 Chapter 45 The Development of Latin Christendom It is worthwhile to note the extremely shrunken dimensions of the share of the world remaining under Aryan control in the 7th and 8th centuries. A thousand years before, the Aryan-speaking races were triumphant over all the civilized world west of China. Now, the Mongol had thrust as far as Hungary, nothing of Asia remained under Aryan rule except the Byzantine dominions in Asia Minor, and all Africa was lost and nearly all Spain. The great Hellenic world had shrunken to a few positions around the nucleus of the trading city of Constantinople, and the memory of the Roman world was kept alive by the Latin of the Western Christian priests. In vivid contrast to this tale of retrogression, the Semitic tradition had risen again from subjugation and obscurity after a thousand years of darkness, yet the vitality of the Nordic peoples was not exhausted, confined now to central and north-western Europe and terribly muddled in their social and political ideas, they were nevertheless building up gradually and steadily a new social order and preparing unconsciously for the recovery of a power even more extensive than they had previously enjoyed. We have told how, at the beginning of the 6th century, there remained no central government in Western Europe at all. That world was divided up among numbers of local rulers holding their own as they could. This was too insecure a state of affairs to last. A system of cooperation and association grew up in this disorder, the feudal system, which has left its traces upon European life up to the present time. The feudal system, which has left its traces upon European life up to the present time. This feudal system was a sort of crystallization of society about power. Everywhere, the lone man felt insecure and was prepared to barter a certain amount of his liberty to help and protection. He sought a stronger man as his lord and protector. He gave him military services and paid him dues, and in return he was confirmed in his possession of what was his. His lord again found safety in vassalage to a still greater lord. Cities also found it convenient to have feudal protectors and monasteries and church estates bound themselves by similar ties. No doubt in many cases allegiance was claimed before it was offered. The system grew downward as well as upward. So a sort of pyramidal system grew up, varying widely in different localities, permitting at first a considerable play of violence and private warfare, but making steadily for order and a new reign of law. The pyramids grew up until some became recognizable as kingdoms. Already by the early 6th century a Frankish kingdom existed under its founder Clovis in what is now France and the Netherlands, and presently Visigothic and Lombard Angothic kingdoms were in existence. The Muslim, when they crossed the Pyrenees in 720, found of this Frankish kingdom under the practical rule of Charles Martel, the mayor of the palace of a degenerate descendant of Clovis, and experienced the decisive defeat at Poitiers, 732 at his hands. This Charles Martel was practically overlord of Europe north of the Alps from the Pyrenees to Hungary. He ruled over a multitude of subordinate lords, speaking French, Latin and high and low German languages. His son Pepin extinguished the last descendants of Clovis and took the kingly state and title. His grandson Charlemagne, who began to reign in 768th, found himself a lord of a realm so large that he could think of reviving the title of Latin Emperor. He conquered North Italy and made himself master of Rome. Approaching the story of Europe as we do from the wider horizons of a world history, we can see much more distinctly than the mere nationalist historian how cramping and disastrous this tradition of the Latin Roman Empire was. A narrow intense struggle for this phantom predominance was to consume European energy for more than a thousand years. Through all that period, it is possible to trace certain unquenchable antagonisms they run through the vits of Europe like the obsessions of a demented mind. One driving force was this ambition of successful rulers, which Charlemagne, Charles the Great, embodied to became Caesar. The realm of Charlemagne consisted of a complex of feudal German states at various stages of barbarism. West of the Rhine, most of these German peoples had learned to speak various Latinized dialects, which fused at last to form French. East of the Rhine, the racially similar German peoples did not lose their German speech. On account of this, communication was difficult between these two groups of barbarian conquerors and a split easily brought about. The split was made, the more easy by the fact, that the Frankish usage made it seem natural to divide the empire of Charlemagne among his sons at his death. So one aspect of the history of Europe from the days of Charlemagne onwards is a history of first this monarch and his family, and then that, struggling to a precarious headship of the kings, princes, dukes, bishops and cities of Europe, while a steadily deepening antagonism between the French and German speaking elements develops in the medley. There was a formality of election for each emperor, and the climax of his ambition was to struggle to the possession of that worn-out, misplaced capital Rome and a coronation there. The next factor in the European political disorder was the resolve of the church at Rome to make no temporal prince but the pope of Rome himself emperor in effect. He was already Pontifex Maximus, for all practical purposes he held a decaying city. If he had no armies, he had at least a vast propaganda organization in his priests throughout the whole Latin world. If he had little power over men's bodies, he held the keys of heaven and hell in their imaginations, and could exercise much influence upon their souls. So throughout the Middle Ages, while one prince manoeuvred against another first for equality, then for ascendancy, and at last for the supreme prize, the pope of Rome, sometimes boldly, sometimes craftily, sometimes feebly, for the popes were a succession of oldish men, and the average reign of a pope was not more than two years. And for the submission of all the princes to himself as the ultimate overlord of Christendom. But these antagonisms of prince against prince and of emperor against pope do not by any means exhaust the factors of the European confusion. There was still an emperor in Constantinople speaking Greek and claiming the allegiance of all Europe. When Charlemagne sought to revive the empire, it was merely the Latin end of the empire he revived. It was natural that the sense of rivalry between Latin Empire and Greek Empire should develop very rapidly. And still more readily did the rivalry of Greek speaking Christianity and the newer Latin speaking version developed. The pope of Rome claimed to be the successor of Saint Peter, the chief of the Apostles of Christ, and the head of the Christian community everywhere. Neither the emperor nor the patriarch of Constantinople were disposed to acknowledge this claim. At dispute about a fine point in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, consummated a long series of dissensions in a final rupture in 1054. The Latin Church and the Greek Church became and remained, thereafter, distinct and frankly antagonistic. This antagonism must be added to the others in our estimate of the conflicts that wasted Latin Christendom in the Middle Ages. Upon this divided world of Christendom reigned the blows of three sets of antagonists. About the Baltic and Norse seas remained a series of Nordic tribes who were only very slowly and reluctantly Christianized. These were the Norsemen. They had taken to the sea and piracy, and were raiding all the Christian coasts down to Spain. They had pushed up the Russian rivers to the desolate central lands, and brought their shipping over into the south flowing rivers. They had come out upon the Caspian and Black seas as pirates also. They set up principalities in Russia. They were the first people to be called Russians. These Norsemen, Russians came near to taking Constantinople. England in the early 9th century was a Christianized, low German country under a king, Egbert, a protégé and pupil of Charlemagne. The Norsemen rested half the kingdom from his successor Alfred the Great, 886, and finally under Canute, 1016, made themselves masters of the whole land. In a role of the Ganger, 912, another band of Norsemen conquered the north of France, which became Normandy. Canute ruled not only over England, but over Norway and Denmark, but his brief empire fell to pieces at his death through that political weakness of the barbaric peoples, division among a ruler's sons. It was interesting to speculate what might have happened if this temporary union of the Norsemen had endured. They were a race of astonishing boldness and energy. They sailed in their galleys even to Iceland and Greenland. They were the first Europeans to land on American soil. Late and un-Norman adventurers were to recover Sicily from the Saracens and Sacroam. It is a fascinating thing to imagine what a great northern, seafaring power might have grown out of Canute's kingdom, reaching from America to Russia. To the east of the Germans and Latinised Europeans was a medley of Slav tribes and Turkish peoples. Prominent among these were the Magyars or Hungarians, who were coming westward throughout the 8th and 9th centuries. Charlemagne held them for a time, but after his death they established themselves in what is now Hungary, and after the fashion of their kindred predecessors, the Huns, raided every summer into the settled parts of Europe. In 938 they went through Germany into France, crossed the Alps into North Italy, and so came home, burning, robbing and destroying. Finally pounding away from the south the vestiges of the Roman Empire were the Saracens. They had made themselves largely masters of the sea. Their only formidable adversaries upon the water were the Norsemen, the Russian Norsemen out of the Black Sea, and the Norsemen of the West. Hemmed in by these more vigorous and aggressive peoples, amidst forces they did not understand, and dangers they could not estimate, Charlemagne and after him, a series of other ambitious spirits, took up the futile drama of restoring the Western Empire under the name of the Holy Roman Empire. From the time of Charlemagne onward, this idea obsessed the political life of Western Europe, while in the east the Greek half of the Roman power decayed and dwindled, until at last nothing remained of it at all but the corrupt trading city of Constantinople and a few miles of territory about it. Politically the continent of Europe remained traditional and uncreative from the time of Charlemagne onward for a thousand years. The name of Charlemagne looms large in European history, but his personality is but indistinctly seen. He could not read or nor write, but he had a considerable respect for learning. He liked to be read aloud to at meals, and he had a weakness for theological discussion. At his winter quarters at Axlac-Capelle or Mayans, he gathered about him a number of learned men and picked up much from their conversation. In the summer he made war against the Spanish Saracens, against the Slavs and Magyars, against the Saxons and others still heathen German tribes. It is doubtful whether the idea of becoming Caesar in succession to Rommel's Augustus occurred to him, before his acquisition of North Italy, or whether it was suggested to him by Pope Leo III, who was anxious to make the Latin Church independent of Constantinople. There were the most extraordinary maneuvers at Rome between the Pope and the prospective emperor in order to make it appear or not appear, as if the Pope gave him the imperial crown. The Pope succeeded in crowning his visitor and conqueror by surprise in St. Peter's on Christmas Day 800 AD. He produced a crown, put it on the head of Charlemagne, and hailed him Caesar on Augustus. There was a great applause among the people. Charlemagne was by no means pleased at the way in which the thing was done. It wrangled in his mind as a defeat, and he left the most careful instructions to his son that he was not to let the Pope crown him emperor. He was to seize the crown in his own hands and put it on his own head himself. So at the very outset of this imperial revival we see beginning the age-long dispute of Pope and emperor for priority. But Louis the Pious, the son of Charlemagne, disregarded his father's instructions, and was entirely submissive to the Pope. The empire of Charlemagne fell apart at the desk of Louis the Pious, and the split between the French-speaking Franks and the Germans-speaking Franks widened. The next emperor to arise was Otto, the son of a certain Henry the Fowler, a Saxon, who had been elected King of Germany by an assembly of German princes and prelates in 919. Otto descended upon Rome and was crowned emperor there in 962. This Saxon line came to an end early in the 11th century and gave place to other German rulers. The feudal princes and nobles to the west, who spoke various French dialects, did not fall under the sway of these German emperors after the Carlovingian line, the line that is descended for Charlemagne, had come to an end and no part of Britain ever came into the Holy Roman Empire. The Duke of Normandy, the King of France, and a number of lesser feudal rulers remained outside. In 987 the Kingdom of France passed out of the possession of the Carlovingian line into the hands of Hugh Capet, whose descendants were still reigning in the 18th century. At the time of Hugh Capet the King of France ruled only a comparatively small territory around Paris. In 1066 England was attacked almost simultaneously by an invasion of the Norwegian Norsemen under King Harold Hardrara and by the Latinised Norsemen under the Duke of Normandy. Old King of England defeated the former at the Battle of Stamford Bridge and was defeated by the latter at Hastings. England was conquered by the Normans and so cut off from Scandinavian, Teutonic and Russian affairs and brought into the most intimate relations and conflicts with the French. For the next four centuries the English were entangled in the conflicts of the French feudal princes and wasted upon the fields of France. Chapter 46 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells Chapter 46 The Crusades and the Age of Papal Dominion It is interesting to note that Charlemagne corresponded with the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid, the Haroun al-Rashid of the Arabian Knights. It is recorded that Haroun al-Rashid sent ambassadors from Baghdad, which had now replaced Damascus as the Muslim capital, was a splendid tent, a water clock, an elephant and the keys of the Holy Sepulchre. This latter present was admirably calculated to set the Byzantine Empire on this new Holy Roman Empire by the years as to which was the proper protector of the Christians in Jerusalem. These presents remind us that while Europe in the 9th century was still a weltering disorder of war and pillage, there flourished a great Arab empire in Egypt and Mesopotamia, far more civilized than anything Europe could show. Here literature and science still lived, the arts flourished and the mind of man could move without fear or superstition. And even in Spain and North Africa, where the Saracenic dominions were falling into political confusion, there was a weaker intellectual life. Aristotle was read and discussed by these Jews and Arabs during these centuries of European darkness. They guarded the neglected seeds of science and philosophy. North east of the Caliph's dominions was a number of Turkish tribes, they had been converted to Islam and they held the faith much more simply and fiercely than the actively intellectual Arabs and Persians to the south. In the 10th century the Turks were growing strong and vigorous, while the Arab power was divided and decaying. The relations of the Turks to the empire of the Caliphate became very similar to the relations of the Nides to the lost Babylonian empire 14 centuries before. In the 11th century a group of Turkish tribes, the Seljuk Turks, came down into Mesopotamia and made the Caliph their nominal ruler, but really their captive until. They conquered Armenia. Then they struck at the remnants of the Byzantine power in Asia Minor. In 1071 the Byzantine army was utterly smashed at the Battle of Melesgard and the Turks swept forward until not a trace of Byzantine rule remained in Asia. They took the fortress of Nikkeye over against Constantinople and prepared to attempt that city. The Byzantine emperor, Michael VII, was overcome with terror. He was already heavily engaged in warfare with a band of Norman adventurers who had seized Durazul and with a fierce Turkish people, the Pachenex, who were raiding over the Danube. In his extremity he sought help where he could and it is notable that he did not appeal to the western emperor but to the Pope of Rome as the head of Latin Christendom. He wrote to Pope Gregory VII and his successor Alexios Cominus wrote still more urgently to Urban II. This was not a quarter of a century from the rapture of Latin and Greek churches. That controversy was still vividly alive in men's minds and this disaster to Byzantium must have presented itself to the Pope as a supreme opportunity for re-asserting the supremacy of the Latin Church over the dissension Greeks. Moreover, this occasion gave the Pope a chance to deal with two other matters that troubled western Christendom very greatly. One was the custom of private war which disordered social life and the other was the separate abundant fighting energy of the low Germans and Christianized Norsemen and particularly of the Franks and Normans. A religious war, the Crusade, the War of the Cross was preached against the Turkish captors of Jerusalem and a truce to all warfare amongst Christians. The declared object of this war was the recovery of the Holy Sepulcher from the unbelievers. A man called Peter the Hermit carried on a popular propaganda throughout France and Germany on broadly democratic lines. He went clad in a coarse garment, barefooted on an ass. He carried a huge cross and harangued the crowd in street or marketplace or church. He denounced the cruelties practiced upon the Christian pilgrims by the Turks and the shame of the Holy Sepulcher being in any but Christian hands. The fruits of centuries of Christian teaching became apparent in their response. A great wave of enthusiasm swept the western world and popular Christendom discovered itself. Such a widespread uprising of the common people in relation to a single idea as now accured was a new thing in the history of our race. There is nothing to parallel it in the previous history of the Roman Empire or of India or China. On a smaller scale, however, there had been similar movements amongst the Jewish people after their liberation from the Babylonian captivity and later on Islam was to display a parallel susceptibility to collective feeling. Such movements were certainly connected with the new spirit that had come into life with the development of the missionary teaching religions. The Hebrew prophets, Jesus and his disciples, Manny, Muhammad, were all exorters of men's individual souls. They brought the personal conscience face to face with God. Before that time religion had been much more a business of fetish, of pseudo-science than of conscience. The old kind of religion turned upon temple, initiated priests and mystical sacrifice, and ruled the common man like a slave by fear. The new kind of religion made a man of him. The preaching of the first crusade was the first stirring of the common people in European history. It may be too much to call it the birth of modern democracy, but certainly at that time modern democracy stirred. For very long we shall find it stirring again and raising the most disturbing social and religious questions. Certainly this first stirring of democracy ended very pitifully and lamentably. Considerable bodies of common people, crowds rather than armies, set out eastward from France and the Rhineland and Central Europe without waiting for leaders or proper equipment to rescue the Holy Sepulchre. This was the people's crusade. Two great mobs blundered into Hungary mistook the recently converted Magyars for pagans, committed atrocities and were massacred. A third multitude was a similarly confused mind. After a great pogrom of the Jews in the Rhineland marched eastward and was also destroyed in Hungary. Two other huge crowds, under the leadership of Peter the Hermit himself, reached Constantinople, crossed the Bosphorus and were massacred rather than defeated by the Seljuk Turks. So began and ended this first movement of the European people as people. Next year, 1097, the real fighting forces crossed the Bosphorus. Essentially they were Norman in leadership and spirit. They stormed Nicaea, marched by much the same route as Alexander had followed fourteen centuries before to Antioch. The Siege of Antioch kept them a year and in June 1099 they invested Jerusalem. It was stormed after a month's siege. The slaughter was terrible. Men riding on horseback were splashed by the blood in the streets. At nightfall on July 15th the crusaders had fought their way into the church of this Holy Sepulchre and overcome all opposition there, bloodstained, weary and sobbing from excess of joy. They knelt down in prayer. Immediately the hostility of Latin and Greek broke out again. The crusaders were the servants of the Latin Church and the Greek patriarch of Jerusalem found himself in a far worse case under the triumphant Latins than under the Turks. The crusaders discovered themselves between Byzantine and Turk and fighting both. Much of Asia Minor was recovered by the Byzantine Empire and the Latin princes were left, a buffer between Turk and Greek, with Jerusalem and a few small principalities of which Edessa was one of the chiefs in Syria. Their grip even on the possessions was precarious and in 1144 Edessa fell to the Muslim leading to an ineffective second crusade which failed to recover Edessa but saved Antioch from a similar fate. In 1169 the forces of Islam were rallied under a Kurdish adventurer named Saladin who had made himself master of Egypt. He preached a holy war against the Christians, recaptured Jerusalem in 1187 and so provoked the third crusade. This failed to recover Jerusalem. In the 4th crusade 1202-1204 the Latin Church turned frankly upon the Greek Empire and there was not even a pretense of fighting the Turks. It started from Venice and in 1204 it stormed Constantinople. The great rising trading city of Venice was the leader in this adventure and most of the coasts and islands of the Byzantine Empire were annexed by the Venetians. A Latin Emperor Baldwin of Flanders was set up in Constantinople and the Latin and Greek Church were declared to be reunited. The Latin emperors ruled in Constantinople from 1204 to 1261 when the Greek world shook itself free again from Roman predominance. The 12th century then and the opening of the 13th was the age of papal ascendancy just as the 11th was the age of the ascendancy of the Sogic Turks and the 10th the age of the Norsemen. A united Christendom under the rule of the Pope came nearer to being a working reality than it ever was before or after that time. In those centuries a simple Christian faith was real and widespread over great areas of Europe. Rome itself had passed through some dark and discreditable phases. Few writers can be found to excuse the lives of popes John the 11th and John the 12th in the 10th century. They were abominable creatures, but the heart and body of Latin Christendom had remained earnest and simple. The generality of the common priests and monks and nuns had lived exemplary and faithful lives. On the wells of confidence such lives created rested the power of the church. Among the great popes of the past had been Gregory the Great, Gregory the First, 590 to 604, and Leo the Third, 795 to 816, who invited Charlemagne to be seither and crowned him inspired of himself. Towards the close of the 11th century there arose a great clerical statesman, Hildebrand, who ended his life as Pope Gregory VII, 1073 to 1085. Next but one after him came Urban II, 1087 to 1099, the Pope of the First Crusade. These two were the founders of this period of papal greatness, during which the popes lorded it over the emperors. From Bulgaria to Ireland and from Norway to Sicily and Jerusalem, the Pope was supreme. Gregory II obliged the Emperor Henry IV to come in penitence to him at Canossa, and to await forgiveness for three days and nights in the courtyard of the castle, clad in sackclothes and barefooted to the snow. In 1176 at Venice, the Emperor Frederick, Frederick Barbarossa, knelt to Pope Alexander III and swore fealty to him. The great power of the church in the beginning of the 11th century lay in the wills and consciences of men. It failed to retain the moral prestige on which its power was based. In the opening decades of the 14th century it was discovered that the power of the Pope had evaporated. What was it that destroyed the naive confidence of the common people of Christendom in the church so that they would no longer rally to its appeal and serve its purposes? The first trouble was certainly the accumulation of wealth by the church. The church never died, and there was a frequent disposition on the part of dying, childless people to leave lands to the church. And sinners were exhorted to do so. Accordingly in many European countries, as much as a fourth of the land became church property, the appetite for property growth was what it feeds upon. Already in the 13th century it was being said everywhere that the priests were not good men, that they were always hunting for money and legacies. The kings and princes disliked this alienation of property very greatly. In the place of feudal lords capable of military support, they found their lands supporting abbeys and monks and nuns. And these lands were really under foreign dominion. Even before the time of Pope Gregory VII there had been a struggle between the princes and the papacy over the question of investitures, the question that is, of who should appoint the bishops? If that power rested with the pope and not the king, then the latter lost control, not only of the consciences of his subjects, but of a considerable part of his dominions. For also the clergy claimed exemption from taxation. They paid their taxes to Rome. And not only that, but the church also claimed the right to levy a tax of one tenths upon the property of the layman, in addition to the taxes he paid his prince. The history of nearly every country in Latin Christendom tells of the same phase in the eleventh century, a phase of struggle between monarch and pope, on the issue of investitures and generally it tells of a victory for the pope. He claimed to be able to excommunicate the prince, to absolve his subjects from their allegiance to him, to recognize a successor. He claimed to be able to put a nation under an interdict, and then nearly all priestly functions seized, except the sacraments of baptism, confirmation and penance. The priests could neither hold the ordinary services, marry people, nor bury the dead. With these two weapons it was possible for the 12th century popes to curb the most recalcitrant princes and over all the most restive peoples. These were enormous powers, and enormous powers are only to be used on extraordinary occasions. The popes used them at last with a frequency that staled their effect. Within thirty years at the end of the 12th century we find Scotland, France and England in turn under an interdict, and also the popes could not resist the temptation to preach crusades against offending princes, until the crusading spirit was extinct. It is possible that if the Church of Rome had struggled simply against the princes and had had a care to keep its hold upon the general mind, it might have achieved a permanent dominion over all Christendom. But the high claims of the pope were reflected as arrogance in the conduct of the clergy. Before the 11th century the Roman priests could marry. They had closed ties with the people among whom they lived. They were indeed a part of the people. Gregory VII made them celibates. He cut the priests off from too great an intimacy with the laymen in order to bind them more closely to Rome. But indeed he opened a fissure between the Church and the commonality. The Church had its own law courts, cases involving not merely priests but monks, students, crusaders, widows, orphans and the helpless, were reserved for the clerical courts, and so were all matters relating to wills, marriages and oaths, and all cases of sorcery, heresy and blasphemy. Whenever the layman found himself in conflict with the priest, he had to go to a clerical court. The obligations of peace and war fell upon his shoulders alone and left the priest free. It is now great wonder that jealousy and hatred of the priests grew up in the Christian world. Never did Rome seem to realize that its power was in the consciences of common men. It fought against religious enthusiasm, which should have been its ally, and it forced doctrinal orthodoxy upon honest doubt and aberrant opinion. When the Church interfered in matters of morality, it had the common man with it, but not when it interfered in matters of doctrine. When in the south of France Waldo taught a return to the simplicity of Jesus in face and life, innocent the third preached a crusade against the valdances, Waldo's followers, and permitted them to be suppressed with fire, sword, rape, and the most abominable cruelties. Even again Saint Francis of Assisi 1181-1226 taught the imitation of Christ and a life of poverty and service. His followers, the Franciscans, were persecuted, scorched, imprisoned, and dispersed. In 1318 four of them were burnt alive at Marcellus. On the other hand the fiercely orthodox Order of the Dominicans founded by Saint Dominic 1170-1221 was strongly supported by innocent the third, who, with its assistance, set up an organization, the Inquisition, for the hunting of heresy and the affliction of free salt. So it was that the Church, by excessive claims, by unrighteous privileges, and by an irrational intolerance, destroyed that free face of the common man, which was the final source of all its power. The story of its decline tells of no adequate filming, from without, but continually of decay from within. Chapter 47 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells Chapter 47 Recalcitrant Princes and the Great Schism One very great weakness of the Roman Church in its struggle to secure the headship of all Christendom was the manner in which the Pope was chosen. If indeed the papacy was to achieve its manifest ambition and establish one rule and one peace throughout Christendom, then it was vitally necessary that it should have a strong, steady, and continuous direction. In those great days of its opportunity it needed before all things that the Popes, when they took office, should be able men in the prime of life, that each should have his successor designate, with whom he would discuss, the policy of the Church, and that the forms and processes of election should be clear, definite, unalterable and unassailable. Unhappily none of these things obtained. It was not even clear who could vote in the election of a Pope, nor whether the Byzantine or Holy Roman Emperor had a voice in the matter. That very great papal statesman Hildebrand, Pope Gregory VII, 1073 to 1085, did much to regularize the election. He confined the votes to the Roman cardinals, and he reduced the emperor's share to a formula of assent conceded to him by the Church. But he made no provision for a successor designate, and he left it possible for the disputes of the cardinals to keep the sea vacant, as in some cases it was kept vacant for a year or more. The consequences of this want of firm definition are to be seen in the whole history of the papacy up to the 16th century. From quite early times onward, there were disputed elections, and two or more men each claiming to be Pope. The Church would then be subjected to the indignity of going to the emperor or some other outside arbiter to settle the dispute. And the career of everyone of the great popes ended in a note of interrogation. At his death the Church might be left headless and as ineffective as at the capitated body. Or he might be replaced by some old rival, eager only to discredit and undo his work. Or some enfeebled old man, dottering on the brink of the grave, might succeed him. It was inevitable that this peculiar weakness of the papal organization should attract the interference of the various German princes, the French king, and the normal and French kings who ruled in England. That they should all try to influence the elections and have a pope in their own interest established in the Lateran Palace at Rome. And the more powerful and important the pope became in European affairs, the more urgent did these interventions become. Under the circumstances it is no great wonder that many of the popes were weak and futile. The astonishing thing is that many of them were able and courageous men. One of the most vigorous and interesting of the popes of this great period was Innocent III, 1198-1216, who was so fortunate as to become pope before he was 38. He and his successors were pitted against an even more interesting personality, the Emperor Frederick II, Stupor Mundi he was called, the Wanderer of the World. The struggle of this monarch against the Rome is a turning place in history. In the end Rome defeated him and destroyed his dynasty, but he left the prestige of the church and pope so badly wounded that its wounds festered and led to its decay. Frederick was the son of the Emperor Henry VI and his mother was the daughter of Roger I, the Norman king of Sicily. He inherited this kingdom in 1198 when he was a child of four years. Innocent III had been made his guardian. Sicily in those days had been but recently conquered by the Normans. The court was half-orantal and full of highly educated Arabs and some of these were associated in the education of the young king. No doubt they were at some pains to make their point of view clear to him. He got a Muslim view of Christianity as well as a Christian view of Islam and the unhappy result of this double system of instruction was a view exceptional in the age of faith that all religions were impostors. He talked freely on the subject, his heresies and blasphemies are on record. As the young man grew up he found himself in conflict with his guardian. And the third wanted altogether too much from his ward. When the opportunity came for Frederick to succeed as Emperor, the Pope intervened with conditions. Frederick must promise to put down heresy in Germany with a strong hand. Moreover he must relinquish his crown in Sicily and south Italy because otherwise he would be too strong for the Pope. And the German clergy were to be freed from all taxation. Frederick agreed but with no intention of keeping his ward. The Pope had already induced the French king to make war upon his own subjects in France. The cruel and bloody crusade against the Valdencies. He wanted Frederick to do the same thing in Germany. But Frederick being far more of a heretic than any of the simple pietists who had incurred the Pope's animosity lacked the crusading impulse. And when innocent urged him to crusade against the Muslim and recover Jerusalem he was equally ready to promise and equally slack in his performance. Having secured the imperial crown Frederick's second state in Sicily which he greatly preferred to Germany as a residence and did nothing to redeem any of his promises to innocent the third who died baffled in 1216. Honorius the third who succeeded innocent could do no better with Frederick and Gregory the Ninth 1227 came to the papal throne evidently resolved to settle accounts with this young man at any cost. He excommunicated him. Frederick's second was denied all the comforts of religion. In the half Arab court of Sicily this produced singularly little discomfort. And also the Pope addressed a public letter to the emperor reciting his vices which were indisputable his heresies and his general misconduct. To this Frederick replied in a document of diabolical ability. It was addressed to all the princes of Europe and it made the first clear statement of the issue between the Pope and the princes. He made a shattering attack upon the manifest ambition of the Pope to become the absolute ruler of all Europe. He suggested a union of princes against this usurpation. He directed the attention of the princes specifically to the wealth of the church. Being fired off this deadly missile Frederick resolved to perform his 12 year old promise and go upon a crusade. This was the sixth crusade, 1228. It was as a crusade forcical. Frederick the second went to Egypt and met and discussed affairs with the sultan. These two gentlemen, both of skeptical opinions, exchanged congenial views, made a commercial convention to their mutual advantage and agreed to transfer Jerusalem to Frederick. This indeed was a new sort of crusade, a crusade by private treaty. Here was no blood splashing the conqueror, no weeping with excess of joy. As this astonishing crusader was an excommunicated man, he had to be content with a purely secular coronation as king of Jerusalem, taking the crown from the altar with his own hand, for all the clergy were bound to shun him. He then returned to Italy, chased the papal armies which had invaded his dominions back to their own territories, and obliged the Pope to grant him absolution from his excommunication. So a prince might treat the Pope in the 13th century and there was now no storm of popular indignation to avenge him. Those days were passed. In 1239 Gregory the Ninth resumed his struggle with Frederick, excommunicated him for a second time and renewed that warfare of public abuse in which the papacy had already suffered severely. The controversy was revived after Gregory the Ninth was dead, when innocent the fourth was Pope, and again a devastating letter, which men were bound to remember, was written by Frederick against the Church. He denounced the pride and irreligion of the clergy and ascribed all the corruptions of the time to their pride and wealth. He proposed to his fellow princes a general confiscation of Church property for the good of the Church. It was a suggestion that never afterwards left the imagination of the European princes. We will not go on to tell of his last years. The particular events of his life are far less significant than its general atmosphere. It is possible to piece together something of his court life in Sicily. He was luxurious in his way of living and fond of beautiful things. He is described as less sensuous, but it is clear that he was a man of very effectual curiosity and inquiry. He gathered Jewish and Muslim as well as Christian philosophers at his court, and he did much to irrigate the Italian mind with Saracenic influences. Through him the Arabic numerals and algebra were introduced to Christian students and among other philosophers at his court was Mikael Scott, who translated portions of Aristotle and the commentaries thereon of the great Arab philosopher Avaros of Cordoba. In 1224 Frederick founded the University of Naples and he enlarged and enriched the great medical school at Salerno University. He also founded a zoological garden. He left a book on Hawking which shows him to have been an acute observer of the habits of birds, and he was one of the first Italians to write Italian verse. Italian poetry was indeed born at his court. He has been called by an able writer the first of the moderns, and the phrase expresses aptly the unprejudiced detachment of his intellectual side. A still more striking intimation of the decay of the living and sustaining forces of the papacy appeared when presently the popes came into conflict with the growing power of the French king. During the lifetime of the Emperor Frederick II, Germany fell into disunion, and the French king began to play the role of guard, supporter and rival to the pope that had hitherto fallen to the Hohenstofen emperors. A series of popes pursued the policy of supporting the French monarchs. French princes were established in the kingdoms of Sicily and Naples with the support and approval of Rome, and the French kings saw before them the possibility of restoring and ruling the empire of Charlemagne. Then however, the German interregnum after the death of Frederick II, the last of the Hohenstofens, came to all end, and Rudolf of Habsburg was elected first Habsburg emperor, 1273. The policy of Rome began to fluctuate between France and Germany, wearing about with the sympathies of each successive pope. In the east, in 1261, the Greeks recaptured Constantinople from the Latin emperors, and the founder of the new Greek dynasty, Mikhail Paleologus, Mikhail VIII, after some unreal tentatives of reconciliation with the pope, broke away from the Roman communion altogether, and with that, on the fall of the Latin kingdoms in Asia, the eastward ascendancy of the popes came to an end. In 1294, Boniface the VIII became pope. He was an Italian, hostile to the French, and full of a sense of the great traditions and missions of Rome. For a time he carried things with a high hand. In 1300 he held a jubilee, and a vast multitude of pilgrims assembled in Rome. So great was the influx of money into the papal treasury that two assistants were kept busy with the rakes collecting the offerings that were deposited at the tomb of Saint Peter. But this festival was a delusive triumph. Boniface came into conflict with the French king in 1302, and in 1303, as he was about to pronounce sentence of excommunication against that monarch, he was surprised and arrested in his own ancestral palace at Ananghi by Gillamy de Nogoret. This agent from the French king, forced an entrance into the palace, made his way into the bedroom of the frightened pope. He was lying in bed with a cross in his hands, and heaped threats and insults upon him. The pope was liberated a day or so later by the townspeople, and returned to Rome. But there he was seized upon an again-made prisoner by the Orsini family. And in a few weeks' time the shocked and disillusioned old man died a prisoner in their hands. The people of Ananghi did resent the first outrage and rose against Nogoret to liberate Boniface. But then Ananghi was the pope's native town. The important point to note is that the French king in this rough treatment of the head of Christendom was acting with the full approval of his people. He had summoned a council of the three estates of France, lords, church and commons, and gained their consent before proceeding to extremities. Neither in Italy, Germany nor England was there the slightest general manifestation of disapproval at this free handling of the sovereign Boniface. The idea of Christendom had decayed until its power over the minds of men had gone. Throughout the 14th century the papacy did nothing to recover its moral sway. The next pope elected Clement V, but the Frenchman, the choice of King Philip of France. He never came to Rome. He set up his court in the town of Avignon, which then belonged not to France but to the papacy, though embedded in French territory, and there his successors remained until 1377, when Pope Gregory XI returned to the Vatican palace in Rome. But Gregory XI did not take the sympathies of the whole church with him. Many of the cardinals were of French origin, and their habits and associations were rooted deep at Avignon. When in 1378 Gregory XI died, and an Italian, Urban VI, was elected, these dissentient cardinals declared the election invalid, and elected another pope, the anti-pope, Clement VIII. This split is called the Great Schism. The popes remained in Rome, and all the anti-French powers, the Emperor, the King of England, Hungary, Poland and the north of Europe, were loyal to them. The anti-popes, on the other hand, continued in Avignon, and were supported by the King of France, his ally the King of Scotland, Spain, Portugal, and various German princes. Each pope excommunicated and cursed the adherents of his rival, 1378 to 1417. Is it any wonder that presently all over Europe people began to think for themselves in matters of religion? The beginnings of the Franciscans and Dominicans, which we have noted in the preceding chapters, are but two among many of the new forces that were arising in Christendom, either to hold or shatter the church, as its own wisdom might decide. Those two orders the church did assimilate and use, though with a little violence in the case of the former. But other forces were more frankly disobedient and critical. As century and a half later came Wycliffe, 1320 to 1384. He was a learned doctor at Oxford. Quite late in his life he began a series of outspoken criticisms of the corruption of the clergy and the unwisdom of the church. He organized a number of poor priests, the Wycliffeites, to spread his ideas throughout England, and in order that people should judge between the church and himself he translated the Bible into English. He was a more learned and far abler man than either St. Francis of St. Dominic. He had supporters in high places and a great following among the people. And though Rome raged against him and ordered his imprisonment, he died a free man. But the black and ancient spirit that was leading the Catholic church to its destruction would not let his bones rest in the grave. By a decree of the Council of Constance in 1415, his remains were ordered to be dug up and burned, an order which was carried out by the command of Pope Martin V by Bishop Fleming in 1428. This desecration was not the act of some isolated fanatic. It was the official act of the church. End of Chapter 47. Chapter 48 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 48 The Mongol Conquest But in the 13th century, while this strange and finally ineffectual struggle to unify Christendom under the rule of the Pope was going on in Europe, far more momentous events were afoot upon the larger stage of Asia. A Turkish people from the country to the north of China rose suddenly to prominence in the world's affairs and achieved such a series of conquests as had no parallel in history. These were the Mongols. At the opening of the 13th century, they were a horde of nomadic horsemen living very much as their predecessors the Huns had done, subsisting chiefly upon meat and mare's milk and living in tents of skin. They had shaken themselves free from Chinese dominion and brought a number of other Turkish tribes into a military confederacy. Their central camp was at Karakorum in Mongolia. At this time China was in a state of division. The great dynasty of Tang had passed into decay by the 10th century and after a phase of division into warring states, three main empires, that of Qin in the north with Pekin as its capital and that of Song in the south with a capital at Nanqun and Xiyan in the center remain. In 1214, Cengiz Han, the leader of the Mongol Confederates, made war on the Qin Empire and captured Pekin, 1214. He then turned westward and conquered western Turkestan, Persia, Armenia, India down to Lahore and south Russia as far as Kiev. He died master of a vast empire that reached from the Pacific to the Tnepr. His successor, Ogday Khan, continued this astonishing career of conquest. His armies were organized to a very high level of efficiency and they had with them a new Chinese invention, gunpowder, which they used in small field guns. He completed the conquest of the Qin Empire and then swept his host right across Asia to Russia, 1235 and all together amazing march. Kiev was destroyed in 1240 and nearly all Russia became tributary to the Mongols. Poland was ravaged and a mixed army of Poles and Germans was annihilated at the Battle of Lignits in Lower Silesia in 1241. The Emperor Frederick II does not seem to have made any great efforts to stay the advancing tide. It is only recently, says Buri, in his notes to Gibbons' decline and fall of the Roman Empire, that European history has begun to understand that the successes of the Mongol army, which overran Poland and occupied Hungary in the spring of AD 1241, were won by consummate strategy and were not due to a mere overwhelming superiority of numbers. But this fact has not yet become a matter of common knowledge. The Vulgar opinion, which represents the Tatars as a wild horde carrying all before them, solely by their multitude and galloping through Eastern Europe without a strategic plan, rushing at all obstacles and overcoming them by mere weight, still prevails. It is wonderful how punctually and effectually the arrangements were carried out in operations extending from the Lower Vistula to Transylvania. Such a campaign was quite beyond the power of any European army of the time and it was beyond the vision of any European commander. There was no general in Europe from Frederick II downward who was not a Tyrol in strategy compared to Subutai. It should also be noticed that the Mongols embarked upon the enterprise with full knowledge of the political situation of Hungary and the condition of Poland. They had taken care to inform themselves by a well-organized system of spies. On the other hand, the Hungarians and the Christian powers, like childish barbarians, knew hardly anything about their enemies. But though the Mongols were victorious at Lignitz, they did not continue their drive westward. They were getting into woodlands and hilly country, which did not suit their tactics. And so they turned southward and prepared to settle in Hungary, massacring or assimilating the kindred Magyar, even as these had previously massacred and assimilated, the mixed Scythians and Avars and Huns before them. From the Hungarian plain they would probably have made raids west and south as the Hungarians had done in the 9th century, the Avars in the 7th and 8th and the Huns in the 5th. But Ogdai died suddenly, and in 1242 there was trouble about the succession. And recalled by this, the undefeated hosts of Mongols began to pour back across Hungary and Romania towards the east. Thereafter the Mongols concentrated their attention upon their Asiatic conquests. By the middle of the 13th century they had conquered the Song Empire. Mongol Khan succeeded Ogdai Khan as Great Khan in 1251 and made his brother Kubla Khan Governor of China. In 1280 Kubla Khan had been formally recognized Emperor of China and so founded the Yuan dynasty, which lasted until 1368. While the last ruins of the Song rule were going down in China, another brother of Mongol, Hulagu, was conquering Persia and Syria. The Mongols displayed a bitter animosity to Islam at this time and not only massacred the population of Baghdad when they captured that city but set to work to destroy the immemorial irrigation system which had kept Mesopotamia incessantly prosperous and populous from the early days of Sumeria. From that time until our own Mesopotamia has been a desert in ruins sustaining only a scanty population. Into Egypt the Mongols never penetrated. The Sultan of Egypt completely defeated an army of Hulagu's in Palestine in 1260. After that disaster the tide of Mongol victory ebbed. The dominions of the Great Khan fell into a number of separate states. The eastern Mongols became Buddhists like the Chinese, the western became Muslim. The Chinese threw off the rule of the Yuan dynasty in 1368 and set up the native Ming dynasty which flourished from 1368 to 1644. The Russians remained tributary to the Tartar Ords upon the southeast steps until 1480 when the Grand Duke of Moscow repudiated his allegiance and laid the foundation of modern Russia. In the 14th century there was a brief revival of Mongol vigor under Timur Lane a descendant of Cengiz Khan. He established himself in western Turkestan, assumed the title of Grand Khan in 1369 and conquered from Syria to Delhi. He was the most savage and destructive of all the Mongol conquerors. He established an empire of desolation that did not survive his death. In 1505 however a descendant of this Timur, an adventurer named Babur, got together an army with guns and swept down upon the plains of India. His grandson Akbar 1556-1605 completed his conquests and this Mongol or Mogul as the Arabs called it, dynasty ruled in Delhi over the greater part of India until the 18th century. One of the consequences of the first great sweep of Mongol conquest in the 13th century was to drive a certain tribe of Turks, the Ottoman Turks, out of Turkestan into Asia Minor. They extended and consolidated their power in Asia Minor, crossed the Dardanelles and conquered Macedonia, Serbia and Bulgaria, until at last Constantinople remained, like an island, amongst the Ottoman dominions. In 1453 the Ottoman Sultan, Mohammed II, took Constantinople, attacking it from the European side with a great number of guns. This event caused intense excitement in Europe and there was talk of a crusade, but the day of the crusades was passed. In the course of the 16th century the Ottoman sultans conquered Baghdad, Hungary, Egypt and most of North Africa and their fleet made the masters of the Mediterranean. They very nearly took Vienna and they exacted its tribute from the emperor. There were but two items to offset the general ebb of Christian dominion in the 15th century. One was the restoration of the independence of Moscow, 1480. The other was the gradual reconquest of Spain by the Christians. In 1492 Granada, the last Muslim state in the peninsula, fell to King Ferdinand of Aragon and his queen Isabella of Castile. But it was not until as late as 1571 that the naval battle of Lepanto broke the prick of the Ottomans and restored the Mediterranean waters to Christian ascendancy. End of chapter 48 Chapter 49 of A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 49 The Intellectual Revival of the Europeans Throughout the 12th century there were many signs that the European intelligence was recovering courage and leisure and preparing to take up again the intellectual enterprises of the first Greek scientific enquiries and such speculations as those of the Italian Lucretias. The causes of this revival were many and complex. The suppression of private war, the higher standards of comfort and security that follow the crusades and the stimulation of men's minds by the experiences of these expeditions were no doubt necessary preliminary conditions. Trade was reviving, cities were recovering ease and safety, the standard of education was arising in the church and spreading among laymen. The 13th and 14th centuries was a period of growing, independent or quasi-dependent cities Venice, Florence, Genoa, Lisbon, Paris, Brookes, London, Antwerp, Hamburg, Nuremberg, Novgorod, Visby and Bergen for example. They were all trading cities with many travellers and where men trade and travel they talk and think. The polemics of the popes and princes, the conspicuous savagery and wickedness of the persecution of heretics were exciting men to doubt the authority of the church and question and discuss fundamental things. We have seen how the Arabs were the means of restoring Aristotle to Europe and how such a prince as Frederick II acted as a channel through which Arabic philosophy and science played upon the renaissance European mind. Still more influential in the stirring up of men's ideas were the Jews. Their vast existence was a note of interrogation to the claims of the church and finally the secret, fascinating inquiries of the alchemists were spreading far and wide and setting men to the petty, furtive and yet fruitful resumption of experimental science. And the stir in men's minds was by no means confined now to the independent and well educated. The mind of the common man was awake in the world as it had never been before in all the experience of mankind. In spite of priest and persecution Christianity does seem to have carried a mental ferment wherever its teaching reached. It established a direct relation between the conscience of the individual man and the God of righteousness so that now if need arose he had the courage to form his own judgment upon prince or prelate or creed. As early as the 11th century philosophical discussion had begun again in Europe and there were great and growing universities at Paris, Oxford, Bologna and other centers, their medieval schoolmen took up again and threshed out a series of questions upon the value and meaning of words that were unnecessary preliminary to clear thinking and scientific age that was to follow. And standing by himself because of his distinctive genius was Roger Bacon, circa 1210 to circa 1293, a Franciscan of Oxford, the father of modern experimental science. His name deserves a prominence in our history second only to that of Aristotle. His writings are one long tirade against ignorance. He told his age it was ignorant, an incredibly bold thing to do. Nowadays a man may tell the world it is as silly as it is solemn, that all its methods are still infantile and clumsy, and its dogmas childish assumptions without much physical danger. But these peoples of the Middle Ages, when they were not actually being massacred or starving or dying of pestilence, were passionately convinced of the wisdom, the completeness and finality of their beliefs, and disposed to resent any reflections upon them very bitterly. Roger Bacon's writings were like a flash of light in a profound darkness. He combined his attack upon the ignorance of his times with a wealth of suggestion for the increase of knowledge. In his passionate insistence upon the need of experiment and of collecting knowledge, the spirit of Aristotle lives again in him. Experiment, experiment, that is the burden of Roger Bacon. Yet of Aristotle himself, Roger Bacon fell full. He fell full of him because men, instead of facing facts boldly, sat in rooms and poured over the bad Latin translations, which were then all that was available of the master. If I had my way, he wrote in his intemperate fashion, I should burn all the books of Aristotle, for the study of them can only lead to a loss of time, produce error and increase ignorance. A sentiment that Aristotle would probably have echoed, could he have returned to a world in which his works were not so much read as worshipped, and that, as Roger Bacon showed, in these most abominable translations. Throughout his books, a little disguised by the necessity of seeming to square it all, with orthodoxy for fear of the prison and worse, Roger Bacon shouted to mankind, seized to be ruled by dogmas and authorities, look at the world. Four chief sources of ignorance he denounced, respect of authority, custom, the sense of the ignorant crowd, and the vain, proud unteachable-ness of our dispositions. Overcome but these, and the world of power would open to men. Machines for navigating are possible without rovers, so that great ships suited to river or ocean, guided by one man, may be born with greater speed than if they were full of men. Likewise, cars may be made, so that without a draught animal they may be moved, cum impetu incestimable, as we deem the disguised chariots to have been from which antiquity fault. And flying machines are possible, so that a man may sit in the middle turning some device, by which artificial wings may beat the air in the manner of a flying bird. So Roger Bacon wrote, but three more centuries were to elapse before man began any systematic attempts to explore the hidden stores of power and interest he realized so clearly existed beneath the dull surface of human affairs. But the Saracenic world not only gave Christendom the stimulus of its philosophers and alchemists, it also gave it paper. It is scarcely too much to say that paper made the intellectual revival of Europe possible. Paper originated in China, where its use probably goes back to the 2nd century BC. In 751, the Chinese made an attack upon the Arab Muslims in Samarkand. They were repulsed, and among the prisoners taken from them were some skilled paper makers, from whom the art was learned. Arabic paper manuscripts from the 9th century onwards still exist. The manufacture entered Christendom either through Greece or by the capture of Moorish paper mills during the Christian Reconquest of Spain. But under the Christian Spanish, the product deteriorated sadly. Good paper was not made in Christian Europe until the end of the 13th century, and then it was Italy which led the world. Only by the 14th century did the manufacture reach Germany, and not until the end of that century was it abundant and cheap enough for the printing of books to be a practicable business proposition. Thereupon printing followed naturally and necessarily, for printing is the most obvious of inventions, and the intellectual life of the world entered upon a new and far more vigorous phase. It ceased to be a little trickle from mind to mind. It became a broad flood, in which thousands and presently scores and hundreds of thousands of minds participated. One immediate result of this achievement of printing was the appearance of an abundance of Bibles in the world. Another was a cheapening of schoolbooks. The knowledge of reading spread swiftly. There was not only a great increase of books in the world, but the books that were now made were plainer to read and so easier to understand. Instead of toiling at a crapped text, I read then thinking over its significance. Readers now could think, unimpeded as they read. With this increase in the facility of reading, the reading public grew. The book ceased to be a highly decorated toy or a scholar's mystery. People began to write books to be read as well as looked at by ordinary people. They've wrote in the ordinary language and not in Latin. With the 14th century, the real history of the European literature begins. So far we have been dealing only with the Saracenics share in the European revival. Let us turn now to the influence of the Mongol conquests. They stimulated the geographical imagination of Europe enormously. For a time under the great Khan, all Asia and Western Europe enjoyed an open intercourse. All the roads were temporarily open, and representatives of every nation appeared at the court of Karakorum. The barriers between Europe and Asia set up by the religious void of Christianity and Islam were lowered. Great hopes were entertained by the papacy for the conversion of the Mongols to Christianity. Their only religion so far had been Shumanism, a primitive paganism. Envoice of the Pope, Buddhist priests from India, Parisian and Italian and Chinese artificers, Byzantine and Armenian merchants, mingled with Arab officials and Persian and Indian astronomers and mathematicians at the Mongol court. We hear too much in history of the campaigns and massacres of the Mongols, and not enough of their curiosity and desire for learning. Not perhaps as an originative people, but as transmitters of knowledge and method, their influence upon the world's history has been very great. And everything one can learn of the vague and romantic personalities of Jengis or Kublai tends to confirm the impression that these men were at least as understanding and creative monarchs as either that flamboyant but egoistical figure Alexander the Great, or that razor of political ghosts, the energetic but illiterate theologian Charlemagne. One of the most interesting of these visitors to the Mongol court was a certain Venetian Marco Polo, who afterwards sat down his story in a book. He went to China about 1272 with his father and uncle who had already once made the journey. The Great Khan had been deeply impressed by the elder Polos. They were the first men of the Latin peoples he had seen, and he sent them back with inquiries for teachers and learned men who could explain Christianity to him, and for warriors other European things that had aroused his curiosity. Their visit with Marco was their second visit. The three Polos started by the way of Palestine and not by the Crimea as in their previous expedition. They had with them a gold tablet and other indications from the Great Khan that must have greatly facilitated their journey. The Great Khan had asked for some oil from the lamp that burns in the holy sepulchre at Jerusalem, and so withers they first went, and then by way of Kilikia into Armenia. They went thus far north because the Sultan of Egypt was raiding the Mongol domains at this time. Then they came by way of Mesopotamia to Ormus on the Persian Gulf as if they contemplated a sea voyage. At Ormus they met merchants from India. For some reason they did not take ship, but instead turned northward through the Persian deserts, and so by way of Balkh over the Pamir to Kashgar, and by way of Khotan and the Lobnur into the Hwanghou valley and on to Pekin. At Pekin was the Great Khan and they were hospitably entertained. Marco particularly pleased Kublai. He was young and clever and it is clear he had mastered the Tartar language very thoroughly. He was given an official position and sent on several missions chiefly in southwest China. The tale he had to tell of vast stretches of smiling and prosperous country, all the way excellent hostilities for travellers and fine vineyards, fields and gardens, of many abbeys of bodiced monks, of manufacturers of close of silk and gold and many fine taffetas, a constant succession of cities and boroughs and so on. First roused the incredulity and then fired the imagination of all Europe. He told of Burma and of its great armies with hundreds of elephants and how these animals were defeated by the Mongol Baomen and also of the Mongol conquest of Pegu. He told of Japan and greatly exaggerated the amount of gold in that country. For three years Marco ruled the city of Yangqiao as governor and he probably impressed the Chinese inhabitants as being little more of a foreigner than any Tartar would have been. He may also have been sent on a mission to India. Chinese records mention a certain Polo attached to the Imperial Council in 1277, a very valuable confirmation of the general truth of the Polo story. The publication of Marco Polo's travels produced a profound effect upon the European imagination. The European literature and especially the European romance of the 15th century echoes with the names in Marco Polo's story with Cathay, North China and Cambolak, Pekin and the like. Two centuries later among the readers of the travels of Marco Polo was a certain Genoese Merringer Christopher Columbus who conceived the brilliant idea of sailing westward around the world to China. In Seville there is a copy of the travels with marginal notes by Columbus. There were many reasons why the thought of a Genoese should be turned in this direction. Until it's captured by the Turks in 1453, Constantinople had been an impartial trading mart between the western world and the east and the Genoese had traded there freely. But the Latin Venetians, the bitter rivals of the Genoese, had been the allies and helpers of the Turks against the Greeks and with the coming of the Turks, Constantinople turned and unfriendly face upon Genoese trade. The long forgotten discovery that the world was round had gradually resumed its sway over man's minds. The idea of going westward to China was therefore a fairly obvious one. It was encouraged by two things. The Merringer's compass had now been invented and men were no longer left to the mercy of a fine night and the stars to determine the direction in which they were sailing. And the Normans, Catalonians and Genoese and Portuguese had already pushed out into the Atlantic as far as the Canary Isles, Madeira and the Azores. Yet Columbus found many difficulties before he could get ships to put his idea to the test. He went from one European port to another. Finally at Granada, just one from the Moors, he secured the patronage of Ferdinand and Isabella and was able to set out across the unknown ocean in three small ships. After a voyage of two months and nine days, he came to a land which he believed to be India, but which was really a new continent whose distinct existence the old world had never his or two suspected. He returned to Spain with gold, cotton, strange beasts and birds, and two wild-eyed painted Indians to be baptized. They were called Indians because to the end of his days he believed that this land he found was India. Only in the course of several years did men begin to realize that the whole new continent of America was added to the world's resources. The success of Columbus stimulated overseas enterprise enormously. In 1497 the Portuguese sailed round Africa to India and in 1515 there were Portuguese ships in Java. In 1519, Magalan, a Portuguese sailor in Spanish employment, sailed out of Seville westward with five ships, of which one, the Victoria, came back up the river to Seville in 1522, the first ship that had ever circumnavigated the world. 31 men were aboard her, survivors of 280 who had started. Magalan himself had been killed in the Philippine Isles. Printed paper books, a new realization of the round world as a thing altogether attainable, a new vision of strange lands, strange animals and plants, strange manners and customs, discoveries overseas and in the skies and in the ways and materials of life burst upon the European mind. The Greek classics, buried and forgotten for so long, were speedily being printed and studied and were coloring men's thoughts with the dreams of Plato and the traditions of an age of republican freedom and dignity. The Roman dominion had first brought law and order to western Europe and the Latin church had restored it, but under both Pagan and Catholic Rome, curiosity and innovation were subordinate to and restrained by organization. The reign of the Latin mind was now drawing to an end. Between the 13th and the 16th century, the European Arians, thanks to the stimulating influence of Semite and Mongol and the red discovery of the Greek classics, broke away from the Latin tradition and rose again to the intellectual and material leadership of mankind. Chapter 50 The Reformation of the Latin Church The Latin Church itself was enormously affected by this mental rebirth. It was dismembered and even the portion that survived was extensively renewed. We have told how nearly the Church came to the autocratic leadership of all Christendom in the 11th and 12th centuries and how in the 14th and 15th its power over man's minds and affairs declined. We have described how popular religious enthusiasm, which had in earlier ages been its support and power, was turned against it by its pride, persecutions and centralization, and how the insidious skepticism of Frederick II bore fruit in a growing insubordination of the princes. The great schism had reduced its religious and political prestige to negligible proportions. The forces of insurrection struck it now from both sides. The teachings of the Englishman Whiteliff spread widely throughout Europe. In 1398 a learned Czech John Haas delivered a series of lectures upon Whiteliff's teachings in the University of Prague. These teachings spread rapidly beyond the educated class and aroused great popular enthusiasm. In 1414-1418 a council of the whole church was held at Constance to settle the great schism. Haas was invited to this council and a promise of a safe conduct from the Emperor seized, put on trial for heresy and burnt alive 1415. So far from tranquilizing the Bohemian people this led to an insurrection of the Haas seeds in that country, the first of a series of religious wars that inaugurated the breakup of Latin Christendom. Against this insurrection Pope Martin V, the Pope specially elected at Constance as the head of a united Christendom, preached a crusade. Five crusades in all were launched upon these sturdy little people and all of them failed. All the unemployed Raffianism of Europe was turned upon Bohemia in the 15th century just as in the 13th it had been turned upon the Vaudenses. But the Bohemian Czechs, unlike the Vaudenses, believed in armed resistance. The Bohemian crusade dissolved and streamed away from the battlefield at the sound of the Haas seeds wagons at the distant chanting of their troops. It did not even wait to fight Battle of Tomaslitz 1431. In 1436 an agreement was patched up with the Haas seeds by the new council of the church at Basil in which many of the special objections to Latin practice were conceded. In the 15th century a great pestilence had produced much social disorganization throughout Europe. There had been extreme misery and discontent among the common people and peasant risings against the landlords and the wealthy in England and France. After the Hussate Wars these peasant insurrections increased in gravity in Germany and took on a religious character. Printing came in as an influence upon this development. By the middle of the 15th century there were printers at work with movable type in Holland and the Rhineland. The art spread to Italy and England where Caxton was printing Investminster in 1477. The immediate consequence was a great increase and distribution of Bibles and greatly increased facilities for widespread popular controversies. The European world became a world of readers to an extent that had never happened to any community in the past and this sudden irrigation of the general mind with clearer ideas and more accessible information occurred just at a time when the church was confused and divided and not in a position to defend itself effectively and when many princes were looking for means to weaken its hold upon the vast wealth it claimed in their dominions. In Germany the attack upon the church gathered grounds of personality of an ex-monk Martin Luther 1483-1546 who appeared in Wittenberg in 1517 offering disputations against various orthodox doctrines and practices. At first he disputed in Latin in the fashion of the schoolman, then he took up the new weapon of the printed ward and scattered his views far and wide in German addressed to the ordinary people. An attempt was made to suppress him as husk had been suppressed but the printing press had changed conditions and he had too many open and secret friends among the German princes for this fate to overtake him. For now in this age of multiplying ideas and weakened faith there were many rulers who saw their advantage in breaking the religious ties between their people and realm. They sought to mix themselves in person the heads of a more nationalized religion England, Scotland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, North Germany and Bohemia one after another separated themselves from the Roman Communion. They have remained separated ever since. The various princes concerned cared very little for the moral and intellectual freedom of their subjects. They used the religious doubts and insurgents of the peoples to strengthen them against Rome but they tried to keep a grip upon the popular movement as soon as that rupture was achieved and a national church set up under the control of the crown. But there has always been a curious vitality in the teaching of Jesus, a direct appeal to righteousness and a man's self-respect over every loyalty and every subordination lay or ecclesiastical. None of these princely churches broke off without also breaking off a number of fragmentary sects that would admit the intervention of neither prince nor pope between a man and his god. In England and Scotland for example there was a number of sects who now held firmly to the bible as their one guide in life and belief. They refused the disciplines of a state church. In England these dissentients were the non-conformists who played a very large part in the polities of that country in the 17th and 18th centuries. In England they carried their objection to a princely head to the church so far as to decapitate King Charles I, 1649, and for 11 prosperous years England was a republic under non-conformist rule. The breaking away of this large section of northern Europe from Latin Christendom is what is generally spoken of as the Reformation. But the shock and stress of these losses produced changes perhaps as profound in the Roman church itself. The church was reorganized and a new spirit came into its life. One of the dominant figures in this revival was a young Spanish soldier, Inigo Lopez de Recalde, better known to the world as Saint Ignatius of Loyola. After some romantic beginnings he became a priest 1538 and was permitted to found the Society of Jesus, a direct attempt to bring the generous and chivalrous traditions of military discipline into the service of religion. The Society of Jesus the Jesuits became one of the greatest teaching and missionary societies the world has ever seen. It carried Christianity to India, China and America. It arrested the rapid disintegration of the Roman church. It raised the standard of education throughout the whole Catholic world. It raised the level of Catholic intelligence and quickened the Catholic conscience everywhere. It stimulated Protestant Europe to competitive educational efforts. The vigorous and aggressive Roman Catholic church we know today is largely the product of this Jesuit revival. End of chapter 50