 CHAPTER 13 THE MAKING OF FRANCE Amongst those who took the cross during the Second Crusade had been Louis VII of France and his wife, Queen Eleanor. They were an ill-matched pair, the king of mediocre ability, weak, peace-loving, and pious. Eleanor liked all a house of aquitaine to which she belonged, imperious, fierce-willed, and without scruple where she loved or hated. Restless excitement had prompted her journey to Palestine, and Louis was impelled by the scandal to which her conduct there gave rise, and also by his annoyance that they had no son, to divorce her soon after they returned home. The foolishness of this step, from a political point of view, can be gauged by studying a map of France in the middle of the 12th century, and remembering that, though king of the whole country a name, Louis as a feudal overlord could depend on little but the revenues and forces to be raised from his own estates. These lay in a small block round Paris, while a way to the north, east, and south were the provinces of tenants and chief three or four times as extensive an area as those of the royal house of Capon. By marrying Eleanor, countess of Porteux and Duchess of Aquitaine, Louis had become direct ruler of the middle and southwest of France as well as of his own crowned mains. But when he divorced his wife, he had once forfeited her possessions. Worse, from his point of view, was to follow, for Eleanor made immediate use of her freedom to marry Henry Count of Anjou, a man fourteen years or junior, but the most important tenant and chief of the king of France, and therefore, if he chose, not unlikely to prove that king's most dangerous enemy. This Henry, besides being Count of Anjou, mine, and terrain, was also Duke of Normandy and King of England, for he was a grandson of Henry I, and had, in 1154, succeeded the feeble Stephen of the anarchy of whose reign we gave a slight description in another chapter. Before dealing with the results of Henry's marriage with the heiress of Aquitaine, it is well to note his work as king of England, for this was destined to be the greatest and most lasting of all the many tasks he undertook. In character, Henry was the exact opposite of Stephen, where the other had wavered, he pressed forward, utterly determined to be the master of his own land. One by one he besieged the rebel barons and leveled with the ground the castles they had built in order to torture and oppress their neighbors. He also took from them the crowned lands which Stephen had recklessly given away in the effort to buy popularity and support. When he found that many of these nobles had usurped the chief offices of state, he replaced them as quickly as he could by men of humble rank and of his own choosing. In this way he appointed the Londoner, Thomas Beckett, whom he had first created Chancellor, to be Archbishop of Category. But the impetuous choice proved to be one of his few mistakes. Henry was so self-confident himself that he was apt to underrate the abilities of those with whom life brought him in contact and to believe that every other will must necessarily bow to his own. It is certain that he found it difficult to pause and listen to reason, for his restless energy was ever spurring him on to fresh ambitions, and he could not bear to waste time, as he thought, in listening to criticisms on what he had already decided. Chroniclers describe how he would fidget impatiently or draw pictures during mass, commending the priests to read the fastest, while he would devote odd moments of his day to patching his old clothes for a warmth of something more interesting to do. Henry II was so able that haste in his case did not mean that his work was slip-shot. He had plenty of foresight and did not content himself destroying those of his subjects who were unruly. He knew that he must win the support of the English people if he hoped to build up his estates in France, and this, though destined to bear no lasting fruit, was ever his chief ambition. Henry II was one of the greatest of English kings, but he had been brought up in France and remained more of an Angevin than an Englishman at heart. Instead of driving his barons into sulky isolation, Henry summed them frequently to his magnum concilium or great council and asked their advice. When he objected to serving with their followers in France as often as he wished, he arranged a compromise that was greatly to his advantage. This was the institution of scootage or shield money, attacks paid by the barons in order to escape military service abroad. With the funds that scootage supplied, Henry could hire mercenary troops while a feudal baron's lost a military training ground. Besides consulting his great council, destined to develop into our national parliament, Henry strengthened the Curia Regis or King's Court that his grandfather Henry I had established to deal with questions of justice and finance. The barons in the time of Stephen had tried to make their own feudal courts entirely independent of royal authority, but Henry, besides establishing a central court of justice to which any subject who thought himself wronged might appeal for a new trial, greatly improved and extended the system of itinerant justices whose circuits through the country to hold pleas of the crown had been instituted by Henry I. This interference, he found, was resented not only by the feudal courts, but also by the sheriffs of the county courts, the Norman form of the old Shire Moots, a popular institution of Anglo-Saxon times. Of late years the latter courts had more and more fallen under the domination of neighboring landowners, and in order to free them Henry held an inquest into the doings of the sheriffs and deposed many of the great nobles who had usurped these offices, replacing them by men of lesser rank who would look to him for favor and advice. Other sovereigns in Europe adopted somewhat similar means of exalting royal authority, but England was fortunate in possessing such popular institutions as the Moots or meetings of the Shire and Hundred through which Henry could establish his justice, instead of merely through crown officials who would have no personal interest in local conditions. By the size of Clarendon it was decreed that twelve men from each hundred and four from each township should decide in criminal cases who amongst the accused were sufficiently implicated to be justly sentenced by the royal judges. Local representatives also were employed on other occasions during Henry's reign in assisting as judges in assessing taxes and in deciding how many weapons and what sort the ordinary freemen might fittingly carry to the safety of his neighbors and of himself. In civil cases, as when the ownership of land or personal property was in dispute, twelve lawful men of the neighborhood, or in certain cases twelve knights of the Shire, were to be elected to help the sheriff arrive at a just decision. In this system of recognition, as it was called, lay the germ of our modern jury. It is probable that the knights and representatives of the hundreds and townships grumbled continually at the trouble and expense to which the king's legislation put them, for neither they nor Henry II himself would realize that they were receiving a splendid education in the ABC of self-government. That must be the foundation of any true democracy. Yet a few generations later, when Henry's weak grandson and namesake Henry III misruled England, the knights of the Shire were already accepted as men of public experience and their representatives summoned to a parliament to defend the liberties of England. Henry II used popular institutions and crown officials as levers against the independence of his baronage, but the chief struggle of his reign in England was not with the barons so much as with the church. Thomas Beckett as chancellor had been Henry's right hand in attacking feudal privileges. He had warned his master that as a leading churchman his love might turn to hate his help to opposition. The king refused to believe him, thrust the burden of the archbishopric of Canterbury on his unwilling shoulders, and then found to his surprise and rage that he had secured the election of a very Hildebrand who held so high a conception of the dignity of the church that it clashed with royal demands at every turn. One of the chief subjects of dispute was the claim of the church to reserve for her jurisdiction all cases that affected clerks, that is, not only priests, but men employed in the service of the church such as acolytes or choristers. The king insisted that clerks convicted in ecclesiastical courts of serious crimes should be handed over to the royal courts for secular punishment. His argument was that if a clerk had committed a murder the ecclesiastical judge was not allowed by canon law to deliver a death sentence and so could do no more than unfrock the guilty man and fine or imprison him. Thus a clerk could live to commit two murders where a layman would, by command of the royal judges, be hung at the first offense. Becket, on his side, would not swerve from his opinion that it was sacrilege for royal officials to lay hands on a priest or clerk whether criminal or not, and when Henry embodied his suggestions of royal supremacy in a degree called the Constitutions of Clarendon, the archbishop publicly refused to sign his agreement to them. Threats and insults were heaped upon him by angry courtiers, and one of his attendants, terrified by the scene, exclaimed, Oh, my master, this is a fearful day. The day of judgment will be yet more fearful, answered the undaunted Becket, and in the face of his fearlessness no one at the moment dared lay hands on him. Shortly afterwards Becket fled abroad, hoping to win the support of Rome. But the pope, to whom he appealed, did not wish to quarrel with the King of England, and used his influence to patch up an agreement that was far too vague to have any binding strength. Thomas Becket returned to Canterbury, but Exile had not modified his opinions, and he had hardly landed before he once more appeared in open opposition to Henry's wishes, ex-communicating those bishops who had dared to act during his absence without his leave. The rest of the story is well known. The ungovernable rage of the Angevin King at an obstinacy as great as his own, his rash cry, is my house so full of fools and dastards that none will avenge me on this upstart clerk, and in his remorse on learning that four knights who had taken him at his word and murdered the archbishop as he note, still undaunted on the altar steps of Canterbury Cathedral. So great was the horror and indignation of Europe, even of those who were devoted to Henry's cause, that the king was driven to strip and scourge himself before the tomb of Thomas the martyr as a public act of penance, and all question of the supremacy of the state over the church was, for the time, dropped. One of the many pilgrims who in the next two years visited the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury in hope of a miracle was Louis VII of France, and the miracle that he so earnestly desired was the recovery of his son and heir Philip Augustus from a fever that threatened his life. With many misgivings the old king crossed the channel to the land of a ruler with whom he had been at almost constant war since Eleanor of Aquitaine's remarriage, but his faith in the vision of the martyr that had prompted his journey was rewarded. Henry received him with great rejoicing and honor after the manner of a loyal vassal, and when the French king returned home he found his son convalescent. The sequel to this journey, however, was the sudden paralysis and lingering death of Louis himself, and the coronation of the boy prince in whom France was to find so great a ruler. When the bells of Paris had wrung out the joyous tidings of his birth one hot August evening fourteen years before, a young British student had put his head out of his lodging window and demanded the news. A boy, answered the citizens, has been given to us this night, who by God's grace shall be the hammer of your king, and who beyond a doubt shall diminish the power and lands of him and his subjects. One half of the reign of Philip Augustus, le Dieu donné, or God given, was the fulfillment of this prophecy. At first sight it would seem as though Henry II of England entered the lists against his overlord, the champion of France, with overwhelming odds in his favor. Ruler of a territory stretching from Scotland, his dependency to the Pyrenees, he added to his lands and welped the brain of a statesman in the experience of long years of war and intrigue. What could a mere boy, fenced round even in his capital of Paris by turbulent barons, hoped to achieve against such strength? Yet the weapons of destruction lay ready to his hand in the very household of the Angevin ruler himself. Legend records that the blood of some demon-ancestress ran in the veins of the dukes of Aquitaine, endowing them with a ferocity and falseness strange even to medieval minds, and the sons whom Eleanor bore to her second husband were true to this bad strain if to nothing else. Thus Thou not know wrote one of them to his father, who had reproached him for plotting against his authority, that it is our proper nature that none of us should love the other, but that every brother should strive with brother and son against father. I would not that Thou should deprive us of our hereditary right and seek to rob us of our nature. Though it's the seventh in order to weaken Henry II, had encouraged this spirit of treachery and even provided a refuge for Beckett during his exile. His policy was continued by Philip Augustus, who kept open house at Paris for the rebellious family of his tenant-in-chief whenever misfortune drove them to fly before their father's wrath, or ambition brought them to hatch some new conspiracy. Could Henry have once established the same firm grip he had obtained in England over his French possessions? He might have triumphed in the struggle with both sons and overlord. But in Poitou and Aquitaine he was merely regarded as Eleanor's consort, and the people looked to his heirs as rulers, especially to Richard his mother's favorite. Yet never had they suffered a reign of greater license and oppression than under the reckless and selfish Lionheart. After much secret plotting and open rebellion, Henry succeeded in imprisoning Eleanor, who had encouraged her sons to defy their father. But with Richard supported by Philip Augustus and the strength of southern France, he was forced to come to terms toward the end of his reign. Though only fifty-six, he was already failing in health, and the news that his own province of mine was fast falling to his enemies had broken his courage. Cursing the son who had betrayed him, he sullenly renewed the oath of army she owed to Philip, and promised to Richard the wealth and independence he had demanded. The compact sign he wrote away heavy with fever to his castle of Chanel, and there indifferent to life sank into a state of stupor. News was brought to him that his youngest son, John, for whom he had carved out a principality in Ireland, had been a secret member of the League that had just brought into his knees. Is it true, he asked, roused for the minute, that John, my heart, has deserted me? Reading the answer in the downcast faces of his attendants, he turned his face to the wall. Now let things go as they will, I care no more for myself or the world. Thus the old king died. In 1189 Richard the Fault succeeded his father, and by his prowess in Palestine became Richard Cordeleon. How he quarreled with Philip II we have seen in the last chapter, and that Philip, after the siege of Ocar, returned home in disgust at the other's overbearing personality. Philip Augustus does not cut the same heroic figure on the battlefield as his rival. Indeed there was no match in Europe for the Devil of Aquitaine, who knew not the word fear and the glamour of whose feats of arms has outlasted seven centuries. It is in kingship that Philip stands preeminent in his own age, ready to do battle at the right moment, but still more ready to serve France by patient statecraft. While Richard remained in Palestine, Philip plotted with the ever treacherous John for their mutual advantage at the absent king's expense. But their enmity remained secret until the joyful news arrived that the royal crusader had been captured in disguise on his way home by the very Leopold of Austria whose banner he had once contemptuously cast into a ditch. Now the Duke of Austria's overlord was the Emperor Henry VI whose claims to Sicily Richard had often derided, and the Lionheart, passing from the dungeon of the vassal to that of the overlord, did not escape until his subjects had paid a huge ransom, and he himself had promised to hold England as a fife of the Empire. Beware the Devil is loose, wrote Philip to John, when he heard that their united efforts to bribe Henry VI into keeping his prisoner permanently had failed. The next few years saw prolonged struggle between the French armies that had invaded Normandy and the forces of Richard, who, burning for revenge, proved as terrible a rival to Philip in the north of France as he had been in the east, and the duel continued until a poisoned arrow pierced the Lionheart's shoulder, causing his death. God visited the land of France, wrote a chronicler, for King Richard was no more. From this moment Philip Augustus began to realize his most cherished ambitions, slowly at first, but thanks to the worst of the English kings, with ever-increasing rapidity. John, who had succeeded Richard, was neither statesman nor soldier. To meaningless outbursts of Angevin rage he added the treachery and cruelty of the House of Aquitaine, and a sluggish disregard of dignity and ordinary decency, peculiarly his own. Soon all his subjects were banded together against him in fear, hatred, and scorn. The church, on whose privileges he trampled, the barons whose wives and daughters were unseafed his court, and whose lands he ravaged and confiscated, the people, whom his mercenaries tortured and oppressed, how he quarreled with the chapter of Canterbury over its choice of an archbishop, defied Pope Innocent III, and then, brought to his knees by an interdict, did homage to the Holy See for his possessions. These things, and the signing of Magna Carta, the English Charter of Popular Liberties at Runnymede, are tales well known in English history. What is important to emphasize here, in a European history, is the contrast of the unpopularity that John had gained for himself amongst all the classes of his own subjects at the very moment that Philip Augustus seemed in franchise to be, indeed, their God-given king. While John feasted at ruin, messengers brought word that Philip was conquering Normandy. Let him alone, some day I will win back all that he has taken, so answered the sluggard. But when he at last raised his standard it was already too late. The English parents would have followed Cordeleon on the road to Paris. They were reluctant to take sword out of Scabbard for John. The very Angevins and Normans were beginning to realize that they had more in common with their French conquerors than with any king across the Channel. Aquitaine, it is true, looked sourly on Philip's progress, but the reason was not that she loved England, but that she feared the domination of Paris and made it a systematic part of her policy for years to support the ruler who lived farthest away and would therefore be likely to interfere the least in her internal affairs. In 1214 John made his most formidable effort, dispatching an army to Flanders to unite with that of the powerful Flemish Count Ferrand, one of Philip's tenants-in-chief, and with the Emperor Otto IV in a combined attack on the northern French frontier. At both end the armies met, Philip Augustus in command of his forces, riding with a joyful face no less than if he had been bitten to a wedding. The battle, when it opened, found him wherever the fight was hottest, wielding his sword, encouraging, rallying, until by nightfall he remained victor of the field with a count of Flanders and many another of his chief enemies, including the English commander, prisoners at his mercy. Philip carried Count Ferrand behind him in chains on his triumphal march to Paris, while all the churches along the way rang their bells and the crowds poured forth to cheer their king and sing tédéums. The battle above was perhaps the most important engagement ever fought on French soil. So wrote a modern historian before the war of 1914. In the days of Louis VII the kings of France had stood dwarfed amid dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine and counts of Flanders and Anjou. Now the son of Louis had defeated an emperor, thrown one rebellious tenant-in-chief into a dungeon, and from another the Anjouvin John gained as the reward of his victory all along colored provinces north of the Loire. Even the crown treasury, once so poor, was replete for the time with the revenues of the confiscated Norman and Anjouvin estates of the English barons, who had been forbidden by their sovereign to do homage any more to a French overlord. Philip Augustus had shown himself Philip the Conqueror. But he was something far greater, a king who, like Henry II of England, could build as well as destroy. During his reign the menace of the old feudal baronage was swept away and the government received its permanent stamp as a servant of the monarchy. In his dealing with the French Church Philip followed the traditions of Pepin the Short and Charlemagne, yet gratifying as were his numerous gifts to monasteries and convents they were dovetailed into a scheme of combining the liberal patron with a firm master. That good relations between king and clergy resulted was largely due to Philip's policy of replacing bishops belonging to powerful families by men of humble origin accustomed to subservience. Also, he would usually support the lesser clergy in their frequent quarrels with their ecclesiastical superiors, thus weakening the leaders while he won the affection of the rank and file. Like John he came into collision with the iron will of Pope Innocent III, but on a purely moral question his refusal to live with the Danish princess Ingoborn to whom he had taken a violent and unaccountable dislike on his wedding day. The bride was a girl of eighteen. She could speak no French. Her husband's bishops were afraid to uphold her cause whatever their secret opinions, but in appealing to the Pope for help she gained an unyielding champion. In other chapters we shall see Innocent III as a politician and a persecutor of heretics. Here he stands as the moral leader of Europe, and no estimate of his character and work would be fair that neglected this aspect. It was to Innocent's political advantage to please the French king, whose help he needed to chastise the English John and to support a crusade against an outburst of heresy and language out. Moreover he had no armies to compel a king who accused his wife of witchcraft to recognize her as queen. Yet Innocent believed that Philip was in the wrong, and when the French king persuaded his bishops to divorce him and then promptly marry it again, papal letters proceeded to denounce the divorce as a farce and the new marriage as illegal. Recall your lawful wife, wrote Innocent, and then we will hear all that you can righteously urge. If you do not do this, no power shall move us to right or left until justice be done. This letter was followed by threats of excommunication, and after some months by an interdict that reduced Philip to a promise of submission in return for a full inquiry into his case. The promise so grudgingly given remained but a promise, and it was not until 1213, nearly twenty years since he had so cruelly repudiated Ingeborg, that, driven by continual papal pressure and the critical state of his fortunes, Philip openly acknowledged the Danish princess as his wife and queen. We have seen something of Philip's dealings with his greater tenants-in-chief. But such achievements as the conquest of Normandy and Anjou, and the victory of Bovan, were but the fruits of years of diplomacy during which the royal power had permeated the land, like ether the atmosphere, almost unnoticed. In lending a sympathetic ear to the complaints of Richard and his brothers against their father, Philip was merely carrying out the policy we have noticed in his treatment of the church. He never began a new campaign without forming alliances that might support him at each step, says Philip's modern biographer. And these allies were often the sub-tenants of large feudal estates to whom in the days of peace he had given his support against the claims of their feudal overlords. Sometimes he had merely used his influence as a mediator. At others he had granted privileges to the tenants, or else he had called the case in dispute before his own royal court for judgment. By one means or another, at any rate, he had made the lesser tenants feel that he was their friend, so that when he went out to battle they would flock eagerly to his banner, sometimes in defiance of their overlord. One danger to the crown lay, not in the actual feudal baronage, but in the prevosts, officials appointed by the king with power to exact taxes, administer the laws, and judge offenders in his name in the provinces. When the monarchy was weak, these prevosts, from lack of control, developed into petty tyrants, and it was fortunate for Philip that their encroachments were resented by both nobles and clergy, so that a system of reform that reduced them again to a subordinate position was everywhere welcomed. Gradually a link was established between local administration and the king's council, namely, officials called in the north of France Baileys in the south Seneshals, whose duty it was to keep a watch over the prevo and to depose or report him if necessary. The prevo was still to collect the royal revenues as of old, but the Bailey would take care that he did not cheat the king and would forward the money that he received to the central government. He would also hold assizes and from time to time visit Paris, where he would give an account of local conditions and how he had dealt with them. In these reforms, as in those of Henry II of England, a process that was gradually changing the face of Europe can be seen at work. First, the crumbling of feudal machinery too clumsy to keep pace with the needs and demands of donning civilization, and next its replacement by an official class educated in the intricacies of finance, justice, and administration, and depended not on the baronage but on the monarchy for its inspiration and success. The chief nobles of France in early medieval times had regarded such titles as Mayor of the Palace, Seneshals, Chamberland, Butler, and the like as bestowing both hereditary glory and also political power. With the passing of years, some of the titles vanished, while under Philip Augustus and his grandson Louis the Ninth, those that remained passed a new man of humbler rank who bore them merely while they retained the office or else, shorn of any political power, continued as honors of the court and ballroom. In effect, the royal household, once a kind of a general servant doing a bit of everything inadequately as in the days of Charlemagne, had now developed into two distinct bodies, each with their separate sphere of work. The great nobles surrounding their sovereign with the dignity and ceremonial in which the middle age is rejoiced, the trained officials advising him and carrying out his will. In his attitude to the large towns, except on his own crown lands where, like other landowners, he hesitated to encourage independence, Philip II showed himself sympathetic to the attempts of citizens to throw off the yoke of neighboring barons, bishops, and abbot. Many of the towns had formed communes, that is, corporations, something like a modern trade union, but these, though destined to play a large part in French history, were as yet only in their infancy. They had their origins sometimes in a revolutionary outburst against oppression, but often in a real effort on the part of leading townsmen to organize the civil life on profitable lines by means of gills or associations of merchants and traders with special privileges and laws. Some of the privileges at which these city corporations aimed were the right to collect their own taxes, to hold their own law courts for deciding purely local disputes, and to protect their trade against fraud, tyranny, and competition from outside. It all sounds natural enough to modern ears, but it will profound indignation in a French writer of the 12th century. The word commune, he says, is new and detestable, for this is what it implies, that those who owe taxes shall pay the rent that is their due to their lord but once in the year only, and if they commit a crime against him, they shall find pardon when they have made amends according to a fixed tariff of justice. Except within his own domains, Philip too readily granted charters confirming the communes and their coveted rights, and he also founded new towns under royal protection, offering there, upon certain conditions, a refuge to escaped serfs able to pay the necessary taxes. In Paris itself, his reign marks a new era, when, instead of a town famed according to a chronicler of the day, chiefly for its pestiferous smells, there were laid the foundations of one of the most luxurious cities of Europe. The cleansing and paving of the filthy streets, the building of fortifications of markets and of churches, and above all, that glory of Gothic architecture, Notre Dame de la Victoire, founded to celebrate the triumph of Bovent. Such were some of the works planned or undertaken in the capital during this reign. Over the young University of Paris, the king also stretched out a protecting hand, defending the students from the hostility of the townfolk by the command that they should be admitted to the privileges enjoyed by priests. For this practical sympathy, he and his successors were well repaid in the growth of an educated public opinion, ready to exalt its patron the crown by tongue and pin. Philip Augustus died in July, 1223. Great among the many great figures of his day, French chroniclers have yet left no distinct impression of his personality. It would almost seem as if the will, the foresight and the patience that have won him fame in the eyes of posterity, built up a baffling barrier between his character and those who actually saw him. Men recognized him as a king to be admired and feared. August in his conquest, terrible in his wrath when he dared cross his will. But his reserve, his indifference to court gaiety, his rigid attitude of dislike to those who used oaths or blasphemy, they found wholly unsympathetic and strange. Of the great work he had done for France, they were too close to judge fairly, and would have understood him better had he been rash and heedless of design like the Lionheart. For a real appreciation of Philip Augustus, we must turn to his modern biographer. Quote, he had found France a small realm hedged in by mighty rivals. When he began his reign, but a very small portion of the French-speaking people owned his sway. As Sousa reigned, his power was derided. Even as immediate lord, he was defied and said it not. But when he died, the whole face of France was changed. The King of the Franks was undisputedly the king of by far the greater part of the land and the internal strength of his government had advanced as rapidly and as securely as the external power. Quote, such was the change in France itself. But we can estimate also today what no contemporary of Philip Augustus could have realized, the effect of that change on Europe when France, from a collection of feudal fives, stood forth at last a nation in the modern sense, ready to take her place as a leader amongst her more backward neighbors. End of chapter 13. Chapter 14. Europe in the Middle Ages by Irna Lyford Plunkett. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 14. Empire and Papacy. When the Emperor Henry IV crossed the ice-bound Alps on his journey of submission to Canosa, he was accompanied by a faithful knight, Frederick of Burin, who he later rewarded for his loyalty with the hand of his daughter and the title Duke of Swavia. Frederick's son was elected emperor as Conran III, the first of the imperial line of Hohenstaufen that was destined to carry on through several generations the war between empire and papacy. The Hohenstaufen received their name from a hill on which stood one of Frederick of Burin's strongest castles. But they were also called Wobblingen after a town in their possession. While a house of Bavaria, their chief rivals was called Wealth after an early ancestor. The feud of Wobblingen and the Wealths that convults Germany had no less devastating and effect upon Italy, always exposed to influence from beyond the Alps, and the names of the rivals, corrupted on Italian tongues into gibbalines and ghouls, became party cries throughout the 13th and 14th centuries. In our last chapter we spoke of French communes, municipalities that rebelled against their overlords, setting up a government of their own. The same process of emancipation was at work in North Italy, only that it was able to act with greater rapidity and success for a time on account of the national tendency towards separation and the vigor of town life. In France, says a 13th century Italian in surprise, only the townspeople dwell in towns, the knights and noble ladies stay on their own domains. Certainly the contrast with this native Lombardy was strong. There, each city lived like a fortified kingdom on its hilltop, or in the midst of wide plains, cut off from its neighbors by suspicion, by jealousy, by competition. In the narrow streets, noble and knight, jostled shoulders perforce with merchants, students, mountain banks, and beggars. The limits of space dictated that many things in life must be shared in common, whether religious processions or plagues, and if street fighting flourished in consequence, so also did class intimacy and a sharpening of wits as well as of swords. Thus the towns of North Italy, like flowers in a hot house, bore fruits of civilization in advance of the world outside, whether in commerce, painting, or the art of self-government. And visitors from beyond the Alps stared astonished at merchants' luxurious palaces that made the castles of their own princes see mere barbarian strongholds. Yet this profitable independence was not one without struggle so fierce and continuous that they finally endangered the political freedom in whose interests they had originally been waged. At first the struggle was with barbarian invaders, and here, as in the case of Rome and the Popes, it was often the local bishops who, when emperors at Constantinople ceased to govern except the name, fostered the young life of the city-states and educated their citizens in a rough knowledge of war and statecraft. With the dawn of feudalism, bishops degenerated into tyrants and municipalities began to elect councils and advisory councils and under their leadership to rebel against their former benefactors and to establish governments independent of their control. The next danger was from within. The cities are swayed more easily than nations, and too often the communes of Lombardy became the prey of private factions or of more powerful city neighbors. Class warred against class and city against city and out of their struggles arose leagues and counterleagues bewildering to follow like the ever-changing colors of a kaleidoscope. Into this atmosphere of turmoil, the quarrel between Popes and Holy Roman emperors begun by Henry IV and Hildebrand and carried on by the Hornstofen and the inheritors of Hildebrand's ideals entered from the communes point of view like a heaven-sent opportunity for establishing their independence. In the words of a 10th century bishop, the Italians always wished to have two masters that they may keep one in check by the other. The cities that followed the Hornstofen were labeled Ghiblien, those that upheld Pope Gulf. Then at first and indeed throughout the contest where cruelty and treachery were concerned, there was little to choose between the rivals. Later, however, the fierce imperialism of Frederick I was to give to the warfare of his opponents the Gulfs, a patriotic aspect. Frederick I, the Barbarossa of the Third Crusade, was a Hornstofen on his father's side and a wolf on his mother's and it had been the hope of those who elected him emperor that like a cornerstone he would bind the two together and thus with God's blessing he might end their ancient quarrel. At first it appeared this hope might be realized for the new emperor made a friend of his cousin Henry the Lion who as Duke of Bavaria and Saxony was heir to the wealth ambitions. Frederick also by his firm and business-like rule established what the chroniclers called such unwanted peace that men seem changed the world a different one the very heaven milder and softer. Unfortunately, Frederick who has been aptly described as an imperialist hildogram regarded the peace of Germany merely as a stepping stone to wider ambitions. Justinian who had ruled Europe from Constantinople was his model and with the help of lawyers from the University of Bologna whom he handsomely rewarded for their services he revived all the old imperial claims over North Italy that men had forgotten or allowed to slip into disuse. The communes found that rights and privileges for which their ancestors had fought and died were trampled underfoot by an imperial official the Podesta sent a supreme governor to eat to the more important towns. Taxes were imposed and exacted to the uttermost coin by his iron hand. Complaint or rebellion were punished by torture and death. Death for freedom is the next best thing to freedom cried the men of Cremah flaming into a wild revolt while Milan shut her gates against her Podesta in an obstinate three-year siege. Deliverance was not yet and Frederick and his vast army of Germans desolated the plains. Cremah was burned, her starving population turned adrift. The glory of Milan was reduced to a stone quarry. Pope Alexander III who feeling his own independence threatened by imperial demands had supported the movement for liberty was driven from Rome and forced to seek refuge in France. Everywhere the gibbalines triumphed and it was in these black days in Italy that the gulfs seized for a time to be a faction and became patriots while the Pope stood before the world the would-be savior of his land from foreign yoke. Amid the smoldering ruins of Milan the lombard lead sprang into life. Town after town weary of German oppression and insolence offered their allegiance. Even Venice, usually selfish in the safe isolation of her lagoons, proffered ships and money. Milan was rebuilt and a new city called after the patriot Pope Alessandria was founded on a strategic site. Alessandria della Paglia, Alessandra of the Straw, Barbarossa nicknamed it contemptuously, threatening to burn it like a heap of weeds. But the new walls withstood his best engines and plague and the damp cold of winter devastated his armies and camped around him. The political horizon was not, indeed, so fair for the emperor as in the early days of his reign. Germany seethed with plots in her master's absence and Frederick had good reason to suspect that Henry the Lion was their chief author, the more that he had sulkily refused to share in the last Italian campaign. Worst of all was the news that Alexander the Third, having negotiated alliances with the kings of France and England, had returned to Italy and was busy stirring up any possible seeds of revolt against Frederick, whom he had excommunicated. In the year 1176 set Lagano 15 miles from Milan, the armies of the League and Empire met in a decisive battle. Barbarossa, nothing doubting of his success against mere armed citizens, but the spirit of the man of Cremus survived in the company of death a bodyguard of Milanese knights sworn to protect their carotio or sacred cart or else to fall beside it. Upon the carotio was raised a figure of Christ with arms outstretched beneath his feet and altar while from a lofty pole hung the banner of Saint Ambrose, patron Saint of Milan. When the battle opened the first terrific onslaught of German cavalry broke the Milanese lines, but the company of death reckless in their resolve rallied the waivers and turned defense into attack. In the ensuing struggle the emperor was unhorsed and in the rumors spread through the ranks that he had been killed the Germans broke and their retreat became a wild unreasoning route that bore their commander back on its tide, unable to stem the current, scarcely able to save himself. Such was the battle of Lagana worthy to be remembered not as an isolated 12th century victory of one set of forces against another, but as one of the first very definite advances in the great campaign for liberty that is still the battle of the world. At Venice in the following year the Hohenstaufen acknowledged his defeat and was reconciled to the church about by the perpetual peace of Constance signed in 1183 he granted to the communes of North Italy all the royal rights, Regalia, which they had ever had or at the moment enjoyed. Such rights, coinage, the election of officials and judges, the power to raise and control armies to impose an exact taxes, these are the pillars on which democracy must support her house of freedom. Yet since freedom to the medieval mind too often implied the right to oppress someone else or maintain a state of anarchy, too much stress must not be laid on the immediate gains. North Italy in the coming centuries was to fall again under foreign rule, her communes to abuse and betray the rights for which the company of death had risked their lives. Yet in spite of this taint of ignorance and treachery, the victory of Lagana had won for Europe something infinitely precious, the knowledge that tyrants could be overthrown by the popular will and feudal armies discomfited by citizen levies. Barbarossa returned to Germany to vent his rage on Henry the Lion to whose refusal to accompany him to Italy he considered his defeat largely due. Strong in the support of the church to which he was now reconciled, he summoned his cousin to appear before an imperial diet and to make answer to the charge of having confiscated ecclesiastical lands and revenues for his own use. Henry merely replied to this mandate by setting fire to church property in Saxony and in his absence the ban of outlawry was passed against him by the diet. Here again was the old Womeligan and wealth feud bursting into flame like a fire that had been but half suppressed and cousinship went to the wall. Henry the wealth was a son-in-law of Henry II of England and had made allies of Philip Augustus and the king of Denmark. His duchy of Bavaria in the south and of Saxony in the north covered a third of German territory. He had been winning military laurels in his struggle against the Slavs while Frederick had been losing Lombardy. Thus he pitted himself against the emperor unmindful that even in Germany the hand of the political clock were moving forward and feudalism slowly giving up its dominion. To the dawning sense of German nationality Barbarossa was something more than first among his barons. He was a king supported by the church and Bavarians and Saxons came reluctantly to the rebel banner while as the campaign developed the other princes saw their fellow vassals beaten and despoiled of his lands and driven into exile without raising a finger to help him. Frederick allowed Henry the lion to keep his Brunswick estates but Saxony and Bavaria he divided up amongst minor vassals in order to avoid the risk of another powerful rival. Master of Germany not merely a name but in power he and his successors could have built up a strong monarchy as Philip II and the House of Capet were to do in France had not the siren voice of Italy call them to wreck on her shifting policies. Hitherto we have spoken chiefly of North Italy but Frederick won bound Germany to her southern neighbors by fresh ties when he married his eldest son Henry in 1187 to Constance heiress of the Norman kingdom of Naples and Sicily. By this alliance he hoped to establish a permanent Hohenstaufen counterpoise in the south to the alliance of the Polk and the gulf towns in the north. Triumphant over the wrathful but helpless Roman sea he felt himself an emperor indeed and having crowned his son Henry as Caesar in imitation of classic times he rode away to the third crusade still lusting after adventure and glory. The news of his death in Asia Minor swept Germany with sadness and pride. Like Hallis House he had been cruel and hard but vices like these seemed to weigh little to the medieval mind against a peace and prosperity enjoyed under his rule. Legends grew about his name and the peasants whispered that he had not died but slept beneath the sandstone rocks and would wake again when his people were in danger to be their leader and protector. Henry VI who succeeded Frederick in the empire succeeded also to his dreams and the pitfalls that they inspired. One of his earliest struggles had been the finally successful attempt to secure Sicily against the claims of Count Tancrede an illegitimate grandson of the last ruler. Great were the sufferings of the unhappy Sicilians who had adopted the Normans cause. For Henry having bribed or coerced the Pope and North Italy into a temporary alliance exacted a bitter vengeance. Tancrede's useful son, blinded and mutilated, was sent with his mother to an alpine prison to end his days while in the dungeons of Palermo and Apulia torture and starvation brought to his followers death as a blessed relief from pain. Queen Constance, who had been powerless to check these atrocities, turned against her husband in loathing. The Pope excommunicated their author but Henry VI laughed contemptuously at both. It was his threefold ambition. First, to make the imperial crown not elective but hereditary in the House of Hohenstaufen. Next, to tempt the German princes into accepting this proposition by the incorporation of Naples and Sicily as a province of the empire. And thirdly, to rule all his dominions from his southern kingdom with the Pope at Rome as in the days of Otto the Great, the chief bishop in his empire. Strong-willed, persistent, resourceful, with the imagination that sees visions and the practical brain of a man of business who can realize them, Henry VI, had he lived longer, might have gained at least a temporary recognition of his schemes. But in 1197 he died at the age of 32, leaving a son not yet three years old as the heir of Hohenstaufen ambitions. Twelve months later died also Queen Constance, having reversed as much as she could during her short widowhood of her hated husband's German policy and having bequeathed the little king of Naples to the guardianship of the greatest of medieval popes and the champion of the ghouls, Innocent III. At the coronation of Innocent III the officiating priests had used these words, take the tiara and know the thou art the father of princes and kings, the ruler of the world, the vicar on earth of our Saviour Jesus Christ. To Lothario di Conti this utterance was but the confirmation of his own beliefs as unshakable as those of Hildebrand, as wide in their scope as the imperialism of Frederick Barbarossa or Henry VI. The Lord Jesus Christ, he declared, has set up one rule over all things as his universal vicar and as all things in heaven, earth, and hell bow to the knee of Christ, so should all obey Christ's vicar, that there be one flock and one shepherd. Again, princes have power on earth, priests have also power in heaven. In illustration of these views he likened the papacy to the sun, the empire to the lesser light of the moon and recalled how Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane gave to St. Peter two swords. By these he explained were meant temporal and spiritual power and emperors who claimed to exercise the former could only do so by the gracious consent of St. Peter's successors since the Lord gave Peter the rule not only of the universal church but also the rule of the whole world. Gregory VII had made men wonder in the triumph of Canossa whether such an ideal of the papacy could ever be realized, but as if in proof he had been hunted from Rome and died in exile. It was left to Innocent III to exhibit the partial fulfillment at any rate of all that his predecessor had dreamed. In character no saintly Bernard of Clairvaux but a clear brain, practical statesman. He set before himself the vision of a kingdom of God on earth after the pattern of earthly kingdoms and to this end that he sincerely believed carried with it the blessing of God for the perfecting of mankind. He used every weapon in his armory. Sometimes his ambitions fail as when in the real glow of enthusiasm he preached the Fourth Crusade, an expedition that ended in Venice who had promised the necessary ships diverting the crusaders to stormer a coveted port on the Dalmatian coast and afterwards to sack and burn Constantinople in the mingled interests of commerce and pillage. His anger at the news that the remonstrances of his legates had been ignored could hardly at first be extinguished. Not thus had been his plan of winning Eastern Christendom to the Catholic faith and of destroying the infidel. For the Latin Empire of Constantinople set up by the victorious crusaders was obviously too weak to maintain for long its tyranny over hostile Greeks or to serve as an effective barrier against the Turks. Statesmanship, however, prompted him to reap what immediate harvest he could from the blunders of his faithless sons and he accepted the submission of the church in Constantinople as a debt long owing to the Holy See. The Fourth Crusade, in spite of the extension of Rome's ecclesiastical influence, must be reckoned as one of Innocence's failures. In the West, on the other hand, the atmosphere created by his personality and statecraft made the name of the Lord Innocent one of weight and fear to his enemies, of rejoicing to his friends. When upholding Queen Ingeborg, he had stood as a moral force, vending Philip Augustus to his will by his convinced determination and the same tenacity of belief and purpose added to the purity of his personal life in the charm of his manner, won him the affection of the Roman populace, usually so hostile to its vickers. Medieval popes were, as a rule, respected less in Italy than beyond the Alps and least of all in their own capital where too many spiritual gifts had been seen debased from material ends and papal acts were often at variance with pious professions. During the pontificate of Innocent the Third, however, we find the prefect, the imperial representative at Rome, accept investiture at his hands. The senator, chief magistrate of the municipality, do him homage, and through this double influence his control became paramount over the city government. In Naples and Sicily he was able to continue the policy of Constance, drive out rebellious German barons, struggling against the Saracens in Sicily and develop the education of his ward, the young king of Naples, as the spiritual son who should one day do battle for his ideals. God has not spared the rod, he wrote to Frederick II. He has taken away your father and mother, yet he has given you a worthier father, his victor, and a better mother, the church. In Lombardy, where the gulfs naturally turned to him as their champion, the papal sway was comparatively smooth for the cruelty of Barbarossa and his son Henry VI had aroused hatred and suspicion on all sides. Thus, Innocent found himself more nearly the master of Italy than any pope before his time, and from Italy his patronage and alliances extended like a web all over Europe. Philip Augustus of France, trying to ignore and defy him, found, in the end, the anger he aroused worth placating. John of England changed his petulant defiant into submission and an oath of homage. Portugal accepted him as her suzerain. Rival kings of Hungary sought his arbitration. Even distant Armenia sent ambassadors to ask his protection. His most impressive triumph power was secured in his dealings with the empire. Henry VI had wished, as we have seen, to make the imperial crown hereditary, but no German prince would have been willing to accept the child he left as heir to his troubled fortunes. The choice of the electors, therefore, wavered between another Hohenstaufen, Philip of Swalia, brother of the late emperor, and the wealth auto, son of Henry the lion. The votes were divided, and each claimant afterwards declared himself the legally elected emperor. One with the title Philip II, the other with that of Otto IV. For 10 long years Germany was devastated by their civil wars. Otto, as a gulf representative, gained the support of innocent the great, to whom the claimants at one time appealed for arbitration. But Philip refused to submit to this judgment in favor of his rival, believing that he himself had behind him the majority of the German princes in the position of the official class. Inasmuch, declared innocent, as our dearest son in Christ, Otto is industrious, prudent, discreet, strong and constant, himself devoted to the church. We, by the authority of St. Peter, receive him as king, and will in due course bestow on him the imperial crown. Here was papal triumph. Rome no longer patronized, but patron, Otto on his knees, gracefully promising submission and homage with every kind of ecclesiastical privilege to complete the picture. Yet circumstances changed traditions as well as people, and when the death of Philip of Swavia left him master of Germany, the gulf Otto found his old ideas impracticable. He became a gibbeline in policy, announced his imperial rights over Lombardy, even over some of the towns belonging to the pope, while he loudly announced his intention of driving the young Hohenstaufen from Naples. Innocence wrathed as Waltiface was unbounded. Otto, no longer his dearest son in Christ, was now a perjurer and schismatic, whose excommunication and deposition were the immediate duty of Rome. Neither, however, was likely to be effective unless the pope could provide Italy and Germany with a rival whose dazzling claims back by papal support would win him followers wherever he went. In this crisis, Innocent found his champion in the Hohenstaufen Prince denounced by Otto, a lad educated almost since infancy in the tenets and ambitions of the Catholic Church. Frederick, king of Naples and Sicily, was an interesting development of hereditary tastes and the atmosphere in which he had been reared. To the southern blood that leaped in his veins he owed perhaps his hot passions his sensuous appreciation of luxury and art is almost serison-content for women, save his toys to amuse his leisure hours. From the Hohenstaufen he imbibed strength, ambition, and cruelty. From the Norman strain on his mother's side his reckless daring and treachery. With the ordinary education of a prince of his day Frederick's qualities and vices might have merely produced a warrior king of rather exceptional ability, but thanks to the papal tutors provided by Innocent the boy's naturally quick brain and imagination were stirred by a course of studies far superior to what his lay contemporaries usually enjoyed. And he emerged in manhood with a real love of books and culture and with an eager curiosity on such subjects as philosophy and natural history. In the Royal Charter by which he founded the University of Naples, Frederick expressed his intention that here those within the kingdom who had a hunger for knowledge might find the food for which they were yearning. In his court at Palermo, if from one aspect disillusioned and luxurious, was also a center for men of wit and knowledge against whose brains the king loved to test his own quips and theories. When Frederick reached Rome on Innocence hasty summons to unsheath the sword of the hornstaff and against Otto, much of his character was as yet a closed book even to himself. Impulsive and eager like any ambitious youth of 17 called the High Adventure and with a genuine respect for his guardian he did not look far ahead but kneeling at the pope's feet, pledged his homage and faith before he rode away northward to win an empire. In Germany a considerable following awaited him, lifelong opponents of Otto on account of his wealth blood and others who hated him for his cherished manners. Amongst them, Frederick scattered lavishly some money he had borrowed from the Republic of Genoa and this generosity combined with his hornstaff and strength and daring increased the happy reputation that papal legates had already established for him in many quarters. In December 1212 he was crowned in mines. The civil war followed, embittered by papal and imperial leagues but in 1214 Otto IV was decisively beaten at Belon in the struggle with Philip II of France that we have already described and the tide which had been previously turning against him now swept away his few friends and last hopes. With the entry of his young rival into the Rhineland provinces the dual empire ceased to exist and Frederick was crowned in Aachen, the old capital of Charlemagne. Innocent III had now reached a summit of his power for his pupil and protege sat on the throne of Rome's imperial rival. In the same year he called a council to the Lateran Palace, the fourth gathering of its kind to consider the two objects dearest to his heart, the deliverance of the Holy Land and the reform of the church universal. Crusading Zeal, however, he could not rouse again. To cleanse and spiritualize the life of the church in the 13th century was to prove a task beyond men of finer fiber than innocent. But as an illustration of his immense influence over Europe, the fourth Lateran Council with its dense submissive crowds represented of every land and class was a fitting end to his pontificate. In the year 1216, Innocent III died. The most powerful of all popes, a striking personality whose life by kindly fate did not outlast his glory. In estimating innocence ability as a statesman, there stands one blot against his record in the clear light shed by after events. Namely, the short-sighted policy that once again united the kingdom of Naples to the empire and laid the papacy between the upper millstone of Lombardy and the nether millstone of southern Italy. Excuse may be found in Innocent's desperate need of a champion with Otto IV threatening his papal heritage, added to his belief in the promises of the young Hohenstaufen to remain his faithful vassal. He also tried to safeguard the future by making Frederick publicly declare that he would bequeath Naples to a son who would not stand for election to the emperor. But entrusting the word of the young emperor, he had sown a win from which his successors were to reap a whirlwind. The new emperor was just 20 years old when Innocent died. Either to please his guardian or moved by a momentary religious impulse, he had taken the cross immediately after his entry into Aachen. But the years passed and he showed himself in no haste to fulfill the vow. Much of his time was spent in his loved southern kingdom where he completed Innocent's work of reducing to submission the Saracen population that had remained in Sicily since the Mohammedan conquest. As infidels the papacy had regarded these Arabs with special hatred. But Frederick once assured that they were so weak that they would be in future dependent on his favor, began protecting instead of persecuting them. He also encouraged their silk industry by building them a town, Lucera, on the Neapolitan coast where they could pursue it undisturbed. While he enrolled large numbers of Arab warriors in his army and used them to enforce his will on the feudal aristocracy, descendants of the Norman adventurers of the 11th century. So successful was he in playing off one section of his subjects against another, opposing or aiding the different classes as policy dictated, that he soon reigned as an autocrat in Naples. Many of the noble strongholds were leveled with the dust. Their claim to wage private war was forbidden on pain of death. Cases were taken away from their law courts and those of the feudal bishops to be decided by royal justices. Towns were deprived of their freedom to elect their own magistrates, while crown officials sent from Palermo administered the laws and imposed and collected taxes. On the whole, these changes were beneficial for private privileges had been greatly abused in Naples and Frederick, like Philip Augustus or the Angevin Henry II, had the instinct and ability to govern well when he chose. Nevertheless, the subjugation of the kingdom, as Naples was usually called in Italy, was of course received with loud outcries of anger by Neapolitan barons and churchmen who hastened to inform the Holy See that their ruler loved Infidel's better-than-Christians and kept an eastern harem at Palermo. Honorius III, the new pope, accepted such reports and scandals with dismay. He had himself noted uneasily Frederick's absorption in Italian fares and frequently reminded him of his crusading vow. Being gentle and slow to commit himself to any decided step, however, it was not till the Hohenstaufen deliberately broke his promise to Innocent III and had his eldest son Henry crown King of the Romans as well as King of Naples, thus acknowledging him as his heir both in Germany and Italy, but Honorius's wrath flamed into a threat of excommunication. For a time it spread no farther since Frederick was lavish in explanations and in promises of friendship that he had no intention of fulfilling while the old pope chose to believe him rather than risk an actual conflagration. At last, however, the patient Honorius died. Gregory IX, the new pope, was of the family of Innocent and shared to the full his views of the worldwide supremacy of the church. An old man of austere life and feverish energy, he regarded Frederick as a monster of ingratitude and became almost hysterical and quite unreasonable in his efforts to humble him. Goaded by his constant reproaches and threats, the emperor began to make leisurely preparations at Brindisi for his crusade, but when he at last started an epidemic of fever to which he himself fell a victim, forced him to put back to port. Gregory, refusing to believe in this illness as anything more than an excuse for delay, at once excommunicated him, and then, though Frederick set sail as soon as he was well enough, repeated the ban, giving as his reason that the emperor had not waited to receive his pardon for the first offense like an obedient son of the church. A crusader excommunicated by the head of Christendom first for not fulfilling his vow and then for fulfilling it. This was a degrading and ridiculous sight, and Frederick, now definitely hostile to Rome, continued on his way, determined with obstinate pride that, if not for the Catholic faith, then for his own glory he would carry out his purpose. The Templars refused him support. The Christians still left in the neighborhood of Ochre helped him half-heartedly or stood aloof, frightened by the warnings of their priests. But Frederick achieved more without the Pope's aid than other crusaders had done of late years with his blessing. By force of arms and still more by skillful negotiations, he obtained from the sultan possession of Jerusalem and, entering in triumph, placed on his head the crown of the Latin kings. His vow fulfilled he sailed for Sicily, and the Pope, whose troops in Frederick's absence had been harrying the kingdom, hastily patched up a piece at San Germano. I will remember the past no more, cried Frederick, but anger burned within him at papal hostility. The emperor has come to me with a zeal of a devoted son, said Gregory, but there was no trust in his heart that corresponded to his words. Ahonestofen, who had taken Jerusalem unaided, supreme in Naples, supreme also in Germany, stretching out his imperial scepter over Lombardy, let Pope, who believed that the future of the church rested on the temporal independence of Rome, could sleep tranquil in his bed with such a vision. It is not possible to describe here, in any detail, the renewed war between empire and papacy that followed the inevitable breakdown of the Treaty of San Germano. Very bitter was the spirit in which it was waged on both sides. Frederick, whatever his intentions, could not forget that it was the father of Christendom who had tried to ruin his crusade. The remembrance did not so much shake his faith as waken him an exasperated sense of injustice that rendered him deaf to those who counseled compromise. Unable to rid himself wholly of the fear of papal censure, he yet saw clearly enough that the sin for which the Popes relentlessly pursued him was not his cruelty nor profligacy nor even his toleration of serocence, but the fact that he was king of Naples as well as Holy Roman Emperor. To a man of Frederick's haughty temperament there was but one absolution he could win for his crime, so to master Rome that he could squeeze her judgments to his fancy like a sponge between his strong fingers. Italy is my heritage, he wrote to the Pope, and all the world knows it. In his passionate determination to obtain this heritage, statesmanship was thrown to the winds. He had planned a strong monarchy in Naples, but in Germany he underbind the foundations of royal authority that Barbarossa and Henry VI had begun to lay. Let every prince, he declared, enjoy in peace according to the improved custom of his land, his immunities, jurisdictions, counties, and hundreds, both of those which belonged to him in full right and those which had been granted out to him in fife. The Italian Hohenstaufen only sought from his northern kingdom, whose good government he thus carelessly sacrificed to feudal anarchy, sufficient money to pay for his campaigns beyond the Alps and leisure to pursue them. In the words of a modern historian, he bartered his German kingship for an immediate triumph over his hated foe. At first, victory rewarded his energy and skill. His hereditary enemy, the Lombard League, had tampered with the loyalty of his eldest son, Henry, king of the Romans, whom he had left to rule in Germany. But Frederick discovered the plot in time and deposed and imprisoned the culprit. In despair at the prospect of lifelong imprisonment held out to him, the young Henry flung himself to his death down a steep mountainside. And Conrad, his younger brother, a boy of eight, was crowned in his stead. In North Italy, Frederick pursued the policy not so much of trampling down resistance with his German levies like his grandfather, Barbarossa, as of employing Italian nobles at the Ghibli party, whom he supported and financed, that they might fight his battles and make his wrath terrible in the popular hearing. Such were Ecclain de Romano and his brother, Albertago, lords of Verona and Vicenza, whose tyranny and cruelty seemed abnormal even in their day. The devil's own servant, Ecclain is called by a contemporary, who describes how he slaughtered in cold blood 11,000 prisoners. Quote, I believe in truth no such wicked man has been from the beginning of the world unto our own days, for all men trembled at him as a rush quivers in the water, and he who lived today was not sure of the moral. The father would seek out and slay his son and the son his father or any of his kingsfolk to please this man, end quote. Albertago hanged 25 of the greatest men at Treviso, who added no wise offended or harmed him. And as the prisoners struggled in their death agonies, he thrust among their feet their wives, daughters and sisters, whom he afterwards turned to drift, half naked, to seek protection where they might. Revenge, when this limb of Satan fell into the hands of his enemies, was of a brutality to match. For Albertago and his young sons were torn in pieces by an infuriated mob, his wife and daughters burned alive, though they were noble maidens and the fairest in the world and guiltless. Passions ran too deep between guilt and gibbling to distinguish innocency or despair youth or sex. Cruelty, the most despicable and infectious of vices, was the very atmosphere of the 13th century, desecrating what has been described from another aspect as an age of high ideals and heroic lives. It was a remark with some surprise by contemporaries that Frederick II could pardon a joke at his own expense, but on the other hand we read of his cutting off the thumb of a notary who had misspelled his name and callously ordering one of his servants by way of amusement to dive and dive again into the sea after a golden cup, until from sheer exhaustion he reappeared no more. At Cortanova, the Lombard League was decisively beaten by the Imperial forces. The Carroccio of Milan seized and burned. Frederick, flushed with success, now declared that not only North but also Middle Italy was subject to his allegiance and replied to a new excommunication by advancing into Romana and besieging some of the papal towns. Gregory, worn out by grief and fury, died as his enemy approached the gates of Rome and as immediate successor, unnerved by excitement, followed him to the grave before the Cardinals who had elected him, could proceed to his consecration. In his fourth, who now ascended the papal throne, had of old shown some sympathy to the Imperial cause, but Frederick, when he heard of his election, is reported to have said, I have lost a friend for no pope can be a gibbling. With the example of Otto IV in his mind, he should have added that no emperor could remain a gulf. Frederick had indeed gained an inveterate enemy more dangerous than Gregory the Ninth because more politic and discreet. From Lyon, wither he had fled. Innocent the fourth maintained unflinchingly the claims he could no longer set forth in Rome, declaring the victorious emperor excommunicate and deposed. As the pope disposed me, asked Frederick scornfully when the news came, bring me my crowns that I may see what he has taken away. One after another he placed on his head the seven crowns his attendants brought him, the royal crown of Germany, an imperial diadem of Rome, the iron circlet of Lombardy, the crowns of Jerusalem, of Burgundy, of Sardinia, and of Sicily, and Naples. See, he said, are they not all mine still? And none shall take them from me without a struggle. So the hideous war between Welfth and Wobblingen, between Gulf and Gibilin continued, and Germany and Italy were deluged with blood and flames. After the emperor Frederick was put under the ban, says a German chronicler, the robbers rejoiced over the spoils. Then were the plowshares beaten into swords and reaping hooks into lances. No one went anywhere without flint and steel to set on fire whatever he could kindle. The ebb from the high watermark of the emperor's fortunes was marked by the revolt and successful resistance of the Gulf city of Parma to the imperial forces. A defeat Frederick might have wiped out in fresh victory had not his own help begun to fail. In 1250 he died, still excommunicate, snatched away to hell according to his enemies, not dead according to many who from love or hate believed his personality of more than human endurance. Yet Frederick, whether for good or ill, had perished, and with him his imperial ambitions. Popes might tremble at other nightmares, but the supremacy of the Holy Roman Empire over Italy would no more haunt their dreams for many years. Naples also, to whose conquest and government he had devoted the best of his brain and judgment, was torn from his heirs and presented by his papal enemy to the French House of Anjou. Struggling against these usurpers, the last of the royal line of Hohenstaufen, Conrad, son of Conrad, a lad of 15, gallant and reckless as his grandfather, was captured in battle and beheaded. Frederick had destroyed in Germany and built on sand elsewhere, and all of his conquests and achievements, only their memory was to dazzle after generations. Stupor at Gloria Mundi, he was called by those who knew him, and in spite of his ultimate failure and his vices, he still remains a wonder of the world, set above enemies and friends by his personality, the glory of his courage, his audacity, and his strength of purpose. End of Chapter 14. Chapter 15, Europe and the Middle Ages by Irna Lyford Plunkett. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 15, Learning and Ecclesiastical Organization in the Middle Ages. The word progress implies to modern men and women a moving forward towards a perfection as yet unknown, freshly imagined indeed by each generation. To the Middle Ages it meant rather appearing back through the mists of barbarian invasions to an idealized Christian Rome. Inspiration lay in the past, not merely in such political conceptions as the Holy Roman Empire, but in the domain of art and thought, where too often tradition laid her choking grip upon originality struggling for expression. The painting of the early Middle Ages was stereotyped in the stiff, though beautiful models of Byzantium that fathers of the church had insisted by means of decrees passed at church councils should be considered as fitting representations of Christian subjects for all time. Less impressive, but more lifelike, were the illuminations of missiles and holy books that in illustrating the gospels or lives of the saints reproduced the artist's own surroundings. The noble he could see from the window of his cell riding by with hawk or hounds, the laborer sowing or delving, the merchant with his money bags, the man of fashion trailing his furred gown. Vignettes such as these were their neat craftsmanship of line and color, their almost photographic love of detail, lend a reality to our glimpses of life in Europe from the 12th to the 14th centuries. Yet great as is the debt we owe them, the real art of the Middle Ages was not consummated with a brush, but with the builder's tools and the sculptor's chisel. Like the painters, the architect's impulse was at first almost entirely religious, though guild halls and universities followed on the erection of churches and monasteries. Nourished on St. Augustine's belief in this life as a mere transitory journey toward the eternal city of God, medieval men and women saw this pilgrimage encompassed with a vast army of devils and saints ranged in constant battle for the human soul. Only through faith and the kindly assistance of the saints could man hope to beat off the legions of hell which hung like a pack of wolves about his footsteps, and nowhere with greater efficacy than in the sanctuary from which human prayer arose daily to God's throne. Churches and chapels in modern times have become the property of a section of the public. That is, those who think or believe in a certain way, and sometimes through poverty of purse or spirit, through bad workmanship or material, the architecture that results is shoddy or insignificant. In the Middle Ages, his parish church was the most certain fact in every Christian's existence from the day he was carried to the font for baptism until his last journey to rest beneath its shadow. Here he would make his confessions, his vows of repentance and amendment, and offer his worship and thanksgiving. Here he would often find a fortified refuge from the violence in the street outside, a school, a granary, a parish council chamber. What more natural than that medieval artist, their souls attuned with the hopes and fears of their age, should realize their genius best in constructing and ornamenting buildings that were, to all citizens alike, the symbol of their belief. Let us build, said the people of Siena in the 13th century, such a church to the glory of God that all men shall wonder. The cathedral, when completed, was but a third in size and grandeur of the original design, for the black death fell upon Siena and carried off her builders in the midst of their work. Yet it remains magnificently arresting to modern eyes as though the faith of those who planned and fashioned its slabs of black and white marble for the love of God and their city had breathed into their workmanship something of the medieval soul. The same is true of Notre Dame de la Victoire in Paris, founded by Philip Augustus, of which Victor Hugo says, each face, each stone is a page of history. It is true of nearly all medieval churches that have outlived the ravages of war and fire, memorials of an age that, if it lacked behind our own in ultimate achievement, was preeminent in one art, at least, ecclesiastical architecture. Where the architect stopped, the medieval sculptor took up his work, at first with simple severity, but later in a riot of imagination that people facades, vaulted roofs, and capitals of columns with the angels, demons, and hybrid monsters that haunted the fancy of the day. The flying buttress, the invention of which made possible lofty claresteries with vast expanses of window, brought to perfection another art, the painting of glass. Here also the medieval artist excelled, and the crucibles in which he mixed the colors that hold us wrapped before the windows of Lyon, Albee, and Chartres still keep unsolved the secret of their transparent delicacy and depth. In the architecture, the sculpture, and in the stained glass of the Middle Ages, we see original genius at work, but in learning and culture, Europe was slower to throw off the giant influence of Rome. Even under the crushing inroads of barbarian ignorance, Italy had managed to keep alive the study of classical authors and of Roman law. Latin remained the language of the educated man or woman, the language in which the services of the church were recited, sermons were preached, correspondence carried on, business transacted, and students in universities and schools addressed by their professors. The advantages of a common tongue can be imagined. The comparative ease with which a pope or king could keep in touch with bishops or subjects of a different race, the accessibility of the best books to students of all nations, since scarcely a medieval author of repute would condescend to employ his own tongue. Above all, perhaps the ease with which an ambassador, a merchant, or a pilgrim could make himself understood on a journey across Europe instead of torturing his brain with struggles after the right word and first one foreign dialect and then another. This classical form, so rigidly withholding knowledge from the grasp of the ignorant, had also its disadvantage for many a medieval pen that could have flown across vellum and joyful intimacy in its owner's tongue, stumbled clumsily amidst Latin constructions, leaving in the end not a spontaneous record of current events, but a dry as dust catalog in bad imitation of some Latin stylist. The modern world is more grateful to medieval culture for such lapses as Dante's Divina Comedia than for all the heavy Latin tomes to Osser's hope for laurel and mortality. For those in England and France who could not easily master Latin or found its stately periods to cumbrous for ordinary conversation, French, descended from the spoken Latin of the Roman soldier or merchant in Gaul, was in the Middle Ages as today the language of polite society. It possessed two distinct dialects, the Lung de Oyl and the Lung de Oc, so-called because the northern Frenchmen, including the Norman, was supposed to pronounce we as we'll, while as Southern fellow countrymen pronounced it as up. England, where ever since the conquest of William I, French had been the natural tongue of a semi-foreign court, owed an enormous literary impulse to the Lung de Oyl during the 12th and 13th centuries, while along the arc that gave its name to a district in the south of France, shared its poetry and romance between Provençals and Catalans. The descendants of the former are today French of the latter, Spanish, but in the 11th century, they were fellow subjects of the Council of Toulouse who ruled over a district stretching from the source of the Rhone to the Mediterranean from the Italian apps to the Hebrew. In this semi-independent kingdom, they're developed a civilization and culture of hot house growth precocious in its appreciation of the less violent pleasures of life, such as love, art, music, literature, but often corrupt in their enjoyment. The gay court of Toulouse paid no heed to St. Augustine's hell, whose fears haunted the rest of Europe in its more thoughtful moments. Joyous and inconsequent, it lived for the passing hour and out of its atmosphere of dalliance and culture, was born a race of poet singers. These troubadours sang of love whose silk and fetters could hold and thrall knights and fair ladies, and their golden lyrics, now plaintive, now gay, were carried to the crowded cities of Italy and Spain or found schools of imitators elsewhere, as in Germany amongst her 13th century minisingers or love singers. In the north of France and in England appeared minstrels also, but their themes were less of love than of battle, and audiences reveled by castle and campfire in the jests or deeds of Charlemagne and his paladins, the chivalry of Arthur and his knights, or in stirring border ballads such as Chevy Chase. The marketplace, the camp and the baronial hall where were sung or recited these often imaginary stories of the past were the schools of the many unlettered, just as the conversation of Arabs and Jews around the desert fires had stimulated the imagination of the young Mohammed, but for the few who could afford a sounder education, there were the universities, Paris, Bologna, Oxford, to name but three of the most famous. The word universitas implied in the Middle Ages a union of men, such a corporation as the gills formed by fishmongers and drapers to protect their trade interests and the universities had indeed originated for a similar purpose. Cities today that have universities in their midst are proud of the fact and welcome new students, but in early medieval times an influx of young men of all ages from every part of Europe, many of them wild and unruly, some so poor that they must beg or steal their daily bread was at first sight a very doubtful blessing. Street fights between nationalities who hated one another on principle or between bands of students and citizens were a common occurrence in the towns that learning honored with their presence and had their usual accompaniment of broken heads, fires and looting. But for the universitas formed by the masters and students to control and protect their members, these centers of education would probably have been stamped out by indignant tradesmen. As it was, they had to fight for their existence. Municipalities looked with no lenient eye upon a corporation that seemed to them a state within a state, threatening their own right to govern all within the city. It was not until after many generations that they understood the meaning of the word co-operation, that is the possibility of assisting instead of hindering the work of the universitas. Sometimes a king like Philip Augustine insisted on toleration by granting to his students the privilege of clergy. But as the university grew, it became able to enforce its own lessons. In the 13th century, the masters of Paris closed their lecture halls and led away their flock in protest for what they considered unfair treatment by the city authorities during a riot. And their absence taught Parisians that in spite of headbreakings, the students were an asset, not a loss to municipal life. Under the protection, therefore, of a papal bull, they returned a few weeks later in triumph to the Latin Quarter. It was only by degrees that colleges where the student could live were erected, or that anything resembling the elaborate organization of a modern university was evolved. Students lodged where they could and masters lived on the goodwill of those who paid their fees and starved if their popularity weighed in with it their audience. The life of both teacher and pupil was vague and hazardous with a background of poverty and crime lurking at the street corners to ruin the unwary or foolish. Nor was the period of study a mere passing sojourn like some modern terms. The Bachelor of Arts at Oxford, of Paris, must be a student of five years standing. The Master of Arts calculated on devoting three years more to gaining his final degree. A doctor of theology would be phased with eight years' hard work at least. It might almost be said that higher education under these circumstances became a profession. To Bologna, the greatest of the Italian universities went those who wished to study Roman law at the fountainhead. This does not mean to stir up the legal dust of a dead empire out of a student's curiosity, but to master a living system of law that barbarian invaders had gradually crafted onto their own national codes. In the 11th century, the laws of Justinian were as much or more revered than in his own day. We have seen that Frederick Barbarossa set the lawyers of Bologna to work to justify, from old legal documents, the claims he wished to establish over Lombardy, and when they had succeeded to his satisfaction, he rewarded them with gifts and knighthood, showing what value he put on their achievement. This is a very good example of the respect felt by medieval minds for the laws and title deeds of an earlier age, even though the tyranny that resulted led the Lombard League to dispute such claims. Still more closely allied than the civil codes of Europe to the old Roman legal texts, was the canon law of the church that had been based directly upon classic models, and with the rise of Hildebrand's worldwide ambitions, its decisions assumed a growing importance and demanded an enormous army of trained lawyers to interpret and arrange them. For use of a practical and ambitious turn of mind, here was a course of study leading to a profession profitable in all ages, when a textbook was provided for such budding lawyers in the Decretum of Gratium, a monk who in the 12th century compiled a full and authoritative text of canon law. The existence of the ecclesiastical courts in which canon law was administered, we have already mentioned in discussing the quarrel of Henry II of England and Thomas Beckett. Founded originally to deal with purely ecclesiastical cases and officials, they tended in time to draw within their competence anyone over whom the church could claim protection and any causes that affected the rights of the Catholic Church. It was a wide net with a very small mesh as the Angevid Henry II and other lay rulers of Europe found. The protection that spread its wings over priests and clerks stretched also to crusaders, widows, and orphans. The jurisdiction of the church courts claimed not merely the moral questions such as heresy, sacrilege, and perjury, but all matters connected with probate of wills, marriage, and divorce, and even libel. Rome became a hive of ecclesiastical lawyers, with a pope like the Roman emperors of old, the supreme law giver and final court of appeal for all church courts of Europe. His rule was absolute, at least in theory, for by his power of dispensation he could set aside, if he considered advisable, the very canon law his office administered. He could also summon to his curia, or papal court, any case on which he wished to pronounce judgment at whatever stage in its litigation in an inferior ecclesiastical court. Under the pope, in an ordered hierarchy, corresponding to the feudal arrangement of lay society, came the metropolitan's who received from his hand, or from those of his legates, the narrow woollen scar for pallium that was the symbol of their authority. Next in order came the diocesan bishops, with their officials, the archdeacons, and rural deans, each with their own court in measure of jurisdiction. The pope's will went forth to Christendom in the form of letters called bulls, from the bullah or heavy seal that was attached to them. Against those who paid no heed to their contents, he could hurl either the weapon of excommunication, that is a personal outlawry from the church, or else if the offender were a king or a city, the still more blasting interdict that fell on ruler and ruled alike. The land that groaned under an interdict was bereft of all spiritual comfort. No priest might say public mass, baptize a newborn child, perform the marriage service, console the dying with supreme unction, or bury the dead. The very church bells would ring no more. It was under this pressure of spiritual starvation when the saints seemed to have withdrawn their sheltering arms and the demons to have gathered joyfully to a harvest of lost souls that John of England was brought by the curses of his people to turn to Rome in repentance and submission. Yet as in the case of most weapons, familiarity bred contempt and too frequent use of powers of interdict and excommunication was to blunt their efficacy, a Frederick II, the oft excommunicated, proved able to conquer Jerusalem and dominate Italy even under the papal ban. The church, in her claims to a world empire, demanded in truth an obedience that was beyond her ability to enforce. She also laid herself open to temptations to which, from the nature of her temporal ambitions, she must inevitably succumb. No such elaborate or expansive administration as emanated from her curia could continue without an inexhaustible flow of money into her treasury. Lawyers, priests, legates, cardinals, the pope himself, each had to be maintained in a state befitting their office in the eyes of the world as ready in the 13th century as in the 20th to judge by appearances and offer its homage accordingly. In addition to the ordinary expenses of a ruler whose court was a center of religious and intellectual life for Europe, there was the constant burden of war first with neighboring Italian rulers and then with the empire. Innocent four triumphed over the Hornstaufen but largely by dipping his hands into English money bags to such an extent indeed during the reign of John's son Henry III that England gained the scoffing name of the milk cow of the papacy. At first, when the ecclesiastical courts had offered to criminals a justice at once more humane and comprehensive than the rough and ready tyranny of a king or feudal lord, the upholders of the rights of canon law were regarded as popular heroes. Later, however, with the growth of national feeling in the development and better administration of the civil codes, men and women began to falter in their allegiance. Canon law was found to be both expensive and tardy, especially in the case of appeals, that is, of cases called from some inferior court to Rome. The key also to the judgments given at Rome was often too obviously gold and of heavy weight. Nor was justice alone to be bought or sold. A large part of the money that filled the Roman treasury was derived from benefits and livings in different countries of Europe that had by one means or another accumulated in papal hands. The constant pressure of the wars with emperors and Italian gibblings made it necessary for the popes to administer this patronage as profitably as possible. And so the spiritual needs of dioceses and parishes became sacrificed to the military calls on the Roman treasury. Sometimes it was not a living itself for which a clerical candidate played heavily but merely the promise of preferment to the next vacancy. Or he would pledge himself in the case of nomination to send his first fruits, that is his first year's revenue to Rome. Those who could afford the requisite sum might be natives of the country in which the vacant bishopric or living occurred. Often they were not and the successful nominee instead of going in person to exercise his duties would merely send an agent to collect his dues. These dues came from many different sources but in the case of livings, principally from the tie, the tax for the maintenance of the church, supposed to represent one-tenth of every man's income. People usually grumble when they are continually asked for money and medieval men and women were no exception to this rule. Thus, to take the case of England, while the wars between emperor and pope left her comparatively indifferent as to the issues involved, the growing exactions of the Roman curia that touched her pockets awoke a smoldering resentment that every now and then flared into hostility. In these times, wrote the chronicler, Matthew Parris, the small fire of faith began to grow exceeding chill so that it was well my reduced ashes. For now was Simoni practiced without shame. Every day illiterate persons of the lowest class, armed with bulls from Rome, feared not to plunder the revenues which our pious forefathers had assigned for the maintenance of the religious, the support of the poor, and the sustaining of strangers. At Oxford in the reign of Henry III, 1216 to 72, the papal legate was forced to fly from the town by indignant clerks of the university, or undergraduates as we should call them today. Where is that usurer, that Simoniac, that plunderer of revenues, that thirster for money, they cried, as they hunted him and his rep new through the streets? It is he who perverts the king and subverts the kingdom to enrich foreigners with our spoils. At Lincoln, Bishop Grostet indignantly refused to invest innocent the fourth's nephew, a boy of 12, with the next vacant pre-bendery of his cathedral. Other papal relatives were absorbing livings and bishoprics elsewhere in Europe, for under innocent the fourth began the open practice of nepotism, that is, of popes using their revenues in their office in order to provide for their nephews and other members of their families. He laid aside all shame, says Matthew Parris of this pope. He extorted larger sums of money than any before him. The sums of money enabled Rome to cast down her imperial foe, but the extortion was a dangerous expedient. Throughout the early Middle Ages, the pope had been accepted by Western Christendom as speaking for the church with the voice of Christ's authority. In his disputes with kings, the latter could never be sure the loyalty of their people should they call on them to take up arms against the Holy Father. With the growth of nations and of Rome as a temporal power, a gradual change came over the European outlook. Subjects were more inclined to obey rulers whom they knew than a distant potentate whom they did not. They were also less ready to accept papal interference without criticism. Thus a distinction was for the first time drawn between the pope and the church. When King Hakko of Norway was offered the imperial crown in the deposition of Frederick II by Innocent IV, he refused, saying, I will gladly fight the enemies of the church, but I will not fight against the foes of the pope. His words were significant of a new spirit. In the feuds of goofs and gibbalines that were act at 12th and 13th centuries were laid the foundations of a movement to control the popes by universal councils in the 15th and of that still more drastic opposition to his powers in the 16th that we call the Reformation, end of chapter 15.