THE SOCIAL LIFE AND STRUCTURE
§ 1. The Clergy, Regular and Secular
In a world so completely under priestly rule, the character of the
priest was in general the image of his influence. Whatever good
organized Christianity did was in virtue of the personal work of
good men in holy orders; and it is comforting to believe that in all
countries and in all ages there were some such, after the fashion of
the "parson" in Chaucer. To such men, the priestly status might give
a special power for righteousness. But seeing that in the average man
righteousness is in the ratio of reflection on knowledge, there is no
escape from the conclusion that in the Middle Ages most priests were
poor moral forces. For their general ignorance is beyond doubt. The
number who in a given district at a given time were unable to read
Latin may be a matter for dispute; but it is clear that what they
did read was as a rule merely distilled ignorance. And if we turn to
the records of ecclesiastical legislation, we find constant evidence,
for many centuries, of the laxity of priestly life in all grades.
To say nothing of the perpetual scandal about concubinage--an
artificial form of sin, in itself no more decisive against a priest's
character than celibacy in its favour--there is in the canons of the
councils a most significant repetition of vetoes on various lines of
conduct which stand for a lack of single-mindedness, and of serious
interest in moral tasks. Century after century, the bishops are
found forbidding the clergy to tell fortunes, to practise magic, to
get drunk, to commit perjury, to take usury, to swear, and to haunt
taverns, as well as to keep concubines. At the same time many of the
bishops themselves had to be perpetually admonished. Under Justinian we
hear of two eastern bishops convicted of unnatural vice, and--the law
as usual exceeding the crime--punished by mutilation. Throughout the
Middle Ages, as to-day, the normal complaints against bishops are on
the score of avarice, luxury, and worldliness; but drunkenness is not
unheard of; and whatever might be said in councils as to concubinage,
it was certain that bishops took at least as much liberty of life as
popes and presbyters. So far as moral example went, then, the social
influence of the priesthood was mostly on the wrong side, since its
normal concubinage was a perpetual lesson in hypocrisy.
On this side, doubtless, the priests were no worse than other men; the
trouble was that they set up to be better, and that the hierarchy was
always seeking to keep up the repute of clerical sanctity by a claim
to asceticism rather than by social beneficence. Thus they put it in
the power of the "average sensual man" to convict of moral imposture
a priesthood which, if free to marry, would have been much less
vulnerable; and by constantly stressing self-denial on a wrong line
they missed promoting self-control on right lines. The primary social
needs of the Middle Ages were peace, civism, and cleanliness; and for
none of these things did clerical teaching in general avail. On the
contrary, it was in effect hostile to all three, since it made virtue
consist in a right relation to the other world rather than to this,
made religion a special ground for warfare, and made uncleanliness
a meritorious form of "self-mortification," which in the Middle Ages
was about the last thing that could be truly said of it.
It is not to be forgotten, indeed, that among the monks or other
clerical scholars of the Dark Ages was to be found most of what
learning and philosophy survived. The reason was that men and youths
with the studious instinct, averse to the brawling life around
them, turned to the monasteries and monastic schools as their one
refuge. But sloth and impotence equally turned thither; and where
the stronger spirits could find a peaceful and useful life without,
the sluggards failed. Monasteries were thus always half filled with
men to whom their vows were irksome; and as women were at the same
time frequently sent to convents against their will, nothing but an
iron discipline could keep the professed order. Given an easy abbot
or abbess, they became centres of scandal; and in the average they
were homes of fairly well-fed idleness. But the full fatality of
the case is seen only when we realize that their very successes,
their provision of a dim retreat for many men and women of refined
and unworldly type, worsened society by leaving the reproduction of
the race to the grosser and harder natures.
The ostensible merit of monasteries, in the medieval period, was their
almsgiving. Without endorsing the mercantilist impeachment of all such
action, we are forced to recognize that theirs demoralized as many
as it relieved. Of a higher order than mere almsgiving, certainly,
was the earlier self-sacrificing service of the mendicant orders of
friars, whose rise is one of the great moral phenomena of the Middle
Ages. For a time, in the thirteenth century, the order of St. Francis
in particular not only organized but greatly stimulated human devotion
of the kind that, happily, is always quietly present somewhere; and
the contrast between the humble beneficence of the earlier friars
and the sleek self-seeking of the average secular priest at once
accredited the former and discredited the latter. But the history of
the mendicant friars as of the previous orders is a crowning proof of
the impossibility of bettering society on a mere religious impulse,
without social science.
Credit for holiness brought large gifts and legacies from
well-meaning but ill-judging laymen and women; and nothing could
prevent the enrichment of orders which had begun under special vows
of poverty. Francis had expressly ruled that his friars should not on
any pretext hold property, and should not even be able to profit by it
through trustees; but the latter provision was annulled, and ere long
the order was as well provided for as any. The better the financial
footing, the more self-seekers entered; and these overruled the more
single-minded. This was the law of development of every "self-denying"
order of the Dark and Middle Ages, from the Benedictine monks to the
Knights Templars. One of the most rigorously planned monasteries of
the Middle Ages, that of the lonely Chartreuse, founded by St. Bruno
late in the eleventh century, at length relaxed its austerities,
and came latterly to be known as a wholesale manufactory of a
liqueur--the distinction by which most men now know also the name
of the Benedictines. In the end, the orders of monks and friars did
something for scholarship and education, after the institution of "lay
brothers," who did the menial work, left the domini in certain orders,
especially the Benedictine, free to devote themselves to learning;
but socially they achieved nothing. When once they had acquired
"foundations" they became plunderers instead of helpers of the poor,
exacting from them gifts, selling them post-mortem privileges, taking
the widow's mite and the orphan's blanket for verbal blessings.
It is always to be remembered, here as before, that Christianity is
not the efficient cause of the failures or the evils which happen
under its auspices: we are not to suppose that had Osirianism or
Judaism or Manichæism or Mithraism chanced to be the religion of
Europe these failures and evils would have been averted. What we
are to realize is, on the other hand, that the conventional view as
to Christianity having been an abnormally efficient cause for good
is a delusion. It is not Christianity that has civilized Europe, but
Europe--the complex of political and culture forces--that has civilized
Christianity. Byzantium and Abyssinia show what the religious system
could amount to of itself. Western Europe surpassed these States
in virtue of conditions more propitious to energy and to freedom:
that was the difference. At the best, medieval Europe was a world of
chronic strife, daily injustice, normal cruelty, abundant misery, and
ever-present disease. To show that Christianity, that is, the holding
of the Christian creed by the men of that world, made these evils less
than they would have been in the same place under any other creed,
is impossible. On the other hand, it is clear that the influence of
Christian doctrine and tradition was on some sides conservative of
evil and obstructive of good.
Those tendencies may indeed be regarded as operating in the
intellectual life, which, though it is in reality only a side of the
sociological whole, we shall conveniently consider apart. Under that
head too we shall note the influence of the Church for culture on
the side of art. But on the side of ordinary life the influence of
the clergy as teachers had two specific tendencies which may here be
noted. One was the disparagement of women; the other the encouragement
of cruelty.
On the first head, as on so many others, the conventional view is
a fallacy. That Christianity raised the status of women is still a
general assumption; but exact research, even when made by an orthodox
theologian, proves the contrary. Down to the nineteenth century, the
solidest rights women possessed were those secured to them by ancient
Roman law; and the tendency of Christian legislation was certainly
to restrict rather than to expand such rights. At the same time the
so-called "Manichæan" element in gospel Christianity, the tendency
to regard the sexual instinct as something corrupt and unclean, gave
to the ordinary language of the Fathers concerning women a tone of
detraction and aversion. The one remedy for an overpoise of the sexual
element in life, and for over-emphasis of female function on that side,
is to secure the community of the sexes in the intellectual life; and
organized Christianity, instead of inculcating this, minimized the
intellectual life all round, thus making self-restraint a matter of
morbid asceticism as against the excess inevitably following on disuse
of mind. In particular, a priesthood nominally committed to celibacy,
yet always practising in the confessional a morbid inquisition into
sexual matters, was committed to treating women disparagingly as
forces of "temptation" when it was not yielding thereto. Nothing
could be more injurious to women's real credit. It is true that the
worship of the Virgin would in some measure counteract the discredit;
but this held equally true of the worship of many pagan Goddesses;
and there is nothing to show that the status of women was higher
in medieval Christendom than in ancient Egypt. Among the Teutons,
the moral status of women seems to have been greatly lowered by the
introduction of Christianity.
As regards cruelty, the evidence is only too abundant. Mosheim admits
that in the Crusades the Christians were more ferocious than the
Saracens; and it is historically certain that the revival of the
ancient practice of judicial torture was the work of the papacy,
seeking to extirpate heresy in the thirteenth century. From the
tribunals of the Inquisition it passed to the ordinary Church courts,
and thence, more slowly, to the courts of justice. In time it became
a daily usage. In the old burg of Nuremberg there is preserved a
collection (sometimes exhibited elsewhere) of the instruments of
torture in common use down to the age of the Reformation. It is an
arsenal of horror. Such engines of atrocity were the normal punitive
expedients of a world in which the image of the Saviour on the cross
was supposed to move men to compassion and contrition; and in which
that Saviour's death was held to redeem men from the penalties of
their sins. Here the practical teaching and example of the priesthood
was all for cruelty. They presided or assisted when the heretic was
racked or burned alive; and their whole conception of morals made
for such methods. Holding the madman as possessed by a devil, they
taught that he should be cruelly scourged; holding that the leper
was stricken by God for sin, they taught that he should be shunned
the more. Paganism was saner.
Nothing is more true in social psychology than the hard saying of
Feuerbach, that "only where reason rules, does universal love rule:
reason is itself nothing else than universal love. It was faith,
not love, not reason, that invented Hell." "Faith has within it a
malignant principle." Medieval Christendom is the demonstration. In
that age the spirit of reason was but occasionally glimpsed. It is seen
in the teaching of John Scotus, who, besides his concrete heresy on the
eucharist, held the all-embracing heresy that authority is derivable
solely from reason, and from his pantheism deduced the conviction that
the doctrine of hell is but an allegory, the actuality of which would
be the negation of divine goodness. But such teaching belonged rather
to pagan philosophy than to Christian faith, and was anathematized
accordingly. It never reached even the scholarly class in general;
and specifically Christian teaching which aimed at softening the
heart was spread abroad to little purpose.
§ 2. The Higher Theology and its Effects
There is something saddening, though not really strange, in the failure
even of the most attractive elements in medieval Christianity to better
the world. To read of the life and teaching of St. Francis of Assisi
is to come as it were in the presence of a really elemental force of
goodness. His namesake of Sales was a persecutor; but the founder of
the Franciscan order seems free of that taint. In him the ecstasy
of pietism seems purified of that correlative of fanatic malignity
which so constantly dogs it in the literature of ancient Christianity,
from the epistles of Paul to the treatises of Augustine. We hear of
his love for all animals, of his seldom-failing goodwill to men, and
his sweet contentment in humble contemplation. Yet when we study him
in relation to his age there fronts us the startling fact that while
his active career is almost exactly synchronous with the horrible
Albigensian crusades, there is no trace in the records that he was
even saddened by them. They ought to have darkened for him the light
of the sun; but not once does he seem to have given even a deprecating
testimony against them. In him, the flower of medieval Christianity,
loyalty to the faith seems to have annulled some of the most vital
modes of moral consciousness.
So again with the influence of such a religious classic as the
Imitatio Christi, attributed to Thomas à Kempis, but probably the work
of several hands, in different countries and centuries. Many men and
women must have supposed themselves to live by it; and its influence
seems wholly for peace and self-surrender. Yet it would be hard to show
that it ever restrained any corporate tendency of a contrary kind,
or ruled the corporate life of a single religious sect. The truth is
that its message was for a life of isolation, as that of the ideal monk
in his cell. Seclusion and not social life, mystic contemplation and
not wise activity, duty to God and not duty to man, are its ideals. It
was in a manner the Christian counterpart of the Meditations of Marcus
Aurelius or the Enchiridion of Epictetus--a manual of the higher or
inner life, making Christianity do for medieval men what Stoicism
could do for pagans in the decadent Roman empire. But Stoicism, by
Christian consent, made for good government; and there is no trace
of any such result from the Imitatio. The model Christian monarch,
St. Louis of France, lived in an earlier age; and even he was a
fanatic where heresy was concerned, and a promoter of religious wars.
The same fatality appears, again, when we turn to the mystical
theology of the German fourteenth-century school of Tauler and
Eckhart, in which both Luther and some of our own day have seen a high
inspiration. Here, perhaps, we come on the secret of the failure we
are considering. Eckhart was a scholar, who had studied and taught at
Paris, and ranked as "provincial" of the Dominican order for Saxony;
and Tauler was his pupil before settling at Basle. Both men undoubtedly
influenced the Brethren of the Free Spirit and others of the so-called
Beghards and Beguins, before mentioned, in particular the sect who
called themselves the "Friends of God"; and they may so be said to
have affected society practically, since these movements aimed at a
species of communism. But the essence of their theology was alien
to that or any organized movement, and if lived up to would have
dissolved it without the interference of the priests and others who
under authority drove women of the Beguine movement from their homes
and seized their poor goods. "If thou wouldst have the Creator," says
Tauler, "thou must forego the creature. The less of the creature,
the more of God. Therefore abjure all creatures, with all their
consolations." Not thus were men in general to be taught to live
more brotherlike. The rude world of the Middle Ages went on its way,
unaffected in the main either by mysticism or by the movements which
set up self-centred societies within society. It needed a more human
spirit to affect humanity in mass.
Such a human spirit, indeed, may be held to have shown itself in
the movement set up in Florence by Girolamo Savonarola near the end
of the fifteenth century. Savonarola was moved by a high concern
for individual conduct; and his gospel was substantially that of an
Ebionite Christian, wroth with all luxury as well as with all levity
of life. Thus he wielded a great influence, setting up in the splendid
Florence of the later Renaissance a forecast of the iron-bound Geneva
of Calvin. It is no final impeachment of him to say that, having gone
so far, he failed and fell; but it is clear that he could not have
been a durable civilizing force. His influence was that of a fanatic,
operating by contagion of excitement and superstitious fear, not that
of an enlightener or a statesmanlike guide. To him amenity and luxury,
art and vice, selfishness and skepticism, were alike anathema; and
he set up in Florence a kind of pietistic reign of terror, driving
impressionable believers to give up their pictures to the fire for
peace' sake, and even letting others be forced to it by fear. On the
great political need of the Italian cities, a fraternal federation,
he had no light whatever; and we find him encouraging his fellow
citizens in their fatal passion for dominating Pisa instead of making
of her an ally and a friend. Lacking light, he finally lacked force;
and when he fell, he fell utterly, leaving no enduring ideal or
discipline to his countrymen.
Thus on every side and at every point in the history of the ages of
faith the ostensibly best religious influences are found failing
to heal society, failing to check the forces of oppression and
dissolution and strife. If we would trace the forces which really
affected social structure and raised masses of men some way in the
scale of manhood, we must turn to the clash of interests and classes,
the play of secular knowledge, the undertakings of laymen on normal
lines of aspiration and on secular views of right.
§ 3. Christianity and Feudalism
We have seen, in studying the expansion of the Church, how it grew
by lending itself to the interests of kings and chiefs as against
subjects. On the same grounds, it made for empires as against
self-governing States. But inasmuch as the papacy ere long fell
out with the emperors of the new line it had itself consecrated, it
also contributed to the break-up of feudalism, in the widest sense
of the term; and it is possible to claim for the Church, further,
a restraining influence on the oppressive action of feudalism, early
and late, in various directions. Under this head would fall to be
judged, in particular, its action on slavery.
As the institution of slavery was taken over by the Christian emperors
from the pagan without any hint of disapproval, it is clear, to
begin with, that the Church had in its days of struggle made no sign
of such condemnation. Nor was there anything in its sacred books to
suggest a repudiation of slavery; on the contrary, Jesus is made to
accept it as a matter of course (Luke xvii, 7-10; Gr.); and Paul,
in a passage which has been garbled in the English translation,
expressly urges that a Christian slave should remain so even if he
have a chance to become free (1 Cor. vii, 20, 21). He and some of the
Fathers certainly urge that slaves should be kindly treated; but many
pagans had done as much, and Seneca on that theme had outgone them
all. Laws for the protection of slaves, too, had been enacted by many
emperors long before Constantine. The only ground, then, on which
Christianity could be credited with setting up by religious appeal
an aversion to slavery would be a visible increase in manumissions
after the time of Constantine. No such increase, however, took place.
A misconception on the subject has arisen by way of a hasty inference
from the fact that in the Christian period all manumissions were
religious acts, performed through the Church. This was no result of
any Christian doctrine, being in fact a deliberate imitation of pagan
practice. Before Constantine, as we have seen, the act of manumission
was a religious one, performed as such in the pagan temples; and when
Constantine adroitly transferred the function from those temples to
the churches, he probably put a check on the process of liberation,
since pagans would long be reluctant to go to the churches for any
purpose. For centuries manumission had been a common act, the number
of freedmen in Rome being notoriously great at all times, from the
day of Cicero onwards. It was almost a matter of course for a Roman
master to free a multitude of his slaves on his deathbed or by his
will, till Augustus enacted that no one should emancipate more than
a hundred at once. A diligent slave, in fact, could usually count on
getting his freedom by five or six years of service; and many were
allowed to buy it out of their savings, or out of earnings they were
permitted to make.
So far were the earlier Christian emperors, with one exception,
from seeking to raise the status of slaves, that they re-enacted the
rule excluding them from the purview of the law against adultery,
"because of the vileness of their condition." The exception was the
law of Constantine forbidding the separation of slaves from their
families--a humane veto disregarded by Christian slave-owners in
modern times. But Constantine, on the other hand, enacted that if a
freewoman should cohabit with a slave, she should be executed, and
he burned alive; and the laws against fugitive slaves were made more
cruel. Gratian even enacted that any slave who dared to accuse his
master of any crime, unless it were high treason, should be burned
alive, without any inquiry into the charge. For the rest, the Fathers
justified slavery on the score of the curse passed on Ham; and the
theses of the Stoics as to the natural equality of men had from them
no countenance.
Only in the reign of Justinian did the law begin expressly to
encourage manumission, to recognize freedmen as full citizens, and
to raise the slave status; and several circumstances are to be noted
as giving a lead to such a course. Justinian had pursued a policy of
great outlays where his immediate predecessors had been frugal, and
to sustain it he had to impose much fresh taxation on the land. For
fiscal purposes, it had long been recognized, the government did
well to limit the power of proprietors to dispose of their slaves;
and it is probable that the humane law of Constantine really had this
end in view. By raising slaves to the status of half-free peasants,
the State increased the number of its taxpayers. "The labourer of
the soil then became an object of great interest to the treasury,
and obtained almost as important a position in the eyes of the fisc
as the landed proprietor himself." In the process the small freeman
was put in a worse position than before; but the slave was at the
same time bettered--the hereditary slave, that is, for captives were
enslaved or bought throughout the history of the Byzantine empire.
The legal change was thus made from economic motives; but one moral
gain did indirectly accrue from the existence of the Church as
such. Under Justinian the empire was re-expanded after having been
for a time curtailed; and this would under paganism have meant a
large addition to the number of slaves. The recovered lands, however,
were peopled by Christians; and all bishops were bound in their own
interest to resist the enslavement and deportation of their flocks;
so that Christianity at this point was favourable to freedom exactly as
was Islam, which forbade Moslems to enslave Moslems. And the indirect
benefit did not end there. The Church, like the fisc, had a good deal
to gain pecuniarily from the freeing of slaves; and, especially in
the West, though it supported slave-laws, it encouraged masters to
manumit for the sake of their souls' welfare in the next world. That
the motive here again was political and not doctrinal is clear from
the two facts--(1) that even when making serfs priests for its own
service the Church often did not legally free them, thus keeping them
more fully subject to discipline; and (2) that while urging laymen to
free the slaves or serfs on their lands Churchmen were the last to free
those on their own, on the score that no individuals in orders had the
right to alienate the property of the order as such. Other economic
causes, of course, effectually concurred to further the freeing of
slaves and serfs, else the institution would not have decayed as
it did in the Middle Ages. It is noteworthy, too, that while the
Jews were the great slave dealers for Europe in the Dark Ages, thus
dangerously deepening their own unpopularity and moving the Church to
thwart the traffic on Christian grounds, Christians everywhere were
long eager to buy and sell barbarians such as the Slavs (from whose
name came the very term "slave" in the modern languages); while the
Christian Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Normans for centuries maintained a
trade in kidnapped Anglo-Saxon or British children and young women,
selling them to Ireland after they were no longer saleable on the
continent. A similar traffic went on among the Bohemians, before the
eyes of St. Adalbert. What the Church did, broadly speaking, was to
restrain the enslavement of Christians by their fellows; and to raise
funds to redeem Christian captives from the Saracens. To a certain
extent the motive was religious: otherwise it was self-regarding.
In similarly indirect ways, organized Christianity tended at times
to restrain feudal tyranny. The bishop and the abbot were territorial
magnates, who to some extent counterpoised the baron; and though the
bishops were too often only barons with a difference, they were often
a barrier to lay ambition and violence. Even as the king's rule might
protect the common people as against their local lords--though the
feudal system did not originally suppose this--so the Church might
be a local benefactor in virtue of its local interests. Here again,
however, the influence was not doctrinal; and Churchmen in general
endorsed the feudal law in letter and in spirit, always availing
themselves of its machinery to extort their own dues.
On the other hand, insofar as the papacy in the twelfth century began
to throw its weight on the side of the popular party in Italy as
against the aristocratic and imperial party, thus constituting the
Guelph faction as against the Ghibeline, it indirectly furthered
the cause of self-government; and even in its official doctrine
there thus came to be inserted provisions in favour of the claim of
subjects to choose their rulers. The teaching of Thomas Aquinas to
this effect must have counted for something in the later evolution
of political doctrine. Nothing however is more remarkable than the
ease with which dutiful kings, as those of later Spain and France,
secured the assent of the Church, as the early barbarian kings had
done, to the suppression of all popular liberties. The economic or
administrative interest of the Church was always the determinant
of its action. It supplied no fixed principle conducive to peace;
on the contrary, it was always a force the more for war in Europe.
§ 4. Influence of the Crusades
That some social gains may be correlative with great historic evils
is perhaps best seen in the case of the Crusades organized by the
Church against the Saracens in Palestine. These campaigns were first
conceived in the interests of the papal power; and as early as 999 Pope
Sylvester II (Gerbert), who had been anti-papal before his elevation,
sent a letter through Europe appealing for united action on behalf
of the Church of Jerusalem. There was no response. In 1074 Gregory
VII strove hard to the same end, seeing in a conquest of the Turks a
means to extend his power over the Eastern Church. Not, however, till
Europe was full of tales of the cruelties wrought by the new Eastern
power, the Turks, against Christian pilgrims--a marked change from
the comparative tolerance of the Caliphs--was it possible to begin a
vast crusading movement among all classes, aiming at the recovery of
the empty sepulchre from which the Christ had risen. To this movement
Pope Urban II zealously lent himself, backing up the wild appeal of
Peter the Hermit (1094) with the fatal bribe of indulgences.
The first effect (1096) was to collect several immense and almost
formless mobs of men and women who by all accounts were in the main
the refuse of Europe. "That the vast majority looked upon their vow
as a licence for the commission of any sin there can be no moral
doubt." The devout exaltation of the few was submerged by the riot
of the many, who began using their indulgences when they began their
march, and rolled like a flood across Europe, massacring, torturing,
and plundering Jews wherever they found them, and forcibly helping
themselves to food where plunder was easy. Multitudes perished by
the way; multitudes more were sold as slaves in Byzantium to pay for
the feeding of the rest there; and of the seven thousand who reached
Asiatic soil with Peter the Hermit, four thousand were slain by the
Turks at Nicæa; some 300,000 thus perishing in all. Inasmuch as Europe
was thus rid of a mass of its worst inhabitants, the first crusade
might be said so far to have wrought indirect good; but the claim is
hardly one to be pushed on religious grounds.
The more organized military forces who soon followed under Godfrey
of Bouillon and other leaders, though morally not better witnesses
to Christianity, achieved at length (1099) the capture of Jerusalem,
and founded the Latin kingdom of Palestine, which subsisted in force
for less than a hundred years, and in a nominal form for a century
longer. As a display of Christian against "pagan" life and conduct,
the process of conquest was worse than anything seen in the East in
the Christian era. No armies were ever more licentious than those of
"the cross"; and those of Attila were hardly more ferocious. Their
own lives were lost in myriads, by the sword, by disease, and by
debauchery; they were divided by mutual hatred from first to last;
and the one force to unify them was the hatred against the infidel
which wreaked itself in the massacre of men, women, and children after
the capture of a city. Besieging Antioch, they shot heads of hundreds
of slain Turks into the city from their engines, and dug up hundreds
of corpses to put the heads on pikes. It is even recorded that when
their savage improvidence left them starving at the siege of Marra
they fed on the corpses they dug up; and when the place was stormed
Bohemond gave up to the general massacre even those inhabitants who
had paid him large sums for their lives, sparing only the young, whom
he sent to the slave-markets of Antioch. When Godfrey took Jerusalem,
the Jews there were all burned alive in their synagogues; and the
chronicles tell that the crusaders rode their horses to the temple
knee-deep in the blood of many thousands of slain misbelievers. On
the second day, in cold blood, there was wrought a fresh massacre
by way of solemn sacrifice; and in the name of Jesus were slain a
great multitude of every age--mothers with the infants in their arms,
little children, youths and maidens, and men and women bowed with
age. Thus was retrieved the mythic Saviour's sepulchre.
Eight times, during two hundred years, was the effort repeated, as
the fortunes of the Christian principalities in the East were shaken
or overthrown by Moslem assailants, and as the papacy saw its chance
or need to weaken the emperor, or otherwise avert danger to itself,
by renewing the call to arms. No religious teacher seems ever to have
doubted the fitness of the undertaking. St. Bernard preached the
second Crusade as zealously as Peter did the first; eloquent monks
were found, as they were needed, to rouse enthusiasm for each of
the rest in turn; and King Louis IX of France, the model monarch of
Christendom, saw in his vain expedition to recover Jerusalem (1248)
the highest service he could do to God or man. As each successive
crusade failed in the act or was followed by decadence and defeat,
the Church professed to see in the disaster a penalty for Christian
sin; and under Innocent III the very cardinals of Rome vowed to mend
their ways, by way of reviving the warlike zeal of the laity. Among
other fruits of the crusading movement had been a vast increase in
the papal revenues; and whereas the imposts specially laid on for
crusading purposes were said by many to have been appropriated by the
papal court, the pope undertook to put the administration of all such
revenue under non-clerical trustees. But between the hardness of the
military task and the endless strifes and degeneracies of the leaders
on the one hand, and the growing distrust of the Church on the other,
the crusading spirit died out in the thirteenth century.
To all who could sanely judge, it had become clear that the crusades
were at once a vast drain on the blood and treasure of Europe and
a vast force of demoralization. In the course of the fifth, the
government of Venice succeeded in using the crusaders, in despite of
the protests of Innocent III, to wrest the city of Zara from the king
of Hungary, himself a zealous crusader. Then the expedition, with the
pope's approval, proceeded to interfere in Byzantine strifes, making
and unmaking emperors, until they had created chaos, whereupon they
sacked Constantinople (1204) with every circumstance of vileness and
violence. The pope, who had hoped to reconcile the Byzantines to papal
rule, burst out in bitter indignation at the deeds of the men to whom
he had given his indulgences; but morality was at an end all round, as
might have been foretold; and the pope accepted the conquest for what
it was to bring him in new power. Christendom thenceforth crusaded
with its tongue in its cheek. From the first the papacy had taught
that no faith need be kept with unbelievers; and so was given a very
superfluous apprenticeship to bad faith between Christians. When
in 1212 there broke out the hapless Children's Crusades, out of
the 30,000 who followed the boy Stephen some way through France,
5,000 were shipped at Marseilles by merchants who, professing to
carry them "for the cause of God, and without charge," sold them as
slaves at Algiers and Alexandria. The last recruits furnished by pope
Nicholas IV to the Grand Master of the Templars were drawn from the
jails of Italy: the papacy itself had ceased to put any heart in the
struggle. It is a reasonable calculation that in the two centuries
from the first crusade to the fall of Acre (1291) there had perished,
in the attempts to recover and hold the Holy Land, nine millions of
human beings, at least half of them Christians. Misery and chronic
pestilence had slain most; but the mere carnage had been stupendous.
Much has been written as to the gains to civilization from the
"intercourse" thus set up between West and East. Gains there were;
and if we remember that thus to have gained was the measure of the
incapacity of Christendom for peaceful traffic with the world of
Islam, we can learn from the process something of real sociological
causation. Men who, from ferocity and fanaticism, could not make quiet
acquaintance with their neighbours, were hurled against them in furious
hordes, generation after generation, and in the intervals of fighting
came to know something of their arts and their thought, exchanging
handicrafts and products. The crowning irony of the evolution lay
in the entrance of unbelief into the Christian world through the
very contact with the "infidel" who was to have been crushed. This
perhaps was the discovery that disillusioned the papacy. And but
for the spirit of faith and hate--the true correlatives in Christian
history--every gain from the Crusades might have been made ten times
over in commerce. To make such gains at the price of nine million
lives and unutterable evil is the contribution of the Crusades to
civilization.
It is true that from the East the later crusaders learned what chivalry
they evolved; that Saladin became a kind of model hero for Christian
knights; and that he could hold knightly friendship with Richard of
England. But Richard nevertheless could massacre two thousand hostages
in cold blood for an unpaid debt; and his crusading left him as it
found him, a faithless ruffian, whom to honour is to be cheated by
a romance. Nor did passages of chivalry ever root out of crusaders'
hearts the creed that no faith need be kept with a misbeliever.
It is true again that the Crusades involved much social metabolism
in Europe. The papal indulgence freed serfs from their masters, and
debtors from their usurers, while the crusade lasted; the crusading
barons freed many more serfs for a price down, and sold broad
lands to middle-class buyers in order to furnish themselves for the
campaign. And the mere stir of the exodus and the return, repeated for
so many generations, was a vivifying shock to the torpor of medieval
Europe, where war was for many the one relief to a vast tedium. But
the torpor must go to the credit of the creed if the shock does, since
the faith had vetoed the intercourse of peace; and to the same account
must be put the throwing back upon itself of the Saracen civilization,
of which Christian enmity directly or indirectly wrought the arrest
and ruin, first in the East, later in Spain. Such wreckages surely
block the path of the wrecker. If, finally, we seek to measure the
reactions of crusading savagery on the life of those who wrought and
those who applauded it--a reaction seldom reckoned in the discussion
of the "results"--we shall be well prepared for the discovery that
in the fourteenth century the general lot of men in Europe showed
no betterment; that the tillers of the soil had still to sweat blood
under feudal masters, save where the enormous loss of life through the
pestilence known as the Black Death had for a time raised the price of
labour; and that the institution which above all embodied for Europe
the memory of the Crusades, the Order of the Knights Templars, was
at length crushed in its home by as base a conspiracy and as cruel a
slaughter as ever marked the struggle of Christian with Mohammedan. It
was pretended by Philip the Fair of France, who began the plot, that
the Order was anti-Christian, and devoted to blasphemous rites; but
there is no proof of the occurrence of anything more than irregular
acts of irreverence, answering to the artistic ribaldries of the
mason-companies who built the cathedrals. That phenomenon is in itself
noteworthy, as showing how the Crusades had tended to shake faith;
but the Templars as a whole were no more unbelievers than the kings
who coveted their wealth. It was for that wealth, which was indeed
incongruously great, that they were conspired against by their fellow
Christians, who in two hundred years of a precarious union of enmity
against men of another faith had not learned goodwill towards those
of their own. The drama ended as it began, in hatred and crime.