THE CRUSADES
We have seen that the kings of the date to which this greatest story
now has come, do not seem to have realised that if they partitioned
up their possessions among several sons the result was likely to be
that there would be disunion and righting. Charlemagne had three
sons, and would, it appears, have divided his Empire by his will
among them, but two of those sons died, so that the whole Empire came
into the hands of the survivor.
This survivor, however, had, in his turn, three sons, and at his
death the Empire was divided amongst the three. In this division we
see the beginnings of the present arrangement of the greater part of
Europe, for one son took a territory of which the boundaries were
nearly the same as those of modern France, another had what
corresponds more or less to Germany of to-day, and the third to
something very like modern Italy. The Italian brother, the eldest,
had the title of Emperor.
And now--to state shortly what was the rather natural outcome of that
division--the kings, or those who claimed the kingship, of those
territories fought over their possessions for at least a century and
a half, 150 years.
Of course that meant that the people of the country were in constant
misery and fear of their lives and uncertainty about any property
they might have. {127} Bands of soldiers, followers of their feudal
lords, went about the country, and were very rough and brutal, taking
all they could find and paying nothing. The authority of the king
could not deal with these disturbers of the peace. The big
landowners grew more and more independent of the king. He might be
their feudal lord, in name, but for all this century and a half the
King of France had no more power than several of the great lords
themselves. More and more then it became necessary for the poorer
class, if they would live safely, to live under the protection of one
or other of the big men. This led to the clustering of the houses of
the poor people round about the castle, the strong place, of their
lord. He organised them as a fighting force, when fighting had to be
done, and stood for them in place of the king. They were his
faithful subjects, getting his protection as their return for working
and fighting for him. Some of these lords grew so powerful and so
dangerous to the king that he was glad to grant them their
independence and full possession of their lands in return for their
assurance that they would not take arms against him and attack his
territory.
[Sidenote: Normandy]
Now all the while that the Danes and Northmen were harrying the
shores of England they paid their attentions no less to the coasts of
France, going up the Seine to Rouen, especially, and establishing
winter quarters there very much as the Danes did in England. The
emperor and the kings of France strove against them, but if they were
defeated they only came back again in numbers larger than before.
The end of it was that in the beginning of the tenth century the king
deemed it his best policy to give up to the Northmen or Normans all
that Normandy which they held despite all he could do against them.
He made it condition that they should become Christians. And thus it
was that they were firmly established as a {128} Duchy under a Duke
(dux, or leader) at the date of their conquest of England in 1066.
Descendants of Charlemagne continued to sit on the throne of France
until near the end of the tenth century, when one Hugh Capet, a great
noble, was elected by his fellow-nobles as king. Note that; that it
was by an election of the feudal lords, not because he had a
hereditary right--that is, a right by birth--to the throne, that he
became king. And how long that dynasty of the Capetian kings, as
they are called, lasted in France you may realise from the fact,
which you most likely will remember, that the king who was
guillotined during the French revolution was called "Louis Capet" by
those revolutionists who proclaimed that all men were equal and that
titles of all kinds were to be done away.
This first elected Capet king, however, had no more power over those
who had elected him than the kings who had descended from
Charlemagne. But the Capetians kept the kingdom in their family, as
we have seen, all down the ages. Still, it was not until nearly two
hundred years later than the election of Hugh Capet that any of his
descendants began to have really great power. About that date, that
is to say towards the end of the twelfth century, or a little before
1200, the king succeeded in making his power over the nobles very
much more effective, and therewith the last days of the feudal system
came to an end. It passed away to give place to what is known as the
"absolute monarchy"--government by a king who was able to do anything
that he chose, without check of any kind.
In the meantime the Carolingian kings (descendants of Carolus Magnus,
Charles the Great, or Charlemagne) went out of the story, and the
Capetians came into it, in the midst of perpetual disorder and fights
among the feudal lords. Each duke, in his duchy, each count in {129}
his county, was a little independent king. It seems a wonder that
the whole government of Europe did not fall apart and dissolve into
these independent governments of the big lords in the different
places, each governing according to his own ideas. It seems a
wonder, and it really is a thing to wonder at. It seems to suggest
that there was some power at work through it all, some one power,
powerful everywhere, which kept things together and in some sort of
unity and order--kept the same ideas of government and justice and so
on underlying all the differences.
[Sidenote: The power of the Church]
It seems as if there must have been some such power, for how else can
we account for the fact that the society of the world did not fall
all to pieces? And we know, as a fact, that there was such a power,
penetrating everywhere: it was power emanating, as at the time of the
Roman Empire, from Rome itself. But now it was not the power of a
government with strong military forces, splendidly organised. It was
the power of the Christian Church, of which Rome, with its bishop who
was called the Pope, was the centre and headquarters for all the
Western world.
It seems all the more wonderful that the Pope of Rome should have
been able to make his power so widely felt, when we see what constant
difficulties he had to encounter in the government of Rome itself.
It is evident that Charlemagne himself, even at the height of his
Empire, deemed that his authority would be increased if he had the
Pope on his side. That is shown by his consecration at Rome, of
which we have spoken before. And there is no doubt that the Pope too
was very glad to have the Emperor on his side, to help him.
At the same time there was another aspect to the story, for the Pope
was continually trying to make himself, as the governor of Rome,
independent of the Emperor. Yet, if he became so independent as to
be {130} without the Emperor's help, he had scarcely sufficient force
at his command to oppose two other parties in Rome who were always
striving for power, the nobles and the populace. A proof of this
weakness of the Pope's is that on the break-up of the Empire of
Charlemagne the Pope at once found himself in difficulties with these
other parties in the city and its vicinity. He was able to assume to
himself much of the power that had been wielded by the Emperor; but,
being now without the help of the Empire, he was without defence
against the nobles, who at once obtained greater power.
And, further, there were enemies without, as well as within. The
Saracens at this time, that is to say in the first half of the tenth
century, were in Sicily and Southern Italy and pressed up from the
south, while again, as long before, tribes of the Huns threatened
from the north. Both dangers were repelled, by the arms of the
"barbarians" far more than by the arms of Rome, and almost at the end
of this tenth century we find a "barbarian," a German, elected as
Pope of Rome.
Yet, in spite of all these difficulties, and while from one moment to
another the very existence of the Pope's rule in Rome, the central
city of the Christian Church, seems to have been in danger, the power
which went out from that centre reached far and was efficient.
Europe, under the feudal system, was very disturbed, maybe, very full
of fighting, but it was deeply religious. Partly it was because men
were so lawless and committed so many sins that they submitted
themselves so humbly to the commands and advice of the priests. They
had very many sins to repent of. The Church and its priests taught
that remission or absolution of sins might be gained by gifts made by
the sinners to the Church. Thus a great lord or a king, to expiate
his evil deeds, might build a cathedral or an abbey or give {131}
extensive grants of land to the Church. Thus the Church grew rich.
[Sidenote: The Holy City]
But the Church also taught that forgiveness for sins might be gained
by doing penance, that is to say by punishment and suffering; and one
of the forms of this punishment which the Church advised as most
efficacious was to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the Holy City.
That is a fact of which it is worth your while to make a special note
in your minds, because it was out of this habit of pilgrims going to
Jerusalem for the good of their souls that those great expeditions
called the Crusades came to be made.
Among the many good things for which the Christian Church was working
was peace. It was working for peace in a world that was at constant
war, in spite of the Church's efforts. It may seem a strange thing
to say, that the Crusades were partly due to the Church's wish for
peace, but it is probably true that part of the reason why the Church
gave them its blessing was they were a means by which Christian
soldiers, instead of fighting against each other, might be united in
fighting against non-Christians, against Mahommedans.
This is one reason which might have led the Church to favour the
Crusades. Another was that it seemed a dreadful thing that a city so
sacred as Jerusalem should be in the hands of the Saracens.
Naturally the Church favoured the attempt to recover the Holy Places
by the Christian powers.
Yet a third reason which brought about the first of the many Crusades
was that the Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, in Constantinople,
was being hard pressed at the moment by the Mahommedans in Asia
Minor, and made a request to the Christians in the West to come to
his help. The Eastern Empire had suffered heavy losses. Not only
had the Saracens taken possession of its old territories of Egypt and
{132} Africa, as well as Palestine and Syria and a large part of Asia
Minor, but from the north had come raiders even to the very walls of
Constantinople itself. A number of races from the north and east had
taken part in these incursions--Huns, Tartars, Slavs, from the
Carpathian Mountains. It is in the ninth century that we begin to
hear of such a country as Russia, which was inhabited by all these
races, and Russia already was beginning to stretch a hand down
towards that Constantinople which she has hankered after ever since.
Then that large and fertile land which is marked as Hungary in modern
maps was already called by that name and had been lost to the Emperor
at Constantinople. His was, in fact, an Empire restricted to a
comparatively small western slice of Asia Minor, to some of the
islands and to the fringes, along the northern shore of the
Mediterranean, of all that it had once claimed in Greece and in what
we know as Turkey in Europe. The aggression which the Emperor
especially dreaded when, he summoned the West to help him was
aggression by the Turks, who had by this time established themselves
as the chief Mahommedan power in the East.
The Turks, a people of the same kin as those Tartars who formed part
of the mixed population of Russia, had come down from the east and
north and settled themselves in force in the eastern part of Asia
Minor. It would seem that they were a tougher and a rougher race
than the Arabians, whose religion they had adopted. But the fact
that they had accepted the religion founded by the Arabian Mahomet,
did not save the Arabs from the attacks of these invading Turks, who
dispossessed them of all their conquests in Syria, Palestine, and
Egypt. Further westward it was chiefly a race of African natives,
who had adopted the religion of Mahomet, with but a small contingent
of any Arabian people, that conquered Spain and had its {133} capital
city at Cordova, in that country. And a little later in the story
another Mahommedan African tribe, closely akin to the conquerors of
Spain, seized and kept a long slice of that southern shore of the
Mediterranean as far east as the Egyptian boundary.
It is the more necessary to make a note of these divisions, because
it seems to have been the way of the Crusaders and of all Christian
people of that time to group together all Mahommedans, no matter of
what race they were, under the common name of Saracen, which
originally was applied to one tribe only of the Arabian nation. By
the end of the eleventh century, when the first Crusaders went to the
Holy Land, the hold of the Moors in Spain was neither as firm nor
nearly as extensive as it had been. The country was divided between
Christian and Moslem, the Moslem still possessing the southern part,
nearer that Africa whence he had come. The fighting was continual,
with results that gave now one side and now the other the advantage,
but it inclined, on the whole, to favour the Christians. This was
the time to which belong the splendid stories about the Cid Campeador
and many other great Spanish and Christian heroes.
But while, in the West, the Christian was thus forcing the African
Saracen gradually to loosen his grip on Spain, in the East the
Turkish Saracen was pressing the Christian so hard as to cause the
ruler of Constantinople, though still claiming the title of Eastern
Emperor, to send a prayer to all Christians to come to his aid.
[Sidenote: Plague in Europe]
The conditions of the people in most parts of Europe was probably
more miserable about this date, that is to say about 1100, than ever
before or since. Besides the misery caused by the perpetual
fighting, there was disease, in the form of a plague, which killed
large numbers; and a very bad season for farming had brought great
scarcity of food. Therefore when the {134} call went forth for
volunteers to help the Christians of the East and to regain the Holy
Places from the infidel, very many were ready to respond to the
summons. The Crusade was preached first by a religious zealot called
Peter the Hermit, and attracted the poor people who were so wretched
in Europe that any change must have seemed likely to be for the
better health of their bodies, quite apart from the saving of their
souls. This call of the Hermit's seems to have been the summons of a
man full of zeal, but of little wisdom. Constantinople, the capital
of the Eastern Empire, whence the prayer for help had come, was named
as the place in which the Crusaders were to collect for the attack on
Palestine. Thither Peter the Hermit led his followers; but very few
survived even to reach that city. On the way across Hungary wild
tribes set upon them and destroyed a great number. So that poor
effort came to nothing, as it was certain that it must from the way
in which it was undertaken.
But in the meantime a more orderly movement had been started, with a
great Churchman, acting as the Pope's legate, at its head. So it had
the Pope's blessing, and many of the great feudal lords were its
leaders. There were lords of Italy, of France, of Germany, and we
may note especially that there were lords of Normandy.
[Sidenote: War for the Cross]
The Northmen had not stopped, in their sea-borne incursions, at
England and the northern coasts of France. They had established
themselves in parts of Spain, they had come through the Straits of
Gibraltar, they had ousted, or had greatly helped in ousting, the
Saracens who had taken possession of Sicily and of the south of
Italy. They had set themselves up as rulers of that Italian south,
with Naples as their capital. Thus enterprising, and ever further
pushing, were these people from the north.
{135}
So these, too, took a part, and a leading part, in the great war for
the Cross. Crusade is from the French _croissade_, which is from
_croix_, a cross. You may have seen figures on tombs in churches, of
knights in armour with one leg crossed over the other. This
distinction of the crossed legs is only given to the figures of
knights who had taken part in one or other of the Crusades.
[Illustration: A CRUSADER.]
It was in the year following the disastrous enterprise of Peter the
Hermit, that these Crusaders, starting from different points in
Europe, came together at Constantinople. Trouble arose then, because
the Emperor of the East wished the leaders to do homage to him. That
meant that any victory they might win in the Holy Land would be a
victory gained for him. Homage is a word derived from _homo_, a man,
and the meaning of "doing homage" was that you confessed yourself the
_homo_, or man, of him to whom you did it.
Thus the Emperor desired these leading Crusaders to be his "men," in
the sense that any lands and cities that they conquered should be
his. That was not quite the idea which they had in their own minds,
when they came to his assistance. The Emperor's view was that all
Asia Minor and Palestine and other lands such as Egypt, which the
Saracens had taken, really belonged to his Empire and should be given
back to the Empire if the Crusaders could gain them.
{136}
The outcome of this difference of opinion seems to have been that the
leaders of the Crusade did homage, reluctantly, to the Emperor, but
perhaps they had the thought in the back of their minds, as they did
it, that it was an oath which they might break. However that may be,
when the time came to fulfil their vow--for they won a quick and easy
success over the Turks in Asia Minor and Syria--they did not give up
Palestine and the Holy Places to the Emperor. A portion of Asia
Minor which they regained from the Saracens was handed over to the
Emperor, but as for Palestine itself, that was taken, and it was
retained, by the Crusaders; and the chief result of that first and
most successful of the Crusades was that a Christian Kingdom of
Jerusalem was set up, and was maintained for nearly a century--from
1097 to 1187. The name of Kingdom of Jerusalem and the title of king
endured for many years more, but the kingdom then consisted of no
more than a strip of the coast-line of the Levant and did not include
the city of Jerusalem at all.
But though the Christians were able to hold this new kingdom in the
East for nearly a hundred years, it was within less than fifty that
the very important frontier city of the Eastern Empire, Edessa, in
Asia Minor, was taken by the Saracens. The Emperor at once sent out
another appeal to the West, and this appeal became the occasion of
the second Crusade, undertaken in 1146.
It began with even brighter promise than the first; for whereas
knights were the leaders of the former, two kings, the King of France
and the King of Germany, put themselves, in person, at the head of
the second. But in spite of the fair promise the main result was
failure. It was the occasion of some successful enterprises by the
way; and we may note that whereas the first Crusade had been almost
entirely French and Norman, English, as well as Germans, took part in
the {137} latter. Also, whereas the route taken by the first had
been entirely overland, through Hungary, some of the second
Crusaders, from England and Flanders, made their way to the East by
sea.
In course of that sea voyage some of the soldiers of the Cross,
landing up the Tagus from their ships, took the city of Lisbon from
the Moors, and this capture was the beginning of the little kingdom
of Portugal. Thence the force went upon its voyage eastward.
[Sidenote: The Wends]
In the north of Germany some of the forces assembled for the Crusade
never went very far from home. They seem to have received the
permission of the Pope to fight against a tribe, called Wends, on
their eastern frontier, instead of against the Saracens; and seeing
that these Wends were heathen, this might perhaps be regarded in the
light of a Holy War no less than that in Asia Minor.
It is possible to state very shortly the achievements of the forces
that did get to the East--they achieved nothing at all. The two
kings seem to have been jealous of each other. They acted
separately, with no joint action, and were defeated in turn. They
returned home with no glory, and left the Kingdom of Jerusalem in a
worse plight than before, just because of their failure, after such
preparations and expectations. The Saracen might well think that if
this was all that the West, under its two greatest kings, could do,
they need not be much afraid.
Therefore they pressed continually closer and closer about the
Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Christians held their own, with a success
that is rather surprising, until the reign of the great Saladin.
Until his reign the Saracens in Asia Minor and in the country east of
the Jordan had not acted in unison with the Saracens in Egypt.
Saladin brought all together; so that now the situation of this Latin
Kingdom of Jerusalem was even worse than we saw the position {138} of
Palestine to be in the very early days of the great story. Then it
had lain between the two powerful empires of Egypt and Babylonia.
Now it was lying like an island in the midst of a sea of enemies all
fighting, not against each other, but united to fight against it.
And then this Jerusalem, taken from the Saracens in 1099, was by them
retaken in 1187.
We may be sure that the Christians in the East could not possibly
have held their own against the Saracens, as they did during these
years, if they had not been constantly receiving reinforcements from
the West. History speaks to us of certain definite dates for the
first, second, third Crusades, and so on, but we also have to imagine
a continual going to and from the East of knights with larger or
smaller followings. In this way the strength of the garrisons in the
kingdom were maintained, and in this way happened that continual
bringing of Eastern ideas to the West, which was really of more
importance in the making of this greatest of all stories than any of
the victories won or cities taken.
{139}