the
Roman _assidui_): the _"precaria,"_ which must originally have been
land granted by lords in response to the prayers of the poor: and
"_libelli_" or transferences of non-movable property which in this
agricultural economy took the place of commerce. The exclusion of women
from inheritance, which went back to the beginnings of Roman law, was
renewed in the form of the "salic law" in Germany and among all the
early barbarian nations of Europe, though it preserved its force only
in France and Savoy.
Punishments were cruel; death was called the "ordinary penalty." But
there was in the Middle Ages no real penal law and procedure dealing
with private offences. The murder of a plebeian was committed either
by his own lord, whom nobody could accuse, or by another lord, who
could indemnify the man's own lord for his loss as if he had been a
slave. This custom was still in force in Poland, Lithuania, Denmark,
Sweden and Norway. Under the name of "canonical purgations" (though
unrecognised by canon law) certain kinds of divine judgments or duels
were practised throughout Europe; and private vengeance flourished down
to the time of Bartolo. In judgments concerned with allodial rights,
the lords met in arms; and in the kingdom of Naples even in Vico's own
days barons avenged intrusions upon their own feoffs on the part of
other barons not by civil suits but by duels. In a society ruled by
force, what wonder that the robbers of the heroic age returned, and
that "pirate" became a title of nobility? Never has the fortune of
kingdoms been so various or so inconstant.
The Roman law of Justinian, penetrated as it was by the idea of equity,
was abandoned and fell into oblivion. In France and Spain any one who
dared to appeal to it in a cause was severely punished; in Italy it
is certain that the nobles considered it dishonourable to regulate
their affairs by Roman law, and professed to live according to that
of the Lombards; while the plebeians, slower in throwing off ancient
customs, continued to practise certain parts of the Roman law by force
of habit. In fact the law of the period consisted rather of habits than
of statutes: rigid formulae and solemn ceremonial once more acquired
importance, and a distinction was made between _pacta nuda,_ naked
agreements, and _pacta vestita,_ agreements clothed and reinforced
by these formulae and ceremonies. An example of the respect in which
formulae were held is afforded by the action of the Emperor Conrad
III. On taking Weinsberg, a town which had supported his rival for the
empire, he condemned it to extermination, making an exception only
in favour of the women and all they could bring out with them. The
women came out of the doomed city carrying on their backs their sons,
husbands and fathers: and the Emperor, standing before the gate at the
head of his army with swords drawn and lances in rest to satisfy their
leader's terrible wrath, watched them and allowed them to pass safe and
sound out of respect for the letter of his own decree.
It was an illiterate period, a fact expressed by Vico in the statement
that languages again became "mute" or hieroglyphic. The common tongues,
Italian, French, Spanish and German, were not written down: only a few
ecclesiastics wrote a barbarous Latin, and hence "cleric" and "scholar"
became synonymous terms; but among the very priests such ignorance
prevailed that we find documents signed by bishops with the sign of
the cross, as they were unable to write their own names. Owing to this
paucity of learning an English law laid down that a man condemned to
death should be reprieved if he could write, as a valuable craftsman;
and "man of letters" as well as "cleric" or "clerk" remained a name for
a learned man. Hence the value and general employment of family arms
to indicate the owners of a house, a tomb, land or livestock, and the
frequency with which coats-of-arms are found on buildings of the time.
With barbarism returned the predominance of verse over prose. The prose
of the Fathers of the Latin Church--and the same is true of those
of the Greek--is full of poetic rhythms, so as to resemble a chant.
The first modern lyric poetry was religious; and if there was not
strictly a Christian religious poetry, this was because the subjects
of our theology transcend all intelligence and imagination and crush
the poetic faculty. Poetry and history were once more confounded; the
romantic poets, the heroic poets of the return to barbarism, believed
their own stories to be true, and thus Boiardo and Ariosto took as
subject for their poems Turpin, Bishop of Paris. And just as the French
language, when owing to the famous Parisian school and the highly
subtle scholastic theology it passed at a stroke from spontaneity to
reflection, preserved pure diphthongs in great number while adopting
abstract terms, so the story of Turpin survived in France like a
Homeric poem. These authors of Latin poems confined themselves entirely
to history, for instance, William of Apulia's _De gestis Normannorum in
Italia_ and Gunther's _Carmen heroicum de rebus a Frederico Barbarossa
gestis._ The first writers in the vernacular were in Italy poets no
less than in Provence and France. A punctilious virtue like that of
Achilles again appeared, the complete morality of the duellist; hence
arose the proud laws, the lofty duties and the vindictive satisfactions
of the knight-errants sung by the romantic poets. Does not Cola di
Rienzo seem to be a real Homeric character in his swift outburst of
emotion when, as we read in his life, while speaking of the unhappy
state of Rome he excited both himself and his listeners to unrestrained
tears? Hyperbole was a common type of thought, as in children; for "I
often remember," writes Vico, "when walking abroad that the gentle
slopes which unfold themselves before my eyes appeared when I was a
child to be steep and lofty mountains." Thus in the Middle Ages Roland
and the other paladins were represented as gigantic in stature: and
images of divine beings, the eternal Father, Christ, or the Virgin,
painted or sculptured, were of colossal dimensions.
But the human mind is like land which, after lying waste for long
centuries, when first cultivated bears crops of wonderful quality,
size and abundance. Thus at the close of barbarism in Italy after four
savage and stormy centuries, arose Dante, the Homer of the second
barbarism, just as somewhat later flourished the delicate verse of
Petrarch and the gallant and graceful prose of Boccaccio; all three
incomparable in their way. And since barbarism is, as we have already
indicated, truthful, frank, faithful, generous and magnanimous by
nature, Dante puts on the stage real persons and real actions of the
dead; and his poem is called a "comedy" in allusion to the ancient
comedy which followed the same principle. It is a poem in which both
the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ find parallels; the former in the
_Inferno,_ where Dante employs his choleric genius and all his vast
imagination in describing the effects of implacable wrath and recalling
numbers of merciless punishments, a worthy companion-picture to the
horrid slaughters of Homer (whose descriptions of them inspire pity in
us, but gave nothing but pleasure to his own audience); the latter,
the _Odyssey,_ which celebrates the heroic endurance of Ulysses, is
paralleled by the _Purgatorio,_ a spectacle of severe punishments
borne with immovable patience, and the _Paradiso_ where infinite
joy is experienced with an infinite tranquillity of mind. Another
similarity between Dante and Homer lies in the physiognomy of the
former's language, which is so varied that some suppose him to have
collected it like Homer from all the dialects of his nation; an opinion
of sixteenth-century scholars which will not stand criticism, for it
is certain that when Dante used them these expressions must have been
current at Florence, and that a lifetime would have been insufficient
to collect them from this side and from that when there were no writers
in the various dialects. But the most important resemblance of Dante
to Homer is in poetic sublimity. Dante is a divine poet who to the
delicate imaginations of to-day seems rough and uncivilised, and often
shocks by unwonted harmonies an ear that has become morbidly sensitive
through effeminate music. But he is received very differently by men
of severe tastes who refuse to be satisfied with flowers, ornaments
and graces. Like Homer too he is great not in esoteric wisdom but in
the vigour of his imagination. Dante was undoubtedly a very learned
theologian, but that was his weakness rather than his strength. If he
had known neither Scholasticism nor Latin, he would have been a still
greater poet, and perhaps the Tuscan language would have had what Latin
never had, a poet who could in everything bear comparison with Homer.
The man who wrote this page of criticism on Dante and vindicated him
once more after centuries of anti-Dantesque taste (or mere Dantesque
grammar or Dantesque scholasticism) and vindicated him in the very
height of the prosperity of the Arcadianism so hostile to him, deserved
to have made the acquaintance of William Shakespeare genius, which he
was perhaps the only man alive capable of understanding. But in Italy,
as in most countries outside England, nothing was known of Shakespear
at this time, and Vico has only the vague and belated remark about him
that the English, untouched by the prevailing delicacy of the century,
took no pleasure in tragedies which had not an element of atrocity in
them, just as the earliest taste of Greek drama was for the abominable
feast of Thyestes and Medea's impious slaughter of her brother and
children. The tendency towards Teutonic poetry and literature remained
in Vico as we know an aspiration only; he was unable to get a clear
view of it however closely he tried to examine it; and when he does
mention it upon the strength of second-hand information, it is only to
say that in the German nation, especially in the purely agricultural
province of Silesia, "poets arose naturally"; in his search for
an unsophisticated popular poetry he had in fact stumbled without
realising his mistake upon the Silesian school of Hoffmanswaldau and
Löhenstein, the German imitators of the Neapolitan Marino. But the only
value of the anecdote is to illustrate anew the tricks played upon Vico
by his lively fancy.
How the world emerged from the second barbarismi and the feudal
constitution, Vico does not say. He does not seem to have fixed his
attention upon the communal movement which presents so many analogies
with the struggles of the Roman plebs and the formation of ancient
democracy. He makes game, here again, of those who traced the genesis
of modern monarchies such as the French to a simple law like that of
Tribonian by which, he explains ironically, the paladins of France
deprived themselves of their power and conferred it upon the kings of
the Capetian dynasty. He also observes that the baronial power, being
dispersed and dissipated by reason of civil wars in which they were
obliged to depend upon the people, was the more easily gathered up
by sovereign monarchs; and that thus the "_obsequium_" of vassals to
their baron passed into the "_obsequium principis._" But he gives quite
a special importance to the rediscovery of Roman law (that "natural
law of the European nations" as Grotius had called it) by the studies
undertaken in the Italian universities. Men thus learnt anew the
principles of natural equity; the nobles and plebeians became equal in
the eyes of civil law as they are already in human nature, the secrets
of the laws passed out of the hands of the feudatories, whose power
consequently diminished by degrees, and the humane government of free
republics and perfect monarchies came into being. The reflux of heroic
society had now undergone a contrary reflux; it was no longer possible,
under the conditions of modern civilisation, to recall it to life,
just as it was impossible for the attempts of the Pythagoreans and
Dion of Syracuse to restore the ancient aristocracies. The plebeians,
once recognised as naturally equals of the nobles, no longer submitted
to remaining inferior to them in civil life. And the few aristocratic
republics which here and there survived in Europe were compelled to
take infinite pains and all manner of wise measures in order to keep
quiet and contented the multitudes whom they governed.
[Footnote 1: See my preface to Sorel's _Reflections on Violence_
(Italian tr., Bari, 1909). pp. xxii-xxvii.]