MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY

Introduction

SECTION II.

CONDITION OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY.

At the extinction of the Carolingian dynasty, France being finally severed from the Holy Roman Empire, as constructed by Charlemagne and Leo III, Germany and Italy remained its constituent parts. Of these parts, Germany, that is to say the territories over which the German monarchs claimed sovereignty, at this time extended northward to the Baltic and North Sea, westward to the Scheldt, the Meuse, the Saone and the Rhone, and southward to the summit of the Alps; the eastern frontier was less clearly defined, whether Hungary and Poland be or be not included.

The eastern and northern provinces of Germany proper, or excluding Poland and Hungary, were occupied by several Slavonian tribes, of whom the most southerly, inhabiting Styria, Carniola, Carinthia, Moravia, Bohemia and Lusatia, were then really incorporated with Germany, notwithstanding Bohemia’s continued maintenance of a distinct nationality, and occasional attempts at separation. Of the tribes dwelling upon the shores of the Baltic, the inhabitants of Pomerelia and Pomerania were still mostly Heathen and independent, although the Duke of Poland claimed them as vassals, and flattered himself he had converted them. The remaining tribes, that held the districts now forming the duchies of Mecklenburg and Holstein, were governed by a native Christian King, Henry, whose mother was a Danish princess; and, however reluctantly, they professed Christianity, and acknowledged the mesne suzerainty of the Duke of Saxony. The kingdom of Burgundy, perfectly distinct, it must be remembered, from the French duchy of Burgundy, had been inherited by the Emperor Conrad II, though whether through his wife Gisela, a niece of the last king, Rudolph III, or through that king’s bequest to Conrad’s predecessor, Henry II, may be questioned, both claims having been informed by a military demonstration, which the Burgundians were glad to forestall by admitting the somewhat irregular pretensions of the Empress. Conrad had, nevertheless, to fight for Gisela’s heritage, with the husbands and sons of other nieces of Rudolph’s, daughters of an elder sister, and eventually found it expedient to leave a considerable part, of course in vassalage, to his chief competitor, Eudes, Comte de Champagne et Blois. Upper Burgundy he incorporated with the empire, and over the western provinces, abutting upon the Jura, appointed a rector or governor, it is said, with a ducal title. But in the Arelat, where his authority was less complete, he could not prevent powerful nobles from making principalities of their counties, for which he was fain to receive their homage and oaths of allegiance.

Teutonic Germany, Germany prior to any Slavonian incorporations, was divided into five national, or, as they are happily denominated by Mr. Hallam, provincial duchies, over each of which reigned its own duke, a vassal of the German monarch as such, and independently of his coronation as Emperor. These duchies were Franconia, Saxony, Bavaria, Swabia, and Lotharingia, which last consisted of the bulk of the provinces between the Rhine and France, lying north of the kingdom of Burgundy. The name of Lotharingia, transformed by the French, whom the English as usual follow, into Lorraine, was given to this duchy when it was the kingdom of a Carolingian Lothar. Of these five duchies Franconia, as the country of all Franks, Salic and Ripuarian, was first in dignity, and originally extended from Thuringia, its eastern march, to, and even across, the Rhine, comprehending much of what was subsequently the Palatinate of the Rhine.

Italy was at this time divided into the kingdom of Lombardy (comprising all northern Italy, except Venice, and in Central Italy the duchies of Lucca, Parma, and Modena, with some of the Legations, now part of the Papal dominions), the duchy or marquisate of Tuscany, the republic of Venice, then confined on the land side within the limits of the Lagoons, the exarchate of Ravenna, as the very small district around that city, governed by a Constantinopolitan officer, bearing the title of Exarch, was still pompously designated, the Papal states, consisting of little more than the duchy of Rome, and the duchy of Apulia, the Magna Grecia of classic antiquity. Over all these states the Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire claimed sovereignty; and except over the remnant of the exarchate and Venice, which, to secure real independence, adhered to the debilitated Eastern empire, powerful and energetic emperors had fully exercised the authority they claimed. Even the Normans, as they conquered first some Apulian counties, and then pretty nearly the whole duchy (a few sea-port towns still defied them), gladly did homage to Henry II, Conrad II and Henry III, in order to obtain, by imperial investiture, a confirmation of their title to their conquests. But since the death of the last-named emperor, civil war, during the latter part of the eleventh century and the first quarter of the twelfth, had weakened the imperial power, and, as a natural consequence, the imperial authority was disputed by popes, and by Norman dukes and earls. The principal apparent difference between Italy and Germany lay in the number of populous and prosperous towns with which the former was covered; in which respect, north of the Alps, only the Arelat and some districts of Lotharingia bore any, the slightest resemblance to Lombardy and Tuscany.

The political aspect of the Holy Roman Empire will be the more intelligible if a retrospective glance be taken at its condition under the Carolingian dynasty; a condition of which, independently of this consideration, it is for two reasons desirable to acquire some knowledge. The first, that the empire of Charlemagne was the ideal that every subsequent energetic emperor aimed at realizing; the second, that in the institutions of his empire is to be found the germ of that Imperial organization, which was progressively developed through the chivalrous feudalism of the middle ages, through many alternations of improvement and deterioration, into the peculiar feudal federation in which in Germany it resulted; and which subsisted, until swept away, together with most continental institutions, by the hurricane of French ambition, revolutionary, republican and imperial.

The Dukes appointed by Charlemagne to the German duchies, originally with the concurrence of the duchy, were simply imperial officers, intrusted with the military command of the district,—as is indeed implied by the title, both in Latin (Dux) and in German (Herzog). Their services were remunerated by fiefs attached to the ducal office, and they were removable at pleasure. This amovibility, including the loss of the ducal fiefs, decidedly marks the purely official character of the duke, land granted in fief being held, not during pleasure, but for life, though liable to forfeiture through misconduct. In fact, Charlemagne’s dukes were more like generals of military divisions of the empire than vassal princes or noblemen of the highest dignity.

Another class of Imperial officers, civilly independent of, and unconnected, though co-existent with, the dukes, was that of the Earls, the Latin Comes and German Graf. To them was committed, each in his own district of jurisdiction or Grafschaft, Anglicé, earldom or county, the administration of justice, though not exempt from the occasional interference of those locomotive judicial inspectors or judges, the Missi Dominici. In military matters every earl was subject to the duke in whose duchy his district lay.

But the nature and position of Charlemagne’s empire, immense in extent, the parts slightly connected, and surrounded by barbarians naturally jealous of their independence, and fearful of being the next subjugated, rendered an incessantly active vigilance requisite for the defence of the frontier, such as the dukes had not leisure, or the earls authority to exercise. To supply this want a new class of officers was created, with the title of Markgraf, anglicized as Margrave, and meaning literally March Earl, or Earl Warden of a march or frontier. These margraves, though subordinate to the duke of whose duchy their respective margraviates formed part, were far superior to the earls in place and power, uniting the military and judicial authority in themselves.

Again, in all the five duchies, intermingled with ducal fiefs and with counties, were extensive crown lands, annexed to an Imperial palace, wholly independent of duke and earl, and administered, both militarily and judicially, by another imperial officer, called a Pfalzgraf, literally Palace-Earl, but usually Englished either Palsgrave from the German, or Palatine from the Latin form of the title. In every duchy there was a Palsgrave, while a Chief, or Arch-Palsgrave, constantly accompanied the Emperor, acting as palace­judge, and conjointly with the Chief Chaplain, now grown into a Chancellor, really constituting the ministry of the empire.

All four classes of officers were paid by fiefs attached to their respective offices, and were removable at pleasure. It presently became the object of all four to render office and remunerative fiefs hereditary in their respective families; whilst the dukes and earls further strove to augment their actual power, by adding, the dukes the judicial, the earls the military authority, to that which they already possessed.

The body of the nation consisted of Freien, i.e. Freemen, otherwise freeholders (landed property being deemed indispensable to perfect freedom), militarily subject to a duke, judicially to an earl, or in both forms to a margrave, but in other respects quite independent of them. Fealty, like allegiance, they owed to the Emperor alone, and to him no service but in arms. To the battle field they were bound to follow the ducal standard, on horse-back, with armed and mounted followers, or singly, or on foot, according to the size of their estates. The land thus held was designated as allodial (because assigned by lot when the conquerors divided part, at least, of the conquered territory amongst themselves) in opposition to the land granted in vassalage by the monarch. And the freeman looked with ineffable disdain upon the vassal and his fief, feof, or feod, the very name of which, formed from feo, wages, and od, estate, expressed his dependent, inferior condition. These proud freemen were divided into two classes, according to the extent of their property. The highest, akin seemingly to the old English Franklins, was denominated Schoeffembaren Freien, because from their ranks only could be selected the Schoeffen (assessors, or might they be termed jurymen?), who formed the tribunal of the earl or his deputy; and at ore time they were the only witnesses whose testimony was admissible before that tribunal. The inferior or poorer freemen equally esteemed themselves superior to vassals; but the position of this class was marked by its name, Pfleghafte Freien, anglicé protected freemen. The smallness of their possessions incapacitating them for independent self-defence, they were obliged to seek or accept the protection of some neighbouring noble­man, whom, in return, they bound themselves to serve in all his feuds, and to whose jurisdiction they became amenable. This class, too indigent to possess horses, naturally formed the infantry of the German armies, alike in national and in private wars.

So far beneath these freemen as scarcely to be regarded by them as fellow creatures, were the Unfreie, or not free, the thralls of their superiors. In Charlemagne’s days these non-free barely amounted to one-tenth of the population of Germany, although their compatriot legal antiquaries distinguish amongst them, even at that early period, many shades or degrees of thraldom. For the present purpose, a less scientific division into two classes may suffice, respectively designated as Hörige and Leibeigene, terms both of which literally mean belonging, but pretty nearly answer to our Villeins adscripti glebae or attached to the soil, and Villeins in gross or regardant. Neither class was permitted to bear arms; but as servants they followed their masters to the field, and, upon an emergency, might, in his defence, be required to fight with knives and club. The Leibeigene were so completely their Lord’s goods and chattels that he could sell them as slaves.

Towns were then scarce in Germany. The early German temper is known to every reader of Tacitus, as antipathetic to the agglomeration of human beings, the concentration of life within walls, seemingly more congenial to the Latin and the Celtic nature. This innate antipathy would necessarily be heightened by detestation of the colonial fortresses which the Romans, expressly to serve as curbs upon the free Teutonic spirit, built upon the Danube, the Rhine and the Moselle. Accordingly, when these Roman cities were destroyed by the successive inundations of Goths, Vandals and Huns, they remained long desolate, only beginning to revive when they severally became the residence of a prelate and a cathedral chapter. Whether, amidst their desolation, they did or did not retain the municipal forms of Roman colonies, is a question upon which legal antiquaries are at variance.

In Italy, Charlemagne had found the kingdom of Lombardy divided into several large and powerful duchies, whose dukes virtually ruled the monarch to whom they professed obedience. Upon completing the conquest, he broke up these duchies into counties, to which, as usual, he appointed earls, his own officers, though occasionally it should seem suffering Lombard nobles to act in that capacity, and left the ducal title, shorn of its formidable preponderance, to the lord of the city whence the duchy took its name. But whether, as in Germany, he made the functions of duke and earl distinct, or they here differed only in dignity, is another of the many quaestiones vexatae of history. To the Roman See he granted a portion of his Italian conquests, to be held, however, like the duchy of Rome itself, as fiefs of the Holy Roman Empire. Magna Grecia, where Amalfi, Naples, and a few more sea-port towns had, at the epoch of the Lombard conquest, declared themselves republics, was, with the Island of Sicily, still called part of the Eastern Empire; and this, with the exception of the Lombard duchy of Benevento, he left untouched. The contrast between Italy and Germany in regard to thriving towns was far more striking at the time of this Frank conquest than at a later period. South of the Alps, the towns were the remains of Roman colonies, or founded by the Prae-Roman power and civilization of the Etruscans, and had retained almost all the forms and organization, if not the substance of self-government, under the long tyranny of the Roman emperors, and amidst the ravages and conquests of Ostrogoths and Lombards. With these republican forms, Charlemagne, so long as the municipal authorities obeyed him and his imperial officers, does not appear to have meddled. These thriving cities afforded here that intermediate class betwixt the noble and the villein, which Germany found in the peasant freemen.

During the three centuries that had elapsed since the resuscitation of the Western, as the Holy Roman Empire, the progressive development of every political and social condition had wrought considerable changes. The feudal system had attained to the fulness of its vigorous maturity.

Without wasting a word upon so threadbare a subject as the character of that system, it may be observed, that wherever it prevailed, it was modified by national idiosyncrasy. In Germany the modifying element was the extraordinary original freedom of the people; and so efficient was it, that by the end of these centuries every freeman may be said to have had a voice in almost every measure or transaction that could affect his interests, whilst, if accused, he could be tried only by his peers, or, rather, his independent fellow-countrymen For instance, no fief could be transferred, or its condition materially altered, without the concurrence, not only of the superior lord, but likewise of the sub-vassals, or vavassours; no judge could lawfully pronounce a sentence without the concurrence of a court of assessors, whether consisting of the vassals of a nobleman or prelate, or of the Schoeffen of a town or village.

The absolute sovereignty exercised by Charlemagne had been impaired by the division of his empire amongst his grandsons. In Germany it was yet further impaired, when, upon the extinction there of the direct male line of his descendants, the crown became elective—the election-like question addressed under the Merovingians and Carolingians to the people or the nobles, “Whether they would have the next heir of the deceased king for their king?” being evidently as mere a form as the similar question addressed to the people at the coronation of an English monarch. But the death of Lewis the Child, there the last of his race, producing a real election, Conrad I, though belonging by females to that race, owed his crown solely to the choice of his countrymen. And rapidly did the weakness of the imperial authority increase, as the extinction of successive dynasties, confirming the new, elective character of the empire, afforded opportunity for extorting concessions from the candidates for sovereignty; concessions not designed, like England’s Magna Charta, to secure good government to all, but to indulge the few with oppressive privileges.

Nominally, nevertheless, the emperor was still absolute, his power being limited rather by casual circumstances than by law. Of these circumstances, the chief were the almost equally absolute power enjoyed by the great vassals, and the want of a regular revenue. The head of the Holy Roman Empire depended for defraying all expenses, public as private, upon the crown lands, his private patrimony, and the usual feudal dues and royalties. These last appear to have consisted of tolls, harbour dues (either of which, imposed by other authority than the monarch’s, was usurpation and downright robbery), the right of coinage, a poll-tax, paid by the Jews as the price of toleration, that is to say, of their lives, mines, salt springs, forests, chases, fisheries, and the like; the right of plundering wrecks included. Some of these royalties were indeed claimed by princes of the empire, as inherent in their own sovereignty, and were constant subjects of contention with the emperor; who, on the other hand, often granted royalties as rewards, or sold them. The worst consequence of this want of revenue, was the impossibility of maintaining an army, a want leaving the empire, upon every occasion of war, aggressive or defensive, against foreign or domestic foe, entirely dependent upon feudal service, any extension of which, beyond its very limited period, could be obtained only by negotiation and compensation, and which, even within that limited period, might be withheld by a refractory vassal prince. Another consequence, less apparently important, but not perhaps without very materially noxious effect, was the want of a settled central seat of government. The only way in which the emperor could turn the scattered crown domains and his patrimonial estates to account, was consuming their produce; wherefore he was constantly removing with his court, ministers, tribunals of justice, &c, from palace to palace, from city to city.

The single legal restriction upon the Imperial authority, was, that the concurrence of the Diet was indispensable to the validity of certain acts, e.g. to the creation of a duchy, the laying a prince of the empire under the ban of the empire, and the like. In legislation this concurrence does not seem to have been actually necessary, since, although laws were usually enacted by the Emperor and Diet conjointly, Imperial edicts, published when no Diet was sitting, were held equally obligatory. The Diet itself, a faint reflection rather than the remains of old German liberty, consisted, in the beginning of the twelfth century, of all the immediate vassals of the crown; and it is worth noting, that whilst a seat in the Diet was evidently a highly prized prerogative, attendance was so often deemed an onerous duty, that heavy fines on failure were necessary to insure it.

To whom the right of electing the King of Germany and future Emperor appertained, was long indeterminate, being variously claimed, or rather appropriated, as circumstances varied. It appears to have been originally esteemed vested in the five national duchies, and usually exercised by their dukes; but whether voting in their individual capacities, or as representatives of their duchies, is by no means clear. Sometimes they alone voted which would favour the first notion; but at others more of the immediate vassals, or even mesne vassals, took part in these elections. From the first the three Rhine archbishoprics, which always enjoyed great pre-eminence, and denied that they were included in any duchy, seemingly, upon that plea, shared the right with the duchies. When St. Boniface, otherwise the Anglo-Saxon missionary, Winfred, was appointed Archbishop of Mainz by Pope Gregory III, supreme authority over the whole Frank, i.e. German and French, Church, was conferred upon him and his successors, if not the title of primate, another quaestio vexata. The arch-chancellorship of the Holy Roman Empire was permanently attached to this See; wherefore it was the office of the Archbishop to convoke and to preside at the Electoral Diet. The Archbishops of Treves and Cologne were respectively arch-chancellors of the Arelat and of Italy; but whether they enjoyed the right of suffrage in those capacities, and, as such, representing the Arelat and Italy, which otherwise had no voice in the election, or on account of the exemption of their powerful sees from connexion with duchies, or in virtue of their functions at the coronation of the elected sovereign, does not appear. The iron crown of Lombardy, like the Imperial crown, was really given by the German election.

Whilst the Imperial authority was undergoing this process of deterioration, the Imperial officers had steadily and successfully pursued their objects. The dukes had gradually rendered both ducal fiefs and ducal office virtually hereditary in their own families. If no law, no Imperial edict, or act of the Diet ratified or recognized such hereditary right, it was tacitly admitted; and the emperors, affecting to grant, as an individual favour, what they could not withhold, uniformly invested the son with the duchy of his deceased father. The dukes had further, by the acquisition of a county within their respective duchies, acquired judicial authority, which they presently extended beyond the limits of the county that gave it; and they had moreover managed to free themselves in its exercise from the interference of Missi Dominici, whose office had gradually fallen into desuetude. By the end of the eleventh century the national dukes were more like vassal monarchs than princes of the empire.

Hence the emperors regarded the dukes as their most formidable opponents, whom it became the chief object of their policy in every way to weaken, and, if possible, to extinguish. By the year 1125 they had, in a manner, disencumbered themselves of two out of the five national duchies, viz., Franconia and Lotharingia. The former, Conrad II, the first Emperor of the Franconian dynasty, when he found it impracticable to retain his duchy with the empire, dismembered; and keeping the ducal domains as his private patrimony, annexed the ducal rights and functions to the bishopric of Wurzburg. The Lotharingian duchy had been previously weakened by division into two duchies, those of Upper and Lower Lotharingia, or Lorraine. The first, which comprehended the territories lying between the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Moselle, was granted in the eleventh century to a family claiming Carolingian descent, who held it, though losing province after province, until, in the eighteenth century, the Duke, chosen as the consort of Maria Theresa of Austria, exchanged the single province of the original duchy remaining for Tuscany, in order to facilitate the unavoidable cession of that single province to Lewis XV of France. To Lower Lorraine, which comprised all the rest of the original duchy, the ducal rights and functions were attached; and it was still a formidable duchy, when the Emperor Henry IV availed himself of the death of Godfrey of Bouillon without children, to weaken it.

Godfrey had inherited it through the adoption of his maternal uncle, Godfrey, surnamed the Humpbacked, Duke of Lower Lorraine, and the gratitude of Henry IV for his staunch loyalty and distinguished services in the field. His brothers, not having been adopted into the Bouillon family, had no pretensions to it; and the Emperor, conniving at the mightiest of the earls taking the opportunity to emancipate themselves from ducal authority, conferred the impaired duchy upon the Earl of Limburg, to whom Godfrey, at his departure for his crusade, had committed its administration. Henry V, at his accession, A.D. 1106, punished the new duke’s fidelity to Henry IV during his own rebellion, by depriving him of the duchy, which, leaving him his new title as Duke of Limburg, he transferred to the Earl of Louvain, one of the most powerful Brabant noblemen, and who, descending in a direct line from Charles the Simple, was the real representative of the Carolingians. At every change some great vassal broke his connexion with the duchy.

The efforts of the earls had been as successful as those of the dukes, though the position of the whole class was not identical. The emperors had favoured them as a counterpoise to the dukes. Their sons were always permitted to inherit their counties, in which many of them had obtained military authority, though still obliged to obey their duke’s summons to the field, and there arrange themselves, with their vassals, under his standard. Many of the earls had become powerful princes of the empire, not much inferior to duke or margrave; but the greater number, to whom fortune had been less propitious, had sunk into vassals of dukes, margraves, or prelates, whilst many counties had been annihilated by absorption into superior principalities. Of the original division of the country into districts of ju­risdiction, each under its Graf, or judge, called the Gauverfassung, i.e. district constitution, no mention occurs after the first quarter of the twelfth century.

The margraves and palsgraves had no object to pursue beyond rendering both office and official fiefs hereditary in their respective families, in which they had succeeded; but, it may be observed, the title of margrave will now occasionally be found unconnected with a menaced frontier, having been either retained after the march had lost its character, or transferred from a real march. Hence, perhaps, in other countries, where its signification was not apparent from the words, it sank into a mere title of nobility, as marchese, marquis. The palsgraves, diminished in numbers, were, like the margraves, princes of the empire, but ranked not with the chief princes—the Arch-Palsgrave excepted, who had suddenly risen in power and dignity. When Conrad I, Duke of Franconia, the first non-Carolingian Emperor, was elected, he gave his duchy to his brother, the Franconian Palsgrave, who permanently united these seemingly incongruous offices. When this duke resigned his pretensions to succeed to his Imperial brother, in favour of Henry, Duke of Saxony, Henry rewarded him with the Palatinate of Lotharingia; and the two palatinates thenceforward remained united. When Conrad II, the founder of the Franconian dynasty, dismembered his duchy, he gave these united palatinates, as the Palatinate on the Rhine, to the Arch-Palsgrave. The Palsgrave on the Rhine was thenceforth one of the chief princes of the empire. He presided over the Imperial Diet in the Emperor's absence, and left his former duty, as palace judge, to a humbler substitute.

Against all these formidable immediate vassals, the emperors had steadily supported the mesne, or sub-vassals and the vavassours; one mode of giving them weight had been making their fiefs legally hereditary, for which they were indebted to Conrad II. With the same object, the emperors had favoured the rise of another class of Princes of the Empire out of the bosom of the Church. The prelates had proved no less ambitious than the laity; but the emperors had judged that ecclesiastical princes, whom, as was then customary, they appointed, and whose dignities could not in the nature of things be hereditary, must needs be firm supporters of their authority. They had therefore willingly granted them fiefs and counties, with princely rights, in every way promoting their territorial acquisitions. Abbeys for either sex, holding immediately of the crown, shared with episcopal and arch-episcopal sees in this devout or politic munificence; and Abbesses thus endowed were remarkable, as a solitary instance, of women entitled to sit and vote in the Imperial Diet. By the twelfth century there were in Germany six-prince-archbishops and thirty-five prince-bishops, besides immediate abbots and abbesses, independently of abbeys and cloisters of inferior dignity; so that perhaps nearly half the land was held by ecclesiastics, owing military service for that land, and charged with the administration of justice to their vassals.

Some land the Church had always possessed, and Charlemagne had felt that the duties attached to its possession were inconsistent with the clerical character. To avoid its being thus desecrated, he decreed that those sanguinary and secular functions should be invariably committed to some lay nobleman, who should transact all the temporal business of the see, abbey, or lowlier church. This deputed representative of the ecclesiastical lord was named in Latin Advocatus, in German, Vogt, Schirmvogt or Kastenvogt, and in French, Vidame; in England the office, as that of an independent nobleman, appears to have been unknown, the churchman intrusting its duties, with the management of his domains, to one of his own vassals, as his reeve, or steward. Hence it is difficult to find a perfectly correspondent English word, and th Vogt is a person of whom it will be too often necessary to speak, for the foreign name to be well admissible. Mr. Hallam, adopting the Latin form, translates it advocate; but the ideas of general and of judge are so glaringly opposed to that of advocate, that the habitual use of this word seems inconvenient; and as we have a Lord Steward amongst the great household officers, perhaps steward may be taken as the least objectionable substitute. From the comparative poverty of the early church, the office, when instituted, was neither laborious nor important, and was gratuitously undertaken, as an act of devotion. As the affairs to be managed and the troops to be led became those of large principalities, the labour increased, and was remunerated with fiefs belonging to the See or Abbey, and the Steward was now selected by the prelate to be represented. The stewardship, thus profitable, was eagerly sought by nobles, even by petty princes; the founder of a new cloister usually kept it for his own family, and it became so decidedly hereditary, that women succeeded to this essentially masculine office. What was sordidly sought was not likely to be honourably used; and the protecting stewards of churches now became their oppressors and plunderers; of one indigent knight, it is recorded, that he pillaged, and in every way harassed a cloister, to extort his appointment as its protecting steward. Before quitting this part of the subject it must be stated that the Emperor bore the title of Schirmvogt—which, in this case, must be Englished Warden or Protector rather than Steward—of the Roman Catholic Church, and especially of the Papal See.

Very material changes had likewise taken place in the condition of other classes; but these may be more conveniently explained after the far greater change, the very start, so to speak, from nonentity into existence, exhibited by the towns, shall have been placed before the reader. During these three centuries occurred the first germination of the seed whence subsequently grew and flourished that very peculiar product, characteristic of feudal Germany, the Free Imperial Cities, beside which the liberties of the colonial cities planted by the Romans in Southern Gaul fade into insignificance. Ultimately the Free Imperial Cities really were so many vassal republics, each with a domain of a few miles square, federal members of the Empire, and immediate vassals of the Emperor, which last, by the way, was the true mediaeval sense of free in Germany.

During the whole period German towns had been upon the increase. The first to arise would be those formed about royal and Imperial palaces, in order to supply the wants, and profit by the expenditure, of the court. The next would be those similarly formed, from similar motives, around cathedrals and episcopal palaces; and amongst these the old Roman cities in which prelates had established themselves, would naturally take precedence. These would revive the earlier and the more vigorously, from having a second source of prosperity, to which every day added importance; their site upon navigable rivers, then well-nigh the only channels of internal traffic. Other rivers would gradually produce other towns; but the greater number of those early built owe their existence to the first Saxon Emperor, Henry, surnamed the Fowler, because when the ensigns of sovereignty were brought him, he was found flying his hawks, his favourite pastime.

Henry I, who is believed to have descended paternally from Witekind, the great Saxon antagonist of Charlemagne, and belonged, through females, to the next in dignity of Saxon families, the Billungs, ranks high amongst the intrinsically great monarchs Germany has to boast. Early in the tenth century, when the Magyars, newly settled in Hungary, by their incessant incursions habitually desolated Germany and northern Italy, and not seldom eastern France, Henry conceived the idea of protecting his own dominions by dotting them over with fortresses. In pursuance of this idea he walled large villages, built walled towns, and decreed that in each district every ninth man should reside in the fortress to form its garrison, whilst the remaining eight should cultivate his land for his benefit; and to the ninth, when selected, he gave the title and privileges, whatever they might be, of a citizen. He ordered, further, that a certain proportion of the harvest should in each district be always stored within the town walls, where, in case of hostile inroad, the whole population, with stock and crop, should take refuge. And he endeavoured to render these towns agreeable as a residence to persons in easy circumstances, by placing tribunals of justice in them, and granting them divers privileges, as municipal institutions, markets, fairs, &c.

Henry’s sole object had been the defence of the country; but besides the security afforded by walls and organization, the riches flowing from the trade that the markets and fairs attracted, awoke a spirit of emulation throughout Germany. The feudal, especially the ecclesiastical, lords of towns saw the advantages derivable from such urban prosperity—towns were lawfully taxable by both lord paramount and mesne lord—and in every way they promoted, even whilst they disdained, the commerce of their own cities. Thus, e.g. an archbishop of Cologne obtained from William the Conqueror commercial privileges in England for Cologne. From more narrow-minded lords charters were purchased or extorted; and as early as the first quarter of the twelfth century some parts of Germany, if they still could not compete with Italy or the Arelat, yet boasted a considerable number of thriving cities, amongst which Bruges, then a sea-port, Ghent, Antwerp, Cologne, Ratisbon, Magdeburg, Dortmund, and Goslar, are named as peculiarly mercantile or manufacturing, and opulent.

Even amongst the Slavonians upon the southern shore of the Baltic an impulse was given to a seemingly pre­existing propensity for commercial towns, which it is somewhat startling to find in a people addicted to piracy, and living, according to most authors, in a social state, nearly patriarchal. But it is confidently asserted that the Slavonians were fishers, agriculturists, and especially traders, as well as pirates; in proof, as also in consequence, of this their commercial character, it is as confidently asserted that their town of Jumnata, Vinetha, or Wineta, as the name is variously given, at the mouth of the Oder, was, in the ninth century, not only the emporium of the Baltic trade, but frequented by merchants from all parts of Europe, and even from Asia or Africa (as attested by the quantities of Arab coins found in the neighbourhood), and was then the largest of European towns. Vinetha fell a victim to the inroads of the sea in the eleventh century; but to supply its place Wollin or Julin, Wolgast, Demmin, and Arkona in Rugen, had arisen.

All German towns appear to have been originally the property either of the crown, or of some prince, prelate, or noble; even the Roman colonial cities having, according to the prevalent opinion, lost all their original municipal rights and privileges. All were governed by officers whom their feudal superiors appointed; the immediate generally by a Burggraf, or Castle-Earl, of course a noble­man, under whom a Schultheiss (a magistrate) administered justice. Of towns belonging to a mesne superior, a Vogt, Steward, was the governor, either with a Schultheiss, or acting in both capacities, probably according to the wealth of the lord and the importance of the city. But whether Schultheiss or Vogt sat in judgment, in towns of all classes, the concurrence of a court of assistants, the already mentioned Schoeffen, was indispensable. Only from one class of freemen, it has been said, could these assistants be selected, and even in this class eligibility was not indefeasible. By the laws of Cologne no man who was deformed, one-eyed, deaf, lame, a stammerer, a leper, a murderer, perjured, ill-reputed, an usurer, who had offered money for the office, or was under twenty-four years of age, could be a Schoeffe. And of these oddly associated grounds of exclusion from office, some of which it may have seemed a work of supererogation to enumerate, it is to be observed that the first six likewise excluded from the right of inheriting property, leaving individuals so afflicted to be taken care of by healthier or better formed heirs, who were compelled to support them.

Subordinate to these feudal officers was a Municipal or Town Council, over which presided a Bürgermeister, usually Englished Burgomaster, but in fact, a mayor, to which council were committed the police of the town and the management of its domain. Again subordinate to this municipal council was, what may be termed, the organization of the town; each trade forming a Guild, under its own council of masters, presided over by the chief of the masters of the trade, called the Altmeister, (Anglicé, old master or Alderman). This guild council decided not only every question of wages, and other relations between master and journeyman, or master and apprentice—in which last capacity no one born out of wedlock could be received—but even the processes of manufacture, the price of wares, and the mode of conducting business. In case of war, each guild formed a distinct company under its own Altmeister; the unfree having been first permitted to bear arms in towns, for the defence of their town walls. The earliest appearance of guilds is in the towns of Flanders and Hainault, which, in wealth, in liberty, and in democratic violence, ever took the lead of those east of the Rhine, where this institution only arose in the twelfth century. Almost every village in Lower Lorraine had, by this time, an analogous organization.

Both burgomaster and heads of guilds were still appointed by the feudal governor. But gradually, as a town throve, symptoms of a desire for some degree of liberty and self-government began to show themselves. The Schultheiss and his court of Schoeffen encroached upon the authority of the governor; the Burgomaster, and Municipal Council upon the authority and the department of the schultheiss; the towns purchased or extorted specific exemptions, rights, and privileges from their lords, or obtained relief by charters from the emperors, who fostered them as a support against the formidable great vassals. Thus the Robber-Knights, as those landless, or nearly landless knights, whose swords literally were their “bread-winners,” were called, being the enemies most dreaded by the trading portion of the community, a town was sometimes guaranteed against the erection of a knight’s castle within a specified distance, even against the erection of a new one by the mesne lord within its walls.

But as yet, the chief object of the towns appears to have been the increase of their population; to achieve which, they held out divers lures to divers classes. They endeavoured to tempt the inferior nobles to enroll themselves as citizens, bv assigning exclusively to them, under the several names of Patricians, or Geschlechter, Anglicé races or families, all posts of authority, down to that of Municipal Councillor; the small non-noble freeholder, by the protection afforded him, even whilst resident upon his own estate, under the queer-sounding designation of Pfahlbürger, or Palisade-Citizen, which was gradually extended to include all suburbans; and finally the villenage, by decreeing that a Villein who had dwelt a year and a day within the town walls, unclaimed by his Lord, was, unless the Lord could show that he had diligently though vainly sought the fugitive, ipso facto, released from the feudal authority of that Lord, as from actual villenage; becoming, in some inferior and still unfree condition, a denizen of the town. That condition seems to have been a sort of easy thraldom to the Municipality, until, in 1106, Henry V enfranchised the handicraftsmen throughout Germany, though real freemen he could not make them, landed property being, it will be remembered, indispensable to that character. These handicraftsmen seem to have all originally been villeins, enfranchised or not, and they were now mostly pfahlbürger, having their workshops without the walls; but the money they earned, in process of time overcame the Teutonic disdain for mechanic arts, and tempted the poorer freeman to join their ranks.

The change that had taken place in the two classes of non-noble freeholders next demands attention. The pride of independence, which had looked scornfully down upon the greatest vassals, lasted long with respect to sub-vassalage; but in regard to fiefs, held immediately of the crown, it seems to have been dying away even before the extinction of the Carolingian dynasty; and the sense of family degradation that drove the Welf, Etico, to hide his shame under a monk’s cowl, when his son accepted very large domains in vassalage of the Emperor Arnulf, may have been produced more by that son’s mode of enlarging, than by his acceptance of the grant. The grant was of as much land as the grantee could drive a plough round during the imperial siesta. He, the grantee, having stationed his best horses in relays, fastened the traces of a small gold plough to his saddle, and successively transferred it to each animal galloped at full speed to the next relay. The success of the trick was only limited by the breaking down of a favourite mare in the stage allotted to her; and the story was deemed au­thenticated by the subsequent aversion of the Welf family for mares.

To return. By the twelfth century, this contempt seems to have much subsided, and many of the freemen passed into the state of vassalage. Of the highest class, the wealthiest were tempted by the title of Graf and the rights of jurisdiction attached to it to make the exchange. Many of somewhat less lofty pretensions rose to nobility with the title of Freiherr, Anglicé Baron, though they were far from becoming as yet the equals even of the Vavassours; and of the poorer portion of this class of Schoeffenbaren Freien numbers obtained a degree of nobility, as Knights. Many of these knights took service under emperor, prince, prelate or noble, who wished to increase his force; whilst others, who possessed little beyond a strong tower, maintained themselves by downright robbery upon the high road or river, which that tower chanced to command. And it becomes evident that such conduct could not be then deemed a very disreputable extension of the right of private war, when we read of a Prince-Archbishop of Cologne who, a full century later, being asked by the Knight, whom he had just installed Constable of a newly-built castle, how he was to feed his people, answered by pointing to two high roads that crossed each other at the foot of the hill upon which the castle stood. The Knights constituted the Chivalry, or in modern conception, rather the cavalry, of the Empire, by the name of Reichsritterschaft, implying that, how indigent soever, they were immediate vassals. The poorest of this schoeffenbaren class, seeking the efficient protection they were too weak to dispense with, sank into the secondary class of Protected-Freemen.

Of this secondary class, the original Protected-Freemen, those who were best off commonly became pfahlbürger of some town, whilst the others were pressed down amongst the non-free, sheltering themselves, if possible, under the shadow of the Church,—who secured great privileges or indulgencies to her dependents,—by becoming church Ministeriales, that is to say, inferior officers or servants of some ecclesiastical establishment. This degradation of the protected freemen, who might be termed the Yeomanry, was more general than the changes in the upper class, but by no means universal. In fact, all these changes were little more than beginning at the opening of the twelfth century; and the Schoeffenbaren Freien and Protected-Freemen together, still formed a very respectable body. Neither had these changes proceeded everywhere alike. In Switzerland and the Tyrol there had always been much less villenage than further from the Alps, and more small freeholders remained in those countries, forming the bulk of the population; whilst in parts of the duchy of Saxony, namely in Frieseland, and along the western sea coast, feudalism was still scarcely known, the inhabitants being almost all freeholders, whether of large or of small estate, all bound to serve the Emperor in arms when needful, but to nothing else.

If the poorer freemen were generally in course of degradation, the evil was in some measure compensated by a consequent amelioration in the condition of the non-free. Those who had sunk to that level had not become villeins; they formed a higher class, bearing the name of Zinsleute, or Rentpayers, the paying of rent for the use of land, whether in money, in kind, or by service other than military, being of course incompatible with the perfect freedom of which the ownership of land was an essential element. Admittance into this class of rent-payers was now the great object of the best villeins, as also of those who had been emancipated, either by the goodwill of their lords, or by making a crusade; and though this change, likewise, was only beginning, gradually the rent­payers, instead of the non-noble freeholders, constituted the bulk of the nation. Such enfranchised villeins as failed to rise so high, produced a class of men previously unknown to feudalism—to wit, that of labourers working for wages. But this class was quite in its infancy at the period now under consideration. That the condition of even the lowest villeins was ameliorated, may be ascribed mainly to the influence of progressive civilization.

In the subjugated Slavonian districts, German immigrants were usually established as Rent-payers, upon very advantageous conditions. The non-free natives, whether agriculturists, herdsmen, fishermen, traders, if indeed traders there were, or pirates, who, under their native princes, had enjoyed much practical liberty, were yet more completely inthralled under their Germ am masters than villeins in gross in Germany. And through such thraldom, some writers aver, that the naturally mild, frugal, industrious, hospitable and honest disposition of the Slavonians, degenerated into the cunning and the cruelty of slaves.

The social and political state of Italy was at one and the same time less complicated and more confused than that of Germany. The first, because being a conquered country the inhabitants were simply divided into two classes, the free as noble conquerors, who ruled and fought and the conquered, who worked and paid. The second, it might seem contradictory dissimilarity, resulted from every successive horde of conquerors bringing with them the laws of their own country, without abrogating those pre-established; so that not only the two classes, but even individuals of each class lived under different codes, as determined by birth or choice. Most especially was this the case in Southern Italy, where the laws of both the East and the West Roman Empires remained co-existent with those of the Lombards, the Normans and the Saracens, whilst even the Jews were under their own law, administered by their own Rabbis.

In Italy, although here likewise the original conquerors had held the lands they seized as allodial, the feudal system now prevailed, the modifying element being the old Roman municipal organization, which saved the towns from the villenage into which the rural population sank under their lords. The city magistrates still bore the venerated title of Consuls, though no longer as rulers of the world, or even of a republic, but in the humbler character of Mayors, and even that still humbler of Heads of Guilds, in Italy called Arti, whence the numbers of officials so denominated, that occasionally perplex a reader’s classical associations. Two, four, six, or even twelve, are the usual number of Consuls in a city, but more are frequently met with; and Lucca, in the year 1124, actually boasted of sixty. Genoa up till nearly that time, offers the variety of two Consuls, regularly elected for periods of four years, which she then altered into four, five or six annual Consuls. The Consuls who acted as Mayors shared their authority with one, two or three Municipal Councils; namely, the Great Council, which comprised all the citizens; the Senate, culled from the higher classes of those citizens; and a sort of Privy Council, yet more select, entitled la Credenza. Yet, notwithstanding this seemingly continuous Roman organization, the towns here, as in Germany, are said to have owed their first mediaeval ideas of strength, and consequently of resistance against oppression, to the walls built as a defence against the inroads of the dreaded Magyars. Of their prosperity much was due to the favour of Otho the Great, who sought in them allies against the struggles of the princely and other great vassals for independence. The Consuls had, at least ever since the establishment of the feudal system, been appointed by the Sovereign in person, or through his officers; and it was only as the cities increased in wealth and power, that they began to strive for the right of electing their magistrates. In the Exarchate, the Consuls and all other magistrates of the district, were selected from one Council, of which they remained members.

Venice had obtained prodigious commercial privileges at Constantinople during the great alarm conceived by the Greek government, at the successful ambition of the Italo-Normans. Thus enriched, she was becoming a very considerable state in power, if not in extent; what territory she did possess lay not in Italy, but on the opposite Dalmatian coast, by the acquisition of which, she evidently aimed at the command of the Adriatic. The originally absolute authority of the Doge, the Venetians were gradually restricting, as prosperity awoke the desire for self-government amongst the opulent merchants. Pisa and Genoa, occupied by their contests for Sardinia, which they had conjointly conquered, and content with the trade of the Western Mediterranean, had not interfered with Venice in the East, till the crusades brought them all together as rivals in the Syro-Frank states.

The progress of Tuscany and the Papal dominions should next come under review. But their condition, as well as that of Apulia, indeed of all Italy in the year 1125, was so much the result of the contest between the Pope and the Emperor, that it will become apparent in the account to be given of that contest, when two classes of persons, common indeed to all parts of the Holy Roman Empire, as to nearly the whole of Europe, though the first seems most appropriately spoken of in connexion with Italy, shall have been disposed of.

This first, and very important class, is that of the Clergy, Secular and Regular. The Secular Clergy comprised the episcopal body, with the cathedral chapters, constituting the councils of their respective bishops, the parish priests with their curates, called vicars in the Roman Catholic Church, and the chaplains of princes and nobles, to whom they were likewise secretaries, archive-keepers, household schoolmasters, and often physicians.

Of prince-prelates, like those of Germany, Italy had only one;—the Pope had for centuries occupied a distinct as well as a loftier position; and the Patriarch of Aquileia, once almost the rival of the Supreme Pontiff, had sunk into insignificance, when, upon the destruction of Aquileia by the Huns, he removed to Grado, one of the Venetian islands, where he had since, in a manner, become the Venetian Metropolitan. The one Italian rival of the German ecclesiastical princes was the Archbishop of Milan, who, as such, entitled himself Comes, or Earl of Milan, and claimed the temporal authority belonging to an earl, with which he strove to combine spiritual independence, scarcely acknowledging the supremacy of the Pope. The other numerous Italian bishops and archbishops had little or no feudal authority beyond the precincts of the cities, in which their episcopal palaces were respectively situated.

Of the great body of the clergy, the condition in many respects altered so materially during the above mentioned contest, that it may here suffice to say, celibacy, though recommended as meritorious by the Nicene Council, as early as the year 325, had not yet been positively enjoined, except to prelates, and was very far from the general practice of the parish priests. The Chapters, although ranking with the Secular clergy, had at this time pretty generally adopted the institutions framed for them by St. Augustin, submitting to the somewhat claustral life thereby enjoined, whence their members received the name of Canons, as living under rule.

The classes of the secular clergy hitherto spoken of, were common to all Christendom; but there was another peculiar to Rome, though occasionally employed elsewhere: this is the College of Cardinals, forming the Papal Privy Council. The title of Cardinal was derived from the odd name by which, in the earliest times of established Christianity, the permanent connexion of clergymen with any specific church was dignified, i.e. clerici cardinales, literally hinge-clerks or priests. Accordingly the original Cardinals were merely the Priests and Deacons attached to the principal churches of Rome, whose constant presence in the Papal metropolis led to the Pope’s selecting his counsellors from amongst them. This, in its turn, rendered the position of hinge-clerk an object of ambition, coveted by prelates; and now the title of Cardinal, whether or not previously given to the priests of the Roman churches, was bestowed upon bishops, generally the suburbicarian, or more especial suffragans of the Roman See, whose local position facilitated their acting as Privy Counsellors; and still every cardinal was nominally, if not really, attached to a Roman church. The Cardinals were not formed into a College until later in the twelfth century.

The Regular Clergy will require more detail. It is customary to speak of different monastic Orders; but in point of fact, there was in Roman Catholic Europe but one real Order of Monks, that of the Benedictines, all others being offsets from this one, as reforms of, or improvements upon, its rules. The Friars, who were not in existence in the twelfth century, occupied a lower grade in the Hierarchy. When, in the sixth century, St. Benedict gathered the dispersed and independent ascetics together into monasteries, there to live according to the strict rule (as a monastic code is technically called) he drew up, they truly supported themselves by the sweat of their brows, tilling the ground with their own hands. They thus brought barren districts under cultivation, and were, even in a political point of view, a most useful fraternity. This they continued to be, when, in places where field labour was abundant, they added to husbandry manufacturing, in which they seem to have very generally been the instructors of their neighbourhood. And this they might be thought still more to become, when the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin, supported by Charlemagne, effected the substitution in the cloister of more intellectual occupations, such as copying and illuminating manuscripts, teaching children, and affording medical, even surgical assistance, for mere manual work. But this change, however judicious, and at the time beneficial, was the first step in deviation from that pure monastic simplicity, in which abbots and abbesses lived, not only like, but with their monks and nuns, even sleeping in the common dormitory and esteemed mitres and other prelatic decorations, inconsistent with monastic humility.

Deviation once begun made rapid progress, fostered by the riches which, in addition to the earnings of their own industry, flowed in upon convents for either sex, from the gifts and bequests of penitent or terrified sinners of all ranks, or by endowments of sovereigns courting church favours. These endowments, bequests and gifts were of every imaginable kind, from fiefs, including counties and ducal rights, through fisheries, ferries, tolls, and the like, to exemption from some specific toll, guarantees against the building of a bridge within a certain distance of a cloister’s ferry, against the intrusion of a chapel or oratory into a district the spiritual wants of which a cloister supplied, down to Ornaments, and wax lights for an altar, a night light for the infirmary, and even a warm bath and a better meal upon certain anniversaries. A French nobleman actually granted the Abbey of Belle-Perche the right of plundering all wrecked vessels, except his own. With riches, the luxury of the age, such as it was, crept into the cloister, idleness, and a general relaxation of discipline, extending in many cases to habitual licentiousness, ensued; and when this became so notorious that a lay patron or a prelate found it necessary to supersede a vicious or an inefficient Superior by an austere monk, commissioned to reform his convent, the intended reformer not unfrequently fell a victim to his zeal by the hands of his flock, or of mercenary assassins in their pay. Often no remedy short of breaking up the monastery, and dispersing the inmates, whether monks or nuns, for castigation and consequent reformation, amongst other cloisters where rigorous discipline still prevailed, proved sufficient. Towards the close of the eleventh century, the reaction naturally consequent upon such flagrant depravity, led to founding Orders of reformed Benedictines, in most of which the founder strove to improve upon the austerities and privations devised by his predecessors. All held themselves Benedictines, acknowledging as their Head the Abbot of the original monastery, the Abbey of Montecassino, who was Abbot of Abbots of the Benedictines; although each reformed Order was separately governed by an Abbot of Abbots of its own, with little reference to Montecassino. Of these numerous reformed Orders, it will here be enough to mention a few of the most remarkable.

The Cluniacenses, so named from the mother abbey of Cluny, celebrated for its magnitude and the extent of its library, was one of the earliest and of the least austere Orders. As the duty subsidiary to their religious rites and exercises, they addicted themselves wholly to intellectual pursuits, including the Fine Arts. The Cistercians, a somewhat later institution, and one of the austerest, in an antagonistic spirit, devoted themselves exclusively to manual labour, in the first instance to agriculture, professing such an actual horror of Belles Lettres, probably as idle, that they visited the sin of versifying with expulsion. When they became missionaries, they so far modified this exclusiveness, that they introduced manufactures amongst the Heathen whom they were endeavouring to convert, and translated the Bible into the language of their Catechumens for their instruction. At home they suffered not a woman’s foot to desecrate the abbey church; and the excessive mortifications and privations enjoined by their Rule for some years, scared away novices. The Cistercians still had but one cloister, whilst those of the Cluniacenses were rapidly increasing in number. One Order, of about the same date, the Prsemonstratensian, rejecting the Rule of St. Benedict for St. Augustin’s, called itself an Order, not of Monks, but of Regular Augustinian Canons. The founder was an opulent nobleman of Lower Lorraine, named Norbert, a libertine voluptuary, who being struck down, though not killed, by lightning, arose a new man, founded this Order, sold his estates, divided the price between his Praemonstratenses and the poor, and revelled in the martyrdom inflicted by the ridicule of his former gay associates. His Order was of course austere. Another Order of Augustinian Canons, that of Fontevraud, founded by Robert d’Arbrissel in 1100, is principally distinguished by the singular circumstance of the chief Abbess being Head of the whole Order, supreme over abbeys of men, as well as over abbeys of women. This, perhaps unique dignity of an abbess, results from the especial dedication of the Order to the Blessed Virgin, whose actual repre­sentation this Chief Abbess is esteemed. Robert, who required temptation to be defied and conquered, not shunned, built the cloisters for the different sexes so nearly contiguous, as to have their church in common; but so strict was the separation enjoined elsewhere, that dying nuns were brought into the church, and there laid upon the paved floor, to receive those rites of religion; usually administered beside the death bed. He showed judgment, however, in providing that this Abbess of Abbots and Abbesses should never be a nunnery-bred virgin, but a widow, who might know something of the world. It may be added that a few Asiatic monks, of the Greek Order of St. Basil, had sought shelter in Southern Italy from the oppression of Moslem masters, and been permitted there to build convents of their own Order.

The other class of persons alluded to, is the Hebrew race. The Jews, then universally hated and despised, incompatible as the two sentiments may appear, whose very existence was rather connived at than tolerated, had nevertheless everywhere made themselves indispensable to their oppressors. The church denunciations against usury, under which name was comprehended all interest whatever paid for the use of money, necessarily threw the whole money-lending business into the hands of those upon whom excommunication was powerless; and well they knew how to profit by the monopoly. Not only kings, princes and nobles, but the very prelates who anathematized all usurers, ay, popes themselves, were constantly obliged to resort to Jews for loans, pawning church plate, pawning the most venerated relics to unbelievers, who did indeed exact usurious interest from their debtors. In Germany the Jews long enjoyed another advantage, through Teutonic disdain for trade; whilst in Italy, Catalonia and the South of France, commerce was, during the earlier portion of the Middle Ages, held so little derogatory to noble birth, as not to incapacitate for knighthood, the Germans deemed it utter, irreparable degradation to a freeman. Hence, the first merchants who settled in German towns were foreigners, mostly Jews; and no inconsiderable number of years elapsed, before the sight of the riches acquired in trade by those foreigners, could tempt the natives to incur the lucrative disgrace.

The Jews were most numerous in the episcopal cities, many of which being commercial, attracted them; and where the bishops, with a view, they alleged, to their conversion, encouraged them to settle. At Worms the Children of Israel asserted that they had had a Synagogue in times anterior to the Christian era. The jurisdiction over them was there hereditary in the Dahlberg family, which, through its descent from a Hebrew soldier, one of the Roman colonists there planted, claimed relationship to the Blessed Virgin.

But whilst thus tacitly tolerated, the Jews were subjected to the most absurdly and often frivolously oppressive laws. They were forbidden to practice agriculture, or any mechanical art; they were compelled to wear a peculiar garb of a peculiar colour, and to reside in a particular quarter of every town, in Italy called the Ghetto, into which they were nightly locked. Councils forbade their employment as physicians, or in any office of administration, whilst such was their superior science and skill, that prelates, ay, occasionally even popes, as well as kings and princes, relied upon them in emergencies, in cases of dangerous disease as well as of financial embarrassment. Whether it were as financiers, or in reference to the Imperial right to slaughter them, of which right their poll-tax was the annual redemption, that the Jews were called Imperial Kammerknechte (Exchequer thralls) may be questionable.

But however irrational the treatment, however anomalous and uncertain the position of the Jews, they do not appear to have been actually persecuted prior to the first crusade. When upon that occasion the crusading rabble massacred them wherever found, the Rhine prelates endeavoured, but neither very successfully, nor, perhaps, efficiently, to defend their Hebrew subjects, against the wilful executioners; and some kinsmen of the Archbishop of Mainz appearing amongst the massacrers, he himself was subsequently taxed by the Emperor, Henry IV, with complicity. At Worms the Jews sought the protection of the Bishop, of which he made their receiving baptism the condition. They asked time for deliberation; and returning home, slew their children, their wives, and themselves. The Emperor, indignant at such an attempt to render hypocrisy compulsory, allowed to all Israelites who might have accepted such terms, a period of grace, within which they might return uncensured to their own religion. The Bishop of Spires sold his protection for money, to the offence equally, though upon different grounds, of the Emperor and of his own flock. The example thus set by a bigoted and blood­thirsty mob, however contemned the wretches who set it, was followed, and not by crusaders alone. Thenceforward the massacre of Jewish creditors seems to have long been esteemed by debtors, called Christians, both the easiest way of freeing themselves from inconvenient pecuniary de­mands, and an acceptable sacrifice to the God of Mercy. Even monarchs, if they did not actually authorize such massacres, appear to have taken therefrom a hint, if hint were needed; and in most countries Jews were now alternately suffered to accumulate wealth by usury, then banished, and their property confiscated; and then again tacitly permitted to return and resume their usurious dealings. Such treatment, together with the atrocious accusations under which the Jews habitually laboured, as of sacrificing Christian children, and using their blood for purposes medical, magical, or simply superstitious, reacted upon the persecuted victims, rendering them, whatever they might have previously been, crafty, cruel, and inveterate enemies of their persecutors.

S. III

THE CONTEST BETWEEN THE POPE AND THE EMPEROR FOR SUPREMACY, ORIGINATING IN ECCLESIASTICAL INVESTITURES AND LAY PATRONAGE.