The Age of Faith

At first it was the episcopacy that profited most from the weakness and quarrels of the French and German kings. In Germany the archbishops, allied with the kings, enjoyed over property, bishops, and priests a feudal power that paid only lip service to the popes. Apparently it was the resentment of the German bishops, irked by this archiépiscopal autocracy, that generated the “False Decretals”; this collection, which would later fortify the papacy, aimed first of all to establish the right of bishops to appeal from their metropolitans to the popes. We do not know the date or provenance of these Decretals; probably they were put together at Metz about 842. The author was a French cleric who called himself Isidorus Mercator. It was an ingenious compilation. Along with a mass of authentic decrees by councils or popes, it included decrees and letters that it attributed to pontiffs from Clement I (91-100) to Melchiades (311-14). These early documents were designed to show that by the oldest traditions and practice of the Church no bishop might be deposed, no Church council might be convened, and no major issue might be decided, without the consent of the pope. Even the early pontiffs, by these evidences, had claimed absolute and universal authority as vicars of Christ on earth. Pope Sylvester I (314-35) was represented as having received, in the “Donation of Constantine,” full secular as well as religious authority over all western Europe; consequently the “Donation of Pepin” was but a halting restoration of stolen property; and the repudiation of Byzantine suzerainty by the pope in crowning Charlemagne appeared as the long-delayed reassertion of a right derived from the founder of the Eastern Empire himself. Unfortunately, many of the unauthentic documents quoted Scripture in the translation of St. Jerome, who was born twenty-six years after the death of Melchiades. The forgery would have been evident to any good scholar, but scholarship was at low ebb in the ninth and tenth centuries. The fact that most of the claims ascribed by the Decretals to the early bishops of Rome had been made by one or another of the later pontiffs disarmed criticism; and for eight centuries the popes assumed the authenticity of these documents, and used them to prop their policies.*

By a happy coincidence the “False Decretals” appeared shortly before the election of one of the most commanding figures in papal history. Nicholas I (858-67) had received an exceptionally thorough education in the law and traditions of the Church, and had been apprenticed to his high office by being a favored aide of several popes. He equaled the great Gregorys (I and VII) in strength of will, and surpassed them in the extent and success of his claims. Starting from premises then accepted by all Christians—that the Son of God had founded the Church by making Peter her first head, and that the bishops of Rome inherited their power from Peter in direct line—Nicholas reasonably concluded that the pope, as God’s representative on earth, should enjoy a suzerain authority over all Christians—rulers as well as subjects—at least in matters of faith and morals. Nicholas eloquently expounded this simple argument, and no one in Latin Christendom dared contradict it. Kings and archbishops could only hope that he would not take it too seriously.

They were disappointed. When Lothaire II, King of Lorraine, wished to divorce his Queen Theutberga and marry his mistress Waldrada, the chief prelates of his kingdom granted his wish (862). Theutberga appealed to Nicholas, who sent legates to Metz to examine the matter; Lothaire bribed the legates to confirm the divorce; the archbishops of Trier and Cologne brought this decision to the Pope; Nicholas discovered the fraud, excommunicated the archbishops, and ordered Lothaire to dismiss his mistress and take back his wife. Lothaire refused, and marched with an army against Rome. Nicholas remained for forty-eight hours in St. Peter’s in fasting and prayer; Lothaire lost courage, and submitted to the Pope’s commands.

Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims, and the greatest prelate in Latin Europe after the Pope himself, dismissed a bishop, Ratherad, who appealed to Nicholas (863). Having reviewed the case, Nicholas ordered Ratherad reinstated; when Hincmar hesitated, the Pope threatened to lay an interdict—a suspension of all church services—upon his province; Hincmar fumed and yielded. To kings as well as prelates Nicholas wrote as one having supreme authority, and only Photius of Constantinople dared gainsay him. In nearly every case later developments showed the Pope to have been on the side of justice; and his stern defense of morality was a lamp and tower in a decadent age. When he died, the power of the papacy was acknowledged more widely than ever before.

IV. THE GREEK CHURCH: 566–898

The patriarchs of the Eastern Church could not admit the overriding jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome for a simple reason: they had long since been subordinated to the Greek emperors, and these would not till 871 abandon their claim to sovereignty over Rome and its popes. The patriarchs occasionally criticized, disobeyed, even denounced, the emperors; but they were appointed and deposed by the emperors, who called ecclesiastical councils, regulated church affairs by state law, and published their theological opinions and directives to the ecclesiastical world. The only checks on the religious autocracy of the emperor in Eastern Christendom were the power of the monks, the tongue of the patriarch, and the vow taken by the emperor, at his coronation by the patriarch, that he would introduce no novelty into the Church.

Constantinople—indeed all the Greek East—was now dotted with monasteries and nunneries in far greater number than in the West. The monastic passion captured some of the Byzantine emperors themselves: they lived like ascetics amid the luxury of the palace, heard Mass daily, ate abstemiously, and bemoaned their sins as sedulously as they committed them. The piety of emperors and of the moribund rich enlarged and multiplied the monasteries with gifts and legacies; men and women of high rank, frightened by omens of death, sought admission to monasteries, and brought with them an ingratiating wealth that would no longer be subject to taxation; others deeded some of their property to a monastery, which then paid them an annuity. Many monasteries claimed to possess relics of revered saints; people credited the monks with control of the wonder-working power of these relics, and offered their coins in the hope of making an unreasonable profit on their investments. A minority of the monks disgraced their faith with idleness, venery, faction, and greed; the majority were reconciled to virtue and peace; altogether the monks enjoyed a popular veneration, a material wealth, and even a political influence that no emperor could ignore. Theodore (759-826), Abbot of the monastery of Studion in Constantinople, was an exemplar of monastic piety and power. Dedicated to the Church by his mother in his childhood, he accepted the Christian mood so thoroughly that in his mother’s last illness he complimented her on her approaching death and glory. He drew up for his monks a code of labor, prayer, chastity, and intellectual development that could stand comparison with that of Benedict in the West. He defended the use of religious images, and boldly denied, before the Emperor Leo V, that the secular power had any jurisdiction over ecclesiastical affairs. Four times he was banished for this intransigeance; but from his exile he continued to resist the Iconoclasts till his death.

Differences of language, liturgy, and doctrine during these centuries drove Latin and Greek Christianity further and further apart, like a biological species divided in space and diversified in time. Greek liturgy, ecclesiastical vestments, vessels, and ornaments were more complex, ornate, and artistically wrought than those of the West; the Greek cross had equal arms; the Greeks prayed standing, the Latins kneeling; the Greeks baptized by immersion, the Latins by aspersion; marriage was forbidden to Latin, permitted to Greek, priests; Latin priests shaved, Greek priests had contemplative beards. The Latin clergy specialized in politics, the Greek in theology; heresy almost always rose in an East that had inherited the Greek passion for defining the infinite. From the old Gnostic heresies of Bardesanes in Syria, and perhaps from the westward movement of Manichean ideas, there arose in Armenia, about 660, a sect of Paulicians that took its name from St. Paul, rejected the Old Testament, the sacraments, the reverence paid to images, the symbolism of the cross. Like some advancing pullulation these groups and theories spread through the Near East into the Balkans, Italy, and France. They bore heroically the most merciless persecutions, and still survive as remnants in the Molokhani, the Khlysti, and the Dukhobors.

The monothelite controversy was more agitated by the emperors than by the people. And doubtless the people were not responsible for the filioque that so tragically advanced the schism of Greek from Latin Christianity. The Nicene Creed had spoken of “the Holy Ghost, who proceedeth from the Father”—ex patre procedit; for 250 years this sufficed; but in 589 a church council at Toledo made the statement read ex patre filioque procedit—“proceedeth from the Father and the Son”; this addition was accepted in Gaul, and zealously adopted by Charlemagne. The Greek theologians protested that the Holy Ghost proceeded not from but through the Son. The popes held the balance patiently for a time, and not until the eleventh century was the filioque officially entered into the Latin creed.

Meanwhile a struggle of wills was added to the conflict of ideas. Among the monks who had fled from Iconoclastic oppression was Ignatius, son of the Emperor Michael I. In 840 the Empress Theodora recalled the monk, and made him patriarch. He was a man of piety and courage; he denounced the prime minister Caesar Bardas, who had divorced his wife and lived with the widow of his son; and when Bardas persisted in incest Ignatius excluded him from the Church. Bardas banished Ignatius, and raised to the patriarchate the most accomplished scholar of the age (858). Photius (820?–91) was a master of philology, oratory, science, and philosophy; his lectures at the University of Constantinople had drawn to him a group of devoted students, to whom he opened his library and his home. Shortly before his promotion to the patriarchal see he had completed an encyclopedic Myriobiblion in 280 chapters, each of which reviewed and sampled an important book; through this vast compilation many passages of classic literature were preserved. His broad culture raised Photius above the fanaticism of the populace, which could not understand why he remained on such good terms with the emir of Crete. His sudden elevation from layman to patriarch offended the clergy of Constantinople; Ignatius refused to resign, and appealed to the bishop of Rome. Nicholas I sent legates to Constantinople to inquire into the case; and in letters to the Emperor Michael III and Photius he laid down the principle that no ecclesiastical matter of grave moment should be decided anywhere in Christendom without the consent of the pope. The Emperor called a church council, which ratified the appointment of Photius, and the Pope’s legates joined in the confirmation. When they returned to Rome Nicholas repudiated them as having exceeded their instructions; he ordered the Emperor to reinstate Ignatius; and when his command was ignored he excommunicated Photius (863). Bardas threatened to send an army to depose Nicholas; the Pope, in an eloquent reply, scornfully pointed to the Emperor’s submission to the marauding Slavs and Saracens.

We have not invaded Crete; we have not depopulated Sicily; we have not subdued Greece; we have not burned the churches in the very suburbs of Constantinople; yet while these pagans with impunity conquer, burn, and lay waste [your territories], we, Catholic Christians, are menaced with the vain terror of your arms. Ye release Barabbas, and kill Christ.²⁷

Photius and the Emperor called another church council, which excommunicated the Pope (867), and denounced the “heresies” of the Roman Church—among them the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son, the shaving of priestly beards, and the enforced celibacy of the clergy; “from this usage,” said Photius, “we see in the West so many children who do not know their fathers.”

While Greek messengers were bearing these pleasantries to Rome, the situation was suddenly changed (867) by the accession of Basil I, who had murdered Caesar Bardas and had superintended the assassination of Michael III. Photius denounced the new Emperor as a murderer, and refused him the sacraments. Basil called a church council, which obediently deposed, insulted, and banished Photius, and restored Ignatius. But when Ignatius soon thereafter died, Basil recalled Photius; a council reinstated him as patriarch; and (Nicholas I having died) Pope John VIII approved. The schism of East and West was for a moment postponed by the death of the protagonists.

V. THE CHRISTIAN CONQUEST OF EUROPE: 529–1054

The most momentous event in the religious history of these centuries was not the quarrel of the Greek with the Latin Church, but the rise of Islam as a challenge to Christianity in both East and West. The religion of Christ had hardly consolidated its victories over the pagan Empire and the heresies when suddenly its most fervid provinces were torn from it, and with alarming ease, by a faith that scorned both the theology and the ethics of Christianity. Patriarchs still sat, by Moslem tolerance, in the sees of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria; but the Christian glory was departed from those regions; and what Christianity remained in them was heretical and nationalist. Armenia, Syria, and Egypt had set up church hierarchies quite independent of either Constantinople or Rome. Greece was saved to Christianity; there the monks triumphed over the philosophers, and the great monastery of the Holy Lavra, established on Mt. Athos in 961, rivaled the majesty of the Parthenon, which had become a Christian church. Africa still had many Christians in the ninth century, but they were rapidly diminishing under the handicaps of Moslem rule. In 711 most of Spain was lost to Islam. Defeated in Asia and Africa, Christianity turned north, and resumed the conquest of Europe.

Italy, bravely but narrowly saved from the Saracens, was divided between the Greek and Latin forms of Christianity. Almost on the dividing line was Monte Cassino. Under the long rule (1058-87) of Abbot Desiderius the monastery reached the zenith of its fame. From Constantinople he brought not only two magnificent bronze doors, but craftsmen who adorned the interiors with mosaics, enamels, and artistry in metal, ivory, and wood. The monastery became almost a university, with courses in grammar, classical as well as Christian literature, theology, medicine, and law. Following Byzantine models, the monks executed exceptionally fine illuminated manuscripts, and copied in a beautiful book hand the classics of pagan Rome; some classics were only thus preserved. In Rome the Church, under Pope Boniface IV and his successors, instead of permitting the further disintegration of pagan temples, reconsecrated them to Christian use and care: the Pantheon was dedicated to the Virgin Mary and All Martyrs (609), the temple of Janus became the church of St. Dionysius, the temple of Saturn became the church of the Saviour. Leo IV (847-55) renewed and embellished St. Peter’s; and through the growth of the papacy and the coming of pilgrims, a polyglot suburb grew around that group of ecclesiastical buildings which took its name from the ancient Vatican Hill.

France was now the richest possession of the Latin Church. The Merovingian kings, confident of buying heaven after enjoying polygamy and murder, showered the bishoprics with lands and revenues. Here, as elsewhere, the Church received legacies from penitent magnates and devout heiresses; Chilperic’s prohibition of such bequests was soon canceled by Gunthram. By one of the many pleasantries of history, the Gallic clergy were almost wholly recruited from the Gallo-Roman population; the converted Franks knelt at the feet of those whom they had conquered, and gave back in pious donations what they had stolen in war.²⁸ The clergy were the ablest, best educated, and least immoral element in Gaul; they almost monopolized literacy; and though a small minority led scandalous lives, most of them labored faithfully to give schooling and morals to a population suffering from the greed and wars of their lords and kings. The bishops were the chief secular as well as religious authorities in their dioceses; and their tribunals were the favorite resort of litigants even in non-ecclesiastical concerns. Everywhere they took under their protection orphans and widows, paupers and slaves. In many dioceses the Church provided hospitals; one such hôtel-Dieu—“inn of God”—was opened in Paris in 651. St. Germain, Bishop of Paris in the second half of the sixth century, was known throughout Europe for his work in raising funds—and spending his own—to emancipate slaves. Bishop Sidonius of Mainz banked the Rhine; Bishop Felix of Nantes straightened the course of the Loire; Bishop Didier of Cahors constructed aqueducts. St. Agobard (779-840), Archbishop of Lyons, was a model of religion and a foe of superstition; he condemned trial by duel or ordeal, the worship of images, the magical explanation of storms, and the fallacies involved in the prosecutions for witchcraft; he was “the clearest head of his time.”²⁹ Hincmar, the aristocratic primate of Reims (845-82), presided over a score of church councils, wrote sixty-six books, served as prime minister to Charles the Bald, and almost established a theocracy in France.

In each country Christianity took on the qualities of the national temperament. In Ireland it became mystic, sentimental, individualistic, passionate; it adopted the fairies, the poetry, the wild and tender imagination of the Celt; the priests inherited the magic powers of the Druids and the myths of the bards; and the tribal organization favored a centrifugal looseness in the structure of the Church—almost every locality had an independent “bishop.” More numerous and influential than the bishops and priests were the monks who, in groups seldom numbering more than twelve, formed half-isolated and mostly autonomous monasteries throughout the island, recognizing the pope as head of the Church, but submitting to no external control. The earlier monks lived in separate cells, practicing a somber asceticism and meeting only for prayer; a later generation—the “Second Order of Irish Saints”—diverged from this Egyptian tradition, studied together, learned Greek, copied manuscripts, and established schools for clerics and laity. From the Irish schools in the sixth and seventh centuries a succession of renowned and redoubtable saints passed over into Scotland, England, Gaul, Germany, and Italy to revitalize and educate a darkened Christianity. “Almost all Ireland,” wrote a Frank about 850, “comes flocking to our shores with a troop of philosophers.”³⁰ As Germanic invasions of Gaul and Britain had driven scholars from those lands to Ireland, so now the wave returned, the debt was paid; Irish missionaries flung themselves upon the victorious pagan Angles, Saxons, Norwegians, and Danes in England, and upon the illiterate and half-barbarous Christians of Gaul and Germany, with the Bible in one hand and classic manuscripts in the other; and for a time it seemed that the Celts would win back through Christianity the lands they had lost to force. It was in the Dark Ages that the Irish spirit shone with its strongest light.

The greatest of these missionaries was St. Columba. We know him well through the biography written (c. 679) by Adamnan, one of his successors at Iona. Columba was born at Donegal in 521, of royal stock; like Buddha he was a saint who could have been a king. At school in Moville he showed such devotion that his schoolmaster named him Columbkille—Column of the Church. From the age of twenty-five he founded a number of churches and monasteries, of which the most famous were at Derry, Durrow, and Kells. But he was a fighter as well as a saint, “a man of powerful frame and mighty voice”;³¹ his hot temper drew him into many quarrels, at last into war with King Diarmuid; a battle was fought in which, we are told, 5000 men were killed; Columba, though victorious, fled from Ireland (563), resolved to convert as many souls as had fallen in that engagement at Cooldrevna. He now founded on the island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland, one of the most illustrious of medieval monasteries. Thence he and his disciples brought the Gospel to the Hebrides, Scotland, and northern England. And there, after converting thousands of pagans and illuminating 300 “noble books,” he died, in prayer at the altar, in his seventy-eighth year.

Kindred to him in spirit and name was St. Columban. Born in Leinster about 543, he does not enter history till we find him, aged thirty-two, establishing monasteries in the wilds of the Vosges Mountains of France. At Luxeuil he instructed his novices:

You must fast every day, pray every day, work every day, read every day. A monk must live under the rule of one father, and in the society of many brethren, that he may learn humility from one, patience from another, silence from a third, gentleness from a fourth…. He must go to bed so tired that he will fall asleep on the way.³²

Punishments were severe, usually by flogging: six stripes for coughing when beginning a psalm, or neglecting to manicure the nails before saying Mass, or smiling during services, or striking the teeth on the chalice at communion; twelve for omitting grace at meal; fifty for being late at prayers, one hundred for engaging in a dispute, two hundred for speaking familiarly with a woman.³³ Despite this reign of terror there was no lack of novices; Luxeuil had sixty monks, many from rich families. They lived on bread, vegetables, and water, cleared forests, plowed fields, planted and reaped, fasted and prayed. Here Columban established the laus perennis, or unending praise: all day and night, through relays of monks, litanies were to rise to Jesus, Mary, and the Saints.³⁴ A thousand monasteries like Luxeuil are a pervasive element in the medieval scene.

The stern temper that framed this rule allowed no compromise with other views; and Columban, who banned disputes, found himself in repeated quarrels with the bishops—whose authority he ignored—with secular officials—whose interferences he repelled—and even with the popes. For the Irish celebrated Easter according to a reckoning practiced by the early Church but abandoned by her in 343. In a consequent conflict with the Gallic clergy these appealed to Gregory the Great; Columban rejected the Pope’s instructions, saying, “The Irish are better astronomers than you Romans,” and bade Gregory accept the Irish mode of calculation or be “looked upon as a heretic and repudiated with scorn by the churches of the West.”³⁵ The rebellious Irishman was expelled from Gaul (609) for denouncing the wickedness of Queen Brunhild; he was put by force on a vessel bound for Ireland; the ship was driven back to France; Columban crossed the forbidden land and preached to the pagans of Bavaria. He could hardly have been as terrible a man as his rule and career picture him, for we are told that squirrels perched confidently on his shoulders and ran in and out of his cowl.³⁶ Leaving a fellow Irishman to found (613) the monastery of St. Gall on Lake Constance, he painfully crossed the St. Gotthard Pass, and established the monastery of Bobbio in Lombardy in 613. There, two years later, in the austerity of his solitary cell, he died.

Tertullian mentions Christians in Britain in 208; Bede speaks of St. Alban as dying in the persecution by Diocletian; British bishops attended the Council of Sardica (347). Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, went to Britain in 429 to suppress the Pelagian heresy.³⁷ William of Malmesbury avers that the Bishop, presumably on a later visit, routed an army of Saxons by having his British converts shout “Hallelujah!” at them.³⁸ From this vigorous condition British Christianity pined and almost died in the Anglo-Saxon invasions; we hear nothing of it again until, at the end of the sixth century, the disciples of Columba entered Northumberland, and Augustine, with seven other monks, reached England from Rome. Doubtless Pope Gregory had learned that Ethelbert, the pagan King of Kent, had married Bertha, a Christian Merovingian princess. Ethelbert listened courteously to Augustine, remained unconvinced, but gave him freedom to preach, and provided food and lodging for him and his fellow monks in Canterbury. At last (599) the Queen prevailed upon the King to accept the new faith; and many subjects followed their example. In 601 Gregory sent the pallium to Augustine, who became the first in an impressive line of distinguished archbishops of Canterbury. Gregory was lenient to the lingering paganism of England; he allowed the old temples to be christened into churches, and permitted the custom of sacrificing oxen to the gods to be gently transformed into “killing them to the refreshing of themselves to the praise of God”;³⁹ so that the English merely changed from eating beef when they praised God to praising God when they ate beef.

Another Italian missionary, Paulinus, carried Christianity to Northumberland (627). Oswald, King of Northumberland, invited the monks of Iona to come and preach to his people; and to help their work he gave them the island of Lindisfarne off the east coast. There St. Aidan (634) founded a monastery that glorified its name by missionary devotion and the splendor of its illuminated manuscripts. There and at Melrose Abbey St. Cuthbert (635?—87) left behind him loving memories of his patience, piety, good humor, and good sense. The holiness of such men, and perhaps the peace and security they enjoyed amid recurrent wars, brought many neophytes to the monasteries and nunneries that now arose in England. Despite occasional lapses into the ways of common men, the monks gave dignity to work by their labor in woods and fields; here too, as in France and Germany, they led the advance of civilization against marsh and jungle as well as against illiteracy, violence, lechery, drunkenness, and greed. Bede thought that too many Englishmen were entering monasteries; that too many monasteries were being founded by nobles to put their property beyond taxation; and that the tax-exempt lands of the Church were absorbing too much of England’s soil; too few soldiers were left, he warned, to preserve England from invasion.⁴⁰ Soon the Danes, then the Normans, would prove the worldly wisdom of the monk.

Strife found its way even into monastic peace when the Benedictine monks of southern England, following the Roman ritual and calendar, came into contact and conflict with the Irish monks and calendar and liturgy in the north. At the Synod of Whitby (664) St. Wilfrid’s eloquence decided the issue—technically, the proper day for Easter—in favor of Rome. The Irish missionaries pugnaciously resigned themselves to the decision. The British Church, unified and endowed, became an economic and political power, and took a leading role in civilizing the people and governing the state.

Christianity came to Germany as the gift of Irish and English monks. In 690 the Northumbrian monk Willibrord, who had been educated in Ireland, crossed the North Sea with twelve adventurous aides, fixed his episcopal seat at Utrecht, and labored for forty years to convert the Frisians. But these realistic lowlanders saw in Willibrord the hand of his protector Pepin the Young, and feared that their conversion would subject them to the Franks; moreover, they were not pleased to be told that all their unbaptized forebears were in hell. A Frisian king, having learned this as he stood on the brink of baptism, turned away, saying that he preferred to spend eternity with his ancestors.⁴¹

A stronger man than Willibrord renewed the campaign in 716. Winfrid (680?-7 54), an English noble and Benedictine monk, won the name of Boniface from Pope Gregory II, and the title of “Apostle of Germany” from a pious posterity. Near Fritzlar in Hesse he found an oak tree worshiped by the people as the home of a god; he felled it; and the populace, amazed at his survival, flocked to be baptized. Great monasteries were set up at Reichenau (724), Fulda (744), and Lorsch (763). In 748 Boniface was made Archbishop of Mainz; he appointed bishops, and organized the German Church into a powerful engine of moral, economic, and political order. Having accomplished his mission in Hesse and Thuringia, and seeking to crown his career with a martyr’s death, Boniface gave up his proud episcopate, and entered Frisia resolved to complete the work of Willibrord. He had labored there a year when he was attacked by the pagans and slain. A generation later Charlemagne brought Christianity to the Saxons with fire and sword; the obstinate Frisians thought it time to yield; and the conquest of Rome’s conquerors by Roman Christianity was complete.

The final triumph of the faith in Europe was the conversion of the Slavs. In 861 Prince Rostislav of Moravia, noting the entrance into his realm of a Latin Christianity that ignored the vernacular in its liturgy, applied to Byzantium for missionaries who would preach and pray in the vulgar tongue. The emperor sent him two brothers, Methodius and Cyril, who, having been reared in Salonika, spoke Slavonic with ease. They were welcomed, but found that the Slavs had as yet no alphabet to fully express their language in writing; the few Slavs who wrote used Greek and Latin characters to represent their speech. Cyril thereupon invented the Slavonic alphabet and script by adopting the Greek alphabet with the values that Greek usage had given it by the ninth century—B sounded as V, H as I (English E), Chi as the Scotch ch; and he devised original letters for Slavonic sounds not expressible by Greek characters. With this alphabet Cyril translated into Slavonic the Septuagint Greek version of the Old Testament, and the Greek liturgical texts, thereby inaugurating a new written language and a new literature.

A struggle now ensued between Greek and Latin Christianity to see which should capture the Slavs. Pope Nicholas I invited Cyril and Methodius to Rome, where Cyril took monastic vows, fell ill, and died (869); Methodius returned to Moravia as an archbishop consecrated by the Pope. Pope John VIII allowed the use of the Slavonic liturgy, Stephen V forbade it. Moravia, Bohemia, and Slovakia (these constituting the Czechoslovakia of today), and later Hungary and Poland, were won to the Latin Church and rite; while Bulgaria, Serbia, and Russia accepted the Slavonic liturgy and alphabet, gave their allegiance to the Greek Church, and took their culture from Byzantium.

Political calculations influenced these religious transformations. The conversion of the Germans aimed to incorporate them firmly into the realm of the Franks. King Harald Bluetooth imposed Christianity upon Denmark (974) as part of the price that the Emperor Otto II demanded for peace; Boris of Bulgaria, after flirting with the papacy, went over to the Greek Church (864) to win protection against an expanding Germany; and Vladimir I made Russia Christian (988) to win the hand of Anna, sister of the Greek Emperor Basil II, and to obtain part of the Crimea as her dowry.⁴²For two centuries the Russian Church acknowledged the patriarch of Constantinople; in the thirteenth century it declared its independence; and after the fall of the Eastern Empire (1453) the Russian Church became the dominant factor in the Greek Orthodox world.

The victorious soldiers in this Christian conquest of Europe were the monks, and the nurses in this war were the nuns. The monks helped the peasant pioneers to bring the wilderness under cultivation, to clear the forest and the brush, to drain the swamps and bridge the creeks and cut the roads; they organized industrial centers, schools, and charity; copied manuscripts and collected modest libraries; gave moral order, courage, and comfort to bewildered men uprooted from their traditional customs, cults, or homes. Benedict of Aniane labored, dug, and reaped amid his monks; and the monk Theodulf, near Reims, drove the plow so faithfully for twenty-two years that after his death it was kept as an object of veneration.

Periodically, after superhuman exaltations of virtue, devotion, and energy, monks and nuns relapsed into human nature, and in almost every century a campaign of monastic reform was needed to lift the monks again to the unnatural heights of their rule. Some monks enlisted in passing moods of piety and self-surrender, and were maladapted to the discipline after their ecstasy waned. Some were oblates, who had been brought to the monasteries and vowed to the monastic life by their parents when they were children of seven or more years of age, sometimes when they were infants in the cradle; and these vicarious vows were held irrevocable until, in 1179, papal decrees allowed their annulment at the age of fourteen.⁴³ In 817 Louis the Pious, shocked by the lax discipline of French monasteries, called a national assembly of abbots and monks at Aachen, and commissioned Benedict of Aniane to re-establish the Rule of St. Benedict of Nursia in all the monasteries of the realm. The new Benedict labored sedulously; but he died in 821, the wars of the kings soon disordered the Frank Empire, and Norman, Magyar, and Saracen raids despoiled hundreds of monasteries. Monks wandered homeless into the secular world; and those who returned after the wave of devastation had receded brought with them worldly ways. Feudal lords seized monasteries, appointed their abbots, appropriated their revenues. By 900 the monasteries of the West, like almost every institution in Latin Europe, had sunk to the lowest point in their medieval history. Some clergy, secular and regular, said St. Odo of Cluny (d. 942), “do so set to naught the Virgin’s Son that they commit fornication in His very courts, nay in those very inns which the devotion of the faithful hath built in order that chastity may be kept safely within their fenced precincts; they so overflow with lust that Mary hath no room wherein to lay the child Jesus.”⁴⁴ It was from Cluny that the great reform of the monasteries came.

About 910 twelve monks had established a monastery there in the hills of Burgundy, almost on the German-French frontier. In 927 Abbot Odo revised its rule towards a moral rigor combined with physical lenience: asceticism was rejected, baths were recommended, diet was generous, beer and wine were allowed; but the old vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity were to be unremittingly enforced. Similar institutions were opened elsewhere in France; but whereas each monastery had heretofore been a lawless law unto itself, or had been loosely subject to local bishop or lord, the new Benedictine monasteries allied with Cluny were ruled by priors subject both to the abbots of Cluny and to the popes. Under Cluny’s abbots Mayeul (954-94), Odilo (994-1049), and Hugh (1049-1109) the movement for monastic affiliation spread from France to England, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Italy, and Spain; many old monasteries joined the “Cluniac Congregation”; by 1100 some 2000 “priories” acknowledged Cluny as their mother and ruler. The power so organized, free from state interference and episcopal supervision, gave the papacy a new weapon with which to control the secular hierarchy of the Church. At the same time it made possible a courageous reform of monasticism by the monks themselves. Disorder, idleness, luxury, immorality, simony were brought under firm rule; and Italy beheld the strange sight of a French monk, Odo, invited to Italy to reform Monte Cassino itself.⁴⁵

VI. THE NADIR OF THE PAPACY: 867–1049

Reform reached Rome last of all. The populace of the city had always been unmanageable, even when the Imperial eagle had wielded legions in its claws; now the pontiffs, armed only with a weak militia, the majesty of their office, and the terror of their creed, found themselves the prisoners of a jealous aristocracy, and of a citizenry whose piety suffered from nearness to Peter’s throne. The Romans were too proud to be impressed by kings, and too familiar to be awed by popes; they saw in the Vicars of Christ men subject like themselves to sickness, error, sin, and defeat; and they came to view the papacy not as a fortress of order and a tower of salvation, but as a collection agency whereby the pence of Europe might provide the dole of Rome. By the tradition of the Church no pope could be elected without the consent of the Roman clergy, nobles, and populace. The rulers of Spoleto, Benevento, Naples, and Tuscany, and the aristocracy of Rome divided into factions as of old; and whichever faction prevailed in the city intrigued to choose and sway the pope. Between them they dragged the papacy, in the tenth century, to the lowest level in its history.

In 878 Duke Lambert of Spoleto entered Rome with his army, seized Pope John VIII, and tried to starve him into favoring Carloman for the Imperial throne. In 897 Pope Stephen VI had the corpse of Pope Formosus (891-6) exhumed, dressed it in purple robes, and tried before an ecclesiastic council on the charge of violating certain Church laws; the corpse was condemned, stripped, mutilated, and plunged into the Tiber.⁴⁶ In the same year a political revolution in Rome overthrew Stephen, who was strangled in jail.⁴⁷ For several years thereafter the papal chair was filled by bribery, murder, or the favor of women of high rank and low morality. For half a century the family of Theophylact, a chief official of the papal palace, made and unmade popes at will. His daughter Marozia secured the election of her lover as Pope Sergius III (904-11);⁴⁸ his wife Theodora procured the election of Pope John X (914-28). John has been accused of being Theodora’s paramour, but on inadequate evidence;⁴⁹ certainly he was an excellent secular leader, for it was he who organized the coalition that in 916 repulsed the Saracens from Rome. Marozia, after having enjoyed a succession of lovers, married Guido, Duke of Tuscany; they conspired to unseat John; they had his brother Peter killed before his face; the Pope was thrown into prison, and died there a few months later from causes unknown. In 931 Marozia raised to the papacy John XI (931-5), commonly reputed to be her bastard son by Sergius III.⁵⁰ In 932 her son Alberic imprisoned John in the Castle of Sant’ Angelo, but allowed him to exercise from jail the spiritual functions of the papacy. For twenty-two years Alberic ruled Rome as the dictatorial head of a “Roman Republic.” At his death he bequeathed his power to his son Octavian, and made the clergy and people promise to choose Octavian pope when Agapetus II should die. It was done as he ordered; in 955 Marozia’s grandson became John XII, and distinguished his pontificate by orgies of debauchery in the Lateran palace.⁵¹

Otto I of Germany, crowned Emperor by John XII in 962, learned the degradation of the papacy at first hand. In 963, with the support of the Transalpine clergy, Otto returned to Rome, and summoned John to trial before an ecclesiastical council. Cardinals charged that John had taken bribes for consecrating bishops, had made a boy of ten a bishop, had committed adultery with his father’s concubine and incest with his father’s widow and her niece, and had made the papal palace a very brothel. John refused to attend the council or to answer the charges; instead he went out hunting. The council deposed him and unanimously chose Otto’s candidate, a layman, as Pope Leo VIII (963-5). After Otto had returned to Germany John seized and mutilated the leaders of the Imperial party in Rome, and had himself restored by an obedient council to the papacy (964),⁵² When John died (964) the Romans elected Benedict V, ignoring Leo. Otto came down from Germany, deposed Benedict, and restored Leo, who thereupon officially recognized the right of Otto and his Imperial successors to veto the election of any future pope.* On Leo’s death Otto secured the election of John XIII (965-72). Benedict VI (973-4) was imprisoned and strangled by a Roman noble, Bonifazio Francone, who made himself pope for a month, then fled to Constantinople with as much papal treasury as he could carry. Nine years later he returned, killed Pope John XIV (983-4), again appropriated the papal office, and died peaceably in bed (985). The Roman Republic again raised its head, assumed authority, and chose Crescentius as consul. Otto III descended upon Rome with an irresistible army, and a commission from the German prelates to end the chaos by making his chaplain Pope Gregory V (996-9). The young Emperor put down the Republic, pardoned Crescentius, and went back to Germany. Crescentius at once re-established the Republic, and deposed Gregory (997). Gregory excommunicated him, but Crescentius laughed, and arranged the election of John XVI as pope. Otto returned, deposed John, gouged out his eyes, cut off his tongue and nose, and paraded him through the streets of Rome on an ass, with his face to the tail. Crescentius and twelve Republican leaders were beheaded, and their bodies were hung from the battlements of Sant’ Angelo (998).⁵³ Gregory resumed the papacy, and died, probably of poison, in 999. Otto replaced him with one of the most brilliant of all the popes.

Gerbert was born of lowly parentage near Aurillac in Auvergne (c. 940), and at an early age entered a monastery there. At the abbot’s suggestion, he went to Spain to study mathematics; and in 970 Count Borel of Barcelona took him to Rome. Pope John XIII was impressed by the monk’s learning, and recommended him to Otto I. For a year Gerbert taught in Italy, and at that time or later had Otto II among his pupils. Then he went to Reims to study logic in the cathedral school; and presently we find him head of the school (972-82). He taught an unusual variety of subjects, including the classic poets; he wrote an excellent Latin, and letters sometimes rivaling those of Sidonius. Wherever he went he collected books, and spent his funds recklessly to have copies made of manuscripts in other libraries; perhaps we owe to him the preservation of Cicero’s orations.⁵⁴ He led the Christian world in mathematics, introduced an early form of the “Arabic” numerals, wrote on the abacus and the astrolabe, and composed a treatise on geometry; he invented a mechanical clock, and an organ operated by steam.⁵⁵ So many were his scientific accomplishments that after his death he was reputed to have possessed magical powers.⁵⁶

When Adalbero died (988), Gerbert sought to succeed him as archbishop of Reims; but Hugh Capet appointed instead Arnulf, a bastard son of the dying Carolingian house. Arnulf plotted against Hugh, an ecclesiastical council deposed him despite papal protests, and chose Gerbert archbishop (991). Four years later a papal legate persuaded a synod at Moisson to unseat Gerbert. The humiliated scholar went to the court of Otto III in Germany, received every honor there, and molded the mind of the young king to the idea of restoring a Roman Empire with its capital at Rome. Otto made him archbishop of Ravenna, and, in 999, pope. Gerbert took the name of Sylvester II, as if to say that he would be a second Sylvester to a second world-unifying Constantine. Had he and Otto lived another decade they might have realized their dream, for Otto was the son of a Byzantine princess, and Gerbert might have become a philosopher-king. But in the fourth year of his papacy Gerbert died, poisoned, said Roman rumor, by the same Stephania who had poisoned Otto.

Their aspirations, and the busy politics of the world around them, show how few were the Christians who took seriously the notion that the world would end in the year 1000. At the beginning of the tenth century a Church council had announced that the final century of history had begun;⁵⁷ at its close a small minority of men so believed, and prepared themselves for the Last Judgment. The great majority went on their wonted ways, working, playing, sinning, praying, and trying to outlive senility. There is no evidence of any panic of fear in the year 1000, nor even of any rise in gifts to the Church.⁵⁸

After the death of Gerbert the decay of the papacy was resumed. The counts of Tusculum, in league with the German emperors, bought bishops and sold the papacy with hardly an effort at concealment. Their nominee Benedict VIII (1012-24) was a man of vigor and intelligence; but Benedict IX (1032-45), made pope at the age of twelve, led so shameful and riotous a life⁵⁹ that the people rose and drove him out of Rome. Through Tusculan aid he was restored; but tiring of the papacy he sold it to Gregory VI (1045-6) for one (or two) thousand pounds of gold.⁶⁰ Gregory astonished Rome by being almost a model pope; apparently he had bought the papacy in a sincere desire to reform it and liberate it from its overlords. The Tusculan house could not favor such a reform; it made Benedict IX pope again, while a third faction set up Sylvester III. The Italian clergy appealed to the Emperor Henry III to end this disgrace; he came to Sutri, near Rome, and convened an ecclesiastical council; it imprisoned Sylvester, accepted Benedict’s resignation, and deposed Gregory for admittedly buying the papacy. Henry persuaded the council that only a foreign pope, protected by the emperor, could terminate the debasement of the Church. The Bishop of Bamberg was elected as Clement II (1046-7); he died a year later; and Damasus II (1047-8) also succumbed to the malaria that now regularly came out of the undrained Campagna. At last in Leo IX (1049-54) the papacy found a man who could face its problems with courage, learning, integrity, and a piety long rare in Rome.

VII. THE REFORM OF THE CHURCH: 1049–54

Three internal problems agitated the Church at this time: simony in the papacy and the episcopacy, marriage or concubinage in the secular clergy, and sporadic incontinence among the monks.

Simony—the sale of church offices or services—was the ecclesiastical correlate of contemporary corruption in politics. Good people were one source of simony; so the mother of Guibert of Nogent, anxious to devote him to the Church, paid ecclesiastical authorities to make him a cathedral canon at eleven; a church council at Rome in 1099 mourned the frequency of such cases. As bishops in England, Germany, France, and Italy administered profane as well as ecclesiastical affairs, and were feudally endowed with lands or villages or even cities to supply their necessary revenues, ambitious men paid secular powers great sums for such appointments, and greedy potentates overrode all decencies to earn these bribes. In Narbonne a boy of ten was made archbishop on paying 100,000 solidi (1016).⁶¹ Philip I of France consoled an unsuccessful applicant for an episcopal see with blithe counsel: “Let me make my profit out of your rival; then you can try to get him degraded for simony; and afterward we can see about satisfying you.”⁶² The French kings, following a tradition established by Charlemagne, regularly appointed the bishops of Sens, Reims, Lyons, Tours, and Bourges; elsewhere in France the bishops were appointed by dukes or counts.⁶³ Many bishoprics became in the eleventh century the hereditary patrimony of noble families, and were used as provision for bastards or younger sons; in Germany one baron possessed and transmitted eight bishoprics.⁶⁴ A German cardinal alleged (c. 1048) that the simoniacal buyers of sees and benefices had sold the marble facings of churches, even the tiles from their roofs, to reimburse themselves for the cost of their appointments.⁶⁵ Such appointees were men of the world; many lived in luxury, engaged in war, allowed bribery in episcopal courts,⁶⁶ named relatives to ecclesiastical posts, and worshiped Mammon with undivided loyalty; Pope Innocent III would say of an archbishop of Narbonne that he had a purse where his heart should have been.⁶⁷ The purchase of sees became so usual that practical men accepted it as normal; but reformers cried out that Simon Magus had captured the Church.⁶⁸

Among the general clergy the moral problem hovered between marriage and concubinage. In the ninth and tenth centuries the marriage of priests was customary in England, Gaul, and north Italy. Pope Hadrian II (867-72) himself had been a married man;⁶⁹ and Bishop Ratherius of Verona (tenth century) reported that practically all priests in his diocese were married. By the beginning of the eleventh century celibacy in the secular clergy was exceptional.⁷⁰ It would be a mistake to consider clerical marriage immoral; though often contrary to the canons and ideals of the Church, it was quite in accord with the customs and moral judgments of the times. At Milan a married priest stood higher in public repute than one unmarried;⁷¹ the latter was suspected of concubinage. Even concubinage—the regular cohabitation of an unmarried man with an unmarried woman—was condoned by public opinion. The great majority of the European clergy led apparently decent moral lives; and all through the Middle Ages we hear of priests and bishops living in saintly devotion to their flocks. Here and there, however, there were scandalous exceptions. In 742 Bishop Boniface complained to Pope Zachary that bishoprics were being given to “greedy laymen and adulterous clerics,”⁷² and that some deacons “kept four or five concubines”;⁷³ and the Venerable Bede, in the same century, condemned “some bishops” of England for “laughter, jesting, tales, revelings, drunkenness, and … dissolute living.”⁷⁴ Towards the end of the first millennium such charges became more numerous. Ralph Glaber described the clergy of that period as sharing in the general immorality of the age. An Italian monk, Peter Damian (1007-72), presented to the Pope a book ominously entitled Liber Gomorrhianus, in which he described, with the exaggerations to be expected from his sanctity, the vices of the clergy; one chapter was “On the Diversity of Sins Against Nature.” Damian strongly urged the prohibition of clerical marriage.

The Church had long since opposed clerical marriage on the ground that a married priest, consciously or not, would put his loyalty to wife and children above his devotion to the Church; that for their sake he would be tempted to accumulate money or property; that he would try to transmit his see or benefice to one of his offspring; that an hereditary ecclesiastical caste might in this way develop in Europe as in India; and that the combined economic power of such a propertied priesthood would be too great for the papacy to control. The priest should be totally devoted to God, the Church, and his fellow men; his moral standard must be higher than that of the people, and must confer upon him the prestige necessary to public confidence and reverence. Several councils had demanded celibacy of the clergy; one—at Pavia in 1018—had decreed a status of perpetual slavery, and disbarment from inheritance, for all children of priests.⁷⁵ But clerical marriage continued.

Leo IX found the see of Peter impoverished by clerical bequests of Church benefices to clerical offspring, by baronial seizures of Church estates, and by the highway robbery of pilgrims bringing prayers, petitions, and offerings to Rome. He organized protection for the pilgrims, recaptured alienated ecclesiastical property, and set himself to the heavy task of ending simony and clerical marriage. Turning over the domestic and administrative cares of the papacy to the shrewd and devoted monk who was to become Gregory VII, Leo left Rome in 1049, resolved to examine at first hand the morals of the clergy, and the functioning of the Church, in the major cities of Europe. The dignity of his bearing, the unaffected austerity of his life, at once revived the respect that men had held for the highest official of the Church; vice hid its head as he approached; and Godfrey of Lorraine, who had plundered churches and defied kings, trembled under papal excommunication, submitted to be publicly scourged before the altar of the church that he had ruined in Verdun, undertook to repair the church, and labored in the work with his own hands. At Cologne Leo held papal court, and received every honor from a German clergy proud of a German pope. Passing into France, he presided over a tribunal at Reims, and conducted an inquiry into lay and clerical morals, the sale of ecclesiastical offices, the spoliation of church property, the relaxation of monastic rules, and the rise of heresy. Every bishop present was ordered to confess his sins. One after another, including archbishops, accused himself. Leo sternly reproved them, deposed some, forgave some, excommunicated four, summoned others to Rome and public penance. He commanded the clergy to dismiss their wives and concubines, and to forgo the use of arms. The Council of Reims further decreed that bishops and abbots were to be elected by the clergy and the people, prohibited the sale of ecclesiastical offices, and forbade the clergy to receive fees for administering the eucharist, attending the sick, or burying the dead. A council in Mainz (1049), under Leo’s urging, enacted similar reforms for Germany. In 1050 he returned to Italy, presided at the Council of Vercelli, and condemned the heresy of Berengar of Tours.

With his long and arduous visitation of the North Leo had restored the prestige of the papacy, replaced the German emperor as the head of the German Church, brought the French and Spanish episcopates to acknowledge the authority of the pope, and made some progress toward cleansing the clergy of venality and venery. In 1051 and 1052 he made further campaigns in Germany and France; presided over a great ecclesiastical assembly at Worms, and another at Mantua. Returning at last to Rome, he took on the uncongenial task of defending the Papal States by military means. The Emperor Henry III had given him the duchy of Benevento; Duke Pandulf of Capua refused to recognize the grant, and, with the help of Robert Guiscard’s Normans, took and held the duchy. Leo asked for a German army to help him oust Pandulf; he received only 700 men; to these he added some untrained Italians; and at their head he marched against the Normans, whose cavalry alone numbered 3000 buccaneers skilled in war. The Normans overwhelmed Leo’s forces, captured him, and then knelt to ask his pardon for having killed 500 of his men. They took him to Benevento, and there, with all courtesy, kept him prisoner for nine months. Heartbroken, and penitent for having taken the sword, Leo wore nothing but sackcloth, slept on a carpet and a stone, and passed nearly all the day in prayer. The Normans saw that he was dying, and released him. He entered Rome amid universal rejoicing, absolved all whom he had excommunicated, ordered a coffin placed in St. Peter’s, sat beside it for a day, and died at the altar. The lame, the dumb, and the lepers came from all parts of Italy to touch his corpse.

VIII. THE GREAT EASTERN SCHISM: 1054

It was in St. Leo’s pontificate that Greek and Latin Christianity were finally divorced. While Western Europe was shrouded in the darkness, misery, and ignorance of the ninth and tenth centuries, the Eastern Empire, under the Macedonian emperors (867-1057), recovered some of the territory it had lost to the Arabs, reasserted its leadership in south Italy, and experienced a new flowering of literature and art. The Greek Church drew strength and pride from the revived wealth and power of the Byzantine state, won Russia, Bulgaria, and Serbia to the Eastern observance, and resented more sharply than ever the claims of a debased and impoverished papacy to the ecclesiastical monarchy of the Christian world. To the Greeks of this age the Germans, Franks, and Anglo-Saxons of the contemporary West seemed crude barbarians, an illiterate and violent laity led by a worldly and corrupt episcopate. The papal rejection of the Byzantine emperor for the king of the Franks, the papal appropriation of the exarchate of Ravenna, the papal coronation of a rival Roman emperor, the papal drive into Greek Italy—these galling political events, and not the slight diversities of creed, severed Christendom into East and West.

In 1043 Michael Cerularius was appointed Patriarch of Constantinople. He was a man of noble birth, wide culture, keen intellect, and resolute will. Though a monk, he had risen through a political rather than an ecclesiastical career; he had been a high minister of the Empire, and would hardly have accepted the patriarchate if it had involved submission to Rome. In 1053 he circulated a Latin treatise by a Greek monk, which strongly criticized the Roman Church for enforcing clerical celibacy contrary to apostolic example and ecclesiastical tradition, for using unleavened bread in the Eucharist, and for adding filioque to the Nicene Creed. In that same year Cerularius closed all those churches in Constantinople that observed the Latin ritual, and excommunicated all clergy who should persist in its use. Leo, then at the height of his pontificate, despatched a letter to Cerularius demanding that the Patriarch should recognize the supremacy of the popes, and branding any church that refused such recognition as “an assembly of heretics, a conventicle of schismatics, a synagogue of Satan.”⁷⁶ In a milder mood Leo sent legates to Constantinople to discuss with the emperor and the Patriarch the differences that kept the two branches of Christianity apart. The emperor received the legates cordially, but Cerularius denied their competence to deal with the issues. Leo died in April, 1054, and the papacy remained vacant for a year. In July the legates, taking matters into their own hands, deposited on the altar of St. Sophia a bull excommunicating Cerularius. Michael convened a council representing all Eastern Christianity; it recapitulated the grievances of the Greek against the Roman Church, including the shaving of the beard; it formally condemned the bull of the legates, and “all who had helped in drawing it up, whether by their advice or even by their prayers.”⁷⁷ The schism was now complete.

IX. GREGORY VII HILDEBRAND: 1073–85

It was a great misfortune for Christianity that an interval of chaos and weakness separated the pontificate of Leo IX from that of one of the strongest popes in the history of the Church.

Hildebrand is a German name, and suggests a German lineage; Gregory’s contemporaries interpreted it to mean Hellbrand, pure flame. He was born of lowly parentage in the hamlet of Sovano in the marshes of Tuscany (1023?). He was educated in the convent of St. Mary on the Aventine at Rome, and entered the Benedictine order. When Pope Gregory VI was deposed and banished to Germany in 1046 Hildebrand accompanied him as chaplain; during that year in Cologne he learned much about Germany that helped him in his later struggle with Henry IV. Soon after his return to Rome he was made a cardinal subdeacon by Leo IX, and was appointed administrator of the Papal States and at the same time legate to France; we may judge from this remarkable elevation of a youth of twenty-five the reputation that he had so soon acquired for political and diplomatic ability. Popes Victor II (1055-7) and Stephen IX (1057-8) continued to employ him in high capacities. In 1059 Nicholas II became Pope largely through Hildebrand’s influence; and the indispensable monk, not yet a priest, was made papal chancellor.

It was at his urging that Nicholas and the Lateran Council of 1057 issued an edict transferring the election of the pope to the College of Cardinals; by that one stroke Hildebrand proposed to rescue the papacy from Roman nobles and German emperors. Already the young ecclesiastical statesman had formulated a far-reaching policy. To secure the papacy from German domination he closed his eyes to the swashbuckling raids of the Normans in southern Italy, recognized their expropriations, and approved their ambitions, in return for a pledge of military protection. In 1073, after serving eight popes for twenty-five years, Hildebrand himself was raised to the papacy. He resisted, preferring to rule behind the throne; but cardinals, clergy, and people cried out, “St. Peter wills Hildebrand to be Pope!” He was ordained priest, was consecrated Pope, and took the honored name of Gregory.

He was small of stature, homely of feature, keen of eye, proud of spirit, strong of will, sure of the truth, and confident of victory. Four purposes inspired him: to complete Leo’s reform of clerical morals, to end lay investiture, to unify all Europe in one church and one republic headed by the papacy, and to lead a Christian army to the East to reclaim the Holy Land from the Turks. Early in 1074 he wrote to the counts of Burgundy and Savoy, and to the Emperor Henry IV, begging them to raise funds and troops for a crusade which he proposed to lead in person. The counts were not moved, and Henry was too insecure on his throne to think of a crusade.

The Lateran Council of 1059, under Nicholas II and Hildebrand, had excommunicated any priest who kept a wife or a concubine, and had forbidden Christians to attend the Mass of a priest known to keep a woman in his house. Reluctant to break up the families of their clergy, many bishops in Lombardy refused to promulgate these decrees, and prominent clerics in Tuscany defended clerical marriage as both moral and canonical. The legislation could not be enforced, and the idea that clergymen living in “sin” could not administer valid sacraments was so enthusiastically taken up by heretical preachers that the papal appeal to the congregations was withdrawn.⁷⁸ When Hildebrand became Gregory VII (1073) he attacked the problem with uncompromising determination. A synod in 1074 renewed the decrees of 1059; Gregory sent these to all the bishops of Europe with a stern command to promulgate and enforce them; and absolved the laity from obedience to priests who disregarded them. The reaction was again violent. Many priests declared that they would abandon their calling rather than their wives; others deprecated the decrees as making unreasonable demands on human nature, and predicted that their enforcement would promote secret promiscuity. Bishop Otto of Constance openly favored and protected his married clergy. Gregory excommunicated him, and absolved his flock from obedience to him. In 1075 Gregory took the further step of commanding the dukes of Swabia and Carinthia, and other princes, to use force, if necessary, in keeping recalcitrant clergy from performing priestly functions. Several German princes obeyed him; and many priests unwilling to dismiss their wives were deprived of their parishes.⁷⁹ Gregory was to die without victory; but Urban II, Paschal II, and Calixtus II reaffirmed and executed his decrees. The Council of the Lateran in 1215 under Innocent III issued a final condemnation, and clerical marriage slowly disappeared.

The problem of investiture seemed simpler than that of clerical marriage. Assuming, as kings and popes agreed, that Christ had established the Church, it seemed clear that her bishops and abbots should be chosen by churchmen rather than by laymen; and surely it was scandalous that a king should not only appoint bishops, but (as in Germany) invest them with the episcopal staff and ring—sacred symbols of spiritual power. But to the kings an opposite conclusion was equally evident. Admitting, as most German bishops and abbots would have done, that they had been invested by the king with lands, revenues, and secular responsibilities, it seemed meet and just, by feudal law, that these prelates—at least the bishops—should owe their appointment and temporal allegiance to the king, as they had done without demurrer under Constantine and Charlemagne. If they were released from such subordination and loyalty half the land of Germany—which had by this time been granted to bishoprics and monasteries⁸⁰—would escape control by the state, and their due and wonted service to it. The German bishops, and many Lombard bishops of German origin and appointment, suspected that Gregory was seeking to end their relative ecclesiastical autonomy, and subordinate them completely to the Roman see. Gregory was willing that the bishops should continue their feudal obligations to the king,⁸¹ but unwilling that they should surrender the lands they had received by royal grant;⁸² by the law of the Church the property of the Church was inalienable. Gregory complained that lay appointment had begotten most of the simony, worldliness, and immorality that had appeared in the German and French episcopates. He felt that the bishops must be brought under the papal authority, or else the Western, like the Eastern, Church would become a subservient appendage to the state.

Behind this historic conflict lay the question of papacy versus empire: which should unify and govern Europe? The German emperors claimed that their power was also divine, as being a necessity of social order; had not St. Paul said that “the powers that be are ordained by God”? Were they not, according to the popes themselves, the heirs of the Empire of Rome? They stood for the freedom of the part as Gregory stood for the unity and order of the whole. Privately they resented—so long before the Reformation—the flow of gold in fees and Peter’s pence from Germany to Italy;⁸³ and they saw in the papal policy an effort of Latin Rome to renew its ancient control over what Italy scorned as the barbarian Teutonic North. They freely admitted the supremacy of the Church in spiritual matters, but asserted a like supremacy for the state in temporal or earthly affairs. To Gregory this seemed a disorderly dualism; spiritual considerations, he felt, should dominate material concerns, as the sun dominates the moon;⁸⁴ the state should be subordinate to the Church—the City of Man to the City of God—in all matters involving doctrine, education, morals, justice, or ecclesiastical organization. Had not the kings of France and the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire implicitly admitted that the spiritual was the source and sovereign of the temporal power by accepting archiepiscopal or papal anointment or consecration? The Church, as a divine institution, merited, universal authority; the pope, as the vicegerent of God, had the right and duty to depose bad kings, and to confirm or reject the choice made of rulers by men or circumstance.⁸⁵ “Who,” asked Gregory, in a passionate epistle to Bishop Hermann of Metz, “is ignorant that kings and princes had their origin in those who, ignorant of God, and covering themselves with pride, violence, and perfidy, in fact nearly every crime … claimed to rule over their peers—i.e., men—in blind lust and intolerable arrogance?”⁸⁶ Looking upon the political division, chaos, and wars of Europe, it seemed to Gregory that the only escape from that age-old misery was a world order in which these states should surrender something of their jealous sovereignty, and acknowledge the pope as their feudal suzerain, the majestic head of a universal, or at least a European, Christian Republic.

The first step toward this end was the liberation of the papacy from German control. The second was to bring all bishops under the authority of the papal see, at least to this degree, that the bishop should be chosen by the clergy and people of the diocese under the auspices of a bishop nominated by the pope or the metropolitan, and that the election should be valid only when confirmed by the archbishop or the pope.⁸⁷ Gregory began with a letter (1073) to the bishop of Châlons, in which he threatened to excommunicate King Philip Augustus of France for selling bishoprics. In 1074 he sent a general letter to the French episcopate calling upon them to denounce the crimes of the King to his face, and to discontinue all religious services in France should Philip refuse to reform.⁸⁸ Lay investiture continued there nevertheless, but the French bishops proceeded with caution, and left the issue to be fought out in Germany.

In February, 1075, a synod of Italian bishops at Rome, under the lead of Gregory, issued decrees against simony, clerical marriage, and lay investiture. With strange precipitance, Gregory at once excommunicated for simony five bishops who were councilors of Henry IV; he suspended the bishops of Pavia and Turin, deposed the bishop of Piacenza, and ordered Bishop Hermann of Bamberg to come to Rome to clear himself from charges of simony. When Hermann tried to bribe the papal tribunal Gregory unceremoniously deposed him. He politely asked Henry to nominate a fit successor for the Bamberg see; Henry not only nominated a court favorite, but invested him with episcopal ring and staff without waiting for papal approval—a procedure accordant with custom, but openly defiant of the Roman synod’s decree. As if to make still clearer his rejection of Gregory’s demands, Henry appointed bishops to the sees of Milan, Fermo, and Spoleto—almost under the nose of the Pope—and kept in his favor the excommunicated councilors.

In December, 1075, Gregory sent Henry a letter of remonstrance, and commissioned the bearers to add an oral message threatening to excommunicate the King should he continue to ignore the Roman synod’s decrees. Henry summoned a council of German bishops to Worms (January 24, 1076); twenty-four came, some stayed away. Before this assembly Hugh, a Roman cardinal, accused Gregory of licentiousness, cruelty, and witchcraft, and of obtaining the papacy by bribery and violence; and he reminded the bishops that the custom of centuries required, for the election of any pope, the consent of the German emperor—which Gregory had not asked. The Emperor, emboldened by his recent suppression of a Saxon revolt, proposed the deposition of the Pope; all bishops present signed the decree; a council of Lombard bishops at Piacenza approved it; and Henry sent it to Gregory with a choice superscription: “Henry, King not by usurpation but by God’s ordinance, to Hildebrand, not Pope but false monk.”⁸⁹ The message was delivered to Gregory at a synod in Rome (February 21, 1076); the 110 bishops there present, all from Italy and Gaul, wished to kill the messenger, but Gregory protected him. The synod excommunicated the bishops who had signed the Worms decree; and the Pope launched upon the Emperor a triple sentence of excommunication, anathema, and deposition, and released Henry’s subjects from their oaths of obedience (February 22, 1076). Henry countered by persuading the bishop of Utrecht to anathematize Gregory—“the perjured monk”—from the pulpit of the cathedral. All Europe was shocked by the papal deposition of an emperor, and still more by the imperial deposition, and episcopal cursing, of a pope. The religious sentiment proved stronger than the national, and public support rapidly deserted the Emperor. Saxony resumed its revolt; and when Henry summoned the bishops and nobles of his realm to councils at Worms and Mainz his call was almost universally ignored. On the contrary the German aristocracy, seeing in the situation a chance to strengthen their feudal power against the King, met at Tribur (October 16, 1076), approved the excommunication of the Emperor, and declared that should he not obtain absolution from the Pope by February 22, 1077, they would name a successor to his throne. It was arranged between the nobles and the papal legates at Tribur that a diet should be held at Augsburg on February 2, 1077, under the presidency of the Pope, to settle the affairs of the Church and the kingdom.

Henry retired to Speyer, defeated and almost entirely deserted. Believing that the proposed diet would confirm his deposition, he sent messengers to Rome, offering to come there and ask for absolution. Gregory replied that as he would soon leave for Augsburg he could not receive Henry at Rome. En route north, the Pope was entertained at Mantua by his friend and supporter Matilda, Countess of Tuscany. Here he learned that Henry had entered Italy. Fearing that the King would raise an army among the antipapal population of Lombardy, Gregory took refuge in Matilda’s fortified castle at Canossa, high in the Apennines near Reggio Emilia. There on January 25, 1077, at the height of one of the severest winters that Italy could recall, Henry, says Gregory’s report to the German princes,

came in person to Canossa … bringing with him only a small retinue…. He presented himself at the gate of the castle, barefoot and clad only in wretched woolen garments, beseeching us with fears to grant him absolution and forgiveness. This he continued to do for three days, while all those about us were moved to compassion at his plight, and interceded for him with tears and prayers…. At length we removed the excommunication from him, and received him again into the bosom of Holy Mother Church.⁹⁰

Gregory hesitated so long through no hardness of heart. He had agreed to make no peace with Henry without consulting the German princes; and he knew that if Henry, forgiven, should rebel again, a second excommunication would have diminished effect, and might receive less support from the nobility; on the other hand the Christian world would have found it hard to understand why the Vicar of Christ should refuse forgiveness to so humble a penitent. The event was a spiritual triumph for Gregory, but a subtle diplomatic victory for Henry, who now automatically regained his throne. Gregory returned to Rome, and devoted himself for the next two years to ecclesiastical legislation chiefly aimed to enforce clerical celibacy. The German princes, however, proclaimed Rudolf of Swabia King of Germany (1077), and Henry’s strategy seemed to have failed. But now that he had freed himself from the papal ban he found fresh sympathy from a people not enamored of the nobility; a new army was recruited to defend him; and for two years the rival kings ravaged Germany in civil war. Gregory, after long vacillation, gave his support to Rudolf, excommunicated Henry a second time, forbade Christians to serve him, and offered absolution from their sins to all who should enlist under Rudolf’s flag (March, 1080).⁹¹

Henry acted precisely as before. He called a council of favorable nobles and bishops at Mainz; the council deposed Gregory; a council of bishops from Germany and northern Italy at Brixen confirmed the deposition, declared Archbishop Guibert of Ravenna Pope, and commissioned Henry to execute its decrees. The rival armies met on the banks of the Saale in Saxony (October 15, 1080); Henry was defeated, but Rudolf was killed. While the rebel nobles divided on the question of a successor to Rudolf, Henry entered Italy, marched unresisted through Lombardy, recruiting another army as he went, and laid siege to Rome. Gregory appealed to Robert Guiscard for help, but Robert was far away. The Pope appealed to William I, whose conquest of England he had sanctioned and helped, but William was not sure that he wanted Henry to lose this royal argument. The people of Rome defended the Pontiff bravely, but Henry was able to seize a large part of Rome, including St. Peter’s, and Gregory fled to the Castello Sant’ Angelo. A synod in the Lateran palace, at Henry’s command, deposed and excommunicated Gregory, and consecrated Guibert as Pope Clement III (March 24, 1084); and a week later Clement crowned Henry Emperor. For a year Henry was master of Rome.

But in 1085 Robert Guiscard, leaving his campaign against Byzantium, approached Rome at the head of 36,000 men. Henry had no army to resist such a force; he fled to Germany, Robert entered the capital, freed Gregory, sacked Rome, left half of it in ruins, and took Gregory to Monte Cassino; the populace of Rome was so infuriated against the Normans that the Pope, their ally, could not remain there in safety. Clement returned to Rome as apparent Pope. Gregory went on to Salerno, held another synod, excommunicated Henry again, and then broke down in body and spirit. “I have loved righteousness,” he said, “and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile.” He was only sixty-two; but the nervous strain of his bitter controversies had worn him out; and his apparent defeat by the man whom he had forgiven at Canossa left him no will to live. There at Salerno, May 25, 1085, he died.

Perhaps he had loved righteousness too imperiously, and had hated iniquity too passionately; it is reserved to the philosopher, and forbidden to the man of action, to see elements of justice in the position of his enemy. Innocent III, a century later, would realize a large part of Gregory’s dream of a world united under the Vicar of Christ; but he would win in a more temperate spirit and with wiser diplomacy. And yet Innocent’s victory was made possible by Gregory’s defeat. Hildebrand had grasped higher than his reach, but he had for a decade raised the papacy to the greatest height and power that it had yet known. His uncompromising war against clerical marriage succeeded, and prepared for his successors a clergy whose undivided loyalty immeasurably strengthened the Church. His campaign against simony and lay investiture would win a tardy victory, but in the end his view would prevail, and the bishops of the Church would become the willing servitors of the papacy. His use of papal legates was destined to extend the power of the popes into every parish in Christendom. Through his initiative papal elections were now free from royal domination. They would soon give the Church an amazing succession of strong men; and ten years after Gregory’s death the kings and nobles of the world would acknowledge Urban II as the head of Europe in that synthesis of Christianity, feudalism, chivalry, and imperialism which we know as the Crusades.

CHAPTER XXII

Feudalism and Chivalry

600–1200

I. FEUDAL ORIGINS

IN the six centuries that followed the death of Justinian, a remarkable collaboration of circumstances slowly effected a basic transformation of economic life in the West European world.

Certain conditions already noted came together to prepare for feudalism. As the cities of Italy and Gaul became unsafe during the German invasions, aristocrats moved out to their rural villas, and surrounded themselves with agricultural dependents, “client” families, and military aides. Monasteries whose monks tilled the soil and practiced handicrafts accentuated the centrifugal movement toward half-isolated economic units in the countryside. Roads injured by war, neglected by poverty, and endangered by highwaymen, could no longer maintain adequate communication and exchange. State revenues declined as commerce contracted and industry fell; impoverished governments could no longer provide protection for life, property, and trade. The obstruction of commerce compelled the villas to seek economic self-sufficiency; many manufactured articles formerly bought from the cities were—from the third century onward—produced on the great estates. In the fifth century the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris show us rural lords living in luxury on spacious holdings tilled by a semiservile tenantry; they are already a feudal aristocracy, possessing their own judiciary¹ and soldiery,² and differing from the later barons chiefly in knowing how to read.

The same factors that paved the way for feudalism between the third century and the sixth established it between the sixth and the ninth. Merovingian and Carolingian kings paid their generals and administrators with grants of land; in the ninth century these fiefs became hereditary and semi-independent through the weakness of the Carolingian kings. The Saracen, Norse, and Magyar invasions of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries repeated and cemented the results of the German invasions six centuries before: central protection failed, the local baron or bishop organized a localized order and defense, and remained possessed of his own force and court. Since the invaders were often mounted, defenders who could afford a horse were in demand; cavalry became more important than infantry; and just as in early Rome a class of equites—men on horseback—had taken form between patrician and plebs, so in France, Norman England, and Christian Spain a class of mounted knights grew up between the duke or baron and the peasantry. The people did not resent these developments; in an atmosphere of terror, when attack might come at any time, they craved military organization; they built their homes as near to the baronial castle or fortified monastery as they could; and they readily gave allegiance and service to a lord—i.e., a law-ward—or to a duke—i.e., one who could lead; we must imagine their terror to understand their subjection. Freemen who could no longer protect themselves offered their land or labor to some strong man in return for shelter and support; in such cases of “commendation” the baron usually assigned to “his man” a tract to be held as a “precarium,” on a lease revocable by the donor at any time; this precarious tenure became the usual form of serf possession of land. Feudalism was the economic subjection and military allegiance of a man to a superior in return for economic organization and military protection.

It cannot be rigidly defined, for it had a hundred variations in time and place. Its origins lay in Italy and Germany, but its most characteristic development came in France. In Britain it may have begun as the enserfment of Britons by Anglo-Saxon conquerors,³ but for the most part it was there a Gallic importation from Normandy. It never matured in northern Italy or Christian Spain; and in the Eastern Empire the great landowners never developed military or judicial independence, nor that hierarchy of fealties which seemed in the West essential to feudalism. Large sectors of Europe’s peasantry remained unfeudalized: the shepherds and ranchers of the Balkans, eastern Italy, Spain; the vine growers of western Germany and southern France; the sturdy farmers of Sweden and Norway; the Teutonic pioneers beyond the Elbe; the mountaineers of the Carpathians, the Alps, the Apennines, and the Pyrenees. It was not to be expected that a continent so physically and climatically diverse should have a uniform economy. Even within feudalism conditions of contract and status varied from nation to nation, from manor to manor, from time to time. Our analysis will apply chiefly to the France and England of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

II. FEUDAL ORGANIZATION

1. The Slave

In those lands and times society consisted of freemen, serfs, and slaves. Freemen included nobles, clerics, professional soldiers, practitioners of the professions, most merchants and artisans, and peasants who owned their land with little or no obligation to any feudal lord, or leased it from a lord for a money rent. Such peasant proprietors constituted some four per cent of the farming population of England in the eleventh century; they were more numerous in western Germany, northern Italy, and southern France; they probably constituted a quarter of the total peasant population in Western Europe.⁴

Slavery diminished as serfdom increased. In twelfth-century England it was mostly confined to household service; in France north of the Loire it was negligible; in Germany it rose in the tenth century, when no compunction was felt in capturing pagan Slavs for menial tasks on German estates, or for sale in Moslem or Byzantine lands. Conversely, Moslems and Greeks were kidnaped by slave traders along the shores of the Black Sea, western Asia, or northern Africa for sale as farm hands, domestic servants, eunuchs, concubines, or prostitutes in Islam or Christendom.⁵ The slave trade flourished especially in Italy, probably due to the nearness of Moslem countries, which could be preyed upon with a good conscience; it seemed a fair revenge for Saracen raids.

An institution that had lasted throughout known history appeared inevitable and eternal, even to honest moralists. It is true that Pope Gregory I freed two of his slaves with admirable words about the natural liberty of all men;⁶ but he continued to use hundreds of slaves on the papal estates,⁷ and approved laws forbidding slaves to become clerics or marry free Christians.⁸ The Church denounced the sale of Christian captives to Moslems, but permitted the enslavement of Moslems and of Europeans not yet converted to Christianity. Thousands of captured Slavs and Saracens were distributed among monasteries as slaves; and slavery on church lands and papal estates continued till the eleventh century.⁹ Canon law sometimes estimated the wealth of church lands in slaves rather than in money; like secular law, it considered the slave as a chattel; it forbade church slaves to make wills, and decreed that any peculium or savings of which they died possessed should belong to the Church.¹⁰ The archbishop of Narbonne, in his will of 1149, left his Saracen slaves to the bishop of Béziers.¹¹ St. Thomas Aquinas interpreted slavery as one consequence of Adam’s sin, and as economically expedient in a world where some must toil in order that others may be free to defend them.¹² Such views were in the tradition of Aristotle, and in the spirit of the times. The rule of the Church, that her property should never be alienated except at its full market value,¹³ was unfortunate for her slaves and serfs; emancipation sometimes proved more difficult on ecclesiastical than on secular properties.¹⁴ Nevertheless the Church progressively restricted the slave traffic by forbidding the enslavement of Christians at a time when Christianity was spreading rapidly.

The decline of slavery was due not to moral progress but to economic change. Production under direct physical compulsion proved less profitable or convenient than production under the stimulus of acquisitive desire. Servitude continued, and the word servus served for both slave and serf; but in time it became the word serf, as villein became villain, and Slav became slave. It was the serf, not the slave, who made the bread of the medieval world.

2. The Serf

Typically the serf tilled a plot of land owned by a lord or baron who gave him a life tenure and military protection as long as he paid an annual rent in products, labor, or money. He could be evicted at the owner’s will;¹⁵ and at his death the land passed to his children only by consent and satisfaction of the lord. In France he could be sold independently of the land, for some forty shillings ($400.00?); sometimes he (i.e., his labor) was sold by his owner in part to one person, in part to another. In France he could abjure the feudal contract by surrendering the land and all his possessions to the seigneur. In England he was denied this right of migration, and fugitive medieval serfs were recaptured as zealously as fugitive modern slaves.

The feudal dues of the serf to the owner of his land were numerous and diverse; some intelligence must have been required even to remember them. (1) He paid annually three taxes in money: (a) a small head tax, to the government but through the baron; (b) a small rent (cens); (c) an arbitrary charge (taille) levied by the owner yearly or of tener. (2) He annually gave the lord a share—usually a dîme or tenth—of his crops and livestock. (3) He owed his lord many days of unpaid labor (corvée); this was an inheritance from older economies, in which tasks like clearing woods, draining marshes, digging canals, raising dykes, were performed by the peasants collectively as an obligation to the community or king. Some lords required three days weekly through most of the year, four or five days a week in plowing or harvest time; additional labor days, paid only by meals, might be exacted in emergencies. This obligation of corvée lay upon only one male in each household. (4) The serf was obliged to grind his corn, bake his bread, brew his beer, press his grapes, at the lord’s mill, oven, vat, or press, and pay a small fee for each such use. (5) He paid a fee for the right to fish, hunt, or pasture his animals, on the lord’s domain. (6)His actions at law had to be brought before the baronial court, and cost him a fee varying with the gravity of the case. (7) He had to serve at call in the baron’s regiment in war. (8) If the baron was captured, the serf was expected to contribute to the ransom. (9) He contributed also to the substantial gift due to the lord’s son on being made a knight. (10) He paid the baron a tax on all products that he took for sale to market or fair. (11) He could not sell his beer or wine until the lord had had two weeks’ prior time to sell the lord’s beer or wine. (12) In many cases he was obliged to buy a prescribed quantity of wine yearly from his lord; if he did not buy in time, says one customal (a collection of the laws of a manor), “then the lord shall pour a four-gallon measure over the man’s roof; if the wine runs down, the tenant must pay for it; if it runs upward, he shall pay nothing.”¹⁶ (13) He paid a fine if he sent a son to higher education or gave him to the Church, for thereby the manor lost a hand. (14) He paid a tax, and required the lord’s consent, in case he or his children married a person not belonging to his manor, for then the lord would lose some or all of the offspring; on many estates permission and fee were required for any marriage at all. (15) In scattered instances¹⁷ we hear of the ius primae noctis or droit du seigneur, whereby the lord might claim the “right of the first night” with the serf’s bride; but in almost all cases the serf was allowed to “redeem” his bride by paying a fee to the lord;¹⁸ in this form the ius primae noctis survived in Bavaria till the eighteenth century.¹⁹ On some English estates the lord fined the peasant whose daughter had sinned; on some Spanish estates a peasant wife convicted of adultery forfeited part or all of her belongings to the lord.²⁰ (16) If the peasant died without issue residing with him, the house and land reverted to the lord by escheat. If his heir was an unmarried daughter, she could retain the holding only by marrying a man living on the same manor. In any event, as a kind of inheritance tax, the lord, on the death of a serf tenant, was entitled to take an animal, or an article of furniture or clothing, from the holding; in some cases the parish priest took a similar mortu-arium;²¹ in France these death dues were exacted only when the serf died without a codomiciled heir. (17) On some—especially on ecclesiasticalmanors he paid an annual and an inheritance tax to the Vogt who provided military defense for the estate. To the Church the peasant paid an annual tithe or tenth of his produce.

From so varied an assortment of dues—never all exacted from one family—it is impossible to calculate the total of a serf’s obligations. For late medieval Germany it has been reckoned at two thirds of his produce.^21a The power of custom, pre-eminent in agricultural regimes, favored the serf: usually his dues in money and kind tended to remain the same through centuries,²² despite rising production and depreciated currencies. Many disabilities or obligations that lay on the serf in theory or law were softened or annulled by baronial indulgence, effective resistance, or the erosion of time.²³ Perhaps in general the misery of the medieval serf has been exaggerated; the dues exacted of him were largely in lieu of a money rent to the owner, and taxes to the community, to maintain public services and public works; probably they bore a smaller proportion to his income than our federal, state, county, and school taxes bear to our income today.²⁴ The average peasant of the twelfth century was at least as well off as some sharecroppers in modern states, and better off than a Roman proletaire in Augustus’ reign.²⁵ The baron did not consider himself an exploiter; he functioned actively on the manor, and seldom enjoyed great wealth. The peasants, till the thirteenth century, looked up to him with admiration, often with affection; if the lord became a childless widower they sent deputations to him to urge remarriage, lest the estate be left without a regular heir, and be despoiled in a war of succession.²⁶ Like most economic and political systems in history, feudalism was what it had to be to meet the necessities of place and time and the nature of man.

The peasant’s cottage was of fragile wood, usually thatched with straw and turf, occasionally with shingles. We hear of no fire-fighting organization before 1250; when one of these cottages took fire it was usually a total loss. As often as not the house had only one room, at most two; a wood-burning fireplace, an oven, a kneading trough, table and benches, cupboard and dishes, utensils and andirons, caldron and pothanger, and near the oven, on the earthen floor, an immense mattress of feathers or straw, on which the peasant, his wife and children, and his overnight guest all slept in promiscuous and mutual warmth. Pigs and fowl had the run of the house. The women kept the place as clean as circumstances would permit, but the busy peasants found cleanliness a nuisance, and stories told how Satan excluded serfs from hell because he could not bear their smell.²⁷ Near the cottage was a barn with horse and cows, perhaps a beehive and a hennery. Near the barn was a dunghill to which all animal or human members of the household contributed. Roundabout were the tools of agriculture and domestic industry. A cat controlled the mice, and a dog watched over all.

Dressed in a blouse of cloth or skins, a jacket of leather or wool, belt and trousers, high shoes or boots, the peasant must have made a sturdy figure, not much different from the peasant of France today; we must picture him not as an oppressed and beaten man, but as a strong and patient hero of the plow, sustained, as every man is, by some secret, however irrational, pride. His wife worked as hard as himself, from dawn to dark. In addition she supplied him with children; and since children were assets on the farm, she bore them abundantly; nevertheless we read in the Franciscan Pelagius (c. 1330) how some peasants “often abstain from their wives, lest children be born, fearing, under pretext of poverty, that they cannot bring up so many.”²⁸

The food of the peasant was substantial and wholesome—dairy products, eggs, vegetables, and meat; but genteel historians mourn that he had to eat black—i.e., whole grain—bread.²⁹ He shared in the social life of the village, but had no cultural interests. He could not read; a literate serf would have been an offense to his illiterate lord. He was ignorant of everything but farming, and not too skilled in that. His manners were rough and hearty, perhaps gross; in this turmoil of European history he had to survive by being a good animal, and he managed it. He was greedy because poor, cruel because fearful, violent because repressed, churlish because treated as a churl. He was the mainstay of the Church, but he had more superstition than religion. Pelagius charged him with cheating the Church of her tithes, and neglecting to observe the holydays and the fasts; Gautier de Coincy (thirteenth century) complained that the serf “has no more fear of God than a sheep, does not give a button for the laws of Holy Church.”³⁰ He had his moments of heavy, earthy humor, but in the fields and in his home he was a man of spare speech, straitened vocabulary, and solemn mood, too consumed by toil and chores to waste his energy on words or dreams. Despite his superstitions he was a realist; he knew the merciless whims of the sky, and the certainty of death; one season of drouth could bring him and his brood to starvation. Sixty times between 970 and 1100 famine mowed men down in France; no British peasant could forget the famines of 1086 and 1125 in Merrie England; and the bishop of Trier in the twelfth century was shocked to see starving peasants kill and eat his horse.³¹ Flood and plague and earthquake entered the play, and made every comedy a tragedy at last.

3. The Village Community

Around the baronial villa some fifty to five hundred peasants—serfs, half free, or free—built their village, living not in isolated homesteads but, for safety’s sake, close together within the walls of the settlement. Usually the village was part of one or more manors; most of its officials were appointed by the baron, and were responsible only to him; but the peasants chose a reeve or provost to mediate between them and the lord, and to co-ordinate their agricultural activity. In the market place they gathered periodically to barter goods in the residuum of trade that survived the economic self-containment of the manor. The village rural household raised its own vegetables and some of its meat, spun its wool or linen, made most of its clothing. The village blacksmith hammered out iron tools, the tanner made leather goods, the carpenter built cottages and furniture, the wheelwright made carts; fullers, dyers, masons, saddlers, cobblers, soapmakers … lived in the village or came there transiently to ply their crafts on demand; and a public butcher or baker competed with the peasant and the housewife in preparing meat and bread.

Nine tenths of the feudal economy were agricultural. Normally, in eleventh-century France and England, the cultivated land of the manor was yearly divided into three fields; one was planted to wheat or rye, one to barley or oats, one was left fallow. Each field was subdivided into acre or half-acre strips, separated by “balks” of unplowed turf. The village officials assigned to each peasant a variable number of strips in each field, and bound him to rotate his crops in accord with a plan fixed by the community. The whole field was plowed, harrowed, planted, cultivated, and harvested by the joint labor of all. The scattering of one man’s strips among three or more fields may have aimed to give him a fair share of unequally productive lands; and the co-operative tillage may have been a survival from a primitive communism of which scant trace remains. In addition to these strips each peasant fulfilling his feudal dues had the right to cut timber, pasture his cattle, and gather hay in the manorial woods, common, or “green.” And usually he had enough land around his cottage for a garden and flowers.

Agricultural science in feudal Christendom could hardly compare with that of Columella’s Romans, or of Moslem Mesopotamia or Spain. Stubble and other refuse were burned on the fields to fertilize the soil and rid it of insects and weeds; marl or other limy earths provided a crude manure; there were no artificial fertilizers, and the costs of transport limited the use of animal dung; the archbishop of Rouen emptied the offal of his stables into the Seine instead of carting it to his fields in nearby Deville. Peasants pooled their pence to buy a plow or harrow for their common use. Till the eleventh century the ox was the draft animal; he ate less expensively, and in old age could be eaten more profitably than the horse. But about 1000 the harness makers invented the stiff collar that would allow a horse to draw a load without choking; so dressed, the horse could plow three or four times as much in a day as the ox; in wet temperate climates speed of plowing was important; so during the eleventh century the horse more and more replaced the ox, and lost his high status as reserved for travel, hunting, and war.³² Water mills, long known to the Moslem East, entered Western Europe toward the end of the twelfth century.³³

The Church eased the toil of the peasant with Sundays and holydays, on which it was a sin to do “servile work.” “Our oxen,” said the peasants, “know when Sunday comes, and will not work on that day.”³⁴ On such days, after Mass, the peasant sang and danced, and forgot in hearty rustic laughter the dour burden of sermon and farm. Ale was cheap, speech was free and profane, and loose tales of womankind mingled with awesome legends of the saints. Rough games of football, hockey, wrestling, and weight throwing pitted man against man, village against village. Cockfighting and bullbaiting flourished; and hilarity reached its height when, within a closed circle, two blindfolded men, armed with cudgels, tried to kill a goose or a pig. Sometimes, of an evening, peasants visited one another, played indoor games, and drank; usually, however, they stayed at home, for no streets were lit; and at home, since candles were dear, they went to bed soon after dark. In the long nights of the winter the family welcomed the cattle into the cottage, thankful for their heat.

So, by hard labor and mute courage, rather than by the initiatives and skills that proper incentives breed, the peasants of Europe fed themselves and their masters, their soldiers and clergy and kings. They drained marshes, raised dykes, cleared woods and canals, cut roads, built homes, advanced the frontier of cultivation, and won the battle between jungle and man. Modern Europe is their creation. Looking now at these neat hedges and ordered fields, we cannot see the centuries of toil and tribulation, breaking back and heart, that beat the raw materials of reluctantly bountiful nature into the economic foundations of our life. Women, too, were soldiers in that war; it was their patient fertility that conquered the earth. Monks fought for a time as bravely as any; planted their monasteries as outposts in the wilds, forged an economy out of chaos, and begot villages in the wilderness. At the beginning of the Middle Ages the greater part of Europe’s soil was untilled and unpeopled forest and waste; at their end the Continent had been won for civilization. Perhaps, in proper perspective, this was the greatest campaign, the noblest victory, the most vital achievement, of the Age of Faith.

4. The Lord

Under every system of economy men who can manage men manage men who can only manage things. In feudal Europe the manager of men was the baron—in Latin dominus, in French seigneur (the Roman senior), in German Herr (master), in English lord. His functions were threefold: to give military protection to his lands and their inhabitants; to organize agriculture, industry, and trade on these lands; to serve his liege lord or his king in war. In an economy reduced to elementals and fragments by centuries of migration, invasion, rapine, and war, society could survive only by the local independence and sufficiency of food supply and soldiery. Those who could organize defense and tillage became the natural lords of the land. Ownership and management of land became the source of wealth and power; and an age of landed aristocracy began that would last till the Industrial Revolution.

The basic principle of feudalism was mutual fealty: the economic and military obligation of serf or vassal to the lord, of lord to suzerain or superior lord, of suzerain to king, of king to suzerain, of suzerain to lord, of lord to vassal and serf. In return for the services of his serfs, the lord gave them land on a life tenure verging on ownership; he allowed them, for a modest fee, the use of his ovens, presses, mills, waters, woods, and fields; he commuted many labor dues for small money payments, and let others lapse in the oblivion of time. He did not dispossess the serf—usually he took care of him—in helpless sickness or old age.³⁵ On feast days he might open his gates to the poor, and feed all who came. He organized the maintenance of bridges, roads, canals, and trade; he found markets for the manor’s surplus products, “hands” for its operations, money for its purchases. He brought in good stock for breeding purposes, and allowed his serfs to service their flocks with his selected males. He could strike—in some localities or circumstances he could kill—a serf with impunity; but his sense of economy controlled his brutality. He exercised judicial as well as military powers over his domain, and profited unduly from fines levied in the manorial court; but this court, though often intimidated by his bailiff, was mostly manned by serfs themselves; and that the rude justice there decreed was not too oppressive appears from the readiness of the serf to buy indemnity from service in these judicial assemblies. Any serf who cared and dared could speak his mind in the manorial court; some dared; and in their piecemeal and unintended way these tribunals helped to forge the liberties that ended serfdom.

A feudal lord could own more than one manor or estate. In such case he appointed a “seneschal” to supervise his “domain”—i.e., all his manors—and a steward or bailiff for each; and he would move from manor to manor with his household to consume their products on the spot. He might have a castle on each of his estates. Descended from the walled camp (castrum, castellum) of the Roman legions, from the fortified villa of the Roman noble, or from the fortress or burg of the German chieftain, the feudal castle or château was built less for comfort than for security. Its outermost protection was a wide, deep fosse or moat; the earth thrown up and inward from the moat formed a mound into which were sunk square posts bound together to form a continuous stockade. Across the moat a cleated drawbridge led up to an iron gate or portcullis, which protected a massive door in the castle wall. Within this wall were stables, kitchen, storehouses, outhouses, bakery, laundry, chapel, and servants’ lodgings, usually all of wood. In war the tenants of the manor crowded with their cattle and movables into this enclosure. At its center rose the donjon, the house of the master; in most cases it was a large square tower, also of wood; by the twelfth century it was built of stone and took a rounded form as easier for defense. The lowest story of the donjon was a storehouse and dungeon; above this dwelt the lord and his family. From these donjons, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, developed the castles and châteaux of England, Germany, and France, whose impregnable stones were the military basis of the lord’s power against his tenants and the king.

The interior of the donjon was dark and confined. Windows were few and small, and seldom glazed; usually canvas, oiled paper, shutters, or lattices kept out most rain and much light; artificial light was provided by candles or torches. In most cases there was but one room to each of the three stories. Ladders and trap doors, or winding stairs, connected the floors. On the second story was the main hall, serving as the baron’s court of justice, and as dining room, living room, and bedroom for most of his household. At one end there might be a raised platform or dais, on which the lord, his family, and his guest ate their meals; others ate from removable tables placed before benches in the aisles. At retiring time mattresses were laid upon the floor or upon low wooden bedsteads in the aisles; all the household slept in this one room, with screens providing privacy. The walls were whitewashed or painted; they were adorned with banners, weapons, and armor, and the room might be protected from drafts by hangings or tapestries. The floor, paved with tile or stone, was covered with rushes and boughs. In the middle of the room a kind of central heating was generated by a wood fire in a hearth. Till the later Middle Ages there was no chimney; smoke escaped through a louver or “lantern” in the roof. Behind the dais a door opened into a “solar,” where the lord, his family, and his guest might take their ease and the sun; furniture was more comfortable there, with a carpet, a fireplace, and a luxurious bed.

The lord of the manor dressed himself in a tunic, usually of colored silk, adorned with some geometrical or floral design; a cape covering the shoulders, and loose enough to be raised over the head; short drawers and breeches; stockings that reached up the thighs; and long shoes with toes curled up like prows. At his belt swung a scabbard and sword; from his neck usually hung some pendant like a cross. To distinguish one helmeted and armored knight from another in the First Crusade,³⁶ European nobles adopted the Islamic practice³⁷ of marking their garments, livery, standards, armor, and equipage with heraldic devices or coats of arms; henceforth heraldry developed an esoteric jargon intelligible only to heralds and knights.* Despite all adornments the lord was no parasitic idler. He rose at dawn, mounted his tower to detect any approaching peril, hastily breakfasted, perhaps attended Mass, had “dinner” at 9 A.M., supervised the multifarious operations of the manor, shared actively in some of them, gave orders of the day to steward, butler, groom, and other servitors, received wayfarers and visitors, had “supper” with them and his family at five, and usually retired at nine. On some days the routine was broken by hunting, more rarely by tournaments, now and then by war. He entertained frequently, and exchanged presents lavishly with his guests.

His wife was almost as busy as himself. She bore and reared many children. She directed the many servants (with an occasional box on the ear), kept an eye on bakery, kitchen, and laundry, superintended the making of butter and cheese, the brewing of beer, the salting down of meat for the winter, and that major household industry of knitting, sewing, spinning, weaving, and embroidery, which made most of the family’s clothing. If her husband went to war she took over the military and economic management of the estate, and was expected to supply his financial needs as he campaigned; if he was taken prisoner she had to squeeze a ransom for him out of the toil of his serfs or from the sale of her finery and gems. If her husband died sonless she might inherit the seigneury, and become its domina, dame; but she was expected to remarry soon to provide the estate and her suzerain with military protection or service; and the suzerain limited her choice to a few candidates capable of meeting these obligations. In the privacy of the castle she could be an amazon or a termagant, and give her husband blow for blow. In her leisure hours she dressed her vigorous body in flowing fur-hemmed robes of silk, dainty headgear and footwear, and gleaming jewelry—an ensemble fit to send a troubadour into amorous or literary ecstasy.

Her children received an education quite different from that of the universities. The sons of the aristocracy were rarely sent to public schooling; in many cases no effort was made to teach them how to read. Literacy was left to clerks or scribes who could be hired for a pittance. Intellectual knowledge was scorned by most feudal knights; du Guesclin, one of the most honored figures of chivalry, trained himself in all the arts of war, and learned to face all weathers stoutly, but never bothered to learn how to read; only in Italy and Byzantium did the nobles carry on a literary tradition. Instead of going to a school, the boy of knightly family was sent, about the age of seven, to serve as page in another aristocratic household. There he learned obedience, discipline, manners, dress, the knightly code of honor, and the skills of joust and war; perhaps the local priest added some training in letters and reckoning. Girls were taught a hundred useful or pretty arts by merely seeing and doing. They took care of guests, and of the knight returning from battle or tournament; they unbuckled his armor, prepared his bath, laid out clean linen and raiment and perfumes for him, and waited on him at table with modest courtesy and tutored grace. They, rather than the boys, learned to read and write; they provided most of the audience for troubadours, trouvères, and jongleurs, and for the romantic prose and poetry of the time.

The baron’s household often included some vassals or retainers. The vassal was a man who, in return for his military service, personal attendance, or political support, received from the lord some substantial boon or privilege—usually a tract of land with its serfs; in such cases usufruct belonged to the vassal, ownership remained with the lord. A man too proud or strong to be a serf, yet too limited to provide his own military security, performed an act of “homage” to a feudal baron: knelt bareheaded and weaponless before him, placed his hands in the hands of the seigneur, declared himself that lord’s homme or man (while retaining his rights as a freeman), and by an oath on sacred relics or the Bible pledged the lord eternal fealty. The seigneur raised him, kissed him, invested him with a fief,* and gave him, in symbol thereof, a straw, stick, lance, or glove. Thenceforward the seigneur owed his vassal protection, friendship, fidelity, and economic and legal aid; he must not, says a medieval lawyer, insult his vassal, or seduce his vassal’s wife or daughter;³⁹if he does, the vassal may “throw down the glove” as a de-fy—i.e., as a release from fealty—and yet keep his fief.

The vassal might “subinfeudate” part of his land to a lesser vassal, who would then bear the same relation and responsibility to him that he bore to his lord. A man might hold fiefs from several lords, and owe them “simple homage” and limited service; but to one “liege” lord he pledged “liege homage”—full allegiance and service in peace and war. The lord himself, however great, might be vassal to another lord by holding property or privilege in fief from him; he might even be vassal to—hold a fief from—the vassal of another lord. All lords were vassals of the king. In these intricate relationships the prime bond was not economic but military; a man gave or owed military service and personal fealty to a lord; property was merely his reward. In theory feudalism was a magnificent system of moral reciprocity, binding the men of an endangered society to one another in a complex web of mutual obligation, protection, and fidelity.

5. The Feudal Church

Sometimes the lord of the manor was a bishop or an abbot. Though many monks labored with their hands, and many monasteries and cathedrals shared in parish tithes, additional support was necessary for great ecclesiastical establishments; and this came mostly from kings and nobles in gifts of land, or shares in feudal revenues. As these gifts accumulated, the Church became the largest landholder in Europe, the greatest of feudal suzerains. The monastery of Fulda owned 15,000 small villas, that of St. Gall had 2000 serfs;⁴⁰ Alcuin at Tours was lord of 20,000 serfs.⁴¹ Archbishops, bishops, and abbots received investiture from the king, pledged their fealty to him like other feudatories, carried such titles as duke and count, minted coin, presided over episcopal or abbey courts, and took on the feudal tasks of military service and agricultural management. Bishops or abbots accoutered with armor and lance became a frequent sight in Germany and France; Richard of Cornwall, in 1257, mourned that England had no such “warlike and mettlesome bishops.”⁴² So enmeshed in the feudal web, the Church found herself a political, economic, and military, as well as a religious, institution; her “temporalities” or material possessions, her “feudalities” or feudal rights and obligations, became a scandal to strict Christians, a talking point for heretics, a source of consuming controversy between emperors and popes. Feudalism feudalized the Church.

6. The King

Just as the Church was in the twelfth century a feudal and hierarchical structure of mutual protection, service, and fealty, sanctioned by benefices and topped by a suzerain pope, so the secular feudal regime demanded for its completion a lord of all vassals, a suzerain of all secular suzerains, a king. Theoretically the king was the vassal of God, and governed by divine right in the sense that God permitted, and thereby authorized, his rule. Practically, however, the king had been elevated by election, inheritance, or war. Men like Charlemagne, Otto I, William the Conqueror, Philip Augustus, Louis IX, Frederick II, and Louis the Fair enlarged their inherited power by force of character or arms; but normally the kings of feudal Europe were not so much the rulers of their peoples as the delegates of their vassals. They were chosen or accepted by the great barons and ecclesiastics; their direct power was limited to their own feudal domain or manors; elsewhere in their kingdom the serf and vassal swore fealty to the lord who protected them, rarely to the king whose small and distant forces could not reach out to guard the scattered outposts of the realm. The state, in feudalism, was merely the king’s estate.

In Gaul this atomization of rule proceeded furthest because the Carolingian princes weakened themselves by dividing the empire, because the bishops subdued them to ecclesiastical subservience, and because the Norse attacks broke most violently upon France. In this perfected feudalism the king was primus inter pares; he stood an inch or two above the princes, dukes, marquises, and counts; but in practice he was, like these “peers of the realm,” a feudal baron limited for revenue to his own lands, forced to move from one royal manor to another for sustenance, and dependent in war and peace upon the military aid or diplomatic service of rich vassals who seldom pledged him more than forty days of armed attendance in the year, and spent half their time plotting to unseat him. To win or reward support, the crown had granted estate after estate to powerful men; in the tenth and eleventh centuries too small a domain remained to the French king to give him secure ascendancy over his vassal lords. When they made their estates hereditary, established their own police and courts, and minted their own coinage, he lacked the force to prevent them. He could not interfere with the jurisdiction of these vassals over their own lands except in the capital cases that appealed to him; he could not send his officers or tax collectors into their domains; he could not stop them from making independent treaties or waging independent war. In feudal theory the French king owned all the lands of the lords who called him their sovereign; in reality he was merely a great landlord, not necessarily the greatest; and never did his holdings equal those of the Church.

But as the inability of the kings to protect their realm had generated feudalism, so the inability of feudal lords to maintain order among themselves, or to provide a uniform government for an expanding commercial economy, weakened the barons and strengthened the kings. The zeal for martial contests absorbed the aristocracies of feudal Europe in private and public wars; the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, the Wars of the Roses, and finally the wars of religion drank up their blood. Some of them, impoverished and recognizing no law, became robber barons who pillaged and murdered at will; and the excesses of liberty called for a unified power that would maintain order throughout the realm. Commerce and industry generated a growing and wealthy class outside the feudal bond; merchants resented feudal tolls and the insecurity of transport through feudal domains; and they demanded that private law should be superseded by a central government. The king allied himself with their class and the rising towns; they provided the finances for the assertion and extension of his authority; and all who felt oppressed or injured by the lords looked to the king for rescue and redress. The ecclesiastical barons were usually vassal and loyal to the king; the popes, however often at odds with royalty, found it easier to deal with a monarch than with a scattered and half-lawless nobility. Upheld by these diverse forces, the French and English kings made their power hereditary, instead of elective, by crowning a son or brother before their own death; and men accepted hereditary monarchy as the alternative to feudal anarchy. The improvement of communication and the increased circulation of money made regular taxation possible; the mounting royal revenue financed larger royal armies; the rising class of jurists attached themselves to the throne, and strengthened it by the centralizing influence of revived Roman law. By the year 1250 the jurists asserted the royal jurisdiction over all persons in the realm; and by that time the oath of allegiance was taken by all Frenchmen not to their lord but to their king. At the end of the thirteenth century Philip the Fair was strong enough to subdue not only his barons, but the papacy itself.

The French kings softened the transition for the aristocracy by replacing the rights of private coinage, judgment, and war with titles and privileges at the royal court. The greater vassals formed the curia regis, or king’s court; they became courtiers instead of potentates; and the ritual of the baronial castle graduated into a ceremonious attendance upon the audiences, the table, and the bedchamber of the king. The sons and daughters of the nobility were sent to serve the king and queen as pages or maids of honor, and learned the courtesies of the court; the royal household became the school of the aristocracy of France. The culminating ceremony was the coronation of the French king at Reims, of the German emperor at Aachen or Frankfort; then all the elite of the land gathered in awesome raiment and equipage; the Church extended all the mystery and majesty of her rites to solemnize the accession of the new ruler; his power became thereby a divine authority, which no man could gainsay except through brazen blasphemy. The feudal lords crowded to the court of the monarchy that had subdued them, and the Church conferred divine right upon the kings who would destroy her European leadership and power.

III. FEUDAL LAW

In the feudal regime, where the judges and executors of civil law were usually illiterate, custom and law were largely one. When question rose as to law or penalty, the oldest members of the community were asked what had been the custom thereon in their youth. The community itself was therefore the chief source of law. The baron or king might give commands, but these were not laws; and if he exacted more than custom sanctioned he would be frustrated by universal resistance, vocal or dumb.⁴³ Southern France had a written law as a Roman heritage; northern France, more feudal, preserved for the most part the laws of the Franks; and when in the thirteenth century these laws too were put into writing, they became even harder to change than before, and a hundred legal fictions rose to reconcile them with reality.

The feudal law of property was complex and unique. It recognized three forms of land possession: (1) the allod, unconditional ownership; (2) the fief—land whose usufruct, but not ownership, was ceded to a vassal on condition of noble service; and (3) tenure—where the usufruct was ceded to a serf or tenant on condition of feudal dues. In feudal theory only the king enjoyed absolute ownership; even the loftiest noble was a tenant, whose possession was conditional on service. Nor was the lord’s possession completely individual; every son had a birthright in the ancestral lands, and could obstruct their sale.⁴⁴ Usually the whole estate was bequeathed to the eldest son. This custom of primogeniture, unknown to Roman or barbarian law,⁴⁵ became advisable under feudal conditions because it put the military protection and economic management of the estate under one head, presumably the most mature. Younger sons were encouraged to venture forth and carve out new estates in other lands. Despite its limitations on ownership, feudal law yielded to no other in reverence for property, and in severity of punishments for violating property rights. A German code held that if a man removed the bark from one of the willow trees that held a dyke, “his belly shall be ripped up, and his bowels shall be taken out and wound around the harm he has done”; and as late as 1454 a Westphalian ordinance held that a man who had criminally removed his neighbor’s landmark should be buried in the earth with his head sticking out, and the land should then be plowed by oxen and men who had never plowed before; “and the buried man may help himself as best he can.”⁴⁶

Procedure in feudal law largely followed the barbarian codes, and extended their efforts to substitute public penalties for private revenge. Churches, market places, “towns of refuge” were endowed with the right of sanctuary; by such restrictions vengeance might be stayed till the law could supervene. Manorial courts tried cases between tenant and tenant, or between tenant and lord; contests between lord and vassal, or lord and lord, were submitted to a jury of “peers of the barony”—men of at least equal standing, and of the same fief,⁴⁷ with the complainant, and sitting in some baronial hall; episcopal or abbey courts tried cases involving persons in orders; while the highest appeals were heard by a royal court composed of peers of the realm, and sometimes presided over by the king. In the manorial courts plaintiff as well as defendant was imprisoned till judgment was pronounced. In all courts the plaintiff who lost was subject to the same penalty that would have been visited upon the defendant if guilty. Bribery was popular in all courts.⁴⁸

Trial by ordeal continued throughout the feudal period. About the year 1215 some heretics at Cambrai were subjected to the hot iron test; suffering burns, they were led to the stake; but, we are told, one was spared when, upon confessing his errors, his hand immediately healed, leaving no trace of the burn. The growth of philosophy through the twelfth century, and the renewed study of Roman law, begot a distaste for these “ordeals of God.” Pope Innocent III secured their complete prohibition by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1216; Henry III adopted this prohibition into English law (1219), Frederick II into the Neapolitan Code (1231). In Germany the old tests persisted into the fourteenth century; Savonarola underwent the ordeal by fire at Florence in 1498; it was revived in the trial of witches in the sixteenth century.⁴⁹

Feudalism encouraged the old Germanic trial by combat, partly as a mode of proof, partly in lieu of private revenge. The Normans re-established it in Britain after its disuse by the Anglo-Saxons, and it remained on the English statute book till the nineteenth century.⁵⁰ In 1127 a knight named Guy was accused by another named Hermann of complicity in the assassination of Charles the Good of Flanders; on Guy denying it, Hermann challenged him to a judicial duel; they fought for hours, till they were both unhorsed and weaponless; they passed from fencing to wrestling, and Hermann demonstrated the justice of his charge by tearing Guy’s testicles from his body; whereupon Guy expired.⁵¹ Perhaps ashamed of such barbarities, feudal custom accumulated restrictions on the right to challenge. The accuser, to acquire such a right, was required to make out a probable case; the defendant might refuse to fight if he had proved an alibi; a serf could not challenge a freeman, nor a leper a sound man, nor a bastard a man of legitimate birth; in general one might challenge only a person of equal rank with himself. The laws of several communities gave the court the right to forbid any judicial duel at its discretion. Women, ecclesiastics, and persons suffering physical disability were exempt from challenge, but they might choose “champions”—professionally skilled duelists—to represent them. As early as the tenth century we find paid champions used as substitutes even by able-bodied males; since God would decide the issue according to the justice of the accusation, the identity of the combatants seemed irrelevant. Otto I submitted to duel by champions the question of his daughter’s chastity, and the disputed succession to certain estates;⁵² and in the thirteenth century King Alfonso X of Castile had recourse to such a duel to decide whether he should introduce Roman law into his kingdom.⁵³ Embassies were sometimes supplied with champions in case diplomatic quarrels should admit of resolution by duels. Until 1821 such a champion figured in the coronation ceremony of English kings; he was by that date a picturesque relic; but in the Middle Ages he was supposed to fling his gauntlet upon the ground and loudly proclaim his readiness to defend in duel against any man the divine right of the new monarch to the crown.⁵⁴

The use of champions cast discredit upon trial by combat; the rising bourgeoisie outlawed it in communal legislation; Roman law replaced it in southern Europe in the thirteenth century. The Church repeatedly denounced it, and Innocent III made the prohibition absolute (1215). Frederick II excluded it from his Neapolitan dominions; Louis IX abolished it in the regions directly subject to his rule (1260); and Philip the Fair (1303) forbade it anywhere in France. The duel derives not so much from judicial combat as from the ancient right of private revenge.

Feudal penalties were barbarously severe. Fines were innumerable. Imprisonment was used as a detention for trial, rather than as a punishment; but it could be a torture in itself when the cell was infested with vermin, rats, or snakes.⁵⁵Men and women might be condemned to the public pillory or stocks, and be a target for public ridicule, decayed food, or stones. The ducking stool was used for minor crimes, and as a discouragement to gossips and shrews; the condemned person was strapped to a chair which was fastened to a long lever and was thereby submerged in a stream or a pond. Tougher convicts could be sentenced to serve as galley slaves: half naked and poorly fed, they were chained to the benches and compelled, on penalty of the severest flogging, to row to exhaustion. Flogging with lash or rod was a common punishment. Flesh—sometimes the face—might be branded with a letter symbolizing the crime; perjury and blasphemy could be punished by piercing the tongue with a hot iron. Mutilation was common; hands or feet, ears or nose, were cut off, eyes were gouged out; and William the Conqueror, to deter crime, decreed “that no one shall be killed or hanged for any misdeeds, but rather that his eyes be plucked out, and his hands, feet, and testicles cut off, so that whatever part of his body remains will be a living sign to all of his crime and iniquity.”⁵⁶ Torture was little used in feudalism; Roman and ecclesiastical law revived it in the thirteenth century. Theft or murder was punished sometimes with exile, more often with beheading or hanging; women murderers were buried alive.⁵⁷ An animal that had killed a human being might also be buried alive or hanged. Christianity preached mercy, but ecclesiastical courts decreed the same penalties as lay courts for similar crimes. The abbey court of St. Geneviève buried seven women alive for theft.⁵⁸ Perhaps in a rude age barbarous punishments were needed to deter lawless men. But these barbarities continued till the eighteenth century; and the worst tortures were practiced not upon murderers by barons but upon pious heretics by Christian monks.

IV. FEUDAL WAR

Feudalism arose as the military organization of a harassed agricultural society; its virtues were martial rather than economic; its vassals and lords were expected to train themselves for war, and be ready at any moment to leave the plowshare for the sword.

The feudal army was the feudal hierarchy organized by ties of feudal allegiance, and strictly stratified according to grades of nobility. Princes, dukes, marquises, counts, and archbishops were generals; barons, seigneurs, bishops, and abbots were captains; knights or chevaliers were cavalrymen; squires were servitors to barons or knights; “men-at-arms”—the militia of communes or villages—fought as infantry. Behind the feudal army, as we see it in the Crusades, a crowd of “varlets” followed on foot, without officers or discipline; they helped to despoil the conquered, and eased the suffering of fallen and wounded enemies by despatching them with battle-axes or clubs.⁵⁹But essentially the feudal army was the man on horseback multiplied. Infantry, insufficiently mobile, had lost its pre-eminence since Hadrianople (378), and would not regain it till the fourteenth century. Cavalry was the battle arm of chivalry; they and the cavalier, the chevalier, and the caballero took their names from the horse.

The feudal warrior used lance and sword or bow and arrow. The knight enlarged his ego to include his sword, and gave it an affectionate name; though doubtless it was the trouvères who called Charlemagne’s sword Joyeuse, Roland’s Durandel, and Arthur’s Excalibur. The bow had many forms: it might be a simple short bow, drawn at the breast; or a longbow aimed from the eye and ear; or a crossbow, in which the cord, drawn taut in the groove of a stock, was suddenly released, sometimes by a trigger, and propelled a missile of iron or stone. The crossbow was old; the longbow was first prominently used by Edward I (1272-1307) in his wars with the Welsh. In England archery was the main element in military training, and a leading element in sport. The development of the bow began the military debacle of feudalism; the knight scorned to fight on foot, but the archers killed his horse, and forced him to uncongenial ground. The final blow to feudal military power would come in the fourteenth century with gunpowder and cannon, which, from a safe distance, killed the armored knight and shattered his castle.

Having a horse to carry him, the feudal warrior could afford to burden himself with armor. In the twelfth century the fully accoutered knight covered his body from neck to knees with a hauberk—a coat of chain mail with sleeves for the arms—and an iron hood that covered all the head except eyes, nose, and mouth; his legs and feet were housed in greaves of mail. In combat he further capped himself with a steel helmet whose “nasal”—a projecting iron blade—guarded the nose. The visored casque and armor of metal plates appeared in the fourteenth century as defense against the long- or crossbow, and continued till the seventeenth; then nearly all armor was abandoned for the advantages of mobility. As a shield the knight suspended from his neck, and grasped by inner straps with his left hand, a buckler made of wood, leather, and iron bands, and adorned at the center with a buckle of gilded iron. The medieval knight was a mobile fort.

Fortification was the chief and usually adequate defense in feudal war. An army defeated in the field might find refuge within manor walls, and a last stand could be made in the donjon tower. The science of siege declined in the Middle Ages; the complex organization and equipment for battering down enemy walls proved too costly or laborious for dignified knights; but the art of the sapper or military miner held its own. Navies, too, were reduced in a world whose will to war outran its means. War galleys remained like those of the ancients—armed with battle towers on the decks, and propelled by freemen or galley slaves. What was lacking in power was made up in ornament, on the ship as on the man. Over a coat of pitch that preserved the wood of the vessel from water and air, medieval shipwrights and artists painted brilliant colors mixed with wax—white, vermilion, ultramarine blue; they gilded the prow and rails, and sculptured figures of men, beasts, and gods on prow and stern. Sails were gaily tinted, some in purple, some in gold; and a seigneur’s ship was emblazoned with his coat of arms.

Feudal war differed from both ancient and modern war in greater frequency and less mortality and cost. Every baron claimed the right of private war against any man not bound to him by feudal ties, and every king was free to embark at any time upon honorable robbery of another ruler’s lands. When king or baron went to war, all his vassals and relatives to the seventh degree were pledged to follow and fight for him for forty days. There was scarce a day in the twelfth century when some part of what is now France was not at war. To be a good warrior was the crown of a knight’s development; he was expected to give or take hard blows with relish or fortitude; his last ambition was a warrior’s death on “the field of honor,” not a “cow’s death” in bed.⁶⁰ Berthold of Ratisbon complained that “so few great lords reach their right age or die a right death”;⁶¹ but Berthold was a monk.

The game was not too dangerous. Ordericus Vitalis, describing the battle of Brémule (1119), reports that “of the 900 knights who fought, only three were killed.”⁶² At the battle of Tinchebrai (1106), where Henry I of England won all Normandy, 400 knights were captured, but not one of Henry’s knights was slain. At Bouvines (1214), one of the most bloody and decisive battles of the Middle Ages, 170 of 1500 knights engaged lost their lives.⁶³Armor and fortress gave advantage to the defense; a fully armored man could hardly be killed except by cutting his throat as he lay on the ground; and this was discountenanced by chivalry. Moreover it was wiser to capture a knight and accept ransom for him than to slay him and invite feud revenge. Froissart mourned the slaughter, at one battle, of “as many good prisoners as would well have brought 400,000 francs.”⁶⁴ Knightly rules and reciprocal prudence counseled courtesy to prisoners, and moderation in ransoms asked. Usually a prisoner was released on his word of honor to return with his ransom by a given date, and rare was the knight who broke such a pledge.⁶⁵ It was the peasantry that suffered most from feudal wars. In France, Germany, and Italy each army raided the lands and pillaged the houses of the vassals and serfs of the enemy, and captured or killed all cattle not gathered within defensive walls. After such a war many peasants drew their own plows, and many starved to death for lack of grain.

Kings and princes strove to maintain some interludes of internal peace. The Norman dukes succeeded in Normandy, England, and Sicily; the count of Flanders in his realm, the count of Barcelona in Catalonia, Henry III for a generation in Germany. For the rest it was the Church that led in limiting war. From 989 to 1050 various Church councils in France decreed a Pax Dei, or Peace of God, and promised excommunication to all who should use violence upon noncombatants in war. The French Church organized a peace movement in various centers, and persuaded many nobles not only to forgo private war but to join in outlawing it. Bishop Fulbert of Chartres (960?-1028), in a famous hymn, gave thanks to God for the unaccustomed peace. The movement was enthusiastically acclaimed by the common people, and good souls prophesied that within five years the peace program would be accepted by all Christendom.⁶⁶ French Church councils, from 1027 on, proclaimed the Treuga Dei, or Truce of God, perhaps recalling the Moslem prohibition of war in time of pilgrimage: all were to abstain from violence during Lent, in season of harvest or vintage (August 15 to November 11), on specified holydays, and for a part of each week—usually from Wednesday evening to Monday morning; in its final form the Truce allowed eighty days in the year for private or feudal war. These appeals and fulminations helped; private war was gradually ended by the co-operation of the Church, the growing strength of the monarchies, the rise of the towns and bourgeoisie, and the absorption of martial energies in the Crusades. In the twelfth century the Truce of God became part of civil, as well as of canon, law in western Europe. The Second Lateran Council (1139) forbade the use of military engines against men.⁶⁷ In 1190 Gerhoh of Reichersburg proposed that the pope should forbid all wars among Christians, and that all disputes among Christian rulers should be submitted to papal arbitration.⁶⁸ The kings thought this a bit too advanced; they waged international wars more abundantly as private wars decreased; and in the thirteenth century the popes themselves, playing the royal game of power with human pawns, used war as an instrument of policy.

V. CHIVALRY

Out of old Germanic customs of military initiation, crossed with Saracen influences from Persia, Syria, and Spain, and Christian ideas of devotion and sacrament, flowered the imperfect but generous reality of chivalry.

A knight was a person of aristocratic birth—i.e., of titled and landowning family—who had been formally received into the order of knighthood. Not all “gentle” men (i.e., men distinguished by their gens or ancestry) were eligible to knighthood or title; younger sons, except of royal blood, were normally confined to modest properties that precluded the expensive appurtenances of chivalry; such men remained squires unless they carved out new lands and titles of their own.

The youth who aimed at knighthood submitted to long and arduous discipline. At seven or eight he entered as a page, at twelve or fourteen as a squire, into the service of a lord; waited upon him at table, in the bedchamber, on the manor, in joust or battle; fortified his own flesh and spirit with dangerous exercises and sports; learned by imitation and trial to handle the weapons of feudal war. When his apprenticeship was finished he was received into the knightly order by a ritual of sacramental awe. The candidate began with a bath as a symbol of spiritual, perhaps as a guarantee of physical, purification; hence he could be called a “knight of the bath,” as distinguished from those “knights of the sword” who had received their accolade on some battlefield as immediate reward for bravery. He was clothed in white tunic, red robe, and black coat, representing respectively the hoped-for purity of his morals, the blood he might shed for honor or God, and the death he must be prepared to meet unflinchingly. For a day he fasted; he passed a night at church in prayer, confessed his sins to a priest, attended Mass, received communion, heard a sermon on the moral, religious, social, and military duties of a knight, and solemnly promised to fulfill them. He then advanced to the altar with a sword hanging from his neck; the priest removed the sword, blessed it, and replaced it upon his neck. The candidate turned to the seated lord from whom he sought knighthood, and was met with a stern question: “For what purpose do you desire to enter the order? If to be rich, to take your ease, and be held in honor without doing honor to knighthood, you are unworthy of it, and would be to the order of knighthood what the simoniacal clerk is to the prelacy.” The candidate was prepared with a reassuring reply. Knights or ladies then clothed him in knightly array of hauberk, cuirass or breastplate, armlets, gauntlets (armored gloves), sword, and spurs.* The lord, rising, gave him the accolade (i.e., on the neck)—three blows with the flat of the sword upon the neck or shoulder, and sometimes a slap on the cheek, as symbols of the last affronts that he might accept without redress; and “dubbed” him with the formula, “In the name of God, St. Michael, and St. George I make thee knight.” The new knight received a lance, a helmet, and a horse; he adjusted his helmet, leaped upon his horse, brandished his lance, flourished his sword, rode out from the church, distributed gifts to his attendants, and gave a feast for his friends.

He was now privileged to risk his life in tournaments that would train him still further in skill, endurance, and bravery. Begun in the tenth century, the tournament flourished above all in France, and sublimated some part of the passions and energies that disordered feudal life. It might be proclaimed through a herald, by a king or a great lord, to celebrate the ordination of a knight, the visit of a sovereign, or the marriage of royal blood. The knights who offered to take part came to the appointed town, hung their armorial bearings from the windows of their rooms, and affixed their coats of arms to castles, monasteries, and other public places. Spectators examined these, and were free to lodge complaint of wrong done by any intending participant; tournament officials would hear the case, and disqualify the guilty; there was then a “blot on his ‘scutcheon,” or shield. To the excited gathering came horse dealers to equip the knight, haberdashers to clothe him and his horse in fit array, moneylenders to ransom the fallen, fortunetellers, acrobats, mimes, troubadours and trouvères, wandering scholars, women of loose morals, and ladies of high degree. The whole occasion was a colorful festival of song and dance, trysts and brawls, and wild betting on the contests.

A tournament might last almost a week, or but a day. At a tournament in 1285 Sunday was a day of assembly and fete; Monday and Tuesday were given to jousts; Wednesday was a day of rest; Thursday saw the tourney that gave its name to the tournament. The lists, or field of battle, were a town square or an outlying open space, partly enclosed by stands and balconies from which the richer gentry, clothed in all the splendor of medieval costume, watched the fray; commoners stood on foot around the field. The stands were decorated with tapestries, drapes, pennants, and coats of arms. Musicians prefaced the engagement with music, and celebrated with flourishes the most brilliant strokes of the game. Between contests the noble lords and ladies scattered coins among the pedestrian crowd, who received them with cries of “Largesse!” and “Noël!”

Before the first contest the knights entered the lists by marching on to the field in brilliant equipage and stately steps, followed by their mounted squires, and sometimes led in gold or silver chains by the ladies for whose glory they were to fight. Usually each knight carried on his shield, helmet, or lance a scarf, veil, mantle, bracelet, or ribbon that his chosen lady had taken from her dress.

The joust or tilt was a single combat of rival knights; they rode against each other “at full tilt,” and launched their lances of steel. If either contestant was unhorsed the rules required the other to dismount; and the fight was continued on foot till one or the other cried quits, or was hors de combat through fatigue or wounds or death, or until judges or king called a halt. The victor then appeared before the judges, and solemnly received a prize from them or from some fair lady. Several such tilts might fill a day. The climax of the festival came with the tourney; the enlisted knights ranged themselves in opposed groups, and fought an actual battle, though usually with blunted arms; in the tourney at Neuss (1240) some sixty knights were killed. In such tourneys prisoners were taken, and ransom exacted, as in war; the horses and armor of the captives belonged to the victors; the knights loved money even more than war. The fabliaux tell of a knight who protested the Church’s condemnation of tournaments on the ground that if effective it would end his only means of livelihood.⁶⁹ When all the contests were over the survivors and the noble spectators joined in an evening of feasting, song, and dance. The winning knights enjoyed the privilege of kissing the loveliest women, and heard poems and songs composed in commemoration of their victories.

Theoretically the knight was required to be a hero, a gentleman, and a saint. The Church, anxious to tame the savage breast, surrounded the institution of knighthood with religious forms and vows. The knight pledged himself always to speak the truth, defend the Church, protect the poor, make peace in his province, and pursue the infidels. To his liege lord he owed a loyalty more binding than filial love; to all women he was to be a guardian, saving their chastity; to all knights he was to be a brother in mutual courtesy and aid. In war he might fight other knights; but if he took any of them prisoner he must treat them as his guests; so the French knights captured at Crécy and Poitiers lived, till ransomed, in freedom and comfort on the estates of their English captors, sharing in feasts and sports with their hosts.⁷⁰ Above the conscience of the commons feudalism exalted the aristocratic honor and noblesse oblige of the knight—a pledge of martial valor and feudal fidelity, of unstinting service to all knights, all women, all weak or poor. So virtus, manliness, was restored to its Roman masculine sense after a thousand years of Christian emphasis on feminine virtues. Chivalry, despite its religious aura, represented a victory of Germanic, pagan, and Arab conceptions over Christianity; a Europe attacked on every side needed the martial virtues again.

All this, however, was chivalric theory. A few knights lived up to it, as a few Christians rose to the arduous heights of Christian selflessness. But human nature, born of jungle and beast, sullied the one ideal like the other. The same hero who one day fought bravely in tournament or battle might on another be a faithless murderer; he might carry his honor as proudly as his plume, and, like Lancelot, Tristram, and realer knights, break up fine families with adultery. He might prate of protecting the weak, and strike unarmed peasants down with a sword; he treated with scorn the manual worker on whose labor rested his citadel of gallantry, and with frequent coarseness and occasional brutality the wife whom he had sworn to cherish and protect.⁷¹ He could hear Mass in the morning, rob a church in the afternoon, and drink himself into obscenity at night; so Gildas, who lived among them, described the British knights of that sixth century in which some poets placed Arthur and “the great order of the Table Round.”⁷² He talked of loyalty and justice, and filled the pages of Froissart with treachery and violence. While German poets sang of chivalry, German knights engaged in fisticuffs, incendiarism, and the highway robbery of innocent travelers.⁷³ The Saracens were astonished by the crudeness and cruelty of the Crusaders; even the great Bohemund, to show his contempt of the Greek emperor, sent him a cargo of sliced off noses and thumbs.⁷⁴ Such men were exceptional, but they were plentiful. It would of course be absurd to expect soldiers to be saints; good killing requires its own unique virtues. These rough knights drove the Moors into Granada, the Slavs from the Oder, the Magyars from Italy and Germany; they tamed the Norse into Normans, and brought French civilization into England on the points of their swords. They were what they had to be.

Two influences moderated the barbarism of chivalry: woman and Christianity. The Church partly succeeded in diverting feudal pugnacity into the Crusades. Perhaps she was helped by the rising adoration of Mary the Virgin Mother; once more the feminine virtues were exalted to check the bloody ardor of vigorous men. But it may be that living women, appealing to sense as well as soul, had even more influence in transforming the warrior into a gentleman. The Church repeatedly forbade tournaments, and was gaily ignored by the knights; the ladies attended tournaments, and were not ignored. The Church frowned upon the role of women in tournaments and in poetry; a conflict arose between the morals of noble ladies and the ethics of the Church; and in the feudal world the ladies and the poets won.

Romantic love—i.e., love that idealizes its object—has probably occurred in every age, in degree loosely corresponding with the delay and obstacles between desire and fulfillment. Until our own age it was rarely the cause of marriage; and if we find it quite apart from marriage when knighthood was in flower, we must view that condition as more normal than our own. In most ages, and above all in feudalism, women married men for their property, and admired other men for their charm. Poets, having no property, had to marry at low level or love at long range, and they aimed their fairest songs at inaccessible dames. The distance between lover and beloved was usually so great that even the most passionate poetry was taken as only a pretty compliment, and a well-mannered lord rewarded poets for inditing amorous verses to his wife. So the viscount of Vaux continued his hospitality and favors to the troubadour Peire Vidal after Peire addressed love poems to the viscountess—even after Peire had tried to seduce her⁷⁵—though this was a degree of amiability not usually to be presumed upon. The troubadour argued that marriage, combining a maximum of opportunity with a minimum of temptation, could hardly engender or sustain romantic love; even the pious Dante seems never to have dreamed of addressing love poems to his wife, or to have found any unseemliness in addressing them to another woman, single or married. The knight agreed with the poet that knightly love had to be for some other lady than his own wife, usually for the wife of another knight.⁷⁶Most knights, though we must not often suspect them of marital fidelity, laughed at “courtly love,” resigned themselves in time to their mates, and consoled themselves with war. We hear of knights turning cold ears to ladies offering romance.⁷⁷ Roland, in the Chanson, died with scarce a thought of his affianced bride Aude, who would die of grief on hearing of his death. Women, too, were not all romantic; but from the twelfth century it became a convention with many of them that a lady should have a lover, Platonic or Byronic, added to her husband. If we may believe the medieval romances, the knight was pledged to the devoir or service of the lady who had given him her colors to wear; she could impose dangerous exploits to test or distance him; and if he served her well she was expected to reward him with an embrace or better; this is the “guerdon” that he claimed. To her he dedicated all his feats of arms; it was her name that he invoked in the crises of combat or the breath of death. Here again feudalism was not a part of Christianity but its opposite and rival. Women, theologically so stinted in love, asserted their freedom and molded their own moral code; the worship of woman in the flesh competed with the adoration of the Virgin. Love proclaimed itself an independent principle of worth, and offered ideals of service, norms of conduct, scandalously ignoring religion even when borrowing its terms and forms.⁷⁸

So complicated a severance of love and marriage raised many problems of morals and etiquette; and, as in Ovid’s days, authors dealt with these questions with all the nicety of casuists. Some time between 1174 and 1182 one Andreas Capellanus—Andrew the Chaplain—composed a Tractatus de amore et de amoris remedio (Treatise on Love and Its Cure), in which, among other matters, he laid down the code and principles of “courtly love.” Andrew limits such love to the aristocracy; he unblushingly assumes that it is the illicit passion of a knight for another knight’s wife, but considers its distinguishing characteristic as the homage, vassalage, and service of the man to the woman. This book is the chief authority for the existence of medieval “courts of love,” in which titled ladies answered queries and handed down decisions about l’amour courtois. In Andrew’s time, if we may credit his account, the leading lady in this procedure was the princess poetess Marie, Countess of Champagne; a generation earlier it had been her mother, the most fascinating woman in feudal society, Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, sometime Queen of France, and later of England. Occasionally, according to the Tractatus, mother and daughter presided together as judges in the court of love at Poitiers.⁷⁹ Andrew knew Marie well, served her as chaplain, and apparently wrote his book to publish her theories and judgments of love. “Love,” he says, “teaches everyone to abound in good manners”; under Marie’s tutelage, we are assured, the rough aristocracy of Poitiers became a society of generous women and gallant men.

The poems of the troubadours contain several references to such courts of love, maintained by high ladies—the viscountess of Narbonne, the countess of Flanders, and others—at Pierrefeu, Avignon, and elsewhere in France;⁸⁰ten, fourteen, sixty women, we are told, sat in judgment on cases submitted to them mostly by women, sometimes by men; disputes were settled, lovers’ quarrels healed, penalties laid upon violators of the code. So (according to Andrew) Marie of Champagne, on April 27, 1174, issued a responsum to the inquiry, “Can real love exist between married people?” She replied in the negative on the ground that “lovers grant everything gratuitously, without being constrained by any motive of necessity; married people are compelled as a duty to submit to one another’s wishes.”⁸¹ All the courts, says our merry Andrew, agreed on thirty-one “Laws of Love”: (1) Marriage cannot be pleaded as an excuse for refusing to love…. (3) No one can really love two people at the same time. (4) Love never stands still; it always increases or diminishes. (5) Favors unwillingly yielded are tasteless…. (11) It is not becoming to love those ladies who only love with a view to marriage…. (14) Too easy possession renders love contemptible; possession that is attended with difficulties makes love … of great price…. (19) If love once begins to diminish, it quickly fades away, and rarely recovers…. (21) Love invariably increases under the influence of jealousy…. (23) A person who is the prey of love eats little and sleeps little…. (26) Love can deny nothing to love.⁸²

These courts of love, if they ever existed, were parts of a kind of parlor game played by the ladies of the aristocracy; busy barons took no known notice of them, and amorous knights made their own rules. But there can be no doubt that increasing wealth and idleness generated a romance and etiquette of love that filled the poetry of the troubadours and the early Renaissance. “In June, 1283,” writes the Florentine historian Villani (1280?-1348),

at the festival of St. John, when the city of Florence was happy, quiet, and at peace … a social union was formed, composed of a thousand people who, all clad in white, called themselves the Servants of Love. They arranged a succession of sports, merrymakings, and dances with ladies; nobles and bourgeois marched to the sound of trumpets and music, and held festive banquets at midday and at night. This Court of Love lasted nearly two months, and it was the finest and most famous that had ever been in Tuscany.⁸³

Chivalry, beginning in the tenth century, reached its height in the thirteenth, suffered from the brutality of the Hundred Years’ War, shriveled in the merciless hate that divided the English aristocracy in the Wars of the Roses, and died in the theological fury of the religious wars of the sixteenth century. But it left its decisive mark upon the society, education, manners, literature, art, and vocabulary of medieval and modern Europe. The orders of knighthood—of the Garter, the Bath, the Golden Fleece—multiplied to the number of 234 in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain; and schools like Eton, Harrow, and Winchester combined the chivalric ideal with “liberal” education in the most effective training of mind and will and character in pedagogical history. As the knight learned manners and gallantry at the court of noble or king, so he transmitted something of this courtoisie to those below him in the social scale; modern politeness is a dilution of medieval chivalry. The literature of Europe flourished, from the Chanson de Roland to Don Quixote, by treating knightly characters and themes; and the rediscovery of chivalry was one of the exciting elements in the Romantic movement of literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whatever its excesses and absurdities in literature, however far chivalry in fact fell short of its ideals, it remains one of the major achievements of the human spirit, an art of life more splendid than any art.

In this perspective the feudal picture is not merely one of serfdom, illiteracy, exploitation, and violence, but as truly a scene of lusty peasants clearing the wilderness; of men colorful and vigorous in language, love, and war; of knights pledged to honor and service, seeking adventure and fame rather than comfort and security, and scorning danger, death, and hell; of women patiently toiling and breeding in peasant cottages, and titled ladies mingling the tenderest prayers to the Virgin with the bold freedom of a sensuous poetry and courtly love—perhaps feudalism did more than Christianity to raise the status of woman. The great task of feudalism was to restore political and economic order to Europe after a century of disruptive invasions and calamities. It succeeded; and when it decayed, modern civilization rose upon its ruins and its legacy.

The Dark Ages are not a period upon which the scholar can look with superior scorn. He no longer denounces their ignorance and superstition, their political disintegration, their economic and cultural poverty; he marvels, rather, that Europe ever recovered from the successive blows of Goths, Huns, Vandals, Moslems, Magyars, and Norse, and preserved through the turmoil and tragedy so much of ancient letters and techniques. He can feel only admiration for the Charlemagnes, Alfreds, Olafs, and Ottos who forced an order upon this chaos; for the Benedicts, Gregorys, Bonifaces, Columbas, Alcuins, Brunos, who so patiently resurrected morals and letters out of the wilderness of their times; for the prelates and artisans that could raise cathedrals, and the nameless poets that could sing, between one war or terror and the next. State and Church had to begin again at the bottom, as Romulus and Numa had done a thousand years before; and the courage required to build cities out of jungles, and citizens out of savages, was greater than that which would raise Chartres, Amiens, and Reims, or cool Dante’s vengeful fever into measured verse.

BOOK V

THE CLIMAX OF CHRISTIANITY

1095–1300

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR BOOK V

750–1100:

The Elder Edda

842:

Strasbourg Oath uses vernaculars

c. 1000:

Rise of polyphonic music

1020:

First communal charter (to Leon)

1040:

Guido of Arezzo’s musical staff

1050–1122:

Roscelin, philosopher

1056–1114:

Nestor & the Russian Chronicle

1056–1133:

Hildebert of Tours, poet

1066–87:

William I King of England

1066–1200:

Norman architecture in England

1076–1185:

Gilbert de la Porree, phil’r

1079–1142:

Abélard, philosopher

1080:

Consuls in Lucca; rise of self-governing cities in Italy

1080–1154:

William of Conches, phil’r

1081–1151:

Abbot Suger of St. Denis

1083–1148:

Anna Comnena, historian

1085:

English Domesday Book

1086–1127:

William X, Duke of Aquitaine, first known troubadour

1088f:

Irnerius & Roman law at Bologna

1088–99:

Pope Urban II

1089–1131:

Abbey of Cluny

1090–1153:

St. Bernard

1093–1109:

Anselm Archb’p of Canterbury

1093–1175:

Durham Cathedral

c. 1095:

Chanson de Roland

1095:

Proclamation of First Crusade

1095–1164:

Roger II of Sicily

1098:

Cistercian Order founded

1098–1125:

Henry V King of Germany

1099:

Crusaders take Jerusalem

1099–1118:

Pope Paschal II

1099–1143:

Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem

1099–1179:

St. Hildegarde

c. 1100:

Arabic numerals in Europe; paper manufactured in Constantinople

1100–35:

Henry I King of England

1100–55:

Arnold of Brescia, reformer

1104–94:

Transition style in architecture

1105:

Adelard’s Quaestiones naturales

1110:

University of Paris takes form

1113:

Prince Monomakh quiets revolution in Kiev

1114–58:

Otto of Freising, historian

1114–87:

Gerard of Cremona, translator

1117:

Abélard teaches Héloïse

1117–80:

John of Salisbury, phil’r

c. 1120:

Est’t of the Hospitalers

1121:

Abélard condemned at Soissons

1122:

Concordat of Worms

1122–1204:

Eleanor of Aquitaine

1123:

First Lateran Council

1124–53:

David I King of Scotland

1127:

Est’t of Knights Templar

1133f:

Abbey of St. Denis rebuilt in Gothic

1135–54:

Stephen King of England

1137:

The first Cortes; Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Britonum

1137–96:

Walter Map (es), satirist

1138:

Conrad III begins Hohenstaufen line

1139–85:

Alfonso I Enriquez, first king of Portugal

1140:

Abélard condemned at Sens

1140–91:

Chrétien de Troyes

1140–1227:

The Goliardic poets

1142:

Rise of Guelf & Ghibelline factions

1142:

Decretum of Gratian

1145–1202:

Joachim of Flora

1146–7:

Revolt of Arnold of Brescia

1147–1223:

Giraldus Cambrensis, geographer

c. 1150:

The Nibelungenlied

1150:

Sententiae of Peter Lombard; sculptures of Moissac; flying buttress used at Noyon

1150–1250:

Heyday of French troubadours

1152–90:

Frederick I Barbarossa emperor of Holy Roman Empire

1154–9:

Pope Hadrian IV

1154–89:

Henry II begins Plantagenet line

1154–1256:

York Minster

1156:

Moscow founded

1157:

Bank of Venice issues gov’t bonds

1157–82:

Valdemar I King of Denmark

1157–1217:

Alexander Neckham, naturalist

1159–81:

Pope Alexander III

c. 1160:

The Cid

1160–1213:

Geoffrey de Villehardouin, hist’n

1163–1235:

Notre Dame de Paris

1165–1220:

Wolfram von Eschenbach, poet

1165–1228:

Walther von der Vogelweide, poet

1167:

Lombard League formed; beginning of Oxford University

1167–1215:

Peire Vidal, troubadour

1170:

Murder of Thomas à Becket; “Strongbow” begins conquest of Ireland; Peter Waldo at Lyons

1170–1221:

St. Dominic

1170–1245:

Alexander of Hales, phil’r

1172f:

Palace of the Doges

1174–1242:

Wells Cathedral

1175–1234:

Michael Scot

1175–1280:

Early English Gothic

1175f:

Canterbury Cathedral

1176:

Carthusian Order est’d; Frederick Barbarossa defeated at Legnano

1178f:

Albigensian heresy; Peterborough Cathedral

1178–1241:

Snorri Sturluson, hist’n

1179:

Third Lateran Council

c. 1180:

University of Montpellier est’d; Marie de France, poetess

1180–1225:

Philip II Augustus of France

1180–1250:

Leonardo de Fibonacci, math’n

c. 1180–1253:

Robert Grosseteste, scientist

1182–1216:

St. Francis of Assisi

1185–1219:

Lesser Armenia fl. under Leo III

1185–1237:

Bamberg Cathedral

1189–92:

Third Crusade

1189–99:

Richard I Coeur de Lion

1190:

Teutonic Order founded

1190–7:

Henry VI of Germany

1192–1230:

Ottakar I King of Bohemia

1192–1280:

Lincoln Minster

1193–1205:

Enrico Dandolo Doge of Venice

1193–1280:

Albertus Magnus

1194–1240:

Llywelyn the Great of Wales

1194–1250:

Frederick II of Sicily

1195–1231:

St. Anthony of Padua

1195–1390:

Bourges Cathedral

1198–1216:

Pope Innocent III

1199–1216:

King John of England

c. 1200:

David of Dinant, phil’r

1200–1304:

Cloth Hall of Ypres

1200–59:

Matthew Paris, hist’n

1200–64:

Vincent of Beauvais, encyclop’t

1201:

Germans conquer Livonia

1201–1500:

Cathedral of Rouen

1202–4:

Fourth Crusade

1202–5:

Philip II of France takes Normandy, Anjou, Maine, and Brittany from England

1202–41:

Valdemar II King of Denmark

1204–29:

Albigensian Crusades

1204–50:

La Merveille of Mont St. Michel

1204–61:

Latin Kingdom of Constant’ple

1205:

Oldest Christian reference to magnetic compass; Hartman von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich

1205–1303:

Cathedral of Leon

1206–22:

Theodore Lascaris Eastern emp.

1207–28:

Stephen Langton Archb’p of Cant’y

1208:

St. Francis founds Friars Minor; Innocent III lays interdict on Engl’d

1209:

Cambridge University founded

1210:

Aristotle forbidden at Paris; Gottfried of Strasbourg’s Tristan

1211–1427:

Reims Cathedral

1212:

Children’s Crusade; Santa Clara founds Poor Clares

1213–76:

James I King of Aragon

1214:

Philip II wins at Bouvines

1214–92:

Roger Bacon

1215:

Magna Carta; Fourth Lateran Council; Dominican Order founded

1216–27:

Pope Honorius III

1216–72:

Henry III King of England

1217:

Fifth Crusade

1217–52:

Ferdinand III of Castile

1217–62:

Haakon IV of Norway

1220–45:

Salisbury Cathedral

1220–88:

Amiens Cathedral

1221–74:

St. Bonaventure

1221–1567:

Cathedral of Burgos

1224:

University of Naples est’d

1224–1317:

Jean de Joinville, hist’n

1225:

Laws of the Sachsenspiegel

1225–74:

St. Thomas Aquinas, phil’r

1225–78:

Niccolò Pisano, sculptor

1226–35:

Regency of Blanche of Castile

1226–70:

Louis IX of France

1227:

University of Salamanca est’d; beginning of papal Inquisition

1227–41:

Pope Gregory IX

1227–1493:

Cathedral of Toledo

1227–1552:

Cathedral of Beauvais

1228f:

Church of San Francesco at Assisi

1228:

Sixth Crusade; Frederick II recovers Jerusalem

1229–1348:

Cathedral of Siena

1230f:

Cathedral of Strasbourg

1230–75:

Guido Guinizelli

1232–1300:

Arnolfo di Cambio, artist

1232–1315:

Raymond Lully, phil’r

1235–81:

Siger of Brabant, phil’r

1235–1311:

Arnold of Villanova, physician

1237:

Mongols invade Russia; William of Lorris’ Roman de la Rose

1240:

Victory of Alexander Nevsky on Neva

c. 1240:

Aucassin et Nicolette

1240–1302:

Cimabue

1240–1320:

Giovanni Pisano, artist

1241:

Mongols defeat Germans at Liegnitz, take Cracow, and ravage Hungary

1243–54:

Pope Innocent IV

1244:

Moslems capture Jerusalem

1245:

First Council of Lyons deposes Frederick II

1245:

Giovanni de Piano Carpini visits Mongolia

1245–8:

Ste. Chapelle

1245–72:

Westminster Abbey

1248:

St. Louis leads Seventh Crusade

1248–1354:

The Alhambra

1248–1880:

Cathedral of Cologne

1250:

St. Louis captured; Frederick II d.; Bracton’s De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae

1252–62:

Formation of Hanseatic League

1252–82:

Alfonso X the Wise of Castile

1253–78:

Ottokar II of Bohemia

1254–61:

Pope Alexander IV

1255–1319:

Duccio of Siena, painter

1258:

Haakon IV of Norway conquers Iceland

1258–66:

Manfred King of Sicily

1258–1300:

Guido Cavalcanti

c. 1260:

Flagellants

1260–1320:

Henri de Mondeville, surgeon

1261:

Michael VIII Palaeologus restores Eastern Empire at Constantinople

1265:

Simon de Montfort’s Parliament

1265–1308:

Duns Scotus, phil’r

1265–1321:

Dante

1266:

Opus maius of Roger Bacon

1266–85:

Charles of Anjou King of Sicily

1266–1337:

Giotto

1268:

Defeat of Conradin; end of Hohenstaufen line

1269:

Baibars takes Jaffa and Antioch

1270:

Louis IX leads Eighth Crusade

1271–95:

Marco Polo in Asia

1272–1307:

Edward I King of England

1273–91:

Rudolf of Hapsburg Emperor of Holy Roman Empire

1274:

Second Council of Lyons

1279–1325:

Diniz King of Portugal

1280–1380:

English Decorated Gothic

1282:

Sicilian Vespers; Pedro III of Aragon takes Sicily

1283:

Edward I reconquers Wales

1284:

Belfry of Bruges

1285–1314:

Philip IV the Fair of France

c. 1290:

Golden Legend of Iacopo de Voragine; Jean de Meung’s Roman de la Rose

1290–1330:

Cathedral of Orvieto

1291:

Mamluks take Acre; end of Crusades; League of the Swiss cantons

1292–1315:

John Balliol King of Scotland

1294:

Lanfranchi founds French surgery

1294:

Church of Santa Croce at Florence

1294–1303:

Pope Boniface VIII

1294–1436:

Cathedral of Santa Maria de Fiore at Florence

1295:

Edward I’s “Model Parliament”

1296:

Boniface’s bull Clericis laicos

1298:

Wallace defeated at Falkirk; Palazzo Vecchio and Baptistery at Florence

1298f:

Cathedral of Barcelona

1302:

Flemish defeat the French at Courtrai; Boniface’s bull Unam sanctarn; Philip IV calls States General

1305–16:

Pope Clement V

1308–13:

Henry VII Western Emperor

1309:

Clement removes papacy to Avignon

1310–12:

Suppression of Templars in France

1314:

Scotland wins independence at Bannockburn

1315:

Swiss defeat Hapsburg army at Morgarten and establish the Swiss Confederacy

CHAPTER XXIII

The Crusades

1095–1291

I. CAUSES

THE Crusades were the culminating act of the medieval drama, and perhaps the most picturesque event in the history of Europe and the Near East. Now at last, after centuries of argument, the two great faiths, Christianity and Mohammedanism, resorted to man’s ultimate arbitrament—the supreme court of war. All medieval development, all the expansion of commerce and Christendom, all the fervor of religious belief, all the power of feudalism and glamor of chivalry came to a climax in a Two Hundred Years’ War for the soul of man and the profits of trade.

The first proximate cause of the Crusades* was the advance of the Seljuq Turks. The world had adjusted itself to Moslem control of the Near East; the Fatimids of Egypt had ruled mildly in Palestine; and barring some exceptions, the Christian sects there had enjoyed a wide liberty of worship. Al-Hakim, the mad caliph of Cairo, had destroyed the church of the Holy Sepulcher (1010), but the Mohammedans themselves had contributed substantially to its restoration.¹ In 1047 the Moslem traveler Nasir-i-Khosru described it as “a most spacious building, capable of holding 8000 persons, and built with the utmost skill. Inside, the church is everywhere adorned with Byzantine brocade, worked in gold…. And they have portrayed Jesus—peace be upon Him!—riding upon an ass.”² This was but one of many Christian churches in Jerusalem. Christian pilgrims had free access to the holy places; a pilgrimage to Palestine had long been a form of devotion or penance; everywhere in Europe one met “palmers” who, as a sign of pilgrimage accomplished, wore crossed palm leaves from Palestine; such men, said Piers Plowman, “had leave to lie all their lives thereafter.”³ But in 1070 the Turks took Jerusalem from the Fatimids, and pilgrims began to bring home accounts of oppression and desecration. An old story, not verifiable, relates that one wayfarer, Peter the Hermit, brought to Pope Urban II, from Simeon, Patriarch of Jerusalem, a letter detailing the persecution of Christians there, and imploring papal aid (1088).

The second proximate cause of the Crusades was the dangerous weakening of the Byzantine Empire. For seven centuries it had stood at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, holding back the armies of Asia and the hordes of the steppes. Now its internal discords, its disruptive heresies, its isolation from the West by the schism of 1054, left it too feeble to fulfill its historic task. While the Bulgars, Patzinaks, Cumans, and Russians assaulted its European gates, the Turks were dismembering its Asiatic provinces. In 1071 the Byzantine army was almost annihilated at Manzikert; the Seljuqs captured Edessa, Antioch (1085), Tarsus, even Nicaea, and gazed across the Bosporus at Constantinople itself. The Emperor Alexius I (1081–1118) saved a part of Asia Minor by signing a humiliating peace, but he had no military means of resisting further attack. If Constantinople should fall, all Eastern Europe would lie open to the Turks, and the victory of Tours (732) would be undone. Forgetting theological pride, Alexius sent delegates to Urban II and the Council of Piacenza, urging Latin Europe to help him drive back the Turks; it would be wiser, he argued, to fight the infidels on Asiatic soil than wait for them to swarm through the Balkans to the Western capitals.

The third proximate cause of the Crusades was the ambition of the Italian cities—Pisa, Genoa, Venice, Amalfi—to extend their rising commercial power. When the Normans captured Sicily from the Moslems (1060–91), and Christian arms reduced Moslem rule in Spain (1085f), the western Mediterranean was freed for Christian trade; the Italian cities, as ports of exit for domestic and transalpine products, grew rich and strong, and planned to end Moslem ascendancy in the eastern Mediterranean, and open the markets of the Near East to West European goods. We do not know how close these Italian merchants were to the ear of the Pope.

The final decision came from Urban himself. Other popes had entertained the idea. Gerbert, as Sylvester II, had appealed to Christendom to rescue Jerusalem, and an abortive expedition had landed in Syria (c. 1001). Gregory VII, amid his consuming strife with Henry IV, had exclaimed, “I would rather expose my life in delivering the holy places than reign over the universe.”⁴ That quarrel was still hot when Urban presided over the Council of Piacenza in March of 1095. He supported the plea of Alexius’ legates there, but counseled delay till a more widely representative assembly might consider a war against Islam. He was too well informed to picture victory as certain in so distant an enterprise; he doubtless foresaw that failure would seriously damage the prestige of Christianity and the Church. Probably he longed to channel the disorderly pugnacity of feudal barons and Norman buccaneers into a holy war to save Europe and Byzantium from Islam; he dreamed of bringing the Eastern Church again under papal rule, and visioned a mighty Christendom united under the theocracy of the popes, with Rome once more the capital of the world. It was a conception of the highest order of statesmanship.

From March to October of 1095 he toured northern Italy and southern France, sounding out leaders and ensuring support. At Clermont in Auvergne the historic council met; and though it was a cold November, thousands of people came from a hundred communities, pitched their tents in the open fields, gathered in a vast assemblage that no hall could hold, and throbbed with emotion as their fellow Frenchman Urban, raised on a platform in their midst, addressed to them in French the most influential speech in medieval history.

O race of Franks! race beloved and chosen by God! … From the confines of Jerusalem and from Constantinople a grievous report has gone forth that an accursed race, wholly alienated from God, has violently invaded the lands of these Christians, and has depopulated them by pillage and fire. They have led away a part of the captives into their own country, and a part they have killed by cruel tortures. They destroy the altars, after having defiled them with their uncleanliness. The kingdom of the Greeks is now dismembered by them, and has been deprived of territory so vast in extent that it could not be traversed in two months’ time.

On whom, then, rests the labor of avenging these wrongs, and of recovering this territory, if not upon you—you upon whom, above all others, God has conferred remarkable glory in arms, great bravery, and strength to humble the heads of those who resist you? Let the deeds of your ancestors encourage you—the glory and grandeur of Charlemagne and your other monarchs. Let the Holy Sepulcher of Our Lord and Saviour, now held by unclean nations, arouse you, and the holy places that are now stained with pollution…. Let none of your possessions keep you back, nor anxiety for your family affairs. For this land which you now inhabit, shut in on all sides by the sea and the mountain peaks, is too narrow for your large population; it scarcely furnishes food enough for its cultivators. Hence it is that you murder and devour one another, that you wage wars, and that many among you perish in civil strife.

Let hatred, therefore, depart from among you; let your quarrels end. Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulcher; wrest that land from a wicked race, and subject it to yourselves. Jerusalem is a land fruitful above all others, a paradise of delights. That royal city, situated at the center of the earth, implores you to come to her aid. Undertake this journey eagerly for the remission of your sins, and be assured of the reward of imperishable glory in the Kingdom of Heaven.⁵

Through the crowd an excited exclamation rose: Dieu li volt—“God wills it!” Urban took it up, and called upon them to make it their battle cry. He bade those who undertook the crusade to wear a cross upon brow or breast. “At once,” says William of Malmesbury, “some of the nobility, falling down at the knees of the Pope, consecrated themselves and their property to the service of God.”⁶ Thousands of the commonalty pledged themselves likewise; monks and hermits left their retreats to become in no metaphysical sense soldiers of Christ. The energetic Pope passed to other cities—Tours, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, Nîmes … and for nine months preached the crusade. When he reached Rome after two years’ absence, he was enthusiastically acclaimed by the least pious city in Christendom. He assumed, with no serious opposition, the authority to release Crusaders from commitments hindering the crusade; he freed the serf and the vassal, for the duration of the war, from fealty to their lord; he conferred upon all Crusaders the privilege of being tried by ecclesiastical instead of manorial courts, and guaranteed them, during their absence, the episcopal protection of their property; he commanded—though he could not quite enforce—a truce to all wars of Christians against Christians; he established a new principle of obedience above the code of feudal loyalty. Now, more than ever, Europe was made one. Urban found himself the accepted master, at least in theory, of Europe’s kings. All Christendom was moved as never before as it feverishly prepared for the holy war.

II. THE FIRST CRUSADE: 1095–99

Extraordinary inducements brought multitudes to the standard. A plenary indulgence remitting all punishments due to sin was offered to those who should fall in the war. Serfs were allowed to leave the soil to which they had been bound; citizens were exempted from taxes; debtors enjoyed a moratorium on interest; prisoners were freed, and sentences of death were commuted, by a bold extension of papal authority, to life service in Palestine. Thousands of vagrants joined in the sacred tramp. Men tired of hopeless poverty, adventurers ready for brave enterprise, younger sons hoping to carve out fiefs for themselves in the East, merchants seeking new markets for their goods, knights whose enlisting serfs had left them laborless, timid spirits shunning taunts of cowardice, joined with sincerely religious souls to rescue the land of Christ’s birth and death. Propaganda of the kind customary in war stressed the disabilities of Christians in Palestine, the atrocities of Moslems, the blasphemies of the Mohammedan creed; Moslems were described as worshiping a statue of Mohammed,⁷ and pious gossip related how the Prophet, fallen in an epileptic fit, had been eaten alive by hogs.⁸ Fabulous tales were told of Oriental wealth, and of dark beauties waiting to be taken by brave men.⁹

Such a variety of motives could hardly assemble a homogeneous mass capable of military organization. In many cases women and children insisted upon accompanying their husbands or parents, perhaps with reason, for prostitutes soon enlisted to serve the warriors. Urban had appointed the month of August, 1096, as the time of departure, but the impatient peasants who were the first recruits could not wait. One such host, numbering some 12,000 persons (of whom only eight were knights), set out from France in March under Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless (Gautier sans-Avoir); another, perhaps 5000 strong, started from Germany under the priest Gott-schalk; a third advanced from the Rhineland under Count Emico of Leiningen. It was chiefly these disorderly bands that attacked the Jews of Germany and Bohemia, rejected the appeals of the local clergy and citizenry, and degenerated for a time into brutes phrasing their blood lust in piety. The recruits had brought modest funds and little food, and their inexperienced leaders had made scant provision for feeding them. Many of the marchers had underestimated the distance; and as they advanced along the Rhine and the Danube the children asked impatiently, at each turn, was not this Jerusalem?¹⁰ When their funds ran out, and they began to starve, they were forced to pillage the fields and homes on their route; and soon they added rape to rapine.¹¹ The population resisted violently; some towns closed their gates against them, and others bade them Godspeed with no delay. Arriving at last before Constantinople quite penniless, and decimated by famine, plague, leprosy, fever, and battles on the way, they were welcomed by Alexius, but not satisfactorily fed; they broke into the suburbs, and plundered churches, houses, and palaces. To deliver his capital from these praying locusts, Alexius provided them with vessels to cross the Bosporus, sent them supplies, and bade them wait until better armed detachments could arrive. Whether through hunger or restlessness, the Crusaders ignored these instructions, and advanced upon Nicaea. A disciplined force of Turks, all skilled bowmen, marched out from the city and almost annihilated this first division of the First Crusade. Walter the Penniless was among the slain; Peter the Hermit, disgusted with his uncontrollable host, had returned before the battle to Constantinople, and lived safely till 1115.

Meanwhile the feudal leaders who had taken the cross had assembled each his own force in his own place. No king was among them; indeed Philip I of France, William II of England, and Henry IV of Germany were all under sentence of excommunication when Urban preached the crusade. But many counts and dukes enlisted, nearly all of them French or Frank; the First Crusade was largely a French enterprise, and to this day the Near East speaks of West Europeans as Franks. Duke Godfrey, Seigneur of Bouillon (a small estate in Belgium), combined the qualities of soldier and monk—brave and competent in war and government, and pious to the point of fanaticism. Count Bohemund of Taranto was Robert Guiscard’s son; he had all the courage and skill of his father, and dreamed of slicing a kingdom for himself and his Norman troops out of the former Byzantine possessions in the Near East. With him was his nephew Tancred of Hauteville, destined to be the hero of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered: handsome, fearless, gallant, generous, loving glory and wealth, and universally admired as the ideal of a Christian knight. Raymond, Count of Toulouse, had already fought Islam in Spain; now, in old age, he dedicated himself and his vast fortune to the larger war; but a haughty temper spoiled his nobility, and avarice stained his piety.

By diverse routes these hosts made their way to Constantinople. Bo-hemund proposed to Godfrey that they seize the city; Godfrey refused, saying that he had come only to fight infidels;¹² but the idea did not die. The masculine, half-barbarous knights of the West despised these subtle and cultured gentlemen of the East as heretics lost in effeminate luxury; they looked with astonishment and envy upon the riches laid up in the churches, palaces, and markets of the Byzantine capital, and thought that fortune should belong to the brave. Alexius may have gotten wind of these notions among his saviors; and his experience with the peasant horde (for whose defeat the West had censured him) inclined him to caution, perhaps to duplicity. He had asked for assistance against the Turks, but he had not bargained upon the united strength of Europe gathering at his gates; he could never be sure whether these warriors aspired to Jerusalem so much as to Constantinople, nor whether they would restore to his Empire any formerly Byzantine territory that they might take from the Turks. He offered the Crusaders provisions, subsidies, transport, military aid, and, for the leaders, handsome bribes;¹³ in return he asked that the nobles should swear allegiance to him as their feudal sovereign; any lands taken by them were to be held in fealty to him. The nobles, softened with silver, swore.

Early in 1097 the armies, totaling some 30,000 men, still under divided leadership, crossed the straits. Luckily, the Moslems were even more divided than the Christians. Not only was Moslem power in Spain spent, and in northern Africa rent with religious faction, but in the East the Fatimid caliphs of Egypt held southern Syria, while their foes, the Seljuq Turks, held northern Syria and most of Asia Minor. Armenia rebelled against its Seljuq conquerors, and allied itself with the “Franks.” So helped, the arms of Europe advanced to the siege of Nicaea. On Alexius’ pledge that their lives would be spared, the Turkish garrison surrendered (June 19, 1097). The Greek Emperor raised the Imperial flag over the citadel, protected the city from indiscriminate pillage, and appeased the feudal leaders with substantial gifts; but the Christian soldiery complained that Alexius was in league with the Turks. After a week’s rest, the Crusaders set out for Antioch. They met a Turkish army under Qilij Arslan near Dorylaeum, won a bloody battle (July 1, 1097), and marched through Asia Minor with no other enemies than a shortage of water and food, and a degree of heat for which the Western blood was unprepared. Men, women, horses, and dogs died of thirst on that bitter march of 500 miles. Crossing the Taurus, some nobles separated their forces from the main army to make private conquests—Raymond, Bohemund, and Godfrey in Armenia, Tancred and Baldwin (brother of Godfrey) in Edessa; there Baldwin, by strategy and treachery,¹⁴ founded the first Latin principality in the East (1098). The mass of the Crusaders complained ominously at these delays; the nobles returned, and the advance to Antioch was resumed.

Antioch, described by the chronicler of the Gesta Francorum as a “city extremely beautiful, distinguished, and delightful,”¹⁵ resisted siege for eight months. Many Crusaders died from exposure to the cold winter rains, or from hunger; some found a novel nourishment by chewing “the sweet reeds called zucra” (Arabic sukkar); now for the first time the “Franks” tasted sugar, and learned how it was pressed from cultivated herbs.¹⁶ Prostitutes provided more dangerous sweets; an amiable archdeacon was slain by the Turks as he reclined in an orchard with his Syrian concubine.¹⁷ In May, 1098, word came that a great Moslem army was approaching under Karbogha, Prince of Mosul; Antioch fell (June 3, 1098) a few days before this army arrived; many of the Crusaders, fearing that Karbogha could not be withstood, boarded ships on the Orontes, and fled. Alexius, advancing with a Greek force, was misled by deserters into believing that the Christians had already been defeated; he turned back to protect Asia Minor, and was never forgiven. To restore courage to the Crusaders, Peter Bartholomew, a priest from Marseille, pretended to have found the spear that had pierced the side of Christ; when the Christians marched out to battle the lance was carried aloft as a sacred standard; and three knights, robed in white, issued from the hills at the call of the papal legate Adhemar, who proclaimed them to be the martyrs St. Maurice, St. Theodore, and St. George. So inspired, and under the united command of Bohemund, the Crusaders achieved a decisive victory. Bartholomew, accused of a pious fraud, offered to undergo the ordeal of fire as a test of his veracity. He ran through a gauntlet of burning faggots, and emerged apparently safe; but he died of burns or an overstrained heart on the following day; and the holy lance was withdrawn from the standards of the host.¹⁸