The Age of Faith

In 1159 the Zhupan (Chieftain) Stephen Nemanya brought the various Serb clans and districts under one rule, and in effect founded the Serb kingdom, which his dynasty governed for 200 years. His son Sava served the nation as archbishop and statesman, and became one of its most revered saints. The country was still poor, and even the royal palaces were of wood; it had a flourishing port, Ragusa (now Dubrovnik), but this was an independent city-state, which in 1221 became a Venetian protectorate. During these centuries Serbian art, Byzantine in origin, achieved a style and excellence of its own. In the monastery church of St. Panteleimon at Nerez (c. 1164) the murals reveal a dramatic realism unusual in Byzantine painting, and anticipate by a century some methods of treatment once thought original to Duccio and Giotto. Amid these and other Serbian murals of the twelfth or thirteenth century appear royal portraits individualized beyond any known Byzantine precedent.¹⁵ Medieval Serbia was moving toward a high civilization when heresy and persecution destroyed the national unity that might have withstood the Turkish advance. Bosnia, too, after its medieval zenith under the Ban (King) Kulin (1180–1204), was weakened by religious disputes; and in 1254 it fell subject to Hungary.

After the death of Stephen I (1038) Hungary was disturbed by pagan Magyar revolts against the Catholic kings, and by the efforts of Henry III to annex Hungary to Germany. Andrew I defeated Henry; and when the Emperor Henry IV renewed the attempt King Geza I frustrated it by giving Hungary to Pope Gregory VII and receiving it back as a papal fief (1076). During the twelfth century rivals for the kingship nurtured feudalism by large grants of land to nobles in return for support; and in 1222 the nobility was strong enough to draw from Andrew II a “Golden Bull” remarkably like the Magna Carta that King John of England had signed in 1215. It denied the heritability of feudal fiefs, but promised to summon a diet every year, to imprison no noble without a trial before the “count palatine” (i.e., a count of the imperial palace), and to levy no taxes upon noble or ecclesiastical estates. This royal edict, named from its golden case or seal, constituted for seven centuries a charter of liberty for the Hungarian aristocracy, and enfeebled the Hungarian monarchy precisely at a time when the Mongols were preparing for Europe one of the greatest crises in its history.

We may judge the extent of the Mongol reach and grasp when we note that in 1235 Ogadai, the Great Khan, sent out three armies—against Korea, China, and Europe. The third army, under Batu, crossed the Volga in 1237, 300,000 strong—no undisciplined horde but a force rigorously trained, ably led, and equipped not only with powerful siege engines but with novel firearms whose use the Mongols had learned from the Chinese. In three years these warriors laid waste nearly all southern Russia. Then Batu, as if unable to conceive of defeat, divided them into two armies: one marched into Poland, took Cracow and Lublin, crossed the Oder, and defeated the Germans at Liegnitz (1241); the other, under Batu, surmounted the Carpathians, invaded Hungary, met the united forces of Hungary and Austria at Mohi, and so overwhelmed them that medieval chroniclers, never moderate with figures, estimated the Christian dead at 100,000, and the Emperor Frederick II reckoned the Hungarian casualties as “almost the whole military force of the kingdom.”¹⁶ Here, by the inexorable irony of history, defeated and victors were of one blood; the fallen nobility of Hungary were descendants of the Mongol Magyars who had ravaged the land three centuries before. Batu took Pesth and Esztergom (1241), while a body of Mongols crossed the Danube and pursued the Hungarian King Bela IV to the Adriatic shore, burning and destroying wildly on the way. Frederick II vainly called upon Europe to unite against the menace of conquest by Asia; Innocent IV vainly tried to woo the Mongols to Christianity and peace. What saved Christianity and Europe was simply the death of Ogadai, and the return of Batu to Karakorum to participate in the election of a new khan. Never in history had there been so extensive a devastation—from the Pacific Ocean to the Adriatic and the Baltic Seas.

Bela IV returned to ruined Pesth, repeopled it with Germans, moved his capital across the Danube to Buda (1247), and slowly restored his country’s shattered economy. A newborn nobility organized again the great ranches and farms on which servile herdsmen and tillers produced food for the nation. German miners moved down from the Erz Gebirge, and extracted the rich ores of Transylvania. Life and manners were still rude, tools were primitive, houses were wattled huts. Amid the confusion of races and tongues, across the hostile divisions of classes and creeds, men sought their daily bread and gain, and restored that economic continuity which is the soil of civilization.

V. THE BORDER STATES

As, in a limitless universe, any point may be taken as center, so, in the pageant of civilizations and states, each nation, like each soul, interprets the drama of history or life in terms of its own role and character. North of the Balkans lay another medley of peoples—Bohemians, Poles, Lithuanians, Livonians, Finns; and each, with life-giving pride, hung the world upon its own national history.

In the earlier Middle Ages the Finns, distant relatives of the Magyars and the Huns, dwelt along the upper Volga and Oka. By the eighth century they had migrated into the hardy, scenic land known to outsiders as Finland, and to Finns as Suomi, the Land of Marsh. Their raids upon the Scandinavian coasts induced the Swedish King Eric IX to conquer them in 1157. At Uppsala Eric left a bishop with them as a germ of civilization; the Finns killed Bishop Henry, and then made him their patron saint. With quiet heroism they cleared the forests, drained the marshes, channeled their “10,000 lakes,”¹⁷ gathered furs, and fought the snow.

South of the Gulf of Finland the same ax- and spadework was accomplished by tribes akin to the Finns—Borussians (Prussians), Esths (Estonians), Livs (Livonians), Litva (Lithuanians), and Latvians or Letts. They hunted, fished, kept bees, tilled the soil, and left letters and arts to the less vigorous posterity for whom they toiled. All but the Estonians remained pagan till the twelfth century, when the Germans brought Christianity and civilization to them with fire and sword. Finding that Christianity was being used by the Germans as a means of infiltration and domination, the Livonians killed the missionaries, plunged into the Dvina to wash off the stain of baptism, and returned to their native gods. Innocent III preached a crusade against them; Bishop Albert entered the Dvina with twenty-three men-of-war, built Riga as his capital, and subjected Livonia to German rule (1201). Two religious-military orders, the Livonian Knights and the Teutonic Knights, completed the conquest of the Baltic states for Germany, carved out vast holdings for themselves, converted the natives to Christianity, and reduced them to serfdom.¹⁸ Heartened by this success, the Teutonic Knights advanced into Russia, hoping to win at least its western provinces for Germany and Latin Christianity; but they were defeated on Lake Peipus (1242) in one of the innumerable decisive battles of history.

Around these Baltic states surged an ocean of Slavs. One group called itself Polanie—“people of the fields”—and tilled the valleys of the Warthe and the Oder; another, the Mazurs, dwelt along the Vistula; a third, the Pomorzanie (“by the sea”), gave its name to Pomerania. In 963 the Polish prince Mieszko I, to avoid conquest by Germany, confided Poland to the protection of the popes; thenceforth Poland, turning its back upon the semi-Byzantine Slavdom of the East, cast in its lot with western Europe and Roman Christianity. Mieszko’s son Boleslav I (992–1025) conquered Pomerania, annexed Breslau and Cracow, and made himself the first King of Poland. Boleslav III (1102–39) divided the kingdom among his four sons; the monarchy was weakened; the aristocracy parceled the land into feudal principalities, and Poland fluctuated between freedom and subjection to Germany or Bohemia. In 1241 the Mongol avalanche came down upon the land, took Cracow, the capital, and leveled it to the ground. As the Asiatic flood receded a wave of German immigration swept into western Poland, leaving there a strong admixture of German language, laws, and blood. At the same time (1246) Boleslav V welcomed Jews fleeing from pogroms in Germany, and encouraged them to develop commerce and finance. In 1310 King Wenceslas II of Bohemia was elected King of Poland, and united the two nations under one crown.

Bohemia and Moravia had been settled by Slavs in the fifth and sixth centuries. In 623 a Slavic chieftain, Samo, freed Bohemia from the Avars, and established a monarchy that died with him in 658. Charlemagne invaded the land in 805, and for an unknown period Bohemia and Moravia were parts of the Carolingian Empire. In 894 the Přemysl family brought both lands under their enduring dynasty; but the Magyars ruled Moravia for half a century (907–57), and in 928 Henry I made Bohemia subject to Germany. Duke Wenceslas I (928–35) brought prosperity to Bohemia despite this intermittent dependency. He had been given a thoroughly Christian upbringing by his mother, St. Ludmilla; and he did not cease to be a Christian when he became a ruler. He fed and clothed the poor, protected orphans and widows, gave hospitality to strangers, and bought freedom for slaves. His brother tried to assassinate him as lacking the vices desirable in a king; Wenceslas struck him down with his own hand, and forgave him; but other members of the conspiracy murdered the King on his way to Mass on September 25, 935. The day is annually celebrated as the feast of Wenceslas, Bohemia’s tutelary saint.

Warlike dukes succeeded him. From their strategic castle and capital at Prague, Boleslav I (939–67) and II (967–99) and Bratislav I (1037–55) conquered Moravia, Silesia, and Poland; but Henry III forced Bratislav to evacuate Poland and resume the payment of tribute to Germany. Ottokar I (1197–1230) freed Bohemia, and became its first king. Ottokar II (1253–78) subjected Austria, Styria, and Carinthia. Eager to develop industry and a middle class as counterweights to a rebellious nobility, Ottokar II encouraged German immigration, until nearly all the towns of Bohemia and Moravia were predominantly German.¹⁹ The silver mines of Kutna Hora became the ground of Bohemia’s prosperity, and the goal of her many invaders. In 1274 Germany declared war against Ottokar; his nobles refused to support him; he surrendered his conquests, and kept his throne only as a German fief. But when the Emperor Rudolf of Hapsburg interfered in the internal affairs of Bohemia, Ottokar raised a new army and fought the Germans at Dürnkrut; again deserted by the nobles, he plunged into the thickest ranks of the enemy and died in desperate combat.

Wenceslas II (1278–1305) won peace by renewed vassalage, and laboriously restored order and prosperity. With his death the Přemyslid dynasty came to an end after a rule of 500 years. The Bohemians, the Moravians, and the Poles were the only survivors of the Slav migration that had once filled eastern Germany to the Elbe; and they were now subject to the German power.

VI. GERMANY

The victor in the historic contest over lay investiture was the aristocracy of Germany—the dukes, lords, bishops, and abbots, who, after the defeat of Henry IV, controlled a weakened monarchy, and developed a centrifugal feudalism that in the thirteenth century deposed Germany from the leadership of Europe.

Henry V (1106–1125), having overthrown his father, continued his father’s struggle against barons and popes. When Paschal II refused to crown him emperor except on surrender of the right to lay investiture, he imprisoned Pope and cardinals. When he died the nobility overthrew the principle of hereditary monarchy, ended the Franconian dynasty, and made Lothair III of Saxony king. Thirteen years later Conrad III of Swabia began the Hohenstaufen dynasty, the most powerful line of kings in German history.

Duke Henry of Bavaria rejected the electors’ choice, and was supported by his uncle Welf, or Guelf; now flared up that strife between “Guelf” and “Ghibelline” which was to have so many forms and issues in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.* The Hohenstaufen army besieged the Bavarian rebels in the town and fortress of Weinsberg; there, says an old tradition, the rival cries “Hi Welf!” and “Hi Weibling!” established the names of the warring groups; and there (says a pretty legend), when the victorious Swabians accepted the surrender of the town on the understanding that the women alone were to be spared, and were to be allowed to depart with whatever they could carry, the sturdy housewives marched forth with their husbands on their backs.²⁰ A truce was called in 1142, when Conrad went on crusade; but Conrad failed and returned in disgrace. The House of Hohenstaufen seemed stamped with disgrace when its first outstanding figure reached the throne.

Friedrich (“Lord of Peace”) or Frederick I (1152–90) was thirty when chosen king. He was not imposing—a small, fair-skinned man with yellow hair, and a red beard that won him in Italy the name of Barbarossa. But his head was clear and his will was strong; his life was spent in labors for the state; and though he suffered many defeats, he brought Germany again to the leadership of the Christian world. Carrying in his veins the blood of both the Hohenstaufens and the Welfs, he proclaimed a Landfried, or Peace of the Land, conciliated his enemies, quieted his friends, and sternly suppressed feuds, disorder, and crime. His contemporaries described him as genial, and ever ready with a winning smile; but he was a “terror to evildoers,” and the barbarism of his penal laws advanced civilization in Germany. His private life was justly praised for decency; however, he divorced his first wife on grounds of consanguinity, and married the heiress of the count of Burgundy, winning a kingdom with his bride.

Anxious for papal coronation as emperor, he promised Pope Eugenius III aid against the rebellious Romans and the troublesome Normans in return for the imperial ointment. Arrived at Nepi, near Rome, the proud young king met the new pontiff, Hadrian IV, and omitted the customary rite by which the secular ruler held the pope’s bridle and stirrup and helped him to dismount. Hadrian reached the ground unaided, and refused Frederick the “kiss of peace,” and the crown of empire, until the traditional ritual should be performed. For two days the aides of Pope and King disputed the point, hanging empire on protocol; Frederick yielded; the Pope retired and made a second entry on horseback; Frederick held the papal bridle and stirrup, and thereafter spoke of the Holy Roman Empire in the hope that the world would consider the emperor, as well as the pope, the vicegerent of God.

His imperial title made him also King of Lombardy. No German ruler since Henry IV had taken this title literally; but Frederick now sent to each of the northern Italian cities a podesta to govern it in his name. Some cities accepted, some rejected, these alien masters. Loving order more than liberty, and perhaps anxious to control the Italian outlets of German trade with the East, Frederick set out in 1158 to subdue the rebellious towns, which loved liberty more than order. He summoned to his court at Roncaglia the learned legists who were reviving Roman law at Bologna; he was pleased to learn from them that by that law the emperor held absolute authority over all parts of the Empire, owned all property in it, and might modify or abrogate private rights whenever he thought it desirable for the state. Pope Alexander III, fearing for the temporal rights of the papacy, and citing the donations of Pepin and Charlemagne, repudiated these claims, and, when Frederick insisted on them, excommunicated him (1160). The cries of Guelf and Ghibel-line now passed into Italy to denote respectively the supporters of the Pope and those of the Emperor. For two years Frederick besieged obdurate Milan; capturing it at last he burned it to the ground (1162). Angered by this ruthlessness, and galled by the exactions of the German podestas, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Treviso, Ferrara, Mantua, Brescia, Bergamo, Cremona, Piacenza, Parma, Modena, Bologna, and Milan formed the Lombard League (1167). At Legnano, in 1176, the troops of the League defeated Frederick’s German army, and forced him to a six years’ truce. A year later Emperor and Pope were reconciled; and at Constance Frederick signed (1183) a treaty restoring self-government to the Italian cities. These in return recognized the formal suzerainty of the Empire and magnanimously agreed to provision Frederick and his retinue on his visits to Lombardy.

Defeated in Italy, Frederick triumphed everywhere else. He successfully asserted the imperial authority over Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary. He reasserted over the German clergy, in practice if not in words, all the rights of appointment that Henry IV had claimed, and won the support of that clergy even against the popes.²¹ Germany, glad to woo him from Italy, basked in the splendor of his power, and gloried in the knightly pageantry of his coronations, his marriages, and his festivals. In 1189 the old Emperor led 100,000 men on the Third Crusade, perhaps hoping to unite East and West in a Roman Empire restored to its ancient scope. A year later he was drowned in Cilicia.

Like Charlemagne he had drunk too deeply of the Roman tradition; he had exhausted himself in the effort to revive a dead past. Admirers of monarchy mourned his defeats as victories for chaos; devotees of democracy celebrate them as stages in the development of freedom. Within the limits of his vision he was justified; Germany and Italy were sinking into a licentious disorder; only a strong imperial authority could put an end to feudal feuds and municipal wars; order had to pave the way before a rational liberty could grow. In the later weakness of Germany, loving legends formed about Frederick I; what the thirteenth century imagined of his grandson was in time applied to Barbarossa: he was not really dead, he was only sleeping in the Kyffhauser Mountain in Thuringia; his long beard could be seen growing through the marble that covered him; some day he would wake up, shrug the earth from his shoulders, and make Germany again orderly and strong. When Bismarck forged a united Germany a proud people saw in him Barbarossa risen triumphantly from the tomb.²²

Henry VI (1190–7) almost realized his father’s dream. In 1194, with the help of Genoa and Pisa, he conquered southern Italy and Sicily from the Normans; all Italy but the Papal States submitted to him; Provence, Dauphiné, Burgundy, Alsace, Lorraine, Switzerland, Holland, Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, and Poland were united under Henry’s rule; England acknowledged itself his vassal; the Almohad Moors of Africa sent him tribute; Antioch, Cilicia, and Cyprus asked to be included in the Empire. Henry eyed France and Spain with unsated appetite, and planned to conquer Byzantium. The first detachments of his army had already embarked for the East when Henry, aged thirty-three, succumbed to dysentery in Sicily.

He had made no provision for so ignominious a revenge by the climate of his conquest. His only son was a lad of three; a decade of disorder ensued while would-be emperors fought for the throne. When Frederick II came of age the war of empire and papacy was resumed; it was fought in Italy by a German-Norman monarch become Italian, and will be better viewed from the Italian scene. Another generation of turmoil followed the death of Frederick II (1250)—that herrenlose, schreckliche Zeit (Schiller called it), that “masterless, frightful age” in which the electoral princes sold the throne of Germany to any weakling who would leave them free to consolidate their independent power. When the chaos cleared the Hohenstaufen dynasty had ended; and in 1273 Rudolf of Hapsburg, making Vienna his capital, began a new line of kings. To win the imperial crown Rudolf signed in 1279 a declaration recognizing the complete subordination of the royal to the papal power, and renouncing all claims to southern Italy and Sicily. Rudolf never became emperor; but his courage, devotion, and energy restored order and prosperity to Germany, and firmly established a dynasty that ruled Austria and Hungary till 1918.

Henry VII (1308–13) made a final effort to unite Germany and Italy. With scant support from the nobles of Germany, and a small following of Walloon knights, he crossed the Alps (1310), and was welcomed by many Lombard cities tired of class war and interurban strife, and anxious to throw off the political authority of the Church. Dante hailed the invader with a treatise On Monarchy boldly proclaiming the freedom of the secular from the spiritual power, and appealed to Henry to save Italy from papal domination. But the Florentine Guelfs won the upper hand, the turbulent cities withdrew their support, and Henry, surrounded with enemies, died of the malarial fever with which Italy now and then repays her importunate lovers.

Turned back in the south by natural barriers of topography, race, and speech, Germany found outlet and recompense in the east. German and Dutch migration, conquest, and colonization reclaimed three fifths of Germany from the Slavs; fertile Germans expanded along the Danube into Hungary and Rumania; German merchants organized fairs and outlets at Frankfort on the Oder, Breslau, Prague, Cracow, Danzig, Riga, Dorpat, and Reval, and trading centers everywhere from the North Sea and the Baltic to the Alps and the Black Sea. The conquest was brutal, the results were an immense advance in the economic and cultural life of the border.

Meanwhile the absorption of the emperors in Italian affairs, the recurrent need of enlisting or rewarding the support of lords and knights with grants of land or power, and the weakening of the German monarchy by papal opposition and Lombard revolts, had left the nobility free to engross the countryside and reduce the peasantry to serfdom; and feudalism triumphed in thirteenth-century Germany at the very time when it was succumbing to the royal power in France. The bishops, whom the earlier emperors had favored as a foil to the barons, had become a second nobility, as rich, powerful and independent as the secular lords. By 1263 seven nobles—the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, the dukes of Saxony and Bavaria, the count palatine, and the margrave of Brandenburg—had been entrusted by the feudality with the authority to choose the king; and these electors hedged in the powers of the ruler, usurped royal prerogatives, and seized crown lands. They might have acted as a central government and given the nation unity; they did not; between elections they went their several ways. No German nation existed yet; there were only Saxons, Swabians, Bavarians, Franks…. There was as yet no national parliament, but only territorial diets, Landtage; a Reichstag, or Diet of the Commonwealth, established in 1247, languished feebly in the Interregnum, and acquired prominence only in 1338. A corps of ministeriales—serfs or freedmen appointed by the king—provided a loose bureaucracy and continuity of government. No one capital centered the country’s loyalty and interest; no one system of laws governed the realm. Despite the efforts of Barbarossa to impose Roman law upon all Germany, each region kept its own customs and code. In 1225 the laws of the Saxons were formulated in the Sachsenspiegel, or Saxon Mirror; in 1275 the Schwabenspiegel codified the laws and customs of Swabia. These codes asserted the ancient right of the people to choose their king, and of the peasants to keep their freedom and their land; serfdom and slavery, said the Sachsenspiegel, are contrary to nature and the will of God, and owe their origin to force or fraud.²³ But serfdom grew.

The age of the Hohenstaufens (1138–1254) was the greatest age of Germany before Bismarck. The manners of the people were still crude, their laws chaotic, their morals half Christian, half pagan, and their Christianity half a cover for territorial robbery. Their wealth and comforts could not compare, city for city, with those of Flanders or Italy. But their peasantry was industrious and fertile, their merchants enterprising and adventurous, their aristocracy the most cultured and powerful in Europe, their kings the secular heads of the Western world, ruling a realm from the Rhine to the Vistula, from the Rhone to the Balkans, from the Baltic to the Danube, from the North Sea to Sicily. Out of a virile commercial life a hundred cities had taken form; many of them had charters of self-government; decade by decade they grew in wealth and art, until in the Renaissance they would be the pride and glory of Germany, and be mourned in our day as a beauty that has passed from the earth.

VII. SCANDINAVIA

After a century of happy obscurity Denmark re-entered world history with Waldemar I (1157–82). Helped by his minister Absalon, Archbishop of Lund, he organized a strong government, cleared his seas of pirates, and enriched Denmark by protecting and encouraging trade. In 1167 Absalon founded Copenhagen as a “market haven”—Kjoebenhavn. Waldemar II (1202–41) replied to German aggression by conquering Holstein, Hamburg, and Germany northeast of the Elbe. “For the honor of the Blessed Virgin” he undertook three “crusades” against the Baltic Slavs, captured northern Estonia, and founded Reval. In one of these campaigns he was attacked in his camp, and escaped death, we are told, partly by his own valor, partly through the timely descent, from heaven, of a red banner bearing a white cross; this Dannebrog, or Dane’s Cloth, became thereafter the battle standard of the Danes. In 1223 he was taken prisoner by Count Henry of Schwerin, and was released, after two and a half years, only on his surrendering to the Germans all his Germanic and Slav conquests except Rügen. He devoted the remainder of his remarkable life to internal reforms and the codification of Danish law. At his death Denmark was double its present area, included southern Sweden, and had a population equal to that of Sweden (300,000) and Norway (200,000) combined. The power of the kings declined after Waldemar II, and in 1282 the nobles secured from Eric Glipping a charter recognizing their assembly, the Danehof, as a national parliament.

Only the imaginative empathy of a great novelist could make us visualize the achievement of Scandinavia in these early centuries—the heroic conquest, day by day, foot by foot, of a difficult and dangerous peninsula. Life was still primitive; hunting and fishing, as well as agriculture, were primary sources of sustenance; vast forests had to be cleared, wild animals had to be brought under control, waters had to be channeled to productive courses, harbors had to be built, men had to harden themselves to cope with a nature that seemed to resent the intrusion of man. Cistercian monks played a noble role in this agelong war, cutting timber, tilling the soil, and teaching the peasants improved methods of agriculture. One of the many heroes of the war was Earl Birger, who served Sweden as prime minister from 1248 to 1266, abolished serfdom, established the reign of law, founded Stockholm (c. 1255), and inaugurated the Folkung dynasty (1250–1365) by putting his son Waldemar on the throne. Bergen grew rich as the outlet of Norway’s trade, and Visby, on the island of Gotland, became the center of contact between Sweden and the Hanseatic League. Excellent churches were built, cathedral and monastic schools multiplied, poets strummed their lays; and Iceland, far off in the Arctic mists, became in the thirteenth century the most active literary center in the Scandinavian world.

VIII. ENGLAND

1. William the Conqueror

William the Conqueror ruled England with a masterly mixture of force, legality, piety, subtlety, and fraud. Elevated to the throne by a cowed Witan, he swore to observe existing English law. Some thanes in the west and north took advantage of his absence in Normandy to try revolt (1067); he returned, and passed like a flame of revenge through the land, and “harried the north” with such judicious killing and destruction of homes, barns, crops, and cattle that northern England did not fully recover till the nineteenth century.²⁴ He distributed the choicest lands of the kingdom in great estates among his Norman aides, and encouraged these to build castles as fortresses of defense against a hostile population.* He kept large tracts as crown lands; one parcel, thirty miles long, was set aside as a royal hunting preserve; all houses, churches, and schools therein were leveled to the ground to clear the way for horses and hounds; and any man who slew a hart or hind in this New Forest was to lose his eyes.²⁵

So was founded the new nobility of England, whose progeny still bear, now and then, French names; and the feudalism that before had been relatively weak covered the land, and reduced most of the conquered people to serfdom. All the soil belonged to the king; but Englishmen who could show that they had not resisted the Conquest were allowed to repurchase their lands from the state. To list and know his spoils, William sent agents in 1085 to record the ownership, condition, and contents of every parcel of land in England; and “so narrowly did he commission them,” says the old Chronicle, “that there was not a yard of land, nay … not even an ox, nor a cow, nor a swine, that was not set down in his writ.”²⁶ The result was the Domesday Book, ominously so named as the final “doom” or judgment in all disputes of realty. To assure himself military support, and limit the power of his great vassals, William summoned all important landowners of England—60,000 of them—to a concourse at Salisbury (1086), and made every man pledge his paramount fealty to the king. It was a wise precaution against the individualistic feudalism that was at that time dismembering France.

One must expect a strong government after a conquest. William set up or deposed knights and earls, bishops and archbishops and abbots; he did not hesitate to jail great lords, and to assert his right over ecclesiastical appointments against the same powerful Gregory VII who was in these years bringing the Emperor Henry IV to Canossa. To prevent fires he ordered a curfew —i.e., a covering or extinction of hearth fires, and therefore in winter retirement to bed—by eight P.M. for the people of England.²⁷ To finance his spreading government and conquests he laid heavy taxes upon all sales, imports, exports, and the use of bridges and roads; he restored the Danegeld, which Edward the Confessor had abolished; and when he learned that some Englishmen, to elude his fingers, had placed their money in monastic vaults, he had all monasteries searched and all such hoards removed to his own treasury. His royal court readily accepted bribes, and honestly recorded them in the public register.²⁸ It was frankly a government of conquerors resolved that the profits of their enterprise should be commensurate with its risks.

The Norman clergy shared in the victory. The able and pliant Lanfranc was brought in from Caen and was made Archbishop of Canterbury and first minister to the King. He found the Anglo-Saxon clergy addicted to hunting, dicing, and marriage,²⁹ and replaced them with Norman priests, bishops, and abbots; he drew up a new monastic constitution, the Customs of Canterbury, and raised the mental and moral level of the English clergy. Probably at his suggestion William decreed the separation of ecclesiastical from secular courts, ordered all spiritual matters to be submitted to the canon law of the Church, and pledged the state to enforce the penalties fixed by ecclesiastical tribunals. Tithes were levied upon the people for the support of the Church. But William required that no papal bull or letter should be given currency or force in England without his approval, and that no papal legate should enter England without the royal consent. The national assembly of the bishops of England, which had been part of the Witan, was hereafter to be a distinct body, and its decrees were to have no validity except when confirmed by the King.³⁰

Like most great men, William found it easier to rule a kingdom than his family. The last eleven years of his life were clouded by quarrels with his Queen Matilda. His son Robert demanded full authority in Normandy; denied this, he rebelled; William fought him indecisively, and made peace by promising to bequeath the duchy to Robert. The King grew so stout that he could hardly mount a horse. He warred with Philip I of France over boundaries; when he tarried at Rouen, almost immovable with corpulence, Philip jested (it was said) that the King of England was “lying in,” and there would be a grand display of candles at his churching. William swore that he would indeed light many candles. He ordered his army to burn down Mantes and all its neighborhood, and to destroy all crops and fruits; and it was done. Riding happily amid the ruins, William was thrown against the iron pommel of his saddle by a stumble of his horse. He was carried to the priory of St. Gervase near Rouen. He confessed his sins in gross, and made his will; distributed his treasure penitently among the poor and to the Church, and provided for the rebuilding of Mantes. All his sons except Henry deserted his deathbed to fight for the succession; his officers and servants fled with what spoils they could take. A rustic vassal bore his remains to the Abbaye aux Hommes at Caen (1087). The coffin made for him proved too small for his corpse; when the attendants tried to force the enormous bulk into the narrow space the body burst, and filled the church with a royal stench.³¹

The results of the Norman Conquest were limitless. A new people and class were imposed upon the Danes who had displaced the Anglo-Saxons who had conquered the Roman Britons who had mastered the Celts …; and centuries would elapse before the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic elements would reassert themselves in British blood and speech. The Normans were akin to the Danes, but in the century since Rollo they had become Frenchmen; and with their coming the customs and speech of official England became for three centuries French. Feudalism was imported from France into England with its trappings, chivalry, heraldry, and vocabulary. Serfdom was more deeply and mercilessly imposed than ever in England before.³² The Jewish moneylenders who came in with William gave a new stimulus to English trade and industry. The closer connection with the Continent brought to England many ideas in literature and art; Norman architecture achieved its greatest triumphs in Britain. The new nobility brought new manners, fresh vitality, a better organization of agriculture; and the Norman lords and bishops improved the administration of the state. The government was centralized. Though it was through despotism, the country was unified; life and property were made more secure, and England entered upon a long period of internal peace. She was never successfully invaded again.

2. Thomas à Becket

It is an adage in England that between two strong kings a weak king intervenes; but there is no limit to the number of intermediate middlings. After the Conqueror’s death his eldest son Robert received Normandy as a separate kingdom. A younger son, William Rufus (the Red, 1087–1100), was crowned King of England on promising good behavior to his anointer and minister Lanfranc. He ruled as a tyrant till 1093, fell sick, promised good behavior, recovered, and ruled as a tyrant till he was shot to death, while hunting, by an unknown hand. The saintly Anselm, who succeeded Lanfranc as Archbishop of Canterbury, withstood him patiently, and was sent back to France.

A third son of the Conqueror, Henry I (1100–35), recalled Anselm. The prelate-philosopher demanded an end to the royal election of bishops; Henry refused; after a tedious quarrel it was agreed that English bishops and abbots were to be chosen by cathedral chapters or the monks in the presence of the king, and should do homage to him for their feudal possessions and powers. Henry loved money and hated waste; he taxed heavily but governed providently and justly; he kept England in order and at peace, except that with one battle—at Tinchebrai in 1106—he restored Normandy to the British crown. He bade the nobles “restrain themselves in dealing with the wives, sons, and daughters of their men”;³³ he himself had many illegitimate sons and daughters by various mistresses,³⁴ but he had the grace and wisdom to marry Maud, scion of both the Scottish and pre-Norman English kings, thereby bringing old royal blood into the new royal line.

In his last days Henry made the barons and bishops swear fealty to his daughter Matilda and her young son, the future Henry II. But on the King’s death Stephen of Blois, grandson of the Conqueror, seized the throne, and England suffered fourteen years of death and taxes in a civil war marked by the most horrible cruelties.³⁵ Meanwhile Henry II grew up, married Eleanor of Aquitaine and her duchy, invaded England, forced Stephen to recognize him as heir to the throne, and, on Stephen’s death, became king (1154); so ended the Norman, and began the Plantagenet, dynasty.* Henry was a man of strong temper, eager ambition, and proud intellect, half inclined to atheism.³⁶ Nominally master of a realm that reached from Scotland to the Pyrenees, including half of France, he found himself apparently helpless in a feudal society where the great lords, armed with mercenaries and fortified in castles, had pulverized the state into baronies. With awesome energy the youthful king gathered money and men, fought and subdued one lord after another, destroyed the feudal castles, and established order, security, justice, and peace. With a masterly economy of cost and force he brought under English rule an Ireland conquered and despoiled by Welsh buccaneers. But this strong man, one of the greatest kings in England’s history, was shattered and humbled by encountering in Thomas à Becket a will as inflexible as his own, and in religion a power then mightier than any state.

Thomas was born in London about 1118, of middle-class Norman parentage. His precocious brilliance of mind caught the eye of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, who sent him to Bologna and Auxerre to study civil and canon law. Returning to England he entered orders, and soon rose to be Archdeacon of Canterbury. But, like so many churchmen of those centuries, he was a man of affairs rather than a clergyman; his interest and skill lay in administration and diplomacy; and he showed such ability in these fields that at the age of thirty-seven he was made secretary of state. For a time he and Henry accorded well; the handsome chancellor shared the intimacy and knightly sports, almost the wealth and power, of the King. His table was the most sumptuous in England; and his charity to the poor was equaled by his hospitality to his friends. In war he led in person 700 knights, fought single combats, planned campaigns. When he was sent on a mission to Paris his luxurious equipage of eight chariots, forty horses, and 200 attendants alarmed the French, who wondered how rich must be the king of so opulent a minister.

In 1162 he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. As if by some magic incantation, he now changed his ways abruptly and thoroughly. He gave up his stately palace, his royal raiment, his noble friends. He sent in his resignation as chancellor. He put on coarse garb, wore a haircloth next to his skin, lived on vegetables, grains, and water, and every night washed the feet of thirteen beggars. He became now an unyielding defender of all the rights, privileges, and temporalities of the Church. Among these rights was the exemption of the clergy from trial by civil courts. Henry, who aspired to spread his rule over all classes, raged to find that crimes by the clergy often went unpunished by ecclesiastical courts. Assemblying the knights and bishops of England at Clarendon (1164), he persuaded them to sign the Constitutions of Clarendon, which ended many clerical immunities; but Becket refused to put his archiepiscopal seal upon the documents. Henry promulgated the new laws nevertheless, and summoned the ailing prelate to trial at the royal court. Becket came, and quietly withstood his own bishops, who joined in declaring him guilty of feudal disobedience to his suzerain the King. The court ordered his arrest; he announced that he would appeal the case to the Pope; and in his archiepiscopal robes, which none dared touch, he walked unharmed from the room. That evening he fed a great number of the poor in his London home. During the night he fled in disguise, by devious routes, to the Channel; crossed the turbulent strait in a frail vessel, and found haven in a monastery at St. Omer in the realm of the king of France. He submitted his resignation as archbishop to Pope Alexander III, who defended his stand, reinvested him with his see, but sent him for a time to live as a simple Cistercian monk in the abbey of Pontigny.

Henry banished from England all of Becket’s relatives, of any age or sex. When Henry came to Normandy Thomas left his cell, and from a pulpit at Vézelay pronounced excommunication upon those English clergymen who upheld the Constitutions of Clarendon (1166). Henry threatened to confiscate the property of all priories, in England, Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine, affiliated with the abbey of Pontigny if its abbot continued to harbor Becket; the frightened abbot begged Thomas to leave, and the ailing rebel lived for a time on alms in a dingy inn at Sens. Alexander III, prodded by Louis VII of France, commanded Henry to restore the Archbishop to his see or face an interdict of all religious services in the territories under English rule. Henry yielded. He came to Avranches, met Becket, promised to remedy all his complaints, and held the Archbishop’s stirrup as the triumphant prelate mounted to return to England (1169). Back in Canterbury, Thomas repeated his excommunication of the bishops who had opposed him. Some of these went to Henry in Normandy and roused him to fury with perhaps exaggerated accounts of Becket’s behavior. “What!” exclaimed Henry, “shall a man who has eaten my bread … insult the King and all the kingdom, and not one of the lazy servants whom I nourish at my table does me right for such an affront?” Four knights who heard him went to England, apparently without the knowledge of the King. On December 30, 1170, they found the Archbishop at the altar of the cathedral in Canterbury; and there they cut him down with their swords.

All Christendom rose in horror against Henry, branding him with a spontaneous and universal excommunication. After secluding himself in his chambers and refusing food for three days, the King issued orders for the apprehension of the assassins, sent emissaries to the Pope to declare his innocence, and promised to perform any penance that Alexander might require. He rescinded the Constitutions of Clarendon, and restored all the previous rights and property of the Church in his realm. Meanwhile the people canonized Becket, and proclaimed that many miracles were worked at his tomb; the Church officially pronounced him a saint (1172); and soon thousands were making pilgrimage to his shrine. Finally Henry, too, came to Canterbury as a penitent pilgrim; all the last three miles he walked with bare and bleeding feet on the flinty road; he prostrated himself before the tomb of his dead foe, begged the monks to scourge him, and submitted to their blows. His strong will broke under the weight of general obloquy and mounting troubles in his realm. His wife Eleanor, banished and imprisoned by the adulterous King, plotted with her sons to depose him. His eldest son Henry led feudal rebellions against him in 1173 and 1183, and died in revolt. In 1189 his sons Richard and John, impatiently awaiting his death, allied themselves with Philip Augustus of France in war upon their father. Driven from Le Mans, he denounced the God who had taken from him this town of his birth and love; and dying at Chinon (1189), he cursed with his last breath the sons who had betrayed him, and the life that had given him power and glory, riches and mistresses, enemies, contumely, treacheries, and defeat.

He had not quite failed. He had surrendered to Becket dead what he had refused to Becket living; yet in that bitter dispute it was Henry’s contention that won the accolade of time: from reign to reign, after him, the secular courts spread their jurisdiction over clerical, as well as lay, subjects of the king.³⁷ He liberated English law from feudal and ecclesiastical limitations, and set it upon the path of development that has made it one of the supreme legal achievements since imperial Rome. Like his great-grandfather the Conqueror he strengthened and unified the government of England by reducing to discipline and order a rebellious and anarchic nobility. There he succeeded too well: the central government became strong to the verge of irresponsible and incalculable despotism; and the next round in the historic alternation between order and liberty belonged to the aristocracy and freedom.

3. Magna Carta

Richard I the Lion-Hearted succeeded without challenge to his father’s throne. Son of the adventurous, impulsive, irrepressible Eleanor, he followed in her steps rather than in those of the somber and competent Henry. Born in Oxford in 1157, he was delegated by his mother to administer her dominions in Aquitaine. There he imbibed the skeptical culture of Provence, the “gay science” of the troubadours, and was never afterward an Englishman. He loved adventure and song more than politics and administration; he crowded a century of romance into his forty-two years, and gave to the poets of his time the compliment of imitation as well as the encouragement of patronage. The first five months of his reign were spent in gathering funds for a crusade; he appropriated for the purpose the full treasury left by Henry II; he removed thousands of officials, and reappointed them for a consideration; he sold charters of freedom to cities that could pay, and acknowledged Scotland’s independence for 15,000 marks—not that he loved money less, but adventure more. Within half a year of his accession he was off to Palestine. He cared as little for his own safety as for others’ rights; he taxed his realm to the utmost, and squandered revenue in luxury, feasting, and display; but he galloped through the final decade of the twelfth century with such bravado and bravery that his fellow poets ranked him above Alexander, Arthur, and Charlemagne.

He fought and loved Saladin, failed and swore to conquer him, turned homeward, and was captured on the way (1192) by Duke Leopold of Austria, whom he had offended in Asia. Early in 1193 Leopold surrendered him to the Emperor Henry VI, who held a grudge against Henry II and Richard; despite the law, generally recognized in Europe, against the detention of a Crusader, Henry VI kept the King of England prisoner in a castle at Dürnstein on the Danube, and demanded for him from England a ransom of 150,000 marks ($15,000,000)—double the whole annual revenue of the British crown. In the meantime Richard’s brother John tried to seize the throne; resisted, he fled to France, and joined Philip Augustus in attacking England. Philip, violating a pledge of peace, attacked and seized English possessions in France, and offered great bribes to Henry VI to keep Richard prisoner. Richard fretted in comfortable durance, and wrote an excellent ballad³⁸ appealing to his country for ransom. Through this turmoil Eleanor governed successfully as regent, with the wise counsel of her justiciar Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury; but they found it hard to raise the ransom. Finally released (1194), Richard hurried to England, levied taxes and troops, and led an army across the Channel to avenge himself and Britain against Philip. Tradition holds that he refused the sacraments for years lest he be required to forgive his faithless enemy. He recovered all the territory that Philip had captured, and resigned himself to a peace that allowed Philip to live. In the interlude he quarreled with a vassal, Adhemar, Viscount of Limoges, who had found a cache of gold on his land. Adhemar offered Richard a part, Richard demanded all, and besieged him. An arrow from Adhemar’s castle struck the King, and Richard Coeur de Lion died in his forty-third year in a dispute over a mess of gold.

His brother John (1199–1216)* succeeded him after some opposition and distrust; and Archbishop Walter made him swear a coronation oath that his throne was held by the election of the nation (i.e., the nobles and prelates) and the grace of God. But John, having been false to his father, his brother, and his wife, was not sorely hampered by one more vow. Like Henry II and Richard I he gave little evidence of religious belief. It was said that he had never taken the Eucharist since coming of age, not even on his coronation day.³⁹ The monks charged him with atheism, and told how, having caught a fat stag, he had remarked: “How plump and well fed is this animal! and yet, I dare swear, he never heard Mass”—which the monks resented as an allusion to their corpulence.⁴⁰ He was a man of much intellect and little scruple; an excellent administrator; “no great friend to the clergy,” and therefore, said Holinshed, a bit maligned by monastic chroniclers;⁴¹ not always in the wrong, but often alienating men by his sharp temper and wit, his scandalous humor, his proud absolutism, and the tax exactions to which he felt driven in defending Continental England against Philip Augustus.

In 1199 John secured permission from Pope Innocent III to divorce Isabel of Gloucester on grounds of consanguinity, and soon thereafter he married Isabella of Angoulême, despite her betrothal to the count of Lusignan. The nobility of both countries took offense, and the count appealed to Philip for redress. About the same time the barons of Anjou, Touraine, Poitou, and Maine protested to Philip that John was oppressing their provinces. By feudal fealties going back to the cession of Normandy to Rollo, the territorial lords of France, even in provinces owned by England, acknowledged the French king as their feudal suzerain; and by feudal law John, as Duke of Normandy, was vassal to the king of France. Philip summoned his royal vassal to come to Paris and defend himself against divers charges and appeals. John refused. The French feudal court declared his possessions in France forfeited, and awarded Normandy, Anjou, and Poitou to Arthur, Count of Brittany, a grandson of Henry II. Arthur laid claim to the throne of England, raised an army, and besieged at Mirabeau Queen Eleanor, who, though eighty, led a force in defense of her unruly son. John rescued her, captured Arthur, and apparently ordered his death. Philip invaded Normandy. John was too busy honeymooning at Rouen to lead his troops; they were defeated; John fled to England; and Normandy, Maine, Anjou, and Touraine passed to the French crown.

Pope Innocent III, at odds with Philip, had done what he could to help John; John now quarreled with Innocent. On the death of Hubert Walter (1205) the King persuaded the older monks of Canterbury to elect John de Gray, Bishop of Norwich, to the vacant see. A group of younger monks chose Reginald, their subprior, as archbishop. The rival candidates hurried to Rome, seeking papal confirmation; Innocent rejected them both, and appointed to the see Stephen Langton, an English prelate who for the past twenty-five years had lived in Paris, and was now a professor of theology in the university there. John protested that Langton had no preparation for the office of primate of England, a position involving political as well as ecclesiastical functions. Ignoring John’s demurrers, Innocent, at Viterbo in Italy, consecrated Stephen archbishop of Canterbury (1207). John defied Langton to set foot on English soil; threatened to burn the cloisters over the heads of the rebellious Canterbury monks; and swore “by the teeth of God” that if the Pope laid an interdict on England he would banish every Catholic clergyman from the land, and would put out the eyes and cut off the nose of some of them for good measure. The interdict was pronounced (1208); all religious services of the clergy in England were suspended except baptism and extreme unction; churches were closed by the clergy, church bells were silenced, and the dead were buried in unconsecrated ground. John confiscated all episcopal or monastic properties, and gave them to laymen. Innocent excommunicated the King; John ignored the decree, and waged successful campaigns in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The people trembled under the interdict, but the nobles acquiesced in the spoliation of Church property as transiently diverting the royal appetite from their own wealth.

Proud of his apparent victory, John offended many by his excesses. He neglected his second wife to beget illegitimate children upon careless mistresses; jailed Jews to milk their money from them; allowed some imprisoned prelates to die of hardships; alienated nobles by adding insults to taxes; and strictly enforced the unpopular forestry laws. In 1213 Innocent used his last resort: he promulgated a decree of deposition against the English King, released John’s subjects from their oath of allegiance, and declared the King’s possessions to be now the lawful spoil of whoever could wrest them from his sacrilegious hands. Philip Augustus accepted the invitation, assembled an impressive army, and marched to the Channel coast. John prepared to resist invasion; but now he discovered that the nobles would not support him in a war against a Pope armed with physical as well as spiritual force. Furious against them, and seeing the imminence of defeat, he struck a bargain with Pandulf, the papal legate: if Innocent would withdraw his decrees of excommunication, interdict, and deposition, and would change from foe to friend, John pledged himself to return all confiscated ecclesiastical property, and to submit his crown and his kingdom to the Pope in feudal vassalage. It was so agreed; John surrendered all England to the Pope, and received it back, after five days, as a papal fief subject to perpetual tribute and fealty (1213).

John embarked for Poitou to attack Philip, and commanded the barons of England to follow him with arms and men. They refused. The victory of Philip at Bouvines deprived John of German and other allies to whom he had looked for aid against an expanding France. He returned to England to face an embittered aristocracy. The nobles resented his inordinate taxation for disastrous wars, his violations of precedent and law, his bartering of England for Innocent’s forgiveness and support. To force the issue, John required of them a scutage—a money payment in lieu of military service. They sent him instead a deputation demanding a return to the laws of Henry I, which had protected the rights of the nobles and limited the powers of the king. Receiving no satisfactory answer, the nobles collected their armed forces at Stamford; and while John dallied at Oxford they sent emissaries to London, who won the support of the commune and the court. At Runnymede on the Thames, near Windsor, the forces of the aristocracy encamped opposite the few supporters of the King. There John made his second great surrender, and signed (1215) Magna Carta, the most famous document in English history.

John, by the grace of God King of England … to his archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons … and all his faithful subjects, greeting. Know ye that we … have by this our present Charter confirmed, for us and our heirs forever:

1. That the Church of England shall be free, and have her whole rights and liberties inviolable….

2. We grant to all the freemen of our kingdom, for us and for our heirs forever, all the below-written liberties….

12. No scutage or aid shall be imposed … unless by the general council of our kingdom….

14. For holding the general council concerning the assessment of aids and scutage … we shall cause to be summoned the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons of the realm* … and all others who hold of us in chief. …

15. We will not in future grant to anyone that he may take aid of his own free [non-slave] tenants, except to ransom his body, and to make his eldest son a knight, and once to marry his eldest daughter; and for this there shall be only a reasonable aid….

17. Common pleas shall not follow our court, but shall be held in some fixed place….

36. Nothing henceforth shall be given or taken for a writ of inquisition … but it shall be granted freely [i.e., no man shall be long imprisoned without trial]….

39. No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or disseised [dispossessed], or outlawed, or banished, or in any way destroyed … unless by the lawful judgment of his peers [his equals in rank], or by the law of the land.

40. We will sell to no man, we will not deny to any man, either justice or right.

41. All merchants shall have safe and secure conduct to go out of, and to come into, England, and to stay there, and to pass as well by land as by water, for buying or selling… without any unjust tolls….

60. All the aforesaid customs and liberties … all people of our kingdom, as well clergy as laity, shall observe, as far as they are concerned, towards their dependents….

Given under our hand, in the presence of witnesses, in the meadow called Runnymede, the 15th day of June, in the 17th year of our reign.⁴²

The Great Charter deserves its fame as the foundation of the liberties today enjoyed by the English-speaking world. It was indeed limited; it defined the rights of the nobles and the clergy far more than of the whole people; no arrangements were made to implement the pious gesture of Article 60; the Charter was a victory for feudalism rather than for democracy. But it defined and safeguarded basic rights; it established habeas corpus and trial by jury; it gave to an incipient Parliament a power of the purse that would later arm the nation against tyranny; it transformed absolute into limited and constitutional monarchy.

John, however, had no idea that he had immortalized himself by surrendering his despotic powers or claims. He signed under duress; and on the morrow he plotted to annul the Charter. He appealed to the Pope; and Innocent III, whose policy now required the support of England against France, came to the defense of his humiliated vassal by proclaiming the Charter void, and forbidding John to obey, or the nobles to enforce, its terms. The barons ignored the decree. Innocent excommunicated them and the citizens of London and the Five Ports; but Stephen Langton, who had led in formulating the Charter, refused to publish the edict. Papal legates in England suspended Langton, promulgated the decree, raised an army of mercenaries in Flanders and France, and with it ravaged the English nobility with fire and sword, plunder, murder, and rape. Apparently the nobles had no dependable public support; instead of resisting with their own feudal levies they invited Louis, son of the French King, to invade England, defend them, and take the English throne as his reward; had the plan succeeded, England might have become part of France. Papal legates forbade Louis to cross the Channel, and excommunicated him and all his followers when he persisted. Louis, arriving in London, received the homage and fealty of the barons. Everywhere outside of mercantile London John was victorious, and merciless. Then, amid the energy and fury of his triumph, he was struck down by dysentery, made his way painfully to a monastery, died at Newark in the forty-ninth year of his age.

A papal legate crowned John’s six-year-old son as Henry III (1216–72); a regency was formed with the earl of Pembroke at its head; encouraged by this elevation of one of their number, the nobles went over to Henry, and sent Louis back to France. Henry grew into an artist-king, a connoisseur of beauty, the inspiration and financier for the building of Westminster Abbey. He thought the Charter a disintegrating force, and tried to abrogate it, but failed. He taxed the nobles within an inch of revolution, always swearing that the latest levy would be the last. The popes needed money, too, and, with the King’s consent, drew tithes from English parishes to support the wars of the papacy against Frederick II. The memory of these exactions prepared the revolts of Wycliffe and Henry VIII.

Edward I (1272–1307) was less a scholar than his father, and more a king; ambitious, strong of will, tenacious in war, subtle in policy, rich in stratagems and spoils, yet capable of moderation and caution, and of farseeing purposes that made his reign one of the most successful in English history. He reorganized the army, trained a large force of archers in the use of the longbow, and established a national militia by ordering every able-bodied Englishman to possess, and learn the use of, arms; unwittingly, he created a military basis for democracy. So strengthened, he conquered Wales, won and lost Scotland, refused to pay the tribute that John had promised the popes, and abolished the papal suzerainty over England. But the greatest event of his reign was the development of Parliament. Perhaps without willing it, Edward became the central figure in England’s finest achievement—the reconciliation, in government and character, of liberty and law.

4. The Growth of the Law

It was in this period—from the Norman Conquest to Edward II—that the law and government of England took the forms which they maintained till the nineteenth century. Through the superimposition of Norman feudal upon Anglo-Saxon local law, English law for the first time became national—no longer the law of Essex or Mercia or the Danelaw, but “the law and custom of the realm”; we can hardly realize now what a legal revolution was implied when Ranulf de Glanville (d. 1190) used this phrase.⁴³ Under the stimulus of Henry II, and the guidance of his justiciar Glanville, English law and courts acquired such repute for expedition and equity (tempered with corruption) that rival kings in Spain submitted their dispute to the royal court of England.⁴⁴ Glanville may have been the author of a Treatise on Laws (Tractatus de le gibus) traditionally ascribed to him; in any case it is our oldest textbook of English law. Half a century later (1250–6) Henry de Bracton achieved the first systematic digest in his five-volume classic On the Laws and Customs of England (De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae).

The King’s rising need for money and troops forced the expansion of the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot into the English Parliament. Impatient to raise more funds than the lords would vote him, Henry III summoned two knights from each county to join the barons and prelates in the Great Council of 1254. When Simon de Montfort, son of a famous Albigensian crusader, led a revolt of the nobles against Henry III in 1264, he tried to win the middle classes to his cause by asking not only two knights from each county, but also two leading citizens from each borough or town, to join the barons in a national assembly. The towns were growing, the merchants had money; it was worth while consulting these men if they would pay as well as talk. Edward I profited from Simon’s example. Caught in the toils of simultaneous wars with Scotland, Wales, and France, he was constrained to seek the support and funds of all ranks. In 1295 he summoned the “Model Parliament,” the first complete Parliament in English history. “What touches all,” his writ of summons read, “should be approved by all, and … common dangers should be met by measures agreed upon in common.”⁴⁵ So Edward invited two burgesses “from every city, borough, and leading town” to attend the Great Council at Westminster. These men were chosen by the more substantial citizens in each locality; no one dreamed of universal suffrage in a society where only a minority could read. In the “Model Parliament” itself the “commons” did not at once hold equal powers with the aristocracy. There was as yet no annual Parliament, meeting at its own will as the sole source of law. But by 1295 the principle was accepted that no statute passed by Parliament could be abrogated except by Parliament; and in 1297 it was further agreed that no taxes were to be levied without Parliament’s consent. Such were the modest beginnings from which grew the most democratic government in history.

The clergy only reluctantly attended this enlarged Parliament. They sat apart, and refused to vote supplies except in their provincial assemblies. Ecclesiastical courts continued to try all cases involving canon law, and most cases involving any member of the clergy. Clerics accused of felonies might be tried by secular authorities; but those convicted of crimes short of high treason were, through “benefit of clergy,” handed over to an ecclesiastical court, which alone could punish them. Moreover, most judges in secular tribunals were ecclesiastics, for education in law was largely confined to the clergy. Under Edward I the secular courts became more secular. When the clergy refused to join in voting supplies, Edward I, arguing that those who were protected by the state should share its burdens, directed his courts to hear no cause in which a churchman was plaintiff, but to try every suit in which a cleric was defendant.⁴⁶ In further retaliation Edward’s Council of 1279, by the Statute of Mortmain, forbade the grant of lands to ecclesiastical bodies without the royal consent.

Despite this divided jurisdiction, English law developed rapidly under William I, Henry II, John, and Edward I. It was a thoroughly feudal law, and bore down heavily on the serf; crimes of freemen against serfs were usually amerced by fines. The law allowed women to own, inherit, or bequeath property, make contracts, sue and be sued, and gave the wife a dower right of one third in her husband’s real property; but all the movable property that she brought to her marriage, or acquired during it, belonged to her husband.⁴⁷ Legally all land belonged to the king, and was held from him in fief. Normally the whole estate of a feudal lord was bequeathed to the eldest son, not only to keep the property intact, but to protect the feudal suzerain from a division of vassal responsibility in dues and war. Among the free peasantry no such rule of primogeniture obtained.

In so feudal a code the law of contract remained immature. An Assize of Measures (1197) standardized weights, measures, and coins, and provided state supervision of their use. Enlightened commercial legislation in England began with the Statute of Merchants (1283) and the Merchants’ Charter (Carta mercatoria, 1303)—two more achievements of Edward I’s creative reign.

Legal procedure slowly improved. To enforce the laws every ward had a “watch,” every borough a constable, every shire a shire-reeve, or sheriff. All men were bound to raise a “hue and cry” on perceiving a violation of the law, and to join in pursuing the offender. Bail was admitted. It is a major credit to English law that torture was not used in examining suspects or witnesses. When Edward II was induced by Philip IV of France to arrest the English Templars, he could find no evidence by which to convict them. Thereupon Pope Clement V, doubtless constrained by Philip, wrote to Edward: “We hear that you forbid torture as contrary to the laws of your land. But no state law can override canon law, our law. Therefore I command you at once to submit those men to torture.”⁴⁸ Edward yielded; but torture was not again used in English legal procedure till the reign of “Bloody” Mary (1553–8).

The Normans brought to England the old Frank system of inquisitio, or judicial inquiry by a jurata or sworn group of local citizens, into the fiscal and legal affairs of a district. The Assize of Clarendon (c. 1166) developed this “jury” plan by permitting litigants to submit the question of their veracity not to trial by combat but to “the country”—i.e., to a jury of twelve knights chosen from the local citizenry, in the presence of the court, by four knights named by the sheriff. This was the grand assize, or major sitting; in the petty assize, or minor session for the trial of ordinary cases, the sheriff himself chose twelve freemen from the neighborhood. Men shunned jury service then as now, and had no notion that the system would be one of the foundations of democracy. By the end of the thirteenth century verdict by a jury had almost everywhere in England replaced the old tests of barbarian law.

5. The English Scene

England in 1300 was ninety per cent rural, with a hundred towns whose modern successors would rank them as villages, and one city, London, boasting of 40,000 population⁴⁹—four times more than any other town in England, but far inferior in wealth or beauty to Paris, Bruges, Venice, or Milan, not to speak of Constantinople, Palermo, or Rome. Houses were of wood, two or three stories high, with gabled roofs; often the upper story projected beyond the one beneath. City law forbade emptying the end products of kitchen, bedroom, or bath through the windows, but the tenants of upper stories often yielded to the convenience. Most of the slops from the houses found their way into the current of rain water that ran along the curbs. It was forbidden to cast feces, permissible to empty urinals, into this gutter stream.⁵⁰ The municipal council did what it could to improve sanitation—ordered citizens to clean the streets before their homes, levied fines for negligence, and hired “rakers” to gather garbage and filth and cart these to dung boats on the Thames. Horses, cattle, pigs, and poultry were kept by many citizens; but this was no great evil, since there were many open spaces, and nearly every house had a garden. Here and there rose a structure of stone like the Temple Church, Westminster Abbey, or the Tower of London, which William the Conqueror had built to guard his capital and shelter distinguished prisoners. Londoners were already proud of their city; soon Froissart would say that “they are of more weight than all the rest of England, for they are the most mighty in wealth and men”; and the monk Thomas of Walsingham would describe them as “of all people almost the most proud, arrogant, and greedy, disbelieving in ancient customs, disbelieving in God.”⁵¹

Through these centuries the amalgamation of Norman, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, and Celtic stocks, speech, and ways produced the English nation, language, and character. As Normandy fell away from England, the Norman families in Britain forgot Normandy and learned to love their new land. The mystic and poetic qualities of the Celt remained, especially in the lower classes, but were tempered by Norman vigor and earthiness. Amid the strife of nations and classes, and the blows of famine and plague, the resultant Briton could still make what Henry of Huntingdon (1084?-1155) called Anglia plena iocis—Merry England—a nation of abounding energy, rude jests, boisterous games, good fellowship, a love of dancing, minstrelsy, and ale. From those virile loins and generations would come the hearty sensuality of Chaucer’s pilgrims, and the magnificent bombast of the cultured swashbucklers of the Elizabethan age.

IX. IRELAND—SCOTLAND—WALES: 1066–1318

In the year 1154 Henry II became King of England, and an Englishman, Nicholas Breakspear, became Pope Hadrian IV. A year later Henry sent John of Salisbury to Rome with a subtle message: Ireland was in a state of political chaos, literary decline, moral debasement, religious independence and decay; would not the Pope permit Henry to take possession of the individualistic isle and restore it to social order and papal obedience? If we may believe Giraldus Cambrensis, the Pope agreed, and by the bull Laudabiliter granted Ireland to Henry on condition of restoring orderly government there, bringing the Irish clergy into better co-operation with Rome, and arranging that a penny (83¢) should be paid yearly to the See of Peter for every house in Ireland.⁵² Henry was too busy at the time to take advantage of this nihil obstat; but he remained in a receptive mood.

In 1166 Dermot MacMurrough, King of Leinster, was defeated in war by Tiernan O’Rourke, King of Brefni, whose wife he had seduced. Expelled by his subjects, he fled with his beautiful daughter Eva to England and France, and secured from Henry II a letter assuring royal good will to any of his subjects who should help Dermot to regain the Leinster throne. At Bristol Dermot received from Richard FitzGilbert, Earl of Pembroke in Wales, known as “Strongbow,” a pledge of military support in return for Eva’s hand in marriage, and the succession to Dermot’s kingdom. In 1169 Richard led a small force of Welshmen into Ireland, restored Dermot with the help of the Leinster clergy, and, on Dermot’s death (1171) inherited the kingdom. Rory O’Connor, then High King of Ireland, led an army against the Welsh invaders, and bottled them up in Dublin. The besieged made an heroic sortie, and the ill-trained and poorly equipped Irish fled. Summoned by Henry II, Strongbow crossed to Wales, met the King, and agreed to surrender to him Dublin and other Irish ports, and to hold the rest of Leinster in fief from the English crown. Henry landed near Waterford (1171) with 4000 men, won the support of the Irish clergy, and received the allegiance of all Ireland except Connaught and Ulster; the Welsh conquest was turned into a Norman-English conquest without a battle. A synod of Irish prelates declared their full submission to the Pope, and decreed that thereafter the ritual of the Irish Church should conform to that of England and Rome. Most of the Irish kings were allowed to keep their thrones, on condition of feudal fealty and annual tribute to the king of England.

Henry had accomplished his purpose with economy and skill, but he erred in thinking that the forces which he left behind him could sustain order and peace. His appointees fought one another for the spoils, and their aides and troops plundered the country with a minimum of restraint. The conquerors did their best to reduce the Irish to serfdom. The Irish resisted with guerrilla warfare, and the result was a century of turmoil and destruction. In 1315 some Irish chieftains offered Ireland to Scotland, where Robert Bruce had just defeated the English at Bannockburn. Robert’s brother Edward landed in Ireland with 6000 men; Pope John XXII pronounced excommunication upon all who should aid the Scots; but nearly all Irishmen rose at Edward’s call, and in 1316 they crowned him King. Two years later he was defeated and slain near Dundalk, and the revolt collapsed in poverty and despair.

The Scots, said Ranulf Higden, a fourteenth-century Briton, “be light of heart, strong and wild enough; but by mixing with Englishmen, they be much amended. They be cruel upon their enemies, and hate bondage most of anything, and hold it foul sloth if any man dieth in bed, and great worship if he die in the field.”⁵³

Ireland remained Irish but lost its liberty; Scotland became British, but remained free. Angles, Saxons, and Normans multiplied in the lowlands, and reorganized agricultural life on a feudal plan. Malcolm III (1058–93) was a warrior who repeatedly invaded England; but his Queen Margaret was an Anglo-Saxon princess who, converted the Scottish court to the English language, brought in English-speaking clergy, and reared her sons in English ways. The last and strongest of them, David I (1124–53), made the Church his chosen instrument of rule, founded English-speaking monasteries at Kelso, Dryburgh, Melrose, and Holyrood, levied tithes (for the first time in Scotland) for the support of the Church, and gave so lavishly to bishops and abbots that people mistook him for a saint. Under David I Scotland, in all but its highlands, became an English state.⁵⁴

But it was not the less independent. The English immigrants were transformed into patriotic Scots; from their number came the Stuarts and the Bruces. David I invaded and captured Northumberland; Malcolm IV (1153–65) lost it; William the Lion (1165–1214), trying to regain it, was taken prisoner by Henry II, and was freed only on pledging homage to the king of England for the Scottish crown (1174). Fifteen years later he bought release from this pledge by helping to finance Richard I in the Third Crusade, but the English kings continued to claim feudal suzerainty over Scotland. Alexander III (1249–86) recovered the Hebrides from Norway, maintained friendly relations with England, and gave Scotland a golden age of prosperity and peace.

At Alexander’s death Robert Bruce and John Balliol, descendants of David I, contested the succession. Edward I of England seized the opportunity; by his support Balliol was made King, but acknowledged the overlordship of England (1292). When, however, Edward ordered Balliol to raise troops to fight for England in France, the Scotch nobles and bishops rebelled, and bade Balliol make alliance with France against England (1295). Edward defeated the Scots at Dunbar (1296), received the submission of the aristocracy, dethroned Balliol, appointed three Englishmen to rule Scotland for him, and returned to England.

Many Scotch nobles owned land in England, and were thereby mortgaged to obedience. But the older Gaelic Scots strongly resented the surrender. One of them, Sir William Wallace, organized an “army of the commons of Scotland,” routed the English garrison, and for a year ruled Scotland as regent for Balliol. Edward returned, and defeated Wallace at Falkirk (1298). In 1305 he captured Wallace and had him disemboweled and quartered according to the English law of treason.

A year later another defender was forced into the field. Robert Bruce, grandson of the Bruce who had claimed the throne in 1286, quarreled with John Comyn, a leading representative of Edward I in Scotland, and killed him. Thereby committed to rebellion, Bruce had himself crowned King, though only a small group of nobles supported him, and the pope excommunicated him for his crime. Edward once more marched north, but died on the way (1307). Edward II’s incompetence was a blessing for Bruce; the nobles and clergy of Scotland rallied to the outlaw’s banner; his reinforced armies, bravely led by his brother Edward and Sir James Douglas, captured Edinburgh, invaded Northumberland, and seized Durham. In 1314 Edward II led into Scotland the largest army that the land had ever seen, and met the Scots at Bannockburn. Bruce had had his men dig and conceal pits before his position; many of the English, charging, fell into the morass, and the English army was almost totally destroyed. In 1328 the regents for Edward III, involved in war with France, signed the Treaty of Northampton, making Scotland once more free.

Meanwhile a like struggle had come to other issue in Wales. William I claimed suzerainty over it as part of the realm of the defeated Harold. He had no time to add it to his conquests, but he set up three earldoms on its eastern frontier, and encouraged their lords to expand them into Wales. South Wales was meanwhile overrun by Norman buccaneers, who left the prefix Fitz (fils, son) on some Welsh names. In 1094 Cadwgan ap Bledyn subdued these Normans; in 1165 the Welsh defeated the English at Corwen; and Henry II, busy with Becket, acknowledged the independence of South Wales under its enlightened King Rhys ap Gruffydd (1171). Llywelyn the Great, by his ability in both war and statesmanship, extended his rule over nearly all the country. His sons quarreled and disordered the land, but his grandson Llywelyn ap Gruffydd (d. 1282) restored unity, made peace with Henry III, and created for himself the title of Prince of Wales. Edward I, intent on uniting Wales and Scotland with England, invaded Wales with an immense army and fleet (1282); Llywelyn died in a chance encounter with a small border force; his brother David was captured by Edward, and his severed head, with Llywelyn’s, was suspended from the Tower of London and left to bleach in the sun, wind, and rain. Wales was made a part of England (1284), and Edward in 1301 gave the title of Prince of Wales to the heir to the English throne.

Through these exaltations and depressions the Welsh kept their own language and their old customs, tilled their rough soil with obstinate courage, and solaced their days and nights with legend, poetry, music, and song. Their bards now gave form to the tales of the Mabinogion, enriching literature with a mystic melodious tenderness uniquely Welsh. Annually the bards and minstrels assembled in a national eisteddfod (from eistedd, to sit), which can be traced back to 1176; contests were held in oratory, poetry, singing, and the playing of musical instruments. The Welsh could fight bravely, but not long; they were soon eager to return and protect at first hand their women, children, and homes; and one of their proverbs wished that “every ray of the sun were a poniard to pierce the friends of war.”⁵⁵

X. THE RHINELANDS: 1066–1315

The countries huddled about the lower Rhine and its many mouths were among the richest in the medieval world. South of the Rhine lay the county of Flanders, running from Calais through modern Belgium to the Scheldt. Formally it was a fief held from the French king; actually it was ruled by a dynasty of enlightened counts, checked only by the proud autonomy of the towns. Near the Rhine the people were Flemish, of Low German origin, and spoke a German dialect; west of the Lys River they were Walloons—a mixture of Germans and French on a Celtic base—and spoke a dialect of French. Commerce and industry fattened and disturbed Ghent, Audenaarde, Courtrai, Ypres, and Kassel in the Flemish northeast, and Bruges, Lille, and Douai in the Walloon southwest; in these cities population was denser than anywhere else in Europe north of the Alps. In 1300 the cities dominated the counts; the magistrates of the larger communities formed a supreme court for the county, and negotiated on their own authority with foreign cities and governments.⁵⁶ Usually the counts co-operated with the cities, encouraged manufactures and trade, maintained a stable currency, and as early as 1100 —two centuries before England—established uniform measures and weights for all the towns.

The class war ultimately destroyed the freedom of both the cities and the counts. As the proletariat rose in number, resentment, and power, and the counts sided with them as an offset to the bumptious bourgeoisie, the merchants sought support from Philip Augustus of France, who promised it in the hope of bringing Flanders effectively under the French crown. England, anxious to keep the chief market for her wool out of the control of the French king, allied herself with the counts of Flanders and Hainault, the duke of Brabant, and Otto IV of Germany. Philip defeated this coalition at Bouvines (1214), subdued the counts, and protected the merchants in their oligarchic regime. The conflict of powers and classes continued. In 1297 Count Guy de Dampierre again allied Flanders with England; Philip the Fair invaded Flanders, imprisoned Guy, and forced him to cede the country to France. But when the French army moved to occupy Bruges the commons rose, overcame the troops, massacred rich merchants, and gained possession of the town. Philip sent a large army to avenge this affront; the workers of the towns formed themselves into an impromptu army, and defeated the knights and mercenaries of France in the battle of Courtrai (1302). The aged Guy de Dampierre was released and restored, and the strange alliance of feudal counts and revolutionary proletaires enjoyed a decade of victory.

What we now know as Holland was, from the third to the ninth century, part of the Frank kingdom. In 843 it became the northernmost portion of the buffer state of Lorraine created by the Treaty of Verdun. In the ninth and tenth centuries it was divided into feudal fiefs for better resistance to Norse raids. The Germans who cleared and settled the heavily wooded district north of the Rhine called it Holtland, i.e., Woodland. Most of the people were serfs, absorbed in the struggle to wrest a living from a land that had always to be diked or drained; half of Holland exists by the taming of the sea. But there were cities, too, not quite as rich and turbulent as the Flemish towns, but soundly based on steady industry and orderly trade. Dordrecht was the most prosperous; Utrecht was a center of learning; Haarlem was the seat of the Count of Holland; Delft became the capital for a time; then, toward 1250, The Hague.* Amsterdam made its debut in 1204, when a feudal lord built a fortress château at the mouth of the Amstel River; the sheltered site on the Zuider Zee, and the pervasive canals, invited commerce; in 1297 the city was made a free port, where goods could be received and reshipped free of customs duties; and thenceforth little Holland played a large part in the economic world. There as elsewhere commerce nourished culture; in the thirteenth century we find a Dutch poet, Maerlant, who vigorously satirized the luxurious life of the clergy; and in the monasteries Dutch art, in sculpture, pottery, painting, and illumination, was beginning its unique and extraordinary career.

South of Holland lay the duchy of Brabant, which then contained the cities of Antwerp, Brussels, and Louvain. Liége was ruled independently by its bishops, who allowed it a large measure of autonomy. Still farther south were the counties of Hainault, Namur, Limburg, and Luxembourg; the duchy of Lorraine, with the cities of Trier, Nancy, and Metz; and several other principalities, nominally subject to the German emperor, but left for the most part to their ruling counts. Each of these districts had a vibrant history of politics, love, and war; we salute them and move on. South and west of them lay Burgundy, in what is now east central France; its varying boundaries discourage definition; its political fortunes would fill vain tomes. In 888 Rudolf I made it an independent kingdom; in 1032 Rudolf III bequeathed it to Germany; but in that year part of it was united, as a duchy, to France. The dukes of Burgundy, like its early kings, governed with intelligence, and for the most part cherished peace. Their great age would come in the fifteenth century.

In classical times Switzerland was the home of diverse tribes—Helvetii, Raeti, Lepontii—of mixed Celtic, Teutonic, and Italic origin. In the third century the Alemanni occupied and Germanized the northern plateau. After the collapse of the Carolingian Empire the land was divided into feudal fiefs subject to the Holy Roman Empire. But it is difficult to enslave mountaineers; and the Swiss, while acknowledging some feudal dues, soon liberated themselves from serfdom. The villages in democratic assemblies chose their own officials, and ruled themselves by the ancient Germanic laws of the Alemanni and Burgundians. For mutual protection the peasants neighboring Lake Lucerne formed themselves into “Forest Cantons” (Waldstätte)-Uri, Nidwalden, and Schwyz, which later gave its name to the state. The sturdy burghers of the towns that had grown along the Alpine passes—Geneva, Constance, Fribourg, Berne, and Basel—elected their own officials, and administered their own laws. Their feudal overlords raised no objection to this so long as basic feudal taxes were paid.⁵⁷

The Hapsburg counts who, from 1173, held the northern districts, proved an exception to this rule, and earned the hatred of the men of Schwyz by attempting to apply feudal dues in full severity. In 1291 the three Forest Cantons formed an “Everlasting League,” and swore a confederatio to give one another aid against external aggression or internal disturbance, to arbitrate all differences, and to recognize no judge who was not a native of the valley, or had bought his office. Lucerne, Zurich, and Constance soon joined the League. In 1315 the Hapsburg dukes sent two armies into Switzerland to enforce all feudal dues. In the pass of Morgarten the infantry of Schwyz and Uri, armed with halberds, defeated the Austrian cavalry in “the Marathon of Switzerland.” The Austrian forces withdrew; the three cantons renewed their oath of mutual support (December 9, 1315), and created the Swiss Confederacy. It was not yet an independent state; the free citizens acknowledged certain feudal obligations, and the suzerainty of the Holy Roman Emperor. But feudal lords and holy emperors had learned to respect the arms and liberties of the Swiss cantons and towns; and the victory of Morgarten had opened the way to the most stable and sensible democracy in history.*

XI. FRANCE: 1060–1328

1. Philip Augustus

At the accession of Philip II Augustus (1180) France was a minor and harassed state, hardly promising any grandeur to come. England held Normandy, Brittany, Anjou, Touraine, and Aquitaine—a domain thrice the size of that directly controlled by the French king. Most of Burgundy adhered to Germany, and the flourishing county of Flanders was in effect an independent principality. So were the counties of Lyons, Savoy, and Chambéry. So was Provence—southeastern France—rich in wine, oil, fruit, poets, and the cities of Aries and Avignon, Aix and Marseille. The Dauphiné, centering about Vienne, had been bequeathed to Germany as part of Burgundy; it was now independently ruled by a dauphin who took his title from the dolphin that was an emblem of his family.

France proper was divided into duchies, counties, seignories, seneschalties, and bailliages (bailiwicks) governed—in order of increasing dependence upon the king—by dukes, counts, seigneurs, seneschals (royal stewards), and bailiffs. This loose aggregation, already called Francia in the ninth century, was in diverse degrees, and with many limitations, subject to the French king. Paris, his capital, was in 1180 a city of wooden buildings and muddy streets; its Roman name, Lutetia, had meant the town of mud. Philip Augustus, shocked by the smell of the thoroughfares that ran beside the Seine, ordered that all the streets of Paris should be paved with solid stone.⁵⁹

He was the first of three powerful rulers who in this age raised France to the intellectual, moral, and political leadership of Europe. But there had been strong men before him. Philip I (1060–1108) made a secure niche for himself in history by divorcing his wife at forty and persuading Count Fulk of Anjou to cede to him the Countess Bertrade. A priest was found to solemnize the adultery as marriage, but Pope Urban II, coming to France to preach the First Crusade, excommunicated the King. Philip persisted in sin for twelve years; at last he sent Bertrade away and was shriven; but a while later he repented his repentance, and resumed his Queen. She traveled with him to Anjou, taught her two husbands amity, and seems to have served both of them to the best of her charms.⁶⁰

Having grown fat at forty-five, Philip handed over the major affairs of state to his son Louis VI (1108–37), himself known as Louis the Fat. He deserved a better name. For twenty-four years he fought, finally with success, the robber barons who plundered travelers on the roads; he strengthened the monarchy by organizing a competent army; he did what he could to protect the peasants, the artisans, and the communes; and he had the good sense to make the Abbot Suger his chief minister and friend. Suger of St. Denis (1081–1151) was the Richelieu of the twelfth century. He managed the affairs of France with wisdom, justice, and farsight; he encouraged and improved agriculture; he designed and built one of the earliest and finest masterpieces of the Gothic style; and he wrote an illuminating account of his ministry and work. He was the most valuable bequest left by Louis the Fat to his son, whom Suger served till death.

Louis VII (1137–80) was the man of whom Eleanor of Aquitaine said that she had married a king only to find him a monk. He labored conscientiously at his royal tasks, but his virtues ruined him. His devotion to government appeared to Eleanor as marital neglect; his patience with her amours added insult to negligence; she divorced him, and gave her hand and her duchy of Aquitaine to Henry II of England. Disillusioned with life, Louis turned to piety, and left to his son the task of building a strong France.

Philip II Augustus, like a later Philippe, was a bourgeois gentilhomme on the throne: a master of practical intelligence softened with sentiment, a patron of learning with no taste for it, a man of shrewd caution and prudent courage, of quick temper and ready amnesty, of unscrupulous but controlled acquisitiveness, of a moderated piety that could be generous to the Church without allowing religion to countermand his politics, and of a patient perseverance that won what bold adventurousness might never have attained. Such a man, at once prosaic and auguste,* amiably inflexible and ruthlessly wise, was what his country needed at a time when, between Henry II’s England and Barbarossa’s Germany, France might have ceased to be.

His marriages disturbed Europe. His first wife, Isabella, died in 1189; and four years later he married Ingeborg, a princess of Denmark. These marriages were political, and brought more property than romance. Ingeborg was not to Philip’s taste; he ignored her after a day; and within the year he persuaded a council of French bishops to grant him a divorce. Pope Celestine III refused to confirm the decree. In 1196, defying the Pope, he married Agnes of Meran. Celestine excommunicated him, but Philip remained obstinate; “I had rather lose half my domains,” he said in a moment of tenderness, “than separate from Agnes.” Innocent III commanded him to take back Ingeborg; when Philip refused, the invincible Pope interdicted religious services in Philip’s domain. Philip, in a rage, deposed all bishops who obeyed the interdict. “Happy Saladin!” he mourned, “who had no pope above him”; and he threatened to turn Mohammedan.⁶¹ After four years of this spiritual war the people began to grumble with fear of hell. Philip dismissed his beloved Agnes (1202), but kept Ingeborg confined at Étampes till 1213, when he recalled her to his bed.

Amid these joys and tribulations Philip reconquered Normandy from England (1204), and in the next two years annexed Brittany, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Poitou to his directly ruled terrain. He was now strong enough to dominate all the dukes, counts, and seigneurs of his realm; his baillis and seneschals supervised local government; his kingdom had become an international power, not a strip of land along the Seine. John of England, so shorn, was not resigned; he persuaded Otto IV of Germany and the counts of Boulogne and Flanders to join him against this swelling France; John would attack through Aquitaine (still England’s), the others from the northeast. Instead of dividing his forces to meet these separate assaults, Philip led his main army against John’s allies, and defeated them at Bouvines, near Lille (1214). That battle decided many issues. It deposed Otto, secured the German throne to Frederick II, ended German hegemony, and hastened the decline of the Holy Roman Empire. It reduced the counts of Flanders to French obedience, added Amiens, Douai, Lille, and St. Quentin to the French crown, and in effect extended northeastern France to the Rhine. It left John helpless against his barons, and forced him to sign Magna Carta. It weakened monarchy and strengthened feudalism in England and Germany, while it strengthened monarchy and weakened feudalism in France. And it favored the growth of the French communes and middle classes, which had vigorously supported Philip in peace and war.

Having trebled the royal domain, Philip governed it with devotion and skill. Half the time at odds with the Church, he replaced ecclesiastics in council and administration with men from the rising lawyer class. He gave charters of autonomy to many cities, encouraged trade by privileges to merchants, alternately protected and plundered the Jews, and fattened his exchequer by commuting feudal services into money payments; the royal revenue was doubled from 600 to 1200 livres ($240,000) a day. In his reign the façade of Notre Dame was completed, and the Louvre was built as a fortress to guard the Seine.⁶² When Philip died (1223) the France of today had been born.

2. St. Louis

His son Louis VIII (1223–6) ruled too briefly to accomplish much; history remembers him chiefly for having married the admirable Blanche of Castile, and begetting by her the one man in medieval history who, like Ashoka in ancient India, succeeded in being at once and in fact a saint and a king. Louis IX was twelve, his mother was thirty-eight, when Louis VIII died. Daughter of Alfonso IX of Castile, granddaughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, Blanche lived up to her royal blood. She was a woman of beauty and charm, energy, character, and skill; at the same time she impressed her age by her untarnished virtue as wife and widow, and her devotion as the mother of eleven children; France honored her not only as Blanche la bonne reine, but equally as Blanche la bonne mère. She freed many serfs on the royal estates, spent great sums on charity, and provided dowries for girls whose poverty discouraged love. She helped to finance the building of Chartres Cathedral, and it was through her influence that its stained glass showed Mary not as virgin but as queen.⁶³ She loved her son Louis too jealously, and was ungenerous to his wife. She trained him sedulously to Christian virtue, and told him that she would rather see him dead than have him commit a mortal sin;⁶⁴ but it was not her doing that he became a devotee. She herself rarely sacrificed policy to sentiment; she joined in the cruel Albigensian Crusade to extend the power of the crown in southern France. For nine years (1226–35), while Louis grew up, she governed the realm; and seldom has France been better ruled. At the outset of her regency the barons revolted, thinking to recapture from a woman the powers they had lost to Philip II; she overcame them with wise and patient diplomacy. She resisted England ably, and then signed a truce on just terms. When Louis IX came of age and assumed the government, he inherited a kingdom powerful, prosperous, and at peace.

He was a handsome lad, taller by a head than most of his knights, with finely cut features, clear skin, and rich blond hair; elegant in tastes, fond of luxurious furniture and colorful clothes; no bookworm, but given to hunting and falconry, amusements and athletic games; not yet a saint, for a monk complained to Blanche of the royal flirtations; she found him a wife, and he settled down. He became a model of conjugal fidelity and parental energy; he had eleven children, and took an intimate share in their education. Gradually he abandoned luxury, lived more and more simply, and consumed himself in government, charity, and piety. He had a kingly conception of monarchy as an organ of national unity and continuity, and as a protection of the poor and weak against the superior or fortunate few.

He respected the rights of the nobles, encouraged them to fulfill their obligations to serfs and vassals and suzerain, but would brook no feudal infringements of the new royal power. He interfered resolutely to repress injustices of lord to man, and in several cases severely punished barons who had executed men without due trial. When Enguerrand de Coucy hanged three Flemish students for killing some rabbits on his estate, Louis had him locked up in the tower of the Louvre, threatened to hang him, and released him on condition that he build three chapels where Masses were to be said daily for his victims; that he give the forest where the young scholars had hunted to the abbey of St. Nicholas; that he lose on his estates the rights of jurisdiction and hunting; that he serve three years in Palestine; and pay the King a fine of 12,500 pounds.⁶⁵ Louis forbade feud vengeance and private feudal war, and condemned the judicial duel. As trial by evidence replaced trial by combat, the baronial courts were progressively superseded by the royal courts organized in each locality by the bailiffs of the King; the right of appeal from baronial judges to the central royal court was established; and in France, as in England, the thirteenth century saw feudal law give way to a common law of the realm. Never since Roman days had France enjoyed such security and prosperity; in this reign the wealth of France sufficed to bring Gothic architecture to its greatest abundance and perfection.

He believed and proved that a government could be just and generous in its foreign relations without losing prestige and power. He avoided war as long as possible; but when aggression threatened he organized his armies efficiently, planned his campaigns, and—in Europe—carried them through with energy and skill to an honorable peace that left no passion for revenge. As soon as the safety of France was assured, he adopted a policy of conciliation which accepted the compromise of opposed rights while rejecting the appeasement of unjust claims. He restored to England and Spain territory that his predecessors had seized; his councilors mourned, but peace endured, and France remained free from attack even during the long absences of Louis on crusades. “Men feared him,” said William of Chartres, “because they knew that he was just.”⁶⁶ From 1243 to 1270 France waged no war against a Christian foe. When her neighbors fought one another Louis labored to reconcile them, scorning the suggestion of his council that such strife should be fomented to weaken potential enemies.⁶⁷ Foreign kings submitted their disputes to his arbitration. People marveled that so good a man should be so good a king.

He was not “that perfect monster whom the world ne’er knew”—the completely faultless man. He was occasionally irritable, perhaps through ill health. The simplicity of his soul sometimes verged upon culpable ignorance or credulity, as in the ill-conceived crusades and maladroit campaigns in Egypt and Tunisia, where he lost many lives besides his own; and though he was honest with his Moslem enemies he could not apply to them the same generous understanding that had succeeded so well with his Christian foes. His childlike certitude of belief led him to a religious intolerance that helped to establish the Inquisition in France, and it quieted his natural pity for the victims of the Albigensian Crusade. His treasury was swelled by confiscating the goods of condemned heretics,⁶⁸ and his usual good humor failed him toward the French Jews.

But with these deductions he came nobly close to the Christian ideal. “On no day of my life,” reports Joinville, “did I ever hear him speak evil of anyone.”⁶⁹ When his Moslem captors accepted by mistake a sum 10,000 livres ($2,000,000) short of the ransom promised for his release, Louis, restored safely to freedom, sent to the Saracens the additional payment in full, to the disgust of his councilors.⁷⁰ Before leaving on his first crusade he bade his officials, throughout his realm, to “receive in writing, and to examine, the grievances that may be brought against us or our ancestors, as also allegations of injustices or exactions of which our bailiffs, provosts, foresters, sergeants, or their subordinates may have been guilty.”⁷¹ “Ofttimes,” says Joinville, “he would go, after Mass, and seat himself against a tree in the wood of Vincennes, and make us sit around him. And all those who had any cause in hand came and spoke to him without hindrance or usher.” He would settle some cases himself, and turn others over to the councilors seated about him, but he gave each pleader the right of appeal to the king.⁷² He founded and endowed hospitals, asylums, monasteries, hospices, a home for the blind, and another (the Filles-Dieu) for redeemed prostitutes. He ordered his agents in each province to search out the old and poor and provide for them at the public expense. Wherever he went he made it a principle to feed, every day, 120 poor people; he had three of them join him for dinner, served them himself, and washed their feet.⁷³ Like Henry III of England, he waited on lepers, and fed them with his own hands. When famine struck Normandy he spent an enormous sum getting food to the needy there. He gave alms daily to the sick, the poor, widows, women in confinement, prostitutes, disabled workingmen, “so that hardly it would be possible to number his alms.”⁷⁴ Nor were these acts of charity spoiled by publicity. The poor whose feet he washed were chosen from the blind; the act was done in private, and the recipients were not told that their attendant was the king. His ascetic self-lacerations were unknown to others until revealed on his flesh after his death.⁷⁵

In the campaign of 1242 he contracted malaria in the marshy regions of Saintonge; it brought on pernicious anemia, and in 1244 he was near death. Perhaps such experiences turned him more and more to religion; indeed, it was on recovering from that illness that he took the oath to crusade. He weakened himself with ascetic self-mortification. When he returned from his first crusade, aged only thirty-eight, he was already bent and bald, and nothing remained of his youthful beauty except the radiant grace of his simple faith and good will. He wore a hair shirt under a monk’s brown robe, and had himself scourged with little iron chains. He loved the new monastic orders, Franciscans and Dominicans, gave to them without stint, and was with difficulty dissuaded from himself becoming a Franciscan. He heard two Masses daily, recited the canonical prayers of tierce, sext, none, vespers, and compline, said fifty Ave Marias before retiring, and rose at midnight to join the priests at matins in the chapel.⁷⁶ He abstained from marital intercourse in Advent and Lent. Most of his subjects smiled at his devotions, and called him “Brother Louis.” One bold woman told him: “It would be better that another should be king in your place, for you are only king of the Franciscans and the Dominicans…. It is an outrage that you should be king of France. It is a great marvel that they don’t put you out.” Louis replied: “You tell the truth … I am not worthy to be king, and if it had pleased our Saviour, another would have been in my place, who would have known better how to govern the kingdom.”⁷⁷

He shared with enthusiasm in the superstitions of his time. The abbey of St. Denis claimed to have a nail from the True Cross; one day the nail was mislaid after its ceremonial exhibition to the people; a great furore arose; the nail was found, and the King was much relieved; “I had rather,” he said, “that the best city in my kingdom had been swallowed up.”⁷⁸ In 1236 Baldwin II of Constantinople, appealing for funds to rescue his ailing state, sold to Louis for 11,000 livres ($2,200,000) the crown of thorns worn by Jesus during His Passion. Five years later Louis bought from the same auctioneer a piece of the True Cross. Possibly these purchases were intended as grants in aid to a Christian kingdom in distress. To receive the relics Louis commissioned Peter of Montreuil to build Sainte Chapelle.

With all his deep piety Louis was no tool of the clergy. He recognized their human shortcomings, and chastised them with good example and open rebuke.⁷⁹ He restricted the powers of ecclesiastical courts, and asserted the authority of the law over all citizens, lay or clerical. In 1268 he issued the first Pragmatic Sanction, limiting the power of the papacy in ecclesiastical appointments and taxation in France: “We will that no one may raise or collect in any manner exactions or assessments of money, which have been imposed by the court of Rome … unless the cause be reasonable, pious, most urgent… and recognized by our express and spontaneous consent, and by that of the Church of our realm.”*

Despite his monastic propensities Louis always remained the king, and preserved the royal majesty even when, as Fra Salimbene describes him, “spare and slender, having the face of an angel, and a countenance full of grace,”⁸¹ he appeared on foot, in pilgrim’s habit and with pilgrim’s staff, to begin his first crusade (1248). Queen Blanche, whom he left, despite her sixty years, as regent with the fullest powers, wept as they parted: “Most sweet fair son, fair tender son, I shall never see you more.”⁸² He was captured in Egypt, and was held for a ransom that Blanche with great difficulty raised and paid; but when, defeated and humbled, he returned to France (1252), he found his mother dead. In 1270, weak with illness, he set out again, this time for Tunisia. It was not so quixotic an enterprise as its failure made it out to be. Louis had allowed his brother, Charles of Anjou, to lead a French army into Italy not only to check German domination there, but also in the hope that Sicily might be made a base for a French invasion of Tunisia. Shortly after reaching Tunisia the great crusader, older in body than in years, died of dysentery. Twenty-seven years later the Church canonized him. Generations and centuries looked back to his reign as the Golden Age of France, and wondered why an inscrutable Providence would not send them his like again. He was a Christian king.

3. Philip the Fair

France was strengthened by the Crusades, in which she took a leading part. The long reigns of Philip Augustus and Louis IX gave her government continuity and stability, while England suffered the negligent Richard I, the reckless John, and the incompetent Henry III, and while Germany disintegrated in the wars between the emperors and the popes. By 1300 France was the strongest power in Europe.

Philip IV (1285–1314) was called le Bel for his handsome figure and face, not for his subtle statecraft and pitiless audacity. His aims were vast: to bring all classes—nobles and clergy as well as townsmen and serfs—under the direct law and control of the king; to base French growth on commerce and industry rather than on agriculture; and to extend the boundaries of France to the Atlantic, the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean, the Alps, and the Rhine. He chose his aides and councilors not from the great ecclesiastics and barons who had served French kings for four centuries past, but from the lawyer class that came to him impregnate with the imperial ideas of Roman law. Pierre Flotte and Guillaume de Nogaret were brilliant intellects careless of morals and precedents; under their guidance Philip rebuilt the legal structure of France, replaced feudal with royal law, overcame his foes by shrewd diplomacy, and in the end broke the power of the papacy, and made the pope in effect a prisoner of France. He tried to detach Guienne from England, but found Edward I too strong for him. He won Champagne, Brie, and Navarre by marriage, and bought with hard cash Chartres, Franche-Comté, the Lyonnais, and part of Lorraine.

Always needing money, he spent half his wits and time inventing taxes and raising funds. He commuted for money the military obligations of the barons to the crown. He repeatedly debased the coinage, and insisted on taxes being paid in bullion or in honest coin. He exiled the Jews and the Lombards, and destroyed the Templars, to confiscate their wealth. He forbade the export of precious metal from his realm. He laid heavy taxes upon exports, imports, and sales, and a war tax of a penny upon every livre of private wealth in France. Finally, without consulting the pope, he taxed the wealth of the Church, which now owned a quarter of the land of France. The results belong to the story of Boniface VIII. When the old Pope, broken by the struggle, died, Philip’s agents and money secured the election of a Frenchman as Clement V, and the removal of the papacy to Avignon. Never had any layman won so great a victory over the Church. Henceforth, in France, the lawyers ruled the priests.

The grand master of the Templars, as he went to the stake, predicted that Philip would follow him within a year. It so befell; and not only Philip but Clement too died in 1314—the triumphant King aged only forty-six. The French people had admired his tenacity and courage, and had upheld him against Boniface; but they cursed his memory as the most grasping monarch in their history. France was almost broken by his victory. His debased currency disordered the national economy, high rents and prices impoverished the people, taxation retarded industry, and the banishment of the Lombards and the Jews crippled the sinews of commerce and ruined the great fairs. The prosperity that had mounted under Louis the Saint declined under the master of every trick of law and diplomatic craft.⁸³

Three sons of Philip mounted the throne and descended into the grave within fourteen years of his death. None of them left sons to inherit his power. Charles IV (d. 13 28) left daughters, but the old Salic law was invoked to refuse them the crown. The nearest male heir of the royal family was Philip of Valois, nephew of Philip the Fair. With his accession the direct line of the Capetian kings ended, and the rule of the House of Valois began.

A coup d’oeil of France in this period shows remarkable advances in economy, law, education, literature, and art. Serfdom was rapidly disappearing as the growth of urban industry lured men from the farms. Paris in 1314 had some 200,000 inhabitants, France some 22,000,000.⁸⁴ Brunetto Latini, fleeing from the political violence of Florence, marveled at the peace and security that reigned in the streets of Paris under Louis IX, the busy handicrafts and commerce of the towns, the fruitful fields and vineyards of the pleasant countryside around the capital.⁸⁵

The rise of the business and professional classes, almost rivaling the nobility in wealth, compelled their representation in the États généraux, or States-General, which Philip IV summoned to Paris in 1302 to give him moral and financial support in his conflict with Boniface. Such general assemblies of the three estates or classes—nobles, clergy, commons—were called only in emergencies (1302, 1308, 1314 …), and were cleverly guided by the lawyers who served the king as a conseil d’état or Council of State. The Parlement of Paris, which took form under Louis IX, was not a representative assembly, but a group of some ninety-four lawyers and clerics apppointed by the king, and meeting once or twice a year to serve as a supreme court. Its ordonnances built up a body of national law based upon Roman rather than Frank codes, and giving the monarchy the full support of the classical legal tradition.

The intellectual excitement of the age of Philip IV is preserved for us in the political treatises of one of his supporters—Pierre Dubois (1255–1312), a lawyer who represented Coutances in the States-General of 1302. In a Supplication du peuple de France au roi contre le pape Boniface (1304)–An Appeal of the People of France to the King against Pope Boniface—and in a tract On the Recovery of the Holy Land (1306), Dubois threw out suggestions that reveal the sharp division that now separated the legal from the ecclesiastical mind in France. The Church, said Dubois, should be disendowed, should no longer receive financial support from the state; the French Church should be separated from Rome; the papacy should be divorced from all temporal power; and the authority of the state should be supreme. Philip should be made emperor of a united Europe, with Constantinople as his capital. An international court should be set up to adjudicate the quarrels of nations, and an economic boycott should be declared against any Christian nation that warred upon another. A school of Oriental studies should be established at Rome. Women should have the same educational opportunities and political rights as men.⁸⁶

It was the age of the troubadours in Provence, of the trouvères in the north, of the Chanson de Roland and other chansons de geste, of Aucassin et Nicolette and the Roman de la Rose, of the first outstanding French historians—Villardhouin and Joinville. In this period great universities were organized in Paris, Orléans, Angers, Toulouse, and Montpellier. It began with Roscelin and Abélard, and culminated in the zenith of the Scholastic philosophy. It was the age of the Gothic ecstasy—of the majestic cathedrals of St. Denis, Chartres, Notre Dame, Amiens, and Reims, and of Gothic sculpture in its most spiritual perfection. Frenchmen were forgivably proud of their country, their capital, and their culture; a national unifying patriotism was replacing the provincialism of the feudal era; already, as in the Chanson de Roland, men spoke lovingly of la douce France, “sweet France.” It was in France, as in Italy, the climax of Christian civilization.

XII. SPAIN: 1096–1285

The Christian reconquest of Spain proceeded as rapidly as the fraternal chaos of the Spanish kings would permit. The popes gave the name and privileges of crusaders to Christians who would help drive back the Moors in Spain; some Templars came from France to help the cause; and three Spanish military religious orders—the Knights of Calatrava, of Santiago, of Alcantara—were formed in the twelfth century. In 1118 Alfonso I of Aragon captured Saragossa; in 1195 the Christians were defeated at Alarcos; but in 1212 they almost wiped out the main Almohad army at Las Navas de Tolosa. The victory was decisive; Moorish resistance broke down, and one by one the Moslem citadels fell: Cordova (1236), Valencia (1238), Seville (1248), Cadiz (1250). Thereafter the reconquista halted for two centuries, to allow time for the wars of the kings.

When Alfonso VIII of Castile was defeated at Alarcos the kings of Leon and Navarre, who had promised to go to his help, invaded his kingdom, and Alfonso had to make peace with the infidels to protect himself against the infidelity of the Christians.⁸⁷ Fernando III (1217–52) reunited Leon and Castile, pushed the Catholic frontier to Granada, made Seville his capital, the great mosque his cathedral, the Alcazar his residence; the Church considered him a bastard at his birth, and made him a saint after his death. His son Alfonso X (1252–84) was an excellent scholar and an irresolute king. Attracted by the Moorish learning that he found in Seville, Alfonso el Sabio, the Wise, braved the bigots by hiring Arab and Jewish, as well as Christian, scholars to translate Moslem works into Latin for the instruction of Europe. He established a school of astronomy, whose “Alfonsine Tables” of heavenly bodies and movements became standard for Christian astronomers. He organized a corps of historians who wrote under his name a history of Spain and a vast and general history of the world. He composed some 450 poems, some in Castilian, some in Galician-Portuguese; many were set to music, and survive as one of the most substantial monuments of medieval song. His literary passion overflowed in books written or commissioned by him on draughts, chess, dice, stones, music, navigation, alchemy, and philosophy. Apparently he ordered a translation of the Bible to be made directly from the Hebrew into Castilian. With him the Castilian language assumed the pre-eminence from which it has since ruled the literary life of Spain. He was in effect the founder of Spanish and Portuguese literature, of Spanish historiography, of Spanish scientific terminology. He tarnished a brilliant career by intriguing to secure the throne of the Holy Roman Empire; he spent much Spanish treasure in the attempt; he sought to replenish his coffers by raising taxes and debasing the coinage; he was deposed in favor of his son, survived his downfall by two years, and died a broken man.

Aragon rose to prominence through the marriage of its Queen Petronilla to Count Ramon Berenguer of Barcelona (1137); Aragon thereby acquired Catalonia, including the greatest of Spanish ports. Pedro II (1196–1213) brought the new kingdom to prosperity by protecting with vigorously enforced law the security of harbors, markets, and roads; he made his court at Barcelona the gay and amorous center of Spanish chivalry and troubadours, and saved his soul—and insured his title—by presenting Aragon to Innocent III as a feudal fief. His son Jaime or James I (1213–76) was five when Pedro died in battle; the Aragonese nobles seized the opportunity to renew their feudal independence; but James took the reins at ten, and soon brought the nobles under royal discipline. Still a youth of twenty, he captured the commercially strategic Balearic Islands from the Moors (1229–35), and regained from them Valencia and Alicante. In 1265, in a chivalric gesture of Spanish unity, he conquered Murcia from the Moors and presented it to the king of Castile. Wiser than Alfonso the Wise, he made himself the most powerful Spanish monarch of his century, the rival of Frederick II and Louis IX. His shrewd intelligence and unscrupulous courage likened him to Frederick; but his loose morality, his many divorces, his ruthless wars and occasional brutality discourage comparison with St. Louis. He conspired to seize south-western France, but the patient Louis outplayed him, though yielding to him Montpellier. In his old age James plotted to conquer Sicily as a bastion of strategy and a haven of commerce, and to make the western Mediterranean a Spanish sea; but the realization of this dream was left to his son. Pedro III (1276–85) married a daughter of Frederick’s son Manfred, King of Sicily, and felt entitled to that island when Charles of Anjou seized it with the blessing of the pope. Pedro renounced the papal suzerainty over Aragon, accepted excommunication, and sailed off to fight for Sicily.

As in England and France, this period saw in Spain both the rise and the decline of feudalism. The nobles began by almost ignoring the central power; they and the clergy were exempt from taxation, which fell the more heavily upon cities and trade; but they ended by submitting to kings armed with their own troops, supported by the revenues and militia of the towns, and endowed with the prestige of a reviving Roman law that assumed absolute monarchy as an axiom of government. At the beginning of the period there was no Spanish law; there were separate law codes for each state, and for each class in each state. Fernando III began, Alfonso X completed, a new system of Castilian law, which from its seven divisions came to be known as the Siete Partidas, or (Laws of) the Seven Parts (1260–5)—one of the most complete and important codes in legal history. Based on the laws of the Spanish Visigoths, but remodeled to accord with Justinian’s Institutes, the Siete Partidas proved too advanced for their age; for seventy years they were largely ignored; but in 1338 they became the actual law of Castile, and in 1492 of all Spain. A like code was introduced into Aragon by James I. In 1283 Aragon promulgated an influential code of commercial and maritime law, and established at Valencia, and later at Barcelona and in Majorca, courts of the Consulate of the Sea.

Spain led the medieval world in developing free cities and representative institutions. Seeking the support of the cities against the nobles, the kings gave charters of self-government to many towns. Municipal independence became a passion in Spain; little towns demanded their liberty from larger ones, or from the nobles, the Church, the king; when they succeeded they raised their own gallows in the market place as a symbol of their freedom. Barcelona in 1258 was ruled by a council of 200 members, of whom a majority represented industry or trade.⁸⁸ For a time the towns were sovereign to the point of independently waging wars against the Moors or one another. But also they formed hermandades—brotherhoods—for mutual action or security. In 1295, when the nobles tried to subdue the communes, thirty-four towns formed the Hermandad de Castilla, pledged themselves to a common defense, and raised a joint army. This Brotherhood, having overcome the nobles, supervised and checked the officials of the king, and passed laws for the common observance of the member towns, which sometimes numbered a hundred.

It had long been the custom of Spanish kings to call, on occasion, an assembly of nobles and clergy; one such gathering, meeting in 1137, received for the first time the name Cortes, courts. In 1188, at the Cortes of Leon, businessmen from the towns were included—probably the earliest instance of representative political institutions in Christian Europe. In this historic congress the king promised not to make war or peace, or issue any decree, without the consent of the Cortes.⁸⁹ In Castile the first such Cortes of nobles, clergy, and bourgeoisie met in 1250—forty-five years before the “Model Parliament” of Edward I. The Cortes did not directly legislate, but it formulated “petitions” to the king; and its power of the purse often persuaded his assent. A decree of the Cortes of Catalonia in 1283, accepted by the king of Aragon, ruled that thereafter no national legislation should be issued without the consent of the citizens (cives); another provision required the king to summon the Cortes annually; these enactments anticipated by over a quarter of a century similar pronouncements (1311, 1322) of the English Parliament. Furthermore, the Cortes appointed members from each social class to a Junta, or Union, to keep watch, in the intervals between the sessions of the Cortes, over the administration of the laws and funds that it had voted.⁹⁰

The problem of government in Spain was complicated by divisive mountains impeding the wide enforcement of a common law. The uneven terrain, the dry plateaus, and the periodic devastations of war discouraged agriculture, and made Spain largely a grazing land for cattle and sheep. The fine sheep herds fed thousands of looms in the towns, and Spain maintained its ancient high reputation for the quality of its wool. Internal trade was harassed by difficulties of transport and diversities of weights, measures, and currencies; but foreign trade grew in the ports of Barcelona, Tarragona, Valencia, Seville, and Cadiz; Catalan merchants were everywhere; and in 1282 the merchants of Castile held a position in Bruges rivaled only by the Hanseatic League.⁹¹ Merchants and manufacturers became the chief financial support of the crown. The urban proletariat organized itself into guilds (gremios), but these were strictly controlled by the kings, and the working classes suffered economic exploitation without political representation.

Most of the industrial workers were either Jews or Mudejares—Moslems in Christian Spain. The Jews prospered in Aragon and Castile; they shared actively in the intellectual life of the two kingdoms; many of them were rich merchants; but at the end of this period they were subjected to increasing restrictions. The Mudejares were allowed freedom of worship, and considerable self-government; they too included many rich merchants; and a few found entry to the royal courts. Their craftsmen strongly influenced Spanish architecture, woodwork, and metalwork to the Mudejar style—the use of Moorish forms and themes in Christian art. Alfonso VI, in a catholic moment, called himself Emperador de los Dos Cultos—Emperor of the Two Faiths.⁹² But the Mudejares in general had to wear a distinctive garb, live in a separate section of each city, and bear especially heavy taxation. Ultimately the wealth aggregated by their industrial and commercial skill excited the envy of the majority race; in 1247 James I ordered their expulsion from Aragon; over 100,000 of them left, taking their technical skills with them; and Aragonese industry thereafter declined.

The partial absorption of Moslem culture into Spanish civilization, the stimulus of victory over an ancient enemy, the growth of industry and wealth, and of manners and tastes, stirred the mental life of Spain. The thirteenth century saw the establishment of six universities in Spain. Alfonso II of Aragon (1162–96) was the first Spanish troubadour; soon there were hundreds; and they not only wrote poetry, they developed the ceremonies of the Church into secular plays, opening a path to the triumphs of Lope de Vega and Calderon. To this period belongs the Cid, the national epic of Spain. Better than all these were the music, songs, and dances that flowed from the hearts of the people in their homes and streets, and graduated into the splendor and pageantry of the royal courts. The first recorded bullfight in the modern style was given at Ávila in 1107 to adorn a wedding feast; by 1300 it was a common sport in the cities of Spain. At the same time the French knights who came to help against the Moors brought the ideas and tournaments of chivalry. Respect for women, or for a man’s exclusive property in a woman, was made a point of honor as vital as a man’s pride in his courage and integrity; the duel of honor became a part of Spanish life. The mixture of European and Afro-Semitic blood, of Occidental and Oriental culture, of Syrian and Persian motives with Gothic art, of Roman hardness with Eastern sentiment, generated the Spanish character, and made Spanish civilization, in the thirteenth century, a unique and colorful element in the European scene.

XIII. PORTUGAL: 1095

In the year 1095 Count Henry of Burgundy, a crusading knight in Spain, so pleased Alfonso VI of Castile and Leon that the King gave him a daughter, Theresa, in marriage, and included in her dowry, as a fief, a county of Leon named Portugal.* The territory had been won from Moslem Spain only thirty-one years before; and south of the Mondego River the Moors still ruled. Count Henry felt uncomfortable as anything less than a king; from their marriage he and his wife plotted to make their fief an independent state. When Henry died (1112), Theresa continued to labor for independence. She taught her riobles and vassals to think in terms of national liberty; she encouraged her cities to fortify themselves and study the arts of war. She led her soldiers in person on campaign after campaign, and between wars she surrounded herself with musicians, poets, and lovers.⁹³ She was defeated, captured, released, and restored to her fief; she lavished funds upon an illicit love, was deposed, went into exile with her lover, and died in poverty (1130).

It was through her inspiration and preparations that her son, Affonso I Henriques (1128–85), achieved her aims. Alfonso VII of Castile promised to recognize him as sovereign ruler of any land that he might conquer from the Moors below the Douro River. With all the reckless bravery of his father and the spirit and pertinacity of his mother, Affonso Henriques attacked the Moors, defeated them at Ourique (1139), and proclaimed himself King of Portugal. The hierarchy persuaded the two kings to submit the matter to Pope Innocent II, who decided in favor of Castile. Affonso Henriques reversed this decision by offering his new kingdom to the papacy as a fief. Alexander III accepted it, and recognized him as King of Portugal (1143) on condition of annual tribute to the See of Rome.⁹⁴ Affonso Henriques resumed his wars with the Moors, captured Santarem and Lisbon, and extended his rule to the Tagus. Under Affonso III (1248–79) Portugal reached its present mainland limits, and Lisbon, strategically placed at the mouth of the Tagus, became its port and capital (1263). An old legend said that Ulysses-Odysseus had founded the city and given it its ancient name Ulyssipo, which the carelessness of tongues transformed into Olisipo and Lisboa.

The last years of Affonso II were embittered by civil war with his son Diniz, who wondered why his father took so long to die. From this dubious beginning Diniz moved into a long and beneficent reign (127 9–1325). Peace with Leon and Castile was achieved by a marital alliance; strife with another heir to the throne was averted by the mediation of Isabel, Diniz’ saintly queen. Renouncing the glories of war, Diniz devoted himself to the economic and cultural development of his kingdom. He founded schools of agriculture, taught his people improved methods of husbandry, planted trees to check erosion, helped commerce, built ships and cities, organized a Portuguese navy, and negotiated a commercial treaty with England; so he earned the title fondly given him by his subjects—Re Lavrador, the Worker King. He was an industrious administrator, and a just judge. He supported poets and scholars, and himself wrote the best poetry of his nation and time; through him Portuguese ceased to be a Galician dialect and became a literary language. In his pastorellas he gave literary form to the songs of the people; and at his court troubadours were encouraged to sing the joys and pains of love. Diniz himself was a connoisseur in women, and preferred his bastards to his one legitimate son. When this son rebelled and raised an army to unseat his father, St. Isabel, who had lived apart from the merry court of the King, rode between the hostile forces, proposed to be the first victim of their violence, and shamed her husband and her son to peace

CHAPTER XXVI

Pre-Renaissance Italy

1057–1308

I. NORMAN SICILY: 1090–1194

IT is remarkable to how many different environments, from Scotland to Sicily, the Normans adapted themselves; with what violent energy they aroused sleeping regions and peoples; and how completely, in a few centuries, they were absorbed by their subjects, and disappeared from history.

For a turbulent century they ruled southern Italy as successors to the Byzantine power, and Sicily as heirs to the Saracens. In 1060 Roger Guiscard, with a tiny band of buccaneers, began the invasion of the island; by 1091 its conquest was complete; in 1085 Norman Italy accepted Roger as its ruler; and when he died (1101) the “two Sicilies”—the island and southern Italy-were already a power in the politics of Europe. Control of the Straits of Messina, and of the fifty miles between Sicily and Africa, gave the Normans a decisive commercial and military advantage. Amalfi, Salerno, and Palermo became the foci of an active trade with all Mediterranean ports, including Moslem centers in Tunisia and Spain. Sicily, now a papal fief, replaced Mohammedan mosques with resplendent Christian churches, and in southern Italy Greek prelates gave way to Roman Catholic priests.

Roger II (1101–54) made Palermo his capital, extended his rule in Italy to Naples and Capua, and in 1130 expanded his title from Count to King. He had all the ambition and courage, resourcefulness and subtlety of his uncle Robert Guiscard; so alert in thought and industrious in action that Idrisi, his Moslem biographer, said of him that he accomplished more asleep than other men awake.¹ Opposed by the popes, who feared his encroachment upon the Papal States; by the German emperors, who resented his annexation of the Abruzzi; by the Byzantines, who dreamed of regaining southern Italy; and by the Moslems of Africa, who longed to recapture Sicily, he fought them all, sometimes several of them at once, and emerged with his kingdom greater than before, and with new acquisitions in Tunis, Sfax, Bone, and Tripoli. He made use of the intelligent Saracens, Greeks and Jews of Sicily to organize a better civil service and administrative bureaucracy than any other nation in Europe had at the time. He allowed the feudal organization of agriculture in Sicily, but kept his barons in check with a royal court whose law covered every class. He enriched the economy of Sicily by bringing in silk weavers from Greece, and furthered commerce by competent protection of life, travel, and property. He allowed religious freedom and cultural autonomy to Moslems, Jews, and Greek Catholics, opened career to all talent, himself wore Moslem garb, liked Moslem morals, and lived as a Latin king in an Oriental court. His kingdom was for a generation “the richest and most civilized state in Europe,”² and he was “the most enlightened ruler of his age.”³ Without him Frederick II, a still greater king, would have been impossible.

The King Roger’s Book of Idrisi suggests the prosperity of Norman Sicily. A hardy busy peasantry covered the rich soil with crops, and kept the cities fed. They lived in hovels, and suffered the usual exploitation of the useful by the clever, but their life was dignified with a colorful piety, and brightened with festivals and song. Every season of the agricultural year had its dances and chants; and vintage time brought bacchanalian feasts that bound ancient Saturnalia with modern Carnival. Even to the poorest there remained love, and folk songs ranging from license and satire to lyrics of purest tenderness. In the town of San Marco, said Idrisi, “the air is perfumed by the violets growing everywhere.” Messina, Catania, Syracuse flourished again as in Carthaginian, Greek, or Roman days. Palermo seemed to Idrisi the finest city in the world: “It turns the heads of all who see it… it has buildings of such beauty that travelers flock to it, drawn by the fame of the marvels of architecture, the exquisite workmanship, the admirable conceptions of art.” The central street was a panorama of “towering palaces, high and superb hostels, churches … baths, shops of great merchants…. All travelers say outright that there are nowhere buildings more marvelous than those of Palermo, nor any sight more exquisite than her pleasure gardens.” And the Moslem traveler Ibn Jubair, seeing Palermo in 1184, exclaimed; “A stupendous city! … The palaces of the king encircle it as a necklace clasps the throat of a maiden with well-filled bosom.”⁴ Visitors were struck by the variety of languages spoken in Palermo, the peaceful mingling of races and faiths, the neighborly confusion of churches, synagogues, and mosques, the elegantly dressed citizens, the busy streets, the quiet gardens, the comfortable homes.

In those homes and palaces the arts of the East served the conquerors from the West. The looms of Palermo wove gorgeous stuffs in silk and cloth of gold; the ivory workers made little caskets shaped and carved in delicate or whimsical designs; the mosaicists covered floors, walls, and ceilings with Oriental themes. Greek and Saracen architects and artisans raised churches, monasteries, and palaces whose plan and ornament, showing no trace of Norman styles, gathered up a thousand years of Byzantine or Arabic influence. In 1143 Greek artists built for Greek nuns, with funds provided by Roger’s Admiral George, a convent dedicated to Santa Maria dell’ Ammiraglio, but now known as the Martorana from its founder. It has been so often restored that little remains of its twelfth-century elements. Typically an Arabic inscription from a Greek Christian hymn runs round the inner dome. The floor is of gleaming varicolored marble; eight columns of dark porphyry frame three apses, their capitals are most gracefully carved; walls and spandrels and vaults glitter with golden mosaics, including a famous Christos Pantocrater—the Universal King—in the sanctuary cupola. Finer still is the Capella Palatina, the chapel of the palace begun by Roger II in 1132. Here everything is exquisite: the simple design of the marble pavement, the perfection of the slender columns and their diverse capitals, the 282 mosaics filling every tempting space, above the altar the solemn figure of Christ in one of the sovereign mosaics of the world, and, over all, a massive timber ceiling in honeycomb design, carved, gilded, or painted with Oriental figures of elephants, antelopes, gazelles, and “angels” that were probably houris from a Mohammedan’s dream of paradise. In all medieval or modern art there is no royal chapel that can compare with this jewel of Norman Sicily.

Roger died in 1154, aged fifty-nine. His son William I (1154–66) earned the title of “the Bad,” partly because his life was written by his enemies, partly because he let others govern while he lived amid eunuchs and concubines in Oriental ease. In his reign the Moslems of Tunisia rose against the Christians, and ended Norman power in Africa. William II (1166–89) lived much the same sort of life as “the Bad,” but was called “the Good” by amiable biographers if only to avoid a confusion of names. He asked pardon for his lax morals by financing in 1176 the monastery and cathedral of Monreale—a “mount royal” five miles outside of Palermo. The exterior is a disagreeable confusion of shafts and interlacing columns; the cloisters are a work of majestic strength and beauty; the mosaics of the interior are renowned but crude; the capitals, however, are richly carved with realistic life—Noah drunk and sleeping, a swineherd tending a pig, an acrobat standing on his head.

Perhaps the Oriental morals of the Norman Sicilian kings weakened their constitutions and shortened their line. Forty years after the death of Roger II his dynasty ingloriously died. William II left no children, and Tancred, illegitimate son of a son of Roger II, was chosen king (1189). Meanwhile the German emperor Henry VI had married Constance, an aunt of William II; eager to unite all Italy under the imperial crown, he claimed the throne of the Sicilies; he secured the active alliance of Pisa and Genoa, whose commerce was irked by Norman control of the central Mediterranean; in 1194 he appeared before Palermo with irresistible force, persuaded it to open its gates to him, and was there crowned King of Sicily. When he died (1197) he left his thrones to his three-year-old son Frederick, who was to become the most powerful and enlightened monarch of a thirteenth century rich in puissant kings.

II. THE PAPAL STATES

North of Norman Italy lay the city-state of Benevento, ruled by dukes of Lombard origin. Beyond this were the lands under the immediate temporal power of the popes—the “Patrimony of Peter”—including Anagni, Tivoli, Rome, and thence to Perugia.

Rome was the center, but hardly the model, of Latin Christianity. No city in Christendom had less respect for religion, except as a vested interest. Italy took only a modest part in the Crusades; Venice shared in the Fourth only to capture Constantinople; the Italian cities thought of them chiefly as opportunities to establish ports, markets, and trade in the Near East; Frederick II postponed his crusade as long as he could, and embarked upon it with a minimum of religious belief. There were religious souls in Rome, gentle spirits who aided pilgrims to maintain the shrines; but their voices were seldom heard above the din of politics.

Aside from the papacy, Rome was in this period a poor city. The Norman sack of 1084 had capped six centuries of destruction and neglect. The population had shrunk to some 40,000 from its ancient million. It was not a hub of commerce or industry. While cities of northern Italy led the economic revolution, the Papal States tarried in a simple agrarian regime. Market gardens, vineyards, and cattle paddocks mingled with homes and ruins within the walls of Aurelia. The lower classes of the capital lived half by handicraft, half by ecclesiastical charity; the middle classes were a medley of merchants, lawyers, teachers, bankers, students, and resident or visiting priests; the upper classes were the higher clergy and the landed nobility. The old Roman custom of owning in the country and living in the city still prevailed. Long since shorn of any general patriotism that would have united them for national defense, the Roman nobles divided into factions led by rich and powerful families—Frangipani, Orsini, Colonna, Pierleoni, Caetani, Savelli, Corsi, Conti, Annibaldi…. Each family made its Roman residence a castle-fortress, armed its members and retainers, and frequently indulged in street brawls, occasionally in civil wars. The popes, having only spiritual weapons little feared in Rome, struggled in vain to keep order in the city; they were repeatedly subjected to insult there, sometimes to violence; and many of them, for peace or safety, fled to Anagni, Viterbo, or Perugia, even to Lyons, at last to Avignon.

The popes had dreamed of a theocracy in which the Word of God, interpreted by the Church, would suffice as law; they found themselves crushed amid the autocracy of the emperors, the oligarchy of the nobles, and the democracy of the citizens. The relics of the Forum and the Capitol kept alive, among the Romans, the memory of their ancient republic; and periodically an effort was made to restore the old autonomy and forms. The leading nobles were still called senators, though the Senate had disappeared; consuls were chosen or appointed, though they wielded no power; and some old manuscripts preserved the half-forgotten edicts of Roman law. Inspired by the rise of free cities in northern Italy, the people of Rome, in the twelfth century, began to demand a return to secular self-government. In 1143 they elected a Senate of fifty-six members, and for some years thereafter elected new senators annually.

The mood of the time called for a voice, and found it in Arnold of Brescia. Tradition reports that he had studied under Abélard in France. He returned to Brescia as a monk, practicing such austerities that Bernard described him as a man who “neither eats nor drinks.” He was substantially orthodox in doctrine, but denied the validity of sacraments administered by priests in a state of sin. He held it immoral for a priest to own property, demanded a return of the clergy to apostolic poverty, and advised the Church to surrender all her material possessions and political power to the state. At the Council of the Lateran in 1139 Innocent II condemned him and commanded him to silence; but Pope Eugenius III absolved him on condition of a pilgrimage to various churches in Rome. It was a kindly error; the sight of the old republican landmarks fired the imagination of Arnold; standing amid the ruins, he called upon the Romans to reject clerical rule, and to restore the Roman Republic (1145). Fascinated by his fervor, the people chose consuls and tribunes to be actual governors, and established an equestrian order to serve as leaders in a new militia of defense. Intoxicated with the ease of this glorious revolution, the followers of Arnold renounced not only the temporal power of the popes, but the authority, in Italy, of the German emperors of the Holy Roman Empire; indeed, they argued, it was the Roman Republic that should rule not Italy alone, but, as of old, the “world.”⁵ They rebuilt and fortified the Capitol, seized St. Peter’s, turned it into a castle, took possession of the Vatican, and levied taxes upon pilgrims. Eugenius III fled to Viterbo and Pisa (1146), while St. Bernard, from Clairvaux, hurled denunciations against the people of Rome, and reminded them that their subsistence depended on the presence of the papacy. For ten years the Comune di Roma ruled the city of the Caesars and the popes.

Plucking up his courage, Eugenius III returned to Rome in 1148. He confined himself for a time to spiritual functions, distributed charity, and won the affection of the populace. His second successor, Hadrian IV, shocked by the killing of a cardinal in a public tumult, laid an interdict upon the capital (115 5). Fearful of a profounder revolution than the aristocracy could digest, the Senate abrogated the Republic and surrendered to the Pope. Arnold, excommunicated, hid himself in the Campagna. When Frederick Barbarossa approached Rome Hadrian asked him to arrest the rebel. Arnold was found and apprehended; he was turned over by the Emperor to the papal prefect of Rome, and was by him hanged (1155). The corpse was burned, and the ashes were thrown into the Tiber “for fear,” said a contemporary, “that the people would gather them up and honor them as the ashes of a martyr.”⁶ His ideas outlived him, and reappeared in the Paterine and Waldensian heretics of Lombardy, in the Albigensians of France, in Marsilius of Padua, and in the leaders of the Reformation. The Senate continued to exist till 1216, when Innocent III succeeded in replacing it with one or two senators congenial to the papal cause. The temporal power of the popes survived till 1870.

At different times the Papal States included Umbria, with Spoleto and Perugia; the “March,” or frontier land, of Ancona on the Adriatic; and the Romagna, or Rome-ruled region, with the cities of Rimini, Imola, Ravenna, Bologna, and Ferrara. Ravenna continued to decline in this period, while Ferrara rose to prominence under the wise leadership of the house of Este. Under the lead of the great lawyers produced by its university, Bologna developed a virile communal life. It was among the first cities to choose a podesta to govern the internal affairs of the commune, and a capitano to lead it in its external relations. Peculiar requirements ruled the choice of the podesta or man of power: he must be a noble, a foreigner to the city, and over thirty-six years of age; he must own no property within the commune, and must have no relative among the electors; he must not be kin to, or come from the same place as, the preceding podesta. These strange rules, adopted to secure impartial administration, prevailed in many Italian communes. The “captain of the people” was chosen not by the communal council but by the popular party, dominated by the merchant guilds; he represented not the poor but the business class. In later centuries he would extend his power at the expense of the podesta, as the bourgeoisie would come to surpass the nobility in wealth and influence.

III. VENICE TRIUMPHANT: 1096–1311

North of Ferrara and the Po lay the district of Veneto, proud of the cities of Venice, Treviso, Padua, Vicenza, and Verona.

It was in this period that Venice matured her power. Her alliance with Byzantium gave her entry to Aegean and Black Sea ports. At Constantinople, in the twelfth century, her nationals are said to have numbered over 100,000, and to have held a section of the city in terror by their insolence and their brawls. Suddenly the Greek Emperor Manuel, prodded by the jealous Genoese, turned against the Venetians in his capital, arrested a great number of them, and ordered a wholesale confiscation of their goods (1171). Venice declared war; her people labored night and day to build a fleet; and in 1171 the Doge Vitale Michieli II led 130 ships against Euboea as a first goal of strategy against the Straits. But on Euboea’s shores his troops fell sick with a disease said to have been caused by Greeks poisoning the water supply; so many thousands died that the ships could not be manned for war; the Doge led his armada back to Venice, where the plague infected and decimated the inhabitants; and at a meeting of the assembly the Doge, blamed for these misfortunes, was stabbed to death (1172).⁷ It is against the background of these events that we must view the Fourth Crusade, and the oligarchic revolution that transformed the constitution of Venice.

The great merchants, fearing the collapse of their commercial empire if such defeats continued, resolved to take the election of the doge, and the determination of public policy, from the general assembly, and establish a more select council, which should be better fitted to consider and transact affairs of state, and might serve as a check upon both the passions of the people and the autocracy of the doge. The three highest judges of the Republic were persuaded to appoint a commission to draw up a new constitution. Its report recommended that each of the six wards of the city-state should choose two leading men, each of whom should choose forty able men; the 480 deputies so chosen were to form the Maggior Consiglio, or Greater Council, as the general legislature of the nation. The Greater Council in turn was to choose sixty of its members as a Senate to govern commerce, finance, and foreign relations. The arrengo or popular assembly was to meet only to ratify or reject proposals of war or peace. A Privy Council of six men, elected severally from the six wards, was to govern the state in any interregnum, and its sanction was to be required to legalize any governmental action of a doge. The first Greater Council elected by this procedure chose thirty-four of its members, who chose eleven of their number, who then, in public deliberation in the cathedral of San Marco, chose the doge (1173). A cry of protest arose from-the people at losing their right of naming the head of the state; but the new doge diverted the disturbance by scattering coin among the crowd.⁸ In 1192, on the election of Enrico Dandolo, the Greater Council required the Doge to swear, in his coronation oath, to obey all the laws of the state. The mercantile oligarchy was now supreme.

Dandolo, already eighty-four, proved to be one of the strongest leaders in Venetian history. Through his Machiavellian diplomacy and personal heroism Venice avenged the disaster of 1171 by capturing and despoiling Constantinople in 1204; thereby Venice became the dominant power in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and the commercial leadership of Europe passed from Byzantium to Italy. In 1261 the Genoese aided the Greeks to regain Constantinople, and were rewarded with commercial preference there; but three years later the Venetian fleet defeated the Genoese near Sicily, and the Greek emperor was forced to restore the favored position of Venice in his capital.

The triumphant oligarchy capped these external victories with another constitutional stroke. In 1297 the Doge Pietro Gradenigo pushed through the Council a proposal that only those citizens—and their male posterity-should be eligible to the Council who had sat in it since 1293.⁹ The great majority of the people were excluded from office by this “Closing of the Council.” A closed caste was created; a Libro d’oro, or Golden Book, of marriages and births within this patrician caste was kept to ensure purity of blood and monopoly of power; the mercantile oligarchy decreed itself an aristocracy of birth. When the people planned a revolt against the new constitution their leaders were admitted into the hall of the Council, and were immediately hanged (1300).

It must be admitted that this frank and ruthless oligarchy governed well. Public order was better maintained, public policy more shrewdly guided, laws more stable and effective, than in the other communities of medieval Italy. Venetian laws for the regulation of physicians and apothecaries preceded similar statutes of Florence by half a century. In 1301 laws forbade unhealthy industries in residential quarters, and excluded from Venice industries that poured injurious fumes into the air. Navigation laws were rigorous and detailed. All imports and exports were subject to state supervision and control. Diplomatic reports covered trade more than politics, and economic statistics were here for the first time made a part of government.¹⁰

Agriculture was almost unknown in Venice, but handicrafts were highly developed, for Venice had imported from the old cities of the Eastern Mediterranean arts and crafts half submerged by political upheavals in the West. Venetian products in iron, brass, glass, gold cloth, and silk were renowned in three continents. The building of boats for pleasure, commerce, or war was probably the greatest of Venetian industries; it reached a capitalistic stage of mass labor and corporate finance, and almost a socialistic stage through control by its chief client, the state. Picturesque galleys with lofty prows, painted sails, and as many as 180 oars bound Venice with Constantinople, Tyre, Alexandria, Lisbon, London, and a score of other cities in a golden chain of ports and trade. Goods from the valley of the Po came to Venice to be reshipped; the products of the Rhine cities came over the Alps to spread out from her quays to the Mediterranean world; the Rialto became the busiest thoroughfare in Europe, crowded with merchants, sailors, and bankers from a hundred lands. The wealth of the North could not compare with the opulence of a city where everything was geared to commerce and finance, and where one ship sent to Alexandria and back brought 1000 per cent on the investment—if it encountered no enemy, pirate, or destructive storm.¹¹ In the thirteenth century Venice was the richest city in Europe, equaled perhaps only by those Chinese cities that her Marco Polo incredibly described.

Faith declines as wealth increases. The Venetians made much use of religion in government, and consoled the voteless with processions and paradise; but the ruling classes rarely allowed Christianity, or excommunication, to interfere with business or war. Siamo Veneziani, poi Cristiani, ran their motto: “We are Venetians; after that we are Christians.”¹² Ecclesiastics were excluded from any share in the government.¹³ Venetian merchants sold arms and slaves, and sometimes gave military intelligence, to Moslems at war with Christians,¹⁴ A certain liberality went with this broad-minded venality: Moslems might come safely to Venice; and the Jews—especially in the Giudecca on the island of Spinalunga—might worship peacefully in their synagogues.

Dante denounced the “unbridled lasciviousness” of the Venetians,¹⁵ but we must not trust the strictures of one who cursed so ecumenically. More significant are the severe penalties prescribed in Venetian law for parents who prostituted their children, or the vainly repeated laws to check electoral corruption.¹⁶ The impression we get is of a hard and brilliant aristocracy stoically resigned to the poverty of the masses, and a populace solacing poverty with the uncornered joys of love. As early as 1094 we hear of the Carnival; in 1228 the first mention of masks; in 1296 the Senate made the last day before Lent (the French mardi gras) a public holiday. On such occasions both sexes flaunted their most expensive finery. Rich ladies crowned themselves with jeweled tiaras or hoods, or turbans woven with cloth of gold; their eyes gleamed through veils of gold or silver web; their necks held strings of pearls; their hands were gloved with chamois or silk; their feet were shod with sandals or shoes of leather, wood, or cork, embroidered in red and gold; their gowns were of fine linen, silk, or brocade, sprinkled with gems, and cut low in the neck to the scandal and fascination of their times. They wore false hair, they painted and powdered, they laced and fasted to be slim.¹⁷ They moved freely in public at any time, joined with shy allure in pleasure parties and gondola escapades, and listened willingly to troubadours importing Provence modes of song for the eternal themes of love.

The Venetians did not, in this period, go in for culture. They had a good public library, but seem to have made little use of it. No contributions to learning, no lasting poetry, appeared amid this unrivaled wealth. Schools were numerous in the thirteenth century, and we hear of private and state scholarships for poor students; but as late as the fourteenth century there were Venetian judges who could not read.¹⁸ Music was held in high esteem. Art was not yet the superb coloratura of later days; but wealth was bringing to Venice the art of many lands, taste was growing, the foundation was being laid, and old Roman skills survived, above all in glass.

We must not picture the Venice of that age as quite so lovely as Wagner or Nietzsche found it in the nineteenth century. Houses were of wood, and streets were simple earth; the Piazza di San Marco, however, was paved with brick in 1172, and the pigeons were there as early as 1256. Pretty bridges began to curve over the canals, and over the Grand Canal the traghetti already ferried many passengers. The side canals were probably less malodorous then than now, for time is needed for any full ripening. But no faults of street or stream could close the soul to the grandeur of a city lifting itself up, century by century, out of the marshes and mists of the lagoons; or the wonder of a people rising out of desolation and isolation to cover the sea with its ships, and levy tribute of wealth and beauty upon half the world.

Between Venice and the Alps lay the city and March of Treviso, of which we shall note only that its people so loved life that it won the name of Marca amorosa or gioiosa. In 1214, we are told, the city celebrated the festival of the Castello d’amore: a wooden castle was set up, and hung with carpets, drapes, and garlands; pretty Trevisan women held it, armed with scented water, fruit, and flowers; youthful cavaliers from Venice competed with gay blades from Padua in besieging the ladies, bombarding them with like weapons; the Venetians, they say, won the day by mingling ducats with their flowers; in any case the castle and its fair defenders fell.¹⁹

IV. FROM MANTUA TO GENOA

West of the Veneto the famous cities of Lombardy ruled the plains between the Po and the Alps: Mantua, Cremona, Brescia, Bergamo, Como, Milan, Pavia. South of the Po, in what is now Emilia, were Modena, Reggio, Parma, Piacenza; lovers of Italy will not resent these sonorous litanies. Between Lombardy and France the province of Piedmont enclosed Vercelli and Turin; and south of these Liguria bent around the gulf and city of Genoa. The wealth of the region was the gift of the Po, which crossed the peninsula from west to east, carrying the commerce, filling the canals, watering the fields. The growth of industry and trade gave these cities the wealth and pride that enabled them generally to ignore their nominal sovereign, the German emperor, and to subdue the semifeudal lords of their hinterland.

Usually a cathedral stood at the center of these Italian towns, to brighten life with the drama of devotion and the spur of hope; near it a baptistery to mark the entry of the child into the privileges and responsibilities of Christian citizenship, and a campanile to sound the call to worship, assembly, or arms. In the neighboring piazza or public square peasants and craftsmen offered their products, actors, acrobats, and minstrels performed, heralds cried their proclamations, citizens chatted after Sunday Mass, and youths or knights engaged in sports or tournaments. A town hall, some shops, some houses or tenements helped to form a guard of brick around the square. From this center ran the crooked, winding, climbing streets, so narrow that when a cart or horseman passed, the pedestrians dodged into a doorway or flattened themselves against a wall. As the thirteenth century progressed and wealth grew, the stucco houses were roofed with red tiles, making a pic turesque pattern for those who could forget the odors and the mud. Only a few streets, and the central square, were paved. Around the city ran a towered and battlemented wall, for war was frequent, and a man had to know how to fight if he cared to be other than a monk.

The greatest of these cities were Genoa and Milan. Genoa—la superba, its lovers called it—was perfectly placed for business and pleasure, rising on a hill before a sea that invited commerce, and sharing in the warm climate of a Riviera that reached out to Rapallo on the east and San Remo on the west. Already a busy port in Roman days, Genoa developed a population of merchants, manufacturers, bankers, shipwrights, sailors, soldiers, and politicians. Genoese engineers brought in clear water from the Ligurian Alps by an aqueduct worthy of ancient Rome, and raised a gigantic mole out in the bay to give her great harbor security in storm and war. Like the Venetians of this epoch, the Genoese cared little for letters or art; they spent themselves in conquering competitors and exploring new avenues for gain. The Bank of Genoa was almost the state; it lent money to the city on condition of collecting the municipal revenue; through this power it dominated the government, and every party that came into office had to pledge loyalty to the Bank.²⁰ But the Genoese were as brave as they were acquisitive. They cooperated with Pisa to sweep the Saracens from the Western Mediterranean (1015–1113), and then fought Pisa intermittently until they shattered their rival’s power in the naval battle of Meloria (1284). For that last conflict Pisa called all men between the ages of twenty and sixty, Genoa all between eighteen and seventy; we may judge from this the spirit and passion of the age. “As there is a natural loathing between men and serpents,” wrote the monk Salimbene, “so is there between the Pisans and the Genoese, between the Pisans and the men of Lucca.”²¹ In that engagement off the coast of Corsica the men fought hand to hand until half the combatants were dead; “and there was such wailing in Genoa and Pisa as was never heard in those cities from their foundation to our times.”²² Learning of this disaster to Pisa, the good men of Lucca and Florence thought it an excellent time to send an expedition against that unfortunate city; but Pope Martin IV commanded them to stay their hands. Meanwhile the Genoese pushed into the East, and came into competition with the Venetians; and between these two rose the bitterest hatred of all. In 1255 they contested the possession of Acre; the Hospitalers fought on the side of Genoa, the Templars for Venice; in that battle alone 20,000 men fell;²³ it destroyed Christian unity in Syria, and perhaps decided the failure of the Crusades. The struggle between Genoa and Venice continued till 1379, when the Genoese suffered at Chioggia the same culminating defeat that they had inflicted upon the Pisans a century before.

Of the Lombard cities Milan was the richest and most powerful. Once a Roman capital, she was proud of her age and her traditions; the consuls of her republic defied the emperors, her bishops defied the popes, her people shared or sheltered heresies that challenged Christianity itself. In the thirteenth century she had 200,000 inhabitants, 13,000 houses, 1000 taverns.²⁴ Herself loving liberty, she did not willingly concede it to others; she patrolled the roads with her troops to force caravans, withersoever bound, to go to Milan first; she ruined Como and Lodi, and struggled to subjugate Pisa, Cremona, and Pavia; she could not rest until she controlled all the commerce of the Po.²⁵ At the Diet of Constance in 1154 two citizens of Lodi appeared before Frederick Barbarossa and implored his protection for their town; the Emperor warned Milan to desist from her attempts upon Lodi; his message was rejected with scorn and trampled under foot; Frederick, eager to subdue Lombardy to imperial obedience, seized the opportunity to destroy Milan (1162). Five years later her survivors and friends had rebuilt the city, and all Lombardy rejoiced in her resurrection as a symbol of Italy’s resolve never to be ruled by a German king. Frederick yielded. But before he died he married his son Henry VI to Constance, daughter of Roger II of Sicily. In Henry’s son the Lombard League would find a more terrible Frederick.

V. FREDERICK II: 1194–1250

1. The Excommunicate Crusader

Constance was thirty when she married Henry, forty-two when she gave birth to her only child. Fearing doubts of her pregnancy and of her child’s legitimacy, she had a tent erected in the market place of Iesi (near Ancona); and there, in the sight of all, she was delivered of the boy who was to become the most fascinating figure of the culminating medieval century. In his veins the blood of the Norman kings of Italy merged with the blood of the Hohenstaufen emperors of Germany.

He was four when, at Palermo, he was crowned King of Sicily (1198). His father had died a year earlier, his mother died a year afterward. Her will besought Pope Innocent III to undertake the guardianship, education, and political protection of her son, and offered him in return a handsome stipend, and the regency and renewed suzerainty of Sicily. He accepted gladly, and used his position to end that union of Sicily with Germany which Frederick’s father had just achieved; the popes reasonably dreaded an empire that should encompass the Papal States on every side and in effect imprison and dominate the papacy. Innocent provided for Frederick’s education, but supported Otto IV for the German throne. Frederick grew up in neglect, sometimes in poverty, so that compassionate citizens of Palermo had on occasion to bring the royal gamin food.²⁶ He was allowed to run free in the streets and markets of the polyglot capital, and to pick his associates wherever he pleased. He received no systematic education, but his avid mind learned from all that he heard or saw; the world would later marvel at the scope and detail of his knowledge. In those days and ways he acquired Arabic and Greek, and some of the lore of the Jews. He grew familiar with different peoples, garbs, customs, and faiths, and never quite lost his youthful habit of tolerance. He read many volumes of history. He became a good rider and fencer, and a lover of horses and hunting. He was short but strong, with “a fair and gracious countenance,”²⁷ and long, red, curly hair; clever, positive, and proud. At twelve he dismissed Innocent’s deputy regent and took over the government; at fourteen he came of age; at fifteen he married Constance of Aragon, and set out to reclaim the imperial crown.

Fortune favored him, for a price. Otto IV had violated his agreement to respect the sovereignty of the Pope in the Papal States; Innocent excommunicated him, and ordered the barons and bishops of the Empire to elect as Emperor his young ward Frederick, “as old in wisdom as he is young in years.”²⁸ But Innocent, so suddenly turning toward Frederick, did not veer from his purpose of protecting the papacy. As the price of his support he required from Frederick (1212) a pledge to continue tribute and fealty from Sicily to the popes; to guard the inviolability of the Papal States; to keep the “Two Sicilies”—Norman southern Italy and the island—perpetually separated from the Empire; to reside in Germany as Emperor and leave the Sicilies to his infant son Henry as King of Sicily under a regent to be appointed by Innocent; furthermore, Frederick bound himself to maintain all the powers of the clergy in his realm, to punish heretics, and to take the cross as a crusader. Financing his trip and retinue with money provided by the Pope, Frederick entered a Germany still held by Otto’s armies. But Otto was defeated by Philip Augustus at Bouvines; his resistance collapsed; and Frederick was crowned emperor in a splendid ceremony at Aachen (1215). There he solemnly renewed his pledge to undertake a crusade; and in the full enthusiasm of triumphant youth he won many princes to make the same vow. For a moment he seemed to Germany a God-sent David who would free David’s Jerusalem from the heirs of Saladin.

But delays ensued. Otto’s brother Henry raised an army to depose Frederick, and the new Pope, Honorius III, agreed that the young Emperor must defend his throne. Frederick overcame Henry, but meanwhile he became involved in imperial politics. Apparently he already longed for his native Italy; the heat and blood of the South were in his temperament, and Germany irked him; of his fifty-six years only eight were spent there. He granted large feudal powers to the barons, gave charters of self-government to several cities, and entrusted the government of Germany to Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne and Herman of Salza, the able Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights. Despite Frederick’s apparent negligence Germany enjoyed prosperity and peace during the thirty-five years of his reign. The barons and bishops were so satisfied with their absentee landlord that to please him they crowned his seven-year-old son Henry “King of the Romans”—i.e., heir to the imperial throne (1220). At the same time Frederick appointed himself regent of Sicily for Henry, who remained in Germany. This rather inverted the plans of Innocent, but Innocent was dead. Honorius yielded, and even crowned Frederick emperor at Rome, for he was anxious that Frederick should embark at once to rescue the Crusaders in Egypt. However, the barons in South Italy and the Saracens in Sicily staged a revolt; Frederick argued that he must restore order in his Italian realm before venturing on a long absence. Meanwhile (1222) his wife died. Hoping to prod him to fulfill his vow, Honorius persuaded him to marry Isabella, heiress to the lost kingdom of Jerusalem. Frederick complied (1225), and added the title of King of Jerusalem to those of King of Sicily and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Trouble with the Lombard cities again delayed him. In 1227 Honorius died, and the stern Gregory IX ascended the papal throne. Frederick now prepared in earnest, built a great fleet, and gathered 40,000 crusaders at Brindisi. There a terrible plague broke out in his army. Thousands died, more thousands deserted. The Emperor himself, and his chief lieutenant, Louis of Thuringia, caught the infection. Nevertheless Frederick gave the order to sail. Louis died, and Frederick grew worse. His doctors, and the higher clergy who were with him, advised him to return to Italy. He did, and sought a cure at Pozzuoli. Pope Gregory, his patience exhausted, refused to hear the explanations of Frederick’s emissaries, and announced to the world the excommunication of the Emperor.

Seven months later, still excommunicate, Frederick set sail for Palestine (1228). On learning of his arrival in Syria, Gregory absolved the subjects of Frederick and his son Henry from their oaths of allegiance, and began negotiations to depose the Emperor. Taking these actions as a declaration of war, Frederick’s regent in Italy invaded the Papal States. Gregory retaliated by sending an army to invade Sicily; monks spread a rumor that Frederick was dead; and soon a large part of Sicily and southern Italy were in papal hands. Two Franciscan delegates of the Pope reached Acre soon after Frederick, and forbade any man in the Christian ranks to obey the excommunicate. The Saracen commander, al-Kamil, astonished to find a European ruler who understood Arabic and appreciated Arabic literature, science, and philosophy, made a favorable peace with Frederick, who now entered Jerusalem as a bloodless conqueror. As no clergyman would crown him King of Jerusalem, he crowned himself in the church of the Holy Sepulcher. The bishop of Caesarea, calling the shrine and city desecrated by Frederick’s presence, laid an interdict upon religious services in Jerusalem and Acre. Some Knights Templar, learning that Frederick planned to visit the reputed site of Christ’s baptism in the Jordan, sent secret word to al-Kamil, suggesting that here was a chance for the Sultan to capture the Emperor. The Moslem commander sent the letter to Frederick. To free Jerusalem from its interdict, the Emperor left it on the third day, and went to Acre. There, as he walked to his ship, the Christian populace bombarded him with filth.²⁹

Arrived at Brindisi, Frederick organized an impromptu army, and advanced to recapture the towns that had yielded to the Pope. The papal army fled, the cities opened their gates; only Sora resisted, and stood siege; it was captured and reduced to ashes. At the frontier of the Papal States Frederick stopped, and sent the Pope a plea for peace. The Pope agreed; the Treaty of San Germano was signed (1230); the excommunication was withdrawn. For a moment there was peace.

2. The Wonder of the World

Frederick turned to administration, and from his court at Foggia, in Apulia, wrestled with the problems of too wide a realm. He visited Germany in 1231, and confirmed, in a “Statute in Favor of Princes,” the powers and privileges that he and his son had extended to the barons; he was willing to surrender Germany to feudalism if that would leave him at peace to develop his ideas in Italy. Perhaps he recognized that the battle of Bouvines had ended German hegemony in Europe, and that the thirteenth century belonged to France and Italy. He paid for his neglect of Germany in the rebellion and suicide of his son.

Out of the polyglot passions of Sicily his despotic hand forged an order and prosperity recalling the brilliance of Roger II’s reign. The rebellious Saracens of the hills were captured, were transported to Italy, were trained as mercenaries, and became the most reliable soldiers in Frederick’s army; we may imagine the wrath of the popes at the sight of Moslem warriors led by a Christian emperor against papal troops. Palermo remained in law the capital of the Regno, as the Two Sicilies were briefly called; but the real capital was Foggia. Frederick loved Italy more ardently than most Italians; he marveled that Yahveh had made so much of Palestine when Italy existed; he called his southern kingdom the apple of his eye, “a haven amidst the floods, a pleasure garden amidst a wilderness of thorns.”³⁰ In 1223 he began to build at Foggia the rambling castle-palace of which only a gateway remains today. Soon a city of palaces rose about his own to house his aides. He invited the nobles of his Italian realm to serve as pages at his court; there they rose through widening functions to administer the government. Head of them all was Piero delle Vigne, a graduate of the school of law at Bologna; Frederick made him logothete or secretary of state, and loved him as a brother or a son. At Foggia, as at Paris seventy years later, lawyers replaced the clergy in administration; here, in the state nearest to the See of Peter, the secularization of government was complete.

Reared in an age of chaos, and learned in Oriental ideas, Frederick never dreamed that the order called a state could be maintained except by monarchical force. He seems honestly to have believed that without a strong central power men would destroy, or repeatedly impoverish, themselves through crime, ignorance, and war. Like Barbarossa he valued social order more highly than popular liberty, and felt that the ruler who competently maintains order earns all the luxuries of his keep. He allowed some measure of public representation in his government: twice a year, at five points in the Regno, assemblies met to deal with local problems, complaints, and crimes; to these assemblies he summoned not only the nobles and prelates of the district, but four deputies from each major city, and two from each town. For the rest Frederick was an absolute monarch; he accepted as axiomatic the basic principle of Roman civil law—that the citizens had handed over to the emperor the sole right to legislate. At Melfi in 1231 he issued for the Regno—chiefly through the legal skill and counsel of Piero delle Vigne—the Liber Augustalis, the first scientifically codified system of laws since Justinian, and one of the most complete bodies of jurisprudence in legal history. It was in some ways a reactionary code: it accepted all the class distinctions of feudalism, and maintained old rights of the lord over the serf. In many ways it was a progressive code: it deprived the nobles of legislative, judicial, and minting powers, centering these in the state; it abolished trial by combat or ordeal; it provided for state prosecutors to pursue crimes that heretofore had gone unpunished if no citizen brought in a complaint. It condemned the law’s delays, advised judges to cut down the perorations of advocates, and required the state courts to sit daily except on holidays.

Like most medieval rulers, Frederick carefully regulated the national economy. A “just price” was established for various services and goods. The state nationalized the production of salt, iron, steel, hemp, tar, dyed fabrics, and silks;³¹ it operated textile factories with Saracen slave women workers and eunuch foremen;³² it owned and operated slaughter houses and public baths; it created model farms, fostered the cultivation of cotton and sugar cane, cleared woods and fields of injurious animals, built roads and bridges, and sank wells to augment the water supply.³³ Foreign trade was largely managed by the state, and was carried in vessels owned by the government; one of these had a crew of 300 men.³⁴ Internal traffic tolls were reduced to a minimum, but tariffs on exports and imports provided the chief revenues of the state. There were many other taxes, for this government, like all others, could always find uses for money. To Frederick’s credit must be put a sound and conscientious currency.

To make this monolithic state majestic and holy without relying upon a Christianity normally hostile to him, Frederick strove to restore in his own person all the awe and splendor that had hedged a Roman emperor. His exquisite coins were stamped with no Christian word or symbol, but with the circular legend IMP/ROM/Cesar/Aug; and on the reverse was the Roman eagle encircled with the name Fridericus. The people were taught that the Emperor was in a sense the Son of God; his laws were the divine justice codified, and were referred to as Iustitia—almost the third person of a new trinity. Anxious to place himself beside the old Roman emperors in the history and galleries of art, Frederick commissioned sculptors to carve his likeness in stone. A bridgehead at the Volturno, a gate at Capua were adorned with reliefs, in ancient style, of himself and his aides; nothing remains of these works except a female head of great beauty.³⁵ This pre-Renaissance attempt to revive classic art failed, washed away by the Gothic wave.

Despite his near-divinity and royal industry, Frederick found it possible to enjoy life at all levels in his Foggia court. An army of slaves, many of them Saracens, ministered to his wants and managed the bureaucracy. In 1235, his second wife having died, he married again; but Isabella of England could not understand his mind or morals, and retired into the background while Frederick consorted with mistresses and begot an illegitimate son. His enemies charged him with maintaining a harem, and Gregory IX accused him of sodomy.³⁶ Frederick explained that all these white or black ladies or lads were used only for their skill in song, dance, acrobatics, or other entertainment traditional in royal courts. In addition to these he kept a menagerie of wild beasts; and sometimes he traveled with a retinue of leopards, lynxes, lions, panthers, apes, and bears, led on a chain by Saracen slaves. Frederick loved hunting and hawking, collected strange birds, and wrote for his son Manfred an admirable and scientific treatise on falconry.

Next to hunting, he took delight in educated and graceful conversation—delicato parlare. He preferred the meeting of true minds to the joust of arms. He himself was the most cultured causeur of his time, and was noted for his wit and repartee; this Frederick was his own Voltaire.³⁷ He spoke nine languages and wrote seven. He corresponded in Arabic with al-Kamil, whom he called his dearest friend after his own sons; in Greek with his son-in-law, the Greek Emperor John Vatatzes; and in Latin with the Western world. His associates—especially Piero delle Vigne—formed their admirable Latin style on the classics of Rome; they keenly felt and emulated the classic spirit, and almost anticipated the humanists of the Renaissance. Frederick himself was a poet, whose Italian verses won Dante’s praise. The love poetry of Provence and Islam entered his court, and was taken up by the young nobles who served there; and the Emperor, like some Baghdad potentate, loved to relax, after a day of administration or hunting or war, with pretty women around him, and poets to sing his glory and their charms.

As he grew older Frederick turned more and more to science and philosophy. Here above all he was stirred by the Moslem heritage of Sicily. He read many Arabic masterpieces himself, brought Moslem and Jewish scientists and philosophers to his court, and paid scholars to translate into Latin the scientific classics of Greece and Islam. He was so fond of mathematics that he persuaded the Sultan of Egypt to send him a famous mathematician, al-Hanifi; and he was intimate with Leonardo Fibonacci, the greatest Christian mathematician of the age. He shared some of the superstitions of his time, and delved into astrology and alchemy. He lured to his court the polymath Michael Scot, and studied occult science with him, and chemistry, metallurgy, and philosophy. His curiosity was universal. He sent questions in science and philosophy to scholars at his court, and as far abroad as Egypt, Arabia, Syria, and Iraq. He kept a zoological garden for study rather than for amusement, and organized experiments in the breeding of poultry, pigeons, horses, camels, and dogs; his laws establishing closed seasons for hunting were based on careful records of pairing and breeding seasons—for which the animals of Apulia were said to have written him a vote of thanks. His legislation included an enlightened regulation of medical practice, operations, and the sale of drugs. He favored the dissection of cadavers; Moslem physicians marveled at his knowledge of anatomy. The extent of his learning in philosophy appears in his request to some Moslem savants to resolve certain discrepancies between the views of Aristotle and Alexander of Aphrodisias on the eternity of the world. “O fortunate emperor!” exclaimed Michael Scot, “I verily believe that if ever a man could escape death by his learning it would be you.”³⁸

Lest the learning of the scholars whom he had assembled should die with their deaths, Frederick founded in 1224 the University of Naples—a rare example of a medieval university established without ecclesiastical sanction. He called to its faculty scholars in all arts and sciences, and paid them high salaries; and he assigned subsidies to enable poor but qualified students to attend. He forbade the youths of his Regno to go outside of it for their higher education. Naples, he hoped, would soon rival Bologna as a school of law, and would train men for public administration.

Was Frederick an atheist? He had been pious in his youth, and perhaps retained the basic tenets of Christianity till his crusade. Intimate intercourse with Moslem leaders and thinkers seems to have ended his Christian faith. He was attracted by Moslem learning, and considered it far superior to the Christian thought and knowledge of his day. At the Diet of German princes in Friuli (1232) he cordially received a Moslem deputation, and later, in the sight of bishops and princes, joined these Saracens in a banquet celebrating a Mohammedan religious feast.³⁹ “It was said by his rivals,” reports Matthew Paris, “that the Emperor agreed and believed in the law of Mohammed more than that of Jesus Christ … and was more a friend to the Saracens than to the Christians.”⁴⁰ A rumor credited by Gregory IX charged him with saying that “three conjurors so craftily led away their contemporaries as to gain the mastery of the world—Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed”;⁴¹ all Europe buzzed with this blasphemy. Frederick denied the charge, but it helped to turn public opinion against him in the final crisis of his life. He was unquestionably something of a freethinker. He had his doubts about the creation of the world in time, personal immortality, the virgin birth, and other doctrines of the Christian faith.⁴² In rejecting trial by ordeal he asked: “How could a man believe that the natural heat of glowing iron will turn cool without an adequate cause, or that, because of a seared conscience, the element of water will refuse to accept [submerge] the accused?”⁴³ In all his reign he built one Christian church.

Within limits he gave freedom of worship to the diverse faiths in his kingdom. Greek Catholics, Mohammedans, and Jews were allowed to practice their religions unmolested, but (with one exception) they could not teach in the university, or rise to official position in the state. All Moslems and Hebrews were required to wear a dress that would distinguish them from Christians; and the poll tax that Moslem rulers levied on Christians and Jews in Islam was here levied upon Jews and Saracens as a substitute for military service. Conversion from Christianity to Judaism or Islam was severely punished in Frederick’s laws. But when, in 12 3 5, the Jews of Fulda were accused of “ritual murder”—the killing of a Christian child to use its blood at the Passover festival—Frederick came to their rescue, and denounced the story as a cruel legend. He had several Jewish scholars at his court.⁴⁴

The great anomaly of this rationalist’s reign was the persecution of heresy. Frederick did not allow liberty of thought and speech, even to the professors in his university; it was a privilege confined to himself and his associates. Like most rulers, he recognized the necessity of religion for social order, and could not allow it to be undermined by his savants; besides, the suppression of heresy facilitated an intermittent peace with the popes. While some other monarchs of the thirteenth century hesitated to co-operate with the Inquisition, Frederick gave it his full support. The popes and their greatest enemy agreed in this alone.

3. Empire vs. Papacy

As Frederick’s rule at Foggia developed, his far-reaching aims became ever clearer: to establish his rule throughout Italy, to unify Italy and Germany in a restored Roman Empire, and perhaps to make Rome again the political as well as the religious capital of the Western world. When in 1226 he invited the nobles and cities of Italy to a diet at Cremona he showed his hand by including in his invitation the duchy of Spoleto, then a papal state, and by marching his troops through the lands of the popes. The Pope forbade the nobles of Spoleto to attend. The Lombard cities, suspecting that Frederick planned to subject them to a real, instead of nominal, submission to the Empire, refused to send delegates; instead they formed the second Lombard League, in which Milan, Turin, Bergamo, Brescia, Mantua, Bologna, Vicenza, Verona, Padua, and Treviso pledged themselves to a defensive and offensive alliance for twenty-five years. The diet was never held.

In 1234 his son Henry revolted against his father and allied himself with the Lombard League. Frederick rode up from southern Italy to Worms, without an army but with plenty of cash; the rebellion collapsed at the news of his coming or the touch of his gold; Henry was put into prison, languished there for seven years, and then, while being transferred to another place of confinement, rode his horse over a cliff to death. Frederick went on to Mainz, presided over a diet there, and persuaded many of the assembled nobles to join him in a campaign for the restoration of imperial power in Lombardy. So aided, he defeated the army of the League at Cortenuova (1237); all the cities surrendered but Milan and Brescia; Gregory IX offered to mediate, but Frederick’s dream of unity could not be reconciled with the Italian love of liberty.

At this juncture Gregory, though ninety and ailing, decided to throw in his lot with the League, and risk the whole temporal power of the popes on the issue of war. He had no fondness for the Lombard towns; he too, like Frederick, considered their liberty a license to chaotic strife; and he knew that they harbored heretics openly hostile to the wealth and temporal power of the Church; at this very time the heretics of besieged Milan were defiling altars and turning crucifixes upside down.⁴⁵ But if Frederick overcame these cities the Papal States would be engulfed within a united Italy and a united Empire dominated by a foe of Christianity and the Church. In 1238 Gregory persuaded Venice and Genoa to join him and the League in war against Frederick; in a powerful encyclical he charged the Emperor with atheism, blasphemy, and despotism, and a desire to destroy the authority of the Church; in 1239 he excommunicated him, ordered every Roman Catholic prelate to proclaim him an outlaw, and absolved his subjects from their oath of allegiance. Frederick replied in a circular letter to the kings of Europe, repudiating the charge of heresy, and accusing the Pope of wishing to destroy the Empire and to reduce all kings to subservience to the papacy. The final struggle between empire and papacy was on.

The kings of Europe sympathized with Frederick, but paid small heed to his appeal for help. The nobility in Germany and Italy sided with him, hoping to restore the cities to feudal obedience. In the cities themselves the middle and lower classes were generally for the Pope; and the old German terms Waibling and Welf, in the form of Ghibelline and Guelf, were revived to signify respectively the adherents of the empire and the defenders of the papacy. Even in Rome this division held, and Frederick had many supporters there. As he approached Rome with a small army one city after another opened its gates to him as to a second Caesar. Gregory anticipated capture, and led a mournful procession of priests through the capital. The courage and frailty of the old Pope touched the hearts of the Romans, and many took up arms to protect him. Unwilling to force the issue, Frederick by-passed Rome, and wintered at Foggia.

He had persuaded the German princes to crown his son Conrad King of the Romans (1237); he had placed his son-in-law, the able but brutal Ezzelino da Romano, over Vicenza, Padua, and Treviso; and had set over the other surrendered cities his favorite son Enzio, “in face and figure our very image,” handsome, proud, and gay, brave in battle and accomplished in poetry. In the spring of 1240 the Emperor captured Ravenna and Faenza, and in 1241 he destroyed Benevento, the center of the papal forces. His fleet intercepted a Genoese convoy carrying toward Rome a group of French, Spanish, and Italian cardinals, bishops, abbots, and priests; Frederick confined them in Apulia as hostages to bargain with. He soon released the French; but his long detention of the rest, and the death of several in his prisons, shocked a Europe accustomed to consider the clergy inviolable; and many now believed that Frederick was the Antichrist predicted some years before by the mystic Joachim of Flora. Frederick offered to release the prelates if Gregory would make peace, but the old Pope remained firm even to death (1241).