The Age of Faith

The Jews of England, excluded from landholding and from the guilds, became merchants and financiers. Some waxed rich through usury, and all were hated for it. Lords and squires equipped themselves for the Crusades with money borrowed from the Jews; in return they pledged the revenues of their lands; and the Christian peasant fumed at the thought of moneylenders fattening on his toil. In 1144 young William of Norwich was found dead; the Jews were accused of having killed him to use his blood; and the Jewish quarter of the city was sacked and fired.¹⁵⁰ King Henry II protected the Jews; Henry III did likewise, but took £422,000 from them in taxes and capital levies in seven years. At the coronation of Richard I in London (1190) a minor altercation, encouraged by nobles seeking escape from their debts to Jews,¹⁵¹ developed into a pogrom that spread to Lincoln, Stamford, and Linn. In York, in the same year, a mob led by Richard de Malabestia, “who was deeply indebted to the Jews,”¹⁵² killed 350 of them; in addition 150 York Jews, led by their Rabbi Yom Tob, slew themselves.¹⁵³ In 1211 300 rabbis left England and France to begin life anew in Palestine; seven years later many Jews emigrated when Henry III enforced the edict of the badge. In 1255 rumor spread through Lincoln that a boy named Hugh had been enticed into the Jewish quarter and there had been scourged, crucified, and pierced with a lance, in the presence of a rejoicing Jewish crowd. Armed bands invaded the settlement, seized the rabbi who was supposed to have presided over the ceremony, tied him to the tail of a horse, dragged him through the streets, and hanged him. Ninety-one Jews were arrested, eighteen were hanged; many prisoners were saved by the intercession of courageous Dominican monks.*¹⁵⁴

During the civil war that disordered England between 1257 and 1267, the populace got out of hand, and pogroms almost wiped out the Jewish communities of London, Canterbury, Northampton, Winchester, Worcester, Lincoln, and Cambridge. Houses were looted and destroyed, deeds and bonds were burned, and the surviving Jews were left almost penniless.¹⁵⁵The English kings were now borrowing from the Christian bankers of Florence or Cahors; they no longer needed the Jews, and found it troublesome to protect them. In 1290 Edward I ordered the 16,000 remaining Jews of England to leave the country by November 1, abandoning all their immovable realty and all their collectible loans. Many were drowned in crossing the Channel in small boats; some were robbed by the ships’ crews; those who reached France were told by the government that they must leave by Lent of 1291.¹⁵⁶

In France, too, the spiritual climate changed for the Jews with the Crusades against the Turks in Asia and the Albigensian heretics of Languedoc. Bishops preached anti-Semitic sermons that stirred the people; at Béziers an attack upon the Jewish quarter was a regular rite of Holy Week; finally (1160) a Christian prelate forbade such preaching, but required the Jewish community to pay a special tax every Palm Sunday.¹⁵⁷ At Toulouse the Jews were forced to send a representative to the cathedral each Good Friday to receive publicly a box on the ears as a mild reminder of everlasting guilt.¹⁵⁸In 1171 several Jews were burned at Blois on a charge of using Christian blood in Passover rites.¹⁵⁹ Seeing a chance to turn a pious penny, King Philip Augustus ordered all the Jews in his realm to be imprisoned as poisoners of Christian wells,¹⁶⁰ and then released them on payment of a heavy ransom (1180). A year later he banished them, confiscated all their realty, and gave their synagogues to the Church. In 1190 he had eighty Jews of Orange killed because one of his agents had been hanged by the city authorities for murdering a Jew.¹⁶¹ In 1198 he recalled the Jews to France, and so regulated their banking business as to secure large profits to himself.¹⁶² In 1236 Christian crusaders invaded the Jewish settlements of Anjou and Poitou—especially those at Bordeaux and Angoulême—and bade all Jews be baptized; when the Jews refused, the crusaders trampled 3000 of them to death under their horses’ hoofs.¹⁶³ Pope Gregory IX condemned the slaughter, but did not raise the dead. St. Louis advised his people not to discuss religion with Jews; “the layman,” he told Joinville, “when he hears any speak ill of the Christian faith, should defend it not with words but with the sword, which he should thrust into the other’s belly as far as it will go.”¹⁶⁴ In 1254 he banished the Jews from France, confiscating their property and their synagogues; a few years later he readmitted them, and restored their synagogues. They were rebuilding their communities when Philip the Fair (1306) had them all imprisoned, confiscated their credits and all their goods except the clothes they wore, and expelled them, to the number of 100,000, from France, with provisions for one day. The King profited so handsomely from the operation that he presented a synagogue to his coachman.¹⁶⁵

So crowded a juxtaposition of bloody episodes scattered over two centuries makes a one-sided picture. In Provence, Italy, Sicily, and in the Byzantine Empire after the ninth century there were only minor persecutions of the Jews; and they found means of protecting themselves in Christian Spain. Even in Germany, England, and France the periods of peace were long; and a generation after each tragedy the Jews there were again numerous, and some were prosperous. Nevertheless their traditions carried down the bitter memory of those tragic interludes. The days of peace were made anxious by the ever-present danger of pogroms; and every Jew had to learn by heart the prayer to be recited in the moment of martyrdom.¹⁶⁶ The pursuit of wealth was made more feverish by the harassed insecurity of its gains; the gibes of gamins in the street were ever ready to greet the wearers of the yellow badge; the ignominy of a helpless and secluded minority burned into the soul, broke down individual pride and interracial amity, and left in the eyes of the northern Jew that somber judenschmerz—the sorrow of the Jews—which recalls a thousand insults and injuries.

For that one death on the cross how many crucifixions!

CHAPTER XVII

The Mind and Heart of the Jew

500–1300

I. LETTERS

IN every age the soul of the Jew has been torn between the resolve to make his way in a hostile world, and his hunger for the goods of the mind. A Jewish merchant is a dead scholar; he envies and generously honors the man who, escaping the fever of wealth, pursues in peace the love of learning and the mirage of wisdom. The Jewish traders and bankers who went to the fairs of Troyes stopped on the way to hear the great Rashi expound the Talmud.¹So, amid commercial cares, or degrading poverty, or mortal contumely, the Jews of the Middle Ages continued to produce grammarians, theologians, mystics, poets, scientists, and philosophers; and for a while (1150-1200) only the Moslems equaled them in widespread literacy and intellectual wealth.²They had the advantage of living in contact or communication with Islam; many of them read Arabic; the whole rich world of medieval Moslem culture was open to them; they took from Islam in science, medicine, and philosophy what they had given in religion to Mohammed and the Koran; and by their mediation they aroused the mind of the Christian West with the stimulus of Saracen thought.

Within Islam the Jews used Arabic in daily speech and written prose; their poets kept to Hebrew, but accepted Arabic meters and poetic forms. In Christendom the Jews spoke the language of the people among whom they lived, but wrote their literature, and worshiped Yahveh, in the ancient tongue. After Maimonides the Jews of Spain, fleeing from Almohad persecution, abandoned Arabic for Hebrew as their literary medium. The revival of Hebrew was made possible by the devoted labors of Jewish philologists. The Old Testament text had become difficult to understand through lack of vowels and punctuation; three centuries of scholarship—from the seventh to the tenth—evolved the “Masoretic” (tradition-sanctioned) text by adding vowel points, accent strokes, punctuation marks, verse separations, and marginal notes. Thereafter any literate Jew could read the Scriptures of his people.

Such studies compelled the development of Hebrew grammar and lexicography. The poetry and learning of Menachem ben Saruk (910-70) attracted the attention of Hasdai ben Shaprut; the great minister called him to Cordova, and encouraged him in the task of compiling a dictionary of Biblical Hebrew. Menachem’s pupil Jehuda ibn Daud Chayuj (c. 1000) put Hebrew grammar upon a scientific basis with three Arabic works on the language of the Bible; Chayuj’s pupil Jonah ibn Janaeh (995-1050) of Saragossa surpassed him with an Arabic Book of Critique that advanced Hebrew syntax and lexicography; Judah ibn Quraish of Morocco (fl. 900) founded the comparative philology of the Semitic languages by his study of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic; the Qaraite Jew Abraham al-Fasi (i.e., of Fez, c. 980) furthered the matter with a dictionary in which all the words of the Old Testament were reduced to their roots alphabetically arranged. Nathan ben Yechiel of Rome (d. 1106) excelled all other Jewish lexicographers with his dictionary of the Talmud. In Narbonne Joseph Kimchi and his sons Moses and David (1160-1235) labored for generations in these fields; David’s Michlol, or Compendium, became for centuries the authoritative grammar of Hebrew, and was a constant aid to King James’ translators of the Bible.³ These names are chosen from a thousand.

Profiting from this widespread scholarship, Hebrew poetry emancipated itself from Arabic exemplars, developed its own forms and themes, and produced in Spain alone three men quite equal to any triad in the Moslem or Christian literature of their age. Solomon ibn Gabirol, known to the Christian world as the philosopher Avicebron, was prepared by his personal tragedy to voice the feelings of Israel. This “poet among philosophers, and philosopher among poets,” as Heine called him,⁴ was born at Malaga about 1021. He lost both parents early, and grew up in a poverty that inclined him to morose contemplation. His verses caught the fancy of Yekutiel ibn Hassan, a high official in the Moslem city-state of Saragossa. There for a time Gabirol found protection and happiness, and sang the joy of life. But Yekutiel was assassinated by enemies of the emir, and Gabirol fled. For years he wandered through Moslem Spain, poor and sick, and so thin that “a fly could now bear me up with ease.” Samuel ibn Naghdela, himself a poet, gave him refuge at Granada. There Solomon wrote his philosophical works, and pledged his poetry to wisdom:

How shall I forsake wisdom?

I have made a covenant with her.

She is my mother, I am her dearest child;

She hath clasped her jewels about my neck….

While life is mine my spirit shall aspire

Unto her heavenly heights.…

I will not rest until I find her source.⁵

Presumably his impetuous pride caused his quarrel with Samuel. Still a youth in his late twenties, he resumed his wandering poverty; misfortune humbled his spirit, and he turned from philosophy to religion:

Lord, what is man? A carcass fouled and trodden,

A noxious creature brimming with deceit,

A fading flower that shrivels in the heat.⁶

His poetry took at times the somber grandeur of the Psalms:

Establish peace for us, O Lord,

In everlasting grace,

Nor let us be of Thee abhorred,

Who art our dwelling place.

We wander ever to and fro,

Or sit in chains in exile drear;

Yet still proclaim, where’er we go,

The splendor of our Lord is here.⁷

His masterpiece, Kether Malkuth (Royal Crown), celebrated the greatness of God as his early poems had celebrated his own:

From Thee to Thee I fly to win

A place of refuge, and within

Thy shadow from Thy anger hide,

Until Thy wrath be turned aside.

Unto Thy mercy I will cling

Until Thou hearken pitying;

Nor will I quit my hold of Thee

Until Thy blessing light on me.⁸

The richness and variety of Jewish culture in Moslem Spain were summed up in the Ibn Ezra family at Granada. Jacob ibn Ezra held an important post in the government of King Habbus under Samuel ibn Naghdela. His home was a salon of literature and philosophy. Of his four sons, reared in this atmosphere of learning, three reached distinction: Joseph rose to high office in the state, and to leadership of the Jewish community; Isaac was a poet, a scientist, and a Talmudist; Moses ibn Ezra (1070-1139) was a scholar, a philosopher, and the greatest Jewish poet of the generation before Halevi. His happy youth ended when he fell in love with a beautiful niece, whose father (his older brother Isaac) married her to his younger brother Abraham. Moses left Granada, wandered through strange lands, and fed his hopeless passion with poetry. “Though thy lips drop honey for others to sip, live on, breathe myrrh for others to inhale. Though thou art false to me, yet shall I be true to thee till the cold earth claims her own. My heart rejoices in the nightingale’s song, though the singer soars above me and afar.”⁹ In the end, like Gabirol, he tuned his harp to piety, and sang psalms of mystic surrender.

Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra—whom Browning used as a mouthpiece of Victorian philosophy—was a distant relative, but an intimate friend, of Moses ibn Ezra. Born in Toledo in 1093, his youth knew hunger, and thirsted for knowledge in every field. He too wandered from town to town, from occupation to occupation, luckless in all; “were candles my merchandise,” he said, with the wry humor of the Jew, “the sun would never set; if I sold burial shrouds, men would live forever.” He traveled through Egypt and Iraq to Iran, perhaps to India, back to Italy, then to France and England; at seventy-five he was returning to Spain when he died, still poor, but acclaimed throughout Jewry for both his poetry and his prose. His works were as varied as his domiciles—on mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, religion; his poems ranged through love and friendship, God and nature, anatomy and the seasons, chess and the stars. He gave poetic form to ideas ubiquitous in the Age of Faith, and he anticipated Newman in a Hebrew melody:

O God of earth and heaven,

Spirit and flesh are Thine!

Thou hast in wisdom given

Man’s inward light divine

My times are in Thy hand,

Thou knowest what is best;

And where I fear to stand

Thy strength brings succor blest.

Thy mantle hides my sins,

Thy mercies are my sure defense;

And for Thy bounteous providence

Thou wilt demand no recompense.¹⁰

His contemporaries valued him chiefly for his Biblical commentaries on every book of the Old Testament. He defended the authenticity and divine inspiration of the Hebrew Scriptures, but interpreted as metaphors the anthropomorphic phrases applied to the Deity. He was the first to suggest that the Book of Isaiah was the work of two prophets, not one. Spinoza considered him a founder of rational Biblical criticism.¹¹

The greatest European poet of his age was Jehuda Halevi (1086-1147?). Born at Toledo a year after its capture by Alfonso VI of Castile, he grew up in security under the most enlightened and liberal Christian monarch of the time. One of his early poems pleased Moses ibn Ezra; the older poet invited Jehuda to come and stay with him in Granada; there Moses and Isaac ibn Ezra entertained him for months in their homes. His verses were read, his epigrams were repeated, in every Jewish community in Spain. His poetry reflected his genial character and his fortunate youth; he sang of love with all the skill and artifice of a Moslem or Provençal troubadour, and with the sensuous intensity of the Song of Songs. One poem—“The Garden of His Delight”—put into fervent verse the frankest passages of that erotic masterpiece:

Come down, her beloved; why tarriest thou

To feed amid her gardens?

Turn aside to the couch of love,

To gather her lilies.

Secret apples of her breasts

Give forth their fragrance;

For thee she hideth in her necklaces

Precious fruits shining like light….

She would shame, but for her veil,

All the stars of heaven.¹²

Leaving the Ibn Ezras’ courteous hospitality, Halevi went to Lucena, and studied for several years in the Jewish academy there; he took up medicine, and became an undistinguished practitioner. He founded a Hebrew institute in Toledo, and lectured there on the Scriptures. He married, and had four children. As he grew older he became more conscious of Israel’s misfortunes than of his own prosperity; he began to sing of his people, their sorrows, and their faith. Like so many Jews, he longed to end his days in Palestine.

O City of the World [Jerusalem], beauteous in proud splendor!

Oh, that I had eagle’s wings that I might fly to thee,

Till I wet thy dust with my tears!

My heart is in the East, while I tarry in the West.¹³

Comfortable Spanish Jews accepted such verses as a poetical pose, but Halevi was sincere. In 1141, leaving his family in good hands, he began an arduous pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Unfavorable winds drove his ship off course to Alexandria. There the Jewish community feted him, and begged him not to venture into Jerusalem, then in the Crusaders’ hands. After some delay he went on to Damietta and Tyre, and thence, for some unknown reason, to Damascus. There he disappeared from history. Legend says that he made his way to Jerusalem, knelt at the first sight of it, kissed the earth, and was trampled to death by an Arab horseman.¹⁴ We do not know if he ever reached the city of his dreams. We do know that at Damascus, perhaps in the last year of his life, he composed an ‘Ode to Zion” that Goethe ranked among the greatest poems in world literature.¹⁵

Art thou not, Zion, fain

To send forth greetings from thy sacred rock

Unto thy captive train

Who greet thee as the remnants of thy flock?…

Harsh is my voice when I bewail thy woes;

But when in fancy’s dream

I see thy freedom, forth its cadence flows,

Sweet as the harps that hung by Babel’s stream.…

I would that, where God’s Spirit was of yore

Poured out unto thy holy ones, I might

There too my soul outpour!

The house of kings and throne of God wert thou;

How comes it then that now

Slaves fill the throne where sat thy kings before?

Oh, who will lead me on

To seek the posts where, in far distant years,

The angels in their glory dawned upon

Thy messengers and seers?

Oh, who will give me wings

That I may fly away,

And there, at rest from all my wanderings,

The ruins of my heart among thy ruins lay?

I’ll bend my face unto thy soil, and hold

Thy stones as precious gold….

Thy air is life unto my soul, thy grains

Of dust are myrrh, thy streams with honey flow;

Naked and barefoot, to thy ruined fanes

How gladly would I go!

To where the ark was treasured, and in dim

Recesses dwelt the holy cherubim…

Perfect in beauty, Zion, how in thee

Do love and grace unite!

The souls of thy companions tenderly

Turn unto thee; thy joy was their delight,

And weeping they lament thy ruin now

In distant exile; for thy sacred height

They long, and toward thy gates in prayer they bow.

The Lord desires thee for His dwelling place

Eternally; and blest

Is he whom God has chosen for the grace

Within thy courts to rest.

Happy is he that watches, drawing near,

Until he sees thy glorious lights arise,

And over whom thy dawn breaks full and clear

Set in the orient skies.

But happiest he who, with exultant eyes

The bliss of thy redeemed ones shall behold,

And see thy youth renewed as in the days of old.¹⁶

II. THE ADVENTURES OF THE TALMUD

The Jews of that golden age in Spain were too prosperous to be as deeply religious as their poets became in declining years; they produced verses joyous and sensuous and graceful, and expressed a philosophy that confidently reconciled the Holy Scriptures with Greek thought. Even when Almohad fanaticism drove the Jews from Moslem into Christian Spain they continued to prosper; and Jewish academies flourished under Christian tolerance in Toledo, Gerona, and Barcelona in the thirteenth century. But in France and Germany the Jews were not so fortunate. They crowded their narrow quarters timidly, and gave their best minds to the study of the Talmud. They did not bother to justify their faith to the secular world; they never questioned its premises; they consumed themselves in the Law.

The academy founded by Rabbi Gershom at Mainz became one of the most influential schools of its time; hundreds of students gathered there, and shared with Gershom in editing and clarifying, through two generations of labor, the Talmudic text. A similar role was played in France by Rabbi Shelomoh ben Yitzhak (1040-1105), fondly called Rashi from the first letters of his title and his name. Born at Troyes in Champagne, he studied in the Jewish academies of Worms, Mainz, and Speyer; returning to Troyes, he supported his family by selling wine, but gave every leisure hour to the Bible and the Talmud. Though not officially a rabbi, he founded an academy at Troyes, taught there for forty years, and gradually composed commentaries on the Old Testament, the Mishna, and the Gemara. He did not try, as some Spanish scholars had done, to read philosophical ideas into the religious texts; he merely explained these with such lucid learning that his Talmudic commentaries are now printed with the Talmud. The modest purity of his character and his life won him reverence among his people as a saint. Jewish communities everywhere in Europe sent him questions in theology and law, and gave legal authority to his replies. His old age was saddened by the pogroms of the First Crusade. After his death his grandsons Samuel, Jacob, and Isaac ben Meir continued his work. Jacob was the first of the “tosaphists”: for five generations after Rashi the French and German Talmudists revised and amended his commentaries with tosafoth or “supplements.”

The Talmud had hardly been completed when Justinian outlawed the book (553) as “a tissue of puerilities, fables, iniquities, insults, imprecations, heresies, and blasphemies.”¹⁷ Thereafter the Church seems to have forgotten the existence of the Talmud; few theologians of the Latin Church could read the Hebrew or Aramaic in which it was written; and for 700 years the Jews were free to study the cherished volumes—so sedulously that they in turn seem almost to have forgotten the Bible. But in 1239 Nicholas Donin, a French Jew converted to Christianity, laid before Pope Gregory IX an indictment of the Talmud as containing shameful insults of Christ and the Virgin, and incitations to dishonesty in dealing with Christians. Some of the charges were true, for the assiduous compilers had so reverenced the tannaim and amoraim as to include in the haggadic or popular portion of the Gemara occasional remarks in which irate rabbis had struck back at Christian critiques of Judaism.¹⁸ But Donin, now more Christian than the Pope, added several charges that could not be substantiated: that the Talmud considered it permissible to deceive, and meritorious to kill, a Christian, no matter how good; that the Jews were allowed by their rabbis to break promises made under oath; and that any Christian who studied the Jewish Law was to be put to death. Gregory ordered all discoverable copies of the Talmud in France, England, and Spain to be turned over to the Dominicans or the Franciscans; bade the monks examine the books carefully; and commanded that the books be burned if the charges proved true. No record has been found of the aftermath of this order. In France Louis IX directed all Jews to surrender their copies of the Talmud on pain of death, and summoned four rabbis to Paris to defend the book in public debate before the King, Queen Blanche, Donin, and two leading Scholastic philosophers—William of Auvergne and Albertus Magnus.¹⁹ After three days’ inquiry the King ordered all copies of the Talmud to be burned (1240). Walter Cornutus, Archbishop of Sens, interceded for the Jews, and the King allowed many copies to be restored to their owners. But the Archbishop died soon afterward, and some monks were of opinion that this was the judgment of God on the royal lenience. Convinced by them, Louis ordered the confiscation of all copies of the Talmud; twenty-four cartloads were brought to Paris, and were committed to the flames (1242). The possession of the Talmud was prohibited in France by a papal legate in 1248; and thereafter rabbinical studies and Hebrew literature declined in all of France except Provence.

A similar debate took place in Barcelona in 1263. Raymond of Peñafort, a Dominican monk in charge of the Inquisition in Aragon and Castile, undertook to convert the Jews of these states to Christianity. To equip his preachers he arranged for the teaching of Hebrew in the seminaries of Christian Spain. A converted Jew, Paul the Christian, assisted him, and so impressed Raymond with his knowledge of both Christian and Jewish theology that the monk arranged a disputation between Paul and Rabbi Moses ben Nachman of Gerona before King James I of Aragon. Nachmanides came reluctantly, fearing victory as much as defeat. The debate continued for four days, to the delight of the King; apparently the amenities were reasonably observed. In 1264 an ecclesiastical commission commandeered all copies of the Talmud in Aragon, obliterated the anti-Christian passages, and returned the books to their owners.²⁰ In an account that Nachmanides wrote of his debate for the Jewish synagogues of Aragon he spoke of Christianity in terms that seemed to Raymond grossly blasphemous.²¹ The monk protested to the King, but it was not till 1266 that James, yielding to papal insistence, banished Nachmanides from Spain. A year later the rabbi died in Palestine.

III. SCIENCE AMONG THE JEWS

Jewish science and philosophy in the Middle Ages were almost entirely domiciled in Islam. Isolated and scorned, and yet influenced by their neighbors, the Jews of medieval Christendom took refuge in mysticism, superstition, and Messianic dreams; no situation could have favored science less. Religion, however, encouraged the study of astronomy, for on this depended the correct determination of the holydays. In the sixth century the Jewish astronomers of Babylonia substituted astronomic calculation for direct observation of the heavens; they based the year on the apparent movements of the sun, and the months on the phases of the moon; gave Babylonian names to the months; made some months “full” with thirty days, some “defective” with twenty-nine; and then reconciled the lunar with the solar calendar by inserting a thirteenth month every third, sixth, eighth, eleventh, fourteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth year in a nineteen-year cycle. In the East the Jews dated events by the Seleucid calendar, which began at 312 B.C.; in Europe, in the ninth century, they adopted the present “Jewish era,” anno mundi—“year of the world”—beginning with the supposed creation in 3761 B.C. The Jewish calendar is as clumsy and sacred as our own.

One of the earliest astronomers in Islam was the Jewish scholar Mashallah (d. c. 815). His De scientia motus orbis was translated from Arabic into Latin by Gerard of Cremona, and won wide acclaim in Christendom. His treatise De mercibus (On Prices) is the oldest extant scientific work in the Arabic tongue. The foremost mathematical treatise of the age²² was the Hibbur ha-meshihah— on algebra, geometry, and trigonometry—of Abraham ben Hiyya of Barcelona (1065-1136), who also composed a lost encyclopedia of mathematics, astronomy, optics, and music, and the earliest surviving Hebrew treatise on the calendar. Abraham ibn Ezra, in the next generation, found no conflict between writing poetry and advancing combinatorial analysis. These two Abrahams were the first Jews to write scientific works in Hebrew rather than in Arabic. Through such books, and a flood of translations from Arabic into Hebrew, Moslem science and philosophy invaded the Jewish communities of Europe, and broadened their intellectual life beyond purely rabbinical lore.

Profiting in some measure from Islamic science, but also recapturing their own traditions of the healing art, the Jews of this period wrote outstanding treatises on medicine, and became the most esteemed physicians in Christian Europe. Isaac Israeli (c. 855-c. 955) acquired such fame as an ophthalmologist in Egypt that he was appointed physician to the Aghlabid court at Qairwan. His medical works, translated from Arabic into Hebrew and Latin, were acclaimed as classics throughout Europe; they were used as textbooks at Salerno and Paris, and were quoted, after 700 years of life, in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Tradition describes Isaac as indifferent to wealth, an obstinate bachelor, and a centenarian. Probably contemporary with him was Asaf ha-Jehudi, the obscure author of a recently discovered manuscript reckoned to be the oldest extant medical work in Hebrew, and remarkable for its teaching that the blood circulates through the arteries and the veins; had he surmised the function of the heart he would have completely anticipated Harvey.²³

In Egypt, after the arrival of Maimonides (1165), the medical art was dominated by Jewish practitioners and texts. Abu al-Fada of Cairo wrote the principal ophthalmological treatise of the twelfth century, and al-Kuhin al-Attar composed (c. 1275) a pharmacopoeia still used in the Moslem world. The Jewish physicians of southern Italy and Sicily served as one medium through which Arabic medicine entered Salerno. Shabbathai ben Abraham (913-70), called Donnolo, born near Otranto, was captured by Saracens, studied Arabic medicine at Palermo, and then returned to practice in Italy. Benvenutus Grassus, a Jerusalem Jew, studied at Salerno, taught there and at Montpellier, and wrote a Practica oculorum (c. 1250) which Islam and Christendom alike accepted as the definitive treatise on diseases of the eye; 224 years after its publication it was chosen as the first book to be printed on its theme.

Rabbinical schools, especially in southern France, gave courses in medicine, partly to provide rabbis with a secular income. Jewish physicians trained in the Hebrew academy at Montpellier helped to develop the famous Montpellier school of medicine. The appointment of a Jew as regent of the faculty in 1300 drew upon his people the wrath of the medical authorities in the University of Paris; the Montpellier school was forced to close its doors to Jews (1301), and the Hebrew physicians of the city shared in the banishment of the Jews from France in 1306. By this time, however, Christian medicine had been revolutionized by Jewish and Moslem example and influence. The Semitic practitioners had long since put behind them the theory of sickness as “possession” by demons; and the success of their rational diagnosis and therapy had weakened the belief of the people in the efficacy of relics and other supernatural means of cure.

The monks and secular clergy whose abbeys and churches housed relics and drew pilgrims found it hard to accept this revolution. The Church condemned the intimate reception of Jewish doctors into Christian homes; she suspected that these men had more physic than faith, and she dreaded their influence upon sick minds. In 1246 the Council of Béziėrs forbade Christians to employ Jewish physicians; in 1267 the Council of Vienna forbade Jewish physicians to treat Christians. Such prohibitions did not prevent some prominent Christians from availing themselves of Jewish medical skill; Pope Boniface VIII, suffering from an eye ailment, called in Isaac ben Mordecai;²⁴ Raymond Lully complained that every monastery had a Jewish physician; a papal legate was shocked to find that this was also the fate of many nunneries; and Christian kings of Spain enjoyed Jewish medical care down to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. Sheshet Benveniste of Barcelona, physician to King James I of Aragon (1213-76), wrote the chief gynecological treatise of his time. The Jews lost their ascendancy in the medical practice of Christendom only when Christian universities, in the thirteenth century, adopted rational medicine.

For so mobile and scattered a people the Jews contributed little to the science of geography. Nevertheless the outstanding travelers of the twelfth century were two Jews—Petachya of Ratisbon and Benjamin of Tudela—who wrote valuable Hebrew narratives of their journeys through Europe and the Near East. Benjamin left Saragossa in 1160, leisurely visited Barcelona, Marseilles, Genoa, Pisa, Rome, Salerno, Brindisi, Otranto, Corfu, Constantinople, the Aegean Isles, An-tioch, every important city in Palestine, and Baalbek, Damascus, Baghdad, and Persia. He returned by ship through the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea to Egypt, Sicily, and Italy, and thence overland to Spain; he reached home in 1173, and died soon afterward. His main interest was in the Jewish communities; but he described with fair accuracy and objectivity the geographic and ethnic features of each country on his route. His account is less fascinating, but probably more reliable, than the reports made by Marco Polo a century later. It was translated into nearly all European languages, and remained till our time a favorite book with the Jews.²⁵

IV. THE RISE OF JEWISH PHILOSOPHY

The life of the mind is a composition of two forces: the necessity to believe in order to live, and the necessity to reason in order to advance. In ages of poverty and chaos the will to believe is paramount, for courage is the one thing needful; in ages of wealth the intellectual powers come to the fore as offering preferment and progress; consequently a civilization passing from poverty to wealth tends to develop a struggle between reason and faith, a “warfare of science with theology.” In this conflict philosophy, dedicated to seeing life whole, usually seeks a reconciliation of opposites, a mediating peace, with the result that it is scorned by science and suspected by theology. In an age of faith, where hardship makes life unbearable without hope, philosophy inclines to religion, uses reason to defend faith, and becomes a disguised theology. Among the three faiths that divided white civilization in the Middle Ages this was least true of Islam, which had most wealth, truer of Christendom, which had less, truest of Judaism, which had least. And Jewish philosophy ventured from faith chiefly in the prosperous Jewry of Moslem Spain.

Medieval Jewish philosophy had two sources: Hebrew religion and Moslem thought. Most Jewish thinkers conceived of religion and philosophy as similar in content and result, differing only in method and form: what religion taught as divinely revealed dogma, philosophy would teach as rationally demonstrated truth. And most Jewish thinkers from Saadia to Maimonides made this attempt in a Moslem milieu, derived their knowledge of Greek philosophy from Arabic translations and Moslem commentaries, and wrote in Arabic for Moslems as well as Jews. Just as Ashari turned against the Mutazilites the weapons of reason, and saved the orthodoxy of Islam, so Saadia, who left Egypt for Babylonia in the very year (915) of Ashari’s conversion from skepticism, saved Hebrew theology by his polemic industry and skill; and Saadia followed not only the methods of the Moslem mutakallimun, but even the details of their arguments.²⁶

Saadia’s victory had the same effect in Eastern Judaism as al-Ghazali’s in Eastern Islam: it combined with political disorder and economic decline to smother Hebrew philosophy in the Orient. The rest of the story belongs to Africa and Spain. At Qairwan Isaac Israeli found time, amid his medical practice and writing, to compose some influential philosophical works. His Essay on Definitions gave several terms to Scholastic logic; his treatise On the Elements introduced Aristotle’s Physics to Hebrew thought; his Book of Soul and Spirit replaced the creation story of Genesis with a Neoplatonist scheme of progressive emanations (“splendors”) from God to the material world; here was one source of the Cabala.

Ibn Gabirol had more influence as a philosopher than as a poet. It is one of the jeux d’esprit of history that the Scholastics quoted him with respect as Avicebron, and thought him a Moslem or a Christian; not till 1846 did Salomon Munk discover that Ibn Gabirol and Avicebron were one.²⁷ The misunderstanding had almost been prepared by Gabirol’s attempt to write philosophy in terms fully independent of Judaism. His anthology of proverbs —Choice of Pearls— took nearly all its quotations from non-Jewish sources, though Hebrew folklore is peculiarly rich in pointed and pithy apothegms. One pearl is quite Confucian: “How shall one take vengeance on an enemy? By increasing one’s good qualities.”²⁸ This is practically a summary of the treatise On the Improvement of the Moral Qualities, which Gabirol seems to have composed at twenty-four, when philosophy is unbecoming. By an artificial schematism the young poet derived all virtues and vices from the five senses, with platitudinous results; but the book had the distinction of seeking to construct, in the Age of Faith, a moral code unsupported by religious belief.²⁹

With like audacity Gabirol’s chef-d’oeuvre—Mekor Hayim—refrained from quoting either the Bible, the Talmud, or the Koran. It was this unusual supernationalism that made the book so offensive to the rabbis and, when translated into Latin as Fons vitae (The Fountain of Life), so influential in Christendom. Gabirol accepted the Neoplatonism that permeated all Arabic philosophy, but he imposed upon it a voluntarism that stressed the action of the will in God and man. We must, said Gabirol, assume the existence of God as first substance, first essence, or primary will, in order to understand the existence or motion of anything at all; but we cannot know the attributes of God. The universe was not created in time, but flows in continuous and graduated emanations from God. Everything in the universe except God is composed of matter and form; these always appear together, and can be separated only in thought.³⁰ The rabbis repudiated this Avicennian cosmology as a disguised materialism; but Alexander of Hales, St. Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus accepted the universality of matter under God, and the primacy of will. William of Auvergne nominated Gabirol as “the noblest of all philosophers,” and thought him a good Christian.

Jehuda Halevi rejected all speculation as vain intellectualism; like al-Ghazali he feared that philosophy was undermining religion—not merely by questioning dogma, or ignoring it, or interpreting the Bible metaphorically, but even more by substituting argument for devotion. Against the invasion of Judaism by Plato and Aristotle, and the seduction of Jews by Mohammedanism, and the continuing attacks of Qaraite Jews upon the Talmud, the poet wrote one of the most interesting books of medieval philosophy—the Al-Khazari (c. 1140). He presented his ideas in a dramatic mise-en-scène— the conversion of the Khazar king to the Jewish faith. Luckily for Halevi the book, though written in the Arabic language, used the Hebrew alphabet, which confined its audience to educated Jews. For the story, bringing a bishop, a mullah, and a rabbi before the curious king, makes short work of both Mohammedanism and Christianity. When the Christian and the Moslem quote the Hebrew Scriptures as the word of God, the king dismisses them and keeps the rabbi; and most of the book is the conversation of the rabbi instructing a docile and circumcised king in Judaic theology and ritual. Says the royal pupil to his teacher: “There has been nothing new since your religion was promulgated, except certain details concerning paradise and hell.”³¹ So encouraged, the rabbi explains that Hebrew is the language of God, that God spoke directly only to the Jews, and that only the Jewish prophets were divinely inspired. Halevi smiles at philosophers who proclaim the supremacy of reason, and subject God and the heavens to their syllogisms and categories, while obviously the human mind is merely a fragile and infinitesimal fraction of a vast and complex creation. The wise man (who is not necessarily learned) will recognize the weakness of reason in transmun-dane affairs; he will keep to the faith given him in the Scriptures; and he will believe and pray as simply as a child.³²

Despite Halevi, the fascination of reason survived, and the Aristotelian invasion continued. Abraham ibn Daud (1110-80) was as deeply Jewish as Halevi; he defended the Talmud against the Qaraites, and proudly narrated the History of the Jewish Kings in the Second Commonwealth. But along with countless Christians, Moslems, and Jews of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, he aspired to prove his faith with philosophy. Like Halevi, he was born in Toledo, and made his living as a physician. His Arabic Kitab al-aqidah al-rafiah (Book of the Sublime Faith) gave the same answer to Halevi that Aquinas would give to the Christian enemies of philosophy: the peaceful defense of a religion against nonbelievers requires reasoning, and cannot rest upon simple faith. A few years before Averroës (1126-98), a generation before Maimonides (1135-1204), a century before St. Thomas Aquinas (1224-74), Ibn Daud labored to reconcile the faith of his fathers with the philosophy of Aristotle. The Greek would have been amused to find himself the recipient of such a triple compliment, or to learn that the Jewish philosophers knew him only in the summaries of al-Farabi and Avicenna, who knew him through imperfect translations and a Neoplatonist forgery. Truer than St. Thomas to their common Aristotelian source, Ibn Daud, like Averroës, claimed immortality only for the universal psyche, not for the individual soul;³³ here, Halevi might have complained, Aristotle triumphed over the Talmud as well as the Koran. Jewish philosophy, like medieval philosophy in general, had begun with Neoplatonism and piety, and was culminating in Aristotle and doubt. Maimonides would take his start from this Aristotelian stand of Ibn Daud, and would face with courage and skill all the problems of reason in conflict with faith.

V. MAIMONIDES: 1135—1204

The greatest of medieval Jews was born in Cordova, son of the distinguished scholar, physician, and judge Maimon ben Joseph. The boy received the name of Moses, and it became an adage among Jews that “from Moses to Moses there arose none like Moses.” His people knew him as Moses ben Maimon, or, more briefly, Maimuni; when he became a famous rabbi the initials of his title and his name were combined into the fond appellation Rambam; and the Christian world expressed his parentage by terming him Maimonides. A probably legendary story tells how the boy showed a distaste for study, and how the disappointed father, calling him “the butcher’s son,” packed him off to live with the father’s former teacher, Rabbi Joseph ibn Migas.³⁴ From this poor beginning the second Moses became adept in Biblical and rabbinical literature, in medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy; he was one of the two most learned men of his time. His only rival was Averroës. Strange to say, these outstanding thinkers, born in the same city only nine years apart, seem never to have met; and apparently Maimonides read Averroës only in old age, after his own books had been written.³⁵

In 1148 Berber fanatics captured Cordova, destroyed churches and synagogues, and gave Christians and Jews a choice between Islam and exile. In 1159 Maimonides, with his wife and children, left Spain; for nine years they lived in Fez, pretending to be Moslems;³⁶ for there, too, no Jews or Christians were allowed. Maimonides justified superficial adherence to Islam among endangered Jews in Morocco by arguing that “we are not asked to render active homage to heathenism, but only to recite an empty formula; the Moslems themselves know that we utter it insincerely in order to circumvent bigots.”³⁷ The head rabbi of Fez did not agree with him, and suffered martyrdom in 1165. Fearing the same fate, Maimonides left for Palestine; thence he moved to Alexandria (1165) and old Cairo, where he lived till his death. Soon recognized as one of the ablest practitioners of his time, he became personal physician to Saladin’s eldest son, Nur-ud-Din Ali, and to Sal-adin’s vizier al-Qadi al-Fadil al-Baisani. He used his favor at court to secure protection for the Jews of Egypt; and when Saladin conquered Palestine Maimonides persuaded him to let the Jews settle there again.³⁸ In 1177 Maimonides was made Nagid or head of the Jewish community in Cairo. A Moslem jurist indicted him (1187) as an apostate from Islam, and demanded the usual death penalty; Maimonides was saved by the vizier, who ruled that a man converted to Mohammedanism by force could not rightly be considered a Moslem.³⁹

During these busy years in Cairo he composed most of his books. Ten medical works in Arabic transmitted the ideas of Hippocrates, Galen, Dioscorides, al-Razi, and Avicenna. Medical Aphorisms reduced Galen to 1500 short statements covering every branch of medicine; it was translated into Hebrew and Latin, and was frequently quoted in Europe under the formula Dixit Rabbi Moyses. For Saladin’s son he wrote a treatise on diet; and for Saladin’s nephew al-Muzaffar I, Sultan of Hamah, he composed an Essay on Intercourse (Maqala fi-l-jima)— on sexual hygiene, impotence, priapism, aphrodisiacs… The introduction to this work struck an unhackneyed note:

Our Lord His Majesty [al-Muzaffar]—may God prolong his power!—ordered me to compose a treatise that would help him increase his sexual powers, as he … had some hardship in this way…. He does not wish to depart from his customs concerning sexual intercourse, is alarmed by the abatement of his flesh, and desires an augmentation [of his virility] on account of the increasing number of his female slaves.⁴⁰

To these writings Maimonides added several monographs—on poisons, asthma, hemorrhoids, and hypochondria—and a learned Glossary of Drugs. Like all books, these medical works contain several items not in accord with the passing infallibilities of our time—e.g., if the right testis is larger than the left, the first child will be male;⁴¹ but they are marked by an earnest desire to help the sick, by a courteous consideration of contrary opinions, and by wisdom and moderation of prescription and advice. Maimonides never prescribed drugs where diet could serve.⁴² He warned against overeating: “The stomach must not be made to swell like a tumor.”⁴³ He thought that wine was healthful in moderation.⁴⁴ He recommended philosophy as a training in the mental and moral balance and calm conducive to health and longevity.⁴⁵

At the age of twenty-three Maimonides began a commentary on the Mishna, and labored on it for a decade amid commerce, medicine, and perilous journeys by land and sea. Published at Cairo (1158) as Kitab al-siraj, or Book of the Lamp, its clarity, erudition, and good judgment at once placed Maimonides, still a youth of thirty-three, next to Rashi as a commentator on the Talmud. Twelve years later he issued his greatest work, written in Neo-Hebraic, and provocatively called Mishna Torah. Here, in logical order and lucid brevity, were arranged all the laws of the Pentateuch, and nearly all those of the Mishna and the Gemaras. “I have entitled this work Mishna Torah [Repetition of the Law],” said the introduction, “for the reason that a person who first reads the written Law [the Pentateuch] and then this compilation, will know the whole oral Law, without needing to consult any other book.”⁴⁶ He omitted some Talmudic regulations concerning omens, amulets, and astrology; he was among the few medieval thinkers who rejected astrology.⁴⁷ He classified the 613 precepts of the Law under fourteen heads, devoted a “book” to each head, and undertook not only to explain each law, but to show its logical or historical necessity. Only one of the fourteen books has been translated into English; it forms a substantial volume; we may judge the immensity of the original.

It is clear from this work, and from the later Guide to the Perplexed, that Maimonides was not openly a freethinker. He endeavored as far as he could to reduce Scriptural miracles to natural causes, but he taught the divine inspiration of every word in the Pentateuch, and the orthodox rabbinical doctrine that the whole oral Law had been transmitted by Moses to the elders of Israel.⁴⁸ Perhaps he felt that the Jews could not claim less for their Scriptures than the Christians and Moslems claimed for them; perhaps he, too, considered social order impossible without belief in the divine origin of the moral code. He was a stern and dictatorial patriot: “All Israelites are bound to follow everything in the Babylonian Talmud, and we should force the Jews of every land to adhere to the customs established by the Talmudic sages.”⁴⁹ A bit more liberal than most Moslems and Christians of the time, he thought that a virtuous and monotheistic non-Jew would go to heaven, but he was as severe as Deuteronomy or Torquemada on heretics within the Hebrew pale; any Jew who repudiated the Jewish Law should be put to death; and “according to my opinion, all members of an Israelite community which has insolently and presumptuously transgressed any of the divine precepts must be put to death.”⁵⁰ He anticipated Aquinas in defending death for heresy on the ground that “cruelty against those who mislead the people to seek vanity is real clemency to the world”;⁵¹ and he accepted without trouble the Scriptural penalty of death for witchcraft, murder, incest, idolatry, violent robbery, kidnaping, filial disobedience, and breaking the Sabbath.⁵² The condition of the Jews migrating from ancient Egypt and trying to form a state out of a destitute and homeless horde may have warranted these laws; the precarious status of the Jews in Christian Europe or Moslem Africa, always subject to attack, conversion, or demoralization, required a hard code to forge order and unity; but in these matters (and before the Inquisition) Christian theory, and probably Jewish practice, were more humane than Jewish law. A better side of this stern spirit shows in Maimonides’ advice to the Jews of his age: “If heathens should say to Israelites, ‘Surrender one of your number to us that we may put him to death,’ they should all suffer death rather than surrender a single Israelite to them.”⁵³

Pleasanter is his picture of the scholar growing into a sage. He approved the rabbinical saying that “a bastard who is a scholar [of the Law] takes precedence of an ignorant high priest.”⁵⁴ He advised the scholar to give three hours daily to earning a living, nine hours to studying the Torah. Believing environment more influential than heredity, he counseled the student to seek association with good and wise men. The scholar should not marry until he has reached the maturity of his learning, has acquired a trade, and has bought a home.⁵⁵ He may marry four wives, but should cohabit with each of them only once a month.

Although connubial intercourse with one’s wife is always permitted, this relation too should be invested by the scholar with sanctity. He should not be always with his spouse, like a rooster, but should fulfill his marital obligation on Friday nights.… When cohabiting, neither husband nor wife should be in a state of intoxication, lethargy, or melancholy. The wife should not be asleep at the time.⁵⁶

And so at last is produced the sage. He

cultivates extreme modesty. He will not bare his head or his body… When speaking he will not raise his voice unduly. His speech with all men will be gentle… He will avoid exaggeration or affected speech. He will judge everyone favorably; he will dwell on the merits of others, and never speak disparagingly of anybody.⁵⁷

He will avoid restaurants except in extreme emergency; “the wise man will eat nowhere except at home and at his own table.”⁵⁸ He will study the Torah every day until his death. He will beware of false Messiahs, but will never lose his faith that some day the real Messiah will come, and restore Israel to Zion, and bring all the world to the true faith, and to abundance, brotherhood, and peace. “The other nations vanish, but the Jews last forever.”⁵⁹

The Mishna Torah irritated the rabbis; few could forgive the presumption of aiming to displace the Talmud; and many Jews were scandalized by the reported assertion of Maimonides⁶⁰ that he who studies the Law is higher than he who obeys it. Nevertheless the book made its author the leading Jew of the time. All Eastern Israel accepted him as its counselor, and sent him questions and problems; it seemed for a generation that the Gaonate had been revived. But Maimonides, not pausing to enjoy his renown, began work at once on his next book. Having codified and clarified the Law for orthodox Jews, he turned to the task of restoring to the Jewish fold those who had been seduced by philosophy or lured into the Qaraite communities of heretical Jews in Egypt, Palestine, or North Africa. After another decade of labor he issued to the Jewish world his most famous work, the Guide to the Perplexed (1190). Written in Arabic with Hebrew characters, it was soon translated into Hebrew as Moreh Nebuchim, and into Latin, and aroused one of the bitterest intellectual tempests of the thirteenth century.

“My primary object,” says the introduction, “is to explain certain words occurring in the Prophetic books”—i.e., the Old Testament. Many Biblical terms and passages have several meanings; literal, metaphorical, or symbolical. Taken literally, some of them are a stumbling block to persons sincerely religious but also respectful of reason as man’s highest faculty. Such persons must not be forced to choose between religion without reason or reason without religion. Since reason was implanted in man by God, it cannot be contrary to God’s revelation. Where such contradictions occur, Maimonides suggests, it is because we take literally expressions adapted to the imaginative and pictorial mentality of the simple, unlettered people to whom the Bible was addressed.

Our sages have said, It is impossible to give a full account of the creation to man…. It has been treated in metaphors in order that the uneducated may comprehend it according to the measure of their faculties and the feebleness of their apprehension, while educated persons may take it in a different sense.⁶¹

From this starting point Maimonides advances to a discussion of deity. That some supreme intelligence rules the universe he deduces from the evidences of design in nature; but he ridicules the notion that all things have been made for the sake of man.⁶² Things exist only because God, their source and life, exists; “if it could be supposed that He does not exist, it would follow that nothing else could possibly exist.” Since in this way it is essential that God exist, His existence is identical with His essence. Now “a thing which has in itself the necessity of existence, cannot have for its existence any cause whatever.” *⁶³ Since God is intelligent, He must be incorporeal; therefore all Biblical passages implying physical organs or attributes in God must be interpreted figuratively. In truth, says Maimonides (probably following the Mutazilites), we cannot know anything of God except that He exists. Even the nonphysical terms that we use of Him—intelligence, omnipotence, mercy, affection, unity, will—are homonyms; i.e., they have different meanings when applied to God than as used of man. Just what their meaning is in God’s case we shall never know; we can never define Him; we must not ascribe to Him any positive attributes, qualities, or predicates whatever. When the Bible tells how God or an angel “spoke” to the Prophets, we must not imagine a voice or sound. “Prophecy consists in the most perfect development of the imaginative faculty”; it is “an emanation from the Divine Being” through dream or ecstatic vision; what the Prophets relate took place not in actuality, but only in such vision or dream, and must in many cases be interpreted allegorically.⁶⁴ “Some of our sages clearly stated that Job never existed, and that he is a poetic fiction … revealing the most important truths.”⁶⁵ Any man, if he develops his faculties to their height, is capable of such prophetic revelations; for human reason is a continuing revelation, not basically different from the vivid insight of the prophet.

Did God create the world in time, or is the universe of matter and motion, as Aristotle thought, eternal? Here, says Maimonides, reason is baffled; we can prove neither the eternity nor the creation of the world; let us therefore hold to our fathers’ faith in its creation.⁶⁶ He proceeds to interpret the creation story of Genesis allegorically: Adam is active form or spirit; Eve is passive matter, which is the root of all evil; the serpent is imagination.⁶⁷ But evil is no positive entity; it is merely the negation of good. Most of our misfortunes are due to our own fault; other evils are evil only from a human or limited standpoint; a cosmic view might discover in every evil the good or need of the whole.⁶⁸ God permits to man the free will that lets him be a man; man sometimes chooses evil; God has foreseen the choice, but does not determine it.

Is man immortal? Here Maimonides applies to the full his capacity for mystifying his readers. In the Guide he avoids the question, except to say that “the soul that remains after death is not the soul that lives in a man when he is born”;⁶⁹ the latter—the “potential intellect”—is a function of the body and dies with it; what survives is the “acquired” or “active intellect,” which existed before the body and is never a function of it.⁷⁰ This Aristotelian-Averroist view apparently denied individual immortality. In the Mishna Torah Maimonides rejected the resurrection of the body, ridiculed the Moslem notion of a physically epicurean paradise, and represented this, in Islam and Judaism alike, as a concession to the imagination and the moral needs of the populace.⁷¹ In the Guide he added that “incorporeal entities can only be numbered when they are forces situated in a body”;⁷² * which seemed to imply that the incorporeal spirit which survived the body had no individual consciousness. As physical resurrection had become a central doctrine of both Judaism and Mohammedanism, many protests were aroused by these skeptical intimations. Transliterated into Arabic, the Guide made a stir in the Moslem world; a Mohammedan scholar, Abd al-Latif, denounced it as “undermining the principles of all faiths by the very means with which it appears to buttress them.”⁷³ Saladin was at this time engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the Crusaders; always orthodox, he now more than ever resented heresy as threatening Moslem morale in the heat of a holy war; in 1191 he ordered the execution of Surawardi, a mystic heretic. In the same month Maimonides issued a Maqala, or discourse, “On the Resurrection of the Dead”; he again expressed his doubts about corporeal immortality, but announced that he accepted it as an article of faith.

The storm subsided for a time, and he busied himself in his work as a physician, and in writing responsa to doctrinal and ethical inquiries from the Jewish world. When (1199) Samuel ben Judah ibn Tibbon, who was translating the Guide into Hebrew, proposed to visit him, he warned him not to expect

to confer with me on any scientific subject for even one hour, either by day or by night; for the following is my daily occupation. I dwell in Fustat, and the Sultan resides at Cairo two Sabbath days’ journey [a mile and a half] distant. My duties to the regent [Saladin’s son] are very heavy. I am obligated to visit him every day, early in the morning; and when he or any of his children, or any inmate of his harem, is indisposed, I dare not quit Cairo, but must stay during the greater part of the day in the palace…. I do not return to Fustat until the afternoon.… Then I am almost dying with hunger. I find the antechambers filled with people, theologians, bailiffs, friends, and foes. … I dismount from my animal, wash my hands, and beg my patients to bear with me while I partake of some refreshments—the only meal I take in twenty-four hours. Then I attend my patients … until nightfall, sometimes until two hours in the night, or even later. I prescribe while lying on my back from fatigue; and when night falls I am so exhausted I can scarcely speak. In consequence of this, no Israelite can have any private interview with me except on the Sabbath. On that day the whole congregation, or at least a majority, come to me after the morning service, when I instruct them…. We study together till noon, when they depart.⁷⁴

He was prematurely worn out. Richard I of England sought him as personal physician, but Maimonides could not accept the invitation. Saladin’s vizier, seeing his exhaustion, pensioned him. He died in 1204, aged sixty-nine. His remains were conveyed to Palestine, where his tomb may still be seen in Tiberias.

VI. THE MAIMONIDEAN WAR

Maimonides’ influence was felt in Islam and Christendom as well as in the Jewish world. Mohammedan pundits studied the Guide under the direction of Jewish teachers; Latin translations of it were used at the universities of Montpellier and Padua; and it was frequently quoted at Paris by Alexander of Hales and William of Auvergne. Albertus Magnus followed the lead of Maimonides on many points; and St. Thomas often considered the views of Rabbi Moyses, if only to reject them. Spinoza, with perhaps some lack of historical understanding, criticized Maimonides’ allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures as a disingenuous attempt to preserve the authority of the Bible; but he hailed the great rabbi as “the first who openly declared that Scripture must be accommodated to reason”;⁷⁵ and he took from Maimonides some ideas on prophecy, miracles, and the attributes of God.⁷⁶

In Judaism itself Maimonides’ influence was revolutionary. His own posterity carried on his work as scholars and Jews: his son Abraham ben Moses succeeded him as Nagid and court physician in 1205; his grandson David ben Abraham and his great-grandson Solomon ben Abraham also succeeded to the leadership of the Egyptian Jews; and all three continued the Mai-monidean tradition in philosophy. For a while it became fashionable to Aristotelize the Bible through allegorical legerdemain, and to reject the historicity of its narratives; Abraham and Sarah, for example, were merely a legend representing matter and form; and Jewish ritual laws had only a symbolical purpose and truth.⁷⁷ The whole structure of Judaic theology seemed about to fall upon the heads of the rabbis. Some of them fought back vigorously: Samuel ben Ali of Palestine, Abraham ben David of Pos-quières, Meïr ben Todros Halevi Abulafia of Toledo, Don Astruc of Lunel, Solomon ben Abraham of Montpellier, Jonah ben Abraham Gerundi of Spain, and many more. They protested against “selling the Scriptures to the Greeks,” denounced the attempt to replace the Talmud with philosophy, deplored Maimonides’ doubts on immortality, and rejected his unknowable God as a metaphorical abstraction that would never stir a soul to piety or prayer. The followers of the mystic Cabala joined in the attack, and desecrated Maimonides’ tomb.⁷⁸

The Maimonidean war divided the Jewish communities of southern France precisely when orthodox Christianity was waging there a war of extermination against the Albigensian heresy. And as Christian orthodoxy defended itself against rationalism by banning the books of Aristotle and Averroës from the universities, so Rabbi Solomon ben Abraham of Montpellier—perhaps to forestall Christian attacks upon Jewish congregations as harboring rationalists—took the unusual step of anathematizing the philosophical works of Maimonides, and excommunicating all Jews who should study profane science or literature, or who should treat the Bible allegorically. The supporters of Maimonides, led by David Kimchi and Jacob ben Machir Tibbon, retaliated by persuading the congregations of Lunel, Béziers, and Narbonne in Provence, and those of Saragossa and Lerida in Spain, to excommunicate Solomon and his followers. Solomon now took a still more startling step: he denounced the books of Maimonides to the Dominican Inquisition at Montpellier as containing heresies dangerous to Christianity as well as Judaism. The monks accommodated him, and all procurable publications of the philosopher were burned in public ceremonies at Montpellier in 1234, and at Paris in 1242. Forty days later the Talmud itself was burned at Paris.

These events drove the supporters of Maimonides to bitter fury. They arrested the leading adherents of Solomon at Montpellier, convicted them of informing against fellow Jews, and condemned them to have their tongues cut out; apparently Solomon was put to death.⁷⁹ Rabbi Jonah, regretting his share in the burning of Maimonides’ books, came to Montpellier, did public penance in the synagogue, and undertook a pilgrimage of repentance to Moses ben Maimon’s grave. But Don Astruc resumed the war by proposing a rabbinical ban on any study of the profane sciences. Nachmanides and Asher ben Yehiel supported him; and in 1305 Solomon ben Abraham ben Adret, the revered and powerful leader of the Barcelona congregations, issued a decree of excommunication against any Jew who should teach, or should before the age of twenty-five dare to study, any secular science except medicine, or any non-Jewish philosophy. The liberals of Montpellier replied by excommunicating any Jew who debarred his son from the study of science.⁸⁰ Neither ban had any wide effect; Jewish youths, here and there, continued to study philosophy. But the great influence of Adret and Asher in Spain, and the growth of persecution and fear throughout a Europe now subject to the Inquisition, drove the Jewish communities back into intellectual as well as ethnic isolation. The study of science declined among them; purely rabbinical studies ruled the Hebrew schools. After its escapade with reason the Jewish soul, haunted with theological terrors and an encompassing enmity, buried itself in mysticism and piety.

VII. THE CABALA

The isles of science and philosophy are everywhere washed by mystic seas. Intellect narrows hope, and only the fortunate can bear it gladly. The medieval Jews, like the Moslems and the Christians, covered reality with a thousand superstitions, dramatized history with miracles and portents, crowded the air with angels and demons, practiced magical incantations and charms, frightened their children and themselves with talk of witches and ghouls, lightened the mystery of sleep with interpretations of dreams, and read esoteric secrets into ancient tomes.

Jewish mysticism is as old as the Jews. It received influences from the Zoroastrian dualism of darkness and light, from the Neoplatonist substitution of emanations for creation, from the Neopythagorean mysticism of number, from Gnostic theosophies of Syria and Egypt, from the apocrypha of early Christianity, from the poets and mystics of India, Islam, and the medieval Church. But its basic sources were in the Jewish mentality and tradition themselves. Even before Christ there had circulated among the Jews secret interpretations of the creation story in Genesis and of Chapters I and X of Ezekiel; in the Mishna it was forbidden to expound these mysteries except privately to a single and trustworthy scholar. Imagination was free to conceive accounts of what had preceded the creation or Adam, or what would follow the destruction of the world. Philo’s theory of the Logos or Divine Wisdom as the creative agency of God was a lofty sample of these speculations. The Essenes had secret writings which were zealously guarded from disclosure, and Hebrew apocrypha like the Book of Jubilees expounded a mystic cosmogony. A mystery was made of the Ineffable Name of Yahveh: its four letters—the “Tetragrammaton”—were whispered to hold a hidden meaning and miraculous efficacy, to be transmitted only to the mature and discreet. Akiba suggested that God’s instrument in creating the world was the Torah or Pentateuch, and that every word or letter of these holy books had an occult significance and power. Some Babylonian Geonim ascribed such occult powers to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and to the names of the angels; he who knew those names could control all the forces of nature. Learned men played with white or black magic—marvelous capacities obtainable through alliance of the soul with angels or demons. Necromancy, bibliomancy, exorcism, amulets, incantations, divination, and casting of lots played their part in Jewish as in Christian life. All the wonders of astrology were included; the stars were letters, a mysterious sky-writing that only the initiate could read.⁸¹

Sometime in the first century A.D. there appeared in Babylonia an esoteric book called Sefer Yezira—The Book of Creation. Mystic devotees, including Jehuda Halevi, attributed its composition to Abraham and God. Creation, it taught, had been effected through the mediation of ten sefiroth— numbers or principles: the spirit of God, three emanations therefrom—air, water, and fire, three spatial dimensions to the left, and three dimensions to the right. These principles determined the content, while the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet determined the forms through which creation could be understood by the human mind. The book elicited learned commentaries, from Saadia to the nineteenth century.

About 840 a Babylonian rabbi brought these mystic doctrines to the Jews of Italy, whence they spread to Germany, Provence, and Spain. Ibn Gabirol was probably influenced by them in his theory of the intermediate beings between God and the world. Abraham ben David of Posquières used the “secret tradition” as a means of drawing Jews away from the rationalism of Maimonides. His son Isaac the Blind and his pupil Azriel were probably the authors (c. 1190) of the Sefer-ha-Bahir, or Book of Light, a mystical commentary on the first chapter of Genesis; here the demiurgic emanations of the Sefer Yezira were changed into Light, Wisdom, and Reason; and this triplication of the Logos was offered as a Jewish Trinity.⁸² Eleazar of Worms (1176-1238) and Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia (1240-91) offered the Secret Doctrine as a more profound and rewarding study than the Talmud. Like Islamic and German mystics, they applied the sensuous language of love and marriage to the relation between the soul and God.

By the thirteenth century the word qabala, tradition, had come into general use to describe the Secret Doctrine in all its phases and products. About 1295 Moses ben Shem Tob of Leon published the third Cabalistic classic, the Sefer ha-Zohar, or Book of Splendor. He ascribed its composition to Simon ben Yohai, a tanna of the second century; Simon, said Moses, had been inspired by the angels and the ten sefiroth to reveal to his esoteric readers secrets formerly reserved for the days of the coming Messiah. All the elements of the Cabala were brought together in the Zohar: the all-inclusiveness of a God knowable only through love, the Tetragrammaton, the creative demiurges and emanations, the Platonic analogy of macrocosm and microcosm, the date and mode of the Messiah’s coming, the pre-existence and transmigration of the soul, the mystical meaning of ritual acts, numbers, letters, points, and strokes, the use of ciphers, acrostics, and the backward reading of words, the symbolical interpretation of Biblical texts, and the conception of woman as sin and yet as also the embodiment of the mystery of creation. Moses of Leon marred his performance by making Simon ben Yohai refer to an eclipse of 1264 in Rome, and use several ideas apparently unknown before the thirteenth century. He deceived many, but not his wife; she confessed that her Moses thought Simon an excellent financial device.⁸³ The success of the book inspired similiar forgeries, and some later Cabalists paid Moses in his own counterfeit by publishing their speculations under his name.

The influence of the Cabala was far-reaching. For a time the Zohar rivaled the Talmud as the favorite study of the Jews; some Cabalists attacked the Talmud as antiquated, literalistic logic-chopping; and some Talmudists, including the learned Nachmanides, were strongly influenced by the Cabalistic school. Belief in the authenticity and divine inspiration of the Cabala was widespread among European Jews.⁸⁴ Their work in science and philosophy suffered correspondingly, and the Golden Age of Maimonides ended in the brilliant nonsense of the Zohar. Even upon Christian thinkers the Cabala exercised some fascination. Raymond Lully (1235?—1315) adapted from it the number and letter mysticism of his Ars magna; Pico della Mirandola (1463-94) thought that he had found in the Cabala final proofs for the divinity of Christ.⁸⁵ Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Robert Fludd, Henry More, and other Christian mystics fed on its speculations; Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522) confessed to poaching upon the Cabala for his theology; and perhaps Cabalistic ideas infected Jakob Böhme (1575-1624). If a greater proportion of Jews than of Moslems or Christians sought consolation in mystic revelations, it was because this world turned its worst face to them, and forced them, for life’s sake, to cloak reality in a web of imagination and desire. It is the unfortunate who must believe that God has chosen them for His own.

VIII. RELEASE

From mystic exaltation, Messianic disillusionment, periodic persecution, and the hard routine of economic life, the medieval Jews found refuge in the obscurity of their congregations and the consolations of their ritual and creed. They celebrated with piety the festivals that recalled their history, their tribulations, and their ancient glory, and patiently adjusted to their urban existence the ceremonies that once had divided the agricultural year. The vanishing Qaraites kept the Sabbath in darkness and cold, lest they violate the Law by kindling fires or lighting lamps; but most Jews, while the rabbis winked, brought in Christian friends or servitors to keep the fires burning and tend the lights. Every chance for a banquet was seized with generosity and pomp: the family gave a feast on the circumcision or confirmation of a son, the betrothal or marriage of a son or daughter, the visit of a noted scholar or relative, the occurrence of some religious festival. Sumptuary regulations of the rabbis forbade the providers of such banquets to invite more than twenty men, ten women, five girls, and all relatives up to the third generation. A wedding feast sometimes lasted a week, and not even the Sabbath was allowed to interrupt it. The bridal pair were crowned with roses, myrtle, and olive branches; their path was strewn with nuts and wheat; barley grains were thrown over them as a hint to fertility; songs and quips accompanied every stage of the event; and in later medieval days a professional jester was engaged to ensure full merriment. Sometimes his jests were mercilessly truthful; but almost always he accepted Hillel’s genial decree, that “every bride is beautiful.”⁸⁶

So the passing generation celebrated its own replacement, rejoiced in its children’s children, and subsided into a harassed but kindly old age. We see the faces of such old Jews in Rembrandt’s portraits: features bearing the history of the people and the individual, beards breathing wisdom, eyes haunted with sad memories but softened with indulgent love. Nothing in Moslem or Christian morals could surpass the mutual affection of young and old in Judaism, the love that overlooks all faults, the quiet guidance of immaturity by experience, and the dignity with which the life fully lived accepts the naturalness of death.

When he made his will the Jew left not only worldly goods to his offspring, but spiritual counsel. “Be one of the first in synagogue,” reads the will of Eleazar of Mainz (c. 1337); “do not speak during prayers; repeat the responses; and after the service do acts of kindness.” And then the final instruction:

Wash me clean, comb my hair, trim my nails, as I was wont to do in my lifetime, so that I may go clean to my eternal resting place, just as I used to go on every Sabbath to the synagogue. Put me in the ground at the right hand of my father; if the space be a little narrow, I am sure that he loves me well enough to make room for me by his side.⁸⁷

When the last breath was drawn, the eyes and mouth of the dead were closed by the eldest son or the most distinguished son or relative; the body was bathed and anointed with aromatic unguents, and wrapped in spotless linen. Almost everyone belonged to a burial society, which now took the corpse, watched over it, gave it the last religious rites, and accompanied it to the grave. In the funeral the pallbearers walked with bare feet; the women preceded the bier, chanted a dirge, and beat a drum. Any stranger who encountered the procession was expected to fall in with it and accompany it to the grave. Usually the coffin was placed near those of dead relatives; to be buried was for a man “to lie with his fathers,” “to be gathered unto his people.” The mourners did not despair. They knew that though the individual might die, Israel would carry on.

BOOK IV

THE DARK AGES

566–1095

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR BOOK IV

486–751:

Merovingian dynasty in Gaul

490–543:

St. Benedict

520–60:

Growth of Irish academies

521–98:

St. Columba

543–615:

St. Columban

568–774:

Lombard kingdom in Italy

568f:

Founding of Venice

582–602:

Maurice Eastern emperor

590–604:

Pope Gregory I the Great

590–616:

Ethelbert King of Kent

597:

Augustine converts England

600–1100:

fl. Gregorian chant

602–10:

Usurpation of Phocas

610–41:

Heraclius Eastern emperor

625–90:

Paul of Ægina, physician

629–38:

Dagobert King of the Franks

640:

Slavs enter the Balkans

c. 650:

Beowulf; Cædmon, poet

651:

Hôtel-Dieu founded at Paris

673–735:

Venerable Bede, historian

680–754:

Boniface, apostle to Germany

687–714:

Pepin the Younger rules Franks

697

First doge in Venice

713–16:

Anastasius II Eastern emp.

717–41:

Leo III the Isaurian, Eastern emp.

726f:

Iconoclastic movement in Byzantium

735:

The School of York

735–804:

Alcuin, educator

751–68:

Pepin the Short rules Franks

751–987:

Carolingian dynasty of Frank kings

756:

Donation of Pepin establishes temporal power of popes

768–814:

Charlemagne King of the Franks

772–804:

Charlemagne wars against Saxons

774:

Charlemagne annexes Lombard crown

774–1200:

Romanesque architecture

776–856:

Rabanus Maurus, educator

778:

Charlemagne in Spain; Roland at Roncesvalles

780–90:

Irene regent at Constantinople

787:

Danes begin to raid England

795:

Danes begin to raid Ireland

797–802:

Irene Eastern “emperor”

800:

Pope Leo III crowns Charlemagne emperor of Roman Empire

802:

fl. Bulgaria under Khan Krum

813–20:

Leo V the Armenian Eastern emp.

814–40:

Louis I the Pious King of the Franks

815–77:

John Scotus Erigena, phil’r

c. 820:

The Variagi enter Russia

829:

Egbert founds Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy & becomes first King of England

829–42:

Theophilus I Eastern emperor

841–924:

Norse raids in France

843:

Partition of Verdun; Ludwig becomes first King of Germany

845–82:

Hincmar Bishop of Reims

848f:

Medical School of Salerno

c. 850:

The Book of Kells; Leo of Salonika, math’n

852–88:

Boris Bulgarian khan & saint

857–91:

Photius patriarch at C’ple

858–67:

Pope Nicholas I

859:

Rurik Grand Prince of Russia

860–933:

Harald Haarfager first King of Norway

862:

The Variagi at Novgorod

863:

Mission of Cyril and Methodius to Moravians

867–86:

Basil I founds Macedonian dynasty

871–901:

Alfred the Great

872:

Norsemen colonize Iceland

875–7:

Charles the Bald, Western emp.

886:

Norse besiege Paris

886–912:

Leo VI the Wise, Eastern emp.

887f:

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

888:

Odo King of France

893–927:

Simeon Bulgar emperor

899–943:

Magyars ravage Europe

905:

Sancho I founds Kingdom of Navarre

910:

Abbey of Cluny founded

911:

Conrad I King of Germany; Rollo Duke of Normandy

912–50:

Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus

c. 917:

The Greek Anthology

919–36:

Henry I the Fowler King of Germany

925–88:

St. Dunstan

928–35:

Venceslas I King of Bohemia

930:

Icelandic Althing est’d

934–60:

Haakon the Good King of Norway

936–73:

Otto I King of Germany

950:

Zenith of medieval Irish literature

955:

Otto defeats Magyars on the Lechfeld

961:

Convent of St. Lavra on Mt. Athos

962:

Otto I Western Roman emperor

963:

Otto deposes Pope John XII

963–9:

Nicephorus Phocas Eastern emp.

965–95:

Haakon the “Great Earl” King of Norway

968:

Hroswitha, dramatist

973—83:

Otto II of Germany

975–1035:

Sancho the Great King of Navarre

976:

Suidas’ Lexicon

976–1014:

Brian Borumha King of Munster

976–1026:

Basil II Eastern emperor

976–1071:

St. Mark’s at Venice

980–1015:

Vladimir I Prince of Kiev

983–1002:

Otto III of Germany

987–96:

Hugh Capet founds Capetian dynasty of French kings

989:

Russia converted to Christianity

992–1025:

Boleslav I first King of Poland

994f:

Cluny monastic reform

997–1038:

St. Stephen King of Hungary

999–1003:

Pope Sylvester II (Gerbert)

1000:

Leif Ericsson in “Vinland”

1002–24:

Henry II of Germany

1007–28:

Fulbert Bishop of Chartres

1009–1200:

German Romanesque

1013:

Sweyn of Denmark conquers England

1014:

Brian Borumha defeats Norse at Clontarf

1015–30:

St. Olaf King of Norway

1016–35:

Cnut King of England

1018–80:

Michael Psellus, historian

1022–87:

Constantine the African, translator

1024–39:

Conrad II of Germany

1028–50:

Zoë and Theodora rule Eastern Empire

1033–1109:

St. Anselm

1034–40:

Duncan I King of Scotland

1035–47:

Magnus the Good King of Norway

1039–56:

Henry III of Germany

1040–52:

Macbeth usurper King of Scotland

1040–99:

Rodrigo Diaz el Cid

1043–66:

Edward the Confessor King of England

1046–71:

Church of St. Ambrose at Milan

1048f:

Abbey of Jumièges

1049–54:

Pope Leo IX

1052:

d. of Earl Godwin, statesman

1054:

Schism of Greek from Roman Church

1055–6:

Theodora Eastern empress

1056–1106:

Henry IV of Germany

1057–9:

Isaac Comnenus Eastern emp.

1057–72:

Peter Damian Bishop of Ostia

1058:

Malcolm III of Scotland deposes Macbeth

1059–61:

Pope Nicholas II; College of Cardinals established

1060:

Robert Guiscard Duke of Apulia

1061–91:

Norman Conquest of Sicily

1063:

Prince Harold conquers Wales

1063f:

Cathedral of Pisa

1066:

Harold King of England; Battle of Hastings; Norman Conquest of England

1073–85:

Pope Gregory VII Hildebrand

1075:

Decree against lay investiture; excommunication of Henry IV

1077:

Henry IV at Canossa

1081–1118:

Alexius I Eastern emp.

1085:

Sack of Rome by Robert Guiscard

CHAPTER XVIII

The Byzantine World

565–1095

I. HERACLIUS

IF now we turn from the Oriental side of the endless duel between East and West, we are soon moved with sympathy for a great empire harassed at once with internal discord and, on every side, external attack. Avars and Slavs were crossing the Danube and taking possession of imperial lands and towns; Persians were preparing to overrun Western Asia; Spain was lost to the Visigoths; and the Lombards, three years after Justinian’s death, conquered half of Italy (568). Plague swept the Empire in 542 and again in 566; famine in 569; poverty, barbarism, and war broke down communications, discouraged commerce, stifled literature and art.

Justinian’s successors were men of ability, but only a century of Napoleons could have coped with their problems. Justin II (565—78) fought vigorously against an expanding Persia. Tiberius II (578—82), favored by the gods with almost every virtue, was taken by them after a brief and just reign. Maurice (582-602) attacked the invading Avars with courage and skill, but received little support from the nation; thousands entered monasteries to escape military service; and when Maurice forbade the monasteries to receive new members until the danger was over, the monks clamored for his fall.¹ The centurion Phocas led a revolution of the army and the populace against the aristocracy and the government (602); the five sons of Maurice were butchered before his eyes; the old Emperor refused to let the nurse of his youngest child save it by substituting for it her own; he himself was beheaded; the six heads were hung up as a spectacle for the people, and the bodies were cast into the sea. The Empress Constantina and her three daughters, and many of the aristocracy, were slain, usually with torture, with or without trial; eyes were pierced, tongues were torn out, limbs were amputated;² once more the scenes of the French Revolution were rehearsed.

Khosru II took advantage of the disorder, and renewed the old war of Persia against Greece. Phocas made peace with the Arabs, and transported the entire Byzantine army into Asia; he was everywhere defeated by the Persians, while the Avars, unresisted, seized nearly all the agricultural hinterland of Constantinople. The aristocracy of the capital appealed to Heraclius, the Greek governor of Africa, to come to the rescue of the Empire and their property. He excused himself on the ground of age, but sent them his son. The younger Heraclius fitted out a fleet, sailed into the Bosporus, overthrew Phocas, exhibited the mutilated corpse of the usurper to the populace, and was hailed as emperor (610).

Heraclius deserved his title and his name. With almost the energy of Heracles he set himself to reorganize the shattered state. He spent ten years in rebuilding the morale of the people, the strength of the army, and the resources of the treasury. He gave land to peasants on condition that the eldest son in each family should render military service. Meanwhile the Persians captured Jerusalem (614), and advanced to Chalcedon (615); only the Byzantine navy, still controlling the waters, saved the capital and Europe. Soon afterward the Avar hordes marched up to the Golden Horn, raided the suburbs, and took thousands of Greeks into slavery. The loss of the hinterland and of Egypt cut off the city’s supply of grain, and compelled abolition of the dole (618). Heraclius, desperate, thought of transporting his army to Carthage and thence attempting to retake Egypt; the people and the clergy refused to let him go, and the Patriarch Sergius agreed to lend him the wealth of the Greek Church, at interest, to finance a holy war for the recapture of Jerusalem.³ Heraclius made peace with the Avars, and at last (622) set out against the Persians.

The campaigns that followed were masterpieces of conception and execution. For six years Heraclius carried the war to the enemy, and repeatedly defeated Khosru. In his absence a Persian army and a host of Avars, Bulgars, and Slavs laid siege to Constantinople (626); an army despatched by Heraclius defeated the Persians at Chalcedon, and the garrison and populace of the capital, roused by the Patriarch, scattered the barbarian horde. Heraclius marched to the gates of Ctesiphon; Khosru II fell; Persia pled for peace, and surrendered all that Khosru had taken from the Greek Empire. After seven years’ absence, Heraclius returned in triumph to Constantinople.

He hardly deserved the fate that shamed his old age. Weakened by disease, he was devoting his last energies to strengthening the civil administration when suddenly wild Arab tribes poured into Syria (634), defeated an exhausted Greek army, and captured Jerusalem (638); and even as the Emperor lay on his deathbed Egypt fell (641). Persia and Byzantium had fought each other to a common ruin. Under Constans II (642—68) the Arab victories continued; thinking the Empire beyond saving, Constans spent his last years in the West, and was killed in Syracuse. His son Constantine IV Pogonatus was abler or luckier. When through five crucial years (673—8) the Moslems made another effort to take Constantinople, “Greek fire,” now mentioned for the first time, saved Europe. The new weapon, allegedly invented by Callinicus of Syria, was akin to our flame throwers, an incendiary mixture of naphtha, quicklime, sulphur, and pitch; it was thrown against enemy ships or troops on flaming arrows, or blown against them through tubes, or shot on iron balls bearing flax and tow soaked in oil; or it was loaded and fired on small boats which were set adrift against the foe. The composition of the mixture was a secret successfully guarded for two centuries by the Byzantine government; to reveal any knowledge of it was treason and sacrilege. The Saracens finally discovered the formula, and used “Saracen fire” against the Crusaders. Until the invention of gunpowder it was the most talked-of weapon in the medieval world.

The Moslems made another assault upon the Greek capital in 717. An army of 80,000 Arabs and Persians under Moslema crossed the Hellespont at Abydos, and besieged Constantinople from the rear. At the same time the Arabs fitted out a fleet of 1800 vessels, presumably small; this armada entered the Bosporus, overshadowing the straits, said a chronicler, like a moving forest. It was the good fortune of the Greeks that in this crisis an able general, Leo “the Isaurian,” replaced the incompetent Theodosius III on the throne, and assumed the organization of defense. He disposed the small Byzantine navy with tactical skill, and saw to it that every ship was well supplied with Greek fire. In a little while the Arab vessels were aflame, and nearly every ship in the great fleet was destroyed. The Greek army made a sortie upon the besiegers, and won so decisive a victory that Moslema withdrew to Syria.

II. THE ICONOCLASTS: 717—802

Leo III derived his cognomen from the district of Isauria in Cilicia; according to Theophanes he was born there of Armenian parentage. His father moved thence to Thrace, raised sheep, and sent 500 of them, with his son Leo in the bargain, as a present to the Emperor Justinian II. Leo became a guardsman of the palace, then commander of the Anatolian legions, finally, by the convincing suffrage of the army, emperor. He was a man of ambition, strong will, and patient perseverance; a general who repeatedly defeated Moslem forces greatly superior to his own; a statesman who gave the Empire the stability of just laws justly enforced, reformed taxation, reduced serfdom, extended peasant proprietorship, distributed lands, repopulated deserted regions, and constructively revised the laws. His only fault was autocracy.

Perhaps in his Asiatic youth he had imbibed from Moslems, Jews, Manicheans, Monophysites, and Paulicians a Stoic-Puritan conception of religion that condemned the addiction of popular Christianity to image worship, ceremonialism, and superstition. The Old Testament (Deut. iv, 15) had explicitly forbidden any “graven image of any figure, male or female, the likeness of any beast that is on the earth.” The early Church had frowned upon images as relics of paganism, and had looked with horror upon pagan sculptures purporting to represent the gods. But the triumph of Christianity under Constantine, and the influence of Greek surroundings, traditions, and statuary in Constantinople and the Hellenistic East, had softened this opposition. As the number of worshiped saints multiplied, a need arose for identifying and remembering them; pictures of them and of Mary were produced in great number; and in the case of Christ not only His imagined form but His cross became objects of reverence—even, for simple minds, magic talismans. A natural freedom of fancy among the people turned the holy relics, pictures, and statues into objects of adoration; people prostrated themselves before them, kissed them, burned candles and incense before them, crowned them with flowers, and sought miracles from their occult influence. In Greek Christianity especially, sacred images were every where—in churches, monasteries, houses and shops, even on furniture, trinkets, and clothes. Cities in danger from epidemic, famine, or war tended to rely upon the power of the relics they harbored, or on their patron saint, rather than on human enterprise. Fathers and councils of the Church repeatedly explained that the images were not deities, but only reminders thereof;⁴ the people did not care to make such distinctions.

Leo III was offended by these excesses of popular faith; it seemed to him that paganism was in this manner reconquering Christianity; and he felt keenly the satire directed by Moslems, Jews, and Christian sects against the superstitions of the orthodox multitude. To weaken the power of the monks over the people and the government, and win the support of Nestorians and Monophysites, he assembled a great council of bishops and senators, and with their consent he promulgated in 726 an edict requiring the complete removal of icons from the churches; representations of Christ and the Virgin were forbidden; and church murals were to be covered with plaster. Some of the higher clergy supported the edict; the lower clergy and the monks protested, the people revolted. Soldiers trying to enforce the law were attacked by worshipers horrified and infuriated by this desecration of the dearest symbols of their faith. In Greece and the Cyclades rebel forces proclaimed a rival emperor, and sent a fleet to capture the capital. Leo destroyed the fleet, and imprisoned the leaders of the opposition. In Italy, where pagan forms of worship had never died, the people were almost unanimous against the edict; Venice, Ravenna, and Rome drove out the Imperial officers; and a council of Western bishops summoned by Pope Gregory II anathematized the Iconoclasts—image breakers—without naming the Emperor. The patriarch of Constantinople joined the revolt, and sought by it to restore the independence of the Eastern Church from the state. Leo deposed him (730), but did him no violence; and the edict was so mildly enforced that when Leo died (741), most of the churches retained their frescoes and mosaics unharmed.

His son Constantine V (741-75) continued his policy, and received from hostile historians the genial epithet of Copronymus—“named from dung.” A council of Eastern bishops, called by him at Constantinople (754), condemned image worship as “abominable,” charged that through such worship “Satan had re-introduced idolatry,” denounced “the ignorant artist who with his unclean hands gives form to that which should be believed only by the heart,”⁵ and decreed that all images in the churches should be erased or destroyed. Constantine executed the decree without moderation or tact; imprisoned and tortured resisting monks; again eyes or tongues were torn out, noses were cut off; the patriarch was tortured and beheaded (767). Like Henry VIII, Constantine V closed monasteries and convents, confiscated their property, turned the buildings to secular uses, and bestowed monastic lands upon his favorites. At Ephesus the imperial governor, with the approval of the Emperor, assembled the monks and nuns of the province, and forced them to marry one another as an alternative to death.⁶ The persecution continued for five years (765-71).

Constantine exacted from his son Leo IV (775-80) an oath to continue the Iconoclastic policy; Leo did what he could despite his weak constitution. Dying, he named his ten-year-old son Constantine VI as emperor (780-97), and nominated his widow, the Empress Irene, as regent during the youth’s minority. She ruled with ability and without scruple. Sympathizing with the religious feelings of the people and her sex, she quietly ended the enforcement of the Iconoclast edicts; permitted the monks to return to their monasteries and their pulpits, and convened the prelates of Christendom in the Second Council of Nicaea (787), where 350 bishops, under the lead of papal legates, restored the veneration—not the worship—of sacred images as a legitimate expression of Christian piety and faith.

In 790 Constantine VI came of age. Finding his mother reluctant to surrender her power, he deposed and exiled her. Soon the amiable youth relented; he brought her back to court, and associated her with him in the imperial power (792). In 797 she had him imprisoned and blinded, and thereafter reigned under the title of emperor—not basilissa but basileus. For five years she administered the Empire with wisdom and finesse: lowered taxes, scattered largess among the poor, founded charitable institutions, and beautified the capital. The people applauded and loved her, but the army fretted at being ruled by a woman more capable than most men. In 802 the Iconoclasts revolted, deposed her, and made her treasurer Nicephorus emperor. She yielded quietly, and asked of him only a decent and safe retreat; he promised it, but banished her to Lesbos, and left her to earn a scanty living as a seamstress. Nine months later she died, with hardly a penny or a friend. The theologians forgave her crimes because of her piety, and the Church canonized her as a saint.

III. IMPERIAL KALEIDOSCOPE: 802—1057

A full perspective of Byzantine civilization would require at this point a record of many emperors and some empresses—not of their intrigues, palace revolutions, and assassinations, but of their policy and legislation, and their age-long effort to protect the diminishing Empire from Moslems on the south and Slavs and Bulgars on the north. In some respects it is an heroic picture: through all the fluent shifts of appearing and disappearing figures the Greek heritage was in good measure preserved; economic order and continuity were maintained; civilization continued, as if by some enduring impetus from the ancient labors of Pericles and Augustus, Diocletian and Constantine. In other aspects it is a sorry spectacle of generals climbing over slain rivals to imperial power, to be slain in their turn; of pomp and luxury, eye-gouging and nose-cutting, incense and piety and treachery; of emperor and patriarch unscrupulously struggling to determine whether the empire should be ruled by might or myth, by sword or word. So we pass by Nicephorus I (802-11) and his wars with Harun al-Rashid; Michael I (811-13), dethroned and tonsured into monkhood because of his defeat by the Bulgars; Leo V the Armenian (813-20), who again forbade the worship of images, and was assassinated while singing an anthem in church; Michael II (820-9) the illiterate “Stammerer,” who fell in love with a nun, and persuaded the Senate to entreat him to marry her;⁷ Theophilus (829—42), a legislative reformer, royal builder, and conscientious administrator, who revived the Iconoclastic persecution, and died of dysentery; his widow Theodora, who as an able regent (842-56) ended the persecution; Michael III “the Drunkard” (842-67), whose amiable incompetence left the government first to his mother and, after her death, to his cultured and capable uncle Caesar Bardas. Then suddenly a unique and unexpected figure appeared on the scene, overthrew every precedent except violence, and founded the powerful Macedonian dynasty.

Basil the Macedonian was born (812?) near Hadrianople of an Armenian peasant family. As a child he was captured by Bulgars, and lived his youth among them beyond the Danube, in what was then called Macedonia. Escaping in his twenty-fifth year, he made his way to Constantinople, and was hired as groom by a diplomat who admired his physical strength and massive head. He accompanied his master on a mission to Greece, and there attracted the attention, and some of the wealth, of the widow Danielis. Back in the capital, he tamed a spirited horse for Michael III, was taken into the Emperor’s service, and, though quite illiterate, rose to the position of lord chamberlain. Basil was ever convenient and competent; when Michael sought a husband for his mistress, Basil divorced his peasant wife, sent her to Thrace with a comforting dowry, and married Eudocia, who continued her services to the Emperor.⁸ Michael supplied Basil with a mistress, but the Macedonian thought he deserved the throne as reward. He persuaded Michael that Bardas was plotting to depose him, and then killed Bardas with his own enormous hands (866). Long accustomed to reign without ruling, Michael made Basil coemperor and left him all the tasks of government. When Michael threatened to dismiss him, Basil arranged and supervised his assassination, and became sole emperor (867): so, even under hereditary monarchy, career was open to talent. With such servility and crime the letterless son of a peasant established the longest of all Byzantine dynasties, and began a nineteen-year reign of excellent administration, legislating wisely, judging justly, replenishing the treasury, and building new churches and palaces for the city that he had captured. No one dared oppose him; and when he died by a hunting accident the throne passed with unwonted quiet to his son.

Leo VI (886-912) was the complement of his father: learned, bookish, sedentary, mild; gossip concluded that he was Michael’s, not Basil’s, son, and perhaps Eudocia was not sure. He earned his cognomen of “the Wise” not by his poetry, nor by his treatises on theology, administration, and war, but by his reorganization of provincial and ecclesiastical government, his new formulations of Byzantine law, and his meticulous regulation of industry. Though an admiring pupil of the scholarly patriarch Photius, and himself devoted to piety, he shocked the clergy, and amused the people, by four marriages. His first two wives died without bearing him a son; Leo insisted on a son as the only alternative to a war of succession; the moral theology of the Church forbade a third marriage; Leo persisted, and his fourth wife, Zoë, crowned his resolution with a boy.

Constantine VII (912—58) was called Porphyrogenitus—“born in the purple”—i.e., in the porphyry-lined apartment reserved for the use of expecting empresses. He inherited his father’s literary tastes, not his administrative capacity. He composed for his son two books on the art of government: one on the “themes” or provinces of the Empire, and a Book of Ceremonies describing the ritual and etiquette required of the emperor. He supervised the compilation of works on agriculture, medicine, veterinary medicine, and zoology, and formed an “historians’ history of the world” by selecting extracts from historians and chroniclers. Under his patronage Byzantine literature flourished in its polished and anemic way.

Perhaps Romanus II (958-63) was like other children, and did not read his father’s books. He married a Greek girl, Theophano; she was suspected of poisoning her father-in-law and hastening Romanus’ death; and before her twenty-four-year-old husband was dead she seduced into her arms the ascetic general Nicephorus II Phocas, who with her connivance seized the throne. Nicephorus had already driven the Moslems from Aleppo and Crete (961); in 965 he drove them from Cyprus, in 968 from Antioch; it was these victories that shattered the Abbasid caliphate. Nicephorus pled with the patriarch to promise all the rewards and honors of martyrdom to soldiers who should fall in battle against the Moslems; the patriarch refused on the ground that all soldiers were temporarily polluted by the blood that they shed; had he consented, the Crusades might have begun a century earlier. Nicephorus lost ambition, and retired into the palace to live like an anchorite. Bored with this monastic existence, Theophano became the mistress of the general John Tzimisces. With her connivance he killed Nicephorus (969) and seized the throne; remorseful, he repudiated and exiled her, and went off to atone for his crimes by transient victories against the Moslems and the Slavs.

His successor was one of the most powerful personalities in Byzantine history. Basil II, born to Romanus and Theophano (958), had served as co-emperor with Nicephorus Phocas and Tzimisces; now (976) he began at the age of eighteen an undivided rule that lasted half a century. Troubles encompassed him: his chief minister plotted to displace him; the feudal barons, whom he proposed to tax, financed conspiracies against him; Bardas Sclerus, general of the eastern army, rebelled, and was suppressed by Bardas Phocas, who then had himself proclaimed emperor by his troops; the Moslems were recovering nearly all that Tzimisces had won from them in Syria; the Bulgars were at their zenith, encroaching upon the Empire in east and west. Basil suppressed the revolt, reclaimed Armenia from the Saracens, and in a ruthless thirty years’ war destroyed the Bulgarian power. After his victory in 1014 he blinded 15,000 prisoners, leaving one eye in every hundredth man to lead the tragic host back to Samuel, the Bulgarian tsar; perhaps in terror rather than in admiration the Greeks called him Bulgaroctonus, Killer of Bulgars. Amid these campaigns he found time to war against “those who enriched themselves at the expense of the poor.” By his laws of 996 he sought to break up some of the large estates, and to encourage the spread of a free peasantry. He was about to lead an armada against the Saracens in Sicily when death surprised him in his sixty-eighth year. Not since Heraclius had the Empire been so extensive, nor since Justinian so strong.

The Byzantine decline was resumed under his aged brother Constantine VIII (1025—8). Having no offspring but three daughters, Constantine persuaded Romanus Argyrus to marry the eldest, Zoë, who was nearing fifty. As regent, and with the help of her sister Theodora, Zoë governed the state through the reigns of Romanus III (1028-34), Michael IV (1034-42), Michael V (1042), and Constantine IX (1042—55); and seldom had the Empire been better ruled. The imperial sisters attacked corruption in state and Church, and forced officials to disgorge their embezzled hoards; one who had been chief minister surrendered 5300 pounds of gold ($2,226,000) which he had secreted in a cistern; and when the Patriarch Alexis died, a cache of 100,000 pounds of silver ($27,000,000) was discovered in his rooms.⁹ For a brief interlude the sale of offices was stopped. Zoë and Theodora sat as judges on the highest tribunal, and dispensed stern justice. Nothing could rival Zoë’s impartiality. Having at sixty-two married Constantine IX, and knowing that her cosmetic skill had preserved barely the surface of her charms, she allowed her new husband to bring his mistress Sclerena to live in the royal palace; he chose quarters between their apartments, and Zoë never visited him without making sure that he was disengaged.¹⁰ When Zoë died (1050), Theodora retired to a convent, and Constantine IX ruled for five years with wisdom and taste; he chose men of competence and culture for his aides, rebeautified St. Sophia, built hospitals and refuges for the poor, and supported literature and art. At his death (1055) the supporters of the Macedonian dynasty led a popular revolt that brought the virgin Theodora out of her conventual retreat, and, much against her will, crowned her empress. Despite her seventy-four years she and her ministers governed efficiently; but in 1056 she died so suddenly that chaos ensued. The palace aristocracy named Michael VI emperor; the army preferred the general Isaac Comnenus. One battle decided the issue; Michael became a monk, and Comnenus entered the capital in 1057 as emperor. The Macedonian dynasty had come to an end after 190 years of violence, war, adultery, piety, and excellent administration.

Isaac Comnenus resigned after two years, named Constantine Ducas, the president of the Senate, as his successor, and entered a monastery. When Constantine died (1067) his widow Eudocia acted as regent for four years; but the demands of war required a sterner leader, and she married and crowned Romanus IV. Romanus was defeated by the Turks at Manzikert (1071), returned to Constantinople in disgrace, was deposed, imprisoned, and blinded, and was allowed to die of his untended wounds. When Alexius Comnenus I, nephew of Isaac Comnenus, came to the throne (1081), the Byzantine Empire seemed near its fall. The Turks had taken Jerusalem (1076), and were advancing through Asia Minor; the Patzinak and Cuman tribes were approaching Constantinople from the north; the Normans were attacking the Byzantine outposts in the Adriatic; the government and the army were crippled with treason, incompetence, corruption, and cowardice. Alexius met the situation with subtlety and courage. He sent agents to foment revolution in Norman Italy; gave Venice commercial privileges in return for the aid of its navy against the Normans; confiscated Church treasures to rebuild his army; took the field in person, and won victories by strategy rather than by blood. Amid these foreign cares he found time to reorganize the government and its defenses, and gave the tottering Empire another century of life. In 1095, in a far-reaching stroke of diplomacy, he appealed to the West to come to the aid of the Christian East; at the Council of Piacenza he offered a reunion of the Greek with the Latin Church in return for the unity of Europe against Islam. His appeal conspired with other factors to unleash the first of those dramatic Crusades that were to save, and then destroy, Byzantium.

IV. BYZANTINE LIFE: 566—1095

At the beginning of the eleventh century the Greek Empire, through the arms and statesmanship of the Isaurian and Macedonian dynasties, had reached again the power, wealth, and culture of its zenith under Justinian. Asia Minor, northern Syria, Cyprus, Rhodes, the Cyclades, and Crete had been wrested from the Moslems; southern Italy was once more Magna Grecia, ruled by Constantinople; the Balkans had been recaptured from Bulgars and Slavs; Byzantine industry and commerce again dominated the Mediterranean; Greek Christianity had triumphed in the Balkans and Russia; and Greek art and literature were enjoying a Macedonian renaissance. The revenue of the state in the eleventh century reached the present equivalent of $2,400,000,000.¹¹

Constantinople was at the crest of its curve, surpassing ancient Rome and Alexandria, contemporary Baghdad and Cordova, in trade, wealth, luxury, beauty, refinement, and art. Its population of nearly a million¹² was now predominantly Asiatic or Slav—Armenians, Cappadocians, Syrians, Jews, Bulgars, and half-Slav Greeks, with a colorful infusion of merchants and soldiers from Scandinavia, Russia, Italy, and Islam; and at the top a thinning layer of Greek aristocrats. A thousand varieties of homes—gabled, terraced, or domed—with balconies, loggias, gardens, or pergolas; full markets reeking with the products of all the world; a thousand narrow muddy streets of tenements and shops; splendid thoroughfares bordered with stately mansions and shady porticoes, peopled with statuary, spanned with arches of triumph, and leading out to the countryside through guarded gates in the fortress walls; complex royal palaces—the Triconchus of Theophilus, the New Palace of Basil I, the Bucoleon of Nicephorus Phocas, descending by marble stairs to a sculptured colonnaded wharf on the Sea of Marmora; churches “as many as there are days in the year” (said a traveler), and several of them architectural jewels; altars enshrining the most revered and precious relics in Christendom; monasteries unashamedly magnificent without, and turbulent with proud saints within; St. Sophia ever newly adorned, glowing with candles and lamps, heavy with incense, solemn with pageantry, sonorous with convincing chants: this was the frame, half gold and half mud, of teeming life in the Byzantine capital.

Within the city palaces of the aristocracy and the great merchants, and in the villas of seaside and hinterland, every luxury available to that age could be found, and decoration uninhibited by Semitic tabus: marbles of every grain and hue, murals and mosaics, sculptures and fine pottery, curtains sliding on silver rods, tapestries and carpets and silks, doors inlaid with silver or ivory, furniture exquisitely carved, table services of silver or gold. Here moved the world of Byzantine society: men and women of fine face and figure, dressed in colored silks and lace and furs, and rivaling the graces, amours, and intrigues of Bourbon Paris and Versailles. Never were ladies better powdered and scented, jeweled and coiffured; in the imperial palaces fires were kept burning all the year long to brew the perfumes required to deodorize queens and princesses.¹³ Never before had life been so ornate and ceremonious, so colorful with processions, receptions, spectacles and games, so minutely ordained by protocol and etiquette. At the Hippodrome as well as in the court the firmly established aristocracy flaunted its finest raiment and ornament; on the highways its stately equipages passed, so reckless as to earn the hatred of the pedestrian poor, and so rich as to bring down the anathemas of prelates who served God in vessels, and on altars, of marble, alabaster, silver, and gold. Constantinople, said Robert of Clari,¹⁴ contained “two thirds of the world’s wealth”; even the common “Greek inhabitants,” reported Benjamin of Tudela, “seem all to be the children of kings.”¹⁵

“If Constantinople,” said a twelfth—century writer, “surpasses all other cities in wealth, it also surpasses them in vice.”¹⁶ All the sins of a great city found room here, impartially in rich and poor. Brutality and piety took turns in the same imperial souls; and among the people intensity of religious need could be adjusted to the corruption or violence of politics and war. The castration of children to serve as eunuchs in harems and administration, the assassination or blinding of present or potential rivals for the throne, continued through divers dynasties and the monotonous kaleidoscope of changeless change. The populace, disordered and manipulated by divisions of race, class, or creed, was fickle, bloodthirsty, periodically turbulent; bribed by the state with doles of bread, oil, and wine; diverted by horse races, beast baitings, rope dancing, indecent pantomimes in the theater, and by imperial or ecclesiastical pageantry in the streets. Gambling halls and saloons were everywhere; houses of prostitution could be found on almost every street, sometimes “at the very church doors.”¹⁷ The women of Byzantium were famous for their licentiousness and their religious devotion, the men for their quick intelligence and unscrupulous ambition. All classes believed in magic, astrology, divination, sorcery, witchcraft, and miraculous amulets. The Roman virtues had disappeared even before the Latin tongue; Roman and Greek qualities had been overwhelmed by a flood of uprooted Orientals who had lost their own morality and had taken on no other except in words. Yet even in this highly theological and sensual society the great majority of men and women were decent citizens and parents, who settled down after youthful frolics to the joys and sorrows of family life, and grudgingly performed the work of the world. The same emperors who blinded their rivals poured out charity to hospitals, orphanages, homes for the aged, free hostels for travelers.¹⁸ And in that aristocracy where luxury and ease seemed the order of every day, there were hundreds of men who gave themselves, with a zeal tempered by venality, to the tasks of administration and statesmanship, and somehow managed, despite all overturns and intrigues, to save the realm from every disaster, and to maintain the most prosperous economy in the medieval Christian world.

The bureaucracy that Diocletian and Constantine had established had become in seven centuries an effective engine of administration, reaching every region of the realm. Heraclius had replaced the old division of the Empire into provinces by a division into “themes,” or military units ruled by a strategos or military governor; this was one of a hundred ways in which the Islamic threat modified Byzantine institutions. The themes retained considerable self-government, and prospered under this centralized rule; they received a continuity of order without bearing the direct force of the struggles and violence that disturbed the capital. Constantinople was ruled by the emperor, the patriach, and the mob; the themes were governed by Byzantine law. While Islam confused law with theology, and Western Europe floundered through the chaos of a dozen barbarian codes, the Byzantine world cherished and extended the legacy of Justinian. The “novels” or new laws of Justin II and Heraclius, the Ecloga, or selected laws, issued by Leo III, the Basilica, or royal edicts, promulgated by Leo VI, and the “novels” of the same Leo, adjusted the Pandects of Justinian to the changing needs of five centuries; codes of military, ecclesiastical, maritime, mercantile, and rural law gave order and dependability to legal judgments in army and clergy, in markets and ports, on the farm and the sea; and in the eleventh century the school of law at Constantinople was the intellectual center of secular Christendom. So the Byzantines preserved Rome’s greatest gift—Roman law-through a millennium of peril and change, until its revival at Bologna in the twelfth century revolutionized the civil law of Latin Europe and the canon law of the Roman Church. The Byzantine Maritime Code of Leo III, developed from the nautical regulations of ancient Rhodes, was the first body of commercial law in medieval Christendom; it became in the eleventh century the source of similar codes for the Italian republics of Trani and Amalfi; and by that lineage entered into the legal heritage of the modern world.

The Rural Code was a creditable attempt to check feudalism and establish a free peasantry. Small holdings were given to retired soldiers; larger tracts belonging to the state were cultivated by soldiers as a form of military service; and great areas were colonized by heretical sects transported from Asia into Thrace and Greece. Still vaster regions were settled, under governmental compulsion or protection, by barbarian groups who were judged less dangerous within the Empire than outside; so Goths were received into Thrace and Illyria, Lombards into Pannonia, Slavs into Thrace, Macedonia, and Greece; by the tenth century the Peloponnesus was predominantly Slav, and Slavs were numerous in Attica and Thessaly. State and Church co-operated to diminish slavery; imperial legislation forbade the sale of slaves, or the enslavement of a freeman, and automatically emancipated slaves who entered the army or the clergy, or married a free person. In Constantinople slavery was in effect limited to domestic service, but it flourished there.

Nevertheless it is almost a Newtonian law of history that large agricultural holdings, in proportion to their mass and nearness, attract smaller holdings, and, by purchase or otherwise, periodically gather the land into great estates; in time the concentration becomes explosive, the soil is redivided by taxation or revolution, and concentration is resumed. By the tenth century most of the soil of the Byzantine East was owned in extensive domains by rich landlords (dynatoi, “powerful men”), or by churches, monasteries, or hospitals endowed with supporting terrain by pious legacy. Such tracts were worked by serfs, or by coloni legally free but economically chained. The owners, equipped with retinues of clients, guards, and domestic slaves, led lives of refined luxury in their villas or their city palaces. We see the good and bad of these great lords in the story of Basil I’s benefactress, the lady Danielis. When she visited him in Constantinople 300 slaves took turns supporting the litter, or covered couch, in which she traveled from Patras. She brought to her imperial protégé richer presents than any sovereign had ever sent to a Byzantine emperor; 400 youths, 100 eunuchs, and 100 maidens were but a part of her gift; there were also 400 pieces of art-woven textiles, 100 pieces of cambric (each so fine that it could be enclosed in the joint of a reed), and a dinner service in silver and gold. During her lifetime she gave away much of her wealth; at her death she willed the rest to Basil’s son. Leo VI found himself suddenly dowered with eighty villas and farms, masses of coin and jewelry and plate, costly furniture, rich stuffs, numberless cattle, thousands of slaves.¹⁹

Such Greek gifts were not altogether pleasing to the emperors. The wealth so gleaned from the flesh and sweat of millions of men gave the owners a power collectively dangerous to any sovereign. Out of self-interest as well as humanity, the emperors sought to halt this process of concentration. The severe winter of 927-8 ended in famine and plague; starving peasants sold their holdings to great landowners at desperately low prices, or merely in exchange for subsistence. In 934 the regent Romanus issued a “novel” that denounced the landlords as having “shown themselves more merciless than famine and plague”; it required the restoration of properties bought for less than half a “fair price”; and permitted any seller, within three years, to repurchase the land he had sold, and at the price he had received. The edict had only a negligible effect; concentration continued; moreover, many free farmers, complaining of high taxes, sold their lands and moved to the towns—if possible, to Constantinople and the dole. Basil II renewed the struggle of emperors against nobles. His decree of 996 permitted the seller at any time to redeem his land at the price of its sale; voided titles to lands acquired in contravention of the law of 934, and demanded the immediate return of such lands to their former owners, without cost. These laws were in large measure evaded, and a modified feudalism was sporadically established by the eleventh century in the Byzantine East. But the effort of the emperors was not lost; the surviving free peasantry, under the stimulus of ownership, covered the land with farms, orchards, vineyards, beehives, and ranches; the large proprietors developed scientific agriculture to its medieval zenith; and from the eighth to the eleventh century Byzantine agriculture kept pace with the prosperity of Byzantine industry.

The Eastern Empire in this period acquired an urban and semi-industrial character quite different from the ruralism of Latin Europe north of the Alps. Miners and metallurgists actively explored and developed the lead, iron, copper, and gold in the soil. Not only Constantinople but a hundred other Byzantine cities—Smyrna, Tarsus, Ephesus, Durazzo, Ragusa, Patras, Corinth, Thebes, Salonika, Hadrianople, Heraclea, Selymbria—throbbed and resounded with tanners, cobblers, saddlers, armorers, goldsmiths, jewelers, metalworkers, carpenters, wood carvers, wheelwrights, bakers, dyers, weavers, potters, mosaicists, painters…. As caldrons and caverns of manufacturing and exchange, Constantinople, Baghdad, and Cordova in the ninth century almost rivaled the bustle and bedlam of a modern metropolis. Despite Persian competition the Greek capital still led the white world in the production of fine tissues and silks; only second to it in this regard were Argos, Corinth, and Thebes. The textile industry was highly organized, and used much slave labor; most other workers were free artisans. The proletarian population of Constantinople and Salonika were class-conscious, and staged many unsuccessful revolts. Their employers formed a considerable middle class, acquisitive, charitable, industrious, intelligent, and fiercely conservative. The major industries, including their workers, artists, managers, merchants, lawyers, and financiers, were organized into systemata, or corporation guilds, lineally descended from the ancient collegia and artes, and akin to the large economic units of a modern “corporative” state. Each corporation had a monopoly in its line, but was strictly regulated by legislation in its purchases, prices, methods of manufacture, and conditions of sale; governmental examiners kept surveillance over operations and accounts; and at times maximum wages were fixed by law. Minor industries, however, were left to free workers and individual enterprise. The arrangement gave order, prosperity, and continuity to Byzantine industry, but it checked initiative and invention, and tended to an Oriental fixity of status and life.²⁰

Commerce was encouraged by state maintenance or supervision of docks and ports, governmentally regulated insurance and loans on bottomry, a vigorous war on piracy, and the most stable currency in Europe. Over all commerce the Byzantine government exercised a pervasive control—prohibited certain exports, monopolized the trade in corn and silk, charged export and import duties, and taxed sales.²¹ It almost invited its early replacement as commercial mistress of the Aegean and Black Seas by allowing foreign merchants—Armenians, Syrians, Egyptians, Amalfians, Pisans, Venetians, Genoese, Jews, Russians, and Catalans—to carry most of its trade, and to set up semi-independent “factories” or agencies in or near the capital. Interest charges were permitted, but were limited by law to twelve, ten, eight per cent, or even less. Bankers were numerous; and perhaps it was the moneylenders of Constantinople, rather than those of Italy, who developed the bill of exchange,²² and organized the most extensive credit system in Christendom before the thirteenth century.

V. THE BYZANTINE RENAISSANCE

From the labor and skill of the people and the superfluities of the rich there came in the ninth and tenth centuries a remarkable revival of letters and arts. Although the Empire to its dying day called itself Roman, nearly all Latin elements had disappeared from it except Roman law. Since Heraclius, Greek had been the language of government, literature, and liturgy, as well as of daily speech, in the Byzantine East. Education was now completely Greek. Nearly every free male, many women, even many slaves, received some education. The University of Constantinople, which, like letters in general, had been allowed to decay in the crises of the Heracleian age, was restored by Caesar Bardas (863), and attained high repute for its courses in philology, philosophy, theology, astronomy, mathematics, biology, music, and literature; even the pagan Libanius and the godless Lucian were read. Tuition was largely free to qualified students, and the teachers were paid by the state. Libraries, public and private, were numerous, and still preserved those classic masterpieces which had been forgotten in the disordered West.

This ample transmission of the Greek heritage was at once stimulating and restrictive. It sharpened and widened thought, and lured it from its old round of homiletical eloquence and theological debate. But its very wealth discouraged originality; it is easier for the ignorant than for the learned to be original. Byzantine literature was intended chiefly for cultured and leisurely ladies and gentlemen; polished and polite, artistic and artificial, Hellenistic but not Hellenic, it played on the surface, and spared the heart, of human life. Though the churchmen of the period were remarkably tolerant, thought of its own accord, through habits formed in youth, stayed within the circle of orthodoxy, and the iconoclasts were more pious than the priests.

It was another Alexandrian age of scholarship. Pundits analyzed language and prosody, wrote epitomes, “outlines,” and universal histories, compiled dictionaries, encyclopedias, anthologies. Now (917) Constantine Cephalas collected The Greek Anthology; now (976) Suidas accumulated his encyclopedic lexicon. Theophanes (c. 814) and Leo the Deacon (b. 950) wrote valuable histories of their own or recent times. Paul of Ægina (615—90) composed an encyclopedia of medicine that combined Moslem theory and practice with the legacy of Galen and Oribasius; it discussed in almost modern terms operations for cancer of the breast, hemorrhoids, catheterization of the bladder, lithotomy, castration; eunuchs were manufactured, says Paul, by crushing the testicles of children in a hot bath.²³

The outstanding Byzantine scientist of these centuries was an obscure and impoverished teacher, Leo of Salonika (c. 850), of whose existence Constantinople took no notice until a caliph invited him to Baghdad. One of his pupils, captured in war, became the slave of a Moslem dignitary, who soon marveled at the youth’s knowledge of geometry. Al-Mamun, learning of it, induced him to join in a discussion of geometrical problems at the royal palace, was impressed by his performance, heard with eager curiosity his account of his teacher, and at once sent Leo an invitation to Baghdad and affluence. Leo consulted a Byzantine official, who consulted the Emperor Theophilus, who hastened to secure Leo with a state professorship. Leo was a polymath, and taught and wrote on mathematics, astronomy, astrology, medicine, and philosophy. Al-Mamun submitted to him several problems in geometry and astronomy, and was so pleased with the replies that he offered Theophilus eternal peace and 2000 pounds of gold if the Emperor would lend him Leo for a while. Theophilus refused, and made Leo Archbishop of Salonika to keep him out of al-Mamun’s reach.²⁴

Leo, Photius, and Psellus were the stellar luminaries of this age. Photius (820?—91), the most learned man of his time, was in six days graduated from layman to patriarch, and belongs to religious history. Michael Psellus (1018?-80) was a man of the world and the court, an adviser of kings and queens, a genial and orthodox Voltaire who could be brilliant on every subject, but landed on terra firma after every theological argument or palace revolution. He did not let his love of books dull his love of life. He taught philosophy at the University of Constantinople, and received the title of Prince of Philosophers. He entered a monastery, found the monastic career too peaceful, returned to the world, served as prime minister from 1071 to 1078, and had time to write on politics, science, medicine, grammar, theology, jurisprudence, music, and history. His Chronographia recorded the intrigues and scandals of a century (976-1078) with candor, verve, and vanity (he describes Constantine IX as “hanging on Psellus’ tongue”²⁵). Here, as a sample, is a paragraph from his description of the revolt that restored Theodora to the throne in 1055:

Each [soldier in the crowd] was armed: one grasped a hatchet, another a battle-ax, one a bow, another a lance; some of the populace carried heavy stones; and all ran in great disorder … to the apartments of Theodora…. But she, taking refuge in a chapel, remained deaf to all their cries. Abandoning persuasion, the crowd used force upon her; some, drawing their daggers, threw themselves upon Theodora as if to kill her. Boldly they snatched her from the sanctuary, clothed her in sumptuous robes, seated her on a horse, and, circling about her, led her to the church of St. Sophia. Now all the population, highborn as well as low, joined in paying her homage, and all proclaimed her queen.²⁶

The personal letters of Psellus were almost as charming and revealing as Cicero’s; his speeches, verses, and pamphlets were the talk of the day; his malicious humor and lethal wit were an exciting stimulus amid the ponderous erudition of his contemporaries. Compared with him and Photius and Theophanes, the Alcuins, Rabani, and Gerberts of the contemporary West were timid emigrants from barbarism into the Country of the Mind.

The most conspicuous side of this Byzantine renaissance was its art. From 726 to 842 the Iconoclastic movement prohibited the sculptural or (with less strictness) pictorial representation of sacred beings; but in compensation it freed the artist from a monotonous confinement within ecclesiastical themes, and turned him to the observation, portrayal, and decoration of secular life. The gods were replaced as subjects by the imperial family, aristocratic patrons, historical events, the animals of the forest, the plants and fruits of the field, the fond trivia of domestic life. Basil I built in his palace the Nea, or New Church, “all adorned,” says a contemporary, “with fine pearls, gold, shining silver, mosaics, silks, and marble in a thousand varieties.”²⁷ Much of the decoration recently uncovered in St. Sophia was the work of the ninth century. The central dome was rebuilt in 975 after an earthquake, and then received its great mosaic of Christ seated on a rainbow; additional mosaics were set up in 1028; the massive cathedral, like a living organism, achieved continued life by the death and renewal of its parts. The bronze doors installed in 838 were so renowned for excellence that similar doors were ordered from Constantinople for the monastery of Monte Cassino, the cathedral of Amalfi, and the basilica of San Paolo outside the walls of Rome; the last pair, made in Constantinople in 1070, still survives as a testimony to Byzantine art.

The royal or “Sacred Palace,” of which the Nea formed the chapel, was a growing congeries of chambers, reception halls, churches, baths, pavilions, gardens, peristyles, and courts; almost every emperor added something to it. Theophilus gave the group a new Oriental touch with a throne room known as Triconchos, from the shell-like apses that formed three of its sides—a plan imported from Syria. North of this he built the Hall of the Pearl; south of it several heliaka or sunrooms, and the Kamilas, an apartment with roof of gold, columns of green marble, and an exceptionally fine mosaic representing on a gold ground men and women gathering fruit. Even this mosaic was surpassed in an adjoining structure, on whose walls green mosaic trees stood out against a golden mosaic sky; and by the floor of the Hall of Harmony, whose marble tesserae gave the effect of a meadow in full flower. Theophilus carried his taste for bizarre splendor à outrance in his palace of Magnaura: in its audience chamber a golden plane tree overhung the throne; golden birds sat on the branches and the throne; golden griffins lay on either side of the royal seat, and golden lions at its foot; when a foreign ambassador was presented, the mechanical griffins rose, the mechanical lions stood up, swished their tails and roared, and the birds broke into mechanical song.²⁸ All this was a frank copy of like absurdities in the palace of Harun al-Rashid at Baghdad.

Constantinople was beautified with the taxes of commerce and the “themes,” but enough remained to add some lesser splendors to the provincial capitals. The monasteries, rich again, rose in stately mass: in the tenth century the Lavra and Iviron at Athos; in the eleventh, St. Luke’s in Phocis, the Nea Moni in Chios, the convent of Daphni near Eleusis—whose almost classic mosaics are the finest examples of the mid-Byzantine style. Georgia, Armenia, and Asia Minor shared in the movement, and became outposts of Byzantine art. The public buildings of Antioch drew Moslem eulogies. In Jerusalem the church of the Holy Sepulcher was rebuilt soon after Heraclius’ victories. In Egypt, before and after the Arab conquest, the Coptic Christians raised domed churches modest in size, but adorned with such artistry in metal, ivory, wood and textiles that all the skills of Pharaonic, Ptolemaic, Roman, Byzantine, and Mohammedan Egypt seemed to have reached them as an unimpaired legacy. The Iconoclastic persecutions drove thousands of monks from Syria, Asia Minor, and Constantinople to southern Italy, where they were protected by the popes; through these refugees, and through Oriental merchants, Byzantine styles of architecture and decoration flourished in Bari, Otranto, Benevento, Naples, even Rome. Ravenna continued to be Greek in art, and produced in the seventh century the magnificent mosaics of St. Apollinaris in Classe. Salonika remained Byzantine, and adorned its own St. Sophia with somber mosaic apostles as gaunt as El Greco’s saints.

In all these lands and cities, as in the capital, the Byzantine renaissance poured forth masterpieces of mosaic, miniature, pottery, enamel, glass, wood, ivory, bronze, iron, gems, and textiles woven, dyed, and decorated with a skill that all the world honored. Byzantine artists made cups of blue glass decorated under the surface with golden foliage, birds, and human figures; glass vessels with a necking of enameled arabesques and flowers; and other forms of glass so exquisite that they were the favorite gifts of Byzantine emperors to foreign potentates. Even more valued as presents were the costly robes, shawls, copes, and dalmatics that displayed Byzantine textile art; such were “Charlemagne’s cloak” in the cathedral of Metz, and the delicate silks found at Aachen in the coffin of that king. Half the majesty that hedged in the Greek emperor, much of the awe that exalted the patriarch, some of the splendor that clothed the Redeemer, the Virgin, and the martyrs in the ritual of the Church, came from gorgeous vestments that embodied the lives of a dozen artisans, the technique of centuries, and the richest dyes of land and sea. The Byzantine goldsmiths and gem cutters were at the top of their line until the thirteenth century; the treasury of St. Mark’s at Venice is rich with the spoils of their craft. To this age belong the astonishingly realistic mosaic of St. Luke, now in the Collège des Hautes Études at Paris; the glowing head of Christ in the “Deesis” mosaic in St. Sophia’s; and the immense mosaic, covering forty square yards, unearthed in Istanbul in 1935 from the ruins of the palace of the Macedonian emperors.²⁹ When Iconoclasm subsided, or where it did not reach, the churches fed piety with icons painted in tempera upon wood, and sometimes cased in enameled or jeweled frames. No miniatures in all the history of illumination surpass the “Vision of Ezekiel” in the ninth-century volume of Gregory Nazianzen’s sermons in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris;³⁰ or the 400 illustrations of the “Menologus” manuscript in the Vatican (c. 1000); or the pictures of David in the Paris Psalter (c. 900). We shall find in them no perspective, no modeling of forms through light and shade; but, as ample recompense, a rich and sensuous coloring, a lively play of imagination, a new knowledge of human and animal anatomy, a happy riot of beasts and birds, of plants and flowers, among saints and deities, fountains, arcades, and porticoes-birds pecking at fruit, bears dancing, stags and bulls locking their horns in battle, and a leopard lifting an impious leg to make a flowing initial for a pious phrase.³¹

Byzantine potters had long known the art of enameling—i.e., applying to a terra-cotta or metal base a metallic oxide which, when fired, fused with the base and gave it both protection and brilliance. The art had come from the Orient to ancient Greece, had disappeared in the third century B.C., and had reappeared in the third century A.D. This mid-Byzantine period was rich in enamels—portrait medallions, icons, crosses, reliquaries, cups, chalices, book covers, and ornaments for harness and other equipage. As early as the sixth century Byzantium received from Sasanian Persia the art of cloisonné enamel: the colored paste was poured into surface areas confined by thin wires or metal strips; these cloisons, soldered to a metal base, constituted the decorative design. A famous example of Byzantine cloisonné is a reliquary made (c. 948) for Constantine Porphyrogenitus, and now in Limburg; it is characteristically Byzantine in its minute and conscientious execution, its ornate and luxurious ornament.

No other art has been so overwhelmingly religious as the Byzantine. A church council of 787 laid down the law: “It is for painters to execute; it is for the clergy to ordain the subjects and govern the procedure.”³² Hence the somber seriousness of this art, its narrow scope of theme, its monotony of method and style, the rarity of its ventures into realism, humor, and common life; ornate and brilliant beyond rival, it never reached the lusty variety and scandalous secularity of mature Gothic art. So much the more must we marvel at its victories and influence. All Christendom from Kiev to Cadiz acknowledged its leadership and flattered it with imitation; even China bowed to it now and then. In its Syrian forms it shared with Persia in molding the architecture, mosaics, and decorative motives of Islamic art. Venice modeled itself on Constantinople, and St. Mark’s on the Church of the Apostles there; Byzantine architecture appeared in France, and mounted as far north as Aachen. Illuminated manuscripts everywhere in the West confessed Byzantine influence. The Bulgars took over Byzantine faith and ornament; and the conversion of Vladimir to Greek Christianity opened a dozen avenues by which Byzantine art entered into Russian life.

From the fifth to the twelfth century Byzantine civilization led Christian Europe in administration, diplomacy, revenue, manners, culture, and art. Probably never before had there been a society so splendidly adorned, or a religion so sensuously colorful. Like every other civilization, it rested on the backs of serfs or slaves, and the gold and marble of its shrines and palaces were the transmuted sweat of workers toiling on or in the earth. Like every other culture of its time, it was cruel; the same man who knelt before the image of the Virgin could slaughter the children of Maurice before their father’s eyes. There was something shallow about it, a veneer of aristocratic refinement covering a mass of popular superstition, fanaticism, and literate ignorance; * and half the culture was devoted to perpetuating that ignorance. No science, no philosophy, was allowed to develop in conflict with that ignorance; and for a thousand years no addition was made by a Greek civilization to man’s knowledge of the world. No work of Byzantine literature has caught the imagination of mankind, or won the suffrages of time. Oppressed by the fullness of its heritage, imprisoned in the theological labyrinths in which dying Greece had lost the Christianity of Christ, the medieval Greek mind could not rise to a mature and realistic view of man and the world; it broke Christianity in half over a vowel, and again over a word, and shattered the Eastern Roman Empire by seeing treason in every heresy.

The marvel remains that this civilization lasted so long. What hidden resources, or inner vitality, enabled it to survive the victories of Persia in Syria, the loss of Syria, Egypt, Sicily, and Spain to the Moslems? Perhaps the same religious faith that weakened defense by relying upon relics and miracles gave some order and discipline to a people perennially patient, however periodically turbulent, and surrounded emperor and state with an aura of sanctity that frightened change. The bureaucracy, collectively immortal, gave continuity and stability through all wars and revolutions, kept internal peace, regulated the economy, and gathered in the taxes that permitted the Empire to expand again almost to its Justinian amplitude. Though the possessions of the caliphs were vaster than the Byzantine, their revenues were probably less; and the looseness of Moslem government, the inadequacy of its communications and its administrative machinery, allowed the Abbasid dominion to disintegrate in three centuries, while the Byzantine Empire endured through a millennium.

Byzantine civilization performed three vital functions. For a thousand years it stood as a bulwark of Europe against Persia and Eastern Islam. It faithfully cherished and fully transmitted—until plundered by the Crusaders in 1204—the recopied texts that handed down the literature, science, and philosophy of ancient Greece. Monks fleeing Iconoclast emperors brought Greek manuscripts to South Italy, and restored there a knowledge of Greek letters; Greek professors, shunning Moslem and Crusader alike, left Constantinople, sometimes settled in Italy, and served as carriers of the classic germ; so year by year Italy rediscovered Greece, until men drank themselves drunk at the fountain of intellectual freedom. And finally, it was Byzantium that won Bulgars and Slavs from barbarism to Christianity, and brought the immeasurable force of the Slavic body and soul into the life and destiny of Europe.

VI. THE BALKANS: 558–1057

For only a few hundred miles north of Constantinople were troubled oceans of men disdainful of letters and half in love with war. The Hun tide had hardly ebbed when a new people of kindred blood, the Avars, moved from Turkestan through southern Russia (558), enslaved masses of Slavs, raided Germany to the Elbe (562), drove the Lombards into Italy (568), and so ravaged the Balkans that the Latin-speaking population there was almost wiped out. For a time the power of the Avars reached from the Baltic to the Black Sea. In 626 they besieged and almost captured Constantinople; their failure began their decline; in 805 they were conquered by Charlemagne; and gradually they were absorbed by the Bulgars and the Slavs.

The Bulgars, originally a mixture of Hun, Ugrian, and Turkish blood, had formed part of the Hun empire in Russia. After Attila’s death one branch established a kingdom—“Old Bulgaria”—along the Volga around the modern Kazan; their capital, Bolgar, was enriched by the river trade, and prospered till it was destroyed by the Tatars in the thirteenth century. In the fifth century another branch migrated southwest to the valley of the Don; one tribe of these, the Utigurs, crossed the Danube (679), founded a second Bulgarian kingdom in the ancient Moesia, enslaved the Slavs there, adopted their language and institutions, and were ultimately absorbed into the Slavic stock. The new state reached its zenith under the Khagan or Khan (Chief) Krum (802), a man of barbarian courage and civilized cunning. He invaded Macedonia—a province of the Eastern Empire—captured 1100 pounds of gold, and burned the town of Sardica, now, as Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital.

The Emperor Nicephorus bettered the instruction by burning Pliska, Krum’s capital (811), but Krum trapped and destroyed the Greek army in a mountain pass, slew Nicephorus, and made the imperial skull his drinking cup. In 813 he besieged Constantinople, fired its suburbs, and devastated Thrace, rehearsing the events of 1913. He was preparing another attack when he burst a blood vessel and died. His son Omurtag made peace with the Greeks, who yielded to him half of Thrace. Under Khan Boris (852-88) Bulgaria adopted Christianity. Boris himself, after a long reign, entered a monastery; emerged four years later to depose his elder son Vladimir and enthrone his younger son Simeon; lived till 907, and was canonized as the first of Bulgaria’s national saints. Simeon (893–927) became one of the great kings of his time; he extended his rule to Serbia and the Adriatic, called himself “Emperor and Autocrat of All the Bulgars and Greeks,” and repeatedly made war against Byzantium; but he tried to civilize his people with translated Greek literature, and to beautify his Danubian capital with Greek art. A contemporary describes Preslav as “a marvel to behold,” full of “high palaces and churches” richly adorned; in the thirteenth century it was the largest city in the Balkans; some scanty ruins remain. After Simeon’s death Bulgaria was weakened with civil strife. Bogomil heretics converted half the peasantry to pacifism and communism; Serbia recovered its independence in 931; the Emperor John Tzimisces reconquered eastern Bulgaria for the Greek Empire in 972; Basil II conquered western Bulgaria in 1014; and Bulgaria became again (1018–1186) a province of Byzantium.

Meanwhile that harassed Empire had received a visit (934-42) from a new barbarian horde. The Magyars, like the Bulgars, were probably derived from those tribes, loosely named Ugri or Igurs (whence ogre), who wandered on the western confines of China; they too had, through long association, a strong infusion of Hun and Turkish blood; they spoke a tongue closely related to those of the Finns and the Samoyeds. In the ninth century they migrated from the Ural-Caspian steppes to the lands adjoining the Don, the Dnieper, and the Black Sea. There they lived by tilling the soil in summer, fishing in winter, and at all seasons capturing and selling Slavs as slaves to the Greeks. After some sixty years in the Ukraine they again moved westward. Europe was then at nadir; no strong government existed west of Constantinople; no united army stood in the way. In 889 the Magyars overran Bessarabia and Moldavia; in 895, under their chieftain Arpad, they began their permanent conquest of Hungary; in 899 they poured over the Alps into Italy, burned Pavia and all its forty-three churches, massacred the inhabitants, and for an entire year ravaged the peninsula. They conquered Pannonia, raided Bavaria (900–7), devastated Carinthia (901), took Moravia (906), plundered Saxony, Thuringia, Swabia (913), southern Germany, and Alsace (917), and overwhelmed the Germans on the Lech, a tributary of the Danube (924). All Europe trembled and prayed, for these invaders were still pagan, and all Christendom seemed doomed. But in 933 the Magyars were defeated at Gotha, and their advance was stayed. In 943 they again invaded Italy; in 955 they pillaged Burgundy. At last in that year the united armies of Germany, under Otto I, won a decisive victory on the Lechfeld, or valley of the Lech, near Augsburg; and Lurope, having in one terrible century (841–955) fought the Normans in the north, the Moslems in the south, and the Magyars in the east, could breathe among its ruins.

The Magyars, subdued, made Europe more secure by accepting Christianity (975). Prince Geza feared the absorption of Hungary into the reexpanding Byzantine Empire; he chose Latin Christianity to win peace in the West, and married his son Stephen to Gisela, daughter of Henry II, Duke of Bavaria. Stephen I (997-1038) became Hungary’s patron saint and greatest king; he organized the Magyars on the lines of German feudalism, and accentuated the religious basis of the new society by accepting the kingdom and crown of Hungary from Pope Sylvester II (1000). Benedictine monks flocked in, built monasteries and villages, and introduced Western techniques of agriculture and industry. So, after a century of war, Hungary passed from barbarism to civilization; and when Queen Gisela presented a cross to a German friend it was already a masterpiece of the goldsmith’s art.

The earliest known home of the Slavs was a marshy region of Russia enclosed by Kiev, Mohilev, and Brest-Litovsk. They were of Indo-European stock, and spoke languages related to German and Persian. Periodically overrun by nomad hordes, often enslaved, always oppressed and poor, they grew patient and strong through endless hardships; and the fertility of their women overcame the high mortality born of famine, disease, and chronic war. They lived in caves or mud huts; hunted, herded, fished, and tended bees; sold honey, wax, and skins; and slowly resigned themselves to settled tillage. Themselves hunted even into hardly accessible marshes and forests, brutally captured and callously sold, they adopted the morals of their time, and bartered men for goods. Inhabiting a cold and damp terrain, they warmed themselves with strong liquor; they found Christianity preferable to Mohammedanism, which forbade alcoholic drinks.³⁴ Drunkenness, uncleanliness, cruelty, and a passion for pillage were their outstanding faults; thrift, caution, and imagination hovered in them between virtue and vice; but also they were good-natured, hospitable, sociable, and loved games, dances, music, and song. The chieftains were polygamous, the poor monogamous, the women—bought or captured for marriage—were anomalously faithful and obedient.³⁵ The patriarchal families were loosely organized in clans, and these in tribes. The clans may have owned property in common in their early pastoral stage;³⁶ but the growth of agriculture—in which different degrees of energy and ability, on diverse soils, produced unequal results—generated private or family property. Frequently divided by migration and fraternal war, the Slavs developed a variety of Slavonic languages: Polish, Wendish, Czech, and Slovak in the west; Slovene, Serbo-Croat, and Bulgarian in the south; Great Russian, White Russian, and Little Russian (Ruthenian and Ukrainian) in the east; nearly all of these, however, have remained intelligible to the speakers of any one of them. Pan-Slavism of speech and customs, along with space, resources, and a vitality born of hard conditions, rigorous selection, and simple food, made the spreading power of the Slavs.

As the German tribes moved south and west in their migrations into Italy and Gaul, an area of low population pressure was left behind them in north and central Germany; drawn into this vacuum, and prodded by the invading Huns, the Slavs expanded westward across the Vistula even to the Elbe; in these lands they became the Wends, Poles, Czechs, Vlachs, and Slovaks of later history. Towards the end of the sixth century a torrent of Slav immigration flooded rural Greece. The cities closed their gates against it, but a strong Slavonic infusion entered the Hellenic blood. About 640 two kindred Slav tribes, the Srbi and the Chrobati, repeopled Pannonia and Illyricum. The Serbs accepted Greek, the Croats Roman, Christianity; this religious division, crossing ethnic and linguistic unity, weakened the nation against its neighbors, and Serbia fluctuated between independence and subjection to Byzantium or Bulgaria. In 989 the Bulgarian Tsar Samuel, having defeated and captured the Serbian John Vladimir, gave him his daughter Kossara in marriage, and allowed him to return to Zita, his capital, as a vassal prince; this is the theme of the oldest Serb novel, Vladimir and Kossara, written in the thirteenth century. The coastal cities of the ancient Dalmatia—Zara, Spalato, Ragusa—retained their Latin language and culture; the remainder of Serbia became Slav. Prince Voislav freed Serbia in 1042; but in the twelfth century it again acknowledged the suzerainty of Byzantium.

When, at the end of the eighth century, this amazing migration of the Slavs was complete, all central Europe, the Balkans, and Russia were a Slavic sea beating upon the borders of Constantinople, Greece, and Germany.

VII. THE BIRTH OF RUSSIA: 509–1054

The Slavs were but the latest of many peoples who rejoiced in the rich soil, spacious steppes, and many navigable rivers of Russia, and mourned the miasmic marshes and forbidding forests, and the absence of natural barriers to hostile invasion, summer’s heat, or winter’s cold. On its least inhospitable coasts—the western and northern fringes of the Black Sea—the Greeks had founded a score of towns—Olbia, Tanais, Theodosia, Panticapeum (Kerch) …—as early as the seventh century B.C.; and had engaged in trade and war with the Scythians of the hinterland. These natives, probably of Iranian origin, imbibed some civilization from the Persians and the Greeks, and even produced a philosopher—Anacharsis (600 B.C.)—who came to Athens and argued with Solon.

During the second century B.C. another Iranian tribe, the Sarmatians, conquered and displaced the Scythians; and amid this turmoil the Greek colonies decayed. In the second century A.D. the Goths entered from the west, and established the Ostrogothic kingdom; about 375 this was overthrown by the Huns; and thereafter, for centuries, the southern plains of Russia saw hardly any civilization, but rather a succession of nomad hordes—Bulgars, Avars, Slavs, Khazars, Magyars, Patzinaks, Cumans, and Mongols. The Khazars were of Turkish origin; in the seventh century they expanded through the Caucasus into south Russia, established an orderly dominion from the Dnieper to the Caspian Sea, and built a capital, Itil, at a mouth of the Volga near the present Astrakhan. Their kings and upper classes accepted the Jewish religion; hemmed in between a Moslem and a Christian empire, they probably preferred to displease both equally rather than one dangerously; at the same time they gave full freedom to the varied creeds of the people. Seven courts administered justice—two for Moslems, two for Christians, two for Jews, one for heathens; an appeal was allowed from the last five to the Moslem courts, whose administration of justice was at that time considered best.³⁷ Encouraged by this enlightened policy, merchants of various faiths gathered in the Khazar towns; a lively trade developed there between the Baltic and the Caspian Seas, and Itil, in the eighth century, was one of the great commercial cities of the world. In the ninth century Khazaria was overrun by Turkish nomads; the government could no longer protect its trade channels from brigandage and piracy; and in the tenth century the Khazar kingdom melted away into the ethnic chaos from which it had taken form.

Into that motley multitude of south and central Russia in the sixth century came a migration of Slavic tribes from the Carpathian Mountains. They settled the valleys of the Dnieper and the Don, and reached out more thinly to Lake Ilmen in the north. For centuries they multiplied, year by year clearing the forests, draining the swamps, eliminating wild beasts, creating the Ukraine. They spread over the plains in a movement of human fertility rivaled only by the Hindus and the Chinese. All through known history they have been on the march—into the Caucasus and Turkestan, into the Urals and Siberia; this process of colonization goes on today, and the Slav ocean every year enters new ethnic bays.

Early in the ninth century an apparently negligible attack came upon Slavdom from the northwest. The Scandinavian Vikings could spare men and energy from their assaults upon Scotland, Iceland, Ireland, England, Germany, France, and Spain to send into northern Russia bands of one or two hundred men to prey upon the communities of Balts, Finns, and Slavs, and then return with their booty. To protect their robberies with law and order, these Vaeringjar or Varangians (“followers”—of a chieftain) established fortified posts on their routes, and gradually they settled down as a ruling Scandinavian minority of armed merchants among a subject peasantry. Some towns hired them as guardians of social order and security; apparently the guardians converted their wages into tribute, and became the masters of their employers.³⁸ By the middle of the ninth century they governed Novgorod (“new fort”) and had extended their rule as far south as Kiev. The routes and settlements they controlled were loosely bound into a commercial and political empire called Ros or Rus, a term of much disputed derivation. The great rivers that traversed the land connected—through canals and short overland hauls—the Baltic and Black Seas, and invited a southward expansion of Varangian trade and power; soon these fearless merchant-warriors were selling their goods or services in Constantinople itself. Conversely, as commerce grew more regular on the Dnieper, the Volkhov, and the Western Dvina, Moslem merchants came up from Baghdad and Byzantium and traded spices, wines, silks, and gems for furs, amber, honey, wax, and slaves; hence the great number of Islamic and Byzantine coins found along these rivers, and even in Scandinavia. As Moslem control of the eastern Mediterranean blocked the flow of European products through French and Italian outlets to Levantine ports, Marseille, Genoa, and Pisa declined in the ninth and tenth centuries, while in Russia towns like Novgorod, Smolensk, Chernigov, Kiev, and Rostov flourished through Scandinavian, Slavic, Moslem, and Byzantine trade.

The Ancient Chronicle of Russia (twelfth century) gave personality to this Scandinavian infiltration by its tale of “three princes”: the Finnish and Slavic population of Novgorod and its vicinity, having driven out their Varangian overlords, fell to so much quarreling among themselves that they invited the Varangians to send them a ruler or general (862). Three brothers came, says the story—Rurik, Sineus, and Truvor—and established the Russian state. The story may be true, despite latter-day skepticism; or it may be a patriotic gloss on a Scandinavian conquest of Novgorod. The Chronicle further relates that Rurik sent two of his aides, Askold and Dir, to take Constantinople; that these Vikings stopped en route to capture Kiev, and then declared themselves independent of both Rurik and the Khazars. In 860 Kiev was strong enough to send a fleet of 200 vessels to attack Constantinople; the expedition failed, but Kiev remained the commercial and political focus of Russia. It gathered under its power an extensive hinterland; and its earliest rulers—Askold, Oleg, and Igor—rather than Rurik at Novgorod, might justly be called the founders of the Russian state. Oleg, Igor and the able Princess Olga (Igor’s widow), and her warrior son Sviatoslav (962-72) widened the Kievan realm until it embraced nearly all the eastern Slavonic tribes, and the towns of Polotsk, Smolensk, Chernigov, and Rostov. Between 860 and 1043 the young principality made six attempts to take Constantinople; so old is the Russian drive to the Bosporus, the Russian hunger for secure access to the Mediterranean.

With Vladimir (972-1015), fifth “Grand Duke of Kiev,” Rus, as the new principality called itself, became Christian (989). Vladimir married the sister of the Emperor Basil II, and thereafter, till 1917, Russia, in religion, alphabet, coinage, and art, was a daughter of Byzantium. Greek priests explained to Vladimir the divine origin and right of kings, and the usefulness of this doctrine in promoting social order and monarchical stability.³⁹ Under Vladimir’s son Yaroslav (1036-54) the Kievan state reached its zenith. Its authority was loosely acknowledged, and taxes were received by it, from Lake Ladoga and the Baltic to the Caspian, the Caucasus, and the Black Sea. The Scandinavian invaders were absorbed, and Slav blood and speech prevailed. Social organization was frankly aristocratic; the prince entrusted administration and defense to a higher nobility of boyars, and a lesser nobility of dietski or otroki— pages or retainers; below these came the merchants, the townspeople, the semiservile peasantry, and the slaves. A code of laws—Russkaya Pravda, or Russian Right—sanctioned private revenge, the judicial duel, and the compurgative oath, but established trial by a jury of twelve citizens.⁴⁰ Vladimir founded a school for boys at Kiev, Yaroslav another at Novgorod. Kiev, the meeting point of boats from the Volkhov, the Dvina, and the lower Dnieper, took toll of all passing merchandise. Soon it was rich enough to build 400 churches and a great cathedral—another St. Sophia—in the Byzantine style. Greek artists were imported to decorate these buildings with mosaics, frescoes, and other Byzantine ornament; and Greek music entered to prepare for the triumphs of Russian choral song. Slowly Russia lifted itself out of its dirt and dust, built palaces for its princes, raised cupolas above huts of mud, and out of the patient strength of its people reared little isles of civilization in a still barbarous sea.

CHAPTER XIX

The Decline of the West

566–1066

WHILE Islam was on the march, and Byzantium was recovering from seemingly fatal blows, Europe fought its way up through the “Dark Ages.” This is a loose term, which any man may define to his prejudice; we shall arbitrarily confine it to non-Byzantine Europe between the death of Boethius in 524 and the birth of Abélard in 1079. Byzantine civilization continued to flourish during this period, despite severe losses of territory and prestige. But Western Europe in the sixth century was a chaos of conquest, disintegration, and rebarbarization. Much of the classic culture survived, for the most part silent and hidden in a few monasteries and families. But the physical and psychological foundations of social order had been so disturbed that centuries would be needed to restore them. Love of letters, devotion to art, the unity and continuity of culture, the cross-fertilization of communicating minds, fell before the convulsions of war, the perils of transport, the economies of poverty, the rise of vernaculars, the disappearance of Latin from the East and of Greek from the West. In the ninth and tenth centuries the Moslem control of the Mediterranean, the raiding of European coasts and towns by Normans, Magyars, and Saracens accelerated this localism of life and defense, this primitivism of thought and speech. Germany and Eastern Europe were a maelstrom of migrations, Scandinavia was a pirates’ lair, Britain was overrun by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes; Gaul by Franks, Normans, Burgundians, and Goths; Spain was torn between Visigoths and Moors; Italy had been shattered by the long war between the Goths and Byzantium, and the land that had given order to half the world suffered for five centuries a disintegration of morals, economy, and government.

And yet during that long darkness Charlemagne, Alfred, and Otto I gave intervals of order and stimulus to France, England, and Germany; Erigena resurrected philosophy, Alcuin and others restored education, Gerbert imported Moslem science into Christendom, Leo IX and Gregory VII reformed and strengthened the Church, architecture developed the Romanesque style; and Europe began in the eleventh century its slow ascent to the twelfth and thirteenth, the greatest of medieval centuries.

I. ITALY: 566–1095

1. The Lombards: 568–774

Three years after the death of Justinian, Byzantine rule was extinguished in northern Italy by the Lombard invasion.

Paul the Deacon, who was one of them, thought that the Lombards or Longobardi owed their name to their long beards.¹ They themselves believed that their original home had been Scandinavia,² and so Dante, their descendant,³ apostrophized them.⁴ We find them on the lower Elbe in the first century, on the Danube in the sixth, used by Narses in his Italian campaign of 552, sent back to Pannonia after his victory, but never forgetting the fruitful loveliness of northern Italy. In 568, pressed on north and east by Avars, 130,000 Lombards—men, women, children, and baggage—moved laboriously across the Alps into “Lombardy,” the lush plains of the Po. Narses, who might have stopped them, had been deposed and disgraced a year before; Byzantium was busy with Avars and Persians; Italy itself, exhausted by the Gothic War, had no stomach for fighting, no money to pay for vicarious heroism. By 573 the Lombards held Verona, Milan, Florence, and Pavia—which became their capital; in 601, they captured Padua, in 603 Cremona and Mantua, in 640 Genoa. Their mightiest king, Liutprand (712-44), took Ravenna in eastern Italy, Spoleto in the center, Benevento in the south, and aspired to unite all Italy under his rule. Pope Gregory III could not allow the papacy to become a Lombard bishopric; he called in the unsubdued Venetians, who retook Ravenna for Byzantium. Liutprand had to content himself with giving northern and central Italy the best government they had had since Theodoric the Goth. Like Theodoric, he could not read.⁵

The Lombards developed a progressive civilization. The king was elected and advised by a council of notables, and usually submitted his legislation to a popular assembly of all free males of military age. King Rathari (643) published a code of laws at once primitive and advanced: it allowed money compensation for murder, proposed to protect the poor against the rich, ridiculed the belief in witchcraft, and gave freedom of worship to Catholic, Arian, and pagan alike.⁶ Intermarriage absorbed the Germanic invaders into the Italian blood and won them to the Latin tongue; the Lombards left their signature here and there in blue eyes, blond hair, and a few Teutonic words in Italian speech. As the conquest subsided into law, the commerce natural to the valley of the Po was resumed; by the end of the Lombard period the cities of northern Italy were rich and strong, ready for the arts and wars of their medieval peak. Literature faltered; from this age and realm time has preserved only one book of significance—Paul the Deacon’s History of the Lombards (c. 748); it is dull, poorly arranged, and without a grain of philosophic salt. But Lombardy left its name on architecture and finance. The building trades had retained some of their old Roman organization and skill; one group, the magistri Comacini, or masters of Como, took the lead in compounding a “Lombard” style of architecture that would later ripen into Romanesque.

Within a generation after Liutprand the Lombard kingdom broke against the rock of the papacy. King Aistulf seized Ravenna in 751, and ended the Byzantine exarchate. As the ducatus Romanus or duchy of Rome had been legally under the exarch, Aistulf claimed Rome as part of his widened realm. Pope Stephen II called upon Constantine Copronymus for aid; the Greek emperor sent a harmless note to Aistulf; Stephen, in a move of endless results, appealed to Pepin the Short, King of the Franks. Scenting empire, Pepin crossed the Alps, overwhelmed Aistulf, made Lombardy a Frank fief, and gave all central Italy to the papacy. The popes continued to acknowledge the formal suzerainty of the Eastern emperors, but Byzantine authority was now ended in northern Italy. The Lombard vassal King Desiderius tried to restore the independence and conquests of Lombardy; Pope Hadrian I summoned a new Frank; Charlemagne swept down upon Pavia, consigned Desiderius to a monastery, ended the Lombard kingdom, and made it a province of the Franks (774).

2. The Normans in Italy: 1036–85

Italy was now abandoned to a thousand years of divided and alien rule, whose details we shall not chronicle. In 1036 the Normans began the conquest of southern Italy from the Byzantine power. The lords of Normandy were wont to transmit land to all sons equally, as in modern France; but whereas in France the law resulted in small families, in medieval Normandy it resulted in small holdings. With no taste for peaceful poverty, and with a zest for adventure and rapine still warm in their Viking memories, some lusty Normans hired themselves out to the rival dukes of southern Italy, fought valiantly for and against Benevento, Salerno, Naples, and Capua, and were given the town of Aversa as their reward. Other Norman young bloods, hearing of lands to be won for a blow or two, left Normandy for Italy. Soon the Normans there numbered enough to fight for themselves; and by 1053 the boldest of them, Robert Guiscard (i.e., the Wise or Wily), had carved out a Norman kingdom in southern Italy. He was such stuff as myths are made of: taller than any of his soldiers, strong of arm and will, fair of features, blond of hair and beard, splendid in dress, greedy and liberal of gold, occasionally cruel, always brave.

Recognizing no law but force and guile, Robert overran Calabria, took Benevento almost over the dead body of Pope Leo IX (1054), struck alliance with Nicholas II, pledged him tribute and vassalage, and received from him title to Calabria, Apulia, and Sicily (1059). Leaving his younger brother Roger to conquer Sicily, he himself captured Bari (1071), and drove the Byzantines from Apulia. Fretting at the Adriatic barrier, he dreamed of crossing it, taking Constantinople, and making himself the mightiest monarch in Europe. He improvised a fleet, and defeated the Byzantine navy off Durazzo (1081). Byzantium appealed to Venice; Venice responded, for she could not be less than queen of the Adriatic; and in 1082 her skillful galleys routed Guiscard’s ships not far from the site of his recent victory. But in the following year Robert, with Caesarean energy, transported his army to Durazzo, defeated there the forces of Alexius I, the Greek Emperor, and marched across Epirus and Thessaly almost to Salonika. Then, on the verge of realizing his dream, he received a desperate appeal from Pope Gregory VII to come and save him from the Emperor Henry IV. Leaving his army in Thessaly, Robert hurried back to Italy, raised a new force of Normans, Italians, and Saracens, rescued the Pope, captured Rome from the Germans, suppressed an uprising of the people against his army, and allowed his angry soldiers to burn and sack the city so thoroughly that not even the Vandals of 451 could equal this destructiveness (1084). Meanwhile his son Bohemond returned to confess that his army in Greece had been destroyed by Alexius. The old buccaneer built a third fleet, defeated the Venetian navy off Corfu (1084), took the Ionian isle of Cephalonia, and died there, of infection or poison, at the age of seventy (1085). He was the first and greatest of the condottieri, the robber captains of Italy.

3. Venice: 451–1095

Meanwhile, at the northern end of the peninsula, a new state had been born, destined to grow in power and splendor while most of Italy withered in anarchy. In the barbarian invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries—above all during the Lombard invasion of 568—the populations of Aquileia, Padua, Belluno, Feltre, and other towns fled for safety to join the fisher folk who dwelt in the little islands formed by the Piave and Adige Rivers at the head of the Adriatic Sea. Some refugees remained after the crises passed, and founded the communities of Heraclea, Melamocco, Grado, Lido … and Rivo Alto (Deep River)—which, as Rialto, became the seat of their united government (811). A tribe of Veneti had occupied northeastern Italy long before Caesar; in the thirteenth century the name Venezia was applied to the unique city that had grown from the refugee settlements.

Life was hard there at first. Fresh water was difficult to secure, and was valued like wine. Forced to market on the mainland, in exchange for wheat and other commodities, the fish and salt that they drew from the sea, the Venetians became a people of boats and trade. Gradually the commerce of northern and central Europe with the Near East flowed through Venetian ports. The new federation, to protect itself from Germans and Lombards, acknowledged Byzantium as its overlord; but the inaccessibility of the islands, in their shallow waters, to attack by land or sea, the industry and fortitude of the citizens, the mounting wealth of their spreading trade, gave the little state an unbroken sovereignty through a thousand years.

Twelve tribunes—apparently one for each of the twelve principal islands-managed the government till 697, when the communities, feeling the need of a united authority, chose their first dux or doge—leader or duke—to serve until death or revolution should depose him. Doge Agnello Badoer (809-27) so skillfully defended the city against the Franks that the doges were chosen from his descendants till 942. Under Orseolo II (991-1008) Venice revenged herself against the raids of Dalmatian pirates by storming their lairs, absorbing Dalmatia, and establishing her control over the Adriatic. In 998 the Venetians began to celebrate, on every Ascension Day, this maritime victory and mastery by the symbolic ceremony of the sposalizia: the doge, from a gaily decorated galley, flung into the open waters a consecrated ring, and cried in Latin: “We marry you, the sea, in sign of our true and perpetual dominion.”⁷ Byzantium was glad to accept Venice as an independent ally, and rewarded her useful friendship with such commercial privileges at Constantinople and elsewhere that Venetian trade reached out to the Black Sea and even to the ports of Islam.

In 1033 an aristocracy of commerce ended the hereditary transmission of the ducal power, returned to the principle of election by an assembly of citizens, and compelled the doge henceforth to govern in collaboration with a senate. By this time Venice was already called “the golden” (Venetia aurea), and her people were famous for their luxurious dress, their widespread literacy, and their civic devotion and pride. They were a restlessly acquisitive tribe, clever and subtle, courageous and quarrelsome, pious and unscrupulous; they sold Christian slaves to the Saracens,⁸ and with part of the profit they built shrines to the saints. The Rialto shops had able craftsmen who inherited the industrial skills of Roman Italy; a busy local trade moved along the canals, silently but for the terse cries of the gondoliers; the island quays were picturesque with adventurous galleys laden with the products of Europe and the East. Mercantile voyages were financed by capitalist loans, paying normally twenty per cent.⁹ The gap between rich (maggiori) and poor (minori) widened as the rich became vastly richer, the poor only slightly less poor. No mercy was shown to simplicity. The race went to the swift, the battle to the strong. The minori walked on bare ground, and the refuse of their houses ran along the streets and into the canals; the maggiori built splendid palaces, and sought to appease God and the people with the most ornate cathedral in the Latin world. The Palace of the Doges, first raised in 814, burnt in 976, bore many changes of face and figure before finding its graceful blend of Moorish ornament and Renaissance form.

In 828 some Venetian merchants stole from an Alexandrian church what purported to be the relics of St. Mark. Venice made the apostle her patron saint, and ravaged half the world to enshrine his bones. The first St. Mark’s, begun in 830, was so damaged by fire in 976 that Peter Orseolo II began a new and larger edifice. Byzantine artisans were summoned, who modeled it on Justinian’s church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople—with five domes over a cruciform plan. For nearly a century the work proceeded; the main structure was finished in substantially its present form in 1071, and was consecrated in 1095. The relics of St. Mark having been lost in the fire of 976, and their absence threatening the sanctity of the cathedral, it was arranged that on the day of consecration the worshipers should gather in the church and pray that the relics might be found. According to a tradition dear to good Venetians, a pillar succumbed to their orisons, fell to the ground, and revealed the evangelical bones.¹⁰ The building was repeatedly damaged and repaired; hardly a decade but saw some alteration or embellishment; the St. Mark’s that we know is of no one date or period, but is a stone and jewel record of a millennium. Marble facings were added to the brick walls in the twelfth century; columns of every variety were imported from a dozen cities; Byzantine artists naturalized in Venice executed mosaics for the cathedral in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; four bronze horses were appropriated from conquered Constantinople in 1204, and were placed over the main portal; Gothic artists in the fourteenth century added pinnacles, window tracery, and a sanctuary screen; and in the seventeenth century Renaissance painters covered half the mosaics with indifferent murals. Through all these changes and ’centuries the strange edifice kept its character and unity—always Byzantine and Arabic, ornate and bizarre: the exterior overwhelmingly brilliant with arches, buttresses, spires, pillars, portals, pinnacles, encrusted polychrome marble, carved cornices, and stately bulbous domes; the interior with its dark wilderness of colored columns, carved or painted spandrels, somber frescoes, 5000 square yards of mosaic, floor inlaid with jasper, porphyry, agate, and other precious stones; and the Pala d’oro, or golden reredos, made of costly metals and cloisonné enamel in Constantinople in 976, overloaded with 2400 gems, and set up behind the main altar in 1105. In St. Mark’s, as in St. Sophia’s, the Byzantine passion for decoration outran itself. God was to be honored with marble and jewelry; man was to be terrified, disciplined, encouraged, and consoled by a hundred scenes from the Christian epic, from the creation to the destruction of the world. St. Mark’s was the supreme and characteristic expression of a Latin people exuberantly won to an Oriental art.

4. Italian Civilization: 566–1095

While eastern and southern Italy remained Byzantine in culture, the rest of the peninsula evolved a new civilization—a new language, religion, and art—from its Roman heritage. For even amid invasion, chaos, and poverty, that heritage was never wholly lost. The Italian language was the rude Latin of the ancient populace, transforming itself slowly into the most melodious of all tongues. Italian Christianity was a romantic and colorful paganism, an affectionate polytheism of local and protective saints, a frank mythology of legend and miracle. Italian art suspected Gothic as barbarous, clung to the basilican style, and finally, in the Renaissance, returned to Augustan forms. Feudalism never prospered in Italy; the cities never lost their ascendancy over the countryside; industry and commerce, not agriculture, paved the roads to wealth.

Rome, never a commercial city, continued to decline. Its senate had perished in the Gothic War; its ancient municipal institutions, after 700, were empty tools and rebel dreams. The motley populace, living in a squalor alleviated by sexual license and papal alms, could express its political emotions only by frequent uprisings against foreign masters or disfavored popes. The old aristocratic families spent their time competing with one another for control of the papacy, or with the papacy for control of Rome. Where consuls, tribunes, and senators had once forged laws with rods and axes, social order was now barely sustained by the decrees of ecclesiastical councils, the sermons and agents of bishops, and the dubious example of thousands of monks, of every nationality, not seldom idle and not always celibate. The Church had denounced the promiscuity of the public baths; the great halls and pools of the thermae were deserted, and the pagan art of cleanliness was in decay. The imperial aqueducts having been ruined by neglect or war, the people drank the waters of the Tiber.¹¹ The Circus Maximus and the Colosseum, of bloody memory, were no longer used; the Forum began in the seventh century to revert to the cow pasture from which it had been formed; the Capitol was paved with mire; old temples and public buildings were dismembered to provide material for Christian churches and palaces. Rome suffered more from Romans than from Vandals and Goths.¹² The Rome of Caesar was dead, and the Rome of Leo X had yet to be born.

The old libraries were scattered or destroyed, and intellectual life was almost confined to the Church. Science succumbed to the superstition that gives romance to poverty. Only medicine kept its head up, clinging with monastic hands to the Galenic heritage. Perhaps out of a Benedictine monastery at Salerno, in the ninth century, a lay medical school took form which bridged the gap between ancient and medieval medicine, as Hellenized south Italy bridged the gap between Greek and medieval culture. Salerno had been a health resort for over a thousand years. Local tradition described its collegium Hippocraticum as composed of ten physician instructors, of whom one was a Greek, one a Saracen, one a Jew.¹³ About the year 1060 Constantine “the African,” a Roman citizen who had studied medicine in the Moslem schools of Africa and Baghdad, brought to Monte Cassino (where he became a monk) and to nearby Salerno an exciting cargo of Islamic medical lore. His translations of Greek and Arabic works in medicine and other fields shared in the resurrection of science in Italy. At his death (c. 1087) the school of Salerno stood at the head of medical knowledge in the Christian West.

The distinctive achievement of art in this age was the establishment of the Romanesque architectural style (774-1200). Inheriting the Roman tradition of solidity and permanence, the Italian builders thickened the walls of the basilica, crossed the nave with a transept, added towers or attached pillars as buttresses, and supported with columns or clustered piers the arches that upheld the roof. The characteristic Romanesque arch was a simple semicircle, a form of noble dignity, better fitted to span a space than to bear a weight. In early Romanesque the aisles—in later Romanesque the nave and aisles—were vaulted, i.e., roofed with arched masonry. The exterior was usually plain, and of unfaced brick. The interior, though moderately adorned with mosaics, frescoes, and carvings, shunned the luxurious decoration of the Byzantine style. Romanesque was Roman; it sought stability and power rather than Gothic elevation and grace; it aimed to subdue the soul to a quieting humility rather than lift it to a heaven-storming ecstasy.

Italy produced in this period two masterpieces of Romanesque: the modest church of Sant’ Ambrogio at Milan, and the immense duomo of Pisa. The building from whose doors Ambrose had barred an emperor was rebuilt by Benedictines in 789, and again decayed. From 1046 to 1071 Archbishop Guido had it completely remodeled from a colonnaded basilica into a vaulted church. Nave and aisles, formerly roofed with wood, now sustained—by round arches springing from compound piers—a vaulted ceiling of brick and stone. The groins or ridges formed in the vault by the intersecting masonry arches were reinforced with “ribs” of brick; this is the oldest “ribbed vault” in Europe.

The simple front of Sant’ Ambrogio seems all the world apart from the complex façade of the cathedral of Pisa, but the elements of style are the same. After the decisive victory of the Pisan over the Saracen fleet near Palermo (1063), the city commissioned the architects Buschetto (a Greek?) and Rinaldo to commemorate the battle, and offer part of the spoils to the Virgin, by erecting a shrine that should make all Italy envious. Nearly the entire massive edifice was made of marble. Above the west portals—later (1606) equipped with superb bronze doors—four tiers of open arcades spanned the facade in immoderate iteration. Within, a profusion of elegant columns—booty of varied provenance—divided the church into nave and double aisles; and over the crossing of transept and nave rose an unpleasantly elliptical dome. This was the first of the great cathedrals of Italy; and it remains one of the most impressive works of medieval man.

II. CHRISTIAN SPAIN: 711–1095

The history of Christian Spain in this period is that of one long crusade—the rising resolve to expel the Moors. These were rich and strong; they held the most fertile terrain, and had the best government; the Christians were poor and weak, their soil was difficult, their mountain barriers shut them off from the rest of Europe, divided them into petty kingdoms, and encouraged provincial chauvinism and fraternal strife. In this passionate peninsula more Christian blood was shed by Christians than by Moors.

The Moslem invasion of 711 drove the unconquered Goths, Suevi, Christianized Berbers, and Iberian Celts into the Cantabrian Mountains of northwestern Spain. The Moors pursued them, but were defeated at Covadonga (718) by a small force under the Goth Pelayo, who thereupon made himself King of Asturias, and so founded the Spanish monarchy. The repulse of the Moors at Tours allowed Alfonso I (739–57) to extend the Asturian frontiers into Galicia, Lusitania, and Viscaya. His grandson Alfonso II (791-842) annexed the province of Leon, and made Oviedo his capital.

In this reign occurred one of the pivotal events of Spanish history. A shepherd, allegedly guided by a star, found in the mountains a marble coffin whose contents were believed by many to be the remains of the Apostle James, “brother of the Lord.” A chapel was built on the site, and later a splendid cathedral; Santiago de Compostela—“St. James of the Field of the Star”—became a goal of Christian pilgrimage only less sought than Jerusalem and Rome; and the sacred bones proved invaluable in stirring morale, and raising funds, for the wars against the Moors. St. James was made the patron saint of Spain, and spread the name Santiago over three continents. Beliefs make history, especially when they are wrong; it is for errors that men have most nobly died.

East of Asturias, and just south of the Pyrenees, lay Navarre. Its inhabitants were mostly of Basque stock—probably of mixed Celtic Spanish and African Berber blood. Helped by their mountains they successfully defended their independence against Moslems, Franks, and Spaniards; and in 905 Sancho I García founded the kingdom of Navarre, with Pamplona as his capital. Sancho “the Great” (994-1035) won his title by absorbing Leon, Castile, and Aragon; for a time Christian Spain verged on unity; but at his death Sancho undid his life’s work by dividing his realm among his four sons. The kingdom of Aragon dates its existence from this division. By pressing back the Moslems in the south, and peacefully incorporating Navarre in the north (1076), it came by 1095 to include a large part of north-central Spain. Catalonia—northeastern Spain around Barcelona—was conquered by Charlemagne in 788, and was ruled by French counts who made the region a semi-independent “Spanish March”; its language, Catalan, was an interesting compromise between Provençal French and Castilian. Leon, in the northwest, entered history with Sancho the Fat, who was so heavy that he could walk only by leaning upon an attendant. Deposed by the nobles, he went to Cordova, where the famous Jewish physician and statesman Hasdai ben Shaprut cured him of obesity. Now as lithe as Don Quixote, Sancho returned to Leon and reconquered his throne (959).¹⁴ Castile, in central Spain, was named from its castles; it fronted Moslem Spain, and lived in continual readiness for war. In 930 its knights refused any longer to obey the kings of Asturias or Leon, and set up an independent state, with its capital at Burgos. Fernando I (1035-65) united Leon and Galicia to Castile, compelled the emirs of Toledo and Seville to pay him yearly tribute, and, like Sancho the Great, canceled his labors with his death by dividing his realm among his three sons, who zealously continued the tradition of internecine war among the Christian Spanish kings.

Agricultural poverty and political disunity kept Christian Spain far behind its Moslem rival in the south and its Frank rival in the north in the amenities and arts of civilization. Even within each little kingdom unity was an interlude; the nobles almost ignored the kings except in war, and ruled their serfs and slaves in feudal sovereignty. The ecclesiastical hierarchy formed a second nobility; bishops, too, owned land, serfs, and slaves, led their own troops in war, usually ignored the popes, and ruled Spanish Christianity as a well-nigh independent church. In 1020 at Leon, nobles and bishops joined in national councils, and legislated as a parliament for the kingdom of Leon. The Council of Leon granted to that city a charter of self-government, making it the first autonomous commune in medieval Europe; similar charters were granted to other Spanish cities, probably to enlist their ardor and funds in the war against the Moors; and a limited urban democracy rose amid the feudalism, and under the monarchies, of Spain.