Book 1 — CHAPTER VI. THE LAST CRUSADES (continued 2)

THE ORDER SUPPRESSED

The king of France arrived at Vienne, and sanctioned by his presence, the pope declared that he should exercise the plenitude of papal authority. He accordingly dissolved the order provisionally and not absolutely, and reserved to himself the disposition of the persons and estates of the Templars. When the subject of the distribution of the knights’ Templar estates was debated in the council, the pope declared that they ought to be bestowed upon the Hospitallers, because the original purpose of the order was the subjugation of infidels, a purpose which the knights of Rhodes were earnestly pursuing.

The decree of confiscation was executed throughout Christendom. The Templars were robbed, but the Hospitallers did not enjoy the whole of the plunder. Philip the Fair, and his successor Louis le Hutin, retained nearly three hundred thousand livres [£12,000 or $60,000] for what they chose to term the expenses of the prosecution. The landed estates were slowly and unwillingly resigned, for the monarchs enjoyed the rents till the commissioners of the knights of Rhodes established their rights. In Germany the Teutonic knights assisted the Hospitallers in plundering those who had formerly been their brethren in arms in Palestine. Dinis, king of Portugal, preserved the order of the Red Cross knights, by changing their title from the soldiers of the Temple to that of the soldiers of Christ. Edward of England gave to different laymen much of the forfeited property. Numbers of the nobility too as heirs of the original donors seized many of the Templars’ estates. Indeed, so great was the injustice done to the Hospitallers, that Pope John XXII censured both the clergy and laity, for their disobedience to the decree of the council at Vienne.

The last circumstance which attended the fate of the Templars was the condemnation of the grand-master, Jacques de Molay.[81] With his dying lips he bore testimony to the virtue of the order; and his mental sufferings on account of his former want of firmness appeared to be greater than his mere corporeal pain. The brother of the prince of Dauphiné met with the same unhappy but honourable end as that of his friend Jacques de Molay. The two priors seem to have died in prison.b

THE CRUSADES IN THE WEST

[1230-1309 A.D.]

Having completed the survey of the vain efforts for the Holy Land, it will be well to glance at the contests springing up elsewhere on the same fanatic belief that orthodoxy was a matter of life and death.a

Though the Crusades met with failure in the East, in the West they achieved their purpose; that is, certain expeditions were highly successful; for example that of the Teutonic knights and sword-bearers into Prussia and the neighbouring regions, where they founded a new state; also Simon de Montfort’s war against the Albigenses which destroyed an ancient civilisation; and the struggle between the Spaniards and the Moors, as a result of which the latter were forced to surrender the peninsula over to Christianity and the civilisation of Europe.

It will be observed that the scene of action of the European Crusades was the two extremities of the continent; around the mouths of the Niemen the pagans of the Baltic were to be converted, and in the country washed by the Tagus, the Moslems of Spain.

THE TEUTONIC CRUSADE

In the interval between the First and Second Crusades some citizens of Bremen and Lübeck had journeyed to the Holy Land and there founded a hospital for their compatriots, which was exclusively under the management of Germans. In Palestine all benevolent institutions were obliged to assume the form of military organisations; thus the Hospitallers, or officials in charge of the hospitals, became the knights of St. John, and the inmates of the temple of Solomon, the knights Templar. The German hospitallers also became transformed into an armed religious body that was called the Teutonic order. Like both the others, this order soon acquired vast properties in Europe, especially in Germany, and the emperor Frederick II raised its grand-master to the rank of prince of the realm. In 1230 a Polish prince made use of their zeal and arms, which could no longer be employed in the Holy Land, by despatching them on a mission to subjugate and convert the Prussians, a people who have since become so closely identified with the Germans settled in the country as to be no longer distinguishable from them. It was this idolatrous people, established between the Niemen and the Vistula, whose language, history, and religion have now completely disappeared, that gave its name to one of the largest and most prosperous states of modern Europe.

The Teutonic order took up its station first at Kulm, whence it proceeded to conquer the Prussians by the use of the means employed by Charlemagne against the Saxons; that is, by destroying one portion of the population and then building fortresses to contain the rest. It was this purpose that Königsberg and Marienburg were intended to serve.

Several years earlier a prelate of Livonia had founded the order of the Brothers of the Sword, known still as the knights of Christ, and the body of the sword-bearers, which subdued Livonia and Esthonia. Disputes with the bishops of Riga caused these organisations to unite in 1237 with the Teutonic order, whose forces were thus doubled. Marienburg became the capital of the order in 1309, and its grand-masters, who reigned over Prussia, Esthonia, Livonia, and Courland, caused these countries to hold communion with the rest of Europe, and planted in them the germs of civilisation. They remain to-day the richest and most progressive of the Russian provinces. As late as the fifteenth century the Teutonic knights retained the preponderance of power in northern Europe, all the countries between the lower Vistula and Lake Peipus being subject to them except Samogitia, a Lithuanian province which separated the original possessions of the two orders.

THE ATTACK ON THE ALBIGENSES

[1167-1208 A.D.]

The crusade directed by Simon de Montfort against the populations of the south of France was at first most disastrous in its effects. During all the time that Christian warriors were being sent out to do battle with miscreants at the opposite end of the Mediterranean Sea, many infidels were awaiting conversion in the very heart of Europe. Not the Jews, who had furnished the first cause for the Crusades in the fury with which they inspired their early persecutors, but the mixed populations in the south of France, composed of Iberians, Gauls, Romans, Goths, and Moors, whose religious beliefs were far removed from orthodoxy. Just what name to give to their heresy it is hard to decide; even contemporaries were at a loss in this respect since they called the people simply Albigenses, from the town Albi, which was their common centre. One thing only is certain—that in 1167 a council was held near Toulouse, presided over by Nicetas, a Greek from Constantinople, at which many oriental ideas were adopted; it has also been asserted that ecclesiastics were treated with scorn in every part of the land, and even St. Bernard himself was received there with derision. From this centre of heresy missionaries were sent out in every direction, and already unseemly doctrines were making themselves known in Flanders, Germany, England, and even in Italy, while recently bands of marauders had spread out in the direction of Auvergne, pillaging churches and profaning sacred objects.

Among the rich and brilliant cities of the south the most important was Toulouse, where resided Count Raymond VI, one of the greatest nobles of the south. Another prominent house was that of Barcelona, which had lately obtained rule over Aragon and possessed Roussillon and Provence; there were further the proud and adventurous nobles of the Pyrenees, who lived free and independent lives, and owed not the least allegiance to either church or king.

The south of France had long been separated from the north. Having other customs and speaking a different tongue, it had made serious efforts under Dagobert, Charles Martel, Pepin, Charlemagne, Charles the Bald, and Hugh Capet, to constitute itself an independent state. Increase in commerce had brought ease to its citizens and affluence to its nobles, and the two classes united in peace and harmony to discharge municipal duties, thus assuring the peace of the whole community. But in those wealthy cities and brilliant courts, made gay by the songs of troubadours, religious doctrines were accorded scant attention, and heresy leaked in from every side.

The all-powerful Innocent III resolved to stamp out this hotbed of impiety that threatened to spread contagion far and wide. He began by organising the Inquisition, which was to seek out and judge heretics, and countless victims were immolated without in any way lessening the number of unbelievers, the rack and the stake being but indifferent demonstrators of the truth. The pope next sent to Raymond VI his legate, the monk Peter of Castelnau, with the demand that the heretics be immediately expulsed. But the heretics formed the main body of the population, and Castelnau accomplished nothing. Raymond was excommunicated and threatened with eternal fires, and the legate was murdered during his passage back over the Rhone (1208).

[1208-1228 A.D.]

“Anathema on the count of Toulouse,” cried the pope, “and remission of sins to all who will take up arms against these pestilent inhabitants of Provence! Forward, soldiers of Christ! let the heretics be wiped out, and colonies of Catholics spring up where their cities now stand!”

The doctrine of extermination was preached by all the organs of the pope: and the duke of Burgundy, the counts of Nevers, Auxerre, Geneva, the bishops of Rheims, Sens, Rouen, Autun, with many Germans and inhabitants of Lorraine, massed forces, and set out on the crusade. Three armies made irruption into the south of France, headed by Simon de Montfort, a feudal lord of the environs of Paris, ambitious, fanatical, and cruel. The count of Toulouse was not immediately attacked, the pope hoping to weaken his resistance by appearing ready to extend a pardon, and hostilities were all directed against the viscount of Béziers. When the latter’s town was taken, the victors, not being able to distinguish the heretics, hesitated whom to strike. “Kill all,” said the legate, “God will easily recognise his own.” Thirty thousand are said to have perished. Carcassonne also succumbed, and the knights of the Ile de France divided up the country under Simon de Montfort, who was made suzerain over all.

Raymond hoped to be spared, now that so sanguinary a sacrifice had been offered up on the altar of orthodoxy, and Innocent himself was inclined to clemency, but the legates were without pity; they would extend mercy to the count only on condition that he should cause all his subjects to don the garb of penitents, degrade his nobles to the state of villeins, discharge his hired troops, raze his castles to the ground, and himself start on a crusade.

The count laughed at these proposals, and again the legates gave the signal for attack. There flocked to the banner of Simon de Montfort a multitude from the north, rejoicing that the highly profitable campaign in the south was not yet at an end. Raymond VI was vanquished at Castelnaudry, and the victors divided up his domains among themselves: to the prelates fell the bishoprics, and to the soldiers the fiefs. The defeated noble had no resource but to seek the protection of Pedro II, king of Aragon, who at once advanced to the rescue, and was joined by all the petty nobles of the Pyrenees, being looked upon by them as their chief.

The battle of Muret, in which the king perished, decided the fate of the south of France (1213). Two years afterward the Council of Lateran ratified the dispossession of Raymond and of most of the other nobles; the legates of the holy see offered their fiefs to the powerful barons who had participated in the crusade; but all save Simon de Montfort refused to accept gifts bought at the price of so much bloodshed. A harsh measure was passed, forbidding widows of heretics who possessed noble fiefs to marry any but Frenchmen during the next ten years. In the grasp of hands so ruthless the civilisation of southern France perished, and all gaiety and poesy disappeared. Innocent III, meanwhile, began to be troubled, fearing to have committed a great iniquity. “Give me back my lands,” the count de Foix said to him, “or I shall claim all of you—property, rights, and heritage, on the Day of Judgment.” “I acknowledge,” answered the pope, “that great wrong has been done you; but it was not done by my order, and I owe no thanks to those who are responsible.”

In their extremity the people of Languedoc bethought themselves of the king of France. Montpellier gave itself up to him, and Philip Augustus sent his son Louis to plant the national standard in the south of France. Louis returned thither at the death of Simon de Montfort, who was killed before Toulouse—whither Raymond VII, son of the old count, had also returned; and Montfort’s successor, Amaury, offered to cede to the king his father’s conquered possessions, which he could no longer defend against the reprobation of the people. Philip, at that time on the brink of the grave, refused the offer, but five years later it was accepted.

WESTERN ASSAULTS ON THE ARABS

[732-1096 A.D.]

Before, during, and after the great Crusades which had the Orient for their scene of action and all the peoples of Europe for their personages, there was being carried on in the West another and smaller undertaking of a similar nature, which won nothing like the renown attending the greater expeditions, but which displayed a tenacity of purpose that kept it in operation during at least eight centuries. When Charles Martel and Pepin le Bref expelled the Arabs from France they simply drove them to the other side of the Pyrenees, seeming to look upon that strong mountain barrier as the confine of Europe and Christianity. Spain was a country to be sacrificed, to be delivered over with Africa to the Moslem races by which it had been invaded. Spain had been Christian, however, before the invasion, and the mass of the people remained so after, by no means all having been subjected. Outside the conquered districts there remained a point where the sacred thought of independence could find safe harbour, and this point was gradually to expand until it formed the nucleus of a new Christian domination.

The weakening of the power of the Cordovan caliphate in its northern provinces, as a result of the revolt of the Beni Hassan in 864, was singularly favourable to the development of the small Christian states. The tenth century, however, did not continue to bring uninterrupted good fortune to the Christian states. While discords were beginning to creep in among their own number, the caliphate was restored by Abd ar-Rahman III, and the adroit Al-Mansur under Hisham II. The terrible defeat suffered by the Christians at Simancas in 940, the overthrow of Sancho the Great by the count of Castile who declared himself independent, and the subsequent reinstatement of Sancho by Abd ar-Rahman, reveal the kingdom of Leon as having fallen into a state of demoralisation so deep that even its enemies had power to dispose of the throne. Al-Mansur also weighed upon the Christians with a ruthless hand. In 997 he found himself master of all the lands the Christians had conquered south of the Douro and the Ebro. When he came to be defeated himself, however, at Calatanazar, near the source of the Douro, his chagrin was so great that he allowed himself to die by starvation, and in him perished the mainstay of the caliphate (998).

We have seen at another point in this history that during the eleventh century the Spanish Arabs fell into complete dissolution; the Christian states, on the other hand, grew into closer and closer union by means of frequent intermarriages and increased trade relations. This process of unification and internal adjustment, as well as the necessity of closing all the gaps left open by the sword of Al-Mansur, held in check the holy war for a period of nearly a century. At the end of that time it was resumed with greater brilliancy and success than before.

Not alone by reason of the fortunate alliances he was able to make did Sancho II merit the title of Great; greatness was to be achieved in Spain mainly by warring upon infidels, and many were the engagements during which the Moors were made to feel the might of his sword. Not content to rest here, he carried his victorious arms, in the intervals of preparing the substitution of the Christian dynasty of Aznar for that of Pelayo, into the heart of the Moslem country to the very walls of Cordova.

[1072-1146 A.D.]

At Sancho’s death Spain was divided into four kingdoms. But Alfonso VI reunited Castile and Leon in 1072, and resumed in Spain the holy war which had been made extremely popular in Europe by the preparations for the First Crusade. The news of the Christian reverses in Jerusalem, and also the growing influence of the holy see, had a powerful effect on Spain. It was the desire of Gregory VII to bring under his domination the Spanish Christian states which had hitherto enjoyed complete religious independence, and in case of their failure to yield it was feared that some day he would arm all Christianity against them.

Always characterised by boundless presumption, Gregory VII demanded of Alfonso VI that he pay him tribute, on the pretext that all lands taken from the infidels were by right the property of the church. Alfonso refused. Then Gregory fell back on another point, the adoption by the Spanish Christians of the Roman instead of the Gothic or Muzarabic ritual to which they had been used. Eventually Alfonso adopted the Roman ritual. Henceforth complete communion was held with Rome by the Spanish people which eventually became the most pronouncedly Catholic, if not always the most submissive to the holy see, of all the races of the earth.

Ferdinand I had profited by the divisions existing among the petty Arab sovereigns to wrest from them many of their possessions. He took Viseu, Lamego, Coimbra, and made the king of Toledo pay him tribute. In 1085 Alfonso VI was even more successful, gaining possession of the entire kingdom. Toledo, formerly the capital and metropolis of the Goths, became once more an important centre; and its restoration marks the fourth stage of the progress of the Christians from the Asturias, where they began their onward march, to the heart of the peninsula, where they were to take up a firm position behind the barrier of the Tagus.

Five years later the Capetian, Henri de Bourgogne, great-grandson of Robert king of France, who had distinguished himself at the conquest of Toledo, took at the mouth of the Douro, Porto Cale, which Alfonso raised to importance by making it the countship of Portugal. Simultaneously with this the famous Cid, Rodrigo de Bivar, the hero of Spanish chivalry and romance, achieved victory after victory along the coast of the Mediterranean, the most important of which was the conquest of Valencia (1094). Finally in 1118 Alfonso I, king of Aragon, won for himself a capital after the manner of the king of Castile, by taking possession of Saragossa, where a Moslem dynasty had long been in power. Thus the Christian invasion, divided like an army into three columns, was steadily advancing across the peninsula, one column in the centre, one in the east and one in the west.

In the centre progress was suddenly arrested, and was later checked along all the lines by unforeseen obstacles which the Christians were unable to surmount until after the lapse of nearly a century. Two new Moslem hordes poured in upon the land, surprising the Spanish conquerors in the midst of their belief that the sources of these invading tides had long since been exhausted. The Almoravids, and after them the Almohads, swarmed out of Africa and revived in the Moslem provinces of Spain the ancient faith of Islam. The names of these two sects signify, respectively, “close alliance with the faith,” and “Unitarians.” The Almoravids steadily increased their power and the extent of their dominion. At the death of the Cid (1099) they retook Valencia, gained possession of the Balearic Isles, and in 1108 won, in a battle as sanguinary and hard-fought as that of Zallaka, a signal victory over Alfonso VI. The Christians asked themselves in alarm if Spain, but half reconquered, was about to be wrested from them again.

As the result showed, their fears were groundless. Toledo, repeatedly besieged, defended itself with victorious energy; and the little earldom of Portugal not only successfully resisted attack, but itself took several towns and drove the invaders back whence they had come.

[1146-1270 A.D.]

The invasion of the Almohads was similar in its effects to that of the Almoravids, which it immediately succeeded. The leader, Abdul-Mumin, began hostilities by laying siege to Fez, which he took in 1146; the same year he led his followers into Spain. As before, it was Castile that had to bear the heaviest shock of the invasion, and at the battle of Alarcon (1195) Alfonso VIII was badly defeated. Portugal, on the other hand, maintained its superiority and placed a decided check upon the invaders at Santerem (1184). The advancement made by Aragon and Portugal caused the thirteenth century to open gloriously for Spain in its struggles against the Moslems. It had, moreover, been given a second powerful instrument with which to achieve victory in the four military bodies organised in the twelfth century expressly for the Spanish Crusade, without prejudice to the great Holy Land crusaders who also took part—the orders of Alcantara, of Calatrava, and of St. James in Castile, and of Evora in Portugal.

In the year 1210 the news was spread throughout all Christendom that four hundred thousand Almohads had crossed the Strait of Gibraltar. Though deeply engaged in the war against the Albigenses, Pope Innocent III could not contemplate the danger thus announced without calling upon all Europe to succour Spain. Public prayers were ordered and indulgence promised to all who would volunteer to fight in the peninsula. The five Christian kings of Leon and Castile, temporarily separated at the time, joined their forces and marched against Muhammed, the fanatical leader of the Almohads. The encounter took place at Alacab, on the plateau of the Sierra Morena, according to the Arabs; at Las Navas de Tolosa, according to the Christians. After an obstinately contested battle the flight of the Andalusians decided the day in favour of the Christians. Muhammed, who had stationed himself on a height amid the serried ranks of his African guard, holding the Koran in one hand and his sword in the other, looked on in undisturbed passivity while his followers suffered the most terrible defeat. “God alone,” he said, “is just and powerful, the demon is without truth or greatness.” Muhammed was at last compelled to take flight on a swift courser of the desert, which carried him far from his enemies. This battle was decisive in the struggles between the Christians and the infidels. The Almoravids and Almohads once definitely repulsed, there rose up in Africa no more defenders of the Moslem faith sufficiently powerful to restore its dominion in Spain.

During the whole of the thirteenth century the Christians reaped the fruits of their victory, which was rendered the more complete by the anarchy that prevailed among all ranks of the Almohads. Cordova (1236), Seville (1266), and many other places fell into the hands of the king of Castile, while James I, king of Aragon, brought the Balearic Isles under subjection, and at the head of eighty thousand French and Spanish troops retook Valencia (1238). Portugal reached its limit of expansion when in 1270 it united the provinces of Algarve, and the outlines it then assumed have never since been changed. The Moors now possessed only the little kingdom of Granada, that was hemmed in on all sides by the sea and the domains of the king of Castile. Yet even in this confined space, their numbers swelled by the refugees that fled to them from the cities captured by the Christians, they contrived to maintain a power that staved off their ultimate downfall for a period of two hundred years. Save to repel certain incursions on the part of the Merinids of Maghreb which never seriously endangered their conquered possessions, the Christians had now no military operations to carry on; hence the crusade in Spain was practically suspended until a later date, 1492.

COMPARISON OF THE TWO CRUSADES

The crusade to Jerusalem had undoubtedly brought forth general results to civilisation, but its particular aim had not been accomplished. It founded no important institutions in the Orient; it did not even succeed in delivering the Holy Sepulchre, and millions of men had left their bones along its route. The crusade in Spain, on the other hand, while it bore no consequences to the social conditions of Europe in the Middle Ages, changed the whole face of Spain and reacted powerfully upon the Europe of modern times. It took the peninsula away from the Moors and gave it to the Christians; it brought into being the little kingdom of Portugal which, carrying on a crusade of its own beyond seas, discovered the Cape of Good Hope; and it made great states of Aragon and Castile, whose kings were inspired with European ambitions by their victories in Spain, and whose inhabitants gained, in the eight centuries of warfare, military customs and knowledge which made of them the condottieri of Charles V and Philip II, not the peaceful and industrious heirs of the commerce and brilliant civilisation of the Moors.

There was still another point. What was the cause of this difference between the two crusades? Jerusalem, situated far from the centre of Catholic denomination, remained in the hands of the Moslems, by whom it was surrounded, for precisely the same reason that Toledo, situated at the limit of their zone of occupation, escaped them to become the possession of the nearby Christians. The whole matter was simply a question of distance. Palestine bordered on the territory of Mecca, as Spain lay in full view of Rome. Geographical relationship is a powerful factor, even in matters that seem to come the least under its influence—the theories and doctrines of religion.e

FOOTNOTES