AUTHOR’S PREFACE.

 

THE term Middle Ages is applied to the time which elapsed between the fall of the Roman Empire and the formation of the great modern monarchies, between the first permanent invasion of the Germans, at the beginning of the fifth century of our era and the last invasion, made by the Turks, ten centuries later, in 1453.

During this interval between ancient and modern times the pursuit of learning and of the arts was almost entirely suspended. Instead of the republics of antiquity and the monarchies of the present day, a special political organization was developed which was called feudalism : this consisted in the rule of the lords. Though every country had its king, it was the military leader who was the real ruler. The central power was unable to assert itself and the local powers were without supervision or direction. Hence this epoch was different in every respect from those which preceded and followed it, and it is on account of this difference in character that we give it a special name and place in universal history.

The history of the Middle Ages is generally disliked by those who are obliged to study it, and sometimes even by those who teach it. It seems to them like a great Gothic cathedral, where the eye loses itself in the infinite details of an art which is without either unity or system, or like an immense and confused book which the reader spells out laboriously but never understands. If, however, we are content to confine this history to the significant facts which alone are worth remembering, and to pass over the insignificant men and events, giving prominence and attention to the great men and great events, we shall find this period to be as simple as it is generally considered confusing.

In the first place, we must define its limits. The true history of the Middle Ages does not extend beyond the ancient Roman Empire and the provinces added to it by Charlemagne when he brought the whole of Germany under one common civilization. Outside of these limits all was still barbarism, of which little or nothing can be known, and whose darkness is only occasionally relieved by a gleam from the sword of a savage conqueror, a Tchingis-Khan, or a Timour. The events which interest us and which exerted an active influence on the development of the modern nations took place within these limits. And even among these events we need only remember those which char­acterize the general life of Europe, not the individual, isolated life of the thousand petty States of which the his­torian as well as the poet can say :

“Non ragioniam di lor ; ma guarda, e passa.”

The Middle Ages were built on the ancient foundation of pagan and Christian Rome. Hence our first task is to study the Roman world and examine the mortal wounds it had suffered; to pass in review this empire, with so many laws but no institutions, with so many subjects but no citizens, and with an administration which was so elaborate that it became a crushing burden ; and, finally, to conjure up before us this colossus of sand, which crumbled at the touch of paltry foes, because, though it contained a religious life, eager for heavenly things, it was inspired by no strong political life such as is necessary for the mastery of the earth.

Beyond the Empire lay the barbarians, and in two cur­rents of invasion they rushed upon this rich and unresisting prey. The Germans seized the provinces of the north ; the Arabs those of the south. Between these mighty streams, which flowed from the east and the west, Constantinople, the decrepit daughter of ancient Rome, alone remained standing, and for ten centuries, like a rocky island, defied the fury of the waves.

With one bound the Arabs reached the Pyrenees, with a second the Himalayas, and the crescent ruled supreme over two thousand leagues of country, a territory of great length, but narrow, impossible to defend, and offering many points of attack. The Caliphs had to contend against a mighty force in the geographical position of their conquests, a force which is often fatal to new-born States, and which in this case destroyed their Empire and at the same time brought ruin to their equally brilliant and fragile civilization.

Many chiefs among the Germans also called into being States which were only ephemeral, because they arose in the midst of this Roman world, which was too weak to defend itself but strong enough to Communicate to all with whom it came in contact the poison which was working in its own veins. To this fact we may attribute the fall of the king­doms of Gaiseric, Theodoric, and Aistulf; of the Vandals, the Heruli, and the eastern and western Goths.

One people alone fell heir to the many invaders who en­tered the Empire by means of the Rhine and the Danube, namely, the Franks. Like a great oak, whose roots grow deep down in the soil which bears and nourishes it, they kept in constant communication with Germany and drew thence a barbarian vigor which continually renewed their exhausted powers.

Though threatened with an early decline under the last Merovingians, they revived again with the chiefs of the second dynasty, and Charlemagne tried to bring order into chaos and throw light into darkness by organizing his dominions around the throne of the Emperors of the west, and by binding to it Germanic and Christian society. This was a magnificent project and one which has made his name worthy to be placed by the side of the few before which the world bows. But his design, which was incapable of accomplishment, not only because geography was against it, as it was against the permanence of the Arabian Empire, but because all the moral forces of the times, both the instincts and the interests of the people, were opposed to its success. Charlemagne created modern Germany, which was a great thing in itself, but the day when he went to Rome to join the crown of the Emperors to that of the Lombard kings, was a fatal day for Italy. From that time this beautiful country had a foreign master, who lived far away and only visited her accompanied by hordes of greedy and barbarous soldiers, who brought ruin in their train. How much blood was shed during centuries in the attempt to maintain the impossible and ill-conceived plan of Charlemagne. How many of the cities and splendid monuments of the country were reduced to ruins, not to mention the saddest thing of all, the ruin of the people themselves and of Italian patriotism.

After the ninth century the Carolingian Empire tottered and fell through the incompetency of its chiefs, the hatred of the people, and the blows of a new invasion led by the Norsemen, the Hungarians, and the Saracens. It separated into kingdoms, and these kingdoms into seignories. I he great political institutions crumbled into dust. The State was reduced to the proportions of a fief. The horizon of the mind was equally limited ; darkness had fallen upon the world ; it was the night of feudalism.

A few great names, however, still survived : France, Germany and Italy; and great titles were still worn by those who were called the kings of these countries. These men were kings in name but not in truth, and were merely the symbols of a territorial unity which existed no longer, and not real, active, and powerful rulers of nations. Even the ancient Roman and Germanic custom of election had been resumed.

Of these three royal powers, one, that of Italy, soon disappeared; the second, that of France, fell very low ; while the third, that of Germany, flourished vigorously for two centuries after Otto I had revived the Empire of Charlemagne, though on a small scale. Just as the sons of Pippin had reigned over fewer peoples than Constantine and Theodosius, the Henrys, Fredericks, and Ottos reigned over a smaller territory than Charlemagne and with a less absolute power.

By the side of and below the kingdoms born of invasion there arose a power of quite a different character, and one which did not confine itself to any limits, whether of country or of law. The Church, emerging wounded but triumphant from the catacombs and the Roman amphitheatres, had gone out to meet the barbarians, and at her word the Sicambrian meekly bowed his head. She only sought a spiritual kingdom; she also gained an earthly one. Power came to her unsought, as it comes to every just and righteous cause which aids the advance of humanity toward a better future. After establishing the unity of her dogma and of her hierarchy, her chiefs attained the highest eminence in the Catholic world, whence they watched, directed, and restrained the spiritual movements inspired by them.

The Church strove to teach mildness to a violent and lawless society, and, opposed to the feudal hierarchy, the equality of all men; to turbulence, discipline; to slavery, liberty; and to force, justice. She protected the slave from his arrogant master, and defended the rights of women, children, and the family against the fickle husbands who did not draw back even from divorce and polygamy. The only succession recognized by the States in their public offices was succession by right of inheritance; the Church set the example of succession by right of intellectual superiority, by the election of her abbots, bishops, and even her pontiff, and serfs succeeded to the chair of St. Peter, thus attaining a dignity higher than that of kings. The barbarians had demolished the civilization of antiquity; the Church preserved its fragments in the seclusion of her monasteries. She was not only the mother of creeds, but was also the mother of art, science, and learning. Those great scholars who taught the world to think again, those maîtres dès pierres vives, who gave Christianity its most wonderful movements, were sons of the Church.

The feudal princes and lords, when freed from feudal slavery, thought themselves above all law because they had put themselves beyond the reach of resistance; but the Popes used the weapons of the Church against them. They excommunicated a usurper of the throne of Norway, a king who falsified the coinage in Aragon, the treacherous and foresworn John in England and in France Philip Augustus, when he repudiated his wife the day after his marriage. During the rule of force the Popes had become the sole guardians of the moral law and they recalled these princes, who transgressed against it, to their duty by releasing their people from their oath of fidelity. The pontifical power spoke in the name and place of popular right.

This great moral force, however, was not always mistress of herself. Until 726 the pontiffs had been the subjects of the Emperors of Rome, western or eastern. Charlemagne claimed and wielded the same authority over them. His successors, the German emperors, tried to follow his example. Henry III deposed three Popes and in 1046 the council of Sutri once again recognized that the election of no sovereign pontiff could be valid without the consent of the emperor.

But after Charlemagne’s death the Church constantly grew in power. Her possession of a large part of the soil of Christian Europe gave her material force; while the fact that all, both great and small, obediently received her command, gave her great moral force ; these two forces, moreover, were increased tenfold by the addition of a third, namely, unity of power and purpose; at the time of the Iconoclasts and the last Carolingians, the sole aspiration of the Church had been to escape from the bonds of the State and to live a free life of her own. When she became stronger and, of necessity, more ambitious, she claimed the right, after the manner of all powerful ecclesiastical bodies, to rule the lay part of society and the civil powers.

Two Towers, accordingly, stood face to face at the end of the eleventh century, the Pope of Rome and the German emperor, the spiritual and the temporal authorities, both ambitious, as they could not fail to be in the existing state of morals, institutions, and beliefs. The great question of the Middle Ages then came up for solution : Was the heir of St. Peter or the heir of Augustus to remain master of the world? There lay the quarrel between the priesthood and the empire.

This quarrel was a drama in three acts. In the first act the Pope and the emperor disputed for the supremacy over Christian Europe; in the Concordat of Worms (1122) they made mutual concessions and a division of powers, which has been confirmed by the opinion of modern times; in the second act, the main question to be solved was the liberty of Italy, which the Popes protected in the interest of their own liberty; in the third act, the existence of the Holy See was in peril; the death of Frederick II saved it.

The result of this great struggle and far-reaching ambition was the decline and almost the ruin of the two adverse powers. The papacy fell, shattered, at Avignon, and the Babylonian captivity began, while the German Empire, mortally wounded, was at the point of disappearing during the Great Interregnum, and only escaped destruction to drag out a miserable existence.

During the contest the people, recovering from their stupor, had turned to seek adventure in new directions. Religious belief, the most powerful sentiment of the Middle Ages, had led to its natural result; it had inspired the crusades and had sent millions of men on the road to Jerusalem.

Though the crusade was successful in Europe against the pagans of Prussia and the infidels of Spain, and, accompanied by terrible cruelty, against the Albigenses of France, it failed in its principal object in the East the Holy Sepulchre remained in the hands of infidels and Europe seemed in vain to have poured out her blood and treasure in the conquest of a tomb which she was not able to keep. Nevertheless, she had regained her youth; she had shaken off a mortal torpor, to begin a new existence, and the roads were now crowded with merchants, the country covered with fruitful fields, and the cities filled with evidences of her growth and power. She created an art, a literature and schools of learning, and it was France which led this movement. The Middle Ages had come to an end when the successors of Charlemagne and of Gregory VII became powerless, when feudalism tottered to its fall and when the lower classes threw off their yoke; new ideas and new needs arising proclaimed the advent of Modern times.

These new needs were represented by the two countries, where they were most fully met, namely, France and England. The England of today dates from the Magna Charta of King John, just as the royal power of Louis XIV came directly from Philip Augustus and St. Louis. We find in these two countries three similar elements : the king, the nobles, and the people, but in different combinations. From this difference in combination resulted the difference in their histories.

In England the Conquest had made the king so strong that the nobles were obliged to unite with the commons in order to save their honor, their estates, and their heads. The nobility favored popular franchises, which they found necessary to their cause; the people were attached to their feudal lords, who fought for them. English liberty, sprung from the aristocracy, has never been unfaithful to its origin, and we have the curious spectacle of a country in which the greatest freedom and the greatest social inequalities exist side by side.

In France, it was the king and the people who were oppressed; they were the ones to unite, in order to overthrow the power of feudalism, their common enemy : but the rewards of victory naturally fell to the share of the leader in battle. This twofold tendency is evident from the fourteenth century. At the beginning of that century, Philip the Fair leveled the castles with the ground, called peasants to participate in his councils, and made every one, both great and small, equal in the eye of the law; at the end of it the London parliament overthrew its king and disposed of the crown.

If these two countries had not fallen upon each other in the violent struggle which is called the Hundred Years War, the fourteenth century would have seen them fairly started in their new life.

Germany and France have a common-starting point in their histories: each arose from the ruins of the great Carolingian Empire, and each was originally possessed of a powerful feudal system; consequently their subsequent careers might have been the same. In one, however, the royal power reached its apogee; in the other it declined, grew dim, and disappeared. There was no mystery in this; it was a simple physiological fact for which no reason can be given. The Capetian family did not die out. After the lapse of nine centuries it still continued to exist; by this mere fact of continuance alone the custom of election was not suf­fered to become established, as there was no occasion for its use. The dynasties on the other side of the Rhine, on the contrary, though at first abler and stronger, seemed to be cursed with barrenness. At the end of two or three generations they became extinct; eighteen royal houses can be counted in five centuries; that is to say, that eighteen times the German people saw the throne left vacant, and were obliged to choose an occupant from a new family. Suc­cession by election, which had been one of the customs of Germany and which the Church had retained, became a regular system. The feudal chiefs were not slow to under­stand what advantages the system had for them: at each election, to use an expression of the day, they plucked a feather from the imperial eagle, and Germany finally counted a thousand princes; while on the other side of her great river, the heir of Hugh Capet could say with truth, “I am the State.”

Such were the three great modern nations, as early as the fourteenth century : Great Britain, with its spirit of public liberty and hereditary nobility; France, with a tendency toward civil equality and an absolute monarchy; Germany, toward independent principalities and public anarchy. Today, the one is virtually an aristocratic republic, the other a democratic State, and the third was until lately a confederation of sovereign States; this difference was the work of the Middle Ages.

In Spain, the Goths who had fled to the Asturias had founded there a Christian kingdom; Charlemagne had marked out two more, by forcing a passage through the Pyrenees at two points, Navarre and Catalonia. These three States, strongly protected by the mountains at their back, had advanced together toward the south against the Moors; but modern times had already begun on the north of the Pyrenees, while the Spaniards, in the peninsula, had not finished their crusade of eight centuries. They gave as yet no sign of what was to be their subsequent career.

The other Neo-Latin people, the Italians, had not been able to find in the Middle Ages the political unity which alone constitutes the individuality of a great nation. There were three obstacles in the way of this: the configuration of the country, which did not offer a geographical center; the thousand cities which ancient civilization had scattered over its surface, and which had not yet learned by bitter experience to surrender a part of their municipal independence to save the common liberty; finally, the papacy, which, owning no master, even in temporal affairs, laid down this principle, very just from its point of view and entirely legitimate in the Middle Ages, namely, that from the Alps to the Straits of Messina there should never be one sole power, because such a power would certainly desire Rome for its capital. This policy lasted for thirteen centuries. It was the papacy which, as early as the sixth century, prevented the consolidation of the Italian kingdom of the Goths; and, in the eighth century, the formation of that of the Lombards; which summoned Pippin against Aistulf, Charlemagne against Desiderius, Charles of Anjou against Manfred; as well as later the Spaniards, the Swiss, and the Imperialists against the French; the French against the Spaniards; which finally entered into compacts with all the foreign masters of the peninsula in order to assure, by a balance of influences and forces, the independence of her little domain and her authority.

Italy, having no central power, was covered with republics, most of which, after a time, developed into principalities. The life there was brilliant, but corrupt, and the civic virtues were forgotten. Anarchy dwelt in her midst an infallible sign that the foreigner would again become her master.

In the North, utter darkness : Prussia and Russia are of yesterday. But in the East there appeared a nation, the Turks, which was formidable since it possessed what Christian Europe no longer had, the conquering spirit of religious proselytism, which had been the spirit of the crusades; and also what Europe did not yet possess, a strong military organization.

Accordingly this handful of nomad shepherds, which had so suddenly become a people, or rather an army, accomplished without difficulty the last invasion; Constantinople fell. But at the very moment when the last remaining fragment of the Roman Empire disappeared, the genius of ancient civilization arose, torch in hand, from the midst of the ruins. The Portugese were on the road to the Cape of Good Hope, while the artists and authors were opening the way to the Renaissance : Wycliffe and John Huss had already prepared the road for Luther and Calvin. The changes at work in the States corresponded to the change in thought and belief. Reform was demanded of the Church; shaken by schism, she refused it; in a century she had to deal with a revolution.

The important facts to be noted are :

The decline of the Roman Empire and the successful accomplishment of two invasions; the transient brilliancy of the Arabian civilization.

The attempted organization of a new Empire by Charlemagne, and its dissolution.

The rise and prevalence of feudalism.

The successive Crusades.

The contest between the Pope and the Emperor for the sovereignty of the world.

We have here the real Middle Ages, simple in their general outline, and reaching their highest development in the thirteenth century.

But even before this period a new phase of the Middle Ages had appeared in England and France; which led to a new social organization of the two countries. Soon a few brave voices were heard discussing the merits of obedience, of faith, even, and pleading the cause of those who, until that time, had been of no account, the peasants and the serfs.

Humanity, that tireless traveler, advances unceasingly, over vale and hill, today on the heights, in the light of day, tomorrow in the valley, in darkness and danger, but always advancing, and attaining by slow degrees and weary efforts some broad plateau, where he pauses a moment to rest and take breath.

These pauses, during which society assumes a form which suits it for the moment, are organic periods. The intervals which separate them may be called inorganic periods or times of transformation. On these lines we may divide the ten centuries of the Middle Ages into three sections : from the fifth to the tenth century, the destruction of the past and the transition to a new form; from the tenth to the fourteenth, feudal society with its customs, its institution, its arts, and its literature. This is one of the organic periods in the life of the world. Then the tireless traveler starts again : this time he again descends to depths of misery to reach, on the other side, a country free from brambles and thorns. When the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are crossed we already perceive from afar the glorious forms of Raphael, Copernicus, and Christopher Columbus, in the dawn of the new world.