INFLUENCE OF THE CHURCH
Twenty lords of Gruyere made up the line which maintained a singularly
kindly and paternal rule over the differing people of their pastoral
kingdom; all of one race, and all but the three last in the direct
descent from father to son. Six centuries they ruled, distinguished
first for their inexhaustible love of life, their knightly valor and
their fidelity to the Catholic faith. The first Count Turimbert, with
his wife Avana, lived in the first castle belonging to the domain at
Castrum in Ogo or Chateau d'Oex. His was the time of good Queen Berthe,
who, for defence against the Saracen invasion, built a long series of
towers on height after height from Neuchatel to the borders of Lake
Leman, many of which, situated in the county of Gruyere, became the
property of its ruling family. That Turimbert was of importance among
the secular landholders of the tenth century is attested by his
participation in the Plaid of St. Gervais, a tribunal famous as being
one of the earliest on record, and held by the Seigneur de la Justice of
Geneva. His exchange of lands with Bishop Boson of Lausanne is also
recorded in the first of a series of yellow parchments, which in
monastic Latin narrate the succeeding incidents of the Gruyere
sovereignty and tell the story of the long predominance of the church in
Switzerland. Seven centuries before Turimbert, in the period of the
Roman domination, a cloister had been founded at St. Maurice D'Agaune,
near the great Rhone gateway of the Alps, in memory of the Theban legion
who had preferred death to the abjuration of their Christian faith.
Here, three centuries later, the converted Burgundian king, Sigismund,
took refuge after the murder of his son, enlarging it into a vast
monastery where five hundred monks, singing in relays from dawn to dawn
in never ceasing psalmodies, implored heaven for pardon of his crime. In
the seventh century came the missionary monks from Ireland, St. Columban
and his successor, St. Gall, who built his hermitage on the site of the
great mediaeval centre of arts and learning which still bears his name.
At the same time, St. Donat, son of the governor of lower Burgundy, and
disciple of Columban, mounted the archiepiscopal throne at Besancon. In
his honor the earliest church of the county of Gruyere was erected near
the castle of Count Turimbert in the Pays-d'en-Haut. Under the influence
of these powerful religious institutions, the country was cultivated and
the people instructed, but under Rodolph III the second Burgundian
kingdom rapidly approached its dissolution. Weakly subservient to the
church, and dispossessing himself of his revenues to such an extent that
he was forced to beg a small pittance for his daily necessities from his
churchly despoilers, it was said of him that "_Onc ne fut roi comme ce
roi_." Ceding the whole of the province of Vaud, including part of the
possessions of Count Turimbert, to the bishop of Lausanne, the already
practically dispossessed monarch named the Emperor Henry II of Germany,
as heir to his throne. And although Henry the II was unable to enter
into this inheritance during the lifetime of Rodolph, the latter's
nephew, the Emperor Conrad the Salique, assumed control of the kingdom
which then was incorporated into the German Empire. Not without
devastating wars and desperate opposition on the part of the heirs of
the Rodolphian line was the country preserved to the German sovereign,
and under his distant rule it became a prey to continuous dissensions
between the bishops and the feudal lords.
"Oh, King," appealed the prelates, "rise and hasten to our
succour--Burgundia calls thee. These countries lately added to thy
dominions are troubled by the absence of their lord. Thy people cry to
thee, as the source of peace, desiring to refresh their sad eyes with
the sight of their King."
The answer to this appeal was the establishment of the Rectorate of
Burgundy under the Count Rudolph of Rheinfelden and his successors, the
Dukes of Zearingen, who founded in the borders of ancient Gruyere the
two cities of Berne and Fribourg. Between these centres of the rising
power of the bourgeoisie arose mutual dissensions and quarrels with the
already hostile lords and bishops, and the country was more than ever
the scene of wars innumerable.
Still holding the supreme power, the Church alone could bring the peace
for which the country longed. At Romont, near the borders of Gruyere,
Hughes, Bishop of Lausanne, invoking a great assembly of prelates,
proclaimed the _Treve de Dieu_ before a throng of people carrying palm
branches and crying "_Pax, Pax Domini_." Thus in this corner of the
world was adopted the law originating in Acquitaine, which prevailed
over all Europe and which alone controlled in those strange times the
violence and the pillage which was the permitted privilege of the robber
bishops and the robber lords. Gruyere and its rulers reflected the
influence of the all-powerful hierarchy, and Turimbert and his
successors took their part in the great religious society extending
over all Europe, where the conservation of faith was of supreme
importance, and when men belonged more to the church than to their
country.
The possession of the great monasteries surpassed those of the largest
landholders, and Rome with its mighty prelates for the second time
became the capital of the world. When Hildebrand the monk, mounting the
papal throne as Gregory VII, excommunicated the German Emperor, Henry
IV, he placed the imperial crown upon the head of none other than
Rudolph of Rheinfelden, the governor of Transjurane Burgundy and of the
province of Gruyere. After Henry, forced to submission, had scaled the
icy heights of the Alps to prostrate himself before Hildebrand at
Canossa, after Rudolph had been killed in battle by Henry's supporter
Godfrey de Bouillon, Hildebrand's pupil and successor Urban II,
journeying to Clermont in Cisjurane Burgundy, summoned all Europe in
torrents of fiery eloquence to rise and deliver the Holy Land from the
power of the Saracens. Unmarked in the churchly parchments which alone
record the history of these times, were the successors of Turimbert; but
in the period of the first Crusade, Guillaume I, of the succeeding and
unbroken line of Gruyere counts, appears as the head of a numerous and
powerful family preeminent for their loyalty to the church. Among the
shining names of chivalry immortalized in the annals of the Holy wars
are those of Guillaume, of his son Ulric, chanoine of the Church at
Lausanne, and of his nephews Hughes and Turin.
Not with Peter the Hermit, the hallucinated dwarf whose sobbing
eloquence had led an innumerable motley host of unnamed peasants to
certain disaster in the deserts of the East, went the hundred Gruyerian
soldiers led by Guillaume, but with the knights and priests of Romand
Switzerland, the Burgundian French and Lombard nobles who swelled the
fabled hosts of Godfrey de Bouillon. With gifts of lands to churches and
to priories and with the blessing of the lord bishop of their county the
Gruyere pilgrims, eager to battle for the holy cause, obeyed with ardor
the cry of _Dieu le veut, Diex le volt_, and leaving their country,
faced without faltering, dangers and distant lands and carried their
scarlet banner with its silver crane, bravely among the bravest.
"The young bergeres of Gruyere," so runs the chronicle, "barred the
gates of the city to prevent their departure, by force the gates were
burst, and the poor maidens wept as they listened to the
standard-bearers cry, a hundred times repeated, "_En Avant la Grue,
S'agit d'aller, reviendra qui pourra._" How wide is the ocean we must
cross," they asked as they galloped down the valleys, "as wide as the
lake we must pass when we go to pray to our Lady of Lausanne?"
Tasso, the poet of the Crusades, so well appreciated the valor of the
Swiss soldiers that he chose their leader for the honor of first scaling
the walls of Jerusalem.
"Over the moat, on a sudden filled to the brim
With a thousand thrown faggots, and with rolled trees stout and slim,
Before all he ventured.
On helmet and buckler poured floods of sulphurous fire.
Yet scatheless he passed through the furnace of flame,
And with powerful hand throwing the ladder high over the wall, mounted
with pride."
Again when the Christians were in want of wood for the catapults and
rolling towers with which to scale and batter down resisting walls,
Tasso leads this same undaunted servant of de Bouillon into the forest
enchanted by the Satanic ally of the Musselmans.
"Like all soldiers I must challenge fate--
Surprises, fears and phantoms know I not.
Floods and roaring monsters, the terrors
Of the common herd affright not me!
The last realm of hell I would invade,
Descending fearless, sword in hand."
Such, according to Tasso, was the spirit of the Swiss Crusaders. Did the
banner of Gruyere float with those of Tancred, of Robert of Normandy and
of all the flower of the French noblesse over the walls of Jerusalem
delivered? No record tells of it. Many of the hundred "beaux Grueriens"
doubtless perished on the holy soil. A fraction only of the host which
in multitudes like the stars and desert sands invaded the east,
assembled for the assault upon the Holy City. Famine, thirst and
pestilence decimated the great armies upon which fell the united cohorts
of the oriental powers. Blasphemy and prostitution, the refuge of
despair, alternated in the camp of the Crusaders with fanatic visions of
visiting archangels, of armed and shining knights descending the slopes
of heaven in their defence. From such a phantasmagoria, surpassing in
the historical records all the poetic imaginations of its famous
chroniclers, only a few returned to tell the tale. Among these fortunate
pilgrims was Guillaume of Gruyere, who, once more safe among his home
mountains, ended his life with lavish gifts to the holy church of which
he was so preeminent a servant. The priory of Rougemont founded by him
upon his return, the church of St. Nicholas in the same region, near the
borders of the Griesbach, still exist in testimony of his devotion and
preserve the memory of his name and reign. Exemplifying by his deeds the
dominating religious exaltation of his time he was allied by marriage
with a family equally illustrious for its loyalty to the church. His
wife, Agathe de Glane, was sister to Pierre and Philippe de Glane,
protectors and tutors of the young count of Upper Burgundy, who through
his mother's marriage to the duke of Zearingen shared with the latter
the rule of the united provinces under the sovereignty of the German
Empire. Son of a father done traitorously to death by his own vassals,
the young count of Burgundy was himself as basely murdered while at
prayer in the church of Payerne by these same vassals, and with him the
brothers-in-law of Guillaume de Gruyere, Pierre and Philippe de Glane.
Guillaume de Glane, son and nephew of the murdered protectors of their
young suzerain, profoundly moved by the tragedy which had befallen his
house, determined to renounce the world and commanding that not one
stone should remain of his great castle of Glane dedicated these same
stones to the enlargement of the monastery of Hauterive, where, taking
the garb of a monk, he finished the remainder of his days. Such was the
origin of the power of the great Cistercian monastery which still stands
at the junction of the rivers Glane and Sarine in the county of
Fribourg. Not content with this unequalled act of piety and
renunciation, the insatiable Bishop of Lausanne exacted the cession of
every chateau and every rood of land belonging to the family of de
Glane, part of which--through the marriage of Agnes to Count Rodolphe
I, and of Juliane to Guillaume of the cadet branch of Gruyere--had
extended the domain of the latter house. Undeterred by the greed of the
bishop, Rodolphe piously preserved the traditions of his predecessors
Raimond and Guillaume II, who had founded the monasteries of Humilimont
and Hautcret, by continued gifts to the latter as well as to Hauterive.
Yet the robber bishop implacably demanded another act of renunciation
from Count Rodolphe, one of serious significance to the future of his
house, by which he authorized the transference of the market of the
county from Gruyere to the neighboring city of Bulle which belonged to
the bishop. The city of Bulle thereafter became the centre of exchange
of the county, while Gruyere, although now the _chef-lieu_ of the
reigning counts, was permanently deprived of all possibility of progress
or enlargement. Thus the city of Bulle, busy and flourishing even to
this day, has kept its place in the growing commercial importance of the
county, while Gruyere is still the little feudal city of the middle
ages, precious historically as it is picturesque, but crystalized in a
permanent immobility. Forty marks, scarcely more than the worth of the
mess of pottage for which Esau sold his heritage, was the price accepted
by Count Rodolphe for the commercial existence of Gruyere.
[Illustration: GATEWAY]
Rodolphe's far more virile successors, Pierre I and Rodolphe II and
III, attempted with the support of the people to defy the power of the
bishop, and in disregard of the act of their predecessor, to keep up the
marche at Gruyere. But the power which could excommunicate an emperor
did not hesitate to launch the same formidable curse upon the princes of
Gruyere and they were forced to yield. The foundation of the church of
St. Theodule at Gruyere and of the rich and venerated convent of the
Part Dieu by his daughter-in-law, Guillemette de Grandson (widow of his
eldest son Pierre) attested the unabated devotion of the Gruyere house
to the Catholic religion.