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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Medieval Europe, by H. W. C. Davis
+
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+Title: Medieval Europe
+
+Author: H. W. C. Davis
+
+Release Date: August, 2004 [EBook #6369]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on December 2, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEDIEVAL EUROPE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by V-M Osterman, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
+
+No. 13
+
+Editors:
+
+HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, Litt.D., LL.D.,
+F.B.A. PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
+
+
+
+
+MEDIEVAL EUROPE
+
+BY H. W. C. DAVIS, M.A.
+
+FELLOW AND TUTOR OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD AUTHOR OF "CHARLEMAGNE,"
+"ENGLAND UNDER THE NORMANS AND ANGEVINS" ETC.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+I THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
+
+II THE BARBARIAN KINGDOMS
+
+III THE EMPIRE AND THE NEW MONARCHIES (800-1000 A.D.)
+
+IV FEUDALISM
+
+V THE PAPACY BEFORE GREGORY VII
+
+VI THE HILDEBRANDINE CHURCH
+
+VII THE MEDIEVAL STATE
+
+VIII THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE--THE CRUSADES
+
+IX THE FREE TOWNS
+
+NOTE ON BOOKS
+
+MAP OF THE BARBARIAN KINGDOMS AND FRANKISH EMPIRE
+
+MAP OF FRANCE
+
+MAP OF HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
+
+MAP OF THE CRUSADES
+
+MAP OF THE ALPS AND NORTH ITALY
+
+
+
+
+MEDIEVAL EUROPE
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+All divisions of history into periods are artificial in proportion as
+they are precise. In history there is, strictly speaking, no end and no
+beginning. Each event is the product of an infinite series of causes,
+the starting-point of an infinite series of effects. Language and
+thought, government and manners, transform themselves by imperceptible
+degrees; with the result that every age is an age of transition, not
+fully intelligible unless regarded as the child of a past and the parent
+of a future. Even so the species of the animal and vegetable kingdoms
+shade off one into another until, if we only observe the marginal cases,
+we are inclined to doubt whether the species is more than a figment of
+the mind. Yet the biologist is prepared to defend the idea of species;
+and in like manner the historian holds that the distinction between one
+phase of culture and another is real enough to justify, and, indeed, to
+demand, the use of distinguishing names. In the development of single
+communities and groups of communities there occurs now and again a
+moment of equilibrium, when institutions are stable and adapted to the
+needs of those who live under them; when the minds of men are filled
+with ideas which they find completely satisfying; when the statesman,
+the artist, and the poet feel that they are best fulfilling their
+several missions if they express in deed and work and language the
+aspirations common to the whole society. Then for a while man appears to
+be the master of his fate; and then the prevailing temper is one of
+reasoned optimism, of noble exaltation, of content allied with hope. The
+spectator feels that he is face to face with the maturity of a social
+system and a creed. These moments are rare indeed; but it is for the
+sake of understanding them that we read history. All the rest of human
+fortunes is in the nature of an introduction or an epilogue. Now by a
+period of history we mean the tract of years in which this balance of
+harmonious activities, this reconciliation of the real with the ideal,
+is in course of preparing, is actually subsisting, and is vanishing
+away.
+
+Such a period were the Middle Ages--the centuries that separate the
+ancient from the modern world. They were something more than centuries
+of transition, though the genius of a Gibbon has represented them as a
+long night of ignorance and force, only redeemed from utter squalor by
+some lingering rays of ancient culture. It is true that they began with
+an involuntary secession from the power which represented, in the fifth
+century, the wisdom of Greece and the majesty of Rome; and that they
+ended with a jubilant return to the Promised Land of ancient art and
+literature. But the interval had been no mere sojourning in Egypt. The
+scholars of the Renaissance destroyed as much as they created. They
+overthrew one civilisation to clear the ground for another. It was
+imperative that the old canons of thought and conduct should be
+reconsidered. The time comes in the history of all half-truths when they
+form the great obstacles to the pursuit of truth. But this should not
+prevent us from recognising the value of the half-truth as a guide to
+those who first discover it; nor should we fall into the error, common
+to all reformers, of supposing that they comprehend the whole when they
+assert the importance of the neglected half. Erasmus had reason on his
+side; but so, too, had Aquinas. Luther was in his rough way a prophet;
+but St. Bernard also had a message for humanity.
+
+Medieval culture was imperfect, was restricted to a narrow circle of
+superior minds, offered no satisfaction to some of the higher faculties
+and instincts. Measure it, however, by the memories and the achievements
+that it has bequeathed to the modern world, and it will be found not
+unworthy to rank with those of earlier and later Golden Ages. It
+flourished in the midst of rude surroundings, fierce passions, and
+material ambitions. The volcanic fires of primitive human nature
+smouldered near the surface of medieval life; the events chronicled in
+medieval history are too often those of sordid and relentless strife, of
+religious persecutions, of crimes and conquests mendaciously excused by
+the affectation of a moral aim. The truth is that every civilisation has
+a seamy side, which it is easy to expose and to denounce. We should not,
+however, judge an age by its crimes and scandals. We do not think of the
+Athenians solely or chiefly as the people who turned against Pericles,
+who tried to enslave Sicily, who executed Socrates. We appraise them
+rather by their most heroic exploits and their most enduring work. We
+must apply the same test to the medieval nations; we must judge of them
+by their philosophy and law, by their poetry and architecture, by the
+examples that they afford of statesmanship and saintship. In these
+fields we shall not find that we are dealing with the spasmodic and
+irreflective heroisms which illuminate a barbarous age. The highest
+medieval achievements are the fruit of deep reflection, of persevering
+and concentrated effort, of a self forgetting self in the service of
+humanity and God. In other words, they spring from the soil, and have
+ripened in the atmosphere, of a civilised society.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
+
+
+Medieval history begins with the dissolution of the Western Empire, with
+the abandonment of the Latin world to German conquerors. Of the
+provinces affected by the catastrophe the youngest was Britain; and even
+Britain had then been Roman soil for more than three hundred years. For
+Italy, Spain, and Gaul, the change of masters meant the atrophy of
+institutions which, at first reluctantly accepted, had come by lapse of
+time to be accepted as part of the natural order. Large tracts of Europe
+lay outside the evacuated provinces; for the Romans never entered
+Ireland or Scandinavia or Russia, and had failed to subjugate Scotland
+and the greater part of modern Germany. But the Romanised provinces long
+remained the dominant force in European history; the hearth-fire of
+medieval culture was kindled on the ruins of the Empire. How far the
+victorious Teuton borrowed from the conquered provincial is a question
+still debated; the degree and the nature of Rome's influence on the new
+rulers varied in every province, indeed in different parts of the same
+province. The fact of the debt remains, suggesting a doubt whether in
+this case it was indeed the fittest who survived. The flaws in a social
+order which has collapsed under the stress of adverse fortunes are
+painfully apparent. It is natural to speak of the final overthrow as the
+judgment of heaven or the verdict of events. But it has still to be
+proved that war is an unfailing test of worth; we have banished the
+judicial combat from our law courts, and we should be rash in assuming
+that a process obviously absurd when applied to the disputes of
+individuals ought to determine the judgments of history on nationalities
+or empires.
+
+The immediate and obvious causes which ruined the Western Empire were
+military and political--the shortcomings of a professional army and
+professional administrators. If asked whether these shortcomings were
+symptomatic of evils more generally diffused through other ranks and
+classes of society, we must go deeper in the analysis of facts. No _a
+priori_ answer would be satisfactory.
+
+The beginning and the end of the disaster were successful raids on
+Italy. Alaric and his Visigoths (401-410 A.D.) shattered the prestige
+and destroyed the efficiency of the government which ruled in the name
+of the feeble Honorius. The Ostrogoths under Theodoric destroyed the
+last simulacrum of an imperial power rooted in Italy (489-493 A.D.).
+After Theodoric had vanquished Odoacer, it was clear that the western
+provinces would not again acknowledge an Emperor acclaimed at Ravenna;
+although the chance remained that they might be reconquered and
+reorganised from Constantinople. This chance disappeared when the
+Lombards crossed the Alps (568 A.D.) and descended on the Po valley.
+From first to last Italy was the key to the West. And these successive
+shocks to imperial power in Italy were all due to one cause. All three
+of the invading hordes came from the Danube. The Roman bank of the great
+river was inadequately garrisoned, and a mistaken policy had colonised
+the Danubian provinces with Teutonic peoples, none the less dangerous
+for being the nominal allies (_foederati_) of the Empire. The
+Visigothic raids, which were in fact decisive, succeeded because the
+military defences of the Western Empire were already strained to
+breaking-point; and because the Roman armies were not only outnumbered,
+but also paralysed by the jealousies of rival statesmen, and divided by
+the mutinies of generals aspiring to the purple. The initial disasters
+were irreparable, because the whole machine of Roman officialdom came to
+a standstill when the guiding hand of Ravenna failed. Hitherto dependent
+on Italy, the other provinces were now like limbs amputated from the
+trunk. Here and there a local leader raised the standard of resistance
+to the barbarians. But a large proportion of the provincials made peace
+on the best terms they could obtain. Such are the essential facts.
+
+Evidently the original error of the Romans was the undue extension of
+their power. This was recognised by no less a statesman than Augustus,
+the founder of the Empire; but even in his time it was too late to sound
+a retreat; he could only register a protest against further annexations.
+Embracing the whole of the Mediterranean littoral and a large part of
+the territories to the south, east, and north, the Empire was encumbered
+with three land frontiers of enormous length. Two of these, the European
+and the Asiatic, were perpetual sources of anxiety, and called for
+separate military establishments. That neither might be neglected in the
+interest of the other it was reasonable to put the imperial power in
+commission between two colleagues. Diocletian (284-305 A.D.) was the
+first to adopt this plan; from his time projects of partition were in
+the air and would have been more regularly carried out, had not
+experience shown that partitions led naturally to civil wars between
+rival Emperors. In 395, on the death of the great Theodosius, the
+hazardous expedient was given a last trial. His youthful sons, Arcadius
+and Honorius, were allowed to divide the Empire; but the line of
+partition was drawn with more regard to racial jealousies than military
+considerations. It extended from the middle Danube (near Belgrade) to a
+point near Durazzo on the Adriatic coast, and thence to the Gulf of
+Sidra. East of this line lay the sphere of Greek civilisation, the
+provinces which looked to Alexandria and Antioch and Constantinople as
+their natural capitals. West of it the prevailing language was Latin,
+and the higher classes of society modelled themselves upon the Italian
+aristocracy.
+
+Founded upon a principle which appeals to our modern respect for
+nationality, this partition only gave a legal form to a schism which had
+been long in preparation. But in one respect it was disastrous. The
+defence of the Danube frontier was divided between the two governments;
+and that of the East, rating the impoverished Balkan peninsula as of
+secondary importance, and envisaging the problem from a wholly selfish
+point of view, left unguarded the great highways leading from the Danube
+into Italy. Stilicho, the great general who administered the West in the
+name of Honorius, ventured to meet this danger by intervening in the
+peninsula, and even in the political intrigues of Constantinople. He
+only succeeded in winning a precarious alliance with the Visigoths and
+the permanent ill-will of the Eastern Empire. He was left to deal
+single-handed with the first invaders of Italy; and the estrangement of
+the two imperial courts persisted after his untimely fall. The Western
+Empire, betrayed by the one possible ally, collapsed under the strain
+of simultaneous attacks along the whole line of the European frontier.
+
+It has been alleged that the Roman armies were neither so robust nor so
+well disciplined in the fifth century as they had been in an earlier
+age. However this may be, they could still give a good account of
+themselves when matched on equal terms with the most warlike of the
+barbarians. It was in patriotism and in numbers, rather than in
+professional efficiency, that they failed when put to the supreme test.
+
+The armies were now largely recruited with barbarians, who numbered more
+than half the fighting strength and were esteemed the flower of the
+Roman soldiery. Many of these hirelings showed an open contempt for
+their employers, and sympathised with the enemies whom they were paid to
+fight. Furthermore, each army, whatever its constituent elements, tended
+to be a hereditary caste, with a strong corporate spirit, respecting no
+authority but that of the general. The soldiers had no civic interests;
+but they had standing grievances against the Empire. Any political
+crisis suggested to them the idea of a mutiny led by the general,
+sometimes to obtain arrears of pay and donatives, sometimes to put their
+nominee upon the throne. The evil was an old one, dating from the latter
+days of the Republic, when Marius, in the interests of efficiency, had
+made military service a profession. But it was aggravated under the
+successors of Diocletian, as the barbarian element in the armies
+increased and the Roman element diminished. Its worst effects appeared
+in the years 406-407. The German inroads upon Italy and Gaul were then
+followed by the proclamation of military usurpers in Britain and on the
+Rhine; the Roman West was divided by civil war at the very moment when
+union was supremely important. Hence the strange spectacle of the
+Visigoths, still laden with the spoils of Rome, entering Gaul by
+invitation of the Empire to fight against imperial armies.
+
+The problem of numbers had been earlier recognised, but not more
+adequately met. Diocletian is said to have quadrupled the armies, and in
+the fourth century they were far larger than they had been under Julius
+and Augustus; Constantine had revised the scheme of frontier-defence to
+secure the greatest possible economy of men. Still, under Honorius, we
+find that one vital point could only be defended by withdrawing troops
+from another. The difficulty of increasing the numbers was twofold.
+First, the army was mercenary, and taxation was already strained to the
+point of diminishing returns. Secondly, it was difficult to raise
+recruits among the provincials. The old principle of universal service
+had been abandoned by Valentinian I (364-375); and although compulsory
+levies were still made from certain classes, the Government had thought
+fit to prohibit the enlistment of those who contributed most to
+taxation. Every citizen was legally liable for the defence of local
+strongholds; but the use of arms was so unfamiliar, the idea of military
+service as a national duty was so far forgotten, that Stilicho, when the
+barbarians were actually in Italy, preferred the desperate measure of
+enlisting slaves to the obvious resource of a general call to arms.
+We find ourselves here confronted with a social malady which was more
+than an economic weakness. The Empire was, no doubt, a complex and
+expensive form of government superimposed upon a society which stood at
+a rudimentary stage of economic development. Barbarous methods of
+taxation and corrupt practices among the ruling classes had aggravated
+the burden to such a degree that the municipalities of the provinces
+were bankrupt, and the middle-class capitalist was taxed out of
+existence. For this and other reasons the population of the older
+provinces was stationary or declining. But there was still much wealth
+in the Empire; and the great landowners of the provinces could raise
+considerable armies among their dependants when they saw fit to do so.
+The real evil was a moral evil, the decay of civic virtue.
+
+We do not mean that the ethics of private life had deteriorated from the
+standard of the past. This is incredible when we remember that
+Christianity was now the all but universal religion of the Empire; for
+Christianity, at its worst and weakest, laid more stress upon ethical
+duties, in the narrower sense, than any of the older religions. The
+provincial was a more moral being than the Goth or the Vandal. It is a
+mere superstition that every victorious race is chaste and frugal, just
+and law-abiding; or that ill success in the struggle for existence is a
+symptom of the contrary vices. In many respects the Greeks who submitted
+to Philip and Alexander were morally superior to the victors of Salamis
+and Plataea. Private and political morality may spring from the same
+root; but the one has often flourished where the other has been stunted.
+Perhaps this is only natural. Human nature seldom develops equally in
+all directions. Men who are intensely concerned with the right ordering
+of their relations to neighbours, friends and family, may well forget
+the larger community in which their private circle is contained. The
+Roman provincial had exceptional excuses for remaining indifferent to a
+state which claimed his loyalty, not in the name of nationality or
+religion, but in that of reason and the common good. Loyalty for him
+could only be an intellectual conviction. But, unless he could enter the
+privileged ranks of the army or the higher civil service, he had no
+opportunities of studying, still less of helping to decide, the
+questions of policy and administration with which his welfare was
+closely though indirectly linked. Political ideas only came before the
+private citizen under the garb of literature. The most admired authors
+only taught him to regret republican polities long out of date. The
+antiquarian enthusiasms which he acquired by his studies were in no way
+corrected by the experience of daily life. If a townsman, he was legally
+prohibited from changing his residence and even from travelling about
+the Empire, for fear that he might evade the tax-collector. If a rural
+landowner, he lived in a community which was economically
+self-sufficient, and consequently provincial to the last degree. The
+types of character which developed under such conditions were not
+wanting in amiable or admirable traits. The well-to-do provincial was
+often a scholar, a connoisseur in art and literature, a polished
+letter-writer and conversationalist, a shrewd observer of his little
+world, an exemplary husband and father, courteous to inferiors,
+warm-hearted to his friends. Sometimes he found in religion or
+philosophy an antidote to the pettiness of daily life, and was roused
+into rebellion against the materialism of his equals, the greed and the
+injustice of his rulers. But he despaired of bridging the gulf between
+the Empire, as he saw it, and the ideal commonwealth--City of God or
+Republic of the Universe--which his teachers held up to him as the goal
+of human aspirations. Rather he was inclined, like the just man of
+Plato, to seek the nearest shelter, to veil his head, and to wait
+patiently till the storm of violence and wrong should pass away.
+
+It is hard to condemn such conduct when we remember the appalling
+contrast between the weakness of the individual and the strength of a
+social order coextensive with civilisation itself. But in this spirit of
+reasonable submission to a state of things which appeared fundamentally
+unreasonable, in this conviction that the bad could not be bettered by
+reforms of detail, there was more danger to society than in the crass
+indifference of the selfish and the unreflecting. When the natural
+leaders of society avow that they despair of the future, fatalism
+spreads like a contagious blight among the rank and file, until even
+discontent is numbed into silence. Nor does the evil end here. The
+idealists pay for their contempt of the real, not merely with their
+fortunes and their lives, but, worse still, with their intellectual
+patrimony. Just as a government deteriorates when it is no longer tested
+by continual reference to principles of justice, so a Utopia, however
+magnificent, fades from the mind of the believer when he ceases to
+revise it by comparison with facts, when it is no longer a reply to the
+problems suggested by workaday experience. Life and theory being once
+divorced, the theorist becomes a vendor of commonplaces, and the plain
+man is fortified in his conviction that he must take life as he finds
+it.
+
+This analysis helps us to understand why the Western Empire, on the eve
+of dissolution, had already assumed the appearance of a semi-barbarian
+state. In those districts which had been lately settled with Teutonic
+colonists the phenomenon may be explained as resulting from
+over-sanguine attempts to civilise an intractable stock. But even in the
+heart of the oldest provinces the conditions were little better. Law and
+custom had conspired to sap the ideas and principles that we regard as
+essentially Roman. The civil was now subjected to the military power.
+The authority of the state was impaired by the growth of private
+jurisdictions and defied by the quasi-feudal retinues of the great. For
+civic equality had been substituted an irrational system of
+class-privileges and class-burdens. Law was ceasing to be the orderly
+development of general principles, and was becoming an accumulation of
+ill-considered, inconsistent edicts. So far had decay advanced through
+the negligence of those most vitally concerned that, if Europe was ever
+to learn again the highest lessons which Rome had existed to teach, the
+first step must be to sweep away the hybrid government which still
+claimed allegiance in the name of Rome. The provincials of the fifth
+century possessed the writings in which those lessons were recorded, but
+possessed them only as symbols of an unintelligible past. A long
+training in new schools of thought, under new forms of government, was
+necessary before the European mind could again be brought into touch
+with the old Roman spirit.
+
+The great service that the barbarians rendered was a service of
+destruction. In doing so they prepared the way for a return to the past.
+Their first efforts in reconstruction were also valuable, since the
+difficulty of the work and the clumsiness of the product revived the
+respect of men for the superior skill of Rome. In the end the barbarians
+succeeded in that branch of constructive statesmanship where Rome had
+failed most signally. The new states which they founded were smaller and
+feebler than the Western Empire, but furnished new opportunities for the
+development of individuality, and made it possible to endow citizenship
+with active functions and moral responsibilities. That these states
+laboured under manifold defects was obvious to those who made them and
+lived under them. The ideal of the world-wide Empire, maintaining
+universal peace and the brotherhood of men, continued to haunt the
+imagination of the Middle Ages as a lost possibility. But in this case,
+as so often, what passed for a memory was in truth an aspiration; and
+Europe was advancing towards a higher form of unity than that which had
+been destroyed.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE BARBARIAN KINGDOMS
+
+
+The barbarian states which arose on the ruins of the Western Empire were
+founded, under widely different circumstances of time and place, by
+tribes and federations of tribes drawn from every part of Germany. We
+expect to find, and we do find, infinite varieties of detail in their
+laws, their social distinctions, their methods of government. But from a
+broader point of view they may be grouped in two classes, not according
+to affinities of race, but according to their relations with the social
+order which they had invaded.
+
+[Illustration: The Barbarian Kingdoms and Frankish Empire]
+
+One group of kingdoms was founded under cover of a legal fiction; the
+Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, and the Burgundians claimed to be the allies
+of the Empire. At one time or another they obtained the recognition of
+Constantinople for their settlements. Their kings accepted or usurped
+the titles of imperial administrators, stamped their coins with the
+effigies of the reigning Emperor, dated their proclamations by the names
+of the consuls for the year, and in many other ways flaunted their
+nominal subjection as the legal basis of their actual sovereignty. This
+fiction did not prevent them from governing their new dominions in true
+Teutonic fashion, through royal bailiffs, who administered the state
+demesnes, and military officers (dukes, counts, etc.) who ruled with
+autocratic sway over administrative districts. Nor did the most lenient
+of them hesitate to provide for their armies by wholesale confiscations;
+the ordinary rule was to take from the great proprietor one-third or
+two-thirds of his estate for the benefit of the Teutonic immigrant.
+Further, we have ample evidence that the provincials found existence
+considerably more precarious under the new order. The rich were exposed
+to the malice of the false informer and the venal judge; the cultivators
+of the soil were often oppressed and often reduced from partial freedom
+to absolute slavery. Yet in some respects the invaders of this type were
+tolerant and adaptable. They left to the provincials the civil law of
+Rome, and even codified it to guard against unauthorised innovations;
+the _Lex Romana Burgundionum_ and the Visigothic _Breviarium Alarici_
+are still extant as memorials of this policy. They realised the
+necessity of compelling barbarians and provincials alike to respect
+the elementary rights of person and property; Theodoric the Ostrogoth
+and Gundobad the Burgundian were the authors of new criminal codes, in
+the one case mainly, in the other partially, derived from Roman
+jurisprudence. Such rulers were not content with professing an impartial
+regard for both classes of their subjects; they frequently raised the
+better-class provincials to posts of responsibility and confidence. By a
+singular fatality the chief races of this group had embraced the Arian
+heresy, which was repudiated and detested by their subjects. Yet their
+great statesmen uniformly extended toleration to the rival creed, and
+even patronised the orthodox bishops, by whom they were secretly
+regarded as worse than the lowest of the heathen. This generosity was
+little more than common prudence. Numerically the conquerors were much
+inferior to the provincials; economically they had everything to lose by
+needless ill-treatment of those whom they exploited. But the best of
+them had studied the organisation of the Empire at close quarters,
+sometimes as captains in the imperial service, sometimes as neighbours
+of flourishing provinces in the years preceding the grand catastrophe;
+and knowledge rarely failed to produce in them some respect or even
+enthusiasm for the _Respublica Romana_. "When I was young," said
+King Athaulf the Visigoth, "I desired to obliterate the Roman name and
+to bring under the sway of the Goths all that once belonged to the
+Romans. But I learned better by experience. The Goths were licentious
+barbarians who would obey no laws; and to deprive the commonwealth of
+laws would have been a crime. So for my part I chose the glory of
+restoring the Roman name to its old estate." To such men the ideal of
+the future was a federation of states owing a nominal allegiance to the
+official head of the Empire, but cherishing an effective loyalty to all
+that was best in Roman law and culture.
+
+The second group comprises the kingdoms which were founded in outlying
+provinces or comparatively late in time. The invaders of England, the
+Franks in Northern Gaul, the Alemanni and the Bavarians on the Upper
+Rhine and the Danube, the Lombards in Italy, the Vandals in Africa,
+never came completely under the spell of the past. The Vandals might
+have done so, but for their fanatical devotion to Arianism; for the
+province of Africa, in which they settled, was one of those which Roman
+statesmanship had most completely civilised. The Franks might have
+imitated the Visigoths and the Burgundians, if fortune had laid the
+cradle of their power in the valley of the Loire or the Rhone instead of
+the forests and marshes of the Netherlands. The Lombards and the Saxons
+showed no innate aversion to the ways and works of Rome; but they
+entered upon provinces which had already been impoverished and
+depopulated by the scourge of war. Such races proceeded rapidly with the
+construction of a new social and political order, because the past was a
+sealed book to them. Roman law vanished from England so completely as to
+leave it doubtful whether the Saxons ever came to terms with the
+provincials; it was tolerated but not encouraged by the Franks; it was
+in great measure set aside by the Lombards; it seems to have been
+unknown to the Alemanni and Bavarians. We shall see in the sequel the
+importance of these facts. The future of Europe lay not with the Goths
+or with the Burgundians, but with more ignorant or less impressionable
+races who, rather by good fortune than by choice, escaped the vices in
+missing the lessons of Roman civilisation. The Franks and the Saxons, as
+we find them described by Gregory of Tours and the Venerable Bede, were
+far from resembling the noble savage imagined by Tacitus and other
+idealists. But they were trained for future empire in the hard school of
+a northern climate.
+
+All that concerns us in the history of these kingdoms can be briefly
+stated.
+
+(1) Teutonic England hardly enters into European history before the year
+800. In the fifth and sixth centuries a multitude of small colonies had
+been founded on the soil of Roman Britain by the three tribes of the
+Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who migrated thither from Jutland and
+Schleswig-Holstein. A few considerable kingdoms had emerged from this
+chaos by the time when the English received from Rome their first
+Christian teacher, St. Augustine: Kent, Sussex, and Wessex in the south;
+Mercia and East Anglia in the Midlands; Northumbria between the Humber
+and the Forth. The efforts of every ruler were devoted to the
+establishment of his personal ascendancy over the whole group. Such a
+supremacy was obtained by AEthelbert of Kent, the first royal convert to
+Christianity; by Edwin of Northumbria and his two immediate successors
+in the seventh century; by Offa of Mercia (757-796); and by Egbert of
+Wessex (802-839), whose power foreshadowed the later triumphs of the
+house of Alfred.
+
+(2) Southern Gaul was divided in the fifth century between the Visigoths
+and the Burgundians. The former of these peoples entered the imperial
+service in 410, after the death of Alaric I, who had led them into
+Italy. His successors, Athaulf and Wallia, undertook to pacify Gaul and
+to recover Spain for the rulers of Ravenna; the second of these
+sovereigns was rewarded with a settlement, for himself and his
+followers, between the Loire and the Garonne (419). In the terrible
+battle of Troyes, against Attila the Hun (451), they did good service to
+the Roman cause; but both before and after that event they were chiefly
+occupied in extending their boundaries by force or fraud. At the close
+of the fifth century their power in Gaul extended from the Loire to the
+Pyrenees, from the Atlantic to the Rhone valley, and along the
+Mediterranean seaboard farther east to the Alps. In Spain--which had
+been, since 409, the prey of the Vandals, Alans and Suevi--they found a
+more legitimate field for their ambitions. Between 466 and 484 they
+annexed every part of the peninsula except the north-west corner, which
+remained the last stronghold of their defeated competitors. The
+Burgundians, from less auspicious beginnings, had built up a smaller but
+yet a powerful kingdom. Transplanted by a victorious Roman general to
+Savoy (443) from the lands between the Necker and the Main, they had
+descended into the Rhone basin at the invitation of the provincials, to
+protect that fertile land alike against Teutonic marauders and Roman
+tax-collectors. By the year 500 they ruled from the Durance in the south
+to the headwaters of the Doubs and the Saone in the north, from the Alps
+and the Jura to the sources of the Loire.
+
+(3) Italy was less fortunate than Gaul; in the fifth century she was
+ravaged more persistently, since Rome and Ravenna were the most tempting
+prizes that the West could offer to conquerors seeking a settlement or
+to mere marauders; and for yet another two centuries her soil was in
+dispute between the Eastern Empire and the Teutons. The strategic
+importance of the peninsula, the magic of the name of Rome, the more
+recent tradition that Ravenna was the natural headquarters of imperial
+bureaucracy in the West, were three cogent reasons why the statesmen of
+Constantinople should insist that Italy must be recovered whatever
+outlying provinces of the West were abandoned. For sixty years after the
+deposition of Romulus Augustulus (476) Italy was entirely ruled by
+barbarians; then for more than two hundred years there was an Imperial
+Italy or a Papal Italy continually at feud with an Ostrogothic or a
+Lombard Italy. It would have been better for the Italians if either the
+Ostrogoths or the Lombards had triumphed decisively and at an early
+date.
+
+The Ostrogoths entered Italy from the north-east in 489, under the lead
+of Theodoric, the first and last statesman of their race. They came from
+the Middle Danube, where they had settled, with the leave of the Empire,
+after the death of Attila and the dissolution of his army. They were now
+in search of a more kindly habitation, and brought with them their
+wives, their children, and their household stuff on waggons. Their way
+was barred by Odoacer the Patrician--general of the Italian army and
+King of Italy in all but name. It cost them four years of hard fighting
+to overthrow this self-constituted representative of the Empire. After
+that they had no overt opposition to fear. To the Italians there was
+little difference between Odoacer and Theodoric. The change of rulers
+did not affect their material interests, since Theodoric merely
+appropriated that proportion of the cultivated land (one-third) which
+Odoacer had claimed for his followers. Nor was submission inconsistent
+with the loyalty demanded by the Eastern Empire; since for the moment it
+suited imperial policy to accept the Visigothic King as the successor of
+Odoacer. Theodoric reigned over Italy for thirty-three years (493-526).
+A tolerant and enlightened ruler, he spared no effort to give his rule a
+legal character, and to protect the Italians against oppression. Two
+eminent Romans, Liberius and Cassiodorus, acted successively as his
+confidential advisers and interpreted his policy to their countrymen. No
+attempt was made to fuse the Ostrogoths with the Italians. The invaders
+remained, an army quartered on the soil, subject for most purposes to
+their own law. But the law of the Italians was similarly respected;
+Theodoric applied the Roman law of crime impartially to both races; and
+he rigourously interdicted the prosecution of private wars and feuds.
+Unfortunately his subordinates were less scrupulous than himself. The
+Ostrogothic soldiery maintained the national character for lawlessness;
+the royal officers and judges were corrupt; men of means were harassed
+by blackmailers and false informers; the poor and helpless were
+frequently enslaved by force or fraud. The Italians could not forgive
+the Arian tenets of their new rulers, even though the orthodox were
+tolerated and protected. Naturally the clergy and the remnants of the
+Roman aristocracy sighed for an imperial restoration. And Theodoric,
+rightly or wrongly, came to suspect them all of treason. In his later
+years he meted out a terrible and barbarous justice to the supposed
+authors of conspiracy--notably to the Senator Boethius, who was beaten
+to death with clubs after a long period of rigourous imprisonment.
+Boethius has vindicated his own fair name, and blackened for ever that
+of Theodoric, by his immortal treatise, the _Consolation of Philosophy_,
+composed in hourly expectation of death. A Christian it would seem, but
+certainly nurtured on the precepts of Plato and the Stoics, Boethius
+turned in his extremity to these teachers for reassurance on the doubts
+which must always afflict the just man enmeshed in undeserved
+misfortune. Himself a philosopher only in his sublime optimism and his
+resolve to treat the inevitable as immaterial, Boethius rivets the
+attention by his absolute honesty. His book, revered in the Middle Ages
+as all but inspired, will be read with interest and sympathy so long as
+honest men are vexed by human oppression and the dispensations of a
+seemingly capricious destiny. But the footprints of the Ostrogoths are
+effaced from the soil of Italy; the name of Theodoric is scantily
+commemorated by some mosaics and a rifled mausoleum at Ravenna. Here at
+least Time has done justice in the end; from all that age of violent
+deeds and half-sincere ideals nothing has passed into the spiritual
+heritage of mankind but the communings of one undaunted sufferer with
+his soul and God.
+
+Theodoric died in 526, bequeathing his crown to his only daughter's son.
+Eight years afterwards the boy king, worn out by premature excess, was
+laid in the grave; his mother was murdered to clear the path of an
+ambitious kinsman; and, while the succession was still in doubt, the
+Emperor Justinian launched upon Italy the still invincible armies of the
+Empire, led by Belisarius, the greatest general of the time and already
+famous as the deliverer of Africa from the Vandals (536). The intrigues
+of his court rivals, rather than the resources of the divided
+Ostrogoths, robbed Belisarius of a decisive victory, and prolonged the
+struggle for years after he had been superseded. But in 553 the last
+embers of resistance were quenched in blood. Italy, devastated and
+depopulated, was reorganised as an imperial province with an elaborate
+hierarchy of civil and military officials. The change was welcome to the
+orthodox clergy, the more so because Justinian gave large powers in
+local administration to their bishops. Of outward pomp there was enough
+to gild corruption and inefficiency with a deceptive splendour; but in
+fact the restored Empire was little more civilised, in the true sense of
+the word, than the barbarian states of the past and future. Upon the
+Italians the Emperor conferred the boon of his famous _Corpus Juris_, a
+compendium of that legal wisdom which constitutes the best title of Rome
+to the world's gratitude. For the future it was momentous that Italy
+learned, at this early date, to regard the _Corpus_ as the perfection of
+legal wisdom. Through the Italian schools of later times (Ravenna,
+Bologna, etc.) the _Corpus_ has influenced the law of every European
+state and has dictated the principles of scientific jurisprudence. But
+in the sixth century good laws availed nothing for want of good
+government.
+
+In 568, only fifteen years after the restoration, the Lombards descended
+upon Italy from the Middle Danube, following the track of Theodoric and
+inspirited by the fame of his success. A few years made them masters of
+the North Italian plain still known as Lombardy. Within three-quarters
+of a century they had demonstrated the hollowness of the Byzantine
+power. The power of their kings, whose capital was Pavia, extended on
+the one side into Liguria and Tuscany, on the other into Emilia and
+Friuli; far away in the south, behind the line of fortresses which
+linked Rome with Ravenna, the semi-independent dukes of Spoleto and
+Benevento were masters of the land on both sides of the Apennines,
+excepting Naples and the toe of the Bruttian peninsula. Apart from these
+districts there remained in the imperial allegiance only the fisher-folk
+of the Venetian lagoons and the lands which afterwards were to be known
+as the Papal States. What the Byzantines achieved by the maintenance of
+this precarious foothold was nothing less than the political disruption
+of Italy. The Lombard duchies of the south were kept separate from the
+parent state; with the result that their ruins were built long
+afterwards into the fabric of a South Italian monarchy which was
+irreconcilably hostile to the political heirs of the Lombard kings. In
+many respects the Lombards showed capacity for governing a subject
+population. They adopted the Latin language; they forsook Arianism for
+Catholicism; they accommodated themselves to city life; they were
+liberal patrons of Italian art and industry. Although they introduced a
+strictly Teutonic form of administration, their rule compared not
+unfavourably with the makeshift methods of Byzantine statesmanship. In
+Imperial Italy we see the strange spectacle of a military despotism
+tempered by the usurped privileges and jurisdictions of the great
+proprietors, or by the ill-defined temporal pretensions of the bishops.
+In Lombard Italy matters were at least no worse. The Lombards were
+aliens; but so were the Greeks. The Greeks treated the Italians as
+inferiors. But the Lombards intermarried freely with their subjects, and
+the Lombard legislators (Rotharis, Luitprand) recognised no invidious
+privileges of race.
+
+(4) Northern Gaul remains to be considered. It was here that the
+Frankish monarchy developed; and we deal last with the Franks because
+they were destined to harvest the chief fruits of barbarian conquest and
+colonisation. By the close of the eighth century Africa, Spain, and
+Britain were the only western provinces of the Empire in which they had
+failed to establish themselves as the sole or the dominant power; and
+moreover they had penetrated by that time farther into Central Europe
+than any Roman statesman, since Tiberius, had extended his schemes of
+conquest. The expansion of the Franks was a slow process, interrupted by
+periods of stagnation or relapse; and we can only trace it in the barest
+outline.
+
+Known from an early date to the Romans as vagrant marauders, the Franks
+had been heavily chastised by most of the soldier emperors from Probus
+to Julian. Some of them were forcibly settled as serf-colonists on the
+left bank of the Rhine; others (the _Salian_ Franks) appropriated
+to themselves a large part of Batavia, the marsh country at the mouths
+of the Scheldt and Rhine; a third group (the _Ripuarians_) occupied
+the lands between the Rhine and the Meuse, in the neighbourhood of Koln
+and Bonn. The Salians and Ripuarians counted as allies (_foederati_) of
+the Empire, at least from the time of Aetius; under whom, like the
+Visigoths, they fought against the Huns at Troyes (451). Their
+aggressions were checked on the West by the Roman governors of the
+country lying between the Somme and the Loire; and their power
+was impaired by the partition of the Salian people among a swarm of
+petty kings. But in 481, with the accession of Clovis to the throne of
+Tournai, there began a period of consolidation and advance. In 486
+Clovis overthrew the Roman governor Syagrius and usurped his power. In
+496 he annexed the purely Teutonic principality which the Alemanni had
+recently established in the country now known as Suabia. This victory
+was the occasion of his conversion to Christianity. The legend goes
+that, in the crisis of the final battle, Clovis appealed to the God of
+his pious wife: "I have called on my gods and they have forsaken me. To
+Thee I turn, in Thee will I believe, if Thou wilt deliver me." He kept
+his word, and was baptised by St. Remi, the Bishop of Rheims, thus
+becoming a member of the orthodox communion, and the hope of all the
+Gallic clergy, who had hitherto submitted with an ill grace to the
+heretical rulers of the Visigoths and the Burgundians. A crafty and
+ambitious savage, the King of Tournai quickly realised the advantage of
+alliance with the native Church. In the year 500 he turned upon the
+Burgundians in the hope of making them his tributaries. He failed in his
+object, for the Burgundian King made a timely feint of conversion to
+orthodoxy and otherwise conciliated the Gallo-Roman population. But over
+Alaric II the Visigoth, who had been so impolitic as to persecute
+orthodox bishops, the Franks secured an easy and dramatic triumph. "It
+irks me," said Clovis to his army, "that these Arians should rule in
+Gaul." The Aquitanians welcomed him as a Crusader; Alaric, after a
+single defeat, took refuge in his Spanish dominions, where he was left
+to rule in peace. At one stroke the power of the Franks had advanced
+from the Loire to the Pyrenees (507). The latter days of Clovis were
+prosperously occupied in exterminating rival Frankish dynasties and the
+more dangerous of his own kindred. He died, after a reign of thirty
+years, in the odour of sanctity: "God increased his kingdom every day,
+because he walked with an upright heart and did what was pleasing in the
+eyes of God." He was buried in the Gallo-Roman part of his dominions, at
+Paris, which he had chosen as his capital. The province of Syagrius,
+later known as Neustria or Western Francia, was the natural centre of
+the Frankish state, nor was Clovis indifferent to the traditions and the
+luxury of an older civilisation. In Aquitaine he posed as the
+representative of the Empire, and he rode through the streets of Tours
+in the purple robe of a consul, which he had received from the Emperor
+Anastasius. The hope at Constantinople was that he would treat Theodoric
+the Ostrogoth as he had already treated Alaric; this was the first of
+many occasions on which the network of imperial diplomacy was woven
+round a Frankish king. Church and Empire conspired to inflame the
+ambitions and enlarge the schemes of Merovingian and Carolingian
+conquerors.
+
+But the Franks, more faithfully than any of their rivals, held to the
+barbarian usage of dividing a kingdom, in the manner of a family estate,
+equally between the sons of a dead sovereign. Logically pursued this
+custom of inheritance would have led to utter disintegration, such as
+Germany exhibited in the fourteenth century. Among the Franks a
+partition was followed, as a matter of course, by fratricidal conflicts
+and consequent reunion of the kingdom in the hands of the ultimate
+survivor; but even so the energies of the nation were squandered upon
+civil wars. The descendants of Clovis did little to augment the realm
+that he bequeathed to them; this little was done in the fifty years
+following his death. The Burgundians, Bavarians and Thuringians were
+subdued; Provence was bought from the Ostrogoths at the price of armed
+support against Justinian; the Saxons were compelled to promise tribute.
+From 561 to 688 the power and the morale of the Franks steadily
+declined. Dagobert I (628-638), the most renowned of the Merovingians
+after Clovis, could only chastise rebels and strengthen the defences of
+the eastern frontier. He released the Saxons from tribute; he was unable
+to prevent an adventurer of his own race, the merchant Samo, from
+organising the Slavs of Bohemia and the neighbouring lands in a powerful
+and aggressive federation. Already in his time the East Franks
+(Austrasians) refused to be governed from Neustria, and insisted that
+the son of Dagobert should be their king. After Dagobert the three
+kingdoms of Neustria, Austrasia and Burgundy asserted their right to
+separate administrations, even when subject to one king.
+
+In each of these divisions the effective ruler was the Mayor of the
+Palace, a viceroy who kept his sovereign in perpetual tutelage. The
+later Merovingians were feeble puppets, produced before their subjects
+on occasions of state, but at other times relegated to honourable
+seclusion on one of their estates. The history of the Franks from 638 to
+719 is that of conflicts between the great families of Neustria and
+Austrasia for the position of sole Mayor. At length unity was restored
+by the triumph of the Austrasian Charles Martel. His father had gained
+the same position, but it was left for the son to sweep away the last
+remaining competitors.
+
+Charles Martel is the true founder of the Carolingian house, although
+his ancestors had long played a conspicuous part in Austrasian and
+national politics. He was not the inventor of feudalism, but was the
+first to see the possibility of basing royal power on the support of
+vassals pledged to support their lord, in every quarrel, with life and
+limb and earthly substance. To provide his vassals with fiefs he
+stripped the churches of many rich estates. But he atoned for the
+sacrilege upon the memorable field of Poitiers. In 711 the Arabs, having
+wrested northern Africa from the Byzantine Empire, entered Spain and
+overthrew Roderic, the last King of the Visigoths. With his death the
+cause of his nation collapsed. Though the Visigoths had long since
+accepted the orthodox creed and were in close alliance with the Spanish
+bishops, they were detested by the provincials, whom they had reduced to
+serfdom and brutally oppressed. Within ten years the soldiers of the
+Caliph were masters of Spain and turned their attention to southern
+Gaul.
+
+The Frankish Duke of Aquitaine could neither protect his duchy nor
+obtain a lasting treaty. In the last extremity he turned to the Mayor of
+the Palace, whom he had hitherto regarded as an enemy. The appeal was
+answered; and Charles with a great Frankish host confronted the Arabs
+under the walls of Poitiers. For seven days neither side would make the
+first move; on the eighth the infidels attacked. The Frankish host was
+composed of infantry protected by mail-shirts and shields; against their
+close-locked lines, which resembled iron walls, the Arabs dashed
+themselves in vain. When the attack had been repelled in disorder, the
+Franks advanced, bearing down resistance by sheer weight and strength.
+The Emir Abderrahman fell on the field, and then night put an end to the
+conflict. Both armies camped on the field; but next morning the Arabs
+had vanished in full retreat for the Pyrenees (Oct. 732). The flood of
+Islam had received the first check; though Spain was not to be recovered
+by the Franks, they were held to have saved northern Europe. Modern
+criticism has remarked that the internal dissensions of Moslem Spain did
+better service than this victory to the cause of Christendom; that the
+Arabs continued to hold Septimania and sent raids into Provence. But for
+contemporaries there was no question that the Franks had established a
+claim to the special gratitude of the Church, and Charles to his
+anomalous position as an uncrowned King. The Mayor of the Palace was
+fully alive to the value of ecclesiastical support. He lent his support
+to the work of the English missionaries Willibrord and Boniface among
+the unconverted German tribes (Frisians, Hessians, Thuringians) over
+whom he claimed supremacy. He permitted Boniface to enrol himself as the
+servant of the Holy See. It is true that he would not form a political
+alliance with the Roman Church against the Lombards. Northern wars
+absorbed him; wars with the Frisians, the Saxons, the rebellious
+Bavarians, Alemannians, and Aquitanians. But from alliance with the
+Church to alliance with Rome was a natural step for his successors.
+Shortly before his death (741) he divided his power between his sons
+Carlmann and Pepin, giving Austrasia to the one, Neustria to the other.
+But Carlmann abdicated to become a monk (747) and Pepin his junior was
+left to continue the work of their father single-handed. Both brothers
+employed Boniface to reorganise and reform the clergy of their
+dominions; Pepin allowed the saint to take from all the Frankish bishops
+an oath of subjection to the Holy See; and accepted him as Archbishop of
+Mainz and primate of the German church. Three years later the Mayor
+obtained the permission of Pope Zacharias to depose the last of the
+Merovingian puppet-kings and to assume the regal style; the Pope justly
+recommending that he should have the title to whom the power belonged
+(751). So ended the line of Clovis, and with it the barbarian period of
+Frankish history. For the next sixty years the history of Europe is that
+of Carolingian conquests and essays in political reconstruction.
+
+And now the growing connection with the Papacy acquired a new character.
+Since the beginning of the eighth century the Eastern Empire had
+forfeited the last claim to Italian allegiance by embracing the
+Iconoclastic heresy, a protest at once belated and premature against the
+growing materialism and polytheism of Catholic Christianity. Pope and
+Lombards made common cause to protect the images in imperial Italy.
+Gregory III excommunicated the iconoclasts (731); the Lombard King
+Aistulf seized Ravenna, the last important stronghold of the Byzantines
+in the peninsula (751). Too late the Papacy realised that the orthodox
+Lombard was a greater menace than the Greek heretic. Aistulf regarded
+Rome, in common with the other territories of the Empire, as his
+rightful spoil. For the first time the issue was raised between secular
+statesmanship scheming for Italian unity and a Roman bishop claiming
+sovereign power as the historical and indispensable adjunct of his
+office. Pope Stephen II visited the Frankish court to urge, not in vain,
+the claims of religion and of gratitude. By two raids across the Alps
+Pepin forced the Lombard to withdraw the claim on Rome, and furthermore
+to restore what had been conquered from the Empire. These territories,
+lying in Romagna and the Marches, the Frankish King conferred on the
+Pope, as the legitimate representative of imperial power (756). Pepin's
+Donation, made in defiance of Byzantine protests, greatly extended the
+temporal power which the predecessors of Stephen had long exercised in
+Rome and the neighbourhood. A shrewd expedient for crippling the most
+formidable rival of the Franks, it was to be the rock on which ideals
+then undreamed of were to founder. For it was the temporal power which
+provoked the last and mortal struggle of the Holy Roman Empire with the
+Papacy, which presented the most stubborn obstacle to the leaders of the
+_Risorgimento_.
+
+Like his father, Pepin laboured hard to knit together the conquests of
+the early Merovingians, but without the same success. He expelled the
+Arabs from Narbonne; he recovered the duchy of Aquitaine and suppressed
+the ducal dynasty after eight hard-fought campaigns. But neither from
+the Saxons nor from the Bavarians could he win effective recognition of
+his suzerainty. What he had achieved in Aquitaine was seriously
+endangered when, on his deathbed, he followed the tradition of dividing
+his realm between his sons Carloman and Charles (768). Fortunately
+Charles, though harassed by the intrigues of his incompetent senior,
+weathered the storm of a new Aquitanian rising; he saw Carloman sink
+unlamented into an early grave (771) and easily obtained recognition as
+sole king. Then indeed he stood in a position singularly favourable for
+prosecuting a policy which should embrace and transcend the ambitions of
+his ancestors. Heir to a power extending from the Atlantic to the
+Bohemian border in the one direction, in the other from the North Sea
+and the Channel to the Alps and Pyrenees; the hereditary patron of the
+Roman Church; ruler of a hierarchy which had definitely accepted the
+ideal of a Christian Republic and desired to see Christian unity
+enforced by the sword of the secular power; lord of a military caste of
+vassals filled with the pride and lust of conquest; he had at his
+disposal the resources and supporters sufficient to make him, what
+Theodoric had idly dreamed of becoming, the supreme lord of the Teutonic
+peoples, the lieutenant of the Empire in all the western provinces. It
+was no ordinary man to whom this opportunity fell. Imperfectly educated,
+even for his age, but of ready wit and unbounded curiosity; a general
+whose iron will and superhuman energy seldom failed in leading his
+soldiers through difficulties and reverses to ultimate victory; a
+dreamer whose imagination kindled whenever he came into contact with the
+great ideas, Christian or pagan, of an older world; a practical
+statesman whose innate love of order and respect for justice were
+coupled with a gift for organisation and the power of extracting their
+best work from his subordinates, it is not for any want of natural
+qualifications that his claim to rank with the great world-heroes can be
+challenged. The shortcomings of his work are merely those of the race
+and the age to which he belonged. The highest statesmanship is only
+possible when the statesman has at his disposal the accumulated
+experience and the specialised capacity of a civilisation which is old
+and at the same time vigorous.
+
+The policy of Charles in his period of sole rule (771-814) is
+Janus-headed; it looks forward and looks back. A true Austrasian, he is
+faithful to the old Frankish ideal of military conquest; but he gives it
+a new meaning, and besides fulfilling the projects of his predecessors
+goes beyond the horizon of their most ambitious enterprises. In his
+friendship for the Pope, in his care for ecclesiastical reform, he is
+his father's son; but the relations of the son with the Church have a
+new purpose and involve more than one breach with the past. His
+administration is largely guided by the traditional standard of royal
+duty; he is a notable steward of his demesnes; he is the reliever of the
+poor, the refuge of the defenceless, the champion of justice. But he is
+also a far-sighted reformer adapting old administrative methods to the
+requirements of a new political fabric. In fact, to epitomise all these
+antitheses in one, he is the heir of an old barbarian monarchy and also
+the founder of a new Empire.
+
+The story of his conquests reads like the epitome of a lost romance--so
+varied are the incidents, so jejune the details afforded by contemporary
+sources.
+
+(1) In 773 he crossed the Alps, at the prayer of Pope Hadrian, because
+the Lombard King Didier had seized some cities comprised in Pepin's
+Donation and was even threatening Rome. Pavia was starved into
+surrender, Didier relegated to a monastery; Charles annexed the whole of
+Lombard territory except Spoleto (which submitted to the Pope) and
+Benevento. He assumed the title of King of the Lombards; but beyond
+garrisoning a few towns and appointing a few Frankish counts made no
+attempt to displace Lombard officials or alter the Lombard modes of
+government. He visited Hadrian at Rome, renewed the Donation of Pepin,
+and concluded a pact of eternal friendship with the Papacy.
+
+(2) Then followed the period of the Saxon wars, as much a crusade
+against German heathenism as the vindication of old and dubious claims
+to suzerainty. The first campaign against the Saxons had taken place in
+772; their final submission was not made till 785. The Saxons were still
+in that stage of political development which Tacitus describes in his
+_Germania_, ruled by petty chiefs who set up a war-leader when
+there was need for common action, otherwise united only by racial
+sentiment and the cult of a tribal deity. But they were a warlike race,
+and found in this crisis a leader of genius, the famous Widukind. At
+last he set his followers the example of embracing Christianity. Charles
+acted as sponsor at his baptism, and Widukind became a loyal subject of
+his spiritual father. In a few years the whole of Saxony was dotted with
+mission churches; in a few generations the Saxons were conspicuous for
+their loyalty to the faith, and the Saxon bishops counted among the
+wealthiest and most influential of ecclesiastical princes. It was
+through Saxon rulers, descended from Widukind, that the imperial policy
+of Charles was revived in the tenth century and the imperial diadem
+appropriated by the German nation. Yet the Saxons sturdily adhered to
+their national laws and language; their obstinate refusal to be ruled by
+other races was a stumbling-block to the most masterful sovereigns that
+medieval Germany produced.
+
+(3) During the years 786-787 Charles was threatened with a conspiracy
+against his power in Italy. Tassilo, the vassal Duke of Bavaria, aspired
+to independence and was induced by his wife, a daughter of King Didier,
+to make common cause with her nation; Areghis, the Lombard ruler of
+Benevento, had emphasised his independence by assuming the style and
+crown of a king. The two princes made common cause, but were detected
+before their plans had matured, and successively terrified into
+submission by the appearance of overwhelming armies on their borders.
+
+The Lombard duchy was no permanent acquisition for the Franks, but that
+of Bavaria was suppressed, in consequence of a second plot (788). The
+addition of this large and wealthy province made the eastern half of the
+Frankish kingdom practically coextensive with medieval Germany, and
+almost equal in importance to the Romanised provinces of Gaul.
+
+(4) As a natural precaution for the defence of Bavaria, Charles then
+turned against the Avars, a race akin to the Huns, who had settled on
+the middle Danube after the departure of the Lombards for Italy. The
+Avars invaded Bavaria and Friuli as allies of Tassilo (788); they were
+punished by three campaigns of extirpation (791-796), which broke their
+power and spared only a miserable remnant of their people. Their land
+was annexed but not settled; for Germany offered a more tempting field
+to the Frankish pioneers. Indeed, some of the surviving Avars were
+planted in the Ostmark (Austria), which Charles established as an
+outpost of Bavaria, to keep watch upon the Slavs.
+
+(5) To Spain the Emperor first turned his attention in 777, when he was
+invited by the discontented emirs on the north of the Ebro to free them
+from the Caliph of Cordova. The next year saw his abortive march through
+the pass of Roncesvalles to the walls of Saragossa--an expedition
+immortalised in the _Chanson de Roland_, the earliest and most famous
+epic of the Charlemagne cycle, but fabulous from first to last, except
+in recording the fact that there was a certain Roland (warden of the
+Breton Mark) who fell in the course of the Frankish retreat. More
+substantial work was done in Spain during the last years of the reign.
+Navarre declared for the Franks and Christianity; the eldest son of
+Charles captured Tortosa at the mouth of the Ebro (811), and founded the
+Spanish Mark.
+
+This lengthy catalogue only accounts for the more important of the wars
+in which Charles and his lieutenants were engaged. We must imagine, to
+complete the picture, a background of minor conflicts within and without
+the Empire--against the Slavs, the Danes, the Greeks, the Bretons, the
+Arabs, the Lombards of Benevento. These crowded years of war leave the
+Frankish Empire established as the one great power west of the Elbe and
+Adriatic. It did not include the Scandinavian lands or British Isles;
+the Franks were never masters of the northern seas. It had failed to
+expel the Arabs and Byzantines from the western Mediterranean; Spain,
+Sicily, even parts of Italy remain unconquered. Of recovering North
+Africa there could be no question. Still in magnitude the Frankish realm
+was a worthy successor of the Western Empire. On Christmas Day, 800,
+Charles was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III, in St.
+Peter's basilica at Rome; and his subjects vainly imagined that, by this
+dramatic ceremony, the clock of history had been put back four hundred
+years. Though the Age of the Barbarians had been ended by the greatest
+of them, the era which he inaugurated was an era not of revival but of
+new development.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE EMPIRE AND THE NEW MONARCHIES (800-1000 A.D.)
+
+
+The imperial policy of Charles the Great constitutes a preface to the
+history of the later Middle Ages. He holds the balance between nascent
+forces which are to distract the future by their conflicts. He pays
+impartial homage to ideas which statesmen less imperious or more
+critical will afterwards regard as irreconcilable. He is at one and the
+same time an autocrat, the head of a ruling aristocracy, and a popular
+ruler who solicits the co-operation of primary assemblies. From the
+highest to the lowest his subjects must acknowledge their unconditional
+and immediate allegiance to his person; yet he tolerates the existence
+of tribal duchies, he revives the Lombard kingdom, and creates that of
+Aquitaine, as appanages for his younger sons. He fosters the growth of
+territorial feudalism, and lends the sanction of royal authority to the
+claims of the lord upon his vassal; but simultaneously he contrives
+expedients for controlling feudalism and stifling its natural
+development. He exalts the Church, and he enslaves her. He is there to
+do the will of God as expounded by the clergy; but he disposes of sees
+and abbacies like vacant fiefs, he dictates to the Pope, he interferes
+with the liturgy, he claims a voice in the definition of dogma and the
+wording of the creed. Finally, and most striking, there is the
+antithesis between the two aspects of his power, the monarchical and the
+imperial.
+
+The Franks left to Europe the legacy of two political conceptions. They
+perfected the system of barbarian royalty; they outlined the ideal of a
+power which should transcend royalty and embrace in one commonwealth all
+the Catholic kingdoms of the West. On the one hand they supplied a model
+to be imitated by an Egbert, a Henry the Fowler, a Hugh Capet. On the
+other hand they inspired the wider aims of the Ottos and the
+Hohenstauffen. It is therefore worth our while to understand what a
+Carolingian king was, and what a Carolingian Emperor hoped to be.
+
+The king's power was based upon three supports: the general allegiance
+of his subjects, the more personal obligations of the vassals who were
+in his _mund_, the services and customs of the tenants on the royal
+demesne. It is from these last that he derives his most substantial
+revenue. He is the greatest landowner of his realm, until in the ninth
+century he dissipates his patrimony by grants of hereditary
+_beneficia_. The farming of the demesnes is an important branch of
+the public service; they are managed by bailiffs, who work under rules
+minutely elaborated by the king in the form of edicts, and who render
+their accounts to a minister of state, the Seneschal or steward of the
+household. The king is further the fountain of justice, the guardian of
+public order, the protector of peaceful industry and commerce.
+Accordingly he derives large profits from the fines of the law-courts,
+the forfeitures of criminals, the tolls of highways and markets, the
+customs levied at seaports and at frontier towns. In the exercise and
+exploitation of his prerogatives he is assisted by functionaries of whom
+most are household officers: the Chamberlain who keeps the royal hoard;
+the Constable (_comes stabuli_) who marshals the host; the Seneschal, or
+High Steward, who controls the demesnes; the Protonotary, by whose staff
+the royal letters and all documents of state are written out; the
+Arch-chaplain, to whom ecclesiastical suitors bring their petitions and
+complaints. Finally there are the Counts of the Palace, appointed from
+the chief races of the realm, who exercise the king's appellate
+jurisdiction in secular cases. But the king is bound by custom to govern
+with the counsel and consent of his great men--a Germanic tradition
+which no after growth of respect for Roman absolutism can destroy. A
+select body of influential nobles deliberates with the king on all
+questions of national importance. Their decisions are submitted
+for approval to a more general assembly (Mayfield), held annually in the
+spring or summer. By this assembly the military expedition of the year
+is discussed and sanctioned; here also are promulgated royal edicts
+(_capitula_).
+
+The ordinary freeman, upon whom falls the ultimate burden of military
+service, has no voice in the debates of the Mayfield; but ordinances
+affecting the old customary laws of the several races which make up the
+kingdom (Salians, Ripuarians, Saxons, etc.) do not take effect till they
+have been accepted by popular assemblies in the provinces which they
+concern. And such revisions are infrequent. The royal prerogative in
+legislation is limited by a popular prejudice, which regards the
+customary law as sacred and immutable. The Capitularies are chiefly
+administrative ordinances; the "law of the land," which is the same
+everywhere and for all persons, is an ideal to be realised in England
+alone of medieval states. Elsewhere the king's law is a supplement, a
+postscript; the privilege of the free man is to live under the law of
+his province, his lord's fief or his free city.
+
+In local administration the king relies, outside the tribal duchies, on
+counts whose districts are subdivisions of the old national provinces.
+The count, often a hereditary official, is a royal deputy for all
+purposes, military and civil. He collects the royal dues, leads the free
+men to the host, maintains the peace and administers justice. His
+tribunal is the old Germanic hundred-court, in which the free suitors
+ought to be the judges; but the suitors for this purpose are represented
+by a few doomsmen (_scabini_) chosen for their respectability and
+knowledge of the law. They are an ineffectual check upon the count, and
+it is a standing difficulty to find ways and means of compelling these
+local viceroys to act with common honesty. For this purpose the king
+annually appoints itinerant inspectors (_missi dominici_); in twos
+and threes they are dispatched on circuit to acquaint the count with
+royal instructions, to promulgate new legislation, and above all to
+receive and adjudicate upon the complaints of all who are oppressed. A
+comparatively late expedient, and the first part of the Carolingian
+system to disappear, these tours of inspection were the one safeguard
+against local misgovernment and the feudalising of official power. When
+they ceased, the Carolingian county too often became a hereditary fief
+exploited for the lord's sole benefit.
+
+The Empire was not intended to supersede this system of royal
+government; kings no less than emperors were regarded as holding a
+definite rank and office in the Christian commonwealth. No traditions of
+imperial bureaucracy, except in a debased and orientalised form, were
+accessible to Charles the Great. In Gaul and Italy he had subjects who
+lived under a corrupt and mutilated Roman Law; but he was unacquainted
+with the scientific principles of the great jurists whose writings were
+the highest achievements of the Roman genius. To the best minds of the
+eighth century the Roman Empire appeared, not as to an Athaulf or a
+Theodoric, a masterpiece of human statesmanship, but rather a divine
+institution, providentially created before the birth of Christ to school
+the nations for the universal domination of His Church. The model of the
+Carolingian Emperors was not Augustus but Constantine the Great, the
+Most Christian ruler who made it his first business to protect the
+Church against heretic and heathen, to endow her with riches, to enforce
+her legislation. However his relation to the Pope might be conceived,
+the Emperor held his office as the first servant of the Church. What
+then were his practical duties? According to some he was pledged to
+restore the material unity of Christendom and to subdue all heathen
+peoples. This childlike ideal of his office no emperor could put into
+practice. Charles the Great waged no important wars after his
+coronation; he did not scruple to make peace with the Eastern Empire or
+even to exchange courtesies with Haroun al Rashid, the Caliph of Bagdad.
+He held, and the sanest of his counsellors agreed, that his first duty
+was to protect, unite and reform the societies over which the Church
+already exercised a nominal dominion. To conquer other Christian rulers
+was no more to be expected of him than that he should surrender his own
+royal prerogative; though it was desirable that they should do homage to
+him as the earthly representative of spiritual unity.
+
+Within his own realms the imperial office was to make a difference in
+the spirit rather than the forms of government. The Empire raised to a
+higher power the dignity and the responsibilities which belonged to him
+as a king. He conceived himself bound to provide more carefully than
+ever for the maintenance of ecclesiastical and the betterment of secular
+law. His subjects were to realise that through their allegiance to him
+they were God's subjects, bound to observe the law of God as a part of
+the law of the Empire; he on his side was to be, to the best of his
+power, a moral censor, an educator, a religious missionary, a protector
+of the clergy, a defender of the faith.
+
+When we turn from this noble dream to follow the history of the
+Carolingian Empire, the contrast between the real and the ideal is
+almost grotesque. Within a generation the Frankish realm is partitioned
+after the Merovingian fashion; all that remains as a guarantee of unity
+is the imperial title attached to one of several kingdoms, and the
+theory that the kings are linked in fraternal concord for the defence of
+Church and State against all enemies. Contemporaries laid the blame on
+the weakness of Lewis the Pious and the ambition of his sons. These
+causes undoubtedly accelerated the process of disruption; but others
+more impersonal and more gradual in their operation were at work below
+the surface of events.
+
+(1) The first was the dawning of nationality. North of the Alps the
+subjects of the Empire fell into a Germanic group, lying chiefly east of
+the Rhine, and a Romance group nearly co-extensive with the modern
+France; Italy was sharply severed from both by geography, by differences
+of race and language, and by political tradition. In the Treaty of
+Verdun (843), which begins the process of political disintegration,
+these natural divisions are only half respected. The kingdom of the East
+Franks is wholly Germanic; that of the West Franks contains the
+Gallo-Roman provinces subdued by Clovis; but between them lies the
+anomalous Middle Kingdom, the portion of the titular Emperor, in which
+are united Italy, Provence, Burgundy, the valley of the Moselle and a
+large part of the Netherlands. In each re-distribution of territories
+among Carolingian princes the lines of partition approximate more
+closely to the boundaries of modern nations. Burgundy and Provence alone
+remain, after the year 888, as memorials of the Middle Kingdom. Italy
+becomes an independent state; the northern provinces (Lotharingia) are
+disputed between the East Franks and the West Franks. And already the
+rulers of the new states are identifying themselves with national
+sentiments and aspirations; it is not without reason that a later age
+has given to Lewis, the first King of the East Franks, the title of "the
+German."
+
+(2) But, in the minds of ordinary men, national sentiment was little
+more than a contempt for those of alien race and speech. The
+nationalities were ready enough to separate one from the other; having
+done so, they split asunder into tribal or feudal groups. Thus in
+Germany the Saxons, Suabians, Bavarians, Thuringians, Franconians group
+themselves round provincial chieftains. West of the Rhine, where Roman
+rule had long since weakened tribal feeling, we can see a broad
+distinction between the North and South of Gaul, but in each half of the
+country the feudal principle is the dominating force; from the middle of
+the ninth century we remark the formation of those arbitrarily divided
+fiefs which play so large a part in French history. But of the feudal
+movement we shall speak elsewhere.
+
+(3) Last but not least we must allow for the disappearance of that moral
+enthusiasm which Charles the Great had evoked in his subjects. His
+conception of the Empire was too large for narrow minds. They could see
+no reason in it. They were acutely alive to the sacrifices which it
+demanded in the present, and sceptical as to the advantages which it
+promised in the future. The idea of working for posterity does not
+naturally occur to half-civilised peoples; they live from hand to mouth,
+and are continually absorbed in the difficulties of the moment; they
+believe in the supremacy of chance or fate or providence, and speak of
+human forethought as presumptuous or merely futile. The imperial
+programme was cherished and publicly defended by a little clique of
+clerical statesmen; but they did not succeed in making many converts.
+When the last of the Carolingian Emperors was deposed (887), there were
+cries of lamentation from ecclesiastics. But among lay statesmen not a
+hand was raised to stay the process of disintegration. This Emperor,
+Charles the Fat, had succeeded by mere longevity in uniting all the
+dominions of his family under his immediate rule; but in three short
+years he dissipated whatever lingering respect attached to the idea for
+which he stood. In the words of the annalist "a crop of many kinglets
+sprang up over Europe." All the new pretenders came from the class of
+the great feudatories. Among the West Franks it was Eude the Count of
+Paris who seized the royal diadem; the East Franks elected Arnulf, Duke
+of Carinthia; Italy became an apple of discord between the margraves of
+Spoleto and Friuli; Burgundy was partitioned by two native families.
+
+Yet within a hundred years there arose a reaction in favour of the
+imperial idea--a reaction of which Germany was the apostle, which Italy
+accepted, which made many converts in West Francia. There were new and
+sufficient reasons for returning to the discarded system. The national
+hierarchies, who had undermined the Frankish Empire to broaden the
+foundations of ecclesiastical privilege and influence, were discovering
+that they had set up King Stork in place of King Log; the exactions of
+an Augustus were as nothing compared with the lawless pillaging of the
+new feudalism; and elective sovereigns, ruling by the grace of their
+chief subjects, were powerless for good as well as harm. The lower ranks
+of laymen had no better cause to be content with the new order under
+which the small freeholder was oppressed, the peasant enslaved, the
+merchant robbed and held to ransom. The freedom of the aristocracy
+spelled misery for every other class. These self-constituted tyrants
+passed their lives in devastating faction fights. Worst of all, their
+divisions and their absorption in petty schemes of personal
+aggrandisement left Europe at the mercy of uncivilised invaders. In the
+ninth and tenth centuries, medieval society experienced the same ordeal
+to which the Roman Empire had been subjected in the fifth. From the
+North and from the East a new generation of barbarians, perceiving the
+patent signs of weakness, began to break through the frontiers in search
+of plunder and of settlements.
+
+First came the Northmen from Norway and Denmark. Like the Saxons of the
+fourth century they were unrivalled seamen. Their fleets transported
+them from point to point faster than land forces could follow in pursuit;
+the great rivers served them as natural highways; and if beaten in a
+descent upon the land, they had always their ships as a safe refuge. To
+make treaties and to offer blackmail was a worse than useless policy;
+the Vikings came in bands which operated separately, or united in this
+year to scatter and form new combinations in the next. One leader could
+not bind another; to buy off one fleet was merely to invite the coming
+of a second. These pirates had begun to molest the British Isles and
+Frisia before the death of Charles the Great; but after the first
+partition of his Empire they fell on the whole coastline from the Elbe
+to the Pyrenees. Originally attracted by the hope of plunder they soon
+aimed at conquest; when, at the close of the ninth century, there was a
+sudden pause in the flood of armed emigration from the North, the
+Danelaw in England and Normandy on the opposite side of the Channel
+remained as alien colonies which the native rulers were obliged to
+recognise.
+
+It was in Gaul that the ravages of the Normans were most severely felt,
+though for a few years they were the scourge of Frisia and the adjacent
+provinces. Germany and Italy had other enemies to fear. In the year 862
+a new danger, in the shape of the Hungarians, appeared on the borders of
+Bavaria. They were an Asiatic people, from the northern slopes of the
+Ural Mountains, who had been moving westward since the commencement of
+the century. Contemporaries identified them with the Huns of Attila, and
+the resemblance was more than superficial. The Hungarians were of the
+Tartar race--nomads who lived by hunting and war, skilled in
+horsemanship and archery, utterly barbarous and a byeword for cruelty.
+The rapidity of their movements, and the distances to which their raids
+extended, are almost incredible. In 899 they swept through the Ostmark
+and reached the Lombard plain; in 915 they sacked Bremen; in 919 they
+harried the whole of Saxony and penetrated the old Middle Kingdom; in
+926 they went into Tuscany and appeared in the neighbourhood of Rome; in
+937 they even reached the walls of Capua. In fact, until the great
+victory of Otto I upon the Lech (955), they were the terror of
+two-thirds of Christian Europe. Italy, the most disunited of the new
+kingdoms, was further vexed by the Saracen pirates who roamed the
+Western Mediterranean. The only sea-power capable of dealing with them
+was that of the Byzantine Empire. The Greek fleet protected the
+southeast of Italy, but was powerless to save Sicily, which was
+conquered piecemeal for the Crescent (827-965). Farther north the
+seaports of Amalfi, Gaeta, Naples and Salerno paid tribute or admitted
+Saracen garrisons; in 846 Ostia and the Leonine quarter of Rome
+(including the basilica of St. Peter) were pillaged. Robber colonies
+established themselves on the river Garigliano, and at Garde-Frainet,
+the meeting-point of Italy and Provence.
+
+The effect which these disasters produced on the minds of the sufferers
+is nowhere more clearly visible than in England. Here the House of
+Alfred was able, within a century of the partition made at Wedmore
+between the West Saxon kingdom and the Danes (878), to establish a
+kingdom of imperial pretensions, loosely knit together but more durable
+and more highly organised than any power which had arisen in Britain
+since the Roman period. In Germany the Saxon line, beginning with Henry
+the Fowler (919-936), was permitted to make the royal title hereditary,
+and to assert an effective suzerainty over the other tribal dukes. In
+France the House of Paris, after ruling for many years in the name of a
+degenerate Carolingian line, was invited in the person of Hugh Capet to
+assume the royal dignity (987). We have here a European movement in
+favour of monarchy; and on the heels of it follows another for the
+restoration of the Empire. The new royal dynasties did good work; even
+the weakest among them, that of France, served as a symbol of unity, as
+a rallying point for the clergy and all other friends of peace; but both
+on practical grounds and on grounds of sentiment they left much to be
+desired. National monarchy meant national wars and the right of national
+churches to misgovern themselves according to their several
+inclinations. Every year the rent in the seamless robe of Christendom
+grew wider; political unity was disappearing, and religious unity would
+soon go the same way. The kingly title made but a slight appeal to the
+imagination or the conscience; with whatever ceremonies a King was
+crowned, the real source of his power was the position which he held,
+independently of his office, as a chief of a tribal or a feudal group;
+of men who, as St. Odo bitterly remarked, being oppressed took to
+themselves a lord that with his help they might become oppressors.
+Sovereign power had lost all poetry and dignity; it was being perverted
+to serve petty ends. An Emperor was needed to restore a higher sense of
+justice, to exalt the spiritual above the material side of life.
+
+So the idealists reasoned, and in Germany their arguments found willing
+converts. This may appear strange, since Germany had taken the lead in
+repudiating the Carolingian Empire, and Henry the Fowler, who
+established the new German monarchy, was the reverse of an idealist. But
+the truth was that the peculiar constitution of the German kingdom and
+the peculiar problems raised by German expansion towards the East were
+such as to make the ideal policy the safest. Though Henry the Fowler had
+sedulously limited his attention to German problems, his son, working on
+the same lines, found himself led by the natural sequence of events to
+cross the Alps, seize Italy and take the imperial crown from the Pope's
+hands.
+
+Henry the Fowler, elected after nineteen years of nominal kingship and
+unbridled anarchy, defined his position by a series of compacts with the
+great Dukes. Suabia, Bavaria and Lotharingia became dependent
+principalities, whose rulers attended national Diets, occasionally
+appeared at court, and still more occasionally rendered military
+service. Under their sway the new feudalism, which they encouraged as
+the means of creating armies both for defence and for pursuing an
+independent foreign policy, took root and throve as a legal institution.
+Within the borders of the duchies Henry had little power except as the
+patron of the church. He claimed the right of nominating bishops--though
+in Bavaria this claim was not made good till the next reign--and
+religious foundations held their privileges by his grace. The
+ecclesiastical councils which legislated with his sanction were more
+important than the Diets composed indifferently of laymen and prelates.
+His general policy gave greater cause for satisfaction to the clergy
+than to the remainder of his subjects. The assertion of supremacy over
+Lotharingia (925), and Bohemia (929), and the defeat of the Hungarians
+at the Unstrut (933), were national achievements; but for nine years
+before the battle of the Unstrut the King had allowed the Hungarians to
+work their will in Bavaria and Suabia, having secured the immunity of
+his own duchy by a separate truce. He had chiefly employed those years
+in building strong towns for the defence of Saxony, and in extending
+Saxon power by the conquest of Brandenburg, Lusatia, Strelitz and
+Schleswig. These could only be called national services on the
+assumption that the crown was to remain the hereditary possession of his
+house; but the German kingship was elective. To the Church, however,
+nothing was more welcome than conquests gained at the expense of heathen
+Slavs and Danes. In her eyes this Saxon statesman was the forerunner of
+the Christian faith in the dark places of Europe. For all these reasons,
+then, the power of Henry and his successors remained a power resting
+upon ecclesiastical support. To strengthen the alliance of church and
+state must be the first object of a Saxon ruler.
+
+For some years after his accession (936) Otto I was harassed by
+pretenders of his own family who allied themselves with one or more of
+the great Dukes. The Bavarians threatened to secede and form an
+independent nation; the Franconians rebelled when their right of waging
+private wars was called in question; the Lotharingians intrigued to make
+themselves an independent Middle Kingdom. All such malcontents found it
+easy to secure a brother or a son of the King as their nominal leader.
+Even when Otto had placed all the duchies in the hands of his own
+kinsmen or connections, his power was still precarious. For he claimed
+new rights which, though necessary to the maintenance of kingly power,
+did violence to feudal and provincial sentiment; while the Dukes whom he
+nominated usually took up the pretensions of their predecessors, and
+identified themselves with the interests of their subjects. It was more
+important than ever that the King should have the help of the clergy in
+educating public opinion. But in the most critical period (939-955) of
+the reign the German primate, Archbishop Frederic of Mainz, lent the
+weight of his influence and high personal reputation to the rebel cause.
+In another direction also Otto found the clergy the chief opponents of a
+cherished scheme. Organised missions were among the means on which he
+relied for civilising and extending his father's conquests in Slavonic
+territory. For this purpose he planned, with the approval of Rome, to
+make Magdeburg an archbishopric and the head of a Slavonic province. To
+this proposal the sees of Mainz and Halberstadt offered strenuous
+resistance, on the ground that it would curtail their jurisdictions
+(955). Twice, therefore, Otto had been sharply reminded that his
+authority over the German Church was insufficient for his purpose.
+
+Meanwhile the train of events had drawn him into Italian politics. The
+Kingdom of Italy had been seized, in 926, by Hugh of Provence, an
+adventurer of Carolingian descent. In 937, on the death of Rudolph II of
+Burgundy, Hugh designed to seize this derelict inheritance. He was
+forestalled by Otto, who assumed the guardianship of the lawful heir of
+Burgundy, the young Conrad; a united kingdom of Italy and Burgundy would
+have been too dangerous a neighbour for the German Kingdom. Hugh,
+however, secured for his son, Lothair, the hand of Conrad's sister
+Adelaide, thus keeping alive the claims of his family for a future day.
+Somewhat later Otto retaliated by giving protection to an Italian foe of
+Hugh, the Margrave Berengar of Friuli, who came to the Saxon court and
+became the liegeman of the German King. In 950 this relation suddenly
+acquired political importance, through the unexpected deaths of Hugh and
+Lothair, and the succession of Berengar in Italy. Reminded of his oath
+to Otto, the new King repudiated his obligations as a vassal, and gave
+further provocation by ill-treating the widowed Adelaide. Otto was thus
+equipped with a double excuse for making war. And war was forced upon
+him by the ambitions of his brother Henry, Duke of Bavaria, and of his
+son Liutolf, Duke of Suabia. Both cast covetous glances on Italy, which
+was hopelessly divided and an easy prey for the first-comer. In 949 the
+Duke of Bavaria had seized Aquileia; in 951 the Duke of Suabia crossed
+the Alps ostensibly to champion Adelaide. Otto could not remain idle
+while two of his subjects and kinsmen contended over the spoils of
+Italy. He collected an army and followed hard on the footsteps of
+Liutolf. Berengar fled, the Dukes made peace with their suzerain, and
+Otto was free to dispose of the Italian kingdom (951).
+
+It is possible that, if the opportunity had been forthcoming, he would
+at once have proceeded to Rome for an imperial coronation. But the Pope,
+who alone could make an Emperor, was the nominee of a Roman faction,
+headed by the ambitious Alberic the Senator who aspired to build up a
+secular lordship on the basis of the Papal patrimony. Otto was not
+invited to visit Rome. After some hesitation he decided, instead of
+himself assuming the unprofitable duties of an Italian King, to restore
+Berengar on condition of a renewal of homage. Perhaps the arrangement
+was intended to be temporary. Otto was still menaced by conspiracies in
+Germany; and Berengar might serve to guard Italy against ambitious
+Dukes, until the hands of his overlord were free for Italian adventures.
+Later events justify some such hypothesis. Within a few years the chief
+difficulties of Otto were removed. A great ducal rising collapsed; the
+Hungarians were so decisively beaten at the Lechfeld (955) that they
+ceased to trouble Germany; death relieved Otto of his most dangerous
+rivals, Archbishop Frederic of Mainz and his own son, Duke Liutolf.
+Then, in 960, arrived the long-delayed call from Rome. John XII, a
+dissipated youth of twenty-two, the son of Alberic (died 954) but devoid
+of his father's ability, invoked the aid of Germany to protect the
+temporal possessions against Berengar. Otto required no second summons.
+Descending upon Italy, he expelled his vassal, assumed the Italian crown
+at Pavia (961) and then repaired to Rome. Here in 962 he was crowned by
+the Pope as lord of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. For good
+or for evil the prerogative of Charles the Great was inseparably united
+to the German monarchy.
+
+From this complicated series of events some interesting conclusions may
+be deduced. The Empire, which has so often been abused as a source of
+countless woes to Germany, was revived in the interests of a purely
+German policy. Unlike his son and his grandson, Otto I never submitted
+to the spell of Italy. Since the time of Charles the Great it had been
+taken for granted that the Empire could only be conferred by the Pope
+and only held by a King of Italy. Otto did not greatly value his Italian
+dominions, though circumstances forced him to reside in Italy for a
+large part of his later years. For a time he had thoughts of recovering
+Apulia and Calabria from the Greeks, Sicily from the Arabs. But he
+abandoned his claims against the Eastern Empire as the price of a
+marriage-alliance, and he left Sicily untouched. The Crown of Italy was
+valuable to him chiefly as a qualification for his imperial office. To
+the ecclesiastical duties of that office he was not indifferent. His
+bishops, though largely employed as secular administrators, were
+chosenwith some regard to their spiritual duties; he was a friend to the
+Cluniac movement for monastic reform. But clearly he did not visit Rome
+in pursuit of any plans for cleansing that Augean stable the Papacy. The
+vices of John XII were notorious; but, as a Pope who could legally
+confer the Empire, he was good enough for Otto's purpose. Only when John
+repented of his bargain and turned traitor was he evicted in favour of a
+more reputable successor (963). And John's successor was a layman until
+the time of his election. Otto's chief concern was to secure a
+trustworthy partisan; this remained the Saxon policy till the days of
+his grandson.
+
+Otto was not indifferent to the splendour or the more ambitious claims
+of his office. He paraded before the world the benevolent protectorate
+which he exercised over the young rulers of Burgundy and France; he
+insisted upon the homage of the Polish and Bohemian dukes. He held
+magnificent Diets to celebrate his new position, and made great efforts
+to win recognition from the Byzantine court. But in substance his
+ambitions were those of a German national king. He had a keen sense of
+realities, a keen appreciation of concrete results; from first to last
+his thoughts centred round the problems of his native land. The
+extension of the eastern frontier, the alliance with the Church, the
+management of the duchies--these were his main achievements as they had
+been his main ambitions. But he had built better than he knew; and the
+Empire acquired before his death a nobler significance than he perhaps
+had ever contemplated.
+
+The work of Otto I was skilfully done, since it survived the follies of
+his son and grandson. For twenty years after his death (973) the titular
+rulers of the Empire were boys and women-regents. At Rome, in Germany,
+on the western and eastern frontiers all the beaten factions and
+humiliated rivals plucked up courage to make another bid for victory.
+The old Empress Adelaide, and her daughter-in-law the Empress Theophano,
+divided or disputed the control of the administration until 991; from
+that date till 998 the elder woman, freed from interference by the death
+of Theophano, exercised a great though a declining influence. Neither
+Empress was competent to handle the singular difficulties of the
+situation. Adelaide, though true to the German ambitions of her husband,
+was guided by personal prejudice in the selection of her ministers.
+Theophano, a woman of remarkable abilities and attainments, despised the
+monotonous intricacies of German politics, encouraged both her husband
+and her son to regard Italy as the worthiest field for the activities of
+an Emperor, and in Italy looked rather to Rome and the South than to
+Lombardy. It was the church party, both in Germany and in Lombardy,
+which in these years kept the subjects of the Empire true to their
+allegiance. The German dukes were less disinterested. But the precedents
+which Otto I had established proved invaluable when his son was required
+to deal with a rebellion, or had the opportunity of appointing to a
+vacant dukedom.
+
+The blame for the chimerical ambitions of Otto II and Otto III is
+usually thrown upon Theophano, that brilliant missionary of Byzantine
+culture and Byzantine political ideas. But the influence which perverted
+the judgement of these Emperors, until they became a byeword in Europe,
+was something more impalpable than the will-force of a domineering
+woman. They were born into the misty morning twilight of the medieval
+renaissance, of an age when intellectual curiosity was awakening, when
+philosophy, the sciences and Latin literature were studied with a lively
+but uncritical enthusiasm, when the rhetorician and the sophist were the
+uncrowned kings of intelligent society. The philosophy was little more
+than school-logic, derived at second or third hand from Aristotle, the
+science a grotesque amalgam of empiricism and tradition. The Latin
+classics, apart from their use as a source of tropes and commonplaces,
+only served to inspire a superstitious and uncomprehending reverence for
+ancient Rome. Of this new learning Otto II and his son were naive
+disciples. They could not sufficiently admire the encyclopaedic Gerbert,
+the most fashionable and incomparably the ablest teacher of their day.
+Otto II and his court listened patiently for hours while Gerbert
+disputed with a Saxon rival concerning the subdivisions of the genus
+philosophy. Otto III invited Gerbert to come to court and cure him of
+"Saxon rusticity"; he deluged the complaisant tutor with Latin verses,
+consulted him in affairs of state, and finally promoted him to the
+Papacy. Gerbert was in fact a subtle and ambitious politician, who
+filled the chair of Peter with no small degree of credit. But his more
+serious talents would never have found their opportunity save for his
+skill in ministering to the pseudo-classicism of rustic Saxons.
+
+Each of these Emperors turned his back on Germany at the first
+opportunity. Each met in Italy with bitter disillusionment and an
+untimely fate.
+
+Otto II, in whose idealism there was a trace of his father's concrete
+ambition, planned the conquest of South Italy and Sicily. The scheme was
+not impracticable as the Hohenstauffen were afterwards to prove. And in
+the year 980 it could be justified as advantageous to the whole of
+Christian Europe. A new Saracen peril was impending in the Western
+Mediterranean. A new dynasty of Mohammedan adventurers, the Fatimites,
+had arisen on the coast of Northern Africa and had made themselves
+masters of Egypt (969). Five years before that event they had already
+occupied Sicily; in 976 they turned their attention to Italy. The south
+of the peninsula was divided between the Eastern Empire and Pandulf
+Ironhead, the lord of Capua, who had established an ephemeral despotism
+on the ruins of Lombard and Byzantine power. Even he could not face the
+Arabs in the open field, and his death (981) was followed by the
+partition of his lands and bitter strife among his sons. Unless Otto
+intervened it was not unlikely that Italy, south of the Garigliano,
+would become a province of the Caliphate of Cairo. Otto, however, was
+ill-qualified to be the general of a crusade. His military experience
+had been gained in petty operations against the Danes and Slavs, and in
+an invasion of France vaingloriously begun but ending in humiliation
+(978). Full of self-confidence he led a powerful force into Apulia,
+intending to expel first the Greeks and then the Arabs. He captured Bari
+and Taranto without difficulty; but he had no sooner entered Calabria
+than he allowed himself to be entrapped by the Emir of Sicily. On the
+field of Colonne (982) he lost the flower of his army and barely escaped
+capture by flight to a passing merchant vessel. Next year he died, in
+the midst of feverish preparations to wipe out this disgrace. It was
+left for the despised Greeks to repel the Arabs from the mainland;
+Sicily remained a Mohammedan possession till the coming of the Normans
+(1062).
+
+It is easier to sympathise with the policy of Otto II than with the man
+himself. The case is reversed when we turn to the career of his son.
+Otto III, an infant at his father's death, escaped from female tutelage
+in 996, and made his first Italian expedition as an autocrat of sixteen.
+He went to free the Papacy from the bondage of a Roman faction, the
+party of the infamous John XII, again rearing its head under a new
+leader. The boy-ruler suppressed the rebels with some gratuitous
+cruelty. But he was not without noble ambitions or the capacity of
+appreciating finer natures than his own. Called upon to nominate a Pope
+he selected his cousin Bruno, a youth little older than himself, but a
+statesman and an idealist, who set himself to assert the authority of
+the Holy See over the national Churches, partly no doubt in the
+interests of the Empire but more in those of morality and discipline.
+Unhappily Bruno died before his influence had eradicated from the
+Emperor's character the weaknesses fostered by scheming flatterers and
+an injudicious education. Gerbert, who succeeded Bruno with the title of
+Sylvester II, encouraged his pupil in a career of puerile extravagances.
+While the new Pope extended his jurisdiction and magnified his office,
+the young Emperor was planning to revive in Rome the ancient glories of
+the Caesars. Otto built a palace on the Aventine; he imitated the
+splendour and travestied the ceremonial of the Byzantine court; he
+devised pompous legends to be inscribed on his seal and on his crown. In
+the year 1000 he made a solemn pilgrimage to Aachen and opened the vault
+of Charles the Great; another to Poland, to pray at the shrine of his
+martyred friend, St. Adalbert, in Gnesen. Meanwhile the serious business
+of the Empire was neglected; the Slavonic states shook off the German
+connection; the eastern frontier was unguarded. Even the Romans, whom he
+cherished as his peculiar people, despised his vagaries and rose in
+insurrection. This was the awakening. Alive at last to the difference
+between his dreams and his true position, he quitted the Eternal City to
+wander aimlessly in Italy, and died broken-hearted at the age of
+twenty-one.
+
+It would obviously be unjust to judge the Holy Roman Empire of the first
+Otto by the tragicomic aberrations of his immediate successors. Their
+careers illustrate, in an extreme form, the temptations to which an
+Emperor was exposed; but neither of them understood the essence of the
+institution. Far from idealising the Empire overmuch they did not make
+it ideal enough. The true conception of Empire eluded their grasp and
+was unaffected by their failure. The policy of Otto the Great is
+justified by the fact that he, like Charles the Great, gave to a
+national monarchy the character of a religious office and the sense of a
+sacred mission. To appreciate his achievement we need only compare the
+German monarchy, as it stood in the year 1000, after a generation of
+misgovernment had marred the architect's design, with that of the Capets
+in France or of the House of Egbert in England. The difference is not
+only in size or outward splendour. The Holy Roman Empire stood for a
+nobler theory of royal and national Duty.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+FEUDALISM
+
+
+Before discussing the origins or the effects of feudalism it is well to
+form a definite conception of the system as we find it in the twelfth
+and thirteenth centuries, when it is the basis of local government, of
+justice, of legislation, of the army and of all executive power. In this
+period the lawyers have arrived at the doctrine that all lands is held
+from the King either mediately or directly. The King is himself a great
+landowner with demesnes scattered over the length and breadth of the
+realm; the revenues of these estates supply him with the larger part of
+his permanent income. The King is surrounded by a circle of
+tenants-in-chief, some of whom are bishops and abbots and ecclesiastical
+dignitaries of other kinds; the remainder are dukes, counts, barons,
+knights. All of these, laymen and churchmen alike, are bound to perform
+more or less specific services in return for their lands; the most
+important is military service, with a definite quota of knights, which
+they usually render at their own charge; but they are also liable to pay
+aids (_auxilia_) of money in certain contingencies, to appear regularly
+at the King's council and to sit as assessors in his law court. They
+hold their lands in fact upon a contract; but the precise obligations
+named in this contract do not exhaust their relation to the King. In a
+vague and elastic sense they owe him honour (_obsequium_) and loyalty
+(_fidelitas_). They must do all in their power to uphold his interests
+and exalt his dignity. He on his side is bound to consult them
+collectively, in all matters of importance, and to maintain them
+individually in the rights and possessions which he has granted to them.
+These personal and indefinite ties should not be renounced, on either
+side, without some very serious reason--gross treachery, gross neglect
+of duty, gross abuse of power or privilege.
+
+These tenants-in-chief have on their estates a number of sub-tenants,
+who are bound to them by similar contracts and a similar personal
+relation. The homage of the sub-tenant to his immediate lord ought to be
+qualified by a reservation of the allegiance which all subjects owe to
+the King. Whether this reservation shall be made or, when made, shall
+have any practical consequences, will depend upon the King's resources
+and personality. Where effective, it means that he can claim from the
+sub-tenants the discharge of certain national duties, can call on them
+for military service, can judge them in his court, can tax them with the
+consent of his council, that is of their lords; on the other hand, it
+means that these sub-tenants may not allege the commands of their lord
+as an excuse for making war upon the King or committing any breach of
+the public peace. Where the general duty of allegiance has lapsed into
+oblivion, the tenant-in-chief is in all but name a dependent king, and
+the feudal state becomes a federation under a hereditary president, who
+occasionally arbitrates between the members of the federation and
+occasionally leads them out to war.
+
+The other members of the feudal state group themselves or are forcibly
+grouped under the rule of different persons in the feudal hierarchy. In
+the open country the soil is partly tilled by small free-holders, who
+pay to this or that lord a rent in money, kind, or services. Like the
+feudal sub-tenants these free-holders are, for most purposes, subject to
+the jurisdiction of their lord; though in the well organised state the
+royal judges protect them against the grosser forms of violence. But the
+greater part of the land is divided between servile village-communities,
+who give up perforce a large proportion of their working-days to the
+cultivation of the lord's demesne. The tendency of feudal law is to
+treat these peasants as slaves, to deny them the assistance of the royal
+law-courts, to regard them as holding their land at the will of their
+lord. In practice the lord finds that he cannot insist upon the full
+measure of his legal right. Though he has the right to reclaim all
+runaways, it is difficult to hunt them down; though he can fix the
+measure of his own demands, it is dangerous and unprofitable to arouse a
+spirit of mutiny. A judge from whom his serfs have no appeal in matters
+that concern their tenure, he finds it politic to make and to observe
+definite contracts, which remain unaltered from one generation to
+another. Hence the condition of the serfs, though hard, is less
+precarious than we might suppose if we only studied what the feudal
+lawyer has to say about them. Turning from the country to the towns, we
+find that all are subject to a lord or to the King; that some are only
+half-emancipated communities of serfs; that in others the burgesses have
+the status of small free-holders; that in a minority, but a growing
+minority, of cases the burgesses have established the right to deal
+collectively with the lord, to be regarded as _communes_ or free
+cities. In these cases there is a form of popular self-government under
+elected magistrates. Through the magistrates the town pays a fixed rent
+to the former lord; usually it claims the special protection of the
+King, and comes to hold the position of a tenant-in-chief (_une
+seigneurie collective populaire_). No society could be, in spirit and
+in organisation, more anti-feudal than the free town of the Middle Ages;
+but it can only secure a safe existence by obtaining a definite position
+in the feudal hierarchy. In fact, the clergy are the only considerable
+class who succeed in resisting the universal tendency to feudalise all
+landed property and to find for every man a lord. Even they are
+compelled to make large concessions to the spirit of the age. It is only
+at the cost of long and ruinous conflicts that bishops and other
+prelates establish some distinction between their position and that of
+the ordinary tenant-in-chief. Even so it remains the law that the
+principal endowments of every religious foundation are fiefs held under
+a feudal contract of service. More successful, though not less
+difficult, was the struggle against the theory that the parish-priest is
+the vassal of his patron and may, by recognising his obligations as a
+vassal, acquire the vassal's privilege of passing on his office to his
+son.
+
+Such then was feudalism in the concrete. It is the negation of all that
+we hold to be most important in the conceptions of the state and
+citizenship. In effect, though not altogether in theory, it subordinates
+the obligations of the citizen to those which the individual incurs by
+entering on a voluntary contract. This contract may or may not be made
+with the ruler of the state; in the majority of cases it is made with a
+fellow-citizen. Though honourable, according to current ideas, this
+contract always leaves to the lord some loopholes for the exercise of
+arbitrary and capricious authority; it impairs, if it does not destroy,
+the rule of law. Again, the effect of the system is to throw the main
+burden of national defence, and the main control of the royal power,
+upon a close hereditary caste of landowners. The standard of public duty
+is lowered; the government becomes either an absolutism or an oligarchy,
+and in either case studies chiefly the interests of a class which
+despises industry and holds privilege to be the necessary basis of
+society. Under feudalism the powers of the Crown, executive, judicial,
+administrative, are often granted away to be held by the same tenure as
+the fiefs over which they are exercised. And thus is created the worst
+form of civil service that we can conceive; a corps of hereditary
+officials, who can only be checked or removed with extreme difficulty,
+who render no account of the sums which they collect under the name of
+fines or dues, who are seldom educated to the point of realising that,
+even in their private interest, honesty is the best policy. If this
+system had developed to its logical conclusion, if the principles of
+feudal government had not been mitigated by revolt from below and
+interested tyranny from above, the only possible end would have been a
+state of particularism and anarchy compared with which the Germany of
+the fifteenth century, or the Italy of the eighteenth, might be called
+an earthly paradise.
+
+The very defects of the feudal system are, however, the best proof that
+it was the natural and inevitable product of social evolution. A legal
+theory so complex, so repugnant to the best traditions both of Roman and
+barbarian government, could not have obtained general recognition, as
+part of the natural order of things, unless it had grown up by degrees,
+unless it had been the outcome of older usages and institutions. A form
+of social organisation so cumbrous and so dangerous could hardly have
+survived for centuries unless it had solved difficulties of unusual
+urgency and magnitude. Let us then consider, in their historical order,
+the antecedents of feudalism and the reasons of state by which it was
+justified.
+
+Before the downfall of the Roman Empire the duties of local government
+were slipping from the grasp of the imperial executive. With or without
+official consent, the great proprietors--already held responsible for
+the taxes, the military service, and the good conduct of their
+dependents--were assuming rights of jurisdiction. When Gaul was
+reorganised by the Merovingians, these private courts of law continued
+to exist; and they were even legally recognised (by Clotaire II in 614)
+as institutions of public utility. A certain number of great estates
+were further protected by special charters of privilege
+(_immunitas_) which forbade public officials to enter them for the
+purposes of making arrests, of holding courts, of collecting fines and
+levying distraints. The owners were obliged to surrender any person
+accused of a grave crime, but otherwise did justice at their pleasure.
+
+This system of immunity was greatly extended by the Carolingian
+sovereigns, but with two important changes. (1) Henceforward the
+privilege was seldom granted to laymen, but was bestowed as a matter of
+course on the estates of bishops and of religious houses. (2) The
+holders of such ecclesiastical estates were compelled to vest their
+powers of police and justice in the hands of laymen (_advocati_)
+chosen either by the central power or by some approved form of election.
+The intention of these changes was to use the private courts for the
+maintenance of public order, to extract the sting from a dangerous
+privilege, and to make it a serviceable instrument of royal policy. But
+only one half of the scheme was permanent. By the middle of the ninth
+century, when _immunitas_ had been granted to all religious foundations,
+the Carolingians allowed the right of choosing the _advocati_ to slip
+from their feeble grasp. The privileged estates remained, but the royal
+control over their internal government was gone. They became
+ecclesiastical seignories; whatever checks were imposed upon
+the power of their rulers came from the lay-nobles who were their
+neighbours, or from the subject population. Partly from respect for
+custom and tradition, partly from motives of self-interest, the great
+ecclesiastical landowners sided with the Crown, even in the tenth
+century, when the fortunes of royalty were at their lowest ebb. But for
+this support a price had to be paid; the old privileges were maintained
+and even augmented by grants of the power of life and death
+(_hautejustice, blut-bann_). Thus came into existence the class of
+ecclesiastical princes, who throughout the Middle Ages maintained a
+state, and wielded a power, comparable with that of any lay feudatory.
+
+The ecclesiastical _immunitas_, as early as the ninth century, was
+in the eyes of all ambitious landowners the model of a privileged
+estate. But it was by another road that the layman arrived at the
+position of a petty sovereign. Speaking broadly, there are two stages in
+his progress. First, he comes into the position of a royal tenant,
+holding his lands in exchange for services and fealty. Secondly, he
+acquires, by delegation or usurpation, a greater or smaller part of the
+royal authority over his own dependents.
+
+(1) The idea of a personal contract between the free warrior and his
+lord, by which the former places himself at the disposition of the
+latter and promises unlimited service, is one which occurs in many
+primitive societies and is peculiar to no one branch of the human race.
+Tacitus noticed, as one feature of German life in his time, the free
+war-band (_comitatus_) who lived in the house of their chief,
+followed him to battle, and thought it the last degree of infamy to
+return alive from the field on which he had fallen. The Merovingian
+kings maintained a bodyguard of this kind (_antrustions_). Under
+the Carolingians such followers appear in the host, in the royal
+household, in every branch of the administration. They are the most
+trusted agents of the King and possess considerable social consequence.
+They are called _vassi_, a name formerly applied to any kind of
+dependent, but now reserved for free men rendering free services to the
+King or some other lord, and subject to his jurisdiction. So valuableare
+these followers that, in the eighth and ninth centuries, the power
+of the great is largely measured by the number of _vassi_ whom they
+can put into the field.
+
+Various considerations suggested to Frankish rulers and nobles the
+expediency of endowing these followers with land, and of granting land
+to no tenant unless he would take the vassal's oath. Usually land was
+the only form of pay which the lord could give; and it always served as
+a material guarantee of faithful service, since it could be resumed
+whenever the vassal made default. In days when law and morality availed
+little as the sanctions of contracts, the landlord naturally desired to
+bind his tenant to him by a personal obligation; and there were obvious
+advantages in providing that every tenant should be liable to aid his
+lord with arms. The estates granted to vassals were known as benefices
+(_beneficia_); they foreshadowed the lay-fief of later times. But
+there are some distinctions to be drawn. The benefice was not _de
+jure_ heritable; it escheated on the death of either lord or tenant.
+The service was not measured with the same precision as in later times.
+The military duties of the beneficed vassal were not different in kind
+or degree from those of the ordinary freemen. Finally, the idea had not
+yet arisen that vassals were superior in status to the rest of the
+community. The importance of the vassal depended entirely on his wealth
+and his rank in the King's employ. Only in the old age of the
+Carolingian Empire, when the class of free landowners, acknowledging no
+lord, had been almost ground out of existence by official oppression and
+the intolerable burden of military service, was the burden of national
+defence thrown entirely upon vassals. Then, as the sole military class
+in the community, they acquired the consideration which, in early stages
+of social development, is the monopoly of those who are trained to arms.
+
+(2) It was natural that the tie of vassalage should be imposed on every
+important official; and natural also to regard his office as a benefice,
+tenable for life or during good behaviour. At an early date we find
+cases of conquered princes--a Duke of Aquitaine, a Duke of Bavaria, a
+King of Denmark--who take the vassal's oath and agree to hold their
+former dominions as a _beneficium_. So again a member of the royal
+house does homage and promises service in return for his appanage. More
+common, and more important for the future, is the practice of treating
+counts as vassals. All over the Frankish Empire the county was the
+normal unit of local administration. The count led the military levies,
+collected the royal dues, enforced the laws, maintained the peace, and
+was a judge with powers of life and death. The Carolingians controlled
+their counts by means of itinerant inspectors (_missi dominici_);
+but with the disruption of their Empire this check was destroyed, while
+the power of the count survived. By that time the office had often
+become hereditary, on the analogy of the _beneficium_, and the
+count appropriated to his own use the profits of his office. In such
+cases his county became a small principality, classed by lawyers as a
+fief, but often ruled without any reference to the interests of the
+royal overlord. The fiefs of Anjou, Champagne and Flanders began in this
+way as hereditary countships. Sometimes, again, we find that a great
+vassal obtains, by grant of usurpation, the prerogatives of a count over
+his own lands; examples are the prince-bishops of Trier (898 A.D.),
+Hamburg (937), and Metz (945).
+
+The first effect of this striking change in the nature of landed
+property and of public office was to substitute for the centralised
+state of the Carolingians a lax federal system, in which each unit was a
+group of men attached to the person of a hereditary superior. This
+nascent feudalism was often brutal, always summary and short-sighted, in
+its methods of government. The feudal group was engaged in a perpetual
+struggle for existence with neighbouring groups. Feudal policy was
+aggressive; for every lord had his war-band, whom he could only hold
+together by providing them with adventure and rich plunder; nor could
+any lord regard himself as safe while a neighbour of equal resources
+remained unconquered. Furthermore, as though the disintegration of
+society had not gone far enough, every great fief was in constant danger
+of civil war and partition. As the lord had treated the King, so he in
+turn was treated by his vassals. He endowed them with lands, he allowed
+them to found families, he gave them positions of authority; and then
+they defied him. In the eleventh century the great fief bristled with
+castles held by chief vassals of the lord; in the small county of Maine
+alone we hear of thirty-five such strongholds; generally speaking they
+were centres of rebellion and indiscriminate rapine. Such feudalism was
+not a system of government; it was a symptom of anarchy.
+
+Yet feudalism had not always been a mere tyranny of the military class
+over the unarmed population. Like the Roman Empire, that of the Franks
+had forfeited respect and popularity by misgovernment, by feeble
+government, by insupportable demands on the personal service of the
+subject. The land-owner was a less exacting master than the Empire;
+often he could defend his tenants from imperial exactions. During the
+invasions of the Northmen and Hungarians, he was impelled by his own
+interest to guard his estates to the best of his ability. Therefore
+common men looked to their landlord, or looked about them for a
+landlord, to whom they could commend themselves. The great estate was
+the ark of refuge from the general flood of social evils. In the
+eleventh century the situation changed. The Hungarian tide of invasion
+was rolled back by a Henry the Fowler and an Otto the Great; the
+Northmen enrolled themselves as members of the European commonwealth.
+The petty feudal despot was no longer needed. From a protector he had
+degenerated into a pest of society. The great political problem of the
+age was to make him innocuous. It was taken in hand, and it was settled,
+by a variety of means.
+
+In France the Church took the lead of the repressive movement,
+endeavouring to mitigate the horrors of private war by certain
+restrictions upon the combatants. During the eleventh century it was not
+unusual for the bishop of a diocese to secure the co-operation of
+representative men, from all classes of society, in proclaiming a local
+Truce of God (_Treuga Dei_). This Truce, which all men were invited
+to swear that they would observe, forbade the molestation of
+ecclesiastics, peasants and other non-combatants; provided that
+cultivated land should not be harried or cattle carried off; and named
+certain seasons when no war should be waged. A typical agreement of this
+kind enjoins that all private hostilities shall be suspended from
+Wednesday evening to Monday morning in each week; from the beginning of
+Advent till a week after the Epiphany; from the beginning of Lent till a
+week after Easter; from the Rogation Days till a week after Pentecost.
+The Truce of God was approved by the Crown both in France and in
+Germany; even in the twelfth century it was still recommended by church
+councils as a useful expedient. But it was seldom effectual. There was
+no machinery for enforcing it; and those who swore to uphold it were so
+divided by conflicting class interests that they could not co-operate
+with any cordiality. The second of these defects, though not the first,
+can also be perceived in the German system of the Land-peace.
+Periodically we find an Emperor constraining a particular province, or
+even the whole German kingdom, to accept a set of rules which are partly
+modelled on those of the _Treuga Dei_ and partly in the nature of
+criminal legislation. Thus in 1103 the magnates of the kingdom were
+required to swear that for the next four years they would not molest
+ecclesiastics, merchants, women, or Jews; that during the same period
+they would neither burn nor break into private houses; that they would
+not kill or wound or hold to ransom any man. In regard to the last rule
+the magnates insisted on some modification; it was finally provided that
+a man meeting a private enemy on the high-road might attack him, but
+might not pursue him if he took refuge in a private house. The general
+Land-peaces of Frederic Barbarossa (1152) and Frederic II (1235) are the
+most important enactments of this kind; but they deviate widely from the
+original type. They are permanent; they aim at the total suppression of
+lawless self-help; they are codes of criminal law which, if thoroughly
+enforced, would have opened a new era in German history. As the case
+stands--they are only the evidence of an unrealised project of reform.
+
+It was not by confederations of this kind, whether spontaneous or
+compulsory, that feudalism could be bridled. The twelfth and thirteenth
+centuries, the great age of medieval statesmanship, saw other and more
+effectual remedies applied. In the free cities of France, Italy, the
+Netherlands and Germany, the commercial classes perfected a form of
+association which, however faulty in other respects, was successful in
+excluding feudalism from the principal centres of urban industry. In the
+larger states, whether kingdoms or not, the rulers, supported by the
+Church and the commons, bestirred themselves to slay the many-headed
+Hydra. Feudalism was not extirpated, but it was brought under the law.
+In many districts it defied repression. To the end of the Middle Ages
+the Knights of Suabia and the Rhineland maintained the predatory
+traditions of the Dark Ages; and everywhere feudalism remained a force
+inimical to national unity. But the great feudatories who survived into
+the age of Machiavelli and of the new despotisms had usually some claims
+upon the respect of their subjects. The Duchy of Brittany, the
+Burgundian inheritance, the German electorates, were mainly
+objectionable as impeding the growth of better communities--better
+because more comprehensive, more stable, more fitted to be the nurseries
+of great ideas and proud traditions.
+
+It remains to speak of chivalry, that peculiar and often fantastic code
+of etiquette and morals which was grafted upon feudalism in the eleventh
+and succeeding centuries. The practical influence of chivalry has been
+exaggerated. Chivalrous ethics were in great measure the natural product
+of a militarist age. Bravery and patriotism, loyalty and truthfulness,
+liberality and courtesy and magnanimity--these are qualities which the
+soldier, even in a semi-civilised society, discovers for himself. The
+higher demands of chivalric morality were as habitually disregarded as
+the fundamental precepts of the Christian faith. The chivalric statesmen
+of the Middle Ages, from Godfrey of Bouillon to Edward III and the Black
+Prince, appear, under the searchlight of historical criticism, not less
+calculating than Renaissance despots or the disciples of Frederic the
+Great of Prussia. But something less than justice has been rendered to
+the chivalric ideal. The ethics which it embodied were arbitrary and
+one-sided; but they represent a genuine endeavour to construct, if only
+for one class, a practicable code of conduct at a time when religion too
+often gloried in demanding the impossible. Chivalry degenerated into
+extravagance and conventional hyperbole; but at the worst it had the
+merit of investing human relationships and human occupations with an
+ideal significance. In particular it gave to women a more honourable
+position than they had occupied in any social system of antiquity. It
+rediscovered one half of human nature. But for chivalry the Beatrice of
+Dante, the Laura of Petrarch, Shakespeare's Miranda and Goethe's
+Marguerite, could not have been created, much less comprehended.
+
+Chivalry in the oldest discoverable form was the invention of the
+Church. The religious service by which the neophyte was initiated as a
+knight has been traced back to the time of Otto III, when it appears in
+the liturgy of the Roman churches. But the ceremony was not in general
+use, outside Italy, before the age of the Crusades. It was Urban II who
+inspired the knighthood of northern Europe with the belief that they
+were _Dei militia_, the soldiers of the Church; and it is significant
+that warfare against the unbeliever ranks prominently among the duties
+enjoined upon the new-made knight, though it does not stand alone. The
+defence of the true faith and of the Church is also inculcated; merit
+might be acquired in persecuting heretics or in fighting for the Pope
+against an unjust Emperor. Nor are the claims of the widow, the orphan
+and the defenceless totally forgotten. But the perfect knight of the
+Church was the Templar, the soldier living under the rule of a religious
+order and devoting his whole energies to the cause of the Holy
+Sepulchre. It was a remarkable innovation when St. Bernard, the mirror
+of orthodox conservatism, undertook to legislate for the Order of the
+Temple; for the primitive Church had hardly tolerated wars in self-
+defence. From one point of view it was a wholesome change of attitude in
+the moral leaders of society, that they should recognise war and a
+military class as inevitable necessities, that they should undertake to
+moralise and idealise the commonest of occupations. But the resolve was
+marred in the execution. In the desire to be practical, the Church set
+up too low an aim and translated Christianity into precepts which were
+only suited for one short stage of medieval civilisation, the stage of
+the Crusades.
+
+In the long run the poet had far more influence than the priest upon the
+chivalric classes. It is remarkable how uniformly Popes and Councils set
+their faces against the bloodshed and extravagant futilities of the
+tournament; still more remarkable that even threats of excommunication
+could not deter the most orthodox of knights from seeking distinction
+and distraction in these mimic wars. Equally significant is the growth
+of the _service des dames_ which, although invested by troubadours
+and minnesingers with a halo of religious allegory, was disliked by the
+Church, not merely from a dread of possible abuses, but as inherently
+idolatrous. The cult of the Virgin, while doing honour to the new
+conception of womanhood, was also a protest against a secular
+romanticism. Here and there a Wolfram von Eschenbach essays the feat of
+reconciling poetry with religion in the picture of the perfect knight.
+But the school of _courtoisie_ prevailed; the most celebrated of
+the troubadours are mundane, not to say profane; Walther von der
+Vogelweide, with his bitter attacks upon the Papacy, is more typical of
+his class than Wolfram with his allegory of Parsifal and the Sangraal.
+It was in Provence, on the eve of the Albigensian Crusade, in the
+society which was most indifferent to official Christianity and most
+hostile to the clergy, that chivalry was most sedulously preached and
+developed in the most curious detail. In the hands of the troubadours it
+became a gospel of pageantry and fanfaron, of artificial sentiments and
+artificial heroisms, cloaking the materialism, the sensuality and the
+inordinate ostentation of a theatrical and frivolous society,
+intoxicated with the pride of life.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE PAPACY BEFORE GREGORY VII
+
+
+An institution is not necessarily discredited when we discover that it
+has grown from small beginnings, has been applied under new conditions
+to new purposes, and in the course of a long history has been defended
+by arguments which are demonstrably false. The child, no doubt, is
+father of the man; but the man is something different from, and may well
+be something better than, his infant self. We must not attach undue
+importance to the study of origins. On the other hand we cannot afford
+to neglect them. However slight the fibres by which the present is
+rooted in the past, to observe them is to realise the continuity of
+human development--the most important, the most obvious, and the most
+neglected of the lessons that history can teach. It is true that the
+roots, however strong and however deeply set, are insufficient to
+account for the characteristics of the plant which springs from them.
+But it is also true that neither plants nor institutions can altogether
+shed the husk of their immaturity. They are not entirely adapted to the
+conditions under which they reach their full development. The Papacy in
+the zenith of its power and renown is partly new and partly old. When we
+consider the papal theory, as it floated before the mind of a Gregory
+VII or an Innocent III, it produces in us the same impression of
+symmetry, logical consistency and completeness, which we experience on
+entering for the first time one of the great medieval churches. But when
+once we have grasped the design of the architect, we shall usually find
+that he has conformed in some respects to unmeaning traditions inherited
+from an earlier period, and further that his work incorporates the
+remnants of an older, simpler structure. Here are pillars of massive
+girth altogether disproportionate to the delicate arches which they
+carry; there an old tower has been buttressed to make it capable of
+supporting a new spire. For all the builder's cunning, we can yet
+distinguish between the new and the renovated. So it is with the papal
+apologia in the great days of papal policy. A sentence from the laws of
+ancient Rome dovetails with an axiom stolen from the philosophers of the
+Porch or the Academy. Fables of Gallic or Egyptian origin are invoked to
+corroborate the canons of Nicene and Chalcedonian synods. A text from a
+Hebrew prophet is interpreted by the fancy of an African expositor. The
+fabric composed of these incongruous elements has in truth a unity of
+purpose; but the design is so disguised and so perverted by the
+recalcitrance of the materials, that we are irresistibly impelled to ask
+how and why they came to be employed.
+
+More than any other human institution the Papacy has suffered from a
+supposed necessity of justifying every forward step by precedent and
+reference to authority. Twice in the course of sixteen centuries the
+Holy See has ventured on a startling change of front, and has been
+sorely embarrassed to rebut the charge of inconsistency. One such change
+was silently effected at the close of the seventeenth century, when the
+Popes ceased to concern themselves more than was unavoidable with
+international affairs. This was a great change; yet not so great as that
+made in the latter part of the eleventh century, by Gregory VII. For he
+revolutionised the whole theory of papal prerogative. Neither a profound
+lawyer nor a profound theologian, he regarded the past history of his
+office with the idealism of a poet, and looked into its future with the
+sanguine radicalism of a Machiavelli or a Hobbes. Gregory VII conceived
+of Christendom as an undivided state; of a state as a polity dominated
+by a sovereign; of a sovereign as a ruler who must be either absolute or
+useless. And who, he asked, but the heir of the Prince of the Apostles
+could presume to claim a power so tremendous? For us the audacity of his
+pretensions is excused by the lofty aims which they were meant to serve.
+To conciliate contemporary opinion it was necessary that the new claims
+should be represented as the revival of old rights, as the logical
+corollaries of undisputed truths. And this course involved as its
+consequence an industrious, if partially unconscious, perversion of past
+history. For the Popes who had gone before him claimed powers which,
+though extensive, were capable of definition; which, though startling,
+could in the main be defended by appeal to well-established usage. The
+new policy led to this paradoxical situation, that precedents were
+diligently invoked to prove the Pope superior to all precedents.
+
+With Gregory VII the primacy of Western Christendom assumed a new
+character. But the primacy, in one form or another, had for centuries
+belonged to the Roman See. So much his remote predecessors had achieved,
+and their success is all the more remarkable when we remember how few of
+them had been distinguished statesmen. It is no matter for surprise
+that, in the course of nine troubled centuries, some Bishops of Borne
+had proved incompetent and others had betrayed the interests committed
+to their charge. It is, however, surprising that the Roman See was able
+to assume and hold the leading position among Western bishops without
+rendering much service to the extension or the organisation of the
+Church.
+
+Of all the early Popes, save Leo I and Gregory I, it is true that we may
+be tolerably at home in the history of their times without knowing much
+about them. No Pope is ranked among the leading Western Fathers. The
+only considerable theologian who occupied the Holy See, before the year
+1000, is Gregory I; and the highest praise which we can give his
+writings is that they imparted new life to some ideas of St. Augustine.
+It is as statesmen, not as thinkers, that the early Popes appeal to our
+attention. Yet their practical achievements scarcely account for the
+reverence which they inspired. The one great mission which Rome set on
+foot was that of Augustine to England. The other evangelists of the Dark
+Ages found their inspiration elsewhere, in the monasteries of Ireland or
+of Gaul and Germany. If we consider the progress of theological science,
+and of ecclesiastical organisation, we find that the great controversies
+were resolved, and the great legislative assemblies convened, in the
+Eastern Empire. It was but rarely that Rome asserted her right to speak
+in the name even of the Western Church; the record of the early Popes
+who attained to such a momentary pre-eminence was not such as the West
+could recollect with satisfaction. In fact, it was due to other causes
+than the merits of individual Popes that Rome became and remained the
+religious metropolis of Europe.
+
+How, then, are we to account for her triumphant progress? Hobbes
+suggested one explanation when he called the Papacy "the ghost of the
+Roman Empire." And it is true that the later Emperors found it
+convenient to confer special privileges on the bishops of their ancient
+capital. But they adopted this policy too late, when reverence for the
+Empire was already declining in the West. By imperial grants the Papacy
+gained no substantial powers, while individual Popes lost credit and
+independence by their special connection with the New Rome on the
+Bosporus. They were compelled to play an ignominious part in the
+squabbles of the Eastern Churches, they were loaded with onerous secular
+duties; they became the emblems and the agents of an alien tyranny,
+mistrusted alike by the barbarian invaders and the nominal subjects of
+the Empire.
+
+Other critics have explained the prestige of the Papacy as the fruit of
+successful impostures. For this hypothesis there is little to be said.
+One or two Popes, not the greatest, have condescended to use forged
+title-deeds. But the effect of these frauds has been much exaggerated.
+The most famous of them are the _Donation of Constantine_ and the
+_False Decretals_. The former, though probably of Roman origin, was
+little used at Rome, and only served to justify the modest beginnings of
+the temporal power. The latter are of more importance, and are sometimes
+regarded as opening an era of new pretensions. In fact they are little
+more than reiterations and amplifications of very ancient claims. Though
+frequently quoted by the canon lawyers, they are not indispensable links
+in the claim of historical proofs and precedents. They are chiefly
+significant as attesting the general desire of churchmen to find some
+warrant for a vigorous exercise of the papal prerogative. A primate with
+real powers was desired, not only by the clergy of the national churches
+as a bulwark against the brutal oppression of the State, but also by all
+religious thinkers as a symbol of corporate unity and a guarantee of
+doctrinal uniformity.
+
+No theory can be regarded as supplying a satisfactory explanation of
+papal authority, unless it explains this general belief in the necessity
+for a visible Head of the Western Church. In part the necessity was
+political. Exposed to the common danger of secular tyranny, the national
+churches looked for safety in federation; and they notified their union
+in the only way that uneducated laymen could understand, by announcing
+their subjection to a single spiritual sovereign. But there remained the
+problem of justifying this act of independence amounting to rebellion.
+The justification was found in two arguments, the one historical, the
+other doctrinal; the one based upon the Roman legend of St. Peter, the
+other on the acknowledged importance of holding fast to right tradition.
+Each of these arguments calls for some consideration.
+
+St. Peter, says the legend, was invested with the primacy among the
+Apostles; such is the plain meaning of the Saviour's declaration, _Tu
+es Petrus_. St. Peter founded the Roman Church and instituted the
+Roman bishopric. To Linus, the first bishop, Peter bequeathed his Divine
+commission and his knowledge of the Christian verities. From Linus these
+gifts descended without diminution to one after another in the unbroken
+chain of his successors. Hence Rome is entitled to the same pre-eminence
+among the churches which Peter held among his brethren. To examine the
+historical basis of the legend would be a lengthy and unprofitable task.
+Of St. Peter's connection with the Eternal City we know nothing certain,
+except that he preached and suffered there. If bishops existed in his
+time, there is some reason for thinking that the office was collegiate,
+and that the committee of bishops was less important then in the
+spiritual life of the community than at a later time. Not until the
+second century did the episcopate become monarchical and the holder of
+the office the supreme authority within the Church by which he was
+elected. The change was complete by the time of Irenaeus, who wrote
+_circa_ 180 A.D.; to him we owe our earliest catalogue of Roman
+bishops, beginning with Linus and ending with Eleutherus, the twelfth
+from Peter and the contemporary of Irenaeus. The later names in the list
+are doubtless those of authentic bishops; the earlier may be in some
+sense historical, the names of famous presbyters or of men who made
+their mark on the old episcopal committee. A point of secondary interest
+is that Irenaeus speaks of bishops, not of Popes; this title came into
+use a hundred years after his time. More important is the fact that, in
+the third century, when our documents become more copious, Rome is
+generally recognised as first in dignity among the churches (_ecclesia
+principalis_), but has no appellate jurisdiction and no legislative
+powers. It is only admitted that, when disputes arise on points of
+tradition, her testimony is entitled to special honour, as that of a
+church which preserves the memory of Peter's teaching. As doctrinal
+controversies become more acute and more fundamental, the importance of
+tradition is emphasised, the authority of those who voice it is
+magnified. Ultimately all the pretensions of the Holy See are founded on
+the claim that she possesses the only undefiled tradition. But it was
+not until long after the third century that the consequences of the
+claim were realised even by the claimants.
+
+If we were invited, at the present day, to suggest a means of conserving
+intact a body of doctrinal definitions and disciplinary law, we should
+not naturally select some mode of oral transmission as the safest
+available. Yet this expedient has found much favour in the past. Even
+among the Jews, with their extreme respect for sacred books, the written
+word was made of none account by the traditions of expositors. The
+votaries of the Greek mystic cults deliberately avoided writing down
+their more important formulae. Several considerations were in favour of
+this curious policy. There were no scientific canons for the
+interpretation of written texts; allegorising commentators read their
+own wild fancies into the plainest sentences. The only way of meeting
+them was to fall back on the traditional interpretation. We use the
+texts to test the traditions; but criticism in its early stages pursues
+the opposite course, and as a natural consequence rates tradition above
+Scripture. Other reasons which discouraged the use of writing were,
+first, the fear that no literary skill might be equal to the difficulty
+of accurate statement; secondly, the natural reluctance of the religious
+mind to let the deepest truths be exposed to the vulgar scoffs and
+criticism of the uninitiated; thirdly, some remnant of the primitive
+superstition that the formulae of a ritual are magic spells, which would
+lose their potency if published to the world; and, finally, the natural
+instinct of a sacerdotal class to reserve the knowledge of deepest
+mysteries to a select inner circle. For all these reasons a jealously
+guarded tradition, commonly designated as the _arcana_ or _secreta_, was
+to be found in all the early Christian Churches. To give a few examples:
+the Apostles' Creed, the distinctive symbol of the Roman Church, was
+preserved by oral tradition only down to the fourth century, and was not
+imparted to any catechumen until the time of his baptism. The minute
+rules of penitential discipline were first committed to writing by
+Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury, towards the close of the
+seventh century; and this innovation was sharply criticised by some
+ecclesiastical synods. Most remarkable of all is the reluctance of the
+churches to write down the essential, operative parts of the Mass.
+Written copies are first mentioned in the fourth century, and it was not
+until a much later period that the diversities of local tradition were
+corrected by the issue of a standard text. It might be supposed that the
+non-existence of official copies was due to the want of any device, such
+as printing, by which they could be cheaply multiplied. But there is a
+curious fact which suggests that publication was considered undesirable.
+One section of the Canon of the Mass was called the secret part
+(_secretum_), and was recited by the celebrant in an undertone, that it
+might not become known to the congregation. Similarly, all literary
+exposition of such central doctrines as the Atonement, or the Trinity,
+was deprecated by early theologians, who pass by them with the remark
+that they are known to the initiate.
+
+This cult of secrecy engendered difficulties which are written large
+upon the page of history. Disputes arose about the wording of the
+creeds, about the canon of the Scriptures, about the number and nature
+of the mortal sins, and the penances which they should entail.
+Periodically a curious investigator raised a storm by claiming that he
+had discovered a flaw in the traditional formulae, or a mistake in the
+sense which was currently attached to them. The one way of meeting such
+doubts was to compare the traditions of the older churches. This could
+be done by a provincial synod or a general council. But of these
+tribunals the former was unsatisfactory, as its decisions were of merely
+local validity and might be overruled by the voice of the universal
+Church. The general council was hard to convene, particularly after a
+rift had opened between the Eastern and the Western Churches. It was
+easier to select as the final arbiter a bishop whose knowledge of
+tradition was derived from an apostolic predecessor. In the East there
+were three such sees (Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria), but in the West
+Rome alone satisfied the necessary conditions. And the Bishops of Rome
+could claim, with some show of reason, that their tradition was derived
+from a worthier source, and had been better guarded against contagion,
+than that of any other Apostolic Church. Was it not a well-established
+fact that Rome had preserved an unwavering front in the face of the
+heretical Arius, when even Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria had
+wavered?
+
+Recourse to Rome as the oracle of the faith was so obvious an expedient,
+given the prevailing attitude towards tradition, that we can only be
+surprised to find how slow and gradual was the triumph of the Roman
+claims. The victory of logic was retarded both by the pride and by the
+common sense of the other Western Churches. On the one hand, the See of
+Carthage clung to the old ideal of Christendom as a confederation of
+self-governing churches, which might consult one another as they pleased
+but recognised no superior except a general council. Carthage carried
+with her the whole Church of Africa, and furnished an example which less
+illustrious communities were proud to imitate. The conquest of Africa by
+the Vandal heretics was necessary before the African Christians would
+consent to look to Rome as their spiritual metropolis. On the other
+hand, the rulings of the Roman bishops were justly suspected of being
+tempered by regard for expediency. Sometimes they relaxed penitential
+discipline, for fear of driving the weaker brethren to apostasy.
+Sometimes, under pressure from Constantinople, they proposed an
+ambiguous compromise with heresy. Such considerations were but gradually
+overborne by the pressure of circumstances. The spread of Arianism and
+the irruption of the Teutons (themselves often Arians) at length
+compelled the churches to take the obvious means of preserving their
+imperilled uniformity and union.
+
+It is in the acts of the Council of Sardica (343 A.D.) that we find the
+first explicit recognition of the Pope as an arbiter and (we may almost
+say) a judge of appeal. This council was merely a gathering of Western
+bishops, and the canons which it passed were never accepted by the
+Church of Africa. So doubtful was their validity that the Popes of the
+next generation disingenuously asserted that they had been passed at the
+earlier and more famous Council of Nicaea (325). Yet even at Sardica the
+Pope was only endowed with one definite prerogative. Henceforward any
+bishop condemned by a provincial synod might appeal to him; he could
+then order a second trial to be held, and could send his legates to sit
+among the judges; but he could not hear the case in his own court. More
+striking than this decree are the words of the letter which the Council
+addressed to Pope Julius: "It will be very right and fitting for the
+priests of the Lord, from every province, to refer to their Head, that
+is to the See of Peter." This recommendation was readily obeyed by the
+Churches of Gaul and Spain. Questions from their bishops poured in upon
+the Popes, who began to give their decisions in the form of open
+letters, and to claim for these letters the binding force of law. Pope
+Liberius (352-366 A.D.) appears to have commenced the practice, although
+the earliest of the extant "Decretals" is from the pen of Pope Siricius
+(385). Sixty years after Siricius' time, when the Western Empire was in
+its death-agony, this claim to legislative power was formally confirmed
+by the Emperor Valentinian III (445). But for some time after the
+Council of Sardica the new prerogative was used with the greatest
+caution. The Popes of that period use every precaution to make their
+oracular answers inoffensive. They assure their correspondents that Rome
+enjoins no novelties; that she does not presume to decide any point on
+which tradition is silent; that she is merely executing a mandate which
+general councils have laid upon her. Those who evince respect for her
+claims are overwhelmed with compliments. A decretal of Innocent I
+(402-417) begins as follows:--
+
+"Very dear brother, the Church's rules of life and conduct are well
+known to a priest of your merit and dignity. But since you have urgently
+inquired of us concerning the rule which the Roman Church prescribes, we
+bow to your desire and herewith send you our rules of discipline,
+arranged in order."
+
+On the other hand, no opportunity is lost of calling attention to the
+Roman primacy. Pope Siricius (384-398) writes in one of his letters: "We
+bear the burdens of all who are oppressed; it is the Apostle Peter who
+speaks in our person." Through the more confidential and domestic
+utterances of these Popes there runs a vein of haughty self-assertion.
+In the homilies of Leo I (440-461) the text _Tu es Petrus_ rings
+like a trumpet note; here we have the Roman ruler communing with his
+Roman people, the pride of empire taking a new shape amidst the ruins of
+that secular empire which the pagan Romans of the past had built up.
+
+In the general chaos produced by the barbarian migrations the
+consequence of the Papacy, as compared with that of other Western sees,
+was considerably enhanced by various causes: by the ruin of Carthage,
+the most unsparing of her critics; by the progressive deterioration of
+the other churches, which was most marked in those provinces where the
+barbarians were most readily converted; by the rising tide of ignorance,
+which overwhelmed all rival conceptions of Christendom and blotted out
+the past history of the Church. So great was this ignorance that
+Innocent I could claim, without much fear of contradiction, that "no man
+has founded any church in Italy, Sicily, Gaul, Spain, or Africa,
+excepting those whom Peter and his successors have ordained as priests."
+In the Italian peninsula there were three churches--Ravenna, Milan,
+Aquileia--which obstinately refused to consider themselves mere
+offshoots from the See of Peter. But the legend struck root and throve,
+as successive Popes associated themselves with missions to the
+unconverted tribes and with reforms in the barbarian churches.
+
+Among the earlier events which contributed to make the Roman belief the
+standard for all Western Christendom we need only mention the conquests
+of the orthodox Frankish monarchy; the official conversions from
+Arianism of the Burgundians (516) and the Visigoths in Spain (586); the
+extirpation of the Vandals and Ostrogoths by Justinian's generals; the
+missions of Augustine to England, of Wilfrid, Willibrord, and Boniface
+to the Germans; the submission of the Frankish Church under the
+influence of Boniface and Pepin the Short (748). Naturally the moral
+influence of Rome in the northern lands was augmented by the revival of
+the Western Empire, which meant the co-operation of Pope and Emperor in
+the extension of the Christian Republic. Cyril and Methodius, the
+Apostles of the Slavs, found it necessary to renounce the allegiance of
+the Greek Church, and to place their converts under the protection of
+Rome (866). It was from Rome that St. Adalbert went forth on his
+ill-starred but glorious mission to the Prussians (997); and it was a
+Pope, Sylvester II, who earned the glory of uniting the Hungarian people
+to Western Christendom (1000). Finally, Canute the Great, of Denmark and
+of England, came in the manner of a pilgrim (1027) to lay the homage of
+his Scandinavian subjects on the altar of St. Peter. The Popes reaped
+where they had not sown; but the harvest was rich and splendid.
+
+No less important was the political character which the papal office
+assumed with the revival of the Empire. Already under Gregory the Great
+we can trace the beginnings of a temporal power. Naturally and
+necessarily the Pope, already like other bishops a functionary charged
+with important secular duties, took upon himself the protection and
+government of Rome and the surrounding duchy, when the rulers of
+Byzantium shook off these unprofitable responsibilities. Naturally and
+excusably he claimed, over his vast Italian estates, the powers of
+jurisdiction which every landowner was assuming as a measure of
+self-defence against oppression or unbridled anarchy. In the time of
+Pepin the Short a further step was taken. The Frank, unwilling to
+involve himself in Italy yet anxious to secure the Holy See against the
+Lombards, recognized Pope Stephen II as the lawful heir of the derelict
+imperial possessions. And Charles the Great, both as King and as
+Emperor, confirmed the donation of his father. To make the Pope an
+independent sovereign was indeed a policy which he refused to entertain.
+His ideal was that of the Eastern Emperors: himself as the head of State
+and Church, the Pope as the Patriarch of all the churches in the Empire,
+elected with the Emperor's approval, ruling the clergy with the
+Emperor's counsel, enjoying over the lands of his see the largest
+privileges bestowed on any bishop, but still in all secular affairs a
+subject of the Empire. But on the other hand arose at Rome a different
+conception of the Pope's prerogative. Long ago Pope Gelasius had
+formulated the principle, more useful to his remote successors than
+himself, of the Two Powers, Church and State, both derived from God and
+both entitled to absolute power in their respective spheres. On this
+principle the State should not interfere with episcopal elections, or
+with matters of faith and discipline; it should not exercise
+jurisdiction over the priesthood who are servants of the Church, or over
+Church estates since they are held in trust for God and the poor. This
+view was proclaimed to the world by Leo III, who caused to be set up in
+the Lateran a mosaic representing in an allegory his relations to the
+Empire. St. Peter sits enthroned above; Charles and Leo kneel to right
+and left, in the act of receiving from the Apostle the pallium and the
+gonfalon, the symbols of their respective offices.
+
+No powerful Emperor ever accepted the Gelasian principle entire. To
+refute it was, however, difficult, so well did it harmonise with the
+current conception of the State. Under the later Carolingians it became
+the programme both of reformers and of mere ecclesiastical politicians.
+The new monasteries, founded or reorganised under the influence of
+Cluny, placed themselves beneath the special protection of the Pope,
+thus escaping from secular burdens. The national hierarchies hailed the
+forgeries of the Pseudo-Isidore as the charter of ecclesiastical
+liberty. Pope Nicholas I took his stand at the head of the new movement,
+and gave it a remarkable development when he asserted his jurisdiction
+over the adulterous Lothaire II (863). Nicholas died before he couldgive
+further illustrations of his claim to be supreme, even over kings,
+in matters of morality and faith. From his time to that of Hildebrand
+there was no Pope vigorous enough to make a similar example. Dragged
+down by their temporal possessions to the level of municipal seigneurs
+and party instruments, the Popes from 867 to 962 were, at the best, no
+more than vigorous Italian princes. To that level they returned after
+the period of the Saxon Ottos (962-1002). In those forty years there
+were glimpses of a better future; the German Pope, Gregory V, allied
+himself to Cluny (996-999); as Sylvester II (999-1003) the versatile
+Gerbert of Aurillac--at once mathematician, rhetorician, philosopher,
+and statesman--entered into the romantic dreams of his friend and pupil,
+Otto III, and formed others on his own behalf which centred round the
+Papacy rather than the Empire. Sylvester saw in imagination the Holy See
+at the head of a federation of Christian monarchies. But fate was no
+kinder to him than to Otto; he outlived his boy patron only by a year.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE HILDEBRANDINE CHURCH
+
+
+Modern life has travelled so far beyond medieval Christianity that it is
+only with an effort we retrace our steps to the intellectual position of
+a St. Bernard, a St. Francis, or the _Imitatio Christi_. Apart from
+the difficulties of an unfamiliar terminology, we have become estranged
+from ideas which then were commonplaces; beliefs once held to be
+self-evident and cardinal now hover on the outer verge of speculative
+thought, as bare possibilities, as unproved and unprovable guesses at
+truth. Our own creeds, it may be, rest upon no sounder bottom of logical
+demonstration. But they have been framed to answer doubts, and to
+account for facts, which medieval theories ignored; and in framing them
+we have been constrained partly to revise, partly to destroy, the
+medieval conceptions of God and the Universe, of man and the moral law.
+
+This is not the place for a critique of medieval religion. But, unless
+we bear in mind some essential features of the Catholic system of
+thought, we miss the key to that ecclesiastical statesmanship which
+dominates the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The programme of the
+great Popes, from Gregory VII to Boniface VIII, must appear a tissue of
+absurdities, of preposterous ambitions and indefensible actions, unless
+it is studied in relation to a theology as far remote from primitive
+Christianity as from the cults and philosophies of classical antiquity.
+
+The first article in this theology is the existence of a personal God
+who, though all-pervading and all-powerful, does not reveal Himself
+immediately to the human beings whom He has created to be His
+worshippers, and does not so order the world that events shall always
+express His will and purpose. He has endowed man with a sinful nature,
+and has permitted His universe to be invaded by evil intelligences of
+superhuman power and malignancy, who tempt man to destruction and are
+bent upon subverting the Divine order of which they form a part. He is
+supremely benevolent, and yet He only manifests the full measure of this
+quality when His help is invoked by prayer; His goodwill often finds
+expression in miracles--that is, in the suspending or reversing of the
+general laws which He has Himself laid down for the regulation of the
+universe and human destinies. He is inscrutable and incomprehensible;
+yet to be deceived as to the nature of His being is the greatest of all
+sins against His majesty. The goal of the religious life is personal
+communion with Him, the intuitive apprehension and spontaneous
+acceptance of His will, the Beatific Vision of His excellencies. But
+this state of blessedness cannot be reached by mere self-discipline; the
+prayers, the meditations, the good works of the isolated and
+uninstructed individual, can only serve to condone a state of
+irremediable ignorance. The avenue to knowledge of Him lies through
+faith; and faith means the unquestioning acceptance of the twofold
+revelation of Himself which He has given in the Scriptures and in the
+tradition of the Church. The two revelations are in effect reduced to
+one by the statement that only the Church is competent to give an
+authoritative exposition of the sacred writings. Upon the Church hangs
+the welfare of the individual and the world. Without participation in
+her sacraments the individual would be eternally cut off from God;
+without her prayers the tide of evil forces would no longer be held in
+check by recurring acts of miraculous intervention, but would rise
+irresistibly and submerge the human race.
+
+A society charged with these tremendous duties, the only organ of the
+Divine will and affording the only assurance of salvation, must
+obviously be superior to all mundane powers. It would be monstrous if
+her teaching were modified, if her powers of self-government were
+restricted, to suit the ambitions or the so-called common sense of a lay
+ruler. The Church stands to the State in the relation of the head to the
+members, of the soul to the body, of the sun to the moon. The State
+exists to provide the material foundations of the Christian society, to
+protect the Church, to extend her sphere and to constrain those who
+rebel against her law. In a sense the State is ordained by God, but only
+in the sense of being a necessary condition for the existence of a
+Christian Commonwealth. Logically the State should be the servant of the
+Church, acting with delegated powers under her direction.
+
+But theories, however logical, must come to terms with facts, or vanish
+into the limbo of chimeras. The power of the Hildebrandine Church was
+subject to serious limitations. On certain questions of importance the
+national hierarchies were inclined to side with the State against the
+Pope; and thus, for example, the claims of the Curia to tax the clergy,
+and to override the rights of ecclesiastical patrons, were restricted at
+one time or another by concordats, or by secular legislation such as the
+English statutes of Provisors and Praemunire. Where the whole of the
+clerical order presented a solid front, it was sometimes possible to
+make good a claim against which there was much to be said on grounds of
+common sense; as, for instance, benefit of clergy,--the exclusive
+jurisdiction of the Church over criminous ecclesiastics,--which was
+enforced even against a sovereign so powerful and so astute as Henry II
+of England. But, in the last resort, the pretensions of the Church
+depended for success upon a public opinion which was hard to move. Not
+because the average layman was critical or anti-clerical, but because he
+was illogical and unimaginative, he remained cold to any programme of
+reform which could only be justified by long trains of deductive
+reasoning; his natural impulse was against violent innovations, and he
+felt rather than argued that the State, as the ultimate guarantee of
+social order, must be maintained even at some cost of theological
+consistency. Until he could be convinced that high moral issues and his
+own salvation were at stake, it was useless or dangerous to
+excommunicate his king and to lay his country under interdict. For want
+of lay support the Church failed to make good such important claims as
+those of immunity from national taxation and of jurisdiction in cases of
+commercial contract. More striking still, she was prevented from
+establishing the Inquisition in states where that tribunal would have
+found no lack of work.
+
+Still, in spite of clerical divisions and lay conservatism, "the freedom
+of the Church" was an ideal which commanded universal homage; and it was
+necessary for the most obstinate opponent of ecclesiastical privilege to
+make it clear that his policy involved no real attack upon this freedom.
+Otherwise, defeat was certain. Thrice in two hundred years the cry for
+freedom was raised against the Holy Roman Empire; and three prolonged
+conflicts ended in the discomfiture of the most resolute and resourceful
+statesmen who ever held that office-Henry IV (1056-1105), Henry V
+(1106-1125), Frederic Barbarossa (1152-1190), and Frederic II
+(1212-1250). In the first of these great conflicts the question at issue
+was the reformation of the national clergy and their emancipation from
+secular authority. Henry IV paid for his assertion of prerogative and
+custom, both by the ignominious though illusory surrender at Canossa
+(1077), and by the unparalleled humiliations of his latter days, when he
+was compelled, as the prisoner of his own son, not only to abdicate but
+also to sign a confession of infamous offences against religion and
+morality. Henry V, reviving the plans of the father whom he had betrayed
+and entrapped, was reduced through very weariness to conclude the
+Concordat of worms (1122)--a renunciation which only ended in something
+less than absolute defeat for the Empire, because the imperial
+concessions were interpreted with more regard to the letter than the
+spirit. In the second struggle the immediate issue was the freedom of
+papal elections, the ultimate question whether Pope or Emperor should
+shape the Church's policy; and Frederic Barbarossa was compelled, after
+a schism of seventeen years' duration to surrender claims which dated
+from the time of Charles the Great, and to make peace with Alexander
+III, whom he had sworn that he would never recognise (Treaty of Anagni,
+1176). Henry VI, the son of Barbarossa, when he joined the kingdom of
+Sicily to the Empire through his marriage with Constance, the heiress of
+the Norman throne, sowed the seed of a new conflict, and bequeathed to
+Frederic II the perilous ideal of an Italy united under a Hohenstauffen
+despotism. Ecclesiastical freedom now became a euphemism for the
+preservation of the temporal power, and for the project of a federal
+Italy, owning allegiance to a papal suzerain. Frederic II, who came
+nearer to success in a more far-reaching policy than any of his
+predecessors, was worn out by the steady alternation of successes with
+reverses, and left his sons and grandson to reap the bitter harvest of a
+failure which he had barely realised.
+
+The moral issue dwindles to smaller proportions in each successive stage
+of this titanic duel between the titular representatives of State and
+Church; and from first to last the Papacy depended largely upon allies
+who were pursuing their own objects in the Church's name. The German
+princes, the Normans of Lower Italy and Sicily, the Lombard communes,
+all contributed in varying degrees to the defeat of the Henries and the
+Frederics. The German princes brought Henry IV to his knees at two
+critical moments in the reign; the majority of them held obstinately
+aloof from the Italian wars of Barbarossa; and Frederic II, who
+endeavoured to buy their neutrality by extravagant concessions, found
+himself confronted by German rebels and pretenders towards the close of
+his career (1246-1250), when the Italian situation appeared to be
+changing in his favour. The Normans intervened more than once in the
+Wars of Investitures to shelter a fugitive Pope or rescue Rome from
+German armies; the Lombards, as we shall relate elsewhere, were the
+chief barrier between Rome and Frederic Barbarossa, between Frederic II
+and Germany. Charles of Anjou was the latest and most efficient champion
+of the papal cause; and he lives in history as the forerunner of the
+conscienceless and shameless statesmanship of the Renaissance epoch. And
+yet, when we have allowed for the utility of these alliances, the
+question remains why radical communes, rebellious feudatories, and
+adventurers in search of kingdoms, found it worth their while to enlist
+in the service of the Church, and to endure the restrictions which such
+a service inevitably entailed. The true strength of the Church lay in
+her moral influence. It was a handful, even among the clergy, who
+devoted themselves heart and soul to the ideal of society which she set
+up. Still her ideal was in possession of the field; it might be
+subjected to a negative and sceptical criticism by an isolated
+philosopher, by a heretical sect, or by an orthodox layman smarting
+under priestly arrogance; but when the forces of the Church were
+mobilised, the indifferent majority stood aside and shrugged their
+shoulders. The way of Rome might not be the way of Christ; but if the
+Apostolic misinterpreted the lessons of Scripture and tradition, from
+whom could a better rule of life be learned? An erring Church was better
+than no Church at all. In the thirteenth century, when papal extortions
+were a subject of complaint in every European state, Frederic II put
+himself forward as the champion of the common interest, and appealed
+from the Pope to the bar of public opinion. It was his turn today, he
+said with perfect truth; the turn of kings and princes would come when
+the Emperor was overthrown. His eloquence made some impression; but his
+fellow-sovereigns could not or would not prevent the Pope from taxing
+their clergy and recruiting their subjects for the Holy War against the
+secular chief of Christendom, the head and front of whose offending was
+that he opposed the interests of the State to the so-called rights of
+the Church.
+
+It is no mere accident that the heyday of sacerdotal pretensions
+coincided with the golden age of the religious orders; that the
+Hildebrandine policy took shape when the Cluniac movement was
+overflowing the borders of France into all the adjacent countries; that
+Alexander III was a younger contemporary of St. Bernard, and that the
+death-grapple between Empire and Papacy followed hard upon the
+foundation of the mendicant fraternities by St. Francis and St. Dominic.
+The monks and the friars were the militia of the Church. Not that the
+medieval orders devoted themselves to a political propaganda with the
+zeal and system of the Jesuits in the sixteenth century. The
+serviceswhich the Cluniacs and the Cistercians, the Dominicans and the
+Franciscans, rendered to the militant Papacy were more impalpable and
+indirect. From time to time, it is true, they were entrusted with
+important missions--to raise money, to preach a crusade, to influence
+monarchs, to convert or to persecute the heretic; St. Bernard, the
+founder of Clairvaux and the incarnation of the monastic spirit, was for
+twenty years (1133-1153) the oracle to whom Pope after Pope resorted for
+direction. But even in St. Bernard's time, and even when the reigning
+Pope was his nominee or pupil, there was a certain divergence between
+the theories for which he stood and the actual policy of the Curia. It
+was, for example, against his better judgment that he organised the
+Second Crusade in deference to the express commands of Pope Eugenius
+III; and on the other hand, the Papacy preserved towards the pioneers of
+scholasticism an attitude which he thought unduly lenient. Rome was more
+broad-minded than Clairvaux, more alive to realities, more versed in
+statecraft and diplomacy; while Clairvaux fostered a nobler conception
+of the spiritual life, and was more consistent in withholding the Church
+from secular entanglements. The qualities which made the monk
+invaluable as a leader of public opinion also made him an incalculable
+and intractable factor in political combinations. He was most useful as
+the missionary and the embodiment of an ecclesiastical idea which,
+unconsciously perhaps but none the less emphatically, attacked the
+foundations of the secular State. The founders of the great orders,
+whether they found their inspiration (with St. Bernard) in the Rule of
+Benedict, or rather strove (with St. Francis) to follow literally the
+commission imposed by Christ upon his twelve Apostles, returned upon a
+past in which the State and Caesar were nothing to the Christian but
+"the powers that be." The monastic or mendicant order, designed as an
+exemplar of the Christian society, was a voluntary association governed
+by the common conscience, as expressed in the will of representative
+chapters and an elected superior. The absolute obedience of the monk or
+friar was self-imposed, the consequence of a vow only accepted from one
+who had felt the inner call and had tested it in a severe probation. In
+virtue of his self-surrender he became dead to the world, a citizen of
+the kingdom of heaven upon earth. No secular duties could be lawfully
+demanded of him; he had migrated from the jurisdiction of the State to
+that of God. The religious orders claimed the right to be free from all
+subjection save that of the Church, as represented by the Pope. Though
+far from holding the State a superfluous invention--they regarded it as
+a Divine instrument to curb the lawless passions of the laity--they
+demanded that all other ministers of God, from the archbishop to the
+humblest clerk in orders, should enjoy the same exemption as themselves
+on condition of accepting the same threefold obligation--Poverty,
+Obedience, Chastity. It was consequently in the religious orders that
+the chief movements for reforming the medieval clergy found their
+warmest partisans; and the same school supplied the theoretical basis
+for each new claim of privilege. The Orders were the salt of the Church,
+so long as they preserved the spirit of their founders. But they were
+also responsible for the insanely logical pretensions which characterise
+the Church's policy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and it
+was with reason that Wycliffe, the greatest medieval critic of the
+sacerdotal theory, attacked the Mendicant Orders as typifying all that
+was worst in the hierarchy of his age.
+
+Naturally enough the monastic spirit has been often treated as an
+absolute antithesis to the lay statesmanship which it so bitterly
+opposed. But in fact they sprang from the same root of a discontent,
+which was wholly reasonable, with the anarchical conditions of the early
+Middle Ages. The religious reformer, stunned and bewildered by the
+wrong-doing of men and the manifest inequity of fortune, argued that a
+world so irredeemably bad must be regarded as an ordeal for the faith of
+the believer. Man was afflicted in this life that he might realise the
+supreme value of the life to come. He was surrounded by evil that he
+might learn to hate it. He was placed in society that he might school
+himself to control the immoral and non-moral instincts which society
+calls into play. The political reformers, at least in their more
+disinterested moods, were animated by the same belief in an all-wise
+Providence, but drew different deductions from it. The God who created
+man as a social being could not have intended that society should remain
+perpetually unjust. He must have intended that it should approximate,
+however imperfectly, to the idea of justice which He has revealed. The
+State is a divine institution, and therefore man must do his best to
+reform the State. The lay ruler, as the representative of justice, is
+God's steward and even in a sense His priest. Frederic II, whom his
+contemporaries denounced as an apostate and blasphemer, only expressed
+in a particularly daring form the tradition of medieval royalty when he
+styled himself, or allowed his flatterers to style him, the Corner-Stone
+of the Church, the Vicar of God, the New Messiah.
+
+Similarly, the heretics and rationalists, whose criticism was even more
+dangerous to the Church than the open violence of the State, had more in
+common with their opponents than we should infer from the duration and
+the character of the disputes which they provoked. In the background of
+medieval history, and developing _pari passu_ with the feud of
+Papacy and Empire, there was a war, of arguments and persecution,
+against free thought, in which the religious Orders figured as the
+protagonists of orthodoxy. Berengar of Tours, who challenged the
+doctrine of transubstantiation and so endangered the basis of the
+sacerdotal theory, lived in the age when a regenerated Papacy was arming
+for the war on secularism; it was Hildebrand himself who pronounced the
+final sentence on the first of the heresiarchs. The age of Henry V and
+of the Concordat of Worms saw the rise of a medieval Puritanism in
+Languedoc and Flanders. Between the Concordat of Worms and the schism of
+Frederic Barbarossa lies the age of Abelard,--the metaphysical
+free-lance who made philosophy the talk of the street-corner and the
+marketplace,--and of Arnold of Brescia, who demanded that the Church
+should be reduced to apostolic poverty. To the youthful days of Frederic
+II belong the Albigensian Crusade, the futile campaign of authority
+against Averroes and Aristotle, the heresy-hunts of volunteer
+inquisitors in Italy and Germany. While the same Emperor was trying
+conclusions with Innocent IV, the Papal Inquisition became a permanent
+branch of the ecclesiastical executive; and the Mendicant Orders, who
+supplied the inquisitors, simultaneously took upon themselves the harder
+task of converting the universities from the cult of Aristotle to a
+belief in the Christian scholasticism formulated by Albertus Magnus and
+Aquinas. The weapons of this interminable and many-sided controversy
+were as rude as the age which forged them: on the one side, coarse
+invective and irreverent paradox; on the other, scandalous imputations,
+spiritual censures, the sword, the prison, and the stake. For the
+medieval attitude towards heterodoxy was unflinching and uncompromising.
+To remain sceptical when the Church had defined was as the sin of
+witchcraft or idolatry. The existence of the rebel was an insult to the
+Most High, a menace to the salvation of the simple; he was a diseased
+limb of the body politic, calling for sharp surgery. And yet these
+nonconformists were anything but unbelievers. The free-thinkers of the
+schools, apart from a few obscure eccentrics, only desired to find a
+rational basis for the common creed or to eliminate from it certain
+articles which, on moral grounds and grounds of history, they
+stigmatised as mere interpolations. The offence of Berengar was that he
+attacked a dogma which had been an open question within the last two
+hundred years; of Abelard, that he offered his own theories on some
+points in regard to which the orthodox tradition was mute or
+inconsistent. As for the sectaries, their offence usually consisted in
+exaggerating one or other of three doctrines which the Church
+acknowledged in a more moderate shape. Either, like the Poor Men of
+Lyons, they desired that the Church should return to primitive
+simplicity; or, like the Albigeois, they harped upon the Pauline
+antithesis between the spirit and the flesh, pushed to extremes the
+monastic contempt for earthly ties, and exalted the Christian Devil to
+the rank of an evil deity, supreme in the material universe. Or,
+finally, with Joachim of Corazzo and the Fraticelli, they developed the
+cardinal idea of the more orthodox mystics, the belief in the inner
+light, and taught that the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life. In
+short, all were guilty, not of repudiating Christianity, but of
+interpreting the Christian doctrine in a sense forbidden by authority.
+Beneath all differences there was unity; behind the controversy,
+agreement. There are no feuds more bitter, no recriminations more
+unjust, than those of men who look at the same faith from different
+sides.
+
+In justice to the official Church it must be remembered that, whether
+she had to deal with kings or heretics, the peculiar nature of her power
+forced her to work through instruments which she was powerless to keep
+in hand, and in which she had placed her confidence with the temerity of
+desperation. There can be no greater contrast than that between the
+Hildebrandine programme and the measures by which it was incompletely
+realised. To enforce the celibacy of the clergy the mobs of Milan and
+the South-German cities were commissioned to rabble married priests. To
+make an end of simony the German princes were encouraged in a policy of
+provincial separatism, a premium was placed on perjured accusations, and
+a son was suborned to betray his father. That the tide of the
+Albigensian heresy might be stemmed, Innocent III launched against the
+brilliant civilisation of Languedoc the brutal and avaricious feudalism
+of the North. Sometimes the error was recognised after it had been
+committed. But no experience could cure the official Church of the
+delusion that every volunteer must be credited with the purest motives
+until the contrary is proved. The same ignorance of human nature
+characterised her methods of administrative routine. Even if, for the
+sake of argument, we admit the truth of the principles which were
+alleged to justify the Papal Inquisition, or the censorship of the
+bishops' courts, or the appellate jurisdiction of the Curia, the fact
+remains that these institutions were so organised and so conducted that
+the most flagrant abuses were only to be expected. A system which, if
+staffed with saints, would have been barely tolerable, became iniquitous
+when it was committed to the charge of petty officials, ill-paid, ill-
+supervised, and ill-selected. To a great extent the crimes and follies
+of the medieval Church were those of a complex bureaucracy in a
+half-civilised state. Such a system fails through being too ambitious;
+the founders have neither the technical experience requisite for a
+satisfactory arrangement of details, nor the subordinates who can repair
+the defects of the machine by the efficiency and honesty with which they
+tend it; and yet because the aim is grandiose, because the supporters of
+the scheme proclaim their readiness and their capacity to regenerate the
+State and human nature, they are hailed as the prophets of a new order;
+they are allowed to plead the excellence of their motives in extenuation
+of all and any means; and they end by creating new evils without
+appreciably diminishing the old.
+
+But if the Church as a scheme of government was a doubtful blessing to
+those who gave her their allegiance, the Church as a home of spiritual
+life was invested with a grandeur and a charm which were and are
+apparent, even to spectators standing at the outer verge of her domain.
+We may compare the religion of the Middle Ages to an alpine range, on
+the lower slopes of which the explorer finds himself entangled in the
+mire and undergrowth of pathless thickets, oppressed by a still and
+stifling atmosphere, shut off from any view of the sky above or the
+pleasant plains beneath. Ascending through this sheltered and ignoble
+wilderness, he comes to free and windswept pastures, to the white
+solitude of virgin snowfields, to brooding glens and soaring peaks robed
+in the light or darkness of a mystery which he is as little able to
+define as to resist. Far below him, illimitably vast and yet infinitely
+little, extends the prospect of the lower levels which, whether
+beautiful or sordid, are too remote to seem a part of the new world in
+which he finds himself, and strike his senses only as a foil and a
+background to the severer hues, the more majestic lines and contours of
+the snow-capped mountain-ranges. On such heights of moral exaltation the
+medieval mystics built their tabernacles and sang their
+_Benedicite_, calling all nature to bear witness with them that God
+in His heaven was very near, and all well with a universe which existed
+only to fulfil His word. It was a noble optimism; and those who embraced
+it are the truest poets of the Middle Ages, none the less poets because
+they expressed their high imaginings in life instead of language.
+Philosophers they neither were nor sought to be; the temperament which
+feels the mystery of things most keenly is not that which probes into
+the how and why; but the world of their dreams was at least superior to
+ours in being founded upon an ever-present and overwhelming reverence
+for the truth behind the veil. The vision of the mountain-peaks, however
+clouded, was worth the toil of the ascent; and there was reason in the
+docility with which the vulgar bowed themselves before the forms and
+ceremonies and rules of outward conduct which the visible Church
+prescribed; since they believed that so they might find the way, in this
+life or a better, to that higher rule of service, exemplified in the
+finest characters of their experience, which as Scripture said and the
+saints testified was perfect life and freedom. It is no wonder that they
+were disposed to go further still; to stake their earthly fortunes and
+the future of society on the bidding of those among the elect who from
+time to time descended among them, like Moses from the mountain, with
+transfigured faces and the message of a new revelation. And if the
+result was sometimes calamitous or pitiable, there were compensating
+gains; a matter-of-fact prosperity is not altogether preferable to
+enlistment in the forlorn hope of idealism. Had medieval society been
+more consistently secular and sceptical, it might have been more
+prosperous, more stable, the nursery of more balanced natures and the
+theatre of more orderly careers. But there would have been the less to
+learn from the ethical and political conceptions of the age. What
+appeals to us in the medieval outlook upon life is, first, the idea of
+mankind as a brotherhood transcending racial and political divisions,
+united in a common quest for truth, filled with the spirit of mutual
+charity and mutual helpfulness, and endowed with a higher will and
+wisdom than that of the individuals who belong to it; secondly, a
+profound belief in the superiority of right over might, of spirit over
+matter, of the eternal interests of humanity over the ambitions and the
+passions of the passing hour. Without Christianity these articles of
+faith could scarcely have passed into the common heritage of men; and,
+without the Church, it is in the last degree improbable that
+Christianity would have survived that age of semi-barbarism in which the
+foundations of the modern world were laid.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE MEDIEVAL STATE
+
+
+Between the years 1100 and 1500 A.D. the state-system of Europe passed
+through changes amounting in their sum-total to a revolution. But the
+changes which endured, whether they affected political boundaries or
+constitutions, came about by slow instalments. At no stage of the
+development was there any general cataclysm such as had followed the
+dissolution of the Frankish Empire, and was to follow the advent of
+Napoleon. New ideas matured slowly in the medieval mind; by the twelfth
+century the forces making for social stability had grown until they
+balanced those of disruption; and it was only in the age of the
+Renaissance that the equilibrium was again destroyed. In the interim the
+vested interests of property and privilege, of religious and secular
+authority, presented a firm front to the anarchists and radicals. The
+Jacquerie in France and Wat Tyler's followers in England, the Albigeois
+of Languedoc and the Hussites of Bohemia, were overwhelmed by armies of
+conservatives spontaneously banded together in defence of the
+established order;--while this spirit prevailed among the ruling
+classes, there was little fear that a revolution of any kind would be
+effected by a sudden stroke. As in domestic politics, so too in
+international relations, these solidly established states were
+habitually inert, strong in defence, but irresolute and sluggish in
+attack. The age produced no conqueror to sweep through Europe like a
+whirlwind, because the implements of conquest on the grand scale had
+either been destroyed or had not yet come into existence. The peoples of
+Europe had emerged from the nomadic stage of culture, and they were not
+yet organised as so many armed camps. The feudal host was hard to
+mobilise, harder still to keep in the field, and at the best an
+unmanageable weapon; a standing army of mercenary soldiers would have
+called for taxation heavier and more regular than any ruler dared to
+demand, or any people could afford to pay. The wars of the Middle Ages
+have therefore, with few exceptions, a stamp of futility and pettiness.
+Ambitious enterprises were foredoomed to failure, and powers apparently
+annihilated by an invading host recovered strength as soon as it had
+rolled away. In short, on the European and on the national stage alike,
+medieval politics meant the eternal recurrence of the same problems and
+disputes, the eternal repetition of the same palliatives and the same
+plan of campaign. It is true that political science made more progress
+than the art of war. But substantial reforms of institutions were
+effected only in a few exceptional communities--in Sicily under the
+Normans and Frederic II, in England under Henry II and Edward I, in
+France under Philip Augustus and his successors. Even in these cases the
+progress usually consists in elaborating some primitive expedient, in
+developing some accepted principal to the logical conclusion. The more
+audacious innovators, a Montfort, an Artevelde, a Frederic II, were
+tripped up and overthrown as soon as they stepped beyond the circle of
+conventional ideas. It will therefore suffice for our present purpose to
+state in the barest outline the leading events of international
+politics, and the chief advances in the theory of government, which
+signalised the Middle Ages.
+
+Extensive diplomatic combinations, though continually planned, seldom
+came to the birth and very rarely led to any notable result. The
+existence of some common interests was recognised; no power viewed with
+indifference any movement threatening the existence of the Papacy, which
+represented religious unity, or of the crusading principalities which
+formed the outer bulwark of Western Christendom; the principle of the
+Balance of Power, though not yet crystallised into a dogma, was so far
+understood that the inordinate growth of any single power alarmed the
+rest, even though they stood in no imminent danger of absorption.
+Therefore whenever the Empire gained the upper hand over the Church,
+whenever a new horde of Asiatics appeared on the horizon, whenever
+France seemed about to become a province of England, or Italy a province
+of France, the alarm was sounded by the publicists, and there ensued a
+general interchange of views between the monarchies; treaty was piled on
+treaty, alliance parried with alliance, as industriously as at any time
+in modern history. But the peoples seldom moved, and the agitation of
+the ruling classes effervesced in words. It is altogether exceptional to
+find two of the greater states uniting for the humiliation of a third,
+as England and the Empire united against Philip Augustus of France. Few
+medieval battles were so far-reaching in their consequences as Bouvines
+(1214), to which England owes her Magna Carta, Germany the magnificent
+and stormy autumn of the Hohenstauffen dynasty, France the consolidation
+of her long-divided provinces under an absolutist monarchy.
+
+At ordinary times there were in medieval Europe two groups of states
+with separate interests and types of polity. They were divided from one
+another by a broad belt of debatable territory, extending from Holland
+to the coast of Provence--the northern lands of the Carolingian Middle
+Kingdom.
+
+To the west lay the monarchies of the Iberian peninsula, of France,
+England, and Scotland; connected by their interest in the trade of the
+Atlantic seaboard, by a common civilisation in which the best elements
+were of French origin, but most of all by their preoccupation with the
+political questions arising out of England's claim to a good half of the
+territory of France. The rivalry of these two great powers, which dated
+in a rudimentary form from the Norman Conquest of England, became acute
+when Henry II, heir in his mother's right to England and Normandy, in
+that of his father to Anjou and Touraine, married Eleanor the duchess of
+Aquitaine and the divorced wife of Louis VII (1152). Developing from one
+stage to another, it alternately made and unmade the fortunes of either
+nation for four hundred years, until Charles VII of France brought his
+wars of reconquest to a triumphant conclusion by crushing, in Guyenne,
+the last remnants of the English garrison and of the party which clung
+to the English allegiance (1453). In the interval there had been sharp
+vicissitudes of failure and success: the expulsion of the English by
+Philip Augustus from Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Touraine, and Poitou; the
+capture of Calais and recovery of Aquitaine by Edward III and the Black
+Prince; the almost complete undoing of their work by Charles V and
+Bertrand Duguesclin; the union of the French and English crowns (1420),
+resulting from the victories of Henry V and the murderous feud of the
+Burgundian and Armagnac factions; the apparition of Jeanne d'Arc as the
+prophetess of French nationalism, and the regeneration of the French
+monarchy by a new race of scientific statesmen. All the West had been
+shaken by this secular duel. For Scotland it spelled independence, for
+Navarre the loss of independence; in Castile it set on the throne the
+new dynasty of Trastamare; to Aragon the result was the appearance of a
+new rival in Mediterranean commerce, the frustration of hopes which had
+centred round Provence and Languedoc, the imperilling of others which
+were fixed on Italy. With each successive triumph of French over English
+arms, the influence of France penetrated farther to the south and east;
+and by the marriages or military successes of princes of the French
+blood-royal, new territories were joined to the sphere of the western
+nations. Under St. Louis the counties of Toulouse and Provence became
+French appanages; his brother, Charles of Anjou, added to Provence the
+derelict kingdom of Naples; and Sicily only escaped from the rule of the
+Angevins by submission to the House of Aragon. After the victories of
+Charles V the Valois dukes of Burgundy, supported by the influence now
+of France and now of England, sketched the outlines of a new Middle
+Kingdom, stretching from the Jura to the Zuyder Zee, and chiefly
+composed of lands which had hitherto been attached to the Empire.
+
+[Illustration: France]
+
+The eastern group of nations is widely different in character. It
+includes a greater number of states, even if we omit from the reckoning
+the great German principalities which were, by the end of the Middle
+Ages, all but sovereign powers; and it is less homogeneous in culture.
+The Empire forms the centre of the group, and round the Empire the minor
+states are grouped like satellites: on the west, Savoy and Provence;
+south of the Alps, Venice, the Papal States, and the Kingdom of Sicily--
+the last-named independent until 1194, and the private property of the
+Hohenstauffen from that date till 1268; on the east the kingdoms of
+Hungary and Bohemia and Poland, and the Russian principalities; on the
+north the three Scandinavian powers. Large as it is, this group only
+includes one state of the first rank; for the Norman kingdom, though a
+masterpiece of constructive  statesmanship, was important in European
+politics rather as a second and a makeweight than as a principal, and
+would have been more admired than feared but for the accidents which
+made the Norman alliance so valuable to the Holy See. When Naples and
+Sicily were held by German Emperors, the Empire towered like a colossus
+above the states of Scandinavia, the Slav and the Magyar. But even
+without this support, the Empire might have continued to dominate two-
+thirds of Europe, if the imperial resources had not been swallowed up by
+the wars of Italy, and if the Emperors who came after the interregnum
+had given the national interest priority over those of their own
+families. In fact, however, the mischief of the Mezentian union between
+Italy and Germany survived their separation; as in western so in central
+Europe, the course of political development was largely determined by
+the persistent and disastrous efforts of a Teutonic to absorb a Latin
+nationality. But whereas the English attacks on France were directly
+responsible for the growth of a French national state, the failure of
+Germany left Italy but half emancipated from the foreigner, and more
+disintegrated than she had been at any period in the past. And whereas
+England, by her failure, was reduced for a while to a secondary rank
+among the nations, the purely German Empire of the fifteenth century was
+still the leading power east of the Rhine. This was partly the result of
+calamities to neighbouring nations which could neither be foreseen or
+obviated. While Western Europe was shielded, in the later Middle Ages,
+from the inroads of alien races, Eastern Europe felt the impact of the
+last migratory movements emanating from Central Asia and the Moslem
+lands. In the thirteenth century the advance guards of the Mongol Empire
+destroyed the medieval kingdom of Poland, and reduced the Russian
+princes to dependence upon the rulers of the Golden Horde. In the
+fifteenth, the advance of the Turks along the Danube completed the ruin
+of the Magyar state, already weakened by the feuds of aristocratic
+factions. But, apart from these favourable circumstances, the resources
+of Germany were irresistible when they could be concentrated. Twice
+after the Great Interregnum the integrity of the Empire was threatened
+by the Bohemian kingdom. On the first occasion, when Ottocar II had
+extended his power into the German lands between Bohemia and the
+Adriatic, he was overthrown by Rudolf of Hapsburg at the battle of the
+Marchfeld (1278); and a new Hapsburg principality was formed out of the
+reconquered lands to guard the south-east frontier against future
+incursions of Czech or Magyar. On the second, when the Hussite levies
+carried their devastations and their propaganda into all the
+neighbouring provinces of the Empire (1424-1434), crusade after crusade
+was launched against Bohemia until the heretics, uniformly victorious in
+the field, were worn out by the strain of their exertions against
+superior numbers, and all the more moderate spirits recognised that such
+triumphs must end in the ruin and depopulation of Bohemia. The case was
+the same in the Baltic, where the struggle with Danish ambitions was
+left to the princes and the free towns. Waldemar II (1202-1241), who had
+planned to revive the Scandinavian Empire of the great Canute, the
+conqueror of England, saw his ambitious edifice crumble to pieces while
+it was still in the making; even the Union of Kalmar (1397), by which
+the crowns of Norway and Sweden and Denmark were vested in a single
+dynasty, could not save the rich prize of the Baltic trade from falling
+into German hands. Germany, even when ill-governed and a prey to the
+ambitions of provincial dynasties, was still _grande chose et
+terrible_, as more than one political adventurer learned to his cost.
+The energy, the intelligence and the national spirit of a great people
+made good all the errors of statesmen and all the defects of
+institutions.
+
+[Illustration: Holy Roman Empire under Frederick Barbarossa]
+
+Late in the fifteenth century the Germans were mortified to discover
+that, although a nation, they had not become a state. They found that
+the centre of political power had shifted westward, that the destinies
+of Europe were now controlled by the French, the English and the
+Spaniards. These nations had perfected a new form of autocracy, more
+vigorous, more workmanlike in structure, than any medieval form of
+government. Germany in the meanwhile had clung to all that was worst and
+feeblest in the old order; her monarchy, and the institutions connected
+with it, had been reduced to impotence. The same process of decay had
+operated in the minor states of the eastern group. In Scandinavia, in
+Hungary, in the Slavonic lands, the tree of royal power was enveloped
+and strangled by the undergrowth of a bastard feudalism, by the
+territorial power of aristocracies which, under cover of administrative
+titles, converted whole provinces into family estates and claimed over
+their tenants the divine right of unlimited and irresponsible
+sovereignty. To investigate all the reasons for the political
+backwardness of these eastern peoples would carry us far afield. But one
+reason lies on the surface. Outside the free towns they had produced no
+middle class; and their towns were neither numerous nor wealthy enough
+to be important in national politics. They were not even represented in
+the national assemblies. In consequence the sovereigns of these states
+were obliged to govern by the help of aristocratic factions; to purchase
+recognition by the grant of larger and larger privileges; and for the
+sake of power to strip themselves of the resources which alone could
+give their power any meaning. But good government in the Middle Ages was
+only another name for a public-spirited and powerful monarchy. Such
+monarchies existed in the western states; they rested upon the shoulders
+of a middle class of small landowners and wealthy merchants, too weak to
+defend themselves in a state of nature, a war of all against all, but
+collectively strong enough to overawe the forces of anarchy.
+
+It may seem strange that this class, which desired strong government for
+purely practical and material reasons, should uniformly have accepted
+hereditary kingship as the one form of government practicable in a large
+community. Even where there was the warrant of tradition for recourse to
+free election, the better governed states preferred that the supreme
+power should pass automatically from father to son. The explanation is
+to be found in the motives which prompted the Athenians, under widely
+different circumstances, to choose their magistrates by lot. The grand
+danger, to be avoided at all costs, was that a disputed succession would
+leave the daily work of government in abeyance and open the door for
+destructive party-conflicts. If continuity and stability of government
+were assured, all would go well. The work of a ruler was not supposed to
+demand exceptional abilities; he existed to do justice, to secure every
+man in the possession of his own, to apply the law without respect of
+persons. For these purposes a high sense of duty was the main requisite.
+The wisest heads of the community would be at the king's service for the
+asking; he could hardly go wrong if he heard attentively and weighed
+impartially the counsel which they had to offer. Admitting that he would
+be all the more efficient for possessing some practical capacity, some
+experience of great affairs, was it not probable that a man of average
+intelligence, who had been trained from his youth to fill the kingly
+office, would acquit himself better than some self-made adventurer of
+genius, who had paid more attention to the arts of winning place and
+popularity than to the work that would be thrown upon him when he
+reached the goal of his ambition? When we further recollect that
+hereditary kingship was sanctioned by use and wont, was the most
+intelligible symbol of national unity, and possessed as of right all the
+prerogatives which were necessary for effective government, it is no
+wonder that even those to whom doctrines of popular sovereignty and a
+social contract were perfectly familiar acquiesced contentedly in a form
+of government which the modern world regards as unreasonable and
+essentially precarious.
+
+But a monarchy, however energetic, however public-spirited, was
+powerless until based on the firm foundations of an organised executive,
+an expert judicature, and an assembly representative in fact if not in
+form. No medieval state was so uniformly fortunate as Germany in finding
+kings of exceptional character and talent. Yet Germany, from the
+beginning to the end of the Middle Ages, was badly governed. This was
+not due solely to the circumstance that the German monarchy was in
+principle elective. It is true that the German crown was often purchased
+by ill-advised concessions; but a greater source of weakness was the
+inability of the Emperors to make the most of the prerogatives which
+they retained, and which the nation desired that they should exercise.
+Imperial justice was dilatory and inefficient because the imperial law
+court followed the Emperor; because the professional was liable to be
+overruled by the feudal element among the judges; because the rules of
+procedure were uncertain and the decisions based not upon a scientific
+jurisprudence but on provincial custom. The Diet of the Empire was weak,
+both in deliberation and as a legislature; because the towns and the
+lesser nobility had no respect for resolutions in framing which they had
+not been consulted. The executive was necessarily inefficient or
+unpopular; because the highest offices were claimed as a right by
+princes who, if laymen, owed their rank to the accident of birth or, if
+ecclesiastics, could only be good servants of the State by becoming
+unworthy servants of the Church. The Emperor who confided in his natural
+counsellors was ill-served; and if he relied upon new men, selected
+solely for their loyalty and qualifications, he incurred the reproach of
+tyranny or submission to unworthy favourites. The evils thus rooted in
+the German constitution had existed at an earlier date in France and
+England. To eradicate them was the object of the constitutional changes
+devised by the Plantagenets in England, by the later Capetian kings in
+France. And in essentials there is a strong likeness between the work of
+the two dynasties. But in England the policy of construction was earlier
+adopted, proceeded more rapidly, and produced an edifice which was more
+durable because established on a broader basis.
+
+The first stage of the policy was to organise the administration of
+those parts of each kingdom which, not having been absorbed in
+privileged fiefs, were still subject to the royal justice and
+contributory to the royal revenue. Owing to the foresight of William the
+Conqueror, there were few such fiefs in England; only in two palatine
+earldoms (Durham and Cheshire), on the Welsh and northern borders, and
+on the lands of a few prelates, was the king permanently cut off from
+immediate contact with the subject population. With these exceptions the
+face of England was divided into shires, and administered by sheriffs
+who were nominees of the Crown, dismissable at pleasure. The shires
+again were divided into hundreds governed under the sheriff by
+subordinate officials. But for the most important duties of executive
+routine the sheriff alone was responsible; he collected the revenue, he
+led the militia, he organised the Watch and Ward and Hue and Cry which
+were the medieval equivalents for a constabulary; finally, he presided
+over the shire moot in which the freeholders gathered at stated
+intervals to declare justice and receive it. The shires were
+periodically visited by Justices in Eyre (analogous to the Frankish
+_missi_) who heard complaints against the sheriff, inspected his
+administration, tried criminals, and heard those civil suits
+(particularly cases of freehold) which were deemed sufficiently
+important to be reserved for their decision. These itinerant
+commissioners were selected from the staff of the royal law court
+(_Curia Regis_), a tribunal which, in the thirteenth century, was
+subdivided into the three Courts of Common Law and acquired a fixed
+domicile at Westminster. The shire courts and the royal court were alike
+bound by the statute-law, so far as it extended; but, in the larger half
+of their work, they had no guides save the local custom, as expounded by
+the good men of the shire court, and the decisions recorded on the rolls
+of the royal court. From the latter source was derived the English
+Common Law, a system of precedents which, in spite of curious subtleties
+and technicalities, remains the most striking monument of medieval
+jurisprudence. In and after the fourteenth century it was supplemented
+by Equity, the law of the Chancellor's court, to which those suitors
+might repair whose grievances could not be remedied at Common Law, but
+were held worthy of special redress by the king in his character of a
+patron and protector of the defenceless. Lastly, on the fiscal side, the
+work of the sheriffs and of the judges was supervised by the Exchequer,
+a chamber of audit and receipt, to which the sheriffs rendered a
+half-yearly statement, and in which were prepared the articles of
+inquiry for the itinerant justices. Originally a branch of the Curia
+Regis and a tribunal as well as a treasury, the Exchequer always remains
+in close connection with the judicial system, since one of the three
+Courts of Common Law is primarily concerned with suits which affect the
+royal revenue. Such was the English scheme of administration, and
+_mutatis mutandis_ it was reproduced in France. Here the royal
+demesne, small in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, was enormously
+enlarged by the annexations of Philip Augustus and the later Capets, who
+brought under their immediate control the larger part of the Angevin
+inheritance, the great fiefs of Toulouse and Champagne, and many smaller
+territories. To provide for the government of these acquisitions, there
+was built up, in the course of the thirteenth century, an administrative
+hierarchy consisting of provosts, who correspond to the bailiffs of
+English hundreds, of _baillis_ and _senechaux_ who resemble the English
+sheriffs, of _enqueteurs_ who perambulate the demesne making inspections
+and holding sessions in the same manner as the English Justices in Eyre.
+All these functionaries are controlled, from the time of St. Louis, by
+the _Chambre des Comptes_ and the _Parlement_, the one a fiscal
+department, the other a supreme court of first instance and appeal.
+Within the _Parlement_ there is a distinction between the Courts of
+Common Law and the _Chambre des Reqeutes_ which deals with petitions by
+the rules of Equity.
+
+The vices of both systems were the same. The local officials were too
+powerful within their respective spheres; neither inspectors nor royal
+courts proved adequate as safeguards against corruption and abuses of
+authority, which were the more frequent because the vicious expedients
+of farming and selling offices had become an established practice.
+Otherwise the English system was superior to that of France,
+particularly in making use for certain purposes of local representatives
+as an additional check upon the servants of the Crown. The English shire
+was in fact as well as in law a community with a true corporate
+character (_communitas_), and possessed a public assembly which was
+a law court and a local parliament in one. Though the ordinary suitor
+counted for little, the secondary landowners, united by ties of local
+sentiment and personal relationship, took a lively interest and an
+active share in the business of the shire court, upholding the local
+custom against sheriffs and judges, serving as jurors, as assessors of
+taxes, as guardians of the peace, and (from the fourteenth century) as
+petty magistrates. Whether elected by their fellows or the nominees of
+the Crown, these functionaries were unpaid, and regarded themselves as
+the defenders of local liberty against official usurpations. In France
+the district of the _bailli_, and still more that of his subordinate the
+_prevot_, was an arbitrary creation, without natural unity or corporate
+sentiment; there was therefore no organised resistance to executive
+authority, and no reason why the Crown should court the goodwill of the
+landed gentry. In the lower grades of the Plantagenet system a powerful
+middle class served a political apprenticeship; under the Capets all
+power and responsibility were jealously reserved to the professional
+administrator. In England the next step in constitutional development,
+the addition to the national assembly of a Third Estate, was brilliantly
+successful, since the House of Commons was chiefly recruited from
+families which had long been active partners in local administration. In
+France the Third Estate, though constantly summoned in the fourteenth
+century, proved itself politically impotent.
+
+Both in France and in England (after 1066) the national assembly began
+as a feudal council, composed of the prelates and barons who held their
+lands and dignities directly from the Crown. But that of France was,
+before the twelfth century, seldom convened, sparsely attended, and
+generally ignored by the greater feudatories, a conference of partisans
+rather than a parliament. In England the Great Council of the Norman
+dynasty, inheriting the prestige and the claims of the Anglo-Saxon
+Witenagemot, held from the first a more respectable position. Even a
+William I or a Henry II scrupulously adhered to the principle of
+consulting his magnates on projects of legislation or taxation; under
+the sons and grandson of Henry II the pretensions of the assembly were
+enlarged and more pertinaciously asserted. The difficulties of the Crown
+were the opportunity of Church and Baronage. The Great Council now
+claimed to appoint and dismiss the royal ministers; to withhold
+pecuniary aid and military service until grievances had been redressed;
+to limit the prerogative, and even to put it in commission when it was
+habitually abused. In fact the English nobility of this period, thwarted
+as individuals in their ambitions of territorial power, found in their
+collective capacity, as members of the opposition in the Council, a new
+field of enterprise and self-aggrandisement. In France there was no such
+parliamentary movement, because the fundamental presupposition of
+success was wanting; because it was hopeless to appeal to public
+opinion, against a successful and venerated monarchy, in the name of an
+assembly which had never commanded popular respect. Under these
+circumstances it was natural that very different consequences should
+ensue in the two countries, when the reformation of their national
+assemblies was taken in hand by Edward I and his contemporary, Philippe
+le Bel. The problem before the two sovereigns was the same--to create an
+assembly which should be recognised as competent to tax the nation. The
+solutions which they adopted were closely alike; representatives of the
+free towns were brought into the Etats Generaux, of free towns and
+shires into the English Parliament; in each case a Third Estate was
+grafted upon a feudal council. But the products of the two experiments
+were different in temper and in destiny. The States General, practically
+a new creation, neither knew what powers to claim or how to vindicate
+them. They turned the power of the purse to little or no account; they
+discredited themselves in the eyes of the nation by giving proofs of
+feebleness and indecision in the first great crisis with which they were
+called to deal, the interregnum of anarchy and conspiracy that ensued
+upon the capture of King John at Poitiers (1356). The result was that
+the States General, occasionally summoned to endorse the policy or
+register the decrees of the monarchy, remained an ornamental feature of
+the French constitution. In England, on the other hand, the Commons
+accepted the position of auxiliaries to the superior Estates in their
+contests with the Crown; and the new Parliament pursued the aims and the
+tactics of the old Great Council, with all the advantages conferred by
+an exclusive right to grant taxation. For more than two hundred years it
+was a popular assembly in form and in pretension alone. The most active
+members of the Lower House were drawn from the lower ranks of the
+territorial aristocracy; and the Commons were bold in their demands only
+when they could attack the prerogative behind the shield of a faction
+quartered in the House of Lords. But the alliance of the Houses
+transformed the character of English politics. Before Parliament had
+been in existence for two centuries, it had deposed five kings and
+conferred a legal title upon three new dynasties; it had indicated to
+posterity the lines upon which an absolutism could be fought and ruined
+without civil war; and it had proved that the representative element in
+the constitution might overrule both monarchy and aristocracy, if it had
+the courage to carry accepted principles to their logical conclusion.
+
+Even in England a medieval Parliament was scarcely a legislature in our
+sense of the word. Legislation of a permanent and general kind was an
+occasional expedient. New laws were usually made in answer to the
+petitions of the Estates; but the laws were framed by the King and the
+Crown lawyers, and often took a form which by no means expressed the
+desires of the petitioners. The most important changes in the law of the
+land were not made, but grew, through the accumulated effect of judicial
+decisions. The chief function of Parliaments, after the voting of
+supplies, was to criticise and to complain; to indicate the shortcomings
+of a policy which they had not helped to make. Except as the guardians
+of individual liberty they cannot be said to have made medieval
+government more scientific or efficient. In the fifteenth century the
+English Commons criticised the government of the Lancastrian dynasty
+with the utmost freedom; but it was left for Yorkist and Tudor despots
+to diagnose aright the maladies of the body politic. Englishmen and
+Frenchmen alike were well advised when, at the close of the Middle Ages,
+they committed the task of national reconstruction to sovereigns who
+ignored or circumvented parliamentary institutions. A parliament was
+admirable as a check or a balance, as a symbol of popular sovereignty,
+as a school of political intelligence. But no parliament that had been
+brought together in any medieval state was fitted to take the lead in
+shaping policy, or in reforming governmental institutions.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE--THE CRUSADES
+
+
+Neither the internal development of the medieval state nor the
+international politics of medieval Europe can be explained without
+constant reference to class distinctions. First, there is a sharp line
+dividing each state horizontally and marking off the privileged few from
+the unprivileged many, the rulers from the ruled. Below the line are the
+traders, artisans, and cultivators of the soil; above it the landlords,
+the officeholders, and the clergy. If an industrial community, here and
+there a Milan or a Ghent, succeeds in asserting political independence,
+the phenomenon is regarded as anomalous and revolutionary; still graver
+is the head-shaking when mere peasants, like the Swiss, throw off what
+is called their natural allegiance. And such cases of successful
+rebellion are rare. It is true that in England, in France, and in the
+Spanish kingdoms there are privileged towns which receive the right of
+representation in national assemblies; but this concession to the power
+of the purse is strictly limited; the spokesmen of the burgesses are not
+invited to express opinions until asked for subsidies or military aid.
+Government is the affair of the King and the privileged classes. But
+again there is a division within the privileged classes, a vertical line
+of cleavage between the various grades of the lay and clerical
+aristocracies. The prelate and the baron, the knight and the priest,
+harmonious enough when it is a question of teaching the unprivileged
+their place, are rivals for social influence and political power, are
+committed to conflicting theories of life. The ecclesiastic, enrolled in
+an order which is recruited from every social grade, makes light of
+secular rank and titles; he claims precedence over every layman; he
+holds that it is the business of the Church to command, of princes to
+obey. The lay feudatory, born into a hereditary caste of soldiers,
+regards war as the highest vocation for a man of honour, is impatient of
+priestly arrogance, and believes in his heart that the Church ought not
+to meddle with politics. It would be a mistake to think of the two
+privileged classes as always at strife with one another and their social
+inferiors. But the great wars of Pope and Emperor, the
+fourteenth-century revolts of French and English peasants, are not
+events which come suddenly and unexpectedly; each such outbreak is like
+the eruption of a volcano, a symptom of subterranean forces continually
+in conflict. The state of peace in medieval society was a state of
+tension; equilibrium meant the unstable balance of centralising and
+centrifugal forces. And this was one reason why wars, condemned in the
+abstract by the Church, were frequently regarded with favour by sober
+statesmen and by idealists. In more ways than one a successful war might
+serve to heal or salve the feuds of rival classes. It offered an outlet
+for the restless and anarchic energies of feudalism; sometimes it ended
+in conquests with which the landless could be permanently endowed. It
+might offer new markets to the merchant, a field of emigration to the
+peasant, a new sphere of influence to the national clergy. Better still,
+it might evoke common sentiments of patriotism or religion, and create
+in all classes the consciousness of obligations superior to merely
+selfish interests.
+
+Such statecraft may perhaps seem rude and barbarous to us. The idea of a
+nation as a system of classes, and of national unity as a condition only
+to be realised when all classes combine for some purpose extraneous to
+the everyday life of the nation, is foreign to our thought. We believe
+that by making war upon class privileges we have given to the State a
+less divided and more organic character. We maintain that the State
+exists to realise an immanent ideal, which we express by some such
+formula as "the greatest good of the greatest number." But we are still
+so far from a reconciliation of facts with theories that we must
+hesitate before utterly condemning the medieval attitude towards war. In
+place of classes we have interests, which are hard to unite and often at
+open variance. Our statesmen balance one interest against another, and
+consider war legitimate when it offers great advantages to the interests
+most worth conciliating. Nor have we yet succeeded in giving to the
+average citizen so elevated a conception of the purpose for which the
+State exists that he can think of national policy as something different
+from national selfishness. It is easier to criticise the enthusiasts who
+urged medieval nations to undertake "some work of noble note," remote
+from daily routine, than it is to discover and to preach a nobler
+enterprise on behalf of a less visionary ideal. It helps us to
+understand, though it does not compel us to accept, the medieval theory,
+when we find modern poets and preachers glorifying war as a school of
+patriotism or of national character.
+
+Wars of conquest were less frequent in the Middle Ages than we might
+expect, and were usually waged on a small scale. Their comparative
+infrequency, in an age of militarism, must be explained by reference
+both to current morality and to economic conditions. For an attack upon
+a Christian power it was necessary that some just cause should be
+alleged. Public opinion, educated by the Church to regard Western
+Christendom as a single commonwealth, demanded that some respect should
+be shown to the ordinary moral code, even in international relations.
+Furthermore the medieval state, loosely knit together and bristling with
+isolated fortresses, showed in defeat the tenacious vitality of the
+lower organisms, and could not be entirely reduced without an
+expenditure, on the invader's part, which the methods of medieval
+state-finance were powerless to meet. Edward I failed to conquer the
+petty kingdom of Scotland; and the French provinces which were ceded to
+Edward III escaped from his grasp in a few years. The profitable wars
+were border wars, waged against the disunited tribes of Eastern Europe,
+or the decadent Moslem states of the Mediterranean. And such wars were
+of common occurrence, sometimes undertaken by the nationalities most
+favourably situated for the purpose, sometimes by self-expatriated
+emigrants in search of a new home.
+
+Thanks to the teaching of the Church, a large proportion of the border
+wars were converted into Crusades for the propagation of the faith or
+the extermination of the unbeliever or the defence of holy places. Often
+enough the religious motive was introduced as an afterthought, and gave
+a thin veil of respectability to operations which it would otherwise
+have been difficult to excuse. In some cases, however, those who
+enlisted as the soldiers of the Church were sacrificing their material
+interests for the good, as they supposed, of their own souls and the
+Christian commonwealth. There was nothing essentially Christian in this
+spirit of self-devotion; it had long been epidemic in the Mohammedan
+world, and accounts for the most successful encroachments of Islam upon
+Europe and the Eastern Empire. The impulse affected Western Christendom
+for a relatively short period of time, only once or twice producing
+movements at all commensurable with those which had emanated from
+Arabia, Asia Minor, and Africa, and leading to no conquests that can
+rank in magnitude with the caliphates of Bagdad, Cordova, and Cairo. But
+the Christian Crusade is in one sense more remarkable than the
+Mohammedan Jehad. Western Europe had long ago emerged from the nomadic
+stage, and even the ruling classes of Western Christendom, cosmopolitan
+as they may seem to us, were attached to their native soil by many ties.
+If the upheaval was smaller in the West than in the East, the material
+to be set in motion was more stubborn and inert, the prizes to be held
+before the eyes of the believer were more impalpable and dubious. There
+were ventures near at hand for which the Church could find volunteers
+without the slightest difficulty. But those which she was more
+particularly bent on forwarding were distant, hazardous, and irksome;
+the majority of the men who went on her great Crusades had no prospect
+of any temporal advantage. In the end those enterprises to which she
+gave her special countenance proved the least successful. It was not in
+the Eastern Mediterranean but in Spain, in Lower Italy, and in Central
+Europe, that the frontiers of Western Christendom were permanently
+advanced. For the historian, however, the failures have an interest not
+inferior to that of the more productive enterprises.
+
+The age of border wars and border colonies begins long before the
+appearance of a true crusading spirit. In German history the movement of
+expansion dates from Henry the Fowler; when he captured Brandeburg (928)
+and annexed the heathen tribes between the Elbe and Oder, he inaugurated
+a policy of settlement and colonisation which the German Margraves of
+those regions were to pursue, slowly and methodically for more than two
+hundred years. In its later stages the policy was sometimes assisted by
+Crusaders; from the first it made many converts to Christianity, and was
+furthered by the foundation of frontier sees and churches subject to the
+German archbishops of Hamburg and Magdeburg. But the men who directed
+the policy were purely secular and selfish. The greatest of them, Henry
+the Lion, Duke of Saxony from 1142 to 1180, and Albert the Bear,
+Margrave of Brandenburg from 1134 to 1170, concentrated their energies
+upon the development and extension of their principalities, exploited
+the Slavs, plotted against one another and their Christian neighbours,
+neglected national interests, and frankly made the Church the instrument
+of their ambitions. Yet in the craft of state-building they showed
+exceptional sagacity, enlisting as their allies the traders of the
+Baltic, the peasants of North Germany and the Low Countries. Under their
+rule and that of their most successful imitators, the Teutonic Knights
+in Prussia, cities such as Lubeck (founded 1143) and Dantsic (colonised
+1308) became centres of German trade and culture; while the open country
+in the basins of the Elbe and Oder was covered with newly settled
+villages of German immigrants. The effects of this colonisation have
+extended far beyond the lands immediately affected and the limits of
+medieval history. The new colonies laid the foundations of modern
+Prussia and modern Saxony. To their existence is due the connection of
+Poland and Bohemia with the state system of medieval Europe, and the
+consequent division of the Slavonic peoples into a western and an
+eastern group; the westward expansion of the Russian Empire was
+forestalled and prevented by these early pioneers of German and of Roman
+influence. Only less important was the German advance along the Danube,
+from the river Inn to Vienna and the Hungarian frontier, which was
+mainly directed by successive heads of the family of Babenberg
+(971-1246), first as Margraves and afterwards as Dukes of Austria. The
+Hapsburg power, like that of the Hohenzollerns, is partly an inheritance
+from medieval frontiersmen who drove a German wedge into the heart of a
+Slavonic territory.
+
+The history of these German colonies often reminds us how naturally such
+business ventures came to be regarded as a species of crusade. In 1147 a
+large body of German pilgrims, enlisted for the Second Crusade, were
+allowed to fulfil their vows by serving against the Slav in the armies
+of Saxony and Brandenburg. The Babenberg dukes, grown weary of their
+monotonous work on the Danube, roamed eastward to conquer Egypt or
+Palestine, westward to exterminate the Albigensians of Languedoc and the
+infidels in Spain. And when we turn from Germany to the Spanish
+peninsula, the alliance between religious fervour and commercial
+enterprise is still more striking. The Christian reconquest of Spain and
+Portugal began two or three generations before the Council of Clermont;
+but, from the first, the southward advance against the rulers of Cordova
+foreshadows the age of the Crusades. In Spain, as in the German marks,
+the pioneers of Christendom were often ruffianly, and always fought with
+an eye to the main chance. Among them are mere desperadoes like the Cid
+Campeador (_d._ 1099), who serves and betrays alternately the Christian
+and the Moorish causes, founds a principality at the expense of both
+religions, but is finally claimed as a hero and a martyr by his native
+Castile, because he has the good fortune to die in her allegiance. Many
+_conquistadores_ of more reputable character settled down contentedly
+amongst a tributary and unconverted Moorish population, whose manners
+and vices they adopted. But in Spain the racial antipathies of Moors and
+Christians were always aggravated by religious zeal. Several times it
+seemed as though Spanish Christianity was in danger of complete
+extinction. In the tenth century two great rulers of Cordova,
+Abderrahman III and Al Mansur, drove back the Castilians to the northern
+mountains and raided the inmost recesses of the Christian territories.
+Somewhat later the Wild Berber hordes of the Almoravides and the
+Almohads, crossing from Africa to usurp the Ommeiad dominions and carry
+on the holy war with greater energy, aroused new fears and provoked in
+the threatened kingdoms a fanaticism equal to their own. The Spanish
+Christians appealed for help to their northern neighbours; armies of
+volunteers from Normandy, from Aquitaine, and from Burgundy, poured over
+the Myrenees to strike a blow for the Cross against the Crescent, and
+incidentally to gain rich spoils or found a colony. The movement was
+early taken under the patronage of Rome. Gregory VII offered papal
+commissions to the immigrants, on condition that they would hold their
+conquests as vassals of the Holy See (1073). And thenceforth each new
+enterprise against the Moors was officially recognised as a service to
+the Catholic Church.
+
+Still, even in Spain, the tendency was for material ambitions to gain
+the upper hand. All classes in the Christian kingdoms benefited by the
+wresting of a new province from the infidel. The nobles received new
+fiefs; the burghers flocked into the cities evacuated by the Moors, or
+were encouraged, by large grants of privileges, to build new cities;
+round the cities clustered communities of peasants, who joyfully
+exchanged the barren security of the northern uplands for the risks and
+the prizes of the river valleys. No kings were so popular as those who
+planned and carried to a successful conclusion these ventures for the
+common good. One such ruler, James the Great of Aragon, has left us in
+his memoirs a faithful and instructive account of the use to which he
+and his subjects turned one of these so-called Crusades. At six years of
+age he had succeeded to a divided kingdom and the shadow of a royal
+prerogative. At fourteen he began a hard struggle, for the mastery of
+his rebellious barons and cities, which lasted five years and earned for
+him more credit than substantial success. When at length the rebels sued
+for peace, he was obliged to grant it without exacting compensation; the
+Crown remained as poor after the victory as before it. A little later he
+conceived the idea of attacking the Moors in the Balearic Isles, "either
+to convert them and turn that kingdom to the faith of our Lord, or else
+to destroy them." He propounded his plan to the Cortes (1229); and in a
+moment dissension was changed to harmony, civil indifference to loyal
+enthusiasm. The barons said that to conquer a Saracen kingdom set in the
+sea would be the greatest deed done by Christians for a hundred years.
+They would give an aid, they would find contingents, they would serve in
+person; always on the understanding that each should share in the spoils
+proportionately to the size of his contingent. The Archbishop of
+Tarragona, speaking for the clergy, said that now at last his eyes had
+seen the salvation of the Lord. He could not serve; he was too old for
+that; but his men and his money were the King's for this sacred
+undertaking, and he would gladly give a dispensation to any bishop or
+abbot who would go with the King; always provided that the clerical
+Crusaders were to share in the booty on the same terms as the laymen. To
+the same purpose, with the same stipulation, spoke the trading-cities.
+The expedition was a brilliant success. Majorca was reduced by the
+efforts of the whole expedition; Minorca capitulated without a struggle;
+and the Archbishop of Tarragona, by special licence from the King,
+conquered Ivica for himself. But the Moors were neither extirpated nor
+converted. Those of Majorca became the tenants of the Crusaders between
+whom that island was divided. Those of Minorca paid an annual tribute to
+the King. In both islands they were guaranteed the use of their native
+customs and religion. Surveying the Crusade many years after it was
+completed, James expresses the highest satisfaction with the results.
+From Minorca he receives not only the agreed tribute, but whatever else
+he chooses to demand. As for Majorca, the Lord has so increased it that
+it produces twice as much as in the days of Moorish rule.
+
+We are now in a position to understand the complex nature of the motives
+which animated the preachers, the generals, and the soldiers of the
+Crusades; for these enterprises are a continuation on a greater scale of
+the German, Spanish, and Norman wars of conquest.
+
+Like the wars of Spain, the Crusades were suggested by fears of a
+Mohammedan advance; the signal for the First Crusade was given by the
+successes of the Seljuk Turks under Alp Arslan and Malik Shah
+(1071-1092). These uncivilised and fanatical usurpers of the caliphate
+of Bagdad overran the whole of Asia Minor and of Syria in twenty years;
+they dealt a heavy blow to the Eastern Empire on the field of Manzikert
+(1071), and founded in Asia Minor the sultanate of Roum; they
+established smaller principalities in Syria. The rulers of
+Constantinople sent urgent appeals for help to the West; and pilgrims
+returning from the Holy Places complained loudly of the insults and
+persecutions by which the conquerors manifested their hostility to the
+Christian faith. Gregory VII, immediately after his election, was moved
+to plan an expedition for the defence of the Eastern Empire, which he
+justly regarded as the bulwark of Europe against Islam. He issued a
+general appeal to the princes of Europe for help and personal service;
+he even proposed to accompany the relieving force. But Gregory, though
+not without imagination, lacked the power of firing popular enthusiasm,
+and aroused mistrust by the admission that he intended using the Crusade
+in the first instance against the Normans of Lower Italy. Few volunteers
+were forthcoming, and his own energies were diverted to another channel
+by the outbreak of the War of Investitures. It was left for Urban II to
+revive Gregory's project, in another and more popular form, at a moment
+when Henry IV seemed a beaten and a broken man, and the unity of the
+Seljuk power had been shattered by the death of Malik Shah. In reality
+the danger from the Turks was then a thing of the past; but, even if
+Urban was correctly informed of their weakness, it needed little
+knowledge of history to warn him that one aggressive movement of Islam
+only died away to be succeeded by another. Like Gregory, he desired to
+strengthen the Eastern Empire; but his plan was new--to found a Latin
+state in Palestine for the defence of Jerusalem and the south-east
+Mediterranean. As with the First Crusade, so with the Second and the
+Third; each was a response to new victories of Mohammedan princes. The
+Second Crusade (1147) was proclaimed in consequence of the fall of
+Edessa, the north-east outpost of the Latin Kingdom. The Third (1189)
+was designed to recover Jerusalem and to cripple the sultanate of Egypt,
+which, under Saladin, seemed on the eve of absorbing not only Syria, but
+also Asia Minor and the Euphrates valley. The signal failure of an
+expedition for which armies were raised by the Emperor, the Kings of
+France and England, and many lesser princes, left the power of Egypt an
+object of almost superstitious awe. The Fifth Crusade (1217) and the
+Seventh (1248) expended their best energies in fruitless and disastrous
+descents on the Nile Delta.
+
+To this view of the Crusades, as a business of high political
+importance, the best of the laymen who led the Christian armies were
+sincerely attached. Many others, equally sincere but governed more by
+sentiment than reason, were moved by the desire to see the Holy Places
+and secure them as the common property of Christendom. But the most
+pertinacious and successful of the commanders went eastward, as their
+kinsmen went across the Elbe or the Alps or the Pyrenees, to carve out
+for themselves new principalities at the expense of Byzantine or
+Saracen, it did not matter which. Naturally the sovereign princes who
+took the Cross do not fall into this category. For them an expedition
+might be either an adventure, or the grudging fulfilment of a penance,
+or a bid for the esteem of their subjects; but it was often a conscious
+sacrifice of self-interest and national interests to a higher duty.
+However low their motives, it would not have paid them to turn aside
+from the task enjoined upon them by European opinion. Even Frederic II,
+the least Christian of Crusaders, who only accomplished his vow to put
+the Pope his adversary in the wrong, fulfilled his undertaking to the
+letter before he ventured to return. But a Crusade controlled by men of
+lower rank tended to be a joint-stock company of freebooters. For every
+Crusade the Pope was, to a certain point, responsible. He issued the
+appeal, he tuned the pulpits; he invited contributions from the laity
+and exacted them from the national churches; he provided for the
+enforcement by ecclesiastical censures of all Crusading vows. In the
+choice of leaders, and in the preliminary councils of war, he had a
+claim to be consulted. One or more of his legates normally accompanied
+the armies. But, if the generals chose to ignore his suggestions and to
+override his representatives, after the march had once begun he was
+powerless. Usually, it is true, his views would appeal to the rank and
+file, exempt as they were from the temptations presented to their
+leaders. But the Common soldiers could only leave the host if they had
+the means of paying for themselves the expenses of the homeward journey.
+Often they protested against the uses to which their arms were put; but
+very seldom were they able to enforce a change of policy.
+
+[Illustration: The Crusaders]
+
+These general statements may be illustrated from the First and Fourth
+Crusades.
+
+Godfrey of Bouillon and his fellow-leaders, when they passed through
+Constantinople (1097), did homage to the Emperor Alexius for any lands
+that they might conquer. The transaction may not have been voluntary;
+this homage was the price demanded for a safe-conduct through the Greek
+dominions. But later events proved that the chief Crusaders were
+resolved not to hold their conquests as fiefs from the Holy See, for
+which they were nominally fighting. As they drew near to the Holy Land,
+it became clear that the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre was a subordinate
+consideration with them. At Tarsus and at Antioch there were fierce
+disputes between rival claimants to the conquered territories. Baldwin
+separated from the main army to found a seignory for himself at Edessa.
+Bohemund remained behind, when Antioch was once assigned to him, for
+fear that any rival should rob him of his prize. Raymond of Toulouse
+turned aside to reduce Tripoli, and was with the greatest difficulty
+constrained to continue the march. The final result of a war in which
+the loss of men must be reckoned by tens of thousands was the
+establishment of the four states of Jerusalem, Edessa, Antioch, and
+Tripoli. To extend the boundaries of these colonies, and to consolidate
+them under the suzerainty of the Crown of Jerusalem, was the work of
+their rulers for the next eighty years. These princes were esteemed as
+champions of the Cross; to assist them in the defence of their
+territories the military orders of the Temple and the Hospital were
+founded under the sanction of the Church; apart from the great relieving
+expeditions, such as those of 1101 and 1147 and 1189, annual fleets of
+soldier-pilgrims arrived to take part in the operations of the year. But
+there is little to show that either the Kings of Jerusalem or their
+great vassals ever justified their position by pursuing an unselfish
+policy. That the dominions which they ruled were imperfectly colonised
+cannot be made a reproach against them; only for knights and merchants
+had the Holy Land any attractions. But the inevitable weakness of the
+Frankish states was aggravated by their feuds and reciprocal ill-faith.
+
+More than a hundred years elapsed before another expedition of this kind
+started for the East. The Second Crusade, inspired by St. Bernard acting
+as the half-reluctant spokesman of the Holy See, was ill-organised,
+ill-directed, and so disastrous a failure that it was followed by a
+perceptible reaction against the idealistic policy of which it was the
+outcome. It revealed to Europe the inefficiency of forces raised with
+more regard to the pious motives than to the efficiency of the recruits,
+and laid bare the calculating selfishness of the Latin principalities.
+But the principal leaders, Louis VII of France and the Emperor Conrad
+II, could not be charged with insincerity. They made gross mistakes, but
+were faithful to the purpose with which they set out. Similarly in the
+Third Crusade, though part of the failure can be directly attributed to
+the national jealousies of the various contingents, and to the quarrels
+of Richard I with the more important of his colleagues, the recovery of
+Jerusalem remained from first to last the dominants object of the army.
+There were cases of petulance, of unnecessary meddling in the squalid
+disputes of the Latin settlers, of readiness to depart on the first
+honourable excuse. But there was no disposition to make the pilgrimage a
+commercial undertaking. It was otherwise in 1203 when the soldiers of
+the Fourth Crusade set out from Venice, leaving behind them the papal
+legate and openly defying the injunctions of Innocent III, whose appeal
+to Christendom was nominally the warrant for their venture.
+
+No kings sailed with them; from the first the movement had been in the
+hands of turbulent feudatories, inspired by chivalry rather than
+religion. Their leader, Boniface of Montferrat, the patron of all the
+troubadours and knights-errant of the South, was a sworn friend of the
+Pope's worst enemy, Philip of Suabia, the brother and successor of the
+Emperor Henry VI. Boniface had been elected to the command without the
+sanction of the Pope; and from an early date was in league with Philip
+to turn the Crusade against Constantinople. This plan was for a time
+concealed from the army, in which a majority of the common soldiers were
+bent upon recovering the Holy Sepulchre. But the nobles, with whom lay
+the last word, were ready for whatever adventure the course of events
+might suggest. Their original hope was to conquer Egypt,--an infinitely
+more tempting prey than Palestine, where the chief fruits of any success
+would be claimed by the remnants of the standing garrison. To obtain
+ships from Venice they undertook on her behalf the siege of Zara; their
+first feat of arms was the conquest of a Christian city, the only
+offence of which was that it disputed the Venetian supremacy in the
+Adriatic. At Zara they were invited by Philip's envoys to attack
+Constantinople, to overthrow the Emperor Alexius III, and to substitute
+for him another Alexius, son of the deposed Isaac Angelus and
+brother-in-law to Philip. The proposal received enthusiastic support
+from the Venetians, whose great commercial interests in the Greek
+capital had been often assailed by the fanaticism of the city-populace.
+The Venetians held the key of the situation, since, if they withdrew
+their transports, the army could neither go forward nor return in
+safety; and the nobles, who needed little persuasion, were able to
+convince the more earnest pilgrims that Philip's offer must of necessity
+be accepted, though Alexius III was on friendly terms with the Pope and
+had been expected to assist the Crusade. To palliate the flagrant
+treachery a promise was exacted from the pretender that, when installed
+as Emperor, he would help in the conquest of Egypt with men, money, and
+supplies.
+
+On July 17th, 1203, the army entered Constantinople, after a short
+siege. Alexius III escaped by flight and Alexius IV was installed in his
+place. Still the Crusaders lingered in a city the outward splendour of
+which appealed irresistibly to their imagination and their avarice. The
+winter, they said, was approaching, and their candidate far from secure
+upon the throne; they would wait for the spring. Before that date, and
+in spite of their countenance, he had fallen before a nationalist
+rebellion (January 1204); and the army hailed the opportunity of
+reuniting the Greek Church to Rome and partitioning the Greek Empire
+among themselves. An agreement was made with the indispensable Venetians
+for the election of a Latin Emperor, to be endowed with one-fourth of
+the provinces; the booty of Constantinople and the remaining lands of
+the Empire were to be divided equally between the Venetians and the
+remaining leaders. For the second time Constantinople was carried by
+storm; a fire destroyed a large part of the city; and the Crusaders
+completed the devastation by three days of indiscriminate plunder and
+massacre. Neither the treasures of the churches nor the priceless
+monuments and statues of the public places were spared. The sum-total of
+the booty was thought to be equal to all the wealth of Western Europe;
+but when it came to the official division all that the knights obtained
+was twenty marks apiece; ten were the portion of a priest, and five of a
+foot-soldier. The other articles of the treaty, which had been referred
+for form's sake to the Pope, were executed without awaiting his reply.
+The Venetian candidate, Count Baldwin of Flanders, was elected to the
+Empire and received the Asiatic provinces. Boniface of Montferrat
+obtained, as a solatium, the kingdom of Thessalonica, embracing roughly
+the modern provinces of Thessaly and Macedonia; his followers were
+allowed to establish themselves by degrees in Central Greece and the
+Morea. The Venetians took the islands of the Ionian Sea, the Cyclades,
+and Aegina and Negropont; the provinces of Albania, Acarnania, and
+Aetolia; the city of Adrianople with the adjacent territories, and other
+possessions of less note.
+
+The Pope, compelled to recognise accomplished facts, merely demanded
+three concessions: that the Latin faith should be established as the
+official religion of the Empire; that the possessions of the Greek
+Church should be handed over to the Latin clergy; and that the Crusaders
+should continue their pilgrimage at the end of a year. Only the first of
+these points was conceded. The Crusade of Innocent III ended, like that
+of Urban II, in the creation of a string of feudal states and commercial
+factories. But in 1204 there was hardly the attempt to justify what had
+been done in the name of religion. The Venetians behaved from first to
+last as commercial buccaneers; a fickle and frivolous ambition, rather
+than calculating villainy, characterised their highborn associates.
+Plainly, these were the only materials available for a Crusade; the
+collapse of the Crusading policy was near at hand.
+
+A few romantic careers illuminate the monotonously sordid annals of the
+Latin Empire, threatened from within by the feuds of the rival baronial
+houses, from without by the Bulgarians, the Greek despots of Epirus, and
+the Greek Emperors of Nicaea. Henry of Flanders, the second Latin
+Emperor (1205-1216), the one constructive statesman produced by the
+Crusade; William of Champlitte, who overran the Morea with but a hundred
+knights, was hailed by the oppressed Greeks as a liberator, and founded
+the Principality of Achaea (1205-1209) only to lose it through the
+treachery of a lieutenant; Niccolo Acciajuoli (+1365), the Florentine
+banker, who rose to be Lord of Corinth, Count of Malta, and
+administrator of Achaea--these were men who on a greater stage might
+have achieved durable renown. But the subject Greeks were not to be
+Latinised by a handful of energetic seigneurs and merchants; one by one,
+as opportunities occurred, the provinces of the Latin Empire deserted to
+the allegiance of Nicaea. Adrianople and Thessalonica were lost in 1222,
+the Asiatic territories by 1228; in 1261 Michael Palaeologus recovered
+Constantinople, which was to remain the possession of his family until
+the capture by the Turks (1453). In Greece and the islands the colonists
+maintained a foothold long after the fall of the Latin Empire. But the
+last of the Frankish Dukes of Athens fell, with all his chivalry,
+fighting against the Catalan Company (1311), a horde of freebooters
+half-Christian and half-Turkish in its composition. Achaea, after years
+of ignominious subjection to the Angevins of Naples, was similarly
+conquered by the Company of Navarre (1380). In a maimed condition the
+two states survived these calamities; but the Greeks and the Venetians
+were enabled to absorb the richest parts of the peninsula; the last
+traces of Frankish blood and institutions were swept away by the Turkish
+conquerors of the fifteenth century. Before these grim invaders the
+Venetians and the Knights of St. John, the last representatives of
+Western power, slowly evacuated the Eastern Mediterranean.
+
+The story of this brilliant and ephemeral episode in the expansion of
+Europe is closed by the Venetian peace of 1479 with the Sultan, and by
+the fall of Rhodes, the stronghold of the Knights, before the Turkish
+arms (1522). But in Malta, down to the commencement of the ninteenth
+century, might be seen the strange and scandalous spectacle of a
+Crusading Order, emancipated from the old vows and obligations, yet
+still allowed to exercise a medieval tyranny in memory of the services
+which their remote predecessors had rendered to the Cross. The other
+Orders had vanished, not less ignominiously, at earlier dates. The
+Templars, who had evacuated Syria to live on their European estates and
+ply the trade of bankers, were proscribed on charges of heresy, by Pope
+Clement V (1312), to gratify the brutal greed of a French king. The
+Teutonic Knights, better counselled by their Grand Master, Hermann of
+Salza (1210-1239), looked about for a new field of conquest; they found
+it on the lower Vistula, where they settled with the countenance of the
+Pope, the Emperor, and the King of Poland to reduce the heathen Slavs.
+But, embroiled with their Polish protector by their territorial
+ambitions, they were reduced, after 1466, to narrow boundaries in East
+Prussia; and hardly a voice was raised in their favour when the last
+Grand Master, a Hohenzollern by birth, became a Protestant and
+bequeathed the lands of the Order to his own family (1525).
+
+From the adventures of the Frankish colonists we turn with relief to
+notice the last expiring flashes of enthusiasm in the armies equipped
+for their relief. The Germans and Hungarians of the Fifth Crusade (1217)
+showed more sincerity than worldly wisdom in delegating the chief
+command to a papal legate, and in following to the bitter end his
+reckless plan of campaign. Inspired with the hope of expelling Islam
+from the Eastern Mediterranean, they would neither be content with
+Damietta, which they conquered, nor with the Holy Land, which was
+offered in exchange by the Sultan of Egypt. They would have all or
+nothing, and they lost even Damietta in the end. Their discomfiture by
+the Nile floods, which they had forgotten to take into their reckoning,
+was a tragi-comic ending to a campaign in which greed and discord had
+been expiated by extraordinary daring. St. Louis, in his Crusades of
+1248 and 1270, flew in the face of common prudence and was thought a
+pious fool, even by the barons who were too loyal to disobey his call.
+But it is such follies that make history something better than a Newgate
+Calendar of the crimes of common sense. He was no general; his attack on
+Egypt was foredoomed to failure, and was made more disastrous by neglect
+of ordinary precautions; that on Tunis, undertaken in the heat of an
+African summer, ended, as might have been expected, in his own death and
+the decimation of his followers by disease. Even as an example these
+expeditions were all but fruitless. Yet, when the worst has been said of
+the Crusades and those who led them, there are moments in the quixotic
+career of St. Louis which haunt the fancy and compel our admiration: his
+bearing when, a captive of the Egyptian Sultan, he refused, even under
+threats of torture, to barter a single Christian fortress for his
+freedom; his lonely watch in Palestine, when for three years he
+patiently awaited the reinforcements that were never sent; his
+death-bed, when he prayed for strength to despise good fortune and not
+to fear adversity. Ideals may fade, but the memories of those who
+realise them are the world's abiding possession.
+
+If we ask what results of a more tangible sort remained from the
+Crusades, when the service of the Holy Sepulchre had become a legend,
+and the name of Crusade a byeword for whatever enterprises are most
+impractical and visionary, the answer must be, that they affected Europe
+chiefly in a negative sense and through indirect channels. They helped
+to discredit the conception of the Church militant; they relieved Europe
+of a surplus population of feudal adventurers; and they accelerated the
+impoverishment of those other feudal families which took an occasional
+part in the Holy War. It has never been proved that they led to
+wholesale emancipation of serfs, or wholesale enfranchisement of towns;
+though it is true that all such expeditions meant an increased demand
+for ready money. To Western civilisation they contributed very little,
+the truth being that there was little to be learned from the Mohammedans
+in Syria. It is through Palermo and Toledo, where Christianity and Islam
+met and mixed in peaceful intercourse, that the knowledge of Arab
+science and philosophy filtered into Europe. The Fourth Crusade was an
+exception to the general rule; it is no accident that Venetian art and
+architecture developed rapidly when the republic was brought into close
+and friendly relations with Constantinople. Through these relations, and
+through studying the masterpieces brought home by the Crusaders,
+Venetian artists recovered the antique feeling for pure form, and
+founded a school which was classical in spirit, Christian only in
+external and unessential features. The learning and literature which the
+Eastern Empire inherited from Rome and Athens had no attraction for
+Venetian merchant princes. But north of the Alps, and especially at
+Paris, the thirteenth century saw an increasing interest in the Greek
+language, and in Greek books, so far as they were useful to theologians
+or scholastic disputants. Politically the Fourth Crusade is memorable
+for its effect upon the Italian balance of power. It gave Venice an
+advantage over her commercial rivals, Pisa and Genoa, which she never
+lost; it gave her also a unique position as an intermediary between East
+and West; and it placed her at the head of an empire comparable to those
+of Athens and of Carthage, the great sea-powers of antiquity. But the
+nation-states of Northern Europe, who had borne the burden and heat of
+the Crusades, were less affected by them, politically or otherwise, than
+were the city-states of Italy.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE FREE TOWNS
+
+
+Scattered broadcast over the territory of every medieval state are towns
+endowed with special privileges, and ruled by special magistrates. Some
+of these towns--particularly in Italy, Southern France, and the
+Rhineland--stand on the sites, and even within the walls, of ancient
+_municipia_, those miniature Homes which the statecraft of the
+Empire had created as seats of government and schools of culture. But,
+even in Italy, the medieval town is indebted to classical antiquity for
+nothing more than mouldering walls and aqueducts and amphitheatres and
+churches. The barbarians had ignored the institutions of the
+_municipium_, though it often served them as a fortress or a royal
+residence or a centre of administration. The citizens were degraded to
+the level of serfs; they became the property of a king, a bishop, or a
+count, and were governed by a bailiff presiding over a seignorial court.
+Only at the close of the Dark Ages, with the development of handicrafts
+and a commercial class, was it found necessary to distinguish between
+the town and the manorial village; and to a much later time the small
+town preserved the characteristics of an agricultural society. Many a
+burgess supplemented the profits of a trade by tilling acres in the
+common fields and grazing cattle on the common pastures; pigs and
+poultry scavenged in the streets; the farmyard was a usual adjunct of
+the burgage tenement. Whether small or great, the town was a phenomenon
+sufficiently unfamiliar to vex the soul of lawyers reared upon Teutonic
+custom. They recognised that they were dealing with a new form of
+community; but they were not prepared to define it or to generalise
+about it. They preferred to treat each town as _sui generis_, an
+awkward anomaly, a privileged abuse.
+
+Indeed, definition was no easy matter, for medieval towns differed
+infinitely in size, in government, and in the ingredients of their
+population. In one respect they are all alike; the most energetic and
+influential, though not necessarily the greater number, of the
+inhabitants are artisans or traders. But side by side with the
+industrial colony stand older interests, which often struggle hard
+against the ascendancy of commerce. In the town or near it there may be
+an abbey or a castle or a cathedral or a royal palace, to which the very
+existence of the burgess community is due. The townsmen, profiting by
+the custom and the protection of the great, have grown rich and
+independent; they have bought privileges or have usurped them. But they
+have still to reckon with the servants, the retainers, and the other
+partisans of a superior always on the watch to recover his lost rights
+of property and jurisdiction; the forces of the common enemy are
+permanently encamped within the walls. Again, if the town lies on a
+frontier or in newly-conquered country, it will be as much a fortress as
+a mart; a number of the residents will be knights or men-at-arms who
+hold their lands by the tenure of defending the town; and these
+burgesses will be naturally indifferent to the interests of the traders.
+Finally, in the Mediterranean lands, with their long tradition of urban
+society, we find the nobles of the neighbourhood resorting to the town,
+building town-houses, and frequently caballing among themselves to
+obtain control of the town's government. Often a long time elapses
+before the class which conceived the idea of municipal liberty is able
+to get the better of these hostile forces; and still more often the
+hardly-won privileges are wrested from those for whom they were
+intended, are cancelled, or are made the monopoly of an oligarchic ring.
+
+Still, the aims of the medieval burgess are more uniform, from one place
+to another and from one generation to another, than we might anticipate
+in ages when information travelled slowly, and when the relations of
+every town to its lord were settled by a separate treaty. In modern
+Europe the town is an administrative district of the state, and is
+organised upon a standard pattern. In medieval Europe the town-charter
+was frequently a compromise with the caprices and the interests of a
+petty seignor; and even kings were inclined to deal with the towns which
+stood upon the royal demesne in a spirit of the frankest opportunism.
+Moreover, the inclination of all lords was to meddle with their
+burgesses no further than seemed necessary to ensure the full and
+punctual discharge of all services and pecuniary dues. So long as these
+were guaranteed, the internal affairs of the town might be left for the
+residents to settle as seemed good to them. But, as to the main
+conditions of the compact, each of the contracting parties holds
+clear-cut and unwavering views. The lords are agreed that privileges of
+trade and tenure may safely be granted if the chief magistrates are
+nominated by, and accountable to themselves. The townsfolk, on the other
+hand, assume that promises of free tenure and free trade will be worth
+nothing unless accompanied by the permission to elect all magistrates
+and councils.
+
+Sometimes the victory rests with the lord, and sometimes with the
+burgesses. Accordingly, there are two kinds of chartered town. The
+larger class includes communities enjoying certain privileges under the
+rule of seignorial functionaries. A smaller class consists of those
+which are not only privileged but "free," that is, self-governing bodies
+corporate. The distinction between the two classes is not precise enough
+to satisfy a modern lawyer. Often a "free" town is obliged to allow the
+lord some voice in the appointment of magistrates; while the humblest
+body of traders may enjoy the right of doing justice in a market-court
+without the interference of a bailiff. The one class shades off into the
+other, if only for the reason that "freedom" is usually won by a gradual
+process of bargaining or encroachment on the part of towns which are
+already privileged. The higher type is simply a later stage in the
+natural course of municipal development.
+
+If we analyse the privileges of those towns which remain in
+leading-strings, the first in order of time and of importance is the
+town-peace, which only the king or his delegate can grant. Invested with
+this peace the town becomes, like a royal palace or the shrine of a
+saint, a sanctuary protected by special pains and penalties; the burgess
+stands to the king in the same relation as the widow and the orphan; to
+do him wrong is an outrage against the royal majesty. Next comes the
+right of trade. The burgesses are allowed to commute their servile dues
+and obligations for a fixed money-rent, that they may be at liberty for
+pursuits more lucrative than agriculture. They also receive a licence to
+hold a weekly market, and possibly a yearly fair as well; it is agreed
+that all disputes of traders, which arise in fair or market, shall be
+decided according to the law of merchants, the general usage of the
+commercial world; and a safe-conduct is granted to all strangers who
+resort to either gathering for lawful purposes. At first the tolls of
+the fair and market are collected by the lord, and the law-merchant is
+administered in the court of his bailiff. Often, however, he ends by
+leasing both the tolls and the commercial jurisdiction to the townsmen.
+When they are permitted (as in Flanders and in England) to form a
+merchant-gild, it is with this body that such bargains are concluded;
+and the gild usually purchases from the lord a quantity of other
+privileges--the monopoly of certain staple industries in the town and
+neighbourhood; rights of pre-emption over all imported wares; and the
+power of making by-laws to regulate wages, prices, the hours of labour,
+and the quality of manufactured goods. Where the lord is a sovereign
+prince, he is often induced to make concessions of a wider scope:
+freedom from inland tolls and from customs at the seaports; the right of
+making reprisals upon native and foreign enemies who rob the merchants
+or infringe the privileges of the town; immunity, in civil suits, from
+every jurisdiction but that of the town-court.
+
+It would be easy to multiply examples of this type of town, but we can
+only mention here a few whose history and customs are particularly
+instructive. One of the oldest is St. Riquier in Ponthieu, a notable
+instance of an industrial community dating from Carolingian times and
+fostered by the policy of a great religious house. The second half of
+the eleventh century is remarkable for the speculative acumen displayed
+by lay and secular lords in fostering the development of new commercial
+centres; the Norman _bourg_ of Breteuil, founded in 1060 by a
+seneschal of William the Conqueror, deserves special consideration as a
+model extensively imitated in England, Wales, and Ireland; the Suabian
+towns of Allensbach and Radolfszell, chartered by the great Abbey of
+Reichenau a few years later, are monuments of German seignorial
+enterprise. Lorris en Gatinais, a town on the demesne of the French
+monarchy, received from Louis VI a set of privileges which became the
+standard for the numerous _villes de bourgeoisie_ founded under the
+immediate sway of the Capetian dynasty.
+
+But the charters thankfully accepted by new colonies or embryonic
+market-centres were insufficient to satisfy the aspirations of older and
+greater cities. At the very time when far-sighted seigneurs are
+scattering commercial privileges broadcast, there begins among the urban
+classes of North France, of Flanders, and of some Italian provinces, an
+agitation for more extensive rights, for "free" municipal constitutions
+of our second type. In these regions the popular cry is "Commune,"
+_novum ac pessimum nomen;_ and it is blended with complaints of
+feudal tyranny, which often develop, since the seigneur of the town is
+commonly a bishop or an abbot, into complaints against the Church. The
+commune is a sworn confederacy (_conjuratio_), which bears some
+resemblance both to the fraternities established for the enforcement of
+the Truce of God (_supra_, p. 103) and to the merchant-gilds. But
+it has also new and striking features. It is formed in defiance of
+authority, and for the purpose of seizing rights which are legally
+vested in the seigneur or the Crown. It is hostile to the ruling classes
+of society; and the object of the members is to establish a republican
+form of government within their city. They are largely merchants or
+artisans; but they concern themselves with wider interests than those of
+trade, and often insist that no man, of whatever avocation, shall remain
+in the city unless he joins the commune.
+
+We should be glad to know more of the bold spirits who directed the
+communal movement in this early stage. They startled contemporaries by
+their radicalism, and their conduct gives the lie to our preconceived
+idea that a townsman is a man of peace. These medieval burgesses were
+accustomed to defend their rights by force; there is nothing abnormal in
+the rule of the merchant-gild of Valenciennes that the gild-brethren
+should always bring their weapons with them to the market, and should
+ride in armed companies to distant fairs. The Milanese and the men of
+Ghent are typical in their greed for empire, in their readiness to
+strike a blow for their own profit whenever war is in the land. If the
+seigneurs of such cities gave cause for dissatisfaction, they found that
+they had brought a hornet's nest about their ears. In the struggle for
+liberties the popular party displayed a high courage which rose superior
+to defeat, though in the hour of triumph it was too often sullied by
+ferocious acts of vengeance. They threw themselves with intelligence and
+energy into the feuds of other interests and classes, backing the Church
+against the State, the State against the baronage, or the weaker against
+the stronger of two rival lords. The policy of the towns was often
+double-faced, material and separatist; but it also embodied ideals of
+justice and of citizenship which were destined to prevail in the
+struggle for existence, and to produce a wholesome reformation in the
+structure of society.
+
+The communal programme was not realised in a day; the struggle for free
+governments, which began in the eleventh century, was continued into the
+thirteenth and fourteenth; and the forces of the movement were already
+exhausted in North France and Italy before it reached a head in South
+France or in Germany. Naturally, in a conflict waged over so wide an
+area for several hundred years, the watchwords were often modified, and
+many different patterns of town government were devised. In its later
+stages the movement was more peaceful, and the purse was often found a
+better argument than the sword; the communal parties ceased to be
+democratic, though they never ceased to be republican; and power was
+practically if not formally monopolised by a municipal patriciate. The
+mass-meeting of the burgesses, all-powerful in the days when the commune
+was an organised rebellion, gradually became insignificant in the older
+communes, and in many of the late foundations was never recognised at
+all, its powers being distributed among the craft-gilds meeting in their
+separate assemblies. Concurrent with this diminution in the importance
+of the ordinary burgess, there is a tendency to restrict the franchise
+by demanding higher and higher qualifications from the candidates. The
+commune, in fact, sinks almost to the level of a trades union or a
+benefit society, and membership is valued chiefly as a title to
+exclusive rights of trade and poor-relief. The political aspect of the
+institution is almost forgotten in countries where the power of the
+state gains ground upon the centrifugal forces of society; and, in those
+communes which preserve the dignity of states, an internecine conflict
+between the rich and poor, the rulers and the ruled, usually becomes the
+main feature of domestic politics.
+
+In spite of these changes in principles and spirit, the organs of
+communal government are almost everywhere the same. The executive power
+is vested in a board or committee, called in Italy the _consules_, in
+France the _echevins, jurati_, or _syndics_, in Germany the _Rath_
+(council). Commonly this board has a president, known in France and
+England as the mayor, in Germany as the burgomaster, who represents the
+body-corporate in all negotiations with the seigneur or the Crown or
+other communes. One or more councils (_sapientes, pares_, etc.) are
+often found assisting the executive with their advice; and in the older
+type of commune the mass-meeting plays a conspicuous part, not only
+electing magistrates and councils, but also voting taxes, auditing the
+accounts of expenditure, and deciding on all questions of exceptional
+importance. Where the general assembly is non-existent or moribund,
+offices are filled either by co-optation or by elections in the
+assemblies of the craft-gilds, or are even allowed to descend by
+hereditary right. As the popular control over the executive declines,
+jealousy of the executive leads to some disastrous changes: to the
+multiplication of offices, to the shortening of terms of office, to
+the creation of innumerable checks and balances, to the organisation of
+this or that powerful interest or party as a state within the state. But
+the morbid pathology of the communes in their last stage of decline is a
+subject with which we need not here concern ourselves. These intricate
+expedients, which are best exemplified in the constitution of
+fourteenth-century Florence, weakened the government but could not make
+it more impartial or more tolerant. By the end of the Middle Ages, the
+ordinary burgess was prepared to hail the advent of a royal bailiff or a
+self-constituted despot, as the only cure for the inveterate disorders
+incident to freedom.
+
+It is refreshing to turn back from the period of disillusionment to that
+of sanguine expectations, and to study the commune in the period of
+infancy and growth, when no other refuge from anarchy and oppression was
+open to the industrial classes, and when emancipated serfs were still
+intoxicated with the dream of liberty.
+
+Curiously enough, the communal revolution began most quietly in the land
+where it was ultimately responsible for the fiercest conflicts. The
+cities of North Italy gained their first instalments of freedom, at
+different periods in the eleventh century, by bargains or by usurpations
+of which few records have come down to us. At Pisa we hear of an
+agreement between the bishop and the citizens (1080-1085) under which
+the latter are permitted to form a peace-association, to hold
+mass-meetings, and to elect _consules_ who shall co-operate with
+the bishop in the government. At Genoa, on the other hand, the commune
+appears (in 1122) after several earlier _conjurationes_ have been
+successfully resisted and dispersed. Probably the case of Pisa is more
+typical than that of Genoa, since we usually hear of a commune for the
+first time when it is already a fully developed institution. In most of
+the North Italian cities it was at the expense of a bishop that the
+commune was established. Legally the change meant the transference, from
+the bishop or another seigneur to the town, of powers derived by
+delegation from the Emperor; and it took place in the course of the
+Investitures contest, when the bishops, conscious of simony and other
+offences which made their position insecure, were more concerned to
+dissuade their citizens from siding with the party of ecclesiastical
+reform than to fulfil their duties as officials of the Empire. The
+Emperors themselves, hard-pressed in the struggle with the Papacy and
+eager to purchase support at any price, contributed to the success of
+the communal movement by the charters which they bestowed on some
+important cities.
+
+In Northern France the situation was less favourable to the towns. Often
+indeed it suited the policy of the Capets to weaken an over-mighty
+subject by protecting his rebellious serfs. But the bishops and the lay
+seigneurs offered a pertinacious opposition to all demands for
+enfranchisement; the King was a timid and vacillating ally, always
+inclined to desert the cause of the townsfolk for a bribe, always in
+fear that the movement might spread to his demesne. Whatever his
+sympathies, he could do little, when it came to blows, but stand aside
+and watch the conflict. Two examples will serve to illustrate the
+general features of these feuds between municipalities and lords.
+
+(1) In 1070 the men of Le Mans were driven to rebellion by the
+lawlessness of the local baronage, and by the oppressions of the
+governor whom an absentee count had put over them. They formed a
+commune, and compelled the more timid of their enemies to swear that
+they would recognise it. Others they caught and hanged or blinded; and
+they made systematic war against the castles of the neighbourhood, which
+they took one by one and burned to the ground--and this, says the
+outraged chronicler, in Lent and even on Good Friday! The citizens
+themselves thought no season too sacred for such a crusade against
+anarchy; once, when their militia went out to attack a castle, the
+bishop and his clergy were induced to lead the vanguard, bearing crosses
+and consecrated banners. But after a time the fortune of war turned
+against the commune; the militia were routed and the count's lieutenant
+recovered the castle which dominated Le Mans. The citizens offered their
+allegiance to the Count of Anjou, if he would deliver them. He came to
+the rescue, the governor fled, the castle was surrendered by the
+garrison and at once demolished. But, before the citizens had settled
+their future relations with Anjou, an English army appeared, led by
+William the Conqueror, their lawful suzerain. The Angevins effaced
+themselves; the citizens, making a virtue of necessity, opened their
+gates to the King; and since he would only confirm their ancient
+liberties, the existence of the commune was abruptly terminated (1073).
+
+(2) At Laon in the next generation there was a wilder and more
+calamitous rising against the misrule of the bishop. His name was
+Waldric; he had been Chancellor to Henry I of England, and was elected
+by the chapter of Laon (1106) because of the great wealth which he had
+accumulated, none too honestly, in the course of his short official
+career. Much of his private fortune was expended in procuring the Pope's
+approval of his very irregular election. The remainder was soon
+squandered in extravagant and riotous living; and the bishop then began
+to exploit his seignorial rights in Laon. His extortions were the more
+resented since he kept no order; the environs of the city swarmed with
+brigands and footpads, and kidnappers were allowed to work their will
+inside the city. At length the burgesses seized an opportunity, when the
+bishop was away in England, to set up a commune. On his return he was
+obliged to accept the situation and to recognise the commune in return
+for a substantial payment. But he further recouped himself by debasing
+the local currency, till it was practically worthless; and he gratified
+his spite against the citizens by an atrocious crime. Professing to have
+discovered a conspiracy against his life, he arrested the Mayor and
+caused the unhappy man to be blinded by a black slave, whom he employed
+as his bodyguard and executioner. The friends of the Mayor complained to
+the Pope; but the bishop got before them with his own version of the
+story, and by the help of bribery secured an honourable acquittal. By
+the same arguments he induced the King to quash the charter of the
+commune, and then seemed master of the situation. But the men of Laon
+conspired to kill him as he was going in state to the cathedral; he was
+with difficulty rescued by his knights, and found it necessary to
+garrison the episcopal palace with villeins from his country estates.
+Arrogant as ever, he boasted of his power and the satisfaction that he
+would exact; the time was coming, he said, when his black slave should
+pull the noses of the most respected citizens, and the fellows would not
+dare to grunt. He was soon undeceived. The mob of Laon stormed the
+palace and massacred the defenders; they found the bishop in the
+cellars, disguised as a peasant and hiding in an empty cask; they
+dragged him forth by the hair of his head, and hacked him to pieces in
+the street (1112). When a calmer mood returned, the citizens were
+appalled at the prospect of the King's indignation. Those who were
+conscious of guilt fled from the city, which was left half-deserted. The
+barons and the serfs of the surrounding country swooped like vultures
+upon Laon, pillaged the empty houses and fought with one another for the
+spoil. For the next sixteen years the remnant of the citizens lived a
+miserable existence as the mere serfs of Waldric's successors. In 1128
+the King permitted them to associate under a Mayor, for the better
+maintenance of the public peace; but they were denied the title of a
+commune, and continued to be subject to the jurisdiction of the bishop.
+
+These dramas of oppression and retaliation, though characteristic in the
+sense that they reveal the worst faults and the best excuses of the
+communal movement, were happily exceptional in Northern France; not
+because oppression was rare, but because rebellions defeated their own
+object. No seignorial concessions were worth the parchment on which they
+were inscribed, without a confirmation from the King; and it was not the
+King's interest to condone sacrilege or overt treason against a feudal
+lord. Hence the founders of a North French commune preferred to keep
+their agitation within the bounds of law. They invoked the King's help,
+and he, for an adequate consideration, destroyed seignorial rights by a
+few strokes of the pen; which he did the more readily since his lawyers
+had formulated the doctrine that communes were tenants of the Crown,
+liable to military service and to taxation at the royal pleasure. From
+the close of the twelfth century there was a firm alliance between the
+Third Estate and the French monarchy. On the whole it was more
+advantageous to the King than to the communes. Under St. Louis and his
+successors, when the power of the feudatories was broken, the commune
+presented itself as an obstacle in the path of central government. On
+one pretext or another, here because of faction-fights and there for
+mismanagement of the communal finances, the cities lost their charters
+and passed under the rule of royal commissioners. It was a poor
+compensation that the Third Estate obtained the right of sending
+delegates to the States General of the Kingdom. Representation brought
+new liabilities without corresponding rights. The Third Estate, holding
+jealously aloof from the estates of the nobles and the clergy, was
+powerless against a determined sovereign.
+
+The French commune, in fact, was a special expedient for the cure of a
+transitory evil. Republican institutions were in France an exotic
+growth, inconsistent with national traditions, and only welcome to
+classes which had neither the political intelligence nor the material
+resources to maintain their own ideals in the face of persistent
+opposition. It is significant that the charters of the French communes
+were frequently cancelled with the approval of the citizen assemblies.
+The situation was different in Flanders and North Italy, where the city
+was the natural unit of society, and the burgher class, enriched by
+foreign trade, were strong enough to negotiate on equal terms with their
+nominal superiors. Cities such as Ghent and Milan were shielded from
+contact with the great monarchies until the habit of self-government was
+firmly rooted in the citizens. When at last they were confronted with
+the absolutist claims of the Capets or the Hohenstauffen, these cities
+did not shrink from a direct appeal to arms; and the wars which they
+waged for independence are not the least interesting chapter of medieval
+history.
+
+Flanders was vexed by a problem of over-population, for which neither
+the continuous exodus of emigrants nor the systematic reclaiming of
+marsh-lands offered a permanent solution. At an early date her
+middle-classes discovered the grand principle of modern industry: that
+by manufacturing for foreign markets the production of wealth can be
+accelerated to an indefinite degree, and the most prolific communities
+maintained in affluence upon a sterile or restricted territory. The
+superfluous labour of the Flemish countryside flocked into towns, at the
+bidding of Flemish capital, and found remunerative employment in the
+weaving trade. From 1127 onwards these towns were bargaining with the
+Counts of Flanders for emancipation. Bruges, Ypres, Lille and Ghent were
+only the most successful among forty thriving communities which, at the
+close of the twelfth century, enjoyed a large measure of self-government
+but found their liberties threatened by the King of France. To meet the
+danger the Flemish communes embarked on the stormy sea of politics. At
+first they fought the King, in the name of the Count, and made their
+first appearance as a military power on the disastrous field of Bouvines
+(1214), which cost Count Ferrand his liberty and the communes the flower
+of their militia. The successors of Ferrand sank deeper and deeper into
+dependence on the Capets, until the communes were forced in self-defence
+to assume the leading role. At Courtrai (in 1302) they turned the tables
+on the Crown, and took an ample vengeance for Bouvines, by a terrible
+slaughter of French knights and men-at-arms, demonstrating to a startled
+Europe that feudal tactics were obsolete, and that pikemen on foot were
+a match for the best mailed cavalry. Cheated by a treacherous Count of
+the due fruits of their victory, the Flemish communes nursed their
+resentment and waited for new opportunities, while consoling themselves
+with savage persecution of the nobles, the clergy, and all others whom
+they suspected of French sympathies. The ambition of Edward III came at
+length to their assistance; under the leadership of Jacques van
+Artevelde, a merchant-prince and demagogue of Ghent, they signed a
+treaty with the English King for the invasion and conquest of France
+(1339). It was a brief and ill-starred alliance, ruinous to Flemish
+trade and abruptly ended by the fall of Artevelde, whom his
+fellow-citizens tore limb from limb under the impression that he was
+aiming at a tyranny (1345). But events soon justified the bold proposals
+of the fallen statesman. In 1369 the heiress of the county was given to
+a French prince of the blood; the French party in Flanders reared their
+heads; Bruges, to the alarm and fury of all patriots, joined the foreign
+cause from jealousy of Ghent. War broke out between the two great
+rivals; and the men of Ghent, commanded by Philip, the son of Jacques
+van Artevelde, gained the upper hand. Victorious in a pitched battle,
+they pursued the beaten army into Bruges, massacred the partisans of
+France, and put the city to the sack. No other commune dared to imitate
+the policy of Bruges, or to dispute the supremacy of Ghent in Flanders.
+The younger Artevelde, like his father before him, stood out for a brief
+moment as the dictator of a league of free republics. But the generals
+of France had profited by their hard experience in the wars with
+England; at Roosebeke (1382) the men of Ghent, charging the French
+cavalry "like wild boars," found themselves outflanked, and were crushed
+by the weight of superior science and numbers. They fought with the fury
+of despair, neither expecting nor receiving quarter. More than twenty
+thousand of the citizens fell in the battle, and were left, by the
+King's order, unburied on the field. The corpse of Artevelde, who had
+been suffocated in the press, was hanged on a gibbet for a warning to
+all demagogues. With him died the day-dream of an independent Flanders.
+Though her cities remained prosperous, they were destined to be
+successively the subjects of the Burgundian, the Spaniard, and the
+Austrian. It was only in 1831 that Flanders at length became a province
+in a kingdom based on the Walloon nationality.
+
+The Italian communes present, in their sharp vicissitudes of fortune, a
+spectacle not less dramatic and infinitely more momentous for the
+general history of Europe. In Italy, as in Flanders, the fair ideal of
+civic freedom was blurred and defaced by party feuds and personal
+ambitions, by the fickleness and passion of the mob, by the lust of
+conquest and the fratricidal jealousies of neighbouring republics. Yet
+to the influence of this ideal we must attribute both the solidarity of
+the Italian city-state and the wealth of individual genius which it
+fostered. The Italian Renaissance was little more than the harvest-time
+of medieval Italy, the glorious evening of a day which had dawned with
+the Fourth Crusade and had reached high noon in the lifetimes of Dante
+and Giotto. In the fifteenth century the aptitudes which had ripened in
+the intense and crowded life of turbulent republics were concentrated
+upon art and letters. The leisure and the security which the specialist
+demands were bought by renouncing the Utopian visions of the past. But
+the growth of technical dexterity was a poor compensation for the
+narrowing of interests; the individual was sacrificed to make the
+artist; and art, too, suffered by the divorce from practical affairs. If
+we are moved to impatience by the waste of life and energy involved in
+the turmoils of medieval Italy, we must remember that in no atmosphere
+less electric would the national energies have matured so early, or
+piled achievement on achievement with such feverish speed.
+
+[Illustration: (map) The Alps and North Italy]
+
+The city, from time immemorial the meeting-ground for the best elements
+in Italian society, had become in the early Middle Ages the one bulwark
+between the Italian middle-classes and a particularly lawless form of
+feudalism; and it had served this purpose well. The number of these
+cities, their population and resources, the luxury of the citizens, the
+splendour of the palaces and public buildings, were the admiration of
+all Europe at a time when the Flemish burghers still lived in wooden
+houses and the Flemish cities were still rudely protected by palisades
+and earthen ramparts. Nature had done much for Italy. Thanks to the
+central situation of the peninsula, the trade between Northern Europe
+and the Mediterranean converged upon her seaports and the Alpine passes
+which stand above the valley of the Po. The untiring industry of Italian
+capital and labour made Lombardy and Tuscany the homes of textile
+manufactures, of scientific cultivation, of banking and finance. In
+every port of the Levant, the Aegean and the Black Sea, the shipmen and
+merchants of Venice, Benoa, and Pisa hunted for trade like
+sleuth-hounds, and fought like wolves to secure a preference or a
+monopoly. By land and sea the rule of life was competition for territory
+and trade. War was a normal and often a welcome incident in the quest
+for wealth; few Italians were free from the belief that conquests are a
+short cut to prosperity, that trade follows the flag, and that the gain
+of one community must be another's loss. Within the city walls, class
+strove with class and family with family. Riot, massacre, and
+proscription were the normal instruments of party warfare; minorities
+conspired from fear of proscription, and majorities proscribed in order
+to forestall conspiracy. Boundless, indeed, was the vitality of
+republics which, under such conditions, not only throve, but also held
+at bay the ablest sovereigns and the most formidable troops of Europe.
+
+The best and the worst features of the communal regime are illustrated
+in the resistance of the Lombard cities to Frederic Barbarossa, the
+first Emperor who formulated and applied to Italy a scheme of absolutist
+government. Between 1154 and 1176 the Lombards turned the course of
+history. They prepared the way for Innocent III to plant his foot upon
+the necks of kings, and for Innocent IV to destroy the House of
+Hohenstauffen. That this would be the result of their stand for liberty,
+neither they nor the other parties to the struggle could foretell. But
+on both sides it was felt that the greatest issues were at stake. The
+question was whether Italy should, once for all, accept a German yoke;
+whether the Papacy should become a German patriarchate; whether free
+institutions, both in Church and State, should give place to a
+bureaucracy.
+
+The question did not take this shape from the beginning. When Frederic
+first intervened in Lombardy he came to protect the smaller cities
+against the imperialist ambitions of Milan, to restore the public peace,
+to investigate innumerable complaints of force and fraud. Many of the
+cities hailed him as a deliverer; against him were only the clients of
+Milan, or those who, on a humbler scale, aspired to emulate her policy.
+Even so it was no easy matter to chastise the most insignificant of the
+contumacious communes; and Milan, who refused point-blank to give
+satisfaction for her lawless acts of conquests, or even to renounce what
+she had won, could not safely be attacked.
+
+Two circumstances were against the Emperor. Any war against the Lombards
+must be a war of sieges; but the military science of the age was more
+skilful in defence than in attack. And no war could be carried to a
+prosperous conclusion without Italian help; for it was impossible to
+interest the German princes in the wars of Italy, or to exact
+substantial help from them. The first of these difficulties Frederic
+Barbarossa never overcame. With the second he was more successful in the
+middle period of the conflict (1158-1162); and it was then that the
+representatives of Lombard independence were most nearly overwhelmed.
+
+In 1158 he came back from Germany to besiege Milan, having carefully
+concluded treaties with her rivals in Lombardy, in the Mark of Verona,
+in Emilia and the Marches. With their help he starved the impregnable
+city into a surrender on terms dictated by himself. In these there was
+nothing to excite suspicion or alarm. It was a matter of course that the
+Milanese should take the oath of allegiance and emancipate the enslaved
+cities. He stipulated further for a palace in the city, and for the
+restitution of all imperial prerogatives (_regalia_) which the
+consuls had usurped; but the full import of these latter articles only
+became clear some two months later, when he announced his future policy
+at a Diet held on the plain of Roncaglia. He disclaimed the intention of
+ruling as a tyrant, but demanded that his lawful rights should be
+respected. As guardian of the public peace, he would permit no private
+wars to be waged and no leagues to be formed among the cities. As lord
+of the land, he claimed, under the title of _regalia_, a formidable
+list of rights and dues which the jurists of Bologna had compiled at the
+expense of much historical research. It included the nomination of the
+highest magistrate in every city; the supreme jurisdiction in appeals
+and criminal causes; the control of mints, markets, and highways; and
+rights of purveyance and taxation. Some of these had been in abeyance
+from time immemorial; most of them had been exercised by the cities for
+more than fifty years. Frederic held that no prescription could avail
+against the Crown; and, if this attitude seemed more appropriate to a
+Justinian than to a King of the Lombards, there was still something to
+be said for his claims on grounds of public policy. Till a strong
+monarchy was re-established in Italy, city would oppress city, and the
+strong would rob the weak. But such a monarchy could only be maintained
+if an ample revenue were assured, and if the powers arrogated by the
+communes were curtailed.
+
+Even those cities which had originally supported Frederic began to waver
+when they saw the logical consequences of his policy. They were not
+disposed to cavil at any measures that he might take against Milan. But
+to deal with friend and foe on the same principles struck them as
+injustice. To run the risk of enslavement by a neighbour was an evil;
+but it was worse to lose for ever the prospect of enslaving others. And
+what guarantee was there that the new absolutism, once firmly in the
+saddle, would always be benevolent, or would always be represented by
+officials of integrity? The claims of the Emperor might be in a sense
+historical; but the cities knew, if he did not, that the so-called
+restoration of _regalia_ was in effect a revolution. The time was
+nearly ripe for general defection; loyalty was strained to
+breaking-point when Frederic began to appoint for each city a resident
+commissioner (_podesta_), empowered to exercise the regalian rights
+and to collect the revenue accruing from them. But Milan was still
+feared and hated. When she alleged that her recent treaty of
+capitulation was infringed by the decrees of Roncaglia, and when she
+expelled the envoys whom Frederic had sent to instal a _podesta_,
+the other cities rallied to the imperial cause. There was one notable
+exception. The little commune of Crema had been ordered to destroy her
+walls; she refused, and made common cause with her great neighbour.
+
+The imperial ban was issued against both cities (April 1159); troops
+were hurriedly called up from Germany, and contingents were obtained
+from the Italian allies, until Frederic had in the field a force
+estimated at 100,000 men. But for six months he was held in check by the
+resistance of Crema, which he had planned to reduce with a small force
+while the main bulk of his levies were gathering for the siege of Milan.
+The attack on Crema was cordially seconded by the citizens of the
+neighbouring Cremona, who gave their assistance in diverting the
+watercourses which ran through the city, and lent Frederic the most
+famous of living engineers to make his siege-machines. Crema was
+completely invested; and every known method of assault was tried. The
+moat was filled with fascines, and movable towers of wood, so high as to
+overtop the battlements, were brought up to the walls; which were also
+attacked with rams, and undermined by sappers working in the shelter of
+huge penthouses. But breaches were no sooner made than repaired; every
+scaling-party was repulsed; and the defenders derided the Emperor in
+opprobrious songs. For once in his life he descended to bluster and
+ferocious inhumanity. He swore that he would give no quarter, he
+executed captives within sight of the walls, and he suspended his
+hostages in baskets from the most exposed parts of the siege-towers.
+Fortunately for his fame he relented, when hunger and the desertion of
+their master-engineer compelled the Cremesi to sue for terms. They
+received permission to depart with as much property as they could carry
+on their backs. The rest fell to the imperial army; and the men of
+Cremona were commissioned to demolish the city, which they did with a
+goodwill. The turn of Milan followed; the Emperor, warned by experience,
+fell back upon the slow and costly, but irresistible method of blockade.
+At the end of eight months (May 1161-Feb. 1162) the city was
+surrendered, evacuated, and condemned to destruction--a sentence which
+it was found impossible to execute completely, so solid were the
+ramparts and so vast the buildings they enclosed. For the moment all
+resistance seemed at an end. The policy outlined at Roncaglia could at
+length be put in force through the length and breadth of Lombardy; and
+Frederic departed for Germany, leaving trustworthy lieutenants to
+complete the vindication of his Italian rights. It only remained to try
+conclusions with a recalcitrant Pope and the evasive Normans of the
+South. The Emperor already saw himself in imagination the master of
+Italy, and even of the Western Mediterranean. Five years passed without
+bringing him nearer to his goal. Then Frederic returned to effect the
+expulsion of Alexander III from Rome. He succeeded in this object, and
+was crowned in St. Peter's by the anti-Pope of his own choosing (August
+1167). It was the highest point of his fortunes, and the calamities
+which followed were so unforeseen and terrible that contemporaries saw
+in them the hand of God. While he was still in Rome, a pestilence broke
+out which cost him two thousand knights and his best counsellors. He was
+forced to fly from the infected city. On his way to the north he found
+the road barred by a new and formidable coalition. The Lombard League
+had come into existence--an alliance organised by Cremona, hitherto the
+staunchest of imperial allies, and closely linked with Venice, which
+Frederic had regarded as a negligible quantity. Of the intentions of the
+League there could be no doubt. The members were already engaged in the
+rebuilding of Milan; they had admitted to their inmost councils a legate
+of Alexander III; they announced that they would only render to the
+Emperor his ancient and undoubted rights. Frederic would not trust
+himself in their vicinity. Accompanied by a handful of knights he
+escaped ignominiously to the north, taking a circuitous route through
+Savoy. The Leaguers no longer troubled to mask their true intentions. As
+a token of their unity they built the city of Alessandria, named after
+Frederic's bitterest enemy, the lawful Pope; and they solemnly
+repudiated the appellate jurisdiction of the imperial law-court (1168).
+
+Six years elapsed before Frederic could return to demand satisfaction,
+and even then he could only muster some eight thousand men. From October
+1174 to April 1175 he was engaged, first in besieging Alessandria, and
+then in making fruitless overtures to the League for a compromise. By
+the end of 1175 he was virtually blockaded in Pavia with a dwindling
+remnant of his army. Reinforced in the spring, he made a rapid march on
+Milan, in the hope of taking unawares the headquarters of the League.
+But the Lombards were forewarned, and met him, at Legnano (29th May
+1176), with a force outnumbering his by more than two to one. The battle
+was hotly contested. The Lombard vanguard, composed of cavalry,
+scattered before the onslaught of the Germans. The Emperor then led a
+charge which penetrated to the centre of the enemy's position. Here was
+the banner of Milan, mounted on a triumphal car (_carroccio_) and
+guarded by picked burgesses, who had sworn to defend their trust to the
+death. Round them the fighting raged for hours; the Germans made no
+impression on their ranks, and by degrees the Lombard troops who had
+fled returned to renew the battle. At length the imperial
+standard-bearer was slain, and Frederic himself unhorsed. Thinking all
+was lost, the imperialists fled confusedly towards Pavia, which they
+reached after suffering more loss in the flight than in the battle.
+Frederic, cut off from his followers, only escaped capture by hiding for
+some days until the road to Pavia was clear.
+
+Legnano was no overwhelming catastrophe, but it was ominous that citizen
+levies had defeated German knights in a fair field. Frederic's
+counsellors insisted that it was foolhardiness to pursue the war
+interminably, when at any moment the papal interest might gain the upper
+hand in Germany. Peace must be made at any cost with Alexander, and he
+would accept no peace from which the Lombards were excluded. Frederic
+yielded to the inevitable with a good grace. A treaty was concluded with
+the Pope in the same year (November 1176); a few months later, a six
+years' truce with the Lombards was arranged at Venice; and at Constance,
+in 1183, this was converted into a lasting peace. In form there was a
+compromise. The cities, while retaining the regalia and the free
+election of their consuls, recognised their allegiance to the Emperor
+and his appellate jurisdiction. In reality the Emperor had surrendered
+everything of value, and the cities ignored any stipulations in the
+treaty which were unfavourable to them.
+
+So matters remained until Frederic II, the grandson of Barbarossa,
+having firmly established himself in his Sicilian heritage, began to
+meditate a closer union between his dominions north and south of the
+Alps. The better to secure his communications with Germany, he prepared
+to enforce in Lombardy the imperial rights reserved at Constance (1226).
+At once the dormant Lombard League revived. The Alpine passes were so
+effectually blockaded that Frederic was left entirely dependent on his
+Sicilian forces. He turned the flank of the League at length, by an
+alliance with Ezzelin da Romano, the tyrant of Verona, which gave him
+access to the Brenner pass; but the League retaliated by lending support
+to his rebellious son, Henry, King of the Germans. So began another war
+in Lombardy. Legnano was brilliantly avenged on the field of Cortenuova
+(1237), where the Emperor routed the Milanese and captured the
+_carroccio_, the symbol of their independence. But he, like his
+grandfather, was worn out by the difficulties of siege warfare; and in
+1240 he turned southward to reduce the States of the Church. One more
+attempt he made on Lombardy in the winter of 1247-1248. But a disastrous
+fiasco destroyed his hopes and gave a mortal blow to his prestige. For
+five months he blockaded Parma, and the city was at the last gasp, when
+he imprudently dismissed a part of his troops. The garrison saw their
+opportunity, and made a desperate sortie while the Emperor was absent on
+a hunting expedition. They surprised and burned the strongly fortified
+camp which he had named Victoria; his baggage and even his crown jewels
+were captured; more than half of his army were slain or taken, and the
+rest fled in confusion to Cremona (18th February 1248). It was necessary
+for Frederic to beat a retreat, and he appeared no more in Lombardy. His
+son Enzio, whom he left to represent him, was captured next year by the
+Bolognese and sentenced to perpetual captivity.
+
+Frederic died in 1250; and from this year we may date both the
+disruption of the Empire and the decadence of the free Italian commune.
+What he had failed to effect, with the united power of Sicily and
+Germany behind him, was accomplished by a score of petty local
+dynasties. At Milan the Visconti completed the enslavement which the
+Delia Torre had first planned; at Verona it was the Scaligeri who
+entered on the imperial inheritance; at Ferrara, the Este; at Padua the
+Carrara; at Mantua, the Gonzaga. The tide of despotism rose slowly but
+surely, until in the fifteenth century Venice alone remained to remind
+Italy of the possibility of freedom.
+
+It is to Germany, rather than Italy or Flanders, that we must look for
+the last and perhaps the most fruitful phase in the development of
+medieval town life. Free institutions were acquired by the German towns
+comparatively late; and although it was the Lombard commune which they
+aspired to reproduce, they never succeeded in securing so large a
+measure of independent power, or in making themselves the capitals of
+petty States. The Hohenstauffen, like the early Capets, were sensible of
+the advantages to be gained by alliance with the Third Estate; but
+Frederic II was obliged to renounce the right of creating free imperial
+cities within the fiefs of the great princes; and most towns were left
+to bargain single-handed with their immediate lords. Shut off from any
+prospects of territorial sovereignty, the towns, even those which held
+from the Empire, were also excluded from the Diet until the close of the
+fifteenth century. Trade afforded the only outlet for their activities.
+But in trade they engaged with such success that, by the close of the
+Middle Ages, Augsburg rivalled Florence as a centre of cosmopolitan
+finance, and the Baltic towns had developed a commerce comparable to
+that of the Mediterranean. It was the Baltic trade which gave birth to a
+new form of municipal league, the famous Hansa. The nucleus of this
+association was an alliance formed between Lubeck and Hamburg to protect
+the traffic of the Elbe. Other cities were induced to affiliate
+themselves, and in 1299 the Hansa absorbed the older Gothland League of
+which Wisby was the centre. By the year 1400 there were upwards of
+eighty Hanseatic cities, lying chiefly in the lower Rhineland, in
+Saxony, in Brandenburg, and along the Baltic coast; but the commercial
+sphere of the League extended from England to Russia and from Norway to
+Cracow.
+
+The Hanseatic cities were subject to many different suzerains, and were
+federated only for the protection of their trade. The League was loosely
+knit together; there was a representative congress which met at
+irregular intervals in Lubeck; but the delegates had no power to bind
+their cities. There was only a small federal revenue, no standing fleet
+or army, and no means of coercing disobedient members save by exclusion
+from trade privileges. Yet this amorphous union ranked for some purposes
+as an independent power. The Hansa policed the Baltic and the waterways
+and high roads of North Germany; it owned factories (steelyards) in
+London, Bruges, Bergen, and Novgorod; it concluded commercial treaties,
+and on occasion it waged wars. In the fourteenth century it monopolised
+the Baltic trade, and was courted by all the nations which had interests
+in that sea. In the fifteenth it began to decline, and in the age of the
+Reformation sank into insignificance. New sea-Powers arose; England and
+the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, came into competition with the
+Hanso; the growth of territorialism in Germany sapped the independence
+of the leading members of the league; and the Baltic trade, like that of
+the Mediterranean, became of secondary importance when the Portuguese
+had discovered the Cape route to India, and when the work of Columbus,
+Cortes, and Pizarro opened up a New World in the Western hemisphere.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Medieval Europe, by H. W. C. Davis
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEDIEVAL EUROPE ***
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