XLII. The Dynasties of Suy and Tang in China
Emperor Taizong (r. 626-649) receives
Ludongzan, ambassador of Tibet, at his court;
painted in 641 AD by Yan Liben (600-673)
THROUGHOUT the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth centuries, there was
a steady drift of Mongolian peoples westward. The Huns of Attila were
merely precursors of this advance, which led at last to the
establishment of Mongolian peoples in Finland, Esthonia, Hungary and
Bulgaria, where their descendants, speaking languages akin to Turkish,
survive to this day. The Mongolian nomads were, in fact, playing a rôle
towards the Aryanized civilizations of Europe and Persia and India that
the Aryans had played to the Æean and Semitic civilizations ten or
fifteen centuries before.
In Central Asia the Turkish peoples had taken root in what is now
Western Turkestan, and Persia already employed many Turkish officials
and Turkish mercenaries. The Parthians had gone out of history, absorbed
into the general population of Persia. There were no more Aryan nomads
in the history of Central Asia; Mongolian people had replaced them. The
Turks became masters of Asia from China to the Caspian.
The same great pestilence at the end of the second century A.D. that had
shattered the Roman Empire had overthrown the Han dynasty in China. Then
came a period of division and of Hunnish conquests from which China
arose refreshed, more rapidly and more completely than Europe was
destined to do. Before the end of the sixth century China was reunited
under the Suy dynasty, and this by the time of Heraclius gave place to
the Tang dynasty, whose reign marks another great period of prosperity
for China.
Throughout the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries China was the most
secure and civilized country in the world. The Han dynasty had extended
her boundaries in the north; the Suy and Tang dynasties now spread her
civilization to the south, and China began to assume the proportions she
has to-day. In Central Asia indeed she reached much further, extending
at last, through tributary Turkish tribes, to Persia and the Caspian
Sea.
The new China that had arisen was a very different land from the old
China of the Hans. A new and more vigorous literary school appeared,
there was a great poetic revival; Buddhism had revolutionized
philosophical and religious thought. There were great advances in
artistic work, in technical skill and in all the amenities of life. Tea
was first used, paper manufactured and wood-block printing began.
Millions of people indeed were leading orderly, graceful and kindly
lives in China during these centuries when the attenuated populations of
Europe and Western Asia were living either in hovels, small walled
cities or grim robber fortresses. While the mind of the west was black
with theological obsessions, the mind of China was open and tolerant and
enquiring.
One of the earliest monarchs of the Tang dynasty was Tai-tsung, who
began to reign in 627, the year of the victory of Heraclius at Nineveh.
He received an embassy from Heraclius, who was probably seeking an ally
in the rear of Persia. From Persia itself came a party of Christian
missionaries (635). They were allowed to explain their creed to
Tai-tsung and he examined a Chinese translation of their Scriptures. He
pronounced this strange religion acceptable, and gave permission for the
foundation of a church and monastery.
To this monarch also (in 628) came messengers from Muhammad. They came
to Canton on a trading ship. They had sailed the whole way from Arabia
along the Indian coasts. Unlike Heraclius and Kavadh, Tai-tsung gave
these envoys a courteous hearing. He expressed his interest in their
theological ideas and assisted them to build a mosque in Canton, a
mosque which survives, it is said, to this day, the oldest mosque in the
world.
XLIII. Muhammad and Islam
Pilgrims
in the Great Mosque of Mecca,
colored engraving, ca.
1860
APROPHETIC amateur of history surveying the world in the opening of
the seventh century might have concluded very reasonably that it was
only a question of a few centuries before the whole of Europe and Asia
fell under Mongolian domination. There were no signs of order or union
in Western Europe, and the Byzantine and Persian Empires were manifestly
bent upon a mutual destruction. India also was divided and wasted. On
the other hand China was a steadily expanding empire which probably at
that time exceeded all Europe in population, and the Turkish people who
were growing to power in Central Asia were disposed to work in accord
with China. And such a prophecy would not have been an altogether vain
one. A time was to come in the thirteenth century when a Mongolian
overlord would rule from the Danube to the Pacific, and Turkish
dynasties were destined to reign over the entire Byzantine and Persian
Empires, over Egypt and most of India.
Where our prophet would have been most likely to have erred would have
been in under-estimating the recuperative power of the Latin end of
Europe and in ignoring the latent forces of the Arabian desert. Arabia
would have seemed what it had been for times immemorial, the refuge of
small and bickering nomadic tribes. No Semitic people had founded an
empire now for more than a thousand years.
Then suddenly the Bedouin flared out for a brief century of splendour.
They spread their rule and language from Spain to the boundaries of
China. They gave the world a new culture. They created a religion that
is still to this day one of the most vital forces in the world.
The man who fired this Arab flame appears first in history as the young
husband of the widow of a rich merchant of the town of Mecca, named
Muhammad. Until he was forty he did very little to distinguish himself
in the world. He seems to have taken considerable interest in religious
discussion. Mecca was a pagan city at that time worshipping in
particular a black stone, the Kaaba, of great repute throughout all
Arabia and a centre of pilgrimages; but there were great numbers of Jews
in the country—indeed all the southern portion of Arabia professed the
Jewish faith—and there were Christian churches in Syria.
About forty Muhammad began to develop prophetic characteristics like
those of the Hebrew prophets twelve hundred years before him. He talked
first to his wife of the One True God, and of the rewards and
punishments of virtue and wickedness. There can be no doubt that his
thoughts were very strongly influenced by Jewish and Christian ideas. He
gathered about him a small circle of believers and presently began to
preach in the town against the prevalent idolatry. This made him
extremely unpopular with his fellow townsmen because the pilgrimages to
the Kaaba were the chief source of such prosperity as Mecca enjoyed. He
became bolder and more definite in his teaching, declaring himself to be
the last chosen prophet of God entrusted with a mission to perfect
religion. Abraham, he declared, and Jesus Christ were his forerunners.
He had been chosen to complete and perfect the revelation of God’s will.
He produced verses which he said had been communicated to him by an
angel, and he had a strange vision in which he was taken up through the
Heavens to God and instructed in his mission.
As his teaching increased in force the hostility of his fellow townsmen
increased also. At last a plot was made to kill him; but he escaped with
his faithful friend and disciple, Abu Bekr, to the friendly town of
Medina which adopted his doctrine. Hostilities followed between Mecca
and Medina which ended at last in a treaty. Mecca was to adopt the
worship of the One True God and accept Muhammad as his prophet, but the
adherents of the new faith were still to make the pilgrimage to Mecca
just as they had done when they were pagans. So Muhammad established the
One True God in Mecca without injuring its pilgrim traffic. In 629
Muhammad returned to Mecca as its master, a year after he had sent out
these envoys of his to Heraclius, Tai-tsung, Kavadh and all the rulers
of the earth.
Then for four years more until his death in 632, Muhammad spread his
power over the rest of Arabia. He married a number of wives in his
declining years, and his life on the whole was by modern standards
unedifying. He seems to have been a man compounded of very considerable
vanity, greed, cunning, self-deception and quite sincere religious
passion. He dictated a book of injunctions and expositions, the Koran,
which he declared was communicated to him from God. Regarded as
literature or philosophy the Koran is certainly unworthy of its alleged
Divine authorship.
Yet when the manifest defects of Muhammad’s life and writings have been
allowed for, there remains in Islam, this faith he imposed upon the
Arabs, much power and inspiration. One is its uncompromising monotheism;
its simple enthusiastic faith in the rule and fatherhood of God and its
freedom from theological complications. Another is its complete
detachment from the sacrificial priest and the temple. It is an entirely
prophetic religion, proof against any possibility of relapse towards
blood sacrifices. In the Koran the limited and ceremonial nature of the
pilgrimage to Mecca is stated beyond the possibility of dispute, and
every precaution was taken by Muhammad to prevent the deification of
himself after his death. And a third element of strength lay in the
insistence of Islam upon the perfect brotherhood and equality before God
of all believers, whatever their colour, origin or status.
These are the things that made Islam a power in human affairs. It has
been said that the true founder of the Empire of Islam was not so much
Muhammad as his friend and helper, Abu Bekr. If Muhammad, with his
shifty character, was the mind and imagination of primitive Islam, Abu
Bekr was its conscience and its will. Whenever Muhammad wavered Abu Bekr
sustained him. And when Muhammad died, Abu Bekr became Caliph =
successor), and with that faith that moves mountains, he set himself
simply and sanely to organize the subjugation of the whole world to
Allah—with little armies of 3,000 or 4,000 Arabs—according to those
letters the prophet had written from Medina in 628 to all the monarchs
of the world.
XLIV. The Great Days of the Arabs
Combat of the Giaour and the Pasha by Eugene Delacroix
THERE follows the most amazing story of conquest in the whole history
of our race. The Byzantine army was smashed at the battle of the Yarmuk
(a tributary of the Jordan) in 634; and the Emperor Heraclius, his
energy sapped by dropsy and his resources exhausted by the Persian war,
saw his new conquests in Syria, Damascus, Palmyra, Antioch, Jerusalem
and the rest fall almost without resistance to the Moslim. Large
elements in the population went over to Islam. Then the Moslim turned
east. The Persians had found an able general in Rustam; they had a great
host with a force of elephants; and for three days they fought the Arabs
at Kadessia (637) and broke at last in headlong rout.
The conquest of all Persia followed, and the Moslem Empire pushed far
into Western Turkestan and eastward until it met the Chinese. Egypt fell
almost without resistance to the new conquerors, who full of a fanatical
belief in the sufficiency of the Koran, wiped out the vestiges of the
book-copying industry of the Alexandria Library. The tide of conquest
poured along the north coast of Africa to the Straits of Gibraltar and
Spain. Spain was invaded in 710 and the Pyrenees Mountains were reached
in 720. In 732 the Arab advance had reached the centre of France, but
here it was stopped for good at the battle of Poitiers and thrust back
as far as the Pyrenees again. The conquest of Egypt had given the Moslim
a fleet, and for a time it looked as though they would take
Constantinople. They made repeated sea attacks between 672 and 718 but
the great city held out against them.
The Arabs had little political aptitude and no political experience, and
this great empire with its capital now at Damascus, which stretched from
Spain to China, was destined to break up very speedily. From the very
beginning doctrinal differences undermined its unity. But our interest
here lies not with the story of its political disintegration but with
its effect upon the human mind and upon the general destinies of our
race. The Arab intelligence had been flung across the world even more
swiftly and dramatically than had the Greek a thousand years before. The
intellectual stimulation of the whole world west of China, the break-up
of old ideas and development of new ones, was enormous.
In Persia this fresh excited Arabic mind came into contact not only with
Manichæan, Zoroastrian and Christian doctrine, but with the
scientific Greek literature, preserved not only in Greek but in Syrian
translations. It found Greek learning in Egypt also. Everywhere, and
particularly in Spain, it discovered an active Jewish tradition of
speculation and discussion. In Central Asia it met Buddhism and the
material achievements of Chinese civilization. It learnt the manufacture
of paper—which made printed books possible—from the Chinese. And finally
it came into touch with Indian mathematics and philosophy.
Very speedily the intolerant self-sufficiency of the early days of
faith, which made the Koran seem the only possible book, was dropped.
Learning sprang up everywhere in the footsteps of the Arab conquerors.
By the eighth century there was an educational organization throughout
the whole “Arabized” world. In the ninth learned men in the schools of
Cordoba in Spain were corresponding with learned men in Cairo, Bagdad,
Bokhara and Samarkand. The Jewish mind assimilated very readily with the
Arab, and for a time the two Semitic races worked together through the
medium of Arabic. Long after the political break-up and enfeeblement of
the Arabs, this intellectual community of the Arab-speaking world
endured. It was still producing very considerable results in the
thirteenth century.
So it was that the systematic accumulation and criticism of facts which
was first begun by the Greeks was resumed in this astonishing renascence
of the Semitic world. The seed of Aristotle and the museum of Alexandria
that had lain so long inactive and neglected now germinated and began to
grow towards fruition. Very great advances were made in mathematical,
medical and physical science.
The clumsy Roman numerals were ousted by the Arabic figures we use to
this day and the zero sign was first employed. The very name algebra is
Arabic. So is the word chemistry. The names of such stars as Algol,
Aldebaran and Boötes preserve the traces of Arab conquests in the
sky. Their philosophy was destined to reanimate the medieval philosophy
of France and Italy and the whole Christian world.
The Arab experimental chemists were called alchemists, and they were
still sufficiently barbaric in spirit to keep their methods and results
secret as far as possible. They realized from the very beginning what
enormous advantages their possible discoveries might give them, and what
far-reaching consequences they might have on human life. They came upon
many metallurgical and technical devices of the utmost value, alloys and
dyes, distilling, tinctures and essences, optical glass; but the two
chief ends they sought, they sought in vain. One was “the philosopher’s
stone”—a means of changing the metallic elements one into another and so
getting a control of artificial gold, and the other was the elixir vitœ,
a stimulant that would revivify age and prolong life indefinitely. The
crabbed patient experimenting of these Arab alchemists spread into the
Christian world. The fascination of their enquiries spread. Very
gradually the activities of these alchemists became more social and
co-operative. They found it profitable to exchange and compare ideas. By
insensible gradations the last of the alchemists became the first of the
experimental philosophers.
The old alchemists sought the philosopher’s stone which was to transmute
base metals to gold, and an elixir of immortality; they found the
methods of modern experimental science which promise in the end to give
man illimitable power over the world and over his own destiny.
XLV. The Development of Latin Christendom
Aachen Gospels (c. 820), an example of Carolingian
illumination
IT is worth while to note the extremely shrunken dimensions of the
share of the world remaining under Aryan control in the seventh and
eighth 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
possessions round 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 that they had previously enjoyed.
We have told how at the beginning of the sixth 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 co-operation and
association grew up in this disorder, 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 for 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 sixth century a Frankish kingdom existed
under its founder Clovis in what is now France and the Netherlands, and
presently Visigothic and Lombard and Gothic kingdoms were in existence.
The Moslim when they crossed the Pyrenees in 720 found 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 of 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 768, found
himself 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 wits 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 become Cæsar. 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 learnt 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
to 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 the 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 manœuvred 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—manœuvred 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 a sense of rivalry between Latin Empire and Greek Empire
should develop very readily. And still more readily did the rivalry of
Greek-speaking Christianity and the newer Latin-speaking version
develop. The Pope of Rome claimed to be the successor of St. Peter, the
chief of the apostles of Christ, and the head of the Christian community
everywhere. Neither the emperor nor the patriarch in Constantinople were
disposed to acknowledge this claim. A 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 rained the blows of three sets of
antagonists. About the Baltic and North Seas remained a series of Nordic
tribes who were only very slowly and reluctantly Christianized; these
were the Northmen. 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 Northmen
Russians came near to taking Constantinople. England in the early ninth
century was a Christianized Low German country under a king, Egbert, a
protégé and pupil of Charlemagne. The Northmen wrested half the kingdom
from his successor Alfred the Great (886), and finally under Canute
(1016) made themselves masters of the whole land. Under Rolph the Ganger
(912) another band of Northmen 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 is interesting
to speculate what might have happened if this temporary union of the
Northmen 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. Later on Norman
adventurers were to recover Sicily from the Saracens and sack Rome. It
is a fascinating thing to imagine what a great northern sea-faring power
might have grown out of Canute’s kingdom, reaching from America to
Russia.
To the east of the Germans and Latinized Europeans was a medley of Slav
tribes and Turkish peoples. Prominent among these were the Magyars or
Hungarians who were coming westward throughout the eighth and ninth
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 at 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 Northmen, the
Russian Northmen out of the Black Sea and the Northmen 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 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 Aix-la-Chapelle or Mayence 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 other still heathen German tribes. It is
doubtful whether the idea of becoming Cæsar in succession to Romulus
Augustulus 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 manœuvres 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
A.D. He produced a crown, put it on the head of Charlemagne and hailed
him Cæsar and Augustus. There was great applause among the people.
Charlemagne was by no means pleased at the way in which the thing was
done, it rankled 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 into 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 death of Louis the Pious and
the split between the French-speaking Franks and the German-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 eleventh 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 from 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 eighteenth century. At the time of Hugh Capet the
King of France ruled only a comparatively small territory round Paris.
In 1066 England was attacked almost simultaneously by an invasion of the
Norwegian Northmen under King Harold Hardrada and by the Latinized
Northmen under the Duke of Normandy. Harold 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.
XLVI. The Crusades and the Age of Papal Dominion
IT is interesting to note that Charlemagne corresponded with the
Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid, the Haroun-al-Raschid of the Arabian Nights.
It is recorded that Haroun-al-Raschid sent ambassadors from Bagdad—which
had now replaced Damascus as the Moslem capital—with 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 and this
new Holy Roman Empire by the ears as to which was the proper protector
of the Christians in Jerusalem.
These presents remind us that while Europe in the ninth 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 vigorous 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 tenth 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 Medes to the last Babylonian Empire fourteen centuries
before. In the eleventh century a group of Turkish tribes, the Seljuk
Turks, came down into Mesopotamia and made the Caliph their nominal
ruler but really their captive and tool. 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 Melasgird,
and the Turks swept forward until not a trace of Byzantine rule remained
in Asia. They took the fortress of Nicæa 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 Durazzo, and with a fierce Turkish people, the Petschenegs,
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 Alexius Comnenus wrote
still more urgently to Urban II.
This was not a quarter of a century from the rupture of the 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 reasserting the supremacy of the Latin Church
over the dissentient 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 superabundant fighting energy of the
Low Germans and Christianized Northmen 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 (1095). The declared object of this war was
the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre 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 market-place or church. He denounced the cruelties practised
upon the Christian pilgrims by the Turks, and the shame of the Holy
Sepulchre being in any but Christian hands. The fruits of centuries of
Christian teaching became apparent in the 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 occurred 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 among 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, Mani, Muhammad, were all exhorters 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 pseudoscience, than of conscience. The old kind of religion turned
upon temple, initiated priest 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.
Before 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 with
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
Nicæa, 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 the Holy Sepulchre and overcome all
opposition there: blood-stained, 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 chief, in Syria. Their grip even on these
possessions was precarious, and in 1144 Edessa fell to the Moslim,
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
Fourth Crusade (1202–4) the Latin Church turned frankly upon the Greek
Empire, and there was not even a pretence 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 twelfth century then and the opening of the thirteenth was the age
of papal ascendancy just as the eleventh was the age of the ascendancy
of the Seljuk Turks and the tenth the age of the Northmen. 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 XI and John XII in the tenth 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. Upon the wealth of
confidence such lives created rested the power of the church. Among the
great Popes of the past had been Gregory the Great, Gregory I (590–604)
and Leo III (795–816) who invited Charlemagne to be Cæsar and
crowned him in spite of himself. Towards the close of the eleventh
century there arose a great clerical statesman, Hildebrand, who ended
his life as Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085). Next but one after him came
Urban II (1087–1099), 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 VII 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
sackcloth 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 eleventh 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
fourteenth century it was discovered that the power of the Pope had
evaporated. What was it that destroyed the naïve 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.
Penitent 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 grows with what it feeds upon. Already in the
thirteenth 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 land 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-tenth
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 ceased 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 twelfth century Popes to curb the most
recalcitrant princes and overawe 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 twelfth
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 eleventh century the Roman priests could
marry; they had close 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 commonalty. 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 no 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 faith and life, Innocent III preached a crusade
against the Waldenses, Waldo’s followers, and permitted them to be
suppressed with fire, sword, rape and the most abominable cruelties.
When again St. Francis of Assisi (1181–1226) taught the imitation of
Christ and a life of poverty and service, his followers, the
Franciscans, were persecuted, scourged, imprisoned and dispersed. In
1318 four of them were burnt alive at Marseilles. On the other hand the
fiercely orthodox order of the Dominicans, founded by St. Dominic
(1170–1221) was strongly supported by Innocent III, who with its
assistance set up an organization, the Inquisition, for the hunting of
heresy and the affliction of free thought.
So it was that the church by excessive claims, by unrighteous
privileges, and by an irrational intolerance destroyed that free faith
of the common man which was the final source of all its power. The story
of its decline tells of no adequate foemen from without but continually
of decay from within.
XLVII. Recalcitrant Princes and the Great Schism
Frederick II's troops paid with leather coins,
from Chigi Codex, Vatican Library
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 could 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, 1073–1085) 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 See 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 sixteenth 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 every one of the great Popes ended
in a note of interrogation. At his death the church might be left
headless and as ineffective as a decapitated body. Or he might be
replaced by some old rival eager only to discredit and undo his work. Or
some enfeebled old man tottering 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 Norman 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 thirty-eight. He and his successors were pitted
against an even more interesting personality, the Emperor Frederick II;
Stupor mundi he was called, the Wonder of the world. The struggle of
this monarch against 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 oriental 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 Moslem 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 that age of faith, that all religions were
impostures. 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.
Innocent III 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 word. The Pope had
already induced the French King to make war upon his own subjects in
France, the cruel and bloody crusade against the Waldenses; 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 Moslim and recover Jerusalem he was equally ready to
promise and equally slack in his performance.
Having secured the imperial crown Frederick II stayed in Sicily, which
he greatly preferred to Germany as a residence, and did nothing to
redeem any of his promises to Innocent III, who died baffled in 1216.
Honorius III, who succeeded Innocent, could do no better with Frederick,
and Gregory IX (1227) came to the papal throne evidently resolved to
settle accounts with this young man at any cost. He excommunicated him.
Frederick II 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.
Having fired off this deadly missile Frederick resolved to perform his
twelve-year-old promise and go upon a crusade. This was the Sixth
Crusade (1228). It was, as a crusade, farcical. Frederick II went to
Egypt and met and discussed affairs with the Sultan. These two
gentlemen, both of sceptical 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
thirteenth century, and there was now no storm of popular indignation to
avenge him. Those days were past.
In 1239 Gregory IX 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 IX was dead, when Innocent IV 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 licentious. But it is clear that he was a man of very
effectual curiosity and inquiry. He gathered Jewish and Moslem 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 Michael Scott, who translated portions of
Aristotle and the commentaries thereon of the great Arab philosopher
Averroes (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 rôle of guard, supporter and rival to
the Pope that had hitherto fallen to the Hohenstaufen Emperors. A series
of Popes pursued the policy of supporting the French monarchs. French
princes were established in the kingdom 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. When,
however, the German interregnum after the death of Frederick II, the
last of the Hohenstaufens, came to an end and Rudolf of Habsburg was
elected first Habsburg Emperor (1273), the policy of Rome began to
fluctuate between France and Germany, veering 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, Michael Palæologus, Michael VIII, after some unreal tentatives
of reconciliation with the Pope, broke away from the Roman communion
altogether, and with that, and the fall of the Latin kingdoms in Asia,
the eastward ascendancy of the Popes came to an end
In 1294 Boniface VIII became Pope. He was an Italian, hostile to the
French, and full of a sense of the great traditions and mission 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 St. 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 Anagni, by Guillaume de Nogaret. 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 and 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 Anagni did resent the first outrage, and rose against
Nogaret to liberate Boniface, but then Anagni 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 pontiff. The idea of Christendom had decayed until its
power over the minds of men had gone.
Throughout the fourteenth century the papacy did nothing to recover its
moral sway. The next Pope elected, Clement V, was a 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 papal See, 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 VII. 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 (1378–1417).
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 the Dominicans, which we have
noted in the preceding chapters, were 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. A
century and a half later came Wycliffe (1320–1384). 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 Wycliffites, 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
or 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 burnt, an order which
was carried out at 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.J. H. Robinson.
XLVIII. The Mongol Conquests
The battle of Liegnitz, 1241. From a medieval
manuscript of the Hedwig legend
BUT in the thirteenth 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 has no parallel in history. These were the
Mongols. At the opening of the thirteenth 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 tenth century, and after a phase of
division into warring states, three main empires, that of Kin in the
north with Pekin as its capital and that of Sung in the south with a
capital at Nankin, and Hsia in the centre, remain. In 1214 Jengis Khan,
the leader of the Mongol confederates, made war on the Kin 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 Kieff. He died master of a vast empire that reached from the
Pacific to the Dnieper.
His successor, Ogdai 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 Kin Empire
and then swept his hosts right across Asia to Russia (1235), an
altogether amazing march. Kieff 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 Liegnitz 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 Bury in his notes to Gibbon’s 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 A.D. 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 Tartars 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 prevailsƒ.
“It was 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 tyro 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 Liegnitz, 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 ninth century, the Avars in the seventh
and eighth and the Huns in the fifth. 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
Roumania towards the east.
Thereafter the Mongols concentrated their attention upon their Asiatic
conquests. By the middle of the thirteenth century they had conquered
the Sung Empire. Mangu Khan succeeded Ogdai Khan as Great Khan in 1251,
and made his brother Kublai Khan governor of China. In 1280 Kublai Khan
had been formally recognized Emperor of China, and so founded the Yuan
dynasty which lasted until 1368. While the last ruins of the Sung rule
were going down in China, another brother of Mangu, Hulagu, was
conquering Persia and Syria. The Mongols displayed a bitter animosity to
Islam at this time, and not only massacred the population of Bagdad 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 of 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 Moslim.
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 hordes upon the south-east steppes
until 1480, when the Grand Duke of Moscow repudiated his allegiance and
laid the foundation of modern Russia.
In the fourteenth century there was a brief revival of Mongol vigour
under Timurlane, a descendant of Jengis 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 Baber, 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 eighteenth
century.
One of the consequences of the first great sweep of Mongol conquest in
the thirteenth 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, Muhammad 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 past.
In the course of the sixteenth century the Ottoman Sultans conquered
Bagdad, Hungary, Egypt and most of North Africa, and their fleet made
them masters of the Mediterranean. They very nearly took Vienna, and
they exacted a tribute from the Emperor. There were but two items to
offset the general ebb of Christian dominion in the fifteenth 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 Moslem 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 pride of the Ottomans, and restored the Mediterranean waters
to Christian ascendancy.
XLIX. The Intellectual Revival of the Europeans
Columbus before the Queen, by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze,
1843
THROUGHOUT the twelfth 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
Lucretius. The causes of this revival were many and complex. The
suppression of private war, the higher standards of comfort and security
that followed 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 thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were a period of
growing, independent or quasi-independent cities; Venice, Florence,
Genoa, Lisbon, Paris, Bruges, London, Antwerp, Hamburg, Nuremberg,
Novgorod, Wisby 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 renascent European
mind. Still more influential in the stirring up of men’s ideas were the
Jews. Their very existence was a note of interrogation to the claims of
the church. And finally the secret, fascinating enquiries 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 eleventh century philosophical discussion had begun
again in Europe, and there were great and growing universities at Paris,
Oxford, Bologna and other centres. There medieval “schoolmen” took up
again and thrashed out a series of questions upon the value and meaning
of words that were a necessary preliminary to clear thinking in the
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 burthen of Roger Bacon.
Yet of Aristotle himself Roger Bacon fell foul. He fell foul of him
because men, instead of facing facts boldly, sat in rooms and pored 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, “Cease to be ruled by dogmas and authorities;
look at the world!” Four chief sources of ignorance he denounced;
respect for authority, custom, the sense of the ignorant crowd, and the
vain, proud unteachableness of our dispositions. Overcome but these, and
a world of power would open to men:—
“Machines for navigating are possible without rowers, so that great
ships suited to river or ocean, guided by one man, may be borne 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
inœstimable, as we deem the scythed chariots to have been from
which antiquity fought. 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 men
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
second century B.C. In 751 the Chinese made an attack upon the Arab
Moslems in Samarkand; they were repulsed, and among the prisoners taken
from them were some skilled papermakers, from whom the art was learnt.
Arabic paper manuscripts from the ninth century onward 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 thirteenth
century, and then it was Italy which led the world. Only by the
fourteenth 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
school-books. 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 crabbed text and 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 wrote in
the ordinary language and not in Latin. With the fourteenth century the
real history of the European literature begins.
So far we have been dealing only with the Saracenic 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 feud 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. Envoys 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 egotistical figure Alexander the Great or that
raiser of political ghosts, that 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 set 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 enquiries for teachers and learned
men who could explain Christianity to him, and for various other
European things that had aroused his curiosity. Their visit with Marco
was their second visit.
The three Polos started by 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 thither they first went, and
then by way of Cilicia into Armenia. They went thus far north because
the Sultan of Egypt was raiding the Mongol domains at this time. Thence
they came by way of Mesopotamia to Ormuz on the Persian Gulf, as if they
contemplated a sea voyage. At Ormuz 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 Kotan and the Lob Nor into the Hwang-ho 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 south-west
China. The tale he had to tell of vast stretches of smiling and
prosperous country, “all the way excellent hostelries for travellers,”
and “fine vineyards, fields and gardens,” of “many abbeys” of Buddhist
monks, of manufactures of “cloth 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 Burmah, and of its great armies with hundreds of
elephants, and how these animals were defeated by the Mongol bowmen, 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 Yang-chow as governor, and he probably impressed the
Chinese inhabitants as being very 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 fifteenth century, echoes with the names in
Marco Polo’s story, with Cathay (North China) and Cambulac (Pekin) and
the like.
Two centuries later, among the readers of the Travels of Marco Polo was
a certain Genoese mariner, Christopher Columbus, who conceived the
brilliant idea of sailing westward round 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 its capture 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 an unfriendly face upon Genoese trade. The long
forgotten discovery that the world was round had gradually resumed its
sway over men’s minds. The idea of going westward to China was therefore
a fairly obvious one. It was encouraged by two things. The mariner’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 Court to another.
Finally at Granada, just won 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 hitherto
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 had 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 Magellan, a Portuguese sailor in
Spanish employment, sailed out of Seville westward with five ships, of
which one, the Vittoria, came back up the river to Seville in 1522, the
first ship that had ever circumnavigated the world. Thirty-one men were
aboard her, survivors of two-hundred-and-eighty who had started.
Magellan 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 colouring 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 thirteenth and the sixteenth century the European
Aryans, thanks to the stimulating influence of Semite and Mongol and the
rediscovery of the Greek classics, broke away from the Latin tradition
and rose again to the intellectual and material leadership of mankind.
L. The Reformation of the Latin Church
Martin Luther at the Imperial Diet of Worms, 1521
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 eleventh and twelfth centuries, and how in the
fourteenth and fifteenth its power over men’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, persecution s and centralization, and how the insidious
scepticism 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 Wycliffe spread widely throughout
Europe. In 1398 a learned Czech, John Huss, delivered a series of
lectures upon Wycliffe’s teachings in the university of Prague. This
teaching spread rapidly beyond the educated class and aroused great
popular enthusiasm. In 1414–18 a Council of the whole church was held at
Constance to settle the Great Schism. Huss was invited to this Council
under promise of a safe conduct from the emperor, seized, put on trial
for heresy and burnt alive (1415). So far from tranquillizing the
Bohemian people, this led to an insurrection of the Hussites in that
country, the first of a series of religious wars that inaugurated the
break-up of Latin Christendom. Against this insurrection Pope Martin V,
the Pope specially elected at Constance as the head of a reunited
Christendom, preached a Crusade.
Five Crusades in all were launched upon this sturdy little people and
all of them failed. All the unemployed ruffianism of Europe was turned
upon Bohemia in the fifteenth century, just as in the thirteenth it had
been turned upon the Waldenses. But the Bohemian Czechs, unlike the
Waldenses, believed in armed resistance. The Bohemian Crusade dissolved
and streamed away from the battlefield at the sound of the Hussites’
waggons and the distant chanting of their troops; it did not even wait
to fight (battle of Domazlice, 1431). In 1436 an agreement was patched
up with the Hussites by a new Council of the church at Basle in which
many of the special objections to Latin practice were conceded.
In the fifteenth 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 Hussite 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 fifteenth 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 in Westminster 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 round the 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
Schoolmen. Then he took up the new weapon of the printed word and
scattered his views far and wide in German addressed to the ordinary
people. An attempt was made to suppress him as Huss 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 Rome. They sought to make 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 insurgence of their 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 politics of that country in the
seventeenth and eighteenth 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 eleven 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 St. 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. This 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 to-day is largely the product of this Jesuit revival.
LI. The Emperor Charles V
Emperor Charles V at Mühlberg, painted in 1548 by
Titian
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE came to a sort of climax in the reign of the
Emperor Charles V. He was one of the most extraordinary monarchs that
Europe has ever seen. For a time he had the air of being the greatest
monarch since Charlemagne.
His greatness was not of his own making. It was largely the creation of
his grandfather, the Emperor Maximilian I (1459–1519). Some families
have fought, others have intrigued their way to world power; the
Habsburgs married their way. Maximilian began his career with Austria,
Styria, part of Alsace and other districts, the original Habsburg
patrimony; he married—the lady’s name scarcely matters to us—the
Netherlands and Burgundy. Most of Burgundy slipped from him after his
first wife’s death, but the Netherlands he held. Then he tried
unsuccessfully to marry Brittany. He became Emperor in succession to his
father, Frederick III, in 1493, and married the duchy of Milan. Finally
he married his son to the weak-minded daughter of Ferdinand and
Isabella, the Ferdinand and Isabella of Columbus, who not only reigned
over a freshly united Spain and over Sardinia and the kingdom of the two
Sicilies, but over all America west of Brazil. So it was that this
Charles V, his grandson, inherited most of the American continent and
between a third and a half of what the Turks had left of Europe. He
succeeded to the Netherlands in 1506. When his grandfather Ferdinand
died in 1516, he became practically king of the Spanish dominions, his
mother being imbecile; and his grandfather Maximilian dying in 1519, he
was in 1520 elected Emperor at the still comparatively tender age of
twenty.
He was a fair young man with a not very intelligent face, a thick upper
lip and a long clumsy chin. He found himself in a world of young and
vigorous personalities. It was an age of brilliant young monarchs.
Francis I had succeeded to the French throne in 1515 at the age of
twenty-one, Henry VIII had become King of England in 1509 at eighteen.
It was the age of Baber in India (1526–1530) and Suleiman the
Magnificent in Turkey (1520), both exceptionally capable monarchs, and
the Pope Leo X (1513) was also a very distinguished Pope. The Pope and
Francis I attempted to prevent the election of Charles as Emperor
because they dreaded the concentration of so much power in the hands of
one man. Both Francis I and Henry VIII offered themselves to the
imperial electors. But there was now a long established tradition of
Habsburg Emperors (since 1273), and some energetic bribery secured the
election for Charles.
At first the young man was very much a magnificent puppet in the hands
of his ministers. Then slowly he began to assert himself and take
control. He began to realize something of the threatening complexities
of his exalted position. It was a position as unsound as it was
splendid.
From the very outset of his reign he was faced by the situation created
by Luther’s agitations in Germany. The Emperor had one reason for siding
with the reformers in the opposition of the Pope to his election. But he
had been brought up in Spain, that most Catholic of countries, and he
decided against Luther. So he came into conflict with the Protestant
princes and particularly the Elector of Saxony. He found himself in the
presence of an opening rift that was to split the outworn fabric of
Christendom into two contending camps. His attempts to close that rift
were strenuous and honest and ineffective. There was an extensive
peasant revolt in Germany which interwove with the general political and
religious disturbance. And these internal troubles were complicated by
attacks upon the Empire from east and west alike. On the west of Charles
was his spirited rival, Francis I; to the east was the ever advancing
Turk, who was now in Hungary, in alliance with Francis and clamouring
for certain arrears of tribute from the Austrian dominions. Charles had
the money and army of Spain at his disposal, but it was extremely
difficult to get any effective support in money from Germany. His social
and political troubles were complicated by financial distresses. He was
forced to ruinous borrowing.
On the whole, Charles, in alliance with Henry VIII, was successful
against Francis I and the Turk. Their chief battlefield was North Italy;
the generalship was dull on both sides; their advances and retreats
depended mainly on the arrival of reinforcements. The German army
invaded France, failed to take Marseilles, fell back into Italy, lost
Milan, and was besieged in Pavia. Francis I made a long and unsuccessful
siege of Pavia, was caught by fresh German forces, defeated, wounded and
taken prisoner. But thereupon the Pope and Henry VIII, still haunted by
the fear of his attaining excessive power, turned against Charles. The
German troops in Milan, under the Constable of Bourbon, being unpaid,
forced rather than followed their commander into a raid upon Rome. They
stormed the city and pillaged it (1527). The Pope took refuge in the
Castle of St. Angelo while the looting and slaughter went on. He bought
off the German troops at last by the payment of four hundred thousand
ducats. Ten years of such confused fighting impoverished all Europe. At
last the Emperor found himself triumphant in Italy. In 1530, he was
crowned by the Pope—he was the last German Emperor to be so crowned—at
Bologna.
Meanwhile the Turks were making great headway in Hungary. They had
defeated and killed the king of Hungary in 1526, they held Buda-Pesth,
and in 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent very nearly took Vienna. The
Emperor was greatly concerned by these advances, and did his utmost to
drive back the Turks, but he found the greatest difficulty in getting
the German princes to unite even with this formidable enemy upon their
very borders. Francis I remained implacable for a time, and there was a
new French war; but in 1538 Charles won his rival over to a more
friendly attitude after ravaging the south of France. Francis and
Charles then formed an alliance against the Turk. But the Protestant
princes, the German princes who were resolved to break away from Rome,
had formed a league, the Schmalkaldic League, against the Emperor, and
in the place of a great campaign to recover Hungary for Christendom
Charles had to turn his mind to the gathering internal struggle in
Germany. Of that struggle he saw only the opening war. It was a
struggle, a sanguinary irrational bickering of princes, for ascendancy,
now flaming into war and destruction, now sinking back to intrigues and
diplomacies; it was a snake’s sack of princely policies that was to go
on writhing incurably right into the nineteenth century and to waste and
desolate Central Europe again and again.
The Emperor never seems to have grasped the true forces at work in these
gathering troubles. He was for his time and station an exceptionally
worthy man, and he seems to have taken the religious dissensions that
were tearing Europe into warring fragments as genuine theological
differences. He gathered diets and councils in futile attempts at
reconciliation. Formulæ and confessions were tried over. The student of
German history must struggle with the details of the Religious Peace of
Nuremberg, the settlement at the Diet of Ratisbon, the Interim of
Augsburg, and the like. Here we do but mention them as details in the
worried life of this culminating Emperor. As a matter of fact, hardly
one of the multifarious princes and rulers in Europe seems to have been
acting in good faith. The widespread religious trouble of the world, the
desire of the common people for truth and social righteousness, the
spreading knowledge of the time, all those things were merely counters
in the imaginations of princely diplomacy. Henry VIII of England, who
had begun his career with a book against heresy, and who had been
rewarded by the Pope with the title of “Defender of the Faith,” being
anxious to divorce his first wife in favour of a young lady named Anne
Boleyn, and wishing also to loot the vast wealth of the church in
England, joined the company of Protestant princes in 1530. Sweden,
Denmark and Norway had already gone over to the Protestant side.
The German religious war began in 1546, a few months after the death of
Martin Luther. We need not trouble about the incidents of the campaign.
The Protestant Saxon army was badly beaten at Lochau. By something very
like a breach of faith Philip of Hesse, the Emperor’s chief remaining
antagonist, was caught and imprisoned, and the Turks were bought off by
the promise of an annual tribute. In 1547, to the great relief of the
Emperor, Francis I died. So by 1547 Charles got to a kind of settlement,
and made his last efforts to effect peace where there was no peace. In
1552 all Germany was at war again, only a precipitate flight from
Innsbruck saved Charles from capture, and in 1552, with the treaty of
Passau, came another unstable equilibrium.
Such is the brief outline of the politics of the Empire for thirty-two
years. It is interesting to note how entirely the European mind was
concentrated upon the struggle for European ascendancy. Neither Turks,
French, English nor Germans had yet discovered any political interest in
the great continent of America, nor any significance in the new sea
routes to Asia. Great things were happening in America; Cortez with a
mere handful of men had conquered the great Neolithic empire of Mexico
for Spain, Pizarro had crossed the Isthmus of Panama (1530) and
subjugated another wonder-land, Peru. But as yet these events meant no
more to Europe than a useful and stimulating influx of silver to the
Spanish treasury.
It was after the treaty of Passau that Charles began to display his
distinctive originality of mind. He was now entirely bored and
disillusioned by his imperial greatness. A sense of the intolerable
futility of these European rivalries came upon him. He had never been of
a very sound constitution, he was naturally indolent and he was
suffering greatly from gout. He abdicated. He made over all his
sovereign rights in Germany to his brother Ferdinand, and Spain and the
Netherlands he resigned to his son Philip. Then in a sort of magnificent
dudgeon he retired to a monastery at Yuste, among the oak and chestnut
forests in the hills to the north of the Tagus valley. There he died in
1558.
Much has been written in a sentimental vein of this retirement, this
renunciation of the world by this tired majestic Titan, world-weary,
seeking in an austere solitude his peace with God. But his retreat was
neither solitary nor austere; he had with him nearly a hundred and fifty
attendants; his establishment had all the splendour and indulgences
without the fatigues of a court, and Philip II was a dutiful son to whom
his father’s advice was a command.
And if Charles had lost his living interest in the administration of
European affairs, there were other motives of a more immediate sort to
stir him. Says Prescott: “In the almost daily correspondence between
Quixada, or Gaztelu, and the Secretary of State at Valladolid, there is
scarcely a letter that does not turn more or less on the Emperor’s
eating or his illness. The one seems naturally to follow, like a running
commentary, on the other. It is rare that such topics have formed the
burden of communications with the department of state. It must have been
no easy matter for the secretary to preserve his gravity in the perusal
of despatches in which politics and gastronomy were so strangely mixed
together. The courier from Valladolid to Lisbon was ordered to make a
detour, so as to take Jarandilla in his route, and bring supplies to the
royal table. On Thursdays he was to bring fish to serve for the jour
maigre that was to follow. The trout in the neighbourhood Charles
thought too small, so others of a larger size were to be sent from
Valladolid. Fish of every kind was to his taste, as, indeed, was
anything that in its nature or habits at all approached to fish. Eels,
frogs, oysters, occupied an important place in the royal bill of fare.
Potted fish, especially anchovies, found great favour with him; and he
regretted that he had not brought a better supply of these from the Low
Countries. On an eel-pasty he particularly doted.”
In 1554 Charles had obtained a bull from Pope Julius III granting him a
dispensation from fasting, and allowing him to break his fast early in
the morning even when he was to take the sacrament.
Eating and doctoring! it was a return to elemental things. He had never
acquired the habit of reading, but he would make what one narrator
describes as a “sweet and heavenly commentary.” He also amused himself
with mechanical toys, by listening to music or sermons, and by attending
to the imperial business that still came drifting in to him. The death
of the Empress, to whom he was greatly attached, had turned his mind
towards religion, which in his case took a punctilious and ceremonial
form; every Friday in Lent he scourged himself with the rest of the
monks with such good will as to draw blood. These exercises and the gout
released a bigotry in Charles that had hitherto been restrained by
considerations of policy. The appearance of Protestant teaching close at
hand in Valladolid roused him to fury. “Tell the grand inquisitor and
his council from me to be at their posts, and to lay the axe at the root
of the evil before it spreads further.”ƒ He expressed a doubt
whether it would not be well, in so black an affair, to dispense with
the ordinary course of justice, and to show no mercy; “lest the
criminal, if pardoned, should have the opportunity of repeating his
crime.” He recommended, as an example, his own mode of proceeding in the
Netherlands, “where all who remained obstinate in their errors were
burned alive, and those who were admitted to penitence were beheaded.”
And almost symbolical of his place and rôle in history was his
preoccupation with funerals. He seems to have had an intuition that
something great was dead in Europe and sorely needed burial, that there
was a need to write Finis, overdue. He not only attended every actual
funeral that was celebrated at Yuste, but he had services conducted for
the absent dead, he held a funeral service in memory of his wife on the
anniversary of her death, and finally he celebrated his own obsequies.
“The chapel was hung with black, and the blaze of hundreds of wax-lights
was scarcely sufficient to dispel the darkness. The brethren in their
conventual dress, and all the Emperor’s household clad in deep mourning,
gathered round a huge catafalque, shrouded also in black, which had been
raised in the centre of the chapel. The service for the burial of the
dead was then performed; and, amidst the dismal wail of the monks, the
prayers ascended for the departed spirit, that it might be received into
the mansions of the blessed. The sorrowful attendants were melted to
tears, as the image of their master’s death was presented to their
minds—or they were touched, it may be, with compassion by this pitiable
display of weakness. Charles, muffled in a dark mantle, and bearing a
lighted candle in his hand, mingled with his household, the spectator of
his own obsequies; and the doleful ceremony was concluded by his placing
the taper in the hands of the priest, in sign of his surrendering up his
soul to the Almighty.”
Within two months of this masquerade he was dead. And the brief
greatness of the Holy Roman Empire died with him. His realm was already
divided between his brother and his son. The Holy Roman Empire struggled
on indeed to the days of Napoleon I but as an invalid and dying thing.
To this day its unburied tradition still poisons the political
air.Appendix to Robertson’s History of Charles V.
LII. The Age of Political Experiments; of Grand Monarchy and
Parliaments and Republicanism in Europe
The Doge of Genoa at Versailles on 15 May 1685
Reparation faite à Louis XIV par le Doge de Gênes.
15 mai 1685 by Claude Guy Halle, Versailles
THE LATIN CHURCH was broken, the Holy Roman Empire was in extreme
decay; the history of Europe from the opening of the sixteenth century
onward in a story of peoples feeling their way darkly to some new method
of government, better adapted to the new conditions that were arising.
In the Ancient World, over long periods of time, there had been changes
of dynasty and even changes of ruling race and language, but the form of
government through monarch and temple remained fairly stable, and still
more stable was the ordinary way of living. In this modern Europe since
the sixteenth century the dynastic changes are unimportant, and the
interest of history lies in the wide and increasing variety of
experiments in political and social organization.
The political history of the world from the sixteenth century onward
was, we have said, an effort, a largely unconscious effort, of mankind
to adapt its political and social methods to certain new conditions that
had now arisen. The effort to adapt was complicated by the fact that the
conditions themselves were changing with a steadily increasing rapidity.
The adaptation, mainly unconscious and almost always unwilling (for man
in general hates voluntary change), has lagged more and more behind the
alterations in conditions. From the sixteenth century onward the history
of mankind is a story of political and social institutions becoming more
and more plainly misfits, less comfortable and more vexatious, and of
the slow reluctant realization of the need for a conscious and
deliberate reconstruction of the whole scheme of human societies in the
face of needs and possibilities new to all the former experiences of
life.
What are these changes in the conditions of human life that have
disorganized that balance of empire, priest, peasant and trader, with
periodic refreshment by barbaric conquest, that has held human affairs
in the Old World in a sort of working rhythm for more than a hundred
centuries?
They are manifold and various, for human affairs are multitudinously
complex; but the main changes seem all to turn upon one cause, namely
the growth and extension of a knowledge of the nature of things,
beginning first of all in small groups of intelligent people and
spreading at first slowly, and in the last five hundred years very
rapidly, to larger and larger proportions of the general population.
But there has also been a great change in human conditions due to a
change in the spirit of human life. This change has gone on side by side
with the increase and extension of knowledge, and is subtly connected
with it. There has been an increasing disposition to treat a life based
on the common and more elementary desires and gratifications as
unsatisfactory, and to seek relationship with and service and
participation in a larger life. This is the common characteristic of all
the great religions that have spread throughout the world in the last
twenty odd centuries, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam alike. They have
had to do with the spirit of man in a way that the older religions did
not have to do. They are forces quite different in their nature and
effect from the old fetishistic blood-sacrifice religions of priest and
temple that they have in part modified and in part replaced. They have
gradually evolved a self-respect in the individual and a sense of
participation and responsibility in the common concerns of mankind that
did not exist among the populations of the earlier civilizations.
The first considerable change in the conditions of political and social
life was the simplification and extended use of writing in the ancient
civilizations which made larger empires and wider political
understandings practicable and inevitable. The next movement forward
came with the introduction of the horse, and later on of the camel as a
means of transport, the use of wheeled vehicles, the extension of roads
and the increased military efficiency due to the discovery of
terrestrial iron. Then followed the profound economic disturbances due
to the device of coined money and the change in the nature of debt,
proprietorship and trade due to this convenient but dangerous
convention. The empires grew in size and range, and men’s ideas grew
likewise to correspond with these things. Came the disappearance of
local gods, the age of theocrasia, and the teaching of the great world
religions. Came also the beginnings of reasoned and recorded history and
geography, the first realization by man of his profound ignorance, and
the first systematic search for knowledge.
For a time the scientific process which began so brilliantly in Greece
and Alexandria was interrupted. The raids of the Teutonic barbarians,
the westward drive of the Mongolian peoples, convulsive religious
reconstruction and great pestilences put enormous strains upon political
and social order. When civilization emerged again from this phase of
conflict and confusion, slavery was no longer the basis of economic
life; and the first paper-mills were preparing a new medium for
collective information and co-operation in printed matter. Gradually at
this point and that, the search for knowledge, the systematic scientific
process, was resumed
And now from the sixteenth century onward, as an inevitable by-product
of systematic thought, appeared a steadily increasing series of
inventions and devices affecting the intercommunication and interaction
of men with one another. They all tended towards wider range of action,
greater mutual benefits or injuries, and increased co-operation, and
they came faster and faster. Men’s minds had not been prepared for
anything of the sort, and until the great catastrophes at the beginning
of the twentieth century quickened men’s minds, the historian has very
little to tell of any intelligently planned attempts to meet the new
conditions this increasing flow of inventions was creating. The history
of mankind for the last four centuries is rather like that of an
imprisoned sleeper, stirring clumsily and uneasily while the prison that
restrains and shelters him catches fire, not waking but incorporating
the crackling and warmth of the fire with ancient and incongruous
dreams, than like that of a man consciously awake to danger and
opportunity.
Since history is the story not of individual lives but of communities,
it is inevitable that the inventions that figure most in the historical
record are inventions affecting communications. In the sixteenth century
the chief new things that we have to note are the appearance of printed
paper and the sea-worthy, ocean-going sailing ship using the new device
of the mariner’s compass. The former cheapened, spread, and
revolutionized teaching, public information and discussion, and the
fundamental operations of political activity. The latter made the round
world one. But almost equally important was the increased utilization
and improvement of guns and gunpowder which the Mongols had first
brought westward in the thirteenth century. This destroyed the practical
immunity of barons in their castles and of walled cities. Guns swept
away feudalism. Constantinople fell to guns. Mexico and Peru fell before
the terror of the Spanish guns.
The seventeenth century saw the development of systematic scientific
publication, a less conspicuous but ultimately far more pregnant
innovation. Conspicuous among the leaders in this great forward step was
Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) afterwards Lord Verulam, Lord Chancellor
of England. He was the pupil and perhaps the mouthpiece of another
Englishman, Dr. Gilbert, the experimental philosopher of Colchester
(1540–1603). This second Bacon, like the first, preached observation and
experiment, and he used the inspiring and fruitful form of a Utopian
story, The New Atlantis, to express his dream of a great service of
scientific research.
Presently arose the Royal Society of London, the Florentine Society, and
later other national bodies for the encouragement of research and the
publication and exchange of knowledge. These European scientific
societies became fountains not only of countless inventions but also of
a destructive criticism of the grotesque theological history of the
world that had dominated and crippled human thought for many centuries.
Neither the seventeenth nor the eighteenth century witnessed any
innovations so immediately revolutionary in human conditions as printed
paper and the ocean-going ship, but there was a steady accumulation of
knowledge and scientific energy that was to bear its full fruits in the
nineteenth century. The exploration and mapping of the world went on.
Tasmania, Australia, New Zealand appeared on the map. In Great Britain
in the eighteenth century coal coke began to be used for metallurgical
purposes, leading to a considerable cheapening of iron and to the
possibility of casting and using it in larger pieces than had been
possible before, when it had been smelted with wood charcoal. Modern
machinery dawned.
Like the trees of the celestial city, science bears bud and flower and
fruit at the same time and continuously. With the onset of the
nineteenth century the real fruition of science—which indeed henceforth
may never cease—began. First came steam and steel, the railway, the
great liner, vast bridges and buildings, machinery of almost limitless
power, the possibility of a bountiful satisfaction of every material
human need, and then, still more wonderful, the hidden treasures of
electrical science were opened to men.
We have compared the political and social life of man from the sixteenth
century onward to that of a sleeping prisoner who lies and dreams while
his prison burns about him. In the sixteenth century the European mind
was still going on with its Latin Imperial dream, its dream of a Holy
Roman Empire, united under a Catholic Church. But just as some
uncontrollable element in our composition will insist at times upon
introducing into our dreams the most absurd and destructive comments, so
thrust into this dream we find the sleeping face and craving stomach of
the Emperor Charles V, while Henry VIII of England and Luther tear the
unity of Catholicism to shreds.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the dream turned to personal
monarchy. The history of nearly all Europe during this period tells with
variations the story of an attempt to consolidate a monarchy, to make it
absolute and to extend its power over weaker adjacent regions, and of
the steady resistance, first of the landowners and then with the
increase of foreign trade and home industry, of the growing trading and
moneyed class, to the exaction and interference of the crown. There is
no universal victory of either side; here it is the King who gets the
upper hand while there it is the man of private property who beats the
King. In one case we find a King becoming the sun and centre of his
national world, while just over his borders a sturdy mercantile class
maintains a republic. So wide a range of variation shows how entirely
experimental, what local accidents, were all the various governments of
this period.
A very common figure in these national dramas is the King’s minister,
often in the still Catholic countries a prelate, who stands behind the
King, serves him and dominates him by his indispensable services.
Here in the limits set to us it is impossible to tell these various
national dramas in detail. The trading folk of Holland went Protestant
and republican, and cast off the rule of Philip II of Spain, the son of
the Emperor Charles V. In England Henry VIII and his minister Wolsey,
Queen Elizabeth and her minister Burleigh, prepared the foundations of
an absolutism that was wrecked by the folly of James I and Charles I.
Charles I was beheaded for treason to his people (1649), a new turn in
the political thought of Europe. For a dozen years (until 1660) Britain
was a republic; and the crown was an unstable power, much overshadowed
by Parliament, until George III (1760–1820) made a strenuous and partly
successful effort to restore its predominance. The King of France, on
the other hand, was the most successful of all the European Kings in
perfecting monarchy. Two great ministers, Richelieu (1585–1642) and
Mazarin (1602–1661), built up the power of the crown in that country,
and the process was aided by the long reign and very considerable
abilities of King Louis XIV, “the Grand Monarque” (1643–1715).
Louis XIV was indeed the pattern King of Europe. He was, within his
limitations, an exceptionally capable King; his ambition was stronger
than his baser passions, and he guided his country towards bankruptcy
through the complication of a spirited foreign policy with an elaborate
dignity that still extorts our admiration. His immediate desire was to
consolidate and extend France to the Rhine and Pyrenees, and to absorb
the Spanish Netherlands; his remoter view saw the French Kings as the
possible successors of Charlemagne in a recast Holy Roman Empire. He
made bribery a state method almost more important than warfare. Charles
II of England was in his pay, and so were most of the Polish nobility,
presently to be described. His money, or rather the money of the
tax-paying classes in France, went everywhere. But his prevailing
occupation was splendour. His great palace at Versailles with its
salons, its corridors, its mirrors, its terraces and fountains and parks
and prospects, was the envy and admiration of the world.
He provoked a universal imitation. Every king and princelet in Europe
was building his own Versailles as much beyond his means as his subjects
and credits would permit. Everywhere the nobility rebuilt or extended
their chateaux to the new pattern. A great industry of beautiful and
elaborate fabrics and furnishings developed. The luxurious arts
flourished everywhere; sculpture in alabaster, faience, gilt woodwork,
metal work, stamped leather, much music, magnificent painting, beautiful
printing and bindings, fine crockery, fine vintages. Amidst the mirrors
and fine furniture went a strange race of “gentlemen” in tall powdered
wigs, silks and laces, poised upon high red heels, supported by amazing
canes; and still more wonderful “ladies,” under towers of powdered hair
and wearing vast expansions of silk and satin sustained on wire. Through
it all postured the great Louis, the sun of his world, unaware of the
meagre and sulky and bitter faces that watched him from those lower
darknesses to which his sunshine did not penetrate.
The German people remained politically divided throughout this period of
the monarchies and experimental governments, and a considerable number
of ducal and princely courts aped the splendours of Versailles on
varying scales. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), a devastating scramble
among the Germans, Swedes and Bohemians for fluctuating political
advantages, sapped the energies of Germany for a century. A map must
show the crazy patchwork in which this struggle ended, a map of Europe
according to the peace of Westphalia (1648). One sees a tangle of
principalities, dukedoms, free states and the like, some partly in and
partly out of the Empire. Sweden’s arm, the reader will note, reached
far into Germany; and except for a few islands of territory within the
imperial boundaries France was still far from the Rhine. Amidst this
patchwork the Kingdom of Prussia—it became a Kingdom in 1701—rose
steadily to prominence and sustained a series of successful wars.
Frederick the Great of Prussia (1740–86) had his Versailles at Potsdam,
where his court spoke French, read French literature and rivalled the
culture of the French King.
In 1714 the Elector of Hanover became King of England, adding one more
to the list of monarchies half in and half out of the empire.
The Austrian branch of the descendants of Charles V retained the title
of Emperor; the Spanish branch retained Spain. But now there was also an
Emperor of the East again. After the fall of Constantinople (1453), the
grand duke of Moscow, Ivan the Great (1462–1505), claimed to be heir to
the Byzantine throne and adopted the Byzantine double-headed eagle upon
his arms. His grandson, Ivan IV, Ivan the Terrible (1533–1584), assumed
the imperial title of Cæsar (Tsar). But only in the latter half of the
seventeenth century did Russia cease to seem remote and Asiatic to the
European mind. The Tsar Peter the Great (1682–1725) brought Russia into
the arena of Western affairs. He built a new capital for his empire,
Petersburg upon the Neva, that played the part of a window between
Russia and Europe, and he set up his Versailles at Peterhof eighteen
miles away, employing a French architect who gave him a terrace,
fountains, cascades, picture gallery, park and all the recognized
appointments of Grand Monarchy. In Russia as in Prussia French became
the language of the court.
Unhappily placed between Austria, Prussia and Russia was the Polish
kingdom, an ill-organized state of great landed proprietors too jealous
of their own individual grandeur to permit more than a nominal kingship
to the monarch they elected. Her fate was division among these three
neighbours, in spite of the efforts of France to retain her as an
independent ally. Switzerland at this time was a group of republican
cantons; Venice was a republic; Italy like so much of Germany was
divided among minor dukes and princes. The Pope ruled like a prince in
the papal states, too fearful now of losing the allegiance of the
remaining Catholic princes to interfere between them and their subjects
or to remind the world of the commonweal of Christendom. There remained
indeed no common political idea in Europe at all; Europe was given over
altogether to division and diversity.
All these sovereign princes and republics carried on schemes of
aggrandizement against each other. Each one of them pursued a “foreign
policy” of aggression against its neighbours and of aggressive
alliances. We Europeans still live to-day in the last phase of this age
of the multifarious sovereign states, and still suffer from the hatreds,
hostilities and suspicions it engendered. The history of this time
becomes more and more manifestly “gossip,” more and more unmeaning and
wearisome to a modern intelligence. You are told of how this war was
caused by this King’s mistress, and how the jealousy of one minister for
another caused that. A tittle-tattle of bribes and rivalries disgusts
the intelligent student. The more permanently significant fact is that
in spite of the obstruction of a score of frontiers, reading and thought
still spread and increased and inventions multiplied. The eighteenth
century saw the appearance of a literature profoundly sceptical and
critical of the courts and policies of the time. In such a book as
Voltaire’s Candide we have the expression of an infinite weariness with
the planless confusion of the European world.
