An Introduction to Medieval History (Routledge Revivals) [1 ed.] 9781032636023, 9781032636160, 9781032636085, 1032636025

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Routledge Revivals

An Introduction to Medieval History

First Published in 1929, An Introduction to Medieval History presents a comprehensive overview of the social, political, and religious movements that inspired medieval civilization and still influence the civilization of our own day. It brings crucial themes like the heritage of Rome; church and the empire; the peasant and his lord; nations and kings; empire and papacy; the eastern empire and the Crusades; transition to modern times; decline of empire and papacy; decline of feudalism and development of trade; and towns and the Renaissance. This introductory book is useful for history students in secondary schools and training colleges and general readers interested to know about the medieval times.

An Introduction to Medieval History

Dorothy Dymond

First published in 1929 by Methuen and Co Ltd. This edition first published in 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Dorothy Dymond 1929 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. A Library of Congress record exists under LCCN: 31001619 ISBN: 978-1-032-63602-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-63616-0 (ebk) ISBN: 978-1-032-63608-5 (pbk) Book DOI 10.4324/9781032636160

THE MADONNA OF THE RUCELLAI CIMABUE ? (1240-1302). This is an altar-piece in Santa Maria Novella, Florence, painted in tempera on a wooden panel. The treatment is Byzantine, and recalls the formal, stiff poses of mosaic : but the angels are beginning to come to life. This picture may be taken as the starting point of Italian art. Both the subject and the meaning of the picture are purely religious

AN INTRODUCTION TO

MEDIEVAL HISTORY BY

D. DYMOND, M.A. LECTURER IN HISTORY AT GOLDSMITHS’ COLLEGE, LONDON EDITOR OF * A HANDBOOK FOR HISTORY TEACHERS ’

WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS, EIGHT MAPS AND A TIME-CHART

M ETH UEN & CO. LTD. 36 E S S E X S T R E E T W. C. LONDON

First Published in 1929

PRINTED

IN G R E A T

BRITAIN

PREFACE HIS little book is intended for the upper forms of secondary schools, for training colleges, and for teachers of younger children. It aims at interesting readers who know little or nothing of the period in those great social, political, and religious movements that inspired medieval civilization and still influence the civilization of our own day. The programme of the book is set out in the Introduction, and its meaning is suggested in the Conclusion. It is hoped that the inclusion of essential facts and dates and the provision of a full time chart will render the book suitable for school examination purposes, and that it may serve also as a useful companion to a course in English medieval history, which cannot be understood without reference to European movements. But the author's main aim has been to arouse in the reader a desire for further knowledge and to put him in a position to acquire it. The whole book is to be regarded as an introduction and guide to its bibliography. The author wishes to offer warm thanks for their help and criticisms to Professor Elizabeth Levett and Mr. Walford Green, who read the book in proof, and to Professor Hilda Johnstone, who read the bibliography. D. D y m o n d

September iQ2 g

CONTENTS CHAPTER

PREFACE

.........................................................................

PAGE

V

INTRODUCTION.................................................................... Xvii

BOOK I.—THE HERITAGE OF ROME I.

THE FIRSTGIFT : THE LAND . . . . I. The barbarian world and the Roman world. Causes of weakness in Rome : the size of the empire : corrupt government: civil w ar: spiritual decline : the foederati: and frontier problems. II. The barbarian invasions. The Goths enter the empire : advance of the Visigoths : of the Vandals : of the Huns : there ceases to be a separate Emperor in Rome : advance of the Ostrogoths : and of the Saxons and Franks : the influence of Rome on the barbarians.

II.

THE SECOND GIFT : THE CHURCH . . . 2 0 I. Origins of the Christian religion. Early organization : the Fathers : the creeds : the monks. II. The barbarian religion. III. The conversion of the barbarians. The Goths : the Vandals : the Franks : how far was the conversion genuine ? IV. The effects of the barbarian conversion. Pagan influences on Christianity : the rise of the authority of bishops : the rise of the papacy : the work of Gregory I in Italy, in the church, and in Western Europe : the limits of his authority : the place of religion in the medieval world.

III.

THE THIRD GIFT : THE EMPIRE . . . . Attempts to restore the Roman Empire. I. The attempt of Justinian : his victory in Constantinople : his ideas of government : his victories in Africa, Italy, Spain, and Persia : incompleteness of his success : his work for art, architecture, and law : his conquests not maintained. II. The attempt of the barbarians : progress of the Franks after Clovis' vii

3

37

viii CHAPTER

AN INTRODUCTION TO MEDIEVAL HISTORY death : the danger of civil war : the danger of Mahometan invasion : the Mahometan invasion repelled by Charles Martel : the Franks united and victorious under Pepin and Charles the Great : character and aims of Charles : his work for art and learning: his government: his coronation as emperor.

PAGE

BOOK II.—MEDIEVAL CIVILIZATION IV.

FEUDALISM : THE PEASANT AND HIS LORD

I.

II. III.

V.

.

The origins of feudalism, (a) The gifts of the king to his soldiers, his officials, and the church : the heneficia : after the death of Charles the Great the heneficia begin to be turned into fiefs : the lords gain privileges and immunities. (b) The people’s desire for protection : lord and m an : commendation. (c) The Viking invasions : character of the invasions : the early raids : the beginning of settlement: the break-up of Charles' empire, the treaty of Verdun and its effects : how the Viking invasions were a cause of feudalism. The feudal peasant. Variety of conditions : the peasant in France : and in England. The feudal lord. Relation between lord and vassal, in theory and in practice : the feudal lords become kings.

NATIONS AND K I N G S .................................................... 80 I. The Normans in Italy. Their w ars: their government. II. The French. The Capetian dynasty : its difficulties and opportunities : its alliance with th e ch u rch an d with the people . Louis VI : his court: his demesne : his general power. Philip II : his character : his relations with England and with Southern France: his government. Louis I X : his character: government: and foreign policy. III. Spain. The Moorish invasions: development of the Christian states of Castile, Aragon, Portugal and Navarre : the Christian kings oppose the feudal lords and fight the Moors : the Cid : James I the Conqueror.

59

CONTENTS c h a pt e r

VI.

IV. Germany. Foundation of the monarchy by Henry the Fowler and Otto the Great: the German kings become emperors and are henceforward too busy to solve the problems of Germany : the problem of the western frontier : the problem of internal disunion : the problem of the eastern frontier : Guelfs and Ghibellines : the duchies break up and the marks develop : failure of Germany to defeat feudalism.

IX pa g e

EMPIRE AND P A P A C Y ............................................................ I 0 4

I. Development of empire and papacy, 962-1046. State of empire and papacy under Otto I and II : the ambitions of Otto III and Sylvester II : the achievements of Henry III. II. The problem of the relations of empire and papacy. Which was the overlord ? Which had the greater intrinsic authority ? Which was the true heir of Rome ? Which had the better historical claim to supremacy ? III. The Investiture Contest. Rise of the papacy after 1046 : the reforms of Leo IX : the election decree and the reform party in Rome : the early relations of Hildebrand and Henry : the Investiture decree and its effects : the development of Hildebrand’s theories: Canossa and its result: the second excommunication of Henry : the end of Hildebrand’s life : the rest of the struggle : the Concordat of Worms. IV. Frederick I and the papacy. The character, aims and difficulties of Frederick I : his first expedition into Italy : the beginning of friction between empire and papacy : the later expeditions into Italy, war with the papacy and the Lombard League : the final defeat and settlement. V. Innocent I I I and the empire. The political outlook of Innocent: his work in the church, in Italy and abroad : his relations with the empire : the disputed election : the choice of Otto : the quarrel with Otto and the coronation of Frederick II. VI. Frederick II. His environment, aims and difficulties : his crusade, and the crusade against him : the rebellion of the cities : renewed war with the papacy and development

X

AN INTRODUCTION TO MEDIEVAL HISTORY

CHAPTER

VII.

of Frederick’s anti-clerical views : his death : the empire defeated : but the papacy is not victorious. MONKS, FRIARS AND SCHOLARS

I.

II.

III. IV.

VIII.

.

.

II.

III.

IV.

125

.

Monasticism. Decline of Benedictine monasticism. The Cluniac reformation. The new orders of the eleventh and twelfth centuries : the Carthusians : the Cistercians : the secular and military orders. The monastic id eal: the daily routine and organization : various types of monks : the highest type, S. Bernard : the value of monasticism to the medieval world. Medieval Education. The schools and their studies. The career of Abelard : his freedom of thought: his rivalry with S. Bernard : his death. Development of the universities. The Friars. The Dominicans. The Franciscans. S. Francis and his religious outlook. Development of the Franciscan movement. The Artists. The mosaics. Early paintings and their limitations. Giotto and S. Francis. The Pre-Raphaelites.

THE EASTERN EMPIRE AND THE CRUSADES

I.

.

PAGE

.

.

The Eastern or Byzantine Empire. The heir of Rome, but influenced by Greece and by the East : its government : nature of the imperial power. Political relations with the East in the seventh and eighth centuries. Heraclius: his aims and beliefs : his early troubles : his triumph over Persia. The rise of Mahomet: his creed : his victories : wide conquests of his successors. Development of the Empire from the eighth to the eleventh century. Iconoclasm. Bulgarian Wars. Economic development. Separation from the West. Renewed Mahometan attack under the Seljuq Turks : the emperor appeals for help to the West. The Crusades. Causes in the West : desire for land : desire for the consecration of warfare : desire to save the holy places : hope of a divine reward. The ‘ first * crusade : relations with Alexius : march to Palestine : Jerusalem taken and sacked : establishment

145

xi

CONTENTS CHAPTER

of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem : character of the crusade. Development of the crusading movement: the ‘ second ' crusade : the rise of Saladin and the *third ’ crusade. Effect of the crusades on trade. The ‘ fourth ' crusade : the attack on Constantinople : establishment of the Latin empire of Constantinople : effect of the fourth crusade, the decline of the crusading movement but the development of trade : the journey of Marco Polo and intercourse with the East.

PAGE

BOOK III.—THE TRANSITION TO MODERN TIMES IX.

THE DECLINE OF EMPIRE AND PAPACY

I.

.

.

Changes in the empire. Loss of prestige of emperor and rise of great families. Rudolf of Hapsburg separates Germany and Italy in practice. Henry VII fails to reunite them. Renewed wars of empire and papacy under Lewis IV. Charles IV gives a constitution to Germany. II. The disasters of the papacy. Effect of the victory over Frederick II. Boniface VIII and the attempt to assert papal power. The first great disaster : the affair of Anagni. The second disaster : the Babylonish captivity. An attempt to revive Rome : Rienzi. An attempt to revive the papacy : Catherine of Siena. The third disaster: the Great Schism. III. Effect of these changes on political thought. Dante and the ‘ De Monarchia \ Marsiglio and the ‘ Defensor Pacis \ Wyclif. Chaucer. Hus : his dependence on Wyclif : his enemies and exile. IV. The Conciliar Movement. The Council of Pisa. Sigismund and his aims. The Council of Constance : its aims and difficulties : the trial of Hus : the ending of the schism : the question of reform. The Hussite Wars. The Council of Basle : the Hussite question solved : the question of papal authority : Eugenius IV quarrels with the Council and Aeneas Sylvius makes peace. V. The revival of the papacy. Early career of Aeneas Sylvius : development of his character : he

167

xii

AN INTRODUCTION TO MEDIEVAL HISTORY becomes pope: his attempt to save the Eastern Empire from the Turks: his failure and death. Future of the empires and papacy.

X.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NATIONS

I.

II.

III. IV. V. VI.

XI.

.

.

.

I90

France. Position of the monarchy under Philip IV. His lands : his government : his need for money : the summoning of the States General and their significance. The Hundred Years' War : causes. Period of English victories to 1360 : criticism of the government and attempts of the States General to gain control: the Great Ordinance and Marcel: the revival of feudalism : the rivalry of Burgundy and Orleans. The second period of the Hundred Years' W ar: English victories and the misery of France : Joan of Arc : the English driven out of France. The new monarchy : Charles VII : Louis XI, his rivalry with Charles the Bold and final victory: his supreme power. Spain. Condition in 1250. Alfonso X of Castile : his civilization, his political ideas and his practical government. The war against feudalism in Castile and Aragon. The rise of the towns and of representative assemblies. The new monarchy : union of Castile and Aragon: defeat of the Moors. Development of Portugal. The Eastern kingdoms. Poland. Bohemia. Hungary. The Balkan States. Russia. The Northern kingdoms. The kings and feudalism. Attempts at union. The kingdom of South Italy. War between Manfred, son of Frederick II, and the pope's candidate Charles of Anjou. A history of rival dynasties. Switzerland. Story of the rebellions against the Hapsburgs and the freedom of Switzerland.

THE DECLINE OF FEUDALISM AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF T R A D E ............................................................ 217

I.

The decline of feudalism. Attempts of the peasants to better themselves by revolution in France, England, Spain, Hungary and Ger-

CONTENTS CHAPTER

II.

XII.

m any: failure of the rebellions. Gradual decay of the system. The rise of the towns. Medieval exports and imports. Trade routes. The towns escape from feudalism by buying charters or fighting for them. What the charters contained : i . Freedom from feudal services. 2. Freedom to trade : permission for a market and freedom from tolls : permission for a merchant gild. The rise of craft gilds : their membership, organization and function. 3. Political independence. Conditions of town life in the later Middle Ages.

TOWNS AND THE RENAISSANCE

I.

II.

xiii

.

.

.

.

PAGE

236

The development of city states, (a) In Flanders. (b) The Hanseatic League : its origins, at home and abroad : its foreign trade : its constitution : wars of the League . (c) In Italy : Italian trade : independence and rivalry of the Italian cities : the political conquests of Florence, Venice and Milan : the character of their wars. Constitutional development: Florence : Venice. The Renaissance. The meaning of the Renaissance. The pioneer, Petrarch. What the Renaissance owed to the Middle Ages. What was n ew : the study of language: scholarship : methods of education : development of art. The meeting of the Middle Age and the Renaissance : Lorenzo de’ Medici and Savonarola : their ideals and achievements contrasted. The end of the Middle Ages.

CONCLUSION..........................................................................................2 5 5 GENEALOGICAL T A B L E S ......................................................2 6 1 TIME CHART..........................................................................................2 6 5 B I B L I O G R A P H Y ..............................................................................2 9 I I N D E X ...................................................................................................... 323

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATE

i.

II. h i

.

iv.

ma do nna

o f

CHRIST APPEARS TO MARY MAGDALENE. t h e l a st

judg me nt

{Photo: Alinari)

t h e

r e s u r r e c t io n

v.

summo ns

vi.

ma do nna

v ii.

ma do nna

o f

t h e

.

FACING PAGE

By Giotto* 128

By Fra Angelico

138

By Piero della Francesca *

142

(d

) .

e t a il

a po s t l e s

By Ghirlandaio

.

* .

238

o f t h e r o c k s ( d e t a i l ). By Leonardo da V i n c i .........................................................244

{Photo : National Gallery)

viii.

By Cimabue (?) * Frontispiece

r u c e l l a i.

t h e

o f

t h e

ba sk e t

{Photo: National Gallery)

t h e

c r e a t io n

o f

ma n

.

By Correggio

.

.

By Michael Angelo *

.

248

.

252

* Photos : Anderson

LIST OF MAPS I.

THE

b a r b a r ia n s

e n t e r

t h e

e m pir e

PAGE

.

5

EMPIRES OF JUSTINIAN, CHARLES AND OTTO

•

52

III.

THE ORIGIN OF THE NATIONS

.

•

67

IV.

MEDIEVAL NATIONS ABOUT

1100 A.D. .

.

98

THE EUROPE OF RELIGION AND LEARNING .

•

137

THE CRUSADES

•

159

MEDIEVAL NATIONS ABOUT 1 3 6 0 A.D. .

•

171

MEDIEVAL TRADE AND TOWNS

.

229

II.

V. VI. VII. VIII.

.

.

XV

INTRODUCTION

T

HE world, which has seen so many civilizations, is often jealous for her dead and hides from us the secrets of their history. Phoenicia and Egypt and Babylon and other great empires of the past are hardly even memories to us ; the events of our own time owe little to them. They rose, lived, were great, and were destroyed. But of the last fallen civilization, Rome, time could not bury the records. The immortal city did not die, but was changed. The history of the change is the history of medieval Europe. This book deals with the transfiguration of Roman to modem history. It begins when Rome is still mistress of the known world, with a language, literature, government of her own, and it ends when modem nations have established their own languages, literatures and governments. It has therefore definite limits of time and space and a clear story to tell. This is its plot. In the year a .d . 303 Rome held as her empire the lands that are now Spain, Portugal, England, France, Italy, a great part of Germany and Austria, the Balkans, Syria and part of Mesopotamia and northern Africa. The Mediterranean was her centre, and the empire surrounded it. Outside this circular fortress, whose heart was Rome, were the unconquered races : the barbarian Goths, Franks, Burgundians and Vandals. Rome, who had won everything by fighting, did not think it strange that her emperors' chief work was to drive back, destroy, conciliate, or tame these races. Time moved so slowly that she hardly noticed how the wars changed character and from about the year 300 onwards became defensive. The barbarians had been a danger so long that R om e w as taken b y surprise w hen at last her danger becam e

deadly. Through long wars, with no great event, she was slowly ruined ; and Goth and Vandal and Hun were her conquerors and took her lands. Sometimes the barbarian drove out the Roman, as the Saxons did in Britain. Sometimes the two lived together like the Franks and Gauls or the Goths and x v ii

xviii

AN INTRODUCTION TO MEDIEVAL HISTORY

Italians. In every case the barbarian won battles, lands and riches from the Romans. But besides the naked facts of a battle fought or a sacked city, history is made by invisible events. A naked fact—the victory by arms of the barbarians—gave to our forefathers their homes. An invisible event gave them civilization. The beauty, wisdom and power of Rome enchanted their minds, so that for a time they could create nothing. If a great barbarian chief conquered his neighbours, he tried to make himself Roman Emperor. If a man made himself a scholar, he did so by reading Roman literature, and he wrote his books in Latin. The barbarians accepted the greatest religion known to Rome—Christianity. The Christian Church was governed by Roman ideas of organization and law. In short, the world's golden age was in the past, and men thought themselves happy or fortunate in so far as they could renew the age of Rome. The first part of the book explains how this happened and how far it succeeded. To rebuild Rome's empire as if it had never fallen was of course impossible. Nothing in history can return ; and the barbarians while they were trying to copy Rome were at the same tiiqe making discoveries of their own. They had brought with them some ideas about government, about war, and about poetry ; these ideas grew and new ideas came, so that between about a . d . 800 and 1300 the genius of Europe was very different alike from Rome and from modern times. This is the greatest, most individual and most dramatic part of the Middle Ages. It is described in the second part of the book. As time passed, there passed away also the direct influence of Rome. The new nations that the barbarians founded became united in themselves, and instead of looking back to a past they wished to copy, they looked forward. Between the years 1300 and 1500 this change is in action ; the influence of Rome fades, original institutions develop, and out of the decay of the Middle Ages our\modem civilization springs. This change is the subject of the third book. Every one of these periods and every minute part of each period is so full and varied that it could be studied endlessly. Each one is of interest in itself, as well as for the part it takes in the plot. Yet no part of history, any more than any man's

INTRODUCTION

xix

life, stands alone ; the great story of civilization includes all the nations, and continues through all the periods of European history. This book describes a part of the pilgrimage of mankind ; and that invisible pilgrimage is its real subject, to be perceived behind the acts of all the heroes and villains on whom the curtain now rises.

BOOK I THE HERITAGE OF ROME

AN INTRODUCTION TO MEDIEVAL HISTORY BOOK I THE HERITAGE OF ROME CHAPTER I

THE FIRST G IF T : THE LAND L The barbarian world and the Roman world. Causes of weakness in Rome : the size of the empire : corrupt government: civil war : spiritual decline : the foederati: and frontier problems. II. The barbarian invasions. The Goths enter the empire : advance of the Visigoths : of the Vandals : of the Huns : there ceases to be a separate Emperor in Rome : advance of the Ostrogoths : and of the Saxons and Franks : the influence of Rome on the barbarians.

T

HE curtain rises on a Goth in Dacia. Tall, wild and shaggy, he is the forest's child, and he is standing far from any town, in a cleared space among trees. He has built himself a low hut of rough wood, and he cooks on fires of logs and reeds. His ancestors are herdsmen and hunters, and so he takes his food like a lord, and plunders the earth instead of serving it. His race desires above everything strength, freedom and war, and all these desires have been fulfilled. He is powerful, free and warlike. Yet this early perfection of the Goth, who has suited himself so exactly by his power and beauty to the dangers and enchantments of the forest, will in a few years leave him. Dacia is a new home to him, and it will set him problems that must change for ever his early simplicity and assurance in life. The coming to Dacia was an adventure of which he has told the world little except in legend. It was a quest— no one knows for what prize. Perhaps the old homeland somewhere 3

4

AN INTRODUCTION TO MEDIEVAL HISTORY

near the Baltic Sea had become too small for the Goths, and so younger brothers were sent out to seek their fortunes. Perhaps the homeland had been disturbed by other wanderers, and perhaps these wanderers too had come from the East in search of a well-watered empty country. Except that, like most events in history, it was something to do with food and through that with land, no one can say clearly why tribes living thousands of miles apart and often with no knowledge of each other should have begun almost in the same century a pilgrimage to the West. It is certain that such a pilgrimage was made ; it stretched from Asia to Spain. It sent the Goths and Lombards to Italy, the Vandals to Africa, the Huns to France, the Saxons, Danes and Normans to England. It is the great Wandering of the Nations, which for centuries kept the barbarian races restless and warlike, until at last they built for themselves either homes or graves ; and while the Goth, Hun and Vandal perished, the Saxon, Frank, Northman and Lombard live as the nations of modem Europe. The Goths of Dacia had just entered on the adventure that was to bring such glory and disaster. With their wives, slaves and cattle they had migrated southwards and by the year a . d . 350 had settled in two great bands on the northwest of the Black Sea, the Ostrogoths in the east, the Visigoths in the west. They brought with them an old magic by which the spirits of the earth and sun showed themselves as gods in temples where sacrifices were made to them and where they were offered arm-rings and torques of gold. These gods, who were once perhaps visible on earth but had long ago vanished, had left to the Goths a race of kings : the families of Amal and Balti. The king was a child of the gods. He wore the sacred collar. He was known as the *dread forest king \ At the moment of his election, Alaric stood raised on a shield above the heads of the highest Gothic fighters. Legends and myths grew up round the splendid names of Gothic kings—Hermanric and Athanarich and Argaith. Round the king were dukes, his comrades, chosen for their courage, who governed under him and fought beside him, and whom he could advise, but not command. Round the dukes, in their turn, were the free fighters, whom they could advise but not command. No great decision could be made except in the open assembly of the Folkmoot, and there the

Troyes}

^U U TESp

ftavern

VANDALS

'GOTi/fsl

Land over 6 0 0 f e e t

Boundary o f Roman Empire

THE BARBADIANS ENTER THE EMPIRE

6

AN INTRODUCTION TO MEDIEVAL HISTORY

kings or dukes laid their plans before the fighters to be ap^ proved or rejected by them. This nation, who understood courage and freedom so well, but had everything to learn about mercy and pity, was by its move into Dacia brought into touch with the religion, statesmanship and civilization of Rome. The mind of the Teutons, while it was capable of creative thought, was very susceptible indeed to inspiration from others, and the Teutons were gamblers who did not fear to approach strange things. Therefore their institutions of a limited fighting kingship, a free assembly, and a wandering life were profoundly changed by the imperialism of Rome. Wealthy Roman citizens of the year a . d . 300 lived in wide, splendid houses of stone or marble, built round open courts where, perhaps, a fountain might spring within a circle of tall slender pillars. Indoors in the cool shady rooms there were delicate wall pictures, and on the floors shone the bright and varied colours of mosaic. These houses were full of treasures. The couches and beds were inlaid with ivory, tortoise-shell and silver ; sometimes they were made all of silver or carved bronze, and their coverings were brilliant. The vases and cups gleamed with jewels ; sometimes even the kitchen vessels were of silver, or if they were of earthenware they were covered with designs of flowers. Everything in the house showed that Rome ruled the world and that the citizen had not worked himself to make his home. His ivories and silks had come from the East, brought from Alexandria or Baghdad by a tall ship rowed by slaves. The wheat for his white bread was grown by the Nile. His bronze benches were carved by slaves from Greece or Persia. All the conquered races were working for him, and their work set him free for a civilized life : he might be a statesman, a lawyer, a merchant, or simply lead a leisurely life in the sunlight. All the finished, solid ease of his surroundings must have seemed to assure him that Rome's power and safety could never end. He lived under an emperor who was above the law, and who ruled from Spain to Persia. After a . d . 286 there were two emperors—one for the East and one for the West. Under them the land was divided into prefectures, dioceses and provinces, each with its governor. These men kept order : no one might fight his neighbours, but there was a great variety of lawsuits at his disposal if he liked to quarrel with

THE FIRST GIFT : THE LAND

7

them. If anyone wanted to travel, he could go in safety along magnificent straight roads, and his letters home would never be lost or delayed. If he were a Roman citizen he would have special privileges and fewer taxes to p a y ; but whoever he was, he could live and trade and grow rich in safety. Yet in the year 300 the wealth and glory of Rome were an illusion ; great though she still was, she had exhausted the sources of her greatness. She had, in the first place, conquered too widely, so that her huge, unwieldy empire had no safe frontiers to the east, either in Europe or Asia. She was threatened by the Persians in Asia, and by the barbarians in Europe. For the same reason, the empire was not united within itself. No form of society could be made that would reconcile, except in the most external way, such different races as the Arabs and Italians and Britons. Rome had tried, as has been shown, to meet this difficulty by dividing her empire into provincial governments, and even by dividing her imperial office. As a result of the first plan the real vigour of the Roman government dissolved away in the hands of thousands of officials, who were either idle or fussy in their business methods, and whose government became unjust and utterly corrupt. As a result of the second plan, civil wars of jealousy and ambition rose between the emperors, and between generals or statesmen who wished to be emperors. Rome was never free from such wars ; between 284 and 400 there were nine great civil wars or rebellions. The strong governor of a province would call himself emperor, as Licinius did. A strong general would take the title, as Maximus did. The emperor's brother or uncle or cousin would turn against him, as did Maxentius, Julian and a score of others. Civil wars and corrupt government that had lost its force and directness were enough to account for the decay of Rome. But behind them lay another subtler cause. No civilization can die as long as its citizens desire strongly that it should live, because civilization in its purest form is a spiritual thing and cannot disappear as long as men's minds will harbour it. Civilization is invisible, built by thoughts : it is a progress in art, knowledge, goodness, and invention, and all of these are created by thought. Rome was dying because she had ceased to create. Her poets and thinkers became less great and productive and fewer in numbers. She began to neglect the

8

AN INTRODUCTION TO MEDIEVAL HISTORY

great work of education, by which children are put into touch with civilization and given the chance of continuing i t ; and her children were brought up by slaves who could inspire them with no free creative impulses. Instead of working, the citizens of Rome were given free bread, grown and paid for by the provincials. It became harder to find men willing to fill the public services and the army. They were ‘ in love with a dying life \ In short, Rome no longer created new wonders, no longer even maintained herself. She became dependent on her subjects. For food, taxes and lesser officials she relied chiefly on her provinces, and many of these were so highly Romanized that she seemed to run little danger in doing so. But for her army, which was a necessary protection of her frontiers and yet a heavy burden on her treasury and population, she began to rely on much more dangerous recruits. She began to enlist barbarians ; and from that time date the barbarian invasions. Imperial Rome had always opened her army to certain barbarians, just as on certain conditions she opened her citizenship to provincials. This was a healthy habit by which she assimilated her subjects. But in the third and fourth centuries she began to enlist as her soldiers all the most dangerous tribes of her enemies, paying them a yearly sum and giving them the title of foederati, yet without either training them or breaking up their unity. This was clearly an enlistment only in name. The barbarians were not absorbed into the Roman army, but were still dangerous to it, and the yearly wage was a bribe to keep them quiet. A half surrender had already been made to the Teutons by this admission that Rome desired no further conquests, but only to keep intact her frontiers which ran along the lines of the Rhine and Danube. To fortify these lines was the task of the great emperors and generals of the fourth century. The Em peror Constantine about a . d . 330 built Constantinople, the New Rome, which was meant to give the empire an impregnable capital just where it might most easily be cut by barbarian attacks. Julian, in a series of great campaigns between a . d . 354 and 357, like a second Caesar held the Rhine and Gaul for Rome. Valentinian, the ‘ frontier emperor ', fortified the whole line of the Danube and Rhine, and while he ruled (364-375) wars never ceased on it. Outside the line lay the world of Teuton barbarians in a

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score of different tribes and settlements stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea and from the Rhine to the Russian Steppelands. In a .d . 375, the year of Valentinian's death, this Teutonic empire was itself attacked by new invaders. These were the Huns, who were as wild and brave as the Goths, and far more savage ; like the early Goths they were on a primitive instinctive pilgrimage towards wider lands, greener country and more plentiful food. They broke into the ring of the Teutonic nations, conquering everywhere. The Goths, already half Romanized and by so much the less vigorous, came defeated to the emperors and asked leave to cross the Danube and shelter behind the forts and armies once raised against themselves. They were given leave. Their migrations were as swift and innumerable ‘ as the rain of ashes from Etna '; and it would have been as impossible to sweep them back. The barbarians had entered the empire. Two years later they rose in arms against their protectors, and at the battle of Hadrianople (378) they defeated Rome's army and killed her emperor. After this time, for a hundred years, Rome won no victories and produced few heroic emperors. Her empire was divided between the rulers of its two capitals, Rome and Constantinople ; the emperor at Constantinople was safe in his fortress, but the emperor at Rome, even if he had been powerful, would have had hard work to defend a city so easily reached and surrounded. Therefore between 375 and 527 Rome yielded up the first of her great possessions, her lands, and the barbarians entered into them. These new-comers were of very different types. The ring of barbarian settlements that lay close to the Roman frontiers was nearly all Teutonic. Its most famous tribes were the Goths, the Saxons and the Franks. Some of these tribes had accepted Roman ideas and had even entered Roman public life as generals or statesmen, so that the difference of birth between Roman and Teuton did not always mean the difference between the old world and the new. Behind this district of varied race, civilization and strength came the new enemies, the Huns and the Vandals ; these in their turn were influenced by Rome as soon as they came close to her. All those differences of race and ability among the invaders which were to mean so much in later history meant little in the immediate

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future, compared with the great ideas that they had in common. First, the motive of all their wanderings was hunger, which manifested itself as a hunger for land. The British legend that told how Hengest and Horsa were offered gifts of land in Kent, and how they opened the door to the invading army, is true in sp irit; for as soon as any barbarian forces conceived the idea of settlement they set themselves to conquest. Secondly, no tribe was highly enough organized to conquer unless it had found some great leader, and therefore each tribe takes an active part in the story when any soldier of genius appears, and otherwise is inactive. Thirdly, all those who settled within the sphere of Rome learnt to wonder at, and so to copy, her ; the civilization of Rome was a revelation to the barbarians, and the medium through which they first saw laws, politics and a church. The adventures of each separate force in winning victories over Rome and then learning secrets from her make a cycle of heroic stories. First marched the Visigoths, who after fighting for long as the auxiliaries of the Roman army at last found a general of high and daring ambitions. Since he had grown up to look on the Roman civilization as the very height and miracle of man's achievement, it seemed to him the height of glory to enter Rome as a conqueror. He was not the only man, by hundreds, in the course of history who was to give up his life to that ambition ; the deep awe aroused in every barbarian by the sense of contrast between himself and Rome created a tradition that to conquer Rome must be a task for heroes, and men were held by that tradition down to the days of Napoleon, long after the original motive had vanished. Alaric, as the pioneer of the tradition, felt it most v iv id ly : ‘ Something within urges me every day irresistibly onwards, saying, “ Proceed to Rome and make that city desolate." ' In 395 or thereabouts he and his nation entered Greece, victorious everywhere and yet half afraid of their victories over those splendid towns which they could not have built and which had been great during centuries of their own barbarity. In this mood they ended the Greek campaigns and began to march up the valley of the Save, heading towards Italy and Rome. To oppose Alaric there were only shadows among the Romans, ruled over by the tired, timid, lifeless Emperor

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Honorius, who played at chicken-keeping. Rome would be badly guarded by him. The Romans had in their army one general, Stilicho, a Vandal by birth, who was fit to meet Alaric in battle ; he was a tall, grave, able man, a glorious soldier and fit to bear any responsibility. But could they trust in his service ? They tried to tr u st; no one has ever known whether they were justified. His battles against the Goths were always brilliant, often victorious, but in his campaigns as a whole there were strange pauses and failures. Italy was defended, but Alaric was not defeated: he was allowed to slip out of dangerous places, to gain the great passes that led into North Italy ; there were frequent negotiations between him and Stilicho, and no one knew whether these were the negotiations of enmity or of a growing friendship and sense of brotherhood. Yet Stilicho's treachery was unproved. The Romans themselves may have been responsible for his failures by their suspicions, contradictory orders and bad policy. In 402, after Stilicho's most famous battle at Pollentia had ended indecisively, the Romans themselves proposed to make Alaric a general in their army and allow him to conquer Illyria if he would leave Ita ly ; these terms were a greater submission and betrayal of their own lasting safety than anything of which Stilicho had been accused. The Romans pursued Stilicho with suspicions, accusations and fea r; at last, in 408 his enemies mutinied against him, and by his arrest and death Rome lost her defender. That same year Alaric reached Rome and besieged it. In the summer of 409 he besieged it a second time. In 410 he ‘ beset, shook and assaulted the trembling Rome \ By the conquest of Rome he had, indeed, shaken and assaulted more than men, an emperor and a c ity : he had shaken the foundations of history. The successes of the barbarian generals against Rome were never maintained for very long. There was a simple reason for this : the tribe was so dependent for victory on its leader that power to conquer died with him ; and the dangerous life of a barbarian general was soon over and gave him little time to build lasting empires. Alaric's empire was still built half of dreams when he died in South Italy, where he had gone to plan the conquest of Africa. It was to the Goths like the death of a god. They gave him a god's burial in

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some secret place under the bed of a river, which they dammed up while their slaves dug his grave. Under the flow they buried with him his imperial ambitions ; and they turned north again, passing through Italy into Gaul and Spain. There they found the Vandals in possession—barbarians of the Baltic district who had wandered through central Europe, fought their way through Gaul, and entered Spain in 409. For twenty years the two homeless nations fought for a home, until in 428 the Vandals found a leader with new plans. This was Gaiseric, a silent, cruel little man who limped, but who could think quickly. He taught the Vandals to win victories. Under him the whole race crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and conquered the Roman provinces of Africa. In 439 Carthage was taken and became the capital of a Vandal kingdom. From that date the Mediterranean was threatened by Vandal pirates, who conquered Sicily, overran South Italy and at last, in 455, plundered Rome itself. But the Vandals were robbers, not conquerors, and their ideals were small and mean beside the heroic ambitions of the Visigoths which had died with Alaric. Rome gained nothing when any one barbarian tribe, even the fiercest, gave up its ambitions ; she had too many enemies. Behind the Visigoths were the Huns, and they were her next invader. They were so ugly and of such Asiatic look that the Romans hardly thought of them as men, but as a *kind of two-footed b ea st' who looked on houses as tombs and ate roots or raw flesh and lived and slept on horseback. Their leader was Attila, an arrogant savage, who was without the kingliness of the Goths but whose cruelty and energy gave him as great powers of command. He had formed a loose military empire that reached from China to Gaul and from Scandinavia to the Danube before he attacked Rome, and he was therefore the first invader whose fighting powers and ambitions had not, to a great extent, been inspired by her example. The impression made on the Huns by Roman civilization was therefore much more sudden and dazzling than anything known to the Goths. Their hard lives were suddenly contrasted with Rome's brilliant, varied luxuries, and they found these luxuries and treasures badly guarded. The instinct to seize, use and destroy was overwhelming. Neither Attila nor his Huns really understood the nature of

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the Roman Empire, its lasting laws and its system of administration that had taken generations to create, for neither of them was capable of such a creation. They were capable only of war and such glory as could be won by it. They learned to attack Roman villas and live in them, but they could build nothing better than log huts. They learned to eat from silver plate and to drink from goblets of silver and gold, but not to mine or carve. Therefore the Huns, although they plundered civilization, were not able to continue it or to create a new one ; and therefore their own fate, in spite of their victory over others, was death. The Roman Empire was theirs to pillage, not to inherit; they could weaken Rome, but they could not endow a new state that should live in history. In 447 Attila attacked the Eastern Empire victoriously, and was bought off with tribute. In 451 he invaded Gaul, and met there another barbarian general of the Roman army, Aetius : a second Stilicho, but less great. Attila took Metz and besieged Orleans. His huge army seemed invincible in its size and reckless fighting, and all Gaul, all the Visigothic settlements and Italy beyond them were exposed to it. These lands were saved by a battle as famous as Marathon or Agincourt, where a small army defeated innumerable enemies. The battle of Troyes or the Catalaunian Fields, whose very site is unknown to us, saved the Celts and Teutons of Gaul from Asiatic oppression ; the fighting was so fierce as to pass into legend, and it was said that the dead fighters, disembodied, continued their war in the windy turbulent sky above the battle-field. Attila 4lost confidence in fighting * and went home. The next year he appeared again at the north of Italy. He was come now into the most famous line of barbarian invasion, leading to Rome, and nothing could show more clearly the effect of Roman civilization on savages than Attila's longing and fear to attack its capital. He could not keep out of Italy, and yet he remembered his defeat in Gaul, feared Aetius, and feared the famines and diseases of this strange sunny country. In the midst of these fears an ambassador came to him from Rome. It was the Pope Leo I who displayed himself to the savages with magnificent ceremony and conquered their imaginations. Without a battle, at the command of Leo, Attila withdrew his men from Italy.

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The old majesty of Rome had frightened him, and he did not live long enough to discover that it was hollow underneath. In 453 he d ied ; and almost directly afterwards Aetius too died—murdered like Stilicho by his masters. The second episode of the Roman defeat was ended, and in spite of danger the city of Rome was still imperial and free. It was imperial and free in name. But in fact the emperors who succeeded one another during the fifth century were not the leaders of their own cause. They depended on barbarian generals and ministers. Not the emperor, but Stilicho, had fought Alaric. Aetius had driven home Attila. It was a natural development of this process when in 476 there ceased to be a separate emperor at Rome. The emperor at Constantinople, who was in name supreme over the whole empire, had no longer a fellow-emperor at Rome, and Italy was governed under him by a barbarian minister named Odovacar. Odovacar was Patrician in Italy, and although he was less great than the earlier barbarian ministers in character or achievement, he governed fairly well. But he could not hope to inspire Rome's enemies with fear, and his real importance in history lies not in his rise to power but in the easiness of his defeat by the next invader, the Ostrogoths. Since 378 and the battle of Hadrianople, many of the Ostrogoths had been settled within the lines of the Byzantine Empire. They had learnt therefore everything about civilization that lies on the surface ; they could see how to organize a state, how to word a law, and how to order their everyday lives. At the same time they knew by instinct what the Imperialists had forgotten—that life is a fight. They were capable of dangerous and victorious acts. As with the Visigoths and Huns, the coming of a great leader inspired their ambitions. This leader appeared suddenly, lonely in a world of savages or tired and decadent emperors ; for he was strong, fresh, wise and eager. He valued the gifts and beauties of civilization, and he conquered great cities and peoples not to destroy, but to guard them. Rome was to him an aged queen who was without power but who could demand reverence. His name was Theodoric, and he was like a free and royal Stilicho, or like an Alaric who understood statecraft. Like theirs, his thoughts were always and naturally expressed in acts, and his active, keen mind was always at work changing

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and creating political facts until he had made a solid and living state ; yet there were still dark and savage places in his consciousness to remind him that civilization cannot be quickly made and that the barbarian could wake in him. A man like Theodoric will spend his life on great vehement acts, which are sometimes savage, often wise and always heroic. Under this general the Ostrogoths invaded first the Balkan lands and then Italy. In both invasions they were successful. The Byzantine Emperor bought them off with a promise that Theodoric should hold Italy if he could take it from Odovacar. The Italians and hired soldiers of Odovacar ran back before him into their fortified towns, and a long siege of Ravenna from 490 to 493 gave Italy to Theodoric. Then began the most strange episode of Rome's fall. Half vanished, wholly defeated, she was given a last golden age. The king of her enemies became her k night; and she found her laws respected, her streets and temples preserved so that their beauty shone out again, and peace given to her people by a man who said, ‘ Reverently to preserve the old is even better than to build afresh.' Rome knew again an age of philosophers and historians in Boethius, Cassiodorus and Jordanes. Boethius was as thoughtful, grave and artistic as any of the old Roman statesmen, and Cassiodorus was a pompous, fluent courtier who loved long, variegated words and knew how to praise Theodoric as if he were a Roman Emperor. Neither Cassiodorus nor Boethius nor Theodoric himself knew that he was far greater than a Roman emperor. He was the promise of history that the wandering nations should at last find all that they sought. Until his reign it was never certain that the barbarian leaders, with all their vigour in war, were capable of creating a strong and peaceful government; after his time the world could look forward hopefully towards rulers like Charles the Great, Alfred and Henry the Fowler. Theodoric solved that very difficult problem, the government of a conquered state. The Italians gave up one-third of their land to the Goths and lived as their neighbours. A Roman, not a Goth, had arranged the division. Each race lived under its own law. Every religion was tolerated. The minds of the Italians were relaxed from fear of war, and they began to build, write, and create a r t;

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they carried to its highest point the fantastic and formal beauty of mosaic. Italy in this period lived a strange double life ; in their peaceful farms and villas and churches the Romans lived like their forefathers, and they knew that in his palace at Ravenna there was a ruler dressed in imperial purple and served by Roman courtiers and ministers. The only change, perhaps, in the details of their home-life was that the wonderful foreign imports had almost ceased and that Italy now produced most of her own food. Yet this ruler was a foreign conqueror, whose curt vigorous style of government was like no Roman government of late decades : and his army was scattered over the country, working as farmers or garrisons of cities. His friends abroad were all barbarians ; he was the leader of a group of barbarian states, the Visigoths, Franks and Burgundians. He had even tried, unsuccessfully, to end their civil quarrels and to unite them in a league of nations. All this showed plainly that there would be no break between old Rome and new Europe, but that the barbarians would adapt to their own uses the ideas, if not the habits, of Rome. Just as Italian and Gothic everyday life was reconciled under Theodoric, so Roman and modem ideas have lived side by side in history. Theodoric's reign ended sadly. He was not defeated, but he fe ll; the barbarian character, even at its strongest, was still not controlled enough to bear power. As an old man Theodoric became unjust. He no longer made all religions free, but began to persecute, and at last imprisoned the pope. He killed Boethius on a charge of treachery; while the imprisoned senator waited for death, he wrote one of the last great books of Roman thought, the Consolation of Philosophy. Theodoric’s power was weakened, and after his death in 526 the Gothic kingdom of Italy was an unreal kingdom. Of all the states, indeed, whose conquests have been told, not one was to stand. The Visigoths, Vandals, Huns and the state of Theodoric all perished. The only barbarians of the fifth century who were to live as conquerors and state builders were the Saxons in England and the Franks in North Gaul. By the time of Theodoric the Saxons and Angles had already passed up the great estuaries of England and had formed settlements and kingdoms; and during Theodoric s lifetime the Franks had produced Clovis, their first great

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leader and the founder of their fortunes. Clovis was a most successful brute of a man. He became king of the Franks when they were beginning to spread southwards and westwards from the Rhine. In a series of wars Clovis conquered North Gaul and Burgundy, and attacked the Visigoths in South-west Gaul. His four sons confirmed these conquests, and began to drive back and defeat the Saxons on the east of the Rhine. By the time of his grandson modem France begins to appear. It is very Teutonic in character and its centre is on the Rhine, not in P aris; it does not include Brittany or Southern Gaul, and it does include a good deal of debatable land on the Saxon or German side of the Rhine. But the Frankish name and race has arrived, and from the sixth century onwards France plays a most brilliant and active part in history. At the beginning of this story the great contrast was shown between the complicated, pleasant daily life of the Roman and the Goth's rough simple ways. The first life depended on a wide foreign trade that gathered materials from all the known world, and on many inventions and devices in using them ; the second was a more primitive struggle with nature, and depended on physical strength with very little help from invention and organization. By the end of the fifth century all this was changed except in the district round Constantinople. The Romans had lost the system by which they had been served, and although many of them still lived in beautiful villas their food was much simpler and a good deal of their treasure had disappeared. The provincials were in a much worse case : either like the Britons they had fled from their homes and had fallen back into savagery, or like many of the Gauls they had become slaves. Although their law and literature were still alive, the literature was unread, and the law half forgotten. The social life of the Romans as a whole was full of memories, but changed. The life of the barbarian too was changed; it shows every possible variety of fusion between the old and new. The Vandals after Gaiseric's time almost reproduced on the surface the life of Rome. African slaves produced, cooked and served their food, and repaired their ships and houses just as was once done for their Roman masters. The Vandals accepted all these services and lived happily as if in a world that was made rich for them by magic,

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A Roman poet who told of the Vandals' plundering raids described the fat Vandals as lying on their ships and watching lazily while their slaves obediently stole treasure for them. In the everyday life of the Vandal state there would be little change except that the Vandals took the place of the Roman ; that instead of the regular interchange of trade new goods entered the country without payment as the spoil of the pirate raids ; and that the natives feared as well as obeyed their masters. But in countries where life was harder, where the country was less warm and rich, and above all where there were no slaves, the barbarians could not keep up Roman habits. The Saxons in Britain inherited from their conquests almost nothing but the bare earth. These barbarians let the Roman roads go to ruin while they made for themselves new tracks, or went back to prehistoric ones, running sometimes only a few hundred yards from the high road. They burnt the towns, and avoiding even the country villas they settled in little groups over the green, wild country, built new houses of mud or wood, and began to produce their own food each group for itself. They had few slaves, for the Britons had fled into Wales ; and therefore they had no teachers in civilization and they lived as roughly and hardily as their cousins in Germany or the Baltic district who had never come close enough to Rome to watch her ways. The Vandals and Saxons made each of them a definite and lasting choice : the Vandals seized and the Saxons rejected the gifts of Rome. It was a choice, unknown to them, of life or death ; for Rome's gifts were so plentiful and attractive that they destroyed all need for effort, and with that all chance of life, to the men who took them. Between these extremes were the Goths and Franks. The Goths in Italy worked side by side with the Italians, generally learning their methods and fitting their own labour to the needs of old, well-cultivated lan d ; but they held this land under new laws and conditions and they did not cease to work on it for themselves. They worked in family groups like colonists, while the Italians were landlords and lived on their rent or on the work of slaves ; and the two systems did not unite. But in Gaul the Roman and barbarian systems were combined, and therefore the Frankish invasion has not cut in two the history of ancient and modern France. In the

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Roman villa of Gaul there was a landlord, some slaves and a greater number of men who were free but who could not leave the land they were working on ; there were also a number of tenants living under the landlord's protection. This system was hardly changed. If the Gallic landlord had been driven out or killed, a Frankish family came to live in his house, and the tenants and serfs worked under him, with the addition perhaps sometimes of some of the poorer Franks. But not nearly as many Frankish chiefs came to look for homes as there were villas in the country : so that very often the Gaul kept his villa and took an oath to be faithful to the Frankish king. The food was being produced by very many different classes of people—serfs working on their master's land, some free men working separately as tenants, and many men who were neither serf nor free working a little separate piece of land which they might not leave. But all this work was alike in being grouped round the villa and in being fairly well organized ; so that the Franks in Gaul had plenty of land and food and led a pleasant life. Land and food and a pleasant life were not, however, the only gifts the barbarians asked from Fate.

CHAPTER II

THE SECOND G IF T : THE CHURCH I. Origins of the Christian religion : early organization : the Fathers : the creeds : the monks. II. The barbarian religion. III. The conversion of the barbarians : the Goths : the Vandals : the Franks : how far was the conversion genuine ? IV. The effects of the barbarian conversion : pagan influences on Christianity : the rise of the authority of bishops : the rise of the papacy : the work of Gregory I in Italy, in the church, and in Western Europe : the limits of his authority. The place of religion in the medieval world.

EARLY every great civilization except our own has produced its own religion. The Egyptian and Babylonian, the Jew and the Greek each worshipped his racial god. But the barbarians who made our civilization, and who had produced a native faith before they came to conquer Rome, found there a religion which transcended their own. This religion had been bom in the East, among races alien to our forefathers; it had been made subtle by Greek thought, which was incomprehensible to them ; and it had been adopted by their defeated enemy, Rome. It was a miracle that the barbarians should have accepted such a religion and that modern Europe should be Christian. But the miracles of history can always be explained. When Christ died and left behind a little group of friends who believed in Him, the future influence of His teaching was uncertain. It might have been lost or confined to a few ; no one would have guessed that Christ’s friends would be more able to attract followers than Himself had been. Even in His lifetime Christ’s teaching had often been misunderstood, because in His acts and words there bloomed such an utter loveliness that people were afraid to take them literally. To Pilate and all the other onlookers it must have seemed that Christ's thoughts died on the cross. But His friends’ adoration for Christ made them, now that they could no longer listen to Him, missionaries of His teaching. A gospel 20

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began to be preached throughout the empire, and in every town there were secret and open believers who in their turn became missionaries. From that time the thoughts and ideas of Christ passed from Him into the hands of ordinary men, who are in the last resort guardians of all ideas, morals and the peace of the world, and whose blundering energy wastes or protects these treasures. Christianity as the barbarians found it had been very greatly changed by this energy. In the first place, the steady increase in the numbers of Christians had made it natural to organize the movement. As early as apostolic times outstanding men had been called elders and bishops, and deacons had been chosen as officers of the little group of Christians in Jerusalem. An apostle like S. Paul who spent his life in mission work had naturally a special importance to the converts of each town ; and these converts, forming a little group called a church, looked on him as the father and founder of that church, and depended for leadership on his visits or letters. As such a church grew stronger it became independent of these travelling preachers, and the believers chose themselves a bishop. As the work of the church grew more exacting a number of ministers and workers were needed, and by degrees there grew up a separate group of clergy who were vowed to their work and passed through certain stages of apprenticeship to it. They were first deacons and then presbyters, and they chose a bishop from among themselves. The bishops of these local churches began to meet each other in councils for discussion and to decide quarrels. Very often they quarrelled among themselves—it was now two hundred years since Christ died—and through their quarrels the bishops of certain great towns, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople and above all Rome, won for themselves a certain special importance. By a . d . 300 the bishops were beginning to write down their decisions and speak of them as laws : this is the beginning of the Canon Law of the Church. The first council of the West was held in Arles in 314, and the first general council of th e whole church at Nicaea in 325. In short, Christianity was becoming united as a nation is united, by common laws, leaders, and institutions ; it remained to be seen whether this political unity would protect or imprison and kill the delicate unseen ideal that Christ had given to the world. From the

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barbarians’ point of view this one fact is supremely important : that when Christianity first appeared to them it was not only a religion of the Romans, but also was governed in provinces and councils and by law as Rome was governed, and had its centres in the Roman capitals; it seemed to them a part of Rome. In the second place, Christianity had had to fight for its life. There had been enemies. Until Constantine had proclaimed toleration (by the Edict of Milan in 313) it was unsafe to be a Christian. Christianity had been persecuted, in peril, a secret religion, for more than two hundred years ; it was therefore held passionately. It produced a series of great thinkers, who tried to work out and define the faith of Christ. Their splendid names, Origen, Athanasius, and Chrysostom the Greeks, Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine the Latins, are banners of the church. These men were full of vitality. Many of them, like Augustine, had been philosophers among the pagans, and before they became Christians had received all that Greece and the East could give them of subtlety and insight. Cyprian, Origen and Augustine were all teachers of logic and philosophy. Others, like Chrysostom or Jerome, had begun their life by a flight from the world into the desert, where they could search alone for some higher way of living. Others, like Ambrose, were statesmen. All the most active and idealistic qualities of any age were represented among the Fathers. They wanted not only to defend Christianity but to develop and define it. The great official creed of the church was published at Nicaea in 325 ; an informal simpler creed was already in existence which at last took the form of our Apostles’ Creed. The writing of these clear, short descriptions of belief was the result of long arguments and quarrels, in which it often seemed that the unity of Christianity would perish and that half a dozen sects would preserve in very different ways the memory of Christ. Cyprian was the first to fight this danger and to believe that the unity of the church was necessary to Christianity. Athanasius fought the world and was twice exiled, but cared nothing for any of his troubles if he could prove that Christ was God and defeat the Arians, who thought that the Father was greater than the Son. The Athanasian Creed expresses his view, though he was not its author. His fight was continued by

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Ambrose and Augustine and by many others, for the Arians were a large sect and hard to defeat. S. Augustine was alive when Alaric sacked Rome ; and when the enemies of Christianity said that the Christian God could not defend his city Augustine answered that the unity of Christian believers was the true City of God ; that no barbarian could overthrow it and that it would become at last a new Jerusalem. This argument was worked out in a great book, De Civitate Dei, which was to inspire medieval thought down to the time of Luther. S. Augustine held that man, who is both body and spirit, inhabits at the same time an earthly and a spiritual world, and must choose for himself which world is to be the more real to him. The problem of choosing between the heavenly and the earthly city and of deciding the relationship between them was to become the central problem of the Middle Ages. So the theory was complete, and as the age of the great Fathers ended Christianity was changed. It was a religion full of laws, creeds, logic ; in every town it had buildings and paid officials ; it had defeated the heathens after a long rivalry, and endured victoriously much conflict within itself. The apostles probably did not foresee such a church, and would hardly have recognized it. The importance of the change to the barbarian and to the future of Europe is this : that from the moment when the first creed was made it was possible to believe' wrongly. A barbarian converted to Christianity by the Arians would not be a member of the true church. A barbarian converted by the orthodox party would be supported by the true church. The creeds of the Fathers set up boundaries round Christendom, and to unity of government was added the unity of a single and fixed belief. This gave political strength to the church. Beside these discoveries in the world of thought, Christianity was discovering in the time of the barbarian invasions a new form of religious life. In that age, when religion was not become stale to its believers but was still a mystery to be explored, the Christian was absorbed in the thought of God. It was his highest aim to forget everyday life, and reach some high place in the mind where only unseen things are real. There grew up in Egypt and Syria and Asia Minor a class of men who dared to go away alone and in solitary desert places

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try to win that experience. Many of them failed, a few grew tired and many more grew proud of their self-denial and took more pleasure in fasting than ordinary people take in eating. But others won, and became great saints, so that ‘ the desert was enamelled with the flowers of Christ \ Disciples came to learn from them, and the saints had to leave their solitude. Pachomius the Egyptian in a vision saw an angel, who pronounced these words : ‘ Pachomius, thou hast rightly ordered thine own life ; needlessly then dost thou sit in the cave ; come out and gather all the young monks, and live with them / So groups of these men came to live together in Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor; then the story of their lives was brought by S. Basil to Greece and by S. Athanasius to Rome, and monasticism began in Europe. During the fourth century it spread from Italy to Spain, France and Ireland ; sometimes men lived alone as hermits, sometimes they lived in groups as monks. Their life of loneliness and long hard thinking was diflicult for Europeans who are used to activity and change. The monks of Gaul protested to their abbot, ' We are Gauls: it's absurd and cruel to try to make us live like angels. We aren't angels : we're Gauls.' Monasticism in Europe was struggling and almost unsuccessful when at the end of the fifth century, in the time of Theodoric, came a genius, Benedict, who was to revive monastic life. Benedict believed that a man should become a monk because he wished to offer up his life to God and keep nothing in it for his own pleasure ; but he believed also that to contemplate God's greatness was not the only way of making this offering. Man could offer up work as well as prayer in sacrifice. In the Benedictine monasteries the monk vowed to give up his will, his riches and human friendships ; freed from these pleasures he could serve God by worship, work and thought. The worship was offered in common by all the monks in eight daily services. They worked for about six hours a day, either reading and copying in the library, or working in the monastery's fields and gardens, or waiting on the poor, or making furniture, or doing housework for the other monks. Their lives were not supposed to be very hard compared with the lives of hermits. They had six or seven hours' sleep and two meals a day. Benedict called such a life ‘ a

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little rule for beginners \ Its success was partly practical; it was not too hard for ordinary men ; its vow of lifelong service to one monastery gave continuity and balance to the system, and the constant work prevented men from becoming morbid. But even in this easier form, the sight of men vowed to such a life must have startled the barbarians. The monks offered to savages who perhaps had never in their lives denied themselves any pleasure the most tremendous proof that their religion was worth a sacrifice. Such were the church and the faith that, held safely in the Roman Empire, were by its fall delivered to the mercies of barbarians. The character of history for a thousand years depended on the power of barbarians, who could receive so little of Rome's learning or invention or law, to receive her austere and mystical religion. The barbarian was not a brute without thought and awe. He had not lived for centuries in dark woods struggling for rough food and housing without wonder about his own life and reverence for the strong, vast and unfriendly earth. His hardships and dangers taught him that man is not a god, but a little thing standing among unknown powers ; and his courage taught him that this little thing can act and think. He felt that he could see a living spirit moving in all the powers of the world. In the storm, in running water, in winds, in fire and heat, this spirit showed itself ; and yet it was greater than all these powers and lived outside them. ‘ They think/ said Tacitus of the early barbarians, ‘ that the gods are too great to be contained in temples or to be represented in the likeness of a human form/ To reverence the secret of life was the great gift of the barbarian, and round that desire he made his religion. In dark, silent groves of the thick woods the secret might most easily utter itself, and so he kept these groves sacred, and priests made sacrifices there. Some soaring green tree, the king of the forest, seemed to him to show the secret power of the earth, and that tree became holy to him . He im agined th a t th e thunder, th e earth's fertility, the sea filled with fish were each magic persons, Thor and Frey and Njord, and each of them held part of the secret. It was not hard, therefore, for the barbarians to have faith in God, or to learn nobler forms of worship. But otherwise the great discoveries of Christianity were new and difficult

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to them. They desired to know the secret of the power working in this world and in their own lives ; but they had not yet recognized the beauty of holiness nor understood that an invisible power within themselves could create such beauty. Victory meant everything to them ; even their gods triumphed by violence and were pleased by sacrifices. It was a tremendous revolution to minds like these to accept Christian values and to see a high invisible victory won in the death of Christ. Clovis' comment on this story was, ‘ If I and my Franks had been there, it wouldn't Fave happened.' Very little is known about the manner of conversion of the barbarians. Christianity at first must have made to most of them the same appeal—either a wonderful mystery, to be revered chiefly because the Romans revered it, or a promise of special divine protection in war. Both these appeals were as much political as religious. The Goths, who were the first converts, accepted Christianity as a part of a certain political situation. In the fourth century they were settled on the Danube frontier ; they were very peaceful and were living by pastoral work and a little trade with the Empire. They were ready to accept Roman ideas, and Christianity had already come to them in fragmentary stories told by captives or by exiles from the great persecutions. In about the year 340 they came under the influence of an Arian bishop, Ulfilas, the first of a series of missionaries. His Arianism made an easier appeal than orthodox Christianity, for the Arian Christ was not unlike the Goth's own gods, a beautiful but not an almighty figure. Many Goths listened to him, and he founded a church among them ; but others resented these new, strange charms. There was a persecution. In 348 Ulfilas appealed to Rome for protection, and he was allowed to bring his followers across the Danube. There in a new home within the empire he established the first Gothic church, through which finally all the Goths were converted. It must have been a strange one. A religion built up on a thousand years of thinking was being taught to a primitive, superstitious race only removed by one generation from savages. Until Ulfilas translated the Gospels for them they had no written language ; and in his translation he decided to leave out all the histories of war ' because his people were already very fond of fighting, and needed the bit rather than the spur \ Above all, in accepting

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Arian belief the Goths had accepted a form of Roman religion that Rome herself would not recognize ; and so they had cut themselves off both from their own gods and from the gods of the future. This was the chief reason for the disappearance of the Goths from history. In the same century the Vandals were converted, and set up rather unsteady Arian churches on the pattern of the Gothic. Then came a pause ; for no missionary lived who could convert the Huns. They were not, however, without influence on religion ; for the Burgundians accepted Christianity on the chance that it would give them victory over the Huns. At the end of the fifth century came the conversion of the Franks. Clovis, king of the Franks, married a Christian, Clotilda. Religion became a personal matter between them, and the match was unequal; he was decisive and impatient, but she was subtle. She argued with him ; ‘ his mind was not moved to belief *. He explained that her God *could not do anything \ She arranged that their eldest son should be baptized in a church where hangings and tapestries and ceremonial should give as much as possible of majesty and mystery, and strike Clovis* imagination. This might have had effect if the baby had not died almost at once. Clovis was disgusted. But a year or so later Clotilda gained her end. Clovis* luck in war changed. Battle, which was to him usually congenial work, suddenly became a thing of panic in which his army was being cut to pieces. He invoked his gods, and they ignored him. He invoked Clotilda's G od; his enemies fled. In common gratitude he had to give in, and he became a Christian under the instruction of Remigius, bishop of Rheims. This missionary was not an Arian, but of orthodox faith ; and so the Frankish converts had the good luck to be under the special protection of Rome. From that time the king of France was ‘ the eldest son of the church *, and from the alliance between France and the church was to spring much of France's greatness in history. Such stories as these do not fully explain the miracle. They were written generally at a later date than the conversion, and always by a churchman who makes the story of his victory much more simple and complete than it can have been. To him the work of one bishop, the conversion of one king, is

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enough to explain the turning of a whole race to Christianity. The real problem lies deeper. The easiest answer to it is that the ordinary barbarian was not really converted when he was baptized. There is a story of a Viking who ‘ believed in Christ, but invoked Thor in voyages and difficulties, and whenever he thought it mattered most \ Some of the missionaries, like S. Boniface of later history, hewed down the sacred trees ; but they probably missed a few, which were worshipped secretly. A hundred years after the time of Clovis there were pagan dukes among the Franks. Even as late as the twelfth century, and in Christian France, the peasants would pray in church for fine weather, but at night when the priest was asleep they would make sure by stealing out into the fields and invoking the old gods. No race ever quite forgets a religion, and these old gods are not dead y e t ; they give names to our days, and our festivals of Christmas and Easter were once their festivals. The ordinary unintelligent barbarian probably tried to serve both religions ; and even intelligent Christian barbarians like Theodoric would not act as missionaries or fight for a united faith, but said, *We cannot command religion ; no man can be forced to believe against his w ill/ The only hope for Christianity was that it should in some way become part of the daily life of the barbarians and not simply a matter of logic or superstition to them ; and through the monastic influence this was what actually came to pass. The monks founded houses in solitary places where they could offer up their lives to God. They must, however, eat and drink a little, and therefore they had to clear the wild forest country round their huts, and make some sort of little field for crops. Fire and axes (and occasionally miracles) brought down the great trees. The fields were widened ; a stone house was built instead of the wooden or reed hut of the pioneers, and in it there was a dormitory with wooden pallets, a refectory, a library, a room for the abbot, and a kitchen. The great monastery wall shut in a garden with fruit-trees and vegetables, a mill, a bakery, and workshops. In other words, each monastery was a source of economic life from which the wild country was opened up and which so added to the comfort of its surroundings that even when monasteries had been built in the loneliest places villages grew up round

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them. The barbarian kings approved of this ; the Goths and Franks often gave land to monasteries, and there exists a charter of Clovis founding a monastery in a central place in France ‘ so that the religious should be no longer strangers among the Franks \ This natural connexion between the monastery and its district was strengthened by the friendliness of the monks to unfortunate people and the share they took in hard peasant work. An abbot of Champagne used to work in the fields so that he could take bread to poor serfs ; and while they ate it he would answer their questions. A monk once flew into a rage with the king of Metz and all his nobles because they had spoiled a harvest by riding their horses through it. The peasants learnt from the monks bee-keeping and poultry-keeping, the care of orchards, and arts and crafts, for which monasteries became famous. In short, the people's daily life, and above all their progress in comfort, were dependent on the example and help of the monks ; and this gave the monks such great influence that they became the real missionaries of the church. At first they awed the barbarians. Alaric ordered the monasteries to be spared in the sack of Rome. There is a story that a Frank's arm was paralysed when he lifted it to kill a monk, and not restored until Clovis begged him off. It followed naturally that some of the more thoughtful or impressionable barbarians themselves became monks, sometimes suddenly giving up great possessions, as Charlemagne's brother did. This had a great effect: it not only proved to the rest that Christianity was worth something, but it brought groups of barbarians, Romans and Gauls into terms of perfect equality and friendship with each other. Such civilization as the monks still remembered and practised began to be transferred to the barbarians, and they took up the work of cultivating and settling the forest land. The monastic movement was adopted by them ; and the historian of the sixth century could boast that whereas during the invasions the monasteries had been small, defenceless fortresses, ‘ now the camps and citadels of the soldiers of Christ shine everywhere '. This slow change was the real conversion of the barbarians ; and it was so slow, so much later in date than their formal conversion by baptism, that Christianity was certain to change during its process. Remigius said to Clovis at his

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baptism, ' Bow the head, 0 Sicambrian : bum what you have adored, and adore what you have burned/ He meant that the barbarians were to throw away their own thoughts and to accept in Christianity new thoughts, a new submission and new civilization. That was impossible. Such things are earned, not given. The barbarians began by imitating the Roman Empire, and they ended by making a group of nations. They began by accepting Christianity, and they ended by making the medieval papacy. The barbarian joined to his reverence for the gods a good deal of cruelty and treachery towards men. These qualities were universal, they were not shown only by fighters like Alaric and Clovis, but by the finer Goths, like Theodoric. When Theodoric wished to be rid of Odovacar he invited him to a feast and suddenly fell on him. Odovacar saw the treachery, and as Theodoric’s sword flashed, he screamed, ' Where is God ? ' He fell. Theodoric laughed to see how deeply his blow had cut, and said that the poor wretch must have had no bones. These savage qualities entered into Christianity when the savages became Christians. The wars of Clovis, which were undertaken because the Franks wanted land and liked fighting for it, were called religious wars, because Clovis was an orthodox king fighting Arians. He was supported in his lifetime by every bishop, priest and monk in Gaul, and after his death they called him a holy man and told stories of his miracles. From his time onward the church was in the habit of appealing to some Christian prince to fight in her defence or for her ambitions ; the history of Christianity for a thousand years after the barbarian conversion is a history of war. The barbarian was superstitious. He believed in charms and spells and the virtue of holy places. This quality too passed into Christianity. All through the Middle Ages the relics of saints were treasured. Evil spirits were feared. The virtue of the Christian holy places, Bethlehem and Jerusalem and Nazareth, drew half Christendom to them as pilgrims, and at last brought the crusaders to conquer them. This motive had great importance in history, for the journeys of pilgrims and crusaders opened up trade roads. The barbarian was impressionable. He had been afraid of Rome even though he could conquer it, and so he was still

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more afraid of the victorious bishops of Christianity. Even Gothic bishops had about them the prestige of higher knowledge. ‘ The Goths who were instructed by Ulfilas in the things belonging to the faith and were made by him sharers in a more civilized way of life, readily obeyed him in all things.' Bishops of the great imperial cities had about them also the prestige of Rome, and the barbarians transferred to them the nervous, uncertain submission that they had once paid to imperial officers. A Frankish king of Austrasia said, 4None reign at all save only the bishops; our dignity is lost, and carried over to the bishops of the cities.' In Spain the bishops helped to draw up the Visigoths' code of law, and had power to control their courts of justice. In short, if the bishops were strong and able, they might recapture and hold for ever some of the organization and power of Rome. At the beginning of the sixth century this chance offered itself plainly. In France, Africa, Constantinople, Italy and soon after in Spain there were national churches on friendly terms with the political rulers, and loosely connected by a general loyalty to the pope, who was bishop of Rome. He was not at that time supreme in the church, but he had a ‘ primacy of honour', which might develop into a more definite superiority, and he claimed a judicial power which would naturally develop into power of legislation. Above all, he did not live under the shadow of an emperor or king as the bishops of Constantinople and Gaul lived. In later days it was believed that Constantine had given Rome to the popes and had gone away in humility to found a new home for himself at Constantinople. The legend was true in meaning, though not in fact. After the emperor ceased to live in Rome there was no rival to the pope's authority, and the city that would always stand to the barbarians as the fortress of imperial honour became a city of the church. Roman buildings were pulled down to build Christian basilicas. In the Vatican of S. Peter there were gifts from barbarian kings like Theodoric and Clovis. The statu e of Trajan had fallen from its column, and in its place they put a statue of S. Peter to look down at Rome like a king. At last came a pope who was almost as powerful as a king. He was called Gregory the Great. He reigned from 590 to 603, at a time when, long after Theodoric's death, Italy was

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being attacked by new invaders named Lombards, and when the emperor at Constantinople could give no help. Gregory organized the imperial armies and bought off a siege of Rome. His defence was quite unsuccessful; he never defeated the Lombards or freed Italy. But by taking on himself such responsibilities he gave the papacy a new character. From this time onwards the pope had a special connexion with Rome and central Ita ly ; they owed him a political as well as a religious loyalty. They were by name subjects of the emperor at Constantinople ; but his exarch and army had done little to help them, and they had obeyed Gregory I almost as if he were their king. He had appointed military governors, seen to the supply of munitions and even once made for Rome a separate peace with the enemy. He alone in Italy had tried to reconstruct social life in the intervals of the wars, and better a little the lot of the conquered ; in the miserable life of the Italians, whom the Lombards attacked, the Imperial officers oppressed, and the emperor neglected, the pope alone defended peace and justice. He was ‘ the flower of this withered Europe \ He was also landlord of large Italian estates, which were called * patrimonies \ Gregory was the first pope who worked these estates like a good business man. He was one of those statesmen who are great not through brilliance or genius but because they can get through a quantity of detailed work without forgetting the general intention of their policy. As Napoleon knew how many guns there were in each fort, so Gregory knew how many cows there were on a farm. He organized the government of each patrimony through rectors and agents as if it had been a Roman province ; and he was very careful that while the church should not encroach on other people, or oppress the peasants working under it, yet its full rights and possessions should be defended. This was the beginning of the temporal, or earthly and visible, power of the pope, as opposed to his spiritual and invisible religious power. The later temporal authority of the pope failed or succeeded according to his ppwer in Ita ly ; and this was developed from the half-traditional and half-territorial overlordship, in name subject to the Emperor, and really independent of him, that Gregory had founded. While Gregory had taken the Emperor's place in Italian wars knowingly and in a practical way, he was unconsciously

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setting up a system which in the end was to give the papacy an imperial place in Europe. He was applying a Roman system of organization to the church and inspiring it with Rome's ambition ; during his pontificate the conversion of England was begun by a monk named S. Augustine, the Arian church of the Visigoths became Catholic and acknowledged the pope, the conversion of the Franks was continued, and the fallen churches of South Italy were reformed. All these converts became in a sense the subjects of Rome. England was divided for religious government into the same provinces that the Emperor Severus had made. Over the greater churches of France and Spain vicarates were set up that were very like the Roman vicarates, and like them had no higher authority than an appeal to Rome. Gregory had visitors and agents to supervise the bishops, just as imperial visitors had once supervised the governors of provinces. With such a beginning it would be possible in the future for the popes to become Emperors and usurp Rome. This future greatness must not be read into Gregory's own life-work. He made no great claims for the papacy, even within the church. Although he was the rival of the bishops of Constantinople and Ravenna, and although tremendous wars of words took place if they wore his vestments or described their office by finer adjectives than his, he did not claim to be the chief bishop. His only peculiar power was the power of justice, and although he supervised the bishops of the provinces more than any earlier pope had done, he called his criticisms friendly advice. In the same way he showed no signs of a belief that popes could command kings ; he was, in fact, rather slavish to kings and tried to win them by flattery. He flattered the emperor at Constantinople up to the day of his murder, and then flattered the murderer for killing him. He never made any objection to the great power of the Frankish kings over the church, and he even gave office to the queen's favourites at the expense of far more deserving men. The king's office seem ed to him divine in its origin and work, so that submission to it was a duty even to popes. ‘ When we offend our rulers, we set ourselves against the ordinance of Him who set them over us.' Gregory's remarks of this kind were very inconvenient to later popes. Yet he thought it a duty to protest if kings acted ‘ against the canons'; this 3

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held good even towards the emperor, and it is easy to see how Gregory's protest ‘ on behalf of God ' became a command in the name of God from later and more independent popes. Gregory made it a duty too to advise and ally with the newer monarchs among the Franks and Visigoths ; he explained the responsibilities of kingship to a king of the Visigoths, and he asked the queen of the Franks to help him in putting down paganism. He appealed to imperial officers in Africa to persecute heretics. This was the first practical instance of that use of the state by the church on which missionary work, the crusades, and the whole political system of the Middle Ages were to depend. The church consented to look on the kingship as a religious office only if it served religion by maintaining justice and order, helping the weak and defending the church. Already it was clear to Gregory that ideally the king and pope were working together in one service, and that while the spheres of their work were different their purposes and principles were alike. Gregory differed from later popes chiefly in realizing that this ideal companionship would never in any circumstances become real. He had to put up with insults from Constantinople and indifference from the barbarian kings. In short, Gregory's views about the papacy were not in themselves extreme, but extreme views could be, and were, developed from them. To have a great pope, an opportunity, and such a use of it, was enough to make the church a new power in the world. From the time of Gregory onward the development of religion became the chief creative work of the barbarian races. Except in the case of Judaism, theirs was the first civilization to think this worth while, and therefore their age has a peculiar quality, unlike ancient or modern history. Their strongest ideas, feelings and loyalty belonged to an unseen world. It was natural enough : for, living in the ruins of an empire and unable to continue its glories, there was a restlessness and despair in the minds of the greatest thinkers of the early Middle Ages which tormented them until they had found some sort of hope. There was no hope in the future of politics —no possible political good in that chaos of fallen order ; and so they began to look on this life as a sort of prelude to some ideal life after death. ‘ Thou hast made us for Thyself,' said Augustine, ‘ and our hearts are restless until they rest in

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Thee.' Gregory left the service of the state, in which he was wealthy and successful, to become a monk. They and others set a fashion, which the shortness and danger of life all through the Middle Ages encouraged, of holding the the present rather ligh tly; their respect was held by the solid greatness of the past, and their hopes were in the City of God. It followed that all their thoughts, arguments and acts were inspired by religion and expressed in some form borrowed from the past. If some thinker of the Middle Ages had an original idea he would try to express it in the words of Scripture or of some great Father; if, as generally happened, no text fitted his meaning, he would make some farfetched interpretation, or illustrate his point by some quotation ; the sacredness of the words would give dignity and truth to his argument, at least in the eyes of a medieval reader. Gregory was one of the first medieval writers to use this method ; he read all sorts of modern meanings into the book of Job, written centuries before his time, and although all his sermons dealt with modern affairs they were almost made up of quotations pieced together. From his time onwards the favourite form of duel between two thinkers who had quarrelled was to throw texts at each oth er; it was more striking, and much more damning, to prove your opponent impious than to prove him unsound. So the authority of the scriptures, the Fathers, and the Canon Law became almighty in the Middle Ages ; but it would not be fair to say that medieval thinkers relied on authority for their ideas. Every age produces ideas, and lives by them. The Middle Ages produced their own ideas, and used authority to prove and sanction them. While popes, monks and thinkers were beginning to pass into this mood of reverence for authority and of belief in paradise, the ordinary layman was beginning to feel a great difference between their minds and his own. There were only two kinds of work for laymen of this period—agriculture and warfare ; and each of these is an engrossing work that develops people's muscles better than their minds. The long, complicated arguments of the clergy were far too difficult for the laymen to follow, and they allowed the clergy to do their thinking, and generally their reading and writing also. The whole work of education, learning and thought belonged to the

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church; and anyone, even a peasant, who had a talent for this work could enter on it by entering the church. The world began to be divided into the religious and the lay, and one of the greatest problems of the Middle Ages was to find points of contact between the two. Gregory began this work when he first preached popular sermons to the crowds, and when he sent out missionaries. The problem was less pressing than it would have been if the laymen had been less respectful to the church. Fighting men did not often harm monks or priests. They felt that by the holiness of monks was produced a sort of invisible protection and benefit to themselves. They thought this crudely enough; but nothing could have been more subtly true. The church, with all its imperfections, was the only guardian of peace, learning, and the higher standard until the time should come when the barbarian had set up an elaborate enough social system to feel easy about his food and begin to attend again to his education. That time was far away. From Gregory's age to the age of the Renaissance organized religion was the most important thing in Europe. It was the second gift of Rome.

CHAPTER III

THE THIRD GIFT : THE EMPIRE Attempts to restore the Roman Empire. I. The attempt of Justinian : his victory in Constantinople : his ideas of government: his victories in Africa, Italy, Spain, and Persia : incompleteness of his success : his work for art, architecture, and law : his conquests not maintained. II. The attempt of the barbarians : progress of the Franks after Clovis' death : the danger of civil war : the danger of Mahometan invasion : the Mahometan invasion repelled by Charles Martel : the Franks united and victorious under Pepin and Charles the Great: character and aims of Charles : his work for art and learning : his government: his coronation as emperor.

HE third gift of Rome was less useful. It has inspired a great many wars, has made ambitious kings dangerous, and has perplexed peaceful kings with its problems. It inspired our great tyrants Charles V, Louis XIV and Napoleon. It was the idea of an empire in Europe. This troublesome gift could not be avoided ; it was made in that time of transition when Rome was defending herself against the barbarian. It was natural that the barbarians, seeing Rome's dying glories, should think that an empire was the natural form of great state in Europe, and that the most splendid title to give a great king should be emperor of Rome. Yet this natural envy and imitation of Rome clashed with all the political ideas of the barbarians themselves. They lived in tribes, their kings were generals, not despots ; their men were free, not subject. This clash between the tribal and imperial idea has been felt throughout history and is not yet ended. The first men to support the imperial idea and impose it on the barbarian nations of Europe were Justinian of Constantinople, Charles of France, and Otto of Germany; and h istory has given to each of them that title of The Great which she rarely offers. Justinian lived in an age when to revive the Roman Empire seemed impossible. He was bom in 483, after the time of the first invasions. When he looked at the old inheritance he found Africa held by the Vandals, Spain and Italy by the 37

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Goths, Gaul by the Franks, and Britain by Angles and Saxons. But with all their strength and restlessness, there was one city of the empire that the barbarians had never entered except as servants or captives : Constantinople stood untouched. Of her Western lands, nothing was left but the Balkans. In the East there was no frontier: Asia Minor and Syria were held only by an unending war with Persia. Standing between the East and West, receiving the attacks of each and holding apart their destinies, Constantinople was still a city of Roman emperors. It was a great, overgrown and rich city, undisciplined by danger. Its citizens liked sensations and entertainment: they liked circuses, food, baths and sudden changes of government. All these things were freely supplied to them by the court; few emperors of Constantinople lived to be old, and they tried to put off the moment of assassination by great generosity to their subjects. They lived in splendour and pleasure, directed wars from a distance, and rode about their city in a pageant until the moment when they saw death looking at them from the dagger-point of some slave or general. Then the city buzzed with news, and soon the army or the crowd had made a new emperor and were enjoying his pageants. Justinian's uncle had become emperor by assassinating, and Justinian never forgot to fear his subjects. To add to their sensations, they had divided themselves into two societies called the Blues and the Greens ; the object of each group was to hate the other, and every one went about armed in case of opportunity. There was not much time for work, but Constantinople was a rich city with plenty of trade, and for free bread, long wars, fine buildings and imperial expenses the peasant could pay. This was the city that Justinian proposed to make guardian of the world. He was wise enough to put no trust in Constantinople, and bold enough to trust himself. He never gave the citizens any power in governing themselves or his conquests. He destroyed local freedom everywhere ; after his time there were no free cities or consuls or senate. He distrusted the ordinary man as a jolly, unofficial, bloodthirsty person who was neither intelligent nor cool enough to govern. The coolness and intelligence of Justinian meanwhile terrified the ordinary m a n ; the emperor was unpopular everywhere

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because he took affairs so seriously. When plans or suspense made him so impatient that he walked about the palace all night, the ordinary men among the Blues said he was talking to demons, and among the Greens they said that he was a demon, and had a monstrous shape. He irritated them, too, by seeming inconsistent; instead of marrying to advantage he married an actress Theodora, a spirited, alluring and terrible woman. In 532 Greens and Blues united to rebel. The city was in flames, a new emperor was chosen, and Justinian was howled down when he tried to speak to the crowd. He was despairing and frightened ; even his bravest general warned him to fly, and he would have given up the game if Theodora had not taunted him : ‘ O Emperor, if you want to save yourself, it's e a sy : we have m oney: there is the sea and there are the ships. But think whether, when you are once safe, you will not like death better than safety. For me, I think that empire is a good shroud.' So Justinian stayed in Constantinople, where in spite of their fears the generals put down the rebellion and killed so many hundreds of citizens that for the rest of his life Justinian's power was unquestioned. He was a good deal strengthened in his distrust of self-government, and he became every year more silent, hard-working and self-contained, trying to compress the work of the empire as much as possible into his own hands. He believed that the first necessity of every state is unity : without unity it will perish in civil wars. Therefore the state must submit to one ruler, and submit to him thoroughly, accepting his decisions about religion, law and daily life ; and his empire should be united from the point of view of defence, not being a fragment of land without frontiers, but a noble and compact group of provinces. In return for the absolute obedience he has from his subjects, the emperor should be their servant, and work all his life so that they ‘ should not journey long and toilsome ways '; he must understand and overlook all the empire's administration. This theory of Justinian's was, like his empire, half Eastern and half Western in character; it was Eastern to think that government should be in the hands of one man and that his subjects had no responsibility but obedience, but it was a Western and Roman idea that this man should use his power to reform the world. Above all,

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Justinian thought the Roman Empire was the final form of government in Europe and one that, founded by God, was destined to last for ever and to recover all its losses. He was a great enough man, by means of hard work, to make half his dream come true. In 533 he sent an army under Belisarius to conquer back Africa from the Vandals. It was not a great piece of work, for the Vandals had rotted ; they were no longer great fighters, and the natives of Africa hated them. In one year Belisarius had won the battle of Decimum, taken Carthage, and driven the name and the race of Vandals out of history. Theirs was the first barbarian state to fall. In 535 Belisarius attacked Italy ; conquest was a harder business here, for the Goths still remembered their fighting days, and they kept up the war for twenty years. In the first campaigns Belisarius easily conquered South Italy, stood a siege of Rome so fierce that his soldiers broke up the old statues of gods and emperors for ammunition, and by 540 had taken Ravenna. These successes, as rapid and unbroken as the victories of Caesar or Napoleon, raised Belisarius to the fame of old Roman generals sent out to war in the days when each war added a province to the empire ; he seemed to have brought back those days and to enrich with their triumphs the empty and barbarous present time. His reward, like the reward of Caesar, Stilicho and Aetius, was ruin. If the mob of Constantinople loved his successes, the court and Justinian feared him because he had been too successful. Although he had conquered Italy by arms, he was given no chance to make his conquest safe by friendliness and good government. Italy was given up to the tax-gatherer and his clerks, and no one at Constantinople understood that the spirit of Theodoric was alive in the Goths and would forbid such a submission. His spirit lived again in a hero, Totila. Totila was a man of his age, at once Roman, Goth and Christian. He was a soldier, a free soldier and a generous soldier ; from these three qualities the knight of the later Middle Ages was to be formed, and Totila was an early knight who was destined to fight losing battles. When he and the generals of Justinian met, two ideas of life met in war. Belisarius fought for the idea of empire, glory and an elaborate life of luxury and wide trade ; Totila fought for freedom and for the sake of fighting and to prevent men from living in towns. At first he was successful.

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In 546 he took Rome, and he emptied and dismantled the town so that no one again should lose his fighting hardness by living behind walls. Belisarius rebuilt it. For two years the men of the towns and the men of the open country fought for Ita ly ; but in 548 Belisarius was deserted by his master. Constantinople had forgotten him, and Justinian, who had never trusted him or given him good fighting means, now recalled him. In 552 the great general was replaced by the chamberlain Narses, a clever enough man, but no hero. The chamberlain defeated Totila and the Goths. Totila died leading a cavalry charge at the battle of Taginae, at which the Goths were defeated. In 553 the Goths asked for, and got, a free passage out of Italy, which they had lost, but where they would not live in submission. They passed defeated and unconquered through the mountains, and were no more heard of. The men of the towns had won, and Italy came again under the government of Constantinople. Meanwhile a part of southern Spain was reconquered. A long war had been fought with Persia, and victory on the whole had been with Justinian. As far as the map could show, it seemed that he would restore the empire. The map lied. Justinian's conquests ended; he never won back Spain, Gaul or Britain, nor defeated Persia, nor even made his conquests in Italy and Africa into a strong, though smaller, Roman Empire. Conquests can be empty things if the conquered people are not being drawn into loyalty, and there was no reason why any native of Italy or Africa should be loyal to Constantinople. In that city all the wealth was wasted that could have relieved their want. Very few of the old Roman families kept their fortunes : they lived in their falling houses at Rome and Carthage and sent their sisters and daughters into convents to get rid of their appetites. The peasants who lived by farming found their lands ruined by war. They had to leave the devastated parts and make smaller, poorer homes in a more fortunate place, where perhaps the villa of a Roman still stood, in decay, without a master. Trade was carried on by Greek or Jewish merchants, for the wealthy merchant class of Italy had disappeared, and business was small and risk y; there was little capital about and no credit, and the whole organization of trade was upset. The only active imperial officer was the tax-gatherer, and he

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was too active. New taxes and arrears from old taxes, together with little pieces of plunder for himself, carried away the peasants' few coins ; and it did not comfort them to hear gossip that Justinian received only part of what was collected and that Narses was making a big fortune as their governor. Under his orders they were made to rebuild the town walls ; but they knew they were building fortresses for him, not homes for themselves. Italy and Africa were conquered countries, ruled by soldiers, and used to the idea of submission. If there was little to fear from them there was also little to hope. They were not working hard enough to yield in taxes anything like the wealth their conquest cost Justinian, and yet with all this money he had not bought safety. The enemies of Rome were not driven back or discouraged. Lombards from the Elbe, moving westward like the rest of the barbarian world, had passed the Danube and were repeating the old compact with Constantinople to enter the empire as allies ; they were soon to march through it as conquerors into Italy. In the Eastern world Turks and Arabs, more to be feared than Persians, were soon to terrify Constantinople. There are in churches at Ravenna and Constantinople mosaic pictures where Justinian's heavy face and wide black eyes appear with a formal majesty that has no suggestion of happiness. There is a very bad statue of him on horseback, holding in his hand a ball and cross labelled Gloriae. These memorials are part of a work more nearly immortal than his wars. While he failed to conquer the world and even to make Constantinople a well-governed city, he understood how to explain to history the greatest ideas of Byzantium in beauty and politics. In his reign the Byzantine world was decorated with a rich, laborious and half Oriental art that contrasted strongly with the barbarian's log palaces. He built bridges, aqueducts, theatres and, above all, churches. The architects could build in varied styles ; there are heavy, solid, oblong buildings of the period, especially in the fortresses and monasteries of Asia, and in contrast there are aqueducts of open leaping arches, and domed churches like S. Sophia. In all that they built, however, there was the same indulgence given to their art which was never restrained like the art of the Greeks. They decorated everything, and by using mosaics, coloured marbles and golden backgrounds they filled

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their more splendid buildings with colour. All their art has a love of hot sunshine in it. They used fruit, flowers, and animals in their designs as lavishly as can be imagined, not copying accurately but giving queer twists and enrichments to the shape, so that they seemed to create a magic world where everything grew faster and more thickly than in nature. The desire of the Byzantine citizens for something sensational, brilliant and new made the architects compete to outdo each other's splendours. All this cost money, which Justinian paid by taxation, by cutting down the salary of anyone who could not resist and by forgetting to pay the army. The influence of Byzantine politics was greater still. It was one of the open questions of the sixth century whether the barbarians would be able to copy the political ideas and devices of Rome, or whether they would have to rediscover for themselves the way to make a state. They were very anxious to copy, for rumours about the glory of Byzantium were almost as splendid and tantalizing as Rome's glorious traditions. In Justinian's time the Franks prayed for the Byzantine emperor. In 568 a Visigoth king began to copy the Byzantine emperor's prestige by being ‘ the first king of the Goths who wore a royal robe and sat on a throne '. In later times a German king dressed up his ministers in Greek dress and called them by Byzantine titles, which they could not pronounce. The influence of clothes, names, customs was strong ; but it was unimportant, for it taught the barbarians pride without wisdom. They could learn wisdom only from the laws and experience that Rome had possessed in her greatness, before her administration was corrupted ; and by the time they came to Europe these laws were so numerous, confused and difficult to follow that even trained lawyers were sometimes at fault. Roman political wisdom might have been lost if it were not for Justinian. He tried to reform the administration partly by reorganizing the police and publishing an ordinance (which had no success) about public

honesty among officials, and partly by making a clear summary of the law. This long, difficult piece of work was done at great speed by his lawyers and is Justinian's greatest monument. The Code which was published in 534 contained the edicts of the emperors; the Digest (533) explained the decisions

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of the greatest judges on difficult cases ; the Institutes (533) formed a sort of treatise for students ; the Novels (535-64) were new laws added by Justinian. All this influenced the barbarians, who began to make their own codes. The Visigothic, Burgundian and Frankish laws all show the influence of Byzantium. Above all, since Justinian's Code was read by the church and became the foundation for canon law, its ideas were spread all over the world as Christianity spread. Modem law, especially French law, owes much to it. When Bracton, an English lawyer of the thirteenth century, determined to make a summary of the law he nearly spoilt it by taking Justinian's subdivisions ready made and finding that the English law would not exactly fit. When Napoleon set his lawyers to work at a code he copied not only Justinian's action but his ideas. For this reason above all others Justinian is to be remembered. The writing down of law is in every nation the first step to freedom and equality. The contents of Justinian's Code influenced the world gradually and very strongly through the church. Roman law, since it was old and had dealt with a great civilization, took for granted many things that were new to the barbarians. It took for granted that land should be owned by individual men and not by groups, and that the owner should be able to prove his righ t; so in Anglo-Saxon England the thegns began to copy the bishops in holding big estates by a written charter from the king, and the idea disappeared that the land was only to be held by custom or folk law. Roman law allowed for several degrees of freedom, and the Angles and Franks copied this, and spoke of free men, of slaves, and of half-free men called serfs who could not leave their master or his land but were not so much in his power that he could sell or kill them. The half-civilized statesmen and lawyers of the early Middle Ages saw from the whole nature of Roman law that justice was a difficult and complicated thing, and would need a big apparatus of law courts and codes and parliaments before it would work ; and more than this, that justice was a moral and spiritual thing. The Romans had said that above their own law was the Law of Nature, which was perfect and whose ideal justice they were trying to express. All medieval history is concerned with the search for such an ideal justice, which was thought of as the direct

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rule of man by G od; and one result of this search was the papacy, through which Heaven might act on earth. Above all, Roman law gave to the Middle Ages the idea that justice was concerned with the rights of particular persons or objects. The definition of justice most often quoted by medieval writers is that it ' gives to every one his right \ Medieval and modem society is built on the belief that men, countries, religions, churches and ideals have certain rights that in justice must not be denied to them ; and it will be seen later what use the popes made of this belief and how much it meant to them. In Roman law all these ideas were connected and given authority by the power of the emperor. No one who read the Institutes could imagine Europe as anything but an empire, and Justinian had lived near enough the East to hear and borrow a good deal of its despotism. This might have meant that the respect of the barbarians for the emperor at Constantinople would grow until they were willing to make him their overlord ; but Justinian himself had destroyed this chance. His power in the West was so unreal that in fifteen years after his death it had gone. In 568 the Lombards, whom he had brought to Pannonia,invaded Italyand set up a kingdom called Lombardy in the Po valley, and the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento in central Italy. Justinian's successors knew better than to put all their lives into a struggle with these enemies ; they were too fierce, and Italy was too poor to be worth saving. From the time of Justinian, therefore, the Byzantine Empire became more clearly a part of the E a s t; in politics, dress, speech and manners it had little left of the old Rome. Constantinople stood between East and West, included in the history of both civilizations and acting as a barrier between them. This did not prevent East and West from fighting; their wars fill the centuries, and brought champions from remote England when Richard I and Edward I fought for the holy places, when Henry VIII planned a crusade, and when in 1918 Allenby entered Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the western half of the empire was left without an emperor, putting an eternal question to the barbarians. They had not lost the feeling of Alaric and Theodoric that Rome was the thing in all the world best worth conquering ;

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on the other hand, they were very busy. They had found it was easier to conquer land than to make a state. Two dangers were waiting for the victorious Franks of Clovis and his sons : the danger of civil war and the danger of an attack from outside. These kept them quiet during Justinian's reign and for some time after. The Franks on the Rhineland were distinct from the Franks in G aul; they were more Teutonic and they were living in wilder country where Roman cultivation and customs had less influence. The Rhine province got a separate name, Austrasia; the province of North Gaul was called Neustria; the province of Burgundy lay far from the Frankish centre and had a life of its own ; and in southern Gaul had grown up an independent state called Aquitaine. It would be a big man's job to control these provinces and Clovis' descendants were not big men, nor had they a fair chance. By the Frankish law land had to be divided on a father's death between all his sons. Twice after the death of Clovis the Frankish land had to be divided among three or four sons who were to rule as equal kings. Civil war was certain, even if all these kings had been bachelors. The Frankish women had personality and took an interest in the world. It had never been a matter of indifference to them, for instance, whether their state were Christian or pagan. They were persevering and successful missionaries, although the gentle teaching of Christianity does not seem to have changed their spirits. This is certainly true of Brunhild, a glorious ruffian and one of the famous royal women of the Middle Ages. She was greater than Theodora, for while Theodora was inspiring Justinian, Brunhild was doing her own work. She and her sister married two brothers, the kings of Austrasia and Neustria ; and her story began when the king of Neustria got tired of the sister—who must have been very different from Brunhild—and killed her. Brunhild promised herself never to rest until Neustria was beaten to the ground ; and although Neustria never was beaten, she kept that promise. Her life was wild, miserable, despotic and full of hard work. She became a living danger to the Franks. Her husband was killed almost at once ; she was imprisoned, and escaped. She ruled Austrasia for her boy, but he died young, before he had avenged her. She ruled again while his

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sons were children. She was cooler-headed by now, and a woman of affairs ; Gregory the Great respected her, or at any rate pretended to do so ; he called her his most excellent daughter, and said that both the way she governed her kingdom and the way she was bringing up her son showed a piety pleasing to God. The Austrasian nobles did not agree with these elegant Roman compliments, for they hated Brunhild fiercely and meant to kill her if they could. She knew it, and defied them. Rebellion and despotism struggled together. When the grandchildren grew up Brunhild sent them to fight Neustria, and although at first they were successful the spirit of quarrel among the Franks was too strong for them and soon set them fighting each other. After their short reign ended in disaster Brunhild had no one left to fight for her, and her enemies closed in. She stood up against them with what men she could g e t ; but she was defeated by the Neustrians and the Austrasian. nobles under Pepin of Landen. She was trampled to death by a wild horse. In her life and death she had shown the virtue of courage ; but what hope was there for the Frankish state if this story of civil war was to repeat itself ? The house of Clovis had failed. The second danger came from outside the Frankish frontiers, and it was in a way connected with the wars of Justinian. In his Persian campaigns Justinian was trying to conquer the East, or at least to prevent the East from conquering him ; and for the time he was successful. But there is another road into Europe from the East besides the road through Asia Minor and Constantinople ; it leads along North Africa into Spain, and soon after the death of Brunhild a. new Eastern power was moving along it. These were the followers of the prophet Mahomet (570-632), who had founded a new religion in Arabia, and whose enthusiastic converts wished to spread his religion by killing every one who did not belong to it. While the weak kings who succeeded Brunhild were ruling in France the Mahometans had conquered Arabia, Palestine and Egypt. In the next half century they conquered North Africa. In 711 they crossed into Spain. The Visigoths were easily defeated ; by 717 the Mahometans were over the Pyrenees. The duke of Aquitaine was afraid of them ; first he tried weakly to drive them back, and by 731 he was trying to make friends with them. It seemed as though the only

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hope for Europe was in the Franks ; yet, with their weak king, their quarrelsome nobles and their disunited provinces, the Franks would not be likely to save Europe. Europe might have been lost if it had not been for two pieces of luck. The first was that the Mahometans were already rather tired, they were troubled with civil wars, and unless they could make fresh conquests very easily they would probably go home ; and the second was that although the Frankish king had grown weak, the Frankish nobles had grown almost strong enough to take his place. The strongest of all were the descendants of that Pepin of Landen who had conquered Brunhild. They had lands and money and they were the king's chief ministers. They were called his Mayors of the Palace. In 715, just after the Mahometans had come to Spain, a member of this family, at first unfortunate and neglected, had fought his way up to its head and had become Mayor. It is hard to describe him, for the chronicler who tells his life is a matter-of-fact man and more interested in people's actions than their characters. To judge from his nickname the hero himself was more interested in action than in character ; for he was called Charles Martel —Charles the Hammer. The chronicler's account is a bare list of wars and victories, with only one descriptive phrase : ‘ Charles, always fearless,------' In 732 this man met the Mahometan army near Poitiers, already half-way through France. When he had finished his work the Mahometans were in retreat towards Spain and the Franks were plundering their camp. From the time of that battle, which is known as the battle of Poitiers, or sometimes as the battle of Tours, until his death in 741 Charles was victorious and famous. He defeated Aquitaine on the south and the Saxons on the east of his kingdom ; the pope asked for his help in Italy, and would probably have got it if Charles had lived longer. Europe now owed a great deal to the Franks, and the Franks owed everything to the family of Pepin and Charles. But these people would get their reward only if they could finish their work. The barbarian world had been saved from an outside danger, but within itself it was still disconnected and quarrelsome. Aquitaine still wished for independence ; Neustria still disliked Austrasia; the Saxon races were still

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unsettled; above all, Italy was still disturbed by the Lombards. They had never settled down since the time of Gregory the G reat; they still aimed at the conquest of all Italy, and they were attacking the papacy. It was from them that the pope had appealed to Charles Martel. The problem before the Franks was to make some fixed centre in this changing, restless, turbulent world of barbarians, and to put a single law where there was nothing but disorder and almost ruin. The fresh strength of the barbarians would be no better than the Byzantine weakness if they were to spend it in harming each other. The first part of the problem would be solved if all the barbarians could be brought under one master. This was done, or nearly so, by the wars of Charles Martel's son Pepin and his grandson Charles the Great. Pepin subdued Aquitaine by 768, fought continually against the Saxons without making much impression on them, and in 755 and 756 went down into Italy to defeat the Lombards. He gave part of their lands to the pope, not quite knowing what else to do with them. Charles finally defeated Aquitaine, settled the Saxons after thirty years' very difficult and cruel fighting (772-804), accompanied by forced conversions and a certain amount of deportation, and made three successful expeditions into Italy. He conquered all North Italy and kept it as a separate kingdom for himself. His only defeat was at Roncesvalles in Spain in 778, and even here he won a strip of land on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees. As far as geography and military power were concerned, Pepin and Charles changed the barbarian world from a disjointed to a compact body of states. There the conquests ended, although when Charles was in Italy he had been known to look out at the blue sea dividing him from the Byzantine Empire, and say, Oh ! if only that little pool weren't in between !' But of course the hardest part of the problem was to come ; what was this body of states to do, and what was it to think about, now th a t it w as m ade ?

A nd w hat place were Pepin

and Charles to take in it ? Pepin when he began his conquest was not even king of the Franks ; he was only Mayor of the Palace, and far from his battle-fields the real king of the Franks was living the life of a lazy farmer. It was not very difficult to suppress this person ; to give an air of justice to 4

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the suppression some monks were sent to ask the pope 4whether he who had the power in a kingdom should not also have the name of king ? ' The pope replied that he should. A little later a pope who was driven out by the Lombards met Pepin at Rheims and crowned him k in g ; and later still a pope named him Patrician of Rome, which Pepin valued although he probably was not sure what it meant. But these titles were small and vague for a man who was making a new world. Pepin was only a beginner; for Charles the Great it was reserved to solve the second problem and receive his reward. Charles was a big, healthy man with a great round head and powerful brain. His straight look, full of personality, overwhelmed timid people. He liked fighting, liked governing, liked progress, liked roast beef, liked old clothes, liked his daughters and liked his men friends. It was by this energy and pleasure in action that he was able to achieve so much ; that human dignity of his was the only sort to impress the Franks, who felt it as degrading to wait on an emperor as it was noble to die for him. The Franks would have hated Justinian's reliance on clothes and tradition. But they liked and feared Charles, who surrounded himself with the baubles of kingship only on great occasions when he could not help it, and whose ideas, for a Frankish king, seemed original. He meant not only to conquer the barbarian world but to inspire it with learning and to unite it in one peaceful government. It was an aim that amazes history ; what confidence, what boldness of imagination this barbarian emperor must have—and how quickly heTnust act, if his lifetime is to see so much. Learning—he hardly knew what it m ean t: exercises for the mind, perhaps, just as hunting exercises the body. He must find men who understood this business ; and he gathered a group of them from all over the world—Alcuin of York, Peter of Tuscany, Paul the Lombard, Theodulf the Visigoth and Einhard from the Rhineland. These were Charles' friends, and so it may be guessed that they were not lean and inhuman scholars, but men who understood their world. They all, even Alcuin, ate and drank well. Alcuin said that Latin grammar was like apples and the classics were like good old wine. Most of the group had good minds ; it remained to find out how to use them, for there was no living

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and growing knowledge anywhere in the world from which they could learn. They tried to display their powers by difficult exercises. There are perhaps few scholars to-day who could make, as any one of this group could, acrostics in Latin verses so elaborate that one acrostic runs round the edge of the verse, further in another makes a little design like a church door, and a third makes a cross in the very middle ; but certainly no scholar would care to try. Alcuin and his friends were more clever than wise. Charles might have taught them something by his sincere curiosity about life and history, and his continual questions ; but unfortunately he insisted on answers to the questions, and so they had to learn to argue. They became finished and active debaters, without having much original thought to argue about. In fact, they had no spirit for original thought. As soon as any scholar of Charles' time had reached a certain stage in his work he was able to read intelligently the old Latin authors, and then all the life was gone out of him. Why think, when everything had been already thought and written ? So far from his being able to add to knowledge, all his learning and industry would never overtake the dead Romans. Therefore when Alcuin and his friends wrote poetry, they imitated Vergil. When Alcuin wrote a debate on grammar all the best parts were copied out of the books of Latin scholars. Einhard's life of Charles is an imitation of Suetonius. Instead of teaching modem subjects like geography or medicine as Charles wished them to do, they would teach only Latin grammar and verse. Above all, when they began to study theology they found such a wealth of knowledge in the writings of the great Fathers that Charles' scholars could hope to do no more than understand i t ; certainly they could add nothing. Learning became an entering into the minds of dead men, whom they reverenced so highly that the slightest word had influence. Alcuin filled his pages with texts from the Fathers, and he called that habit of quotation which spoilt his books ‘ gathering flowers'. This reverence, although he accepted it, made Charles im patient: ‘ Why haven't I got twelve men as good as Jerome or Augustine ? ' he exclaimed to Alcuin. ‘ W ell/ said Alcuin, *even God has only got two : and you want twelve !'

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So Charles’ first aim had only half succeeded. It is true there was a revival of learning in his time : there were free schools managed by Alcuin at the palace and at Tours, and at various monasteries books were written and church services reformed; but all these things were more Roman than modem, and instead of making a new world of learning the scholars were only looking back to the old world. Rome was reconquering the barbarians. In all Charles’ renaissance there are only two successes. The first was Einhard’s life of Charles, which is so well written that Charles seems to speak and live in i t ; the second was the making of a beautiful little clear round handwriting, probably derived from Irish sources, to replace the horrid scrawl of the earlier barbarian manuscripts. Except for this the learning of Charles’ court was a queer, stiff imitation of learning, and had no connexion with the life and history of the eighth century. Better success might be expected in government, since this was in Charles’ own hands. His empire included Visigoths, Gauls, Franks, Saxons, Lombards and Italians, and each of these had their own customs and law. The Frankish law and the Roman were the most usual, and often were administered in the same town by the count and the bishop. Charles meant to make a code that would include these systems. He produced a group of edicts called capitularies ; in spite of all his efforts they would make only a slender book, and he certainly did not succeed in combining the whole code of Roman and Frankish law. Einhard gives the reason : he had not time. The capitularies are lists of directions and advice to his officials or to the church, obviously made to meet practical needs, and issued without any large plan. They copy in turn the earlier laws of the barbarians, the laws of Justinian and the Ten Commandments; they are quite unclassified, and since they repeat Charles’ directions again and again, we may conclude that they were not kept. They show a man struggling with chaos. All over the empire Charles had as his officers counts w ho were supposed to hold

courts of justice ; the laws were full of injunctions to these counts and also of summons, warning and advice. The counts were unjust, or corrupt, or inefficient. He tried to put in their place a body of freemen as judge. The freemen could not do the work ; he had to put up with the counts again.

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It was impossible to trust them, and he set up a body of royal agents called missi, whose activities grew during his reign ; the last capitularies are full of the missi and their work. They had to supervise the count and hear complaints against him, collect taxes, hold courts of justice, supervise the bishops and clergy, look after Charles’ property, and see that each piece of land was sending, or helping to send, a soldier to his wars. But not even the missi could be trusted. Charles had to allow appeals to be made to himself. Even when they were honest, the missi had great difficulty in controlling the strong counts ; sometimes a missus quartered himself on a count until at last the count gave in, to be rid of him. And even when the counts and bishops were honest, they could not always control the people. The capitularies are full of police duties, which had to be undertaken by the people themselves ; there are fines for men who fail to keep watch and ward, or who hear the clash of arms and do not come to see what is the matter ; and the fines cannot have been effective, for almost at the end of his life Charles was still issuing lists showing the various sums a man must pay as compensation for murdering one of his acquaintance—to kill a Frank cost eight hundred shillings, but a slave could be put to sleep for fifty. The church was more trouble to Charles than the people. He took it for granted that he should look after the morals and order of the clergy, and he found it a hopeless business ; they are always being told to obey their superiors and to be kind to the poor in return for his protection. There is no doubt that this emperor cared for his people and was prepared to stand up for the weak ones. He was the protector of widows and orphans. He tried to stop profiteering ; in his laws the price of com is fixed, weights and measures and coins are made uniform, and no one is allowed to comer supplies—' for this I call an unworthy gain ’. Again and again the capitularies show the same spirit: he will have justice in his kingdom ; and next year the phrases and laws are repeated—justice has not come yet. But although he failed to make a just and strong government, Charles’ government was much juster and stronger than any yet seen among the barbarians. There had never been missi before, nor such good roads and bridges for them to travel on, nor such fine palaces for the kings, nor schools

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for the children. The barbarians had never fought together until they fought with Charles Martel at Poitiers and in the army of Charles the Great. No barbarian king had ever been known so far away ; Charles had connexions with Spain and Scotland and Constantinople and even Persia, whose king sent him some Eastern dresses and an elephant. No kings but Pepin and Charles had ever rescued the pope from his enemies and been so flattered by him. Charles had protected the pope not only against the Lombards, but even against the Romans when they rose against him. When the great Frank brought back this pope to Rome and looked at the imperial buildings there, he must have thought that his own power was not so very different from the power of Rome. So, evidently, Pope Leo III thought. Surrounded by the Lombards, attacked even by his own subjects the Romans, and forgotten by Constantinople, Leo must have felt that his safety depended on recognizing Charles' power in Italy. He would have neither lands nor authority nor even his own life if Charles had not given them to him. He arranged a plan. On Christmas morning, 800, Charles heard mass in S. Peter's. He was wearing his best clothes, which he disliked : a tunic of gold cloth, a cloak with a golden girdle, jewels on his sword and shoes. The church was full of Franks and Romans. As Charles got up from his knees he saw Leo standing near him and holding a very precious crown. The church behind him suddenly grew noisy. He felt the crown on his forehead. People were shouting his name and calling him ‘ the Augustus, crowned by God \ He was Emperor of the Romans. At first Charles dreaded this greatness. It must have been a matter of common talk that he should become emperor, for no one in the church was surprised, and Leo probably thought it would please him. But Charles seems to have decided it was not worth the risk of offending the Byzantine emperor, for he said afterwards to Einhard that he would never have gone to mass that day if he had known what Leo meant to do. The Eastern Empire was certainly offended, but Charles soon realized that it could do nothing but send him angry letters; he sent back friendly ones and called the emperor his brother. To every one else the coronation seemed right and natural: 4 Since God had given all these lands to him it seemed right that with God's help . . . he

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should have the name of Emperor also/ The barbarians had conquered Europe only to bow down again to the idea of the Roman Empire. After Charles had ruled for fourteen years as emperor, he died and was buried at Aix-la-Chapelle. His memory is immortal, and when in a later age men wished to praise each other they said, ‘ He is fit to use the stirrups of Charlemagne/ The Roman Empire of the barbarians lasted till it was destroyed by Napoleon in 1806.

BOOK II MEDIEVAL CIVILIZATION

BOOK II MEDIEVAL CIVILIZATION CHAPTER XV

FEUDALISM I. The origins of feudalism, (a) The gifts of the king to his soldiers, his officials and the church : the beneficia : after the death of Charles the Great the beneficia begin to be turned into fiefs : the lords gain privileges and immunities, (b) The people's desire for protection : lord and man : commendation. (c) The Viking invasions : character of the invasions : the early raids : the beginning of settlement: the break-up of Charles’ empire, the treaty of Verdun and its effects : how the Viking invasions were a cause of feudalism. II. The feudal peasant. Variety of conditions : the peasant in France : and in England. III. The feudal lord. Relation between lord and vassal, in theory and in practice : the feudal lords become kings.

I

T is clear that the odd government, half Roman and half primitive, of Charles' empire could not continue without change ; as the barbarian states established themselves and grew older, they were likely to become more original. Even in Charles' time and earlier, becoming far more marked in the century after his death, we can find the origins of that strange, indefinable structure called Feudalism which was to affect the Middle Ages in their farming, fighting, society, politics, law and at last even in their ideas of religion. It was as wide in its influence and as closely connected with the sources of man's prosperity as Industrialism is to-day. The object of this chapter is to discover the origins of feudalism in the history following Charles' reign, the immediate effect on his empire and the development of feudalism in the countryside ; and most of the chapter will be concerned, not with great men and their achievements, but with the muddles and changes of ordinary everyday life. The lawgivers and saints of the Middle Ages must wait until the great majority have provided them with something to eat. 5

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Feudalism at bottom means simply putting one tiling— generally a man, or his wealth—under the protection of another, which involves putting him into the power of another. It was caused by danger and insecurity, which made protection seem more comfortable, more to be desired, than freedom. All classes of men were not faced by exactly the same sort of danger, so that people came into protection in half a dozen different ways. The king, the head of the nation, was least of all able to stand alone. He must have support in war, and he must have officials to enforce his decrees. Therefore he must take men into his service, and give them some kind of reward. From the very beginning of barbarian history he had been surrounded by a group of special fighting comrades who became the thegns of the Saxons, the gefolge of the Germans and the antrustes of the Franks. Perhaps the best general term would be jideles, meaning those who took a special oath of fidelity to the king and had a close personal relationship with him. Alfred of England relied much on his ‘ king's thegns \ Aethelfleda's pleasure when she took Derby from the Danes was clouded because 4there were slain four of her thegns who were dear to her '. This system spread in the lands of the Carolingian Empire, in England and elsewhere, so that by the ninth and tenth centuries every ruler had crowds oi jideles who had taken the oath and were bound to fight for h im ; and he was bound in fairness to do something for them. He was bound to protect them, and if he could not do so, their oath dissolved. When many of his jideles deserted him on the Field of Lies, Louis the Pious told the rest to go, for they would only injure themselves by staying with him. They were sorry, but they evidently thought he was right to release them, and they went away. The king was even bound in some cases to take his jideles' advice. Charles the Great would not cross the Alps without their consent. The early fighting band, since it lived in the king's house, soon came to be used by him in government. So an official class arose which became very large and important under the Carolingians. The counts represented the king in every district, collected his taxes, coined his money, held his courts of justice and were supposed to enforce his laws, under the supervision of the missi dominici. This class too was

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necessary to the king and would expect a reward from him. Lastly, the king, like most other medieval fighters, was terribly anxious to make the church his friend. Men of that age risked their bodies as a matter of course in battle or hunting, but they set considerable value on the safety of their souls. Hell was so real to them, and the way to heaven so very perplexing. Every one, especially when he felt ill, wanted to make some sort of bargain with the church. Now, what gift could the king make to his soldiers, his officials and to heaven ? He wanted to give them wealth— and he was human, and wanted to give a wealth that would not cost him too much. There was onfy one form of wealth possible in an age that had few coins and jewels, no big mines, no businesses, no banks and above all no means of storing food and fuel or moving them from one place to another; and that was the land itself, where food could be grown, a house built, and trees cut into firewood. The king had some land of his own, on which he lived and which was called his demesne. He had also some rights over other land—for instance, the right to lodge and eat there for a certain time, the right of corvee or forced labour, the right of tolls on the use of roads or bridges or markets, and some rights of justice. He decided that in return for services and the oath of fidelity he would grant out these rights in a certain district to a man for his lifetime, and this conditional gift was called a beneficium. A good deal of Europe had been given out in this way by the time of Charles, and beneficia existed everywhere side by side with land which was still held without conditions. It was calculated that at one time one-third of the land was held by the church. Some kings were beginning to feel that this went too far. Sigebert II gave twelve square leagues to an abbey, but his successor cut it down to six, and the early Carolingians made themselves rich by revoking gifts made to the church. The king's position would not have been weakened if he had not granted too many beneficia, if he had been careful that they should last only for a lifetime, and if he had kept a tight hold over his soldiers, counts and bishops as Charles the Great did. But Charles the Great was followed by a son very unlike himself. Instead of the great solid figure, big head and

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commanding air, there was a man of middle height, kind and nervous, with long feet and fingers, a long nose, clear eyes and ' so many virtues that it would be tedious to tell them '. This was Louis the Debonnaire or the Pious, who could understand Greek and talk Latin easily, who was always in church and who never laughed out loud. His sons were worse s till; he had one good fighter in his eldest son, Lothair, one good worker, Louis the German, but a third son of particularly windy ambitions and half-hearted silly actions, called Charles the Bald. And their sons were worse s till; so it can be imagined that holders of beneficia were able to change things a little for their own benefit. The first great object was to make the beneficia hereditary. Louis the Pious began this process by giving away royal lands ‘ as eternal possessions '. In 844 and again in 851 and 856 Charles the Bald had to sign documents giving sure possession to his fideles and promising to govern by their common assent. When the owner of a beneficium died, his son would appear to take the oath of fidelity, and the king would generally reply by making the gift over to him ; at first the chroniclers call this *most generous ', but after a time it becomes customary. So the beneficia very gradually became hereditary, and all that was left of the old plan was the custom of paying relief or heriot to the king when a new heir took up the property. In England, for instance, under Cnut, a king's thegn ‘ of those that are nearest to him, paid in heriot four horses, two saddled and two unsaddled, and two swords and four spears and as many shields and a helmet and a coat of mail and fifty mancuses worth of gold \ The very name beneficium began to disappear, and by the eleventh century estates held in return for services were called fiefs. The second great object of the lords was to make their lands and the people on it yield them as much as possible. The counts who had held courts of justice or coined money for Charles began to carry on the work for their own benefit under his weaker successors. In this way nearly all the king's rights escaped from him and became the property of the counts. Laws made in the public interest became sources of profit for them ; for instance, they turned Charles the Great's regulation of the price of wine into a monopoly of wine selling for themselves. Many of the bishops had held counts'

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office, so they did the same ; the archbishop of Rheims was count of Rheims. Other fideles watched these privileges enviously and they made the king give them franchises, by which they could hold courts and coin money. They also envied the lands of the royal demesnes, which paid no taxes, and they made the king give them immunities from paying taxes. As the kings were weak men they were too much afraid of their subjects to hold out, and so they *abdicated more and more, in order to remain king \ Now while necessity and danger had forced the king to take all sorts of people under his protection and pay pretty heavily for their loyalty, the common people were beginning to crowd under the protection of the fideles. In a primitive country it is very dangerous to be lonely, and from the beginning of history men had been careful to connect themselves with some strong group. At first it was a man's kin who protected him, cleared his name if he were accused of crime, were responsible for him if he committed crime, and avenged him by a bloodfeud if he were killed. As time went on the real relation became less important, and men adopted brothers, as Roland did Oliver, exchanging a few drops of blood ; or made themselves into a group like the Saxon guild-brethren. If a man of Alfred's time fought and slew, the relations on his father's side paid the fine ; if he had none, the mother's relations paid a third, the guild brethren a third ‘ and for a third let him flee '. These groups were perhaps found rather cumbrous, for soon it became far more usual for a man to have a lord who protected him and was responsible for him and to whom he was faithful. This was such a help to justice and order that the king welcomed the coming of the lords. Charles the Bald ordered that there should be no man without a lord. In England iEthelstan ordained *concerning those lordless men of whom no law may be got that the kindred be commanded that they . . . find him a lord in the folkmoot \ The relation between lord and man was at first purely personal, just like the relation between the king and his fideles ; but it too was soon mixed up with land. It was not possible for any important institution in the Middle Ages to keep clear of land. The solid earth, with its promise of harvest, was all their livelihood. If the crop failed or was destroyed in one district, that district must starve, even

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though there might be plenty, a hundred miles away. Men must live close to a harvest, and make sure by work or other means that they would share its bread. Therefore landlords were certain to appear. The land granted out by the king was often granted out again by the lord. The bishops and abbots did not want to farm all their estates, and they let out parts of it to small farmers, who held the land from them in return for services. In 852 Ceolred, abbot of Medeshamstead, let to Wulfred the land of Sempringham ‘ on the agreement that after his day the land should return to the monastery and Wulfred . . . each year should deliver to the monastery 10 loads of wood and 12 loads of brushwood and 6 loads of faggots and 2 butts of full clear ale and 2 cattle for slaughter and 600 loaves and 10 measures of Welsh ale and each year a horse and one night's entertainment '. These farmers had lost some of their freedom, but on the other hand they had gained a very powerful protector, and they had not to bear the weight of military service, which pressed very hard on the small freeholder. In Charles' time men had often gone into the church ‘ not so much for devotion as to escape military service'. So other small freeholders began to make contracts with the church, or with the lord of some beneficium, by which they took an oath of fidelity and promised certain services in return for protection. This was called commendation, and its terms were varied but quite definite. * I, Pontius, commended myself to the Bishop who was then alive, Alfantus. And every year in the month of May I will give the Bishop of Apt a ram with the best sheep, and at the feast of S. Castor a measure of bread and wine and a pig worth two shillings.' When a man commended his land he usually did it not only for a lifetime, but for ever ; and it was probably this humble bargain between the small freeholder and the bishop or lord that put the idea of the hereditary fief into the heads of the holders of beneficia. The dangers that the small freeholder had feared under Charles the Great were multiplied after his death. The unity and justice of the empire were falling, and in every district the lords were pressing to extend their powers. The kings could not check them, for they themselves were facing a new and terrible danger. A fresh barbarian invasion of Norsemen from Scandinavia and Denmark was pouring into the Carolin-

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gian Empire, as once the Franks and the Goths had poured into the empire of Rome. The Norsemen, or Vikings, were very like the Goths. Tall, beautiful men, they were brave as a matter of course, and sometimes in battle a sort of madness of strength descended on them which they called the Berserk fury. Their legends and myths were the stuff of which poetry is made. They had fine names—Rollo, Borik, Bjorn Ironside, and that most famous hero of legends, Ragnarr LoJ£brok. They sailed in long, oaken boats, very shallow and quite open to the weather, which were driven by oars and carried one square sail. The ship had a high prow, carved like a dragon's head ; the sides were carved into patterns and over them hung the warriors' shields, red, black and gold. In the ship were crowded the oarsmen, sometimes as many as sixty pairs, and the armed fighters. They were the first men in the world's history to sail straight out to sea. They had no cover, no compass and only a primitive rudder ; their hardships can be imagined from the legend of Leif, who thought it kinder to give his princess a gold ring and a cloak and leave her for ever (even though they had a child) rather than take her with them. They steered by the sun and stars, and sometimes drifting far through the mist they would throw up ravens to see where the nearest land lay. Such daring sailors will often sail to their death ; but sometimes they will stumble on treasure and new worlds. The Norsemen sailed in the north to Iceland, Greenland, and perhaps even to America, which they called Wineland the Good. They raided the British Isles, Germany, France, a part of Spain and entered the Mediterranean. Towards the east they crossed the Baltic and set up city states in Russia and reached Constantinople. They were looking for gold, which was a warm fire to their eyes, and for the deep green country that was too scanty in their n orth ; so that they were accustomed first to explore, then to raid and then, if the country were good, to settle. Eric the Red, who colonized Greenland, called it so ' because men would be more willing to go there if it had a good name '; although agriculture was so hard that the greater number of the population later had never seen bread and did not know what it was. But the greatest desire of the Norsemen was never fulfilled. They sailed after a floating island, a fairy 5

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place, incredibly green, that had been often sighted but never reached by any of them. It was a mirage of the sea. These bold heathen broke into the world of Christendom just as it was becoming orderly, to disturb, and almost destroy its order. Their raids began in England in 787 ; soon after they sacked Lindisfarne and raided Skye and the Isle of Man, and then there was a pause while they attacked Ireland. They hardly touched Charles’ empire during his lifetime, but from 834 onwards they raided every year from Frisia to Brittany. The object was gold and cattle, and the raids were carried out suddenly and with great cruelty. They were much better armed than the natives, for all their artistic power was spent in making armour, two-handed axes, bright swords, and the great bows that let fly the *wound bees ’. After they understood the importance of speed and that wherever they landed a local levy began slowly to collect against them, they seized horses from the nearest farm, and ' when they were ahorsed ’ they rode for the treasure and were away again before battle could be given. After their raid of S. Waast there was ‘ not a place, not a road, without its dead bodies ’. A charter refers to ‘ the destruction of Brittany, which was destroyed by the Norsemen’. In Guienne the inhabitants of the coast towns fled inland, and *so long continued that fierce ravaging of the Norsemen that nobly built churches returned to desert and the thick forests closed in on their walls ’. Much of the coast land must have been emptied by them, for they soon began to think of settlement. They began to spend the winter in Ireland (834), in the Carolingian Empire (843), and in England (851). From this time they made definite settlements, generally on islands in river mouths, as a base for their raids. They had Thanet and Sheppey for the Thames, Lindisfarne for the Tweed, Walcheren for the Scheld, Oissel for the Seine, and Noirmoutiers for the Loire. The first kingdom was set up in Ireland about 843. In 844 they raided into Spain and took Seville. In 845 they sailed up the Seine and sacked Paris ; by that time the whole of the Seine and Loire basins were dotted with Viking settlements, and they held Frisia and had raided far up the Elbe. In 859-862 one great band attacked Spain and followed the way of all the barbarians by making for Rome ; they missed it, and sacked Luna instead. Then Charles’

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empire was left in peace while from 866-878 the English fighting was at its h eigh t; in 878 by the Peace of Wedmore with Alfred the Danes set up kingdoms over half England, and their friends came back to attack Europe. This story of success needs some explanation. Charles' strong empire should not have been so easily defeated. It was defeated, like its Roman model, as much by civil war as by attacks from outside. The Frankish habit of dividing an inheritance between- sons still continued, and during his lifetime Louis the Pious made four separate divisions of his land. Each was unpopular, and each led to a civil war or rebellion in the midst of which poor Louis was often defeated. His defeats and his readiness to do penance for the sins that must have deserved them lessened his apparent grandeur; on the Field of Lies in 833, when his army deserted, ‘ the fidelity of many men was quenched \ When he died in 840 there was a scramble between his sons. Charles and Louis were jealous of Lothair, who, although he had only a share in the lands of the empire, had the imperial title and the homage of the fideles. He was defeated at Fontenoy in 841, and in 843 he agreed to the Treaty of Verdun, which, with the later treaties that confirmed it, is the most significant partition in European history. To understand this partition it must be clearly grasped that there was no such thing as a modern nation in Charles' empire. It was made up of loose groups, often with a tribal origin, of which the chief were Aquitaine, Burgundy, Neustria, Austrasia, Saxony and Bavaria; besides these, there was Italy. But men inside these groups did not necessarily take the same side in the civil wars, and there was little conscious feeling of union among them. They were more conscious of imperial unity, at any rate in the lifetime of Charles. When the division was made, Louis the German naturally took the eastern lands, with which he had always been connected and where he had worked under his father. Charles the Bald took the western lands. It was thought essential for Lothair to hold the centres of the Carolingian power; that is, its real centre and birthplace round Aix-la-Chapelle in Austrasia and its legal centre in Rome. He took Italy, and a strip of land running north of it through Burgundy and Austrasia to the sea. Now the masses of land taken by Louis and Charles

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were sensibly grouped. Charles had good frontiers in the Pyrenees and the sea coast, and Louis’ newer states had indefinite room for expansion against the Slavs to the east. A difference of language was already growing up to divide them, and when the allies took an oath at Strasbourg, Louis spoke something like German, and Charles something like French. A definite step had been taken in the development of France and Germany. But Lothair’s empire was an unnatural state, cut in half by the Alps, and when he died in 855 it was further subdivided between his sons. The Italian states naturally held together; and that northern strip, without frontiers, without unity, closely connected in history and geography with the states on each side of it, was certain to become their battle-ground. The treaty of Verdun was not ten years old when the northern lands of Lothair, to which he gave the name of Lotharingia, or Lorraine, were contested between France and Germany; and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that they have been contested ever since. These wars for Lorraine, together with innumerable civil wars between sons, account for the defeat of the Carolingians by the Norsemen. Charles the Bald intrigued with them against his own brothers, undertook three great attacks on Lorraine and in 875 made an Italian expedition. He was crowned emperor and much enjoyed the clothes and ceremonies ; but he did not defeat the Norsemen. As the chronicler wrote, ‘ Our kingdom, once glorious, is now inglorious—how weak the strength and power of princes ! ' The kings had half a dozen remedies ; they met in solemn conferences and sent disapproving protests to the king of Denmark; they tried to play off the Vikings of the Somme against those of the Seine. More usefully, Charles the Bald tried to increase his cavalry and build fortified bridges to defend Paris. But usually they gave the Norsemen money to go away, and the Norsemen took the money, and stayed. This threw back the people on local defence. Cavalry and a strong castle were the only protectors ; and they hurried to commend their land to anyone who could ride, fight and lead. They built him a castle—at first of wood, but soon of thick stone ; they were only too pleased to build the castle which sheltered their own wives and cattle. At Pontoise

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' the Franks built a fortress which could hinder the Norman's movements, and they committed it to Aletrannus to keep'. In England the aldermen were the leaders—the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that in 845 Eanwulf the alderman led the men of Somerset, in 837 Aethelhelm the alderman led the men of Dorset, and so on. In France the counts and other landlords led. Robert the Strong, count of Paris, defended the Seine. The depopulated lands were being colonized on the feudal plan. A bishop organized immigration into Grenoble in 950-976 ; he divided up the land between colonists on condition of their service to himself. An abbot Elias ‘ attracts ' men to his fief and helps them to build a town and mill which they must pay him for using. All over Europe the land was grouping itself into small units for the sake of defence, and in almost every unit there was a stone castle and a landlord. The landlords seemed at first the saviours of the people. Gauzbertus of Malamont was rescued from imprisonment by his peasants, who destroyed the castle where he had been held Thus when the Vikings returned to Europe in 878 they found themselves opposed by counts rather than kings. Odo, count of Paris, the son of Robert the Strong, defended Paris through its great siege of 885-6, and his only reward was that the emperor who came up to complete the victory gave the Norsemen money and a passage to Burgundy. By 887 there were five separate kingdoms in the Carolingian Empire— Italy, Germany, Lower Burgundy, Upper Burgundy and Neustria; and the kingdom of Neustria was actually held by Odo the count for his lifetime, although after his death the Carolingians came back. Germany was practically freed from the Vikings' raids by a victory at the Dyle in 891, and from that time she could attend to the Slavs. But France endured another attack from Rollo on the Seine, and at last by the treaty of St. Clair-sur-Epte in 911 she gave up the land between Flanders and Brittany, which was called Normandy. At this time (910-927) the descendants of Alfred were reconquering their Danelaw; but in 980 the raids began again and ended by the establishment of Danish kings in England from 1013 to 1042. With their death the story of the great invasions must end ; for when the Normans begin to wander again they are more like Frenchmen than Vikings, and only

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their name and their restlessness remain to show us the real meaning of the Norman conquest of England, the Norman kingdom of Sicily and the crusades. The Vikings at home settled down into the three kingdoms of Norway, Sweden and Denmark and were converted to Christianity in the tenth century. The general effect of the invasions had been to split up the empire of Charles and to give a tremendous impetus to feudalism. Once begun, feudalism quickly developed, as every man's greed led him to grab at a little more land, or a little more power over the people living there. After the settlement of the Normans a Dane called Sifrid suddenly seized the monastery town of Ghisna and called himself lord of it. The abbot appealed to count Amulf for help, but instead of giving it Arnulf let Sifrid do homage to him for Ghisna. A monk of Arras calculates that between 866 and 1170 his abbey lost nine-tenths of its possessions by usurpation. It was not safe to do anyone a favour, for this was so easily turned into service. Fulk Nerra begged the abbey of S. Aubin as a favour to mow his corn ; Fulk's successor claimed it as a right. A certain Hildiardis coaxed the monks of S. Martin to make their tenants send all their grain to her mill, and when she was dead *the custom remained'—the new owner would seize the goods of any tenant who went to another mill. Another lord of the district levied taxes on the same tenants, until the abbot excommunicated him. The barons were in the habit of ‘ invading' their neighbour's lands and sacking towns as if they were in enemies' country. It followed that the peasants soon ceased to look on the lords as their saviours. They no longer built castles willingly, and they grumbled that the lords gathered treasure 4by the toil of miserable m e n '. Yet they could not escape from the contract they had so gladly entered into. Throughout the Middle Ages, the peasants were in the grip of the lords ; and the peasants make up the great majority of Europeans. E v ery scrap of food was produced by them. ‘ It is the peasants who give life to the rest, who feed and sustain them : and yet they endure great ills, snow, rain and storm. They open the earth with their hands in misery and hunger. They lead a bitter life, poor, suffering and dependent.' So a monk wrote, conscious of the debt his generation owed to the

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peasants. How was this debt paid, and what was the condition of the peasants in the Middle Ages ? It must be clearly understood that their condition was not all alike all over Europe. What with usurpations, divisions, raids and family troubles, the size and kind of estate became infinitely varied, and the neat Roman villa disappeared. For instance, Uncbald of Vieuvicq gave a part of Vieuvicq to the cathedral at Chartres and left the rest to his son. The son gave out another part to his fighting men as a reward. His three sons divided the rest and cut off another bit for their sister's dowry. It would be a mistake to think of the seigneur as always rich and noble. Many seigneurs, like some lords of the manor in England, can have been little more than peasants. Sometimes not the land, but the rights, were divided. The justice of Pouanc6 was divided between Marmoutier and the seigneur de la Guerche, so that one did justice on Thursdays and the other for the rest of the week. Nearly always there were peasants with different rights and obligations on the same estate. This was specially the case in England, where feudalism came late and where there was no Roman villa system left as a foundation for it. When William the Conqueror reached England he found several different varieties of peasants or villeins, besides some freeholders ; and from our knowledge of the English working man of to-day we may feel sure that they valued these distinctions and were deeply annoyed when the Normans overlooked them. So feudal classes never kept still, and feudalism cannot be described as a *system '; estates were always changing hands, adding to or losing their rights, being let out to new under-tenants, or going back to the overlord because there was no heir. However, certain main points are established. There was clearly a great debasement of free non-noble men all over Europe ; they had lost the full right to their land and had become dependent on a landlord. They were grouped on his estate, which was called in England the manor, in France the seigneurie and in Germany the Grundherrshaft. The service they owed might vary, but there always was service. In France there were two great groups of peasants, besides the small wandering population who did casual work or colonized the forests. There were the serfs, whose condition was very

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miserable ; they had to work for the lord and they might not move from his estate or marry out of it. In his court of justice he often had rights of life and death over them. Their homes were not safe. Gautier Renaud, for instance, and the monks of Marmoutier *possess serfs in common which are to be divided between us. Therefore on June 6th 1087 we divided the boys and girls of several parents. We have received on our side among the children of Renaud de Villana a boy Bartholomew, and three girls Hersende, Milesende and Letgarde : and among the children of Guasclin a girl Aremburge and a boy Gautier. A very little girl, still in her cradle, was left out of the division and remains our common property/ Whenever serfs appear in the French romances they are ugly and misshapen, almost inhuman. *Peasants, whom one might call cattle \ said one poet seeking for a good phrase. The ‘ free ' peasants, many of them descendants of freeholders who commended themselves, were rather better off than these cattle, but still owed many services in return for the land they occupied. The dangers of the invasions had tended to bring them together into small clusters or villages, and there they set up huts of mud and wattle and were not directly under the eye of the lord, whose stone castles might be at some little distance and whose bailiffs had other villages to worry besides their own. They began to cultivate their gardens, and so they have made the garden of France. But still their work was hindered by a tremendous number of dues and restrictions. They had to pay a quit rent in money or kind to the lord and do a good deal of work for him, besides paying all the taxes he asked. They had to pay when a son entered on his father's land, when they bought and sold anything, and when they used bridges or roads, although built by their own labour. The lord had a group of banalites or monopolies, some of which lasted until the French Revolution. Perhaps no one but he could sell wine ; nearly always the people were bound to use his mill, oven, w inepress or brewery, and pay what he asked. They had to attend his court of justice. And these rights were always increasing by violence or custom. Landri le Gros attacked merchants going over his land until they paid him tribute to let them alone ; this ‘ put a second sin into his head ' and he turned their tribute into a claim of toll on every

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passenger. According to an old poem the peasants on their way to a certain market had to pay a penny to cross the bridge, or their cloaks were snatched, and, *L oudly though th e boor m ay weep. N aked on his w ay h e’ll creep

The development of trade was greatly hindered by these tolls and by many other miscellaneous dues ; for instance, the men of S. Dizier not only had to use the mills and ovens of William of Dampierre but they might not make charcoal except from his trees, and from those only when he wanted some cut. The English peasant was rather better off, for the old English village kept many of its rights even when the king's gifts, the Danish invasions and the Norman Conquest turned it into the landlord's estate or manor. The many divisions of the earlier peasantry died out soon after the conquest, and except for the servants in the manor-houses, the bailiff, the priest, and a few cottars, there was no one in the manor except the great class of villeins and the much smaller class of freeholders. The freeholders paid rent for their land and did very few services, and those only of a superior kind ; for instance, they might supervise the villein's work in harvest time. The villein had to do a good deal of work ; from two to five days a week one man from each villein holding (on which a man and his sons would generally be working) had to work on the lord's farm ; there was also carrying to do and boon work or extra work at busy times. The villein paid taxes ; often he had to pay toll for sales or roads as the French peasant did, and he had to pay merchet when he married off his daughter and heriot as a death duty. He had to use his lord's mill, which was called ‘ suit of m ill'. He had to pay ‘ suit of cou rt', which meant that he must attend the lord's court of justice, and *suit of fold ', by which he had to drive his animals every night into the lord's fold so that the lord got all the manure. He had also to send some of his produce to the manor-house. He did all this unwillingly, it may be imagined ; so that the manorial court records are full of cases where villeins are found guilty for something undone in their service. In the manor courts of the abbot of Bee, for instance, the whole township of Little

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Ogbourne, except for seven persons, has to pay 6s. Sd. for not coming to wash the lord's sheep. All the ploughmen of Great Ogbourne are convicted by the oath of twelve men because by reason of their default the lord's land was illploughed. Isabella Waring gives the lord 4s. for leave of marriage for her daughter Mary. Ragenilda of Bee gives 2s. for having married without leave. Hugh Wiking pays 12d. for not making suit at the lord's mill, and Robert Hulle the same for cutting down and selling some trees that he had no business to touch. William Bigge and William Druladon are found guilty of *wrongly having millstones in their house and taking toll, to the great damage of the lord as regards the suit to his mill \ In the manor court of the abbot of Ramsay a certain Henry Godswein has to pay 6d. for coming late to mow the lord's crop ; soon after he is fined for illreaping in his boon work. On the second boon-day in autumn he refused to come, but turned up later in the day when the bailiff's back was turned, to assure his friends that it was time to go home—and they went, ‘ to the damage of the lord \ In the same court Richard in the Nook is fined 6d. for being slow about the carrying due from him as boon work. The court was not entirely oppressive. Villeins got justice against one another, and sometimes against the lord — both as regards their holding of land and any other property. Geoffrey Sweyn says that John Crisp has taken half a virgate of his land, and he offers the lord 2s. to let him have a jury to decide the quarrel. Alice, the wife of John Bert, is fined 6d. because she ‘ in evil manner took a sheet that was hanging on the hedge of William Roger's son and thereof made herself a shirt'. Outside the court the villein was treated as a free man by the law, except with regard to his lord. He could bring no suit against his lord, or if he did the lord could say, ‘ This is my villein : I need not answer him.' The villein could feed a certain number of animals (according to the size of his holding) on the common pasture of the manor, and although by law it might be argued that they did not exactly belong to him, practically he did what he liked with them and could leave them to his son. In the same way the son inherited the father's holding, although legally it did not belong to him but was only lent to him by the lord in return for services. The- holdings were of many different sizes ;

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there was a little garden round the mud and wattle hut and a certain number of strips of land, separated by thin strips of grass, in the big arable field where all the villeins worked. They enclosed this field with a hedge until the harvest was reaped; then they either sowed it with a different crop or destroyed the hedge and left it to rest, so that in turn each part of the arable land bore com or beans or lay fallow. The pasture and woodland stretched beyond. A swineherd led his pigs under the beech-trees. He could see the mill close to him and hear the stream running ; farther away the manorhouse and the new stone church raised their sharp outlines, putting to shame the little hovels that clustered near them. A deep-rutted lane ran through the length of the estate, was carried by a bridge over the river and disappeared into the woods whose green walls shut away the world. This loneliness of the little estate, which was an island of cultivation in the midst of forest or marsh, was more powerful than the law in keeping the peasant at home. He had nowhere to go. Even in the worse districts of France, and much more in England and Germany, he feared the wilderness of life and held to the lord who at least gave him work, land, and a place in the world. He could not be dispossessed or unemployed; he had only to fear a failure of the harvest; unless perhaps his lord should get the worst of it in a private war and the village should be burned, as often happened in North France. 4The villein may not leave his villein n est’, said English law. It must depend on a man's spirit and his experience of hunger whether he regards the peasant’s holding as a little nest or a little cage. Meanwhile the lords, whose relations to each other and to the king had been in extreme confusion all over Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries were beginning to organize themselves and make new laws to suit the changed condition of things. It was beginning to be recognized by the eleventh century that in theory all land belonged to the king, and that it was held from him either directly, by a tenant in chief or indirectly from some one holding through a tenant in chief ; the line might be very long, as land was let out again and again to sub-tenants, but it always ended with the king. In France there was supposed to be a regular hierarchy of fiefs ; the seigneur held from the vicomte, the vicomte from the

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comte, the comte from the due, and the due from the king. All these tenants owed rights to their overlord. They owed, first, fidelity, which they promised by the gesture of kneeling before their lord and putting their hands between his ; then military service, according to the size of their holding ; then taxation. This was sometimes demanded irregularly, when the consent of the tenants was supposed to be asked, but there were also certain regular demands. The feudal aids had to be paid when the lord's eldest son was knighted, when the eldest daughter was married, and when his body had to be ransomed. The feudal due of relief was paid when the tenant entered on his estate ; the lord had also the right of wardship, when the heir was a child, and of marriage, that is, choosing a husband if the heir were a girl. Often the tenant had to lodge and feed his lord for a certain length of time. These payments were made by the under-tenant to his lord and by the tenants in chief to the king. In return the lord or the king promised protection, safety in his estate, and freedom from unfair exactions. The lord had certain rights of justice over his tenants, but the tenant could claim to be judged only by his equals. The whole business was a contract. Yet this contract was not only a legal one ; it was personal and ideal. It was meant to be a clear confession that men were by nature dependent on each other, and that this relationship could be raised from violence and competition only by loyalty and mutual help. Feudalism made an effort to idealize dependence. Fulbert of Chartres, in a letter explaining the feudal oath, said that the tenant is bound to aid and counsel his lord, protect his person, guard his court, preserve his estate, join in his enterprises, and ‘ remember these words—safely, secretly, honestly, peaceably and effectively '; and the lord is bound to do the same to his tenant. The knights who followed these ideals discovered the beautiful virtues of chivalry and became defenders of the weak, terrible to the strong and faithful to an oath. It is hardly necessary to say that the greater number of medieval tenants never imagined such an ideal, or dreamt even of keeping the legal contract they had undertaken. Feudalism proved to be a very poor system of government; it put too much power into the hands of individuals. The ordinary feudal baron was unfit to use power. In his big

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body there lived a very simple nature—enthusiastic, warlike, superstitious and cruel. He spent his life in hunting and fighting. He arranged tournaments or mock-fights in time of peace, but what he loved best was private war or rebellion against his overlord. The supreme overlord, the king, had little chance of power against such warlike vassals. As early as 881 Hincmar of Rheims was telling the king of France, ‘ You have so many partners and rivals in this part of the kingdom that you are king by name rather than strength/ The king's weakness and the frequent wars made it easy for great barons to establish big estates in which they were practically independent; sometimes these estates were old tribes, sometimes they were official divisions of the empire, sometimes they grew up by chance. They emerged one by one in the course of the ninth and tenth centuries, and most of them exist in some form for the rest of history. The chief in Germany were Bavaria, Saxony, Franconia and Suabia, each with a duke at its head. Between Germany and France were the duke of Lotharingia and the king of Burgundy. In France were the counts of Anjou, Blois, Champagne, Toulouse, the dukes of Normandy, Brittany, Aquitaine and French Burgundy, and the ‘ duke of the Franks ', who held Paris and what was left of Neustria. In England, Cnut had revived tribal divisions in the four earldoms of Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex. In each country great families were gaining far more power than the king held. In Germany the duke of Saxony, in France the duke of the Franks, a descendant of that Odo who held Paris against the Vikings, and in England Godwin and his sons were all stronger than their overlords, and were sometimes the real governors of their country. At last in every country came the natural climax : the old dynasty fell and the barons elected their greatest member to succeed it. In 919 Henry the Fowler duke of Saxony became king of Germany. In 987 Hugh Capet duke of the Franks became king of France. In 1066 Harold Godwinsson earl of Wessex became king of England. Feudalism had won. Two centuries of disorder and change had ended in another defeat of Rome. The empire was parted, and the title of em peror, though it never lapsed, had become a name quarrelled for by feudal princes. Feudal law

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was taking the place of Roman law. Yet there were two classes of men in Europe who might be thought to dislike feudalism, with its independence and oppression, and who might undertake a war against it. The first class was the serfs ; and history might expect a silent and very slow rebellion to rise from beneath against the barons. In the second class were the great barons who were made kings by their fellows, and whose change of work would naturally bring an abrupt change in their feelings toward feudal independence. This attack was more open and terribly prolonged. From the eleventh century to the sixteenth the kings, in alliance with the common people, were at war with feudalism ; and their efforts have resulted in modern government.

CHAPTER V

NATIONS AND KINGS I. The Normans in Italy. Their wars : their government. II. The French. The Capetian dynasty : its difficulties and opportunities : its alliance with the church and with the people. Louis VI : his court, his demesne : his general power. Philip II : his character : his relations with England and with Southern France : his government. Louis IX : his character : government: and foreign policy. III. Spain. The Moorish invasions : development of the Christian states of Castile, Aragon, Portugal and Navarre : the Christian kings oppose the feudal lords and fight the Moors : the Cid : James I the Conqueror. IV. Germany. Foundation of the monarchy by Henry the Fowler and Otto the Great: the German kings become emperors and are henceforward too busy to solve the problems of Germany : the problem of the western frontiers : the problem of internal disunion : the problem of the eastern frontier : Guelfs and Ghibellines : the duchies break up and the marks develop : failure of Germany to defeat feudalism.

IME had brought Western Europe of the tenth century into confusion by destroying its unity. There were too many masters and they wanted to devour each other. To get armies, they sublet more and more land, building new castles and granting out new fiefs, until they had given away all real possession to their soldiers—and the soldiers were not always faithful. Even the great barons were losing power within their estates. The kings were almost without power. Yet it was through the kings that unity returned at last, and a group of nations established themselves. A citizen of modem Europe who wants to understand his surroundings must go and watch the kings at work in the Middle Ages. There came into Europe in the time of the Viking invasions a race that possessed a genius for monarchy. The Normans who had settled in France formed themselves into a strong duchy whose institutions and ideas of centralized government had a good deal of influence on the French king ; but they were not content with this duchy, for at heart they were still wanderers. They undertook the conquest of England in 80

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1066, and after a long tussle with the stubborn Anglo-Saxon they set up a centralized monarchy whose heroes are William I, Henry I and Henry II. These men succeeded by methods that all Europe was to copy—a close alliance with the towns and the poor people against the great landlords, and the replacing of feudal government by royal armies, administration and courts of justice. But the conquest of England was not the Normans' only achievement, for by the eleventh century they were adventuring as far as the Mediterranean and even Constantinople. There was not much room at home for younger sons ; and besides, every Norman wanted to see the world. It was in this way, first as pilgrims and travellers, later in little groups of soldiers who offered themselves for hire, that the Normans began to make themselves at home in South Italy. Here they were in the centre of the world, and in this point of contact between Italy, Greece and Africa many races and governments struggled. Constantinople still claimed the greater part of South Italy, and there were settlements of Greek merchants in every town, but Sicily had been conquered by the Saracens, Naples was practically a free republic, and Benevento was a Lombard d uchy; to the north lay the pope's lands. Wars beween such neighbours were inevitable, yet the sunshine was too seductive for these lazy fighters, and they would rather not fight their own battles. They preferred to hire Normans, who soon took advantage of their position and began to conquer on their own account. They appeared first in 1016 ; by 1030 they had a town of their own, Aversa, and by 1042 they had conquered Apulia and set up a military federation under twelve counts. In 1053 the pope brought an army to turn out these upstarts. The upstarts defeated him at the battle of Civitate under their leader Robert Guiscard. This tall fighter, who was never defeated, would have made as good a lawyer ; he was skilful and cunning in negotiation, and by 1059 he had persuaded the pope to acknowledge him as duke of Apulia. By 1101, after forty years' war, his younger brother Roger conquered Sicily. After 1127 Roger's son, Roger II, united Sicily and Apulia and made himself king. It was a wonderful list of victories, for the Normans were fewer in number and far farther from home than in the English conquest; but more wonderful than their conquest of 6

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Italy was the fact that they were able to govern it. Roger II was a man of energy and ambition. His big, thick body, with its hard face and first-rate brains, was capable of any amount of work. His life was complicated by wars against the feudal barons, wars against the papacy and empire and a war in Africa. He had to deal, not with a race or nation, but with an extraordinary mixture of races. His council, for instance, contained at one time a French notary, several French barons and judges, several Saracen emirs, and a chaplain called William. On state occasions he wore a Greek crown and an Arab cloak. He imitated the Arabs in the splendour of his ceremony, and he rode to his coronation through streets brightly streaked with hangings of Eastern stuffs. All society was transformed by this Eastern influence. Respectable Norman ladies went to church looking like Saracens in a mist of scent, paint and coloured veils ; their clothes were of golden silk. Every race—Italian, Saracen, Lombard, Greek and Norman —demanded individual treatment. The church and the merchants asked for protection, and the feudal barons demanded independence. Roger succeeded because he was tolerant of all these demands except the last. He issued his charters in French, Latin, Greek and Arabic. Every one kept his own law and religion, a proceeding that caused the scandalized Christian to call Roger ‘ the baptized sultan \ Local customs were respected, and the old titles of Greek or Lombard officials did not disappear during his reign. Yet above all this difference, using it indeed, and taking from each part ‘ whatever he found that was beautiful and useful/ Roger was able to perfect a single centralized scheme of government which forbade the development of feudal independence. The king was absolute in legislation. He ruled through a council or curia, which was attended by the great vassals and by the king's officers and judges, who did all the work and formed a sort of inner council. The curia had powers of justice and could summon cases from other courts ; it was not afraid of passing sentence on great men. It managed the finance of the country, and by degrees set up a separate financial court rather like the exchequer of the Normans in England ; but Roger's court had Arabic names and numerals that Henry II would not have understood, The court kept

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registers of all the vassals and the military service due from them, and of the king's lands, their value and the villeins living on them. These lands, from which the king got most of his income, were managed by royal agents. Under this system the merchants lived happily enough, and so did the small landlords, who were encouraged by Roger as a balance to the great. Many of the villein class were fairly well off and could leave the land if they wanted to ; others who had been conquered in war were miserable and had no freedom, but owed military service, rent, and long hours of work in return for permission to cultivate a little land. Some were actually slaves. This was the only class not benefited by the growing prosperity of Italy. No class or institution was allowed to escape from the king's justice. The barons were defeated if they rebelled. The towns were favoured at first because Roger needed their help against the barons, but as soon as he was secure he took away their independence and made them submit to his judges. He was generous to the church, but he never allowed it to be free ; he appointed bishops and even created a new bishopric. At first sight he seems to a modern mind to be fighting against freedom ; but this is to misunderstand the age. The free barbarians had entered civilization and must undergo a long apprenticeship before they learned how to be free under the new conditions. Without Roger's despotism and his genius for order, the soldiers and landlords would have ruined their world by plundering the merchants, the villeins and each other. Monarchy was a necessary and natural stage in the life of the world ; and while the Normans were building it up in England and Italy a slow development of the same kind was going on in France. The soul of France was fitted for monarchy because she had imperial traditions dating from the days of Charles the Great and of Rome. Hugh Capet and the kings who succeeded him were conscious of this theory and managed to believe in it. They called themselves ‘ successors of the lord Charles the Emperor '— ‘ kings of the Franks always August '■—4keeping the custom of our ancestors the Frankish emperors and kings ’. They were given great ideas about the importance of their work ; they were supposed to concern themselves ‘ with

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justice, with peace, with the condition of the kingdom and the honour of the church'. But these words were empty. Hugh had no ancestor among the Frankish emperors ; he was the man who had usurped their place. He was a hard-headed, cunning, successful baron who knew how far he could go, and who never risked too much. Certainly he did not concern himself with justice and peace and the condition of the kingdom ; because neither he nor his early successors dared enter the greater part of their kingdom. Their own estate lay in the north, round Paris and Orleans. It was very well placed with regard to the conquest of North France. But even there it was surrounded with enemies. Normandy and its chief town Rouen cut off Paris from the sea, and though the first three Capets were careful to keep Normandy as their friend, the fourth was obliged to quarrel with that headstrong soldier, William the Conqueror, son of Robert the Devil. After William conquered England in 1066 the Norman house became the greatest danger to the Capets. Close beside them they had a deadly enemy in the counts of Blois, who later inherited Champagne ; beyond Blois, on the west, was the count of Anjou, a very independent person, and that strange, lonely country of the Bretons who never seemed to understand France or belong to it. On the east was the eternal problem of the frontier. The old middle kingdom was splitting up and the pieces were beginning to attach themselves to France or Germany ; France got Flanders and the duchy of Burgundy, Germany got Lorraine and the kingdom of Burgundy. But none of these places was safely attached : it was always in touch with the next-door neighbour and desired by him. Hugh tried to ally with Constantinople against Germany. In 1024 a French king was trying to get together a coalition and claim Lorraine as his inheritance. A century later, in 1124, Germany threatened to invade France. This was the position in the king's own country, where he was known. In the south of France, as king, he hardly existed. The duke of Aquitaine spoke contemptuously of *the king's futility '. No early Capet ever made a law that affected the whole kingdom; their decrees were all charters given to individuals. It is unlikely that the great barons paid any feudal dues to the early Capets. The most that they did for their land was to pay homage if they happened to be in a new

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king's neighbourhood, and if they felt like it. The southern barons never attended meetings of his council. The northern barons did worse, for they came there to order him about. They had even invaded his cou rt; his seneschal, constable, cupbearer, chamberlain and chancellor were all barons, so that he felt nervous about his money and his army. He had no national income, except for a few occasional fines, and he was obliged to live on his estate like any other baron ; the farms had to send grain and wine to a few central places, and the king brought his court there to eat them. The nation at large tended to copy the barons. Men might appeal, even piteously, for the king's protection. *All the world cries, where is our lord the king, and when will he come to help us ? ' as the bishop of Chalons wrote with pathos. But when the king did come they did not like his justice. He could so seldom enforce it. When count Raoul killed a clerk, for instance, he might be summoned, but no one could make him come—he might be excommunicated, but that need not prevent him from killing another clerk. Sometimes peace was solemnly announced at a big meeting. At Heri, in 1024, the barons were summoned to take an oath 1so that if they would not make peace from respect and fear of the king, they might at least sign a pact of peace in the name of G od'. The king was not master even in his own estate, for Hugh had been obliged to give away land to reward his supporters, and so all the lesser barons were made independent. In these circumstances the king began a struggle for real power. He had certain opportunities. Although he was obliged to defend his estate on equal terms against the counts of Flanders, Normandy, Blois or Anjou, these counts were never friendly with each other. He could make alliances among them, form parties, and let them fight away at each other, or he could stir up rebellions among their lesser barons. Although his feudal rights were seldom acknowledged by grown men, he had valuable rights over minors, and now and then he could filch aw ay som e little boy's estate and add it to his

own. He could try to keep up the system of beneficia and look on the barons as his fideles, but this attempt failed. Even though the beneficia were supposed to be held for life it came to be thought very shabby if the gift were not extended to the son ; soon a man like the count of Chartres was saying

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that he was ' more w orthy' of this beneficium because his fathers had held it. . . . At last beneficia disappeared, and it was a matter of course that a landlord handed on his lands to his son. Men were too much impressed by the power of these landlords to feel that loyalty was due to the king. North France was becoming more and more feudal and the king could not stop it. All that he could do was to keep it in such a state of war that no one became more powerful than himself. This was not altogether a kingly act, but it served. Only one class was friendly to the early Capets. This was the clergy, who had done a great deal to make Hugh king. The church offered the king, first, a reason for existence. In theory he existed as the protector of religion, and so he was a sacred person whom no one had any right to resist. The theory was encouraging, but it was hardly true, and the early Capetians were more interested in the practical friendship of the church. They could enter the church lands much more freely than the lands of the barons and control the government there. The clergy from high to low really did look on themselves as the old-fashioned fideles who had a personal loyalty to the king. An ordinary village priest once led the king's army in an attack on a castle and was the first to reach the walls. There was a very famous old man, Fulbert of Chartres, who had been the king's schoolfellow and who ‘ loved him with all his h ea rt'. His letters show the mixed relation of the clergy to the king, half dependent and half superior. At one time Fulbert is reminding the king that ‘ I, too, am among your fideles ', and asking him for help against a certain Geoffrey, who is attacking him. The king makes an expedition and pulls down Geoffrey’s castle ; but soon Geoffrey is rebuilding and the king is begged to make his overlord, the count of Blois, control him a little better. It was this sort of appeal that gave the king a chance to interfere between the great and the lesser barons. At another time Fulbert is seen trying to make the people of his district lo y a l; but he is not hopeful of success—he says that the barons ‘ do you all the harm they can, and what they can't do, they threaten '. Once he takes a superior tone with the king, who has been slack about his religious duties. ‘ If you do well, I am glad ; if otherwise I am sorry and afraid.' He sums up his feelings : ‘ If you concern yourself with justice and peace, the condition of the kingdom and the honour

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of the church, I am your little satellite ready to help you as much as I can/ The king took help from his ‘ little satellite ', but he sometimes broke the condition about the freedom of the church. It was so important to choose his own bishops, since they were his best friends. In 1010 the king got his candidate in at Orleans by exiling his rivals friends, winning a street fight, and ignoring Fulbert's protests. It is clear that the alliance between king and church would break if ever the church should begin to insist on freedom of election of bishops. The appeal of the church for order and protection was repeated by the towns and the poor. They had no one else to whom they could appeal. This was the king's greatest opportunity. In theory he was a splendid monarch, the head of a body of officers, the master of a magnificent estate, and able to enforce his laws throughout France. Not one of these facts was really true. If he wished to take his opportunity he must make the facts come true ; he must be able to offer the people what they asked. The first four Capetians could not do this ; they could hardly keep on the throne. After them came a group of far more famous and successful kings who made themselves masters of France and brought back the rule of law. Louis VI (who later became Louis the Fat) is the hero of a chronicle written by Suger, abbot of Saint Denis and the chief minister of France. Suger was wise and quiet and understood what went on round him. He outlived his hero by many years, and as a tired old man he went on with Louis' work under many difficulties ; almost the last glimpse shows him using his fortune to pay the king's debts. He should share the credit of Louis Vi's fame, but the chronicle does not dwell on his deserts. The book centres round Louis, to whom is opposed one worthy enemy, Henry I of England, and several villains, especially Hugh of Le Puiset, ‘ a most wicked tyrant who feared neither the King of All Things nor the King of France'. At first Louis appears bright, young, and a ctive, illum inating with his adventures the dull court of Philip I. He seems to have been always at war and alwa}fs fought desperately; Suger calls him *the famous youth '. He had such a jolly manner that *some people thought he was simple '. As he grew, they found themselves mistaken. Other chronicles show Louis less easily brilliant. He was a

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patient worker set down to very hard work, and his chief virtue was to begin it in the right way. He saw that in order to become master of France he must be master in his own household. The great offices held by barons began to be treated as honorary, and some trained clerks from the king's chapel were brought in to do the real work. Instead of the long scrambling charters of the tenth century, confirmed by half a dozen barons and bishops, Louis began to issue short business-like charters sealed by the chancellors. The barons still came to the council, especially on great occasions, but from Louis Vi's time the king's clerks came too, and the council was more dependent on the king. Quarrels and lawsuits of all kinds were brought to it, so that it began to sit in Paris fairly regularly instead of travelling about with the king. The king himself was able to spend most of his time in Paris when he was not at the wars, for his farms and towns were beginning to send him money instead of grain and wine. This made him freer, and the towns preferred it. In 1128 Laon arranged to pay twenty pounds if the king did not come to stay there. It was better to pay twenty pounds than to spend uncomfortable days wondering when the king meant to go. Outside the household Louis nearest enemies were those lesser barons on his own estate who, like Hugh of Le Puiset, defied the king and lived by plunder. Legal measures were no use against them. When they were summoned to appear they remained silent in their castles, whose stone walls and wooden palisades were hidden in the deep woods. One of Hugh's friends was excommunicated every Sunday; he did not improve. In m i Louis attacked Hugh, whose castle held out w e ll; but at last the wall was down, the enemy driven into the keep, and Hugh carried off to prison. Next year he was freed, after making all sorts of promises. They were easily betrayed, and he was soon in rebellion again, * angry as a dog who had been chained'. His castle was forced for the second time, and it was pulled down so that the whole place lay open as though struck by a curse from heaven. In 1117 he rebelled and was subdued for the third time. He is last seen as a pilgrim on the way to Jerusalem, making his peace with heaven. This proof of Louis' success impressed the other barons ; some of them made friends with him, some

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of them were conquered, and by the end of Louis' reign the king's agents were able to ride peacefully along every road in his estate. In North France as a whole he was not successful, in spite of constant wars with Blois and Normandy. He made himself respected as an enemy, but he was not a master. He soon began to age ; he improved in public speaking, but he grew pale and fat and less reckless in fighting. The wars dragged on, broken now and then by a truce or a change of alliance, bringing misery to the country people, who starved and trembled. With South France, as usual, the king had little to do. Yet one or two incidents of Louis' reign show the general movement towards unity. The king made it his business to protect merchants and to ally with towns. He gave a charter to the town of Lorris granting it the right of trading freely and safely; other towns bought charters of the same kind from their lords, and so a class began to grow up independent of feudalism. In 1124 the emperor of Germany, in alliance with the king of England, planned a great invasion of France and began to move towards Rheims. Louis called on the barons of France to march under him. They were all ready to come, even his enemy of Blois and the barons of Aquitaine and Brittany, who hardly knew him. The Germans were taken aback by this proof of unity and they retreated. France was left to fall back into her own quarrels. But history did not forget that she was capable of uniting in face of danger. As Louis grew old he became too fat to ride. This almost meant sentence of imprisonment for life, for the carriages of those days were clumsy. He despaired that just as time was beginning to teach him wisdom he should be unable to use it. ‘ If I had known when I was young—if I were strong, now that I am old—I should have conquered many kingdoms.' He had to sit s till; and perhaps in memory he watched the famous youth repeat his exploits, and longed to prompt him. Thanks to Louis, who died in 1137, and to Suger, who continued Louis's policy in the reign of his son Louis VII, many more opportunities were offered to the grandson Philip II. Philip was successful, and he is spoken of with gratitude by French historians in the thirteenth and twentieth centuries ; but he is not loved. ‘ No one could deny/ wrote

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AN INTRODUCTION TO MEDIEVAL HISTORY

Gille of Paris, 'th at for our time Philip was a good prince. Under him the kingdom was strengthened and the royal power was greatly increased. Only—if he had been more gentle and moderate, the kingdom would have been all the better.' Philip would have despised this advice, for he knew how easily most people are alarmed by a decided manner. ' No one can govern well who is not able to give a direct refusal to a request.' He was ambitious, and at the bottom of his nature, below a cheerful and almost genial look, he was cold. He seldom made mistakes, and in particular never made the mistake of trusting anyone ; and no one made the mistake of getting fond of him. He found himself, when very young, at the head of a compact estate, from which Louis VI had removed all the rebels and brigands. Even the greater barons noticed his existence. Several of them came to his coronation, and they were all supposed to pay homage and obey the general laws made in his court. When he grew older and faced facts he realized that their obedience was shaky and would never be real until he had got power over their lands. Their lands gave them riches and armies. If Philip were to be king of France he must make himself the landlord of France. He was friendly with Champagne and Burgundy, but in two districts of France he was almost powerless. The great Angevin Empire made by Henry II of England stretched almost the length of France on the north and west. It included Normandy, Brittany, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Poitou and Aquitaine. Henry was even claiming Toulouse, and seemed to be looking over the Alps towards Rome and a greater empire than the Angevin. Philip's struggle with this power, and his victory, was a wonderful achievement which gave him the title of Augustus. He was opposed in turn by three kings of England—Henry II, Richard I and John—and to each of them he brought a tragic fate. First, Henry's fine brains and energy were tired out, and Philip watched without comment when the old man, flushed and angry and hardly able to sit his horse for pain, surrendered after a defeat by his own sons allied with Philip, in 1199. Then came the sons' turn. Richard was deserted on the crusade and betrayed to his enemies ; he came home furious, only to die in a little skirmish before he had taken revenge. John, who knew that

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he had inherited an impossibly great task, was easily ruined. In 1204 Philip conquered Normandy. His conquest was made sure in 1214 by the defeat of John, in alliance with Otto of Germany, at the battle of Bouvines, the first great act in that long rivalry which was to bring French, German and English forces to fight again and again in their natural meeting-point, Flanders. By the end of Philips reign all the English lands north of the Loire were made part of the royal estate. Other lands were added by purchase, inheritance or exchange. The politics of North France were transformed, and from this time the king's power was supreme there. In South France things were different. There the king was not defied, because he was unknown. From the time of its first unity under Clovis to the time of its second unity under Philip II the history of North France had hardly touched these mysterious southern provinces. Few Franks or Norsemen had reached them. Hugh Capet was a name to them—a name, probably, of a barbarian. They still held memories of Rome and the e a s t; they were different from the north in language, buildings, sunshine—everything that makes a distinctive people. It follows naturally that they differed in their thoughts about art and religion. While the rest of Europe was producing monks they were producing troubadours and heretics. Their poetry did not matter to politics, but their heresies gave a good opportunity to anyone who wanted to come and plunder them. The Albigenses of the south believed in two spirits of good and evil whose conflict determined the fortune of the world. The pope announced a crusade against these beliefs, which bore the mark of eastern influence and which were suited in their dreaminess and their remote origin to the old civilization of the south. The northern barons took advantage of the crusade to conquer Toulouse in a series of wars beginning in 1209 ; and Philip took advantage of their conquest by sending his son with an army at a critical moment. By 1226 the south was defeated, th e A lbigenses had either run aw ay, recanted or been killed,

and the count of Toulouse was made to marry his daughter to one of Philip's grandsons, who in the end succeeded him. In 1271 Toulouse and part of Provence were joined to the royal estate. As Philip had expected, these victories with regard to land

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were accompanied by victories in government. Every one was ready to submit to him or was asking his protection. He was quite willing to sell it to them in charters bearing his seal. Monasteries and church lands of all kinds, foreigners and private merchants bought these charters, which gave them special protection for a certain number of years. Towns bought the right to hold fairs and to make themselves a free self-governing town, or commune. The barons were less important in the king's council, which was filled with Philip's ministers, and even sometimes with clergy and burghers specially summoned by the king. Great baronial offices like those of seneschal and chancellor were left empty. The court of justice was by this time doing such difficult work and knew so much Roman law that only trained lawyers could work in it, and although some barons still attended in Philip's time they must have felt with annoyance that these fools of clerks who could not hold a lance were considered more important than they were. The court dealt with some great offenders— Burgundy was condemned in 1186 and John of England in 1202. Burgundy submitted, and Normandy was confiscated from John. A court of peers came into being to try cases affecting the barons only. The king's demesne was divided into districts and in every district a bailiff collected the king's income and held a monthly court of justice. In the demesnes of the great barons Philip made friends not only with the bishops but with the towns and the small landlords, who often entered into a kind of association with him in government. These were like fortresses holding out for the king in a strange country. So the king became powerful, but he was not loved. Philip's grandson, Louis IX, who is called Saint Louis, transformed this ambitious and successful policy into something more human. He was a man of very simple nature ; some people despised him and thought him a fool, but to others ‘ there was something in the mere sight of him that found a way to the heart'. ‘ He was spare and slender, somewhat lean and of a proper height, having the face of an angel and a mien full of grace.' One of his great barons, Joinville, who wrote his biography, said that he could look ‘ the finest knight that ever was seen ', but his confessor thought another aspect more striking, and said *that there was something

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divine about him \ Louis' character puzzled his barons because it was at once so sturdy and so unselfish, and they were not accustomed to the sight of a king who honestly wanted to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. He made no great change in government, but he brought a change in spirit, for he was in love with justice rather than ambition, and he knew how to recognize his friend even in hard circumstances. He condemned Enguerrand de Couci, for instance, who had hanged three boys trespassing on his land to shoot rabbits, even though half the baronage was of de Couci's kin and the barons went to stand by Enguerrand in court, leaving the king by himself. He granted a county which had been promised to Reynold of Trie although all his lawyers said that the letter of promise was not binding because Reynold had lost half its seal. He advised his son if any man had a suit against him to speak against himself until the truth was known, for this would make his councillors feel bolder in giving a fair judgment. This search for justice changed the character of the king's government and foreign policy. In government the king's wisdom became famous, so that foreigners in England or Provence asked him to settle their quarrels. He heard cases from his own people as he sat in the woods at Vincennes or on a carpet spread in his garden in Paris. He would not sell important offices like the provostship of Paris, but chose a good man and paid him well so that he should not be tempted by bribes. In a famous ordinance, which Joinville describes, he forbade his bailiffs to own any land in the districts they governed or to take unreasonable fines or taxes from the people or accept any present except a little fruit and wine. This ordinance was needed, for Joinville himself grumbled at the way the king's servants bullied his tenants, and people were beginning to find out that a bad bailiff was as troublesome as a baron. Louis chose his men carefully, and often made inquiry about them through special agents, sent round as Charles the Great had sent the missi dominici. These were not necessarily grand people, but sometimes poor knights and friars. In foreign politics he believed in giving every man his own. When Henry III of England attacked him in 1242 and encouraged his barons to rebel, Louis fought and defeated him at Taillebourg, and never had any more trouble with the

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barons. But he wanted to make peace with England, and by the treaty of Paris in 1259 Henry was granted all the lands ever held by the English in Aquitaine, provided that he did homage for them and gave up his claim to Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Poitou. He settled the southern frontier of France at the Pyrenees by the treaty of Corbeil with Aragon in 1258, and he made peace in the south by the treaty of Lorris in 1243. He wanted to protect France, but not to enlarge her. Louis died in Africa, on crusade. His death is shown in an illuminated manuscript of the fourteenth century. He is half lying on a bed. A little white figure has slipped away from him, its feet still touching his lips ; this is the soul of S. Louis, to which angels hold out their arms. This stiff little picture with its divine meaning is Louis' best epitaph. So the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries produced in France a monarchy whose chief interest was to protect the poor people against the great feudatories. The strength of the monarchy in this period brought nothing but good to the majority of Frenchmen. It was becoming clear that monarchy was the only possible alternative to feudalism, and that those European nations were the luckiest who possessed strong kings. The monarchy in Spain is supposed to descend from a little group of men with their leader Pelayo, who held out against the triumphant Moors in the caves of Covadonga in the Asturias, and were victorious there in 718. At this time the Moors held practically the whole peninsula, whose lands were divided between their soldiers and the submissive Christians who paid tribute to them. These Christians were persecuted only by fits and starts, for while the Berbers from Africa were fanatical Mahometans, the Arabs had become philosophically tolerant; and the natural emnity between Berbers and Arabs, or between different branches of Arabs among themselves, was to account for the fact that while the Moors created a great civilization in Spain, they never created a lasting empire there. Their first great empire was set up by a member of the Umayyad dynasty, who entered Spain as an adventurer in 755 and made himself emir of it. The emirate was raised to

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a caliphate by Abd-ar-Rahman III, caliph of Cordova from 912 to 961, and the greatest of the Umayyads. He put down the disorder of the Arabian aristocracy, fought the Christians with varying success, and defended Spain against another invasion from Africa ; but all these wars were to him a prelude to his real work of peace and civilization. Under him Cordova became, as a Saxon nun of the tenth century called it, the *Jewel of the World \ It was a town of mosques and palaces, among which were open gardens such as the Golden Meadow or the Meadow of Murmuring Waters. The architecture made great use of arches and pillars, inlaid with bright colours and covered with intricate patterns. Gold shone from the azure ceilings of the mosques ' as lightning shines from the sky \ In the bazaars food was sold more cheaply than Spain had ever known before, and the roads were guarded by police. The Arabs had learned all that the Spaniards knew about agriculture, and had added to it a knowledge of irrigation and the growth of rice and sugar, the vine and the olive. The caliph encouraged learning, particularly medicine, botany, and poetry. Splendid in war, his real love was for the things of the mind, and his nature was reflective and melancholy. It is said that when he died in 961 there were found noted in his diary the number of his happy days ; in a reign of fifty years he had counted fourteen. After the death of Abd-ar-Rahman III the Moorish civilization was at its h eigh t; but his empire was less triumphant. It fell in 1031, chiefly as the result of civil wars, and a number of independent states took its place. In 1091 these were united under the Almoravides, who came from Africa to help the Moors against the Christians, and whose empire lasted for fifty years. Between 1145 and 1149 the Almoravides were overthrown by a fresh invasion of fanatical Almohades, and a third period of unity began. Meanwhile the little Christian states in the Asturias had given birth at the beginning of the tenth century to the kingdom of Leon, from which Castile was separated about half a century later. Navarre and Aragon appeared at about the same date as Leon, and Catalonia, or the Spanish mark of Charles the Great, had freed itself from the Franks a little earlier. The history of these states was to be one of wars with the Moors, wars with feudalism, and the development of

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national unity. But not one of these great movements was recognized in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Feudalism was increasing by the practice of commendation, and was especially strong in Catalonia. There was no strong religious feeling, and no desire for unity. It happened that Christian Spain was united under one ruler in 1027 l but before his death in 1035 he deliberately divided his estates. During the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, however, the great movements begin to appear. Constant wars of conquest and royal marriages brought some degree of union to Christian Spain. Catalonia became part of the kingdom of Aragon in 1164. Leon was finally united with Castile in 1230. On the other hand, by 1144 Portugal had made itself independent of Castile, and remained so. Navarre was under French influence from 1234 when a count of Champagne became king there. Meanwhile the kings of Castile and Aragon were doing their best to fight the barons. As in France, they tried to ally with the people. As early as the tenth century the kings had begun to plant villas or towns in territory newly conquered from the Moors. These towns were given charters of self-government, and their representatives were summoned to the king's great council or Cortes from 1188 in Leon, and from 1250 in Castile. The kings also tried to control the local government through agents called Adelantados. In Aragon, where there was much French influence, the task was harder. The nobles and the king were so hostile that there actually existed a judicial officer called the Justicia whose main work was to mediate between them, and this officer was considered to be independent of the kings authority. But here too the kings encouraged the growth of towns, and there was popular representation in the Cortes, probably from 1274. The great triumph of Spain at this time was that long crusade against the Moors whose legendary hero was the Cid. The historical Cid was undoubtedly heroic; but he was not much of a crusader. If he was ‘ the scourge of the Moslems he was almost equally the scourge of the Christians. He took sides impartially with either Christian or Moor, whichever paid best. At one time he was believed to be receiving nearly three thousand gold pieces a year in tribute, and in

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1094 he captured Valencia and reigned there till his death in 1099. His greatest quality was his boldness, so great that even the Arab chronicler who wrote of him as ' that Gallician dog ' also wrote that *he was in his love of glory, strength of character and heroic courage one of the marvels of the Lord \ But his religious devotion was far to see k ; and the real heroes of the crusade were not adventurers like the Cid, but the kings of Aragon and Castile. The kings of Castile captured Toledo in 1085, overthrew the Almohades by a great victory at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, took Cordova in 1236 and Seville in 1248. The kings of Aragon captured Saragossa in 1118, and used it as their base for further conquest. A series of warrior kings reached its climax in the reign of James I the Conqueror (1213-1276), and he, rather than the Cid, deserves to stand as the type of crusading Spain. He was a very tall man, fair-haired and active. His career of adventure began as a child, for his father was killed in the Albigensian crusade, and the barons of North France tried to keep him prisoner. His escape from them and early victories in his own country determined his character ; he grew up in love with the bright eyes of danger. In time of war he was cruel, but, as his name implies, gallant and successful, and he was implicitly faithful to his word, whether it were a vow (as his chronicler records) to pull the beard of the Saracen king when he was conquering Majorca in 1229, or the very difficult promise he made to his ally Castile that he would hand over Murcia when he conquered it in 1265-1266. He won the Balearic Isles (1229-1232) and Valencia (1238) for the throne of Aragon, and. he tried, although not very successfully, to subdue the Aragonese nobles. In particular, he succeeded in controlling the appointment of the justicia, although not in controlling his work after he was appointed. The reputation that he left is summed up in the enthusiastic words of a chronicler of the next generation : ' He was acknowledged to be th e m ost handsom e prince of the world, and the m ost w ise,

and the most generous, and the most beloved. . . . Besides, he loved and feared God above all things. . . . Besides, he was more accomplished in feats of arms than any other m an/ Thus by the middle of the thirteenth century the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile had established themselves and begun 7

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the war with feudalism. They had conquered all the central part of the peninsula and nothing was left to the Moors in Spain but the little kingdom of Granada. The fate of Germany was very different. While the Norman, French and Spanish kings were succeeding, the German kings were failing in their wars against feudalism ; and this failure was to have disastrous results on German history. After the treaty of Verdun had divided the Carolingian Empire, Germany, like France, had fallen into confusion, and local feudal leaders had arisen to replace the central power. These leaders formed duchies which revived the old tribes of Germany, so that the duchies were dangerously independent and unlike each other. They were called Saxony, Franconia. Bavaria and Suabia. On their western frontier France and Germany were continually fighting for Lothair's land, which was now called the duchy of Lotharingia or Lorraine. Their eastern frontier was continually invaded by uncivilized and unconverted tribes of Slavs. A difficult task faced Henry duke of Saxony when in 919 he was elected king of Germany. At first he seemed likely to win, for he and his son Otto realized that Germany's true vocation was to extend the north-eastern frontiers and add the Slavonic lands to Christendom. Henry made a line of marches between the Elbe and the Oder. Another group ran southwards from Bohemia to the Adriatic, and one of these, the East Mark of Bavaria, became the Austria of later history. He built towns in the marches and made every ninth man live in the town and provide a refuge for the others who had to till his lands. He was not too particular about his colonists ; for instance, he settled a band of robbers in the suburbs of Merseburg, and these, as soon as they were given land and work, became quite respectable and sent men to his wars. The Hungarians invaded Germany in 933 and were defeated ; they came again in 955 in th e tim e of his son O tto, and were defeated w ith great slaughter at the battle of the Lechfeld. Where they had once ravaged, towns and churches were built and the German priests and merchants came to live amongst the Slavs. Henry did not interfere with the other dukes, but Otto did,

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and with some success. He made friends with the bishops, who became his agents all over Germany; two rebellions were put down, and the confiscated duchies were given to friends. Men long oppressed were encouraged to appeal to the king's court of justice. Up to this point Germany was following the policy that gave such strength later to the French and Norman monarchies ; and at this point she made a mistake. The imperial idea still had power in Europe to draw nations into ruin. The name of *Emperor ' was still being fought for by the dukes of Lothair's old kingdom in Italy. Rome was still the prize of the world whose conqueror would be held the equal of Alaric and Theodoric and Charles the Great. Such a challenge was too much for Otto, who felt himself to be the strongest man in the West. He had the excuse that history dazzled him ; and also the practical excuse that he was always being drawn into Italian politics by the appeals of the pope and the adventures of his own son, who, as duke of Suabia, was tempted to involve himself in the wars of imperial succession going on across the border. Otto invaded Italy twice—in 951 and 961—and in 962 he was crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. From that time few kings could spare time to develop the German monarchy, and the three great problems of Germany—the wars on her eastern and western frontiers and the divisions made by feudalism—have never been solved. In the old middle kingdom several different states had arisen out of the ruins of the Carolingian Empire. Two kingdoms of Burgundy (upper and lower) and a duchy of Burgundy had been set up by enterprising counts at the end of the ninth century. The duchy of Burgundy was included in France, the kingdoms were united in 933 and passed to the German monarch in 1032. He had little or no control over them. Farther north the duke of Lotharingia was practically independent because he could play off the king of France against the king of Germany. In the reigns of Henry and Otto, for instance, this was done by Giselbert, who was a difficult subject, like most of the men produced by feudalism. ‘ His restless eyes were so changeful that no one could tell their colour; his body was strong, his will inflexible, his spirit unstable. He had a wily tongue ; generous with his own

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wealth, he had great greed for the wealth of others. In war, in conflict, was his greatest jo y / He quarrelled with the king of France and got Henry’s support against him, changed sides, and invaded Germany with the French army. Exactly the same change of sides happened in another little war with Burgundy, and yet Henry dared not destroy him, but made friends with him again and gave him his daughter in marriage. In the reign of Otto, Giselbert joined the great rebellion of 939, and when Otto seemed to be winning, the duke brought in the king of France again. The result might have been desperate if Giselbert had not been overwhelmed in a skirmish on the banks of the Rhine and drowned in its waters. Within Germany itself there was no unity. Almost every king had rebellions to face. One of the most dangerous was the Saxon rebellion, which began in 1073, and which was partly national war against a new dynasty and partly feudal revolt. The Saxons were sturdy men, and they were angry because they saw their green hills beginning to be topped by the king’s castles and because they had to work for the disorderly garrisons ; also they had more of the king’s company than they liked, for he was fond of living at Goslar, and he had a large train with healthy appetites. They besieged King Henry IV in his castle at Harzburg, so that he had to escape by night and ride for his life through the woods and private paths. The nobles joyfully joined the game, and began to talk of the king’s ‘ atrocious crimes ’ and how it might be necessary to depose him. At last Henry defeated the Saxons on the Unstrut in 1075 ; but they remained his enemies, and later raised an anti-king against him. This was one of the worst of many rebellions and civil wars. The defence of the eastern frontier began to pass out of the king’s hands. As the eastern peoples became civilized they set up kingdoms of their own in Poland, Hungary and Bohemia, and although these kingdoms were supposed to be subject to Germany, they were generally at war with her. The ruler of Poland was allowed to make himself king in 1000, and immediately set to work to unite all the Slav countries under his rule. Fortunately for the kings of Germany he died in 1025, and after a struggle of a hundred years the kingdom of Poland was divided into many small states (1138). In Bohemia the title of king was granted in 1086, and became lasting from

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1156. The Hungarians settled down more or less peacefully after their big defeat on the Lechfeld, and a strong monarchy was established there from about the year 1000. In the north-east the work of building towns and keeping peace was carried on by the barons instead of the king. The greatest pioneer was Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, who in his long life was by turns a robber, the king's chief vassal, a pilgrim, a statesman and a rebel; so strangely the chances of a feudal duke's fortune changed. He belonged to the great family of Guelf, while his cousin the Emperor Frederick I was a Ghibelline. In his time the two houses, which had always been rivals, began to give their names to opposing political parties. The Ghibellines were imperialists; the Guelf name was adopted by any power—baronial, papal, or democratic—that defied the empire. Under Henry the Lion baronial independence reached its height. It was he who succeeded in civilizing the mark lands between the Elbe and the Oder, though he was very careless of other people's rights in doing i t ; for instance, he stole the town of Liibeck from another baron. He was the most powerful man in North Germany, made so by Frederick himself, who in his hurry to get to Italy, gave Henry the duchy of Bavaria. Henry felt himself to be a sort of king in North Germany, and he would not leave home to help Frederick in the Italian wars. There was a quarrel, Henry's enemies among the other barons took advantage of it, and in 1180 he was deprived and exiled. This seemed to be the greatest victory won by the German monarchy over feudalism, yet in reality Frederick would not have won the war without the alliance of the other barons, and in any case Henry had not really been on the side of disorder in Germany ; he had been doing the king's work. He was the last of the great dukes, and after his time the duchies split up into more and more estates, and feudalism multiplied. The Ascanian house, and later the duchy of Brunswick, divided the old Saxon duchy. Lower Lotharingia ceased to be a duchy, and most of the power in it was held by the duke of Brabant, the count of Holland, and the bishops of Cologne, Treves and Liege ; in the duchy of Upper Lotharingia the bishops of Metz, Toul and Verdun began to be more powerful than the duke. Western Franconia was given by Barbarossa to his brother, with the title of Palatine of the Rhine, and in

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1253 this district came into the hands of the Wittelsbach family, which had held Bavaria ever since the fall of Henry the Lion. In Suabia a family called the Zahringen had large estates, some of which they bequeathed to the Hapsburg family in 1218. Meanwhile, as the duchies split up, the marks were growing. The old Nord Mark became the Margravate of Brandenburg from about 1140, and Austria became a duchy in 1156. An order of crusaders called the Teutonic knights began to conquer Prussia in 1231. Between Otto's coronation in 962 and Henry the Lion's defeat in 1180, the German kings had made occasional efforts at centralization, and had always failed. Otto had tried the plan of giving duchies to his own relations, but he found that they quarrelled or rebelled as often as anyone else. The king had his own trained counsellors who were called ministeriales, but they never won any great power because they were surrounded by feudal privileges and institutions. When Henry the Lion fell, Frederick Barbarossa tried to make * Landpeaces ' and bind all the landlords to the rule of law, but after his death civil war began again. Barbarossa's grandson, Frederick II, gave up hope, and in 1231 he recognized the independence of landlords in governing their estates. The kings had not even succeeded in making their own succession hereditary, for though a son often succeeded his father, he could only do so by the election of the barons, and the man with the most spears had the casting vote. The result of all this was that Germany never became united in the Middle Ages. Her development was thrown back for hundreds of years, and she has only just passed through the period of unification by despots that England experienced in the time of the Tudors and ended in the time of the Stuarts. Yet while she was spoiling her own history Germany was creating in Italy a wonderful story, full of thought and adventure. This story will be told in the next chapter, and the German kings whose names have appeared impersonally in this summary will take the greatest parts ; for while they were failing to unite Germany, through Italy they were trying to rule the world.

CHAPTER VI

EMPIRE AND PAPACY I. Development of empire and papacy, 962-1046. State of empire and papacy under Otto I and II : the ambitions of Otto III and Sylvester II : the achievements of Henry III. II. The problem of the relations of empire and papacy. Which was the overlord ? Which had the greater intrinsic authority ? Which was the true heir of Rome ? Which had the better historical claim to supremacy ? III. The Investiture Contest. Rise of the papacy after 1046 : the reforms of Leo IX : the election decree and the reform party in Rome : the early relations of Hildebrand and Henry : the Investiture decree and its effects : the development of Hildebrand’s theories : Canossa and its result: the second excommunication of Henry : the end of Hildebrand’s life : the rest of the struggle : the Concordat of Worms. IV. Frederick I and the papacy. The character, aims and difficulties of Frederick I : his first expedition into Italy : the beginning of friction between empire and papacy : the later expeditions into Italy, war with the papacy and the Lombard League : the final defeat and settlement. V. Innocent I II and the empire. The political outlook of Innocent: his work in the church, in Italy, and abroad : his relations with the empire : the disputed election : the choice of Otto : the quarrel with Otto and the coronation of Frederick II. VI. Frederick II. His environment, aims and difficulties : his crusade, and the crusade against him : the rebellion of the cities ; renewed war with the papacy and development of Frederick’s anticlerical views : his death : the empire defeated : but the papacy is not victorious. *Woe to Rome ! for she is oppressed and despoiled by many nations. She has been taken captive by the Saxon king, her people are put to the sword, her strength is brought to nothing. Her gold and silver are carried away in their purses. She who was a mother is become a daughter, she has lost all that she had, she is robbed of her youth. The people of Gaul have usurped her : she was too beautiful.’

S

O the monk Benedict of Soracte lamented when in 962 Otto I took Rome and was crowned emperor th ere; and other men of that age who knew something of history must have felt with Benedict the pity of Rome's fortune. Once victory had adorned her, and the greatest emperors could only hope to be worthy of her. Now a new 104

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emperor had won his title by conquering her. Yet in her defeat she was to begin life again. In the time of Otto I neither empire nor papacy seemed likely to be very great. It is true that Otto and his son were crowned at Rome, but they did not live there or control the restless citizens who rebelled regularly as soon as the emperor and his army had left the city. Otto I could not speak Latin. He and Otto II went on expeditions into South Italy, but made no lasting conquest. The papacy was in a far worse condition, for it was in the power of the Roman nobles, and unworthy men were made popes. When Otto I came to Rome the papacy was held by a boy who was generally drunk, and who, to amuse himself, had made his horse a deacon and drunk a toast to the devil. He had no command over the bishops, who said that they need not obey Rome ; Rome had given light to their ancestors, but now darkened the world. The best remedy for this seemed to be that Otto, as the only person with any army behind him, should give the papacy to a decent man and protect him from the nobles. This was done in 963, but the new pope was never safe when the emperor was out of Rome. In Otto's reign there were three Roman rebellions in ten years. The change from this sordid history to something more real and heroic was due chiefly to two men who ruled in the century following Otto's death in 973. Under his grandson, Otto III (who died when he was twenty-one years old) a new and wonderful conception of the empire began to be imagined. Under Henry III (1039-1056) this conception was very nearly realized. Otto III, very young, intelligent, and a dreamer, wanted to revive the first ardour of the religion of Christ and the lost majesty of Rome's supremacy, and to unite these in an empire that should dominate Western Europe, where there should be nothing left of the pagan or barbarian. This ambition deserves respect because it is built on a very real fact ; a civilization such as was growing up in Western Europe is essentially a unity, and Otto believed that this unity should find some expression in its political government. His empire, it it had succeeded, would have given to Europe that universal arbitrator for the lack of which she has fought unending wars

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and which she is now beginning painfully to create in the League of Nations. Otto was the first emperor capable of such an idea. He was cosmopolitan, half a Greek by birth, and able to speak Greek, Latin, Italian and German. People said that in adoration of the past he had opened the grave of Charlemagne, where he found the old emperor undecayed, sitting enthroned with a sceptre in his hands and his nails grown through his gloves. History was so real to Otto that he saw nothing amusing in the efforts of his German ministers to sign their names in Greek characters, or to bear their clumsy part in the Eastern ceremony of his court. Nor did he think it unkingly to care for his soul. Sometimes, for long spaces of time, there was no emperor at the court, but in South Italy a pilgrim was toiling through the desolate country to an anchorite's hut. He meant to make Rome his actual capital, and built a palace on the Aventine. There he lived, having defeated the nobles for the time, and near him lived the German or French popes whom he appointed and protected. One of these, Sylvester II, was as great in the church as Otto was in the state. He was a famous scholar who borrowed his law and poetry from the old Romans and his mathematics from the Arabs ; the unlearned thought him a magician, and shrank away from his books,where pictures of queerly decorated circles and triangles (probably spells) broke the unintelligible reading matter. He wrote a book on Arithmetic, which, as William of Malmesbury said later, mathematicians themselves sweated in reading. Working among all the chaos of knowledge left by two civilizations, Sylvester came to value order and organization above everything. He thought that all knowledge could be included in one simple plan, if men would only work a little harder and connect everything that they knew ; and he thought that the world and its government too ought to submit to a divine order. God has made the pope ‘ high and universal, the vicar of Peter, servant of the servants of God ' to serve the world by governing it in God's name. As governor he had inherited much of the power of Rome ; Sylvester defended a monastery 4with the shield of Rome's m ajesty', or forgave a bishop ‘ that the dignity of Rome's glory may shine o u t '. But as a Christian he was the servant of God's servants, and did not wish ‘ to hold the

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subjects of the church as slaves, but to welcome them everywhere as sons \ The world was ready to respect such a man, and under Sylvester the pope's power increased. He began to reform the church ; several rebellious bishops had to submit to him, and he made certain monasteries free from the bishops and put them directly under his authority. He subdued the king of France, who had married a cousin against the decrees of the church and was made to abandon her. The new king of Hungary received his crown from the pope, as a vassal and son. Sylvester even preached a crusade to free Jerusalem from the pagans. Otto watched all this with pleasure, for Sylvester was his old schoolmaster, and as pope and emperor they were great friends. They meant to work together. Otto was to protect the church ; Germany was ‘ the right arm of Christ \ Just as Sylvester's office was surrounded by some of Rome's prestige, Otto's office was made sacred by religion. He was not only Caesar ; he was also ‘ the servant of the Apostles ’, 1the servant of Christ'. Neither Otto nor Sylvester had time to wonder which of them was the more Roman, or whose office was the more sacred ; for neither lived long after they came to power. In the year 1000, when he had ruled four years, Rome rebelled against Otto and he had to realize that the city rejected him. ‘ I would have given you fame that would have spread to the ends of the earth,' he told the Romans. But they drove him o u t; and in 1002 he died, disillusioned, as he was advancing in arms against the tumble-down, uneasy-living Rome that had replaced the city of his dreams. Sylvester died a year later. For some time the empire made no advance, and the papacy, captured again by the Roman nobles, lost all its power. When at last Henry III entered Italy in 1046, he found three popes fighting for the crown. Henry was as

sensible, b u rly an d successful as O tto h a d been b rilliant and

unfortunate ; he faced facts and set to work. He defeated the Slav rebels in Bohemia and Hungary. He began to build castles on the Saxon hills and subdue that country to himself. He gave up the hopeless job of suppressing the great dukes, and tried to control them by making them

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responsible for good government. In 1046, at a synod held at Sutri, he deposed all three popes and put a German in their place. The empire had never been more orderly and prosperous; and when Henry died in 1056 he had done a man's work. Yet both Henry's success and Otto's conception of the empire rested on an assumption that empire and papacy would work together. They had done so under Otto and Henry partly because the emperors were on the side of the angels, and partly because the popes needed protection. If the popes became independent and an emperor arose who was bored by religion, the alliance must end ; for in any scheme of universal monarchy empire and papacy were natural rivals. The thinkers of the Middle Ages were so surrounded by feudalism in their everyday life and in their law that they could not help applying feudal ideas to the universe. If there were to be a universal monarchy, God was its invisible king, and all other powers held from Him as vassals. But among these vassals some must be the tenants in chief and act as overlords to the rest. The pope was certainly a tenant in chief because he held the place of S. Peter, who had been directly privileged by Christ. The emperor claimed that he was a tenant in chief because the Roman Empire was ordained by God for political government, just as the papacy was ordained for spiritual guidance. But the pope could reply, as Hildebrand replied, ‘ When Christ gave the charge to S. Peter, did he leave out kings ? And if, as you say, popes are appointed to judge spiritual things, how much more shall they judge secular things ! ' The emperor now had nothing to s a y ; because no one in the Middle Ages wished to deny that spiritual things transcend the things of this world. The truth was that the empire and papacy were dividing an inheritance between them. The empire had the name, the great Roman name that carried with it such memories and chances of conquest. The only parts of Rome's lands that were still united were held by the emperor, and he represented better than any other one man the power of the legions. The church, on the other hand, had kept much of the Roman law in her canon law. She habitually used the Latin language. What was left of Rome's learning and literature was possessed by her. Above all, she represented

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the organization of Rome throughout Christendom. Whereever there were priests and monks the pope had subjects, so that the papal edict had power in every nation while the imperial edict had no power outside Germany and Italy. The Roman system of provinces and dioceses was now the system of the church. Every nation of Christendom was represented at the pope's council. His government was more highly centralized than the emperor's, and had a closer connexion with Rome. The emperors were crowned at Rome, but the popes lived there. In theory, and perhaps in the world of ideals, the pope had the better claim ; but when both parties appealed to precedent the emperors won easily. They could prove that Charles the Great had patronized the popes and made one defend himself on oath, and that Otto I, Otto III and Henry III had deposed and appointed popes at will. The popes had never possessed such practical powers over the emperors : however they could, and did, recall the coronations of Pepin as king and of Charlemagne and Otto I as emperor, and there were few people with enough knowledge of history to understand that the pope had not really taken the initiative in any of these cases. The bestowing of the crown could be made to look very like a feudal ceremony. The story of Constantine's donation could be told again. The whole matter might be argued endlessly. Soon after the death of Henry III the argument became a matter of practical politics. The immediate cause of this was the rise of the pope's power. After Henry III had appointed a pope in 1046, a reform party had grown up at Rome. The German pope Leo IX, whom Henry III had appointed, held conferences and passed decrees in Rome and even went on progress throughout Germany and France, holding synods, preaching, and, as the chroniclers say, working miracles. The aim of the reformers was not to win power over people but to bring them to virtue. In particular they fought simony, or the selling of offices in the church, and the m arriage of priests, which m ade local interests and ties stronger than loyalty to the world church. In all this they were supported fairly well by Henry III. But the very success of their movement forced them to develop on new lines. The popes were poor, and they were very unsafe in Rome. They felt that in order to be free

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they must have land and money, and it was this that urged them on to the disastrous adventure of Civitate. In 1053, Leo led a German army down to South Italy to take possession of the Duchy of Benevento, and was defeated at Civitate by the Normans. They were clearly too strong to resist, so the popes at last decided to ally with them on condition that they did homage to the papacy for their lands ; and from that time the overlordship of Italy was one of the pope's chief ambitions. Leo's claims to power led also to a quarrel with the Christian Church in Constantinople, so that the Greek Church and the Roman Catholic Church separated from each other in his time and have remained separate ever since. After the death of Leo another German pope held office, and then came the death of Henry III and the minority of his son. This meant that the popes had lost their master ; and in 1059 they passed a decree by which new popes were to be chosen by the cardinals of the Roman Church. The cardinals were nearly all reformers, so that this election decree took the power from the emperor and gave it to the reform party, which was growing stronger every year, and which was under the influence of three great men. The first, Cardinal Humbert, was the thinker and scholar of the movement. He wrote three books against simony, in which he claimed great power for the papacy. The second, Hildebrand, took most of his ideas from these books ; he was a younger man than Humbert and had been brought up among the reform party. He worked in the papal chancery, and as he grew older he was recognized as an excellent organizer and man of business. The third, Peter Damian, was a saint. His heart longed for the silence of his monastery, and he both loved and hated Hildebrand, who was always dragging him into some piece of reform business, useful and good enough in itself, but full of the need for diplomacy and assertion. Hildebrand became rather disgusted with Peter, especially when he objected to becoming a bishop, and probably Hildebrand had no idea what Peter meant by calling him a ‘ holy Satan '. These three men grew old together at Rome, and Humbert and Peter died before Hildebrand reached the height of power and became one of the greatest popes in history. W hen in 1073 H ildebrand becam e pope he was an old m an

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who had served his holy mother church since his youth and who had passed through a life of travel, business and politics, always with the single aim of devotion to h e r ; yet it would be a mistake to think that he deliberately intended to provoke a contest with the empire. His views were clearly expressed in a letter written to a German baron a few months after his accession : ' Priesthood and empire should be joined in the unity of concord. For as the human body is given temporal light by the two eyes, so the body of the church is enlightened with spiritual light by these two dignities, in pure religion agreeing/ No co-operation could be more complete and spontaneous than the co-operation of the eyes in seeing; and if the empire and papacy were to share so intimately in the work of saving mankind it followed that they were on equal terms and that their origins were equally divine. The king, like the pope, had a moral right to rule : he ruled by the sanction of God. But it followed also that he was under a moral obligation to rule well, and that as God's officer he must obey the will of God. Hildebrand had in his mind a picture taken from S. Augustine of the ideal king, the Rex Justus, who protected the weak and fatherless and who did justice and preferred the interests of the church to his own. With such a king, Hildebrand honestly believed himself willing to co-operate. The difficulty was, that such kings do not exist. Henry IV of Germany was a man of sense, but he was spoilt and uncontrolled in youth, and in his age he was embittered by the troubles that followed his father's policy, of which he had to bear all the burden. Henry III had tried to control the German barons and make the papacy efficient; and he had succeeded in enraging the barons and making the popes ambitious. Henry IV, in the early years of his manhood, was so busy putting down the Saxon rebellions that he hardly realized what danger could come from the second of his rivals, who was distant and aged, and who seemed at first so ready to make friends. This strictly conditional friendship ended in 1075, when Hildebrand published an investiture decree forbidding laymen to invest bishops with the ring and staff of office. If the decree were obeyed, kings would no longer be able to appoint bishops or to regard them as vassals who paid homage like

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any other landlord ; and to Hildebrand it seemed an obvious piece of justice that laymen should not interfere with officers of the church or with their holy signs of office. To Henry it seemed as obvious an injustice that men who would hold land in his own empire, and who generally represented the authority of the emperor in their district, should be removed so far from his control. The decree was passed in February 1075. Henry broke it by appointing new bishops and by defying Hildebrand at the Council of Worms. At the Lent Synod of 1076 Hildebrand excommunicated Henry, and released all subjects from the oath of allegiance they had taken to him. This was practically a sentence of deposition ; and it was issued against the most powerful king in Christendom, by a man who had no army. No ordinary courage would have attempted this. It was the result of a deep conviction, not only that his cause was right, but that it would be upheld by heaven. Hildebrand now denounced the office of kingship as having its origin in robbery and ambition. He now believed that to S. Peter alone God had granted authority on earth, an authority far surpassing that of kings, and he believed steadfastly that this powerful saint spoke through his own lips. He awaited a miracle. To the strength of this faith was added the terrible strength of old age, sure of its purpose, and working against time as it feels life sink. A battle of diplomacy began. Hildebrand allied with Henry's enemies in Germany, and it was arranged that in the spring, as soon as the snow melted from the Alpine passes, he should come north and hold a council for the final decision. This union of the pope and the barons would be fatal to Henry, who determined to divide his enemies. He crossed the Alps at the risk of his life and appeared before Canossa, the castle in which Hildebrand was staying, saying that he was penitent and desired absolution. It was impossible for Hildebrand as a priest to refuse this submission, even though the statesman Hildebrand guessed pretty clearly at its motive. After three days of negotiation, the pope and emperor were formally reconciled ; and as both of them had expected, the German barons were furious with Hildebrand and set up an anti-king without his consent. Canossa would have been a place of bitter memories for Hildebrand if it had not been for the impression made on the imagination of

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Europe by the thought of Henry kneeling before Hildebrand and submitting to him. The real inferiority of the empire seemed sealed by this act, which the popular story made more degrading than was actually the case. By the time the gossip reached Germany, Henry was said to have been kept waiting outside the gate for three days, standing barefoot in the snow with a halter round his neck. The reconciliation at Canossa divided Hildebrand and the German barons for three years, during which time Henry and the anti-king were fighting. At last, in 1080, Henry's defeat at the battle of Flarcheim, joined with a fresh message of defiance from him, brought about a second excommunication, in which Hildebrand pronounced that Henry was deposed, and that victory was taken away from his arms. He believed that S. Peter would enforce this sentence. But the sentence was not enforced. In 1081 the victorious Henry, leaving his rival dead on a German battle-field, marched into Italy at the head of an army which for four successive years besieged Rome. An anti-pope, chosen in 1080, blessed his cause, and in 1084 crowned him emperor. Hildebrand appealed to the Normans, who were willing to fight the emperor, but who had no intention of letting the pope use their victory. They raised the siege of Rome, only to sack the city themselves and carry off Hildebrand into South Italy. In 1085 he died at Salerno in their power, and it must have seemed to him that this quarrel, in which both he and Henry had acted as champions of great ideas, had ended in defeat by a series of unmeaning accidents where he had looked for a special providence. The question of lay investiture, however, was not settled by Gregory's death but by a compromise called the Concordat of Worms which a later pope and a later emperor made in 1122. Henry IV died in 1106 after an old age that had been saddened by his son's rebellions. Henry V, who succeeded him, was at first very successful. In m i he marched to Rome and actually im prisoned th e pope, who first agreed to renounce all the temporal rights if Henry would allow the church to invest bishops, then renounced investiture itself, and finally withdrew all his concessions. Henry's success had been too great to la st; most people were shocked at the pope's imprisonment and relieved at his retractation, 8

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Henry was excommunicated in 1119. But both the papacy and the empire were beginning to be ready for compromise. A council was held at Worms in 1122, where the concordat was arranged. The emperor gave up the right to invest bishops with the ring and staff, while the pope, on his side, allowed the election of bishops to be made in the king's presence, and agreed that the bishop should pay homage for his land. This was the same compromise that had been made in 1107 by Anselm and Henry I of England. The question of the general supremacy of the church over the king was not mentioned in either compromise, and further wars were destined to be fought about it. In the year 1152 there was elected in Germany an emperor of great ambition, young, but already renowned in war. This was the famous Frederick I, who was descended from the Hohenstaufen or Ghibelline family. He was to live until 1190, when, as the Germans were marching through Asia Minor on the third crusade, the cold waters of a swift river received and overwhelmed that brave figure. From the first the hearts of his knights and knightly bishops warmed towards Barbarossa; he was a leader. He reminded the chroniclers of old stories of Charles the Great, so that in their descriptions of him they often copied bits out of Einhard and others, and made it rather hard to trust them. But Frederick certainly had the red beard, from which he got his nickname, and golden red hair cut short on the head and cheeks. He had the fair skin that goes with such hair, and he coloured easily, not so much when he was angry as when he was embarrassed. His eyes were clear, his lips thin. He was not very tall. He was a good speaker and had *good wits, quick decisions, good luck in war, and a love of difficulties and glory \ In his days the lawyers of the empire were busy reading Roman law in the great code of Justinian. They knew just enough to appreciate the order and majesty of law as revealed in those splendid volumes, and they were especially struck with the idea of the emperor as the origin of law, and as expressing in his person the unity of all the scattered Roman peoples. The lawyers talked freely of these ideas, and Frederick must often have heard them ; they seemed to respond to his own ambitions. He felt that he was meant

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to represent law and unity in Europe—or at any rate in Germany and Italy. But even in Germany and Italy things would not, he knew, be too easy. The government of Germany was not really imperial, but feudal, and Henry the Lion was not very likely to regard his cousin as ‘ a living law \ In South Italy there were the Normans. In Central Italy there was the papacy. In North Italy a new, and therefore a supremely annoying, independent power was growing. On the little hills that rise from the green plain of Lombardy the Italian merchants lived in cities whose steep outer walls enclosed a cluster of mounting roofs and towers. In these houses the great merchant lived as richly as a noble, while there was comfort even in the little huts of the poor; for since the first crusade had showed the way to the East a trade in spices, silks, velvet, embroidered carpets and jewels passed through Constantinople or Alexandria or Acre over the Mediterranean into North Italy, and there was dispersed again by sea or through the Alpine passes to France, Spain and Germany. The towns competed with each oth er; at this time Milan was certainly the chief, with Tortona, Crema, Brescia, Piacenza as her friends, and Pavia, Cremona, Lodi, and Bergamo as enemies. Venice aimed at controlling the sea roads on the east, and Genoa on the west. The merchants were comfortable enough to desire freedom, and for many years they had enjoyed this. The emperor had never ruled them personally; he had ruled them through the bishops, and when the appointment of bishops was upset by the investiture contest, even this authority had disappeared. The towns became bitterly hostile to their bishops. In Brescia the citizens were led by an ascetic reformer named Arnold, who wished not only to set up a free democratic government in the city but to deprive the church of all property and temporal power, so that spiritual and secular things should no longer be in confusion. When the pope banished him from Brescia, Arnold went to spread his ideas in Paris, and at last came to Rome about 1147, just as the Romans had defeated the pope and turned Rome into a free commune based on the traditions of the Republic. There he knew a few years of happiness ; he saw Roman senators passing again through the streets and looked forward to the rebuilding of the Capitol. But with the coming of a new pope, Hadrian IV, who put

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Rome under an interdict, Arnold's power disappeared and he fled back to Lombardy. Here he was in the very heart of the movement. Almost all the cities were by this time independent of their bishops. It can be imagined that Frederick when he came would not find them submissive to himself. They were ready even to unite with one another, against the emperor. In 1154, Frederick marched into Italy, and at the first Diet of Roncaglia he asserted imperial rights over the cities. These were—the right of coinage, the right of tolls, various dues, and the right of appointing the governor or podestd. He also made a great show of force, burnt several castles which the cities had built without his leave, and took Arnold prisoner. Then he marched down to Rome, put down the rebellion there and was crowned. Arnold was executed ; the commune of Rome died with him, and Frederick believed that the spirit of freedom also was dead. When the people of Rome spoke to him of their greatness, Frederick interrupted them, and said it was true that Rome had once been great; but that with the title of emperor the real greatness of Rome, her wisdom, her courage and her legions, had passed to the Germans. Frederick bore himself to every one with great haughtiness, and when he met Hadrian IV (the only Englishman who ever was pope) it was with difficulty that he was persuaded to meet the pope humbly and hold his stirrup as the emperor was supposed to do. Neither the pope, the Romans, nor the cities of the north were pleased with Frederick but they said little, and he went home again, apparently successful. By 1157 the letters passing between Hadrian and Frederick show that friction was beginning between them. In July Hadrian wrote to complain that Frederick had treated his legates badly, that he put the emperor's name before the pope's in his letters, and that he was wrong in trying to exact homage from the bishops, ‘who are Gods, and sons of the H ighest'. Frederick answered that although both empire and papacy were founded by heaven, yet the temporal power of the pope was certainly granted by emperors, for it had never been heard of before the days of Constantine. If the bishops held land and temporal rights they must pay tribute to the state as Christ did to Rome ; they were quite free to give up their lands, if

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they liked that better. Hadrian replied in September much more bitterly. He reminded Frederick that the pope had given the imperial crown, and that if he were pleased with the emperor he might give yet greater beneficia. This implied that the empire was held in a feudal way from the pope, and held not even as a hereditary fief, but as a beneficium, or grant for life. The letter was read in a diet of German barons at Besangon by a proud and brave cardinal—Roland of Siena —who barely escaped with his life. Hadrian's next letter eased the situation for the time by explaining that he had used the word in its older meaning of ‘ benefits '. In 1158 Frederick made a second expedition, and asserted his rights over the cities at the second diet of Roncaglia. This time Milan resisted, and was taken. Her fate inspired the Italian cities to union, defiance and a determination to be free. In the next year Hadrian died, and was succeeded by Roland as Alexander III. After a little hesitation Frederick refused to recognize this man, whom he believed to be his enemy, who was opposed to the homage of bishops, and who claimed complete independence for the pope's lands in Italy. Frederick recognized Victor IV as anti-pope. In 1162 for the second time he took Milan and razed it to the ground. In 1166 another campaign was fought, but was cut short by the fever. Its chief result was to rouse the cities to desperate resistance. They formed themselves into the Lombard League, which was in alliance with Alexander I I I ; they rebuilt Milan and founded a new city called Alessandria to connect her with the sea. In 1174 Frederick gathered his army for a supreme effort. But here the weakness of his feudal empire was exposed, for Henry the Lion refused to make another Italian expedition, and even Frederick's own friends were beginning to grumble that ‘ they had imperilled their souls for him long enough '. When he entered Italy he was already half defeated, while the cities were fired with despair and courage, and each place sen t o u t its young m en to fight ro u n d the carroccio', or car adorned with flowers, that was its symbol of freedom. In 1176 Frederick was beaten at the battle of Legnano. He was obliged to make a truce with the cities, and in the next year he made peace with Alexander, and granted full independence to the State of the Church by the Peace of Venice.

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In 1183 by the Treaty of Constance he gave back to the cities almost all the rights they had claimed. Then he had peace, until in 1190 the news of the fall of Jerusalem to the Turks brought out this old warrior to lose his life journeying towards the holy places. Thus the career of Frederick had decided two things, and decided them against the emperor—the absolute power of Caesar was not to be restored and the Italian cities were to be free. But the quarrel between empire and papacy was not yet decided. Under Frederick's son, Henry VI, the emperor gained a great advantage, for Henry married the heiress of the Norman kingdom in South Italy and thenceforward held land on both sides of Rome. But Henry, a man of great promise, died in 1197 before he could use this advantage, and left as his heir a son of three years old called Frederick. So the imperial attack was held up, and the next move was to come from the papacy. Somewhere about the time of Hadrian IV's death was born a man who continued the great war. In 1198 he became Pope Innocent III. He was a man of middle height, striking enough in appearance to win from one writer the adjective ‘ beautiful \ He seems to have given his contemporaries the impression of an able, accomplished man, both learned and eloquent and politic. They respected his knowledge of law and literature, and they liked his courage, for he was ‘ a bold man and stout of h ea rt', but they did not emphasize his holiness further than by saying that he ‘ meant w e ll' or ‘ was very useful to the church'; and he was never canonized. Yet Innocent, at any rate in his youth, had known the dark perplexities of the medieval thinker, whose struggles to find heaven ended only in hating the prison of this world. He had seen man as *made of dust, of clay, of ashes ' —‘ bom a servant to labour, fear and sorrow ', and ‘ a subject of death \ And in the ilipe statesmanship of his later years the student who wrote these words was still living ; Innocent was a fighter without illusions. His ideas were the ideas of Hildebrand put into a legal form. Both Innocent and Hildebrand believed that the pope was above kings and emperors because he represented a higher authority than they did, an authority that existed for the sake of righteousness and not for the sake of conquest : ‘ The Lord called priests gods, but kings He

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called princes. Princes have power over men's bodies, priests have power over men's souls. Inasmuch as the soul is more lofty than the body, so is the priesthood more lofty than kingship.' But while Hildebrand had. believed, at any rate at first, that the pope's authority was purely moral and should be exerted only when kings would not act justly of their own accord, Innocent saw that no medieval authority was worth anything until it was expressed in feudal terms ; feudalism was the political language of the Middle Ages. To Innocent belonged the work of combining the two greatest traditions of the barbarian world : imperialism and feudalism. By feudalizing the Roman tradition—that is, by turning all the kings of Christendom into vassals of the Roman See—he hoped to bring about a real restoration of Rome in history and approach as nearly as possible to the rule of God on earth. It follows from this that Innocent's work must be persistent and many-sided ; the most striking thing about him is not that he controlled such great men, but that he controlled so many. The reform of the church was continued throughout his whole reign by means of innumerable letters and interviews, ending with the great Lateran Council of 1215. It was Innocent III who sanctioned the work of Francis of Assisi, and brought about the fourth crusade, and blessed the Albigensian crusade of France, and began the Inquisition and sent a mission to Russia. In politics too he was full of innovations. He was the first pope who really controlled Rome, where the prefect of the city became his nominee. From this centre his power extended all round the Mediterranean. In Sicily he became the guardian of Henry's son Frederick. The Armenian king submitted to him. He confirmed the title of king to John of Bulgaria. He became the feudal overlord of Portugal and Aragon, and tried to unite the Spanish states in fighting the Moors. In all these places he was restoring a Roman influence which had long been lost, and reviving the old conception of Rome as a Mediterranean power. And in the colder North, where Rome's influence in old days had penetrated, Innocent was powerful too. The great Philip II of France, who was his closest ally in politics, had to bear a long war, ending with Innocent's victory, when he wished to put away his wife Ingeborg. And every English reader knows how John of England objected to the

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archbishop whom the pope had found for him, and at last in 1213 had to accept him, and at the same time pay tribute to Innocent and become his vassal. For where Gregory VII had exacted penitence, Innocent III exacted homage. This desire for feudal supremacy naturally reached its highest point in regard to the empire. ‘ The empire belongs to the papacy, in origin and directly ; because the empire was transferred from Greece by means of the papacy to Charles the Great/ And in regard to the empire Innocent certainly had great chances. On the death of Henry VI there were three claimants—the little Frederick (who was of course the true Ghibelline heir), Philip, the brother of Henry VI (who was the obvious heir, being of the right family and the right age), and Otto the Guelf, son of Henry the Lion (who represented the baronial opposition to the Ghibellines). Innocent's first aim was to be recognized by all three parties as arbiter, and in 1201, after three years of exhausting civil war in Germany and much letter-writing on the part of Innocent, this recognition was given. Innocent was determined not to let one man inherit both South Italy and Germany, so he set aside Frederick as too young. He was not very anxious to give power to anyone called Ghibelline, so he set aside Henry's brother and chose Otto the Guelf, with whose family the papacy had allied against the emperor ever since the time of Hildebrand. Unfortunately, Innocent's choice did not seem likely to end the matter, for the Ghibellines went on fighting, and were successful enough to make Innocent very uneasy as time went on. He was on the point of changing sides when in the June of 1208 Philip was killed ; and by November Otto was really king. In return for Innocent's support he had to promise to abandon lay investiture and to maintain the pope's Italian possessions. In 1209 he was crowned at Rome, and Innocent was able to say that the pope had transferred the empire from the Ghibellines to the Guelfs, just as he had transferred it from the Greeks to Charlemagne long ago. Unfortunately, as soon as the crown was on his head, Otto IV the Guelf seemed to put on with it all the feelings and policy of a Ghibelline. Innocent's conditions had been too hard ; Otto did not even pretend to keep them. He claimed rights of lay investiture, and thinking himself safe

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from any further rivalry he began to seize the pope's lands in Italy. Innocent saw that he had made an almost fatal mistake. There was only one candidate left for him to support and only one ally strong enough to help him. In 1210 he excommunicated Otto and persuaded Philip II of France to support Frederick's claim to the throne. Frederick, who was now eighteen, came to Rome and saw Innocent, from whom he accepted even harder conditions than Otto had done ; but he never told anyone how the affair struck him. In 1214 it was successfully ended by Philip's victory over Otto and John in the campaign of Bouvines. Innocent died a year later. He had raised the papacy to such greatness as to make the emperor's final defeat very probable ; yet he had also left to the empire a fit champion for its last struggle. Frederick II had grown up in Sicily, which was then the meeting-point of all civilizations and all history. The world was not divided for him into Christians whom a good emperor should protect and infidels whom he should try to kill. Frederick knew that the Saracens who had settled in South Italy were better subjects than the Christians. Nor were his ideas of government feudal; they were half Norman and half Eastern. His Norman blood and traditions helped him to value the centralized government which he had inherited in South Italy from Roger I I ; his Eastern sympathies made him regard this government as a means to absolute and expert despotism, which he thought the only satisfactory form of government. His chief aim, in early life, was to extend this despotism throughout the empire, working northwards from Sicily towards Central Italy, North Italy, and at last to that benighted barbarian Germany which must have seemed to him almost the end of the world. With order he would have brought enlightenment. He thought that Christian education was inefficient compared with the freer philosophic training of Islam, and that Christian theology was full of evasions and crude symbolism. *Their God must be as big as a mountain ; He's still there, and yet they're always eating Him u p ', he said of the sacrament; and again, as he rode through the harvest, ‘ I wonder how many Gods they’ll make out of this cornfield ! 9 Frederick was impatient of theology, but philosophy attracted him. He wrote to the scientists of Islam asking what the nature of the soul was, and whether it

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was immortal; and when he heard in reply that his questions were too crude to be answered easily, and that no one could think clearly without long training and hard work, he respected the higher standard. He was prepared, if not to work hard himself, at least to give others a chance of doing so ; and to this end he founded the University of Naples and revived a school of medicine at Salerno. He himself could speak several languages, and was at home in either Christian or Mohamet an circles. He seemed fitted to reconcile the east with the west, and to create a state unlike any other in Europe. But these ambitions of Frederick were completely out of touch with existing facts. He wanted to unite the empire ; but the only bond between the scattered imperial lands was the bond of religion, and this was what he valued least. He wanted to introduce despotism ; but other forms of government existed already in the empire, and these, the feudal baronial government of Germany, the free city government of Lombardy, and above all the pope’s government in Central Italy, with its universal claims, were understood by the people concerned and often had a deep hold on their loyalty. The tragedy of Frederick’s life was that he regarded these deadly enemies as momentary evils that must be removed before he began his real work, and that he realized only slowly what forces he had challenged. Finally, Frederick was in favour of friendly intercourse between east and w e st; and his final pledge to Innocent III was that he should lead a crusade against Islam. To avoid this pledge was essential. He put off the pope with repeated promises, and set to work at the organization of Italy. This policy succeeded during the lifetime of Honorius III, who followed Innocent, and who was a peaceloving man. But after him, in 1227, came Gregory IX, who called the pope the ‘ creator of the emperor ’ and held that ' Christian emperors must subordinate their actions, not only to the Roman pope, but even to other clergy’. He insisted on the crusade, and Frederick made an apparent submission. He set sail from Brindisi, and the pope was triumphant. But within a few days the sails reappeared, and Frederick was soon in Italy again explaining that he felt himself too unwell to proceed. Gregory excommunicated him. In 1228 the excommunicate put his critic in an awkward

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position by setting out on the crusade in good earnest. Gregory announced that he had gone ‘ as a pirate, not as a pilgrim', and that a counter-crusade should be made on his Italian Lands. The next year, having made an excellent trading treaty in Palestine, Frederick returned to deal with this second crusade, and by the Treaty of San Germano in 1230 peace between him and the pope was patched up for the time. Frederick began his work again, only to find new obstacles rising in the rebellion of his son in Germany, and in the defiance of the Lombard cities. By 1236 he had dealt with Germany, and he then reasserted Barbarossa’s original claims over Lombardy. The towns united against him, and he defeated them at the battle of Cortenuova in 1237. They lost heart at this, and would have given good terms. But Frederick would accept nothing but unconditional surrender, and when the cities thought of surrender their courage rose again, inspired by memories of Legnano. In 1238 Frederick was obliged to retreat from the siege of Brescia, and in 1239 Gregory took advantage of this to ally with the cities and renew the excommunication. Frederick was successful again, invaded the state of the church, and was threatening Rome when Gregory died in 1241. There was a pause in the hostilities. But it could not last, for Frederick had learnt at last that the papal office was his real rival. By 1245 he was deposed again by Innocent IV, a pope as embittered as Gregory. Innocent allied with the German barons, who set up an anti-king, with the Italian barons, who conspired against the emperor, and with the cities. Frederick set up no anti-pope, for he had finished with popes. His aim now was to create a purely secular state ; sometimes he imagined himself a Messiah who should save his world from the ambition of the church. His friends ‘ looked for his arrival as for the coming of Christ \ He was to them the saviour of Rome, or the eagle with great wings of E zekiel's vision.

M eantim e, u n til th e vision should be

fulfilled, he had to fight the communes, and he continued in war unt il death overtook him in 1250, his work unfinished. With Frederick II the true imperial idea perished. His sons faiied as he had done, and in 1268 his last descendant was kille d. The empire passed away from the Hohenstaufen ;

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though new emperors arose and sometimes made expeditions into Italy, there were few left to hope for their success or to remember the days when the unity of Christendom under Rome seemed the natural end of history. The papacy, victorious over the emperors, never took their place as rulers of Christendom. Continual excommunications had weakened the pope's power, and new enemies were soon to arise against him, like ghosts of dead emperors, in the national kings of France and England.

CHAPTER VII

MONKS, FRIARS AND SCHOLARS I. M c n a s tic is m . Decline of Benedictine monasticism: the Cluniac reformation. The new orders of the eleventh and twelfth centuries : the Carthusians : the Cistercians : the secular and militaryorders. The monastic ideal: the daily routine and organization : various types of monks: the highest type, S. Bernard : the value of monasticism to the medieval world. II. M e d ie v a l E d u c a tio n . The schools and their studies. The career of Abelard : his freedom of thought: his rivalry with S. Bernard : his death. Development of the universities. III. T h e F r ia r s . The Dominicans. The Franciscans. S. Francis and his religious outlook. Development of the Franciscan movement. IV. T h e A r tis ts . The mosaics. Early paintings and their limitations. Giotto and S. Francis. The pre-Raphaelites.

T

HE Middle Ages are called by some the Dark Age, and by some the Age of Faith ; and this incongruity should prepare the reader to find in them, especially when he wishes to understand their spiritual life, modes of expression quite different from any used in the twentieth century. Without this preparation medieval religion must seem pure chaos ; for there never was an age that produced such great theologians and so much superstition, such scholars hungry for learning and so much ignorance, such glorious saints and such brutality; and between these extremes lies a variety of every kind, so that it is never safe to generalize. There is a story of a knight, Herluin, who went to watch the monks of a great monastery where he thought of entering, and who was disillusioned by their irreverence as they pushed into the church, laughing, jostling each other, and comparing ornaments ; but that night as Herluin was praying, hidden in the chapel between services, a monk came in quietly and p ray ed till daw n, ra p t in p rayer. So H erluin learned not to judge ; and men of a later age can do the same, and remember that in the most degraded monastery there may always have been that figure, kneeling secretly. By the time that the empire was being restored under Charles in 800 and under Otto in 962, Benedictine monasticism had 125

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spread over all Christendom, and had lost a good deal of its fervour; it had, in fact, been too successful. Those early monks, burly and sweating, who had cleared the forests and built their own monasteries and followed the plough because they believed with S. Benedict that labour made men truly monks, were gone by O ttos day. The monasteries were rich with gifts of land and serfs. Villages had grown up round them. The monks could live by other m ens labour. Yet when the decline had reached a certain point a movement of reform checked i t ; and this alternate decline and reform repeated itself throughout the Middle Ages. The first reform came from a Benedictine monastery called Cluny which was founded about 910 by a duke of Aquitaine. The Cluniacs aimed at a return to the Rule of S. Benedict, which had been long neglected. They were to abstain from meat and spice ; they were to use clothes of black stuff when they could get it, ‘ because black is humbler than the other colours '; they were to speak seldom ; and they were to return to manual work. To prevent these rules from being forgotten again, the many new monasteries founded from Cluny were to be kept under control of the abbot of Cluny, who could inspect them, take tribute from them, and appoint their priors. They were generally free from the control of the local bishop and directly under the abbot of Cluny and the pope. The abbots of Cluny therefore became very powerful and often had to do with imperial politics ; it was Hugh abbot of Cluny who negotiated between Hildebrand and Henry IV at Canossa. But very soon wealth and power began to corrupt the Cluniacs. Their dependence on the abbot of Cluny kept them safe as long as good abbots were chosen, but left them in all the greater danger if, as sometimes happened, an unworthy man were made abbot. The Cluniacs had no means of opposing him. Meanwhile the many gifts made to them and the growing value of their lands tempted them to an easy life. They gave up manual work and took an increasing interest in food. When S. Bernard came to visit Cluny he found them, on fast days, eating five courses of eggs and fish ; they were ‘ inflaming the passions ' with pepper and ginger, and wearing rich furs. Therefore in the eleventh century another movement of

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reform began, and many new orders were founded. In 1038 a hermit order was founded at Vallombrosa. In 1076 Etienne de Muret founded Grandmont, ‘ an order for good men \ At about the same time some of the cathedral clergy, who were not monks, and who were therefore generally called ' secular ' clerks, began to live together under rule as monks did ; these were called the Austin Canons or Canons Regular. In 1084 S. Bruno founded the Grande Chartreuse, from which the Carthusian order spread. The Carthusians lived under one roof like monks, but their lives were spent alone in separate cells, where they worked and prayed in silence. The life was so hard that no one joined the Carthusians unless he honestly wished to share their ideal, so that the Carthusian order is the only one that has never needed reform to this day. About 1100 was founded Fontevrault, a monastery for monks and nuns, which was ruled by an abbess out of reverence to the Virgin Mary. In 1098 Citeaux was founded, first of the great order of Cistercians. They brought about a return to simplicity. They wore no furs, linen, or ornaments, but only a rough white tu n ic; there were no mattresses on their beds, and they lived on coarse bread, beans, cabbages, and a little fish, without eggs or meat. Their monasteries and churches were bare; none of the decorations and frescoes of Cluny were seen there, but plain buildings without towers or belfries, standing in lonely places ; the crosses were of wood instead of gold, the candlesticks of iron, and the vestments of linen instead of embroidered silk. It was only slowly that men realized how this restraint and simplicity had brought with it a new beauty in architecture. In organization the Cistercians were less centralized than the Cluniacs. Each new monastery was independent, but it was kept in touch with the rest by a yearly meeting or congregation at which the abbot of Citeaux presided. He could visit and correct other monasteries, but the abbots of the first four daughter monasteries had equal rights over him. About m o William of Champeaux founded the congregation of S. Victor for the secular clergy, and another such order, the Premonstratensians or White Canons, was founded by S. Norbert at Premontre in 1120. The fighting orders of the Poor Brethren of the Hospital of S. John and the Templars had been founded about 1118. Their aim was to combine an

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active crusading life with the discipline of a monastery and thus to devote body and soul alike to the service of God. They took the threefold vow of poverty, chastity and obedience. The Templars were pledged to eat only twice a day, to wear garments of one colour only, and to obey their masters so minutely, ‘ as if commanded by G od', that they might not even bathe or open a letter without leave. The order was governed by a grand master and chapter. It is true that the ideals of the Templars soon began to be hampered by wealth and privilege ; as early as 1133 a king of Aragon is said to have left a third of his land to them, and a series of decrees during the next century made them independent of any authority except the papacy. They began to enlist enormous numbers of servants and artisans, to live arrogantly, to act as financiers and bankers rather than poor knights, and to keep up such a rivalry with the Hospitallers that in 1243 the orders were actually fighting in Palestine. Nevertheless the Templars did good work for the crusades and their rule offers a further proof of the tremendous power of religion in medieval times. Another fighting order, the Teutonic Knights, was founded at the time of the third crusade, and in about 1230 devoted itself to wars against the heathen Prussians on the Baltic. Meanwhile, soon after 1113 another order of canons, the Gilbertines, was founded by Gilbert of Sempringham. It is clear that all these institutions would never have arisen unless monasticism had supplied some real need in medieval life. The monastic ideal was an attempt to live on earth in the city of God. S. Augustine had disclosed to the barbarian world a vision of unity between God and those who loved Him, by saying that faithful Christians, while they were living an ordinary life in earthly cities, could live also a spiritual life in the city of God, which was contained in Him, and which neither time nor famine nor invasions could destroy. The barbarians after their conversion produced men who were enchanted by this vision and longed to make it true; this was the starting-point of the monastic ideal. But to live in that divine city seemed impossible to men who were fighting and struggling for their earthly safety and for the safety of their wives and children. Therefore the renunciations, as we should call them now, of property, marriage and personal

PLATE II

C H R IS T A P P E A R S T O M A R Y M A G D A L E N E GIOTTO, a Florentine, who lived from 1267 to 1337, painted this picture in fresco. It is in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua. A fresco is painted directly on to a wall while the plaster is still fresh and damp ; the picture dries into the wall and can never be removed from it. This picture, like the Madonna of the Rucellai, is purely religious in idea, but the treatment is far more dramatic and realistic than in the earlier picture

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liberty by the monks did not seem to idealists among the monks themselves to be renunciations, but a gift of freedom. They did not feel that they were shut off from life ; they felt that they were entering into life. The city of God was more real than Rome to Gregory the Great, and it was when he left his monastery for earthly business that he felt imprisoned. ‘ Oh, Peter/ he said once to his friend, ‘ my unhappy soul, struck with the wound of earthly business, remembers what it once was in the monastery . . . how it triumphed over all earthly things ; how it thought of nothing but heaven ; how while still imprisoned in the body it yet escaped by contemplation from the chain of the flesh ; how death itself, which is a punishment to almost all, my soul loved as the entrance into life and the reward of its labour. But now . . . it bears the burden of secular business, and after the lovely face of its own silence it is smirched with the dust of earthly deeds/ It was the idea of the soul as imprisoned in the body that made the monks anxious for a very hard and simple life. S. Bernard said that the soul was the guest of the body and deserved honourable treatm ent; and in criticism of the food at Cluny he remarked that with broiled meats the flesh, not the soul, is made fat. The fasting and asceticism practised in monasteries were valuable, not in themselves, but because they freed the soul. By them man was absolved from the desires of the body and was at leisure to delight in ' the whiteness and fragrance of virtue '. Monastic life was so organized as to give men the best chance of reaching this ideal. Monks gave up their property so that they might be able *to follow, naked, the naked Christ'. They gave up homes and friends and the thought of marriage, for the monk must be as if *only he and God existed in this universe \ They gave up the distinctions of rank, and *whether serf or free became all one in Christ \ Peter of Cluny said once that however humble men had been when they came to the monastery they could still rise freely to the greatest office in it ; and this spirit of equality was shown in practice when the little beggar boy of S. Albans rose through the Canons Regular to become Pope Hadrian IV. They gave up their desire for success and fame. The cathedrals which they built, the carvings and bright windows, preserved no artist's name. Anselm in his riper days used to tell how 9

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reluctant he had been to enter Bee as a young monk, because he felt that while Lanfranc was prior there was no room for another great man ; and he used to add, ‘ That was before I was tam ed/ The details of the monk's daily routine varied both in different centuries and according to the different seasons of the year, but the principle on which his routine was planned remained unchanged. His day was divided between work, rest, and that divine worship which was the central fact of his life. He spent about six hours a day in the chapel. The day of the monk in the eleventh and twelfth centuries began with Nocturn and Lauds, which were said in the night at a time varying with the season from midnight onwards. He rolled out of bed for these services without dressing, and joined a procession that moved silently by the light of flickering candles into the chapel. After Lauds he went back to bed for another few hours' sleep, and was wakened in good earnest for Prime at about six o'clock. After Prime he dressed and washed—a simple business, for he had taken off only his tunic when he went to bed, and baths were not enforced except before the greatest festivals. The only part of himself that a monk washed at all thoroughly were his hands, which were washed before and after every meal. When he was as clean as he and his fellows thought necessary he went to Mass, sometimes joining to it the service of Tierce, which was really supposed to be said at nine o'clock. After this he went to the chapter, where all matters of business and discipline were dealt with, and then to the cloister for half an hour's talking, in which various groups of monks held parliaments or discussions. Then he said Tierce, if it were not yet said, but generally it was over, and he could go straight on to High Mass, and perhaps join to it the services of Sext and None. These were not due to be said till twelve and three o'clock, but he liked to get them over early and keep a clear space of time for work ; so that at last None, which was originally the *ninth ' hour, came to stand for *noon '. After High Mass he had dinner and then in summer took a siesta. This was the best part of the day to the boys in the monastery school, for when the master was at all kindhearted they were sent out to games. A certain Abbot Maglorious of Jersey used to send his boys out to the shore during the siesta, and

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was under the impression that they learned their lessons there. After the siesta came work of various kinds till sundown, when Vespers was sung. After Vespers came supper, and reading in the chapter-house ; and after that, Compline, and then the monks went to bed and the greater silence began, not to be broken till Prime. This daily routine was changed sometimes for special fasts or feasts of the church ; and it was surrounded with all sorts of rules and counsels of perfection, down to an urgent request that monks should not spit at dinner-time. The abbot had the chief authority in the monastery ; next to him came the prior and sub-prior, who were responsible for discipline. Below these came a cellarer, who was charged with the oversight of the wide estates, manors, and granges of the monastery, and who, with the kitchener, looked after the housekeeping, a chamberlain to look after the monks' dress, a cantor or precentor to direct the singing, a sacrist to take care of the church plate and ornaments, an infirmarian who nursed sick monks, an almoner, a guest master, and the master of the novices, besides lesser officers. A man who subjected himself to this life took a great risk. He could find in it the means of reaching the city of God : and men like S. Anselm and S. Bernard succeeded in their search. But if he failed, or if he had never really desired the monastic ideal, he probably became worse than ordinary men, because he was leading a more artificial life. S. Augustine said that he had never known better men than those who had profited by monasteries, and never known worse men than those who had fallen there. Monasticism was to produce many different types of monks. In the early days of monasticism the great majority of monks were peasants. It was considered an event worth mentioning, when, as sometimes happened, ‘ counts were seen cooking in the kitchen and margraves leading out pigs to feed \ These peasants had led a hard life, so that a fairly lax monastery might even seem to them a refuge of bodily comfort ; and except in the best times every monastery was probably burdened with its materialists who had never been transported into the city of God. The monks of S. Evroul drove out their abbot because he was a scholar and made some of them spend their time in copying instead of field labour. They said, ' What are the men who pray going to live on if

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there aren't enough men to plough ? ' Men of this type found intellectual work a torment to them. Richalm of Schonthal said that ‘ reading was a furnace that tryeth all men \ and that devils afflicted men who tried to read with a sort of universal itching and fidgetiness. Even more intelligent men found writing heavy work. *He who does not know how to write imagines it to be no labour; but though three fingers hold the pen, the whole body grows weary/ At Clairvaux, S. Bernard had to cut some of his sermons short (not very short) because his audience was growing sleep y; and what was true sometimes of Clairvaux, must have been true often of many other places. Perhaps even worse than the heavy, uncouth peasants were the monks who had no real vocation. In the stricter abbeys novices were not accepted till they were full-grown. S. Benedict named eighteen, Peter of Cluny named twenty, as the age of admission. Nevertheless boys came in much younger from the monastic school, or because they had been dedicated by their parents, sometimes when they were only five years old. The famous chronicler Orderic was eleven. Many of these boys took the vows before they could understand in the least what such vows m ean t; and so arose the class that brought scandals into the monastery, or at best made it a very slack and comfortable place. They were supported by the army who came into the monastery only because other people did. And they were always in a state of friction with those monks who had begun from high ideals but who had become petty and quarrelsome by the monotony of their lives, ‘ despising the greatest things for Christ's sake, yet keeping the old Adam in the smallest things \ Such men often exaggerated the ascetism of their lives so that they should feel complacent and virtuous ; and S. Bernard had to tell them that Christ would not accept fasts and mortifications if self-will were found in them. But in Bernard himself and in his friends the monastic ideal was fulfilled. Bernard became a monk at Citeaux in 1113 at the age of twenty-two, and was appointed abbot of Clairvaux in 1115. He was a man who made a great impression on onlookers. They describe him as fairly tall, very thin, his head with its flaxen hair set on ‘ a long and slender neck, white and comely as a swan \ But far more striking than this

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bodily grace was his look of simplicity and purity, ‘ radiant with a light not of earth but of heaven '. His influence was so great that he was concerned in almost every important event of his day. He ended a quarrel between two rival popes which began in 1130 and continued until 1138, and he acted as the adviser of a later pope who had been his pupil. He was in touch with nearly all the kings of his time—Louis VI and VII of France, Henry I of England, Lothair and Conrad of Germany, Alfonso of Portugal—and was not afraid of contradicting them. He preached the second crusade of 1147. He helped to draw up the rule for the Templars. He was the champion of the church, as will be seen later, against the growing freedom of thought. All these activities were repugnant to him, at any rate in their beginnings, and he was not seeking fame. No one could have been trusted as Bernard was trusted by his fellows if there had been anything of self in his work. In the space of three years he refused the bishopric of Chalons and the archbishoprics of Genoa and Milan ; and it was his pupil, not himself, who was made pope. Bernard thought that the meaning of life was the return of the soul to God. ‘ It is a great good to seek God. I think that among all the blessings of the soul there is none greater than this. It is the first of the gifts of God/ He thought that man's soul is made in the image of the Word, and resembles God in its immortality and its freedom of will, ' a quality plainly divine, that shows forth in the soul like a jewel set in gold \ In this freedom of will is the origin of sin. ‘ Who shall free me from my own hands ? ' By sin the soul loses a part of its resemblance to God. But ‘ although the gold is dim, yet it is still gold '; and man begins his return ‘ when, being like the word by nature, it endeavours to come near Him by will '. This effort earns from God the gift of faith, which is a divine assurance and not an act of man : and even the effort that earned it was the gift of God and inspired by Him. ‘ Not only has He sought me, unhappy as I am, but has caused me to seek Him, an d to feel sure of succeeding in my search.' When man has received faith he begins to desire virtue and to gather in the heavenly garden the lilies of truth and gentleness and righteousness. This was the teaching of Bernard in those sermons that used to send some of the monks to sleep ; and undoubtedly

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one of the reasons that made ordinary people support monasticism was that they reverenced such teaching and were glad to think that the monks were practising it, since it was not always quite convenient to themselves. A certain William of Talmont founded a monastery, since, ‘ if I cannot myself live worthily for the service of God, I wish at least to assure a home to those with whom it pleases God to dwell \ A noble of Maine was even more frank : ‘ I, Gervais, who belong to the chivalry of the age, caring for the salvation of my soul, and considering that I shall never reach heaven by my own prayers and fasting, have resolved to recommend myself in some way to those who night and day serve God in their practices ; so that thanks to their intercession I may be able to obtain that salvation which I of myself am unable to merit.' The layman of the Middle Ages honestly thought that the monks' holiness did him good. Their prayers calmed storms by sea and gave victory by la n d ; and a baron was always willing to pay well for masses which the monks should sing after his death for the good of his soul. The monks were also very useful socially. They often visited and nursed the sick, and they were always supposed to give alms, though a lax monastery might give few. At Cluny such great alms were given that the almoner needed five assistants ; he visited the sick poor once a week, taking them bread, meat and wine. The monasteries were open to pilgrims and strangers. The monastery of Bee could boast *that the door is always open to all, and that its bread is free to the whole world '. And finally, though the first usefulness of the monks was over when they gave up manual work, the later monks often set an example of good management in economic affairs. It was the Cistercians who showed England how to produce and export wool. But while the monks were valuable to religious life their usefulness in education declined. They still did a good deal of copying and chronicle writing, but by S. Bernard's time their schools were only for novices, and the education of lay children was passing into other hands. This led to the greatest problem of Bernard's life. As the Benedictine schools declined, the cathedral schools of the Canons developed, and at Paris, Chartres, Laon and m an y other tow ns m asters began to lecture and attract students. No second lecturer was

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allowed to teach without permission, so that the lecturer had a monopoly of the students, who moved on to another town when they had had enough of him. Their syllabus was divided into two parts called the ‘ Trivium ' and the ‘ Quadrivium \ The Quadrivium was supposed to be the more advanced because it dealt with subjects unfamiliar to the Middle Ages—music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy; but for this very reason little valuable teaching could be given, so that the Quadrivium was not of great importance. The real work was connected with the Trivium, which consisted of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic. The students learned Latin grammar and read some of the classics, especially Vergil, Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, Terence and Horace ; they knew no Greek. As training in rhetoric they wrote essays and verses and prepared speeches for debate. Dialectic, or logic, was their most advanced subject. They generally worked at set books instead of reading widely, because books were rare in those days, and for the same reason the master did most of his teaching in the form of lectures, on which the students could take their own notes ; and these methods have influenced the teaching in our schools and universities up to this day. But although the teaching was formal, the efforts they had made to get it, and the freedom of their lives (for while the actual course of study was severe, no one was bound to finish any course of study or to stay with a master a day longer than he liked), made the students very eager ; and thus in the twelfth century there began a Renaissance of learning whose chief interests were classics, logic and philosophy, and theology. In 1100, nine years after the birth of S. Bernard, the hero of this Renaissance came to Paris to study. His name was Peter Abelard ; he had been brought up in Brittany, and he was twenty-one years old. He had already studied at Compiegne and perhaps Chartres. He was a man of the most brilliant gifts who could not conceive of being timid or untru th fu l, or considerate either, in his use of them . A m odem historian, R&nusat, described him as walking through the streets of Paris, finely dressed, his head held high, his gaze direct, and a general air of challenge and pride about him. He had a genius for teaching ; and he was the sort of teacher who was bom to inspire his pupils and irritate his colleagues.

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He quarrelled with all his masters, leaving angry and baffled lecturers behind him in every town he visited. In Paris the teacher of philosophy was obliged to withdraw his most cherished theory under Abelard's criticism, and in return did his best to prevent Abelard from lecturing there. In 1112 or 1113, about the time when Bernard entered Citeaux, Abelard went to Laon to study theology, where he briefly and accurately summed up the elderly lecturer as *a barren fig-tree \ ‘ His flow of language was wonderful, but the subject-matter was silly. He kindled a fire, not to give light, but to fill the house with smoke.' Both in Paris and Laon, Abelard ended by giving lectures himself, and, to the annoyance of the older teachers, these unauthorized lectures were packed with students, who loved Abelard because he was bold and truthful, and who were ready, as the event showed, to follow him into the wilderness. In 1116 (when Bernard had been for a year at Clairvaux) Abelard's life was completely changed by his passionate love for Heloise, which ended tragically; at its close Heloise became a nun and Abelard a monk. He was never again to know any happiness. He went from one monastery to another. In 1121 a Council at Soissons condemned and burned his book on the Trinity. Soon after he fled from the monastery of S. Denis into solitude and built himself a hermit's hut of reeds near Troyes ; and it was here that his students followed him and camped round his hut, and at last built a monastery of wood and stone for themselves and him. But Abelard would not stay there, for by this time, rightly or wrongly, he believed that he had gained the deadly enmity of S. Bernard, and he escaped to Brittany. He was probably wrong at the time ; but he was right in thinking that such an enmity was certain to arise. Abelard and Bernard represented different ways of trying to understand life, and this made it quite impossible for them to understand each other. Each of them honestly believed the other to be fighting against what was good. Abelard reverenced the truth more than anything else in life, and he was willing to spend the whole force of his intellect in gaining it. ‘ By doubting we are led to enquire ; by enquiring we perceive the truth.' ‘ We must not accept the opinion of any doctor, but weigh the reason of his doctrine.' He was willing to face

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facts, such as, for instance, discrepancies of teaching in the holy writings. He published a book called Yes and No in which he took a number of subjects (as, for instance, belief in God, the value of human reason in faith, whether men are ever justified in killing their fellows, and many others), and showed that the sayings of the Fathers on these subjects contradicted each other. Bernard more than disapproved of this method, for it left him bewildered and at sea ; it seemed to him the most crude and deliberate irreverence. ‘ There is nothing in heaven above and in the earth beneath of which he deigns to confess ignorance ; he raises his eyes to heaven and searches the deep things of God/ ‘ How much wiser he would be if he were willing to beheve what he cannot understand/ ‘ Peter Abelard is destroying the virtue of the Christian faith because he thinks that he is able to comprehend God by his unaided reason/ S. Anselm had once said, ‘ I believe, in order that I may understand/ Abelard said, ‘ How is it possible to believe what one has not first understood ? ' Abelard said that faith was an opinion of things unseen. Bernard said, ‘ Faith is not an opinion, but a certitude/ Perhaps it could not be helped that this disagreement brought about personal bitterness. Bernard gathered no lilies of gentleness where Abelard was concerned. He wrote furious letters to the pope, the cardinals, to French nobles, to anyone who might be able to suppress Abelard. At last in 1140, when Abelard was sixty-one and Bernard forty-nine years old, a meeting was arranged at Sens where Bernard was to attack, and Abelard defend, the great lecturer's theology. Abelard was full of arguments, and Bernard had prepared nothing. Yet when Abelard rose to speak and saw the faces of all his enemies before him his self-possession failed. He threw up his case, appealed to the pope, and set off for Rome, leaving the Council rejoicing at a miracle. But he never reached Rome ; he took refuge in Cluny, and died there in 1142. Cluny, for all its broken fasts, had still pity and love for the unfortunate. Henceforward two spirits moved in medieval life. Abelard was one of the founders of scholastic philosophy, and a generation after his death universities came into being to continue work on his method. Bologna, Paris, Oxford and probably Cambridge were founded in the twelfth century; Naples,

THE LAST JUDGMENT (DETAIL)

Museo di San Marco, Florence. Painted by FRA ANGELICO (1387-1455). This part of the picture shows the souls of the righteous received by angels in bright heavenly gardens

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Padua, Orleans, Toulouse and others in the thirteenth; Rome, Florence, Prague, Heidelberg, Cologne, Vienna and Grenoble and others in the fourteenth ; and among the many fifteenth-century foundations were Leipzig, Louvain, S. Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen. Meanwhile the monastic movement never again reached such greatness as under S. Bernard. The Cistercians, like the Cluniacs, were doomed to grow rich. But in the thirteenth century the spirit of the early Cistercians was revived and made more beautiful by the coming of the friars. There were two chief orders of friars. The order of S. Dominic was founded between 1205 and 1215 in the course of a mission to the Albigenses. It was a preaching order which paid special attention to missions and to learning. The white tunic and black cloak of the Dominicans, or Black Friars, were familiar in the great university towns of Paris, Oxford and Bologna before 1220, and in the course of the Middle Ages they had travelled as far as Persia, Thibet and Africa on missionary work. They lived in friaries, each with its elected prior ; the friaries were grouped in provinces with a provincial over each, and the whole order was under the control of a master-general. Like the Franciscans they were not shut off from the world as monks were, but they travelled through the world as pilgrims, trying to soften human ambitions and not to take part in them. The Franciscan Order of Friars Minor, or Grey Friars, was founded in 1209. It was a preaching order that lived partly by manual work but chiefly by alms. There was a second order for women and a third order for people of Franciscan spirit who were still in the world. This order too undertook missionary work, beginning in 1217 in Hungary, France, Spain and Syria, and extending in 1219 to Egypt and Morocco and in 1224 to England. The spirit of the order was reflected from its founder, S. Francis of Assisi. Francis and Dominic met at the great Lateran Council of 1215, where they became friends, although they were very different from each other. Dominic’s face, full of Spanish gravity and almost severe, showed a self-contained and ascetic sp irit; but Francis was a poet. He was small, dark and active. He had the olive face and smooth, thin features of an Italian, ' black eyes with a candid look ’, and a scanty

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dark beard, through which his white teeth often shone as he smiled. Once he had been the leader of fun among the young men of Assisi, and then he dressed in scarlet cloth or in fine Italian armour; but when Dominic met him he was going clad in an old patched tunic with a rope round it, and throughout his lifetime he continually appeared in a different cloak or in no cloak at all, for as soon as some friend put one on his shoulders he gave it away. He had once been rich in Assisi, where his father was a carpet merchant who had a big trade with France ; but by 1215 he had long accepted Poverty as his bride. He did this in order to be free from worry, which he regarded as the greatest curse in life. He and his friends *having nothing, loved nothing, and therefore had no fear of losing anything ; everywhere they were secure \ They lived by alms and they built themselves little wicker huts if there were no handy porch to creep into for the night. This was quite different from the monastic plan of a common, enclosed life in some well-endowed building. Francis was the most original and radical thinker the world had known since Christ; and this was because he was not afraid to imitate Christ literally, both in his way of living and in his optimism. He thought of goodness as a creative force that, if men would only practise it sincerely, would destroy sin. He did not say, *Anger, fear and worry are wrong '; but he said, ‘ Where there is love and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance. Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor worry. Where there is poverty and joy, there is neither greed nor avarice/ Vices were things to be confessed, thrown away and forgotten ; virtues were to be adored and dwelt upon. ‘ O wisdom, queen of virtues, may the Lord save you with your sister holy pure simplicity. O lady holy poverty, may the Lord save you with your sister holy humility. O lady holy charity, may the Lord save you with your sister holy obedience. O, all most holy virtues, may the Lord from whom you come save you. There is no man at all in all the world who can possess one of you unless first he d ie/ His belief that the spiritual life, however adventurous, was in its nature a very happy one distinguishes Francis from the sadder saints of the monastic ideal. Bernard had travelled all day by a lake without seeing it ; but Francis, a *happy traveller through the world *, saw in nature ‘ a bright mirror

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of God's goodness—and made of all things a ladder to reach the Throne His legend is full of stories about flowers and animals, and his finest poem was a canticle to the sun. The older monks had believed that the discomfort of the body was a virtue in itself, but Francis understood that the aim of austerity is to forget the body. He said once to a young friar who had almost killed himself with fasting, ‘ Depriving the body of what it needs through indiscretion is just the same sin as giving it too much through gluttony ': a remark that would have lopped off the halo of many an ascetic monk. He believed in the quiet mind. ' No matter in what way anyone may sin, if the servant of God is troubled or angered, he lays up guilt to himself. That servant of God who is not angered or troubled about anything lives well.' ' They are true peacemakers who, among all the things that they suffer in this world, keep peace in body and mind for the love of Christ/ The ideas of Francis woke an immediate response in people’s hearts. A few brothers joined him in 1209, and by 1219 five thousand friars came to Assisi for the chapter-general, or parliament, at which the affairs of the order were settled. The increase of numbers was wonderful, but it naturally brought with it difficulties of organization ; and apart from the fact that Francis was the worst organizer in the world, he had a dread of organization as likely to end the freedom and simplicity of the friars' life. Already in 1219 people were beginning to criticize him, especially as he had insisted on sending out the missionaries of 1217 without any letters of recommendation from the pope, and several of them had had a bad time in consequence. The situation was saved, or lost, according to the view of the reader, by Francis' close friendship with Ugolino bishop of Ostia, who was later to oppose Frederick II as Pope Gregory IX. Ugolino directed the general policy of the movement till his death, and brought it into line with the Dominican. He helped Francis to revise the final Rule of 1223, which upheld the doctrine of absolute poverty against those friars who wished to leave i t ; but Ugolino arranged, even in Francis' lifetime, that the friars could use a stone building at Bologna on condition that the pope were the legal owner, and when he became pope after Francis' death in 1226 he declared by bull that property

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could be held for friars by trustees. This led to a war among the Franciscans which was one of the causes of their decline in the fourteenth century. Meanwhile the order had become a learned order, in imitation of the Dominicans. Francis disliked and distrusted the change, and refused to let the novices own so much as a psalter. But the movement was too strong for him. In 1223 S. Anthony of Padua became reader in theology at Bologna. No one denies that these changes made Francis very unhappy for a time, although different views can be taken as to the necessity for organization and endowment of the friars. But the true Franciscan spirit could not be destroyed or fail to find outlets for itself. Francis himself recovered his peace of mind and in the end ‘ met death singing \ One possible outlet was a revival of Franciscan spirit among the friars themselves, and several such revivals did take place, culminating in the founding of the Capuchin order in 1526. Another outlet was artistic. Italian poetry and drama, and above all art, received new life from S. Francis. Art in the earlier Middle Ages had been only an imitation of Byzantine mosaics or illuminations. The mosaics enriched the dim churches with their bright gold and colour, but it was very hard to represent real people and scenes in them. A formal design looked much better than an attempt to copy flowers and animals, and people could only be shown like stiff corpses with staring black eyes. There was some wall painting in Rome ; but painting in any real sense did not begin in Italy until about the time of S. Francis. Then churches began to be decorated with the pictures of saints and Madonnas, which were drawn not for the sake of beauty but for an aid to reverence, and which seemed to the unlearned almost to have brought the real Madonna into their church to bless them. Legend has always connected this early painting with the name of an artist, Cimabue ; but probably none of his paintings are left to us, and the author of the most famous early Madonna, the Rucellai Madonna, was Duccio di Buoninsegna, who came from Siena. On the day when an altarpiece of Duccio's was taken to the Duomo, the shops of Siena were closed and the citizens turned out in procession after the picture as if the Madonna herself were coming home. This religious motive influenced the whole art of painting.

PLATE IV

THE RESURRECTION San Sepulchre, Borgo. Painted by PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA (1420 ?-1492). This picture, full of mystery and awe, may be contrasted with the grace and simplicity of Fra Angelico to show two sides of medieval religious thought. The advance in technique, in composition and power of expression, may be seen by comparing this picture with Giotto’s, which bears certain striking resemblances to it

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The Madonna was a heavenly person, and so she needed no background from real life. Adoring angels were generally set round her on a background of plain gold. The artists were not yet able to make the Madonna look holy, so they showed her holiness partly by giving her a gold halo and partly by making her much bigger than the other people in the picture. They could only represent spiritual greatness by physical greatness. Down to quite a late date, in pictures of the Crucifixion, the figure of Christ is drawn much larger than the figures of the thieves. Also the artists exaggerated those parts of the body that they considered most divine ; they gave the Virgin a big head, long eyes, each larger than her mouth, and long, delicate hands. In the arrangement of the picture they were still a good deal influenced by mosaic, so that there were very few figures in their pictures, the draperies were arranged with careful symmetry, and above all there was no movement. Everybody in their pictures is keeping quite still. A little later artists were asked to paint not only altarpieces but frescoes or big pictures covering the whole wall of the church. There was room now for more figures, and it was suggested that scenes from the lives of great saints should be painted. Soon after the death of S. Francis a number of artists, of whom the most famous was Giotto, were attempting this sort of picture. But directly people tried to draw scenes from the Bible, or from the life of S. Francis, a new problem arose. S. Francis would not keep still. The stories about him were all vivid and dramatic, and the pictures too must be dramatic. Further, nearly all his adventures happened in the open air, so that landscape and animals had to be added to the picture ; and there was often a crowd of faces to be drawn, which led to the beginning of portrait painting. All the conventions of the earlier pictures were scattered. Giotto began to paint strong, beautiful forms, differing from each other and expressing themselves by passionate gestures. In his picture of the Resurrection the heavy, dark faces of the sleeping soldiers are quite different in type from the faces of Mary, Christ or those calm onlooking angels. Christ stands at the side of the picture and is not drawn on a larger scale than the r e st; yet He is the most important person in it, because the line of

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Mary's kneeling figure and her arms stretched out to Him lead the eye to His face and show that He is turning to look down at her even while He escapes. From this time divine figures and allegories were painted by many Italians, and in their pictures they created a world so expressive of their faith that the history of medieval religion might as well be told without the Franciscans as without the pre-Raphaelite artists. This side of Italian art perhaps reached its perfection in the fourteenth century under Fra Angelico, who painted a world in which the miraculous was the most rea l; a world where flowers bloomed in the grass as the feet of saints trod there, or where the air was full of small angels fluttering like birds, joyful or dismayed, above the actors in some great scene of faith or revelation.

CHAPTER VIII

THE EASTERN EMPIRE AND THE CRUSADES I. The Eastern or Byzantine Empire. The heir of Rome, but influenced by Greece and by the E a st: its government: nature of the imperial power. II. Political relations with the East in the seventh and eighth centuries. Heraclius : his aims and beliefs : his early troubles : his triumph over Persia. The rise of Mahomet: his creed : his victories : wide conquests of his successors. III. Development of the empire from the eighth to the eleventh century. Iconoclasm. Bulgarian Wars. Economic development. Separation from the West. Renewed Mahometan attack under the Seljflq Turks : the emperor appeals for help to the West. IV. The Crusades. Causes in the W est: desire for land : desire for the consecration of warfare : desire to save the holy places : hope of a divine reward. The ‘ first ’ crusade : relations with Alexius : march to Palestine : Jerusalem taken and sacked : establishment of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem : character of the crusade. Development of the crusading movement: the ‘ second ' crusade : the rise of Saladin and the *third' crusade. Effect of the crusades on trade. The ' fourth ’ crusade : the attack on Constantinople : establishment of the Latin empire of Constantinople : effect of the fourth crusade, the decline of the crusading movement but the development of trade : the journey of Marco Polo and intercourse with the East.

D

ANTE once dreamed of a unity in Christendom under the Roman Empire, but his dream was an impossible one ; for apart from the civil wars of empire and papacy in Western Europe one half of the Roman Empire had never come under the control of the barbarians but had remained aloof, despising the greatness of Charles and Otto. Constantine had chosen and founded his city w e ll; no barbarian ever sacked Constantinople. When the conquests of Justinian had fallen and the West was irrevocably lost, the ancient Roman Empire continued to exist in the Balkans, Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt. It refused to recognize Charles the Great as emperor, but at last it was obliged to give a practical, though not a formal, recognition to the empire of Otto. The barbarian Roman emperors in Germany and the legitimate Roman emperors at Constantinople were polite to each other at a distance, and even sometimes connected 10

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themselves by marriage. Otto III was the son of the German Otto II and a princess of Byzantium. But although the Byzantine Empire was the direct heir of Rome it was not, after the time of Justinian, very Roman in its character. It was influenced by the ideas of Greece. There was a more remote past to be felt in the Balkans than the past of Augustus. Men looked beyond him to Alexander, or even to the age of Pericles. Greek became the ordinary language of the empire, and Latin was kept only for formal use, such as the giving of commands in the army. The emperor's court and ministers had Greek names—the names that Otto III tried to copy. The University of Constantinople gave lectures on Greek literature. Byzantine artists sometimes used Greek colonnades in their architecture, or copied in mosaic the fine brow and eyes of a Hellenistic portrait, or painted the story of Troy on a palace wall. The delicately carved ivory coffers of the twelfth century were often covered with stories of the old myths drawn by artists who had seen and admired the low reliefs of Greece. The great work of Constantinople was to guard the treasures of Greece during the period of anarchy that followed Rom es fall, and to preserve them for the use of a later civilization. The present age owes its continuity with Roman history to Charles the Great, and its continuity with Greek civilization to Constantinople. The great city acted also as a bridge between East and West. There were visible side by side houses built in the courtyard plan like Roman villas, and Eastern-looking houses of two or three stories, their fagades decorated with bright colours. A stranger walking down the Mese, the chief street of Constantinople, would see that the goods displayed in the bazaar had come from far afield ; on the grocer's stall there was pepper from Java, cloves, cinnamon, mace and ginger and half a dozen other spices from the Far East. Rubies from Ceylon, lapis lazuli from Persia and pearls polished in Baghdad shone in the jeweller's boxes ; and Baghdad had provided too the carpets and silks of glorious colouring. This trading intercourse with the East had a very strong effect on Byzantine government. The emperor became more despotic and his government more highly centralized. His decree was law. In administration and justice he acted as

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the head of a hierarchy of officials who were entirely dependent on him for promotion. There were first a group of heads of central departments ; the Prime Minister was called the ‘ Grand Logothete ', and almost on a level with him were the ‘ Quaestor ', the Chief Minister of Justice, and the * Logothete of the Public Treasury ', the Chief Minister of Finance. The ' Eparch ' acted as governor of Constantinople, an office both arduous and varied, since he regulated all the affairs of the city from controlling its trade to suppressing its revolutions. The heads of the army and navy were called the ‘ Grand Domestic ' and the ' Grand Drungarius '. Beneath this central organization there was an elaborate local organization of thirty-one Themes, or large administrative districts, each ruled by an official called *Strategus ', who controlled both military and civil government and who, like all the other great officers, had innumerable agents and clerks under him. The chief officers were all very great people and had clothes and titles to correspond. A man who had reached such a position would seem to himself to be at the summit of ambition. But he made little mark on history. His work was not creative, and the organization was too large for individual initiative to affect it. His virtue was to obey the emperor's rules, and the only variety he could give to his work was to disobey them either by enriching himself through corrupt and oppressive government or by conspiring against the emperor ; for the emperor's power dominated the whole organization, and although ambitious men often tried to seize the empire, no one ever tried to reform or limit the imperial power ; this was the greatest difference between the Eastern and Western empires. The Eastern emperor was either emperor by divine right, absolute and glorious ; or he was utterly deserted, the victim of assassins, while another man usurped his place. The mob of Constantinople often rebelled against an emperor, but they never tried to change the system. They supported the imperial power partly because they got food from the em peror, partly because he had an army and used it, and partly because his rule seemed to them the will of God. Religion and government was one. The Byzantine emperor was head of the church and president of its councils ; there was no war of empire and papacy here. Constantinople therefore seemed to the people not only the ‘ Jewel of the

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world ' but the ‘ city protected by God ', whose affairs *are in God's hands and need no earthly weapons '. It was natural that the Eastern trade and these Eastern conceptions of government, together with the fact that the barbarians so soon recovered Justinian's Italian conquests, should have alienated Byzantium from the rest of Europe and given her Eastern ambitions. Asia Minor was the richest and most important block of provinces ; and it was towards the lands beyond Asia Minor and towards Rome's old enemy, Persia, that the empire wished to expand. Her greatest success, followed immediately by a far more terrible failure, took place in the reign of Heraclius from 610 to 641. Heraclius, son of the governor of Africa, was a strongly built and soldierly man. His coin shows a broad, open face, thick hair, and a full beard ; this was of yellow colour and was shaved in peace-time. He began his reign as a usurper. In 610 he killed the tyrant emperor, Phocas, feeling his act to be one of courage and duty. But before he died the tyrant uttered one short sentence which gave the direction to Heraclius' future. When the two were face to face in the palace Heraclius burst out into reproaches about the way the empire had been governed. His victim replied only, ‘ And will you govern it any better ? ' In these words he expressed the only possible justification for those emperors (and they were many) who, through selfishness or weakness, abandoned the effort to help their people. The task was too hard. Persia under her great king Chosroes raided the provinces of Asia Minor in the East, and to the West there was still the barbarian menace, for the Avars under their Khagan were almost in sight of Constantinople. Nevertheless, Heraclius accepted the challenge of Phocas. He gave life to that dying world ; almost alone among the emperors of Constantinople he had a clear and practical view of her vocation. Deeply influenced by religion, he saw in the empire a divinelyappointed guardian of the Christian faith, and therefore the enemies of Byzantium seemed to him to offer opportunities for service rather than threats of destruction. It was natural that such a prize should be attacked, and certain that it would be delivered. He took as a symbol of all that religion meant to him the figure of Mary, that ‘ blessed lady, like unto God, the Mother of God '. She moves through all the thoughts

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and adventures of Heraclius. Her picture was carried on campaigns. In his letters from the wars he dwelt on praises of her and gratitude for her protection. Even his enemies, the chroniclers say, caught from him the power of vision, and when the Khagan at last attacked Constantinople he said that at the moment of defeat *a woman appeared, richly dressed, passing along the fortifications \ Heraclius never spoke of Chosroes and the Khagan as his own enemies or even as the enemies of Constantinople. They were *traitors to God '; and they were always referred to as ' hated by God ' in contrast with his own soldiers ‘ whom Christ loved \ The Byzantine Empire could be saved at this time only by a man of enthusiasm, great military ability and endurance. Religion gave enthusiasm to Heraclius and nature had made him a great general. But the third quality is harder to discern ; perhaps history will never know how far the changes in Heraclius' fortunes were due to himself. After his spirited rebellion against Phocas in 610 he entered on a period of disaster. In 612 his most trusted general had to be deposed for conspiracy. In 617 he was led into a trap by the Khagan, who arranged a friendly meeting at the Long Walls, and suddenly made a treacherous attack. Heraclius saved himself by flight, but was unable to prevent the suburbs of the city from sack. Chosroes of Persia was advancing from the east. He captured Emesa in 611, Damascus in 613, and Jerusalem in 614. Christ's earthly home was desecrated by pagans. The wood of the true Cross, holiest of relics, was carried into Persia. Chosroes sent to demand submission from Heraclius, warning him not to trust in that Christ who was unable to save Himself from the Jews. One Persian army advanced through Asia Minor as far as Chalcedon, and another captured Egypt, cutting off the grain supply of Constantinople. Heraclius was silen t; it is hard to tell whether his was the silence of despair or of preparation. At last a change came. As late as 618 Heraclius was said to be so hopeless that he was thinking of retiring from Constantinople to Africa. But a year later he was in the midst of preparations—enlisting and drilling a new army, raising crusading funds from the treasures of the churches, and actually inspiring Constantinople with enough self-denial to let him cut down the bread dole and economize in public

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services. Then followed a series of great campaigns (622628) in Asia Minor, Armenia and Persia by which he saved his empire. A united attack of the Avars and the Persian army from Chalcedon failed to take Constantinople in 626 ; and meanwhile Heraclius won victory after victory, pursued Chosroes to Nineveh in 627, and at last saw his great enemy dethroned and killed by revolution. Persia was vanquished for ever. In 629 Heraclius entered Jerusalem and restored there the wood of the Cross. This was his most glorious moment. It was said that about this time Heraclius received a letter from some obscure Arab called Mahomet, who was preaching a new religion and wanted the emperor to adopt it. Heraclius, already well provided with religious beliefs, destroyed the letter without considering it. Nor would he have thought much of Mahomet's gospel even if he had understood it. Heraclius was the heir to an ancient civilization and a religion already respectably old, but Mahomet was a pioneer living among barbarous wandering tribes of Arabs whose food and ideas were scanty. He was a passionate, erratic prophet of beliefs that he himself understood only sometimes in rapturous visions. Inspiration showed him the many little local gods of Arabia drawn into one almighty and yet merciful being surrounded with angels and genii, ‘ who has created life and death that he might prove you which is most righteous in his actions ; and he is mighty, and ready to forgive. . . . By the angels who rank themselves in order; and by those who drive forward and dispel the clouds ; and by those who read the Koran for an admonition ; verily your God is one.' This universal king of mankind had raised up Mahomet himself as an apostle or prophet to purify the people and to teach them wisdom. His mission was to declare that belief in God should lead men to choose the good life as the only means of pleasing Him, and that a day was coming when their choice should be rewarded. *When the sun shall be folded up ; and when the stars shall fa ll; and when hell shall bum fiercely; and when paradise shall be brought near ; every soul shall know what it hath wrought. . . . It is a day when one soul shall not be able to obtain anything on behalf of another so u l: and the command, on that day, shall be God's.' The wicked burned for ever ; but the righteous went to inhabit the shady

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gardens of paradise, where there was plenty of water in the fountains, plenty of silk cushions to lie on, and plenty of black-eyed and agreeable damsels. All this, and much more, was preached by Mahomet in the streets of Mecca, where he was a merchant; and the confused, glowing sentences are preserved for us in the Koran, which became the Bible of Islam. The Arabs adopted this religion with an ease that was rather surprising, considering that ideas of the unity of God, the good life, and immortality were all new to them. But two things made it possible for them to become good Mahometans. In the first place the religion was not different from their own, but only an extension of i t ; their gods were not destroyed, but absorbed—*the gods are one God '; the black stone that they had worshipped at Mecca was still a sacred relic in the Ka’ba, or temple of Mahometan worship. In the second place, by a series of chances Mahometanism almost at once became connected with plunder and tribute ; and the Arabs were poor men. In 622 Mahomet and his followers were expelled from Mecca and took refuge in Medina. He was obliged to live by plundering the caravans, and this involved him in war which ended in the conquest of Mecca in 630. The tribes of central Arabia tried to regain the town, and they in their turn were defeated and made to accept Islam or pay tribute. In 632 Mahomet died, but his successors were tempted to raid the borders of Persia and the Byzantine Empire, generally on the invitation of native tribes who found the imperial taxation rather too heavy for them. The tribute to Medina was cheaper, and it could even be avoided by adopting the religion. This friendliness on the part of the provinces, joined with the famine and poverty of their own land, soon encouraged the Arabs to pass from raiding to deliberate conquest. Thus began a period of great invasions from the south into the lands that Heraclius had just annexed. The movement opened with almost simultaneous attacks on Syria, Persia and Egypt. The first big attack on Persia was made in 637, when the Arabs won the victory of Kadislya and took Ctesiphon. In 641 they completed their conquest by the battle of Nihawand. Egypt was attacked in 639 ; the battle of Heliopolis was won in 640 and Alexandria fell

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in 642. Thereafter the conquest moved more slowly, but by degrees the whole of northern Africa was gained and Carthage captured in 698. The Arabs had meanwhile invaded Syria and won their first victory over Heraclius’ troops at Ajnadain in 634. In 635 they took Damascus. Heraclius, now ageing, nerved himself, and in 636 sent against them every man he could raise. He was defeated and his army cut to pieces at the battle of the Yarmuk. Jerusalem fell in 638. When Heraclius died in 641 he left behind him a defeated empire, open to fearful danger. The whole situation between East and West had changed. The Mahometans were united by their religion and their devotion to one ruler or Caliph, the representative of the Prophet. They were clearly aiming at a general invasion of the West. In 711 they crossed to Spain. In 717 they besieged Constantinople. Western civilization was saved, in part by its own efforts. Although the greater part of Spain fell to the Moors, they were turned back from France in 732 by Charles Martel at the battle of Tours or Poitiers. In Constantinople there appeared as deliverer a hardy peasant who rose through force of character and military genius to become the Emperor Leo III, or Leo the Isaurian. Under his command the great capital held out gallantly ; it is not an easy city to conquer. Nevertheless, throughout the rest of the Middle Ages it was in constant danger, and the defence was to end at last, after seven hundred years, in defeat. Safety depended chiefly on the disunion that developed among the Mahometans themselves ; there were soon rival caliphs, and the empire was broken up by civil war. After the eighth century the first force of Islam was spent and the Byzantine Empire entered a period of comparative quiet. It was for Leo III to determine the lines on which imperial development was to move. He was a bold, tactless reformer who resisted abuses with as much energy as he had resisted the Saracen on the field of battle. The use of sacred images and pictures which Heraclius had loved was abhorrent to Leo ; he felt that such use was not only superstitious and almost idolatrous in itself, but also gave too much influence to the monks and made Christendom a scandal to the world of Islam. In 726 he passed the first of a series of acts against

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the use of images in religious worship. All the empire was divided into the party of the Iconoclasts, or image breakers, and the party of the monks who defended images. Until the death of Leo's son in 775, and again under later emperors between 813 and 842, the government was iconoclastic. Monasteries were dissolved, their treasures confiscated, their champions persecuted and even killed. The ‘ godless art of painting' was utterly forbidden. This movement was probably a genuine attempt to purify divine worship, but it was disfigured by cruelty and greed, and deserved to fail. After 842 there was a change of government and images were restored. Leo's secular policy too was bold and important but finally unsuccessful. He defeated the Bulgars in 774, but they continued to attack the empire, and were tamed only gradually. He made a gallant effort to prevent the degradation of the small freeholder into serfdom; but serfdom was inevitable as a system of aristocracy and large estates developed, and neither Leo nor his successors was able to stop it. In his time the main strength of the Byzantine Empire were the classes of independent freeholders and of soldiers holding small farms on condition of military service ; but by the time of the crusades the land was cultivated by villeins, some of them still possessing personal liberty, but many of them bound to the soil and owing heavy dues to their lord, the church and the state. The gradual degradation of the peasant was one of the main cases of the final decline of Byzantium. Commercially, however, Constantinople increased its greatness. Besides managing the carrying trade of the East, the great city was itself a centre of manufacture, particularly in armour, rich woven stuffs of all kinds and colours, and articles of luxury. The workers were organized in groups called systemata which could be entered only after a close apprenticeship, and which produced generations of men who were artists in their work. This rich, industrious class of bourgeois produced m ost of th e w ealth of C onstantinople, and continued

to do so until it was ruined by taxation and foreign competition in the time of the later crusades. Meanwhile, in spite of their trade relations, the Eastern Empire after Leo's time drifted farther and farther away from the West. A long estrangement began to divide the Greek

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Church from the church at Rome. There was a serious quarrel in 863, when the pope threatened the patriarch with excommunication, and the Byzantine emperor in return threatened the pope with deposition. A long controversy about doctrine began when the Romans spoke of the Holy Spirit as proceeding from the Father and the Son (ftlioque), while the Greeks held that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. These quarrels were deeply regretted by the best men on both sides, but they were difficult to stop. The simple fact was that since there were two empires in Europe it was almost inevitable that there should be two churches as well. The separation of the eastern and western churches was prepared when Constantine founded the New Rome, and it was determined when the pope crowned Charles the Great as emperor. Pope and patriarch were natural rivals; and the ideas of universal papal authority which developed in the time of Hildebrand were certain to strain their relations too far. In 1054 Leo IX's ambassadors bore to Constantinople the final sentence of separation. The long prosperity of Byzantium was broken in the eleventh century by the rise of a new Mahometan power. A young and fierce race called the Seljuq Turks began to advance against the old governments of Baghdad and Syria. In 1063 it was commanded by a great king named Alp Arslan, or *The Courageous Lion who wished to create a powerful and highly civilized state. His chief minister, Nizam-al-Mulk, was the friend of Omar Khayyam and founded the University of Baghdad. The spirit of this civilization was one of poetry and mathematics, more scientific than the civilization of the West, but equally mystical. Omar was writing a learned treatise on algebra at a time when the Western world was quite ignorant of the subject. But Turk and Christian alike believed that the end of life is a return to God, and the remark of a later Turkish hero, Saladin, might easily have been echoed by the crusaders who were fighting against him : ' The best death is to die on the Path of God.' When Alp Arslan became king the Turks had just conquered Armenia. Alp Arslan invaded and occupied Asia Minor and in 1071 defeated the troops of the Byzantine Empire at the battle of Manzikert. This decided the emperors to take the risk of an appeal for Western help. Alexius Comnenus, an

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emperor who was no fool, but too crafty and timid for greatness, sent to the pope a series of appeals culminating in 1090. The request was answered by Gregory VITs successor, Urban II, who preached the crusade at the Council of Clermont 1095, where ‘ fire fell from heaven like small stars ' and illuminated the hearts of all who heard him. It is easy to see why the popes welcomed the idea of a crusade. They wished to extend the frontiers of Christendom by conquests of pagan lands and perhaps by a reconciliation with the Greek Church, and they were glad of the chance to act as leaders of the Christian world. But it is harder to see why they were so successful. Men took the Cross in such numbers that the chronicler could say, ‘ God has poured the West into the E a st/ Why did thousands undertake this quest, when the way was so long and uncertain ? This question can best be answered by looking at the most widely different types of men who came on the first crusade. Far the most capable and successful of all the crusaders was Bohemond the Norman, son of Robert Guiscard, whom the chroniclers call wise, prudent, subtle and warlike, and whom the modern historian Von Sybel sums up as a ‘ lean, pale, ambitious prince \ He had already been fighting to extend the Norman conquests from Italy to the Balkans, and as he was not the son of Robert the Crafty for nothing, it is safe to suppose that he came on crusade in the hope of making fresh conquests in the East. His journey was simply a further wandering of the Norsemen. His wiliness was always very useful to the crusaders, whether he employed it in tricking Alexius, taking Antioch treacherously, or creating a panic among the Turks by declaring that Christian barons always roasted and ate their prisoners. In strong contrast to this figure stands the hero of the crusade, the darling of all the chroniclers and legend-makers, Godfrey of Bouillon, who finally became king of Jerusalem. * He was great of body, not of the greatest but of middle greatness, more strong than any other man, his arms great and stout, the breast much large and broad, and visage well made and coloured, hair fair/ This stalwart person was always supposed by the chroniclers to have gone on crusade for the sake of defending God against His enemies, and the account was in a great measure true. The crusades were (from one

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point of view) a soldier's version of the religion which S. Bernard could express in words, but which the soldiers could express only in acts. They, like S. Bernard, believed in the city of God, but it was to them no visible domain but 4the holy city of Jerusalem which our Lord so much loved that He would die therein for to save the world ', and the object of their journey was to *cleanse the holy city '. Godfrey and his kind regarded themselves as having entered the service of God in the same way that they might have entered the service of some greater feudal baron ; and while they were prepared to be loyal, they naturally expected some reward. The traditional account of Godfrey's speech before Antioch represents him as saying, *Therefore if it be so that we hold us all ready to do the service of our Lord for which we departed out of our countries, let us have in Him steadfast hope, for He guerdonneth well His soldiers ; when our enemies shall come to us let us receive them vigorously with glaives, spears and swords.' Such was the attitude of most of the crusading barons. They were nearly all Frenchmen, obstreperous subjects who received every encouragement from the king of France to leave his lands. Hugh of Vermandois went first, and there followed besides Godfrey and Bohemond, Bohemond's nephew Tancred, Robert of Normandy, eldest son of William the Conqueror, Stephen of Blois, Godfrey's brother Baldwin and Raymond of Toulouse. Among the poor people who crowded to the first crusade, most of them converted by the rather injudicious zeal of popular preachers like Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless, there was the same mixture of motives. Many of them were honestly inspired. They saw visions of Christ and the saints urging them to great deeds. But all the same, they were under the impression that the golden streets of Jerusalem were paved with real gold. It can be imagined with what feeling Alexius welcomed first the popular crusade of Peter the Hermit and later the crusading barons who met at Constantinople. It can be imagined why the chroniclers describe him as ‘ worried and bubbling over with rage ' when he heard that Bohemond was coming. Alexius had expected money, and perhaps a contingent of men, from the West, but he had never expected a rabble of peasants and half a dozen separate baronial armies intent upon

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conquest. For it was clear from the beginning that the barons' idea of defending Christendom was to take the offensive and set up an independent state in the Holy Land. Alexius did what he considered the best for himself. He shipped the peasant crusaders over to Asia Minor at once, where the greater number were instantly massacred by the Turks. A few under Peter the Hermit survived and hung on to the baronial army. When the barons came up, Alexius persuaded most of them to take an oath that they would do homage to him for their conquests. Later on he accompanied the crusade, only to desert it when the hardest fighting had begun. The Eastern Empire, therefore, which was the direct inspiration of the crusades, almost at once became their enemy. The barons were not statesmanlike enough to realize that it was essential for them to keep on good terms with Alexius. They disliked and distrusted him, and though they abused him for treachery, they were not sorry that he deserted them. Nor did they understand Eastern affairs enough to be surprised at the lack of resistance they encountered from the Turks. Alp Arslan would have swept them all into the sea ; but Alp Arslan was dead, and for the time the Turks were disunited. The crusaders captured Nicaea in 1097 and passed on through Asia Minor. Baldwin made such a successful independent expedition towards the Euphrates that he was invited to become lord of Edessa. The main body went on to Antioch, besieged it unsuccessfully, and at last were obliged to promise it to Bohemond, who took the city by treachery. When it was taken the crusaders were themselves besieged by a Turkish relieving force, and after a period of famine and despair they rallied their courage and cut their way out in seven armies. Then the whole mass streamed onwards to Jerusalem. Raymond of Toulouse was at their head, and the bishop who represented the pope had died at Antioch. Thus the pope lost what chance he had of controlling the situation when in the July of 1099 the crusaders entered Jerusalem. They appear to have acted there in accordance with the instincts of their barbarian forefathers. The first instinct of the feudal fighter who had taken a place was to sack it, and this instinct they obeyed so well that the streets ran with

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blood, ‘ in such wise that it was great pity for to see, if it had not been of the enemies of our Lord Jesus Christ \ The second instinct was to seize the land, not in order to work it themselves, but to establish feudal overlordship over the people who were already working it. The crusaders did this without the least regard for their military safety. They did not attempt to take Damascus or Aleppo, which commanded the caravan roads to the east, or to make a scientific frontier, though they knew that enemies were on three sides of them and the sea on the fourth. They set up four feudal lords, Baldwin of Edessa in the north, Bohemond of Antioch and Raymond of Tripolis in central Syria, and Godfrey of Jerusalem in the south. The lands of these princes formed the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. It need not be added that they at once began to quarrel with each other and to dispute the succession to the throne. Yet in this confused and blundering effort there had been something sublime. If the crusaders were not perfectly united they were at least more united than Europeans of to-day, to whom a joint crusade would be impossible. They were united by two things : their code of military prowess and their religion. Members of a young and fighting civilization, they worshipped feats of arms, and they upheld the crusading movement because it gave scope for heroic adventure. Here, for instance, is a typical mention of a knight otherwise unknown to history : ‘ And there was another valiant man in like wise named Robert of Paris. And he died by his prow ess/ Bohemond, the real hero of the crusade, was never the hero of the chroniclers, because he had a modem idea of generalship and did not expose himself unnecessarily. The only feat of arms the chroniclers could find to tell of him was that when Tancred was fighting in the melee as though he set no store by his life, Bohemond broke through the press and dragged him out again. But of Godfrey one tall story after another was told, culminating in the tale of his cutting a Turk in half at one blow, so that ‘ the upper part of him fell to the ground and the other part abode still sitting on the horse which entered into the c ity / These deeds of arms were consecrated to the service of Christ. The crusaders called themselves the *host of Christ \ When they attacked Jerusalem they were encouraged by visions of a knight with a

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clear and shining shield, signalling them to renew the attack. At the worst moment of the crusade, the siege of Antioch, an eyewitness wrote : 4And we were in that siege seven weeks and three days, and many of our men received their martyrdom there, and glad and rejoicing sent back their happy souls to G od ; and among the poorest people many died for the name of Christ, who in heaven triumphant wear the martyr’s robe, saying with one voice, “ 0 Lord, avenge our blood which was shed for Thee who art blessed and praised for ever and ever. Amen.” ' Miracles apart, it was clear that the only hope of safety for the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was in frequent communication with Christian Europe, of which it was only an outpost. But regular communication was impossible in those days, especially as the eastern empire was hostile. Therefore the first crusade was certain to be followed by others. Frequent expeditions were undertaken from all parts of Europe. The most famous of these are generally distinguished by numbers ; but while this arrangement is convenient it is very unreal. Reinforcements were constantly arriving in the Holy Land, and of the people mentioned in this book alone Hugh of Le Puiset, Henry the Lion, Frederick I and II, Philip II, Richard Cceur de Lion and Louis IX were all crusaders. The aim of all the early expeditions was to defend the kingdom of Jerusalem. A famous expedition generally known as the second crusade was made by Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany in 1147. But all these crusades ended in failure, for when the Turkish power rose again under Saladin, the Latin kingdom was doomed. The Turks recaptured Edessa in 1144, and in 1187 Saladin took Jerusalem. The third crusade started two years later, but had bad luck. Frederick Barbarossa was drowned on his way through Asia Minor. Philip II of France, joined after some months by Richard Coeur de Lion, at last succeeded in relieving Acre, which was almost the only town left to the Christians. Philip did not like his allies or the expedition, and he took the first opportunity of going home. Richard, left in command of a mixed and inefficient army, marched down the coast, winning the battle of Arsuf on his way. But he did not dare to attack Jerusalem, though his army reached Beit-nuba, only twelve miles away. He was obliged to make

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his way to Jaffa, where his sadness was a little cheered by a victorious encounter, singlehanded, with several Turks at once ; and at last he set sail, looking back all night through the starlight towards the Holy Land, and promising himself one day to return there. But there was to be no return, for the wars of East and West were entering a new stage* Merchants had followed the crusaders to Palestine and had brought back products of the East to tempt Western appetites. Sugar began to take the place of honey even in the manors of far-off England. The merchants brought back spices, gems, silks, a little cotton, dyes and drugs, and paid for them in coral, furs, woollen goods and precious metals. The Western merchants did not know where their purchases came from, except that they came from the East. They only knew that such goods arrived in Alexandria or the cities of Syria such as Acre or Damascus, or in Trebizond in the north of Asia Minor, or above all in Constantinople itself. Therefore merchants of Italian seacoast towns like Venice, Genoa or Pisa began to settle certain of their own traders in these cities whenever they were allowed to do so, and their traders bought the goods and shipped them off to the Italian cities where merchants from the rest of Europe could buy them again. The privilege of making such a settlement was very important to the merchants. Venice was given in 1084 a quarter in Constantinople, and in 1123 a street in Acre. Genoa, who took a great share in the first crusade, gained in 1105 streets in Jerusalem and Jaffa and one-third of Tyre and Caesarea. A greater charter in 1190 gave Genoa privileges in Sidon, Tyre and Acre, and Venice and Pisa did their best to prevent her from using them. It was an ambition to extend such privileges that changed the whole course of the crusades. In 1202 a crusading expedition collected at Venice on the appeal of Innocent III. There were present many feudal barons whose leaders, Baldwin of Flanders and Boniface of Montferrat, cam e from crusading fam ilies.

Their aim w as to

recover Jerusalem by an attack on Egypt, and they bargained with the Venetians for ships. The Venetians had enough ships, but the crusaders, who were needy, had not enough m oney; so the Venetians proposed that to pay their debt they should begin the crusade by capturing Zara, a towji 11

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which Venice had always wanted to possess. After the crusaders had agreed to this, they had lost their first enthusiasm for Jerusalem. Nobody knows who first uttered to them the word Constantinople, or suggested that the New Rome was nearer and richer than the Holy City. The plan was due, partly to the Venetians, partly to the alliance offered by a claimant to the throne of Constantinople, partly to the memory of that old hostility between the Eastern Empire and the crusades. The fourth crusade fulfilled the ambitions of Bohemond. In 1203 the crusaders reached Constantinople. At first sight they were dazzled with the city, so unlike their barbarian towns of the north, where low houses clustered in the shadow of some austere cathedral. The houses of Constantinople were of white stone or marble. The crusaders from their ships ‘ looked on it very earnestly, for they never thought there could be in all the world so rich a c it y ; and they marked the high walls and strong towers that enclosed it round about and the rich palaces and mighty churches, and the height and length of that city which above all others was sovereign. And let it be known to you that no man there was of such hardihood but his flesh trembled/ They attacked the city and conquered it, to find the spoils and riches even greater than their dreams. There was a palace whose walls were covered with pure gold. There was *gold and silver vessels and precious stones and samite and cloth of silk and robes of vair, grey and ermine and every choicest thing upon the earth'. In the excitement of dividing the spoil the crusaders forgot Jerusalem. They quarrelled with the Greek claimant whom they had brought with them and set up a Latin Empire of Constantinople under Baldwin of Flanders. The fourth crusade had lasting effects on crusading history. From a political point of view it brought destruction, for although the Latin Empire was weak and the Greeks reconquered it in 1261, the Byzantine Empire had been greatly weakened by the fall of Constantinople. This had offered to the Greek emperors a final proof that the West was not willing to support them against the Turks, and thus the chief political importance of the crusades was at an end ; they had ceased to act as the champion of Western civilization against the Turks. The religious motive too was weakened. Later

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crusades were undertaken either reluctantly, as in the crusade of Frederick II (1228-1229), or from purely political motives, as in the Albigensian crusades, or the crusades against Frederick II himself in Italy. The last true crusader was S. Louis of France, who made expeditions to Egypt and Tunis in 1248 and 1270, and who died on the second campaign. But although the fourth crusade was a political and religious disaster it was a great commercial triumph. At the fall of Constantinople Venice had been granted 4the quarter and the half of a quarter ' of the empire, and she took out her share chiefly in islands (including Crete) and coast-line, and in the establishment of a big colony in Constantinople itself. She had a monopoly of the Black Sea trade. Her commerce widely increased, and she had also a great home industry in glass, silk and fine cloth. The rough wool of English Cistercian monasteries came to Venice to be made up. Venice, Genoa and Pisa were therefore the heirs of the crusaders. The Eastern trade that they organized was perhaps not very valuable to Europe in itself, for it dealt chiefly in luxuries. But the fact of trading was of supreme value. It brought with it the virtues of increased knowledge, better seamanship, and above all more of that curiosity about the world in which the Middle Ages until now had been a little lacking. In 1271 a young man of seventeen named Marco Polo set out with his father on an adventure. Until this time the Venetians had been content to receive their Eastern goods from middlemen, knowing nothing of their place of origin. The secret of the East was to be solved by Marco, who passed through the well-known trading districts of Syria and Armenia into remoter lands. On the frontier of Armenia he found the manufacture of cloth of gold and silk. In Persia, where he saw the tombs of the great Magi, there were sold silk tissue, cottons and the finest needlework, embroideries of birds and beasts and flowers. Turquoises were found and the finest horses were bred there. At Hormuz he encountered the Indian merchants ‘ with ships loaden with spicery and precious stones, pearls, elephants' teeth, and many other wares/ He did not travel on the Indian merchants' sea route because the ships seemed untrustworthy, but he turned north again and took the upper road, passing through the wearisome desert of Gobi, haunted by demons. At last,

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three and a half years after leaving Venice, he reached the other great civilization of the world, where the Great Khan reigned in Cathay and where Chinese merchants in junks carried on a busier trade than the Venetians did in the Mediterranean. Here Marco Polo lived for seventeen years in the Great Khan's service, and he observed with pleasure and reverence the strange ways of a new world. But in 1292 he grew home-sick for Venice, and persuaded the Khan to let him make the return journey by sea as the escort of a little princess who was to marry the king of Persia. This return journey cleared up the mysteries of the Eastern trade. He saw the spices of Java and Sumatra, the sapphires, topaz and amethysts of Ceylon, with a ruby as thick as a man's arm, free from flaws and as red as fire. He described the diving for pearls in the Indian Ocean and how the Indians lived on rice instead of wheat, and how diamonds were found in the kingdom of Telingana, and what stores of pepper, ginger and Brazil-wood were at Quilon. The pepper of Quilon went all over the world, and some of it helped to season the salt beef of English manorial lords in their cold winter when the stock was killed off and there was little variety in food. Marco deposited his little princess in Persia, and then he came safely back to Venice and lived till 1324. He wrote a book describing his journey, but many of the Venetians would not believe his marvellous accounts, and the book had to wait for true appreciation till Western explorers again travelled by Marco Polo's route in the nineteenth century. Thus out of the decline of the crusades a new ideal developed. The crusades had begun as an attack on the East by the Western peoples ; and they had ended by inspiring men of the West to know the East better, though not well.

BOOK III THE TRANSITION TO MODERN TIMES

BOOK III TH E TRA N SITIO N TO M ODERN TIMES CHAPTER IX

THE DECLINE OF EMPIRE AND PAPACY I. C h a n g e s i n th e e m p ir e . Loss of prestige of emperor and rise of great families. Rudolf of Hapsburg separates Germany and Italy in practice. Henry VII fails to reunite them. Renewed wars of empire and papacy under Lewis IV. Charles IV gives a constitution to Germany. II. T h e d is a s te r s o f the p a p a c y . Effect of the victory over Frederick II. Boniface VIII and the attempt to assert papal power. The first great disaster: the affair of Anagni. The second disaster: the Babylonish captivity. An attempt to revive Rome : Rienzi. An attempt to revive the papacy : Catherine of Siena. The third disaster : the Great Schism. III. E ffe c t o f th ese c h a n g es o n p o li t i c a l th o u g h t. Dante and the ' De Monarchia \ Marsiglio and the * Defensor Pacis \ Wyclif. Chaucer. Hus : his dependence on Wyclif : his enemies and exile. IV. T h e C o n c ilia r M o v e m e n t. The Council of Pisa. Sigismund and his aims. The Council of Constance : its aims and difficulties : the trial of Hus : the ending of the schism : the question of reform. The Hussite Wars. The Council of Basle : the Hussite question solved : the question of papal authority : Eugenius IV quarrels with the Council and Aeneas Sylvius makes peace. V. T h e r e v iv a l o f the p a p a c y . Early career of Aeneas Sylvius, development of his character : he becomes pope : his attempt to save the Eastern Empire from the Turks : his failure and death. Future of the empires and papacy.

I

T has been seen that by the last half of the thirteenth century almost all the great lights of medieval history were past their zenith. The crusades had failed. Feudalism was to lose its reason for existence as the age of barbarian invasions became more and more remote. The monks and friars, having already lost their great leaders, were soon to be in danger of losing the inspiration those leaders had bequeathed. At the same time new activities began to appear—in the universities, the development of 167

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trade, the development of the nations, the new forms of representative government, new ways of making war—and these were not connected in one system of divine government as the activities of the past had been. The history of Europe became fuller, more complicated, more national. In this changed world men began to lose faith in the simple theory of a universal empire. The death of Frederick II, his indifference to Christian ideas, the defeat and disappearance of his house, were all shocks to the imperial tradition. It was impossible not to see that Germany had lost control of Italy and of herself. She was prosperous, but she was not well ruled ; and people ceased to pretend any longer that she had once been governed in the Roman spirit and soon would be again. Although the imperial title did not disappear, the real power came to be held by great landlords, either bishops, like the archbishops of Mayence, Cologne and Treves, or big families like the Hapsburgs, the Wittelsbachs and the House of Luxemburg. These last began a sort of game of collecting estates by marriage, purchase or force, and quarrelling among themselves about the imperial title. After the defeat of the Hohenstaufen the empire was no longer hereditary in practice but became genuinely elective, and as there were always two or three claimants and no one quite knew who had the right to elect or how the election should be carried on, there were lively times at each accession. Between a . d . 1273 and 1493 there were ten emperors, three wars of succession and two depositions. This new empire, in which Rome had practically disappeared and feudalism was triumphant, came into being in 1273, when Rudolf of Hapsburg was elected emperor. He was a lean, tall man with a long nose, brave, homely and stingy. Although nothing that he did was of very great importance he nevertheless changed the empire by limiting its ambitions. He cared nothing about Italy and willingly resigned all his claims there to the pope, with whom he was determined not to quarrel. * I leave it to you to decide whether I am to believe this or th a t/ he would say to his confessor. The things he did care about were wars against the robber counts of Suabia, wars against a rebel king of Bohemia (1276-8), attempts to keep order by proclaiming a public peace (1287) and hunting. He was generally successful in the wars, and added to his

THE DECLINE OF EMPIRE AND PAPACY

169

family estates the duchy of Austria which had belonged to the king of Bohemia. The Hapsburg family was to be connected with Austria for hundreds of years, and in the end the Hapsburgs were to become hereditary emperors ; but Rudolf died in 1291 knowing nothing of the changes he had helped to bring about. The emperors who followed Rudolf had their choice whether they would work entirely for German power as he had done or whether they would return to the ideas of the Hohenstaufen. These ideas, ambitious and yet idealistic, with their reverence for history and love of daring, found no champion until a Luxemburg Henry VII was made emperor in 1308 and soon afterwards added the kingdom of Bohemia to his family possessions. In 1310 this great-hearted adventurer entered Italy, determined to act as a just and righteous Caesar who should take sides with no party and make peace between all. No country could have received him more gladly. Dante called him the Rex Justus of Augustine, the golden eagle of paradise; the cities of the north sent deputies to welcome him ; the pope spoke of him as the king who brought peace with him. Henry was crowned King of Lombardy in 1311 and tried to reconcile the parties which existed in every Italian city and which had taken the names of Guelf and Ghibelline. But he never from the beginning had the remotest chance of success. Florence and Naples were against him. When he reached Rome in 1312 he found a city of ruins and barricades, half of it occupied by a Neapolitan army, and its inhabitants in a fever of excitement and fear. Since Florence was Guelf, Henry was forced to become a Ghibelline in selfdefence ; and this marks the real failure of his attempt. He was crowned in Rome and then retired north, fighting desperately. In Pisa he wintered and repaired his military losses ; but the loss of his prestige was never to be repaired. He had barely left Pisa for the southern march when he died of fever in the unhealthy August of 1313. A fter him cam e an em peror of the house of W ittelsb ach ,

Lewis IV of Bavaria, whose reign brought a feeble renewal of the wars of empire and papacy, just as Henry VIPs reign had brought a renewal of imperial ambitions. The quarrel for succession reached such a climax in Lewis’ time that Pope John X X II was encouraged to join in and claim the right of

170

AN INTRODUCTION TO MEDIEVAL HISTORY

arbitration which Innocent III had once held. All the old weapons were used. John deposed Lewis in 1324, Lewis invaded Italy in 1327, was crowned in Rome and set up an anti-pope there in 1328. But the old skill in using these weapons was gone, and gone too was the sense that they were being used in a noble cause. No one took much notice of Lewis' anti-pope, who was soon hurrying off to the pope for forgiveness. No one was impressed by John's verdict of deposition ; in 1338 the electors of Germany met at Rense and declared that they were the only people who could make or unmake emperors, and that the pope's consent or confirmation was not needed. The pope succeeded at last in persuading a party among the electors to choose as anti-emperor Charles of Bohemia, grandson of Henry V I I ; but Lewis died in 1347 before the issue could be fought out, and Charles became emperor without great opposition. Charles was a Slav in appearance, small and black-haired. He was not popular except in Bohemia ; people said he never looked anyone straight in the face. The knightly spirit of his grandfather had not descended to him, but he was far more able and subtle. His policy was perfectly definite ; he meant to abandon Italy and the papacy and attend to Germany ; and later historians' opinions of this policy vary according to the value they put on geography or history as worthy to decide the fates of nations. Charles took the geography of Germany into consideration when he decided that his kingdom must end at the Alps in the south, but that it could be expanded eastwards ; and he denied the claim of past history when he decided that Germany and Rome had nothing to do with each other. He had to deal with a disorderly country in which the great landlords were dangerously quarrelsome and the great cities (as it seemed to him) dangerously independent. The time was gone when the emperor might have hoped to subdue the landlords or confiscate their lands. Charles was facing four hundred years too late the problem which William I of England and Louis VI of France had faced in the eleventh century. It was too late to subdue the feudal lords ; all that he could hope to do was to find in the very strength of feudalism itself some remedy against its worst evils. This was the real aim of the constitution which he drew up in 1356, the Golden Bull. In this constitution

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. 156, 250, 256, 258, 259 life and work, 132-8 Bernardino, 185 Berne, 214-16 Berri, 199 Besan9on, diet of, 117 Bigge, William, 75 Bj6m Ironside, 65 Black Death, 218 Blois, 78, 84, 86, 89 Boccaccio, 246 Boethius, 15-16 Bohemia, 99, 101, 107, 168, 170, 179, 180, 210, 211, 212, 222 Bohemond, 155, 156, 157, 158, 162, 187 Bologna, 138, 141, 142 Boniface, 28, 256-7 Boniface VIII, 173 Boniface of Montferrat, 161-2 Bordeaux, 196, 197 Bourbon, 199

Bourges, Pragmatic Sanction of,

185

Bouvines, battle of, 91, 121 Brabant, 102 Brandenburg : Hohenzollerns in, 188 one of Seven Electors, 172 origin of, 103 Bremen, 225 Brescia, 115, 123 Brethren of the Hospital of S. John, 127, 128 Bretigni, treaty of, 196 Brittany, 66, 78, 84, 89, 90, 136, 192, 231 Bruges, 224, 226, 230, 231, 233, 234, 235, 237, 238 Brunhild, 46-7 Bruno, 127 Brunswick, 102, 239 Bulgaria, 153, 186, 187, 21 x Burgundy : duchy of, 78, 84, 90, 92, 100, 187, 188, 192, 199, 200, 201, 202-4 kingdoms of, 70, 78, 84, 100, 192 part of Frankish State, 17, 46, 68 Byzantium. See Eastern Empire. Caesarea, 161 Calais, 196, 238 Cambridge, 138 Canon Law, 21, 35, 108 Canossa, 112-13, I26, 173 Cape of Good Hope, 210 Capitularies of Charles the Great, 53 Capuchin Order, 142 Carolingian Empire : coronation of Charles, 55 downfall, 65-70 its foundation, 49 Carolingian Renaissance, 50-3 Carrara, 242 Carter, Thomas, 221-2 Carthage, 12, 40, 152 Carthusians, 127 Casimir III of Poland, 210

INDEX Cassel, battle of, 236 Cassiodorus, 15 Castile, 95, 96, 97, 206, 207, 208, 209, 220 Castillon, battle of, 201 Catalaunian Fields, battle of, 13 Catalonia, 95, 96, 208, 218 Cathay, 164 Catherine of Siena, 175-6 Cesarini, 184-5, 186 Ceuta, 210 Chalons, 85, 133 Champagne, 78, 84, 90, 96, 192 Charles Martel, 48, 152 Charles VII of France, 200-2 Charles VIII of France, 214, 242 Charles IV of Germany, 170-2, 175, 180 Charles of Anjou, 213-14 Charles the Bald, 62, 63, 68, 69 Charles the Bold, 202-5 Charles the Great, 15, 29, 83, 100, 106, 109, 114, 120 125, 145, 191, 204, 222, 253 appearance and character, 50 government, 50-6 his wars, 49 Chartres, 72, 85, 134, 135, 259 Chaucer, 178 Chosroes of Persia, 148-50 Chrysostom, 22 Cid, 96-7 Cimabue, 142 Ciompi, 231, 242, 243 Cistercians, 127, 134, 139 Citeaux, 127 Civitate, battle of, 81, n o Clement VII, 176 Clericis Laicos, 173 Clermont, Council of, 155 Clotilda, 27 Clovis, 16-17, 26, 27, 28, 30, 91 Cluny, 126, 127, 129, 138, 139 Cnut, 62, 78 Cologne, 102, 139, 168, 172, 188, 224, 227, 237, 240 Columbus, 209 Comines, Philip of, 202, 203, 204, 205 Commendation, 64 Compi£gne, 135

325

Conflans, treaty of, 203, 204, 205 Conrad III of Germany, 133, 160 Constance : council of, 180-3, 184, 191 treaty of, 118 Constantine, 8, 22, 31, 116, 145 Constantinople, 81, 84, 223 centre of religious life, 21 fall to Turks, 186-7 founded, 8 from Justinian to the crusades,

1 4 5 -5 4

separation of Greek and Roman Churches, n o , 154 the patriarch and the pope, 33 under Justinian, 37-9 Corbeil, treaty of, 94 Cordova, 95, 97 Coreggio, 250 Cortenuova, battle of, 123 Cortes, 96, 207, 208, 209 Counts, officials of Charles the Great, 53, 54, 60, 62 Courtrai, battle of, 236 Covadonga, 94 Cr^y, battle of, 196, 199 Crema, 115 Cremona, 115 Crusades: Albigensian, 91, 97, 163, 191 First, 155-60 Fourth, 161-2 Frederick II's, 122-3, 162-3 Louis IX ’s, 160, 163 Second, 133 Third, 114, 160-1 Ctesiphon, 151 Cyprian, 22 Dacia, 3-5 Damascus, 149, 152, 158, 161, 223 Damian, Peter, n o Danelaw, 70 Dante, 145, 169, 176, 177, 245, 248, 256 Danzig, 239 De Civitate Dei, 23 Decimum, battle of, 40 Denmark, 64, 211-12, 218, 222, 240

326

AN INTRODUCTION TO MEDIEVAL HISTORY

Dominic, 139 Donation of Constantine, 31, 109 Duccio di Buoninsegna, 142, 249 Dyle, battle of, 70 East Anglia, 78 East Mark, 99 Eastern Empire : allows rule of Theodoric, 15 attacked by barbarians, 13 becomes sole seat of empire, 14 divided from West, 6 history from Justinian to 1261, Chap. VIII history from 1261 to 1453, 186-7 relations with Charles the Great, 49, 55 revival under Justinian, 3743, 45 trade, 146, 153, 161, 223 Edessa, 157, 158, 160 Edward I of England, 173, 195, 217, 226, 232 Edward III of England, 195, 19b, 233 Edward IV of England, 204 Egypt, 149, 151, 240 Einhard, 50, 53, 55, 114 Election decree, n o Emesa, 149 England, 16, 33, 65, 66, 68, 74, 78, 80, 81, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 119, 191, 195201, 204, 221, 236, 237 Enguerrand de Couci, 93 Eparch, 147 Epila, battle of, 207 Eric the Red, 65 Eugenius IV, 184-5, 186 Fathers of the Church, 22, 51 Ferdinand of Aragon, 208-9, 218, 220, 233, 254 Ferrara, Council of, 185 Feudalism, Chap. IV, passim decline, 216-22 Field of Lies, 68 Filioque clause, 154 Flanders, 84, 91, 192, 195, 196, 223, 231, 236-7, 240

Flarcheim, battle of, 113 Florence, 169, 185, 223, 224, 226, 231, 234, 240, 241, 242-4, 2 5 2 -4

Council of, 185 Fontenoy, battle of, 68 Fontevrault, 127 Fra Angelico, 144 France, 139, 174, 191, 220, 221, 223, 226, 230, 236, 239 Carolingian rule, 46-56, 62 establishment of barbarian rule in Gaul, 16-17 frontier problem with Germany, IOO-I history 987-1270, 83-94 history in later Middle Ages, 191-205 relations with papacy, 173, 176, 180, 187 Viking raids, 65 Franche Comt6, 192, 204 Francis of Assisi, 119, 139-42, 250 Franconia, 78, 99, 102, 219 Franks, 65, 83, 91 their conversion, 27-8 their establishment in Gaul, 16-17 their mode of life, 17-18 Frederick I of Germany, 160, 225 internal policy, 102-3 war with papacy, 114-18 Frederick II of Germany, 160, 163, 168, 172, 213, 214, 225,

245

internal German policy, 103, 121-3 minority, 118, 120, 121 war with papacy, 121-3 Frederick III of Germany, 185-6, 188 Friars, 139-42, 178 Frisia, 66 Fulbert of Chartres, 77, 86, 257 Fulk Nerra, 71 Gaiseric, 12 Gallipoli, 186 Gascony, 192

INDEX Genoa, 115, 133, 161, 163, 186, 223, 224, 242 Germany, 89, 113, 174, 219, 222, 223, 225 becomes separate State, 68-9 conquests of Charles the Great 49 defeats Vikings, 70 duchies and frontier, 78, 84 history in later Middle Ages, Chap. IX internal history, 918-1273, 99-103 Viking raids, 65 wars of Empire and papacy, Chap. VI Ghent, 223, 224, 233, 236 Ghibelline, 102, 114, 120, 169, 241 Ghirlandaio, 250, 253 Gilbert of Sempringham, 128 Giotto, 143, 249, 250 Giselbert of Lotharingia, 100-1 Glarus, 214-16 Glasgow, 139 Godfrey of Bouillon, 155-8, 187 Golden Bull, 170-2 Goslar, 101 Gothland, 237 Goths : conversion, 26 early character and government, 3-6 relations with Rome, 9, 18 See also Ostrogoths and Visigoths. Granada, 99, 209 Grand Domestic, 147 Grand Drungarius, 147 Grand Logothete, 147 Grandella, battle of, 213 Grandmont, 127 Grandson, battle of, 204 Great Schism, 176 Greek Church, n o , 152-4, 185 Greenland, 65 Gregory I, the Great, 31-6, 47, 129, 257 Gregory VII, 110-13, 118, 120, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259 Gregory IX, 122-3, I4I

3*7

Grenoble, 70, 139 Guadaloupe, sentence of, 220 Guelf, 102, 120, 169, 241 Guesclin, Bertrand of, 196 Guillaume, Karle, 218 Gutenberg, 249 Hadrian IV, 115-17, 129 Hadrianople : battle of, 9, 14 fall of, 187 Hamburg, 224, 237 Hanseatic League, 224, 237-40 Hapsburgs, 103, 168, 169, 185, 188, 214-16 Harzburg, 101 Heidelberg, 139 Heliopolis, battle of, 151 Helsingborg, battle of, 239 Henry I of Germany, 15, 78, 99 Henry III of Germany, 105, 107-8, 109, h i Henry IV of Germany, 101, 110-13, 258 Henry V of Germany, 113-14 Henry VI of Germany, 118 Henry VII of Germany, 169, 170 Henry I of England, 81, 87, 114, 133 Henry II of England, 81, 82, 90, 225, 226 Henry III of England, 93, 232 Henry V of England, 199-200, 224 Henry the Lion, 102, 115, 117, 160, 225 Henry the Navigator, 209 Heraclius, 148-52 Hermandades, 209-8 Hildebrand. See Gregory VII. Hincmar of Rheims, 78 Hohenstaufen, 114, 123, 168, 172, 240 Holland, 102 Honorius, Emperor, 11 Honorius III, 122 Hugh Capet, 78, 83, 86, 91, 192, 205 Hugh of Cluny, 126 Hugh of Le Puiset, 87, 88, 160 Hugh of Vermandois, 156

328

AN INTRODUCTION TO MEDIEVAL HISTORY

Humbert, Cardinal, n o Hundred Years’ War, 195-201, 221, 236 Hungary : establishment of, 101-2 history, 107, 139, 180, 210, 218, 222 the Hungarians attack Germany, 99 Huns, 9, 12-14 Hus, 178-81, 183, 212 Hussite Wars, 183-4 Iconoclasts, 152-3 Ingeborg, 119 Innocent III, 122, 161, 170, 172, 173, 189, 258 his pontificate, 118-21 Innocent IV, 123 Investiture Decree, m - 1 2 Ireland, 66 Isabella of Castile, 207-9 Italy : barbarian invasions of, 10-11, 13-14, 15-16, 40-1, 49 city life, Chaps. XI and XII passim part played in wars of Empire and Papacy, Chap. VI pa-s sim, 168, 169, 170 the Carolingian Empire in Italy, 49, 68, 69, 70 Ivan the Great, 211 Jacquerie, 197, 218 Jagello of Lithuania, 210 James I of Aragon, 97 Jerome, 22, 51 Jerusalem, 21, 30, 149, 150, 152, 157, 160 Joan of Arc, 175, 200—1 John Hunyadi, 187, 211 John of Bulgaria, 119 John of England, 90, 91, 92, 119, 120, 195, 232 John of France, 196, 197, 198 John the Fearless, 199-200 John XXII 169-70, 177, 178 John XXIII, 180, 181 Joinville, 92, 259 Jordanes, 15

Julian, 7, 8 Justinian, 145, 146, 206, 255 life and work, 37-45 Kadisiya, battle of, 151 Kalmar, Union of, 212 Kossovo, battle of, 187 Kuttenberg, battle of, 183 Landino, 251, 253 Laon, 88, 134, 136, 224, 225 Las Navas de Tolosa, 97 Latin, 50-3, 108, 135, 146, 246-8 Empire of Constantinople, 162, 186 Kingdom of Jerusalem, 157-61 Laupen, battle of, 215 Laura, 247 Lechfeld, battle of, 99 Leghorn, 241 Legnano, battle of, 117, 123 Leicester, 226, 228, 234, 235 Leipzig, 139, 179 Leo I, 13 Leo III, 55-6 Leo IX, 109-10 Leo III, the Isaurian, 152-3 Leon, 95, 96 Leonardo da Vinci, 250, 251 Lewis IV of Germany, 169-70, 177, 178 Li&ge, 102, 203 Lindisfarne, 66 Lipan, battle of, 184 Lithuania, 210 Lodi, 115, 241 Logothete of the Public Treasury, 147 Lombard cities, 115-18, 122-3 League, 117, 225, 233 Lombards, 32, 42, 45, 49, 55 London, 231, 232, 233, 234, 237, 238 Lorraine. See Lotharingia. Lorris, treaty of, 94 Lothair, 68-9, 100, 204 Lotharingia, 68-9, 78, 84, 99, 100-1, 112 Louis VI of France, 87-9, 133, 1 7 °> J 95

INDEX Louis VII of France, 89, 133, 160 Louis IX of France, 92-4, 160, 163, 192, 202, 213, 259 Louis XI of France, 202-5 Louis the Debonnaire, 62, 68 Louis the German, 62, 68 Louvain, 139 Lubeck, 102, 224, 225, 226, 233, 234, 237, 239 Lucerne, 214, 215 Luna, 66 Luxemburg, 168, 188 Magnus of Norway, 212 Mahomet, 47, 150-1 Maine, 90, 94, 204 Majorca, 97 Manfred, 213 Mantua, Congress of, 187 Manzikert, battle of, 154 Marcel, Etienne, 197-8 Marco Polo, 163-4 Margaret of Denmark, 212 Marsiglio of Padua, 177-8 Martin V, 182 Maximilian, 188 Mayence, 168, 172, 188 Pragmatic Sanction of, 185 Mayors of the Palace, 48, 49, 50 Mecca, 151 Medici, 242-4 Cosimo, 244, 252 Lorenzo, 244, 250-4 Piero, 244, 252 Medina, 151 Mercia, 78 Merseburg, 99 Metz, 102, 188 Milan, 115, 117, 133, 187, 224, 241, 242, 246, 249 Missi dominici, 54, 60, 93 Monasticism : K Benedictine rule, 24-5 ^ early influence, 28—9 k origins, 23-4 reform movements, 125-35 Mons en Puelle, battle of, 236 Montlhery, battle of, 203 Montpellier, 194, 197 Morat, battle of, 204

329

Morgarten, battle of, 215 Murcia, 97 Muret, Etienne de, 127 Nafels, battle of, 215 Nancy, battle of, 204 Naples, 81, 122, 138, 169, 176, 214, 241, 242, 252, 253 Napoleon, 32, 56 Narses, 41-2 Navarre, 95, 96, 98, 209 Neustria, 46-7, 68, 70 Nicaea, 21, 157, 186 Nicopolis, battle of, 187 Nihawand, battle of, 151 Nineveh, 150 Nizam-al-Mulk, 154 Noirmoutiers, 66 Norbert, 127 Nord Mark, 103 Normandy, 70, 78, 80, 84, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 192, 199, 201, 231 Normans in S. Italy, 80-3, n o , 113, 118, 121 Norsemen, 65-71, 91, 155 Northumbria, 78 Norway, 211-12, 213 Nottingham, 224, 225, 226, 232 Novgorod, 237, 238, 239 Nuremburg, 239 Odo, count of Paris, 70, 78 Odovacar, 14 Oissel, 66 Omar Khayyam, 154 Orderic, 132 Origen, 22 Orleans, 84, 87, 138, 192, 199 Ostrogoths, 14-16, 40-1 Otto I of Germany, 99-101, 104-5, 109, 125 Otto II of Germany, 105, 146 Otto III of Germany, 105-7, 109, 146 Otto IV of Germany, 91, 120-1 Ourique, battle of, 209 Oxford, 138, 225 Padua, 138, 241, 242, 246, 247 Palatinate of the Rhine, 102, 172

330

AN INTRODUCTION TO MEDIEVAL HISTORY

Papacy : early development to death of Gregory I, 21, 31-4 relations with Carolingians, 48, 50, 55 under German Emperors before Henry IV, 105, 106, 107-8 wars of Empire and Papacy, Chaps. VI and IX passim Paris, 66, 69, 70, 84, 88, 115, 134, z 3 5 > I3b, 138, 192, i 94> 201, 205 treaty of, 94 Paul the Lombard, 50 Pavia, 115 Pazzi revolt, 244, 252 Peasants’ Wars, 218-19, 221 Pedro IV of Aragon, 207, 208 Pelayo, 94 Pepin, King of the Franks, 49- 50, 55> I09 Pepin of Landen, 47-8 Peronne, 203, 225, 232 Persia, 41, 47, 55, i 48- 5°> *5L 163 Peter of Cluny, 129, 132 Peter of Tuscany, 50 Peter the Hermit, 156-7 Petrarch, 174, 175, I97> 245-8 Philip I of France, 87 Philip II of France, 119, 121, 192, 202, 232 crusade, 160-1 life and work, 89-92 Philip IV of France, 196, 202 government, 192-5 religious policy, 173-4 Philip VI of France, 195, 196 Philip of Burgundy, 200 Philip of Suabia, 120 Phocas, 148 Piacenza, 115 Picquigny, treaty of, 204 Pinturicchio, 188 Pisa, 161, 163, 169, 224, 241 Council of, 180, 181 Pius II. See Aeneas Sylvius. Poitiers or Tours : battle of, 48, 55 battle of (1356), 196, 198, 199

Poitou, 90, 94, 192, 196 Poland, 101, 210, 211, 222 Pollentia, battle of, 11 Portugal, 96, 119, 209-10 Prague : city of, 183, 184 four articles of, 184 university of, 139, 179 Premonstratensians, 127 Provence, 91, 192, 204 Prussia, 103, 128 Quadrivium, 135 Quaestor, 147 Ravenna, 15, 16 Raymond of Toulouse, 156, 157,

158

Remigius, 27, 29 Rense, 170 Rheims, 89, 196, 197 Richard I of England, 90, 160-1 Rienzi, 174-5 Robert Guiscard, 81, 155 Robert of Normandy, 156 Robert the Strong, 70 Roger I of Sicily, 81 Roger II of Sicily, 81-3, 121 Roland, Cardinal. See Alexander III. Rollo, 65, 70 Roman Law, 43-5, 92, 108, 114 Rome : beginning of ‘ imperial idea ’ in medieval history, 37 besieged by Belisarius, 40-1 centre of religious life, 21 Charles crowned there, 55 entered by Henry VII, 169 entered by Lewis IV, 170 has no longer a separate emperor, 14 Otto I crowned there, 100, 104, 105 part played in general history, xvii-xix part played in wars of empire and papacy, Chap. VI passim policy of Otto III there, 105-7 return of Papacy, 176

INDEX Rome (c o n t .) : Rienzi in Rome, 174-5 sacked by Alaric, 10-11 state of her empire, about a . d . 300, 6-9 Roncaglia, diets of, 116, 117 Roncesvalles, battle of, 49, 253 Rouen, 84, 199, 225 Rudolf of Hapsburg, 168-9, 206, 214 Russia, 119, 210, 222, 223, 237 St. Andrews, 139 St. Clair-sur-Epte, treaty of, 70 St. Denis, monastery of, 87, 136 St. Omer, 226-7 St. Quentin, 225 St. Victor, congregation of, 127 St. Waast, 66 Saladin, 160 Salerno, 113, 122 San Germano, treaty of, 123 Saragossa, 97 Sarzana, 241 Savonarola, 250-4, 256 Saxons, 16, 17, 18, 48, 49 Saxony, 68, 78, 99, 101, 102, 107, 172, 188 Schwyz, 214-16 Sempach, battle of, 215 Sens, council of, 138 Serbia, 186-7, 211 Seville, 66, 97 Sforza, 242 Sicilian Vespers, 213 Sicily, 12, 81-3, 118, 1 1 9 , 121, 212-14 Siena, 142, 185, 188 S ie te P a r tid a s , 206 Sigismund, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 187, 211 Sluys, battle of, 196 Soissons : council of, 136 town of, 225 Spain, 139, 176, 181, 182, 191, 220, 223, 225, 229 barbarian invasions, 12, 41 history from 718 to 1250, 9 4 - 9 history in later Middle Ages, 206-9

33i

Spain (co n t.) : Mahometan conquest, 47-8 Viking raids, 65, 66 States General of France, 173, 194, 195, 197, 198, 201-2, 205 Stephen of Blois, 156 Stihcho, 11 Stralsund, 234, 239, 240 Suabia,, 78, 99, 100, 103, 168 Siiger, 87, 89 Sutri, synod of, 108 Sweden, 211-12, 223 Switzerland, 191, 204, 212, 214-16 Sylvester II, 106-7 Taborites, 184 Taginae, battle of, 41 Taillebourg, battle of, 93 Tancred, 156, 158, 187, 188 Tannenberg, battle of, 210 Tell, William, 216 Templars, 127-8, 133 Teutonic Knights, 103, 128, 210 Theodora, 39 Theodoric, 14-16, 28, 30, 100 Theodulf the Visigoth, 50 Toledo, 97 Tortona, 115 Totila, 40-1 Toul, 102, 188 Toulouse, 78, 90, 91, 139 Touraine, 90 Tours : battle of, 48 school at, 53 Trebizond, 161, 223 Trfeves, 102, 168, 172, 188 Trivium, 135 Troyes, 136 battle of, 13 treaty of, 200 Turks : Ottoman Turks, 186—8 Seljtlq Turks, 154-63 Ugolino. S e e Gregory IX. Ulfilas, 26, 31 Ulm, 224, 239 Umayyad dynasty, 94, 95

332

AN INTRODUCTION TO MEDIEVAL HISTORY

Unstrut, battle on, i o i Unterwalden, 214-16 Urban II, 155 Urban IV, 176 Uri, 214-16 Utraquists, 184 Valencia, 97 Valentinian, 8 Valladolid, ordinance of, 220 Vallombrosa, 127 Vandals, 12, 17-18, 27, 40 Varna, battle of, 187 Vasco da Gama, 210 Venice : city of, 115, 161, 162, 163, 164, 186, 188, 223, 224, 230, 234, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 244-5, 246, 249 peace of, 117 Verdun : bishopric of, 102, 188 treaty of, 68, 69, 99, 191 Vergil, 51, 135, 246, 247 Verona, 241 Victor IV, 117 Vienna, 139 Vikings. S e e Norsemen.

Vincennes, 93 Visconti, 242 Visigoths, 4, i o - n , 12, 16, 17, 3i. 33. 43. 206 Volterra, 252 Waldemar III of Denmark, 212, 239-40 Walter the Penniless, 156 Wessex, 78 Wettin, 188 William I of England, 72, 81, 156, 170 William of Champeaux, 127 Winkelried, 215 Wisby, 224, 237, 239 Wittelsbach, 103, 168, 169, 188 Worms : Concordat of, 113-14 Council of, 112 Wyclif, 178-80, 181 YarmQk, battle of, 152 Zahringen, 103 Zara, 161 Ziska, 183-4 Zurich, 214-16

P r i n t e d b y J a r r o ld