 Chapter 10 Europe in the Middle Ages by Ierna Lifford Plunkett This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 10. Feudalism and Monasticism. Feudalism. Wherever in the course of history men have gathered together they have gradually evolved some form of association that would ensure mutual interests. It might be merely the tribal bond of the Arabians by which a man's relations were responsible for his acts and avenged his wrongs. It might be a council of village elders such as the Russian Mirror making laws for the younger men and women. It might be a group of German chiefs legislating on moonlit nights according to the description of Tacitus by their campfires. In contrast to primitive associations stands the elaborate government of Rome under Augustus and his successors. The despotic emperor, his numberless officials, the senators were their huge estates, the struggling curiolis, the army of legions carrying out imperial commands from Scotland to the Euphrates. When Rome fell, her government, like a house whose foundations have collapsed, fell also. Barbarian conquerors, established in Italy and the Roman provinces, took what they liked of the laws that they found, added to them their own customs and out of the blend evolved new codes of legislation. Yet legislation without some method of ensuring its execution could not save nations from invasion nor the merchant or peasant from becoming the victims of robberies and petty crimes. Medieval centuries are sometimes called the age of feudalism because during this time feudalism was the method gradually adopted for dealing with the problems of public life amongst all classes and nearly all the nations of Europe. There are two chief things to be remembered about feudalism. First that it was no sudden invention, but a growth out of old ideas both Roman and Barbarian, and next that it was intimately connected in men's minds with the thought of land. This was natural for, after all, land or its products are as necessary to the life of every individual as air and water, and therefore the cultivation of the soil and the distribution of its fruits are the first problems with which the governments are faced. Feudalism assumed that all the land belonging to a nation belonged in the first place to that nation's king. Because he could not govern or cultivate it all himself, he would parcel it out in fiefs amongst the chief nobles at his court, promising them his protection and asking in return that they should do him some specified service. This system recalls the villa of Roman days with its senator granting protection to its tenants from robbery and excessive taxation and employing them to plow and sow to reap his crops and build his houses and bridges. In the Middle Ages the service of the chief tenants was nearly always military, to appear when summoned by the king with so many horsemen and so many archers fully armed. In order to provide this force the tenant would be driven in his turn to grant out parts of his land to other tenants who would come when he called them with horsemen and arms that they had collected in a similar way. This process was called sub-infudation. The city thus took the form of a pyramid with the king at the apex, immediately blow him, his tenants in chief, and below them in graded ranks or layers the other tenants. This brings us to the base of the pyramid, the people who could not fight themselves having neither horses nor weapons, and who certainly could not lend any other soldiers to their lord's banner. Were they to receive no land? In the Roman villa the bottom strata was the slave, the chattel with no rights even over his own body. Under the system of feudalism the base of the pyramid was made up of serfs, men originally free with a customary right to the land on which they lived, who had lost their freedom under feudal law and had become bound to the land, a scriptig lebae, in such a way that if the land were sublet or sold they would pass over to the new owner like the trees or the grass. In return for their land, though they might not serve their master with spear or bow, they would work in his fields, build his bridges and castles, mend his roads, and guard his cattle. From the top to bottom of this pyramid of feudal society ran the binding border of tenure and service. But these were not the only links which kept feudal society together. An attendant did homage for his land, and with head uncovered, with belt on girt, his sword removed, placed his hands between those of his lord, and took an oath after the manner of the thegons of Wessex to their king. To love what he loved and shun what he shunned, both on sea and on land, there entered into this relationship the finer bond of loyalty due from a vassal to his overlord. It was the descendant of the old Teutonic idea of the comatatus described by Tacitus. The chief, destined to lead and guide, his bodyguard pledged to follow him to death if necessary. Put shortly then, feudalism may be described as a system of society based upon the holding of land. A system, that is, in which a man's legal status and social rank were in the main determined by the conditions on which he held, that is, possessed, his land. Such a system, to return to our example of the pyramid, grew not only from the apex by the sovereign granting lands as the king of France did to rollo the granger, but from the middle and base as well. One of the chief feudal powers in medieval times was the church, for though abbots and bishops were not supposed to fight themselves, yet they would often have numbers of lay military tenants to bring to the help of the king or their overlord. Some of these tenants were men whom they had provided with the states, but others were landowners who had voluntarily surrendered their rights over the land in return for the protection of a local monastery or bishopric, and thus had become its tenants. A large part of the church land was, however, held not by military or lay tenure, but in return for spiritual services or free alms as it was called, i.e. prayers for the soul of the donor. Perhaps a landowner wished to make a pious gift on his deathbed, or had committed a crime and believed that a surrender of his property to the church would placate God. For some such reason, at any rate he made over his land or part of it to the church, which in this way accumulated great estates and endowments free from the usual liabilities of lay tenure. All over Europe, other men, and even whole villages and towns, were taking the same steps, seeking protection direct from the king or a great lord or an abbot or bishop, offering in return rent, services, or tolls on their merchandise. The system at its best stood for the protection of the weak in an age when armies and a police force, as we understand the terms, did not exist. Even when the system fell below this standard, and it often fell badly, there still remained in its appeal to loyalty an ideal above and beyond the ordinary outlook of the day. A seed of nobler feeling that, with the growth of civilization and under the influence of the church, blossomed into the flower of chivalry. I made them lay their hands in mine and swear to reverence the king as if he were their conscience, and their conscience as their king, to break the heathen and uphold Christ, to ride abroad, regressing human wrongs, to speak no slander, no, nor listen to it, to honor his own word as if his gods to live sweet lives in purest chastity. Such are the vows that Tennyson puts in the mouth of Arthur's knights, who, with Charlemagne and his paladins, were the heroes of medieval romance and dreams. King Henry the Fowler, who ruled Germany in the early part of the tenth century, instituted the Order of Nighthood, forming a bodyguard from the younger brothers and sons of his chief barons. Before they received the sword-tap on their shoulder that confirmed their new rank, these candidates for Nighthood took four vows. First to speak the truth, next to serve faithfully both king and church, thirdly, never to harm a woman, and lastly, never to turn their back on a foe. Probably many of these half-barbarian young swashbucklers broke their vows freely, but some would remember and obey, and so amid the general roughness and cruelty of the age there would be established a small leaven of gentleness and pity left to expand its influence through the coming generations. It is because of this ideal of chivalry, often eclipsed and even travestied by those who claim to be its brightest mirrors, but never quite lost to Europe, that strong nations have been found ready to defend the rights of the weak and men have laid down their lives to avenge the oppression of women and children. On the evil side of feudalism much more could be written than of the good. The system, on its military side, was intended to provide the king with an army, but if one of his tenants-in-chief chose to rebel against him, the vassals who held their lands from this tenant were much more likely to keep faith with the Lord to whom they paid immediate homage than with their sovereign. Thus, often the only force on which a king could rely were the vassals of the royal domain. Again, feudalism by its policy of making tenants-in-chief responsible for law and order on their estates had set up a number of petty rulers with almost absolute power. Peasants were tried for their offenses in their Lord's court by his bailiff or agent, and by his will they suffered death or paid their fines. Except in the case of Charlemagne, strong enough to send out Misi and to support them when they overrode local decisions, the Lord's justice or injustice would seem a real thing to his tenants-in-chiefs. The King's Law Something Shadowy and Far Away As Duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror had been quite as powerful as his overlord, the King of France. When he came to England he was determined that none of the barons to whom he had granted estates should ever be his equal in this way. He therefore summoned all land-owning men in England to a council at Salisbury in 1086, and made them take an oath of allegiance to himself before all other Lords. Because he was a strong man he kept his barons true to their oath or punish them, but during the reign of his grandson Stephen, who disputed the English throne with his cousin Matilda and therefore tried to buy the support of the military class by gifts and concessions, the vices of feudalism ran almost unchecked. They had done homage to him and sworn oaths, says the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, but they no faith kept, for every rich man built his castles and defended them against him, and they filled the land with castles. Then they took these whom they suspected to have any goods by night and by day, seizing both men and women, and they put them in prison for their gold and silver and tortured them with pains unspeakable. I cannot and I may not tell of all the wounds and of all the tortures that they inflicted upon the wretched men of this land, and this state of things lasted the nineteen years that Stephen was king and ever grew worse and worse. Stephen was a weak ruler struggling with a civil war, so that it might be argued that no system of government could have worked well under such auspices. But if we turn to the normal life of the peasant folk on the estates of the monastery of Mount St. Michael in the thirteenth century, we shall see that the humble tenants at the base of the feudal pyramid paid dearly enough for the protection of their overlords. In June the peasants must cut and pile the hay and carry it to the manor house. In August they must reap and carry in the convent grain. Their own grain lies exposed to wind and rain. On the nativity of the virgin the villain owes the pork dew one pig and eight. At Christmas a fowl fine and good. On Palm Sunday the sheep do. At Easter he must plow, sow, and harrow. When there is building the tenant must bring stone and serve the masons. He must also haul the convent wood for two deniers a day. If he sells his land he owes his lord a thirteenth of its value. If he marries his daughter outside the lord's domain he pays a fine. He must grind his grain at the lord's mill and bake his bread at the lord's oven where the customary charges never satisfy the servants. Certainly the peasant to the middle ages can have had little time to lament even his own misery. Perhaps to keep his hovel from fire and pillage and his family from starvation was all to which he often aspired. War it has been said was the law of the feudal world, and all over Europe the moat-girt castles of powerful barons and walled towns and villages sprang up as a witness to the turbulent state of society during these centuries. To some natures this atmosphere of violence, of course, appealed. Hi, sirs, I'm for war. Peace giveth me pain. No other creed will hold me again. On Monday, on Tuesday, whenever you will, day, week, month, or year, are the same to me still. So sang a Provence-Albaran of the twelfth century. And we find an echo of his spirit in Spain as late as the fifteenth, when a certain noble, sighing for the joys and spoils of civil war, remarked, I would, there were many kings in Castile, for then I should be one of them. The church, endeavoring to cope with the spirit of anarchy, succeeded in establishing on different occasions a truce of God, somewhat resembling the sacred months devised by the Arabs for a like purpose. From Wednesday to Monday, and during certain seasons of the year, such as Advent or Lent, war was completely forbidden under ecclesiastical censure, while at no time were priests, laborers, women, or children to be molested. The defect of such reforms lay in the absence of machinery to enforce them, and feudalism, the system by which in practice the few lived at the expense of the many, continued to flourish until foreign adventure, such as the Crusades, absorbed some of its chief supporters, and civilization and humanity succeeded in building up new foundations of society to take its place. It would seem as if the lessons of good government had to be learned in a hard school, generally through bitter experience on the part of the governed. Monasticism If the study of feudalism is necessary to a knowledge of the material life of the Middle Ages, its spirit is equally a closed book without an understanding of monasticism. What induced men and women, not just a few devout souls, but thousands of ordinary people of all nations and classes, from the prince to the serf, to forsake the world for the cloister, and far from regretting the sacrifice to maintain with obvious sincerity that they had chosen the better part. If we would realize the medieval mind, we must find an answer to this question. Turning to the earliest days of monasticism, when the fathers of the church sought hermit cells, we recalled a shrinking of finer natures from the brutality and lust of pagan society, the intense conviction that the way to draw nearer God was to shut out the world, and the desire of assignment stylites to make the thoughtless mind, by the sight of a self-inflicted penance, think for a moment at any rate of a future heaven on health. Motives such as these continued to inspire the enthusiastic Christians throughout the Dark Ages following the fall of Rome. But as Europe became outwardly converted to the Catholic faith, it was not paganism from which the monk fled, but the mockery of his own beliefs that he found in the lives of so-called Christians. The corruption of imperial courts, even those of a Constantine or Charlemagne, the cunning cruelty of a baptized Clovis, the ruthless selfishness of a feudal baron or Norman adventurer fighting in the name of Christ, all these were hard to reconcile with a gospel of poverty, gentleness, and brotherhood. Even the light of pure ideals once held aloft by the church had begun to burn dim, for men are usually tolerant of evils to which they are accustomed, and the priest who had grown up amid barbarian invasions was inclined to look on the coarseness and violence that they bred as a natural sight of life. As a rule he continued to maintain a slightly higher standard of conduct than his parishioners, but sometimes he fell to their level or below. The great danger to the church, however, was, as always in her history, not the hardships that she encountered, but the prosperity. The bishops, overseers responsible for the discipline and well-being of their dioceses, became in the Middle Ages by reason of their very power and influence, too often the servants of earthly rulers rather than of God. Far better educated and disciplined than the laymen experienced in diocesan affairs, without ties of wife and family, since the church law forbade the clergy to marry, they were selected by kings for a responsible office in the state. Usually they proved the wisdom of his choice through their gifts of administration and loyalty, but the effect on the church of adding political to ecclesiastical power proved disastrous in the end. Their great landed wealth made the bishops feudal barons, while bishoprics, in their turn, came to be regarded as offices at the disposal of the king. A bad king would parcel them out amongst his favorites or sell them to the highest bidders heedless of their moral character, thus crept into the church the sin of Simonie or traffic and holy things so strongly condemned by the first apostles, and following hard on the heels of Simonie the worldliness born of temptations of wealth and power. The bishop who was numbered amongst a feudal baronage and entertained a lax nobility at his palace was little likely to be shocked at priests convicted of ignorance or immorality or spend his time in trying to reform their habits. It was then, not only in horror of the world, but in reproach of the church herself that the monk turned to the idea of separation from man and communion with God. In the earliest days of monasticism, each hermit followed his special theory of prayer and self-discipline. He would gather round him small communities of disciples, and these would remain or go away to form other communities as they chose, a lack of system that often resulted in unhealthy fanaticism or useless idleness. In the sixth century, an Italian monk, Benedict of Nursia, 480-543, compiled a set of regulations for his followers, which under the name, the Rule of Benedict, became the standard code of monastic life for all Western Christendom. Benedict demanded of his monks an obituary of twelve months during which they could test their call to a life of continual sacrifice. At the end of this time, if the novice still continued resolute in his intention and was approved by the monastic authorities, he was accepted into the brotherhood by taking the perpetual vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity, the three conditions of life most hostile to the lust of possession, turbulence, and sensuality that dominated the Middle Ages. To these vows were added the obligation of manual labor, seven hours' work a day in addition to the recitation of prayers enjoined on the community. The faithful Benedictine at least could never be accused of idleness and to the civilizing influence of the regulars as the monks were called because they obeyed a rule regular in contrast to the secular priests who lived in the world, Europe owed an immense debt of gratitude. Sometimes it is said, contemptuously, that the monks of the Middle Ages chose beautiful sites on which they found luxurious homes. Certainly they selected as a rule the neighborhood of rivers and lakes, water being a prime necessity of life, and in such neighborhoods raised chapels and monasteries that have become the architectural wonders of the world. Yet many of these wonders began in a circle of wooden huts built on a reclaimed marsh, and it was the labor of the followers of Saint Benedict that replaced wood by stone and swamps by gardens and farms. Where the barbarian or feudal anarchists burned and destroyed, the monk of the Middle Ages brought back the barren soil to pastureage or tellage, and just as he weeded, sowed, and planted as part of his obligation to God, sowed from the produce of his labors he provided for the destitute at his gate, or in his cloister school supplied the ignorant with the rudiments of knowledge and culture. The monasteries were centers of medieval life, not like the castles of death. In his quiet cell the monk chronicler became an historian. The copyist reproduced with careful affection decaying manuscripts. The illuminator made careful pictures of his day. The chemist concocted strange healing medicines, or in his crucibles developed wondrous colors. Good it is for us to dwell here where man lives more purely, falls more rarely, rises more quickly, treads more cautiously, rests more securely, is absolved more easily, and rewarded more plentiously. This is the saying of St. Bernard, one of the later monastic reformers, and his ideal was the general conception of the best life possible as understood in the Middle Ages. To the monasteries flocked the devout seeking a home of prayer, but also the student or artist unable to follow his bent in the turbulent world, and the man who despised or feared the atmosphere of war. Even the feudal baron would pause in his quarrels to make some pious gift to Abbey or Priory, a tribute to a faith he admired, but was too weak to practice. Sometimes he came in later life, a penitent who, toiling like a serf, sought in the cloister the salvation of his soul. In the monasteries, says a medieval German, one saw counts cooking in the kitchen and margraves leading their pigs out to feed. Monasticism, with its belief in brotherhood, was a leveler of class distinctions, but, like the rest of the church, it found in the popular enthusiasm it aroused the path of temptation. Men we have seen entered the cloister for other reasons than pure devotion to God, and the rule of Benedict proving too strict they yield secretly to sins that perhaps were not checked or reproved, because avids and times ceased to be saints and became, like the bishops, feudal landlords with worldly interests. In this way, vice and laziness were allowed to spread in cling-like bindweed. Throughout the Middle Ages there were times of corruption and failure amongst the monastic orders, followed by waves of sweeping reform and earnest endeavor, when, once again, the cross was raised as an emblem of sacrifice and drew the more spiritual of men unto it. In 910 the monastery of Cuny was founded in Burgundy, and, freed from the jurisdiction of local bishops by being placed under the direct control of the Pope, was able to establish a reformed Benedictine order. Its abbot was recognized not only as the superior of the monastery at Cuny, but also of daughter-houses that sprang up all over Europe, subject to his discipline and rule. Other monastic orders founded shortly after this date were those of the Carthusians and Cistercians. In their desire to combat worldliness, the early Carthusians, or monks of the monastery of Chartres, carried on in ceasing war against the pleasures of the world. Strict fasting for eight months in the year, one meal a day eaten in silence and alone, no conversation with other brethren save at a weekly meeting, this was the background to a life of toil and prayer. The monastery of Sateux and southern France, from which the Cistercians take their name, was another attempt to live in the world but not of it. The white monks, so-called from the color of their woolen frocks, sought solitudes in which to build their houses. Their churches and monasteries remain among the glories of architecture, but through fear of riches they refuse to place in them crosses of gold or silver, or to allow their priests to wear embroidered vestments. No Cistercian might recite the service of the mass for money or be paid for the cure of souls. With his hands he must work for his meager fare, remembering always to give God thanks for the complete self-renunciation to which he was pledged by his order. Chief among the Cistercian saints is Bernard, 1090 to 1153, a Burgundian noble who in 1115 founded a daughter monastery of his order at Clairvaux, and as its head became one of the leaders of medieval thought. When he was only twenty, he had appeared before the abbot of Sateux with a band of companions, relations and friends whom his eloquence had persuaded to enter the monastery with him. Throughout his life this power over others and his fearlessness in making use of this influence were his most vivid characteristics. His speech, wrote someone who knew him, was suited to his audience. To country folk he spoke as though born and bred in the country, and so to other classes as though he had been always occupied with their business. He adapted himself to all, desiring to gain all for Christ. In these last words lie his mission and the secret of his success. Never was his eloquence exerted for himself, and so men who wished to criticize were overborn by his single-minded sincerity. Severe to his own shortcomings, gentle and humble to his brethren, ready to accept reproof or undertake the meanest task, Bernard was fierce and implacable to the man or the conditions that seemed to him to stand in the way of God's will. I grieve over thee, my son Jeffrey, he wrote to a young monk who had fled the austerities of Clairvaux. How could you, who were called by God, follow the devil recalling me? Turn back, I say, before the abyss swallows thee, before bound hand and foot thou art cast into outer darkness, shut in with the darkness of death. To the ruler of France he sent a letter of reproof ending with the words, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God even for thee, O King. And his audacity, instead of working as ruin, brought the leading clergy and statesmen of Europe to the cells of Clairvaux, as if to some oracles' temple to learn the will of God. From his cell St. Bernard preached a second crusade, reformed abuses in the church, deposed an antipope, and denounced heretics. In his distrust of human reason, trying to free itself from some of the dogmatic assertions of early Christian thought, he represented the narrow outlook of his age. But in his love of God and through God of humanity, he typifies the spiritual charm that, like a thread of gold, runs through all the dross of hardness and treachery in the medieval mind. Do not grieve, he wrote to the parents of an office. He goes to God but you do not lose him, rather through him you gain many sons, for all of us who belong to Clairvaux have taken him to be a brother and you to be our parents. To St. Bernard self-reunciation meant self-realization, the laying down of a life to find it again, purified and enriched. And this was the ideal of monasticism, often misunderstood and discredited by its weaker followers, like all ideals, but yet the glory of its saints. CHAPTER 11 THE INVESTITURE QUESTION We have said that in the oath of Strasbourg it was possible to distinguish the infant nations of France and Germany. This is true, yet Germany, though distinct from her neighbors, was to remain all through the Middle Ages rather an agglomeration of states than a nation as we understand the word today. One reason for the absence of any common policy and ambitions was that Charlemagne, though he had conquered the Saxons and other Germanic tribes, had never succeeded in welding them into one people. After his successors the different races easily slipped back into regarding themselves rather as Saxons, Franconians, or Bavarians, than as Germans. Indeed the Bohemians relapsed into heathendom and became once more altogether uncivilized. This instinct for separation was aided by the feudal system, since rebel tenants and chiefs could count on provincial feeling to support them against the king their overlord. It is hardly surprising, then, if the struggle that broke out in Germany as elsewhere in Europe between rulers and their feudal baronage was decided there in favor of the baronage. Perhaps if some strong king could have given his undivided attention to the problem he might have succeeded, like William I of England, in making himself real master of all Germany. But unfortunately the rulers of the German kingdom were never free from foreign wars. Just as the Norsemen had descended on the coasts of France, so Danes, Slavs, and Hungarians were a constant menace to the civilization of Germany. Hords of these barbarians breaking over the frontiers every year and even pillaging the districts as far west as the Rhine. German kings, in consequence of this external menace, had to rely for the defense of their frontiers upon the military power of their great vassals. They were even forced to create large estates called Marx, Marchlands, upon their northern and eastern border, to act as national bulwarks. Over these ruled margraves, graphs or counts of the Mark, with a large measure of independence. Modern Prussia was once the Mark of Brandenburg, a war state created against the Slav. Austria, the Mark placed in the east between Bavaria and the Hungarians, Schleswig the Mark established to hold back the Danes. Yet another cause told for disruption. The fact that when the Carolingian line came to an end in Germany early in the tenth century, the practice sprang up of electing kings from among the chief princes and dukes. Though this plan worked well if the electors made an honest choice, yet it gave the feudal baronage a weapon on the other hand if they wished to strike a bargain with a would-be ruler or to appoint a weakling whose authority they could undermine. The first of the elected kings of Germany was Conrad of Franconia, during whose reign the feudal system took strong root, and who ruled rather through his barons than in opposition to their wishes. On his deathbed he showed his honest desire for the welfare of Germany. I know, he declared, that no man is worthier to sit on my throne than my enemy Henry of Saxony. When I am dead, take him the crown and the sacred lance, the golden armlet, the sword, and the purple mantle of the old kings. The princes, who followed his advice, found their new ruler out hawking on the mountainside and under the nickname Henry the Fowler he became their king and one of Germany's national heroes. In his untiring struggle against invaders Henry I recalls the Anglo-Saxon Alfred the Great, and like Alfred he was at first forced to fly before his enemies. To the disgust of the great dukes he bought a nine-year's peace from the Hungarians by paying tribute. But when the enemy went away he at once began to build castles or burgs and filled them with soldiers under the command of burgraves. These castles were placed all along the frontiers and gradually villages and towns gathered round them for safety. In the tenth year the Hungarians came as usual to ask for the tribute money, but Henry ordered a dead dog to be thrown at their messenger's feet. In the future this is all your master will get from us, he exclaimed, and the answer, as he expected, provoked an immediate invasion. Instead of being able to lay waste the countryside as of old, however, the Hungarians now found burgs well fortified and provisioned that they could neither take nor leave with safety in their rear. When at last they met Henry in pitched battle they broke and fled before his onslaught, declaring that the golden banner of St. Michael carried at the head of his troops had by some wizardry contrived their ruin. Besides repulsing invaders Henry the Fowler imposed his will to a considerable extent over his rebellious baritage. In another chapter we have noted how he instituted the order of knighthood as a way of harnessing to his service the restless energy of the younger sons of the nobles. He also tried to strengthen the middle classes as a counterpoise to the baronage by encouraging the construction of walled towns for the protection of merchants, while he would hold his councils rather in towns than in the woods like his predecessors in order to attract people to settle there. Many of the marks owe their origin to Henry's policy of strengthening the border provinces, and in this and in his determination to subdue the Hungarians he found an able successor in his son Otto I. Otto's reign might from one aspect be called a history of wars. First there were foreign wars, the subjugation of Denmark, whose king became a German vassal, the reconquest and conversion of Bohemia, and also a series of campaigns against the Hungarians, resulting at last in 955 in a victory at Augsburg so complete that never again the hated invaders dared to cross the border save in marauding bands. But besides fighting against foreign neighbors, Otto had a continual struggle at home in order to reassert the authority of the crown over the great Dutchies, such as Lotharingia and Bavaria. When he was able to do so, he would replace the most turbulent of the Dukes by members of his own family, or he would make gifts of large estates to bishops hoping in this way to provide himself with loyal tenants-in-chief. In this, however, he was not successful, for he found the feudal bishops amongst his worst enemies, so that he turned at last for help to the new type of churchmen, bred by the cluneic reform movement, men of learning and culture, monks in their religious observances, statesmen in their outlook. These were at one with him and his desire for a united Germany and a pureer church, but Otto was placed by a great problem when he wished to reform and control his bishops. How far were the German clergy under his jurisdiction? How far did they owe obedience only to Rome as they claimed if he tried to exert his authority over them? Charlemagne had been able to deal easily with such difficulties, for the Pope had been his ally, almost it might be said, his vassal, and so they could have but one mind on church matters. By the time of Otto the Great, however, German kings had long ceased to be emperors, and the imperial title bandied about from one Italian prince to another had become tarnished in the world's eyes. Was it worthwhile, then, for a German king to regain this title in order to gain control over the Sea of St. Peter? Notice of history able to test medieval policy by its ultimate results will answer no, seeing that German kings would have done well to resist the will of the Whists bluer the crowns of Lombardy and Rome. But to Otto the question of interference in Italy bore a very different aspect. Too great to be dazzled by the title of emperor, too busy to invade Italy merely for the sake of forcing the Pope to become his ally, Otto found himself faced by the necessity of choosing whether he would make himself lord of the lands on other side of the Alps, or see one of his most powerful subjects, the Duke of Bavaria, do so instead. The occasion of this choice was the murder of Count Lothar of Provence, one of the claimants to the throne of Italy. Lothar's widow, Adelaide, a Burgundian princess, appealed to Germany to avenge her wrongs, a piece of knight air-tree with such prospects of profit that several of the German princes and notably the Duke of Bavaria, whose lands laid just to the north of the Alps, were only too willing to undertake it. In 951 Otto the Great, anticipating their ambitions, crossed the Alps with an army, rescued Adelaide from her husband's murderer, married her himself, and was crowned King of Italy at Pavia. Recalled to Germany by foreign invasions, he appeared again in Italy ten years later, and in February 962 was crowned Emperor by the Pope at Rome. His successors, dropping the title King of Germany, claimed henceforth to be kings of the Romans on their election, and, after their coronation by the Pope, holy Roman emperors. Temporal overlords of Christendom, as the Popes claimed to be spiritual viceroys. This coronation of Otto the Great was a turning point in the history of Germany, though at the time it caused little stir. To Otto himself it was merely the culminating success of his career, enabling him to undertake, without interference, the reform of the German Church that he had planned, and also to issue a charter that, while confirming the Popes in their temporal possessions, insisted that they should take an oath of allegiance to the Emperor before their consecration. By this measure the papacy became, in the eyes of Europe, merely the chief sea in the Emperor's dominion. And under Otto's immediate successors this supremacy was not seriously disputed by the Popes themselves. In some cases they were German nominees, ready to acknowledge the scepter that secured their election. But even where this was not the case, there was a general feeling that Rome had less to fear from the tyranny of emperors beyond the Alps than from the encroachment of the petty lords of Italy. The dukes of Spoletum, Counts of Tuscany, and Barons of the Roman Compana had no respect at all for the head of Christendom except as a pawn in their political moves. One of the most unscrupulous and dissolute families in the vicinity of Rome, the Crescentia, who claimed the title of patrician, once granted by eastern emperors to Italian viceroys, secured the papacy for three successive members of their house. Under the last of these, Benedict IX, a boy of 12 at the time of his election, vice and tyranny walked through the streets of Rome rampant and unashamed. The young pope, described by a contemporary as a captain of thieves and brigands, did not scruple to crown his sins by selling his holy office in a moment of danger to another of his family. As his excesses had already led the people of Rome to set up an anti-pope, and as he himself withdrew his abdication very shortly, the disgraceful state of affairs culminated in three popes, each denouncing one another and each arming his followers for battle in the streets. The interference of the emperor Henry III, a member of the salient house of Saxony, was welcomed on all sides and at the synod of Sutri the rival popes were all deposed and a German bishop, chosen by the emperor, elected in their place. Henry III has been described by a modern historian as the strongest prince that Europe had seen since Charlemagne. Not only did he succeed in subduing the unruly Bohemians and Hungarians, but he also built Germany into the temporary semblance of a nation, mastering her baronage and purifying her church. His influence over Italy was wholly for her good, but by the irony of fate his cousin Bruno, whom he nominated to the Sea of Saint Peter under the name of Leo IX, was destined to lay the foundations of a papacy independent of German control. Bruno himself insisted that he should be elected legally by the clergy and people of Rome, and though of royal blood he entered the city barefoot as a penitent, unlike the haughty Roman nobles to whom the title Pope had merely seemed an extra means of obtaining worldly honor and pleasure, he remained after his consecration, gentle and accessible to his inferiors, and devoted his whole time to the work of reform. At his first council he strongly condemned the sin of Simoni, and he insisted on the celibacy of the clergy as the only way to free them from worldly distractions and ambitions. In order that his message might not seem intended for Italy alone, he made long journeys through Germany and France. Everywhere he went he preached the purified ideal of the church upheld by the monks of Clooney, but side by side with this he and his successor set another vision that they strove to realize, the predominance of the papacy in Italy as a temporal power. It was Leo the Ninth who, dreading the norm and settlements in southern Italy as a menace to the states of the church, formed a league against the invaders, but after his defeat at their hands, followed shortly by his death, his successors, as we have seen, wisely concluded a peace that left them feudal overlords of Apulia and Calabria. Realizing that, to dominate the affairs of the peninsula, they must remain at home, future popes said ambassadors call legates to express and explain their will in foreign countries. While in 1059, in a further effort towards independence, Pope Nicholas II revolutionized the method of papal elections. The popes, it was decreed, were no longer to be chosen by the voice of the people and clergy of Rome generally, but only by the cardinals, that is, the principal bishops of the city sitting in secret conclave. This body, the College of Cardinals, was to be free of imperial interference. Behind Pope Nicholas, in his daring policy of independence, stood one of the most powerful figures of his age, Hildebrand Archdeacon of Rome. The son of a village carpenter, small, ill-formed, insignificant in appearance, he possessed the shrewd, practical mind and indomitable will of a born ruler of men. It is said that in boyhood his companions found him tracing with the chips and shavings of his father's workshop the words, I shall reign from sea to sea. Yet he began his career by deliberately accepting exile with the best of the popes deposed by the Council of Sutri, and it was Leo IX who, hearing of his genius, found him and brought him back to Rome. Gradually, not only success he popes, but the city itself grew to lean upon his strength, and when in 1073 the Holy See was left vacant, a general cry arose from the populace. Hildebrand is Pope. It is the will of Saint Peter. Taking the name of Gregory VII, Hildebrand reluctantly, if we are to believe his own account, accepted the headship of the church. Perhaps knowing how different was his ideal of the office from its reality, he momentarily trembled at the task he had set himself. But, once enthroned, there was no weakness in his manner to the world. In his ears the words of Christ, thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, could never be reconciled with vassalage to any temporal ruler. To Saint Peter and his successors, not to emperors or kings, had been given the power to bind or loose, and Gregory's interpretation of this text did not even admit of two co-equal powers ruling Christendom by their alliance. Human pride has created the power of kings, he declared. God's mercy has created the power of bishops. The pope is master of emperors and has rendered holy by the merits of his predecessor Saint Peter. The Roman church has never aired, and holy scripture proves that it can never air. To resist it is to resist God. Such a point of view, if put to any practical test, was sure to encounter firm if not violent opposition. Thus, when Gregory demanded from William of Normandy the oath of fealty alleged to have been promised by the latter to Alexander II in return for the papal blessing upon the conquest of England, the conqueror replied by sending rich gifts and token of his gratitude for papal support, but supplemented them with a message as uncompromising as the pope's ideal. I have not sworn, nor will I swear fealty, which was never sworn by any of my predecessors to yours. William, thereupon, proceeded to dispose of benefits and bishoprics in his new kingdom as he chose, and even went so far as to forbid the recognition of any new pope within his dominions without his leave, or the publication of papal letters and decrees that had not received his sanction. Perhaps if England had been nearer to Italy or if William had misused his authority instead of reforming the English church, Gregory VII might have taken up the gauntlet of defiance thus thrown at his feet. Instead he remained on friendly terms with William and it was in the empire, not in England, that the struggle between church and state began. The emperor, Henry III, who had summoned the Synod of Sutri, had been a great ruler, great enough even to have affected a satisfactory compromise with Hildebrand, but though before he died he succeeded in securing his crown for his son Henry, a boy of six, he could not bequeath him the strength of character or statesmanship. Thus from his death in 1056 the fortunes of his house and empire slowly waned. It is difficult to estimate the natural gifts of the new ruler of Germany, for an unhappy upbringing warped his outlook and affections. Left at first under the guardianship of his mother, the Empress Agnes, the young Henry IV was enticed at the age of 11 on board a ship belonging to Annele, the ambitious arch-bishop of Cologne. While he was still admiring her wonders, the ship set sail up the Rhine, and though the boy plunged overboard in an attempt to escape his kidnappers, he was rescued and brought back. For the next four years he remained first the pupil of arch-bishop Annele, who punished him for the slightest fault with harsh cruelty and deprived him of all companionship of his own age, and then of Adelbert, arch-bishop of Raman, who indulged his every whim and passion. At length at the age of 15, handsome and kingly in appearance, but utterly uncontrolled and dissolute in his way of life, Henry was declared of age to govern for himself, and straight away began to alienate his barons and people. He had been married against his wish to the plain daughter of one of the Margraves and expressed his indignation by ill-treating and neglecting her to the wrath of her powerful relations. He also built castles on the hill-tops in Saxony from which his troops oppressed the countryside. But the sin for which he was destined to be called into account was his flagrant misuse of his power over the German church. At first when reproved by the Pope for selling bishoprics and benefits, Henry was apologetic in his letters, but he had no real intention of amending his ways and soon began to chafe openly at Roman criticism and threats. At last, acrimonious disputes came to a head in what is called the investiture question, and because it is a problem that affected the whole relation of church and state in the 11th century, it is important to understand what it exactly meant to Europe. Investiture was the ceremony by which a temporal ruler, such as a king, transferred to a newly chosen church official, such as a bishop, the lands and rights belonging to his office. The king would present the bishop with a ring and crozier and the bishop in return would place his hands between those of the king and do him homage like a lay tenant-in-chief. The Roman sea declared that it was not fitting for hands sacred to the service of God at his altar to be placed in submission between those that a temporal ruler had stained with the blood of war. Behind this figure of speech lay the real reason, the implication that if the ring and the crozier were to be taken as symbols of lands and offices, bishops would tend to regard these temporal positions as the chief things in their lives and the oath of homage they gave in exchange as more important than their vow to do God's service. Gregory VII believed that he could not reform the church unless he could detach its officials from dependents-on-lay rulers who could bribe or intimidate them. And in the age in which he lived, he could show that for every William of Normandy ready to invest good churchmen, there were a hundred kings or petty rulers who only cared about good tenants, that is, landlords who would supply them faithfully with soldiers and weapons. As a counter-argument, temporal rulers maintained that churchmen who accepted lands and offices were lay tenants in this respect, whatever popes might choose to call them. The king who lost the power of investing his bishops lost control over wealthy and important subjects and since he would also lose the right to refuse investiture, he might find his principal bishoprics in the hands of disloyal rebels or of foreigners about whom he knew nothing. The whole question was complicated, largely because there was so much truth on both sides. Gregory, however, forced the issue in early in 1075 in a synod held at Rome, put forth the famous decree by which lay investiture was henceforth sternly forbidden. Henry IV, on the other hand, spoiled his case by his wild disregard of justice. In the same year, he appointed a new archbishop to the important sea of Milan and invested in him without consulting Gregory VII at all. He further proceeded to appoint two unknown foreigners to Italian bishoprics. Angry at the letter of remonstrance which these acts aroused, he called a church council at Worms in the following year and there induced the majority of German pishops, very reluctantly, to declare Gregory deposed. Henry, king not by usurpation but by God's grace to Hildebrand, henceforth no pope but a false monk, thus began his next letter to the Roman Pontiff to which Hildebrand replied by acts communicating his deposer, "'Blessed Peter, as thy representative I have received from God the power to bind and loosen heaven and on earth. For the honor and security of thy church in the name of God almighty, I prohibit Henry the king, son of Henry the emperor, from ruling Germany and Italy. I release all Christians from the oaths of fealty they may have taken to him, and I order that no one shall obey him.'" This decree provided occasion for all German nobles whom Henry IV had alienated to gather together under the banner of the papal legate and for the oppressed Saxon countryside to renew the serious revolt which had broken out two years before. Even the German bishops grew frightened at the part they had played in deposing Gregory so that the once powerful ruler found himself looked upon as an outlaw with scarcely a real friend, save for the wife he had ill-treated and no hope save submission. In the winter of 1066, as an old story tells, when the mountains were frozen hard with snow and ice, he and his wife and one attendant crossed the Alps on sledges and sought the pope in his castle of Canossa, built amidst the highest regions of the Apennines. Gregory coldly refused him audience. The king, he intimated, might declare that he was repentant. He had done so often in the past, but words were not deeds. Putting aside his royal robes and clad in a penitence woollen tunic, Henry, to show his sincerity, remained barefoot for three days like a beggar in the castle yard. Then only on the entreaty of some Italian friends was he admitted to the presence of the pope, who at his cry of, Holy Father, spare me, raised him up and gave him formal forgiveness. The scene at Canossa is so dramatic in its display of Hildebrand's triumph and the emperor's humiliation that it is lived in the world's memory, yet it was no closing act in the struggle, but merely an episode that passed and left little mark. Henry IV, as soon as he could win himself a following in Germany and Italy, returned to the practice of lay investiture and Gregory VII, who had never believed in his sincerity, continued to denounce him and plan the coronation of rival emperors. Imperial ambitions at last reached their height, for Henry IV succeeded in inducing German and Italian bishops to depose Gregory once more and even appoint an antipope, in whose name Imperial armies ravaged Lombardy, forced their way as far south as Rome and besieged Hildebrand in the castle of San Angelo. From this predicament, he was rescued by the Normans of South Italy under Robert Guiscard, but these ruthless vassals of the church massacred and looted the holy city directly they had scaled the walls, and when they turned homewards, carrying Gregory VII with them, they left half Rome in ruins. Gregory VII died not long afterwards, homeless and deposed, but with unshaken confidence in the righteousness of his cause. I have loved justice and hated iniquity, he said during his last illness. Therefore I die in exile. In exile thou couldst not die, replayed a bishop standing at his bedside. Vicar of Christ and his apostles, thou hast received the nations for thine inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Future history was to show that Hildebrand in defeat had achieved more than his rival in victory. Henry IV outlived his enemy by 21 years, but they were bitter with disillusionment. Harassed by Gregory VII's successors who continued to advocate papal supremacy, faced by one rebellion after another in Germany and Italy, Henry IV yielded at last a weariness in old age when he found his sons had become leaders of the forces most hostile to him. Even in his submission to their demands he found no peace, for he was thrust into prism, compelled to abdicate and left to die miserably of starvation and neglect. In the reign of his son Henry V, a compromise on the investiture question was arranged between church and empire. By the concordat of worms it was agreed first that rulers should renounce their claim to invest bishops and abbots with a ring and a crozier. These were to be given by representatives of the church to candidates chosen and approved by them. But the second point of importance was that this ceremony must take place in the presence of the king or his representative to whom the new bishop or abbot would at once do homage for his lands and offices. Almost a similar settlement had been arrived at between church and state in England some 15 years earlier, arising out of the refusal of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, to do homage to Henry I, the conqueror's son. In this case there was no clash of bitterness and dislike for the old archbishop was perfectly loyal to the king at heart, though prepared to go to the stake on a matter of conscience as this question had become to Ernest Churchman. His master on his side respected Anselm's saintly character and only wished to safeguard his royal rights over all his subjects. Compromise was therefore a matter of rejoicing on both sides and with the decision of the council at worms, investiture ceased to be a vital problem. Its importance lies in the fact that it was one of the first battles between church and state and though a compromise, yet a formal victory for the church. The dependence of the papacy on the imperial government that Europe had considered natural in the days of Charlemagne, or a lot of the great, was a thing of the past. For the acknowledgement of ecclesiastical freedom from lay supremacy, one of the main issues for which Hildebrand had struggled, schemed and died, had been won by his successors, following in his steps. End of Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Europe in the Middle Ages by Ierna Lippard Plunkett. This Slibervox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 12 The Early Crusades. The imperial standards of Constantinople were designed with a two-headed eagle, typifying Constantine's rule over the kingdoms of East and West. Towards the end of the 11th century, this emblem had become more symbolic of the emperor's anxious outlook upon hostile neighbors. With Asia Minor practically lost by the establishment of a Mohammedan dynasty at Nicaea, within 100 miles of the Christian capital, with the Bulgarians at the gates of Adrianople, and with the Normans and the Popes in possession of his Greek patrimony in Italy, Alexius Comanus, when he ascended the throne of the Caesars, found himself master of an attenuated empire, consisting mainly of strips of Greece and Seaboard. Yet in spite of her shorn territories, Constantinople remained the greatest city in Europe, not merely in her magnificent site and architecture, nor even in her commerce, but in the whole she preserved over the imagination of men. Athenaric the Goth had exclaimed that the ruler of Constantinople must be a god. 11th century Europe accepted him as mortal, but still crowned the lord of so great a city with a halo of awe. It was Constantinople that had won the Russians, the Bulgarians, and the Slavs from heathenism to Christianity, not to the Catholicism of Western Europe, but to the Greek interpretation of the Christian faith called by its believers the Orthodox. It was Constantinople whose gold coin, the Byzant, was recognized as the medium of exchange between merchants of all nations. It was Constantinople again, her wealth, her palaces, her glory of pomp and government, that drew Russian, Norse, and Slav adventurers to serve as mercenaries in the emperor's army, just as exhilaries had clamored of old to join the Roman eagles. Monks the Verangir bodyguard, responsible for the safety of the emperor's person, were to be found at one time many followers of Harold Saxon, who, escaping from a conquered England, gladly entered the service of a new master to whom the name Norman was also anathema. Alexius Comenus was in character like his empire, a shrinkage from the dimensions of former days. There was nothing of the practical genius of a Constantin in his unscrupulous ability to mold small things to his advantage, nothing of the heroic Charlemagne in his eminently calculating courage. Yet his daughter Anna Comenna, who wrote a history of his reign, regarded him as a model of imperial virtues, and his court that had ceased to distinguish pomp from greatness and elaborate ceremonial from glory, echoed this fiction. It was this mixture of pretension and weakness of skill and cunning, of nerve and treachery, so typical of the later Eastern emperors that made the nations of Western Europe, while they admired Byzantium, yet used the word Byzantine as a term of mingled contempt and dislike. The emperor, on his part, had no reason to love his Western neighbors. The popes had robbed him of the ex-archate of Ravenna. They had set up a headship of the church in Rome, death to the claims of Constantinople, when in the eighth century the emperor Leo, the Asaurian, earned the nickname of iconoclast or image breaker by a campaign of destruction amongst devotional pictures and images that he denounced as idolatrous. Rome definitely refused to accept this ruling on behalf of Western Christendom. This was the beginning of the actual schism between the Eastern and Western churches that had been always alien in their outlook. In the ninth century the breach widened, for Pope Nicholas I supported a patriarch or bishop of the Eastern church deposed by the emperor. Subsequent disputes were rendered irreconcilable in the middle of the 11th century, when the patriarch of Constantinople closed the Latin churches and convents in his diocese and publicly declared the views of Rome heretical. Besides the Pope at Rome, the Eastern Empire possessed other foes in Italy. Chief of these were the Normans, who not content with acquiring Naples, had under the leadership of Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemond captured the famous port of Derozzo on the Adriatic and invaded Macedonia. From this province they were only evicted by Alexius Comanus after wearying campaigns of guerrilla warfare to which his military ability was better suited than to pitch battles or shock tactics. More subtly dangerous than either Pope or Normans was the commercial rivalry of the merchant cities of the Mediterranean, Pisa, Genoa, and Venice. It was Venice who, from behind her barrier of islands, had watched Attila the Hun lead away his armies in impotent rage. It was Venice, again, who of the North Italian states successfully resisted the feudal domination of Western emperors and kept her own form of republican government in violet of external control. It was the young Venice, the queen of the Adriatic, as her sons and daughters proudly called her, that could, alone in their commercial splendor and arrogance, compare with the dying glory of Constantinople. Alexius Comanus and his struggles against Robert Guiscard had been compelled to call twice upon Venice for the assistance of her fleet. But he paid dearly for this alliance. In the trading privileges he was forced to grant in eastern waters. Wherever in the Orient, Venetian merchants landed to exchange goods. They were quick to establish a political footing. And the world mart on the Adriatic into which poured silks and dyes, the sugar and spices of Asia, built up under the rule of its dojos or dukes, a national as well as a commercial reputation. In 1095, necessity spurred Alexius Comanus to appeal not merely to Venice for succor, but to Pope Urban II and all the leading princes of Western Europe. From Jerusalem to the Aegean, he wrote, the Turkish hordes of Masterdall, their galleys sweeping the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, threatened the imperial city itself, which, if fall it must, had better fall into the hands of Latins than of Pagans. These Turks, or Tartars, to whom he referred, were the cause of the eastern empire's sudden danger. Descendants of a Mongol race in Central Asia, of which the Huns were also an offshoot, they turned their faces westward some centuries later than the ancestors of Attila, fired by the same love of battle and bloodshed and the same contempt for civilization. To them, the wonderful Arabian kingdom, molded by successive calipses of Baghdad out of Eastern art, luxury, and mysticism, held no charm, save loot. Conquered Greece had endowed Rome with its culture, but the inheritance of Arun el Rashid bequeathed to its conquerors, only the fighting creed of Islam. Mohammedan's faith, the Turkish armies, more dangerous than ever because more fanatical, swept over Persia, Syria, Palestine, and Asia Minor, subjugating Arabs and Christians until they came almost to the straits of the Bosporus. Here it was that they forced Alexius Comanus to realize his imminent danger and to turn to his enemies in Europe for the protection of his tottering empire. The Latins, or Christians of the west, to whom he appealed, had reasons enough of their own for answering him with ready promises of man and money. From the early days of the church, it had been the custom of pious folk, or of sinners anxious to expiate some crime, to set out in small companies to visit the holy places in Jerusalem where a tradition held that Christ had preached, prayed, and suffered, that there they might give praise to God and seek his pardon. These pilgrimages, with their mixture of good comradeship, danger, and discomfort, had become very dear to the popular mind, and if not encouraged by the Mohammedan Arabs, had been at least tolerated. Hospitals or sanctuaries were built for the refreshment of weary or sick travelers, and pilgrims on the payment of a toll could wander practically where they chose. On the advent of the Turks, all was changed. The holy places became more and more difficult to visit. Christians were stoned and beaten, mulked at of their last pennies and extortionate tolls, and left to die of hunger or flung into dungeons for ransom. Tradition says that a certain French hermit called Peter, who visited Jerusalem during the worst days of Turkish rule, went one night to the holy sepulcher weeping at the horrors he had seen, and as he knelt in prayer, it seemed to him that Christ himself stood before him, and bade him rouse the faithful to the cleansing of the holy places. With this mission in mind, he had once left the holy land and sought Pope Urban II, who had already received the letter of Alexius Comanus, and now, fired by the hermit's enthusiasm, willingly promised his support. Whether Urban was persuaded by Peter or no is a matter of doubt, but he at any rate summoned the council to Clermont in 1095, and there, in moving words, besought the chivalry of Europe to set aside its private feuds and either recover the holy places or die before the city where Christ had given his life for the world. It is likely that he spoke from mixed motives. A true inheritor of the theories of Gregory VII, he could not but recognize in the prospect of a religious war where the armies of Europe would fight under the papal banner and at the papal will, the exaltation of the Roman sea. Was there not also the hope of bringing the Greek church into submission to the Roman as the outcome of an alliance with the Greek Empire? Might not many turbulent feudal princes be persuaded a journey to the east, who by happy chance would return no more to trouble Europe? Such calculations could Urban's ambitions weave, but with them were entwined unworldly visions that lent him a force and eloquence that no calculations could have supplied. Wherever he spoke, the surging crowd would rush forward with a shout, Deus volt, it is the will of God, and this became the battle cry of the crusaders. The whole world, says a contemporary, desired to go to the tomb of our lord at Jerusalem. First of all, went the meaner people and then the man of middle rank and lastly very many kings, counts, marquesas and bishops and thing that never happened before, many women turned their steps in that same direction. The order is significant and shows that the appeal of Urban and of Peter the Hermit had touched first the heart of the masses to whom the rich man's temptation to hesitate and think of the moral were of no account. Corn had been dear in France before the council of Clermont owing to bad harvests, but the speculators who had bought up the grain to sell at high price to those who later must eat or die found it left on their hands after the council was over. The men and women of France were selling, not buying, regardless of possible famine, that they might find money to fulfill their burning desire to go to the Holy Land and there win the Holy Sepulcher and gain pardon for their sins as Pope Ben Hermit had promised them. The ordinary crusading route passed through the Catholic kingdom of Hungary to Bulgaria and then to Constantinople where the various companies of armed pilgrims had agreed to meet. It was with the entry into Bulgaria whose Orthodox king was secretly hostile to the pilgrims that trouble began. Food and drink were grudged by the suspicious natives even to those willing to pay their way whereupon the utterly indisciplined forces could not be prevented from retaliating on this inhospitality by fire and pillage. A species of warfare ensued in which Latin stragglers were cut off and murdered by mountain robbers while the many undesirables who had joined the crusaders more in hope of loot and adventure than of pardon brought an evil reputation on their comrades by their greed and the brutality they exhibited toward the peasants. Reason enough was here to account for the pathetic failure of the advance guard of crusaders, the poor, the fanatic, the disreputable drawn together in no settled organization and with no leaders of military repute. Alexius Comenas, who had demanded an army, not a rabble, dealt characteristically with the problem by shipping these first crusaders in haste and unsupported to Asia Minor. There he left them to fall prey to the Turks' disease and their own inadequacy so that few ever saw the coasts of their native lands again. If the first crusade began in tragedy, it ended in triumph through the arrival in Constantinople of a second force from the West. This time of disciplined troops under the chief military leaders of Europe. Alexius Comenas had good cause to remember the prowess of his old enemy, Bowman, son of Robert Weisgard, who wrote at the head of the Sicilian Normans while other names of repute were Godfrey de Bouillon, Duke of Lorraine and Robert, the eldest son of William the Conqueror with Archbishop Otto of Bayou, his uncle. Some of the crusaders wrote Anna Comena were guileless men and women, marching in all simplicity to worship at the tomb of Christ. But there were others of a more wicked kind to wit, Bowman, and the like. Such men had but one object to obtain possession of the imperial city. These suspicions, perhaps well-founded, were natural to the daughter of the untrustworthy Alexius Comenas, who trusted nobody. Hating to entertain at his court so many well-armed and often insolent strangers, yet fearing in his heart to aid their advance lest they should set up a rival kingdom to his own, the emperor, having cajoled the leaders into promises of homage for any conquests they might make, at length transported them and their followers across the Hellespont. The Christian campaign began with the capture of Nicaea in 1097, followed by a victorious progress through Asia Minor. For nearly a year the crusaders besieged and then were, in their turn, besieged in Antioch, enduring tortures of hunger, thirst, and disease. When courage flagged and hope seemed nearly dead, it was the supposed discovery by one of the chaplains of the lance that had pierced Christ's side as he hung upon the cross that kept the Christians from surrender. With this famous relic, born in their midst by the papal legate, the crusaders flung the gates of Antioch wide and issued forth in a charge so irresistible in its certainty of victory that the Turks broke and fled. The defeat became a rout and Antioch remained as a Christian principality under Bamond when the crusaders marched southward along the coast route toward Jerusalem. They came inside of this, the goal of their ambitions on the 7th June 1099, not garbed as knights and soldiers, but barefooted as humble pilgrims, kneeling in ecstasy of awe upon the Mount of Olives. This mood of prayer passed rapidly into one of fierce determination, and on the 15th of June, God predibolon and his Loraners forced to breach in the nasty walls and hacking their way with sword and spear through the streets, met their fellow crusaders triumphantly entering from another side. The scene that followed while in keeping with medieval savagery has left a shameful stain upon the Christianity it professed to represent. Turks, Arabs and Jews, old men and women, children and babies, thousands of a defenseless population were deliberately butchered as a sacrifice to Christ who, dying, preached forgiveness. Their crusaders rode their horses up to the knees in the blood of that human shambles. There might no prayers nor crying of mercy prevails, says an eyewitness. Such a slaughter of pagan folk had never been seen nor heard of. None knew their number, save God alone. Their mission accomplished, the majority of crusaders turned their faces homewards, but before they went they elected God predibolon to be the first ruler of the new Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, with Antioch and Odessa in the north as dependent principalities. God predibolon reigned for almost a year, bearing the title Guardian of the Holy Grave, since he refused to be crowned master of a city where Christ had worn a wreath of thorns. His protest is typical of the genuine humility and love of God that mingled so strangely in his veins with pride and cruelty. When he died he left a reputation for courage and justice that wove around his memory, romance and legends like the tales of Charlemagne. His immediate successors were a brother and a nephew and it is in the reign of the latter that we first hear mention of the military orders, so famous in the crusading annals of the Middle Ages. These were the hospitalers or Knights of St. John, inheritors of the rents and property belonging to the old hospital founded for pilgrims in Jerusalem, and the Templars, so-called from their residence near the site of Solomon's Temple. Both orders were bound, like the monks, by the vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity, but the work demanded of them, instead of labor in the fields, was perpetual war against the infidel. When the Templars are summoned to arms, said a 13th century writer, they inquire not of the number but of the position of their foe. They are lions in war, lambs in the house, to the enemies of Christ fierce and implacable, but to Christians kind and gracious. Yet a third order, that of the Teutonic Knights, was founded in the 12th century, arising like that of the Knights of St. John out of a hospital, but one that had been built by German merchants for crusaders of their own race. At the end of the 13th century, the order removed to the Southern Baltic, and on these cold, inhospitable shores, embarked on a crusading against the heathen Lithuanians. It is of interest to students of modern history to note that in the 16th century, the last Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights became converted to the doctrines of Luther, suppressed his order, and absorbed the estates into an hereditary fife, the Duchy of Brandenburg. On the mark in Duchy of Brandenburg, both founded with entirely military objects, was the future kingdom of Prussia built. The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, 1099 to 1187, survived for more than three quarters of a century. That it had been established with such comparative ease was due not only to the fighting quality of the crusaders, but also to the feuds that divided Turkish rulers of the House of Seljuk. The Turks far outnumbered the Christians, and whenever the caliphs of Baghdad and Cairo should sink their rivalries, or one Muslim ruler in the East gains a tendency over all others, the days of the small Latin kingdom in Palestine would be numbered. In the meantime, the Latins maintained their position with varying fortune. Now with the aid of fresh recruits from Europe, and Genoese and Venetian sailors capturing coast towns, now losing land outposts, there were insufficient garrisons to protect. It was the loss of Odessa that roused Europe to its second crusade, this time through the eloquence of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who persuaded not only Louis VII of France and his wife, Queen Eleanor, but also the at first reluctant emperor, Conrad III, to bind the cross of their arms and go to the sucker of Christendom. The Christian who slays the unbeliever in the Holy War is sure of his reward, more sure if he is slain. The pictures of the glories of martyrdom and of earthly conquests painted by the famous monk were so vivid that on one occasion he was forced to tear up his own robes to provide sufficient crosses for the eager multitude. But the triumph to which he calls so great a part of the population of France and Germany proves the beckoning hand of death and failure. Both the king and emperor reached Palestine. Louis VII even visited Jerusalem, but when they sailed homewards they had accomplished nothing of any lasting value. Odessa remained under Mohammedan rule and the Christians had been forced to abandon the siege of Damascus that they had intended as a prelude to a victorious campaign. What was worse was that Louis and Conrad had left the chivalry of their armies in a track of whitening bones where they had retreated, victims not merely of Turkish prowess in numbers but of Christian feuds, Greek treachery and the failure of food supplies and disease. The Byzantine empire owed to the first crusaders large tracts of territory recovered from the Turks and Asia Minor. But angered by broken promises of homage on the part of Latin rulers, the Greeks repaid this debt in the second crusade by acting as spies and secret allies of the Mohammedans. On occasion they were even to be found fighting openly side by side with the Turks. Yet more merciless than these pagans in their brutal refusal to give food and drink to the stragglers of the Latin armies whom they had so basely betrayed. The widows and orphans of France and Germany when their rulers returned bereft both of glory and minute arms, reviled Saint Bernard as a false prophet. But though he responded sternly that the guilt lay not with God but in the worldiness of those who had taken the cross, he was sorely troubled at the shattering of his own hopes. The sons of God, he wrote warily, have been overthrown in the desert, slain with a sword or destroyed by famine. We promised good things and behold disorder. The judgments of the Lord are righteous, but this one is an abyss so deep that I must call him blessed who has not scandalized therein. For some years after the second crusade, Western Europe turned a deaf ear to entreaties for help from Palestine. And the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem continued to decline steadily, not only in territory but in its way of life. The innervating climate, the temptations to an unhealthy luxury that forgot Christian ideals, the almost unavoidable intermarriage of the races of East and West, all these sapped the vitality and efficiency of the crusading settlers, while the establishment of a feudal government at Jerusalem resulted in the usual quarrels amongst tenants-in-chief and their subtenants. In these feuds, the hospitalers and Templars joined with an avaricious rivalry unworthy of their creed of self-denial. By 1183, Guy de Lousignan, who had succeeded in seizing the crown of Jerusalem by craft on the failure of the royal line, could only count on the lukewarm support of the majority of Latin barons. Thus handicapped, he found himself suddenly confronted by a union of the Turks of Egypt and Syria under Saladin, Caliph of Cairo, a leader so capable and popular that the downfall of divided enemies was inevitable. At Hatton, near the lake of Tiberias on a rocky, waterless spot, the Christians and Mohammedans met for a decisive battle in the summer of 1187. The Latins, hemmed in by superior numbers and tortured by the heat and thirst, fought desperately beneath the relic of the true cross that they had borne with them as an incitement to their courage. But the odds were too great and King Guy himself was forced to surrender when the defeat of his army had turned into a rout. In the autumn of the same year, Jerusalem, after less than a month's siege, opened their gates to the victor. Very different was the entry of Saladin to that of the first crusaders, for instead of a general massacre, the Christian population was put to ransom by the Sultan and his brother as an acceptable arms to Allah, freeing hundreds of the poorer classes for whom enough money could not be provided. Europe received the news that the Holy Sepulchre had returned to the custody of the infidel with a shame and indignation that was expressed in the Third Crusade. This time, however, no straggling bands of enthusiasts were encouraged, and though the expedition was approved by the Pope, neither he nor any famous churchmen, such as Peter the Hermit or St. Bernard of Clairvaux, were responsible for the majority of volunteers. The Third Crusade was in character of military campaign of three great nations, of the Germans under the emperor Frederick Barbarossa or the redbeard, of the French under Philip II, and of the English under Richard the Lionheart. Other princes, famous enough in their lands for wealth and prowess, sailed also, and had there been union in that great host, Saladin might well have trembled for his empire. He was saved by the utter lack of cohesion and petty jealousies of his enemies as well as by his statescraft and military skill. While English and French rulers still haggard over the terms of an alliance that would allow them to leave their lands with an easy mind, Frederick Barbarossa, the last to take the cross, set out from Germany, rapidly crossed Hungary and Bulgaria, reduced the Greek emperor to hostile inactivity by threats and military display, and began a victorious campaign through Asia Minor. Here fate intervened to help the Mohammedans for while fording a river in Silesia, the emperor was swept from his horse by the current and drowned. So passed away Frederick the Redbeard and with him what his strong personality had made an army. Some of the tutans returned home while those who remained degenerated into a rabble, easy victims for their enemies' spears and arrows. In the meantime, Richard of England, 1189 to 99, and Philip of France had clasped the hand of friendship and having levied the saladin tie the tax of one-tenth of the possessions of all their subjects in order to pay their expenses, set sail eastward from Marseille. Both were young and eager for military glory, but the French king could plot and wait to achieve the ultimate success he desired while in Richard the statesman was wholly sunk in the soldier of fortune. To medieval chroniclers there was something dazzling in the Lionheart's physical strength and in the sheer daring with which he would force success out of apparently inevitable failure or realize some dangerous enterprise. Though fortune wreaks her spleen on whomever she pleases, yet he was not drowned for all her adverse waves. The Lord of Ages gave him such generosity of soul and endued him with such virtues that he seemed rather to belong to earlier times than these. To record his deeds would cramp the writer's finger joints and stun the hearer's mind. Such are a few of the many flattering descriptions, the obvious sincerity of which paints the English king as he seemed to the man who fought beside him. A clever strategist, a born leader in battle, fearless himself and with a restless energy that inspired him when sick to be carried on cushions in order to direct the fire of his stone slingers, Richard turned his golden qualities of generalship to dust by his utter lack of diplomacy intact. Of gifts such as these that are one half of kingship, he was not so much ignorant as heedless. He willed to do things like his great ancestor, the Conqueror, but his sole weapon was his right hand, not the subtlety of his brain. The King of England had gallows erected outside his camp to hang the thieves and robbers on, deeming it that no matter what country the criminals were, he considered every man has his own and left no wrong unevented. This typical high-handed action, no doubt splendid in theory as a method of discouraging the crimes that had helped to ruin previous campaigns, was, when put into practice, sufficient alone to account for the hatred Richard inspired amongst rulers whose subjects he thus chose to judge and execute at will. The King of France, we are told, winked at the wrongs his men inflicted and received, but he gained friends, while Richard's progress was a series of embittered feuds accepted lightheartedly without any thought of his own future interests or those of the crusade. Open rupture with Philip II of France was brought about almost before they had left the French coast through Richard's repudiation of his ally's sister, to whom he had been betrothed, since the English king was now determined on a match with Baron Garia, the daughter of the King of Navarre. In South Italy he acquired his next enemies in both claimants then disputing the crown of Sicily, but before he sailed away he had battered one of the rivals, the Norman Tancred, into an outwardly submissive ally after a battle in the streets of Messina. The other rival, Henry, son of Frederick Barbarossa, and afterwards the emperor Henry VI, remained his enemy, storing up a grudge against him in the hopes of a suitable opportunity for displaying him. From Cyprus, Richard, pursuing military glory, drove its Greek ruler because he had dared to imprison some shipwrecked Englishmen, and thus, adding an island to his dominions and the Eastern emperor to his list of foes, arrived at last in Palestine in the summer of 1191, just in time to join Philip II in the siege of Ocar. The two kings and peoples did less together than they would have done separately in each set but light store by the other. So the tale runs in the contemporary chronicle. And when Ocar at last surrendered, the feuds between English and French had grown so irreconcilable that Philip II, who had fallen sick, sulkily declared that he had fulfilled his crusading vow and departed homewards. Not long afterwards went Leopold, Archduke of Austria, nursing cold rage against Richard in his heart because of an insult to his banner that, planted on an earthwork beside the arms of England, had been contemptuously flung into the ditch below. The Lionheart was now master of the enterprise in Palestine, a terror to the Turks who would use his name to frighten their unruly children into submission. But though he remained 14 months, the jealousies and rivalries of his camp, with which he was not the man to contend, kept him dallying on the coast route to Jerusalem, unable to proceed by open warfare or to get the better of the wily Saladin in his diplomacy. News came that Philip II and the Emperor Henry VI were plotting with his brother John for his ruin at home and Richard, weary at heart and sick in health, agreed to a three years and eighth months truce that left the Christians in the possession of the seaports of Jaffa and Tyre with the coastal territory between them and gave pilgrims leave to visit Jerusalem untaxed. He himself refused with tears in his eyes even to gaze from a distant height on the city he could not conquer. But, vowing he would return, he set sail for the west in the autumn of 1192 and with his departure the third crusade ended. There were to be many other crusades but none that expressed in the same way as these first three expeditions, the United Aspirations of Western Europe for the recovery of the land of the Holy Sepulchre. National jealousies had ruined the chances of the third crusade and with every year the spirit of nationality was to grow in strength and make common action less possible for Europe. There is another reason also for the changing character of the crusades, namely the loss of the religious enthusiasm in which they had had their origin. Men and women had believed that the cross on their arms could turn sinners into saints, break down battlements and destroy infidels as if by miracle. When they found that human passions flourished as easily in Palestine as at home and that the way of salvation was as ever the path of hard labor and constant effort, they were disillusioned and eager multitudes no longer clamored to go to the east. Their crusades did not stop suddenly but degenerated with a few exceptions in a mere political enterprises, patronized now by one nation, now by another. The armies were recruited by mere love of adventure, lust of battle or the desire for plunder. If Western Christendom had gained no other blessing by them, the early crusades at least freed the nations at a critical moment from a very large proportion of the unruly baronage that had been a danger to commerce and good government. England paid heavily in gold for the third crusade but the money supplied by merchants in towns was well spent in securing from the lionheart privileges and charters that laid the foundations of municipal liberty. In France the results of the second crusade had been for the moment devastating. Whole villages marched away, cities and castles stood empty and in some provinces it was said scarce one man remained to seven women. In the orgy of selling that marked this exodus, lands and possessions rapidly changed hands. The smaller fives tending to be absorbed by the larger fives and many of these in their turn by the crown. Aided also by other causes the king of France with his increased domains and revenues came to assume a predominant position in the national life. Perhaps the chief effect of the crusades on Europe generally was the stimulus of new influences. Men and women if they live in a rut and feed their brains continually on the same ideas grow prejudiced. It is good for them to travel and come in contact with opposite views of life in different manners and customs however much it may annoy them at the time. The crusades provided this kind of stimulus not only to the commerce of Mediterranean ports but in the world of thought, literature and art. The necessity of transport for large armies improved shipbuilding. The cutting of Turkish foes, the ingenuity of Christian armorers and engineers, the influence of Byzantine architecture and mosaics, the splendor of Venice and stone and color. Western Europe continued to hate the East but she could not live without her silks, spices and perfumes nor forget the dream of the fabulous wonders of Cathay. Thus the age of the crusades will be seen at last to merge its failures in the successes of an age of discovery that were to lay bare a new West and another road to the Orient. End of chapter 12.