 21 Italy in the Later Middle Ages When the Company of Death repulsed the German army of Frederick Barbarossa on the field of Lugano, it raised a loft before the eyes of Europe, not only the banner of democracy but also of nationality. Others, as we have seen, followed these banners once displayed. The Swiss cantons shook off the Habsburg yoke. The Flemish towns defied their accounts in French overlords. The Hansa cities formed political as well as commercial leagues against Scandinavia. France, England and Spain emerged through war and anarchy as modern states conscious of a national destiny. The slow evolution of nations and classes is the history of the Later Middle Ages. But in Italy there is no steady progress to record. Rather, a retrogression that proves her early efforts to secure freedom were little understood even by those who made them. Frederick II had ruled Lombardy in the 13th century through tyrants, but long after the Hornstofen had disappeared and the quarrels of the Welsh and the Weiblegen had dwindled into a memory in Germany. The feuds of gulfs and gibbalines were still a monstrous reality in towns south of the Alps, where petty despots enslaved the communes and reduced the country to perpetual warfare. At length, from this welter of lost hopes and evil deeds, there emerged not Italy a nation but five Italian states of preeminence in the peninsula, namely Milan, Venice, Florence, Naples and Rome. Each was more jealous of the other than of foreign intervention, so that on the slightest pretext one would appeal to France to support her ambitions, another to Spain or to the empire, and yet a third to Hungary or the Greeks. If Italy, as a result, became at a later date the cockpit of Europe, where strangers fought their battles and settled their fortunes, it was largely her lack of any national foresight and medieval times that brought honor to this misery. The history of Milan, first as a commune fighting for her own liberty and destroying her neighbors, then as the battleground of a struggle between two of her chief families, and finally as the slave of the victor, is the tale of many a north Italian town, only that position and wealth gave to the fate of this famous city a more than local interest. The lords of Milan in the 14th and early 15th centuries were the disconti, typical tyrants of Italy of their day, quick with their swords but still more ready with poison or a dagger, profligate and luxurious, patrons of literature and art, bad enemies and still worse friends, false and cruel, subtle as the serpent they so fittingly bore as an emblem. No bond but fear compelled their subjects' loyalty, and deliberate cruelty to inspire fear they had made a part of their system. Bernabeu of disconti permitted no one but himself to enjoy the pleasures of the chase, but for this purpose he kept some five thousand savage hounds fed on flesh, and into their kennels his soldiers cast such hapless peasants as had accidentally killed their lords game, or dared to poach on his preserves. No sense of the sanctity of an envoy's person disturbed this grim disconti's sense of humor, when he demanded of messengers sent by the pope with unpleasant tidings whether they would rather drink or eat. As he put the question, he pointed towards the river, rushing in a torrent beneath the bridge on which he stood, and the envoy's, casting horrified eyes in that direction, replied, Sir, we will eat. Eat this, then, said Bernabeu sternly, handling them the papal letter with its leaden seals and thick parchment, and before they left his presence the whole had been consumed. Galeazo Visconti, an elder brother of Bernabeu, bore an even worse reputation for cruelty. Those he condemned to death had their suffering prolonged on a deliberate program during forty-one days, losing now an eye and now a footer a hand, were beaten, forced to swallow nauseous drinks, and then, when the agony could be prolonged no further, broken on the wheel. This scene of this torture was a scaffold set in the public gaze that Milan might read what was the anger of the Visconti and Trimble. The most famous of this infamous family was Gian Galeazo, the son of Galeazo, a youth so timid by nature that he would shake and turn white at the sudden closing of a door or at a noise in the street below. His uncle, Bernabeu, believed him half-witted and foolishly accepted an invitation to visit him after his father's death, intending to manage the young man's affairs for him and to keep him in terrified submission. The wily old man was to find himself outmatched, however, for Gian Galeazo came to their meeting place with an armed guard, arrested his uncle and imprisoned him in a castle where he died by slow poison. After this, Gian Galeazo arraigned alone in Milan, with no law save his ruthless ambition, and by this and his skill in creating political opportunities and making use of them at his neighbor's expense, he succeeded in stretching his tyranny over the plains of Lombardy and southward amongst the hill-cities of Duskany. Near at home he beat down resistance by force of arms, while farther away he secured by bribery or fraud the allegiance of cities too weak to stand alone, yet less afraid of distant Milan than of Venice or Florence that lay nearer to their walls. It was one of Gian Galeazo's aim to found a kingdom in North Italy, and he went far towards realizing his project, stretching his dominion at one time to Verona and Vicenza at the very gates of Venice, while in the south he absorbed as subject towns Pisa and Siena the two arch-enemies of Florence. This territory, acquired by war, bribery, murder, and fraud, he persuaded the emperor to recognize as a duchy hereditary in his family, and at once proceeded to form alliances with the royal houses of Europe. The marriage of his daughter Valentia, with the young and weak-minded Duke of Orleans, brother of the French king, though hardly an attractive union for the bride, proved fraught with importance for the whole of Italy, since at the very end of the 15th century Louis, Duke of Orleans, a grandson of Valentia Visconti, succeeded to the French crown as Louis XII and also laid claim to the duchy of Milan as a descendant of the Visconti. At first sight it seems strange that any race so cruel and unprincipled as the Visconti should continue to maintain their tyranny over men and women, naturally independent, like the inhabitants of North Italy. Certainly, if their rulers had been forced to rely on municipal levies, they would not have kept their power even for a generation. But unfortunately, the old plan of expecting every citizen of military age to appear at the sound of a bell in order to defend his town had practically disappeared. Instead, the professional soldier had taken the citizen's place. The type of man who, as long as he received high wages and frequent booty, did not care who was his master, nor to what ugly job of carnage or intimidation he was bidden to bring his sword. This system of hiring soldiers, condottieri, as they were called in Italy, had arisen partly from the laziness of the townsmen themselves who did not wish to leave their business in order to drill and fight, and were therefore quite willing to pay volunteers to serve instead of them. Partly, it was due to the reluctance of tyrants to arm and employ as soldiers the people over whom they ruled. From the point of view of the Visconti, for instance, it was much safer to enroll strangers who would not have any patriotic scruples in carrying out a massacre or any other orders equally harsh. For such ruffians, Italy herself supplied a wide recruiting ground, namely the numberless small towns, once independent but now swallowed up by bigger states, who treated the conquered as perpetual enemies to be bullied and suppressed, allowing them no share in the government nor voice in their future destiny. Wide experience has taught the world that such tyranny breeds merely hatred and disloyalty, and the continual local warfare from which medieval Italy suffered could be largely traced to the failure to recognize this political truth. With no legitimate outlet for their energies, the young men of the conquered towns found in the formation of a company of adventurers, or in the service of some prince, the only path to renown, possibly a way of revenge. To Italian Condotieri were added German soldiers whom emperors visiting Italy had brought in their train, and who afterwards remained behind, looking on the cities of Italy as a happy hunting ground for loot and adventure. Yet a third source of supply were free-booters from France, released by one of the truces of the Hundred Years' War, and hastily sent by those who had employed them to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Amongst those who came to Italy in the 14th century and built for himself a name of terror and renown was an English captain, Sir John Hawkwood, the son of an Essex tailor, knighted by Edward III for his prowess on the battlefields of France. Here is what a Florentine chronicler says of him. Quote, He endured under arms longer than anyone, for he endured sixty years, and he well knew how to manage that there should be little peace in Italy in his time. For man and communes in all cities live by peace, but these men live and increase by war, which is the undoing of cities, for they fight and become of none. In such men there is neither love nor faith." One tale of the day records how some Franciscans, meeting Sir John Hawkwood, exclaimed as was their custom, peace be with you. To their astonishment he answered, God take away your alms. When they asked him for the reason for wishing them so ill, he replied, You also wish that God might make me die of hunger. Know you not that I live on war and that peace would ruin me? I therefore return your greeting in like sort. Sir John Hawkwood spent most of his time in the service of Florence, and whatever his cruelty and greed he does not seem to have been as false as other captains of his time. Indeed, when he died the Florentines buried him in their cathedral and raised an effigy and grateful memory of his deeds on behalf of the city. Returning to the history of Milan and her condottieri, John Galasio, though timid and unwarlike himself, was a shrewd judge of character, and his captains, while they struck terror into his enemies, remained faithful to himself. When he died in 1402, however, many of them tried to establish independent states, and it was some years before his son, Filippo Maria, could master them and regain control over the greater part of the duchy. Even more cowardly than his father, Filippo Maria lived, like Louis XI of France, shut off from the sight of men. Cismondi, the historian, describes him as a strange, dingy creature with protruding eyeballs and furtive glance. He hated to hear the word death mention, and for fear of assassination would change his bedroom every night. When news was brought him of defeat, he would tremble in the expectation that his condottieri might desert him. When messengers arrived flush with victory, he was scarcely less aghast, believing that the successful general might become his rival. Such was the penalty paid by despots, save for those of iron nerve, in return for their luxury and power. The dread that the most servile of condottieri might be bribed into a relentless enemy, poison lurk in the seasoned dish or wine-cup, a dagger pierced the strongest mesh of steel tunic. So night and day was the great Visconti haunted by fear, while his hired armies forced Genoa to acknowledge his suzerainity, and plunged his duchy into rivalry with Venice along the line of the river Adigy. The history of Venice differs in many ways from that of other Italian states. Built on a network of islands that destined her geographically for a great sea power, she had looked from earliest times not to territorial aggrandizement, but to commercial expansion for the satisfaction of her ambitions. In this way, she had avoided the strife of feudal landowners, and even the gulf and gibbaline factions that had reduced her neighbors to slavery. Elsewhere in Italy, the names of cities and states are bound up with the histories of medieval families, Naples with the quarrels of Hornstaffin, Augevans, and Aragonese, Rome with the barons of the Campania, the Orsini and Colonna, Milan with the Visconti, and later with the Sforza, Florence with the Medici. But in Venice the state was everything, demanding of her sons and daughters, not the startling qualities and vices of the successful soldier of fortune, but obedience, self-effacement, and hard work. The doge, or duke, the chief magistrate of Venice, has been compared to a king, but he was, in reality, merely a president elected for life, and that by a system rendered as complicated as possible in order to prevent wire pulling. Once chosen and presented to the people with the old formula, this is your doge, and it please you, the new ruler of the city found himself hedged about by a hundred constitutional checks that compelled him to act only on the well-considered advice of his six ducal counselors, forbade him to raise any of his family to a public office, or to divest himself of a rank that he might with years find more burdensome than pleasant. He was also made aware that the respect with which his commands were received was paid not to himself but to his office, and through his office to Venice, a royal mistress before whom even a haughty aristocracy willingly bent the knee. In the early days, all important matters in Venice were decided by a general assembly of the people, but as the population grew this unwieldy body was replaced by a grand council of leading citizens. In the early 14th century another and still more important change was made, for the ranks of the Grand Council were closed and only members of those families who had been in the habit of attending its meetings were allowed to do so in the future. Thus a privileged aristocracy was created and the majority of Venetians excluded from any share in their government. But because this government aimed not at the advantage of any particular family but at the whole state, people forgave its despotic character. Even the famous Council of Ten that, like the Court of Star Chamber under the Tudors, had power to seize and examine citizens secretly in the interests of the state, was admired by the Venetians over whom it exerted its sway because of its reputation for even-handed justice that drew no distinctions between the son of a doge, a merchant, or a beggar. The Venetian Republic, says a modern writer on medieval times, was the one stable element in all North Italy, and this condition of political calm was the wonder and admiration of contemporaries. Sometimes today it seems difficult to admire medieval Venice because of her selfishness and frank commercialism. She had no sense of patriotism either towards Italy or Christendom, witnessed the Fourth Crusade, where nothing but her insistent desire to protect her trading position in the East had influenced her diplomacy. This accusation of selfishness is true, but we must remember that the word patriotism has a much wider scope in modern times than was possible to the limited outlook of the Middle Ages. Venice might be unmoved by the words Italy or Christendom, but the whole of her life and ideals were centered in the word Venice. Her sailors and merchants, who laid the foundations of her greatness, were no hired mercenaries but citizens willing to lay down their lives for the Republic, who was their mother and their queen. Thus, narrowing the term patriotism, we see that of all the Italian powers, Venice alone understood what the word meant, in that her sons and daughters were willing to sacrifice as a matter of course, not merely life, but family ambitions, class, and even individuality to the interests of their state. The ambitions of Venice were bound up with the shipping and commerce that had gained for her the carrying trade of the world. To take, for example, the wool manufacturer of such vital interest to English and Flemings, we find that at one time this depended largely on Venetian merchants, who would carry sugar and spices to England from the East, replace their cargo with wool, unload this in turn in the harbors of Flanders, and then, laden with bales of manufactured cloth, return to dispose of them in Italian markets. Besides the carrying trade, which depended on her neighbor's industry, Venice had her own manufacturers, such as silk and glass. But in either case, both her sailors and workmen found one thing absolutely vital to their interests, namely the command of the Adriatic. Like the British Isles of today, Venice could not feed her thriving population from home produce, and yet, with enemies or pirates hiding along the Dalmatian coast, safety for her richly laden vessels passing to and fro could not be guaranteed. These are some of the reasons why, from earliest times, the Republic had embarked on an aggressive maritime policy that brought her into clash with other Mediterranean ports, and especially with Genoa, her rival in eastern waters. When, at the end of the Fourth Crusade, Venice forced Constantinople to accept a Latin dynasty, she secured for herself, for the time being, a special privilege in that world market. Genoa, who adopted the cause of the exiled Greeks, achieved a signal triumph in her turn when in 1261, with her assistance, Michael Paleologus, a Greek general, restored the Byzantine Empire amid public rejoicings. Open warfare was now almost continuous between the Republics. There was street fighting in Constantinople and in the ports of Palestine, sea battles off the Italian and Greek coasts, encounters in which varying fortunes gave at first the mastery of the Mediterranean to neither Venice nor Genoa, but which disastrously weakened the whole resistance of Christendom to the Mohammedans. At length, in 1380, a decisive battle was fought off Cioca, one of the cities of the Venetian Lagoons, wither the Genoese fleet, triumphant on the open seas, had taken up its quarters, determined to blockade the enemy and to surrender. Let us man every vessel in Venice and go and fight the flow, was the general cry. And a popular leader, Pisani, imprisoned on account of his share in a recent naval disaster, was released on the public demand and made captain of the enterprise. Long live Pisani, the citizens shouted in their joy. But their hero, true to the spirit of Venice, answered them. Venetians cry only, long live Saint Mark. With a few ships in manned his disposal, Pisani recognized that it was out of the question to lead a successful attack. But he knew that if he could defer the issue, there was a Venetian fleet in the eastern Mediterranean, which, learning his straits, would return with all possible speed to his aid. He therefore determined to force the enemy to remain where they were without offering open battle. In this maneuver he carried out with great boldness and skill, sinking heavy vessels loaded with stones in the channels that led to Cioca, while placing his own fleet across the main entrance to prevent Genoese reinforcements. The blockaders were now blockaded, and through long winter days and nights the rivals, worn out by their bitter vigil, starving and short of ammunition, watched one another and searched the horizon anxiously. At length a shout arose, for distant sails had been sighted. Then, as the Venetian flag floated proudly into view, the shout of Pisani and his men became a song of triumph, the Republic was saved. Venice was not only saved from ruin, her future as Queen of the Adriatic was assured, for the Genoese admiral was compelled to surrender and his Republic to acknowledge her rival supremacy of the seas. The sea policy of Venice was the inevitable result of her geographical position, but as the centuries passed she developed a much more debatable land policy. Many medieval Venetians declared that since land was the source of all political trouble, therefore Venice should only maintain enough command over the immediate mainland to secure the city from a surprise attack. Others replied that such an argument was dictated by narrow-minded prejudice, a point of view suitable to the days when Lombardy had been divided amongst a number of weak city-states, but impracticable with powerful tyrants such as the disconti, masters of North Italy. Unless Venice could secure the territories lying at the foot of the Alps, and also a wide stretch of eastern Lombardy, she would find that she had no command over the passes in the mountains by means of which she carried on her commerce with Germany and Austria. The advocates of a land empire policy received confirmation of their warnings when, in the early part of the 14th century, Mastino de la Scala, Lord of Essenza, Padua, and Treviso attempted to levy taxes on Venetian goods passing through his territories. The Republic, roused by what she considered an insult to her commercial supremacy, promptly formed a league with Milan and Florence against Mastino and obtained Treviso and other towns as a result of a victorious war. This campaign might, of course, be called merely a part of Venice's commercial policy, defense, not aggression. But later, in 1423, the Florentines persuaded the Republic to join with them in a war against the disconti, declaring that they were weary of struggling alone against such tyrants, and that if Venice did not help them, they would be compelled to make Filippo Maria King of North Italy. The result of the war that followed was a treaty securing Venice a temporary increase of power on the mainland, and may be taken as the first decisive step in her deliberate scheme of building up a land empire in Italy. Machiavelli, a student of politics in the 16th century, who wrote a handbook of advice for rulers called the Prince, as well as the history of Florence, his native city, declares that the decline of the Venetians dated from the time when they became ambitious of conquest by land, and of adopting the manners and customs of the other states of Italy. This may be true, but it is doubtful whether the great Republics could have remained in glorious isolation with the disconti knocking at her gates. From Venice we must turn to Florence, which by the 15th century emerged from petty rivalries as the first city in Tuscany. Like Milan, Florence fell a prey to gulfs and gibberleads, but these feuds, instead of becoming a family rivalry between would-be despots, developed into a bitter class war. On the fall of Frederick II, the gulfs, who in Florence at this date may be taken as representing the populo grasso, or rich merchants, as opposed to the groundy, or nobles, succeeded in driving the majority of their enemies out of the city. They then remodeled the constitution in their own favor. The chief power in the city was now the signary, composed of the gunfulionaire of justice and a number of priors, representatives of the arti, or guilds of lawyers, physicians, clothiers, and the like, to name but a few. No aristocrat might stand for any public office unless he became a member of one of the guilds, and in order to ensure that he did not merely write down his name on their registers, it was later enacted that every candidate for office must show proof that he really worked at the trade of the guild to which he claimed to belong. Other and sterner measures of proscription followed with successive generations. The noble who injured a citizen of lesser rank, whether on purpose or by accident, was liable to have his house leveled with the dust. The towers from which in the old days his ancestors had poured boiling oil or stones upon the rivals were reduced by law to a height that could be easily scaled. In the case of a riot, no aristocrat, however innocent his intentions, might have access to the streets. The groundy was, in fact, both in regard to politics and justice placed at such an obvious disadvantage that to a noble and ambitious enemy was a favorite Florentine method of rendering him harmless. The gulf triumph of the 13th century did not, in spite of its completeness, bring peace to Florence. New parties sprang up, and the government, in its efforts to keep clear of class or family influence, introduced so many complicated checks that great injury was done to individual action and all hope of a steady policy removed. Members of the signatory, for instance, served only for two months at a time. The twelve buon amini, or good men, elected to give them advice, only for six. What was most in contrast to the ideal of the right man for the right job was a practice of first making a list of all citizens considered suitable to hold office, then putting the names in a bag and afterwards picking them out haphazard as vacancies occurred. Even this precaution against favoritism, and one is inclined to add also against efficiency, was checked by another law, the summoning of a parliamento in cases of emergency. This parliamento was an informal gathering of the people collected by ringing of a bell in the big square, where it was then asked to decide whether a special committee should be appointed with free power to alter the existing constitution. Politicians argued that here in the last resort was a direct appeal to the people, but in reality, by placing armed men at the entrances to the square, a docile crowd could be maneuvered at the mercy of any mob orator set up by those behind the scenes. Power remained in Florence in the hands of the prosperous burgers and merchants, and these in time developed their own feuds under the names of whites and blacks adopted by the partisans in a family quarrel. The greatest of Italian poets, Dante Alegere, was a white, and was exiled from his city in 1302 owing to the triumph of his rivals. When pardon was suggested on the payment of a large sum of money, Dante, who had tried to serve his city faithfully, refused to comply, feeling that this would be an open acknowledgement of his guilt. If another way can be found, which shall not taint Dante's fame and honor, he wrote proudly, that way I will accept, and with no reluctant steps. But if Florence is not to be entered by any such way, never will I enter Florence. Dante's middle outlook was typical of medieval times in its stern prejudices and hatreds, but it was also clearer and nobler in its scope. An enthusiastic gibbaline in politics, he believed that it was the first duty of Holy Roman emperors to exert their authority over Italy. But this vision was not narrowed, as with many Italians, into the mere hope of restoration to home and power, with a sequel of revenge on private enemies. Dearer to Dante than any personal ambition was the desire for the salvation of both church and state from tyranny and corruption. In this, he believed, could only be achieved by bestowing supreme power on a world emperor. One attempt at reform had been made in 1294 when the conclave of cardinals, suddenly stung with a contrast between the character of the Catholic Church and its professions, chose as their vicar a hermit noted for his privations in holy life. Celestine V, as he was afterwards called, was a small man, pale and feeble with tousled hair and garments of sackcloth. When a deputation of splendidly dressed cardinals came to find him, he fled in terror, and it was almost by force that he was at last persuaded to go with him and put on the pontifical robes. The men and women who longed for reform now waited eagerly for this new pope's mandates. But their expectations were doomed to failure. Celestine V had neither the originality nor the strength of will to withstand his change of fortunes. Terrified by his surroundings, he became an easy prey to those who were unscrupulous and ambitious, giving away benefits sometimes twice over because he dared not refuse them to importunate courtiers, and creating new cardinals almost as fast as he was asked to do so. At last he was allowed to abdicate and hurried back to his cell, but only to be seized by a successor, the fierce Boniface VIII, and shut up in a castle where he died. Dante hated Boniface as a ruler who debased his spiritual opportunities in order to obtain material rewards, but he had hardly less scorn for Celestine V, who was given power to reform the Church of Christ and made the great refusal. Reform in the Florentine's eyes could not be looked for from Rome, but when Emperor Henry VII crossed the Alps, his hopes rose high that here at last was the savior of Italy, and it is probable that at this time the poet wrote his political treaties called the De Monarchia embodying his views. He himself went out to meet his champion. But Henry was not destined to be a second Charlemagne or Otto the Great, and his death closed all expectations built on his chivalrous character and ideals. Dante's greatest work is his long poem The Divina Comedia, divided into three parts, the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradisio. It tells how, on Good Friday of the year of Jubilee 1300, the Florentine, meeting with the spirit of Virgil whom he had chosen as his master, was led by him through the realms of everlasting punishment and of penance, and from there was born by another guide, Beatrice, the idealized vision of a woman he had loved on earth, up through the nine heavens to the very throne of God. As a summary of medieval theories as to the life eternal, and also as the reflection of a 14th century mind on politics of the day, the Divine Comedy is indeed an historical treasury as well as a masterpiece of Italian literature. It is, however, a great deal more, the revelation of the development of a human soul. Dante's journey is told with a mastery of atmosphere in detail that holds our imaginations today with a sense of reality. It was obviously still more real to himself and expresses the agonized endeavor of a soul alive to the corruption and nerve weariness of the world around him to find the way of salvation, a pilgrimage crowned at last by the realization of Savita's day so supreme in its beauty and peace as to surpass the prophecies of St. Augustine. Quote, Now glory to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, rang aloud throughout all paradise, that with the song my spirit reeled so passing sweet the strain, and what I saw was equal ecstasy, one universal smile at scene of all things, joy past compare, gladness unutterable, imperishable life of peace and love, exhaustless riches, and unmasured bliss, end quote. Dante himself did not live to fulfill his earthly dream of returning to Florence, but died at Ravenna in 1321. On his tomb is an inscription in Latin containing the words Whom Florence bore, the mother that did little of him, while his portrait has the proud motto so typical of his whole life, I yield not to misfortune. In later centuries Florence recalled with shame her repudiation of this greatest of her sons, but while I lived and for some years after his death political prejudices blinded her eyes. In the Emperor Henry VII, to whom Dante referred to as king of the earth and servant of God, Florence saw an enemy so hateful that she was willing to forego her boasted democracy and to accept as master any prince powerful enough to oppose him. Thus she granted the signoria or overlordship of the city for five years to King Robert of Naples, the head of the gulf party in Italy during the early years of the 14th century. King Robert of Naples was a grandson of Charles, Count of Anjou, brother of St. Louis, and true to the tradition of his house, stood as a champion of the popes against imperial claims over Italy. Outwardly he was by far the most powerful of the Italian princes of his day, but in reality he sat uneasily upon his throne. The Neapolitans had not learned with time to love their Angevin rulers, but even after the death of Conradin remembered the Hohenstaufen and envied Sicily that dared to throw off the French yoke and give herself to a Spanish dynasty. It is difficult to provide a short and at the same time connected account of the history of Naples from the death of King Robert in 1343 until 1435 when it was conquered by the house of Aragon. For nearly a century there is a dismal record of murders and plots with scarcely an illuminating glimpse of patriotism or of any heroic figure. It is like a dance of death with ever-changing partners, and nothing achieves save crimes and revolutions. King Robert's successor was a granddaughter, Joanna I, a political personage from her cradle, and married at the age of five to a boy cousin two years her senior, Andrew of Hungary, brother of Louis the Great. We cannot tell if, left to themselves, this young couple, each partner so passionate and self-willed, could have learned to work together in double harness. What is certain is that no one in that corrupt court gave them the chance. One party of intrigers continually whispering in Joanna's ear that as queen it was beneath her dignity to accept any interference from her husband. While her rivals reminded the young Prince Andrew that he was descended from King Robert's elder brother and therefore had as great a right to the throne as his wife, frequent quarrels as to whose will should prevail shook the council chamber and then at last came tragedy. In 1345 Joanna and Andrew then respectively 18 and 20 set out together into the country on an apparently amicable hunting expedition. As they slept one night in the guest room of a convent, the Prince heard himself called by voices in the next room. Suspecting no harm he rose and went to see which of his friends had summoned him, only to find himself attacked by a group of armed men. He turned to re-enter the bedroom, but the door was locked behind him. With the odds now wholly against him, Andrew fought bravely for his life, but at length two of his assassins succeeded in throwing a rope around his neck and with this they strangled him and hung his body from the balcony outside. Attendants came at last and, forcing the door, told Joanna of the murder on which she declared that she had been so soundly asleep that she had heard nothing, though she was never able to explain satisfactorily how, in that case, the door of her bedroom had become locked behind the young king. Naturally the greater part of Europe believed that she was guilty of connivance in the crime and King Louis of Hungary brought an army to Italy to avenge his brother's death. He succeeded in driving Joanna from Naples, which he claimed is his rightful inheritance, but he was not sufficiently supported to make a permanent conquest, and in the end he was forced to hurry away to Hungary where his throne was threatened, leaving the question of his sister-in-law's guilt to be decided by the Pope. The Pope at this time looked to the Angevan rulers of Naples as his chief supporters, and at once proclaimed Joanna innocent. It is worthy of note that three princes were found brave enough to become her husband in turn, but though four times married, Joanna had but one son who died as a boy. At first she was quite willing to accept, as her heir, a cousin, Charles of Durazzo, who was married to her niece, but soon she had quarreled violently with him and offered the throne instead to a member of the French royal house, Louis du Coventry. This is a very bewildering moment for students of history, because it introduces into Italian politics a second Angevan dynasty only distantly connected with the first, yet both laying claim to Naples and waging war against one another as if each belonged to a different race. Joanna, in the end, was punished for her capriciousness, for in the course of the Civil War she had introduced she fell into the hands of Charles of Durazzo, who, indignant at his repudiation, shut her up in a castle where she died. One report says that she was smothered with a featherbed, another that she was strangled with a silken cord, perhaps in memory of Prince Andrew's murder. After this act of retribution, Charles of Durazzo maintained his power in Naples for four years, though he was forced to surrender the county of Provence to a Zanzibin rival. Not content with his Italian kingdom, he set off with an army to Hungary as soon as he heard of the death of Louis the Great, hoping to enforce his claims on that warrior's lands. Instead, he was assassinated and succeeded in Naples by his son, Ladislas, a youth of fifteen. Ladislas proved a born soldier of unflagging energy and purpose, so that he not only conquered his unruly baronage, but made himself master of southern Italy, including Rome, from which with usual Angevin hostility he drove the pope. Here was a chance for bringing about the union of Italy under one ruler, and Ladislas certainly aimed at such an achievement. But apart from his military genius he was a typical despot of his day, cruel and scrupulous and pleasure-seeking as the Bisconti, and when he died still a young man, in 1414, few mourned his passing. His sister, Joana II, who succeeded him, lacked his strength while exhibiting many of his vices. Like Joana I, she was false and fickle. Like Joana I, she had no direct errors, so that the original house of Angevin and Naples came to an end when she died. Many negotiations as to her successor took place during the latter years of her reign, and for some time it seemed as if the old queen would be content to accept Louis III of Anjou, at this time the representative of the second Angevin house. But in a moment of caprice and anger she suddenly bestowed her favor instead on Alfonso V of Aragon in Sicily, and adopted him as her heir. Of course, being Joana she again changed her mind, but though Alfonso pretended to accept his repudiation, the hard-headed Spaniard was not to be turned so easily from an acquisition that would forward Aragonese ambitions in the Mediterranean. Directly Joana II died, Alfonso appeared off Naples with a fleet, and though he was taken prisoner in battle and sent as a prisoner to Filippo Maria Visconti at Milan, he acted with such diplomacy that he persuaded that despot, hitherto an ally of the Anjavans, that it was much safer for Milan to have a Spanish rather than the French house raiding in Naples. This was the beginning of a firm alliance between Milan and Naples, for Alfonso, released from his captivity, succeeded in establishing himself in the kingdom, where, withdrawing his court from Aragon, he founded a new capital that became the center for learned and cultured Italians as of old in the days of Frederick II. We have dealt now with four of the five principal Italian states during the later Middle Ages. In Rome, to pick up the political threads, we must go back to the effects of the removal of the papal court to Avion in 1308. From the point of view of the popes themselves, many of them Frenchmen by birth, there were considerable advantages to be gained by this change, not only safety from the invasions of holy Roman emperors aspiring to rule Italy, but also from the turbulence of Roman citizens and barons of the Campania. Avion was near enough to France to claim her king's protection, but far enough outside her boundaries to evade obedience to her laws. It stood in the county of Provence, part of the French estates of the Angevin House of Naples, but during her exile, Joanna I, penniless and in need of papal support, was induced to sell the city, and it remained an independent possession of the Holy See until the 18th century. From the immediate advantages caused by the Babylonian captivity, as these years of papal residence in Avion were called, we turned to the ultimate disadvantages, and these were serious. Inevitably, there was a lowering of papal prestige in the eyes of Europe. In Rome, that since classic times had been the recognized capital of the western world, the pope had seemed indeed a worldwide potentate, on whom the mantle both of Saint Peter and of the Caesars might well have fallen. Transferred to a city of Provence, he shrank almost to the measure of a petty sovereign. During the Hundred Years' War, for instance, there was widespread grumbling in England at the obedience owed to Avion. The popes, ran popular complaint, were more than half French in political outlook and sympathy, so that an Englishman who wished for a successful decision to his suit in a papal law court must pay double the sums proffered by men of any other race in order to obtain justice. What was more, he knew that any money he sent to the papal treasury helped to provide the sinews of war for his most hated enemies. The papacy had been disliked across the Channel in the days of Innocent Four, when England was taxed to pay for wars against the Hornstofen. Now, more than a century later, grumbling had begun to crystallize in the dangerous shape of a resistance not merely to papal supremacy, but to papal doctrine on which that supremacy was based. Thus Wycliffe, the first great English heretic who began to proclaim his views during the later years of Edward III's reign, was popularly regarded as a patriot, and his sermons denouncing Catholic doctrine widely read and discussed. In the thirteenth century, it had been possible to suppress heresy and languedoc. But in the fourteenth century, there were no longer popes like Innocent Three, you could persuade men to fight battles of Avion, and so the practice of criticism and independent thought grew. And by the fifteenth century, many of the doctrines taught by Wycliffe had spread across Europe and found a home in Bohemia. With the history of the Bohemian heresy, we shall deal later, but having treated its development as partly arising from the change in papal fortunes, we must notice the effect of the Babylonian captivity on Rome herself, and this indeed was disastrous. The absence of the Pope, says Gregorovius, a modern German historian, left the nobility more unbridled than ever. These hereditary houses now regarded themselves as masters of Rome left without her master. Their mercenaries encamped on every road. Travelers and pilgrims were robbed. Places of worship remained empty. The entire circumstances of the city were reduced to a meaner level. No prince, noblemen, or envoy of a foreign power any longer made his appearance. Vickers replaced the cardinals absent from their titular churches, while the Pope himself was represented in the Vatican as by a shadow by some bishop of the neighborhood, Nipi, Viterbo, or Orvieto. The wealth and pomp that had made the papal court a source of revenue to the Romans were transferred to Provence. The Orsini and Colonna battled in the streets with no high pontiff to hold them in check. Only his agents remained, who were there mainly to collect his rents and revenues, so that the city seemed once again threatened with political extinction as when Constantine had removed his capital to the Bosporus. One short period of glory there was in seventy years of gloom. The realized vision of a Roman, Cola de Rienzi, a youth of the people who, steeped in the writings of classical times, hoped to bring back to the city the freedom and greatness of republican days. From contemporary accounts, Rienzi had a wonderful personality, striking looks, and an eloquence that rarely failed to move those who hurt him. At Avion, as a Roman envoy, he gained papal consent to some measures earnestly desired at Rome, and this success won him a large and enthusiastic following amongst the citizens, who applauded all that he said and offered to uphold his ambitions with their swords. The first step to the greatness of Rome was obviously to restore order to her streets, and Rienzi therefore determined to overthrow the nobles, who with their retainers were always brawling, and above all a proud family of Colonna, one of whom without any provocation had killed his younger brother in a fit of rage. The revolution took place in May 1347 when, with a papal vicar standing at his side, in banners representing liberty, justice, and peace floating above his head, Rienzi proclaimed a new constitution to the populace and invested himself as chief magistrate with a title of Tribune, illustrious redeemer of the Holy Roman Republic. At first there was laughter amongst the Roman nobles when they heard of this proclamation. If the fool provokes me further, exclaimed Stephen Colonna, the head of that powerful clan, I will throw him from the capital. But his contempt was turned to dismay when he heard that a citizen army was guarding the bridges and confining the aristocratic families to their houses. In the end Stephen fled to his country estates while the younger members of his household came to terms with the Tribune and swore allegiance to the new republic. Rienzi was now triumphant and his letters to all the rulers of Europe announced that Rome had found peace and law while he exhorted the other cities of Italy to throw off the yoke of tyrants and join a national brotherhood. It would seem that Rienzi, alone of his contemporaries, saw a vision of a united Italy. But, unfortunately, the common sense and balance that are necessary to secure the practical realization of a visionary's dreams were lacking. The Tribune was undoubtedly great, but not great enough to stand success. The child of peasants, he began to boast that he was really a son of the emperor Henry VII and the pageantry that he had first employed to dazzle the Romans grew more and more elaborate as he himself became ensnared by a false sense of his own dignity. Clad in a toga of white silk edged with a golden fringe, he would ride through the streets on a white horse amid a cavalcade of horsemen splendidly equipped. In order to celebrate his accession to power, he instituted a festival where amid scenes of lavish pomp he was knighted in the latter end with a golden girdle and spurs and after bathing in the porphyry font in which tradition declared that Constantine had been cleansed from leprosy. The people, as is the way with crowds, clapped their hands and shouted while a trumpet's blue, and they scrambled for the gold Rienzi's servants through broadcast. But long afterwards, when they had forgotten the even-handed justice their Tribune had secured them, they remembered his foolish extravagance and display and resented the taxes that he found it necessary to impose in order to maintain his government and state. The history of Rienzi's later years is a tale of brilliant opportunities created in the first place by his genius and then lost by his timidity or lack of balance. On one occasion, when he learned that the very nobles who had sworn on oath to uphold his constitution were plotting its overthrow, he invited the leaders of the conspiracy to a banquet, arrested them, and sent them under guard to prison. The next morning the prison bell tolled and the nobles within were let out, apparently to the death their treachery had richly deserved. At the last moment, however, when each had given up hope, the Tribune came before the scaffold and after a sermon on the forgiveness of sins ordered those who were condemned to be set free. If he had wished to win their allegiance by this act of clemency, Rienzi had ill-judged his enemies. They had disliked him before as a peasant upstart. Now they hated him far more bitterly as a man who had been able to humble them in the public gaze, believing, whether rightly or wrongly, that it was not forgiveness but fear of the powerful families to which they belonged that had finally moved him to mercy. From this moment, the Orsini, the Kelowna, and their friends had but one object in life to pull the Tribune from his throne. By bribery and the spreading of false rumors, they set themselves to undermine his influence, telling tales everywhere of his extravagance and luxury as contrasted with the heavy taxes. Until it last, in 1354, a tumult broke out in the city and a mob collected that stormed the palace where Rienzi lodged, shouting, death to the traitor. As the Tribune attempted to escape, he was seen against the flames of his burning walls and cut down. With the fall of Rienzi died the idea of a restored and reformed Italy through the medium of the Holy Roman Republic, just as Dante's hope of a new and more perfect Roman Empire had been shattered by the death of Henry VII. Was there then no hope for Italy and medieval minds? The next answer, that there was hope, indeed came from Siena, one of the hill towns not far south of Florence. And its author was a peasant girl, Catherine Menincasa, who, like Jeanne d'Art, looking round upon the misery of her country, believed that she was called by God to show her fellow countrymen the way of salvation. St. Catherine, for she was afterwards canonized, was one of the twenty-five children of a Sienese dire, who was at first very angry that his daughter refused to marry and instead joined the order of Dominican tertiaries, that is, of women who, still remaining in their own homes, bound themselves by vows to obey a religious rule. In time not only the dire, but all Siena came to realize that Catherine possessed a mind and a spirit far above ordinary standards, so that, while in her simplicity she would accept the meanest household tasks, she had yet so great an understanding of the larger issues of life that she could read the cause of each man or woman's trouble who came to her and suggest the remedy they needed to give them fresh courage or hope. During an outbreak of plague in Siena, it was Catherine, who, undismayed and tireless, went everywhere amongst the sick and dying, infusing new heart into the weary doctors and energy into patients succumbing helplessly to the disease. When one of the wild young nobles of the town was condemned to death, according to the harsh law of the day, for having dared to criticize his government, Catherine visited him in prison. She found him raging up and down his cell like some trapped wild animal, refusing all comfort. But her presence and sympathy brought him so great a sense of peace, and even of thanksgiving, that he went to the scaffold at last joyfully, we are told, calling it the holy place of justice. Here, not shrinking from the scene of death itself, Catherine awaited him, kneeling before the block, and received his head in her lap when it was severed from his body. When he was at rest, she wrote afterwards, showing what a strain had been. My soul also rested in peace and quiet. St. Catherine was not alarmed when ambassadors from other cities, and even messengers from the Pope at Avion, came to ask her advice on thorny problems. She believed that she was a messenger of God, servant and slave of the servants of Jesus Christ, as she styled herself in her letters, and that God intended the regeneration of Italy to be brought about neither by emperor nor by a Holy Roman Republic, but by the Pope himself. No longer must he live at Avion, but return to Rome, and once established there, begin the work of reform so sorely needed both by church and state. Then would follow a call to the world that, recognizing by his just and generous acts that he was indeed the father of Christendom, would joyfully come to offer its allegiance. This eye-ideal touched the hearts and imaginations of even the least spiritual of Catherine's contemporaries. One of her letters was addressed to that firebrand, Sir John Hawkwood, whom she besought to turn his sword away from Italy against the Turks, and it is said that on reading it he took an oath that if other captains would go on a crusade, he would do so also. St. Catherine herself went to Avion and saw Pope Gregory XI, the timid man who loved luxury and peace of mind, fearing greatly the turbulence of Rome. At this time all the barons of the Campana and most of the cities on the Papal Estates were up in arms, and Gregory had been warned that unless he went in person to pacify the combatants, he was likely to lose all his temporal possessions. Catherine, when consulted, told him sternly that he should certainly return to Italy, but not for this reason. Open the eyes of your intelligence, he said, and look steadily at this matter. You will then see, Holy Father, that it is more needful for you to win back souls than to reconquer your earthly possessions. In January 1377, St. Catherine gained her most signal triumph for Gregory XI at her persuasion, appeared in Rome and took up his quarters there, so bringing to an end the Babylonian captivity. Not long afterwards he died, and the Romans who had rejoiced at his coming were overwhelmed with fear that his successor might be a Frenchman and returned to Avion. Give us a Roman, they howled, surging around the palace where the College of Cardinals, or Consistory as it was called, was holding the election, and the Cardinals, believing that they would be torn in pieces unless they at least chose an Italian, hastily elected a Neapolitan, the Archbishop of Berry, who took the name of Urban VI. It was an unfortunate choice. Urban honestly wished to reform the church, but if Christian charity, without which good deeds are of no avail, he possessed nothing. Arrogant, passionate, and fierce in his frequent hatreds, blind to either tact or moderation, he tried to force the Cardinals by threats and insults into surrendering their riches and pomp. I tell you in truth, exclaimed one of them, when he had listened to the Pope's first fiery denunciations. You have not treated the Cardinals today with the respect they received from your predecessors. If you diminish our honor, we shall diminish yours. Rome was soon aflame with the plots of the rebellious College, whose members, finally withdrew from the city, declared that they had been intimidated in their choice by the mob, that the election of Urban was therefore invalid, and that they intended to appoint someone else. As a result of this new conclave, there appeared a rival pope, Clement VII, who after a short civil war, fled from Italy and took up as residence at Avignon. The period that followed is called the Great Schism, one of the times of deepest humiliation into which the papal power ever descended. From Rome and Avignon, two sets of bulls, claiming divine sanction and the necessity of human obedience, went forth to Christendom, their authors each declaring himself the one lawful successor of St. Peter and the father of the Holy Catholic Church. With Clement VII cited France, her ally Scotland, Spain and Naples, with Urban VI, Germany, England and most of the Northern Kingdoms. And when these popes died, the cardinals they had elected perpetuated the schism by choosing fresh rivals to rend the unity of the Church. Thus, in the struggle for temporal supremacy, reform was forgotten, and the growing spirit of doubt and skepticism given a fair field in which to sow her seed. St. Catherine had realized her desire, the return of the pope to Rome, only, we see, to find it fail in achieving the purpose for which she had prayed and planned. The popes of the 14th century were men of the age in which they lived, not great souls like the saint of Siena herself, who called them to a task of which they were spiritually incapable. With her death her ideal faded, and another gradually took shape in the minds of men, namely an appeal from the vicar of Christ on earth to Christ himself residing in the whole body of the Church. Christendom remembered that in the early days of her history it had been the councils of the fathers, sitting at Nicaea and elsewhere, that had defined the faith and made laws for the Catholic Church. Now it was suggested that once more a large world council should be called from every Catholic nation, composed of cardinals, archbishops, bishops, the heads of the friars, and of the monastic and military orders, together with doctors with theology and law. This council was to be given power by the whole of Christendom to end the schism, condemn heresy, and reform the Church. The person who was chiefly responsible for the summoning of this council that met at Constance in 1414 was Sigismund, king of the Romans, a son of the emperor Charles IV, and brother and heir to the emperor Wenzel, a drunken sought, who was also king of Bohemia, but quite incapable of playing an intelligent part in public affairs. Sigismund was king of Hungary by election and through his marriage with a daughter of Louis the Great, but his subjects had little respect for his ability and were usually in a state of chronic rebellion. In spite of the fact that he had no money and had been decisively and ingloriously defeated in battle by the Turks, he continued to hold high ambitions, desiring above all things to appear as the arbiter of European destinies who would reform both Church and state. The Council of Constance gave him an opportunity, and certainly no other man worked as hard to make it a success. Sometimes he presided in person at the meetings, which dragged out their weary discussions for about four years, and at other times he would visit the courts of Europe, trying to persuade rival popes to resign, or if they were obstinate, civil sovereigns to refuse them patronage and protection. He even tried, though in vain, to act as mediator in the Hundred Years War, in order that the political quarrels of French and English might not bring friction to the Council Board. It is unfortunate for Sigismund's memory that his share in the Council of Constance was marred by treachery. As heir to the throne of Bohemia and the incapable Wenzel, he was often led to interfere in the affairs of that kingdom, and filled it his duty to take some steps with regard to the spread of Wycliffe's doctrines amongst his future subjects, especially in the National University of Prague. Here heretical views were daily expounded by a clever priest and teacher, John Huss. Now the Orthodox Catholics in the University were mainly Germans and hated by the ordinary Bohemians, who were Slavs, and these therefore admired and followed Huss for national as well as from religious convictions. Sigismund agreed with Huss in desiring a drastic reform of the Church, suitable means for ensuring which he hoped to see devised at Constance. At the same time he trusted that the representatives of Christendom would come to some kind of a compromise with a Bohemian teacher on his religious views, and persuade him by their arguments to withdraw some of his most unorthodox opinions. With his inded view he therefore invited Huss to appear at the Council, offering him a safe conduct. Many of the Bohemians suspected treachery and shook their heads when their national hero insisted that he was bound in honor to make profession of his faith when summoned. God be with you, exclaimed one, for I fear greatly that you will never return to us. This prophecy was fulfilled, for Huss, when he arrived at Constance, found that Sigismund was absent and the attitude at the Council definitely hostile to anything he might say. After a prolonged examination he was called upon to recant his errors and, refusing to yield, was condemned to death as a heretic. Sigismund, on his return to Constance shortly after the sentence had been passed, was persuaded that unless he consented to withdraw his safe conduct, the whole gathering would break up in wrath. Herod, he was told, had made a bad oath in agreeing to fulfill the wish of Herodius' daughter and should have refused her demand for the head of John the Baptist. To pledge faith to a heretic was equally wrong, for as an example and warning to Christendom all heretics should be burned. It was imperative, therefore, for the good of the Church that such a safe conduct should be withdrawn. Sigismund at last sullenly yielded, conscious of the stain on his honor, yet still more fearful lest the Council he had called together with so great an effort should melt away its tasks unfulfilled as his many enemies hoped. In July 1415 Huss was burned alive, crying aloud with steadfast courage of those about him who urged him to recant. Lo, I am prepared to die in that truth of the Gospel which I taught and wrote. Lest he should be revered as a martyr, the ashes of Huss were flung into the river, his very clothes destroyed, but measures that it prevailed when an Arnold Ebrecia preached to a few some two centuries before were unavailing when a John Huss died for the faith of a nation. Sigismund kept his Council together, but he paid for his broken word in the flame of hatred that is accession in 1419 aroused in Bohemia, and which lasted during the 17 years of what are usually called the Hussite Wars. The Council of Constants had condemned heresy. It succeeded in deposing three rival popes, and by its united choice of a new pope, Martin V, it put an end to the long schism that had divided the Church. The question of reform, the most vital of all the problems discussed, resulted in such controversy that man grew weary, and it was postponed for settlement to another Council that the new pope ledged himself to call in five years. Such were the practical results of the first real attempt at the Church to solve the problems of medieval times, not by the decision of one man, whether pope or emperor, but by the voice of Christendom at large. If the attempt failed, the difficulties in the way were so great that failure was inevitable. The conciliar movement was modern in the sense that it was an appeal to the judgment of the many rather than of a single autocrat, but it proved too medieval in actual construction and working for the growing spirit of nationality that brought its prejudices and its misunderstandings to the Council Hall. English and French, Germans and Bohemians, Italians and men from beyond the Alps, were too mutually suspicious, too assured of the righteousness of their own outlook, to be able to sacrifice their individual or still more their national convictions to traditional authority. The day for world rule, as medieval statesmen understood the term, had passed, and the Council of Constance was a witness to its passing. Chapter 22 Of Europe in the Middle Ages by Irna Lyford Plunkett This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 22 Part 1 The Fall of the Greek Empire The final failure of Christendom to preserve Eastern Europe from the infidel may be traced back to the disastrous Fourth Crusade in the thirteenth century, when Venice, for purely selfish reasons, drove out the Greek rulers of Constantinople and helped to establish a Latin or a Frankish Empire. This empire lasted for fifty-seven years, weak in its foundation and growing ever weaker like a badly built house, ready to tumble to the ground at the first tempest. It pretended to embrace all the territory that had belonged to its predecessors, but many of the feudal landowners whom it appointed were never able to take possession of their estates that remained under independent Greek or Bulgarian princes. While in Asia Minor, the exiled Greek emperors ruled at Nicaea, awaiting an opportunity to cross the Bosporus and effect a triumphant return. Michael Paleologus, to whom the opportunity came, was an unscrupulous adventurer who on account of his military reputation had been appointed guardian of the young emperor of Nicaea, John Ducas, a boy of eight. Taking advantage of this position, Michael drove from the court all whom he knew to be disinterested partisans of his charge, and then declared himself joint emperor with the child. This ambitious claim was but a step to worse deeds, for before he was ten years old the unhappy little emperor had been binded and thrust into a dungeon by his co-emperors' orders, and the paleology had become the reigning house of the Eastern Empire. This was an evil day for Christendom, for though Michael Paleologus beat down the resistance of all the Greek princes who dared to resent the way in which he had usurped the throne, and afterwards succeeded in entering Constantinople, yet neither he nor his descendants were the type of men to preserve what he had gained. Nearly all the paleology were weak and false. Michael himself so shifty in his dealings that his friends trusted him less than his enemies. Because he had won his throne by fraud and cruelty, he was always suspicious, like Italian despots, lest one of his generals should turn against him and outwit him. Instead, therefore, of keeping his attention fixed on the steadily increasing power of the Mohammedans, an inspection that would have warned a wise man to maintain a strong army along the borders of the Empire and Asia Minor, he was so afraid of his own Greek troops that, once established in Constantinople, he disbanded whole regiments and exiled their best officers. Everything he did, in fact, was calculated merely to secure his immediate safety or advantage with no thought for the future so that he died leaving his kingdom an easy prey to foreign enemies strong enough to seize the advantage. Besides the misrule of Michael Paleologus, other factors were at work, busily undermining the restored Greek Empire. For one thing, the Greek and Bulgarian princes, who had obtained independence when the Latins ruled in Constantinople, had no intention of returning to their old allegiance, while here and there were feudal states, like the Duchy of Athens, established by the Latins and still held by them, although the Frankish Emperor who had been there Suzerain had disappeared. The islands in the Aegean Sea were most of them in Venetian hands, and Venice took care that the Greek Empire, whose fleet she had swept from the Mediterranean in the 13th century, should not construct another sufficiently strong to win back these commercial and naval bases. In the same way the trade that had passed from Constantinople never returned, for the cities of the Mediterranean preferred to deal on their own account with Syrian and Egyptian merchants rather than to pay toll to a middleman in the markets of the Paleology. For all these reasons it can be easily seen that the new Byzantine Empire was in a far worse state of weakness and instability than the old. Like Philip IV of France, who found the financial methods of Charlemagne quite inadequate for dealing with his more modern needs and expenses, the Paleology were confronted by a system of administering laws and exacting taxes that, having completely broken down under the strain of foreign invasion, was even more incapable of meeting 14th century problems with any feasible solution. More practical rulers might have invented new methods, but the only hope by the upstart line that had usurped power without realizing the responsibility such power entailed was to seek the military and financial aid of the West, as in the days of Alexios Comanus. Little such aid was there to gain. Venice and Genoa, once eager crusaders, were now too busy contesting the supremacy of the Mediterranean to act together as allies in eastern waters. The Popes, annoyed that the overthrow of the Latin Empire had brought about the restoration of the Greek Church, were willing enough to consider the reconversion of Byzantium held out to them as bait, but even if they granted their sympathy they had obviously too many political troubles of their own to make lavish promises likely a fulfillment. Western Europe, in fact, was too interested in its own national struggles to answer calls to a crusade, too blind in its narrow self-interest and prejudice against the Greeks to realize what danger the ruin of Constantinople must bring on those who, for centuries, used her as a bulwark. Andronicus, too, the son and successor of Michael, was equally cruel and false, and still more of a personal coward. He saw the dangers of a Mohammedan invasion that his father had ignored, and in terror both of the Turks and of his own subjects arranged to hire a band of Catalan mercenaries who had been fighting for the Aragonese against the Angevans in Sicily in the war introduced by the Sicilian Vespers. This war over, the captain of the Catalans, Roger de Flor, a Templar who had been expelled from his order for his wild deeds, was quite willing to unsheathe this sword on a new field of glory and pillage, so that on receiving dazzling promises of reward and friendship he and his merry men sailed for the East. Once established in Greece, however, the Catalans proved so arrogant and lawless that the Greeks complained that they were a far worse infliction than the Mohammedans. Quarrels ensued, and finally, in the course of a bitter dispute between Roger de Flor and Andronicus, the Spanish general was murdered as he stood talking to his master. This act of treachery, added to growing indignation at the limited supplies of money the Emperor had grudgingly dispersed for his foreman army, turned the Catalans from pretense allies into a horde of raging enemies. From the walls of Constantinople itself they were driven back, but elsewhere they burned and slew and laid waste the country, until at last reaching Athens they stormed the walls of that city, killed its Latin Duke, and established themselves as an independent republic. By the time they had ceased to rove the Catalans had also ceased to be dangerous, but in their savage wanderings they had inflicted incalculable harm upon the Byzantine Empire. The Andronicus, who could barely hold them at bay before the gates of his capital, was an Andronicus who could not hope to withstand invasion in Asia Minor, and over his eastern boundaries, left weakly kerosene since the days of Michael Paleologus, pour the Turks in irresistible numbers. Soon they remained to the Greek Empire of all their provinces across the Bosporus merely a strip of coastline to the north of the Dardanelles, and finally this also was whittled away, and the Turks crossed the Straits and captured Gallipoli as a base for future operations in Europe. The chief Mohammedan emir during his period of conquest was a certain Orchem, son of Othman, whose name in the form Ottoman is still borne by his branch of the Turkish race. This Orchem was quite as cruel and unscrupulous as the Paleology, but far more statesmanlike. For, as he conquered the territory of Greek emperors and rival emirs in Asia Minor, he consolidated his rule over them by a just and careful government that gradually welded them into a compact state. When a civil war broke out between John V, the grandson of Andronicus II, and his guardian and co-ruler, a wily schemer of the Michael Paleologus type called John Canticusanus, the latter, with other lack of patriotism, appealed to Orkin for aid. He even offered him his daughter in marriage, an alliance to which the Turks eagerly agreed, dispatching a large force of auxiliaries to thrace as a token of his friendly intentions toward his future father-in-law. These troops he determined should remain, and difficult indeed the Christians found it to dislodge them in later years, for the Turkish legions had been stiffened by a device of Orchem, which has done more to keep his name in men's minds perhaps than any of his victories. It was the emirs' custom, on a march of conquest, not to oppress the Concord, but to exact from them a tribute both in money and in child life. From every village that passed under the rule of Orkin, his soldiers carried away from their homes a fixed number of young boys, chosen because of their health and sturdy, well-developed limbs. These children were placed in barracks where they were educated without any knowledge of their former life to become soldiers of the Prophet, fanatical, highly disciplined, skilled with a bow and saber, inculcated with but one ideal and ambition to excel in state's craft or on the battlefield. Because of their excessive loyalty, emirs would choose from among the ranks of these tribute children their viziers and other chief officials, while the majority would enter the infantry corps of Janissaries, or new soldiers, whose ferocity and endurance in attacking or holding apparently impossible positions became the terror of Europe. In the words of a modern historian, with diabolical ingenuity the Turks secured the victory of the Crescent by the children of the Cross and trained up Christian boys to destroy the independence and authority of their country and their church. In 1361, some years after Orkin's death, the Turks captured Adrianople and thus came into contact with other Christian nations besides the Greeks, namely the Serbians and Hungarians. The Serbians were the principal Slav race in the Balkans, and under their great ruler, Stephen Dusan, it had seemed likely that they might become the predominant power in Eastern Europe. The kings of Bulgaria and Bosnia were their vassals. They had made conquests both in Albania and Greece, thus opening up a way to the Adriatic energy and seas. It would have been well for Christendom if this energetic race of fighters could have subdued the feeble Greeks, and so presented to the Turks, when they crossed the Bosporus, a foe worthy to match the Janissaries in stubborn courage. Unfortunately, Stephen Dusan died before the years of Turkish invasion, leaving his throne to a young son, a youth of great parts, as a Serbian chronicler describes him, quiet and gracious, but without experience. Only experience or an iron will could have held together in those rough times a kingdom relying for its protection on the swords of a quarrelsome nobility. And Serbia broke up into a number of small principalities, her disintegration assisted by the ambitious jealousy of Louis the Great of Hungary, who lost no opportunity of dismembering and weakening the sister kingdom that might otherwise prove a hindrance to his own imperial projects. With the career of Louis we have dealt in other chapters, and have seen him humbling the Venetians, driving Joana I out of Naples, acquiring the throne of Poland, fighting against the Turks and the Emperor Charles IV. Because he spent his energy recklessly on all these projects, Louis remains for posterity, apart from the civilizing influence of his court life, one of the arch-destroyers of the Middle Ages, the sovereign who more than any other exposed Eastern Europe to Mohammedan conquest. Had he either refrain from his constant policy of aggression towards Serbia, thus allowing her to unite her subject princes in the face of the invading Turks, or had he even been powerful enough to found an empire of Hungary that would absorb both Serbia and Constantinople and act as a bulwark in the East, medieval history would have closed on a different scene. Instead the famous victories of Louis over the Turks that made his name honored by Christendom were rendered of no avail by other partial victories over Christian nations who should have been his allies. On the field of Kosovo in 1389 the Serbians, shorn of half their provinces and weakened and betrayed by the Hungarians, met the Turks in battle. Both sides have left record of the ferocity of the struggle. The angels in heaven, said the Turks, amazed by the hideous noise, forgot the heavenly hymns with which they always glorify God. The battlefield became like a tulip bed with its ruddy severed heads and rolling turbans. Few, wrote the Serbian chronicler, returned to their own country. When the day closed, both the Serbian King Lazar and the Turkish Sultan lay dead among their warriors and the victory, as far as the actual fighting was concerned, seemed to rest neither with Christian nor Muslim. Yet in truth the Turks could supply other armies as numerous and as well equipped to take the place of those who had fallen, while the Serbians had exhausted their uttermost effort. Thus the fruits of the battle fell entirely into the hands of the infidel. Things are hard for us, hard since Kosovo is a modern Serbian saying, for the Serbs have never forgotten the day when they fought their last despairing battle as champions of the cross, and lost for a time their ambition of dominating Eastern Europe. Their resteth to Serbia aglory runs the old ballad. Gay, as long as a babe shall be born, or their resteth the man in the land, so long as a blade of corn shall be reaped by a human hand, so long as the grass shall grow on the mighty plain of Kosovo, so long, so long, even so, shall the glory of those remain who in this day in battle were slain. From the day of Kosovo the ultimate conquest of Eastern Europe by the Turks became a certainty. Lack of ambition on the part of some of the sultans and a life and death struggle in which others found themselves involved in Asia Minor against Tartar tribes merely deferred the time of reckoning, but it came at last in the middle of the fifteenth century when Mohammed II, the conqueror, determined to reign in Constantinople. This Mohammed, famous in medieval history, was the son of a Serbian princess and he is said to have grown up indifferent alike to Christianity or Islam. He is described as having a pair of red and white cheeks full and round, a hooked nose and a resolute mouth, while flatterers went still farther and declared that his mustache was like leaves over two rose buds and every hair of his beard a thread of gold. In character, from a fierce, undisciplined boy, he grew into a self-willed man, intent upon the satisfaction of his ambitions and desires. He could speak, or at least understand, Arabic, Greek, Persian, Hebrew and Latin, and chroniclers record that it was in reading the triumphs of Alexander and Julius Caesar that he was first inspired with the thought of becoming a great general. His rival, Constantine Levin, the last and best of the paleology, was a man of very different type from the Turk or indeed from his own ancestors. He was devoted to the Christian religion and Greece, brave, simple and generous. When he first became aware of Mohammed's aggressive hostility, he attempted to disarm it by liberating Turkish prisoners. If it shall please God to soften your heart, he sent word, I shall rejoice, but however that may be I shall live and die in the defense of my people and of my faith. His words were put to the test when, in the autumn of 1452, the siege of Constantinople began. The emperor looked despairingly for western aid, in order to secure which the emperor John V had himself in years gone by, visited Rome and made formal renunciation to the pope of all the views of the Greek church that disagreed with Catholic doctrine. One of the chief points of controversy had been the Catholic use of unleavened bread in the sacrament of the Mass. Another, the words of the Nicene Creed, declaring that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the son as well as from the father. In all matters of faith as well as of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, John V and later Constantine himself had made open acknowledgment of the supremacy of Rome, but their compliance did not avail to save their kingdom in the hour of danger. Indeed, while it evoked little military support from Catholic nations, it aroused keen hostility and treachery at home. There were many Greeks who refused to endorse their sovereign signature to what they considered an act of national betrayal, some declaring openly that the Mohammedans' victories were God's punishment on kings who had forsaken the faith of their fathers, and that it would be better to see the turbans of the infidels in Saint Sophia than a cardinal's red hat. Then Mohammed began to thunder with his fourteen batteries against the once impregnable walls of Constantinople, making enormous breaches the reduction of the city had become only a question of days. It is said that the sultan in his eagerness to take possession offered the emperor and his army freedom and religious toleration if they would capitulate. I desire either my throne or a grave, replied Constantine, knowing well which of the two must be his fate. Besides some four thousand of his own subjects he could command only a few hundred mercenaries sent by the Pope and three hundred Genoese. Of the Venetians and other Western Europeans there were even less, and it was with this miniature army that he manned the wide circuit of the walls, let out sorties, and rebuilt as well as he could the gaps made by the heavy guns. The contest was absurdly unequal, for Mohammed had some two hundred and fifty-eight thousand men, and in May 1453 the inevitable end came to a heroic struggle. Up through the breaches in the wall that no labor was left to repair climbed wave after wave of fanatical Janissaries, shouting their hopes of victory and paradise. Beneath their continuous onslaughts the defenders weakened and broke, fighting to the last amid the narrow streets, until Constantine himself was slain, his body only recognized later by the golden eagles embroidered on his shoes. The women and many of the Greeks who had refused to help in this time of crisis, because of the emperor's submission to the Catholic Church, were torn from their sanctuary in St. Sophia and sold as slaves in the markets of Syria. Thus was lost the second city of Christendom to the infidels, and the old Roman Empire, whose restoration had been a medieval idea for centuries, perished forever. Retribution, at least according to human ideas of justice, often seems to lag in history, but in the case of the fall of Constantinople some of the culprits most responsible, on account of their selfish indifference, were speedily called on to pay the penalty. Mohammed too, his ambition inflated by what he had already achieved, planned the reduction of Christendom, declaring that he would feed his horse from the altar of St. Peter's in Rome. With an enormous army he advanced through Serbia and besieged Belgrade. But here he was thrust back by a Christian champion, John Hunyadi, the wicked one, as the title reads in Turkish, with such loss of men and material that Hungary and Eastern Germany were saved from serious danger for eighty years. With the Balkan states it was otherwise, whose governments, divided in their councils jealous in their rivalries, had been incapable of the Union that could alone have saved them, and one by one they were crushed beneath the conqueror's heel. Greece also came under Muslim domination, and finally the islands of the Aegean Sea that Venice had torn from Constantinople in the interests of her trade were rested away from her, leaving her faced with the prospect of commercial ruin. Part II. Voyage and Discovery All through the Middle Ages, it had been to the cities of the Mediterranean, first of all to Amalfi and Pisa, then to Marseille, Barcelona, Genoa, and Venice, that Europe had turned as her obvious medium of communication with the East and all its fabulous wonders. In the thirteenth century of the Venetian merchant Marco Polo, setting forth with his father and uncle, had visited the kingdom of Cathay, or China, and brought back twenty years later, not only marvelous tales of the court of Kubla Khan and Pekin, but also precious stones, rubies, sapphires, diamonds, and emeralds in such abundance that he was soon nicknamed by his fellow citizens as Marco of the Millions. To the delighted ears of the guests he invited to a banquet on his return, he poured descriptions of a land where merchants are so numerous and so rich that their wealth can neither be told nor believed. They and their ladies do nothing with their own hands, but live as delicately as if they were kings. What seems to have struck his medieval mind with almost astonishment were the enormous public baths in the city of heaven in southern China, of which there were four thousand, the largest and most beautiful baths in the world. The banquets, also given by the great Khan, excelled any European feasts. They were attended by many thousands of guests, and their host, raised on a dais, had as his servants the chief nobles, who would wind rich towels around their mouths that they might not breathe upon the royal plates. For presence the Khan was accustomed to receive at a time some five thousand camels, or an equal number of elements, draped in silken cloths worked with silver and gold. His government surpassed in its organization anything Europe had imagined since the fall of the Roman Empire, such for instance as the postal system, by means of messengers on foot and horse that linked up Beacon with lands a hundred days' distance, or the beneficent regard of a ruler who in times of bad harvests not only remitted taxation but dispatched grain to the principal districts that had suffered. Coal was used in China freely, a kind of black stone cut from the mountains and veins, as Marco Polo describes it. It maintains the fire, he added, better than wood, and throughout the whole of Cathay this fuel is used. Besides dilating on the wealth and prosperity of China, the Venetian had also much to say of Zipangu or Japan, of Tibet and Bengal, of Ceylon, the finest island in the world, and of Java, supposed then to be above three thousand miles wide. Other travelers were to confirm many of his statements, but none told their tales so simply and realistically as Polo, while not a few, like the English Sir John Mandeville in the fourteenth century, supplied fiction in large doses where it seemed to them the truth might bore their readers. The eagerness with which either fact or fiction was swallowed bears witness at any rate, first to the extraordinary fascination excited in medieval minds by such names as Cathay or Zipangu, and next to the general Western belief in the inexhaustible riches of the East and their determination to secure at least a portion. When the Seljuk Turks, with their fierce animosity towards Christendom, had settled like a curtain between East and West, the dangers and expanse of trading and commerce with Arabia and Asia Minor of course increased. Venice and Genoa still brought back shiploads of silks, spices, and perfumes for Western markets, but the price of these goods was increased by the tolls paid to Turkish sultans and emirs for leaped transfer merchandise from camels to trading-sloops. Then came the fall of Constantinople, when Venice, by a treaty with a conqueror in the following year, appeared to secure wonderful trading privileges. Muhammad, however, made such promises only to break them when convenient, and so as soon as he could afford to do so, because he was securely established in Europe, the tolls he demanded became heavier, not lighter, the restrictions he placed on trade more and more galling to Christian merchants, until the usual purchasers of Venetian goods grew exasperated at prices that doubled and trebled continually. There were but two methods of avoiding this ever-increasing policy of exploitation, apart from doing without such luxuries. Either a complete conquest of the Turks that would compel them to open up afresh the old caravan routes to the East, or else the discovery of a new route that would avoid their dominions altogether. Largely through the blind selfishness of Mediterranean cities, and especially of Venice, we have seen that the golden opportunity of aiding the Byzantine Empire had been lost forever. Thus the first method failed. It remains to deal with the second, the voyages of discovery with which the Middle Ages fittingly close. Toward the end of the fourteenth century, there was born in Portugal a prince, Henry, third son of King John I, and grandson by an English mother of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. While he was still a boy, this prince earned fame for his share in the capture of Ciuta, a Moorish town exactly opposite Gibraltar on the North African coast. To the ordinary Portuguese mind, this conquest raised hopes of a gradual absorption of the southern Mediterranean seaboard, possibly of competition in the Levant with Geno and Venice. But Prince Henry saw farther than ordinary minds. The problem that he set himself in any one Arab or European who seemed likely to supply a solution was, what would happen if, instead of entering the Mediterranean, Portuguese ships were to sail due south? How big was this unknown stretch of land called Africa, in the maps of which geographers hid their ignorance by placing labels such as, here are Hippographs, here are two-headed monsters? Would it not be possible to reach the far famed wonders of Cathay by sailing first south and then east around Africa, thus avoiding trade routes through Syria and southern Russia? It was fortunate that Prince Henry was a mathematician and geographer himself. For many people told him in answer to his inquiries that Africa ended at Cape Nam, not so many miles south of Tangier, while others that the white man who dared to sail beyond a certain point would be turned black by the heat of the sun while the waters boiled about his vessel and the winds blew sheets of flame across the horizon. Prince Henry refused to believe such tales. He could not sail himself because he was so often occupied with wars in Africa against the Moors. But year after year he fitted out ships at his own expense and chose the most daring mariners whom he could find, bribing them with promises of reward and fame to navigate the unknown African coast. He himself built a naval arsenal at Sagras on the southern promontory of Portugal, and here, when not busy with affairs of state, he would study the heavens, make charts, and watch anxiously for the returning sales of his brave adventurers. During Prince Henry's lifetime, Portuguese or Italians in his pay discovered not only Madeira or the island of wood, as they christened it from its many forests, but the Canaries, Cape Verde Islands, and the African coast as far as south as Gambia and Sierra Leone. Soon there was no longer any need to bribe mariners into taking risks, for those who first led the way on these adventurous voyages brought back with them negroes and gold dust as evidence that they had been to lands where men could live, and where there were possibilities of untold wealth. Thus the work of exploration continued joyfully. It was in 1471, some years after the death of Prince Henry, that Portuguese navigators crossed the equator without being broiled black by the sun or raising sheets of flame, as the superstitious had predicted. The next important step on this new road to Asia was the voyage of Bartholomew Diaz, whose sailing ever southwards swept in an icy wind without knowing it, round the Cape, past Table Mountain, and then, turning eastwards, landed at last on the little island of Santa Cruz and Algoa Bay where he planted a cross. He would have explored the mainland also, but kafirs armed with heavy stones collected and drove back the landing party. Diaz, emboldened by a success, wished to sail farther, but his crew were weary of adventure and with tears of regret in his eyes he was forced to yield to their threats of mutiny and turn homewards. At Lisbon, describing his voyage, he said then on account of its dangers he had called the southernmost point of Africa the Cape of Storms, but the King of Portugal, hearing that this was indeed the limit of the continent, and that in all probability the way to Asia lay beyond would not consent to such an ill-ohmen name. It shall be the Cape of Good Hope, he declared, and so it has remained. In 1498 the work of exploration begun by Diaz was completed by another famous navigator, Vasco de Gama. National hopes of wealth and glory were centered on his task, and when he and his company marched forth to their ships, a large crowd went with them to the shore, carrying candles and singing a solemn litany. Then the sails of his four vessels dipped below the horizon and were not seen for two years and eight months, but when at last men and women had begun to despair at the great silence, their hero reappeared amongst them, bringing news more wonderful and glorious than anything that Portugal had dared to hope. There is little space to tell in this chapter the adventures that Vasco de Gama related to the King and his court. He and his crews, it seemed, had sailed for weeks amid a lonely, dreary waste of seas and boundless sky. They had skirmished with hoten-tots and doubled the cape, caught in such a whirl of breakers and stormy winds that the walls of the wooden ships had oozed water, and despair and sickness had seized upon all. Vasco de Gama, even when ill and depressed, was not to be turned from his purpose. Eastwards and northwards he set his sails, in the teeth of laments and threats from his sailors, and so on Christmas Day landed on a part of the coast to which, in memory of this most famous Diaz Natalis, gave the name of Natal. Battling the dread disease of Scurvy, brought on by prolonged diet of salt-meat, the Portuguese commander pursued his way, attacked as often as he landed for water and fresh food by fierce Mohammedan tribes, until at last, guided by an Arabian pilot whom he had picked up, he came to the harbors of Calicut, in India, where there was a Christian king. The new route to Asia had been discovered. A lucky venture, plenty of emeralds, you owe great thanks to God for having brought you to a country holding such riches, declared the natives, and loud was the rejoicing of the Portuguese at this glorious national prospect. The likely effect of Vasco de Gama's voyage did not pass unnoticed elsewhere in Europe. Soon exclaimed a Venetian merchant in deep bloom, it will be cheaper to buy goods in Lisbon than in Venice. The death knell of the great Republic's commercial prosperity sounded in these words. In the meantime, some years before Vasco de Gama's triumphant achievement, a still greater discovery was made that was destined, in the course of time, to change the whole commercial aspect of the world. Its author was a Genoese sailor, Christopher Columbus, who, tradition says, once sailed as far north as Iceland and in the south through the island of Porto Santo. Always in his spare time he could be found bent over maps and charts, calculating, weaving round his reason mathematical arguments the tales of shipwreck mariners, until at last he brought to the ears of his astonished fellow men and women a scheme for finding Cathay, neither by sailing south nor east, but due west across the Atlantic. Here is a 14th century description of the Atlantic, a dismal picture still popularly accepted in the 15th, quote, a vast and boundless ocean on which ships dare not venture out of sight of land. For even if sailors knew the directions of the winds, they could not know whether those winds would carry them, and as there is no inhabited country beyond, they would run great risks of being lost in the mist and vapor. The limit of the west is the Atlantic Ocean, end quote. Many people still believe that the world was flat, and that to sail across the Atlantic was to incur the risk of being driven by the winds over the edge into space. Thus Columbus met with either reproof for contemplating such risks or ridicule for his folly, but so convinced was he of his own wisdom that he only grew the more enthusiastic as a result of opposition. Without money or royal patronage he could not hope to make the voyage a success, and so he laid a scheme before the King of Portugal, usually a willing patron of adventure. Unfortunately for Columbus the discoveries along the African coast promised such wealth and trade to Portugal that a ruler did not feel inclined to take risks in other directions that, while they must involve expense, as yet held no guarantee of repayment. I went to take refuge in Portugal, wrote Columbus at a later date, since the King of that country was more versed in discovery than any other, but in fourteen years I could not make him understand what I said. Even at last from Portugal by a decided refusal Christopher went to Spain sending his brother Bartholomew with a letter explaining his project to King Henry VII of England. It is interesting to note that the keen-witted tutor, as soon as the scheme was laid before him, is said to have expressed his readiness to learn more and to lend his support. But Bartholomew had been shipwrecked on his voyage northward, and owing to this delay Columbus had already received the patronage of Spain and set out on his voyage before his brother returned with the news. It was Queen Isabelle of Castile, wife of King Ferdinand of Aragon, who, after considerable hesitation, and against the advice of a council of leading bishops and statesmen, determined finally to pledge her sympathy, and, tradition says, her jewels if necessary, and the mariners' cause. Part of the attraction of this project lay in its appeal to her Castilian imagination, for Castile had ever been haunted by the possibilities of the bleak gray ocean that ruled at the gates of Galicia. But still more potent than the thought of discovery was the desire of spreading the Catholic faith. This hope also inspired Columbus, who regarded his enterprise as in the nature of a crusade, believing that he had been called to preach the Gospel to the millions of heathen inhabiting Cathay. When Columbus set forth on his first voyage to the Indies, as he roughly called the unknown territory he sought, those who sailed in his three ships were many of them pressed men, that is, sailors ordered on board by their town that having incurred royal displeasure was given this way of appeasing it. Thus they were without enthusiasm or any belief in what they thought their admirals mad and dangerous adventure, and from the time that they lost sight of land they never ceased to grumble and utter threats of mutiny. At one time it was the extraordinary variation in the compass that brought them trembling to complain. At another the steadiness of the wind blowing from the east that they believed would never change and allow them to return home. Finally it was the sluggish waters of the Sargasa Sea amid whose weeds they saw themselves destined to drift until they died of starvation and thirst. To every suggestion of setting the sails eastward, Columbus turned to deaf ear, but for the rest he threatened, cajoled or argued, as the occasion seemed to demand, his own heart sinking each time the cry of land was raised and ardently desired vision proved only to be some bank of clouds lying low upon the horizon. At length came the news that a moving light had been seen in the darkness. It appeared like a candle that went up and down, says Columbus and his diary, and all waited eagerly for dawn that revealed at last a wooded island, later called the Bahamas, but then believed to be a part of the mainland of Asia. Clad in armor and carrying the royal banner of Spain, the great discoverer of the west stepped ashore and there, humbly kneeling, he and his crews raised to heaven a tedium of thankfulness and joy. Columbus made five voyages to the west and all, for the way once shown proved easy enough, nor did he need to press crews for the enterprise, but rather to guard against unwelcome stowaways. The brown-skinned Indians, gaily colored parrots, gold nuggets and strange roots that he brought back as witness of his first success, were enough to inflame the minds and ambitions of Spaniards with such high hopes of wealth and glory that they almost fought to be allowed to join the expeditions. Vasco de Gama was rewarded for his voyage to India with a large pension in the Portuguese title of Dom. He died in Honored Old Age. It is sad to find that after the first triumphant return, when no glory and praise seemed too great to be stow on their hero, the Spaniards turned against Columbus. They blamed him because gold was not more abundant, because his settlers quarreled and started feuds with the natives, because, although a very great mariner, he did not prove a governor able to control and manage other men easily. Not a few were jealous of his genius and determined to bring about his ruin out of spite. From his third voyage to the West, Columbus was sent back by his enemies in chains, ill with wounded pride and his shameful treatment. Queen Isabel, airing of it, instantly ordered his release and tried to soothe his indignation, but not long afterwards she herself died and Ferdinand, left to himself, was wholly intent on Aragonese ambitions in the Mediterranean. To him the conquest of Naples was far more important than any discovery of Cathay, and so Columbus's complaints went unheeded, and he died in poverty, forgotten by all save a few. After twenty years of toil and peril, he exclaimed bitterly, as he was born ashore from his last voyage, I do not own even a roof in Spain. The new world, to which he had won an entrance, was given the name of another, namely of a Florentine, a Marigold Vespucci, whose sailing beyond the West Indies reached the mainland. The effect of Columbus's discovery upon the life of Europe was momentous. No longer the Atlantic lay like a gray wall between man and the unknown, it had become a highway, not to Cathay, but to a greater West, where there were riches beyond all human dreaming, ready as a harvest for the enterprising and hard-working. The central road of medieval commerce had been the Mediterranean, the highway of the modern world was to be the Atlantic, and the commercial future of Europe lay not with the city republics of the South, but with the nations of the North and West, with Portugal and Spain, with Flanders in England, that had lain upon the fringe of the old world, but stood at the very heart to the new.