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HEART OF EUROPE
[Illustration: _The Cathedral of Reims_]
HEART OF EUROPE
BY
RALPH ADAMS CRAM, LITT.D., LL.D.
F.A.I.A., A.N.A., F.R.G.S.
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1916
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published October, 1915
[Illustration]
TO
E. S. C.
WHO SOME DAY MAY KNOW THE
HEART OF EUROPE
AND TO WHOM THIS BOOK MAY BE A DIM RECALLING
“OF OLD, UNHAPPY, FAR-OFF THINGS
AND BATTLES LONG AGO”
WHITEHALL
29 AUGUST, 1915
The author wishes to express his great sense of personal obligation to
Miss Gertrude Schirmer and Mr. Emil P. Albrecht for their kindness in
furnishing illustrations that otherwise could not have been obtained.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A SANCTUARY LAID WASTE 1
II. THE FORGING OF MEDIÆVALISM 15
III. FLANDERS AND BRABANT 37
IV. THE SPANISH NETHERLANDS 63
V. THE GLORY OF A GREAT ART 84
VI. AMIENS AND REIMS 109
VII. THE BURGHERS AND THEIR BUILDING 128
VIII. COAL AND IRON 149
IX. A TALE OF THREE CITIES 172
X. MARGARET OF MALINES 191
XI. THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTERS 219
XII. GOTHIC SCULPTURE 238
XIII. THE ALLIED ARTS 256
XIV. ART IN THE RHINELAND 278
XV. THE FOREST OF ARDEN 296
XVI. EX TENEBRIS LUX 310
ILLUSTRATIONS
_Reims_ _Frontispiece_
Facing page
_The hall of the University of Louvain_ 12
_The chapel at Aix_ 30
_St. Bavon’s Tower, Ghent_ 44
_The Quai aux Herbes, Ghent_ 50
_Bruges, from the Quai du Rosaire_ 54
_The Duke of Alva, Moro van Dashorst_ 68
_Jumièges_ 86
_Laon_ 98
_Beauvais_ 106
_Amiens_ 112
_Reims_ 116
_The destroyed Hôtel de Ville of Arras_ 130
_The destroyed Cloth Hall of Ypres_ 132
_Bruges, Hôtel de Ville_ 134
_The Hôtel de Ville of Louvain_ 138
_A chimney-piece from Courtrai_ 164
_A canal in Malines_ 174
_The belfry of Bruges_ 184
_The tower of St. Rombaut, Malines_ 202
_A detail from the church at Brou_ 216
_Our Lady, from the Tryptich at Ghent, Hubert van Eyck_ 226
_A drawing of St. Barbara, Jan van Eyck_ 232
_A Memling altar-piece_ 234
_Madonna and Child with St. Luke, Van der Weyden_ 236
_A head, now destroyed, from Reims_ 242
_Three destroyed figures from Reims_ 250
_Fifteenth-century Flemish tapestry_ 262
_Worms_ 282
_Cologne_ 286
_Strasbourg_ 288
_Bacharach on the Rhine_ 292
_Schloss Eltz_ 300
HEART OF EUROPE
I
A SANCTUARY LAID WASTE
Between the Seine and the Rhine lay once a beautiful land wherein more
history was made, and recorded in old monuments full of grace and
grandeur and fancy, than in almost any other region of the world. The
old names were best, for each aroused memory and begot strange dreams:
Flanders, Brabant, the Palatinate; Picardy, Valois, Champagne,
Franche-Comté; Artois, Burgundy, and Bar. And the town names ring with
the same sonorous melody, evoking the ghosts of a great and indelible
past: Bruges, Ghent, Louvain, and Liége; Aix-la-Chapelle, Coblentz, and
Trèves; Ypres and Lille, Tournai and Fontenay, Arras and Malplaquet;
Laon, Nancy, Verdun, and Varennes; Amiens, Soissons, and Reims. Cæsar,
Charlemagne, St. Louis, Napoleon, with proconsuls, paladins, crusaders,
and marshals unnumbered; kings, prince-bishops, monks, knights, and
aureoled saints take form and shape again at the clang of the splendid
names.
And in all these places, and by all these men (and elsewhere, endlessly,
and by hands unnumbered), two thousand years had wrought their visible
manifestation in abbey, church, and cathedral; in manor and palace and
castle, in trade hall and civic hall, and in library and seminary and
school.
Wars, great and small, have swept it from river to river, but much has
been free for a century and all of it free for forty years. Under every
oppression and every adversity it has thriven and grown rich, not in
material things alone, but in those commodities that have actual
intrinsic value; and a short year ago it was the most prosperous,
peaceful, and industrious quarter of Europe. Whatever the war, however
violent the opposing agencies, its priceless records of architecture and
other acts were piously or craftily spared, except when the madness of
the French Revolution swept over its convents and cloisters, leaving
Coxyde, Villers, St. Bavon, St. Jean des Vignes, the Abbaye des Lys,
dead witnesses of the faith that had built them and the spared monuments
as well.
And now a thing calling itself the highest civilisation in Europe, with
the name of God in its mouth, again sweeps the already well-swept land.
In defiance of Peace Palaces and Conferences; in spite of the bankers of
the world and their double-knotted purse-strings; in spite of a
socialism that said war should not happen again, and an evolutionary
philosophy that said it could not happen again (men now being so
civilised), the world is at war, and the old arena of Europe flames as
at Armageddon, while those things too sacred for pillage and destruction
by the armies and the commanders of five centuries are given over to
annihilation in order that the peril of the Slav, on the other side of
Europe, may not menace the treasured civilisation of the West, whose
vestiges even now are blazing pyres, or cinders and ashes!
It is significant that thus far the heavy hand of the pursuer has fallen
notably on two things: the school and the church; for these are two of
the three things he most fears and hates. Not the school, as with him,
where secularism, through economic materialism and a sinister
philosophy, breeds a race as unprincipled as it is efficient and
fearless, nor the church, as with him, where intellectualism ousts
faith, expediency morals, and God is glad “ably to support” the
victorious battalions of a crown prince. Quite otherwise; the school
that teaches both independence and regard for law, with religion as the
only basis for right conduct, and the Church that teaches humility and
the reality of sin, and the subservience of all rulers, whether king or
parliament, to the religion and the authority of a living Christ
speaking to-day as He spoke on the Mount of Olives.
When the University of Louvain passed in the smoke and flame of a
murdered city; when the Church of St. Pierre and the Cathedral of
Malines and the Shrine of Our Lady of Reims were shattered by bombs and
swept by devouring fire, there was something in it all other than the
grim necessity of a savage war; there was the symbol of a new thing in
the world, built on all Louvain, Malines, and Reims had denied, and
destroying the very outward show of what could not exist on earth side
by side with its potent and dominant negation.
Reims Cathedral “stood in the line of gunfire,” it was “a landmark and
unfortunately could not escape,” it had been “fortified by the enemy
and therefore could not be spared.” All true, each statement, and thus:
It stood between a brute power founded on Bismarckian force and
Nietzschean antichristian philosophy, on the one hand, and on the other
nations newly conscious of their Christianity, ashamed of their
backsliding, and ready to fight to the death for what had made them. It
_was_ a landmark, a vast, visible showing forth of a great Christian
spirit and a greater Christian principle, and as such it must go down.
It _was_ fortified, as every church is fortified, to fight against the
devil and all his works, and therefore, equally with the allied forces
behind it, it was fighting against a common enemy. If by its ruin it can
make this universally and eternally clear, we can see it go without a
tear or a regret, for, like the martyr in the Roman arena, it has
accomplished its work.
Thus far, of the great cities, Liége, Louvain, Malines, Ypres, Arras,
and Reims are gone, with the greater part of their treasured art, while
Laon, Soissons, and Namur have been grievously wrecked. Apparently,
Amiens, Noyon, Bruges, and Ghent are now safe, but endless opportunities
open for destruction and pillage, and we may well be prepared for
irreparable loss before the invader is hurled back across his natural
river frontier. Let us consider, not what already has been annihilated,
but the kind of art it was, so measuring, in a degree, the quality of
our loss--and of what we still may lose.
First of all, there are the towns themselves, for all art is not
concentrated in hôtel de ville and cathedral; it shows itself sometimes
in more appealing guise in the river villages and proud cities, and its
testimony to a great past is here equally potent. Ypres, Malines,
Dinant, Termonde, and Huy, all of which are gone, were treasures that
belonged to all the world; Namur and Plombières we could not spare, and
as for Bruges and Ghent, even apart from their exquisite architecture
and their treasures of painting, the soul shudders at what might happen
there were they involved in the retreat of a disorganised army, when one
considers what happened to Liége and Louvain in its victorious advance.
All Belgium and Luxembourg, all Picardy and Champagne are, or were, rich
with lovely little towns and villages, each a work of art in itself;
they are shrivelling like a garden under the first frost, and, it may
be, in a little while none will remain.
The major architecture of this unhappy land falls into three classes and
three periods of time. Oldest and most priceless are the churches, and
these are of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, the ages
when religion was one and secure and was building a great civilisation
that we would fain see equalled again. Then come the town halls and
guildhalls of the fifteenth century, each speaking for the proud freedom
of merchant and burgher, when the hold of religion was weakening a
little, and the first signs were showing themselves of what, in the end,
was to have issue in this war of wars; finally come the town houses of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in all their quaint
individuality and their overriding self-esteem, though fine still, and
with hints of the great art that already had passed.
Brussels is full of these, and Antwerp; Louvain had them, and Ypres,
Termonde, Arras, and Charleville, only a few months ago; in Bruges and
Ghent they fill whole streets and stand in silent accusation of what we
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have offered as our
contribution to the housing of civilisation.
Of the civic halls the list is endless: Brussels, Malines, Bruges,
Ypres, Ghent, Antwerp, Mons, Audenaarde, Termonde and Liége; Compiègne,
St. Quentin, Arras, Valenciennes; ranging from the grave solemnity of
the enormous and wide-spread Ypres to the lacy fantasticism of Louvain
and Audenaarde. Architecture has gone far from the Salle Synodale of
Sens and the Merveille of Mont-St.-Michel, and it has not gone
altogether well, but how significant these stone fancies are of the
abounding life and the splendid pride and the open-handed beneficence of
the fifteenth-century burghers, who loved their towns and bent the
rebellious masonry to their will, working it into a kind of stony lace
and embroidery to the glory of trade and civic spirit! If we should lose
them now, as we almost lost Louvain, standing in the midst of the
roaring flame and drifting smoke, while tall churches and rich
universities and fair old houses crumbled and died around it, what
should we not lose?
And the churches, those matchless monuments, four, five, and six
centuries old, where generations have brought all their best to glorify
God, where glass and sculpture, tapestries and fretted woodwork,
pictures, and gold and silver wrought cunningly into immortal art--how
are we to speak of these, or think of them, with St. Pierre of Louvain
and St. Rombaut of Malines still smoking with their dying fires, while
piece by piece the calcined stone falls in the embers, and while Reims,
one of the wonders of the world, stands gaunt and shattered, wrecked by
bombs, swept by fire, its windows that rivalled Chartres split into
irremediable ruin, its statues devastated that once stood on a level
with the sculptures of Greece?
The catastrophe itself is so unthinkable that the world does not now
half realise it. And yet, what of all that remains in the
pathway--backward or forward--of Attila and his Huns? St. Gudule of
Brussels, St. Bavon of Ghent, and the cathedrals of Antwerp, Tongres,
and Tournai; and in France that matchless sequence of which Reims was
once the central jewel, Soissons, Senlis and Noyon, St. Remi, Amiens,
and Laon; here, with Reims, are seven churches such as man never
surpassed, and equalled only at Paris, Chartres, Coutances, and Bourges;
each is of a different _timbre_, each a different expression of the
greatest century of Christian civilisation, and, given the opportunity,
there is no reason why each should not suffer the fate of Reims.
There is a thin and sinister philosophy, akin to that of Treitschke and
Nietzsche (which is for to-day what Machiavelli was for the sixteenth
century), that avows no building, no consummate work of art of any kind,
“worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier,” justifying its statement on
the basis of a superficial humanism. Never was a more malignant ethic. A
man is valuable in proportion to what he is and does for righteous
society, and for what he makes of himself as a free and immortal soul
responsible to God. Go through the roaring mills of Crefeld and Essen,
the futile pleasure-haunts of Homburg and Wiesbaden, the bureaux and
barracks and palaces of Berlin; you will find--as similarly in every
country--hundreds of thousands of peasants, workmen, and aristocrats
whose contribution to Christian civilisation is nothing, and will be
nothing however long they may live; who forget their souls and deny
their God, and of these we can say, it is not the bones of a Pomeranian
grenadier or even the bones of a Prussian _Junker_ that weigh more in
the scale than Reims or Louvain, it is not a million of these that mean
so much for service and the glory of God, as one such potent influence
as Amiens or Reims, or the library and schools of Louvain, or the
pictures of Memling and the Van Eycks in Bruges and Antwerp and Ghent.
Those that cry loudest for the sanctity of human life and its priority
before art and letters, most insistently hurl a hundred thousand lives
against inevitable death, and spread black starvation over myriads of
women and children, in order that their privilege of selling inferior
and unnecessary products to far-away savages may be preserved intact.
Against this set the cathedrals and universities and the exquisite art
of France and Belgium and the Rhine; consider what it meant once, what
it means even now, what for the future it is destined to mean as never
before.
For the old passes: the old that began with Machiavelli and is ending
with von Bernhardi. It is not alone Prussia that will be purged by the
fire of an inevitable conflict, nor Germany, nor all the Teuton lands;
it is the whole world, that sold its birthright for a mess of pottage
and now, in terror of the price at last to be paid, denounces the
infamous contract and fights to the death against the armies of the
Moloch it helped to fashion. And when the field is won, what happens but
the coming into its own again of the very power that made Reims and
Louvain, the recovery of the old and righteous and Christian standard of
values, the building on the ruins of five centuries of a new
civilisation where whatever art that remains will play its due part as
the revealer of that Absolute Truth that brought it into being,
forgotten now for very long? Then the pictures of Flanders and Umbria
and Tuscany, the sculpture of France, the music of Teuton and Slav, the
“minor arts” of all mediævalism, the architecture of Bourges and Amiens
and Chartres will both reveal and inspire with doubled power.
And in all and through all, Reims in its ruin will be a more potent
agency of regeneration than the perfection of Chartres or the finality
of Bourges.
I should like to consider, though briefly and in the light of a very
real unity that negatived the political disunity that has always
prevailed, the art of these lands where for a twelvemonth millions of
men have fought after a fashion never known before, while around them
each day saw the irreparable destruction of the best that man could do
for the love of God, and better than he can do now. In spite of
constantly changing
[Illustration: THE HALL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LOUVAIN]
frontiers and dynastic vicissitudes, the great unity of mediævalism
blends the Rhineland, Flanders, Brabant, Luxembourg, Artois, Champagne,
Eastern Normandy, Eastern France, into a consistent whole, so far as all
real things are concerned. In spite of its bickerings and fightings and
jealousies and plots and counterplots, Europe was really more united,
more a working whole, during the Middle Ages than ever it has been
since. One religion and one philosophy did for the fluctuant states what
the Reformation, democracy, and “enlightenment” could only undo, and in
this vanishing art, which, after all, is the truest history man can
record, we find the dynamic force, the creative power, of a culture and
a civilisation that took little count of artificial barriers between
perfectly artificial nations, but included all in the greatest and most
beneficent syntheses Europe has ever known.
The art of this land--or these lands, if you like--should be so
considered; not as an interesting and even stimulating by-product of
social, industrial, and political evolution, with only an accidental
relationship to them, and only an empirical interest for the men of
to-day, but as the most perfect material expression of the great
reality that existed through and by these agencies that were in
themselves nothing; the character that emerged through the turmoil of
human activity, as it shows itself in the men and women of the time, and
expresses itself in their art.
To do this fully is impossible; every province would require a volume,
every art a series of volumes, but at least we can catalogue again the
more salient qualities of the greater masterpieces, and try to
co-ordinate them into some outward semblance of that essential unity
they both promised and expressed.
II
THE FORGING OF MEDIÆVALISM
It is not a large land, this Heart of Europe; three hundred and fifty
miles perhaps from the Alps to the sea, and not more than two hundred
and fifty from the Seine at Paris to the Rhine at Cologne; half the
size, shall we say, of Texas; but what Europe was for the thousand years
following the fall of Rome, this little country--or the men that made it
great--was responsible. Add the rest of Normandy, and the spiritual
energy of the Holy See, with a varying and sometimes negligible
influence from the Teutonic lands beyond the Rhine, and you have the
mainsprings of mediævalism, even though for its full manifestation you
must take into account the men in the far countries of the Italian
peninsula and the Iberian, in France and England, Bavaria, Saxony,
Bohemia.
The great empires of to-day, England, France, Germany, Italy, two of
which have eaten steadily into its territories until only a tiny
Luxembourg remains, together with a small new state with a novel name
made greater and more lasting by the events of a year than those of its
predecessors, have dulled the memory of an ancient unity, taking to
themselves at the same time credit, that is none of theirs, for men and
happenings that made ten centuries of enduring history; so the glory,
the high achievements of the small old states are forgotten. And yet,
out of these little dukedoms and counties and free cities came the men
who made France and Germany, who determined the genius of mediævalism,
imparted to it the high soul and the swift hand of its peculiar
personality, and gave to the world the memory and tradition of faith and
heroism, together with so much of that inimitable art that was its
perfect showing forth, and, until yesterday, a visible monument of its
accomplishment.
National unity this territory and these peoples have never possessed.
During the Roman dominion they formed the provinces of Germania and
Belgica, in the diocese of Gaul; under the Merovings all was comprised
in the Frankish kingdom, the old line between the Roman provinces
remaining to divide Austrasia and Neustria, as the northern and southern
sections came to be called under the Carolings. With the disruption of
the empire of Charlemagne, Austrasia went to the kingdom of the East
Franks, Neustria to that of the West Franks, the former becoming (west
of the Rhine) the duchies of Upper and Lower Lorraine, the latter (east
of the Seine) Flanders and Champagne. When Otto the Great restored the
Holy Roman Empire in A. D. 962, the Lorraines of course formed a part.
These comprised all that is now (or was, in June, 1915) Germany west of
the Rhine, together with all of Belgium except Flanders, Luxembourg, and
a strip of territory along the northeast frontier of France. Westward to
the Seine the land was divided into many feudal holdings, Flanders,
which then comprised not only northern Belgium but the present French
departments of Nord and Pas de Calais; Champagne, Amiens, Vermandois,
Laon, Reims, Châlons. During the Middle Ages Lower Lorraine became the
duchy of Brabant and the county of Hainault. Upper Lorraine, Luxembourg
and Bar, southern Flanders, Artois. Picardy and Valois became entities,
and the great bishoprics of Cologne, Trèves, Strasbourg, Cambray, Liége
acquired more and more land until they were principalities in
themselves.
During the fifteenth century the magnificent efforts of the dukes of
Burgundy to create for themselves an independent state between France
and the Empire, and reaching from the Rhine to the Aisne, from the Alps
to the sea, resulted in a partial and temporary unification of the old
Belgian lands, but with the death of Mary of Burgundy in 1482, the whole
territory became more and more closely knit into the Empire, France
losing even her claim to suzerainty over Flanders; all the lands west of
the Meuse and over the Rhine as far as the Ems became the Netherlands,
comprising roughly what is now Holland and Belgium. The duchies of
Luxembourg, Bar, and Lorraine, with the Palatinate, shared all that lay
between the Meuse and the Rhine, save what the great bishoprics had
assumed to themselves, while Burgundy (except the Franche-Comté) and
Lorraine were definitively merged in France.
Then came the Spanish dominion over the whole territory, barring the
duchy of Julich along the Rhine; the revolt of Holland and the severing
of the United Netherlands north of the Rhine from the Spanish
territories; finally, in 1715, after 160 years of ruinous domination,
Spain was driven out and Austria succeeded in Flanders, Brabant, and
Luxembourg, maintaining herself there until the time of Napoleon a
century later, when for a few years everything as far as the Rhine,
together with the Netherlands on the other side, was incorporated in
France. With the fading of the splendid dream of a Napoleonic empire,
Holland and Belgium, as we know them now, came into existence, the lands
of the duchy of Julich went to Prussia, the Palatinate to Bavaria.
Luxembourg was reduced to its existing area and the French frontier
delimited as it is now, except for Alsace and Lorraine, which were lost
in 1870.
Between the upper and nether millstones of France and the Empire, the
Heart of Europe for fifteen centuries has been ground into fragments of
ever-changing form, never able to coalesce into unity, but producing
ever in spite of political chaos and dynastic oppression great ideals of
piety, righteousness, liberty; great art-manifestations of the vigour
and nobility of race, great figures to uphold and enforce the lofty
principles that have made so much of the brilliant history of mediæval
Europe, and all centring around the lands of the many tribes who from
earliest times were known as the Belgæ.
They enter well into history, these Belgæ, in the fifty-seventh year
before the birth of Christ, Nervii, Veromandri, Atrobates, from the
valleys of the Meuse and the Sambre, as Cæsar found and declared, “that
day against the Nervii,” when the battle for the winning of this new
land was his by hardly more than a chance. The tribes were hard and
free, and they died in the end almost to a man, five hundred remaining
out of fifty thousand warriors. But Cæsar was magnanimous, as always,
and by no means without appreciation of his adversaries, so Allies of
Rome, with full claim on her protection, they became, with the rank and
title of a free people, as they have remained at heart ever since. In
seven years the last of the tribes had surrendered and Belgium became a
flourishing colony as well as the advance-guard of Roman civilisation in
its progress against the savage Germans of the Rhine. By the fall of the
Empire a great and united people had come into being between Gaul and
Germania, divided into four great sections with their several capitols
at Trèves, Reims, Mainz, and Cologne.
Meanwhile the Franks had come on the scene, though their name is rather
a rallying-cry than a mark of race, meaning only that certain of the
tribes of Gaul, with others of the Belgæ, were determined to be free--as
they became shortly and as they have generally remained ever since. Now
the Salian Franks were the dwellers in Flanders and Brabant and under
their Duke Clodion had extended their borders as far as Soissons.
Clodion’s successor, Merovæus, was grandfather of Clovis, the first
Christian king of the north. The Merovings, then, are neither strictly
of Gaul nor of Germany, but of the Heart of Europe itself, and their
blood, like that of their followers, a mingling of Germanic and Celtic
and Roman strains.
Châlons saw them allied with the Romans and driving back the fierce tide
of the earlier Huns that threatened to beat out the last flicker of
light in Europe: Tolbiac saw them hurl back the savage Allemanni, in the
year 496, again preserving the European tradition from submergence under
barbarian hordes, nor was this the last time they were to perform this
service. Already Clovis had married Clotilde, niece of the Duke of
Burgundy, so bringing another region into close contact with his own,
and now, after the successful issue of the battle of Tolbiac, when he
had first called on the God of Christians, he presented himself before
the Archbishop of Reims, St. Remi, for baptism, where he heard the
significant words: “Bow thy proud head, Sicambrian! destroy what thou
hast worshipped, worship what thou hast destroyed.”
Whatever the motive, and however inadequate the performance of his new
obligations by Clovis, his baptism is one of the crucial events in
history, marking the end of paganism as a controlling force, and with
the conquest of Italy by Theodoric and the promulgation of the Holy Rule
of St. Benedict, the beginning of the great Christian era of culture and
civilisation that was to endure, unimpaired, for a thousand years.
The dominion of Clovis comprised all that is now France south to the
Loire and Burgundy, with Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Bavaria, but
his capital was at Tournai, and he was in fact even more a Belgian than
a French sovereign. Under him all the Franks were united and his power
was such that the Emperor at Constantinople made him patrician, consul,
and Augustus. With his death in 511 began a long era of division and
reunion, of internecine warfare and the plotting of jealous women, two
of whom, Fredegonde personifying the Gallic influence, Brunhilde the
Germanic, fostered a conflict that hardly came to an end before the fall
of the dynasty.
Little by little the Merovings broke away from their racial Belgic
affiliations, Soissons became the capital rather than Tournai, and at
last by a dramatic turn of fate another Belgian race brought the
decrepit line to its term and founded a new and a nobler house. Pepin of
Landen, in the province of Liége, became mayor of the palace and the
active influence in royal affairs, somewhere about the year 620, and it
was a son of his daughter, Pepin of Herstel (a town also in the province
of Liége) who was father of Charles Martel, who in his turn was the
grandfather of Charlemagne.
As the Huns and the Allemanni had been rolled back from their savage
incursions by the aid of men of Belgic nationality, so now the greater
threat of an onrushing Mohammedanism was to be dispelled by another and
a greater personality, Charles the Hammer, a soldier of consummate
ability, the real ruler of all the Franks, and the victor at the battle
of Tours when final decision was reached as to whether Europe was for
the future to be Moslem or Christian.
Charles Martel died when only fifty years of age, and his son Pepin
succeeded him as mayor of the palace. The fiction of Meroving kingship
could no longer be maintained; the stock was hopelessly degenerate; the
people demanded an end, the Pope sanctioned it, and so, after a most
orderly fashion Childeric III betook himself to a convenient cloister,
Pepin was raised on the shields of the Gallic soldiers, then decently
crowned in St. Denis, and the dynasty of the Carolings began. For
sixteen years he reigned as kings had not been wont to reign for many
centuries; Saxony, Brittany, Languedoc were added to the Frankish
dominions, Rome twice saved from the Lombard invaders, and the Papacy
made the faithful ally and defender of the Frankish kingdom, then the
one great power in Europe.
There were more reasons than that of policy for this alliance.
Practically abandoned by the Roman Emperors in the east, Italy had been
the prey of tribe after tribe of northern savages, and the Papacy was
the only centre of order and authority. In spite of this the Popes still
shrank from severing themselves wholly from the imperial centre, but the
iconoclastic controversy had resulted in what was both heresy and schism
on the part of the patriarchate of Constantinople, and communion was no
longer possible. Moreover, all the other northern tribes that had
accepted Christianity--Goths, Vandals, Lombards--had adopted the Arian
heresy and were therefore even more distasteful to Rome than unconverted
heathen. This condition of things justified the Papacy in its attitude
of intolerance, and when Pepin came to the throne, it was almost at the
last gasp, through persecution, spoliation, and outrage at the hands of
the Teutonic Arians. The Frankish kingdom alone was Catholic, and
enthusiastically Catholic, and it is small wonder that to the Pope the
rise of a great and powerful and Catholic nation under the dominating
Carolings came as a special mercy from heaven--as, indeed, it was.
With the death of Pepin and the accession of his son Charles--known now
for all time as Charlemagne--the curtain rose on one of the most
brilliant dramas of history. The Lombards had again revolted; Pope
Hadrian called on the Franks in despair; King Charles hurled his armies
into Italy like an avalanche, captured and deposed Desiderius, last of
the Lombard kings, proclaimed himself King of Lombardy, pressed on to
Rome, and was welcomed there by the Supreme Pontiff as the saviour of
Christendom.
He would, however, accept no formal honours save that of patrician, and
returned to the north to continue the work of his father in
consolidating and extending the kingdom. For twenty-four years he was
engaged in innumerable wars, in eager efforts to restore education,
political order, ecclesiastical righteousness, and even some small
measure of genuine culture, with results that seem miraculous in the
light of what had been before for so many centuries. Finally, in the
year 799, he went again to Rome, where Leo III now sat in the chair of
Peter, and at mass on Christmas Day, A. D. 800, the Pope came suddenly
behind him as he was kneeling before the altar in St. Peter’s and,
placing a crown on his head, cried in a loud voice: “Life and victory to
Charles, the great and pacific Emperor of the Romans, crowned by the
hand of God!” and after three centuries and more of anarchy, barbarism,
and hopeless degeneration, the empire was restored as the Holy Roman
Empire, in the person of a Frankish warrior of the lands of the Belgæ,
and destined to endure for another thousand years.
Aix-la-Chapelle is the very centre of the land and the people that
built up the Christian civilisation of the Middle Ages, and it was here
that Charlemagne fixed his chief place of residence. During his lifetime
it was the very, and the only, centre of order and of culture in Europe.
A great warrior, he was an even greater administrator, while as the
restorer of learning and the patron of art and letters he was perhaps
greatest of all. When he came to the throne there lay behind him nearly
four centuries of absolute anarchy and barbarism, from the Baltic to the
Mediterranean and from the Atlantic to the marches of the Teutonic
savages. What he built he built from the ground upward, and though his
was only the “false dawn” that heralds the day, passing utterly, so far
as one could see, within a generation after his death, it was the saving
of Europe, the preservation of the succession, that, the second Dark
Ages overpassed, guaranteed the coming in of the great era that began
with the millennial year of Christianity and lasted for five full
centuries.
Under his direction a complete administrative system was established
over the unwieldy empire; local governments were set up, with a system
of regular visitations from the central authority, and in this way the
foundations were laid for the counties of Flanders, Brabant, Hainault,
into which, together with Vermandois, Valois, Amiens, and Champagne,
this territory of our survey was divided during the Middle Ages.
In religion, education, and art Charlemagne went far beyond his
predecessors for five centuries, so far as the form and re-creation are
concerned. Separated at last from the church in the East, now definitely
schismatic, heretical, and Erastian, the Papacy was in a position to go
on unhindered in its development, and Charlemagne became not only a
defender but a zealous and enthusiastic reformer. Monasticism was
universally strengthened and extended, new bishoprics were founded, the
state of the Holy See purified, while schools were established in
connection with cathedrals and monasteries throughout the Empire.
Charles had a great passion for scholars and artists, gathering them
from Italy, Spain, England, wherever, indeed, they were to be found, and
for a time his court was the nucleus of culture in the West.
Architecture was reborn, all the ravelled threads from Rome,
Constantinople, Ravenna, Syria were gathered up and knit together, and
though few authentic works from among the myriads of the Emperor’s
creation still remain, we know from what we have, and chiefly the royal
chapel at Aix, that the result was the restoring once more of a line of
continuity after the vast vacancy of the Dark Ages, and the initiation
of a new vitality that, after the second Dark Ages, was to serve as the
energising power that brought Romanesque art into existence and made
possible the great glory of Gothic.
Great as he was, Charlemagne had all the weaknesses of his racial
tradition, and by yielding to these his era was his alone, nor could it
outlast his personal influence. Divided between his successors, the
Empire rapidly and naturally fell to pieces during the lifetime of Louis
le Debonnaire, who for a brief period had succeeded in uniting it again,
and during the second Dark Ages, from 850 to 1000 A. D., there is no
more of note to record in this region than in any other part of Europe.
The era had culminated under Charlemagne; it was now to sink to its end,
as always had happened before, as always, so far as we can see, must
continue to happen. Not until the turn of the tide at the year 1000
could a real recovery begin. In the meantime history is little more than
a series of personal contests, but out of these certain beginnings are
made that are to have issue in great things, and amongst these are the
appearance of the first Baldwin of Flanders and the establishing of the
first hereditary title, and therefore the oldest in Europe. Baldwin of
the Iron Arm successfully fought the Vikings, driving them west until
they were forced to content themselves with the land they ultimately
made immortal as Normandy. His son married a daughter of Alfred the
Great, so establishing a certain connection between England and
Flanders, and by fortifying Bruges, Ypres, Ghent, and Courtrai, he did
much toward fixing these cities as centres of municipal life and of that
fierce independence that marked them for so many generations.
With the opening of the new era, at the beginning of the eleventh
century, a new vitality shows itself in the land. William of Normandy
had become the son-in-law of Baldwin V, and from Flanders many knights
joined the Conqueror for his invasion of England, one becoming first
Earl of Northumberland, another first Earl of Chester. Under Baldwin VI
complete peace was restored to the distracted provinces, while the
Charter of Grammont is a landmark in that development
[Illustration: THE CHAPEL AT AIX]
of personal and civil liberty which is one of the great glories of
mediævalism. The Tribunal of Peace, established by the Bishop of Liége,
is another shining sign of the times, while the defeat of France in its
attacks on Flemish independence assured a long period of splendid
development.
This was enhanced by the Crusades, and here, particularly in the first,
the Heart of Europe showed the quality of the blood that was its life.
Whatever the Crusades may have become after long years, they were in
their earliest impulse supreme examples of human faith, unselfishness,
devotion, heroism, and piety. The redemption of the Holy Places of
Christianity from the infidel became a passion, and the protagonist, the
moving and vitalising spirit, was one Peter the Hermit, of the province
of Liége, who, crucifix in hand, toiled through eastern France, the
Netherlands, the Rhineland, as well as through his own country,
exhorting prince and peasant to take up arms for the freeing of the Holy
Land from the Saracen.
His success was almost miraculous, for the great adventure appealed to
every instinct of the time--piety, reverence, chivalry, romance, the
passion for a new and venturesome and knightly quest--and in less than
two years the Pope himself set his seal of approbation on the First
Crusade. In Clermont, in the year 1095, surrounded by four hundred
bishops and mitred abbots, he cried to the waiting multitudes of Europe:
“Are we called upon to see in this century the desolation of
Christianity and to remain at peace the while our holy religion is given
over into the hands of the oppressor? Here is a lawful war; go, defend
the House of Israel!” Almost with a single voice Europe made answer with
the rallying-cry: “God wills it!” Every scarlet garment was shredded in
pieces to furnish crosses which were sewn to the shoulders; some even
branded themselves with the sign of the cross by means of red-hot irons.
Within another year an army of 100,000 men had been gathered together,
under the leadership of Peter, himself, and it poured across Europe as
far as Constantinople, a disorganised and impotent mob. It met its fate
as soon as it had crossed the Bosporus into Saracen territory, and only
a shattered remnant, including the originator of the mad venture, ever
returned to its home. In the meantime, however, a greater captain than
Peter the Hermit, and of the same race, was gathering the enormous host
that succeeded where he had failed. Godfrey of Bouillon, of the province
of Liége, a great scholar and greater soldier, gathered 90,000 knights
and men-at-arms in Flanders and Brabant, and set out for Jerusalem on
the 10th of August, 1096. A month later the French under command of the
King’s brother, and the Flemings under Robert, Count of Flanders,
followed in his track. Baldwin of Bourg, the Counts of Hainault, Namur,
Grez, Audenaarde, and Ypres, with knights of Dixmude, Alost, Bruges,
Ghent, Brussels, and Tournai were amongst the leaders, and a
concentration was effected at Constantinople when there were no less
than 600,000 in all. Crossing into Asia, the great host swept onward
from one victory to another; the battle of Dorylæum, fought on the 4th
of July, 1097, proved them invincible. Tarsus and Antioch fell, and
nothing lay between them and Jerusalem. The city was besieged and
finally carried by assault, the attack beginning on the 14th of July,
and after a week of incessant fighting on the walls and through the
streets, Jerusalem was wholly in the hands of the Crusaders. But the
host that set out from its many sources in Europe had vanished and only
a tenth of the original number remained to fight the relieving army from
Egypt at Ascalon, and to organise the victory. Five hundred thousand men
had perished on the long march, died of disease, or fallen in battle.
Godfrey of Bouillon became the first King of Jerusalem, the choice
resting between him and Robert of Flanders. He reigned only a year, and
was succeeded by his brother Baldwin, who had made himself Count of
Edessa, and whose descendants continued on the throne for several
generations.
In all the succeeding Crusades, Flanders and Brabant, Lorraine,
Champagne, and Burgundy played leading parts, and in the fifth, when the
arms of the knights were turned from the relief of Jerusalem to the
conquest of the Byzantine Empire, another Baldwin of Flanders was
leader, and, after the fall of Constantinople, became the first Latin
Emperor of the East, his dynasty continuing on the throne for fifty
years.
Amazing as were the results of the Crusades, with the conquering of the
Saracens in the Holy Land, and the overthrow of the Eastern Empire, a
Walloon being crowned first King of Jerusalem and a Fleming first Latin
Emperor of Byzantium, the local results had no permanency, Jerusalem
falling again to the Mussulmans after a century and a half,
Constantinople reverting to the Eastern line at about the same time. In
Europe, however, the results had been of profound import; directly, the
Crusades had had a vast influence in determining the temper and the
course of mediævalism, indirectly they had laid the foundations of the
industrial supremacy of the Belgian cities and of the emancipation of
the people from feudalism. The Saracen of the twelfth century was the
antithesis of the Ottoman Turk of to-day, and from him the Crusaders
learned much to their advantage, while from the Eastern Empire came new
impulses toward the development of a broader culture than the West alone
could have achieved. So far as the cities of Flanders, Brabant, and
Lorraine were concerned, the absence of their martial and turbulent
knights was by no means an unmixed catastrophe. The vast expeditions
demanded vast expenditures: money came generally into use in place of
barter; the common people who remained at home developed their
industries, increased their wealth, and in the end took into their own
hands much of the business of the government. The habit and tradition
of independence and liberty which so grew up, maintained itself steadily
against all assaults, nor has it lapsed or waned, as the last year has
gloriously proved, and many of the tall towers that became the
recognised symbol of civic independence still stand in testimony, though
one by one they are falling before the armed negation of all they rose
to proclaim.
III
FLANDERS AND BRABANT
In a study such as this tries to be, it is, of course, impossible to
consider in any degree the history of those portions of the chosen
territory that joined themselves to, or were by force incorporated in,
the great surrounding states. The Rhineland, in spite of its minor
vicissitudes of lordship, is and has always been Germanic, and its
annals are part and parcel of those of the Teutonic Holy Roman Empire
and of the German Empire that succeeded it. The marshes of the mouth of
the Rhine early differentiated themselves both from Germany and from the
Gallic provinces farther south; Dutch they were and Dutch they will ever
remain; their history and their culture and their art are by themselves.
The same is true of Champagne, Picardy, Burgundy, Bar, and of the lands
between them and the Seine. This is France, and its history is the
history of France even if its art takes enduring colour from a
persistent quality in its people that is its own and not simply that of
the Franks and Normans and Celts who coalesced around the old Île de
France to the building of one of the great peoples and one of the great
states in history. Each gave more than it received when it became a part
of a state that was slowly building itself out of assembling races and
peoples, but each was like the daughter of a house; however much she
might bring to some alliance, of fortune or character or power, she
became merged in her new family, forsaking her name and accepting that
of her chosen spouse, together with his ambitions, his interests, and
his fortunes. We may then consider the outlying lands of our central
district as so many fair daughters who have allied themselves with
suitors from neighbouring territories; remembering them with affection,
taking pride in the dowries they have carried with them, but confining
ourselves to the fortunes of the men of the line who have preserved the
family name and defended its honour in the field. In this sense
Flanders, Brabant, and Luxembourg are the three princes to whom was
given the defence of the patrimony that has been theirs from the ancient
times of the earliest beginnings of the house amongst the Gallic and
Germanic tribes of the Rhine valley, the meadows and uplands of the
Scheldt and the Meuse and the Sambre, and in the Forest of Ardennes.
As the Heart of Europe gradually became parcelled out between the great
adjoining empires, each taking its colour more or less from the central
influences, while in every instance contributing something in its turn
to the sum that made up the varying greatness of both, the essential
qualities of the original Belgæ seemed to concentrate in the little
province of Flanders, which, during the whole of the Middle Ages, played
a part in Europe strikingly disproportionate to its size, which was less
than half that of the State of Connecticut, though it contained over
1,200,000 people and counted cities like Ghent with 250,000 population,
Ypres with 200,000, Bruges and Courtrai with 100,000 each. At the same
time London could boast only 35,000 citizens. In trade, industry,
wealth, culture, and the standard of living Flanders was far in advance
of the rest of northern Europe, while it was marked by a perfect passion
for liberty not only for the state but for each individual member
thereof.
Every portion of the land we are considering made its own contribution,
early or late, to the great sum of mediævalism, but it would be
impossible to consider, even superficially, the gifts of Champagne,
Burgundy, the Rhineland. This book does not assume to be a history, it
is only a sequence of notes on the lost or imperilled art of the Heart
of Europe, with just so much of history as may serve to suggest what lay
behind and gave this art its peculiar and unmatched quality.
The great elements that entered into this art and this civilisation that
were pre-eminently the art and civilisation of Christianity were
primarily two: northern blood and monastic fervour. To the worn-out
vitality of the Mediterranean races came in the fresh vigour of the
North, Lombard, Germanic, Norman, Frank, while the monastic impulse
imparted by St. Benedict broke the spell of the Dark Ages, made possible
the “false dawn” of Carolingian civilisation, and then, through its
successors, the monks of Cluny in the eleventh century and the
Cistercians in the twelfth, brought to perfection and to complete
fulness of expression all the latent possibilities in the clean new
blood that had been transfused into the hardening veins of an Europe
already dangerously near dissolution.