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MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY |
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BOOK I.
CHAPTER VI.
CONRAD III. [1147—1152.]
Conrad at Constantinople. — King Henry's
Government.—Relations with the Pope.—Henry the Lion's Crusade.—Conrad's Return.
— Rebellion of Welf.— Henry the Lion.—Death of King Henry.—Of Conrad. —Of St.
Bernard.—State of Europe and Palestine.
In Europe the failure of this, the second
Crusade, provoked universal wrath. The Abbot of Clairvaux, who of all the
disappointed must have been the most deeply grieved and wounded, was now
severely blamed for having preached it. He pleaded, in his justification, the
express commands of the Pope, which he was bound implicitly to obey; and he
attributed the failure to the sins of the Crusaders, who had, he averred, shown
themselves unworthy to be champions of the Cross. He further sought alleviation
to his own profound disappointment and affliction, as also to the general
mortification, in two considerations. The one, the firm belief that the
expedition had, at all events, wrought the salvation of the souls of those who
had fallen in so holy a cause;—and what imperilled souls, to say the least, he
knew many of them to be! The other, that misfortunes, of whatever kind—however
bewildering to human reason—could only befall their victims by the appointment
of God, in his inscrutable wisdom.
Conrad landed at Constantinople, and there
committed his army to the charge of his nephew, with instructions to lead it
home, with all convenient despatch, by the same road by which they .had come
forth. He himself, the mutual distrust that had originally alienated the two
Emperors having now given place to cordial confidence, remained for some little
time at the Greek Court; professedly to recruit his health, which was seriously
impaired by the fatigues, hardships, and vexations of his Syrian campaign. His
real motive for lingering appears to have been to concert offensive and
defensive measures against the King of Sicily, then still at war with Manuel.
Roger’s constantly increasing power, combined with his scarcely dissembled
hostility to Conrad, the Head of the Holy Roman Empire, who as such claimed his
homage, required constant vigilance; and Conrad’s apprehensions had been
aroused anew by a recent visit of Duke Welf’s to Palermo. Welf, it will be
remembered, had verbally renounced his pretensions to Bavaria, and joined in
the crusade. But when the rites of pilgrimage had been performed at Jerusalem,
he refused to take part in the siege of Damascus; and, as though he had gone
forth solely as a pilgrim, not as a crusader, embarked at Acre for Europe; but
deviated from his course to make a long halt at the Sicilian Court in his way
to Germany. He had since returned thence to put the schemes concerted with
Roger in execution. Conrad could not doubt but that the object of this visit
was to concoct some hostile design against himself and his brother Henry
Jasomir. To counteract their league it was desirable to draw closer the union
of the two empires; to which end, and to secure Constantinopolitan support to
the Duke of Bavaria, Conrad had asked and obtained for his brother a promise of
the hand of Manuel’s sister or niece, Theodora. To expedite and complete the
marriage, Henry had remained behind with Conrad ; and when all these arrangements
were perfected, the Western Emperor was conveyed, together with his brother and
new sister-in-law, in Greek vessels, to the head of the Adriatic, upon the road
home. Conrad’s course was, in the first instance, rather to Lombardy, whence he
was to cooperate in arms with the forces of the Eastern Empire against the
Normans. But he presently found it expedient to visit Germany, prior to taking
active measures in Italy.
The young King’s government during his
father’s absence had, with the exception of some of those usual feuds and
disorders which no Truce of God, or Realm’s-peace, unless inforced by
irresistible power, could effectually restrain, been reasonably tranquil. At
Rome, Eugenius III had re-established himself, reducing his republican flock to
tolerable order. He had compelled the Senators to receive their appointment
from him conjointly, at least, with the people; had recovered the often
contested royalties, and had abolished the office of Patrician, restoring that
of Imperial Prefect; which he had restored as a papal, not an imperial office.
If this encroachment upon imperial rights was not quite what might have been
expected from the Pope towards an Emperor, who was at that very moment
sacrificing his own interests to those of Christendom, the Holy Father’s conduct
was otherwise unobjectionable; he professed, and probably felt, friendly
sentiments towards King Henry, and readily afforded him whatever support he
required.
During Henry’s reign as vicegerent for his
absent father, only two events of material importance appear to have occurred.
One was the death of Frederic the One-eyed, Duke of Swabia. He was ill when his
brother and his son, despite his earnest remonstrances, took the Cross; and, notwithstanding
the consolations and pious admonitions of St. Bernard, vexation at their
resolution, and anxiety as to the issue of their enterprise, so aggravated his
malady, that it baffled his physician’s skill and speedily carried him off. Duke
Frederic, upon reaching Germany, at the head of the surviving Crusaders in
April, 1149, found his father in the tomb, and Welf in Swabia, eagerly
attacking the Hohenstaufen patrimony. The rightful heir immediately assumed the
title of Duke of Swabia, and proceeded to restore peace in his duchy, by
recovering his possessions from his maternal uncle, punishing such vassals as
had, since his father’s death—whether by joining Welf or in private feuds—violated
the Truce of God, enjoined during the continuance of the Crusade. His
appearance seems to have broken the schemes of the confederates; Welf retired,
for the moment at least, to his own fiefs, and all was temporarily quiet.
The other event was one of more extensive
interest, being the substitute Crusade against the Slavonians of Germany, which
some of the vowed champions of the Holy Sepulchre chose to deem the equivalent
of an expedition to Palestine. Yet was this substitute crusade scarcely viewed
with a favourable eye by the most powerful of the princes, who had made it an
excuse for remaining at home, namely, the Duke of Saxony, and his former rival,
but now reconciled, kinsman and neighbour, the Margrave of Brandenburg. But
these princes are said to have been gifted with a dexterity in adapting
themselves to circumstances not very consonant with their surnames of the Lion
and the Bear. The Heathen Slavonians, for whose forcible conversion the crusade
was projected, had long paid tribute to both princes; who contemplated
annexing, at no distant day, the tributary lands to their own respective
dominions. Whether the Lion might not look prospectively to a lion’s share may
be questionable ; but for the moment they acted in concert, and were little
inclined to see their management of the war interfered with, or the, to them
profitable, state of tributepaying peace interrupted. By the menace of a
crusade they might hope to frighten those tributaries into vassalage, but
evidently desired nothing more from it, certainly nothing through the
intervention of their brother princes ; to avoid which they endeavoured to
procrastinate the opening of the crusade. A third Saxon chief, the Archbishop
(late Dean) of Bremen, was differently circumstanced. The bishops to whom—when
these tribes professed Christianity—their spiritual concerns had been
committed, were his suffragans; and his duty, as their Metropolitan, as well as
his temporal interest, demanded their re-instalment. He, therefore, was
impatient to see the crusade in action, but wanted power to urge his
confederates onward. Nor could any cordiality exist between him and the Duke of
Saxony, who had plundered him of half his patrimony ; although, when he had
secured his booty, the Duke had sought to conciliate him by undertaking the
punishment of his murdered brother’s assassins.
The manoeuvres of the Lion and the Bear,
for a while deferred the commencement of hostilities, which were at length
begun by the Slavonians themselves, impatient of the ever impending and ever
postponed storm. One tribe broke into the territories of the Earl of Holstein,
the professed friend and ally of Niklot, Prince of the Obodrites, and other
western Slavonians. The irruption was so unexpected that they surprised,
seized, and plundered Earl Adolfs new city of Lubeck, before he could muster
forces to defend it, or even to oppose their further progress. Thus provoked,
the Duke and Margrave could procrastinate no longer, and the former set up the
standard of the Cross. The Saxon Crusaders—joined by the Duke of Zäringen, with
his Swabian and Burgundian vassals, mostly Alsatians and Swiss; by the
alienated kinsmen, who, competitors for the crown of Denmark, suspended their
almost fraternal war, to engage in a crusade that might add a province to the
contested kingdom; and by a Polish prince—crossed the Elbe and laid siege to
Dubin
But if thus forced into action, the
inclinations of Henry and Albert were unchanged. They were quite determined not
to see the land, they already deemed their own, divided amongst their Danish,
Polish, and German allies, nor even amongst their own vassals; not to cede, for
instance, so considerable an island as Rugen to Abbot Wibald, whose vassals
fought in the crusading army, and who claimed it for his abbey of Corvey. It is
said the Damascus game, or one bearing close analogy to it, was played at
Dubin. In various ways the Lion and the Bear baffled the designs of their
allies, fairly wearying them out; and, finally, by prevailing upon the alarmed
Slavonians again to receive baptism, which left no pretence for a Crusade, and
to release the Danish prisoners taken in their recent piratical incursions,
which left the Danes no political quarrel, they put an end to the war. The
belligerent missionaries withdrew triumphant to their homes; when the
Slavonians, regardless of their baptism, but paying tribute as before to Saxony
and Brandenburg, relapsed into their pristine idolatry, and their habitual
piracy. The chief result of this crusade seems to have been the marriage of the
Duke of Saxony to his cousin dementia, daughter of the Duke of Zäringen,
settled during its continuance. It was, perhaps, upon the strength of his thus
redoubled alliance with Zäringen, that Henry now, without awaiting either the
further proceedings of an Imperial Diet, or—as he was not only bound by all
laws concerning crusaders, but pledged by oath to do—the return of his
crusading sovereign, entitled himself Duke of Saxony and Bavaria.
This assertion of a claim, disallowed by
the Diet and formally renounced by himself, was not the only annoying affair
that greeted Conrad at his return. Although Welf’s invasion of Swabia appears
to have been a rashly spontaneous attempt to profit by his brother-in-law’s
death and his nephew’s absence, the suspicions, that his visit to Roger had
awakened, were fully justified. The King of Sicily, eager to excite
disturbances in Germany, had not only promised Welf ample supplies of money to
support his empty pretensions to Bavaria, but sought through him to open a
correspondence with the other pretender to that duchy, W elf's nephew; whose
cooperation could be expected only upon the plan of two rivals joining to
wrest from a third the prize, to be afterwards battled for between themselves.
Ghibeline writers accuse Eugenius III of concurrence in these designs of his
vassal-king, which, when they became apparent, he strongly condemned But proof
of such duplicity does not appear; nor without it should the pupil of St.
Bernard be suspected of conduct so repugnant to his principles.
The rebellion thus planned not having been
organized in time to profit by the absence of the Emperor, broke out soon after
his return. Welf and his unfailing ally, the Duke of Zäringen, again invaded
Bavaria; assisted by Hungarian troops, paid, in all likelihood, with Sicilian
gold, whom Geisa, notwithstanding his friendly professions to the Emperor, sent
to support his rebel; whilst Henry the Lion, whether in concert with his uncle
or not, armed in Saxony. It is to be observed that some uncertainty touching
the frontier of the Austrian march—Bavaria having once extended to the Raab if
not to the Theiss, and Hungary since to the Ens—kept up constant ill-blood
between Hungary and Bavaria. Thus aided, Welf was enabled to possess himself,
not indeed of Bavaria, which Henry would hardly have suffered him to seize, but
of some Hohenstaufen castles, and to carry the civil war, with its devastations
and misery, across the Rhine, and even into Lorrain. Tidings of these troubles
no sooner reached the Pope than, through the Abbot of Clairvaux, he transmitted
to the Imperial Crusader the strongest assurances that from him the rebels
neither had, nor should have, support or countenance; and that St. Bernard
firmly believed the assurances he conveyed, there can be no doubt. Whether
trusting them or not, Conrad diligently occupied himself with all necessary
measures for extinguishing the rebellion. The command of the army raised for
that purpose he entrusted to his son, and in February of the following year,
1150, King Henry completely routed the insurgents. The Duke of Swabia then
solicited and obtained permission to mediate a cessation of hostilities, so
painful to his feelings, between his paternal and maternal relations. He
prevailed upon Welf to abandon his groundless pretensions to Bavaria, in
consideration of being invested by the Emperor with several valuable fiefs;
upon Conrad to grant this compensation; and enjoyed the high gratification of
reconciling his two beloved uncles.
But only partial was this restoration of
peace; and still was Conrad obliged to defer both his coronation progress to
Rome, and the expedition against the King of Sicily, concerted with Manuel. If
the uncle had abandoned an utterly unfounded pretension, the nephew only the
more vehemently advanced his claim to Bavaria; a claim that was undeniable,
save as invalidated by his father's rebellion and subsequent contumacy, the
sentence of the Diet, and his own formal renunciation upon compromise. Henry
the Lion asserted that his patrimonial duchy, of which he had already assumed
the title, had been unjustly confiscated from his father; and he protested
against his own renunciation upon two grounds—the first, that it had been
surreptitiously extorted from a minor, incompetent thus to surrender his own
rights, much more those of his posterity; the second, that the surrender was
solely in favour of his mother, and, therefore, when she died, leaving no child
but himself, her duchy came to him as her sole heir. Conrad referred the
question to a Diet, as the only tribunal authorized to decide one of such
magnitude, and summoned a Diet to assemble for this express purpose at Ulm.
But the Duke of Saxony, notwithstanding the
general displeasure that Conrad’s transfer of Bavaria to Henry Jasomir had
excited, feared the indisposition of his brother princes to see any individual
of their body acquire so immense a preponderance as must result from the union
of two of the original duchies; and chose to rely rather upon his own arms
than their decision. He did not attend the Diet, but appeared in arms upon the
frontier of Bavaria and Swabia. Albert’s hopes revived upon the rebellion of
his rival, which superseded the reference to a Diet; and Conrad, at his
entreaty, invaded Saxony in concert with him, leaving the defence of Bavaria to
the Dukes of Bavaria and Swabia.
This invasion recalled the Lion to defend
the duchy of which he had possession, yet it should seem recalled him singly.
He is said to have left his army to take care of itself (of course appointing a
leader, but the accounts are little circumstantial and somewhat confused)
making his way in disguise into Saxony, there to raise another army to oppose
the invaders. But a heavy private misfortune that befel the Emperor interfered
with the prosecution of these operations, relieved the Duke from all immediate
apprehensions, and occasioned a further delay of the projected expedition to
Italy.
In the year 1151 Conrad lost his son Henry,
his already elected and crowned colleague and successor. It was not to indulge
his parental grief that be postponed his important avocations. The new
arrangements, requisite in a matter so important as the succession, were now in
his opinion his most urgent business, more urgent even than the repression of
Henry the Lion’s ambition; and necessarily to be completed before he should
either risk his own person in battle, or again quit Germany ; whether to
receive the Imperial crown in Rome, to arbitrate between the Pope and the
Romans, who were again calling upon him to undertake that office, or to
cooperate with Manuel. His only remaining son had barely completed his seventh
year; and under existing circumstances Conrad would not suffer paternal
affection to supersede the dictates of patriotic policy. He made no attempt to
substitute the boy Frederic for the promising young man he and the empire had
lost in King Henry; but recommended his nephew, Frederic Duke of Swabia, to the
princes as his successor, upon the several grounds of his being then in the
full vigour of manhood; distinguished alike for the highest intellectual
qualities, as for energy, valour, and personal prowess; and of his blood
relationship to the Welfs, which would tend to allay the chief feud that had
distracted Germany during his own reign. For his infant son he merely requested
that he might, when of man’s estate, be invested with the family duchy of
Swabia, and the Franconian patrimony of his grandmother, the Princess Agnes.
These preparatory arrangements were only in
progress; no Diet had as yet elected the subordinate colleague and future
successor to the Emperor—at a later period entitled King of the Romans, and
regularly so elected; nor is it certain even that any summonses for the purpose
had been issued. A Diet was indeed upon the point of assembling at Bamberg, not
a usual place for the sitting of Electoral Diets, and there was probably no
present intention of taking any step beyond consulting the Princes of the Empire
upon these plans, upon the chastisement of the contumacious Duke of Saxony, and
the coronation expedition, when Conrad was seized with a sudden malady, with
which the leechcraft of the age proved inadequate to grapple. Upon the 15th of
February, 1152, after committing the regalia to the hands of the Duke of Swabia,
Conrad expired, in the fifty-eighth year of his age. He was at the time
supposed to have been poisoned by his Italian physician, a pupil of the highly
reputed medical school of Salerno, at the instigation, according to some
writers, of his constant enemy Roger; according to others, of Eugenius III, who
was believed to dread his appearance in Italy, lest the repeated invitations of
the Romans might have so stimulated his ambition, or so biassed his judgment in
their favour, as to endanger the temporal sovereignty of the Popes. There is
not only no proof of this crime, but no adequate motive alleged, the Duke of
Saxony’s rebellion being certain to occupy the Emperor for some time at least
in Germany; and consequently no rational ground for suspicion, beyond Conrad’s
death being somewhat premature; but he, in answer to that, is said never to
have thoroughly recovered from the hardships and the sufferings, physical and mental,
undergone in Asia Minor. A modern writer has to contend with a strong desire to
omit, either as wearisome or as absurd, this ever recurring accusation of
poisoning, which would be ludicrous, were it not a revolting indication of the
state of moral feeling. As such, the conscientious historian has no choice but
to record it.
Conrad was a brave, upright, sensible, and
pious man, a well intentioned and energetic monarch; but the embarrassments
caused him by the enmity of the Welts, and the consequent exhaustion of his
resources, together with the consumption of money, time, and human life by his
crusade, not n little hampered and impaired the beneficial vigour of his
government. If his reign gave birth to no new encroachments, papal or
episcopal, upon the imperial authority, he was unable to recover any of the
rights and privileges ceded by Lothar, to correct any of the abuses that had
crept into the Church—and the extent of these may be inferred from the single
fact, that in 1145 the Chapter of Liege, freed from monastic restraint,
consisted, not of poor scholars, but of nine sons of kings, fourteen sons of
dukes, thirty sons of earls, and seven of barons and knights—. Or to reduce the
great vassals to reasonable subjection. To judge by an anecdote which a modern
Italian writer has extracted from an old chronicler, he was at least an admirer
of learning. The recent compatriot biographer of Italy’s great poet relates that
Conrad, being entangled by a professed dialectician in a net of logic, uttered
a regretful reflection upon the happiness of those who could devote their hours
to such studies.
To avoid interrupting the history of the
next reign with matter irrelevant thereto, the death of Conrad’s revered
contemporary, the Abbot of Clairvaux, which took place the following year 1153,
preceded by such characteristic incidents, relative to this extraordinary man,
as have not hitherto found a fitting place, may be here, though somewhat
prematurely, inserted. St. Bernard’s dread of the presumption of human reason,
rather than any doubt of its capacity to grapple with doctrinal questions, and
his consequent mistrust of every deviation, even from established forms of
speech upon religious topics, are strikingly exemplified in his intercourse
with Abelard. The Abbot selected from the works of that erudite, as astute,
dialectician, a number of propositions, which he denounced to a French Synod
as heretical. The Synod summoned the accused teacher, who was then .Abbot of
St. Gildas in Britanny (having resigned the Paraclete, as a nunnery, to Eloisa,
who is stated to have there held a school of theology, Greek and Hebrew), to
answer to the accusation, and Abelard, promptly obeying, prepared to defend
the assailed propositions, by proving them orthodox. But the Abbot of Clairvaux
positively refused to risk his own orthodoxy by listening to arguments that
might bewilder him, that he might be unable to refute whilst knowing them to be
heretical, and insisted upon their being simply submitted to the Pope. The most
remarkable part of the story perhaps, is that the arrogant, as able, Abelard,
agreed so to submit his opinions, and when the Pope pronounced them heterodox,
at once recanted them. St. Bernard, charmed by such humility united to such
abilities, became thenceforward one of his staunchest friends; the other being
Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, in whose abbey the accused had awaited the
papal decision, and after receiving it passed the remainder of his life. While
speaking of Abelard, it may be added that two letters, both addressed to
Eloisa, yet exist, which go far to prove his submission and recantation honest;
the one written in full confidence by himself, and containing his perfectly
orthodox profession of faith; the other from the pen of Peter the Venerable,
condoling with the Abbess of the Paraclete, upon the death of her friend, and
giving a very touching account of the perfect piety that gilded the latter
years, and the closing scene of his life.
When commanded by the Pope to put down
heresy, not by disputation, but by simply preaching to heretics, our Abbot’s
conduct was different. A monk, named Henry, whether French, Swiss or Italian,
seems doubtful, impelled either by strong doctrinal opinions, or by impatience
of the monotony of conventual duties, fled from his cloister; and leading an
apparently vagabond life, as a missionary, by the fame of his learning and his
ascetic habits, such as walking barefoot, eating the poorest food, and the
like, collected in the south of France a number of disciples, who called
themselves Henricians. What were the specific doctrines, beyond the rejection
of infant baptism, that he taught, is again not clear; Whilst endeavouring to
steer clear between contemporary Romanist bigotry that imputed every absurdity
and every vice to every heretic, and the Protestant bigotry of later times,
that regards every dissenter from the Church of Rome as a philosopher and a
saint, it must be constantly borne in mind, that all extant information
concerning early heretics is derived from their adversaries. Henry has been
called a Manichean, then a favourite designation for a heretic; and it is
known, that like Arnold of Brescia, he declaimed against the wealth of the
Church, the luxury of prelates, the dissolute lives of monks and nuns, and the
general unapostolic conduct of the clergy. But to oppose this, St. Bernard, the
known steady censor of all such offences, though addressing his censures only
to the offenders, not disturbing the minds of the laity with them, would
scarcely have been selected. Some dogmas contrary to those of the Church of
Rome he must have taught; and a suspicion that they might be licentious, arises
from a letter of the Abbot of Clairvaux, which declares the heresiarch’s life
to be so. In it he expressly states that Henry, after preaching all day,
usually passed the night either with courtesans or with the wives of some of
his flock. And even the admirers of Henry, who speak of him as rigid in his
life, and famed for sanctity as well as learning, are said to admit the truth
of this charge of libertinism.
Against, or rather to these Henricians,
Eugenius III ordered Abbot Bernard to preach; and he, in obedience to the
mandate, journeyed from his abbey to the county of Toulouse, where they chiefly
abounded. His success in recalling them to the bosom of the Church was great;
and is believed to have been chiefly due to his meekness, and to the evidence
borne by his personal appearance to his own abstinence from the luxurious
indulgences which his hearers so reprobated in the clergy, and which really
seem to have been the main cause of their dissent from the Romish Church. In
proof of this, it is related that, as he, one day at Toulouse, remounted his
palfrey, after preaching to a congregation of Henricians, one of the heretics
tauntingly cried, “Sir Abbot, your master did not ride so fat a horse!’’—“That
I know, friend,” Bernard quietly answered: “but it is the nature of beasts to
feed and grow fat. We shall be judged, not by our cattle but—ourselves.” As he
spoke he opened his garment, showing his emaciated, fleshless neck and breast.
The scoffer was silenced, and the greater part of the crowd converted.
But Abbot Bernard’s horror of heresy was
not confined to such as were the offspring of bold or of astute human reason.
His mysticism could not betray him into sanctioning or conniving at mystic
innovations. The Canons of Lyons having, in 1136, put forth the doctrine of the
Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, he, though professing especial
devotion to the Virgin, sharply rebuked them for advancing a dangerous novelty,
which must be offensive to the Blessed Virgin herself, who possessed more than
a sufficiency of certain merits.
Proceeding to the death-bed of the zealous
Abbot, we find it a scene of activity, for, lying upon it, he finished his treatise, De Considerations sui, addressed to Eugenius III. In this work he
expresses, almost as strongly as could Arnold of Brescia, or the monk Henry,
his disapprobation of the exercise of temporal power by ecclesiastics, even by
the Pope, and also of the actual pomp, state, troops, dress, &c. &c. of
the supreme pontiff, as unseemly in the successor of the fisherman, St. Peter.
To a work of a different kind he was called as he still lay on his dying-bed,
from which he rose to undertake it. The Archbishop of Treves requested him to
effect a reconciliation between the citizens of Metz and a neighbouring
nobleman, whose feud he himself, though both parties were of his flock, found
it impossible to appease. The Abbot, indefatigable in all good offices,
regardless of suffering and of debility, repaired to Metz, with considerable
difficulty, accomplished his mission of charity, and returned to Clairvaux to
die amongst his monks, of whom he is said to have had ultimately seven hundred
in his own abbey. He himself had founded seventy-two Cistercian monasteries in
different countries, whilst such was the influence of his reputation upon that
of his Order, that before his death the number of Cistercian cloisters is
estimated at five hundred. He was canonized within twenty years after his
death.
It were surely superfluous to add any
character of Abbot Bernard, or to vindicate him from the sneers of
philosophers, or even from the charge of ambition and of red-hot fury against
heretics. A mystic and fanatic he might be, but mysticism and fanaticism were
integral elements of the spirit of the age, and without them he could hardly
have influenced his contemporaries. He seems the very impersonation of the
purest religious feeling of the twelfth century.
With respect to the state of the known
world at Conrad’s death, a few words, after what has been already stated, will
suffice. Of the countries most connected with, and often dependent upon, the
Holy Roman Empire, Hungary, it has been seen, was then quietly governed by
Geisa, whilst in Poland the brother Dukes were still struggling for, and
successively obtaining, supremacy. In Denmark Eric had not, like Canute,
submitted to Lothar’s decision. He had continued the civil war; and both Niel
and Magnus having fallen in battle, had possessed himself of the crown, with as
little regard to his nephew Waldemar’s right, as Niel had shown to that of his
nephew and Eric’s brother, Canute. But Eric himself was now in the tomb, and his
son Swayn was struggling for the succession against Magnus’s son, Canute, both
being legitimate heirs of illegitimate kings; whilst Waldemar, in modern
acceptation from the first the only rightful heir, claiming nothing beyond his
father’s duchy, with which he was invested, zealously supported the son of his
father’s avenger against the son of his father’s murderer. To enter into these
broils farther than is necessary to explain the intervention of the German
sovereigns, were superfluous; but one Danish achievement of this epoch is
illustrative of the social condition of the times. Such were the evils
inflicted on the Danish shores by Slavonian piracy, that a citizen of Roeskilde
founded a Gilde, under the name of the Roeskilde Brotherhood, for
repressing it:—a proper instance of the Scandinavian sense of the word gilde.
So dangerous was the service esteemed to which this brotherhood devoted itself,
that they never embarked to prosecute their object without preparing themselves
by Confession, Absolution, and receiving the Sacrament. The rules of the gilde were the equal division of all booty, and the release of all Christian slaves
found in the hands of the pirates, if Danes, gratuitously; if strangers, upon
paying a moderate ransom. What pecuniary assistance they might require to equip
their vessels—they took nothing to sea with them but their arms—was repaid by a
proportionate share of the booty.
With regard to unconnected and clearly
independent countries, in the western peninsula, Countess Teresa, dethroned
and imprisoned by her son, was dead; that son, Alfonso Henriques, having
reconquered the greater part of Portugal from the Arabs, had received primarily
from his triumphant army, and afterwards from the first Portuguese Cortes,
celebrated as the Constituent Cortes of Lamego, the title of King.
Castile and Leon were again dissevered, Alfonso VII having divided them between
his two sons. Navarre in like manner was again dissevered from Aragon, with
which, on the other hand, the county of Barcelona, i. e. Catalonia, was
indissolubly united. And here occurred one of those instances of disinterested
virtue and genuine piety, whether perfectly judicious or not, with which the
inclination to refresh the mind of both writer and reader amidst so much
perfidy, intrigue, inordinate ambition, and wanton cruelty, is irresistible.
Happily it has not yet been reasoned away, though both overlooked and ridiculed
it has been. When the bellicose consort of Queen Urraca, Alfonso of Aragon and
Navarre, died without children, both those kingdoms were at a loss for a king.
He, his only brother, Ramiro, being a monk, had bequeathed both to the
Templars, but to this disposition neither would submit. Navarre proclaimed a
remote scion of her own original royal race King; as Aragon did Ramiro, imploring
the Pope to grant him a dispensation from his vows, that he might reign, marry,
and save the royal line from extinction. It was granted; the monk ascended the
throne, and married. Within the year his Queen bore him a daughter; when,
esteeming the object for which the dispensation had been granted attained, he
required the Cortes to acknowledge and swear allegiance to the infant
Petronilla as their Queen; he married her in her cradle to Raymond V, Earl of
Barcelona, committed the regency, till the baby Queen should be of age to
govern, to him, and returned to his cell. In Moslem Spain, the Almoravide
tyranny was at an end. A moslem sect, called the Almohades, or Al Mowahidin, had risen against it in Morocco; and this
division of the Almoravide forces had enabled the Spanish Arabs to throw off a
yoke long impatiently borne. The Almohades, not having as yet emerged from
Africa, Moslem Spain, temporarily emancipated, broke into almost as many small
states as it contained large towns; many of which, during this period of
Mohammedan weakness there, the Christian princes, especially Alfonso the
Battler and Alfonso Henriques, conquered.
The state of France was unchanged. The
dissensions of the King and Queen ran high, but had not yet severed Aquitaine
and Poitou from the crown. Elinor laughed at the monarch, who, in obedience to
priestly injunctions, had cut off the long flowing locks which, however unmanly
in modern eyes, had long been the mark of royal dignity, and still denoted high
birth and chivalry, scornfully complaining that she had married a monk in lieu
of a king. Lewis on his part doubted her fidelity, but too well knew the value
of her Aquitaine and Poitou principalities to repudiate their sovereign, at
least until she should have brought him a son to unite them indissolubly with
the crown of France.
In England, Stephen was now in tranquil
possession of the crown, upon the understanding that the Empress Maud’s son,
Henry Earl of Anjou, should succeed him; to which, upon the loss of his own
only son, he readily assented. Scotland, like Ireland, was scarcely known in
European politics.
Northern Scandinavia remained pretty much
in the condition already described; but an incident of its recent history may
be worth recording, as illustrative of manners. A Norwegian King, who died a.d.
1136, having left two sons, of the respective ages of five and three years, a
collateral heir claimed the kingdom; when the champions of the joint minor
kings deemed their heading their army so indispensable, that they carried the
babies to the post they should have occupied as men; where one of them was
crippled for life by the wounds he received in the arms of his warrior-nurse.
The state of the church in both Sweden and Norway, being reported as alike
disorderly and unsatisfactory, Eugenius III sent Cardinal Nicholas
Breakspeare, an Englishman, of whom more hereafter, to reform it. He
endeavoured to inforce in both kingdoms the celibacy of the clergy and the
payment of tithes; but was more successful in establishing a regular hierarchy
in Norway, an Archbishop of Drontheim, or Nidaros, with his suffragan bishops
in Iceland, the Faroe, the Shetland, and the Orkney islands.
In Russia the sovereignty had, long before
the middle of this century, made one step towards the regular hereditary
principle. The Grand Prince Vladimir, surnamed Monomach (probably after the
Byzantine Emperor, Constantine Monomachus), an able and ambitious monarch, had
achieved limitation to his own descendants, of the succession still by
eldership, not degree of relationship, to the dignity of grand-prince, thus
excluding his innumerable kin of vassal princes. About this time Kiew had ceded
to Vladimir the title of
grand-principality; but Moscow, though not yet elevated to supremacy, was no
longer unknown. The Grand-Prince George Vladimirowitz, Vladimir Monmach’s son,
passing through it whilst yet a village, was at once charmed with its
situation, and, offended by some deficiency in its Lord’s marks of reverence; whereupon
he put the disrespectful Lord to death, carried off the children of his victim,
the sons as prisoners, the daughter for the wife of his own eldest son; and
seizing the village, enlarged and raised it to the rank of a city, inviting, it
is said, the most civilized of the Slavonians to people it.
The Greek Empire, it has been seen, was
still, in an interval of tolerable prosperity, under the able, if not chivalrously
honourable, Manuel Comnenus. It was at that moment engaged in an
often-recurring war with Hungary for Servia, which resolutely asserted its
independence of both realms.
In Syria, intolerance of a woman’s reign
had, when Melisenda made an European kinsman, named Manasse, Constable, been
inflamed to the utmost. The disgraceful end of the siege of Damascus,
wheresoever the fault lay, had exasperated all discontents. Baldwin, who had
long been impatient of his subjection to his mother, was easily stimulated to
wrest the government from her by force of arms. He first compelled her to
divide the kingdom with him ; and presently, hungering now for the whole as
before for a part, forcibly reduced her to the single town of Neapolis. But if
he unfilially indulged his ambition, it was not in a mere spirit of boyish
vanity, or as the puppet of the courtiers and politicians, who had urged him
on. The Archbishop of Tyre asserts that the disappointments and mortifications
of his campaign with the Crusaders completely roused him from the vices and
follies of youth, to undertake, with a strong sense of their reality, the cares
of manhood and sovereignty. And although he still, more chivalrously than
regally, indulged in some idly marauding incursions upon Moslem lands, when no
longer irritated by Melisenda’s authority, he learned to value her wisdom, and seek
her advice.
Whilst this was passing in the kingdom of Jerusalem,
Noureddin was prosecuting the hostilities his father had begun against the
northern Syro-Frank States. Earl Joscelin, who had been spurred to active
exertion by the loss of Edessa, was taken prisoner, and never released. His
Countess prepared vigorously to defend the remnant of her children’s heritage,
but was utterly unable, singlehanded, to offer any resistance to the Moslem
arms. The pre-eminently chivalrous Prince Raymond fell in battle. The widowed
Princess of Antioch, Constance, was totally unfit to supply the place of her
lost consort ; but the Patriarch, who in this emergency seized the reins of
government, made every preparation for defending the capital, against which
Noureddin advanced. His measures and the natural strength of Antioch deterred
the Moslem conqueror from a siege, to which he as yet deemed himself hardly
equal. He passed under the walls, terrifying the Princess and the inhabitants
with the display of his forces, performed the ablutions prescribed by his
religion, in the sea, in token of having triumphantly reached its shore, and
retired to devastate the less defended parts of the two principalities.
Baldwin now came to the assistance of the
menaced ladies. But experience had taught him the value of his mother’s policy;
and, instead of rushing into war with the powerful Noureddin, he made overtures
to him on their behalf. The triumphant invader, wishing to increase his power
for the final struggle by subjugating the still independent Mohammedan
potentates within reach, prior to attacking the whole of the Christian States,
agreed to a truce, pledging himself during its continuance to abstain from any
inroad upon the remaining territories of Antioch and Edessa, provided the
Princess, her son, and the Countess, renounced all pretension to what he had
conquered. For Constance this was sufficient; but it was so clear that the
poor remainder of the county of Edessa could not repel invasion whenever the
war should be renewed, that Baldwin advised the Countess to close with the proposal
of the Emperor Manuel, who offered her a liberal pension for herself and her
children upon condition of her surrendering the remainder of the county to him.
She did so; and a Greek army, then in Cilicia, was sent to occupy and defend
it.
Baldwin had an ulterior object in this advice, which was the increase of the Syro-Frank population of his own more especial dominions. All Edessans of this description, the Countess and her family included, upon the transfer of the district to the Byzantine Empire, migrated southwards, and escorted by Baldwin and his troops reached Palestine in safety. Manuel was the least gainer by the transaction; for Noureddin, holding the truce to be void in respect to the county when the Countess with whom it was made ceased to be a party concerned, immediately attacked the territory she had resigned. Constantinopolitan troops fought well only under their Emperor’s own eye, and Manuel was not in Syria; the whole province was finally lost to the Christians within the year, increasing the force of their most formidable enemy. Another incident that about this time tended to weaken the Syro-Frank States was the murder of the Earl of Tripoli. Although his having been suspected of poisoning the Earl of Toulouse may show him not a very estimable character, his death was an evil; being imputed to the native Syrians, it exasperated all of European origin against them, besides leaving Tripoli to a minor. Baldwin immediately committed the regency to the young. Earl’s mother, Countess Hodierna, Melisenda’s youngest sister; and thus both Antioch and Tripoli were ruled by women and children, and the kingdom of Jerusalem, or rather the Syro-Frank States were, for the first time, seriously threatened. For the southern frontier no apprehensions were entertained; the Fatimid Caliphs of Egypt having already sunk deep into the degeneracy, the lethargy of voluptuous indolence, that seems to be the inevitable lot of every Oriental dynasty.
BOOK II.
FREDERIC I., SURNAMED BARBAROSSA.
CHAPTER I.
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