Part 2 — Chapter III. (These four articles abrogated by the four articles following them, 118-122.) Article 118. The Federal Constitution may at any time be amended. (continued 32)

Rise of the Carolingians.

The division in the Frankish dominion which finally marked itself deeply and became permanent was that which separated the East Kingdom, or Austrasia, from the West Kingdom, or Neustria. In Austrasia, the Germanic element prevailed; in Neustria, the Roman and Gallic survivals entered most largely into the new society. Austrasia widened into the Germany of later history; Neustria into France. In both these kingdoms, the Frankish kings sank lower and lower in character, until their name (of Merwings or Merovingians, from an ancestor of Clovis) became a byword for sloth and worthlessness. In each kingdom there arose, beside the nominal monarch, a strong minister, called the Major Domus, or Mayor of the Palace, who exercised the real power and governed in the king's name. During the last half of the seventh century, the Austrasian Mayor, Pippin of Heristal, and the Neustrian Mayor, Ebroin, converted the old antagonism of the two kingdoms into a personal rivalry and struggle for supremacy. Ebroin was murdered, and Pippin was the final victor, in a decisive battle at Testry (687), which made him virtual master of the whole Frank realm, although the idle Merwings still sat on their thrones. Pippin's son, Charles Martel, strengthened and extended the domination which his father had acquired. He drove back the Saxons and subdued the Frisians in the North, and, in the great and famous battle of Tours (732) he repelled, once for all, the attempt of the Arab and Moorish followers of Mahomet, already lodged in Spain, to push their conquests beyond the Pyrenees. {1016} The next of the family, Pippin the Short, son of Charles Martel, put an end to the pretence of governing in the name of a puppet-king. The last of the Merovingians was quietly deposed—lacking even importance enough to be put to death— and Pippin received the crown at the hands of Pope Zachary (A. D. 751). He died in 768, and the reign of his son, who succeeded him—the Great Charles—the Charlemagne of mediæval history—is the introduction to so new an era, and so changed an order of circumstances in the European world, that it will be best to finish with all that lies behind it in our hasty survey before we take it up.

The Conquests of Islam.

Outside of Europe, a new and strange power had now risen, and had spread its forces with extraordinary rapidity around the southern and eastern circuit of the Mediterranean, until it troubled both extremities of the northern shore. This was the power of Islam—the proselyting, war-waging religion of Mahomet, the Arabian prophet. At the death of Mahomet, in 632, he was lord of Arabia, and his armies had just crossed the border, to attack the Syrian possessions of the Eastern Roman Empire. In seven years from that time, the whole of Palestine and Syria had been overrun, Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch, and all the strong cities taken, and Roman authority expelled. In two years more, they had dealt the last blow to the Sassanian monarchy in Persia and shattered it forever. At the same time they were besieging Alexandria and adding Egypt to their conquests. In 668, only thirty-six years after the death of the Prophet, they were at the gates of Constantinople, making the first of their many attempts to gain possession of the New Rome. In 698 they had taken Carthage, had occupied all North Africa to the Atlantic coast, had converted the Mauretanians, or Moors, and absorbed them into their body politic as well as into their communion. In 711 the commingled Arabs and Moors crossed the Straits and entered Spain, and the overthrow of the Christian kingdom of the Visigoths was practically accomplished in a single battle that same year. Within two years more, the Moors (as they came to be most commonly called) were in possession of the whole southern, central, and eastern parts of the Spanish peninsula, treating the inhabitants who had not fled with a more generous toleration than differing Christians were wont to offer to one another. The Spaniards (a mixed population of Roman, Suevic, Gothic, and aboriginal descent) who did, not submit, took refuge in the mountainous region of the Asturias and Galicia, where they maintained their independence, and, in due time, became aggressive, until, after eight centuries, they recovered their whole land.

The Eastern Empire.

At the East, as we have seen, the struggle of the Empire with the Arabs began at the first moment of their career of foreign conquest. They came upon it when it was weak from many wounds, and exhausted by conflict with many foes. Before the death of Justinian (565), the transient glories of his reign had been waning fast. His immediate successor saw the work of Belisarius and Narses undone, for the most part, and the Italian peninsula overrun by a new horde of barbarians, more rapacious and more savage than the Goths. At the same time, the Persian war broke out again, and drained the imperial resources to pay for victories that had no fruit. Two better and stronger emperors—Tiberius and Maurice—who came after him, only made an honorable struggle, without leaving the Empire in a better state. Then a brutal creature—Phocas—held the throne for eight years (602-610) and sunk it very low by his crimes. The hero, Heraclius, who was now raised to power, came too late. Assailed suddenly, at the very beginning of his reign, by a fierce Persian onset, he was powerless to resist. Syria, Egypt and Asia Minor were successively ravaged and conquered by the Persian arms. They came even to the Bosphorus, and for ten years they held its eastern shore and maintained a camp within sight of Constantinople itself; while the wild Tartar nation of the Avars raged, at the same time, through the northern and western provinces of the Empire, and threatened the capital on its landward sides. The Roman Empire was reduced, for a time, to "the walls of Constantinople, with the remnant of Greece, Italy, and Africa, and some maritime cities, from Tyre to Trebizond, of the Asiatic coast." But in 622 Heraclius turned the tide of disaster and rolled it back upon his enemies. Despite an alliance of the Persians with the Avars, and their combined assault upon Constantinople in 626, he repelled the latter, and wrested from the former, in a series of remarkable campaigns, all the territory they had seized. He had but just accomplished this great deliverance of his dominions, when the Arabs came upon him, as stated above. There was no strength left in the Empire to resist the terrible prowess of these warriors of the desert. They extinguished its authority in Syria and Egypt, as we have seen, in the first years of their career; but then turned their arms to the East and the West, and were slow in disputing Asia Minor with its Christian lords. "From the time of Heraclius the Byzantine theatre is contracted and darkened: the line of empire which had been defined by the laws of Justinian and the arms of Belisarius recedes on all sides from our view" (Gibbon). There was neither vigor nor virtue in the descendants of Heraclius; and when the last of them was destroyed by a popular rising against his vicious tyranny (711), revolution followed revolution so quickly that three reigns were begun and ended in six years.

The so-called Byzantine Empire.

Then came to the throne a man of strong character, who redeemed it at least from contempt; who introduced a dynasty which endured for a century, and whose reign is the beginning of a new era in the history of the Eastern Empire, so marked that the Empire has taken from that time, in the common usage, a changed name, and is known thenceforth as the Byzantine, rather than the Eastern or the Greek. This was Leo the Isaurian, who saved Constantinople from a second desperate Moslem siege; who checked for a considerable period the Mahometan advance in the East; who reorganized the imperial administration on lasting lines; and whose suppression of image-worship in the Christian churches of his empire led to a rupture with the Roman Church in the West,—to the breaking of all relations of dependence in Rome and Italy upon the Empire in the East, and to the creating of a new imperial sovereignty in Western Europe which claimed succession to that of Rome.

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Lombard Conquest of Italy.

On the conquest of Italy by Belisarius and Narses, for Justinian, the eunuch Narses, as related before, was made governor, residing at Ravenna, and bearing the title of Exarch. In a few years he was displaced, through the influence of a palace intrigue at Constantinople. To be revenged, it is said that he persuaded the Lombards, a German tribe lately become threatening on the Upper Danube, to enter Italy. They came, under their leader Alboin, and almost the whole northern and middle parts of the peninsula submitted to them with no resistance. Pavia stood a siege for three years before it surrendered to become the Lombard capital; Venice received an added population of fugitives, and was safe in her lagoons—like Ravenna, where the new Exarch watched the march of Lombard conquest, and scarcely opposed it. Rome was preserved, with part of southern Italy and with Sicily; but no more than a shadow of the sovereignty of the Empire now stretched westward beyond the Adriatic.

Temporal Power of the Popes.

The city of Rome, and the territory surrounding it, still owned a nominal allegiance to the Emperor at Constantinople; but their immediate and real ruler was the Bishop of Rome, who had already acquired, in a special way, the fatherly name of "Papa" or Pope. Many circumstances had combined to place both spiritual and temporal power in the hands of these Christian pontiffs of Rome. They may have been originally, in the constitution of the Church, on an equal footing of ecclesiastical authority with the four other chiefs of the hierarchy—the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem; but the great name of Rome gave them prestige and weight of superior influence to begin with. Then, they stood, geographically and sympathetically, in nearest relations with that massive Latin side of Christendom, in western Europe, which was never much disturbed by the raging dogmatic controversies that tore and divided the Church on its Eastern, Greek side. It was inevitable that the Western Church should yield homage to one head—to one bishopric above all other bishoprics; and it was more inevitable that the See of Rome should be that one. So the spiritual supremacy to which the Popes arrived is easily enough explained. The temporal authority which they acquired is accounted for as obviously. Even before the interruption of the line of emperors in the West, the removal of the imperial residence for long periods from Rome, to Constantinople, to Milan, to Ravenna, left the Pope the most impressive and influential personage in the ancient capital. Political functions were forced on him, whether he desired to exercise them or not. It was Pope Leo who headed the embassy to Attila, and saved the city from the Huns. It was the same Pope who pleaded for it with the Vandal king, Genseric. And still more and more, after the imperial voice which uttered occasional commands to his Roman subjects was heard from a distant palace in Constantinople, and in accents that had become wholly Greek, the chair of St. Peter grew throne-like,—the respect paid to the Pope in civil matters took on the spirit of obedience, and his aspect before the people became that of a temporal prince.

This process of the political elevation of the Papacy was completed by the Lombard conquest of Italy. The Lombard kings were bent upon the acquisition of Rome; the Popes were resolute and successful in holding it against them. At last the Papacy made its memorable and momentous alliance with the Carolingian chiefs of the Franks. It assumed the tremendous super-imperial right and power to dispose of crowns, by taking that of the kingdom of the Franks from Childeric and giving it to Pippin (751); and this was the first assumption of that right by the chief priest of Western Christendom. In return, Pippin led an army twice to Italy (754-755), humbled the Lombards, took from them the exarchate of Ravenna and the Pentapolis (a district east of the Appenines, between Ancona and Ferrara), and transferred this whole territory as a conqueror's "donation" to the Apostolic See. The temporal sovereignty of the Popes now rested on a base as political and as substantial as that of the most worldly and vulgar potentates around them.

Charlemagne's restored Roman Empire.

Pippin's greater son, Charlemagne, renewed the alliance of his house with the Papacy, and strengthened it by completing the conquest of the Lombards, extinguishing their kingdom (774), and confirming his father's donation of the States of the Church. Charlemagne was now supreme in Italy, and the Pope became the representative of his sovereignty at Rome,—a position which lastingly enhanced the political importance of the Roman See in the peninsula. But while Pope and King stood related, in one view, as agent and principal, or subject and sovereign, another very different relationship slowly shaped itself in the thoughts of one, if not of both. The Western Church had broken entirely with the Eastern, on the question of image-worship; the titular sovereignty of the Eastern Emperor in the ancient Roman capital was a worn-out fiction; the reign of a female usurper, Irene, at Constantinople afforded a good occasion for renouncing and discarding it. But a Roman Emperor there must be, somewhere, for lesser princes and sovereigns to do homage to; the political habit and feeling of the European world, shaped and fixed by the long domination of Rome, still called for it. "Nor could the spiritual head of Christendom dispense with the temporal; without the Roman Empire there could not be," according to the feeling of the ninth century, "a Roman, nor by necessary consequence a Catholic and Apostolic Church." For "men could not separate in fact what was indissoluble in thought: Christianity must stand or fall along with the great Christian state: they were but two names for one and the same thing" (Bryce). Therefore the head of the Church, boldly enlarging the assumption of his predecessor who bestowed the crown of the Merovingians upon Pippin, now took it upon himself to set the diadem of the Cæsars on the head of Charlemagne. On the Christmas Day, in the year 800, in the basilica of St. Peter, at Rome, the solemn act of coronation was performed by Pope Leo III.; the Roman Empire lived again, in the estimation of that age, and Charles the Great reopened the interrupted line of successors to Augustus.

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Before this imperial coronation of Charlemagne occurred, he had already made his dominion imperial in extent, by the magnitude of his conquests. North, south, east, and west, his armies had been everywhere victorious. In eighteen campaigns against the fierce and troublesome Saxons, he subdued those stubborn pagans and forced them to submit to a Christian baptism—with how much of immediate religious effect may be easily surmised. But by opening a way for the more Christ-like missionaries of the cross, who followed him, this missionary of the battle-ax did, no doubt, a very real apostolic work. He checked the ravages of the piratical Danes. He crushed the Avars and took their country, which comprised parts of the Austria and Hungary of the present day. He occupied Bavaria, on the one hand, and Brittany on the other. He crossed the Pyrenees to measure swords with the Saracens, and drove them from the north of Spain, as far as the Ebro. His lordship in Italy has been noticed already. He was unquestionably one of the greatest monarchs of any age, and deserves the title Magnus, affixed to his name, if that title ever has been deserved by the kings who were flattered with it. There was much more in his character than the mere aggressive energy which subjugated so wide a realm. He was a man of enlightenment far beyond his time; a man who strove after order, in that disorderly age, and who felt oppressed by the ignorance into which the world had sunk. He was a seeker after learning, and the friend and patron of all in his day who groped in the darkness and felt their way towards the light. He organized his Empire with a sense of political system which was new among the Teutonic masters of Western Europe (except as shown by Theodoric in Italy); but there were not years enough in his own life for the organism to mature, and his sons brought back chaos again.

Appearance of the Northmen.

Before Charlemagne died (814) he saw the western coasts and river valleys of his Empire harried by a fresh outpouring of sea-rovers from the far North, and it is said that he had sad forebodings of the affliction they would become to his people thereafter. These new pirates of the North Sea, who took up, after several centuries, the abandoned trade of their kinsmen, the Saxons (now retired from their wild courses and respectably settled on one side of the water, while subdued and kept in order on the other), were of the bold and rugged Scandinavian race, which inhabited the countries since known as Denmark, Sweden and Norway. They are more or less confused under the general name of Northmen, or Norsemen—men of the North; but that term appears to have been applied more especially to the freebooters from the Norwegian coast, as distinguished from the "Danes" of the lesser peninsula. It is convenient, in so general a sketch as this, to ignore the distinction, and to speak of the Northmen as inclusive, for that age, of the whole Scandinavian race.

Their visitations began to terrify the coasts of England, France and Germany, and the lower valleys of the rivers which they found it possible to ascend, some time in the later half of the eighth century. It is probable that their appearance on the sea at this time, and not before, was due to a revolution which united Norway under a single king and a stronger government, and which, by suppressing independence and disorder among the petty chiefs, drove many of them to their ships and sent them abroad, to lead a life of lawlessness more agreeable to their tastes. It is also probable that the northern countries had become populated beyond their resources, as seemed to have happened before, when the Goths swarmed out, and that the outlet by sea was necessarily and deliberately opened. Whatever the cause, these Norse adventurers, in fleets of long boats, issued with some suddenness from their "vics," or fiords (whence the name "viking"), and began an extraordinary career. For more than half a century their raids had no object but plunder, and what they took they carried home to enjoy. First to the Frisian coast, then to the Rhine—the Seine—the Loire,—they came again and again to pillage and destroy; crossing at the same time to the shores of their nearest kinsmen—but heeding no kinship in their savage and relentless forays along the English coasts—and around to Ireland and the Scottish islands, where their earliest lodgments were made.

The Danes in England.

About the middle of the ninth century they began to seize tracts of land in England and to settle themselves there in permanent homes. The Angles in the northern and eastern parts and the Saxons in the southern part of England had weakened themselves and one another by rivalry and war between their divided kingdoms. There had been for three centuries an unceasing struggle among them for supremacy. At the time of the coming of the Danes (who were prominent in the English invasion and gave their name to it), the West Saxon kings had won a decided ascendancy. The Danes, by degrees, stripped them of what they had gained. Northumberland, Mercia and East Anglia were occupied in succession, and Wessex itself was attacked. King Alfred, the great and admirable hero of early English history, who came to the throne in 871, spent the first eight years of his reign in a deadly struggle with the invaders. He was obliged in the end to concede to them the whole northeastern part of England, from the Thames to the Tyne, which was known thereafter as "the Danelaw"; but they became his vassals, and submitted to Christian baptism. A century later, the Norse rovers resumed their attacks upon England, and a cowardly English king, distrusting the now settled and peaceful Danes, ordered an extensive massacre of them (1002). The rage which this provoked in Denmark led to a great invasion of the country. England was completely conquered, and remained subject to the Danish kings until 1042, when its throne was recovered for a brief space of time by the English line.

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The Normans in Normandy.

Meanwhile the Northmen had gained a much firmer and more important footing in the territory of the Western Franks—which had not yet acquired the name of France. The Seine and its valley attracted them again and again, and after repeated expeditions up the river, even to the city of Paris, which they besieged several times, one of their chiefs, Rolf or Rollo, got possession of Rouen and began a permanent settlement in the country. The Frank King, Charles the Simple, now made terms with Rollo and granted him a district at the mouth of the Seine, (912), the latter acknowledging the suzerainty or feudal superiority of Charles, and accepting at the same time the doubly new character of a baptised Christian and a Frankish Duke. The Northmen on the Seine were known thenceforth as Normans, their dukedom as Normandy, and they played a great part in European history during the next two centuries.

The Northmen in the West.

The northern sea-rovers who had settled neither in Ireland, England, nor Frankland, went farther afield into the West and North and had wonderful adventures there. They took possession of the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Hebrides, and other islands in those seas, including Man, and founded a powerful island-kingdom, which they held for a long period. Thence they passed on to Faroë and Iceland, and in Iceland, where they lived peaceful and quiet lives of necessity, they founded an interesting republic, and developed a very remarkable civilization, adorned by a literature which the world is learning more and more to admire. From Iceland, it was a natural step to the discovery of Greenland, and from Greenland, there is now little doubt that they sailed southwards and saw and touched the continent of America, five centuries before Columbus made his voyage.

The Northmen in the East.

While the Northmen of the ninth and tenth centuries were exciting and disturbing all Western Europe by their naval exploits, other adventurers from the Swedish side of the Scandinavian country were sallying eastwards under different names. Both as warriors and as merchants, they made their way from the Baltic to the Black Sea and the Bosphorus, and bands of them entered the service of the Eastern Emperor, at Constantinople, where they received the name of Varangians, from the oath by which they bound themselves. One of the Swedish chiefs, Rurik by name, was chosen by certain tribes of the country now called Russia, to be their prince. Rurik's capital was Novgorod, where he formed the nucleus of a kingdom which grew, through many vicissitudes, into the modern empire of Russia. His successors transferred their capital to Kief, and ultimately it was shifted again to Moscow, where the Muscovite princes acquired the title, the power, and the great dominion of the Czars of all the Russias.

The Slavonic Race.

The Russian sovereigns were thus of Swedish origin; but their subjects were of another race. They belonged to a branch of the great Aryan stock, called the Slavic or Slavonic, which was the last to become historically known. The Slavonians bore no important part in events that we have knowledge of until several centuries of the Christian era had passed. They were the obscure inhabitants in that period of a wide region in Eastern Europe, between the Vistula and the Caspian. In the sixth century, pressed by the Avars, they crossed the Vistula, moving westwards, along the Baltic; and, about the same time they moved southwards, across the Danube, and established the settlements which formed the existing Slavonic states in South-eastern Europe—Servia, Croatia and their lesser neighbors. But the principal seat of the Slavonic race within historic times has always been in the region still occupied by its principal representatives, the Russians and the Poles.

Mediæval Society. The Feudal System.

We have now come to a period in European history—the middle period of the Middle Ages—when it is appropriate to consider the peculiar state of society which had resulted from the transplanting of the Germanic nations of the North to the provinces of the Roman Empire, and from placing the well civilized surviving inhabitants of the latter in subjection to and in association with masters so vigorous, so capable and so barbarous. In Gaul, the conquerors, unused to town-life, not attracted to town pursuits, and eager for the possession of land, had generally spread themselves over the country and left the cities more undisturbed, except as they pillaged them or extorted ransom from them. The Roman-Gallic population of the country had sought refuge, no doubt, to a large extent, in the cities; the agricultural laborers were already, for the most part, slaves or half-slaves—the coloni of the Roman system—and remained in their servitude; while some of the poorer class of freemen may have sunk to the same condition.

How far the new masters of the country had taken possession of its land by actual seizure, ousting the former owners, and under what rules, if any, it was divided among them, are questions involved in great obscurity. In the time of Charlemagne, there seems to have been a large number of small landowners who cultivated their own holdings, which they owned, not conditionally, but absolutely, by the tenure called allodial. But alongside of these peasant proprietors there was another landed class whose estates were held on very different terms, and this latter class, at the time now spoken of, was rapidly absorbing the former. It was a class which had not existed before, neither among the Germans nor among the Romans, and the system of land tenure on which it rested was equally new to both, although both seem to have contributed something to the origin of it. This was the Feudal System, which may be described, in the words of Bishop Stubbs, as being "a complete organization of society through the medium of land tenure, in which, from the king down to the landowner, all are bound together by obligation of service and defence: the lord to protect his vassal, the vassal to do service to his lord; the defence and service being based on, and regulated by, the nature and extent of the land held by the one of the other." Of course, the service exacted was, in the main, military, and the system grew up as a military system, expanding into a general governing system, during a time of loose and ineffective administration. That it was a thing of gradual growth is now fairly well settled, although little is clearly known of the process of growth. It came to its perfection in the tenth century, by which time most other tenures of land had disappeared. The allodial tenure gave way before it, because, in those disorderly times, men of small or moderate property in land were in need of the protection which a powerful lord, who had many retainers at his back, or a strong monastery, could give, and were induced to surrender, to one or the other, their free ownership of the land they held, receiving it back as tenants, in order to establish the relation which secured a protector.

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In its final organization, the feudal system, as stated before, embraced the whole society of the kingdom. Theoretically, the king was the pinnacle of the system. In the political view of the time—so far as a political view existed—he was the over-lord of the realm rather by reason of being its ultimate land-lord, than by being the center of authority and the guardian of law. The greater subordinate lordships of the kingdom—the dukedoms and counties—were held as huge estates, called fiefs, derived originally by grant from the king, subject to the obligation of military service, and to certain acts of homage, acknowledging the dependent relationship. The greater feudatories, or vassals, holding immediately from the king, were lords in their turn of a second order of feudatories, who held lands under them; and they again might divide their territories among vassals of a third degree; for the process of sub-infeudation went on until it reached the cultivator of the soil, who bore the whole social structure of society on his bent back.

But the feudal system would have wrought few of the effects which it did if it had involved nothing but land tenure and military service. It became, however, as before intimated, a system of government, and one which inevitably produced a disintegration of society and a destruction of national bonds. A grant of territory generally carried with it almost a grant of sovereignty over the inhabitants of the territory, limited only by certain rights and powers reserved to the king, which he found extreme difficulty in exercising. The system was one "in which every lord judged, taxed, and commanded the class next below him, in which abject slavery formed the lowest and irresponsible tyranny the highest grade, in which private war, private coinage, private prisons, took the place of the imperial institutions of government" (Stubbs). This was the singular system which had its original and special growth among the Franks, in the Middle Ages, and which spread from them, under the generally similar conditions of the age, to other countries, with various degrees of modification and limitation. Its influence was obviously opposed to political unity and social order, and to the development of institutions favorable to the people.

But an opposing influence had kept life in one part of society which feudalism was not able to envelope. That was in cities. The cities, as before stated, had been the refuge of a large and perhaps a better part of the Roman-Gallic free population which survived the barbarian conquest. They, in conjunction with the Church, preserved, without doubt, so much of the plant of Roman civilization as escaped destruction. They certainly suffered heavily, and languished for several centuries; but a slow revival of industries and arts went on in them,—trade crept again into its old channels, or found new ones,—and wealth began to be accumulated anew. With the consciousness of wealth came feelings of independence; and such towns were now beginning to acquire the spirit which made them, a little later, important instruments in the weakening and breaking of the feudal system.

Rise of the Kingdom of France.

During the period between the death of Charlemagne and the settlement of the Normans in the Carlovingian Empire, that Empire had become permanently divided. The final separation had taken place (887) between the kingdom of the East Franks, or Germany, and the kingdom of the West Franks, which presently became France. Between them stretched a region in dispute called Lotharingia, out of which came the duchy of Lorraine. The kingdom of Burgundy (sometimes cut into two) and the kingdom of Italy, had regained a separate existence; and the Empire which Charlemagne had revived was nothing but a name. The last of the Carlovingian emperors was Arnulf, who died in 899. The imperial title was borne afterwards by a number of petty Italian potentates, but lost all imperial significance for two-thirds of a century, until it was restored to some grandeur again and to a lasting influence in history, by another German king.

Before this occurred, the Carlovingian race of kings had disappeared from both the Frank kingdoms. During the last hundred years of their reign in the West kingdom, the throne had been disputed with them two or three times by members of a rising family, the Counts of Paris and Orleans, who were also called Dukes of the French, and whose duchy gave its name to the kingdom which they finally made their own. The kings of the old race held their capital at Laon, with little power and a small dominion, until 987, when the last one died. The then Count of Paris and Duke of the French, Hugh, called Capet, became king of the French, by election; Paris became the capital of the kingdom, and the France of modern times had its birth, though very far from its full growth.

The royal power had now declined to extreme weakness. The development of feudalism had undermined all central authority, and Hugh Capet as king had scarcely more power than he drew from his own large fief. "At first he was by no means acknowledged in the kingdom; but … the chief vassals ultimately gave at least a tacit consent to the usurpation, and permitted the royal name to descend undisputed upon his posterity. But this was almost the sole attribute of sovereignty which the first kings of the third dynasty enjoyed. For a long period before and after the accession of that family France has, properly speaking, no national history" (Hallam).

The Communes.

When the royal power began to gain ascendancy, it seems to have been largely in consequence of a tacitly formed alliance between the kings and the commons or burghers of the towns. The latter, as noted before, were acquiring a spirit of independence, born of increased prosperity, and were converting their guilds or trades unions into crude forms of municipal organization, as "communes" or commons. Sometimes by purchase and sometimes by force, they were ridding themselves of the feudal pretensions which neighboring lords held over them, and were obtaining charters which defined and guaranteed municipal freedom to them. One or two kings of the time happened to be wise enough to give encouragement to this movement towards the enfranchisement of the communes, and it proved to have an important influence in weakening feudalism and strengthening royalty.

[Image: Europe at the close of the 10th century.]

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Germany.

In the German kingdom, much the same processes of disintegration had produced much the same results as in France. The great fiefs into which it was divided—the duchies of Saxony, Franconia, Swabia and Bavaria—were even more powerful than the great fiefs of France. When the Carlovingian dynasty came to an end, in 911, the nobles made choice of a king, electing Conrad of Franconia, and, after him (919), Henry the Fowler, Duke of Saxony. The monarchy continued thereafter to be elective, actually as well as in theory, for a long period. Three times the crown was kept in the same family during several successive generations: in the House of Saxony from 919 to 1024; in the House of Franconia from 1024 to 1137; in the House of the Hohenstaufens, of Swabia, from 1137 to 1254: but it never became an acknowledged heritage until long after the Hapsburgs won possession of it; and even to the end the forms of election were preserved.

The Holy Roman Empire.

The second king of the Saxon dynasty, Otho I., called the Great, recovered the imperial title, which had become extinct again in the West, added the crown of Lombardy to the crown of Germany, and founded anew the Germanic Roman Empire, which Charlemagne had failed to establish enduringly, but which now became one of the conspicuous facts of European history for more than eight hundred years, although seldom more than a shadow and a name. But the shadow and the name were those of the great Rome of antiquity, and the mighty memory it had left in the world gave a superior dignity and rank to these German emperors, even while it diminished their actual power as kings of Germany. It conferred upon them, indeed, more than rank and dignity; it bestowed an "office" which the ideas and feelings of that age could not suffer to remain vacant. The Imperial office seemed to be required, in matters temporal, to balance and to be the complement of the Papal office in matters spiritual. "In nature and compass the government of these two potentates is the same, differing only in the sphere of its working; and it matters not whether we call the Pope a spiritual Emperor, or the Emperor a secular Pope." "Thus the Holy Roman Church and the Holy Roman Empire are one and the same thing, in two aspects; and Catholicism, the principle of the universal Christian society, is also Romanism; that is, rests upon Rome as the origin and type of its universality" (Bryce). These mediæval ideas of the "Holy Roman Empire," as it came to be called (not immediately, but after a time), gave importance to the imperial coronation thenceforth claimed by the German kings. It was a factitious importance, so far as concerned the immediate realm of those kings. In Germany, while it brought no increase to their material power, it tended to alarm feudal jealousies; it tended to draw the kings away from their natural identification with their own country; it tended to distract them from an effective royal policy at home, by foreign ambitions and aims; and altogether it interfered seriously with the nationalization of Germany, and gave a longer play to the disrupting influences of feudalism in that country than in any other.

Italy, the Empire and the Papacy.

Otto I. had won Italy and the Imperial crown (962) very easily. For more than half a century the peninsula had been in a deplorable state. The elective Lombard crown, quarreled over by the ducal houses of Friuli, Spoleto, Ivrea, Provence, and others, settled nowhere with any sureness, and lost all dignity and strength, though several of the petty kings who wore it had been crowned emperors by the Pope. At Rome, all legitimate government, civil or ecclesiastical, had disappeared. The city and the Church had been for years under the rule of a family of courtesans, who made popes of their lovers and their sons. Southern Italy was being ravaged by the Saracens, who occupied Sicily, and Northern Italy was desolated by the Hungarians. Under these circumstances, Otto I., the German king, listened to an appeal from an oppressed queen, Adelaide, widow of a murdered king, and crossed, the Alps (951), like a gallant knight, to her relief. He chastised and humbled the oppressor, rescued the queen, and married her. A few years later, on further provocation, he entered Italy again, deposed the troublesome King Berengar, caused himself to be crowned King of Italy, and received the imperial crown at Rome (962) from one of the vilest of a vile brood of popes, John XII. Soon afterwards, he was impelled to convoke a synod which deposed this disgraceful pope and elected in his place Leo VIII., who had been Otto's chief secretary. The citizens now conceded to the Emperor an absolute veto on papal elections, and the new pope confirmed their act. The German sovereigns, from that time, for many years, asserted their right to control the filling of the chair of St. Peter, and exercised the right on many occasions, though always with difficulty.

Nominally they were sovereigns of Rome and Italy; but during their long absences from the country they scarcely made a show of administrative government in it, and their visits were generally of the nature of expeditions for a reconquest of the land. Their claims of sovereignty were resisted more and more, politically throughout Italy and ecclesiastically at Rome. The Papacy emancipated itself from their control and acquired a natural leadership of Italian opposition to German imperial pretensions. The conflict between these two forces became, as will be seen later on, one of the dominating facts of European history for four centuries—from the eleventh to the fourteenth.

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The Italian City-republics.

The disorder that had been scarcely checked in Italy since the Goths came into it,—the practical extinction of central authority after Charlemagne dropped his sceptre, and the increasing conflicts of the nobles among themselves,—had one consequence of remarkable importance in Italian history. It opened opportunities to many cities in the northern parts of the peninsula for acquiring municipal freedom, which they did not lack spirit to improve. They led the movement and set the example which created, a little later, so many vigorous communes in Flanders and France, and imperial free cities in Germany at a still later day. They were earlier in winning their liberties, and they pushed them farther,—to the point in many cases of creating, as at Pisa, Genoa, Florence, and Venice, a republican city state. Venice, growing up in the security of her lagoons, from a cluster of fishing villages to a great city of palaces, had been independent from the beginning, except as she acknowledged for a time the nominal supremacy of the Eastern Emperor. Others won their way to independence through struggles that are now obscure, and developed, before these dark centuries reached their close, an energy of life and a splendor of genius that come near to comparison with the power and the genius of the Greeks. But, like the city-republics of Greece, they were perpetually at strife with one another, and sacrificed to their mutual jealousies, in the end, the precious liberty which made them great, and which they might, by a well settled union, have preserved.

The Saxon line of Emperors.

Such were the conditions existing or taking shape in Italy when the Empire of the West—the Holy Roman Empire of later times—was founded anew by Otho the Great. Territorially, the Empire as he left it covered Germany to its full extent, and two-thirds of Italy, with the Emperor's superiority acknowledged by the subject states of Burgundy, Bohemia, Moravia, Poland, Denmark, and Hungary—the last named with more dispute.

Otho the Great died in 972. His two immediate successors, Otho II. (973-983) and Otho III. (983-1002) accomplished little, though the latter had great ambitions, planning to raise Rome to her old place as the capital of the world; but he died in his youth in Italy, and was succeeded by a cousin, Henry II., whose election was contested by rivals in Germany, and repudiated in Italy. In the latter country the great nobles placed Ardoin, marquis of Ivrea, on the Lombard throne; but the factions among them soon caused his overthrow, and, Henry, crossing the Alps, reclaimed the crown.

The Franconian Emperors.

Henry II. was the last of the Saxon line, and upon his death, in 1024, the House of Franconia came to the throne, by the election of Conrad II., called "the Salic." Under Conrad, the kingdom of Burgundy, afterwards called the kingdom of Arles (which is to be distinguished from the French Duchy of Burgundy—the northwestern part of the old kingdom), was reunited to the Empire, by the bequest of its last king, Rudolph III. Conrad's son, grandson, and great grandson succeeded him in due order; Henry III. from 1039 to 1056; Henry IV. from 1056 to 1106; Henry V. from 1106 to 1125. Under Henry III. the Empire was at the summit of its power. Henry II., exercising the imperial prerogative, had raised the Duke of Hungary to royal rank, giving him the title of king. Henry III. now forced the Hungarian king to acknowledge the imperial supremacy and pay tribute. The German kingdom was ruled with a strong hand and peace among its members compelled. "In Rome, no German sovereign had ever been so absolute. A disgraceful contest between three claimants of the papal chair had shocked even the reckless apathy of Italy. Henry deposed them all and appointed their successor." "The synod passed a decree granting to Henry the right of nominating the supreme pontiff; and the Roman priesthood, who had forfeited the respect of the world even more by habitual simony than by the flagrant corruption of their manners, were forced to receive German after German as their bishop, at the bidding of a ruler so powerful, so severe, and so pious. But Henry's encroachments alarmed his own nobles no less than the Italians, and the reaction, which might have been dangerous to himself, was fatal to his successor. A mere chance, as some might call it, determined the course of history. The great Emperor died suddenly in A. D. 1056, and a child was left at the helm, while storms were gathering that might have demanded the wisest hand" (Bryce).

Hildebrand and Henry IV.

The child was Henry IV., of unfortunate memory; the storms which beset him blew from Rome. The Papacy, lifted from its degradation by Henry's father and grandfather, had recovered its boldness of tone and enlarged its pretensions and claims. It had come under the influence of an extraordinary man, the monk Hildebrand, who swayed the councils of four popes before he became pope himself (1073), and whose pontifical reign as Gregory VII. is the epoch of greatest importance in the history of the Roman Church. The overmastering ascendancy of the popes, in the Church and over all who acknowledge its communion, really began when this invincible monk was raised to the papal throne. He broke the priesthood and the whole hierarchy of the West to blind obedience by his relentless discipline. He isolated them, as an order apart, by enforcing celibacy upon them; and he extinguished the corrupting practices of simony. Then, when he had marshalled the forces of the Church, he proclaimed its independence and its supremacy in absolute terms. In the growth of feudalism throughout Europe, the Church had become compromised in many ways with the civil powers. Its bishoprics and abbeys had acquired extensively the nature of fiefs, and bishops and abbots were required to do homage to a secular lord before they could receive an "investiture" of the rich estates which had become attached by a feudal tenure to their sees. The ceremony of investiture, moreover, included delivery of the crozier and the pastoral ring, which were the very symbols of their spiritual office. Against this dependence of the Church upon temporal powers, Gregory now arrayed it in revolt, and began the "War of Investitures," which lasted for half a century. The great battle ground was Germany; the Emperor, of necessity, was the chief opponent; and Henry IV., whose youth had been badly trained, and whose authority had been weakened by a long, ill-guardianed minority, was at a disadvantage in the contest. His humiliation at Canossa (1077), when he stood through three winter days, a suppliant before the door of the castle which lodged his haughty enemy, praying to be released from the dread penalties of excommunication, is one of the familiar tableaux of history. He had a poor revenge seven years later, when he took Rome, drove Gregory into the castle St. Angelo, and seated an anti-pope in the Vatican. But his triumph was brief. There came to the rescue of the beleaguered Pope certain new actors in Italian history, whom it is now necessary to introduce.

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The Normans in Italy and Sicily.

The settlement of predatory Northmen on the Seine, which took the name of Normandy and the constitution of a ducal fief of France, had long since grown into an important half-independent state. Its people—now called Normans in the smoother speech of the South—had lost something of their early rudeness, and had fallen a little under the spell of the rising chivalry of the age; but the goad of a warlike temper which drove their fathers out of Norway still pricked the sons and sent them abroad, in restless search of adventures and gain. Some found their way into the south of Italy, where Greeks, Lombards and Saracens were fighting merrily, and where a good sword and a tough lance were tools of the only industry well-paid. Presently there was banded among them there a little army, which found itself a match for any force that Greek or Lombard, or other opponent, could bring against it, and which proceeded accordingly to work its own will in the land. It seized Apulia (1042) and divided it into twelve countships, as an aristocratic republic. Pope Leo IX. led an army against it and was beaten and taken prisoner (1053). To release himself he was compelled to grant the duchy they had taken to them, as a fief of the Church, and to extend his grant to whatever they might succeed in taking, beyond it. The chiefs of the Normans thus far had been, in succession, three sons of a poor gentleman in the Cotentin, Tancred by name, who now sent a fourth son to the scene. This new comer was Robert, having the surname of Guiscard, who became the fourth leader of the Norman troop (1057), and who, in a few years, assumed the title of Duke of Calabria and Apulia. His duchies comprised, substantially, the territory of the later kingdom of Naples. A fifth brother, Roger, had meantime crossed to Sicily, with a small following of his countrymen; and, between 1060 and 1090, had expelled the Saracens from that island, and possessed it as a fief of his brother's duchy. But in the next generation these relations between the two conquests were practically reversed. The son of Roger received the title of King of Sicily from the Pope, and Calabria and Apulia were annexed to his kingdom, through the extinction of Robert's family.

These Normans of Southern Italy were the allies who came to the rescue of Pope Gregory, when the Emperor, Henry IV., besieged him in Castle St. Angelo. He summoned Robert Guiscard as a vassal of the Church, and the response was prompt. Henry and his Germans retreated when the Normans came near, and the latter entered Rome (1084). Accustomed to pillage, they began, soon, to treat the city as a captured place, and the Romans rose against them. They retaliated with torch and sword, and once more Rome suffered from the destroying rage of a barbarous soldiery let loose. "Neither Goth nor Vandal, neither Greek nor German, brought such desolation on the city as this capture by the Normans" (Milman). Duke Robert made no attempt to hold the ruined capital, but withdrew to his own dominions. The Pope went with him, and died soon afterwards (1085), unable to return to Rome. But the imperious temper he had imparted to the Church was lastingly fixed in it, and his lofty pretensions were even surpassed by the pontiffs who succeeded him. He spoke for the Papacy the first syllables of that awful proclamation that was sounded in its finality, after eight hundred years, when the dogma of infallibility was put forth.

Norman Conquest of England.

The Normans in Italy established no durable power. In another quarter they were more fortunate. Their kinsmen, the Danes, who subjugated England and annexed it to their own kingdom in 1016, had lost it again in 1042, when the old line of kings was restored, in the person of Edward, called the Confessor. But William, Duke of Normandy, had acquired, in the course of these shiftings of the English crown, certain claims which he put forth when Edward died, and when Harold, son of the great Earl Godwine, was elected king to succeed him, in 1066. To enforce his claim, Duke William, commissioned by the Pope, invaded England, in the early autumn of that year, and won the kingdom in the great and decisive battle of Senlac, or Hastings, where Harold was slain. On Christmas Day he was crowned, and a few years sufficed to end all resistance to his authority. He established on the English throne a dynasty which, though shifting sometimes to collateral lines, has held it to the present day.

The Norman Conquest, as estimated by its greatest historian, Professor Freeman, wrought more good effects than ill to the English people. It did not sweep away their laws, customs or language, but it modified them all, and not unfavorably; while "it aroused the old national spirit to fresh life, and gave the conquered people fellow-workers in their conquerors." The monarchy was strengthened by William's advantages as a conqueror, used with the wisdom and moderation of a statesman. Feudalism came into England stripped of its disrupting forces; and the possible alternative of absolutism was hindered by potent checks. At the same time, the Conquest brought England into relations with the Continent which might otherwise have arisen very slowly, and thus gave an early importance to the nation in European history.

The Crusades.

At the period now reached in our survey, all Europe was on the eve of a profounder excitement and commotion than it had ever before known—one which stirred it for the first time with a common feeling and with common thoughts. A great cry ran through it, for help to deliver the holy places of the Christian faith from the infidels who possessed them. The pious and the adventurous, the fanatical and the vagrant, rose up in one motley and tumultuous response to the appeal, and mobs and armies (hardly distinguishable) of Crusaders— warriors of the Cross—began to whiten the highways into Asia with their bones. The first movement, in 1096, swept 300,000 men, women and children, under Peter the Hermit, to their death, with no other result; but nearly at the same time there went an army, French and Norman for the most part, which made its way to Jerusalem, took the city by assault (1099) and founded a kingdom there, which defended itself for almost a hundred years. Long before it fell, it was pressed sorely by the surrounding Moslems and cried to Europe for help. {1024} A Second Crusade, in 1147, accomplished nothing for its relief, but spent vast multitudes of lives; and when the feeble kingdom disappeared, in 1187, and the Sepulchre of the Saviour was defiled again by unbelievers, Christendom grew wild, once more, with passion, and a Third Crusade was led by the redoubtable Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, of Germany, King Richard Cœur de Lion, of England, and King Philip Augustus of France. The Emperor perished miserably on the way and his army was wasted in its march; the French and English exhausted themselves in sieges which won nothing of durable advantage to the Christian world; the Sultan Saladin gathered most of the laurels of the war.

The Turks on the Scene.

The armies of Islam which the Crusaders encountered in Asia Minor and the Holy Land were no longer, in their leadership, of the race of Mahomet. The religion of the Prophet was still triumphant in the East, but his nation had lost its lordship, and Western Asia had submitted to new masters. These were the Turks—Turks of the House of Seljuk—first comers of their swarm from the great Aral basin. First they had been disciples, won by the early armed missionaries of the Crescent; then servants and mercenaries, hired to fight its battles and guard its princes, when the vigor of the Arab conquerors began to be sapped, and their character to be corrupted by luxury and pride; then, at last, they were masters. About the middle of the ninth century, the Caliph at Bagdad became a puppet in their hands, and the Moslem Empire in Asia (Africa and Spain being divided between rival Caliphs) soon passed under their control.

These were the possessors of Jerusalem and its sacred shrines, whose grievous and insulting treatment of Christian pilgrims, in the last years of the eleventh century, had stirred Europe to wrath and provoked the great movement of the Crusades. The movement had important consequences, both immediate and remote; but its first effects were small in moment compared with those which lagged after. To understand either, it will be necessary to glance back at the later course of events in the Eastern or Byzantine Empire.

The Byzantine Empire.

The fortunes of the Empire, since it gave up Syria and Egypt to the Saracens, had been, on the whole, less unhappy than the dark prospect at that time. It had checked the onrush of Arabs at the Taurus mountain range, and retained Asia Minor; it had held Constantinople against them through two terrible sieges; it had fought for three centuries, and finally subdued, a new Turanian enemy, the Bulgarians, who had established a kingdom south of the Danube, where their name remains to the present day. The history of its court, during much of the period, had been a black and disgusting record of conspiracies, treacheries, murders, mutilations, usurpations and foul vices of every description; with now and then a manly figure climbing to the throne and doing heroic things, for the most part uselessly; but the system of governmental administration seems to have been so well constructed that it worked with a certain independence of its vile or imbecile heads, and the country was probably better and better governed than its court.

At Constantinople, notwithstanding frequent tumults and revolutions, there had been material prosperity and a great gathering of wealth. The Saracen conquests, by closing other avenues of trade between the East and the West, had concentrated that most profitable commerce in the Byzantine capital. The rising commercial cities of Italy—Amalphi, Venice, Genoa, Pisa—seated their enterprises there. Art and literature, which had decayed, began then to revive, and Byzantine culture, on its surface, took more of superiority to that of Teutonic Europe.

The conquests of the Seljuk Turks gave a serious check to this improvement of the circumstances of the Empire. Momentarily, by dividing the Moslem power in Asia, they had opened an opportunity to an energetic Emperor, Nicephorus Phocas, to recover northern Syria and Cilicia (961-969). But when, in the next century, they had won a complete mastery of the dominions of the Caliphate of Bagdad, they speedily swept back the Byzantines, and overran and occupied the most of Asia Minor and Armenia. A decisive victory at Manzikert, in 1071, when the emperor of the moment was taken prisoner and his army annihilated, gave them well nigh the whole territory to the Hellespont. The Empire was nearly reduced to its European domain, and suffered ten years of civil war between rivals for the throne.

At the end of that time it acquired a ruler, in the person of Alexius Comnenus, who is the generally best known of all the Byzantine line, because he figures notably in the stories of the First Crusade. He was a man of crafty abilities and complete unscrupulousness. He took the Empire at its lowest state of abasement and demoralization. In the first year of his reign he had to face a new enemy. Robert Guiscard, the Norman, who had conquered a dukedom in Southern Italy, thought the situation favorable for an attack on the Eastern Empire, and for winning the imperial crown. Twice he invaded the Greek peninsula (1081-1084) and defeated the forces brought against him by Alexius; but troubles in Italy recalled him on the first occasion, and his death brought the second expedition to naught.

Such was the situation of the Byzantines when the waves of the First Crusade, rolling Asia-ward, surged up to the gates of Constantinople. It was a visitation that might well appall them,—these hosts of knights and vagabonds, fanatics and freebooters, who claimed and proffered help in a common Christian war with the infidels, and who, nevertheless, had no Christian communion with them—schismatics as they were, outside the fold of the Roman shepherd. There is not a doubt that they feared the crusading Franks more than they feared the Turks. They knew them less, and the little hearsay knowledge they had was of a lawless, barbarous, fighting feudalism in the countries of the West,—more rough and uncouth, at least, than their own defter methods of murdering and mutilating one another. They received their dangerous visitors with nervousness and suspicion; but Alexius Comnenus proved equal to the delicate position in which he found himself placed. He burdened his soul with lies and perfidies; but he managed affairs so wonderfully that the Empire plucked the best fruits of the first Crusades, by recovering a great part of Asia Minor, with all the coasts of the Euxine and the Ægean, from the weakened Turks. The latter were so far shaken and depressed by the hard blows of the Crusaders that they troubled the Byzantines very little in the century to come.

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But against this immediate gain to the Eastern Empire from the early Crusades, there were serious later offsets. The commerce of Constantinople declined rapidly, as soon as the Moslem blockade of the Syrian coast line was broken. It lost its monopoly. Trade ran back again into other reopened channels. The Venetians and Genoese became more independent. Formerly, they had received privileges in the Empire as a gracious concession. Now they dictated the terms of their commercial treaties and their naval alliances. Their rivalries with one another involved the Empire in quarrels with both, and a state of things was brought about which had much to do with the catastrophe of 1204, when the fourth Crusade was diverted to the conquest of Constantinople, and a Latin Empire supplanted the Empire of the Roman-Greeks.

Effects of the Crusades.

Briefly noted, these were the consequences of the early Crusades in the East. In western Europe they had slower, but deeper and more lasting effects. They weakened feudalism, by sending abroad so many of the feudal lords, and by impoverishing so many more; whereby the towns gained more opportunity for enfranchisement, and the crown, in France particularly, acquired more power. They checked smaller wars and private quarrels for a time, and gave in many countries unwonted seasons of peace, during which the thoughts and feelings of men were acted on by more civilizing influences. They brought men into fellowship who were only accustomed to fight one another, and thus softened their provincial and national antipathies. They expanded the knowledge—the experience—the ideas—of the whole body of those who visited the East and who survived the adventurous expedition; made them acquainted with civilizations at least more polished than their own; taught them many things which they could only learn in those days by actual sight, and sent them back to their homes throughout Europe, to be instructors and missionaries, who did much to prepare Western Christendom for the Renaissance or new birth of a later time. The twelfth century—the century of the great Crusades—saw the gray day-break in Europe after the long night of darkness which settled down upon it in the fifth. In the thirteenth it reached the brightening dawn, and in the fifteenth it stood in the full morning of the modern day. Among all the movements by which it was pushed out of darkness into light, that of the Crusades would appear to have been the most important; important in itself, as a social and political movement of great change, and important in the seeds that it scattered for a future harvest of effects.

In both the Byzantine and Arabian civilizations of the East there was much for western Europe to learn. Perhaps there was more in the last named than in the first; for the Arabs, when they came out from behind their deserts, and exchanged the nomadic life for the life of cities, had shown an amazing avidity for the lingering science of old Greece, which they encountered in Egypt and Syria. They had preserved far more of it, and more of the old fineness of feeling that went with it, than had survived in Greece itself, or in any part of the Teutonized empire of Rome. The Crusaders got glimpses of its influence, at least, and a curiosity was wakened, which sent students into Moorish Spain, and opened scholarly interchanges which greatly advanced learning in Europe.

Rising Power of the Church.

Not the least important effect of the Crusades was the atmosphere of religion which they caused to envelope the great affairs of the time, and which they made common in politics and society. The influence of the Church was increased by this; and its organization was powerfully strengthened by the great monastic revival that followed presently: the rise of purer and more strictly disciplined orders of the "regular" (that is the secluded or monastic) clergy—Cistercians, Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans, etc.; as well as the creation of the great military-religious orders—Knights Templars, Knights of the Hospital of St. John, Teutonic Knights, and others, which were immediately connected with the Crusades.

To say that the Church gained influence is to say that the clergy gained it, and that the chief of the clergy, the Pope, concentrated the gain in himself. The whole clerical body was making encroachments in every field of politics upon the domain of the civil authority, using shrewdly the advantages of superior learning, and busying itself more and more in temporal affairs. The popes after Gregory VII. maintained his high pretensions and pursued his audacious course. In most countries they encountered resistance from the Crown; but the brunt of the conflict still fell upon the emperors, who, in some respects, were the most poorly armed for it.

Guelfs and Ghibellines.

Henry IV., who outlived his struggle with Gregory, was beaten down at last—dethroned by a graceless son, excommunicated by a relentless Church and denied burial when he died (1106) by its clergy. The rebellious son, Henry V., in his turn fought the same battle over for ten years, and forced a compromise which saved about half the rights of investiture that his father had claimed. His death (1125) ended the Franconian line, and the imperial crown returned for a few years to the House of Saxony, by the election of the Duke Lothaire. But the estates of the Franconian family had passed, by his mother, to Frederick of Hohenstaufen, duke of Swabia; and now a bitter feud arose between the House of Saxony and the House of Hohenstaufen or Swabia,—a feud that was the most memorable and, the longest lasting in history, if measured by the duration of party strifes which began in it and which took their names from it. For the raging factions of Guelfs and Ghibellines which divided Italy for two centuries had their beginning in this Swabian-Saxon feud, among the Germans. The Guelfs were the partisans of the House of Saxony; the Ghibellines were the party of the Hohenstaufens. The Hohenstaufens triumphed when Lothaire died (1138), and made Conrad of their House Emperor. They held the crown, moreover, in their family for four generations, extending through more than a century; and so it happened that the German name of the German party of the Hohenstaufens came to be identified in Italy with the party or faction in that country which supported imperial interests and claims in the free cities and against the popes. Whereupon the opposed party name was borrowed from Germany likewise and applied to the Italian faction which took ground against the Emperors—although these Italian Guelfs had no objects in common with the partisans of Saxony.

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The Hohenstaufens in Italy.

The first Hohenstaufen emperor was succeeded (1152) by his nephew Frederick I., called Barbarossa, because of his red beard. The long reign of Frederick, until 1190, was mainly filled with wars and contentions in Italy, where he pushed the old quarrel of the Empire with the Papacy, and where, furthermore, he resolutely undertook to check the growing independence of the Lombard cities. Five times during his reign he led a great army into the peninsula, like a hostile invader, and his destroying marches through the country, of which he claimed to be sovereign, were like those of the barbarians who came out of the North seven centuries before. The more powerful cities, like Milan, were undoubtedly oppressing their weaker neighbors, and Barbarossa assumed to be the champion of the latter. But he smote impartially the weak and the strong, the village and the town, which provoked his arrogant temper in the slightest degree. Milan escaped his wrath on the first visitation, but went down before it when he came again (1158), and was totally destroyed, the inhabitants being scattered in other towns. Even the enemies of Milan were moved to compassion by the savageness of this punishment, and joined, a few years later, in rebuilding the prostrate walls and founding Milan anew. A great "League of Lombardy" was formed by all the northern towns, to defend their freedom against the hated Emperor, and the party of the Ghibellines was reduced for the time to a feeble minority. Meantime Barbarossa had forced his way into Rome, stormed the very Church of St. Peter, and seated an anti-pope on the throne. But a sudden pestilence fell upon his army, and he fled before it, out of Italy, almost alone. Yet he never relaxed his determination to bend both the Papacy and the Lombard republics to his will. After seven years he returned, for the fifth time, and it proved to be the last. The League met him at Legnano (1176) and administered to him an overwhelming defeat. Even his obstinacy was then overcome, and after a truce of six years he made peace with the League and the Pope, on terms which conceded most of the liberties that the cities claimed. It was in the reign of Frederick that the name "Holy Roman Empire" began, it seems, to be used.

Frederick died while on a crusade and was succeeded (1190) by his son, Henry VI., who had married the daughter and heiress of the King of Sicily and who acquired that kingdom in her right. His short reign was occupied mostly in subduing the Sicilian possession. When he died (1197) his son Frederick was a child. Frederick succeeded to the crown of Sicily, but his rights in Germany (where his father had already caused him to be crowned "King of the Romans"—the step preliminary to an imperial election) were entirely ignored. The German crown was disputed between a Swabian and a Saxon claimant, and the Saxon, Otho, was King and Emperor in name, until 1218, when he died. But he, too, quarreled with a pope, about the lands of the Countess Matilda, which she gave to the Church; and his quarrel was with Innocent III., a pope who realized the autocracy which Hildebrand had looked forward to, and who lifted the Papacy to the greatest height of power it ever attained. To cast down Otho, Innocent took up the cause of Frederick, who received the royal crown a second time, at Aix-la-Chapelle (1215) and the imperial crown at Rome (1220). Frederick II. (his designation) was one of the few men of actual genius who have ever sprung from the sovereign families of the world; a man so far in advance of his time that he appears like a modern among his mediæval contemporaries. He was superior to the superstitions of his age,—superior to its bigotries and its provincialisms. His large sympathies and cosmopolitan frame of mind were acted upon by all the new impulses of the epoch of the crusades, and made him reflect, in his brilliant character, as in a mirror, the civilizing processes that were working on his generation.

Between such an emperor as Frederick II. and such popes as Innocent III. and his immediate successors, there could not fail to be collision and strife. The man who might, perhaps, under other circumstances, have given some quicker movement to the hands which measure human, progress on the dial of time, spent his life in barely proving his ability to live and reign under the anathemas and proscriptions of the Church. But he fought a losing fight, even when he seemed to be winning victories in northern Italy, over the Guelf cities of Lombardy, and when the party of the Ghibellines appeared to be ascendant throughout the peninsula. His death (1250) was the end of the Hohenstaufens as an imperial family. His son, Conrad, who survived him four years, was king of Sicily and had been crowned king of Germany; but he never wore the crown imperial. Conrad's illegitimate brother, Manfred, succeeded on the Sicilian throne; but the implacable Papacy gave his kingdom to Charles of Anjou, brother of King Louis IX. of France, and invited a crusade for the conquest of it. Manfred was slain in battle, Conrad's young son, Conradin, perished on the scaffold, and the Hohenstaufens disappeared from history. Their rights, or claims, in Sicily and Naples, passed to the Spanish House of Aragon, by the marriage of Manfred's daughter to the Aragonese king; whence long strife between the House of Anjou and the House of Aragon, and a troubled history for the Neapolitans and the Sicilians during some centuries. In the end, Anjou kept Naples, while Aragon won Sicily; the kings in both lines called themselves Kings of Sicily, and a subsequent re-union of the two crowns created a very queerly named "Kingdom of the Two Sicilies."

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Germany and the Empire.

After the death of Frederick II., the German kings, while maintaining the imperial title, practically abandoned their serious attempts to enforce an actual sovereignty in Italy. The Holy Roman Empire, as a political factor comprehending more than Germany, now ceased in reality to exist. The name lived on, but only to represent a flattering fiction for magnifying the rank and importance of the German kings. In Italy, the conflict, as between Papacy and Empire, or between Lombard republican cities and Empire, was at an end. No further occasion existed for an imperial party, or an anti-imperial party. The Guelf and Ghibelline names and divisions had no more the little meaning that first belonged to them. But Guelfs and Ghibellines raged against one another, more furiously than before, and generations passed before their feud died out.

While the long, profitless Italian conflict of the Emperors went on, their kingship in Germany suffered sorely. As they grasped at a shadowy imperial title, the substance of royal authority slipped from them. Their frequent prolonged absence in Italy gave opportunities for enlarged independence to the German princes and feudal lords; their difficulties beyond the Alps forced them to buy support from their vassals at home by fatal concessions and grants; their neglect of German affairs weakened the ties of loyalty, and provoked revolts. The result might have been a dissolution of Germany so complete as to give rise to two or three strong states, if another potent influence had not worked injury in a different way. This came from the custom of equalized inheritance which prevailed among the Germans. The law of primogeniture, which already governed hereditary transmissions of territorial sovereignty in many countries, even where it did not give an undivided private estate, as in England, to the eldest son of a family, got footing in Germany very late and very slowly. At the time now described, it was the quite common practice to divide principalities between all the sons surviving a deceased duke or margrave. It was this practice which gave rise to the astonishing number of petty states into which Germany came to be divided, and the forms of which are still intact. It was this, in the main, which prevented the growth of any states to a power that would absorb the rest. On the other hand, the flimsy, half fictitious general constitution which the Empire substituted for such an one as the Kingdom of Germany would naturally have grown into, made an effective centralization of sovereignty—easy as the conditions seemed to be prepared for it—quite impossible.

Free Cities in Germany and their Leagues.

One happy consequence of this state of things was the enfranchisement, either wholly or nearly so, of many thriving cities. The growth of cities, as centers of industry and commerce, and the development of municipal freedom among them, was considerably later in Germany than in Italy, France and the Netherlands; but the independence gained by some among them was more entire than in the Low Countries or in France, and more lasting than in Italy.

Most of the free cities of Germany were directly or immediately subject to the Emperor, and wholly independent of the princes whose territories surrounded them; whence they were called "imperial cities." This relationship bound them to the Empire by strong ties; they had less to fear from it than from the nearer small potentates of their country; and it probably drew a considerable part of such strength as it possessed, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, from their support. Their own power was being augmented at this period by the formation of extensive Leagues among them, for common defense, and for the protection, regulation and extension of their trade. In that age of lawless violence, there was so little force in government, everywhere, and so entire a want of co-operation between governments, that the operations of trade were exposed to piracy, robbery, and black-mail, on every sea and in every land. By the organization of their Leagues, the energetic merchants of north-western Europe did for themselves what their half-civilized governments failed to do for them. They not only created effective agencies for the protection of their trade, but they legislated, nationally and internationally, for themselves, establishing codes and regulations, negotiating commercial treaties, making war, and exercising many functions and powers that seem strange to modern times. The great Hansa, or Hanseatic League, which rose to importance in the thirteenth century among the cities in the north of Germany, was the most extensive, the longest lasting and the most formidable of these confederations. It controlled the trade between Germany, England, Russia, the Scandinavian countries, and the Netherlands, and through the latter it made exchanges with southern Europe and the East. It waged successful war with Denmark, Sweden and Norway combined, in defiance of the opposition of the Emperor and the Pope. But the growth of its power engendered an arrogance which provoked enmity in all countries, while the slow crystalizing of nationalities in Europe, with national sentiments and ambitions, worked in all directions against the commercial monopoly of the Hansa towns. By the end of the fifteenth century their league had begun to break up and its power to decline. The lesser associations of similar character—such as the Rhenish and the Swabian—had been shorter-lived.

The Great Interregnum.

These city-confederations represented in their time the only movement of concentration that appeared in Germany. Every other activity seemed tending toward dissolution. Headship there was none for a quarter of a century after Frederick II. died. The election of the Kings, who took rank and title as Emperors when crowned by the Pope, had now become the exclusive privilege of three prince-bishops and four temporal princes, who acquired the title of Electors. Jealous of one another, and of all the greater lords outside their electoral college, it was against their policy to confer the scepter on any man who seemed likely to wield it with a strong hand. For twenty years—a period in German history known as the Great Interregnum—they kept the throne practically vacant. Part of the Electors were bribed to choose Richard, Earl of Cornwall, brother of the English King Henry III., and the other part gave their votes to Alfonso, King of Castile. Alfonso never came to be crowned, either as King or Emperor; Richard was crowned King, but exercised no power and lived mostly in his own country. The Empire was virtually extinct; the Kingdom hardly less so. Burgundy fell away from the imperial jurisdiction even more than Italy did. Considerable parts of it passed to France.

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Rise of the House of Austria.

At last, in 1273, the interregnum was ended by the election of a German noble to be King of Germany. This was Rodolph, Count of Hapsburg,—lord of a small domain and of little importance from his own possessions, which explains, without doubt, his selection. But Rodolph proved to be a vigorous king, and he founded a family of such lasting stamina and such self-seeking capability that it secured in time permanent possession of the German crown, and acquired, outside of Germany, a great dominion of its own. He began the aggrandizement of his House by taking the fine duchy of Austria from the kingdom of Bohemia and bestowing it upon his sons. He was energetic in improving opportunities like this, and energetic, too, in destroying the castles of robber-knights and hanging the robbers on their own battlements; but of substantial authority or power he had little enough. He never went to Rome for the imperial crown; nor troubled himself much with Italian affairs.

On Rodolph's death (1291), his son Albert of Austria was a candidate for the crown. The Electors rejected him and ejected another poor noble, Adolphus of Nassau; but Adolphus displeased them after a few years, and they decreed his deposition, electing Albert in his place. War followed and Adolphus was killed. Albert's reign was one of vigor, but he accomplished little of permanent effect. He planted one of his sons on the throne of Bohemia, where the reigning family had become extinct; but the new king died in a few months, much hated, and the Bohemians resisted an Austrian successor. In 1308, Albert was assassinated, and the electors raised Count Henry of Luxemburg to the throne, as Henry VII. Henry VII. was the first king of Germany since the Hohenstaufens who went to Italy (1310) for the crown of Lombardy and the crown of the Cæsars, both of which he received. The Ghibelline party was still strong among the Italians. In the distracted state of that country there were many patriots—the poet Dante prominent among them—who hoped great things from the reappearance of an emperor; but the enthusiastic welcome he received was mainly from those furious partisans who looked for a party triumph to be won under the new emperor's lead. When they found that he would not let himself be made an instrument of faction in the unhappy country, they turned against him. His undertakings in Italy promised nothing but failure, when he died suddenly (1313), from poison, as the Germans believed. His successor in Germany, chosen by the majority of the electors, was Lewis of Bavaria; but Frederick the Fair of Austria, supported by a minority, disputed the election, and there was civil war for twelve years, until Frederick, a prisoner, so won the heart of Lewis that the latter divided the throne with him and the two reigned together.

France under the Capetians.

While Germany and the fictitious Empire linked with it were thus dropping from the foremost place in western Europe into the background, several kingdoms were slowly emerging out of the anarchy of feudalism, and acquiring the organization of authority and law which creates stable and substantial power. France for two centuries, under the first three Capetian kings, had made little progress to that end. At the accession (1103) of the fourth of those kings, namely, Louis VI., it is estimated that the actual possessions of the Crown, over which it exercised sovereignty direct, equalled no more than about five of the modern departments of France; while twenty-nine were in the great fiefs of Flanders, Burgundy, Champagne, Normandy, Brittany, Anjou, Vermandois, and Boulogne, where the royal authority was but nominal; thirty-three, south of the Loire, were hardly connected with the Crown, and twenty-one were then dependent on the Empire. The actual "France," as a kingdom, at that time, was very small. "The real domain of Louis VI. was almost confined to the five towns of Paris, Orleans, Estampes, Melun, and Compiegne, and to estates in their neighbourhood." But the strengthening of the Crown was slightly begun in the reign of this king, by his wise policy of encouraging the enfranchisement of the communes, as noted before, which introduced a helpful alliance between the monarchy and the burgher-class, or third estate, as it came to be called, of the cities, against the feudal aristocracy.

But progress in that direction was slight at first and slowly made. Louis VII., who came to the throne in 1137, acquired momentarily the great duchy of Aquitaine, or Guienne, by his marriage with Eleanor, who inherited it; but he divorced her, and she married Henry Plantagenet, who became Henry II., King of England, being at the same time Duke of Normandy, by inheritance from his mother, and succeeding his father in Anjou, Maine and Touraine. Eleanor having carried to him the great Aquitanian domain of her family, he was sovereign of a larger part of modern France than owned allegiance to the French king.

French recovery of Normandy and Anjou.

But the next king in France, Philip, called Augustus (1180), who was the son of Louis VII., wrought a change of these circumstances. He was a prince of remarkable vigor, and he rallied with rare ability all the forces that the Crown could command. He wrested Vermandois from the Count of Flanders, and extorted submission from the rebellious Duke of Burgundy. Suspending his projects at home for a time, to go crusading to the Holy Land in company with King Richard of England, he resumed them with fresh energy after Richard's death. The latter was succeeded by his mean brother John, who seems to have been hated with unanimity. John was accused of the murder of his young nephew, Arthur of Brittany, who disputed the inheritance from Richard. As Duke of Normandy and Anjou, John, though King of England, was nevertheless a vassal of the King of France. Philip summoned him, on charges, to be tried by his peers. John failed to answer the summons, and the forfeiture of his fiefs was promptly declared. The French king stood well prepared to make the confiscation effective, while John, in serious trouble with his English subjects, could offer little resistance. Thus the Norman realm of the English kings—their original dominion—was lost beyond recovery, and with it Anjou and Maine. They held Guienne and Poitou for some years; but the bases of the French monarchy were broadened immensely from the day when the great Norman and Angevin fiefs became royal domain.

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The Albigenses.

Events in the south of France, during Philip's reign, prepared the way for a further aggrandisement of the Crown. Ancient Latin civilization had lingered longer there, in spirit, at least, than in the central and northern districts of the kingdom, and the state of society intellectually was both livelier and more refined. It was the region of Europe where thought first showed signs of independence, and where the spiritual despotism of Rome was disputed first. A sect arose in Languedoc which took its name from the district of Albi, and which offended the Church perhaps more by the freedom of opinion that it claimed than by the heresy of the opinions themselves. These Albigeois, or Albigenses, had been at issue with the clergy of their country and with the Papacy for some years before Innocent III., the pontifical autocrat of his age, proclaimed a crusade against them (1208), and launched his sentence of excommunication against Raymond, Count of Toulouse, who gave them countenance if not sympathy. The fanatical Simon de Montfort, father of the great noble of like name who figures more grandly in English history, took the lead of the Crusade, to which bigots and brutal adventurers flocked together. Languedoc was wasted with fire and sword, and after twenty years of intermittent war, in which Peter of Aragon took part, assisting the Albigeois, the Count of Toulouse purchased peace for his ruined land by ceding part of it to the king of France, and giving his daughter in marriage to the king's brother Alphonso,—by which marriage the remainder of the country was transferred, a few years later, to the French crown.

The Battle of Bouvines.

Philip Augustus, in whose reign this brutal crushing of Provençal France began, took little part in it, but he saw with no unwillingness another too powerful vassal brought low. The next blow of like kind he struck with his own hand. John of England had quarreled with the mighty Pope Innocent III.; his kingdom had been placed under interdict and his subjects absolved from their allegiance. Philip of France eagerly offered to become the executor of the papal decree, and gathered an army for the invasion of England, to oust John from his throne. But John hastened now to make peace with the Church, submitting himself, surrendering his kingdom to the Pope, and receiving it back as a papal fief. This accomplished, the all-powerful pontiff persuaded the French king to turn his army against the Count of Flanders, who had never been reduced to a proper degree of submission to his feudal sovereign. He seems to have become the recognized head of a body of nobles who showed alarm and resentment at the growing power of the Crown, and the war which ensued was quite extraordinary in its political importance. King John of England came personally to the assistance of the Flemish Count, because of the hatred he felt towards Philip of France. Otho, Emperor of Germany, who had been excommunicated and deposed by the Pope, and who was struggling for his crown with the young Hohenstaufen, Frederick II., took part in the melee, because John was his uncle, and because the Pope was for Philip, and because Germany dreaded the rising power of France. So the war, which seemed at first to be a trifling affair in a corner, became in fact a grand clearing storm, for the settlement of many large issues, important to all Europe. The settlement was accomplished by a single decisive battle, fought at Bouvines (1214), not far from Tournay. It established effectively in France the feudal superiority and actual sovereignty of the king. It evoked a national spirit among the French people, having been their first national victory, won under the banners of a definite kingdom, over foreign foes. It was a triumph for the Papacy and the Church and a crushing blow to those who dared resist the mandates of Rome. It sent King John back to England so humbled and weakened that he had little stomach for the contest which awaited him there, and the grand event of the signing of Magna Charta next year was more easily brought about. It settled the fate of Otho of Germany, and cleared the bright opening of the stormy career of Frederick II., his successor. Thus the battle of Bouvines, which is not a famous field in common knowledge, must really be numbered among the great and important battles of the world.

When Philip Augustus died in 1223, the regality which he bequeathed to his son, Louis VIII., was something vastly greater than that which came to him from his predecessors. He had enhanced both the dignity and the power, both the authority and the prestige, of the Crown, and made a substantial kingdom of France. Louis VIII. enlarged his dominions by the conquest of Lower Poitou and the taking of Rochelle from the English; but he sowed the seeds of future weakness in the monarchy by creating great duchies for his children, which became as troublesome to later kings as Normandy and Anjou had been to those before him.

Saint Louis.

Louis IX.—Saint Louis in the calendar of the Catholic Church—who came to the throne in 1226, while a child of eleven years, was a king of so noble a type that he stands nearly alone in history. Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor, and King Alfred of England, are the only sovereigns who seem worthy to be compared with him; and even the purity of those rare souls is not quite so simple and so selfless, perhaps, as that which shines in the beautiful character of this most Christian king. His goodness was of that quality which rises to greatness—above all other measures of greatness in the distinction of men. It was of that quality which even a wicked world is compelled to feel and to bend to as a power, much exceeding the power of state-craft or of the sword. Of all the kings of his line, this Saint Louis was probably the one who had least thought of a royal interest in France distinct from the interest of the people of France; and the one who consciously did least to aggrandize the monarchy and enlarge its powers; but no king before him or after him was so much the true architect of the foundations of the absolute French monarchy of later times. His constant purpose was to give peace to his kingdom and justice to his people; to end violence and wrong-doing. {1030} In pursuing this purpose, he gave a new character and a new influence to the royal courts,—established them in public confidence,—accustomed his subjects to appeal to them; he denounced the brutal senselessness of trials by combat, and commanded their abolition; he gave encouragement to the study and the introduction of Roman law, and so helped to dispel the crude political as well as legal ideas that feudalism rested on. His measures in these directions all tended to the undermining of the feudal system and to the breaking down of the independence of the great vassals who divided sovereignty with the king. At the same time the upright soul of King Louis, devotedly pious son of the Church as he was, yielded his conscience to it, and the just ordinances of his kingdom, no more than he yielded to the haughty turbulence of the great vassals of the crown.

The great misfortunes of the reign of Saint Louis were the two calamitous Crusades in which he engaged (1248-1254, and 1270), and in the last of which he died. They were futile in every way—as unwisely conducted as they were unwisely conceived; but they count among the few errors of a noble, great life. Regarded altogether, in the light which after-history throws back upon it, the reign of Louis IX. is more loftily distinguished than any other in the annals of France.

Philip the Fair and Pope Boniface.

There is little to distinguish the reign of St. Louis' son, Philip III., "le Hardi," "the Rash" (1270-1285), though the remains of the great fief of Toulouse were added in his time to the royal domain; but under the grandson of St. Louis, the fourth Philip, surnamed "le Bel," there was a season of storms in France. This Philip was unquestionably a man of clear, cold intellect, and of powerful, unbending will. There was nothing of the soldier in him, much of the lawyer-like mind and disposition. The men of the gown were his counsellors; he advanced their influence, and promoted the acceptance in France of the principles of the Roman or civil law, which were antagonistic to feudal ideas. In his attitude towards the Papacy—which had declined greatly in character and power within the century past—he was extraordinarily bold. His famous quarrel with Pope Boniface VIII. resulted in humiliations to the head of the Church from which, in some respects, there was no recovery. The quarrel arose on questions connected chiefly with the taxing of the clergy. The Pope launched one angry Bull after another against the audacious king, and the latter retorted with Ordinances which were as effective as the Bulls. Excommunication was defied; the Inquisition was suppressed in France; appeal taken to a General Council of the Church. At last Boniface suffered personal violence at the hands of a party of hired ruffians, in French pay, who attacked him at his country residence, and received such indignities that he expired soon after of shame and rage. The pope immediately succeeding died a few months later, and dark suspicions as to the cause of his death were entertained; for he gave place (1305) to one, Clement V., who was the tool of the French king, bound to him by pledges and guarantees before his election. This Pope Clement removed the papal residence from Rome to Avignon, and for a long period—the period known as "the Babylonish Captivity"—the Holy See was subservient to the monarchy of France.