CRISTO RAUL.ORG

DURUY'S

HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE AGES

BOOK VII

THE CRUSADES(1095-1250)

CHAPTER XIX.

THE FIRST CRUSADE TO JERUSALEM (1095-1099).

WITHIN this world of the Middle Ages, there were two entirely distinct worlds : that of the Gospel and that of the Koran. They had already come sometimes into collision, but finding that they were nearly in strength , they had been content with tacitly dividing the known world between them. The Koran ruled from the Pyrenees to the mouth of the Ganges; the Gospels ruled the whole of Europe, with the exception of Spain. Only the outer edges of these two worlds had come into contact with each other in the frontier wars, but the time had now come when they were to be involved in a general war.

We have already seen what an important part the Germanic society played in Christendom, of which it was the leading spirit. Though complete unity could not be maintained, division had not proved fatal to it; its life and activity were immense, and it proved a fruitful soil for the propagation of new ideas.

The Greek society, which made up the remainder of Christendom, isolated as it was between the Germans and the Arabs, like an island surrounded by the floods of invasion, dragged out a barren and insignificant existence. Since the time of Justinian, the same story had been repeated over and over of court intrigues, interspersed with acts of cruelty, theological disputes which excited the people, wars against the masters of Asia and against the barbarians who sometimes appeared in the north, and occasionally, among all these disturbances, some legislative achievements. The separation between the Empire of the East and the German peoples had become even wider, since it had become a religious separation also. The schism of the two churches, which began with the quarrel of the Iconoclasts, continued through the two following centuries, though the Greeks under Irene and Theodora (787 and 842) had returned to the orthodox worship of images. The installation of Photius as Patriarch of Constantinople, which was disapproved of by Pope Nicholas I, widened the breach; a point of dogma, the admission by the Latin church of the filioque in that passage, of the Nicene Creed where it says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father; some differences in matters of observance; the use of leavened instead of unleavened bread, the marriage of the priests, the use of the vulgar tongue in the celebration of the church services, baptism by immersion, the Saturday’s fast, and above all the rivalry of the two churches over the king of Bulgaria, whom the patriarch finally succeeded in winning to his communion, put the finishing stroke to the separation, which was complete in 1054 after the papal legates had placed on the altar of Saint Sophia an anathema which branded “The seven mortal heresies of the Greeks.”

Though separated from the rest of Christendom, it must be acknowledged that the Empire of the East had resources enough, besides sometimes possessing princes who were able to guard their own frontiers and even to gain advantages over her enemies and the neighboring peoples, especially over those of the north, the Russians and the Bulgarians. Attacks were first made by the Russians upon the empire in 865. They descended the Borysthenes in their vessels and reached Constantinople by the Black Sea. The Greek fire drove them away both this first and many other times. Toward the end of the tenth century they formed another project and made an attempt to establish themselves on the right bank of the Danube, but John Zimisces drove them off (972). Discouraged by these fruitless efforts, the Russians decided to have the Greeks for their friends, and after the marriage of their chief Vladimir with the daughter of the Emperor Basil II (980), peace reigned between the two peoples. Vladimir became a convert to the religion of his wife.

In their struggle with the Bulgarians, the Greeks were even more successful. It is true that Constantinople was besieged several times, and that the Empire was invaded twenty-six times by the Bulgarian king, Samuel; but in 1019 Basil II. overthrew their kingdom, and the Empire was again victorious.

After the first great attack of the Arabs, the Greek Empire was able to repel them successfully. The Greek navy recovered its old force in the ninth century, and took the islands of the Archipelago and several points in the Morea, which had been occupied by the infidels, dividing the latter as far as the latitude of Sicily. In the tenth century, Nicephorus Phocas led the Greek army again to Cilicia and Syria, countries which had been lost to the empire long before. John Zimisces went still farther and crossed the Euphrates, striking terror into the heart of Bagdad. The Greek Empire showed a singular vitality, and though always on the point of dissolution survived the barbarians who had so often overwhelmed it.

Since Heraclius, the throne of Byzantium had been occupied by three different dynasties, the Isaurian from 717 to 802, the Phrygian from 820 to 867, and the Macedonian from 867 to 1056. The last of these, which produced the three remarkable men, Nicephorus Phocas, Zimisces, and Basil II, revived some of the ancient glory of the Empire. We must remember however, that this family came to the throne when the Bulgarians and the Abbasides were utterly exhausted. The dynasty of the Comneni, on the contrary, which came to the throne in 1057 with Isaac, had to contend against new and formidable enemies, the Turks, who had recently become the masters of Asia. Romanus Diogenes, the only prince of any valor who sprung from this family in the second half of the eleventh century, defeated the Seljuk Alp-Arslan, but was taken prisoner by him in a second battle (1071). Alexis Comnenus (ro8i), feeling too weak to resist them alone, called the Germans to his aid and thus contributed something to the first crusade. In the crusades, the great events of the time, the Greek Empire, which no longer possessed any real strength or vigor, let the Franks take the lead, and when the rough-hewn civilization of the West was brought into contact with the exhausted civilization of the East, it was easy to see to which empire the future belonged.

Such was the Christian world. In reviewing the Mussulman world, it must be born in mind how greatly its power had declined. At one time there had been three great empires: that of the Ommiades in Spain, of the Fatimites in Africa, and of the Abbasides in Asia. Then the Ommiades of Cordova, shaken by the double attack of the small Christian states at the north, and of the Moorish people from Africa at the south, had disappeared; the dominion of the Fatimites was reduced to the limits of Egypt by the aggressions of the African dynasties on the west and the victorious Seljuk Turks on the east; and finally, in 1058, the Abbasides of Bagdad had been almost overthrown by these same Turks. Thus the Arab society had not had the good fortune possessed by the Germanic society of being able to set a definite limit to all later invasion of its territory, and to organize itself during times of peace behind some mighty barrier.

The Turks founded a great empire under Alp the Lion (Arslan) (1063), and Malek-Shah (1075), successors of Togrul-Beg. The first took the Greek Emperor, Romanus Diogenes, prisoner in 1071, and conquered Armenia. The second sent troops to invade Syria, Palestine, and Jerusalem, and even pushed his armies as far as Egypt; while a member of the Seljuk family conquered Asia Minor from the Greeks, and founded the kingdom, of Iconium, which extended from the Taurus to the Bosphorus, and which continued its growth under his son Kilij-Arslan, who took the title of Sultan of Roum [Rome]. At the death of Malek-Shah (1093), according to a Persian poet, “A cloud of princes rose from the dust of his feet,” by which is meant that the power of his empire was broken. Persia, Syria, and Kerman became distinct sultanates, sharing the fate of all Asiatic conquests. Nevertheless, the whole of Asia was in the hands of the Turks when the Christians arrived.

The Christian of Europe, confined in a limited space, without any large horizon save that of his thoughts, and with no food for thought except what he found in his holy books and their stories, concentrated all his poetical feelings on the localities continually mentioned in these books, where his Saviour lived and died and accomplished on the cross the great mystery of the redemption. His ideal country—the place toward which he was impelled by all his most serious and sweetest thoughts—was Jerusalem, where the Holy Sepulchre was, and where the Empress Helena had devoutly collected the relics of the Passion; and next to Jerusalem, the Mount of Olives, Golgotha, and Bethlehem. Happy would he be who might see Jerusalem, and doubly happy he who should die there. The common people did not even hope for such blessedness. Palestine was so far away. A very few pilgrims went there, and on their return their narratives were listened to with the greatest eagerness. Cries of horror and hatred were lifted up against the infidels when they described the tyranny exercised in the Holy City by the Fatimite Caliph Hakim, or later by the Sultan Malek-Shah. Even pilgrims were not admitted except on the payment of a piece of gold, and many, having exhausted all their means on the journey, were obliged to wait at the gate of the Holy City till the charity of some rich noble arriving from Europe allowed them to enter. Nevertheless the numbers of the travelers increased and gradually became quite considerable. During the eleventh century sometimes as many as 3000 started at once, sometimes even 7000. These were still armies of peaceful men, but they prepared the way for armies of a different kind.

The Greek Emperor Alexis Comnenus, alarmed by the appearance of the Turks on the opposite bank of the Bosphorus, directly in front of Constantinople, sent forth a cry for help, which was heard in all the courts of Europe. But the western Christians were indifferent to the dangers threatening this last remainder of the Roman Empire. Pope Silvester II. had already written in vain an eloquent letter to the princes in behalf of abandoned Jerusalem. Gregory VII, whose soul was always filled with great thoughts, wished to go himself with 50,000 knights to deliver the Holy Selpulchre. Emperors and popes were powerless, but what they were unable to perform was accomplished by a poor monk.

Jerusalem had just fallen into the hands of a savage horde of Turks, who, instead of treating the pilgrims with the indulgence shown them by the Caliphs of Bagdad and Cairo, overwhelmed them with insults, and it was only by running great risks that the pilgrims could approach the holy places. Peter the Hermit made all France resound with the melancholy accounts of their distress, and the people were fired with a devout enthusiasm and everywhere took arms to rescue the tomb of Christ from the hands of the infidels. The Council of Clermont, which came together in 1095, with the French Pope Urban II. at its head, proclaimed the crusade; the number of those who in that and the following year fixed upon their breasts the cross of red cloth, the sign of their enlistment in the holy project, was. almost a million. The Church put them under the protection of the Truce of God, and granted them various privileges for their property, which were to last through the whole time of the expedition.

Men came from the most distant countries. Guibert of Nogent says : “Men landed at all the ports of France, who, as they were unable to make themselves understood, placed their fingers over each other in the form of a cross, to signify that they wished to take part in the holy war.” The most impatient were the poor, putting their trust in God alone, and with the cry of “God wills it,” (Dieu le veut) they were the first to start, though without any preparation and almost without weapons. Whole families went, men and women, old and young together, and the little ones, who were placed on carts drawn by oxen, could be heard to exclaim whenever they saw a castle or a city, “Is not that Jerusalem?”. A vanguard of 15,000 men, with only six horses among them, were the first to take the road, led by a poor Norman knight, Walter the Penniless. Peter the Her­mit followed with 100,000 men. Another troop, led by a German priest Gotteschalk, brought up the rear. They passed through Germany, slaying any Jews they met, living by pillage and accustoming themselves to violence. In Hungary they caused such disturbances that the population took to arms and, after having killed many of them, drove them into Thrace. Only a very few of them got as far as Constantinople. The Emperor Alexis, in haste to get rid of such allies, sent them on into Asia as soon as possible. There they fell under the sabre of the Turks, on the plain of Nicaea, and their bones were said to have been used by the Crusaders who followed them in fortifying their camp.

While this reckless vanguard was marching to its death, the knights were arming themselves and being organized. They finally started with 100,000 horsemen and 600,000 foot soldiers, as we are told, going by different routes and under different leaders. The men from the North of France and from Lorraine passed through Germany and Hungary. Among them was Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine, the bravest, strongest, and most devout of the crusaders, and his two brothers, Eustach of Boulogne, and Baldwin. Led by the Count of Toulouse, the men of Southern France crossed the Alps and passed through Dalmatia and Thrace. Adhemar, the bishop of Puy and the legate of the Holy See, the spiritual chief of the crusade was with this army. The Duke of Normandy and the Counts of Blois, of Flanders, and of Vermandois, went to join the Normans of Italy, who were led by Bohemond, Prince of Tarentum, and his nephew, Tancred, who, after Godfrey, was the most perfect knight of the times; and these together crossed the Adriatic and passed through Greece and Macedonia.

The place of general meeting was at Constantinople. The Emperor was alarmed lest they should begin their crusade there by taking possession of the great city. Some, indeed, thought of doing so, in order to put an end to the treacheries “of these Grecules, the meanest of men,” but Godfrey of Bouillon opposed it. He agreed beforehand to do homage to the Emperor Alexis for all the lands of which he might gain possession. After he had done this no one else dared refuse.

Alexis, however, did not feel secure until the last of these proud warriors had passed into Asia. The first place reached by the Crusaders as they entered the Asiatic peninsula was the great city of Nicaea, and this they besieged. Nothing could be more striking than the appearance of their camp, where there were so many languages, so many war-cries, and so many different styles of arms, but where, nevertheless, all were inspired by one idea. At the sight of people gathered together from all parts of western Europe into one camp, the men of the time, who were accustomed to the isolation of the feudal system, there felt the force of new and broader ideas, and gained their first conception of nationality and of patriotism.

“O France,” wrote one of the chroniclers, “thou country which should rank higher than all others, how beautiful were the tents of thy soldiers in the land of Rome!”. Nicaea was about to surrender, after some violent attacks, when the Greeks who were in the army of the crusaders persuaded the inhabitants to raise the standard of Alexis, and having raised the colors of the Greek Empire they could not be attacked. The crusaders were outraged by this treachery, and withdrew, passing on into Asia Minor.

They had found the road to Nicaea still covered with the bodies of the soldiers of Peter the Hermit; and it was now their turn to strew the plains with dead and dying; Their most terrible enemy was not the Turk; for though Kilij-Arslan, who had recently been beaten near Nicaea, attempted to make good his defeat, he was overcome by them on the plains of Dorylaeum and his camp was taken (1097). But when the crusaders came to the part of Phrygia called by the ancients Burning Phrygia, they were overcome by hunger and thirst. Most of the horses died, many of the knights were obliged to ride asses and oxen, and the luggage was carried upon beasts of all sorts. These misfortunes were increased by fatal discord within the army; the different nations quarreled with one another. Baldwin, brother of Godfrey, and Tancred, the nephew of Bohemond, were contending for the city of Tarsus. Nevertheless, in spite of all these misfortunes, the march continued. Baldwin succeeded in gaining an entrance into Edessa, on the Euphrates, and became the prince of that city. This advanced position gave protection to the crusaders and brought them into communication with the Christians of Armenia.

On October 18, 1097, they reached the great city of An­tioch, with its 450 towers. The siege lasted a long time, and while it was going the crusaders be­came greatly weakened ; on the banks of the Orontes and under the shade of the garden of Daphne, so celebrated in antiquity, they forgot their valor and gave themselves up to dissipation. The winter rains deluged the camp, and famine forced them to eat thistles and dead animals. Bohemond saved them by throwing Antioch open to them, which he accomplished by means of a secret correspondence he kept up with Firuz, an Armenian renegade, within the city. During a stormy night, when the noise of the wind and thunder deafened the sentinels, the Christians scaled the walls by means of rope ladders which were let down to them, and threw themselves upon the city, crying : “God wills it!”. Bohemond’s efforts to save the army were not entirely disinterested; he had stipulated that, if successful, he should be the prince of Antioch.

The crusaders, reduced to half their original numbers, underwent the same suffering inside the city that they had had to bear outside the walls, for they were besieged by 200,000 Turks led by Kerboga, the lieutenant of the Caliph of Bagdad. Godfrey had his last war-horse killed, and despair had settled down upon them, when a Marseillais priest, Peter Barthelemy, announced to the leaders of the army that Saint Andrew had revealed to him in his sleep that the spear which pierced the side of Christ was under the high altar of the church, and that the possession of this would give the victory to the Christians. They dug under the altar, found the spear; and the crusaders, filled with enthusiasm, marched against the army of Kerboga and cut it to pieces.

Instead of starting at once for Jerusalem they stayed six months longer in Antioch, where great numbers died of the plague. When they finally left the city, of the 600,000 who had started, only 50,000 were left; though it is true that a number of them had settled down in the various cities through which the crusade had passed. They followed along the coast of the Mediterranean in order to keep in communication with the fleets from Genoa and Pisa which brought them supplies. In addition to this, as they were pass­ing through the rich valleys of the Lebanon range they soon recovered from their sufferings and regained their strength. Their enthusiasm grew as they approached the Holy City, and began to traverse places hallowed by the narratives of the Gospels; and in speaking of the moment when they had finally crossed the last hill and Jerusalem lay before their eyes, one of the monks in the army exclaimed, “O blessed Jesus, when the Christians saw thy holy city, what floods of tears flowed from all eyes!”. Cries broke forth on every side of “Jerusalem; Jerusalem God wills it, God wills it!”. They stretched out their arms, fell on their knees, and kissed the ground.

The next thing was to take this city, the object of so many vows. Jerusalem was defended by the soldiers of the Fatimite Caliph of Cairo, who had lately captured it from the Turks. When the crusaders were in Antioch this caliph had offered to let them enter Jerusalem if they would come in unarmed, but the Christians had rejected this offer with indignation. They wished to conquer Jerusalem with their blood. They had to endure great sufferings under the walls of the city. The earth was parched by the summer suns, the brook of Cedron was dried up, and the cisterns were either filled up or poisoned by the enemy; only a little stagnant water could be found, and this even the horses refused to drink. To keep up the spirits of the army, a solemn procession was made around the city. All the crusaders stopped and prostrated themselves on the Mount of Olives. On the fifteenth day of July, 1099, a general assault was made at early dawn, and three great rolling towers were pushed up against the walls of the city, but they fought all day without gaining any advantage. The next day, after new vicissitudes, the crusaders were finally victorious. Tancred and Godfrey, at two different points, were the first to enter the city. They had still to fight their way through the streets and to get possession of the Mosque of Omar where the Mohammedans took shelter. Blood flowed in streams, and inside the mosque it came up to the breasts of the horses. The massacre was suspended for a while, in order that all might go barefooted and unarmed and kneel down at the holy sepulchre ; but it began again and lasted a whole week.

The crusaders lost no time in organizing their new conquest. Godfrey was unanimously elected King of Jerusalem, but he would only accept the title of Defender and Baron of the Holy Sepulchre, refusing “to wear a crown of gold where Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and the King of kings, wore a crown of thorns on the day of his passion. The victory of Ascalon, won by the crusaders a little later, over an Egyptian army which had been sent to recapture Jerusalem, secured their conquest to them. The Mussulman poets mourned : “How much blood has been shed ; what blows have been inflicted on the true believers. Their wives have been obliged to flee, hiding their faces. Their children have fallen prey to the sword of the victor. For our fathers, once masters of Syria, there is now no refuge but the backs of their camels and the entrails of the vultures.” Islamism was indeed paying for its ancient conquests. But the Christians were already weary of so much hardship. Almost all the nobles were in haste to return to their own firesides ; and, with Godfrey and Tancred, hardly more than 300 knights remained in Jerusalem. The ones who remained, with tears in their eyes, begged those who departed never to forget them, saying : “Do not forget your brothers whom you leave in exile. When you get back to Europe, arouse in all. Christians the desire to visit the holy places which we have delivered, and exhort the warriors to come and fight the infidel nations.” But the enthusiasm of Europe was chilled when so few returned from the enormous number that started, and fifty years elapsed before another crusade of any importance was undertaken to relieve the kingdom founded at Jerusalem.

When left to its own resources the little kingdom was organized for defense, and was regularly constituted on the principles of feudalism transported, ready-made, into Asia. It was regulated by a code, called the Assizes of Jerusalem, which Godfrey of Bouillon had drawn up in French, and which gives us a complete picture of the feudal system which, until then, had not been embodied anywhere in any great legislative monument. Fiefs were established, namely, the principalities of Edessa and of Antioch, increased later by the county of Tripoli and the marquisate of Tyre and other smaller seignories—a strange mixture of biblical names and feudal institutions, which is very charac­teristic of the Middle Ages, and which shows the close union of religious faith with the military life of the times.

The country was put under three jurisdictions: the court of the king, that of the Vicount of Jerusalem, and for the natives, the Syrian tribunal. The country was defended by two great military institutions : the order of the Hospitalers of Saint John of Jerusalem, organized upon an earlier institution, in 1100, and that of the Templars, founded in 1118 by Hugh de Payens, institutions character­istic both of the era and of the circumstances in which they were founded. In them can be discerned both the chival­rous and the monastic spirit.

The new state at first continued in search of conquest, as if obedient to the original impulse it had received. Under the two first successors of Godfrey, Baldwin I (1100-1118), and Baldwin II (1118-1131), Acre, Caesarea, Ptolemais, Beirut, Sidon, and Tyre were all taken. But after these reigns dissensions broke out and the decline of the kingdom began. The Atabeks, rulers of Mosul and Damascus, took Edessa and massacred the inhabitants (1144). This bloody disaster, which left Palestine unprotected, impelled Europe to renew the crusade.

CHAPTER XX.

THE LAST CRUSADES IN THE EAST ; THEIR RESULTS (1147-1270.]

The first crusade was very different from the other seven; it affected the whole of Europe, stirred the masses to their depths, both commoners and lords, and indicated a great movement in the field of sentiment and ideas. Those fought in the two following centu­ries had no longer that character. They were almost all led by kings who had stood aloof from the first, and though faith was still an inspiring influence, yet it was often overruled by motives of policy. The spirit of the second crusade still bore a close resemblance to that which had animated the first; it was, however, no longer the work of the people, but of princes, of the Emperor Conrad III, and of the King of France, Louis VII, the last of whom took the cross in spite of the prudent counsels of his minister, the Abbot Suger. The crusade was preached in France and Germany by St. Bernard; but the zeal had already cooled. Murmurs of discontent were heard when a general tax war levied on all the kingdom of France and on all conditions of men, whether nobles, priests, or peasants; at Sens, the burgers killed the abbot of St. Peter le Vif, the feudal lord of a part of their city, because of a tax he wished to impose on them. “The king,” said a contemporary, “started out in the midst of imprecations.” The command of the expedition was offered to St. Bernard; but he remembered the fate of Peter the Hermit, and refused. The Emperor was the first to start with the Germans. The Greeks of Constantinople, who hated the Latins as much as they did the Turks, had deceived him in every way, even selling him flour mixed with lime, and had urged him to go over into Asia. While Louis was at a distance with his Franks, the Emperor Manuel sent deputies to meet him. The feudal lords were disgusted with the fulsome flattery of the Greeks, and in­terrupted them by saying : “Do not tell us so often of the glory, piety, and wisdom of the king. He knows himself and we know him. State briefly what you wish.” What Manuel wished for in his fright, was that the crusaders should swear an oath of allegiance to him. They consented again, though, as in the first crusade, they let some threatening words escape their lips. The Germans were already in the middle of Asia Minor, but betrayed by their Greek guides they strayed into the defiles of the Taurus and there fell by the sword of the Turk. Conrad came back almost alone to Constantinople.

Louis, who had been warned of the danger, followed a course along the sea and secured his route by a victory on the Meander. But near Laodicea the country grew mountainous. There the folly of the chiefs and the lack of discipline among the soldiers brought on the first disaster. The king just escaped being killed, and for a long time he fought alone, as all the nobles who formed his body-guard had been killed. “Noble flowers of France,” said one of the chroniclers, “who faded away before they could bear fruit beneath the walls of Damascus.” At Attalia it was decided that it would be impossible to proceed. The king and his chiefs embarked in Greek ships to accomplish their pilgrimage by sea, leaving the multitude of pilgrims to perish by the arrows of the Turks, or, accusing Christ of having deceived them, to become Mohammedans. Three thousand escaped death in this way.

When Louis arrived at Antioch he no longer thought of fighting, but only of accomplishing his pilgrim’s vow, of praying at the Holy Sepulchre, and of ending the unlucky expedition as soon as possible. He hurried his march to Jerusalem, paying no heed to the prayers of the Prince of Antioch and the Count of Tripoli, who wished to detain him. The people, princes, and prelates went before him, carrying olive branches and singing : “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”. He thought it necessary, however, to do something and to draw his sword once at least in the Holy Land. It was proposed to attack Damascus. Damascus is one of the holy cities of Islamism and the pearl of the East. It stands surrounded by great gardens which are watered by the different branches of the Barradi, and which form a forest of orange and lemon trees, cedars, and trees of delicious fruits. It is the capital of the desert, and for Syria either a bulwark or a perpetual menace, according as it is in friendly or in hostile hands. The attack seemed at first to succeed; they gained possession of the gardens, but the Christian princes fell to fighting over the Skin of the bear before they had killed him, and they were finally obliged to raise the siege and go back to Palestine. Conrad and Louis had exhausted their patience; they returned to Europe, meeting with fresh misadventures on their way, for the King of France fell into the hands of Greek pirates and owed his deliverance to the Normans of Sicily. Europe again welcomed very few of those who had started out. The first crusade had at least attained its end, it had delivered Jerusalem; the second had spilt the blood of Christians to no purpose. After that Palestine was weaker and Islamism stronger, and the crusaders brought nothing back from their expedition but shame, or, as in the case of Louis VII, dishonor.

St. Bernard was deeply afflicted by the unsuccessful result of the enterprise he had advised, and tried to start another; but when people have made one unfortunate expedition they do not soon renew the attempt. Suger himself, by a singular contradiction, tried to organize another crusade afterwards, but he died in the midst of the preparations.

Nearly half a century passed before another expedition set out for the Holy Land; the pilgrims’ zeal had grown very cool. Moreover the advantage gained by the first expedition had not as yet been entirely lost: Jerusalem was still in Christian hands. But in 1171 a Mussulman of great genius, named Saladin, took Egypt from the Fatimites, and soon after obtained possession of the dominions of his former sovereign Noureddin, in Syria. Under him a great Mussulman power grew up which covered all the country from the Euphrates to the Nile and shut in the Christians of the East on all sides. The latter were overwhelmed at the battle of Tiberias, where the King of Jerusalem, Guy de Lusignan, was taken prisoner. Even the Holy City fell. Great blows like this alone could rouse Europe. The Pope begged for a crusade, and laid a tax, the Saladin tithe, on all lands, even those belonging to the Church. The three most powerful Christian monarchs set out: Frederick Bar­barossa, Philip Augustus, and Richard Coeur de Lion (1189).

Barbarossa entered Asia by way of Hungary and Con­stantinople. His journey was similar in all respects to those of the preceding crusaders. The troubles with the Greek emperors were repeated, disguised as before by hypocritical ceremonies. It seemed as if the German army, which was well supplied with money and well equipped, would arrive at the end of the journey in much better condition than had been the fate of any previous army, in spite of meeting the same difficulties in Asia Minor. But a most unlooked-for event changed the course of affairs. While crossing the mountains of Cilicia on a hot June day, the Emperor wished to shorten the route and refresh himself by swimming across a little river called the Selph or Calycadnus. The ice-cold water was fatal to him. Mohammedans saw the finger of God in his death. “Frederick was drowned,” they said, “in a place where the water was only waist deep, which proves that God wished to deliver us from his hands.” His army, crushed by this blow, broke up or perished, leav­ing, out of the 100,000 Germans who had started, only 5000 to reach the Holy Land, where the kings of France and of England, Philip Augustus and Richard, arrived the next year. Richard had arranged to start out with Philip Augustus, whose fast friend he had been so long as his father lived. They started by sea—a new route. Philip embarked at Genoa, Richard at Marseilles, and putting into Sicily, they spent the winter there. They were friends when they arrived on the island, enemies when they left. A little more and they would have come to blows. Their misunderstanding doomed the crusade to failure from the first.

Philip was the first to arrive. He found Ptolemais besieged by Guy de Lusignan and the remains of the German army. He courteously refused to do anything before Richard’s arrival. The latter had been detained on his way to seize and to bind, as it was said, with silver chains, Isaac Comnenus, who had styled himself Emperor of Cyprus, and who had had the audacity to shut his gates against the crusaders. By the time he reached Palestine, Saladin had been able to reassemble his forces. Ptolemais, valiantly defended, resisted for more than two years; nine battles were fought before her walls. But it is remarkable to see what changes the relations between the Christian and the Mussulmans had undergone since the first crusade. The frequent intercourse between Christians and infidels had weakened the force of fanaticism on both sides. “We are not without religion,” said the Mohammedans, begging for life on their knees, “and we are descended from Abraham, and we call ourselves Saracens after his wife Sara.” The fierce hatred of former days had given way to a sort of chivalrous courtesy among the chieftains. Saladin sent fruits from Damascus to the Christians and they sent him jewels from Europe. The opposed camps began to entertain respect for one another, but on the field of battle their desire for blood returned, and great cruelty was still shown toward the conquered. Richard is said on one day to have had 2700 prisoners put to death.

The want of harmony between the kings of France and England had retarded the capture of Ptolemais (1191), and finally caused the departure of Philip Augustus. Richard remained in Palestine to wage a useless war. His pride estranged the leading crusaders and many of them left him on that account. He himself finally left Palestine, having been warned that his brother John was plotting against him. He had but seen the Holy City from afar, and he sighed as he left it in the hands of the infidels. He was, able, however, to obtain an entrance into the city for pilgrims, and to make amends to Guy de Lusignan, by giving him the island of Cyprus for a kingdom. On his return he was driven by storm upon the coasts of Dalmatia; Leopold, the duke of Austria, who was his personal enemy, seized him and sold him to Emperor Henry VI., who did not set him at liberty until he had secured an enormous ransom.

The fourth crusade was an enterprise of a peculiar character. After the unsuccessful result of the third, Jerusalem was forgotten, and instead of pious expeditions, we hear only of wars between Christian kings and peoples. England, Germany, and France, but lately united in their desire to deliver the Holy Sepulchre, were now taking up arms against each other; the Emperor Otto IV was excommunicated, Philip Augustus had been, and John was soon to be, and they naturally thought little about the Holy Land. The great Pope Innocent III wished to recall it to their minds. He had a crusade preached, promising remission of all their sins to those who would serve God for a year. Fulk, a priest of Neuilly-sur-Marne, was the one to preach this crusade. He went to a tournament held in Champagne, and his burning words inspired all the princes and knights assembled there to take the cross. The kings stood aloof, as they did the first time, and the people did also. Chivalry alone entered the lists more to indulge in feats of arms than from ardent piety, as was clearly shown by the character of this crusade. It was a great piratical expedition and nothing else. Baldwin IX; Count of Flanders, and Boniface II, Count of Montferrat, were at its head. As it had been proved that the route by sea was much to be preferred to that by land, the crusaders went to Venice to demand ships. 

Venice was then the Queen of the Adriatic. The inhabitants had been driven by Attila’s invasions from the main land to the islands in the lagunes, and had found safety and prosperity in that situation, which is alone of its kind in the world.

Not one of the ruling powers which had passed over Italy had been able to touch them. Their commerce was extensive; the islands and coasts of Istria and Illyria had recognized their supremacy. They seconded the crusades partly from religious conviction, and partly from a spirit of gain. The Mussulmans and the Greeks were their rivals in the eastern part of the Mediterranean. They considered it a good opportunity to dispossess them. The interested services which they rendered to the crusaders procured for them in 1130 the privilege of establishing a quarter exclusively to themselves in each town of the new kingdom of Jerusalem. At the same time they took pos­session of the Greek islands of Rhodes, Samos, Scio, Lesbos and Andros. In Venice the interview between the Pope Alexander III and Frederick Barbarossa, in 1177, took place after a victory gained by the doge over the imperial fleet. A slab of red porphyry still marks the place in the vestibule of St. Mark, to the right of the door of entrance, where the reconciliation was effected, which restored peace to Italy. In memory of that great event and of his last victory, Alexander III, gave the chief of Venice that ring which the doge threw into the sea as a token of marriage with the Adriatic, and after that, he repeated this ambitious betrothal every year with a pomp that exalted the pride and patriotism of the Venetians. Four years before, Venice had made the office of doge elective, and with its great council had organized the aristocratic government which created its greatness.

Such was Venice when the crusaders appeared. Godfrey of Villehardouin, seneschal of the Count of Champagne, himself gives an account of the embassy in which he took part. It was a strange sight to see those feudal lords obliged humbly to request a favor of the people. “We will grant it, we will grant it,” cried the sovereign people. The mercantile and maritime city of Venice could not do otherwise than make so great a service a matter of business, and demanded eighty-five thousand marks of silver, which would be worth today more than $800,000, but whose purchasing power was even more at that day. Knights did not handle such sums of money. The Venetians consented to receive in payment, instead of money, a hostile town which the crusaders should capture for them. They had recently taken away from the Greeks the principal towns on the Dalmatian coast, Spalato, Ragusa, and Sebenico. In order to control these shores and the Adriatic, they needed one more town, namely, Zara, which was held by the King of Hungary. Innocent III hurled his anathemas at them for turning aside from the crusade in this manner, but in vain; the Venetians would have Zara; their doge, Dandolo, ninety years of age, had himself taken the cross (1202).

Now that the first account had been settled they were ready to start. But where should they go, was the question. The experiences of the two last crusades had shown that a point of support would be necessary in order suc­cessfully to carry on their operations in Palestine; and that point of support ought to be either Egypt or the Greek Empire. The Venetians persuaded their allies that Cairo or Constantinople was the key to Jerusalem. There was some truth in this idea, but the main point with them was commercial interest. The acquisition of Cairo would put the route to Judea in the hands of the Venetian merchants; Constantinople would secure to them the commerce of the Black Sea and all the Archipelago. They decided on Constantinople, whither a young Greek prince, Alexis by name, offered to conduct them, provided they would restore his father, Isaac Angelus, to the throne from which he had been driven (1203)

When the French came in sight of Constantinople and saw the high walls, the innumerable churches whose gilded domes glistened in the sunlight, and when their eyes had traveled, said Villehardouin, “over the length and breadth of that city which was sovereign overall others, you can well imagine that there was no heart so bold that it did not tremble, .... and each one looked at his weapons, which he would need to use.” A magnificent army of 60,000 men was drawn up on the shore. The crusaders looked forward to a terrible battle. They were landed, fully equipped, in boats. Even before they touched the shore “the knights left the ships and jumped into the sea up to their waists, all armed, their helmets laced, sword in hand, and the brave archers and the brave cross-bowmen with them. And the Greeks made a great show of holding them back. But when it came to lowering the lances, the Greeks turned their backs and fled, leaving to them the shore. And never more proudly was anything taken.” On July 18 (1203) the city was carried by assault, and the old Emperor was drawn from his hiding-place and restored to the throne. Alexis had made the crusaders the most splendid promises, and, in order to keep his word, laid new taxes on the en­feebled people, driving them to such a point of exasperation that they strangled the Emperor, put another man, Murzuflus, in his place, and shut the gates of the town. The crusaders attacked it immediately. Three days sufficed them to force an entrance (March 12); and this time they sacked the city. They burned one whole quarter, a square league in extent. It is impossible to say how many great works of art perished in the flames; 400,000 marks of silver were brought together into one church to be dis­tributed.

A partition of the empire itself followed. Baldwin IX, Count of Flanders, was chosen Emperor of Romania, as they named it. He carried the election over the heads of his competitors, Dandolo and Boniface of Montferrat. The Venetians did not insist upon seeing their doge on the imperial throne. They took what suited them better, one of the quarters of Constantinople with the coasts of the Bosphorus and the Propontis, and the greater part of the islands, Crete, etc., styling themselves, lords of a quarter and a half of the Greek Empire. The Marquis of Montferrat was made King of Thessalonica, Villehardouin Marshal of Romania, and his nephew Prince of Achaia. The Count of Blois had the Asiatic provinces. There were dukes of Athens and of Naxos, counts of Cephalonia, a lord of Thebes and of Corinth. A new France sprang up, with its feudal customs, at the extremity of Europe. Members of the family of the Comneni, however, retained a few fragments which they made into the principalities of Trebizond, Napoli d’Argolide, Epirus, and Nicaea. The crusaders were too few in number to be able to keep their conquest long. In 1261 the Latin Empire was broken up. Yet even till the end of the Middle Ages and until the conquest by the Turks, in certain parts of Greece there remained relics of those feudal principalities which had been so strangely founded on the old ground of Miltiades and Leonidas by the French of the thirteenth century.

But meantime there was always a body of Christians in Palestine who did not cease to call upon their western brethren for help. When the barons of the Holy Land were without a king, in 1217, they offered the crown, not to any powerful European sovereign who would pay them no attention, but to a knight who was as valiant as he was poor, to John of Brienne, whose whole army of crusaders numbered but three hundred knights. Germany had no thought but for the struggle between Otto of Brunswick and Philip of Swabia; France, but for the war with the Albigenses. England was under an interdict. Andrew II., King of Hungary, conducted the fifth crusade; but it had no lasting results. Nevertheless John of Brienne gained enough strength from it to begin the conquest of Egypt from Melik-el-Kamel, a nephew of Saladin, who was reigning at Cairo. Damietta was about to fall when the Sultan offered if the Christians would abandon it to give up to them Jerusalem and all of Palestine; the legate haughtily rejected these advantageous propositions, believing that he could conquer Egypt himself, and Damietta was soon taken. But when the Nile overflowed and surrounded the Christians they were glad to be able to withdraw and abandon Damietta (1221).

The sixth crusade was more successful than its predecessors. The Emperor Frederick II., who had finally decided to set out after many delays, accomplished with one stroke of his pen what the sword of Coeur de Lion had not been able to do. Profiting by the terror which the approach of Tartar hordes from the east inspired in Melik-el-Kamel, he obtained from him a truce for ten years, and the restitution to the Christians of the Holy City, together with Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Sidon; he then crowned himself King of Jerusalem (1229).

An unsuspected enemy appeared at this stage of affairs, inspiring terror both in Mussulman Asia and Christian Europe. An invasion of the Tartar Mongols, similar to the Hunnic invasion of the fourth century which cast Barbarian Europe upon Roman Europe, and coming from the same direction, suddenly burst forth in the thirteenth century. The Mongol hordes were leading idle lives, scattered about the steppes of Southern Asia, some of them even tributary to the Chinese Empire, when Temudgin, chief of one of the tribes, brought them all under his authority (1203), and resolved to lead them to the conquest of the world. Those nomad communities are easily put in motion; the horses, flocks, and houses can all be transported without difficulty. Their houses were chariots or large cabins on wheels, drawn by long lines of oxen. This comprised the whole of the movable household of the Tartar; he himself was on horseback night and day, awake or asleep. His food consisted of a small piece of meat made tender by being carried between the saddle and the back of his horse, or of milk and curds. He feared neither fatigue nor privation, and yielded to his chiefs with passive obedience. In common with all the Mongolian race he scarcely had a religion, but he was proud and inordinately ambitions for his nation, counting on obtaining the empire of the world, and looking upon his Khan as the king of the earth, a divine being, as it were. As cavalry they were irresistible, full of cunning as well as cruelty.

Temudgin, surnamed Jenghiz-Khan (chief of the chiefs), led on his hordes to the east and the west. He subdued China, the Huns of Kharesm, Khorasan, and Persia, and sent his son, Tchutchi, to invade Europe. The latter gave battle to the Russians at Kolka (1223), where six of their princes perished. Jenghiz-Khan died in 1227 after creating an empire which stretched from the Crimea to Pekin, His four sons continued to extend its limits. His grand­son Batu marched against the Russians. He annihilated their armies, took Moscow (1237), and advanced as far as Novgorod. The grand-duchy of Kief went out of existence (1239); that of Vladimir preserved its existence by paying tribute. Leaving Russia, the Mongols attacked and conquered Poland; after Poland, Silesia and Moravia, which they laid waste. Then they fell upon Hungary, surprised and destroyed the army which opposed them, and finally crossed the Danube, ravaging on every side. Eu­rope was terrified and prayed God to remove the scourge, fearing lest it should see its religion and civilization perish. An embassy from the Pope to the pitiless conquerors brought back for sole answer the order to pay tribute. It was time for them to cross themselves; no one took up arms; the Emperor Frederick II alone took energetic steps to resist them. He sent his two sons Conrad and Enzio with large forces to meet the Mongols, one of whose divisions they cut in pieces, and the barbarians withdrew, either out of discouragement or for some different reason; Russia alone remained in their power.

In western Asia Hulagu took possession of Bagdad (1258), where he put to death the Caliph Motassem, who had fallen into his hands, and conquered everything in his path as far as the frontiers of Egypt.

The result of this invasion was the final loss of Jerusalem to the Christians. The Turcomans of Kharesm, who were flying before the Mongols, threw themselves upon Syria, laid waste everything there; with fire and with sword, and after the victory at Gaza, won from a last army of Frankish crusaders (1239), they took possession of the Holy City and handed it over to the Sultan of Egypt.

When the Pope heard of the cruelties committed by these fierce hordes, he called the faithful once more to arms. But Europe was no longer moved by the spirit of the crusades. It could only find response in the heart of a king who was full of piety, namely, St. Louis. During a sickness in which he just escaped death, he made a vow to go to the deliverance of Jerusalem, and in spite of the prayers of all his court, even of his pious mother, Blanche of Castile, he embarked at Aigues-Mortes, after four years spent in preparation, with a powerful and chivalrous army; his wife, Marguerite of Provence, wished to accompany him (1248). The voyage was prosperous, and they wintered in Cyprus. The Crusaders had conceived the remarkable idea of attacking the Saracens at the heart of their empire, in Egypt: they even intended to found a colony there, and had the novel foresight to take with them a great quantity of agricultural implements.

In the spring the fleet set sail, and was soon in sight of Damietta. All the forces of the Sultan were drawn up on the shore. St. Louis was one of the first to throw himself into the sea, and was followed by his army, giving the French cry, “Montjoie, Saint Denis!” which had taken the place of “Dieu le veut!”. After a hard fight the crusaders conquered and entered the city, which the Mohammedans fired before they abandoned it.

The Knights Templar and the Knights of St. John had come to join them; a magnificent prospect lay before them, the Mohammedans were terrified. But they lost everything by delay. The army felt the effects of the Eastern climate and gave themselves up to debauchery; there followed sickness and the pest which is peculiar to the Delta. The chiefs disputed over the booty which had escaped the flames of Damietta. St. Louis could no longer quell the insubordination of his barons : “You are no King at all,” said the Earl of Salisbury, who had been offended by Robert d’Artois, “since you cannot enforce justice.” When they put themselves in motion again, the army was no longer capable of conquering. The canal of Aschmun stopped the crusaders for a month. Finally they found a ford ; Robert d’Artois was the first to cross it; he was young and impetuous and did not know the value of waiting. Instead of stopping to give the whole army time to join him, he rushed in pursuit of the Saracens who were flying before him, and dashed into the village of Mansurah; there he saw himself shut in and in spite of a brave defense perished with all his troops. The army avenged his death by taking the camp of the enemy. But after this exploit they found it impossible to go farther; famine and the pest increased their ravages, the king himself could not hold out. His patience and courage could do no more than afford an admirable but useless example. A retreat was necessary; the sick were embarked on the Nile. The crusaders suffered enormous losses at the hands of the Saracens; 30,000 perished. What remained of them fell at last into the hands of the infidels, including the king himself. The enemy were so moved by his goodness that they spared his life; but they exacted as a ransom the restitution of Damietta, and a million pieces of gold [about two million dollars]. This treaty, arranged by Turan-shah, was signed by another sovereign; the Mamelukes, who, since the time of Saladin, had formed the guard of the sultans of Cairo, had killed him and put Eibek in his place; it was then that the domination of this race began, and it lasted until Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt.

St. Louis departed sadly with 6000 men. But he wished at least to touch the Holy Land. He accordingly stayed there for four years, occupied in building fortresses, redeeming captives, and negotiating with the Mongols and with the Old Man of the Mountain, chief of the terrible sect of the Assassins (from haschisch, a liquor given them by their chief to intoxicate them). The death of Queen Blanche and the revolt of the “Pastoureaux” called him back to France (1254). These distant expeditions were condemned in decided language. “He is very foolish,” wrote Joinville, “who, having some sin upon his soul, puts himself into such danger.”

Nevertheless St. Louis, indefatigable in his piety, tried another crusade sixteen years later, the last of all. He embarked again at Aigues-Mortes in 1270, but was not bound for the Holy Land. His brother, Charles of Anjou, who, in the interests of his kingdom of Sicily, desired an expedition to go out against the King of Tunis, persuaded him that he ought to attack the Mohammedans at that place. Disaster again followed them; they found famine and the pest lying in wait for them beneath the walls of Tunis. St. Louis died, showing that Christian resignation which had lent such beauty to his character. The princes who had accompanied him were bribed to retreat; Charles of Anjou was paid the tribute due to him, and there the crusades ended forever.

France was prominent at the beginning and at the end of the series of great expeditions led by Europeans against Asia. In the middle, too, and when they turned aside from their pious object, France was still conspicuous, for then a Fleming, or, in other words, a Frenchman, was on the throne of Constantinople. The country was a leading participant in all but the less important expeditions. The name of Frank had an ominous sound in the ears of the Orientals; they used it to designate all the West, and it inspired them with terror. They could conceive of nothing greater than the boldness and valor of that people. Even in our time they say : “The Franks are demons who can do everything by the power of God.”

We cannot help lamenting that so much blood should have been spilled. No other wars have ever caused such loss of life. If all who perished in the Crusades could rise from the grave they would be numerous enough to people a large country. But since the cost of all progress is measured by its importance, it will be granted that the progress resulting from those great movements was not too dearly bought.

Asia apparently triumphed. Palestine remained in the hands of Mohammedans after they had completely conquered it in 1291, and their historian could say with pride: “If it please God, things will remain as they are until the last judgment.” But the possession of Palestine was not the greatest benefit which Europe could gain by the Crusades. What was of real importance to her, as well as to Asia, was the bringing together of these two parts of the world, the contact and, up to a certain point, the mingling of the two differing civilizations; the enlargement of ideas, the intercommunication of knowledge, the exchange of products ; in one word, a great step was made toward unity in the life of the world, the greatest step, most certainly, since the time of Alexander and the Roman Empire.

What changes took place even in the countries whence the crusaders started, and in the minds of those men and their contemporaries! Before that time they had lived separated and hostile lives; the Crusades did away with isolation and division to a great extent. On the perilous voyage, crossing the distant countries, and in the midst of people of another religion, the Crusaders acknowledged their brotherhood in Jesus Christ. The division of the immense army into corps according to nations brought the men of one country to consider themselves children of the same fatherland. The Frenchman from the north drew near to the Frenchman from the south. The feeling of national fraternity, which had been lost to France since the days of Rome, though felt for a short moment under Charlemagne, was found again on the road to Jerusalem; and the troubadours and trouvères began to sing, at least for the barons and knights, the doux-pays of France !

At Clermont, Urban II had not preached the crusade solely for the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre, for it was also his intention to put an end to the scourge of private warfare. “There was a great silence,” said Guibert of Nogent, over all Christendom deep in meditation. A silence of arms and of evil passions, which, unfortunately, did not last long, but which gave the world some respite and encouraged the growth of two new forces, both needing peace for their development—namely, the royal power and the middle class, of which we shall speak hereafter.

The great expeditions which renewed the ties between Christian nations, and connected Europe with Asia, opened once more the paths of commerce, closed since the time of the invasions. The East was again accessible to the merchants of the West, manufactures started up again to furnish the arms, trappings, and clothes needed by so many men. This movement, once begun, did not again die out. The number of artisans multiplied like the merchants, and little by little great sums of money accumulated in their hands. A new element of power, which had passed out of knowledge, was then revived; namely, personal wealth, opposed to wealth in land, which will show continued growth from this time, and by the side of the nobles, the masters of the soil, will appear the commoners grown to be masters of gold through manual labor and intelligence.

Certain institutions or new customs were directly caused by the crusades. In the confusion produced by the great gatherings of men some distinguishing marks were necessary. They invented or increased the use of coats of arms, which consisted of various emblems upon the shields of warriors of distinction, or their armor or banner, and which passed from father to son after the thirteenth century. These armorial bearings grew into a complicated language, which formed the science of Heraldry. Family names also began to make their appearance at this time. To the baptismal names, almost the only ones used up to that time, and which were few in number, many people having the same, was now added a territorial name to distinguish the different families. This name was hereditary and com­mon to all the members of one and the same house, while the baptismal name was personal and died with its bearer.

It has been already stated that the crusades brought about the creation of the military orders of the Holy Land. To the same cause, or rather to the religious movement of which the crusades themselves were a consequence, is due the creation of new religious orders in Europe, and the mendicant monks may be placed side by side with the soldier monks. The former carried on the same crusades at home which the latter waged abroad.

The appearance of the mendicant orders was an important innovation in the Church. About the year 520 St. Benedict had promulgated a monastic rule which had been gradually embraced by all the monks of the West; the rule imposed the duty of working with the hands and with the mind. The Benedictines added agriculture to preaching, and copying manuscripts to prayer. Schools were usually annexed to their convents, and contributed toward the saving of letters from complete ruin. In the thirteenth century, however, the religious communities saw their influence declining owing to the fact that they had grown rich and sometimes corrupt. It was to guard against that enemy, riches, that the new orders of Franciscans (1215) and Dominicans (1216) took a formal vow of poverty. Removed as they were from the jurisdiction of the bishops, they were the devoted soldiers of the Holy See : they were obliged to live in charity, to have no possessions, to go through the world carrying the Gospel to all places no longer visited by the over-rich clergy—to the poor, in the public places, and on the roads. The two orders, though alike on this point, differed in the spirit of their founders; it was the austere St. Dominic who founded the one, the tender and mystical St. Francis who founded the other.

Those zealous preachers had immense influence on the people and even on the Church. The Dominicans, whose particular mission it was to convert heretics, were invested with inquisitorial functions in 1229; but the tribunal of the Inquisition, although born in France at the time of the struggle with the Albigenses, fortunately failed to take root there and to extend as it did in Spain and Italy. The Dominicans in France went by the name of Jacobins, because their first convent was built in the street of St. Jacques. The Franciscan order, or the Friars Minor, gave rise to the Recollets, the Cordeliers, and the Capucins. The Carmelites and the Augustinians belong to the same century, and together with those above mentioned form the four mendicant orders. The austerity and exalted piety of the new monks, and the learning of some of their doctors, roused a spirit of emulation in the ancient orders and even in the secular clergy, where a stricter ecclesiastical discipline began to appear.

Great opposition was roused, indeed, by the favor shown by the Pope to the mendicant orders. The bishops, the University of Paris, and especially the bold doctor of the Sorbonne, William de St. Amour, contested the right of the Pope to bestow upon mendicant monks the privilege of preaching and performing the duties of a parish priest. To which St. Thomas Aquinas replied, that if a bishop could delegate his powers within his diocese, the Pope could do as much within the limits of Christendom,

CHAPTER XXI.

THE CRUSADES OF THE WEST.

THE crusades in the east failed; but those in the west were successful. By the crusades in the west, we mean the expeditions made by the Teutonic knights and the Brothers of the Sword into Prussia and the neighboring regions, where they founded a new state; the war waged by Simon de Montfort against the Albigenses, which destroyed an ancient civilization; and the struggle of the Spaniards against the Moors, who were finally obliged to yield the peninsula to Christendom and to European civilization. These European crusades, as we have seen, took place at the two extreme ends of the continent, at the mouth of the Tagus and at the mouth of the Niemen, against the Mohammedans of Spain and against the pagans of the Baltic.

In the interval between the first and second crusades, certain merchants from Bremen and Lübeck who had come to the Holy Land founded there a hospital for their compatriots, in which all menial services were performed by Germans. Every benevolent institution and place of refuge founded in Palestine was forced to take the form of a military institution; the hospitallers had become Knights of Saint John, and the servitors of the house of the temple of Solomon the military order of the Templars. The Ger­man hospitallers also transformed themselves into a religious and military organization, the Teutonic order. Like the other two orders, the Teutonic order acquired numerous lands in Europe, especially in Germany, and the Emperor Frederic II. raised their grand master to the rank of a prince of the empire. In 1230 a Polish prince took advantage of the zeal and strength which they could no longer employ in the Holy Land, and commissioned them to subjugate and convert the Prussians, a nation which has either entirely disappeared or has been so completely ab­sorbed by the Germans who settled in the country that it is no longer distinguishable. It was an idolatrous people, settled between the Niemen and the Vistula, whose language, religion, and history are lost, but whose name is borne by one of the great states of modern Europe.

The order settled at first at Kulm, and conquered the Prussians by the same means which Charlemagne had employed against the Saxons, that is, by destroying part of the population and by building fortresses to keep the rest in check. Koenigsburg and Marienburg served the latter end.

A few years later, a bishop of Livonia had founded, with the same end in view, the order of the Brothers of the Sword, called also the Knights of Christ, who subdued Livo­nia and Esthonia. Some difference with the bishops of Riga obliged them in 1237 to unite with the Teutonic knights, whose forces were in this way doubled. In 1309 Marienburg became the capital of the order and the resi­dence of its grand masters, who ruled over Prussia, Esthonia, Livonia, and Courland, and who brought these countries into the Christian Church and sowed there the seeds of civilization. To this very day these provinces are the richest and the most advanced of the Russian empire. Up to the fifteenth century the Teutonic knights held the preponderance of power in the north of Europe. All the country between the lower part of the Vistula and Lake Peipus, with the exception of a strip of Lithuanian territory, which separated the original possessions of the two orders, was subject to them.

The crusade led by Simon de Montfort against the populations in the South of France, on the contrary, had at first most disastrous results.

At the very time when Christendom was sending its warriors to fight the infidels at the other end of the Mediterranean, it had unbelievers living in the very heart of its Empire. We do not refer to the Jews, by whose massacre the first crusaders had begun their crusade with a frenzy abominable to us but natural enough to that time, but to the peoples of Southern France. The beliefs held by this population, which was a mixture of so many races, of the Iberian, Gallic, Roman, Gothic and Moorish races, were very far from orthodox. We hardly know how to describe what they were; the name of Manichaeism, which was applied to them, is a commonplace of the Middle Ages. By calling these heretics Albigenses (from the town Albi), the men of that time showed that they themselves did not kn6w how to term their heresy. All that is known is that in 1167 a council was held near Toulouse, which was presided over by a Greek from Constantinople, named Nicetas, and by which certain Oriental ideas were adopted; that in this country the clergy were treated with contempt, and even Saint Bernard had been received with insults. This church sent missionaries everywhere, and offensive doctrines began to appear in Germany, England, and even in Italy. Lately, bands of men had come from the direction of Auvergne and had sacked churches, taking pains to profane all sacred objects.

The most prosperous of all the rich and brilliant cities of the South was Toulouse, whose Count Raymond VI was one of the mightiest lords of that region. The other powers in the South were the house of Barcelona, now supreme over Aragon, Rousillon, and Provence, and the petty lords of the Pyrenees, proud, independent, adventurous, who lived just as they chose, without the least respect for the precepts of the Church, or any concern for the King.

In reality the South of France had been separated from the North for a long time. We have already seen the efforts made by its inhabitants, under Dagobert, Charles Martel, Pippin, Charlemagne, Charles the Bald, and Hugh Capet, to form a separate nation. They had a different language and different customs. Commerce had brought the comforts of life to the middle classes, and luxury to the nobles; and these two classes, who, without hatred or jealousy, shared between them the municipal governments of the country, gave it an enduring peace. But in these rich cities and brilliant courts which inspired the songs of the troubadours, religious doctrines were handled as lightly as morals, and heresy penetrated everywhere.

The all-powerful Innocent III resolved to root out this nest of heresies and impieties, for he feared that they would become contagious. He began by organizing the Inquisition against the sectarians, a tribunal charged with exam­ining and judging heretics by means of torture; and which has immolated numberless human victims, without succeeding in destroying heresy, for butchery is a poor means to use in establishing truth. The Pope sent to Raymond VI his legate, the monk Peter de Castelnau, who demanded the expulsion of all heretics; but as all, or nearly all, the inhabitants of the country were heretics, Castelnau gained nothing. On being excommunicated (1207) and threatened by the legate with “everlasting fire,” Raymond in his anger allowed a few such words to escape from him as Henry II. had pronounced against Thomas a Becket : a knight followed the legate and killed him when crossing the Rhone (1208). “Anathemas be upon the head of the Count of Toulouse,” cried Innocent III. “All sins shall be remitted to those who will take up arms against these tainted Provençals! Go forth, soldiers of Christ! May all heretics disappear, and colonies of Catholics take their place!”. The monks of Citeaux, organs of the Pope, preached this crusade of extermination. The Duke of Burgundy, the counts of Nevers, Auxerre, and Geneva, the bishops of Rheims, Sens, Rouen and Autun, and many others, with Germans and Lorrainers, gathered in crowds. Three armies invaded the south : they were led by Simon de Montfort, a petty lord from the neighborhood of Paris, an ambitious, fanatical, and cruel man.

The first attack was not made on the Count of Toulouse, as the Pope had held out hopes of pardon to him, with a view of weakening his resistance, but on the Viscount of Beziers. His city was taken, but the victors hesitated to strike the death-blow, as they could not tell the heretics from the orthodox. “Kill them all; for you may be sure God will know his own,” said the legate, and thirty thousand were massacred. Carcassonne yielded next, and the knights of the Isle of France divided the country between them, while Simon de Montfort was made their suzerain. After this frightful sacrifice on the altars of orthodoxy, Raymond hoped to be spared, and even Innocent himself was inclined to compassion; but the legates were merciless and opposed to all pity. They would only offer pardon to the Count of Toulouse on the condition of his obliging all his subjects to put on the dress of penitents, his nobles to become villeins, of his sending away all his soldiers, destroying all his castles, and going himself to the Holy Land.

The count laughed at these propositions; and the legates started again to the attack. Simon de Montfort gathered about him a multitude of men from the North who were overjoyed to hear that the grand pillage of the South was not yet ended. Raymond VI was defeated at Castelnaudary, and the victors divided up the fragments of his territory, the bishops receiving the bishoprics and the soldiers the fiefs. Raymond was forced to take refuge with the king of Aragon, Peter II. He hastened thither, and was joined by all the petty lords of the Pyrenees who con­sidered the king of Aragon their chief. The battle of Muret, in which Peter was killed, decided the fate of the South of France (1213). Two years later the Council of the Lateran ratified the dispossession of Raymond and of most of the nobles of the South. The papal legate offered their estates to the powerful barons who had made this crusade, but the latter refused to accept these blood-stained lands. Simon de Montfort accepted them. It was decreed that the widows of heretics who had possessed noble fiefs could marry none but Frenchmen for the next ten years. The civilization of the South perished under such rude treatment. The “gay science,” as the troubadours called poetry, lost all inspiration among the bleeding ruins that remained. Innocent III, however, finally became uneasy; he did not feel sure that he had not committed a great crime. When the Count de Foix said to him, “Give me back my land; or else at the day of judgment I will demand it all of you, my land, my rights, and my heritage,”—the Pope replied : “I acknowledge that you have suffered great wrongs, but they were not done you by my orders, and I feel no gratitude toward those who did them.”

In their misery, the people of Provence remembered the King of France. The inhabitants of Montpellier put themselves under his protection, and Philip Augustus sent his son Louis to show them the banner of France. After the death of Simon de Montfort, who was killed near Toulouse, which Raymond VII., son of the former count, had recovered, Louis returned there; and Amaury, Montfort’s heir, offered to give up to the king the conquests made by his father, which he was no longer able to defend in the face of the universal reprobation of his subjects. Philip, already almost at the point of death, refused this offer, which was accepted five years later.

At the very time of the great crusades which were being made in the East by all the peoples of Europe, as well as before and after them, a crusade was being carried on in the West in which fewer peoples were involved, but which belonged peculiarly to one people, whose leaders without leaving their own country were on the very field of battle; and which for that reason made much less stir and noise than the others, though it was pursued with a perseverance and obstinacy that made it last eight centuries. When Charles Martel and Pippin the Short expelled the Arabs from France, they were content with driving them beyond the Pyrenees, and apparently thought that this strong barrier of mountains marked the limits of Europe and Christendom. Spain seemed utterly sacrificed, and with Africa was given over to the Saracens who had invaded it. Nevertheless Spain had been Christian before its invasion; and the mass of the population, part of which was not entirely subdued, was so still. There was still a point in the country which had not been reached by conquest, a single point, but one which gave shelter to the sacred flame of independence, and which gradually became enlarged and formed the nucleus of the Christian domination at its revival.

The Pyrenees, which cross the broad, short isthmus that connects Spain with the continent, extend toward the west along the coast of Spain, leaving between them and the ocean a strip of land from ten to fifteen leagues in width. Here they are called the Cantabric Pyrenees. It was to this corner, which was protected by mountains and out of the reach of invasion, and with a vegetation quite different from the almost African vegetation of the rest of Spain, that the remains of the nations either subjugated or destroyed by invasion had fled at different times; Hermanrich and the Suevi during the Visigoth invasion, and Pelayo and his companions during the Arab invasion. Pelayo and his companions had preferred to flee before the rapid and irresistible stream of the Mohammedans rather than to be subject to them; but as soon as they had put the mountains between them and their enemies, they stopped their flight, and though they had only a hold on the very edge of Spain, retained it with an unrelaxing firmness. Gijon, situated on the coast, was their capital. With their backs toward the ocean, they presented their front to the enemy, and in what might be called the lists of Spain, shut in on all sides by the ocean and mountains, stood prepared to engage in a contest which was to last eight centuries.

They gained ground little by little, and moving their capital as they advanced toward the south, they soon gave up Gijon on the coast and made Oviedo, at the foot of the mountains in Asturia, the residence of their king (760).

Here they found a powerful ally in Charlemagne, the great protector of Christianity, who had extended the Frankish dominion across the Pyrenees at two points, at Pampeluna and at Barcelona. This helpful diversion enabled them to repel several expeditions against them; and under Alfonso II, in 788, they destroyed a hostile army at Lodos, in Galicia.

After Charlemagne, the Spanish Gascons founded the little kingdom of Navarre toward the middle of the ninth century, and the Frankish counts of Barcelona assumed hereditary rights. When the lords of Aragon were able to join hands with the counts of Barcelona and the kings of Navarre, and when counts of Castile held the territory between the kingdoms of Navarre and Leon, there was in the north of Spain a continuous line of Christian principalities extending toward the south from Cape Creux to the Corogne, and covered by the mountains as if by fortresses.

The development of the little Christian states was greatly aided by the shock given to the Caliphate of Cordova by revolt of Ibn Hafson, and as a result Alfonso III the Great (862-910), was able to make notable progress. To the countries he possessed on the coast, to Biscay, Asturias, and Galicia, he was able to add Burgos, county south of the Minho, with Toro and Zamora on the Douro, and even Sala­manca and Coimbra, to the south of this latter river. The Christian states were already entering into relations with each other, and Alfonso now formed an alliance with the king of Navarre. The zeal for the holy war was felt here sooner than in the rest of Europe. Saint James, “Slayer of the Moors” (San Jago Matamoros), became their national saint, and the Spanish Christians made pilgrimages to his church at Compostella in crowds. Finally in 914 the Asturians made another step in advance, crossed the mountains, and leaving Oviedo, fixed their capital at Leon, After this it was clear that the Moors could no longer hold Spain, for the breach was open and the enemy on the alert.

Nevertheless, the tenth century was not so favorable to the Christian states. For while some differences arose between them, the strength of the caliphate was greatly revived by Abderrahman III. and by the skillful Almanzor under Hescham II. The great defeat of Simancas suffered in 940, the overthrow of the King Sancho the Great by the Count of Castile, who made himself independent, and his re-establishment by Abderrahman himself, show us the kingdom of Leon in so weakly a condition that its enemy was able to decide even over the disposal of the throne. Almanzor the Victorious bore even more heavily upon the Christians. He subdued the county of Castile, took possession of Salamanca, Zamora, Astorga, and even Leon, which latter he razed to the ground (984). On another expedition he took Coimbra, Lamego, Braga, and San Jago de Compos­tella, the Holy City, from which he carried away the bells. He had equal success in the east, where he took Barcelona, and by 997 was master of all that the Christians had conquered south of the Douro and the Ebro. But the first time he was defeated, after fifty actions, at Calatanazor, near the source of the Douro, he was so broken-hearted that he starved himself to death; and all the power of the Caliphate died with him (1002). We have already seen that the empire of the Arabs in Spain fell to pieces in the eleventh century; the Christian states, on the contrary, drew nearer together and were united by marriages and by other alliances. They were so much occupied by these internal alliances and adjustments, and also by closing the breaches in their armor made by Almanzor’s sword, that the holy war was suspended for nearly the whole century. Toward the end it was taken up again, however, and pursued with even greater success than before.

Sancho the Great, King of Navarre in 1000, laid the foundation of the greatness of his house by the marriage of his sister with the Count of Castile, which county was joined to Navarre in 1026 when the Castilian family became extinct. A few years later, he gave this same county of Castile, which he made into a kingdom (1033), to his son Ferdinand, who was the son-in-law and heir of the king of Leon. He also made the county of Aragon into a kingdom for his third son Ramiro, and the Count of Barcelona acknowledged him as his suzerain. At the death of Sancho (1035), his oldest son Garcias inherited the kingdom of Navarre. 

It is not alone on account of these alliances that Sancho III merits his title of the Great. The only claims to greatness in Spain were gains made at the expense of the infidels. The Moors suffered many times under his sword, and at the same time that he was preparing throughout all the Christian part of the country the substitution of the Basque royal house of Aznar for that of Pelayo, he pushed his conquests against the Arabs into the very heart of their country, even up to the walls of Cordova.

After his death there were four kingdoms in Christian Spain : three of them, Navarre, Castile, Aragon, belonged to the sons of Sancho; the fourth, Leon, belonged to Bermudo. But at the death of the latter in 1037 the male line, of the descendants of Pelayo became extinct, and the council of Asturia gave the crown to his brother-in-law, Ferdinand, who thus joined Leon and Castile. Since the memorable year of 1037 we can consider Christian Spain, with the exception of Portugal, as divided into the three kingdoms of Castile and Leon in the northwest and center, Navarre at the north, and Aragon at the northeast.

Ferdinand I had the unfortunate idea of dividing his states between his children, according to the old German custom; but Alfonso VI reunited them in 1073 and resumed the holy war in Spain, just when the preparations for the first crusade made such warfare popular throughout all Europe. The news of the misfortunes at Jerusalem and the growing influence of the Holy See was felt in Spain as well. Gregory VII wished to bring under his sway the Christian kingdoms of this country, which until now had continued more or less independent of the Holy See. Whether or not they should put themselves under the Roman church was a serious question; if they did not there was fear that the Pope might sometime call all Christendom to arms against them. With his unlimited pretensions Gregory VII demanded homage from Alfonso VI under the pretext that all land conquered from the Infidels belonged to the Church. Alfonso refused. Gregory then turned his efforts in another direction, that of the adoption by the Christians in Spain of the Roman ritual instead of the Gothic or Mozarabian ritual used by them until then. He sent a legate to them, and the question was seriously debated in the assembly of the grandees and the bishops at Burgos in 1077. The king, injured by the pretensions of the Pope, joined the laymen in opposing the introduction of the Roman ritual, but the queen, the archbishop, and all the clergy were in favor of it. As the discussion led to no decision, they submitted the question to “the judgment of God” in the ordeals of fire and water, and the judicial combat. The Gothic ritual was victorious in the lists, but Alfonso saw the danger of this victory, and in 1079 declared himself for the Roman ritual. From that year the Spanish people were admitted to full communion with Rome, and they became the most Catholic of people, though by no mean always the most submissive to the Holy See.

Ferdinand I had taken advantage of the differences between the small Arab kings, to encroach upon their territory. He had taken Viseu, Lamego, and Coimbra, and had made the king of Toledo tributary to him. In 1085 Alfonso VI did still better and took possession of the latter city. Toledo, the ancient capital and metropolis of the Visigoths, again became a capital and metropolis, and this event, counting Gijon, Oviedo, and Leon, made the fourth great step in the progress of the Christians, who had started from Asturia but who were henceforth established in the heart of Spain and protected by the Tagus.

Five years later, the Capetian, Henry of Burgundy, a great-grandson of Robert, the king of France, who had distinguished himself at the taking of Toledo, seized Portucale, situated at the mouth of the Douro, and Alfonso Converted his conquest into the county of Portugal (1095). At the same time Rodrigo de Bivar, the famous Cid (lord), and the hero of the Spanish romancers, who became, the pattern of chivalry, advanced along the coast of the Mediterranean, crowning victory with victory, and took possession of Valencia (1094). Finally, in 1118, Alfonso I, the king of Aragon, like the king of Castile, won a new capital for himself by conquering Saragossa, where a Mussulman dynasty had reigned with splendor for many years. In this way the Christian invasion advanced like one army divided into three columns, one at the east, one at the west, and one at the center.

But this progress went no farther at the center, and was soon arrested almost all along the line by obstacles which were not surmounted by the Christians for nearly a century. They saw two new Almohades floods of Mussulman invasion advancing toward them, when they had supposed it utterly exhausted long before. Successively two sects, advancing from Africa, revived the worn-out Islamism of these countries; first came the Almoravides, and then the Almohades, both puritan sects who were trying to restore simplicity to the religion of Mohammed. The name of the former signifies a closer connection with the true faith (religious). The name of the latter signifies unitarians. The one prayer of the founder of the Almohad sect was : “O Lord, O Allah, thou most merciful of the merciful, thou knowest our sins, wilt thou pardon them : thou knowest our needs, wilt thou satisfy them ; thou knowest our enemies, wilt thou prevent the evil which they could do us? It is enough that thou art our lord, our creator, and our help.”

The real leader of the Almoravides was Jussuf, who founded Morocco in 1062, and made it the seat of his political and religious government in Magreb. When Alfonso had conquered Toledo, Aben-Abed, the last Arab chief who possessed any real power in Spain, feeling incapable of resisting the Christians alone, called Jussuf to his aid. The latter arrived with his terrible African bands, and (1086) annihilated the Christian army at Zalaca. But Aben-Abed did not gain anything from this victory. He was driven from Seville, and left his country with that calm philosophy which endows the character of the Arabs of Spain with so much poetry. His companions wept on leaving their beautiful home, but he consoled them by saying : “Friends, let us learn to endure our fate. In this life we only gain things to lose them again, and God only gives us the possessions of the earth in order to take them away from us again. The sweet and the bitter, pleasure and pain, are always near each other—but a generous heart is untouched by the caprices of fortune.” The dominion of the Almoravides was strengthened and extended; they recaptured Valencia at the death of the Cid (1099), seized the Balearic Islands, and in 1108, at Ucles, defeated Alfonso VI in as bloody a battle as the one at Zalaca. The Christians were in doubt whether all they had gained in Spain would not be again wrested from them. This was not the case, however.

Though besieged several times, Toledo was defended with great energy and success, and in the west the little county of Portugal not only resisted all invasion, but also succeeded in taking some cities and in driving back the infidels. The latter returned in great numbers to attack Alfonso, the son of Henry of Burgundy, who advanced into Ourique to meet them, almost to the southwest end of the peninsula. The day before the battle he proclaimed to his soldiers that Christ had appeared to him, had promised him the victory, and told him to assume the title of king. To win the favor of heaven, his soldiers bestowed the new title upon him and gained a great victory (1139), which gave to Portugal Cintra and Santarem on the Tagus, and Elvas and Evora beyond that river.

The invasions of the Almohades had almost the same results as those of the Almoravides, whom they supplanted. Their leader, Abdalmumen, having taken Fez in 1146, sent his forces the same year to Spain. This time all the blows of the invaders were aimed at Castile, and Alfonso IX, was utterly defeated at the battle of Alarcos in 1195. Portugal, on the other hand, retained its superiority, and defeated them severely at Santarem (1184). In the meantime Aragon, whose throne had been occupied since 1137 by the house of Barcelona, increased her power by adding the counties of Cerdagne, Roussillon, Carcassonne, and Forcalquier, and the signory of Montpellier to Catalonia. For a while she also included Provence, which raised her to a high rank as a maritime power, as she possessed a great extent of coast upon the Mediterranean.

This progress made by Aragon and Portugal put Spain in a position at the beginning of the thirteenth century to renew gloriously the struggle with the infidel. Another powerful aid to victory had been given her by the founding, during the twelfth century, of four military orders which were especially devoted to the Spanish crusade, without mentioning the great European orders of the Holy Land, which had also spread thither. These fourorders were those of Alcantara, of Calatrava, and of St. James in Castile and Leon, and of Evora in Portugal.

In 1210, the news spread throughout all Christendom that 400,000 Almohades had just crossed the Straits of Gibraltar. The Pope Innocent III., though occupied at that time by the war with the Albigenses, could not contemplate this danger without urging Europe to come to the aid of Spain. Public prayers were commanded, and the indulgences were promised to all who would go to fight in the peninsula. The five Christian kings of the country (Castile and Leon were for the moment separated) joined forces and marched against Mohammed, the fanatical chief of the Almohades. The two hostile armies met on the plateau of the Sierra Morena, at Alacab according to the Arabs, at Las Navas de Tolosa according to the Christians. A terrible battle was fought, which was decided in favor of the Christians by the flight of the Andalusians. Mohammed, who had watched the battle from a hill, under a red pavilion, surrounded by the thick ranks of his African guard, and with the Koran in one hand and his sword in the other, saw the terrible defeat of his soldiers without even changing his attitude, and saying “God alone is just and mighty, the devil is false and treacherous.” He was finally persuaded to take to flight. This battle decided the struggle of which Spain had so long been the theater. After the Almoravides and the Almohades no help came from Africa sufficient to restore any strength to the dominion of the Mohammedans.

During the whole of the thirteenth century the Christians reaped the fruits of this victory, and their progress was made even more easy by the fact that the government of the Almohades had fallen in civil war and anarchy. Cordova (1236), Murcia (1243), Seville (1248), and many other places fell into the hands of the king of Castile, while James I the Conquistador, the king of Aragon, subdued the Balearic Isles, and with the aid of an army of 80,000 Spaniards and Frenchmen, conquered Valencia (1238). In 1270, by the permanent annexation of Algarve, Portugal also extended her territory, which since then has never been increased. The Moors no longer possessed anything but the little kingdom of Grenada, and this was shut in on every side by the ocean or the possessions of the king of Castile. But within these small limits, with their numbers recruited by the people driven by the Christians from the conquered villages, they held their own with an energy which deferred their final ruin for two centuries. After this, except for a, few incursions of the Merinides of Magreb, which were successfully repelled, the conquests of the Christians were undisturbed, and we may say that the Spanish crusade was almost entirely suspended till 1492.

Though the crusades to Jerusalem had undoubtedly accomplished some good results for general civilization, they did not accomplish the end for which they were planned. They neither founded anything in the east, nor did they even deliver the Holy Sepulchre, and millions of men had perished on the journey thither.

The crusades in Spain, on the other hand, though utterly without influence upon the social state of Europe during the Middle Ages, completely changed the political geogra­phy of Spain, and were not without results for the future of modern Europe. They wrested the peninsula from the Moors and gave it to the Christians; they founded the little kingdom of Portugal, which later pursued its crusade across the ocean and discovered the Cape of Good Hope; they founded the important states of Castile and Aragon, in whose chiefs their Spanish victories awakened a European ambition, and whose inhabitants had acquired by this war of eight centuries the military mode of life which made them the condottieri of Charles V.and Philip II rather than the peace-loving heirs of the industry, commerce, and brilliant civilization of the Moors.

To the question why there was such a marked difference in the results of the crusades in the East and West, we must answer that it was due to the situations and surroundings of the two objects of attack. Jerusalem, situated far from the center of the Catholic sway, and surrounded by Mussulmans, remained Mussulman, just as Toledo, situated at the extreme end of the Mussulman line of occupation, and surrounded by Christians, fell into the hands of the Christians. Palestine was near to the land of Mecca, and Spain almost within sight of Rome. Geography exerts a great influence even over the things which seem farthest removed from it, as, for instance, the extent and authority of religious ideas.

CHAPTER XXII.

PROGRESS OF THE CITIES.

SINCE the fall of the Carolingian Empire, we have seen feudalism taking possession of the greater part of Europe. We have seen the Pope and the Emperor disputing over Italy and the dominion of the world, and, finally, the people hurrying in vast numbers along the road to Jerusalem. In the midst of these great events, a fourth fact of general importance was evolved from the other three, and had, in its turn, grave consequences. A part of the enslaved population raised itself by manual labor and intelligence and took its place below, though by the side of, the lord and the priest; the class of common free-men, in fact, whose almost complete disappearance in the ninth century has been mentioned, had formed again and had acquired political existence. While studying the feudal system we saw what a wide chasm lay between the warlike and the working portions of society. The latter did not long remain resigned to its subjection and complete inferiority to the tipper classes. Revolt broke out. As early as the year 987 the feudal villeins of Normandy were rising in all parts of the country, holding meetings and forming associations, bound by oath, by means of deputies sent from all parts. They swore to free themselves from the dominion of the lords, in order that they might govern themselves by their own laws and be able to hunt freely in the woods, fish the streams, etc. That revolt was cruelly suppressed by the duke. It was one of the first indications revealing the nature of the people of the Middle Ages. So soon as the feudal system was firmly established, it held down the people of the country districts with a power that forbade all struggles. Then the cities broke out in resistance. The movement began among the little gatherings of men whose numbers were increased by the first progress of industry, and whose very situation enabled them to offer resistance. In 1067 the city of Mans formed an association bound by oath and took arms against its feudal lord. That was the beginning of the communal movement, which showed itself in different phases and with different results throughout Europe from the eleventh to the fourteenth century.

In many places the beginnings of this movement dated far back into the past, in other places they were of recent origin. The greater number of the cities of Italy and in Southern France, which had not received the full force of the barbaric invasions, and where the feudal system, later, had been less complete, had retained the municipal institutions of the Roman Empire, and though these were no doubt often obstructed and suppressed they were always ready to right themselves again on the first opportunity. In Italy, most of the towns of Lombardy, which were controlled by their bishops, whose authority was something between that of the old defenders of the Roman empire and that of feudal lords, had even in the tenth century begun to enjoy almost complete freedom, following the example shown them by such towns as Genoa and Venice, favored, as they were, by their peculiar geographical position. Milan, Pavia, and Venice were in the front rank. With the help of what remained of their free institutions, those cities made a great advance in commerce and manufactures, and when they became rich and powerful tried to free themselves from episcopal authority. When the contest between the Papacy and the Empire broke out they were quick to turn it to their own advantage. They formed an alliance between their citizens and the lesser nobility of the neighborhood and in freeing themselves not only from the great nobles, but almost completely from dependence on the emperor, they transformed themselves ’into the Lombard republics already mentioned.

Within certain limits the South of France fared in the same way as Italy. Traces of the old Roman municipal government are found in the cities of Marseilles, Arles, Toulouse, Narbonne, Nimes, Perigueux, etc., from the eighth to the twelfth century. They are also to be found in the central and even in the northern parts, though more rarely; for example, at Bourges, Paris, Rheims, and Metz. The Empire had once extended its system of uniform institutions throughout these regions as well as farther south—but as the German conquest had been more thorough there than in other parts, only a very small number of towns had been able to preserve even the ruins of municipal organization. Those that had the advantage in this respect possessed a middle-class aristocracy which seemed to be derived from the old curials; even in the South the Roman names are to be met with, namely, the senate, consuls, decemvirs, and ediles. Bourges had, in the seventh century, its senatorial families. Elsewhere these terms were replaced by others of like meaning, belonging to the Middle Ages,— prud'hommes, bonhommes (boni homines). Coins have been found of the time of Charles the Bald, bearing the inscription, Biturices (the inhabitants of Bourges). We see that in all these cities municipal life prevailed before the epoch commonly assigned to the communal movement; it simply gained in activity and extent at that time.

In the North, on the contrary, most of the cities, whether they were of ancient date and had lost their municipal institutions, or whether they were of recent foundation and had never possessed them, were obliged to win by force the advantages which had no precedent to authorize them, to present claims that were new and offensive to the feudal lords, and to introduce into the body politic principles that were revolutionary for the time. Feudalism, which had expanded there with uniformity and with all its German rudeness, fought desperately against the villeins who dared dream of being no longer absolutely at the command of their lords. And yet the lords were obliged to yield almost everywhere where there were masses of men crowded into a narrow space—energetic artisans accustomed to handle the mallet and the axe, who, when it came to a revolt, could very well buckle on the armor themselves that they had been making the night before for their lord, and who had their labyrinth of narrow and tortuous streets to offset the impregnable castles of the nobles, streets where the great battle-horse and long lance could hardly find space to turn. Moreover, the growth of luxury accompanied the growth of chivalry, and of new and finer needs ; and with it grew the number of laborers and the size and strength of their towns. Accordingly we see later on, and especially in the Netherlands, towns like Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, etc., which were able to send out great armies from within their walls.

This movement assumed a more energetic form in the northeast than in any other part of France. We have noticed that the first commune established was at Mans (1067). It was abolished, however, two years later by William. Closely following came Cambrai, which was or­ganized in 1076, after more than a hundred years of open war between the inhabitants and the bishop, their feudal lord. This community went through many changes, and was abolished and re-established many times. Those of Noyon, Beauvais, and St. Quentin came next in order. The most famous was at Laon, and started in the year 1106. This town had before that been nothing but a den of thieves; the nobles had carried on their robbery openly, the citizens revenged themselves by imitating them; to be on the streets at night was out of the question. The bishop, moreover, a Norman of very warlike spirit, and a great hunter, but not much of a priest, overwhelmed the town with his exorbitant demands, the fruits of which he divided with the dignitaries of the cathedral and the noble families of the town. Whoever cast reflection upon the least of his acts, was given over to be tortured by a black slave that he owned. The citizens held political meetings, united, adopted a plan for a communal government, and bought of the bishop the right of enforcing it. But the bishop tried to take back what he had sold; thereupon there was a ter­rible insurrection, in which he was killed. King Louis the Fat interfered and allowed the town to keep its commune, with certain modifications. In the two centuries that follow, the history of this town is a long series of vicissitudes. It finally lost its liberty under Philip the Fair. The communes of Amiens, Soissons, Rheims, Sens, and Vezelay were also established in the first half of the twelfth century, and were often the occasion of no less obstinate struggles. There was, we see, a kind of unity in this great movement, and although the local sufferings caused each communal insurrection, it cannot be denied that the example of neighboring towns, which had already freed themselves, had great influence in the other towns about them. It is proved by the fact that they imitated each other; the commune of Laon was organized on the model of the communes of St. Quentin and of Noyon, the charter of Laon served as a pattern to Crespy and Montdidier. The charter of Soissons was very famous, and was adopted in many places.

Let us now define the word commune more carefully. One of the enemies and contemporaries of the communal revolution, the Abbot Guibert of Nogent, said : “Com­mune is a new and detestable word, and its meaning is as follows : the people who are liable to the taille pay the rent which they owe to their lord only once a year. If they commit a misdemeanor they are acquitted of it on the pay­ment of a fine determined by law ; and as to the levying of money, customarily inflicted on the serfs, from that they are entirely exempt.” These few lines give a sufficiently correct definition of the word commune, though they are far from giving it as odious a character as their author desired. They show us the tenants requiring guarantees for their persons and their possessions, and placing these guarantees under the care of magistrates already existing, maires, jurés, échevins, possessing, in fact, through their principal magistrates, and this is their distinguishing feature, a jurisdiction of their own, but not usually attempting to form political constitutions. There lies the difference between the French communes and the Italian republics; the former limited, though they did not, like the latter, throw off the dominion of their feudal lords. The commune of Cambrai is quoted as one of those that put most restrictions on the seignorial rights : “Neither the bishop nor the emperor,” said a contemporary, “can impose a tax there, no tribute is exacted; the soldiery cannot be called out, except for the defense of the city, and, moreover, on the condition that the citizens shall be able to return to their houses on the same day.” The citizens of Cambrai were on the same basis as the most favored feudatory.

The reason that the communes of France were not able to reach political independence and to form little republics was, that although they were successful in avoiding the domination of their immediate lord, they could not escape that of their superior sovereign the king. The city of Amiens had wrested a communal charter from their count; when the county of Amiens was joined to the crown of France, the struggle was no longer against a petty lord, but against the king himself. It was the same case with many other towns. Very often, in the heat of the fight with their lords, they called upon the king of their own accord and asked for assistance, which he hastened to grant in order that he might not lose so good an occasion to strike a blow at the seignioral power. They found in him a protector for the time being, and one who was very useful during the struggle, but who afterwards proved fatal to their development, and stopped it before it reached political independence. The great number of royal ordinances relating to the communes, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, show how large a part royalty took in this revolutionary movement; there are 9 acts signed by Louis VI., the Fat, relative to communes; 23 of Louis VII; 78 of Philip Augustus; 10 of Louis VIII; 20 of St. Louis; 15 of Philip III; 46 of Philip the Fair; 6 of Louis X; 12 of Philip V; 19 of Charles IV. The principle that the communes belonged to the king prevailed as early as the time of Louis VII, and sixty years later Beaumanoir wrote, that “No one can establish a commune without the consent of the king.” At the beginning of the fourteenth century the development of the communes ceased and gave way to a movement in the opposite direction. Then we see some of the communes suppressed by the authorities, others themselves demanding their suppression in the hope of finding more security under the authority of a lord or a king than they could in the disturbed condition of free institutions. So the communes, in France, did nothing to help on the growth of universal liberty, and did not even know how to keep what they had acquired ; they not only never thought of forming a confederation among themselves, like the Lombard towns, but they allowed themselves to be despoiled of their rights, or else gave them up of their own accord.

Though the communes lost or failed to reach political liberty, they at least preserved some guarantees, some municipal privileges. They thus approached the enfranchisement of the people by another path, namely, by the formation of the more properly called the bourgeoisies (villes de bourgeoisie). We have already mentioned, in connection with the seignioral castles, the agglomerations of men and habitations which attached themselves, as it were, to their great walls. It was to the interest of the lord of the castle to enlarge these communities, thereby increasing the number of his subjects and artisans, and augmenting his revenues and even his military forces; for many a time the men (commonly called parishioners), whether from the towns or from villages, were seen marching, led by their priest, wherever their lord directed. He also tried to attract the peasants from neighboring domains by the advantages he offered on his land ; he granted a charter in advance and had it published far and wide, like the following : “Be it known to all men present and to come, that I, Henry, Count of Troyes, have established the customs set forth below for the inhabitants of my villeneuve (near Pont-sur-Seine) : every man living in said town shall pay twelve deniers and a measure of oats yearly as the price of his domicile; and if he wishes to have a portion of land for meadows, he may pay four deniers rent per acre. The houses, vineyards, and meadows may be sold or transferred at the pleasure of the purchaser. (Here we see the peasant grown to be a proprietor.) The men residing in said town shall not be made to join the army nor to go on any expedition unless I myself am at their head. I grant them, moreover, the right of having six échevins, who shall administer the common affairs of the town and shall assist my provost when his courts are in session. I have secured that no lord, whether knight or otherwise, shall be able to take away from the town any of the new inhabitants, for any reason whatever, unless the latter should be his serf, or should owe him arrears of his taille. Enacted at Provins, in the year of the Incarnation 1175.” What the Count of Troyes did was done by other lords, and often by the king himself. The name of villeneuve, which occurs in many localities (Villeneuve-de-Roi, Villeneuve-St. Georges, etc.) is a relic of this general movement.

Some of the old cities also obtained privileges analogous to those of the new cities, while remaining, like them, under the provost of their lord or of the king. It was in the royal domains that this usually took place. Orleans and Paris were among such cities, for, in spite of their antiquity, it appears that they had not kept their Roman municipal government, but, on the contrary, owed all their franchises and privileges to the Middle Ages and the kings, except at Paris the corporation of the Nantes, which goes back to the emperors and probably to the Gauls. In 1137, at Orleans, Louis VII. forbade the provost and the sergeants of the town to molest the citizens in any way, and fixed the impost to be levied for the king on every measure of corn and of wine; ten years later he abolished the right of mortmain. Still later he made regulations for the remission of abuses, for the organization of the judicial system, and for the encouragement of commerce.

Certain of these town charters served as models for many others, as we have seen the communal charters doing. Such were the customs of Loris in Gatinais accorded by the king to seven bourgs or towns of his domains in the space of fifty years (1163-1201). The great difference between the communes and these towns is that the former gained by force their privileges, which included that of jurisdiction, or the right to administer justice, while the latter by peaceful measures obtained less extensive concessions in which the right of jurisdiction was not included.

To sum up the whole matter, we see that, of the towns of France, some were never enfranchised from royal authority, while others, namely the communes and municipal cities, reverted to that authority. In all the cities a middle class was formed which grew richer day by day through commerce and industry, which formed powerful corporations everywhere, filled the universities, and acquired knowledge, especially legal knowledge, together with wealth. The common people had two paths open to them by which they could attain to political influence: as merchants and manufacturers they were called by St. Louis into his council; as lawyers we shall see them reigning under the protection of Philip the Fair, and, admitted by this same Philip the Fair to the general assemblies of the nation, they no longer formed merely a class but a recognized order, an estate of the realm, the Third Estate.

The revolution which raised the people in England and introduced that element into the public life of the nation was not of the same character as that in France. In the first place the bloody struggles of the French communes were not seen there. Many of the English towns before the Norman conquest were already rich and populous and took part in the affairs of the country. In the time of Ethelred II, the inhabitants of Canterbury attended the court of the earl and those of London took part several times in the election of kings. Yet they do not appear to have sent deputies to the Saxon Witenagemot, and their rights were generally confined within their walls. The Norman conquest did them a great deal of harm; in York the number of houses fell from 1609 to 967; in Oxford, from 721 to 234 ; and many other towns had a like experience. As they were less formidable, from that time they lost their rights, and the lord, whether king or baron, of the domains in which they were situated disposed of their possessions and of their inhabitants with almost absolute power. Henry I. restored their privileges and gave its first charter to the city of London. Under Henry II., the inhabitants of many towns acquired the right of ownership in the land they occupied, and bought off, for a fixed charge, the special and uncertain tributes which were arbitrarily de­manded of them. Finally, under King John, the granting of charters became a frequent occurrence. From that time on the cities, grown rich and powerful, inspired respect in their lords, whether kings or barons, who no longer exacted but asked the cities and towns of their domains for assistance; they were then on the same basis as the possessors of fiefs; the foremost citizens of London and of the Cinque Ports (Dover, Sandwich, Hythe, Hastings, and Romney), even acquired the titles of nobles and barons. In 1264 the above-mentioned towns, together with York and Lincoln and all the other great cities of England, were authorized to send deputies to parliament. This marks their first appearance in political life. One hundred and twenty towns sent deputies to the parliament convoked by Edward in 1295, for it is just, said the preamble to the writs of election, that what affects the interests of all should be approved by all.

The towns had been assisted in their progress by the small gentry, that is to say, the knights of the shires, and the free tenants. Something of the same sort happened in Italy. But in Italy the remoteness or the weakness of sovereign authority relieved these two classes from the necessity of uniting: they became rivals, and their rivalry destroyed the Italian republics. In England, on the contrary, the necessity of union was enjoined by the permanence of royal power and its continual presence in all parts of the kingdom; and instead of little ephemeral republics a great system of national representation was developed. While in England the towns united with the nobility against the power of royalty, in Germany as in France they allied themselves with the sovereign against the feudal system, the only difference being that the alliance was much less close and involved a much smaller degree of dependence. The emperor raised the towns to an immediate feudal connection with himself as against the princes of the empire,—that is, the towns lying in the territory of the princes were directly dependent not upon the princes, but upon the emperor, who thus had his supporters in the very heart of the great fiefs. The German towns, which had before that been rich and commercial, now increased their commerce and their wealth, thanks to their new condition. Henry V lent great assistance to this revolution by granting privileges to the lower class of citizens, the artisans, who up to that time had been distinguished from the freemen and placed in a lower grade, according to the spirit of the Roman law; he released them from one oppressive custom in particular, which gave their feudal lord at their death a right to all their movable goods, or at least the power to demand whatever was best in the inheritance. In many of the towns he took away all temporal authority from the bishops and divided the citizens into companies according to the nature of their occupations; an institution soon adopted by the other commercial countries. The citizens thus organized were not slow in forming councils, which were chosen from their own number by election, like a senate or a magistracy, and which, after first confining themselves to assisting the emperor’s or the bishop’s officer, obtained the right of jurisdiction in the thirteenth century.

In Germany the towns, to increase their population, used means like those we have seen employed in France by the kings and lords in the founding of their villeneuves; the feudal lord opened an asylum about his castle and the towns opened one about their walls; a host of strangers hastened to establish themselves there, under the name of Pfahlburger (citizens of the palisades; hence faubourg). The serfs of the neighboring lords often took refuge there, and at the end of a year and a day they could not be reclaimed. This gave rise to many complaints on the part of the lords.

The towns in Germany which enjoyed the greatest prosperity were those lying on the Rhine and in Lorraine; Mainz, Cologne, Coblentz, Bonn, Aix-la-Chapelle, and in Saxony, Magdeburg, Bremen, Lübeck, Hamburg; in Bavaria, Ratisbon; in Swabia, Augsburg and Ulm; in Franconia, Nuremberg, Frankfort on the Main, Spire, Worms, etc. Their commerce extended far and wide; they exchanged commodities from the north of Europe for those of the East, and they were soon admitted to the diets of the Emperor. But they did not succeed in founding a class throughout the country, for they were not able to join with the feudal nobility, as in England, nor, as in France, to make common cause with the king, who was too weak and often engaged with the very different interests created by his imperial title. Accordingly they remained almost isolated from the rest of the empire, and were obliged to provide for their own defense on account of the weakness of the supreme power and the bad condition of the imperial police; they formed leagues among themselves which were of great importance, but which could not give rise to a real body politic any more than that of the Lombard towns.

The advances made by the city population had an influence also upon the people of the country districts. Charters of enfranchisement for the serfs increased in number. In the twelfth century they had already been allowed to testify in court; and some of the popes, Hadrian IV, and especially Alexander III., who has left us a celebrated bull, had demanded liberty for them. In the thirteenth century the enfranchisements were very numerous ; for the lords began to understand what was said by Beaumanoir and very distinctly by many charters, to the effect that they would gain more in having free industrious men on their land than by keeping the lazy serfs, “who neglect their work, saying that they are working for some one else.”

In this way the new class which was unknown to the Bishop Adalbero in the time of King Robert had come into existence, and was animated by a totally different spirit from that shown by the class which had so long impeded its progress. The feudal order ruled by the right of privilege, made the eldest born sole heir, and kept the inheritance permanently in the same line, while the middle class inscribed in their charters some of the principles of rational right, and the equal division of property between all the children.

The new popular law, from its low and humble origin, could not have entered into competition with the aristocratic law if it had not found in the old law of the Roman Emperors a potent auxiliary. This law, though long neglected, had not been entirely forgotten, and it made a glorious reappearance in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in some of the Italian towns, especially at Bologna, where numbers of students, gathered together from all parts of Europe, crowded into the lecture room of Irnerius, who had revived the study of jurisprudence. The French were the first to cross the mountains, the pilgrims of science, as their fathers before them had been pilgrims of the cross, in order to listen to his learned lectures; and soon Montpellier, Angers, and Orleans had their chairs of Roman Law. In the time of Philip Augustus, Justinian’s compilation was translated into French, and its study proved so attractive that some of the popes and councils solemnly forbade the monks having anything to do with it, lest they should be diverted by it from meditation on the sacred books.

In the eyes of the men of that time, lost in the chaos of feudal laws, the Roman code, an admirable collection of logical deductions whose premises were natural equality and general utility, seemed to be, in very truth, what they called it, reason written out. The children of the wealthy among the middle class were devoted by their parents to its study, which they found a weapon of defense against the feudal system ; by means of these laws, which were rendered doubly respectable by their origin and by their antiquity, the lawyers were able to work in a thousand different ways toward the overthrow of the two great slaveries of the Middle Ages,—the slavery of man and the slavery of the land. St. Louis had already authorized Languedoc to make the Roman law their municipal law; the same concession was made to other provinces. In those that kept their own special laws, the Roman law, held in reserve to be consulted in all doubtful cases, insensibly pervaded the local customs with its own spirit. Thus began, in the thirteenth century, that war between rational law, whether Roman or customary, and the aristocratic law of the feudal order; sustained and directed by the legists, this contest did not end for France until the great year of 1789, in the triumph of equality over privilege. It has not yet come to an end in those European countries which have not followed our path.

CHAPTER XXIII.

CIVILIZATION OF THE TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH CENTURIES.

THE progress made by the urban population was due to the progress which had been made by commerce and by the industrial arts, both of which had been in developed by the crusades.

In the imagination of the people of the Middle Ages, the East, and particularly India, were countries of fabulous wealth. There, most exquisite wares, precious stones, and gold were to be found in profusion. They knew no other way of reaching these marvelous countries except by Asia; either by pass­ing to the north of the Caspian Sea, or through Syria and Persia, or by the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. All these three waters were used, but all commerce carried on by them was pursued under many obstacles and with the greatest risks. We can obtain some idea of this by the narrative of a few intrepid travelers of the Middle Ages.

Towards 1172, the Jew Benjamin of Tudela traveled as far as Samarcand and Hindostan. In 1246, a Franciscan monk, John du Plan Carpin [Carpini] was sent by Innocent IV. to the Tartars, on whom he wrote a treatise which has come down to us. In 1253, St. Louis, who was then in Palestine, wishing to form an alliance with the Mongols if possible, sent the Franciscan, Rubruquis (Ruybroecq) thither and commissioned him to write him long letters describing all that he saw.

During this same period, the adventurous Venetian family of which Marco Polo was the youngest and most celebrated member, had already begun their travels. Marco Polo lived with his father and uncle twenty-six years among the Tartars in China. They rendered valuable services to the Khan, and he was unwilling to have them leave him. They succeeded, however, in returning to Europe, after seeing the whole coast of China and India. When they returned to Venice, their friends refused to recognize them, as their heirs had declared that they were dead; and in fact they strongly resembled Tartars, both in their looks and their language, and made a very poor appearance on their arrival. They collected together all whom they knew to be their former friends and relations, and in their presence ripped up the coarse clothing they had worn; diamonds, emeralds, and sapphires fell from every seam, and it was not long before all their friends and relations were ready to acknowledge them. Marco Polo took part in a war which his compatriots were carrying on with the Genoese, and was taken prisoner by the latter. During his captivity, in which he was treated with great consideration, he wrote his most valuable narrative.

Another narrative, curious in a different way, was written by the English knight, Sir John Maundeville, who traveled during the middle of the fourteenth century. This narrative, it has been supposed, was written by him in three languages, in English, French, and Latin, and copies of it were greatly multiplied during the next century. It is remarkable for certain cosmographical ideas of the roundness of the earth, the possibility of making the passage of its circumference, and the existence of the antipodes, all questions of the first importance as influencing the discovery of a new route to India, which was made by Vasco de Gama at the beginning of modern times.

The merchants did not venture quite as far as these bold apostles of science. They hardly went out of sight of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, or the Baltic, but they kept up a constant intercourse with the farthest countries of the East by means of caravans. Arab money has been found as far north as the shores of the Gulf of Finland, and the merchants of Novgorod carried on a lively commerce with the East, from whence the richest commodities have always come—such as silken fabrics, perfumes, spices, precious stones, ivory, gold-dust, the plumes of Africa, the woods used in dyeing, Damascus weapons, the tissues of Mosul and India, and the sugar of Syria.

This commerce centered about two distinct regions during the Middle Ages ; one the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic, the other the shores of the Mediterranean.

The commerce on the Mediterranean flourished long before that of the North. Without mentioning the cities on the African coast which were so prosperous during the tenth and eleventh centuries, or the Arabs of Spain, who were so industrious and so rich, there were Barcelona, the storehouse and market of all Spain, Montpellier, Narbonne, Arles, Marseilles, Nice, Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Amalfi, and Venice, which were all struggling for the supremacy over the east­ern commerce. The Italian cities gained the greater part and scattered their counting-houses over the coasts of the Archipelago and the Black Sea, where Venice and Genoa ruled either simultaneously or by turns.

However, it cost them a great deal of trouble to bring even a small part of this wealth from the depths of Asia, through lands inhabited by hostile populations and often convulsed by wars ; and it was also difficult to transport these products across the Alps to the cities of the North to exchange them for the products of that region. Marseilles, Beaucaire, Lyons, and Troyes served France as intermediate stations; Constance, Basel, and Strassburg for the Rhine country; Innsbruck for the Alps ; Augsburg for the great Bavarian plain; Ulm, Ratisbon, and Vienna for the Danube, and Nuremberg for Franconia. The products of northern commerce were also brought to these cities.

In the low countries of the north of Germany and France, which were often flooded by water and intersected by rivers, the cities naturally were stronger than the feudal nobility. From their situation on the ocean and at the mouth of great rivers which could carry their ships in all directions into the very heart of a vast continent, they naturally devoted themselves to commerce; but with this difference from the Italian cities, that whereas the latter always looked upon each other as rivals, as there was no powerful feudal system in their midst to force them to unite against a common foe, the German cities formed a confederation in the interest of mutual protection. This confederation, which was called the Hanseatic League, held the supreme power in the north of Europe and united all the cities on the shores of the Baltic, the rich cities on the Rhine, and the great communes of Flanders, by a common commercial interest.

From London to Novgorod, on all the vessels of commerce and above all counting-houses, floated one and the same flag, that of the Hansa. The merchants of this League were masters of the fisheries, the mines, the agriculture, and the manufactures of Germany. In their markets were exchanged the furs, tallow, and hides from Russia, grain, wax, and honey from Poland, amber from Prussia, metals from Saxony and Bohemia, wines from the Rhine and from France, wool and tin from England, linens from Holland and Friesland, cloths from Flanders, and many other things. And, last but not least, the Italians and Provençals sent the products of the Orient to the great free port of Bruges. In 1360, there were 52 cities in this confederation, and in the fifteenth century 80 cities. They were divided into four colleges with Lübeck, Cologne, Brunswick, and Danzig, at their head. Lübeck was the capital or rather the metropolitan seat of the League.. The branch offices were at Lon­don, Bruges, Bergen and Novgorod; also at Paris, Wisby, on the island of Gothland, etc.

Flanders, situated in the very midst of this great com­mercial association of Germany, and covered with cities and workshops, was a zealous center of industry. Ghent, with its 80,000 citizens able to bear arms, planted proudly on its shield this device, which savors something of Rome: S. P. Q. G. (senatus populusque Gandavensium). Ypres counted 200,000 weavers within her walls and suburbs; Bruges, the entrepôt of all Flanders, was the meeting-place of European merchants and had a chamber of insurance (1310) two centuries before the rest of Europe. Matthew of Westminster says : “The whole world was clothed in English wool which had been manufactured in Flanders. All the kingdoms in Christendom, and even the Turks, were disturbed by the war that broke out between the cities and the count in 1380.” As to Holland, though still somewhat obscure it already showed some signs of its future brilliant fortune. An inundation of the ocean in the thirteenth century joined the Zuyder Zee with the ocean, and made Amsterdam a port secure from all tempests; in the fourteenth century the change of the herring fishery, which left the shores of Scania for the shores of England and Holland, brought a great source of wealth to these countries.

In England both commerce and industry were still dormant. Nevertheless, England had some commercial relations with Spain, sending her fine sheep thither and receiving in exchange the Arab horses, from which the best English herds of today have descended.

In France in the twelfth century, annual fairs, which were famous throughout all Europe, were held at Troyes, in Champagne, Beaucaire in Languedoc, and Saint Denis near Paris. The merchants of Rouen, Orleans, Amiens, Rheims, etc., kept up relations with the rich factories of Flanders and the immense warehouses of Bruges. Those of Lyons, Nimes, Avignon, and Marseilles went twice a year to Alexandria in search of the commodities of the East, which reached France also through Venice and the German cities. Bordeaux already exported wines to England and Flanders. The cities of Languedoc bought fine weapons at Toledo and hangings of leather worked with arabesques at Cordova. Paris had a hanse or association for the merchandise which came by water, and its privileges were confirmed by Philip Augustus. Hence the vessel which is still to be seen on the shield of the city. Saint Louis took the merchants under his special protection.

They had their regulations, which formed, as it were, three maritime codes. All the commerce of the South was regulated by the Consolato del Mare. That of the North had two different codes,—the Lois d’Oleron, an imitation of the Consolato del Mare, and the ordinances of Wisby, which were drawn up after the Lois d’Oleron.

We must also mention a discovery which belongs to the Middle Ages, though its full influence was not felt till the beginning of modern times, and which is also due to the re­lations between Europe and Asia—namely, the compass. Its origin is not known with any certainty. Guiot de Provins, a Latin poet who lived in France toward the year 1200, compares in his verse the lover to the needle, which proves that it was known at that time, and that it is an error to attribute its discovery to an inhabitant of Amalfi during the fourteenth century. It may have been derived from the Saracens, who perhaps learned it from the Chinese. At all events it was not until the fourteenth century that it was really put into use by the Genoese and the other people living on the coasts of the Mediterranean, and that they put sufficient faith in it to undertake voyages along the Atlantic coasts guided only by the little instrument which was eventually to open all the paths of the ocean to the people of Europe.

The crusaders brought some new industries back with them from the East: the tissues of Damascus, which were imitated at Parma and Milan; glass from Tyre, which was copied at Venice, where looking-glasses were made to replace the metal mirrors; the use of windmills, of flax, of silk, and of a number of useful plants, such as the Damascus plum tree, the sugar cane, which was to supersede honey, the only sugar known to antiquity, but which at first could only be cultivated in Sicily or Spain, whence it passed later to Madeira and the Antilles, bringing great wealth with it; and finally the mulberry tree, which enriched first Italy and then France. Cotton fabrics began to be known during this epoch. Paper made from cotton had been known for a long time; linen paper was known by the end of the thirteenth century, but it did not entirely replace parchment until the sixteenth century. Damaskeening and the engraving of seals and coins were being perfected. The art of enameling was learned, and the goldsmith’s art received a new impulse.

During the later times of the Roman Empire the work­men of the same trade had begun to form associations among themselves. The Germans also had formed certain guilds whose members promised to support each other, and celebrated their union by banquets, which were put under the patronage of some god or hero, and which gained for the members of a guild the name of Brothers of the Banquet. The corporations of the Middle Ages resulted from the combination of these two institutions. Charlemagne forbade them, and the synod of Rouen in 1189 prohibited them; but they were too necessary in these times of violence to be discouraged by mere interdictions. The communes had guaranteed the liberty of persons; the corporations secured liberty for labor. The members of these corporations were of great assistance to each other, and took care of the old men, and the widows and orphans of any members. Each corporation had its patron saint, its festivals, and its treasury. The chiefs, and the syndics or wardens, prevented frauds and enforced the regulations. These regulations required a long and hard apprenticeship, and secured the monopoly of their industry to the members of corporations, so that the number of master workmen was fixed for each profession by the corporation itself. The result was that there was no competition and the prices were maintained at a very high point. This severe discipline was, however, necessary to the infancy of industry. Later these corporations became impediments to industry, but in the Middle Ages they were a necessity. The middle class of the present day is an outcome of these associations. We still possess the regulations drawn up in the time of Saint Louis for the corporations of Paris. The master workmen were charged with the government of their fellow-workmen, the handling of certain moneys, and even possessed some judicial power; but they were also responsible to the magistrate for all disorders committed by members of their corporations.

The corporations gave some security to the industries of the cities, but did nothing for agriculture. Forests and waste lands covered the greater part of the country and well-cultivated land was only to be found in the near neighborhood of the cities and enclosed towns, and around the strong castles and monasteries. The laborer did not dare venture beyond the reach of a place of refuge. Crespy in Vallois is a good ex­ample of the construction of most of the cities of the times. It had an extensive faubourg, which was separated from the city by a line of fortifications; the faubourg itself was protected by a girdle of palisades. The burghers lived in the city, while the faubourg served the peasants as a shelter for themselves, their animals and agricultural implements in winter or in any time of danger. While they were working in the fields they lived in huts such as our wood-cutters still use in the forests. We have already noticed the same arrangements in the German cities.

If it was necessary for the peasants to take such precautions, how many more must have been necessary for the merchants. Besides the duties which were collected at the gates of each city, they paid a right of escort to the lord of each domain traversed by them, to insure them against all robbery. Those who traveled by water were also subjected to many exactions, and particularly to the odious right of wreckage. When a shipwreck took place the lords who owned the lands on the coast took possession of everything that washed ashore. “I have here a stone which is more valuable than the crown diamonds,” said a lord of Léon in Brittany, pointing out a rock which was famous for the number of shipwrecks it had caused. And people even went so far as to add to the dangers of the ocean by showing false lights, and thus attracting vessels on to the reefs.

The kings tried to revive a capitulary of Charlemagne’s which obliged the lords who levied toll to keep the roads in order and to guarantee the safety of travelers from the rising to the setting of the sun. But in the Middle Ages they were seldom able to enforce obedience. Another great obstacle to commerce was the infinite diversity of the money. Most of it was bad, and it had to be changed at every fief, and always at a loss to the merchant. In France, St. Louis decreed that the money issued by the eighty lords who had the right to coin money should only be received on their own lands, while the money coined by the crown should be a legal tender throughout the whole king­dom. This was a step in the direction of the abolition of seignioral money, and greatly benefited commerce.

As the Church forbade loans at interest, the usurers multiplied greatly; they were usually Jews, as this was the only form of commerce allowed them, and it was one of the causes of the general hatred of the race. To conceal their wealth and to enable it to circulate freely, they either invented or borrowed the invention of the Italian bankers, of the bill of exchange, which annihilated distance for capital just as in our day steam has annihilated distance for people. In the latter part of the Middle Ages, the Lombard and the Caorsini [from Cahors] bankers (the latter came from the South of France, which, like Italy, was much enriched by commerce) competed with the Jews, with the advantage that they were not, like the latter, subjected to constant extortions. The persecuting fanaticism of the Middle Ages not only subjected this unhappy people to most terrible sufferings, but it was also the cause of the many vices developed in them by the desire to avenge themselves on their oppressors. The history of the Jews before and since 1789 gives a curious and significant example of the different results that are obtained by oppression and by justice.

As order became more established in the state, work became plenty in the cities and the general standard of comfort was raised. A new order of needs were felt; namely, those of the mind. The great things which had been accomplished and the new things which had been seen had given a “fresh impulse to the mind, as to commerce and industry, and letters and the arts now took a great step in advance. The number of schools increased and the courses of study were extended. The national literatures began at this time, and many great men made their appearance, as Albert the Great, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, and Dante. If the fourteenth century had not been desolated by terrible wars, we should be able to date the Renaissance from the thirteenth century.

Almost all the abbeys of any importance had their schools, and we have already seen, taking France as an example, how numerous the abbeys were in Europe. But the desire for instruction was so general that the monastic schools were not sufficient to satisfy it. Other schools were opened in the great cities. The high price of books and the poverty of the times made it necessary for all instruction to be given by lectures. As soon as a celebrated master opened a course of lectures anywhere crowds of pupils flocked to hear him. When Abelard, for instance, spoke in the open air on the declivity of the mountain Saint Genevieve, which is still covered with vineyards and flowers, thousands of pupils gathered eagerly to hear his words. But in the Middle Ages everything was inclined to take the form of a corporation. The master and the pupils associated themselves together, like the artisans, and formed under the name of universities bodies which had extensive privileges. The most famous of these was the Studium of Paris (the name of university was not used till about 1250), founded in 1200, which received its statutes from the cardinal-legate Robert de Courçon fifteen years later, and served many of the other universities as a model. Its renown was so great that students came thither from all countries, for the language used in the schools, the Latin, was the universal language of the Middle Ages. This university was divided into four faculties, those of theology, of law, of medicine, and of the arts. The latter faculty taught grammar, rhetoric and dialectics, which course was called the trivium, and as a further course arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, called the quadrivium. The Roman law was studied especially at Orleans, and medicine especially at Montpellier. The faculty of the arts elected the rector, to whom, at an early date, the faculties became subject.

After Paris the oldest and most famous universities were those of Montpellier and Orleans in France, of Oxford and Cambridge in England; of Padua in Italy, and of Sala­manca and Coimbra in Spain, all of which were founded in the thirteenth century. The first German university, that of Prague, was not founded until 1348. The students at these schools possessed many privileges. The fifteen or twenty thousand pupils at the University of Paris, who were not subject to the authority of the magistrates of the city and could not be arrested for debt, often disturbed the peace of the city by their quarrels and disorders ; but out of their number in the thirteenth century alone, there came seven popes and a great number of cardinals, without counting many of the illustrious men who had come to take their seats among the pupils of the Rue du Fouare to ascend the “holy mountain of science.” Until this time, ever since the fall of the Roman Empire, all learning had been entirely in the hands of the clergy, and was only transmitted by them to others of their own number; the universities now secularized learning. That of Paris, though surnamed “the eldest daughter of the kings” and “the citadel of the Catholic faith,” soon was possessed throughout Christendom of so great a moral authority that it more than once forced the kings and popes to respect its opinions.

It was a long time before the people of the Middle Ages, imbued as they were with the most profound faith, asked of others than their theologians the solution of those great problems concerning the nature of the soul and of God, which have always occupied the human mind. A questioning spirit was, however, finally awakened, and from that mo­ment philosophy, which had been dead for six centuries, reappeared, but under a peculiar form, which procured it the special name of Scholasticism.

In the eleventh century, at the request of the monks of Bec, Saint Anselm wrote his Monologium, in which he supposes the existence of an ignorant man who has only the assistance of the lights of nature in his search for the truth. In this reason is only the humble servant of faith, for Anselm’s sole end in view, in using the processes of reasoning employed by Aristotle for the discovery of scientific truths, was to prove religious truths. Later when translations appeared from Arabic into Latin, of a great number of the works of Aristotle which were unknown to the preceding age, which had only possessed a fragment of the Organon, the thirteenth century was almost dazzled with these new riches, and the Stagirite reigned supreme in all the philosophic chairs. Unfortunately the earlier persevering study of his first books, which were little understood, had led the thought of the Middle Ages into a path from which it was difficult to return. All science was reduced to the art of reasoning, and every regularly formed syllogism carried conviction with it regardless of the premises on which it rested. Hence scholasticism was not a definite system of philosophy, that is, an organized body of doctrines on the great questions which interest us all; it was rather a certain method of discussing all questions, starting from premises which were either adopted ready-made or assumed without attempting first to verify their truth. Hence no idea of any importance to the world was gained from this system ; and it remained a sort of intellectual gymnastics in which the reward was not the discovery of any truth, but a victory gained in a combat of words, aided by subtile and ridiculous distinctions and by a barbarous language which was only comprehensible to the initiated. Much time and energy was lost in these dis­putes ; nevertheless, the mind was sharpened and strengthened by these struggles, and was prepared for more serious studies.

The twelfth century had resounded with the great quarrels between the realists and the nominalists, between Roscellinus and Saint Anselm, and between William of Champeaux and his most famous disciple, Abelard, who finally vanquished his master. Abelard, who is perhaps more famous for his loves than for his knowledge, produced in the quarrel between the realists and the nominalists a new and conciliatory opinion which more nearly approaches the truth : the opinion which denies to ideas in general any existence outside of our minds, but concedes to them an existence within us as conceptions of our minds. As he had ventured to apply pure dialectics to matters of faith, he was excommunicated by Saint Bernard, just as John Scotus had been in the ninth century by Pope Nicholas on the same ground. “Who are you, and what benefit do you bring us?” cried the apostle of the twelfth century. “What subtile discovery have you made? Tell us what revelation has been made to you, that has been made to no one else before you. As for me, I listen to the prophets and the apostles. I obey the gospels. And even if an angel should come from heaven to teach us what was contrary to these laws, he should be accursed!”. The struggle between reason and authority broke out with its usual violence. The voices of the Breton philosopher and the Burgundian orator resounded through the twelfth century. The former, born in 1079, died in 1142; the latter, born in 1091, died in 1153.

During the thirteenth century long debates were carried on between the Scotchman Duns Scotus and the Italian Saint Thomas Aquinas, both of whom studied and taught at Paris with the greatest success, dividing between them the school, and all Christendom, and continuing to agitate the fourteenth century by the disputes of their partisans, the Scotists and the Thomists. St. Thomas Aquinas was the most perfect expression of idealism in scholasticism. His Summa Theologies, though left unfinished, is a great work, in which he proposed to record all that was known of the relations between God and man. These men had been preceded in the school of Paris by the German, Albert the Great, who was afterwards bishop of Ratisbon, and whose wisdom gave him the reputation of being a magician, and by the Englishman Alexander of Hales, “the irrefragable doctor,” and the oracle of the Franciscans.

After these great men, we must at least mention Vincent of Beauvais, chaplain of St. Louis, if not for his intellectual power, at least for the interest afforded us by his encyclopedia of the learning of his times, his Speculum majus, which recalls Pliny’s work on the learning of antiquity. We must, however, hasten to say that until the thirteenth century, the Middle Ages had lived upon the remains of the knowledge of antiquity without having added to it in any way. Albert the Great was the first to return to the method of observation in the study of physical nature, but no invention was made until the Englishman, Roger Bacon, a Franciscan monk who also studied at Paris, discovered or at least explained in his writings the composition of gun­powder, and the construction of the magnifying glass and of the air-pump. He perceived the necessity of making over the calendar, and the changes he proposed are precisely the same as those adopted under Gregory XIII. There was something both of Kepler and of Descartes in the monk who dared write : “We have three means of knowledge,— first, authority, which by enforcing opinions on the mind without enlightening it, induces belief but not comprehension; second, reasoning, by which we cannot distinguish a sophism from a demonstration except by verifying the conclusion by experience and practice; and third, experience, which is the end of all speculation and the queen of the sciences, since it alone can verify and crown their results.” It is not surprising that, in spite of his sincere faith, this pioneer suffered the same fate as all those who are in advance of their age. Bacon spent twenty-four years of his life either in the prisons of his order or under persecution; he died about 1294.

The Spaniard Raymond Lull also produced at Paris, in the city of the philosophers, his Ars magna, a forcible but vain attempt to draw up a classification of the sciences and to construct a sort of thinking machine, which, if successful, would have rendered the mind perfectly barren.

But, by one of those vicissitudes so often presented by the history of the human mind, this great thirteenth century had not passed before, tired of these interminable metaphysical debates and these arguments which came to nothing, some, with Simon of Tournay, had arrived at the negation of all certainty, while others with St. Bonaventura lost themselves in the clouds of mysticism.

One of the fancies of this age was astrology, and it con­tinued to be studied until the sixteenth century, and did not become entirely extinct until the seventeenth. The astro­logers pretended to read the destinies of human life in the stars. Another folly was that of the alchemist who sought after the philosopher’s stone, that is, the means of making gold by the transmutation of metals. Though they had such a fantastic end in view, these researches led to some fortunate discoveries. Some astrologers, by dint of gazing at the sky, finally began to look there for the laws regulating the movement of the stars; the alchemists did not find gold in their crucibles, but they found new substances, or discovered some new property of the substances already known. In this way the distillation of salts, the strong acids, the art of enameling, and of making the convex glasses from which spectacles are made, were all discovered. We have already spoken of gunpowder, which was known to the Arabs, and of the compass, which' was, perhaps, transmitted to us by them from China.

As we have spoken of the aberrations of science, we must also mention those of the intellect. Magicians were to be found everywhere, and their numbers increased rapidly. Many of these unhappy men believed firmly that they were in communication with the devil, and many insane men who should rather have been cured were sent to the executioner.

As the Middle Ages advanced, the individuality of the different nations became more and more perceptible. All intellectual life was for a long time almost exclusively confined to the Church and found its expression in Latin, the universal language. Now secular society began in its turn to think, speak, and write, and this in as many different idioms as there were nations. Each nation had already its own language, which was not only spoken by the mob, but in several cases had been raised to some literary standing, and was dethroning the Latin language, which until then had been set apart for all the great objects of life.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, however, only three settled and active literatures were to be found, one in Germany, and one in the north, and one in the south of France. This last was the literature of the langue d'oc, or the Provençal.

The language was brilliant, harmonious, and elegantly polished, but its subjects—almost confined to love and strife—were treated with a conventionality which becomes monotonous. Among the princes who patronized and even themselves practiced Provençal poetry, Richard Coeur de Lion and William of Poitiers are the most familiar; conspicuous among the troubadours are Amaut Daniel, famous for his elaborate versification, Peire Vidal, Guiraut de Borneil, and Raimon de Miraval, representing quite different social classes and poetic temper. Bertran de Born, too, is remembered for his sirventes, political satires which like daggers both dazzle the eyes and drive a blow home. In this literature some traces of Arab influence may also be detected, and it has great skill in the dialectic of poet- lovers.

But the growing power of northern France gave its idiom the preponderance. The Normans carried it to Italy, where it did not prevail, and to England, where it was in constant use for three centuries; the French crusaders carried it everywhere. It became the legal language: it was the language of the assizes or laws of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and of the “Etablissements de Saint Louis.” In this language Villehardouin wrote his history of the fourth crusade, and Joinville the biography of St. Louis, works which can still be read by us. A Venetian translating a chronicle of his country into French in 1275 excused himself for so doing, by saying that the French language “prevails throughout the world and is more pleasing to the ear than any other.” Some ten years earlier, Brunetto Latini, the master of Dante, wrote his Trésor in French, “because the French language is more common to all men and more agreeable.”

Thus during the same time that Paris was attracting all the eminent minds from all Christendom, by the renown of her schools, her vernacular, which was despised by the learned doctors, was extending its empire far beyond the French frontiers. We must also mention that the French genius, which is so often accused of a sterility in epic poetry, poured forth a flood of delightful poetry over all the neighboring countries. The troubadours had been checked, among other causes, by the crusade against the Albigenses, which drowned the civilization of Languedoc in blood, and their bolder strains were no longer to be heard, nor the sweet canzones of the authors of the jeux partis. But at the north of the Loire, the trouvères were still composing their chansons de gestes (poems of knightly adventure), which were genuine epic poems, and which were translated or imitated in Italy, England, and Germany. So that we may say with justice that, in the thirteenth century, France was incontestably the intellectual superior of all the other European states.

Epic cycles, however, exhaust themselves; the heroic epic poem is a thing of the past. In the east, Robert Wace, “Clerk at Caen,” versified toward 1155 Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fabulous' account of the Kings of England.

Christian of Troyes, died in 1195, gave poetical distinction to several legends, one of them in the hands of his continuators reaching nearly 50,000 verses of eight sylla­bles, while by other authors the same fable was endowed with a religious character in the story of the Holy Grail. The spirit of the times is faithfully reflected in this combination of gallant chivalry and of piety. The inspiration and simple power of the song of Roland is a thing of the past. The time has come when refinement of style and novelty of subject-matter are the things most sought for, and these were nowhere so available as in the authors of antiquity. The story of Ulysses and of the Argonauts borrowed from Statius were narratives which could not fail to please the many a Christian Ulysses who, in the crusades, also wandered far in Asia. The Trojan War, the magician Medea, and Alexander delighted the trouvères of this age. Their style began to show an imitation of the ancients. In this way the epic poetry changed its character and the transition was effected from the primitive type to the types which belong to a more advanced civilization. The epic poetry developed in two different directions; the part devoted to the description of the passions gave rise to the allegorical romance, while the narrative part gave rise to prose narratives. Analysis and truth superseded spontaneous and poetic inspiration.

William de Lorris, who wrote before 1260, began the famous Romance of the Rose, in which the actors are abstractions such as Reason, Winning Address, Danger, Meanness, Avarice, etc. Jean de Meung continued it later, but with a new transformation which gave birth to satire. The fabliau was already in existence, which was a modification of such romances as we have just spoken of, though not differing greatly from them. In this the actors were animals, who represented either some passion or some social condition, and the romance of Renard, which was later so much developed, made its first appearance early in the thirteenth century. This was the comedy of the times. By this time the poet had already ceased to be a trouvère wandering from house to house; he was now to be found in the best school for comedy, that is, in a garret. Ruteboeuf gives us the first type of the poet by profession who was not enriched by his trade, “who coughs with the cold and yawns with hunger,” and who nevertheless, in spite of this poverty, is gay, daring, and sarcastic, and writes on every subject with the bold and free style that is a prophecy of Villon. On his lips the language is strong and practical; more soft and tender than the words of William de Lorris, or the famous Thibaut de Champagne, or in the lays (rhymed narratives) of Marie of France.

We will cite a few lines to give an idea of the boldness of this poetry. The authors of the Romaine of the Rose were not afraid to say to the nobles :

Que leur corps ne vaut une pomme

Plus que le corps d’un charretier.

That their bodies were not worth an apple more than the body of a plowman.

They also speak very irreverently of the beginnings of the royal authority :

Un grand vilain entre eulx eslurent,

Le plus corsu de quant qu’ils furent,

Le pins ossu et le greigneur

Et le firent prince et seigneur.

Cil jura que droit leur tiendroit

Se chacun en droit soy luy livre

Des biens dont il se puisse vivre....

They chose a big rustic from their own number, the stoutest of them all, with largest frame and the hugest, and him they made prince and lord. He swears that he will look out for them if each contributes to his support.

These bold words were inspired by the great hatred which brooded in the hearts of the peasants, and which broke out with such fury in the middle of the next century in the fierce insurrection of the Jacquerie.

We must not, however, assume from the free words of these poets, the existence of any real revolutionary feeling. They were the press of those times, and we find in their verses as it were an echo of all the noises of the day, and of all the feelings of the people. But their main idea was merely to mock and laugh. They even made sport of what they most respected, the Church, and of what they most dreaded, the torments of hell. We might give some curious examples of this infamous rashness; but we prefer to quote the narrative of the Vilain qui conquist Paradis par plaid (The villein who gained paradise by pleading), in which are discernible the good sense and the rude feeling for justice which will raise up Jacques Bonhomme from his fall.

“A villein once died without either devil or angel feeling any concern about him. However, his soul, on looking up toward heaven, saw Saint Michael conducting one of the elect, and followed him up to Paradise.

“Saint Peter, after having admitted the elect, refused admittance to the soul who had been recommended by no one… ‘Good Sir Peter,’ said the soul that had been dismissed, ‘God made a great mistake when he made you his apostle and gatekeeper, you who denied him three times. Give admittance to one who is much more loyal than you.’ Saint Peter, feeling very much ashamed, went to complain to his colleague Saint Thomas, who in his turn tried to put the insolent soul out of Paradise. The villein was ready with a fresh sally, and said, ‘Thomas, you are a fine one to play the proud, when you would not believe in God until after you had touched his wounds.’ Saint Thomas appealed to Saint Paul, who, when he tried to straighten things out, was greeted with this home truth : ‘Was it not you, Paul the Bald, who stoned Saint Stephen, and to whom the good God gave a great box on the ear?’ Peter, Thomas, and Paul, having no reply to make, carried their complaints to God himself, and the serf, freed by his word, made his defense before him. . . . and the villein gained his cause before divine justice’.

We shall see later how he gained it in the courts of men.

The general literary use of prose in romance begins in the twelfth century, and soon after 1200 we find it employed in chronicles. The first French chroniclers were, however, not writers by profession, but two illustrious nobles, who were both actors in the scenes they described. Godfrey of Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne, has left us in the Conquest of Constantinople a history of the fourth crusade, in which, as we have already seen, he took part. He wrote like a true soldier, in a strong and concise style, which is not without a certain military stiffness : he does not spend any time in fine writing, but goes right ahead from one assault to another, giving a sharp exclamation whenever he comes to anything that surprises him. The Sire de Joinville, also from Champagne, shows more flexibility of style and more acuteness of mind in his Mémoires of the seventh crusade; he notices everything, gives his reflections on every subject, and is willing to talk freely about it all; about his own feelings as well as about the events of the wars. He is an earlier Froissart, but one who was worthy to be the counselor and friend of the devout and excellent Louis IX.

Under the Hohenstaufen, German literature also shone with a great brilliancy, which was, however, in part reflected from the French. These princes were poets themselves, and both loved and honored poetry. The taste for poetry spread from their courts to those of their vassals, and the Swabian poets, like the French trouvères, wandered from castle to castle. Most of the poets came from the province of Swabia, as Schiller did later, and the Swabian idiom was the one first used in German poetry. These poets occasionally met together for literary contests, such as was held at the Wartburg in 1207, when Wolfram von Eschenbach, the most famous of the poets of courtly romance was present. Manesse of Zurich collected these scattered works, at. the beginning of the thirteenth century, and they were more than one hundred and thirty in number.

The same characteristics that we have already noticed in the French literature are to be found in the German literature of the times. The same two kinds of poetry flourished, the epic and the lyric. In the former they took all their inspirations from this side of the Rhine ; their epic poems are either translations or imitations from the cycle of Charlemagne and the Round Table, as for instance, Eschenbach’s Parsival, Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, and Hartmann von der Ane’s Iwein.

Yet these poets seldom confined themselves to French originals, and in these they were by no means mere translators. They compress or expand at pleasure, and their genuine imaginative power is as manifest as their easy versification and the felicities of their diction. Nowhere else in literature is the story of Tristram told with the inten­sity and beauty of Gottfried’s version; and by common consent, Wolfram is the greatest medieval poet before Dante.

Of the heroic poems which are peculiar to Germany, and of which great numbers were written, many have entirely disappeared. Those which have been preserved are partly founded on Lombard-gothic traditions, like King Rother, Otnit, Hugdietrich and Wolfdietrich, the flight of Dietrich, the battle of Ravenna, the death of Alphart, the little Gar­den of Roses, the giant Siegenot, and the combats of Die­trich and hfs companions, and partly derived from the French and Burgundian chronicles which are related to the Gothic-Lombard chronicles ; among the latter are the noble Song of the Niebelungen, which the Germans call their Iliad, Gudrun, the great Garden of Roses, and Biterolf.

There was a marked difference between the two schools of lyric poets, the minnesinger (singers of love) and their successors and imitators the meistersinger (the master singers). The delicate, poetical, and chivalrous spirit of the minnesinger which was seen notably in their chief, Walther von der Vogelweide, and was originally caught, as we may believe, from southern France was entirely wanting in the meistersinger. This poetry first developed from pure lyric into satire, and violently attacked the priests and nobles : it then became moral, didactic, and allegorical, and finally toward the end of the thirteenth century the fable made its appearance. The Jewel of Boner, a collection of a hundred fables, is dated about 1300. Of prose, which is much slower than poetry in its development, we have only three important examples of this period; two of them are works of legislation, the Saxon Mirror, composed about 1230 by the Saxon Eike von Repkow, and the Swabian Mirror; the third' is a work of religious eloquence, the sermons of a Franciscan monk named Bertold, which were written during the second half of the thirteenth century.

We have already noticed the attempts which had been made to find a style of architecture which would better correspond with the ardent faith of the people than that of Greece and Rome, and at the same time meet the needs of a climate to which the flat roofs of the East were not adapted, and the needs of a religion which opened the sacred enclosure to the whole people instead of excluding them as did the pagan worship from its temples.

The thirteenth century is marked by the triumph of the architecture which is so improperly called gothic.

The special characteristic of this style of architecture is the pointed arch or ogive. This form, which was never used anywhere with the same profusion as in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, was at first attributed to the Goths, from whom the name was derived, and then to the Arabs, but with equal error. Undoubtedly the pilgrims, who many of them belonged to the clergy brought back with them from the East some impressions and memories which left their mark on the Christian edifices; a number of churches were built on the plan of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and mosaics and the colors used alternately are probably also an importation from the East. But as for the pointed arch it is found in the Byzantine architecture as well as in the Arabian; it belongs to all ages and all countries, from the tomb of Atreus and the gates of the Pelasgic cities in Italy to the constructions of the Nubian and American savages. It is merely an easy and simple process of supplying the place of the semicircular arch, which latter demanded much greater knowledge and precision.

The pointed arch was at first rough and irregular, and did not attain its perfect form until by a gradual and natural process the lines had been purified and varied, and it had been adorned by the small columns and nervures. This form of arch was marvelously adapted to express the mysticism of the Christian peoples and the passionate soaring of their souls toward Heaven; the sheaf of small Gothic pillars, straight, bold, and almost alarmingly delicate, shot upward and seemed even higher than they really were from the narrow opening of the Gothic arch which crowned them. The Gothic architecture did not reach its highest perfection in the South, where the belief was more formal and more Roman, but in the North, where there was more of mysticism and this fact, it seems to us, is another proof that the Gothic architecture did not come from the Arabs, at least from those of Spain, who would certainly have transmitted it to the south of France before the north.

This new style which arose north of the Loire, crossed the Channel, the Rhine, and the Alps, and colonies of French artists carried it to Canterbury, Utrecht, Milan, Cologne, Strassburg, Ratisbon, and even to Sweden. A rough but simple statuary decorated the doorways, the galleries, and the cloisters, and stained glass producing magical effects by means of the windows was brought to a perfection which we have only just succeeded in once more attaining. The painters in miniature who adorned the missals and the book of offices have also left us some charming works of art.

With the Italian, Cimabue, the master of Giotto, the renaissance of painting was begun in Florence in this century. But it was not until the fifteenth century that the great Flemish masters prepared the way for a revolution in this art.

DURUY'S

HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE AGES