knows. The chronicle of the Abbey of Margan in South Wales, a
chronicle of which the only known manuscript ends with the year 1232,
and of which the portion dealing with the early years of John's reign
was not compiled in its present form till after 1221 at earliest,
asserts that on Maunday Thursday (April 3, 1203), John, "after dinner,
being drunk and possessed by the devil," slew his nephew with his own
hand and tied a great stone to the body, which he flung into the
Seine; that a fisherman's net brought it up again, and that, being
recognized, it was buried secretly, "for fear of the tyrant," in the
Church of Notre Dame des Prés, near Rouen. William the Breton, in his
poem on Philip Augustus, completed about 1216, relates in detail, but
without date, how John took Arthur out alone with him by night in a
boat on the Seine, plunged a sword into his body, rowed along for
three miles with the corpse, and then threw it overboard. Neither of
these writers gives any authority for his story. The earliest
authority of precisely ascertained date to which we can trace the
assertion that Arthur was murdered was a document put forth by a
personage whose word, on any subject whatever, is as worthless as the
word of John himself--King Philip Augustus of France. In 1216--about
the time when his Breton historiographer's poem was completed--Philip
affected to regard it as a notorious fact that John had, either in
person or by another's hand, murdered his nephew. But Philip at the
same time went on to assert that John had been summoned to trial
before the supreme court of France, and by it condemned to forfeiture
of all his dominions, on that same charge of murder; and this latter
assertion is almost certainly false. Seven months after the date
assigned by the Margan annalist to Arthur's death--in October,
1203--Philip owned himself ignorant whether the Duke of Brittany were
alive or not.[34] Clearly, therefore, it was not as the avenger of
Arthur's murder that Philip took the field at the end of April. On the
other hand, Philip had never made the slightest attempt to obtain
Arthur's release; early in 1203, if not before, he was almost openly
laying his plans in anticipation of Arthur's permanent effacement from
politics.
The interests of the French King were in fact no less concerned in
Arthur's imprisonment, and more concerned in his death, than were the
interests of John himself. John's one remaining chance of holding
Philip and the Bretons in check was to keep them in uncertainty
whether Arthur were alive or dead, in order to prevent the Bretons
from adopting any decided policy, and hamper the French King in his
dealings with them and with the Angevin and Poitevin rebels by
compelling him to base his alliance with them on conditions avowedly
liable to be annulled at any moment by Arthur's reappearance on the
political scene. If, therefore, Arthur--as is most probable--was now
really dead, whether he had indeed perished a victim of one of those
fits of ungovernable fury in which--and in which alone--the Angevin
counts sometimes added blunder to crime, or whether he had died a
natural death from sickness in prison, or by a fall in attempting to
escape,[35] it would be equally politic on John's part to let rumor do
its worst rather than suffer any gleam of light to penetrate the
mystery which shrouded the captive's fate.
John's chance, however, was a desperate one. A fortnight after Easter,
1203, the French King attacked and took Saumur. Moving southward, he
was joined by some Poitevins and Bretons, with whose help he captured
sundry castles in Aquitaine. Thence he went back to the Norman border,
to be welcomed at Alençon by its count, and to lay seige to Conches.
John, who was then at Falaise, sent William the Marshal to Conches, to
beg that Philip would "have pity on him and make peace." Philip
refused; John hurried back to Rouen, to find both city and castle in
flames--whether kindled by accident or by treachery there is nothing
to show. Conches was taken; Vaudreuil was betrayed; the few other
castles in the county of Evreux which had not already passed, either
by cession, conquest, or treason, into Philip's hands shared the like
fate, while John flitted restlessly up and down between Rouen and
various places in the neighborhood, but made no direct effort to check
the progress of the invader. Messenger after messenger came to him
with the same story: "The King of France is in your land as an enemy;
he is taking your castles; he is binding your seneschals to their
horses' tails and dragging them shamefully to prison; he is dealing
with your goods at his own pleasure." John heard them all with an
unmoved countenance, and dismissed them all with the unvarying reply:
"Let him alone! Some day I shall win back all that he is winning from
me now."
It was by diplomacy that John hoped to parry the attack which he knew
he could not repel by force. Early in the year he had complained to
the Pope of the long course of insult and aggression pursued toward
him by Philip, and begged Innocent to interfere in his behalf.
Thereupon Philip, in his turn, sent messengers and letters to the
Pope, giving his own version of his relations with John, and
endeavoring to justify his own conduct. On May 26th, Innocent
announced to both kings that he was about to despatch the abbots of
Casamario, Trois Fontaines, and Dun as commissioners to arbitrate upon
the matters in dispute between them.
These envoys seem to have been delayed on their journey; and when they
reached France they, for some time, found it impossible to ascertain
whether Philip would or would not accept their arbitration. When at
last he met them in council at Mantes on August 26th, he told them
bluntly that he "was not bound to take his orders from the apostolic
see as to his rights over a fief and a vassal of his own, and that the
matter in dispute between the two kings was no business of the
Pope's." John meanwhile had, on August 11th, suddenly quitted his
passive attitude and laid siege to Alençon; but he retired on Philip's
approach four days later. An attempt which he made to regain Brezolles
was equally ineffectual. Philip, on the other hand, was now resolved
to bring the war to a crisis. It was probably straight from the
council at Mantes that he marched to the siege of Château Gaillard.
Château Gaillard was a fortress of far other importance than any of
the castles which both parties had been so lightly winning, losing,
and winning again, during the last ten years. It was the key of the
Seine above Rouen, the bulwark raised by Richard Coeur de Lion to
protect his favorite city against attack from France. Not till the
fortifications which commanded the river at Les Andelys were either
destroyed or in his own hands could Philip hope to win the Norman
capital. And those fortifications were of no common order. Their
builder was the greatest, as he was the last, of the "great builders"
of Anjou; and his "fair castle on the Rock of Andelys" was at once the
supreme outcome of their architectural genius, and the earliest and
most perfect example in Europe of the new development which the
crusaders' study of the mighty works of Byzantine or even earlier
conquerors, quickened and illuminated as it was by the exigencies of
their own struggle with the infidels, had given to the science of
military architecture in the East. During the past year John had added
to his brother's castle a chapel with an undercroft, placed at the
southeastern corner of the second ward. The fortress, which nature and
art had combined to make impregnable, was well stocked with supplies
of every kind; moreover, it was one of the few places in Normandy
which Philip had no hope of winning, and John no fear of losing,
through treason on the part of its commandant. Roger de Lacy, to whom
John had given it in charge, was an English baron who had no stake in
Normandy, and whose personal interest was therefore bound up with that
of the English King; he was also a man of high character and dauntless
courage. Nothing short of a siege of the most determined kind would
avail against the "Saucy Castle"; and on that siege Philip now
concentrated all his forces and all his skill.
As the right bank of the Seine at that point was entirely commanded by
the castle and its neighbor fortification, the walled town--also built
by Richard--known as the New or Lesser Andely, while the river itself
was doubly barred by a stockade across its bed, close under the foot
of the rock, and by a strong tower on an island in midstream just
below the town, he was obliged to encamp in the meadows on the
opposite shore. The stockade, however, was soon broken down by the
daring of a few young Frenchmen; and the waterway being thus cleared
for the transport of materials, he was enabled to construct below the
island a pontoon, by means of which he could throw a portion of his
troops across the river to form the siege of the New Andely, place the
island garrison between two fires, and at once keep open his own
communications and cut off those of the besieged with both sides of
the river alike.
These things seem to have been done toward the end of August. On the
27th and 28th of that month John was at Montfort, a castle some
five-and-twenty miles from Rouen, held by one of his few faithful
barons, Hugh of Gournay. On the 30th, if not the 29th, he and all his
available forces were back at Rouen, ready to attempt on that very
night the relief of Les Andelys. The King's plan was a masterpiece of
ingenuity; and the fact that the elaborate preparations needed for its
execution were made so rapidly and so secretly as to escape detection
by an enemy so close at hand goes far to show how mistaken are the
charges of sloth and incapacity which, even in his own day, men
brought against "John Softsword."[36]
He had arranged that a force of three hundred knights, three thousand
mounted men-at-arms, and four thousand foot, under the command of
William the Marshal, with a band of mercenaries under Lou Pescaire,
should march by night from Rouen along the left bank of the Seine, and
fall, under cover of darkness, upon the portion of the French army
which still lay on that side of the river. Meanwhile, seventy
transport vessels, which had been built by Richard to serve either for
sea or river traffic, and as many more boats as could be collected,
were to be laden with provisions for the distressed garrison of the
island fort, and convoyed up the stream by a flotilla of small
warships, manned by "pirates" under a chief named Alan and carrying,
besides their own daring and reckless crews, a force of three thousand
Flemings. Two hundred strokes of the oar, John reckoned, would bring
these ships to the French pontoon; they must break it if they could;
if not, they could at least coöperate with the Marshal and Lou
Pescaire in cutting off the northern division of the French host from
its comrades and supplies on the left bank, and throw into the island
fort provisions which would enable it to hold out till John himself
should come to its rescue.
One error brought the scheme to ruin, an error neither of strategy nor
of conduct, but of scientific knowledge. John had miscalculated the
time at which, on that night, the Seine would be navigable upstream,
and his counsellors evidently shared his mistake till it was brought
home to them by experience. The land forces achieved their march
without hinderance, and at the appointed hour, shortly before
daybreak, fell upon the French camp with such a sudden and furious
onslaught that the whole of its occupants fled across the pontoon,
which broke under their weight. But the fleet, which had been intended
to arrive at the same time, was unable to make way against the tide,
and before it could reach its destination the French had rallied on
the northern bank, repaired the pontoon, recrossed it in full force,
and routed John's troops. The ships, when they at last came up, thus
found themselves unsupported in their turn, and though they made a
gallant fight they were beaten back with heavy loss. In the flush of
victory one young Frenchman contrived to set fire to the island fort;
it surrendered, and the whole population of the New Andely fled in a
panic to Château Gaillard, leaving their town to be occupied by
Philip.
The Saucy Castle itself still remained to be won. Knowing, however,
that for this nothing was likely to avail but a blockade, which was
now practically formed on two sides by his occupation of the island
fort and the Lesser Andely, Philip on the very next day set off to
make another attempt on Radepont, whence he had been driven away by
John a year before. This time John made no effort to dislodge him. It
was not worth while; the one thing that mattered now was Château
Gaillard. Thither Philip, after receiving the surrender of Radepont,
returned toward the end of September, 1203, to complete the blockade.
No second attempt to relieve it was possible. It may have been for the
purpose of endeavoring to collect fresh troops from the western
districts, which were as yet untouched by the war, that John about
this time visited his old county of Mortain, and even went as far as
Dol, which his soldiers had taken in the previous year. But his
military resources in Normandy were exhausted; the Marshal bluntly
advised him to give up the struggle. "Sire," said William, "you have
not enough friends; if you provoke your enemies to fight, you will
diminish your own force; and when a man provokes his enemies, it is
but just if they make him rue it."
"Whoso is afraid, let him flee!" answered John. "I myself will not
flee for a year; and if indeed it came to fleeing, I should not think
of saving myself otherwise than you would, wheresoever you might be."
"I know that well, sire," replied William; "but you, who are wise and
mighty and of high lineage, and whose work it is to govern us all,
have not been careful to avoid irritating people. If you had, it would
have been better for us all. Methinks I speak not without reason."
The King, "as if a sword had struck him to the heart," spoke not a
word, but rushed to his chamber; next morning he was nowhere to be
found; he had gone away in a boat, almost alone, and it was only at
Bonneville that his followers rejoined him. This was apparently at the
beginning of October, 1203. For two months more he lingered in the
duchy, where his position was growing more hopeless day by day. At the
end of October, or early in November, he took the decisive step of
dismantling Pont de l'Arche, Moulineaux, and Montfort, three castles
which, next to Château Gaillard, would be of the greatest value to the
French for an advance upon Rouen. To Rouen itself he returned once
more on November 9th, and stayed there four days. On the 12th he set
out for Bonneville, accompanied by the Queen, and telling his friends
that he intended to go to England to seek counsel and aid from his
barons and people there, and would soon return. In reality his
departure from the capital was caused by a rumor which had reached him
of a conspiracy among the Norman barons to deliver him up to Philip
Augustus. At Bonneville, therefore, he lodged not in the town, but in
the castle, and only for a few hours; the Marshal and one or two
others alone were warned of his intention to set forth again before
daybreak, and the little party had got a start of seven leagues on the
road to Caen before their absence was discovered by the rest of the
suite, of whom "some went after them, and the more part went back."
Still John was reluctant to leave Normandy; he went south to Domfront
and west to Vire before he again returned to the coast at Barfleur on
November 28th, and even then he spent five days at Gonneville and one
at Cherbourg before he finally took ship at Barfleur on December 5th,
to land at Portsmouth next day.
It was probably before he left Rouen that he addressed a letter to the
commandant of Château Gaillard in these terms: "We thank you for your
good and faithful service, and desire that, as much as in you lies,
you will persevere in the fidelity and homage which you owe to us;
that you may receive a worthy meed of praise from God and from ourself
and from all who know your faithfulness. If, however--which God
forbid!--you should find yourself in such straits that you can hold
out no longer, then do whatsoever our trusty and well-beloved Peter of
Préaux, William of Mortimer, and Hugh of Howels, our clerk, shall bid
you in our name."
An English chronicler says that John "being unwilling"--or
"unable"--"to succor the besieged, through fear of the treason of his
men, went to England, leaving all the Normans in a great perturbation
of fear." It is hard to see what they feared, unless it were John's
possible vengeance, at some future time, for their universal readiness
to welcome his rival. Not one town manned its walls, not one baron
mustered his tenants and garrisoned his castles, to withstand the
invader. Some, as soon as John was out of the country, openly made a
truce with Philip for a year, on the understanding that if not
succored by John within that time they would receive the French King
as their lord; the rest stood passively looking on at the one real
struggle of the war, the struggle for Château Gaillard.
At length, on March 6, 1204, the Saucy Castle fell. Its fall opened
the way for a French advance upon Rouen; but before taking this
further step Philip deemed it politic to let the Pope's envoy, the
Abbot of Casamario, complete his mission by going to speak with John.
The abbot was received at a great council in London at the end of
March; the result was his return to France early in April, in company
with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the bishops of Norwich and Ely, and
the earls of Pembroke and Leicester, all charged with a commission "to
sound the French King, and treat with him about terms of peace." On
the French King's side the negotiation was a mere form; to whatever
conditions the envoys proposed, he always found some objection; and
his own demands were such as John's representatives dared not attempt
to lay before their sovereign--Arthur's restoration, or, if he were
dead, the surrender of his sister Eleanor, and the cession to Philip,
as her suzerain and guardian, of the whole Continental dominions of
the Angevin house.
Finally, Philip dropped the mask altogether, and made a direct offer,
not to John, but to John's Norman subjects, including the two lay
ambassadors. All those, he said, who within a year and a day would
come to him and do him homage for their lands should receive
confirmation of their tenure from him. Hereupon the two English earls,
after consulting together, gave him five hundred marks each, on the
express understanding that he was to leave them unmolested in the
enjoyment of their Norman lands for a twelvemonth and a day, and that
at the expiration of that time they would come and do homage for those
lands to him, if John had not meanwhile regained possession of the
duchy. Neither William the Marshal nor his colleague had any thought
of betraying or deserting John; as the Marshal's biographer says, they
"did not wish to be false"; and when they reached England they seem to
have frankly told John what they had done, and to have received no
blame for it.
The return of the English embassy was followed by a letter from the
commandant of Rouen--John's "trusty and well-beloved" Peter of
Préaux--informing the English King that "all the castles and towns
from Bayeux to Anet" had promised Philip that they would surrender to
him as soon as he was master of Rouen, an event which, Peter plainly
hinted, was not likely to be long delayed. This information about the
western towns was probably incorrect, for it was on Western Normandy
that Philip made his next attack. John meanwhile had in January
imposed a scutage of two marks and a half per shield throughout
England, and, in addition, a tax of a seventh of movables, which,
though it fell upon all classes alike, the clergy included, he is said
to have demanded expressly on the ground of the barons' desertion of
him in Normandy.
The hire of a mercenary force was of course the object to which the
proceeds of both these taxes were destined; but they took time to
collect and John soon fell back upon a readier, though less
trustworthy, resource, and summoned the feudal host of England to meet
him at Portsmouth, seemingly in the first week of May. It gathered,
however, so slowly that he was obliged to give up the expedition.
Philip was about this time besieging Falaise; he won it, and went on
in triumph to receive the surrender of Domfront, Séez, Lisieux, Caen,
Bayeux, Coutances, Barfleur, and Cherbourg. He was then joined by
John's late ally, the Count of Boulogne, as well as by Guy of Thouars,
the widower of Constance of Brittany; and these two, their forces
swelled by a troop of mercenaries who had transferred their services
from John to Philip after the surrender of Falaise, completed the
conquest of Southwestern Normandy, while the French King at last set
his face toward Rouen. He was not called upon to besiege it, nor even
to threaten it with a siege. On June 1, 1204, Peter de Préaux made in
his own name, and in the names of the commandants of Arques and
Verneuil, a truce with Philip, promising that these two fortresses and
Rouen should surrender if not succored within thirty days. The three
castellans sent notice of this arrangement to John, who, powerless and
penniless as he was, scornfully bade them "look for no help from him,
but do whatsoever seemed to them best." It seemed to them best not
even to wait for the expiration of the truce; Rouen surrendered on
June 24th, and in a few days Arques and Verneuil followed its example.
Thus did Normandy forsake--as Anjou and Maine had already
forsaken[37]--the heir of its ancient rulers for the King of the
French.
FOUNDING OF THE MONGOL EMPIRE BY GENGHIS KHAN
A.D. 1203
HENRY H. HOWORTH
The origin and early history of the Mongols are very
obscure, but from Chinese annals we learn of the existence
of the race, from the sixth to the ninth century, in regions
around the north of the great desert of Gobi and Lake Baikal
in Eastern Asia. The name Mongol is derived from the word
_mong_, meaning "brave" or "bold." Chinese accounts show
that it was given to the Mongol race long before the time of
Genghis Khan. It is conjectured that the Mongols were at
first one tribe of a great confederacy whose name was
probably extended to the whole when the power of the
imperial house which governed it gained the supremacy. The
Mongol khans are traced up to the old royal race of the
Turks, who from a very early period were masters of the
Mongolian desert and its borderland. Here from time
immemorial the Mongols "had made their home, leading a
miserable nomadic life in the midst of a wild and barren
country, unrecognized by their neighbors, and their very
name unknown centuries after their kinsmen, the Turks, had
been exercising an all-powerful influence over the destinies
of Western Asia."
But at the beginning of the thirteenth century arose among
them a chief, Genghis Khan, the "very mighty ruler," whose
prowess was destined to lead the Mongolian hordes to the
conquest of a vast empire, extending over China and from
India through Persia and into Russia.
Who and what this mighty ruler was, and by what achievements
he advanced to lay the foundations of his empire, are told
by Howorth, not only with an authoritative fidelity to
history, but with a literary art that is no less faithful in
its appreciation of oriental character and custom.
Among the men who have influenced the history of the world Genghis
Khan holds a foremost place. Popularly he is mentioned with Attila and
with Timur as one of the "scourges of God," one of those terrible
conquerors whose march across the page of history is figured by the
simile of a swarm of locusts, or a fire in a Canadian forest; but this
is doing gross injustice to Genghis Khan. Not only was he a conqueror,
a general whose consummate ability made him overthrow every barrier
that must intervene between the chief of a small barbarous tribe of an
obscure race and the throne of Asia, and this with a rapidity and
uniform success that can only be compared to the triumphant march of
Alexander, but he was far more than a conqueror. Alexander, Napoleon,
and Timur were all more or less his equals in the art of war. But the
colossal powers they created were merely hills of sand, that crumbled
to pieces as soon as they were dead.
With Genghis Khan matters were very different: he organized the empire
which he had conquered so that it long survived and greatly thrived
after he was gone. In every detail of social and political economy he
was a creator; his laws and his administrative rules are equally
admirable and astounding to the student. Justice, tolerance,
discipline--virtues that make up the modern ideal of a state--were
taught and practised at his court. And when we remember that he was
born and educated in the desert, and that he had neither the sages of
Greece nor of Rome to instruct him, that unlike Charlemagne and Alfred
he could not draw his lessons from a past whose evening glow was still
visible in the horizon, we are tempted to treat as exaggerated the
history of his times, and to be sceptical of so much political insight
having been born of such unpromising materials.
It is not creditable to English literature that no satisfactory
account of Genghis Khan exists in the language. Baron D'Ohsson in
French, and Erdmann in German, have both written minute and detailed
accounts of him, but none such exists in English, although the subject
has an epic grandeur about it that might well tempt some well-grounded
scholar to try his hand upon it.