The Age of Faith

Bohemund became by grateful consent Prince of Antioch. Formally he held the region in fief to Alexius; actually he ruled it as an independent sovereign; the chieftains claimed that Alexius’ failure to come to their aid released them from their vows of allegiance. After spending six months in refreshing and reorganizing their weakened forces, they led their armies toward Jerusalem. At last, on June 7, 1099, after a campaign of three years, the Crusaders, reduced to 12,000 combatants, stood in exaltation and fatigue before the walls of Jerusalem. By the humor of history, the Turks whom they had come to fight had been expelled from the city by the Fatimids a year before. The caliph offered peace on terms of guaranteed safety for Christian pilgrims and worshipers in Jerusalem, but Bohemund and Godfrey demanded unconditional surrender. The Fatimid garrison of 1000 men resisted for forty days. On July 15 Godfrey and Tancred led their followers over the walls, and the Crusaders knew the ecstasy of a high purpose accomplished after heroic suffering. Then, reports the priestly eyewitness Raymond of Agiles,

wonderful things were to be seen. Numbers of the Saracens were beheaded … others were shot with arrows, or forced to jump from the towers; others were tortured for several days and then burned in flames. In the streets were seen piles of heads and hands and feet. One rode about everywhere amid the corpses of men and horses.¹⁹

Other contemporaries contribute details: women were stabbed to death, suckling babes were snatched by the leg from their mothers’ breasts and flung over the walls, or had their necks broken by being dashed against posts;²⁰ and 70,000 Moslems remaining in the city were slaughtered. The surviving Jews were herded into a synagogue and burned alive. The victors flocked to the church of the Holy Sepulcher, whose grotto, they believed, had once held the crucified Christ. There, embracing one another, they wept with joy and release, and thanked the God of Mercies for their victory.

III. THE LATIN KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM: 1099–1143

Godfrey of Bouillon, whose exceptional integrity had finally won recognition, was chosen to rule Jerusalem and its environs under the modest title of Defender of the Holy Sepulcher. Here, where Byzantine rule had ceased 465 years before, no pretense was made of subordination to Alexius; the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem became at once a sovereign state. The Greek Church was disestablished, its patriarch fled to Cyprus, and the parishes of the new kingdom accepted the Latin liturgy, an Italian primate, and papal rule.

The price of sovereignty is the capacity for self-defense. Two weeks after the great liberation, an Egyptian army came up to Ascalon to reliberate a city holy for too many faiths. Godfrey defeated it, but a year later he died (1100). His less able brother, Baldwin I (1100–18), took the loftier title of king. Under King Fulk, Count of Anjou (1131–43), the new state included most of Palestine and Syria; but the Moslems still held Aleppo, Damascus, and Emesa. The kingdom was divided into four feudal principalities, centering respectively at Jerusalem, Antioch, Edessa, and Tripolis. Each of the four was parceled into practically independent fiefs, whose jealous lords made war, coined money, and otherwise aped sovereignty. The king was elected by the barons, and was checked by an ecclesiastical hierarchy subject only to the pope. He was further weakened by ceding the control of several ports—Jaffa, Tyre, Acre, Beirut, Ascalon—to Venice, Pisa, or Genoa as the price of naval aid and seaborne supplies. The structure and law of the kingdom were formulated in the Assizes of Jerusalem—one of the most logical and ruthless codifications of feudal government. The barons assumed all ownership of land, reduced the former owners—Christian or Moslem—to the condition of serfs, and laid upon them feudal obligations severer than any in contemporary Europe. The native Christian population looked back to Moslem rule as a golden age.²¹

The young kingdom had many elements of weakness, but it had a unique support in new orders of military monks. As far back as 1048 the merchants of Amalfi had obtained Moslem permission to build a hospital at Jerusalem for poor or ailing pilgrims. About 1120 the staff of this institution was reorganized by Raymond du Puy as a religious order vowed to chastity, poverty, obedience, and the military protection of Christians in Palestine; and these Hospitalers, or Knights of the Hospital of St. John, became one of the noblest charitable bodies in the Christian world. About the same time (1119) Hugh de Payens and eight other crusader knights solemnly dedicated themselves to monastic discipline and the martial service of Christianity. They obtained from Baldwin II a residence near the site of Solomon’s Temple, and were soon called Knights Templar. St. Bernard drew up a stern rule for them, which was not long obeyed; he praised them for being “most learned in the art of war,” and bade them “wash seldom,” and closely crop their hair.²² “The Christian who slays the unbeliever in the Holy War,” wrote Bernard to the Templars, in a passage worthy of Mohammed, “is sure of his reward; more sure if he himself is slain. The Christian glories in the death of the pagan, because Christ is thereby glorified”;²³ men must learn to kill with a good conscience if they are to fight successful wars. A Hospitaler wore a black robe with a white cross on the left sleeve; a Templar a white robe with a red cross on the mantle. Each hated the other religiously. From protecting and nursing pilgrims the Hospitalers and Templars passed to active attacks upon Saracen strongholds; though the Templars numbered but 300, and the Hospitalers some 600, in 1180,²⁴ they played a prominent part in the battles of the Crusades, and earned great repute as warriors. Both orders campaigned for financial support, and received it from Church and state, from rich and poor; in the thirteenth century each owned great estates in Europe, including abbeys, villages, and towns. Both astonished Christians and Saracens by building vast fortresses in Syria, where, dedicated individually to poverty, they enjoyed collective luxury amid the toils of war.²⁵ In 1190 the Germans in Palestine, aided by a few at home, founded the Teutonic Knights, and established a hospital near Acre.

Most of the Crusaders returned to Europe after freeing Jerusalem, leaving the man power of the harassed government perilously low. Many pilgrims came, but few remained to fight. On the north the Greeks watched for a chance to recover Antioch, Edessa, and other cities which they claimed as Byzantine; to the east, the Saracens were being aroused and unified by Moslem appeals and Christian raids. Mohammedan refugees from Jerusalem told in bitter detail the fall of that city to the Christians; they stormed the Great Mosque of Baghdad, and demanded that Moslem arms should liberate Jerusalem, and the sacred Dome of the Rock, from unclean infidel hands.²⁶ The caliph was powerless to heed their pleas, but Zangi, the young slave-born Prince of Mosul, responded. In 1144 his small well-led army took from the Christians their eastern outpost al-Ruah; and a few months later he recaptured Edessa for Islam. Zangi was assassinated, but he was succeeded by a son, Nur-ud-din, of equal courage and greater ability. It was the news of these events that stirred Europe to the Second Crusade.

IV. THE SECOND CRUSADE: 1146–8

St. Bernard appealed to Pope Eugenius III to sound another call to arms. Eugenius, enmeshed in conflict with the infidels of Rome, begged Bernard to undertake the task himself. It was a wise suggestion, for the saint was a greater man than he whom he had made Pope. When he left his cell at Clairvaux to preach the crusade to the French, the skepticism that hides in the heart of faith was silenced, and the fears spread by narratives of the First Crusade were stilled. Bernard went directly to King Louis VII, and persuaded him to take the cross. With the King at his side he spoke to a multitude at Vézelay (1146); when he had finished, the crowd enlisted en masse; the crosses prepared proved too few, and Bernard tore his robe to pieces to provide additional emblems. “Cities and castles are emptied,” he wrote to the Pope; “there is not left one man to seven women, and everywhere there are widows to still living husbands.” Having won France he passed to Germany, where his fervent eloquence induced the Emperor Conrad III to accept the crusade as the one cause that could unify the Guelf and Hohenstaufen factions then rending the realm. Many nobles followed Conrad’s lead; among them the young Frederick of Swabia who would become Barbarossa, and would die in the Third Crusade.

At Easter of 1147 Conrad and the Germans set out; at Pentecost Louis and the French followed at a cautious distance, uncertain whether the Germans or the Turks were their most hated foes. The Germans felt a like hesitation between Turks and Greeks; and so many Byzantine towns were pillaged on the way that many closed their gates, and dispensed a scanty ration by baskets let down from the walls. Manuel Comnenus, now Eastern Emperor, gently suggested that the noble hosts should cross the Hellespont at Sestos, instead of going through Constantinople; but Conrad and Louis refused. A party in Louis’ council urged him to take Constantinople for France; he refrained; but again the Greeks may have learned of his temptation. They were frightened by the stature and armor of the Western knights, and amused by their feminine entourage. His troublesome Eleanor accompanied Louis, and troubadours accompanied the Queen; the counts of Flanders and Toulouse were escorted by their countesses, and the baggage train of the French was heavy with trunks and boxes of apparel and cosmetics designed to ensure the beauty of these ladies against all the vicissitudes of climate, war, and time. Manuel hastened to transport the two armies across the Bosporus, and supplied the Greeks with debased coinage for dealings with the Crusaders. In Asia a dearth of provisions, and the high prices demanded by the Greeks, led to many conflicts between saviors and saved; and Frederick of the Red Beard mourned that his sword had to shed Christian blood for the privilege of encountering infidels.

Conrad insisted, against Manuel’s advice, on taking the route followed by the First Crusade. Despite or because of their Greek guides, the Germans fell into a succession of foodless wastes and Moslem snares; and their loss of life was disheartening. At Dorylaeum, where the First Crusade had defeated Qilij Arslan, Conrad’s army met the main Moslem force, and was so badly beaten that hardly one Christian in ten survived. The French army, far behind, was deceived by false news of a German victory; it advanced recklessly, and was decimated by starvation and Moslem raids. Reaching Attalia, Louis bargained with Greek ship captains to transport his army by sea to Christian Tarsus or Antioch; the captains demanded an impossible fee per passenger; Louis and several nobles, Eleanor and several ladies, took passage to Antioch, leaving the French army in Attalia. Mohammedan forces swept down upon the city, and slaughtered nearly every Frenchman in it (1148).

Louis reached Jerusalem with ladies but no army, Conrad with a pitiful remnant of the force with which he had left Ratisbon. From these survivors, and soldiers already in the capital, an army was improvised, and marched against Damascus under the divided command of Conrad, Louis, and Baldwin III (1143–62). During the siege disputes arose among the nobles as to which should rule Damascus when it fell. Moslem agents found their way into the Christian army, and bribed certain leaders to a policy of inaction or retreat.²⁷ When word came that the emirs of Aleppo and Mosul were advancing with a large force to relieve Damascus, the advocates of retreat prevailed; the Christian army broke into fragments, and fled to Antioch, Acre, or Jerusalem. Conrad, defeated and diseased, returned in disgrace to Germany. Eleanor and most of the French knights returned to France. Louis remained another year in Palestine, making pilgrimages to sacred shrines.

Europe was stunned by the collapse of the Second Crusade. Men began to ask how it was that the Almighty allowed His defenders to be so humiliated; critics assailed St. Bernard as a reckless visionary who had sent men to their death; and here and there emboldened skeptics called in question the most basic tenets of the Christian faith. Bernard replied that the ways of the Almighty are beyond human understanding, and that the disaster must have been a punishment for Christian sins. But from this time the philosophic doubts that Abélard (d. 1142) had scattered found expression even among the people. Enthusiasm for the Crusades rapidly waned; and the Age of Faith prepared to defend itself by fire and sword against the inroads of alien beliefs, or no belief at all.

V. SALADIN

Meanwhile a strange new civilization had developed in Christian Syria and Palestine. The Europeans who had settled there since 1099 gradually adopted the Near Eastern garb of wound headdress and flowing robe as suited to a climate of sun and sand. As they became more familiar with the Moslems living in the kingdom, mutual unfamiliarity and hostility decreased. Moslem merchants freely entered Christian settlements and sold their wares; Moslem and Jewish physicians were preferred by Christian patients;²⁸ Moslem worship in mosques was permitted by the Christian clergy; and the Koran was taught in Moslem schools in Christian Antioch and Tripolis. Safe conducts for travelers and traders were exchanged between Christian and Moslem states. As only a few Christian wives had come with the Crusaders, many Christian settlers married Syrian women; soon their mixed offspring constituted a large element of the population. Arabic became the daily speech of all commoners. Christian princes made alliances with Moslem emirs against Christian rivals, and Moslem emirs sometimes asked the aid of the “polytheists” in diplomacy or war. Personal friendships developed between Christians and Mohammedans. Ibn Jubair, who toured Christian Syria in 1183, described his fellow Moslems there as prosperous, and as well treated by the Franks. He mourned to see Acre “swarming with pigs and crosses,” and odorous with a vile European smell, but he had some hopes that the infidels would gradually be civilized by the superior civilization to which they had come.²⁹

In the forty years of peace that followed the Second Crusade, the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem continued to be torn with internal strife, while its Moslem enemies moved toward unity. Nur-ud-din spread his power from Aleppo to Damascus (1164); when he died, Saladin brought Egypt and Moslem Syria under one rule (1175). Genoese, Venetian, and Pisan merchants disordered the Eastern ports with their mortal rivalry. Knights quarreled for the royal power in Jerusalem; and when Guy de Lusignan maneuvered his way to the throne (1186), disaffection spread among the aristocracy; “if this Guy is a king,” said his brother Geoffrey, “I am worthy to be a god.” Reginald of Châtillon made himself sovereign in the great castle of Karak beyond the Jordan, near the Arabian frontier, and repeatedly violated the truce arranged between the Latin king and Saladin. He announced his intention to invade Arabia, destroy the tomb of “the accursed camel driver” at Medina, and smash the Kaaba at Mecca in fragments to the ground.³⁰ His small force of knightly adventurers sailed down the Red Sea, landed at el-Haura, and marched to Medina; they were surprised by an Egyptian detachment, and all were cut down except a few who escaped with Reginald, and some prisoners who were taken to Mecca and slaughtered instead of goats at the annual pilgrimage sacrifice (1183).

Saladin had heretofore contented himself with minor forays against Palestine; now, offended to the depths of his piety, he re-formed the army that had won him Damascus, and met the forces of the Latin kingdom in an indecisive battle on the historic plain of Esdraelon (1183). A few months later he attacked Reginald at Karak, but failed to enter the citadel. In 1185 he signed a four-year truce with the Latin kingdom. But in 1186 Reginald, bored with peace, waylaid a Moslem caravan, and took rich booty and several prisoners, including Saladin’s sister. “Since they trusted in Mohammed,” said Reginald, “let Mohammed come and save them.” Mohammed did not come; but Saladin, infuriated, sounded the call for a holy war against the Christians, and swore to kill Reginald with his own hand.

The crucial engagement of the Crusades was fought at Hittin, near Tiberias, on July 4, 1187. Saladin, familiar with the terrain, took up positions controlling all the wells; the heavily armored Christians, having marched across the plain in midsummer heat, entered battle gasping with thirst. Taking advantage of the wind, the Saracens started a brush fire whose smoke further harassed the Crusaders. In the blind confusion the Frank footmen were separated from the cavalry, and were cut down; the knights, fighting with desperation against weapons, smoke, and thirst, at last fell exhausted to the ground, and were captured or slain. Apparently by Saladin’s orders, no mercy was shown to Templars or Hospitalers. He directed that King Guy and Duke Reginald be brought before him; to the King he gave drink as a pledge of pardon; to Reginald he gave the choice of death or acknowledging Mohammed as a prophet of God; when Reginald refused, Saladin slew him. Part of the booty taken by the victors was the True Cross, which had been borne as a battle standard by a priest; Saladin sent it to the caliph at Baghdad. Seeing that no army remained to challenge him, he proceeded to capture Acre, where he freed 4000 Moslem prisoners, and paid his troops with the wealth of the busy port. For a few months nearly all Palestine was in his hands.

As he approached Jerusalem the leading citizens came out to bid for peace. “I believe,” he told them, “that Jerusalem is the home of God, as you also believe; and I will not willingly lay siege to it, or put it to assault.” He offered it freedom to fortify itself, and to cultivate unhindered the land for fifteen miles around, and promised to supply all deficiencies of money and food, until Pentecost; if, when that day came, they saw hope of being rescued, they might keep the city and honorably resist him; if no such prospect appeared, they were to yield peaceably, and he would spare the lives and property of the Christian inhabitants. The delegates refused the offer, saying that they would never surrender the city where the Saviour had died for mankind.³¹ The siege lasted only twelve days. When the city capitulated, Saladin required a ransom of ten gold pieces ($47.50?) for each man, five for each woman, one for each child; the poorest 7000 were to be freed on the surrender of the 30,000 gold bezants (c. $270,000) which had been sent to the Hospitalers by Henry II of England. These terms were accepted, says a Christian chronicler, “with gratitude and lamentation”; perhaps some learned Christians compared these events of 1187 with those of 1099. Saladin’s brother al-Adil asked for the gift of a thousand slaves from the still unransomed poor; it was granted, and he freed them. Balian, leader of the Christian resistance, asked a like boon, received it, and freed another thousand; the Christian primate asked and received and did likewise. Then Saladin said: “My brother has made his alms, and the patriarch and Balian have made theirs; now I would make mine”; and he freed all the old who could not pay. Apparently some 15,000 of the 60,000 captured Christians remained unransomed, and became slaves. Among the ransomed were the wives and daughters of the nobles who had been killed or captured at Hittin. Softened by their tears, Saladin released to them such husbands and fathers (including King Guy) as could be found in Moslem captivity, and (relates Ernoul, squire to Balian) to “the dames and damsels whose lords were dead he distributed from his own treasure so much that they gave praise to God, and published abroad the kindness and honor that Saladin had done them.”³²

The freed King and nobles took an oath never to bear arms against him again. Safe in Christian Tripolis and Antioch, they were “released by the sentence of the clergy from the enormity of their promise,” and laid plans of vengeance against Saladin.³³ The Sultan allowed the Jews to dwell again in Jerusalem, and gave Christians the right to enter, but unarmed; he assisted their pilgrimage, and protected their security.³⁴ The Dome of the Rock, which had been converted into a church, was purified from Christian taint by sprinkling with rose water, and the golden cross that had surmounted the cupola was cast down amid Moslem cheers and Christian groans. Saladin led his wearied troops to the siege of Tyre, found it impregnable, dismissed most of his army, and retired ill and worn to Damascus (1188), in the fiftieth year of his age.

VI. THE THIRD CRUSADE: 1189–92

The retention of Tyre, Antioch, and Tripolis left the Christians some strands of hope. Italian fleets still controlled the Mediterranean, and stood ready to carry fresh Crusaders for a price. William, Archbishop of Tyre, returned to Europe, and recounted to assemblies in Italy, France, and Germany the fall of Jerusalem. At Mainz his appeal so moved Frederick Barbarossa that the great Emperor, sixty-seven years old, set out almost at once with his army (1189), and all Christendom applauded him as the second Moses who would open a way to the Promised Land. Crossing the Hellespont at Gallipoli, the new host, on a new route, repeated the errors and tragedies of the First Crusade. Turkish bands harassed its march and cut off its supplies; hundreds starved to death; Frederick was drowned ignominiously in the little river of Salef in Cilicia (1190); and only a fraction of his army survived to join in the siege of Acre.

Richard I of the Lion Heart, recently crowned King of England at the age of thirty-one, resolved to try his hand on the Moslems. Fearing French encroachment, in his absence, upon English possessions in France, he insisted that Philip Augustus should accompany him; the French king—a lad of twenty-three—agreed; and the two youthful monarchs received the cross from William of Tyre in a moving ceremony at Vézelay. Richard’s army of Normans (for few Englishmen took part in the Crusades) sailed from Marseille, Philip’s army from Genoa, for a rendezvous in Sicily (1190). There the kings quarreled and otherwise amused themselves for half a year. Tancred, King of Sicily, offended Richard, who seized Messina “quicker than a priest could chant matins,” and restored it for 40,000 ounces of gold. So solvent, he embarked his army for Palestine. Some of his ships were wrecked on the coast of Cyprus; the crews were imprisoned by the Greek governor; Richard paused for a moment, conquered Cyprus, and gave it to Guy de Lusignan, the homeless king of Jerusalem. He reached Acre in June of 1191, a year after leaving Vézelay. Philip had preceded him; the siege of Acre by the Christians had already lasted nineteen months, and had cost thousands of lives. A few weeks after Richard’s arrival the Saracens surrendered. The victors asked, and were promised, 200,000 gold pieces ($950,000), 1600 selected prisoners, and the restoration of the True Cross. Saladin confirmed the agreement, and the Moslem population of Acre, excepting the 1600, were allowed to depart with such provisions as they could carry. Philip Augustus, ill with fever, returned to France, leaving behind him a French force of 10,500 men. Richard became sole leader of the Third Crusade.

Now began a confused and unique campaign in which blows and battles alternated with compliments and courtesies, while the English King and the Kurd Sultan illustrated some of the finest qualities of their civilizations and creeds. Neither was a saint: Saladin could dispense death with vigor when military purposes seemed to him to require it; and the romantic Richard permitted some interruptions in his career as a gentleman. When the leaders of besieged Acre delayed in carrying out the agreed terms of surrender, Richard had 2500 Moslem prisoners beheaded before the walls as a hint to hurry.³⁵ When Saladin learned of this he ordered the execution of all prisoners thereafter taken in battle with the English King. Changing his tune, Richard proposed to end the Crusades by marrying his sister Joan to Saladin’s brother al-Adil. The Church denounced the scheme, and it was dropped.

Knowing that Saladin would not stay quiet in defeat, Richard reorganized his forces and prepared to march sixty miles southward along the coast to relieve Jaffa, which, again in Christian hands, was under Moslem siege. Many nobles refused to go with him, preferring to stay behind in Acre and intrigue for the kingship of the Jerusalem which they trusted Richard would take. The German troops returned to Germany, and the French army repeatedly disobeyed the orders, and frustrated the strategy, of the British King. Nor were the rank and file ready for renewed effort. After the long siege, says the Christian chronicler of Richard’s crusade, the victorious Christians,

given up to sloth and luxury, were loath to leave a city so rich in comforts—to wit, the choicest of wines and the fairest of damsels. Many, by a too intimate acquaintance with these pleasures, became dissolute, till the city was polluted by their luxury, and their gluttony and wantonness put wise men to the blush.³⁶

Richard made matters more difficult by ordering that no women should accompany the army except washerwomen, who could not be an occasion of sin. He atoned for the defects of his troops by the excellence of his generalship, the skill of his engineering, and his inspiring valor on the field; in these respects he excelled Saladin, as well as all other Christian leaders of the Crusades.

His army met Saladin’s at Arsuf, and won an indecisive victory (1191). Saladin offered to renew battle, but Richard withdrew his men within Jaffa’s walls. Saladin sent him an offer of peace. During the negotiations Conrad, Marquis of Montferrat, who held Tyre, entered into separate correspondence with Saladin, proposing to become his ally, and retake Acre for the Moslems, if Saladin would agree to his appropriating Sidon and Beirut. Despite this offer, Saladin authorized his brother to sign with Richard a peace yielding to the Christians all the coastal cities that they then held, and half of Jerusalem. Richard was so pleased that he ceremoniously conferred knighthood upon the son of the Moslem ambassador (1192). A while later, hearing that Saladin was faced with revolt in the East, he rejected Saladin’s terms, besieged and took Darum, and advanced to within twelve miles of Jerusalem. Saladin, who had dismissed his troops for the winter, called them back to arms. Meanwhile dissension broke out in the Christian camp, scouts reported that the wells on the road to Jerusalem had been poisoned, and the army would have nothing to drink. A council was held to decide strategy; it voted to abandon Jerusalem and march upon Cairo, 250 miles away. Richard, sick, disgusted, and despondent, retired to Acre, and thought of returning to England.

But when he heard that Saladin had again attacked Jaffa, and had taken it in two days, Richard’s pride revived him. With such troops as he could muster he sailed at once for Jaffa. Arrived in the harbor, he cried, “Perish the hindmost!” and leaped to his waist into the sea. Swinging his famous Danish ax, he beat down all who resisted him, led his men into the city, and cleared it of Moslem soldiery almost before Saladin could learn what had occurred (1192). The sultan summoned his main army to his rescue. It far outnumbered Richard’s 3000, but the reckless courage of the King carried the day. Seeing Richard unmounted, Saladin sent him a charger, calling it a shame that so gallant a warrior should have to fight on foot. Saladin’s soldiers soon had enough; they reproached him for having spared the Jaffa garrison, which was now fighting again. Finally, if we may believe the Christian account, Richard rode along the Saracen front, lance at rest, and none dared attack him.³⁷

On the next day fortune changed. Reinforcements reached Saladin; and Richard, sick again, and unsupported by the knights at Acre and Tyre, once more sued for peace. In his fever he cried out for fruit and a cooling drink; Saladin sent him pears and peaches and snow, and his own physician. On September 2, 1192, the two heroes signed a peace for three years, and partitioned Palestine: Richard was to keep all the coastal cities he had conquered, from Acre to Jaffa; Moslems and Christians were to pass freely into and from each other’s territory, and pilgrims would be protected in Jerusalem; but that city was to remain in Moslem hands. (Perhaps the Italian merchants, interested chiefly in controlling the ports, had persuaded Richard to yield the Holy City in return for the coastal area.) The peace was celebrated with feasts and tournaments; “God alone,” says Richard’s chronicler, “knoweth the measureless delight of both peoples”;³⁸ for a moment men ceased to hate. Boarding his ship for England, Richard sent a last defiant note to Saladin, promising to return in three years and take Jerusalem. Saladin replied that if he must lose his land he had liefer lose it to Richard than to any other man alive.³⁹

Saladin’s moderation, patience, and justice had defeated Richard’s brilliance, courage, and military art; the relative unity and fidelity of the Moslem leaders had triumphed over the divisions and disloyalties of the feudal chiefs; and a short line of supplies behind the Saracens proved of greater advantage than Christian control of the seas. The Christian virtues and faults were better exemplified in the Moslem sultan than in the Christian king. Saladin was religious to the point of persecution, and allowed himself to be unreasonably bitter against the Templars and Hospitalers. Usually, however, he was gentle to the weak, merciful to the vanquished, and so superior to his enemies in faithfulness to his word that Christian chroniclers wondered how so wrong a theology could produce so fine a man. He treated his servants with gentleness, and himself heard all petitions. He “esteemed money as little as dust,” and left only one dinar in his personal treasury.⁴⁰ Not long before his death he gave his son ez-Zahir instructions that no Christian philosopher could surpass:

My son, I commend thee to the most high God…. Do His will, for that way lies peace. Abstain from shedding blood … for blood that is spilt never sleeps. Seek to win the hearts of thy people, and watch over their prosperity; for it is to secure their happiness that thou art appointed by God and me. Try to gain the hearts of thy ministers, nobles, and emirs. If I have become great it is because I have won men’s hearts by kindness and gentleness.⁴¹

He died in 1193, aged only fifty-five.

VII. THE FOURTH CRUSADE: 1202–4

The Third Crusade had freed Acre, but had left Jerusalem unredeemed; it was a discouragingly small result from the participation of Europe’s greatest kings. The drowning of Barbarossa, the flight of Philip Augustus, the brilliant failure of Richard, the unscrupulous intrigues of Christian knights in the Holy Land, the conflicts between Templars and Hospitalers, and the renewal of war between England and France broke the pride of Europe and further weakened the theological assurance of Christendom. But the early death of Saladin, and the breakup of his empire, released new hopes. Innocent III (1198–1216), at the very outset of his pontificate, demanded another effort; and Fulk de Neuilly, a simple priest, preached the Fourth Crusade to commoners and kings. The results were disheartening. The Emperor Frederick II was a boy of four; Philip Augustus thought one crusade enough for a lifetime; and Richard I, forgetting his last word to Saladin, laughed at Fulk’s exhortations. “You advise me,” he said, “to dismiss my three daughters—pride, avarice, and incontinence. I bequeath them to the most deserving: my pride to the Templars, my avarice to the monks of Cîteaux, my incontinence to the prelates.”⁴² But Innocent persisted. He suggested that a campaign against Egypt could succeed through Italian control of the Mediterranean, and would offer a means of approaching Jerusalem from rich and fertile Egypt as a base. After much haggling Venice agreed, in return for 85,000 marks of silver ($8,500,000), to furnish shipping for 4500 knights and horses, 9000 squires, 20,000 infantry, and supplies for nine months; it would also provide fifty war galleys; but on condition that half the spoils of conquest should go to the Venetian Republic.⁴³ The Venetians, however, had no intention of attacking Egypt; they made millions annually by exporting timber, iron, and arms to Egypt, and importing slaves; they did not propose to jeopardize this trade with war, or to share it with Pisa and Genoa. While negotiating with the Crusaders’ committee, they made a secret treaty with the sultan of Egypt, guaranteeing that country against invasion (1201).⁴⁴ Ernoul, a contemporary chronicler, alleges that Venice received a huge bribe to divert the crusade from Palestine.⁴⁵

In the summer of 1202 the new hosts gathered in Venice. There were Marquis Boniface of Montferrat, Count Louis of Blois, Count Baldwin of Flanders, Simon de Montfort of Albigensian fame, and, among many other notables, Geoffroi de Villehardouin (1160–1213), Marshal of Champagne, who would not only play a leading part in the diplomacy and campaigns of the crusade, but would enshrine its scandalous history in face-saving memoirs that marked the beginning of French prose literature. France, as usual, supplied most of the Crusaders. Every man had been instructed to bring a sum of money, proportionate to his means, to raise the 85,000 marks payable to Venice for her outlay. The total fell short by 34,000 marks. Thereupon Enrico Dandolo, the almost blind doge “of the great heart,” with all the sanctity of his ninety-four years, proposed that the unpaid balance should be forgiven if the Crusaders would help Venice capture Zara. This was now the most important Adriatic port after Venice itself; it had been conquered by Venice in 998, had often revolted and been subdued; it now belonged to Hungary, and was that country’s only outlet to the sea; its wealth and power were growing, and Venice feared its competition for the Adriatic trade. Innocent III denounced the proposal as villainous, and threatened to excommunicate all participants. But the greatest and most powerful of the popes could not make his voice heard above the clamor of gold. The combined fleets attacked Zara, took it in five days, and divided the spoils. Then the Crusaders sent an embassy to the Pope begging his absolution; he gave it, but demanded the restoration of the booty; they thanked him for the absolution, and kept the booty. The Venetians ignored the excommunications, and proceeded to the second part of their plan—the conquest of Constantinople.

The Byzantine monarchy had learned nothing from the Crusades. It gave little help, and derived much profit; it regained most of Asia Minor, and looked with equanimity upon the mutual weakening of Islam and the West in the struggle for Palestine. The Emperor Manuel had arrested thousands of Venetians in Constantinople, and had for a time ended Venetian commercial privileges there (1171).⁴⁶ Isaac II Angelus (1185–95) had not scrupled to ally himself with the Saracens.⁴⁷ In 1195 Isaac was deposed, imprisoned, and blinded by his brother Alexius III. Isaac’s son, another Alexius, fled to Germany; in 1202 he went to Venice, asked the Venetian Senate and the Crusaders to rescue and restore his father, and promised in return all that Byzantium could supply for their attack upon Islam. Dandolo and the French barons drove a hard bargain with the youth: he was persuaded to pledge the Crusaders 200,000 marks of silver, equip an army of 10,000 men for service in Palestine, and submit the Greek Orthodox Church to the Roman Pope.⁴⁸ Despite this subtle sop, Innocent III forbade the Crusaders, on pain of excommunication, to attack Byzantium. Some nobles refused to share in the expedition; a part of the army considered itself absolved from the Crusade, and went home. But the prospect of capturing the richest city in Europe proved irresistible. On October 1, 1202, the great fleet of 480 vessels sailed amid much rejoicing, while priests on the war-castles of the ships sang Veni Creator Spiritus.⁴⁹

After divers delays the armada arrived before Constantinople on June 24, 1203. “You may be assured,” says Villehardouin,

that those who had never seen Constantinople opened wide eyes now; for they could not believe that so rich a city could be in the whole world, when they saw her lofty walls and her stately towers wherewith she was encompassed, and these stately palaces and lofty churches, so many in number as no man might believe who had not seen them, and the length and breadth of this town which was sovereign over all others. And know that there was no man among us so bold but that his flesh crept at the sight; and therein was no marvel; for never did any men undertake so great a business as this assault of ours, since the beginning of the world.⁵⁰

An ultimatum was delivered to Alexius III: he must restore the Empire to his blinded brother or to the young Alexius, who accompanied the fleet. When he refused, the Crusaders landed, against weak opposition, before the walls of the city; and the aged Dandolo was the first to touch the shore. Alexius III fled to Thrace; the Greek nobles escorted Isaac Angelus from his dungeon to the throne, and in his name a message was sent to the Latin chieftains that he was waiting to welcome his son. After drawing from Isaac a promise to abide by the commitments that his son had made with them, Dandolo and the barons entered the city, and the young Alexius IV was crowned coemperor. But when the Greeks learned of the price at which he had bought his victory they turned against him in anger and scorn. The people reckoned the taxes that would be needed to raise the subsidies promised to his saviors; the nobility resented the presence of an alien aristocracy and force; the clergy rejected with fury the proposal that they should bow to Rome. Meanwhile some Latin soldiers, horrified to find Moslems worshiping in a mosque in a Christian city, set fire to the mosque, and slew the worshipers. The fire raged for eight days, spread through three miles, and laid a considerable section of Constantinople in ashes. A prince of royal blood led a popular revolt, killed Alexius IV, reimprisoned Isaac Angelus, took the throne as Alexius V Ducas, and began to organize an army to drive the Latins from their camp at Galata. But the Greeks had been too long secure within their walls to have kept the virtues of their Roman name. After a month of siege they surrendered; Alexius V fled, and the victorious Latins passed like consuming locusts through the capital (1204).

So long kept from their promised prey, they now—in Easter week—subjected the rich city to such spoliation as Rome had never suffered from Vandals or Goths. Not many Greeks were killed—perhaps 2000; but pillage was unconfined. The nobles divided the palaces among them, and appropriated the treasures they found there; the soldiers entered homes, churches, shops, and took whatever caught their fancy. Churches were rifled not only of the gold, silver, and jewels accumulated by them through a millennium, but of sacred relics that would later be peddled in Western Europe at good prices. St. Sophia suffered more damage than the Turks would inflict upon it in 1453;⁵¹ the great altar was torn to pieces to distribute its silver and gold.⁵² The Venetians, familiar with the city that had once welcomed them as merchants, knew where the greatest treasures lay, and stole with superior intelligence; statues and textiles, slaves and gems, fell discriminately into their hands; the four bronze horses that had surveyed the Greek city would now romp over the Piazza di San Marco; nine tenths of the collections of art and jewelry that would later distinguish the Treasury of St. Mark’s came from this well-managed theft.⁵³ Some attempt was made to limit rape; many of the soldiers modestly contented themselves with prostitutes; but Innocent III complained that the pent-up lust of the Latins spared neither age nor sex nor religious profession, and that Greek nuns had to bear the embraces of French or Venetian peasants or grooms.⁵⁴ Amid the pillage libraries were ransacked, and precious manuscripts were ruined or lost; two further fires consumed libraries and museums as well as churches and homes; of the plays of Sophocles and Euripides, till then completely preserved, only a minority survived. Thousands of art masterpieces were stolen, mutilated, or destroyed.

When the riot of rapine had subsided, the Latin nobles chose Baldwin of Flanders to head the Latin kingdom of Constantinople (1204), and made French its official language. The Byzantine Empire was divided into feudal dominions, each ruled by a Latin noble. Venice, eager to control the routes of trade, secured Hadrianople, Epirus, Acarnania, the Ionian Isles, part of the Peloponnesus, Euboea, the Aegean Isles, Gallipoli, and three eighths of Constantinople; the Genoese were dispossessed of their Byzantine “factories” and outposts; and Dandolo, now limping in imperial buskins, took the title of “Doge of Venice, Lord of One Fourth and One Eighth of the Roman Empire”;⁵⁵ soon afterward he died, in the fullness of his unscrupulous success. The Greek clergy were mostly replaced by Latins, in some cases precipitated into holy orders for the occasion; and Innocent III, still protesting against the attack, accepted with grace the formal reunion of the Greek with the Latin Church. Most of the Crusaders returned home with their spoils; some settled in the new dominions; only a handful reached Palestine, and without effect. Perhaps the Crusaders thought that Constantinople, in their hands, would be a stronger base against the Turks than Byzantium had been. But generations of strife between the Latins and the Greeks now absorbed the vitality of the Greek world; the Byzantine Empire never recovered from the blow; and the capture of Constantinople by the Latins prepared, across two centuries, its capture by the Turks.

VIII. THE COLLAPSE OF THE CRUSADES: 1212–91

The scandal of the Fourth Crusade, added in a decade to the failure of the Third, gave no comfort to a Christian faith soon to be faced with the rediscovery of Aristotle and the subtle rationalism of Averroës. Thinkers were much exercised to explain why God had allowed the defeat of His defenders in so holy a cause, and had granted success only to Venetian villainy. Amid these doubts it occurred to simple souls that only innocence could regain the citadel of Christ. In 1212 a German youth vaguely known to history as Nicholas announced that God had commissioned him to lead a crusade of children to the Holy Land. Priests as well as laity condemned him, but the idea spread readily in an age even more subject than most to waves of emotional enthusiasm. Parents struggled to deter their children, but thousands of boys (and some girls in boys’ clothing), averaging twelve years, slipped away and followed Nicholas, perhaps glad to escape from the monarchy of the home to the freedom of the road. The swarm of 30,000 children, leaving mostly from Cologne, passed down the Rhine and over the Alps. Many died of hunger; some stragglers were eaten by wolves; thieves mingled with the marchers and stole their clothing and food. The survivors reached Genoa, where the earthy Italians laughed them into doubt; no ships would carry them to Palestine; and when they appealed to Innocent III he gently told them to go home. Some marched disconsolately back over the Alps; many settled in Genoa and learned the ways of a commercial world.

In France, in this same year, a twelve-year-old shepherd named Stephen came to Philip Augustus, and announced that Christ, appearing to him while he tended his flock, had bidden him lead a children’s crusade to Palestine. The king ordered him to return to his muttons; nevertheless 20,000 youngsters gathered to follow Stephen’s lead. They made their way across France to Marseille, where, Stephen had promised them, the ocean would divide to let them reach Palestine dryshod. It failed them; but two shipowners offered to take them to their destination without charge. They crowded into seven ships, and sailed forth singing hymns of victory. Two of the ships were wrecked off Sardinia, with the loss of all on board; the other children were brought to Tunisia or Egypt, where they were sold as slaves. The shipowners were hanged by order of Frederick II.⁵⁶

Three years later Innocent III, at the Fourth Lateran Council, again appealed to Europe to recover the land of Christ, and returned to the plan that Venice had frustrated—an attack upon Egypt. In 1217 the Fifth Crusade left Germany, Austria, and Hungary under the Hungarian King Andrew, and safely reached Damietta, at the easternmost mouth of the Nile. The city fell after a year’s siege; and Malik al-Kamil, the new Sultan of Egypt and Syria, offered terms of peace—the surrender of most of Jerusalem, the liberation of Christian prisoners, the return of the True Cross. The Crusaders demanded an indemnity as well, which al-Kamil refused. The war was resumed, but went badly; expected reinforcements did not come; finally an eight-year truce was signed that gave the Crusaders the True Cross, but restored Damietta to the Moslems, and required the evacuation of all Christian troops from Egyptian soil.

The Crusaders blamed their tragedy upon Frederick II, the young Emperor of Germany and Italy. He had taken the crusader’s vow in 1215, and had promised to join the besiegers at Damietta; but political complications in Italy, and perhaps an inadequate faith, detained him. In 1228, while excommunicate for his delays, Frederick set out on the Sixth Crusade. Arrived in Palestine, he received no help from the good Christians there, who shunned an outlaw from the Church. He sent emissaries to al-Kamil, who was now leading the Saracen army at Nablus. Al-Kamil replied courteously; and the Sultan’s ambassador, Fakhru’d Din, was impressed by Frederick’s knowledge of the Arabic language, literature, science, and philosophy. The two rulers entered into a friendly exchange of compliments and ideas; and to the astonishment of both Christendom and Islam they signed a treaty (1229) by which al-Kamil ceded to Frederick Acre, Jaffa, Sidon, Nazareth, Bethlehem, and all of Jerusalem except the enclosure—sacred to Islam—containing the Dome of the Rock. Christian pilgrims were to be admitted to this enclosure to perform their prayers on the site of Solomon’s Temple; and similar rights were to be enjoyed by Mohammedans in Bethlehem. All prisoners on either side were to be released; and for ten years and ten months each side pledged itself to peace.⁵⁷ The excommunicate Emperor had succeeded where for a century Christendom had failed; the two cultures, brought together for a moment in mutual understanding and respect, had found it possible to be friends. The Christians of the Holy Land rejoiced, but Pope Gregory IX denounced the pact as an insult to Christendom, and refused to ratify it. After Frederick’s departure the Christian nobility of Palestine took control of Jerusalem, and allied the Christian power in Asia with the Moslem ruler of Damascus against the Egyptian Sultan (1244). The latter called to his aid the Khwarazmian Turks, who captured Jerusalem, plundered it, and massacred a large number of its inhabitants. Two months later Baibars defeated the Christians at Gaza, and Jerusalem once more fell to Islam (October, 1244).

While Innocent IV preached a crusade against Frederick II, and offered to all who would war against the Emperor in Italy the same indulgences and privileges granted to those who served in the Holy Land, the saintly Louis IX of France organized the Seventh Crusade. Shortly after the fall of Jerusalem he took the cross, and persuaded his nobles to do likewise; to certain reluctant ones, at Christmas, he presented costly garments bearing an inwoven cross. He labored to reconcile Innocent with Frederick, so that a united Europe might support the Crusade. Innocent refused; instead, he sent a friar—Giovanni de Piano Carpini—to the Great Khan, suggesting a union of Mongols and Christians against the Turks; the Khan replied by inviting the submission of Christendom to the Mongol power. At last, in 1248, Louis set out with his French knights, including Jean Sieur de Joinville, who would narrate the exploits of his King in a famous chronicle. The expedition reached Damietta, and soon captured it; but the annual inundation of the Nile, which had been forgotten in planning the campaign, began as the Crusaders arrived, and so flooded the country that they were confined to Damietta for half a year. They did not altogether regret it; “the barons,” says Joinville, “took to giving great feasts … and the common people took to consorting with lewd women.”⁵⁸ When the army resumed its march it was depleted by hunger, disease, and desertion, and weakened with indiscipline. At Mansura, despite brave fighting, it was defeated, and fled in wild rout; 10,000 Christians were captured, including Louis himself, fainting with dysentery (1250). An Arab physician cured him; after a month of tribulation he was released, but only in return for the surrender of Damietta, and a ransom of 500,000 livres ($3,800,000). When Louis agreed to this enormous ransom, the sultan reduced it by a fifth, and trusted the King for an unpaid half.⁵⁹ Louis led the remnant of his army to Acre, and stayed there four years, vainly calling upon Europe to cease its wars and join him in a new campaign. He dispatched the monk William of Rubruquis to the Mongol Khan renewing the invitation of Innocent—with similar results. In 1254 he returned to France.

His years in the East had quieted the factionalism of the Christians there; his departure released it. From 1256 to 1260 a civil war of the Venetians against the Genoese in the Syrian ports dragged every faction into it, and exhausted the Christian forces in Palestine. Seizing the opportunity, Baibars, the slave Sultan of Egypt, marched up the coast and took one Christian town after another: Caesarea (1265), Safad (1266), Jaffa (1267), Antioch (1268). The captured Christians were slaughtered or enslaved, and Antioch was so devastated with plunder and fire that it never recovered.

Roused to new fervor in his old age, Louis IX took the cross a second time (1267). His three sons followed his example; but the French nobility rejected his plans as quixotic, and refused to join; even Joinville, who loved him, would have none of this Eighth Crusade. This time the King, wise in government and foolish in war, landed his inadequate forces in Tunisia, hoping to convert its bey to Christianity, and to attack Egypt from the west. He had hardly touched African soil when he “fell sick of a flux in the stomach,”⁶⁰ and died with the word “Jerusalem” on his lips (1270). A year later Prince Edward of England landed at Acre, bravely led some futile sallies, and hurried back to accept the English crown.

The final disaster came when some Christian adventurers robbed a Moslem caravan in Syria, hanged nineteen Moslem merchants, and sacked several Moslem towns. Sultan Khalil demanded satisfaction; receiving none, he marched against Acre, the strongest Christian outpost in Palestine; taking it after a siege of forty-three days, he allowed his men to massacre or enslave 60,000 prisoners (1291). Tyre, Sidon, Haifa, and Beirut fell soon afterward. The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem maintained a ghostly existence for a time in the titles of vain potentates, and for two centuries a few adventurers or enthusiasts embarked upon sporadic and futile efforts to resume the “Great Debate”; but Europe knew that the Crusades had come to an end.

IX. THE RESULTS OF THE CRUSADES

Of their direct and professed purposes the Crusades had failed. After two centuries of war, Jerusalem was in the hands of the ferocious Mamluks, and Christian pilgrims came fewer and more fearful than before. The Moslem powers, once tolerant of religious diversity, had been made intolerant by attack. The Palestinian and Syrian ports that had been captured for Italian trade were without exception lost. Moslem civilization had proved itself superior to the Christian in refinement, comfort, education, and war. The magnificent effort of the popes to give Europe peace through a common purpose had been shattered by nationalistic ambitions and the “crusades” of popes against emperors.

Feudalism recovered with difficulty from its failure in the Crusades. Suited to individualistic adventure and heroism within a narrow range, it had not known how to adjust its methods to Oriental climates and distant campaigns. It had bungled inexcusably the problem of supplies along a lengthening line of communications. It had exhausted its equipment, and blunted its spirit, by conquering not Moslem Jerusalem but Christian Byzantium. To finance their expeditions to the East, many knights had sold or mortgaged their properties to lord, moneylender, Church, or king; for a price they had resigned their rights over many towns in their domains; to many peasants they had sold remission of future feudal dues. Serfs by the thousands had used the crusader’s privilege to leave the land, and thousands had never returned to their manors. While feudal wealth and arms were diverted to the East, the power and wealth of the French monarchy rose as one of the major results of the Crusades. At the same time both the Roman Empires were weakened: the Western emperors lost prestige by their failures in the Holy Land, and by their conflicts with a papacy exalted by the Crusades; and the Eastern Empire, though reborn in 1261, never regained its former power or repute. The Crusades, however, had this measure of success, that without them the Turks would have taken Constantinople long before 1453. For Islam, too, was weakened by the Crusades, and fell more easily before the Mongol flood.

Some of the military orders suffered tragic fates. Those Hospitalers who survived the massacre at Acre fled to Cyprus. In 1310 they captured Rhodes from the Moslems, changed their name to the Knights of Rhodes, and ruled the island till 1522; expelled then by the Turks, they removed to Malta, became the Knights of Malta, and continued to exist there till their disbandment in 1799. The Teutonic Knights, after the fall of Acre, transferred their headquarters to Marienburg in the Prussia they had conquered for Germany from the Slavs. The Templars, driven from Asia, reorganized in France. Possessed of rich holdings throughout Europe, they settled down to enjoy their revenues. Free from taxation, they lent money at lower interest rates than the Lombards and the Jews, and reaped lush profits. Unlike the Hospitalers, they maintained no hospitals, established no schools, succored no poor. At last their hoarded wealth, their armed state within the state, their insubordination to the royal power, aroused the envy, fear, and wrath of King Philip IV the Fair. On October 12, 1310, by his order, and without warning, all Templars in France were arrested, and the royal seal was set on all their goods. Philip accused them of indulging homosexual lusts, of having lost their Christian faith through long contact with Islam, of denying Christ and spitting upon the cross, of worshiping idols, of being in secret league with the Moslems, and of having repeatedly betrayed the Christian cause. A tribunal of prelates and monks loyal to the King examined the prisoners; they denied the royal charges, and were put to the torture to induce them to confess. Some, suspended by the wrists, were repeatedly drawn up and suddenly let down; some had their bare feet held over flames; some had sharp splinters driven under their fingernails; some had a tooth wrenched out day after day; some had heavy weights hung from their genitals; some were slowly starved. In many cases all these devices were used, so that most of the prisoners, when examined again, were weak to the point of death. One showed the bones that had fallen from his roasted feet. Many of them confessed to all the charges of the King; some told how life and liberty had been promised them, under the royal seal, if they would admit the allegations of the government. Several of them died in jail; some killed themselves; fifty-nine were burned at the stake (1310), protesting their innocence to the end. Du Molay, the Grand Master of the order, confessed under torture; led to the stake, he withdrew his confession; and the inquisitors proposed to try him again. Philip denounced the delay, and ordered him to be burned at once; and the royal presence graced the execution. All the property of the Templars in France was confiscated by the state. Pope Clement V protested against these procedures; the French clergy supported the King; the Pope, a virtual prisoner at Avignon, ceased resistance, and abolished the order at Philip’s behest (1312). Edward II, also needing money, confiscated the property of the Templars in England. Some of the wealth so appropriated by Philip and Edward was surrendered to the Church; some of it was granted by the kings to favorites, who by these means founded great manors, and supported the kings against the older feudal nobility.

Possibly some of the Crusaders had learned in the East a new tolerance for sexual perversions; this, and the reintroduction of public baths and private latrines in the West may be included among the results of the Crusades. Probably through contact with the Moslem East, the Europeans returned to the old Roman custom of shaving the beard.⁶¹ A thousand Arabic words now came into the European languages. Oriental romances flowed into Europe, and found new dress in the nascent vernaculars. Crusaders impressed by the enameled glass of the Saracens may have brought from the East the technical secrets that led to the improved stained glass of the developed Gothic cathedrals.⁶² The compass, gunpowder, and printing were known in the East before the Crusades ended, and may have come to Europe in the backwash of that tidal wave. Apparently the Crusaders were too unlettered to care for “Arabic” poetry, science, or philosophy; Moslem influences in such fields came rather through Spain and Sicily than through the contacts of these wars. Greek cultural influences were felt by the West after the capture of Constantinople; so William of Moerbeke, Flemish Archbishop of Corinth, furnished Thomas Aquinas with translations of Aristotle made directly from the original. In general the discovery, by the Crusaders, that the followers of another faith could be as civilized, humane, and trustworthy as themselves, if not more so, must have set some minds adrift, and contributed to the weakening of orthodox belief in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Historians like William, Archbishop of Tyre, spoke of Moslem civilization with a respect, sometimes with an admiration, that would have shocked the rude warriors of the First Crusade.⁶³

The power and prestige of the Roman Church were immensely enhanced by the First Crusade, and progressively damaged by the rest. The sight of diverse peoples, of lordly barons and proud knights, sometimes of emperors and kings, uniting in a religious cause led by the Church raised the status of the papacy. Papal legates entered every country and diocese to stir recruiting and gather funds for the Crusades; their authority encroached upon, often superseded, that of the hierarchy; and through them the faithful became almost directly tributory to the pope. The collections so made became customary, and were soon applied to many purposes besides the Crusades; the pope acquired, to the active dissatisfaction of the kings, the power to tax their subjects, and divert to Rome great sums that might have gone to royal coffers or local needs. The distribution of indulgences for forty days’ service in Palestine was a legitimate application of military science; the granting of similar indulgences to those who paid the expenses of a Crusader seemed forgivable; the extension of like indulgences to those who contributed to funds managed by the popes, or who fought papal wars in Europe against Frederick, Manfred, or Conrad, became an added source of irritation to the kings, and of humor to the satirists. In 1241 Gregory IX directed his legate in Hungary to commute for a money payment the vows of persons pledged to a crusade, and used the proceeds to help finance his life-and-death struggle with Frederick II.⁶⁴ Provençal troubadours criticized the Church for diverting aid from Palestine by offering equal indulgences for a crusade against the Albigensian heretics in France.⁶⁵ “The faithful wondered,” says Matthew Paris, “that the same plenary remission of sins was promised for shedding Christian, as for shedding infidel, blood.”⁶⁶ Many landowners, to finance their crusade, sold or mortgaged their property to churches or monasteries to raise liquid funds; some monasteries in this way acquired vast estates; when the failure of the Crusades lowered the prestige of the Church, her wealth became a ready target of royal envy, popular resentment, and critical rebuke. Some attributed the disasters of Louis IX in 1250 to the simultaneous campaign of Innocent IV against Frederick II. Emboldened skeptics argued that the failure of the Crusades refuted the claims of the pope to be God’s vicar or representative on earth. When, after 1250, monks solicited funds for further crusades, some of their hearers, in humor or bitterness, summoned beggars and gave them alms in the name of Mohammed; for Mohammed, they said, had shown himself stronger than Christ.⁶⁷

Next to the weakening of Christian belief, the chief effect of the Crusades was to stimulate the secular life of Europe by acquaintance with Moslem commerce and industry. War does one good—it teaches people geography. The Italian merchants who throve on the Crusades learned to make good charts of the Mediterranean; the monkish chroniclers who accompanied the knights received and transmitted a new conception of the vastness and variety of Asia. The zest for exploration and travel was stirred; and Baedekers appeared to guide pilgrims to and through the Holy Land. Christian physicians learned from Jewish and Moslem practitioners, and surgery profited from the Crusades.

Trade followed the cross, and perhaps the cross was guided by trade. The knights lost Palestine, but the Italian merchant fleets won control of the Mediterranean not only from Islam but from Byzantium as well. Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi, Marseille, Barcelona had already traded with the Moslem East, the Bosporus, and the Black Sea; but this traffic was immensely enlarged by the Crusades. The Venetian conquest of Constantinople, the transport of pilgrims and warriors to Palestine, the purveyance of supplies to Christians and others in the East, the importation of Oriental products into Europe—all these supported a degree of commerce and maritime transport unknown since the most flourishing days of Imperial Rome, Silks, sugar, spices—pepper, ginger, cloves, cinnamon—rare luxuries in eleventh-century Europe—came to it now in delightful abundance. Plants, crops, and trees already known to Europe from Moslem Spain were now more widely transplanted from Orient to Occident—maize, rice, sesame, carob, lemons, melons, peaches, apricots, cherries, dates … shallot and scallion were named from the port, Ascalon, that shipped them from the East to the West; and apricots were long known as “Damascus plums.”⁶⁸ Damasks, muslins, satins, velvets, tapestries, rugs, dyes, powders, scents, and gems came from Islam to adorn or sweeten feudal and bourgeois homes and flesh.⁶⁹ Mirrors of glass plated with metallic film now replaced those of polished bronze or steel. Europe learned from the East to refine sugar, and make “Venetian” glass.

New markets in the East developed Italian and Flemish industry, and promoted the growth of towns and the middle class. Better techniques of banking were introduced from Byzantium and Islam; new forms and instruments of credit appeared; more money circulated, more ideas, more men. The Crusades had begun with an agricultural feudalism inspired by German barbarism crossed with religious sentiment; they ended with the rise of industry, and the expansion of commerce, in an economic revolution that heralded and financed the Renaissance.

CHAPTER XXIV

The Economic Revolution

1066–1300

I. THE REVIVAL OF COMMERCE

EVERY cultural flowering finds root and nourishment in an expansion of commerce and industry. Moslem seizure of eastern and southern Mediterranean ports and trade, Moslem, Viking, and Magyar raids, political disorder under the successors of Charlemagne, had driven European economic and mental life to nadir in the ninth and tenth centuries. The feudal protection and reorganization of agriculture, the taming of Norse pirates into Norman peasants and merchants, the repulse and conversion of the Huns, the recapture of the Mediterranean by Italian trade, the reopening of the Levant by the Crusades, and the awakening contact of the West with the more advanced civilizations of Islam and Byzantium, provided in the twelfth century the opportunity and stimulus for the recovery of Europe, and supplied the material means for the cultural blossoming of the twelfth century and the medieval meridian of the thirteenth. For society, as well as for an individual, primum est edere, deinde philosophari—eating must come before philosophy, wealth before art.

The first step in the economic revival was the removal of restraints on internal trade. Shortsighted governments had levied a hundred charges upon the transport and sale of goods—for entering ports, crossing bridges, using roads or rivers or canals, offering goods for purchase at markets or fairs. Feudal barons felt justified in exacting tolls on wares passing through their domains, as states do now; and some of them gave real protection and service to merchants by armed escorts and convenient hospitality.* But the result of state and feudal interference was sixty-two toll stations on the Rhine, seventy-four on the Loire, thirty-five on the Elbe, seventy-seven on the Danube …; a merchant paid sixty per cent of his cargo to carry it along the Rhine.¹ Feudal wars, undisciplined soldiery, robber barons, and pirates on rivers and seas, made roads and waterways a martial risk to merchants and travelers. The Truce and Peace of God helped land commerce by proclaiming relatively safe periods for travel; and the growing power of the kings diminished robbery, established uniform measures and weights, limited and regulated tolls, and removed tolls altogether from certain roads and markets in the time of the great fairs.

Fairs were the life of medieval trade. Pedlars, of course, carried small wares from door to door, artisans sold their products in their shops, market days gathered sellers and buyers in the towns; barons sheltered markets near their castles, churches allowed them in their yards, kings housed them in halles or stores in the capitals. But wholesale and international trade centered in the regional fairs periodically held at London and Stourbridge in England, at Paris, Lyons, Reims, and the Champagne in France, at Lille, Ypres, Douai, and Bruges in Flanders, at Cologne, Frankfort, Leipzig, and Lübeck in Germany, at Geneva in Switzerland, at Novgorod in Russia…. The most famous and popular of these fairs took place in the county of Champagne at Lagny in January, at Bar-sur-Aube in Lent, at Provins in May and September, at Troyes in September and November. Each of these six fairs lasted six or seven weeks, so that in sequence they provided an international market through most of the year; they were conveniently located to bring the products and merchants of France, the Lowlands, and the Rhine Valley into contact with those of Provence, Spain, Italy, Africa, and the East; altogether they constituted a major source of French wealth and power in the twelfth century. Originating as early as the fifth century in Troyes, they declined when Philip IV (1285–1314), having taken Champagne from its enlightened counts, taxed and regulated the fairs into penury. In the thirteenth century they gave place to maritime commerce and ports.

Shipbuilding and navigation had slowly improved since Roman days. Hundreds of coastal cities had good lighthouses; many—like Constantinople, Venice, Genoa, Marseille, Barcelona—had commodious docks. Vessels were usually small, with half a deck or none, and carrying some thirty tons; so limited, they could ascend rivers far inland; hence towns like Narbonne, Bordeaux, Nantes, Rouen, Bruges, Bremen, though some distance from the sea, were accessible to ocean-going ships, and became flourishing ports. Some Mediterranean vessels were larger, carrying 600 tons and 1500 passengers;² Venice gave Louis IX a ship 108 feet long, manned by 110 men. The ancient galley was still the regular type, with high ornamental poop, one or two masts and sails, and a low hull for two or three banks of oars—which might total 200. Most oarsmen were free enlisted men; galley slaves were rare in the Middle Ages.³ The art of tacking before the wind, known in the sixth century, developed leisurely until the twelfth, when—mostly on Italian ships —fore and aft rigs were added to the old square sail;⁴ but the chief motive power still remained in the oars. The compass, of doubtful origin,* appeared in Christian navigation about 1200; Sicilian mariners made it available in rough waters by resting the magnetic needle on a movable pivot;⁵ even so another century passed before mariners (the Norse excepted) dared leave sight of land and steer a straight course across open sea. From November 11 to February 22 ocean voyages were exceptional; they were forbidden to ships of the Hanseatic League; and most Mediterranean or Black Sea shipping halted in that period. Sea travel was as slow as in antiquity; from Marseille to Acre took fifteen days. Voyages were not recommended for health; piracies and shipwrecks were numerous, and the sturdiest stomachs were upset. Froissart tells how Sir Hervé de Léon took fifteen days tossing between Southampton and Harfleur, and “was so troubled that he had never health afterward.”⁶ As poor compensation, fares were low; sixpence paid for a Channel crossing in the fourteenth century; and proportionate costs for freight and long voyages gave water transport an advantage that in the thirteenth century transformed the political map of Europe.

The Christian reconquest of Sardinia (1022), Sicily (1090), and Corsica (1091) from the Saracens opened the Straits of Messina and the central Mediterranean to European shipping; and the victories of the First Crusade regained all but the southern ports of that sea. So unshackled, commerce bound Europe into a widening web of trade routes, and connected it not only with Christians in Asia, but with Islamic Africa and Asia, even with India and the Far East. Goods from China or India came through Turkestan, Persia, and Syria to Syrian or Palestinian ports; or through Mongolia to the Caspian and the Volga; or by boat to the Persian Gulf, up the Tigris or Euphrates, and over mountains and deserts to the Black Sea, or the Caspian, or the Mediterranean; or by the Red Sea through canals or caravans to Cairo and Alexandria. From the Moslem ports of Africa trade—mostly Christian in the thirteenth century—fanned outward to Asia Minor and Byzantium; to Cyprus, Rhodes, and Crete; to Salonika, the Piraeus, Corinth, and Patras; to Sicily, Italy, France, and Spain. Constantinople added her luxury products to the stream of goods, and fed the traffic up the Danube and the Dnieper to Central Europe, Russia, and the Baltic states. Venice, Pisa, and Genoa captured the westward Byzantine trade, and fought like savages for the Christian mastery of the sea.

Strategically placed between the East and West athwart the Mediterranean, with ports facing in three directions upon that sea, and with northern cities commanding the passes of the Alps, Italy was geographically bound to profit most from the trade of Europe with Byzantium, Palestine, and Islam. On the Adriatic stood Venice, Ravenna, Rimini, Ancona, Bari, Brindisi, Taranto; on the south, Crotone; along her west coast Reggio, Salerno, Amalfi, Naples, Ostia, Pisa, and Lucca carried a rich commerce, and Florence, the banker, pulled the financial strings; the Arno and the Po took some of the trade inland to Padua, Ferrara, Cremona, Piacenza, and Pavia; Rome drew the tithes and fees of European piety to her shrines; Siena and Bologna stood at the generative crossing of great interior roads; Milan, Como, Brescia, Verona, and Venice gathered into their laps the fruits of the trade that moved over the Alps to and from the Danube and the Rhine. Genoa dominated the Tyrrhenian Sea as Venice ruled the Adriatic; her merchant fleet numbered 200 vessels manned by 20,000 men; her trading ports reached from Corsica to Trebizond. Like Venice and Pisa, Genoa traded freely with Islam: Venice with Egypt, Pisa with Tunisia, Genoa with Moorish Africa and Spain. Many of them sold arms to the Saracens during the Crusades. Powerful popes like Innocent III denounced all traffic with the Moslems, but gold ran thicker than faith or blood, and the “blasphemous trade” went on.⁷

Her wars with Venice weakened Genoa, and the ports of southern France and western Spain reached out for a share of Mediterranean commerce. Marseille, stagnant during the Moslem ascendancy, recaptured for a time her old pre-eminence; but nearby Montpellier, stimulated by her polyglot population and culture of Gauls, Moslems, and Jews, rivaled Marseille in the twelfth century as a southern gateway of France. Barcelona profited from the old Jewish mercantile families that remained after its reconquest from Islam; there and at Valencia Christian Spain, blocked by the Pyrenees, found contact with the Mediterranean world. Cadiz, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, and Nantes sent their ships along the Atlantic coasts to Rouen, London, and Bruges; Genoa in the thirteenth century, Venice in 1317, sent vessels through Gibraltar to all these Atlantic ports; by 1300 trade over the Alps diminished, and Atlantic commerce began to lift the Atlantic nations to that leadership which Columbus would ensure.

France grew rich on her rivers, liquid strands of unifying trade; the Rhone, Garonne, Loire, Saône, Seine, Oise, and Moselle fructified her commerce as well as her fields. Britain could not yet rival her; but the Cinque (Five) Ports on the Channel welcomed foreign ships and goods; and the Thames at London was already in the twelfth century bordered with a continuous line of docks, where exports of cloth, wool, and tin paid for spices from Arabia, silks from China, furs from Russia, and wines from France. Busier still—busier than any other northern port—was Bruges, commercial capital and outlet of a Flanders rich in both agriculture and industry. There, as in Venice and Genoa, the east-west crossed the north-south axis of European trade. Situated near the North Sea coast opposite England, it imported English wool to be woven by Flemish or French looms; sufficiently inland to give safe harbor, it attracted the fleets of Genoa, Venice, and western France, and allowed them to reallocate their wares along a hundred routes to minor ports. As ocean transport became safer and cheaper, overland commerce declined, and Bruges succeeded to the Champagne fairs as the northern focus of European trade. Heavy river traffic on the Meuse, the Scheldt, and the Rhine brought to Bruges the goods of western Germany and eastern France for export to Russia, Scandinavia, England, and Spain. Other towns were nourished by that river trade: Valenciennes, Cambrai, Tournai, Ghent, and Antwerp on the Scheldt; Dinant, Liege, and Maestricht on the Meuse.

Bruges was the chief western member of the Hanseatic League. To promote international co-operation against external competition, to arrange congenial association for merchants stationed away from home, to protect themselves from pirates, highwaymen, fluctuating currencies, defaulting debtors, tax collectors, and feudal tolls, the commercial towns of northern Europe formed in the twelfth century various alliances, which the Germans called hanses—i.e., unions or guilds. London, Bruges, Ypres, Troyes, and twenty other cities formed the “London Hanse.” Lübeck, which had been founded in 1158 as an outpost of German war and trade with Scandinavia, entered into a similar union with Hamburg (1210) and Bruges (1252).* Gradually other cities joined—Danzig, Bremen, Novgorod, Dorpat, Magdeburg, Thorn, Berlin, Visby, Stockholm, Bergen, London; at its height in the fourteenth century the League bound fifty-two towns. It held the mouths of all the great rivers—Rhine, Weser, Elbe, Oder, Vistula—that brought the products of Central Europe to the North or Baltic Sea; it controlled the trade of northern Europe from Rouen to Novgorod. For a long time it monopolized the herring fisheries of the Baltic, and the trade of the Continent with England. It established courts for the settlement of disputes among its members, defended its members against lawsuits from without, and at times waged war as an independent power. It made laws regulating the commercial operations, even the moral conduct, of its member cities and men; it protected its merchants from arbitrary legislation, taxes, and fines; it enforced boycotts against offending cities; it punished default, dishonesty, or the purchase of stolen goods. It established a “factory” or trading post in each member city, kept its merchants under its own German laws wherever they went, and forbade them to marry foreigners.

The Hanseatic League was for a century an agency of civilization. It cleared the Baltic and North Seas of pirates, dredged and straightened waterways, charted currents and tides, marked off channels, built lighthouses, ports, and canals, established and codified maritime law, and in general substituted order for chaos in northern European trade. By organizing the mercantile class into powerful associations, it protected the bourgeoisie against the barons, and promoted the liberation of cities from feudal control. It sued the king of France for League goods ruined by his troops, and forced the king of England to pay for Masses to redeem from purgatory the souls of Hanseatic merchants drowned by Englishmen.⁸ It spread German commerce, language, and culture eastward into Prussia, Livonia, and Estonia, and made great cities of Königsberg, Libau, Memel, and Riga. It controlled the prices and qualities of goods traded in by its members, and established such a reputation for integrity that the name Easterlings (Men from the East), which the English gave them, was adopted by the English as meaning sterling worth, and was in this form attached to silver or pound as meaning trustworthy or real.

But in time the Hanse became an oppressor as well as a defender. It limited too tyrannically the independence of its constituents; forced cities into memberships by boycotts or violence; fought its competitors by fair means or foul; it was not above hiring pirates to injure a rival’s trade. It organized its own armies, and set itself up as a state within many states. It did what it could to oppress and suppress the artisan class from which it derived its wares; all laborers, and many others, came to fear and hate it as the most powerful of all monopolies ever engaged in the restraint of trade. When the workers of England revolted in 1381, they pursued all the Hanseatics even into church sanctuaries, and murdered all those who could not say “bread and cheese” with a pure English accent.⁹

About 1160 the Hanse seized the Swedish island of Gotland, and developed Visby as a base and bastion for the Baltic trade. Decade by decade it extended its control over the commerce and politics of Denmark, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. In thirteenth-century Russia, reported Adam of Bremen, Hanseatic merchants “are as plentiful as dung … and strive as hard to get a marten skin as if it were everlasting salvation.”¹⁰ They fixed their seat at Novgorod on the Volkhov, lived there as an armed merchant garrison, used St. Peter’s Church as a warehouse, stacked wine casks around its altar, guarded these stores like ferocious dogs, and fulfilled all the outward observances of religious piety.¹¹

Not content, the League turned its thoughts to controlling the trade of the Rhine. Cologne, which had formed a hanse of its own, was forced into subordination. But farther south the Hanseatic was stopped by the Rhenish League, formed in 12 54 by Cologne, Mainz, Speyer, Worms, Strasbourg, and Basel. Still farther south Augsburg, Ulm, and Nuremberg handled the trade that came up from Italy; to this day one may see in Venice the Fondaco de’ Tedeschi, their depot on the Grand Canal. Regensburg and Vienna stood at the western end of the great Danube artery that took the products of inland Germany through Salonika into the Aegean, or through the Black Sea to Constantinople, Russia, Islam, and the East. So European trade came full circle, and the web of medieval commerce was complete.

What sort of men were the merchants who sent their goods along these routes amid the suspicious faces, strange tongues, and jealous creeds of a dozen lands? They came from many peoples and countries, but a great number of them were Syrians, Jews, Armenians, or Greeks. They were seldom such businessmen as we know today, safe and sedentary behind a desk in their own city. Usually they moved with their goods; often they traveled great distances to buy cheaply where the products they wanted abounded, and returned to sell dear where their goods were rare. Normally they sold, as well as bought, wholesale—en gros, said the French. The English translated en gros into grosser, and used this first form of the word grocer to mean one who sold spices in bulk.¹² Merchants were adventurers, explorers, knights of the caravan, armed with daggers and bribes, ready for highwaymen, pirates, and a thousand tribulations.

The variety of laws and the multiplicity of jurisdictions were perhaps the worst of their harassments, and the progressive formulation of an international law of commerce and navigation was one of their major achievements. If a merchant traveled by land he was subject to a new court, and perhaps different laws, at every feudal domain; if his wares were spilled upon the road, the local lord could claim them. If his ship was stranded it belonged by the “law of wreck” to the landlord upon whose shores it fell; a Breton lord boasted that a dangerous rock on his coast was the most precious stone in his crown.¹³ For centuries the merchants fought this abuse; in the twelfth they began to secure its abrogation. Meanwhile the international Jewish traders had accumulated for their own use a code of mercantile law; these regulations became the foundation of the law merchant of the eleventh century.¹⁴ This ius mercatorum grew year by year through the ordinances issued by lords or kings for the protection of merchants or visitors from foreign states. Special courts were established to administer the law merchant; and significantly these courts disregarded such old forms of evidence or trial as torture, duel, or ordeal.

As early as the sixth century in the laws of the Visigoths, foreign merchants had received the right, in disputes affecting only themselves, to be judged by delegates from their own countries; so began that consular system by which a trading nation maintained abroad “consuls,” counselors, to protect and aid their nationals. Genoa established such a consulate at Acre in 1180; French cities followed suit in the twelfth century. Agreements among nations—even between Christian and Moslem states—for such consular rights were among the best medieval contributions to international law.

A measure of maritime law had survived from antiquity; it never ceased among the enlightened merchants of Rhodes; and one of the oldest maritime codes was the Code des Rhodiens of 1167. The Lois d’Oléron were issued at the end of the twelfth century by an island off Bordeaux to govern the wine trade, and were adopted by France, Flanders, and England. The Hanseatic League published a detailed code of maritime regulations for its members: precautions to be taken for the safety of passengers and cargo, obligations of rescuer and rescued, duties and wages of captains and crews, and conditions under which a merchant vessel might or should become a man-of-war. Penalties in these codes were severe, but apparently severity was necessary to establish traditions and habits of nautical discipline and reliability. The Middle Ages disciplined men for ten centuries in order that modern men might for four centuries be free.

II. THE PROGRESS OF INDUSTRY

The development of industry kept pace with the expansion of commerce; wider markets stimulated production, and mounting production nourished trade.

Transport progressed least. Most medieval highways were avenues of dirt and dust or mud; no crown or culverts carried water from the road; holes and pools abounded; fords were many, bridges few. Burdens were carried on pack mules or horses rather than in carts, which could not so well avoid the holes. Carriages were large and clumsy, rode on iron tires, and had no springs;¹⁵ they were so uncomfortable, however ornate, that most men and women preferred to travel on horseback—both sexes astride. Until the twelfth century the maintenance of roads depended upon the owner of the adjoining property, who wondered why he should spend to mend what chiefly transients used. In the thirteenth century Frederick II, inspired by Moslem and Byzantine examples, ordered the repair of roads in Sicily and southern Italy; and about the same time the first “royal highways” were built in France—by laying stone cubes in a loose bed of earth or sand. In the same century the cities began to pave their central streets. Florence, Paris, London, and the Flemish towns built excellent bridges. In the twelfth century the Church organized religious fraternities for the repair or construction of bridges, and offered indulgences to those who shared in the work; such frères pontifs built the bridge at Avignon, which still preserves four arches from their hands. Some monastic orders, pre-eminently the Cistercians, toiled to keep roads and bridges functioning. From 1176 to 1209 king, clergy, and citizens contributed funds or labor to raising London Bridge; houses and a chapel rose over it, and twenty stone arches carried it across the Thames. Early in the thirteenth century the first known suspension bridge was thrown over a gorge in the St. Gotthard Pass of the Alps.

Roads being painful, waterways were popular, and played the leading role in the transport of goods. One boat could carry as much as 500 animals, and far more cheaply. From the Tagus to the Volga the rivers of Europe were its main highways, and their direction and outlets determined the spread of population, the growth of towns, and often national military policy. Canals were innumerable, though locks were unknown.

Whether by boat or by land, travel was arduous and slow. A bishop took twenty-nine days to go from Canterbury to Rome. Couriers with fresh relays of horses could make a hundred miles a day; but private couriers were costly, and the post (re-established in Italy in the twelfth century) was normally confined to government affairs. Here and there—as between London and Oxford or Winchester—a regular stagecoach service was available. News, like men, traveled slowly; intelligence of Barbarossa’s death in Cilicia took four months to reach Germany.¹⁶ Medieval man could eat his breakfast without being disturbed by the industriously collected calamities of the world; or those that came to his ken were fortunately too old for remedy.

Some advances were made in the harnessing of natural power. The Domesday Book recorded 5000 water mills in England in 1086; and a drawing of 1169 pictures a water wheel whose leisurely revolutions were multiplied to high speed by a succession of diminishing gears.¹⁷ With such acceleration the water wheel became a basic instrument of industry; a water-driven sawmill appears in Germany in 1245;¹⁸ one water mill at Douai (1313) was used in making edged tools. The windmill, first reported in western Europe in 1105, spread rapidly after Christian notice of its wide use in Islam;¹⁹ Ypres alone had 120 in the thirteenth century.

Improved tools and expanding needs encouraged an outburst of mining. The commercial demand for a reliable gold coinage, and the increasing ability of people to satisfy the passion for jewelry, led to renewed washing of gold grains from rivers, and the mining of gold in Italy, France, England, Hungary, and above all in Germany. Toward 1175 rich veins of copper, silver, and gold were found in the Erz Gebirge (i.e., ore mountains); Freiberg, Goslar, and Annaberg became the centers of a medieval “gold rush”; and from the little town of Joachimsthal came the word joachimsthaler—meaning coins mined there—and, by inevitable shortening, the German and English words thaler and dollar.²⁰ Germany became the chief provider of precious metal for Europe, and its mines formed the foundation—its commerce the framework—of its political power. Iron was mined in the Harz Mountains and in Westphalia, in the Lowlands, England, France, Spain, and Sicily, and once more in ancient Elba. Derbyshire mined lead, Devon, Cornwall, and Bohemia tin, Spain mercury and silver, Italy sulphur and alum, and Salzburg took its name from its great deposits of salt. Coal, used in Roman England but apparently neglected in the Saxon period, was mined again in the twelfth century. In 1237 Queen Eleanor abandoned Nottingham Castle because of fumes from the coal burned in the town below; and in 1301 London forbade the use of coal because smoke was poisoning the city—medieval instances of a supposedly modern woe.²¹ Nevertheless by the end of the thirteenth century coal was actively mined at Newcastle and Durham, and elsewhere in England, Belgium, and France.

The ownership of mineral deposits became a confusion of laws. When feudal tenure was strong the lord claimed all mineral rights in his land, and mined the deposits with his serfs. Ecclesiastical properties made similar claims, and used serfs or hired miners to exhume valuable deposits from their land. Frederick Barbarossa decreed that the sovereign was sole proprietor of all minerals in the soil, and that these could be worked only by firms under state control.²² This reassumption of the “regalian right” usual under the Roman emperors became the law of medieval Germany. In England the crown claimed all silver and gold deposits; baser metals could be mined by the landowner on payment of a “royalty” to the king.²³

Smelting was by charcoal, and used up much wood in still primitive furnaces. Even so the coppersmiths of Dinant produced fine brass wares; the ironworkers of Liége, Nuremberg, Milan, Barcelona, and Toledo made excellent arms and tools; and Seville was renowned for its steel. Toward the end of the thirteenth century cast iron (fused at 15 3 5 degrees C.) began to replace wrought iron (softened by 800 degrees C.); nearly all previous ironworking had been by hammering—the smiting from which the smith derived his Saxon name. Bell founding was an important industry, for cathedrals and town belfries rivaled one another in the weight, sonority, and timbre of their bells. Coppersmiths made curfews (couvre-feus) to cover hearth fires when curfew rang. Saxony was famous for its bronze founders, England for its pewter —a mixture of copper, bismuth, antimony, and tin. Wrought iron made elegant window gratings, majestic grilles for cathedral choirs, and mighty hinges that spread in varied forms over doors for strength and ornament. Goldsmiths and silversmiths were numerous, for gold or silver plate served not only to display or disguise one’s worth, but also to hedge a man against deflated currencies, and to give him, in emergency, a form of wealth convertible into food or goods.

In the thirteenth century the textile industry in Flanders and Italy assumed a large-scale, semicapitalist structure, in which thousands of workers produced goods for the general market, and earned profits for investors whom they seldom saw. In Florence the Arte della Lana, or Wool Guild, had great factories (fondachi) where washers, fullers, sorters, spinners, weavers, inspectors, and clerks worked under one roof, with materials, tools, and looms over which they had no ownership or control.²⁴ Wholesale cloth merchants organized factories, provided equipment, secured labor and capital, fixed wages and prices, arranged distribution and sale, took the risks of enterprise, bore the losses of failure, and reaped the profits of success.²⁵ Other employers preferred to farm out the raw material to individual workers or families who, with their own equipment, would turn it into finished products at home, and would deliver these to the merchant for a wage or price; in this manner thousands of men and women in Italy, Flanders, and France were brought into industrial occupations.²⁶ Amiens, Beauvais, Lille, Laon, St. Quentin, Provins, Reims, Troyes, Cambrai, Tournai, Liége, Louvain—above all, Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, and Douai—became whirlpools of such commission industry, famous for their artistry and their revolts. Laon gave its name to lawn (a linen), Cambrai to cambric, and the diaper pattern took its name from d’Ypres.²⁷ At Ghent 2 300 weavers worked at looms; Provins had 3 200 in the thirteenth century.²⁸ A dozen Italian cities had their own textile industries. At Florence in the twelfth century the Arte della Lana specialized in the production of dyed woolen goods; early in the thirteenth century the Arte di Calimala, or Cloth Guild, organized an extensive business in the import of wool and the export of finished fabrics. By 1306 Florence had 300 textile factories, and by 1336, 30,000 textile workers.²⁹ Genoa made fine velvets and gold-threaded silks. Toward the end of the thirteenth century Vienna imported Flemish weavers, and soon had a flourishing textile industry of her own. England had almost a monopoly in northern Europe’s production of wool; it sent most of its products to Flanders, and thereby bound that country to it in policy and war. The town of Worstead, in Norfolk, gave its name to a variety of woolen cloth. Spain also turned out fine wool; her merino sheep were a main source of her national income.

The Arabs had brought the culture and manufacture of silk to Spain in the eighth century, and to Sicily in the ninth; and Valencia, Cartagena, Seville, Lisbon, and Palermo continued the arts after becoming Christian. Roger II imported Greek and Jewish silk weavers from Corinth and Thebes into Palermo in 1147, and housed them in a palace; through these men and their children sericulture spread through Italy. Lucca organized the manufacture of silk on a capitalistic scale, rivaled by Florence, Milan, Genoa, Modena, Bologna, and Venice. The art crossed the Alps, and developed skilled practitioners in Zurich, Paris, and Cologne.

A hundred other crafts rounded out the scope of medieval industry. Potters glazed earthenware vessels by powdering their moistened surface with lead and baking them in a gentle heat, adding copper or bronze to the lead if they wished a green instead of a yellow glaze. As buildings and fires became more costly in the growing cities of the thirteenth century, tiles replaced thatched roofs; London made the change mandatory in 1212. The building trades must have been competent, for some of the sturdiest structures existing in Europe date from this period. Industrial glass was made for mirrors, windows, and vessels, but on a relatively small scale. Cathedrals had the finest glass ever produced, but many houses had none. Glass blowing was practiced in western Europe from at least the eleventh century; probably the art had never ceased in Italy from its heyday under the Roman Empire. Paper, till the twelfth century, was imported from the Moslem East or Spain; but in 1190 a paper mill was opened at Ravensburg in Germany, and in the thirteenth century Europe began to make paper from linen. Hides were among the leading articles of international commerce, and tanning was universal; glovers, saddlers, purse makers, shoemakers, and cobblers were jealously distinct. Furs were brought in from north and east, and were dressed for royalty, nobility, and bourgeoisie. Wine and beer served instead of central heating, and many towns profited by a municipal monopoly of brewing. The Germans already led the world in this ancient art; and Hamburg, with 500 breweries in the fourteenth century, owed most of its prosperity to its ale.

Aside from textiles, industry remained in the handicraft stage. Workers serving a local market—bakers, cobblers, blacksmiths, carpenters, etc.—controlled their own equipment and product, and remained individually free. Most industry was still carried on in the homes of the workers, or in shops attached to their homes; and most families performed for themselves many of the tasks now delegated to shops or factories—baked their bread, wove their clothing, mended their shoes. In this domestic industry progress was slow; tools were simple, machines few; motives of competition and profit did not stimulate men to invention, or the replacement of human skill with mechanical power. And yet this may have been the most wholesome form of industrial organization in history. Its productivity was low, its degree of contentment was probably and relatively high. The worker remained near his family; he determined the hours and (in some measure) the price of his work; his pride in his skill gave him character and confidence; he was an artist as well as an artisan; and he had the artist’s satisfaction of seeing an integral product taking form under his hands.

III. MONEY

The commercial and industrial expansion revolutionized finance. Commerce could not advance by barter; it required a stable standard of value, a convenient medium of exchange, and ready access to investment funds.

Under Continental feudalism the great lords and prelates exercised the right of mintage, and European economy suffered from a bedlam of currencies worse than today’s. Counterfeiters and coin clippers multiplied the chaos. The kings ordered such gentry to be dismembered, or emasculated, or boiled alive;³⁰ but they themselves repeatedly debased their currencies.* Gold became scarce after the barbarian invasions, and disappeared from the coinages of Western Europe after the Moslem conquest of the East; between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries all such coinages were in silver or baser metals. Gold and civilization wax and wane together.

In the Byzantine Empire, however, gold was coined throughout the Middle Ages. As contact between West and East grew, Byzantine gold coins, called bezants in the West, began to circulate through Europe as the most honored money in Christendom. In 1228 Frederick II, having observed the beneficent effect of a stable gold currency in the Near East, minted in Italy the first gold coins of western Europe. He called them augustales in frank emulation of Augustan coins and prestige; they deserved the name, for though imitative, they were of noble design, and reached at once the highest level of medieval numismatic art. In 1252 both Genoa and Florence issued gold coins; the Florentine florin, equaling in value a pound of silver, was the more beautiful and viable, and was accepted throughout Europe. By 1284 all the major nations of Europe except England had a trustworthy gold coinage—an achievement sacrificed in the turmoil of the twentieth century.

By the end of the thirteenth century the kings of France had bought up or confiscated nearly all seignorial rights to the coining of money. The French monetary system kept till 1789 the terms, though hardly the values, established by Charlemagne: the livre or pound of silver; the sou or twentieth part of a livre; and the denier or twelfth part of a sou. This system was brought to England by the Norman invasion; there, too, the “pound sterling” was divided into twenty parts—shillings—and each of these into twelve parts —pence. The English took the words pound, shilling, and penny from the German Pfund, Schilling, and Pfennig; but took the signs for them from the Latin: £ from libra, s. from solidus, d. from denarius. England did not arrive at a gold currency till 1343; her silver currency, however, as established by Henry II (1154–89), remained the most stable in Europe. In Germany the silver mark was coined in the tenth century, at half the value of the French or British pound.

Despite these developments, medieval currencies suffered from fluctuations of value, the unsteady ratio of silver to gold, the power of the kings and cities—sometimes of nobles and ecclesiastics—to call in all coins at any time, charge a fee for reminting, and issue new coins debased with more alloy. Through the dishonesty of the mints, through the more rapid increase of gold than of goods, through the convenience of redeeming national debts in depreciated money, an irregular deterioration affected all European currencies through medieval and modern times. In France the livre had in 1789 only 1.2 per cent of its value under Charlemagne.³² We may judge the fall of money from some typical prices: at Ravenna in 1268 a dozen eggs cost “a penny”; at London in 1328 a pig cost four shillings, an ox fifteen;³³ in thirteenth-century France three francs bought a sheep, six a pig.³⁴ History is inflationary.*

Where did the money come from that financed and expanded commerce and industry? The greatest single provider was the Church. She had an unparalleled organization for raising funds, and had always a liquid capital available for any purpose; she was the greatest financial power in Christendom. Moreover, many individuals deposited private funds for safekeeping with churches or monasteries. From her wealth the Church lent money to persons or institutions in difficulty. Loans were made chiefly to villagers seeking to improve their farms; they acted as land banks and played a beneficent role in promoting a free peasantry.³⁶ As early as 1070 they lent money to neighboring lords in exchange for a share in the revenues of the lords’ property;³⁷ through these mortgage loans the monasteries became the first banking corporations of the Middle Ages. The abbey of St. André in France did so flourishing a banking business that it hired Jewish moneylenders to manage its financial operations.³⁸ The Knights Templar lent money on interest to kings and princes, lords and knights, churches and prelates; their mortgage business was probably the largest in the world in the thirteenth century.

But these loans by church bodies were usually for consumption or for political use, seldom for financing industry or trade. Commercial credit began when an individual or a family, by what Latin Christendom called commenda, commended or entrusted money to a merchant for a specific voyage or enterprise, and received a share of the profits. Such a silent or “sleeping” partnership was an ancient Roman device, probably relearned by the Christian West from the Byzantine East. So useful a way of sharing in profits without directly contravening the ecclesiastical prohibition of interest was bound to spread; and the “company” (companis, bread-sharer) or family investment became a societas, a partnership in which several persons, not necessarily kin, financed a group or series of ventures rather than one. Such financial organizations appeared in Genoa and Venice toward the end of the tenth century, reached a high development in the twelfth, and largely accounted for the rapid growth of Italian trade. These investment groups often distributed their risk by buying “parts” in several ships or ventures at a time. When, in fourteenth-century Genoa, such shares (partes) were made transferable, the joint-stock company was born.

The greatest single source of finance capital—i.e., funds to meet the pre-income costs of an undertaking—was the professional financier. He had begun in antiquity as a money-changer, and had long since developed into a moneylender, investing his own and other people’s money in enterprises, or in loans to churches, monasteries, nobles, or kings. The role of the Jews as moneylenders has been exaggerated; they were powerful in Spain, and for a time in Britain, weak in Germany, outdone in Italy and France by Christian financiers.³⁹ The chief lender to the kings of England was William Cade; the chief lenders in thirteenth-century France and Flanders were the Louchard and Crespin families of Arras;⁴⁰ William the Breton described Arras at that time as “glutted with usurers.”⁴¹ Another center of northern finance was the bourse (bursa, purse) or money market of Bruges. A still more powerful group of Christian moneylenders originated in Cahors, a town of southern France. Matthew Paris writes:

In these days (1235) the abominable plague of Cahorsians raged so fiercely that there was scarcely any man in all England, especially among the prelates, who was not entangled in their nets. The king was indebted to them for an incalculable account. They circumvented the indigent in their necessities, cloaking their usury under the pretense of trade.⁴²

The papacy for a time entrusted its financial affairs in England to the Cahorsian bankers; but their ruthlessness so offended the English that one of their number was murdered at Oxford, Bishop Roger of London pronounced an anathema upon them, and Henry III banished them from England. Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, lamented on his deathbed the extortions of “the merchants and exchangers of our lord the Pope,” who “are harder than the Jews.”⁴³

It was the Italians who developed banking to unprecedented heights in the thirteenth century. Great banking families rose to supply the sinews of far-reaching Italian trade: the Buonsignori and Gallerani in Siena, the Frescobaldi, Bardi, and Peruzzi in Florence, the Pisani and Tiepoli in Venice…. They extended their operations beyond the Alps, and lent great sums to the ever-needy kings of England and France, to barons, bishops, abbots, and towns. Popes and kings employed them to collect revenues, manage mints and finances, advise on policy. They bought wool, spices, jewelry, and silk wholesale, and owned ships and hotels from one end of Europe to the other.⁴⁴ By the middle of the thirteenth century these “Lombards,” as the North called all Italian bankers, were the most active and powerful financiers in the world. They were hated at home and abroad for their exactions, and were envied for their wealth; every generation borrows, and denounces those who lend. Their rise dealt a heavy blow to Jewish international banking, and they were not above recommending the banishment of these patient competitors.⁴⁵ The strongest of the “Lombards” were the Florentine banking firms, of whom eighty are recorded between 1260 and 1347.⁴⁶ They financed the political and military campaigns of the papacy, and reaped rich rewards; and their position as papal bankers provided a useful cover in operations that were hardly in harmony with the views of the Church on interest. They made profits worthy of modern times; the Peruzzi, for example, paid a forty per cent dividend in 1308.⁴⁷ But these Italian firms almost atoned for their greed by their vitalizing services to commerce and industry. When their tide ebbed they left some of their terms—banco, credito, debito, cassa (money box, cash), conto, disconto, conto corrente, netto, bilanza, banca rotta (bank broken, bankruptcy)—in almost all European languages.⁴⁸

As these words suggest, the great money firms of Venice, Florence, and Genoa, in or before the thirteenth century, developed nearly all the functions of a modern bank. They accepted deposits, and carried current accounts—between parties having an unfinished series of money transactions. As early as 1171 the Bank of Venice arranged exchanges of accounts among its clients by mere bookkeeping operations.⁴⁹ They made loans, and as security they accepted jewelry, costly armor, government bonds, or the right to collect taxes or manage the public revenue. They received goods in bond for transfer to other countries. Through their international connections they were able to issue letters of credit by which a deposit made in one country would be returned to the depositor, or his appointee, in another country—a device long known to the Jews, the Moslems, and the Templars.⁵⁰ Conversely, they wrote bills of exchange: a merchant, in return for goods or a loan, gave a promissory note to pay the creditor at one of the great fairs or international banks by a stated time; these notes were balanced against one another at fair or bank, and only the final balance was paid in money; hundreds of transactions could now take place without the nuisance of carrying or exchanging great sums and weights of coin. As the banking centers became clearing houses, the bankers avoided the long journey to the fairs. Merchants throughout Europe and the Levant could draw on their accounts in the banks of Italy, and have their balances settled by interbank bookkeeping.⁵¹ In effect the utility and circulation of money were increased tenfold. This “credit system”—made possible by mutual trust—was not the least important or honorable aspect of the economic revolution.

Insurance too had its beginnings in the thirteenth century. The merchant guilds gave their members insurance against fire, shipwreck, and other misfortunes or injuries, even against lawsuits incurred for crimes—whether the members were guilty or innocent.⁵² Many monasteries offered a life annuity: in return for a sum of money paid down, they promised to provide the donor with food and drink, sometimes also with clothes and lodging, for the rest of his life.⁵³ As early as the twelfth century a Bruges banking house offered insurance on goods; and a chartered insurance company was apparently established there in 1310.⁵⁴ The Bardi of Florence, in 1318, accepted insurance risks on overland assignments of cloth.

The first government bonds were issued by Venice in 1157. The needs of war led the republic to exact forced loans from the citizens; and a special department (Camera degli Impresidi) was set up to receive the loans, and give the subscribers interest-bearing certificates as state guarantees of repayment. After 1206 these government bonds were made negotiable and transferable; they could be bought or sold, or used as security for loans. Similar certificates of municipal indebtedness were accepted at Como in 1250 as equivalent to metal currency. Since paper money is merely a governmental promise to pay, these negotiable gold certificates marked the beginning of paper money in Europe.⁵⁵

The complicated operations of the bankers, the papacy, and the monarchies required a careful system of bookkeeping. Archives and account books swelled with records of rents, taxes, receipts, expenditures, credits, and debts. The accounting methods of imperial Rome, lost in western Europe in the seventh century, continued in Constantinople, were adopted by the Arabs, and were revived in Italy during the Crusades. A fully developed system of double-entry bookkeeping appears in the communal accounts of Genoa in 1340; the loss of Genoese records for the years from 1278 to 1340 leaves open the probability that this advance was also an achievement of the thirteenth century.⁵⁶

IV. INTEREST

The greatest obstacle to the development of banking was the ecclesiastical doctrine of interest. This had three sources: Aristotle’s condemnation of interest as an unnatural breeding of money by money,⁵⁷ Christ’s condemnation of interest,⁵⁸ and the reaction of the Fathers of the Church against commercialism and usury in Rome. Roman law had legalized interest, and “honorable men” like Brutus had charged merciless rates. Ambrose had denounced the theory that one may do what he likes with his own:

“My own,” say you? What is your own? When you came from your mother’s womb, what wealth did you bring with you? That which is taken by you, beyond what suffices you, is taken by violence. Is it that God is unjust in not distributing the means of life to us equally, so that you should have abundance while others are in want? Or is it not rather that He wished to confer upon you marks of His kindness, while He crowned your fellow man with the virtue of patience? You, then, who have received the gift of God, think you that you commit no injustice by keeping to yourself alone what would be the means of life to many? It is the bread of the hungry you cling to, it is the clothing of the naked you lock up; the money you bury is the redemption of the poor.⁵⁹

Other Church Fathers had verged upon communism. “The use of all that is in the world,” said Clement of Alexandria, “ought to be common to all men. But by injustice one man has called this his own, another that; and so has come division among men.”⁶⁰ Jerome held all profit unjust; Augustine considered all “business” an evil, as “turning men from seeking true rest, which is God.”⁶¹ Pope Leo I had rejected these extreme doctrines; but the mood of the Church continued unsympathetic to commerce, suspicious of all speculation and profit, hostile to all “engrossing,” “forestalling,” and “usury”—by which last term the Middle Ages meant any interest charge whatever. “Usury,” said Ambrose, “is whatever is added to the capital”;⁶² and Gratian embodied this blunt definition in the canon law of the Church.

The councils of Nicaea (325), Orléans (538), Mâcon (585), and Clichy (626) had forbidden the clergy to lend money for gain. The capitularies of Charlemagne for 789, and the Church councils of the ninth century, extended the prohibition to laymen. The revival of Roman law in the twelfth century emboldened Irnerius and the “glossators” of Bologna to defend interest, and they were able to quote Justinian’s Code in its behalf. But the Third Council of the Lateran (1179) renewed the prohibition, and decreed “that manifest usurers shall not be admitted to communion, nor, if they die in sin, to Christian burial; and no priest shall accept their alms.”⁶³ Innocent III must have taken a more lenient view, for in 1206 he advised that in certain cases a dowry “should be committed to some merchant,” so that an income might be derived from it “by honest gain.”⁶⁴ Gregory IX, however, returned to the conception of usury as any receipt of any profit on a loan;⁶⁵ and this remained the law of the Roman Church till 1917.

The wealth of the Church was in land, not in trade; she scorned merchants as the feudal baron scorned them; land and labor (including management) seemed to her the only true creators of wealth and value. She resented the rising power and opulence of a mercantile class not too well disposed to feudal landowners or to the Church; she had for centuries thought of all moneylenders as Jews; and she felt justified in rebuking the hard terms exacted by moneylenders from needy ecclesiastical institutions. By and large, the effort of the Church to control the profit motive was an heroic assertion of Christian morality; it formed a wholesome contrast to the imprisonment or enslavement of debtors that had disgraced Greek, Roman, and barbarian life and law. We cannot be sure that men are happier today than they would have been had the view of the Church prevailed.

For a long time the legislation of governments supported the position of the Church; and the prohibition of interest was enforced in the secular courts.⁶⁶ But commercial necessity proved stronger than fear of prison or hell. The expansion of trade and industry demanded the use of idle money by active enterprise; states at war or in other emergencies found it easier to borrow than to tax; guilds both lent and borrowed at interest; landowners extending their property, or leaving for crusades, welcomed the moneylender; churches themselves, and monasteries, survived their crises or rising costs or needs by recourse to the Lombards, the Cahorsians, or the Jews.

The wits of men found many subterfuges from the law. A borrower would sell land cheap to the lender, leave him the usufruct as interest, and later repurchase the land. Or the landowner sold to the lender some or all of the annual rents or revenues of his land; if, for example, A sold to B for $100 the rents of a parcel yielding $10.00 a year, B was in effect lending A $100 at ten per cent. Many monasteries invested their funds by buying such “rent charges”—above all in Germany, where the word for interest, Zins, grew out of the medieval Latin for rents, census.⁶⁷ Towns borrowed money by deeding to the lender a share in their revenues.⁶⁸ Individuals and institutions, including monasteries, lent money in return for secret gifts or fictitious sales.⁶⁹ Pope Alexander III complained in 1163 that “many of the clergy” (chiefly monastic) “while they shrink from common usury as from a thing too plainly condemned, do notwithstanding lend money to others who are in need, take their possessions in pledge, and receive the fruits therefrom accruing beyond the principal lent.”⁷⁰ Some borrowers pledged themselves to pay “damages” increasing for every day or month of delay in repaying a loan; and the date of payment was placed so early as to make such concealed interest inevitable;⁷¹ on this basis the Cahorsians lent money to certain monasteries on terms equivalent to sixty per cent per year.⁷² Many banking firms openly lent at interest, and claimed immunity on the theory that the law applied only to individuals. The cities of Italy made no excuses for paying interest on their government bonds. In 1208 Innocent III remarked that if all usurers were excluded from the Church as canon law demanded, all churches might as well be closed.⁷³

The Church reluctantly adjusted herself to realities. St. Thomas Aquinas, about 1250, courageously formulated a new ecclesiastical doctrine of interest: the investor in a business enterprise might legitimately share in the gain if he actually shared in the risk or the loss;⁷⁴ and loss was interpreted to include any delay in the repayment of the loan beyond a stipulated date.⁷⁵ St. Bonaventura and Pope Innocent IV accepted the principle, and widened it to legitimize a payment made to a lender in return for the temporary loss of the use of his capital.⁷⁶ Some fifteenth-century canonists admitted the right of states to issue interest-bearing bonds; Pope Martin V in 1425 legalized the sale of rent charges; after 1400 most European states repealed their laws against interest; and the Church prohibition survived as a dead letter which all agreed to ignore. The Church tried to find a solution by encouraging St. Bernardino of Feltre and other ecclesiastics in establishing, from 1251 on, montes pietatis—“hills of love”—where trustworthy persons in need, by depositing some article as a pledge, might obtain loans without interest. But these precursors of our pawnbrokers’ shops touched only a small sector of the problem; the needs of commerce and industry remained, and capital rose to meet them.

The professional moneylenders exacted high rates of interest not so much because they were conscienceless devils as because they ran great risks of loss and head. They could not always enforce their contracts through appeals to the law; their accumulations were subject to requisition by kings or emperors; they could at any moment be banished, and were at all times damned. Many loans were never repaid; many borrowers died bankrupt; some went on crusades, were excused from paying interest, and never returned. When borrowers defaulted, the lenders could only make up the loss by raising rates on other loans; the good loan had to pay for the bad one, as the price of commodities bought must include the cost of commodities spoiled before sale. In twelfth-century France and England the interest rate ranged between 33⅓% and 43⅓%;⁷⁷ sometimes it rose to 86%; in prosperous Italy it sank to 12½% to 20%;⁷⁸ Frederick II, about 1240, tried to lower the rate to 10%, but soon paid more than that to Christian moneylenders. As late as 1409 the government of Naples allowed 40% as the legal maximum.⁷⁹ The interest rate fell as the security of loans rose, and as the competition of lenders increased. Gradually, through a thousand experiments and errors, men learned to use the new financial tools of a progressive economy, and the Age of Money began in the Age of Faith.

V. THE GUILDS

In ancient Rome there were countless collegia, scholae, sodalitates, artes—associations of artisans, merchants, contractors, political clubs, secret fraternities, religious brotherhoods. Did any of these survive to beget the medieval guilds?

Two letters of Gregory I (590–604) refer to a corporation of soap makers at Naples, and to another of bakers at Otranto. In the law code of the Lombard King Rotharis (636–52) we read of magistri Comacini—apparently master masons from Como, who speak of one another as collegantes—colleagues of the same collegium⁸⁰ Associations of transport workers are mentioned in seventh-century Rome and in tenth-century Worms.⁸¹ The ancient guilds continued in the Byzantine Empire. In Ravenna we find references to many scholae or economic associations—in the sixth century to bakers, in the ninth to notaries and merchants, in the tenth to fishermen, in the eleventh to victualers. We hear of artisan ministeria in ninth-century Venice, and of a gardeners’ schola in eleventh-century Rome.⁸² Doubtless most of the ancient guilds in the West succumbed to the barbarian invasions, and the resulting reruralization and poverty; but some seem to have survived in Lombardy. When commerce and industry recovered in the eleventh century the conditions that had begotten the collegia regenerated the guilds.

Consequently these were strongest in Italy, where the old Roman institutions were best preserved. In Florence, in the twelfth century, we find arti—“arts,” craft unions—of notaries, clothiers, wool merchants, bankers, physicians and druggists, mercers or silk dealers, furriers, tanners, armorers, innkeepers….⁸³ These guilds were apparently modeled on those of Constantinople.⁸⁴ North of the Alps the destruction of the ancient collegia was presumably more complete than in Italy; yet we find them mentioned in the laws of Dagobert I (630), the capitularies of Charlemagne (779, 789), and the ordinances of Archbishop Hincmar of Reims (852). In the eleventh century the guilds reappear in France and Flanders, and multiply rapidly as charités, frairies (brotherhoods), or compagnies. In Germany the guilds (hanse) stemmed from old Markgenossenschaften—local associations for mutual aid, religious observances, and holiday hilarity. By the twelfth century many of these had become trade or craft unions; and by the thirteenth century these were so strong that they contested political as well as economic authority with the municipal councils.⁸⁵ The Hanseatic League was such a guild. The first mention of English guilds is in the laws of King Ine (688–726), which speak of gegildan—associates who helped one another to pay any wergild assessed against them. The Anglo-Saxon word gild (cf. the German Geld, the English gold and yield) meant a contribution to a common fund, and later the society that administered the fund. The oldest reference to English trade guilds is dated 1093.⁸⁶ By the thirteenth century nearly every important town in England had one or more guilds, and a kind of municipal “guild socialism” held sway in England and Germany.

Nearly all the guilds of the eleventh century were merchant guilds: they included only independent merchants and master workmen; they excluded all persons dependent upon others. They were frankly institutions in restraint of trade. They usually persuaded their towns to keep out, by a high protective tariff or elsewise, goods competitive with their own; such alien goods, if allowed to enter the town, were sold at prices fixed by the affected guild. In many cases a merchant guild obtained from commune or king a local or national monopoly in its line or field. The Paris Company for the Transit of Merchandise by Water almost owned the Seine. By city ordinance or economic pressure the guild usually compelled craftsmen to work only for the guild or with its consent, and to sell its products only to or through the guild.

The greater guilds became powerful corporations; they dealt in a variety of goods, purchased raw materials wholesale, provided insurance against losses, organized the food supply and sewage disposals of their towns, paved streets, built roads and docks, deepened harbors, policed highways, supervised markets, regulated wages, hours, conditions of labor, terms of apprenticeship, methods of production and sale, prices of materials and wares.⁸⁷ Four or five times a year they fixed a “just price” that in their judgment gave fair stimulus and reward to all parties concerned. They weighed, tested, counted all products bought or sold in their trade and area, and did their best to keep inferior or dishonest goods from the market.⁸⁸ They banded together to resist robbers, feudal lords and tolls, refractory workmen, tax-levying governments. They took a leading part in politics, dominated many municipal councils, effectively supported the communes in their struggles against barons, bishops, and kings, and themselves evolved into an oppressive oligarchy of merchants and financiers.

Usually each guild had its own guild hall, which in the later Middle Ages might be architecturally ornate. It had a complex personnel of presiding aldermen, recorders, treasurers, bailiffs, sergeants…. It had its own courts to try its members, and required its members to submit their disputes to the guild court before resorting to state law. It obligated its members to help a fellow guildsman in sickness or distress, to rescue or ransom him if attacked or jailed.⁸⁹ It supervised the morals, manners, and dress of its members, and fixed a penalty for coming to meeting stockingless. When two members of the Leicester Merchants’ Guild engaged in fisticuffs at Boston Fair, their fellows fined them a barrel of beer, to be co-operatively drunk by the guild.⁹⁰ Each guild had an annual feast for its patron saint, when a brief prelude of prayer sanctioned a day of moist exuberance. It shared in financing and adorning the city’s churches or cathedral, and in preparing and performing those miracle plays which mothered the modern drama; and in municipal parades its dignitaries marched in gorgeous liveries, displaying the banners of their trade in colorful pageantry. It provided for its members insurance against fire, flood, theft, imprisonment, disability, and old age.⁹¹ It built hospitals, almshouses, orphanages and schools. It paid for the funerals of its dead, and for the Masses that would rescue their souls from purgatory. Its prosperous decedents seldom failed to remember it in their wills.

Normally excluded from these merchant guilds, and yet subject to their economic regulations and political power, the craftsmen in each industry began in the twelfth century to form in each town their own craft guilds. In 1099 we find guilds of weavers in London, Lincoln, and Oxford, and, soon afterward, of fullers, tanners, butchers, goldsmiths…. Under the names of arti, Zunfte, métiers, “companies,” “mysteries,” they spread throughout Europe in the thirteenth century; Venice had fifty-eight, Genoa thirty-three, Florence twenty-one, Cologne twenty-six, Paris one hundred. About 1254 Étienne Boileau, “provost of merchants”—secretary of commerce—under Louis IX, issued an official Livre des Métiers, or Book of Trades, giving the rules and regulations of 101 Paris guilds. The division of labor in this list is astonishing: in the leather industry, for example, there were separate unions for skinners, tanners, cobblers, harness makers, saddlers, and makers of fine leather goods; in carpentry there were distinct unions of chest makers, cabinetmakers, boatbuilders, wheelwrights, coopers, twiners. Each guild jealously guarded its craft secrets, fenced in its field of work against outsiders, and engaged in lively jurisdictional disputes.⁹²

In the spirit of the times the craft guild took a religious form and a patron saint, and aspired to monopoly. Ordinarily no one might follow a craft unless he belonged to its guild.⁹³ The guild leaders were annually elected by full assemblies of their craft, but were often chosen by seniority and wealth. Guild regulations determined—as far as merchant guilds, municipal ordinances, and economic law would allow—the conditions under which the members worked, the wages they received, the prices they charged. Guild rules limited the number of masters in an area, and of apprentices to a master; forbade the industrial employment of women except the master’s wife, or of men after six P.M.; and punished members for unjust charges, dishonest dealing, and shoddy goods. In many cases the guild proudly stamped its products with its “trademark” or “[guild]hallmark,” certifying their quality;⁹⁴ the cloth guild of Bruges expelled from the city a member who had forged the Bruges hallmark on inferior goods.⁹⁵ Competition among masters in quantity of production or price of product was discouraged, lest the cleverest or hardest masters become too rich at the expense of the rest; but competition in quality of product was encouraged among both masters and towns. Craft, like merchant, guilds, built hospitals and schools, provided diverse insurance, succored poor members, dowered their daughters, buried the dead, cared for widows, gave labor as well as funds to building cathedrals and churches, and pictured their craft operations and insignia in cathedral glass.

The fraternal spirit among the masters did not prevent a sharp gradation of membership and powers in the craft guilds. At the bottom was the apprentice, ten to twelve years old, bound by his parents, for a period of from three to twelve years, to live with a master workman, and serve him in shop and home. In return he received food, clothing, shelter, and instruction in the trade; in the later years of his service, wages and tools; at the end of his term, a gift of money to start him on his own. If he ran away he was to be returned to his master and punished; if he continued to abscond he was forever debarred from the craft. On completing his service he became a journeyman (serviteur, garçon, compagnon, varlet), passing from one master to another as a day (journée) laborer. After two or three years the journeyman, if he had enough capital to open his own shop, was examined for technical ability by a board of his guild; if he passed he was made a master. Sometimes—but only in the later Middle Ages—the candidate was required to submit to the governors of the guild a “masterpiece”—a satisfactory sample of his craft.

The graduate craftsman, or master, owned his tools, and usually produced goods directly on order of the consumer, who in some cases provided the materials, and might at any time come in and watch the work. The middleman, in this system, did not control the avenues between the maker and the user of goods. The scale of the craftsman’s operations was limited by the market for which he produced, which was usually his town; but he was not dependent upon the fluctuations of a general market, or the mood of distant investors or purchasers; he did not know the economic paranoia of alternating exaltations and depressions. His hours were long—eight to thirteen hours a day; but he chose them himself, worked in a wisely leisurely way, and enjoyed many a religious holiday. He ate nourishing food, bought sturdy furniture, wore simple but durable clothing, and had at least as wide a cultural life as the master workman of today. He did not read much, and was spared much stupefying trash; but he shared actively in the song and dance, the drama and ritual, of his community.

Throughout the thirteenth century the craft guilds waxed in number and power, and provided a democratic check on the oligarchic merchant guilds. But the craft guilds in turn became an aristocracy of labor. They tended to restrict mastership to masters’ sons; they underpaid their journeymen, who in the fourteenth century weakened them with repeated revolt; and they raised ever higher barriers against entry into their membership or their towns.⁹⁶ They were excellent organizations for an industrial age when difficulties of transportation often narrowed the market to local buyers, and capital accumulations were not yet sufficiently rich and fluid to finance large-scale undertakings. When such funds appeared the guilds—merchant or craft —lost control of the market, and therefore of the conditions of work. The Industrial Revolution destroyed them in England by the slow fatality of economic change; and the French Revolution abruptly disbanded them as hostile to that freedom and dignity of work that for a bright moment they had once sustained.

VI. THE COMMUNES

The economic revolution of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, like those of the eighteenth and the twentieth, caused a revolution in society and government. New classes rose to economic and political power, and gave to the medieval city that virile and pugnacious independence which culminated in the Renaissance.

The question of heredity versus environment affects the cities, as well as the guilds, of Europe; were they the lineal descendants of Roman municipalities, or new concretions deposited by the stream of economic change? Many Roman cities maintained their continuity through centuries of chaos, poverty, and decay; but only a few in Italy and southeastern France kept the old Roman institutions, and fewer still the old Roman law. North of the Alps, barbarian laws had overlaid the Roman heritage; and in some measure the political customs of the German tribe or village had seeped even into ancient municipalities. Most transalpine towns belonged to feudal domains, and were ruled by the will and appointees of their feudal lords. Municipal institutions were alien, feudal institutions natural, to the Teutonic conquerors. Outside of Italy, the medieval city rose through the formation of new commercial centers, classes, and powers.

The feudal town had grown up, usually on elevations, at the junction of roads, or along vital waterways, or on frontiers. Around the walls of the feudal castle or fortified monastery the modest industry and trade of the townsmen or burgesses had slowly developed. When Norse and Magyar raids subsided, this extramural activity expanded, shops multiplied, and merchants and craftsmen, once transient, became settled residents of the town. In war, however, insecurity returned; and the extramural population built a second wall, of wider circumference than the feudal moat, to protect itself, its shops, and its goods. The feudal baron or bishop still owned and ruled this enlarged town as part of his domain; but its growing population was increasingly commercial and secular, fretted under feudal tolls and controls, and plotted to win municipal liberty.

Out of old political traditions and new administrative needs an assembly of citizens and a corps of officials took form; and more and more this “commune”—the body politic—regulated the affairs of the city—the body geographical. Towards the end of the eleventh century the merchant leaders began to demand from the feudal overlords charters of communal freedom for the towns. With characteristic shrewdness they played one overlord against the other—baron against bishop, knight against baron, king against any of them or all. The townsmen used diverse means to achieve municipal freedom: they took a solemn oath to refuse and resist baronial or episcopal tolls or taxes; they offered the lord a flat sum, or an annuity, for a charter; on the royal domain they won autonomy by money grants, or services in war; sometimes they bluntly announced their independence, and fought a violent revolution. Tours fought twelve times before its liberty was won. Lords in need or debt, especially in preparing for a crusade, sold charters of self-government to the towns that they held in fief; many English cities in this way won their local autonomy from Richard I. Some lords, above all in Flanders, granted charters of incomplete freedom to cities whose commercial development enhanced baronial revenues. The abbots and bishops resisted longest, for their consecration oath bound them not to lower the income of their abbeys or sees—by which their many ministrations were financed; hence the struggle of the towns against their ecclesiastical owners was most bitter and prolonged.

The Spanish kings favored the communes as foils to a troublesome nobility, and the royal charters were many and liberal. Leon received its charter from the king of Castile in 1020, Burgos in 1073, Najera in 1076, Toledo in 1085; and Compostela, Cadiz, Valencia, Barcelona soon followed. In Germany feudalism, in Italy the cities, profited from the mutual exhaustion of Empire and papacy in the war of investitures and other conflicts between Church and state. In northern Italy the cities attained a political vigor hardly known before or since. As the Alpine streams fed the great rivers of Lombardy and Tuscany, and these accommodated commerce and fertilized the plains, so the commerce of transalpine Europe and western Asia, meeting in northern Italy, generated there a mercantile bourgeoisie whose wealth rebuilt old cities, raised up new ones, financed literature and art, and proudly cast off feudal bonds. The nobility from their castles in the countryside fought a losing war against the communal movement; yielding, they took up residence in the city, and swore loyalty to the commune. The bishops, who for centuries had been the real and able governors of the Lombard towns, were subdued with the help of the popes, whose authority they had long ignored. In 1080 we hear of “consuls” governing Lucca; in 1084 we find them at Pisa, in 1098 at Arezzo, in 1099 at Genoa, in 1105 at Pavia, in 1138 at Florence. The cities of northern Italy continued till the fifteenth century to acknowledge the formal sovereignty of the Empire, and indited their state papers in its name;⁹⁷ but in practice and effect they were free; and the ancient regime of city-state was revived, with all its chaos and stimulus.

In France the enfranchisement of the cities involved a long and often violent struggle. At Le Mans (1069), Cambrai (1076), and Reims (1139) the ruling bishops, by excommunication or force, succeeded in suppressing the communes set up by the citizens; at Noyon, however, the bishop of his own accord gave a charter to the town (1108). St. Quentin freed itself in 1080, Beauvais in 1099, Marseille in 1100, Amiens in 1113. At Laon in 1115 the citizens took advantage of their corrupt bishop’s absence to establish a commune; on his return he was bribed to take oath to protect it; a year later he induced King Louis VI to suppress it. In the monk Guibert of Nogent’s account of what followed we sample the intensity of the communal revolution:

On the fifth day of Easter week … there arose a disorderly noise throughout the city, men shouting “Commune!” … Citizens now entered the bishop’s court with swords, battle-axes, bows, hatchets, clubs, and spears, a very great company…. The nobles rallied from all sides to the bishop…. He, with some helpers, fought them off with stones and arrows…. He hid himself in a cask … and piteously implored them, promising that he would cease to be their bishop, would give them unlimited riches, and would leave the country. And as they with hardened hearts jeered at him, one named Bernard, lifting his battle-ax, brutally dashed out the brains of that sacred, though sinner’s, head; and he, slipping between the hands of those who held him, was dead before he reached the ground, stricken by another blow under the eye-sockets and across the nose. There brought to his end, his legs were cut off, and many another wound inflicted. Thibaut, seeing a ring on the Bishop’s finger, and not being able to draw it off, cut off the finger.⁹⁸

The cathedral was fired, and was razed to the ground. Thinking to take two steps at once, the pillagers began to sack and burn the mansions of the aristocracy. A royal army stormed the city, and joined nobles and clergy in massacring the population. The commune was suppressed. Fourteen years later it was restored; and the citizens labored with pious enthusiasm to rebuild the cathedral that they or their fathers had destroyed.

The struggle continued for a century. At Vézelay (1106) the people killed Abbot Arnaud and set up a commune. Orléans rose in 1137, but failed. Louis VII granted Sens a charter in 1146, but revoked it three years later on petition of the abbot within whose domains the city lay; the populace killed the abbot and his nephew, but failed to re-establish the commune. The bishop of Tournai fought a civil war for six years (1190–6) to overthrow the commune; the pope excommunicated all the citizens. On Easter Sunday of 1194 the people of Rouen sacked the houses of the cathedral canons; in 1207 the city was put under a papal interdict. In 1235 at Reims the stones brought into the city to rebuild the cathedral were seized by the populace and were used for missiles and barricades in a revolt against the highest ecclesiastic in Gaul; he and his canons fled, and did not return until two years later, when the pope induced Louis VII to abolish the commune. Many cities of France never succeeded, till the Revolution, in establishing their freedom; but in north France most of the cities were freed between 1080 and 1200, and, under the stimulus of liberty, entered upon their greatest age. It was the communes that built the Gothic cathedrals.

In England the kings won the support of the cities against the nobility by granting them charters of limited self-government. William the Conqueror gave such a charter to London; similar charters were yielded by Henry II to Lincoln, Durham, Carlisle, Bristol, Oxford, Salisbury, and Southampton; and in 1201 Cambridge bought its communal rights from King John. In Flanders the ruling counts made substantial concessions to Ghent, Bruges, Douai, Tournai, Lille … but overcame all attempts at complete municipal independence. Leyden, Haarlem, Rotterdam, Dordrecht, Delft, and other Dutch cities obtained charters of local autonomy in the thirteenth century. In Germany the liberation was long drawn out, and mostly peaceful; the bishops, who had for centuries ruled the cities as feudatories of the emperors, yielded to Cologne, Trier, Metz, Mainz, Speyer, Strasbourg, Worms, and other cities the right to select their own magistrates and make their own laws.

By the end of the twelfth century the communal revolution was won in western Europe. The cities, though seldom completely free, had thrown off their feudal masters, ended or reduced feudal tolls, and severely limited ecclesiastical rights. The Flemish cities forbade the establishment of new monasteries, and the bequest of land to churches; they restricted the right of the clergy to be tried by episcopal courts, and contested clerical control of primary schools.⁹⁹ The mercantile bourgeoisie now dominated municipal and economic life. In nearly all the communes the merchant guilds were recognized as self-governing bodies; in some cases the commune and the merchant guild were identical organizations; usually the two were distinct, but the commune rarely contravened the interests of the guilds. The lord mayor of London was chosen by the city guilds. Now, for the first time in a thousand years, the possession of money became again a greater power than the possession of land; nobility and clergy were challenged by a rising plutocracy. Even more than in antiquity the mercantile bourgeoisie turned its wealth, energy, and ability to political advantage. In most cities it eliminated the poor from assemblies or offices. It oppressed the manual worker and the peasant, monopolized the profits of commerce, taxed the community heavily, and spent much of the revenue in internal strife, or in external wars to capture markets and destroy competitors. It tried to suppress artisan associations, and refused them the right to strike, under penalty of exile or death. Its regulation of prices and wages aimed at its own good, to the serious detriment of the working class.¹⁰⁰ As in the French Revolution, the defeat of the feudal lords was a victory chiefly for the business class.

Nevertheless the communes were a magnificent reassertion of human liberty. At the call of the bell from the town campanile, the citizens flocked to assemble, and chose their municipal officers. The cities formed their own communal militia, defended themselves lustily, defeated the trained troops of the German emperor at Legnano (1176), and fought one another to mutual exhaustion. Though the administrative councils soon narrowed their membership to a mercantile aristocracy, the municipal assemblies were the first representative government since Tiberius; they, rather than Magna Carta, were the chief parent of modern democracy.¹⁰¹ The atavistic relics of feudal or tribal law—compurgations, duels, ordeals—were replaced by the legal and orderly examination of witnesses; the wergild or blood price gave way to fines, imprisonment, or corporal punishment; the law’s delays were reduced, legal contracts replaced feudal status and loyalties, and a whole new body of business law created a new order in European life.

The young democracy leaped at once to a semisocialistic state-managed economy. The commune minted its own currency, ordered and supervised public works, built roads, bridges, and canals, paved some city streets, organized the food supply, forbade forestalling, engrossing, or regrading, brought seller and buyer into direct contact at markets and fairs, examined weights and measures, inspected commodities, punished adulteration, controlled exports and imports, stored grain for lean years, provided grain at fair prices in emergencies, and regulated the prices of essential foods and beer. When it found that a price set too low discouraged the production of a desirable commodity, it allowed certain wholesale prices to seek their own level through competition, but established courts or “assizes” of bread and ale to keep the retail price of these necessities in constant relation with the cost of wheat or barley.¹⁰² Periodically it published a list of fair prices. It assumed that for every commodity there must be a “just price,” combining costs of materials and labor; the theory ignored supply and demand, and fluctuations in the value of currency. Some communes, like Basel or Genoa, assumed a monopoly of the trade in salt; others, like Nuremberg, brewed their own beer, or stored corn in municipal granaries.¹⁰³ The flow of goods was impeded by municipal protective tariffs;¹⁰⁴ and in some cases by requiring transient merchants to expose their goods for sale in the town before passing through.¹⁰⁵ As in our century, these regulations were often circumvented by the subtlety of refractory citizens; “black markets” were numerous.¹⁰⁶ Many of these restrictive ordinances brought more harm than good, and soon ceased to be enforced.

But all in all, the work of the medieval communes did credit to the skill and courage of the businessmen who managed them. Under their leadership Europe experienced in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries such prosperity as it had not known since the fall of Rome. Despite epidemics, famines, and wars, the population of Europe swelled under the communal system as not for a thousand years before. The population of Europe had begun to decline in the second century, and had probably reached nadir in the ninth century. From the eleventh century to the Black Death (1349) it rose again with the resurrection of commerce and industry. In the region between the Moselle and the Rhine it probably multiplied tenfold; in France it may have reached 20,000,000—hardly less than in the eighteenth century.¹⁰⁷ The economic revolution involved a migration from country to city almost as definite as in recent times. Constantinople with 800,000, Cordova and Palermo with half a million each, had long been populous; but before 1100 only a few cities north of the Alps had more than 3000 souls.¹⁰⁸ By 1200 Paris had some 100,000; Douai, Lille, Ypres, Ghent, Bruges, approximately 50,000 each; London 20,000. By 1300 Paris had 150,000, Venice, Milan, Florence 100,000,¹⁰⁹ Siena and Modena 30,000,¹¹⁰ Lübeck, Nuremberg, and Cologne 20,000, Frankfort, Basel, Hamburg, Norwich, York 10,000. Of course all these figures are loose and hazardous estimates.

The growth of population was both a result and a cause of the economic development: it came from improved protection of life and property, better exploitation of natural resources through industry, and the wider spread of food and goods through rising wealth and trade; conversely it offered an expanding market to commerce and industry, to literature, drama, music, and art. The competitive pride of the communes turned their wealth into cathedrals, city halls, bell towers, fountains, schools, and universities. Civilization crossed seas and mountains in the wake of trade; from Islam and Byzantium it swept over Italy and Spain, and marched over the Alps into Germany, France, Flanders, and Britain. The Dark Ages became a memory, and Europe was alive again with lusty youth.

We must not idealize the medieval town. It was picturesque (to the modern eye) with castle-crowned hill and towered wall, with thatched or tiled houses, cottages, and shops crowding gregariously around cathedral, castle or public square. But for the most part its streets were narrow and tortuous alleys (ideal for defense and shade), where men and beasts moved to the clatter of hoofs and words and wooden shoes, and with the leisureliness of an age that had no machines to spare its muscle and wear its nerves. Around many of the city dwellings were gardens, chicken coops, pig pens, cow pastures, dunghills. London was finicky and decreed that “he who will nourish a pig, let him keep it in his own house”; elsewhere the swine rooted freely among the open garbage piles.¹¹¹ Every now and then heavy rains swelled the rivers and flooded fields and cities, so that men rowed boats into Westminster Palace.¹¹² After rain the streets would be muddy for days; men wore boots then, and fine ladies were borne in carriages or chairs, undulating from hole to hole. In the thirteenth century some cities paved their main streets with cobblestones; in most cities, however, the streets were unpaved, unsafe for foot or nose. Monasteries and castles had good drainage systems;¹¹³ cottages usually had none. Here and there were grassy or sandy squares, with a pump from which people might drink, and a trough for passing animals.

North of the Alps houses were nearly all of wood; only the richest nobles and merchants built of brick or stone. Fires were frequent, and often swept unchecked through a town. In 1188 Rouen, Beauvais, Arras, Troyes, Provins, Poitiers, and Moissac were all destroyed by fire; Rouen was burned down six times between 1200 and 1225.¹¹⁴ Tile roofs became the custom only in the fourteenth century. Fire fighting was by bucket brigades, heroic and incompetent. Watchmen were provided with a long hook to pull down a burning house if it threatened other buildings. Since all wished to live near the castle for security, buildings rose to several stories, sometimes six; and the upper floors projected charmingly and alarmingly over the street. Towns issued ordinances limiting the height of buildings.

Despite these difficulties—hardly felt because felt by nearly all—life could be interesting in the medieval city. Markets were crowded, talk was plentiful, dress and goods were colorful, pedlars cried their wares, craftsmen plied their trades. Strolling players might be performing a miracle or mystery play in the square; a religious procession might pass down the street, with proud merchants and sturdy workers marching, and gaudy floats and solemn vestments and stirring song; some glorious church might be a-building; some pretty lass might lean from a balcony; the town belfry might summon the citizens to meeting or to arms. At sunset curfew rang, and bade all people hasten home, for there were no lights in the streets except candles in windows, and here and there a lamp before a shrine. A nocturnal burgher would have his servants precede him with torches or lanterns and arms, for police were rare. The wise citizen retired early, shunning the tedium of illiterate evenings, and knowing that at dawn the noisy cocks would crow, and work would clamor to be done.

VII. THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION

The growth of industry and commerce, the spread of a money economy, and the rising demand for labor in the towns transformed the agricultural regime. The municipalities, eager to get new “hands,” announced that any person living in a town for 366 days without being claimed, identified, and taken as a serf, became automatically free, and would enjoy the protection of the commune’s laws and power. In 1106 Florence invited all the peasants of the surrounding villages to come and live there as freemen. Bologna and other towns paid feudal lords to let their serfs move into the city. A large number of serfs escaped, or were invited, to open new lands east of the Elbe, where they became automatically free.

Those who remained on the manor showed a troublesome resistance to feudal dues long sanctioned by time. Emulating the town guilds, many serfs formed rural associations—confréries, conjurations—and bound themselves by oath to act together in refusing feudal dues. They stole or destroyed seignorial charters that recorded their bondage or obligations; they burned down the castles of obstinate seigneurs; they threatened to abandon the domain if their demands were not met. In 1100 the villeins of St. Michel-de-Beauvais announced that they would thereafter marry any woman they pleased, and would give their daughters to any man who pleased them. In 1102 the serfs of St. Arnoul-de-Crépy refused their abbot lord the traditional heriot, or death due, or to pay a fine for letting their daughters marry outside the domain. Similar rebellions broke out in a dozen towns from Flanders to Spain. The feudal lords found it increasingly difficult to make a profit out of serf labor; rising resistance required costly superintendence at every turn; villein labor in manorial shops proved more expensive, and less competent, than the free labor that produced like goods in the towns.

To keep the peasants on the land, and make their labor profitable to himself, the baron commuted the old feudal dues for money payments, sold freedom to serfs who could pay for it with their savings, leased more and more of the demesne to free peasants for a money rental, and hired free labor for the workshops on his estate. Year by year, following the lead of the Moslem and Byzantine East, western Europe, from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, passed from payments predominantly in kind to payments predominantly in currency. Feudal landlords, desiring the manufactured products that commerce laid before their eyes, craved money with which to purchase them; going off to the Crusades, they wanted money rather than food and goods; governments demanded taxes in money, not in kind; the landlords yielded to the course of events, and sold their products for cash instead of consuming them by laborious migration from villa to villa. The change to a money economy proved costly for the feudal landlords; the commutations and rents they received acquired the fixity of medieval custom, and could not be raised as rapidly as the value of money fell. Many of the aristocracy had to sell their land—usually to the rising bourgeoisie; some nobles, as early as 1250, died landless or destitute.¹¹⁵ Early in the fourteenth century King Philip the Fair of France freed the serfs on the royal domain, and in 1315 his son Louis X ordered the liberation of all serfs “on fair and suitable conditions.”¹¹⁶ Gradually, from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, at different times in divers countries west of the Elbe, serfdom gave place to peasant proprietorship; the feudal manor broke up into small estates, and the peasantry rose in the thirteenth century to a degree of freedom and prosperity that it had not known for a thousand years. The seignorial courts lost their jurisdiction over the peasants, and the village community elected its own officers, who swore allegiance not to the local lord but only to the crown. The emancipation in western Europe was not quite complete till 1789; many feudal lords still claimed the old rights in law, and would try, in the fourteenth century, to restore them in fact; but the movement toward free and mobile labor could not be stopped so long as commerce and industry grew.

The new stimulus of freedom co-operated with an immense widening of the agricultural market to improve the methods, tools, and products of tillage. The rising population of the towns, the increase of wealth, the new facilities of finance and trade expanded and enriched the rural economy. New industries created a demand for industrial crops—sugar cane, aniseed, cumin, hemp, flax, vegetable oils, and dyes. The nearness of populous towns promoted cattle raising, dairy farming, and market gardening. From thousands of vineyards in the valleys of the Tiber, the Arno, the Po, the Guadalquivir, the Tagus, the Ebro, the Rhone, the Gironde, the Garonne, the Loire, the Seine, the Moselle, the Meuse, the Rhine, and the Danube wine flowed along the rivers and over land and sea to console the toilers of Europe’s fields, workshops, and counting rooms; even England, from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, made wine. To feed the hungry towns, where fast days were numerous and meat was costly, great fleets went out into the Baltic and North Seas to bring in herring and other fish; Yarmouth owed its life to the herring trade; the merchants of Lübeck acknowledged their debt to it by carving herrings on their pews;¹¹⁷ and honest Dutchmen admitted that they had “built upon herrings” the proud city of Amsterdam.¹¹⁸

Agricultural technique slowly improved. The Christians learned from the Arabs in Spain, Sicily, and the East; and the Benedictine and Cistercian monks brought old Roman and new Italian tricks of farming, breeding, and soil preservation to the countries north of the Alps. The strip system was abandoned in laying out new farms, and each farmer was left to his own initiative and enterprise. In Flanders fields reclaimed from swamps the peasants of the thirteenth century practiced a three-field rotation of crops, in which the soil was used each year, but was triennially replenished by fodder or leguminous plants. Powerful teams of oxen drew iron plowshares more deeply into the soil than before. Most plows, however, were still (1300) of wood; only a few regions knew the use of manure; and wagon wheels were seldom shod with iron tires. Cattle raising was difficult because of prolonged droughts; but the thirteenth century saw the first experiments in the crossing and acclimatization of breeds. Dairy farming was unprogressive; the average cow in the thirteenth century gave little milk, and hardly a pound of butter per week. (A well-bred cow now yields ten to thirty pounds of butter per week.)

While their masters fought one another, the peasants of Europe fought the greater battle, more heroic and unsung, of man against nature. Between the eleventh and the thirteenth century the sea had thirty-five times swept over barriers and across the Lowlands, creating new gulfs and bays where once there had been land, and drowning 100,000 persons in a century. From the eleventh to the fourteenth century the peasants of these regions, under their princes and abbots, transported blocks of stone from Scandinavia and Germany, and built the “Golden Wall” behind which the Belgians and the Dutch have developed two of the most civilized states in history. Thousands of acres were rescued from the sea, and by the thirteenth century the Lowlands were latticed with canals. From 1179 to 1257 the Italians cut the famous Naviglio Grande, or Great Canal, between Lake Maggiore and the Po, fertilizing 86,485 acres of land. Between the Elbe and the Oder patient immigrants from Flanders, Frisia, Saxony, and the Rhineland turned the marshy Mooren into rich fields. The superabundant forests of France were progressively cleared, and became the farms that through centuries of political turmoil have kept France fed. Perhaps it was this mass heroism of clearance, drainage, irrigation, and cultivation, rather than any victories of war or trade, that provided the foundation on which, in final analysis, rest all the triumphs of European civilization in the last 700 years.

VIII. THE CLASS WAR

In the early Middle Ages there had been only two classes in western Europe: German conquerors and native conquered; by and large the later aristocracies in England, France, Germany and northern Italy were descendants of the conquerors, and remained conscious of this blood relationship even amid their wars. In the eleventh century there were three classes: the nobles, who fought; the clergy, who prayed; and the peasants, who worked. The division became so traditional that most men thought it ordained by God; and most peasants, like most nobles, assumed that a man should patiently continue in the class into which he had been born.

The economic revolution of the twelfth century added a new class—the burgesses or bourgeoisie—the bakers, merchants, and master craftsmen of the towns. It did not yet include the professions. In France the classes were called états—estates or states—and the bourgeoisie was reckoned as the tiers état, or “third estate.” It controlled municipal affairs, and won entry into the English Parliament, the German Diet, the Spanish Cortes, and the States-General—the rarely convened national parliament of France; but it had, before the eighteenth century, little influence on national policy. The nobles continued to rule and administer the state, though they were now a minor force in the cities. They lived in the country (except in Italy), scorned city dwellers and commerce, ostracized any of their class who married a bourgeois, and were certain that an aristocracy of birth is the only alternative to a plutocracy of business, or a theocracy of myths, or a despotism of arms. Nevertheless the wealth that came from commerce and industry began now to compete—and in the eighteenth century would surpass—the wealth that came from the ownership of land.

The rich merchants fretted over aristocratic airs, and scorned and exploited the craftsman class. They lived in ornate mansions, bought fine furniture, ate exotic foods, and garbed themselves in costly dress. Their wives covered expanding forms with silks and furs, velvets and jewelry; and Jeanne of Navarre, Queen of France, was piqued to find herself welcomed into Bruges by 600 bourgeois ladies as gorgeously robed as herself. The nobles complained, and demanded sumptuary laws to check this insolent display; such laws were periodically passed; but as the kings needed bourgeois support and funds, these laws were only spasmodically enforced.

The rapid growth of urban population favored the bourgeois owners of city realty; and the consequent unemployment made it easier to manage the manual working class. The proletariat of servants, apprentices, and journeymen had little education and no political power, and lived in a poverty sometimes more dismal than the serf’s. A thirteenth-century day laborer in England received some two pence per day—roughly equivalent, in purchasing power, to two dollars in the United States of America in 1948. A carpenter received four and one eighth pence ($4.12) per day; a mason three and one eighth, an architect twelve pence plus traveling expenses and occasional gifts.¹¹⁹ Prices, however, were commensurately low: in England in 1300 a pound of beef cost a farthing (twenty-one cents); a fowl one penny (eighty-four cents); a quarter of wheat five shillings nine and one half pence ($57.90).¹²⁰ The work day began at dawn and ended at dusk—sooner on the eve of Sunday or a feast day. There were some thirty feast days in the year, but in England probably not more than six exempted the people from toil. The hours were a bit longer, the real wages no worse—some would say higher¹²¹—than in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century England.

Toward the end of the thirteenth century the class struggle became class war. Every generation saw some revolt of the peasantry, particularly in France. In 1251 the oppressed peasantry of France and Flanders rose against their secular and ecclesiastical landlords. Calling themselves Pastoureux (Shepherds), they formed a kind of revolutionary crusade under the lead of an unlicensed preacher known as “the Master of Hungary.” They marched from Flanders through Amiens to Paris; discontented peasants and proletaires joined them en route, until they numbered over a hundred thousand men. They bore religious banners, and proclaimed devotion to King Louis IX, then a prisoner of the Moslems in Egypt; but they were ominously armed with clubs, daggers, axes, pikes, and swords. They denounced the corruption of government, the tyranny of the rich over the poor, the covetous hypocrisy of priests and monks; and the populace cheered their denunciations. They assumed the ecclesiastical rights of preaching, granting absolution, and performing marriages, and slew some priests who opposed them. Passing on to Orléans, they massacred scores of clergy and university students. But there and at Bordeaux the police overcame them; their leaders were captured and executed; and the wretched survivors of the futile march were hunted like dogs and dispersed into divers haunts of misery. Some escaped to England, and raised a minor peasant uprising, which was in turn suppressed.¹²²

In the industrial towns of France the craft guilds rose in repeated strikes or armed insurrection against the political and economic monopoly and dictation of the merchant class. In Beauvais the mayor and some bankers were manhandled by 1500 rioters (1233). At Rouen the textile workers rebelled against the merchant drapers, and killed the mayor who intervened (1281). At Paris King Philip the Fair dissolved the workers’ unions on the ground that they were plotting revolution (1295, 1307). Nevertheless the craft guilds won admission to the municipal assemblies and magistracies at Marseille (1213), Avignon, Arles (1225), Amiens, Montpellier, Nîmes…. Sometimes a member of the clergy would side with the rebels, and give them slogans. “All riches,” said a thirteenth-century bishop, “come from theft; every rich man is a thief or the heir of a thief.”¹²³ Similar revolts disordered the Flanders towns. Despite the penalty of death or banishment for strike leaders, the coppersmiths of Dinant rose in 1255, the weavers of Tournai in 1281, of all Ghent in 1274, of Hainault in 1292. The workers of Ypres, Douai, Ghent, Lille, and Bruges joined in revolt in 1302, defeated a French army at Courtrai, won the admission of their representatives to communal councils and offices, and revoked the oppressive legislation with which the mercantile oligarchy had harassed the crafts. Acquiring power for a time, the weavers sought to fix—even to reduce—the wages of the fullers, who then allied themselves with the merchant rich.¹²⁴

In 1191 the merchant guilds won control of London; soon afterward they offered King John an annual payment if he would suppress the weavers’ guild; John complied (1200).¹²⁵ In 1194 one William Fitzobert or Long-beard preached to the poor of London the need of a revolution. Thousands listened to him eagerly. Two burgesses sought to kill him; he fled into a church, was forced out by smoke, and committed hara-kiri almost by the Japanese ritual. His followers worshiped him as a martyr, and kept as sacred the soil that had received his blood.¹²⁶ The popularity of Robin Hood, who robbed great lords and prelates but was kind to the poor, suggests the class feeling in twelfth-century Britain.

The bitterest conflicts took place in Italy. At first the workers joined with the merchant guilds in a series of bloody insurrections against the nobles; by the end of the thirteenth century this struggle was won. For a time the industrial population shared in the government of Florence. Soon, however, the great merchants and entrepreneurs secured ascendancy in the city council, and imposed such arduous and arbitrary rules upon their employees that the struggle entered, in the fourteenth century, its second phase —sporadic and intermittent war between the rich industrialists and the workers in the factories. It was amid these scenes of civil strife that St. Francis preached the gospel of poverty, and reminded the nouveaux riches that Christ had never had any private property.¹²⁷

The communes, like the guilds, declined in the fourteenth century through the expansion of a municipal into a national economy and market, in which their rules and monopolies obstructed the development of invention, industry, and trade. They suffered further through their chaotic internal strife, their ruthless exploitation of the surrounding countryside, their narrow municipal patriotism, their conflicting policies and currencies, their petty wars upon one another in Flanders and Italy, and their inability to organize themselves into an autonomous confederation that might have survived the growth of the royal power. After 1300 several French communes petitioned the king to assume their governance.

Even so the economic revolution of the thirteenth century was the making of modern Europe. It eventually destroyed a feudalism that had completed the function of agricultural protection and organization, and had become an obstacle to the expansion of enterprise. It transformed the immobile wealth of feudalism into the fluent resources of a world-wide economy. It provided the machinery for a progressive development of business and industry, which substantially increased the power, comforts, and knowledge of European man. It brought a prosperity that in two centuries could build a hundred cathedrals, any one of which presumes an amazing abundance and variety of means and skills. Its production for an extending market made possible the national economic systems that underlay the growth of the modern states. Even the class war that it let loose may have been an added stimulant to the minds and energies of men. When the storm of the transition had subsided, the economic and political structure of Europe had been transformed. A flowing tide of industry and commerce washed away deep-rooted impediments to human development, and carried men onward from the scattered glory of the cathedrals to the universal frenzy of the Renaissance.

CHAPTER XXV

The Recovery of Europe

1095–1300

I. BYZANTIUM

ALEXIUS I COMNENUS, after guiding the Eastern Empire success fully through Turkish and Norman wars and the First Crusade, ended his long reign (1081–1118) amid a characteristically Byzantine intrigue. His eldest daughter, Anna Comnena, was a paragon of learning, a compendium of philosophy, a poet of parts, a politician of subtlety, an historian of accomplished mendacity. Betrothed to the son of the Emperor Michael VII, she felt herself marked for empire by her birth, her beauty, and her brains, and she could never forgive her brother John for being born and succeeding to the throne. She conspired to assassinate him, was detected and forgiven, retired to a convent, and chronicled her father’s career in a prose Alexiad. John Comnenus (1118–43) astonished Europe by a reign of private virtue, administrative competence, and victorious campaigns against pagan, Moslem, and Christian foes; for a time it seemed that he would restore the Empire to its former scope and glory; but a scratch from a poisoned arrow in his own quiver ended his life and his dream.

His son Manuel I (1143–80) was an incarnate Mars, dedicated to war and delighting in it, ever in the van of his troops, welcoming single combat, and winning every battle but the last. Stoic in the field, he was an epicurean in his palace, luxurious in food and dress, and happy in the incestuous love of his niece. Under his indulgent patronage literature and scholarship flourished again; the ladies of the court encouraged authors, and themselves condescended to write poetry; and Zonaras now compiled his immense Epitome of History. Manuel built for himself a new palace, the Blachernae, on the seashore at the end of the Golden Horn; Odom of Deuil thought it “the fairest building in the world; its pillars and walls were half covered with gold, and encrusted with jewels that shone even in the obscurity of the night.”¹ Constantinople in the twelfth century rehearsed the Italian Renaissance.

This splendor of the capital, and the many wars that the aging empire waged to ward off death, required heavy taxation, which the enjoyers of luxuries passed on to the producers of necessaries. The peasants grew poorer, and surrendered to serfdom; the manual workers of the cities lived in noisome slums, whose dark filth harbored uncounted crimes. Vague semicommunistic movements of revolt agitated the proletarian flux,² but have been forgotten in the careless repetitiousness of time. Meanwhile the capture of Palestine by the Crusaders had opened Syrian ports to Latin commerce, and Constantinople lost to the rising cities of Italy a third of its maritime trade. Christian and Moslem alike aspired to capture this treasury of a millenníum’s wealth. A good Moslem, visiting the city in Manuel’s heyday, prayed: “May God in His generosity and grace deign to make Constantinople the capital of Islam!”³ And Venice, daughter of Byzantium, invited the chivalry of Europe to join her in raping the Queen of the Bosporus.

The Latin kingdom of Constantinople, established by the Fourth Crusade, endured but fifty-seven years (1204–61). Rootless in the race, faith, or customs of the people—hated by a Greek Church forcibly subjected to Rome —weakened by its division into feudal principalities each aping sovereignty-lacking the experience required to organize and regulate an industrial and commercial economy—attacked by Byzantine armies without and conspiracies within—and unable to draw from a hostile population the revenues needed for military defense, the new kingdom stood only as long as Byzantine revenge lacked unity and arms.

The conquerors fared best in Greece. Frank, Venetian, and other Italian nobles hastened to carve the historic land into feudal baronies, built picturesque castles on dominating sites, and ruled with dash and competence a supine and industrious population. Prelates of the Latin Church replaced the exiled bishops of the Orthodox faith; and monks from the West crowned the ancient hills with monasteries that were monuments and treasuries of medieval art. A proud Frank took the title of duke of Athens, which Shakespeare, by a venial error of 2000 years, would un-Baconianly apply to Theseus. But the same martial spirit that had reared these little kingdoms destroyed them with fraternal strife; rival factions fought suicidal wars in the hills of the Morea and on the plains of Boeotia; and when the “Grand Catalan Company” of military adventurers from Catalonia invaded Greece (1311), the flower of Frank chivalry there was slaughtered in battle near the Cephisus River, and helpless Hellas became the plaything of Spanish buccaneers.

Two years after the fall of Constantinople, Theodore Lascaris, son-in-law of Alexius III, set up a Byzantine government in exile at Nicaea. All Anatolia, with the rich cities of Prusa, Philadelphia, Smyrna, and Ephesus, welcomed his rule; and his just and able administration brought new prosperity to these regions, new life to Greek letters, and new hope to Greek patriots. Farther east, at Trebizond, Alexius Comnenus, son of Manuel, established another Byzantine kingdom; and a third took form in Epirus under Michael Angelus. Lascaris’ son-in-law and successor, John Vatatzes (1222–54), added part of Epirus to the Nicaean kingdom, recaptured Salonika from the Franks (1246), and might have regained Constantinople itself had he not been called back to Asia Minor by learning that Pope Innocent IV had invited the advancing Mongols to attack him from the East (1248). The Mongols rejected the papal plan on the ironical pretense that they were loath to encourage “the mutual hatred of Christians.”⁴ John’s long reign was one of the most creditable in history. Despite expensive campaigns to restore Byzantine unity, he lowered taxes, encouraged agriculture, built schools, libraries, churches, monasteries, hospitals, and homes for the old or the poor.⁵ Literature and art prospered under him, and Nicaea became one of the richest, fairest cities of the thirteenth century.

His son Theodore Lascaris II (1254–8) was an ailing scholar, learned and bemused; he died after a brief reign, and Michael Paleologus, leader of the discontented aristocracy, usurped the throne (1259–82). If we may believe the historians, Michael had every fault—“selfish, hypocritical… an inborn liar, vain, cruel, and rapacious”;⁶ but he was a subtle strategist and a triumphant diplomat. By one battle he made his power in Epirus secure; by an alliance with Genoa he won ardent aid against the Venetians and the Franks in Constantinople. He instructed his general Strategopulus to feint an attack upon the capital from the West; Strategopulus approached the city with only a thousand men; finding it weakly guarded, he entered and took it without a blow. King Baldwin II fled with his retinue, and the Latin clergy of the city came after him in righteous panic. Michael, hardly believing the news, crossed the Bosporus, and was crowned emperor (1261). The Byzantine Empire, which the world had thought dead, awoke to a post-mortem life; the Greek Church resumed its independence; and the Byzantine state, corrupt and competent, stood for two centuries more as a treasury and vehicle of ancient letters, and a frail but precious bulwark against Islam.

II. THE ARMENIANS: 1060–1300

About 1080 many Armenian families, resenting Seljuq domination, left their country, crossed the Taurus Mountains, and established the kingdom of Lesser Armenia in Cilicia. While Turks, Kurds, and Mongols ruled Armenia proper, the new state maintained its independence for three centuries. In a reign of thirty-four years (1185–1219) Leo II repelled the attacks of the sultans of Aleppo and Damascus, took Isauria, built his capital at Sis (now in Turkey), made alliances with the Crusaders, adopted European laws, encouraged industry and commerce, gave privileges to Venetian and Genoese merchants, founded orphanages, hospitals, and schools, raised his people to unparalleled prosperity, earned the name of Magnificent, and was altogether one of the wisest and most beneficent monarchs in medieval history. His son-in-law Hethum I (1226–70), finding the Christians unreliable, allied himself with the Mongols, and rejoiced at the expulsion of the Seljuqs from Armenia (1240). But the Mongols became converts to Mohammedanism, warred on Lesser Armenia, and reduced it to ruins (1303f.). In 1335 Armenia was conquered by the Mamluks, and the country was divided among feudal lords. Through all this turbulence the Armenians continued to show an inventive skill in architecture, a high excellence in miniature painting, and a resolutely independent form of Catholicism which turned back all attempts at domination by either Constantinople or Rome.

III. RUSSIA AND THE MONGOLS: 1054–1315

In the eleventh century southern Russia was held by semibarbarous tribes—Cumans, Bulgars, Khazars, Polovtsi, Patzinaks…. The remainder of European Russia was divided into sixty-four principalities—chiefly Kiev, Volhynia, Novgorod, Suzdalia, Smolensk, Ryazan, Chernigov, and Pereyaslavl. Most of the principalities acknowledged the suzerainty of Kiev. When Yaroslav, Grand Prince of Kiev, died (1054), he distributed the principalities, according to their importance, among his sons in order of their seniority. The eldest received Kiev; and by a unique rota system it was arranged that at any princely death each princely survivor should move up from a lesser to a greater province. In the thirteenth century several principalities were further split into “appanages”—regions assigned by the princes to their sons. In the course of time these appanages became hereditary, and formed the basis of that modified feudalism which would later share with the Mongol invasion the blame for keeping Russia medieval while western Europe advanced. In this period, however, the Russian towns had a busy handicraft industry, and a richer trade than they would have in many later centuries.

The power of each prince, though usually inherited, was limited by a popular veche or assembly, and by a senate of nobles (boyarskaya duma). Administration and law were mostly left to the clergy; these, with a few nobles, merchants, and moneylenders, almost monopolized literacy; with Byzantine texts or models before them, they gave Russia letters and laws, religion and art. Through their labors the Russkaya Fravda, Russian Right or Law, first formulated under Yaroslav, received emendation and definitive codification (c. 1160). The Russian Church was given full jurisdiction over religion and the clergy, marriage, morals, and wills; and she had unchecked authority over the slaves and other personnel on her extensive properties. Her efforts moderately raised the legal status of the slave in Russia, but the traffic in slaves continued, and reached its height in the twelfth century.⁷

That same century saw the decline and fall of the Kievan realm. The feudal anarchy of the West had its rival in the tribal and princely anarchy of the East. Between 1054 and 1224 there were eighty-three civil wars in Russia, forty-six invasions of Russia, sixteen wars by Russian states upon non-Russian peoples, and 293 princes disputing the throne of sixty-four principalities.⁸ In 1113 the impoverishment of the Kievan population by war, high interest charges, exploitation, and unemployment aroused revolutionary rioting; the infuriated populace attacked and plundered the homes of the employers and moneylenders, and occupied the offices of the government for a moment’s mastery. The municipal assembly invited Prince Monomakh of Pereyaslavl to become Grand Prince of Kiev. He came reluctantly, and played a role like Solon’s in the Athens of 594 B.C. He lowered the rate of interest on loans, restricted the self-sale of bankrupt debtors into slavery, limited the authority of employers over employees, and by these and other measures—denounced as confiscatory by the rich and as inadequate by the poor—averted revolution and reorganized peace.⁹ He labored to end the feuds and wars of the princes, and to give Russia political unity; but the task was too great for his twelve years of rule.

After his death the strife of princes and classes was resumed. Meanwhile the continued possession of the lower Dniester, Dnieper, and Don by alien tribes, and the growth of Italian commerce at Constantinople, in the Black Sea, and in the ports of Syria, diverted to Mediterranean channels much of the trade that formerly had passed from Islam and Byzantium up the rivers of Russia to the Baltic states. The wealth of Kiev declined, and its martial means or spirit failed. As early as 1096 its barbarian neighbors began to raid its hinterland and suburbs, plundering monasteries and selling captured peasants as slaves. Population ebbed from Kiev as a danger spot, and man power further fell. In 1169 the army of Andrey Bogolyubski sacked Kiev so thoroughly, and enslaved so many thousands of its inhabitants, that for three centuries the “mother of Russian cities” almost dropped out of history. The seizure of Constantinople and its trade by Venetians and Franks in 1204, and the Mongol invasions of 1229–40, completed the ruin of Kiev.

In the second half of the twelfth century the leadership of Russia passed from the “Little Russians” of the Ukraine to the rougher, hardier “Great Russians” of the region around Moscow and along the upper Volga. Founded in 1156, Moscow was in this age a small village serving Suzdalia (which ran northeast from Moscow) as a frontier post on the route from the cities of Vladimir and Suzdal to Kiev. Andrey Bogolyubski (1157–74) fought to make his principality of Suzdalia supreme over all Russia; but he died by the hand of an assassin while campaigning to bring Novgorod, like Kiev, under his sway.

The city of Novgorod was situated in northwestern Russia, on both sides of the Volkhov, near the exit of that river from Lake Ilmen. As the Volkhov emptied into Lake Ladoga in the north, and other rivers left Lake Ilmen to the south and west, and the Baltic, via Lake Ladoga, was neither too close for safety nor too far for trade, Novgorod developed a vigorous internal and foreign commerce, and became the eastern pivot of the Hanseatic League. It traded through the Dnieper with Kiev and Byzantium, and through the Volga with Islam. It almost monopolized the traffic in Russian furs, for its control reached from Pskov in the west to the Arctic on the north, and almost to the Urals on the east. After 1196 the vigorous merchant-aristocrats of Novgorod dominated the assembly that ruled the principality through its elected prince. The city-state was a free republic, and called itself “My Lord Novgorod the Great.” If a prince proved unsatisfactory, the burgesses would “make a reverence and show him the way to leave” town; if he resisted they clapped him into jail. When Sviatopolk, Grand Prince of Kiev, wished to force his son upon them as prince (1015), the Novgorodians said, “Send him here if he has a spare head.”¹⁰ But the republic was not a democracy; the workers and small traders had no voice in the government, and could influence policy only by repeated revolts.

Novgorod reached its zenith under Prince Alexander Nevsky (1238–63). Pope Gregory IX, anxious to win Russia from Greek to Latin Christianity, preached a crusade against Novgorod; a Swedish army appeared on the Neva; Alexander defeated it near the present Leningrad (1240), and won his surname from the river. His victory made him too great for a republic, and won him exile; but when the Germans took up the crusade, captured Pskov, and advanced to within seventeen miles of Novgorod, the frightened assembly begged Alexander to return. He came, recaptured Pskov, and defeated the Livonian Knights on the ice of Lake Peipus (1242). In his last years he had the humiliation of leading his people under the Mongol yoke.

For the Mongols entered Russia in overwhelming force. They came from Turkestan through the Caucasus, crushed a Georgian army there, and pillaged the Crimea. The Cumans, who had for centuries warred against Kiev, begged for Russian aid, saying, “Today they have seized our land, tomorrow they will take yours.”¹¹ Some Russian princes saw the point, and led several divisions to join the Cuman defense. The Mongols sent envoys to propose a Russian alliance against the Cumans; the Russians killed the envoys. In a battle on the banks of the Kalka River, near the Sea of Azov, the Mongols defeated the Russian-Cuman army, captured several Russian leaders by treachery, bound them, and covered them with a platform on which the Mongol chieftains ate a victory banquet while their aristocratic prisoners died of suffocation (1223).

The Mongols retired to Mongolia, and busied themselves with the conquest of China, while the Russian princes resumed their fraternal wars. In 1237 the Mongols returned under Batu, a great-nephew of Jenghiz Khan; they were 500,000 strong, and nearly all mounted; they came around the northern end of the Caspian, put the Volga Bulgars to the sword, and destroyed Bolgar, their capital. Batu sent a message to the Prince of Ryazan: “If you want peace, give us the tenth of your goods”; he answered, “When we are dead you may have the whole.”¹² Ryazan asked the principalities for help; they refused it; it fought bravely, and lost the whole of its goods. The irresistible Mongols sacked and razed all the towns of Ryazan, swept into Suzdalia, routed its army, burned Moscow, and besieged Vladimir. The nobles had themselves tonsured, and hid in the cathedral as monks; they died when the cathedral and all the city were given to the flames. Suzdal, Rostov, and a multitude of villages in the principality were burned to the ground (1238). The Mongols moved on toward Novgorod; turned back by thick forests and swollen streams, they ravaged Chernigov and Pereyaslavl, and reached Kiev. They sent envoys asking for surrender; the Kievans killed the envoys. The Mongols crossed the Dnieper, overrode a weak resistance, sacked the city, and killed many thousands; when Giovanni de Piano Carpini saw Kiev six years later, he described it as a town of 200 cottages, and the surrounding terrain as dotted with skulls. The Russian upper and middle classes had never dared to arm the peasants or the city populace; when the Mongols came the people were helpless to defend themselves, and were massacred or enslaved at the convenience of the conquerors.

The Mongols advanced into Central Europe, won and lost battles, returned through Russia ravaging, and on a branch of the Volga built a city, Sarai, as the capital of an independent community known as the Golden Horde. Thence Batu and his successors kept most of Russia under domination for 240 years. The Russian princes were allowed to hold their lands, but on condition of annual tribute—and an occasional visit of homage over great distances—to the khan of the Horde, or even to the Great Khan in Mongolian Karakorum. The tribute was collected by the princes as a head tax that fell with cruel equality upon rich and poor, and those who could not pay were sold as slaves. The princes resigned themselves to Mongol mastery, for it protected them from social revolt. They joined the Mongols in attacking other peoples, even Russian principalities. Many Russians married Mongols, and certain features of Mongolian physiognomy and character may have entered the Russian stock.¹³ Some Russians adopted Mongol ways of speech and dress. Made a dependency of an Asiatic power, Russia was largely severed from European civilization. The absolutism of the khan united with that of the Byzantine emperors to beget the “Autocrat of All the Russias” in later Muscovy.

Recognizing that they could not keep Russia quiet by force alone, the Mongol chieftains made peace with the Russian Church, protected her possessions and personnel, exempted them from taxation, and punished sacrilege with death. Grateful or compelled, the Church recommended Russian submission to the Mongol masters, and publicly prayed for their safety.¹⁴ To find security amid alarms, thousands of Russians became monks; gifts were showered upon religious organizations, and the Russian Church became immensely rich amid the general poverty. A spirit of submissiveness was developed in the people, and opened a road to centuries of despotism. Never-theless it was Russia, bending under the Mongol whirlwind, that stood as a vast moat and trench protecting most of Europe from Asiatic conquest. All the fury of that human tempest spent itself upon the Slavs—Russians, Bohemians, Moravians, Poles—and the Magyars; Western Europe trembled, but was hardly touched. Perhaps the rest of Europe could go forth toward political and mental freedom, toward wealth, luxury, and art, because for over two centuries Russia remained beaten, humbled, stagnant, and poor.

IV. THE BALKAN FLUX

At an alien distance the Balkans are a mountainous mess of political instability and intrigue, of picturesque subtlety and commercial craft, of wars, assassinations, and pogroms. But to the native Bulgar, Rumanian, Hungarian, or Yugoslav his nation is the product of a thousand years’ struggle to win independence from encompassing empires, to maintain a unique and colorful culture, to express the national character unhindered in architecture, dress, poetry, music, and song.

For 168 years Bulgaria, once so powerful under Krum and Simeon, remained subject to Byzantium. In 1186 the discontent of the Bulgar and Vlach (Wallachian) population found expression in two brothers, John and Peter Asen, who possessed that mixture of shrewdness and courage which the situation and their countrymen required. Summoning the people of Trnovo to the church of St. Demetrius, they persuaded them that the saint had left Greek Salonika to make Trnovo his home, and that under his banner Bulgaria could regain liberty. They succeeded, and amiably divided the new empire between them, John ruling at Trnovo, Peter at Preslav. The greatest monarch of their line, and in all Bulgarian history, was John Asen II (1218–41). He not only absorbed Thrace, Macedonia, Epirus, and Albania; he governed with such justice that even his Greek subjects loved him; he pleased the popes with allegiance and monastic foundations; he supported commerce, literature, and art with enlightened laws and patronage; he made Trnovo one of the best adorned cities of Europe, and raised Bulgaria, in civilization and culture, to a level with most of the nations of his time. His successors did not inherit his wisdom; Mongol invasions disordered and weakened the state (1292–5), and in the fourteenth century it succumbed first to Serbia and then to the Turks.