MINIATURES OF FRENCH HISTORY
MINIATURES OF
FRENCH HISTORY
By
HILAIRE BELLOC
AUTHOR OF
“NAPOLEON’S CAMPAIGN OF 1812,” “THE ROAD,” Etc.
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
MINIATURES OF FRENCH HISTORY
Printed in the U. S. A.
D–B
DEDICATED TO
SISLEY HUDDLESTON
CONTENTS
THE FOUNDING OF MARSEILLES 1
THE FALL OF THE VENETI 8
THE DEATH OF ST. MARTIN 17
THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS 26
THE BREAKING OF ISLAM 34
RONCESVALLES 44
THE NORMAN SIEGE 55
THE CROWNING OF THE CAPETIAN 64
THE TORRENT 70
THE CONQUEROR 80
THE SERFS 87
JERUSALEM 95
THE LOSS OF AQUITAINE 104
THE PILGRIMAGE 112
THE TRIUMPH OF SALADIN 120
CHÂTEAU GAILLARD 152
THE CONVERSATION OF THE KING 161
THE DEATH OF ST. LOUIS 171
THE TEMPLARS 178
BLANCHETAQUE 188
VILLE GAGNÉE 201
LOUIS XI AND CHARLES THE BOLD 211
TWO SATURDAYS 224
THE FRONTIER 231
THE EXILE 240
THE MONEY-LENDER 247
THE CHÂTEAU 259
THE THREE PLACES: FONTAINEBLEAU, MADRID, SARATOGA 268
THE END OF CHATEAUBRIAND 276
A SOLDIER OF ’70 284
TWO MEN OF THE MARNE 293
MINIATURES OF FRENCH HISTORY
MINIATURES OF FRENCH HISTORY
THE FOUNDING OF MARSEILLES
(599 B.C.)
It was the women who made Marseilles, and through women did there
first come to this land writing and the living record of heroes, and
wine, and building with stone, and a knowledge of the gods.
For the Phoceans, a Greek people from under the sunrise, had sent
forth (many hundred years--more than five hundred years before the
Romans came to make Gaul) a shipload to wander and to find new land.
But that ship’s company a matron of Ephesus had gathered together.
She was their priestess, and her goddess was at the prow. And that
women thus led had come about in this fashion:--
The Phocean men having consulted an oracle, the oracle had told them
that they should send to Ephesus, where great Artemis, the sister
of the Sun, had her temple and her shrine. So the Phoceans sent an
embassy to the shrine of the goddess, and while they were there great
Artemis appeared in a dream to Aristarché, a matron of that city, and
said to her (standing by the bed with her hands uplifted), “Take one
of those statues which are sacred to me, and join you these Phocean
men under their captain, Simos, and his son Protis, merchants, and
sail with them to the new land.”
The long Phocean ship, narrow and lithe in line like a greyhound,
low in wall, shot forward under fifty rowers. She so roamed from
headland to headland westward all the summer through, and her lookout
peered for harbours that no man had yet taken, and for an open
emplacement where the new city might stand. All the while the figure
of great Artemis, the sister of the Sun, whom Aristarché served with
sacrifice, stood upon their prow, and all their good fortune in the
beginning of this thing was from women altogether. So they went on
from headland to headland, still finding every place of vantage
taken; and still shooting westward by day, anchored through the
summer nights under the shelter of some jutting land.
Though they had so sailed for many days through the Mediterranean
weather, they had not yet found a place for a city. Round the long
bay which the Ligurians see from their high hills above the shore,
round the bended knee of the north Italian waters, they found cities
and islands and promontories encircling little gulfs, but none that
would welcome them, and none standing empty for those who would seek
new land.
Until at last, when they had passed and marked far inland to the
north the high snows of the Alps, and when they had so divided the
waters westward for many days more, they came to a shelter cunningly
hidden by a god, but discoverable to sailors who had long known the
sea. It was a place where many might pass and never guess an entry,
but where one with keen eyes would discover, masked under a turn of
rock, the gates of a harbour; and thither the helmsman steered them
round with his broad oar astern, right round in a sweep (for the
haven is cut backward, looking as it were not to the sea, but back
again on to the land). And when they had passed the narrow gates they
found themselves in a clear, deep pool with firm rock all about and
riding for a hundred ships.
There did they let go the anchor, and came to rest after so long a
wandering.
About the shores of this perfect harbour they saw no men, or houses
of men, nor tillage of fields, nor temples of the gods, but very
barren hills high inshore; and the place seemed theirs altogether.
When, therefore, they had landed, still under the guidance of the
priestess Aristarché, and sent messengers up into the bare hill
country and the low, spare brush of that land, those messengers came
back to tell them that all this part was the country of a Ligurian
king, and this king was friendly to strangers, and his name was Nam;
nor had this people any knowledge of the sea, nor did they use boats
and sails and oars, nor were they jealous of their port.
But first, before he would talk of anything with ambassadors, King
Nam must give a feast; for he had a daughter to wed, and by the
custom of her people she must choose her mate at this feast and
declare him at the board. To this feast the Phoceans were bidden,
and their embassy sat, with King Nam at his side, having for their
chief men Simos the merchant, their captain, and the young man Protis
his son; there also round the board sat the chiefs of the hill men,
each from his tribe, for each was a suitor and hoped that King Nam’s
daughter would choose him. The name of that princess was Gyptis, nor
did she come to the feast where the men were, for she was a virgin.
But when the feast was done and the time for her entry had come,
the king sent for the princess and ordered that all should be done
according to custom. And she came into the room like one dreaming,
and she held in her right hand a chalice full of pure water, which
she was to give to whomever she would, or to whomever the gods
directed her. And that man to whom she gave it should be her husband.
Gyptis then, going round the board while all watched her, put forward
the chalice in her hand and held it out to the young man Protis,
the stranger from overseas; and he took it and drank, and the king
applauded, saying, “This thing was done by the gods.” For it was a
god that had guided the virgin, and great Artemis presided here,
though the Ligurians did not know her, for they were barbarians.
Once again, therefore, had the goddess worked by a woman, and the
chieftains from the hills did not complain, for they knew her
presence.
Protis, rising up and taking the cup, drank from it and confirmed
the espousals, and the Ligurian men swore firm friendship with the
newcomers, and granted them the shore; and, since a harbour was
their desire, King Nam made over this empty harbour to them, where
the Phoceans, with great rejoicings and thanks to the goddess, built
all that a city should have--a council-house, and a market-place, and
walls, and gates, and a place for games, and a stronghold also upon a
height behind the harbour, and temples for the gods. But their chief
temple they raised to Artemis, and put in it that statue of her which
they had brought from very far away, from the Phocean land and from
home.
When all this was done, and the city founded and the harbour ordered,
and ships sailing out and in, Gyptis and Protis, man and wife, were
saluted king and queen of the city; but she queen more than he king,
because it was the women that had made Marseilles, and they owed
themselves all to the goddess.
Now when Gyptis and Protis had thus taken their thrones to rule
over Marseilles from youth to age, they took new names as befitted
their new station and the new fortunes of the Phocean land, and in
these names they bore record of the great good that had happened.
For Protis, the lucky bridegroom, called himself Euxenos, which is
in Greek the “well fortuned guest”; but Gyptis, who had brought him
so great a dowry, putting off the Ligurian name that her mother had
given, put on a Greek name also, and called herself “Aristoxena,”
which is in Greek “the best of hostesses.” And she worshipped with
him her husband, and with all the Phoceans, at the shrine of Artemis,
which Aristarché served, the priestess of the city. And so they ruled
until they died.
This is the way in which Marseilles was founded, and thus it was that
the women founded Marseilles.
THE FALL OF THE VENETI
(56 B.C.)
Julius Cæsar had thought to have subdued all the country of Gaul and
all the tribes inhabiting it, and he had left in garrison, upon this
point and that, certain of his lieutenants with their legionaries,
while he himself went off to another and distant part of his
command--the mountains of Illyria, which overlook the Adriatic Sea;
and this was in the winter, fifty-six years before our Lord was born.
But during that winter time, when the gathering of food for the
armies had made the Roman officers in Gaul send out messengers and
embassies for the gathering of grain, the seafaring men of Brittany,
always in a way apart from other men, and hard, and keeping their own
counsel, and difficult to subdue, had secretly prepared revolt and
had sent all up the Channel past by what is Normandy to-day, and by
what is the Boulonnais to-day, and Ponthieu and the Artois, summoning
to their aid any of the sailors that would dare to come, men knowing
the rough seas, well provisioned with many ships. They sent also over
the sea to Britain for aid, and from all these parts upon either
side of the Narrow Seas they found alliances, for they were preparing
a great thing. Cæsar, far off in the south, heard nothing of all
this, and the great officers, his lieutenants in Gaul, were also
ignorant of what was toward, so silently and rapidly did the Bretons
work.
Until, as the year turned, young Crassus, who was in command over
the Seventh Legion and had cantoned it for the winter in the country
about the lower Loire, and who, like the others, had sent out his
messengers to get wheat from the tribes around, heard that his
embassy to the Veneti (by that name were these Bretons then called),
Velanius and Silius, had been detained, and that the tribes farther
on to the north in Normandy held also other deputies whom he had sent
thither to levy food. Even as he heard this, young Crassus learnt
from those whom the Veneti had sent to him with the news of their
proud act, that if he would have his legates back he must himself
give up the Breton hostages whom he had in his camp. Now these
Bretons, the Veneti of Vannes, in thus detaining the Roman officers
and in sending to their general such a message, knew that they had
thrown down a challenge of life and death against all the power of
Rome.
Out from that coast to the north and to the south of the Loire’s
mouth stretches for ever all away to the west the great ocean, here
stormy beyond most seas and filling and emptying the rocky bays with
swift irregular tides, and beating upon islands and many heaped
boulders of stone that are islands at high water, and at low water
joined to the mainland by spits of sand.
This sea the Veneti held, and they were the masters of it altogether,
for though their own land did not reach to the Loire itself, yet
their great ships were dreaded and obeyed for many a day’s sail, and
the rare shelters behind the juts of rock or within the islands they
claimed to be theirs, even when the land about was tilled by another
tribe. These great ships of theirs, which were their pride, stood
up like castles out of the sea, very high at poop and prow, and of
marvellous thick timber, with huge foot-square baulks and the nails
clamping them thick as a man’s thumb, so stout was all their building
and so great and heavy were their ships of war. Iron also--and this
seemed strange to the Romans and a sort of terrifying thing--were
their anchor cables, and the vast square sails, whereby such weights
of wood and men and iron were moved, were not of canvas but of hide,
another thing monstrous in Roman eyes.
Against this power of theirs by sea the Veneti were very sure that
the little men from the south could do nothing, cunning though they
were in arts, and always favoured by fortune in their wars, and full
of wealth, and coming--the leaders of them--from palaces for homes.
For the Veneti were sailors, and sailors ever believe that the sea
is wholly theirs, and is a certain defence against all evil and a
certain avenue to all good fortune. But the Romans were soldiers,
ignorant of the sea and fearing it, nor had they any fleet on those
shores, nor could they seemingly make one which could at all dispute
the mastery of the Atlantic with the great leathern-sailed vessels
and their high freeboards that could withstand all the anger of the
sea. And more than this, the Veneti knew what a labyrinth was all
that coast under the water of it, and how many shoals and rocks
there lay hidden by the tide, and where these lurked; and they knew
what fate would befall vessels that struck, and they knew the shoals
whereon their own great boats, flat in the bilge, could lie unharmed
when the tide left them, but which would wreck hulls too deep and
narrow, and ignorant of the peculiar custom of those waters.
To Cæsar, far off in the Illyrian mountains, this news had been sent
by young Crassus post-haste, and he heard it as he was setting out
to watch in Italy his rivals and his friends; for Cæsar, while he
conquered Gaul, was thinking much more of how later he might rule
Rome. He saw what peril lay to him and all his fortunes in this
sudden pride of the Veneti, and in all this rising of the sailors who
knew the Northern Sea from the Straits to the two Cornwalls. First
he ordered, and that immediately, the subject tribes round about
the Loire’s mouth, and especially those who held the valley of the
Charente and the harbours thereabout, and the men who lived upon the
banks of the Loire itself, to build a fleet speedily and to send up
such vessels as they had, that Crassus might have some weapon at
least to his hand, and he sent up from the Roman shores--from the
Mediterranean, that is--and from the Roman province which to-day we
call Provence, rowers and men skilled in piloting, and a levy of the
seafarers of the inland sea. But with all this he knew that he was
attempting a doubtful thing, for his ships had no great strength, nor
their sailors the skill of the Veneti, and their hulls were small
and weak; and as for the Mediterranean rowers, they knew nothing
of the Atlantic sweep, with its great rollers of Biscay under the
south-west wind, nor of the heaving of the tides.
Next Cæsar, when he had laid his plans for Italy at Lucca, upon the
road to Rome, came northward quickly into Gaul, and was himself upon
these coasts of the Veneti at the moment when spring breaks over the
wind-harried land and the wide heaths of the Bretons. And with his
armies he laboriously worked up the coast, beleaguering first one
stronghold of theirs and then another, but all the summer through
(during which heavy storms broke continually, for that season was a
wild one) he failed, and the Veneti kept him at bay. _They_ could
hold the sea in spite of weather; their stores and camps were on the
islands and peninsulas to be approached only by the painful thrusting
out of causeways from the shore, and when at last any one of these
should be taken the sailor folk had only to put their people and
their goods aboard and to sail to some other not yet conquered refuge.
Until he had the better of their fleet--if, indeed, he could ever
hope to master it--Cæsar must despair of conquest, and with this
successful stand of all the northern shores he would lose Gaul.
At last, towards the end of that summer, there came a day in which
his fortunes and those, therefore, of France and all the world were
decided. For a gentler air was upon the sea coming up from the
southward, and the Roman fleet, which wild westerly weather had kept
imprisoned in the Loire for all these weeks, could clear at last.
It was upon a day when the sea was thus friendly, but the wind strong
enough and steady to fill their sails, that the boats came out from
the Loire mouth, making for the open sea.
There is in that country a great slope of open land standing above
the sea and crowned by the old town of Guerande. And there, upon the
low heights that leaned back from the sea and that overlooked islands
and half islands upon the shore below and the harbour behind Croisic
(where now the salt marshes are), lay stretched the Roman army,
awaiting, helpless and as onlookers, the coming fight.
For as the light ships of the Roman fleet came sailing and rowing
round the corner of the land, and appeared in procession upon the
great open of the sea, from the harbour at the feet of the army the
whole Venetian fleet, two hundred and twenty monsters, with their
dark leathern sails and their enormous hulls shadowing the sea, stood
out, with the wind upon the port beam, under that same weather, and
marshalled in the open for the fight. It was not quite noon.
Commanding those light, swift, but puny vessels upon whom his fate
and that of all Gaul depended, Cæsar had placed Brutus, young, in his
twenty-ninth year--Brutus, his darling, who was later to kill him in
the Senate House at Rome. And this Brutus had designed, as his one
hope against his enemy so greatly stronger at sea, something whereby
he might board. For the Roman was a soldier, and sure of victory
with the sword. This something was an armament in his light ships
of long poles, to the ends of which were lashed curved blades--as
our bill-hooks. Against those high freeboards and against those
tall poops the turrets which the Romans might run up upon their own
decks availed nothing, and it was under the peril of a plunging fire
from above and at the cost of a slaughter of which we are not told,
that the southern rowers, bending violently to their work, shot up
alongside of their great enemies, now two, now three engaging upon
either side some one Venetian hull. The hooks ran out and up, the
blades caught the halyards, and the oarsmen, suddenly backing water,
cut through those ropes cleated to the enemy’s bulwarks; and here and
there, all up and down the line, the Roman legionaries, watching
from the heights upon the shore, saw the great leathern sails come
crowding down, and the crew beneath them helpless. And everywhere the
little southern men swarmed up the sides of the great Breton ships
and boarded; and everywhere the sword conquered, though the long
fight lasted through the afternoon under a wind that slowly died away.
Thus did Cæsar and his men see victory accomplished on the sea below
them, before the sun had set over the calm to the west.
When all was lost, some remnant of the Venetian fleet not yet
captured brought up their helms a-weather and stood to run before
what was left of the southerly breath that evening into their
harbours of the north. But the slight wind betrayed them, for before
darkness it had utterly died away.
Thus was the issue of the Western world decided, and soon after all
the land of the Veneti was in Roman hands, their great men put to the
sword, and such of their people as had not fled sold into slavery,
for a terror to all the other dwellers along the coasts of the sea.
THE DEATH OF ST. MARTIN
(_November 11_, A.D. 400)
Where the river Loire runs shallow or suddenly rising over its broad
bed, broken by willowed banks of sand that stand above the summer
stream and are, in spates, drowned up to their topmost branches;
where it goes between sharp, low green hills on either side, wherein
caves are a habitation for men; all down its valley by Tours there
was a murmuring and a noise. It was November, and there were storms
in the valley. The suddenly risen water drummed against the wooden
piles of the long bridge of Tours, and was swirling brown and thick
up to the lower branches of the trees in the islands. Nor could a
boat go easily against it, though towed by strong horses.
Men were passing backward and forward to the north and to the south
over that long bridge of trestles from Tours, the town, with its
low roofs of spread red tiles, to the caves upon the farther shore,
where was a hive of monks: all out of their cells to-day and eagerly
hearing the news in the market-place. The very old man, Martin, the
bishop of the city, was dying at Candes, miles away up river. He had
not been able to come back to his own.
He was more than a king here, for he was also an ambassador of
heaven, and when he had gone along the streets muttering to himself
and blessing rapidly those who knelt before him, men felt that they
had met not a man only but a spirit. The Emperor’s Count who took the
Pleas was small before him. The city held to Martin, and it was his
own.
Its walls were filled not only with his long presence, but with the
stories, grown greater through days of marching, of his strange
missions into the eastern woods: into the Morvan, and the dark
Vosges; and of dead men risen, and of lights seen in the sky. Also
the army remembered him. He knew the quarters outside the walls where
the huts of the barbaric soldiers were, and whence passed into and
out of the gates of the city the gentlemen, their officers, marked
upon their armour with silver and with gold. The soldiers had both
songs and tales of Martin as he had been sixty years before, riding
at the head of a column in his purple cloak; and those who had
visited the German mountains and the valleys below the Danube could
remember the portents of his birth.
Up there at Candes he lay dying, with some priests about him and the
monks of a new house. He lay stretched upon a bed of reeds, still
muttering to himself in a sort of sleep, the very old man. They
watched for his passing as they stood around, and it seemed to them
as though heaven was bending and touching earth to make a way for
the ascent of his spirit. All the Church of Gaul was centred here in
his lean and broken body, and three full generations which had seen
Gaul changed from the pagan to the Christian thing. He still muttered
faintly to himself upon his bed of reeds.
Within his closed mind, which no longer received the voices of this
world, there passed great dreams or memories, and the perpetual
wandering over the earth in the pursuit of his Lord filled Martin
now, as he lay dying, with scene after vivid scene in which he stood
outside himself and saw himself, and remembered all his time.
He felt, as his mind so wandered, a strong horse beneath him, and
he was upon that western road which came up to the western gate of
Amiens, straight from the Beauvaisis. He was a young soldier; he
was not much more than a boy. Against the metal scales of his jerkin
the sword hilt tinkled as he rode; the air was keen with winter;
there were dark clouds over the east, and a great menace of snow. The
rolling upland was bare right up to the brick wall of the city. His
mount moved impatiently through the biting wind, and as he went he
saw, crouching at the gate of the city, that beggar man, the memory
of whose eyes had filled all his life thenceforward. He remembered
the look and how, with shame, but compelled by a fire within him (and
looking up to watch whether the guard had noted an officer’s folly),
he had quickly cut his coat with his sword and thrown the fragment
of warmth down to the half naked man. He saw--he saw the eyes still
following him through the gate, not only with gratitude, not only
with benediction, but also with prophecy, and he rode on into the
town, ashamed in his mangled accoutrement, hiding the cut as best he
could with his left bridle arm, but still thinking of those eyes. And
Martin, lying there dying after full sixty years, murmured so that
men around him could hear the words, “It was the Lord, Martin; it was
the Lord.”
Next he was in the deep woods of the Æduans, high up in the hills,
three days and more from posting-houses and from stone roads. The
forest was damp all about him. He was in a clearing with two priests,
his companions, and the wilder men of the hills were watching him
sullenly while he broke their uncouth idol with an axe and preached
to them the living God. But as he watched them he doubted their mood,
and as he went back down the hills he feared their trapping him--even
the chief whom he had baptized. Then all those trees quite faded,
and he was in a place where the magnificence of the emperor shone--a
huge figure, too strong and squat, with a bull neck corded, and the
heavy, flushed face of exaggerated command. And he saw standing,
richly clothed amid a group of clients, the eager, furtive, not sane
face of Priscillian, and yet he pleaded for the life of that man.
And lying so in his weakness and dying, his lips tried to frame the
cry which came but as a whisper, though a whisper shrill within the
soul: “The Church will have no blood. He is a bishop. The Church will
have no blood.” And again he was in the forum outside the palace
wall at Treves, standing ashamed and with head bent, defeated, while
the crowd came laughing and jostling by from the execution of the
magician. He stood there alone and baulked, knowing that blood had
been shed, and that he had been powerless.
Next, time rolled back within him, and he was but just free of his
uniform, still so very young and full of his first fervours, and
behind him were high mountains and about him the meres, the ditches,
the reeds, the low lines of trees, and the hot sky of Lombardy. The
straight imperial road ran right before him for a mile and more, and
he limped along it at the end of his long, lonely journey towards
the splendours, the high colonnades and the clangour of Milan. And
even as he went, wholly bound up within himself and considering his
mission from the Lord, he felt again that great fear which is not
of this world, and which stands at last on the threshold of every
death. His heart began to faint in him, and his thews were loosened,
so that he could hardly stand. There was evil all around, and that
awful presence of the Pit. Martin in his dream groaned and turned
upon the reeds whereon he lay, so that the priests about him thought
his agony had come. Within his mind he was still upon that Milan
road, and still the oppression of evil grew, and still the dreadful
mastery of the abyss and of things condemned. Then he heard once
more right through him in its deep tones, as he had heard it then
in his boyhood, the challenge of hell, bidding him answer whither he
was bound and what business he purposed to do. And Martin, as he lay
dying, was again himself of those days, and found himself answering
again from within: “Oh, thou foul beast, I go to do the work of my
Lord.” And again the mortal cold seized him everywhere as he felt,
vibrating through his being, not heard by mortal ears, the mighty
challenge of the receding ghost: “Martin, I will thwart you every
way, and I will defeat you in the end.”
The despairs seized him even as the scenery turned within his closed
mind, and even here, in the article of death, the old man raised
himself upon one elbow a little and stared all about. He had opened
his eyes. He saw the room and the priests about him; one moved
forward as though to touch him, but the others held him back. And a
young man but lately tonsured, an Angevin from the valley, said with
sobs, “Oh, my father, do you not know me?”
Martin, seeing that young face, smiled for a moment, but outwards
only, for within the terror had returned. Though he now saw real men
and the very walls of the stone room wherein he lay, and the true
sky beyond the open arches, a November sky of driving cloud, yet
was he in the presence of that terror, and he called out in a loud
voice, challenging it: “Thou foul beast, I say to thee again, thou
foul beast, what power hast thou over me? I have faithfully served my
Lord, and I have done many and wonderful things for Him.”
When the old man had said this so loudly, and while those about him
were drawing back, many crossed themselves, feeling a combat of great
power passing before them. They saw their father suddenly loosed from
terror, and his limbs relax, and the falling upon his face of an
awful dignity, which at the last relapsed into a stern but conquering
smile. And so he lay backwards and was dead.
That evening they said Mass, and they absolved the body laid out upon
a bier before the altar, and surrounded, as custom is, with lights,
and the women also sang. And when the morning came they put the body
of Martin upon a boat draped with hangings as fitted the greatness
of the man and of his office and of all the evangelization of the
Gauls. And certain skilful men having been chosen from among the
river people to guide the boat over the turning of the flood water,
they brought it down to Tours, and there they buried him amid a
great concourse of the people, and all his monks lamenting him from
the caves beyond the river. Then, when some years had passed, the
devotion of his successors built a little chapel over that famous
grave, and a bishop from foreign parts sent a sculptured marble for
the tomb, and later still another church was raised in memory of the
apostle. And one hundred years and another hundred years and another
went by to the added glory of his tomb, until pagan savages of the
north came and ruined it; and when it had risen again in splendour
above him, other enemies, heretics, came and ruined it again, leaving
it all desolate and bare walls, and at last only two towers of what
had been his shrine. But for the third time, and in our day, men
built the shrine again, and there it is, as you may see it if you go.
And so it will be, perhaps, for many lives of men to come--the Church
rising and falling, and the tomb of Martin continuing in the midst.
THE BAPTISM OF CLOVIS
(_December 25_, A.D. 496)
The great plains of Champagne were white with snow, and the small
rivers of that land made little black ribbons across the desert of
frost. Upon the high hills that overlook the plain from the west the
deep forest of leafless trees stood out as black against the sky in
frost. The town of those flats, all square, with its low Roman walls
and plain arched gates, was dark against the snow in the midst of the
level. The straight arrow of the road making for the western gate was
dark also against the snow by the passage of so many feet and of so
many wheels and horsemen, for an army had gone past.
It was in the Christmas time of the year 496. The army was the
army of that king from the Netherlands, a leader of the Frankish
auxiliaries and their master in the forces of Rome. His rough name of
a Flemish sort his soldiers repeated as Clodveg, or some such sound.
For us and for history it is Clovis, and there followed him in that
band of auxiliaries men, some of his own small tribe which lay round
Tournai and the Lowlands, some from the Seine. Four thousand of
them, perhaps: a column marching to his orders and ready to support
his government, for government there must be.
Rome no longer truly governed.
Although these auxiliaries, like every other soldier, thought
themselves Roman indeed, and were citizens indeed, and used the
money, and when they could read could read only the letters of Rome;
and though, apart from the army, all that world in town and country
was Roman through and through, yet there went out now no orders from
Rome to Gaul and the north. The sacred town was far. No tribute,
though levied in the Roman name, went its way southward by the great
roads to Italy. No writ came borne by a messenger to the Counts, each
in his City.
Of that great body of arms which had been the pride and the
sustenance of society there was now left nothing but these chance
bodies, the auxiliary or regular, drawn from barbarian stock,
fighting one with another each for its leader’s command--and yet some
one must govern. The money that passed with the emperor’s head upon
it (the head of the emperor far off in new Rome upon the Bosphorus)
must be paid to an order, and some tax on it must sustain some
chief who could settle between man and man and could put terror into
wrongdoing, and confirm to a free man his brother’s inheritance and
the obedience of his slaves--yet there was still no government, nor
any Justiciar in all these fields of Gaul. But the cities as best
they could, jealously guarding their walls and arming their burghers
for defence, stood each alone and kept their monies for their own
chiefs; and the Counts, who once had been the officers of empire,
lingered on: or stripped of power to the benefit of some greater
citizen and wealthier, or still ruling, but ruling of their own right
and with no charter from Cæsar: nor revocable, nor truly appointed.
For fifteen years all up and down the open country in between the
woods, all up and down the old state roads still strong and hard,
from city to city in the vague shocks of the time, this garrison that
followed Clovis had triumphed. For Clovis the boy had led them first
when he had come out of the Lowlands, barely fifteen years, and now,
a man of thirty, he led them still. And it was with these his men
never yet conquered that he had passed through that Christmas weather
into the town of Rheims. He had come to assume government at last,
and since Cæsar far away no longer ordered, to take up the business
of ordering, between the cities of the north and among free men.
For now one hundred years had most men of the cities accepted the
Faith. And though amid the dwindling soldiery the gods of the pagans
lingered, and though the auxiliaries, barbaric like the rest,
followed, each group of them, the customs of the tribe whence it
sprang, and for the most part did not yet know Christ, yet as they
marched through that land they were marching through Christian land,
and by this time the feasts of repose and the songs they heard and
answered, and the rites of marriage when they would wed into the folk
about them, and the rule whereby alone their children could succeed
to their land when they had done with arms, all these things were
Christian. Stronger than the cities, much more real than the empty
name of Cæsar, was the Church; and in each city a great priest,
ordering the wealth of the clergy, administrating their wide farms
and their thousand slaves, speaking with ancient authority and
remembering Rome, ruled, and was a bishop. Of these the greatest in
that time was Remigius, whom we call St. Remi, the lord in Rheims and
the father of Champagne.
This man, whose judgment and whose word weighed much more with Gaul
of the north than many soldiers, had seen the young man Clovis thus
conquering to the east and to the west, passing through the gates
of the cities and breaking in battle the Germans of the Rhine, so
that from the day of his victory no more hordes came out from the
forests, where there are no towns, into the plains of Gaul. To the
south, in the name of Rome, there governed men who hated the Catholic
name and who had a pride in hating it, because in the days when they
had risen to power and to be kings (each over his body of garrisons,
in the name of the emperor) the emperor’s court itself had accepted
heresy, and the Catholic millions were despised. Here, in the north,
fate still hung doubtful who would seize power, and, if he seized it,
whether he should stand with the bishops of the Church or against
them like the southern lords.
Clovis, three years before perhaps, had wed Clotilde of great beauty
and young, and for herself Catholic, niece of the Burgundian king;
and when their first son was born to them she had him baptized as
should be baptized the son of a king (for Clovis was called “king”
by the Franks, the soldiers of his troop). But the child had died,
and in his death Clovis had learnt a terror of the Cross. Yet was
his second son also baptized with pomp, as though there were already
about this warrior, his father, something imperial. And this second
child lived. Then it was that in his battle with the German horde,
out near the Rhine and in the thickest of the press when victory or
rout hung even, Clovis made a loud vow to the God of Clotilde if he
should be victorious over the Germans he would follow Him. He had won
the victory, he had driven them over Rhine, and now at last with his
men he was riding into Rheims for the feast, and Remigius knew that
now Gaul, in the north, and as far southward as such armies could
conquer, would be governed with the bishops and with the Church.
In the Basilica of Rheims, round-arched and long, Remigius ordered
hangings of the richest dyes, come from the old time before the
wealth and order of the empire had failed; and round the baptistry
also he had the same colours displayed, and out of doors in the
keen air across the streets of the town, and with pennons in the
market-place, he ordered decorations as though for a victory. Pagan
men come in from the hills understood the greatness of the moment.
For all the history of France and the turning of it lay here, since
Clovis, who must now take up government in the Roman name, and
restore the fortunes of these cities, was to abandon the old and
powerless gods and to be baptized.
They burnt incense in the baptistry on that short winter day, and
lit a crowd of candles, making the round place glorious. But Clovis
thought of the army, and before he would do so great a thing he
appealed first to the soldiers (whom a chief must hold), lest too
many of them should regret the old gods. But those who spoke for them
bade him go forward, and whatever he did they would also do.
Then Clovis knelt for baptism amid those lights within, and Remigius,
the great bishop, said over him not only the sacramental words, “...
of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” which are the
making of Christian men, but also those other famous words: “Bow down
the head, Sicambrian, adore what thou hast burnt, and burn what thou
hast adored.”
When Clovis arose from the fount he had entered the company of
Christian men. There were to be new things in Europe from that time
and for ever, because the Gallic sword, which is the chief maker of
Europe, had passed into the hands of a man so baptized. The proud
heresies of the south were to pass at last, and there was to go out,
even into the Germanies, where as yet were no cities nor letters,
nor the art of building with stone, that influence from Gaul which
has made of those forests an European thing. From this baptistry at
Rheims set out a new story for the West.
As for the soldiery, these too for the greater part (three thousand
of the men of his small army) were baptized when Clovis was baptized;
and the new men to be recruited into the host for the new wars were
to march henceforward in the Catholic name; and everywhere the
peoples in suspicion of their not-Catholic lords, by the Alps as by
the Apennines, by the Cevennes as by the Pyrenees, were to look to
the north and to the Franks for their sword and for their deliverance.
THE BREAKING OF ISLAM
(_October_, A.D. 732)
When Christendom was Christendom at last, and all seemed bound
together under one bond, the Emperor far in the East building his
great Church, the Pope ruling in the West from Rome in the name of
Christ, unseen lord of all Roman men; when Britain itself, swept by
the pagans, was returning to the light of Europe, and when even in
the Germanies, or on the edges of them, missionaries had begun to
do their work, there had arisen, by that mischance which prevents
perfection in any human thing, a new enemy far away in the desert.
In the hot sands of which Europe knew nothing, and which were for
century upon century a boundary to all Roman things, in an obscure
town free from Roman rulers, in a market-place of the Arabs near
the Red Sea, there had arisen a man who was to change all. This was
Mahomet.
Mahomet, acquainted with the Faith, selected from manifold Christian
truth what few points seemed good to him, and composed a new heresy
alive with equality and the reduction of doctrine to the least
compass; rejecting mysteries--save that of immortality. He denied the
Incarnation and left the Eucharist aside.
Mahomet had visions and heard divine commands. Stones spoke to him,
and he perceived the glories of heaven. But more than this, in
the desert places and under the brazen sun, he was filled with a
command to teach what he had seen and known. He must re-make men.
For this mighty task he found two mighty levers--brotherhood and
simplicity--and to these he joined the delight of arms. For those who
followed him were to be equal and to be brothers one with another,
and this particularly as soldiers; and they were to spread through
the world by the sword and by example the teaching that there was but
one God, and that all subservience to men or to the forms of men,
or the calling of a man a god, or the painting, or the drawing, or
the sculpture of men, was an abomination. This something, simple,
enthusiastic with the sword and proclaiming a binding equality,
rose from the desert suddenly as its columns of sand rise in the
whirlpools of hot air. It moved forth, as do those columns of sand.
It came in a cavalry charge with Arab horses, and it conquered
everywhere. All men who found it seized it gladly or submitted, and
the great prophet was not dead a hundred years when this Arabian
thing, riding out to destroy the Christian name, was hammering
at Constantinople in the east, had burnt all through the African
north, had swept Spain, had harried every coast of the Mediterranean
Sea, had crossed the Pyrenees, and was striking at the heart of
Christendom in Gaul.
Never had an issue so great been joined upon our western fields.
Never since then, of all the great issues, has an issue so great been
determined among all the great battles that our rivers have seen.
All Spain, I say, save the hills of the north-west, was held by
this new power. Everywhere our shrines were subdued and our people
despised, the subjects of these soldiers, when, from Spain as their
base and possession, the Arabs determined to settle the quarrel for
ever and to destroy the West in Gaul. It was the year 732 of the
Incarnation. It was just a hundred years since Mahomet had died.
Across the high heart of the Pyrenees run, side by side in two
gorges, two roads. The one is that which runs by the noise of the
river Aragon, and has above its summit the high peak Garganta; the
other comes by the Gallego, and has by its summit the twin granite
peak of the Midi. By these roads came, pouring over the high hills
into Gaul, the myriads of the Arabs. And as they came they cried in
every town of the plains that there was but one God, their God, and
our shrines were desolate. They destroyed our harvest, they burnt our
farms, they seized our citadels, they made still northward to decide
whether the whole world should be Christ’s or theirs. And Abdul
Rahman, the viceroy, led them.
So they rode in their white cloaks, the thousands of them, on their
light Eastern horses that were so quick of foot, and having on the
thigh their short, curved scimitars, and slung at their saddle
their small round shields. They came to the broad Garonne with its
vineyards, and Eudes, the Duke of all that country, came out to meet
them, and was defeated utterly. The walls of Bordeaux could not keep
them out. They surged into that town; they burnt its churches also.
The broad Garonne was no barrier for them, nor the Dordogne beyond.
They came up to Poitiers, and Poitiers first resisted. Its walls were
too strong. Abdul Rahman burnt the Church of St. Hilary without the
walls, then left that hill town for a further attack when his triumph
should be achieved, and led his myriads northward still on up the
great road to Tours. For Tours was St. Martin’s shrine and the heart
of Gaul, and there should the doom of Christendom be decided.
There was in government over the armies of Gaul in that day a man
called Charles, whom men also called “The Hammer.” For many years had
he warred with his men behind him against the other great ones in the
north, for he was the bastard of the chief of the French who governed
in the name of kings that were no longer kings.
This man Charles was forty-four years old, very strong and greatly
dreaded, and all the things that the French had done in the old
days he did, raiding in particular the Germanies, burning the pagan
shrines in their forests, and taking tribute from the barbarians.
Eudes also, in the south, he had warred against and defeated;
but Eudes, now in this flood of the Arabs, called to Charles the
Christian in the north, and Charles answered. He gathered universal
levies from all the cities of the north, and from the valleys of the
Loire and of the Seine, and from the edges of the Netherlands, and
the forests of the east, and marched as though with a whole nation
of men against the Saracens.
It was already autumn. Abdul Rahman was half-way come from Poitiers
to Tours.
The place where his advance was halted by the coming of the French
host is memorable.
It is a bare upland between the two rivers of the Vienne and of the
Clain, lonely, with few hamlets, and in the midst of it to-day the
ruins of a great Roman tower and the last traces of the great Roman
road. There, in that autumn weather, the men scouting before the vast
army of Charles found upon a Sunday evening the miles of tents, and
saw the troops of horses picketed and the sheaves of spears, and rode
back to the Chief with their news. There also in that bare plain,
between the two rivers, which is to-day as deserted as ever, was the
soul of Europe to be decided one way or the other, and the fate of
the Christian name.
The Christian men came in their dense columns over the bridge where
the rivers join. They poured into that peninsula; they also fixed
their camp from stream to stream, and their great body of heavier
horses, and their weapons, which were not spears nor scimitars, but
the long sword and the long shield and the battle-axe; and they were
summoned to the sound of horns and of great oliphants.
Now one day passed and another, and nothing was done; but at night
each of the hosts could see the fires of the other, murky in the
damp autumn weather, red against the low mists; and every morning,
as the late sun rose beyond the valley of the Vienne over the damp
fields of October through the fogs, the northern men heard the Arab
call to prayer, shrill and singing, and the challenge to their faith
and their name. And the Arabs could also see, far off across the
space that divided them, men differently habited from the soldiers of
Charles. They knew them well, for Spain was full of them. They were
the priests.
So one day passed, and another and another, and yet no battle was
joined; until at last a week had passed, and it was Saturday. Upon
that morning, then, the leader of the Mahommedans, looking northward
again to see what the camp of his enemies did, saw it covered all
along its front by one packed line, dense, and cramped together as a
faggot is cramped in its bond, all facing southward and hiding the
tents behind with their line: for this was the army of Charles, now
drawn up for battle.
There was a southern man, a Spaniard, who saw that sight, and who
said that the men of the north were frozen men--men fixed by the cold
with frozen faces, and he said that so standing all in line, not
moving at all, they seemed to be a wall.
Then, before such a sight, the Arab army moved and swirled; there
was the saddling of horses and the calling of the companies together
with the shrill tube, and the words of the East cried from one to
another, and accoutrement upon every side, until the light horses
and their white-cloaked riders were ready, some with the thin lance
levelled, some with the bared scimitar in hand, for the charge; and
among them many wore mail, fine and closely linked, and iron upon
their heads. But all were mounted for speed and for the rapid turning
of a horse this way and that. The line charged. You might have seen
the breaking of the white cloaks against those tall northern men,
like the breaking of waves against a ridge of rock that bounds the
sea. And when from that first charge they rode back, leaving the line
unbroken, then one could see, scattered everywhere before that line,
the bodies of men fallen, and of horses which the battle-axe had
felled.
But again those thousands charged, and again and with every charge
lost more, not breaking the northern line. All the short autumn day
was full of this fury and of these cries of the Orient, and of the
scurry of hoofs; and throughout the full hours the men of Charles
took the strain, killing and breaking the attack until, when the
night fell, the assault had ruined itself; and in the counting of the
dead they found that Abdul Rahman himself had fallen.