{1021}
Germany.
In the German kingdom, much the same processes of
disintegration had produced much the same results as in
France. The great fiefs into which it was divided--the duchies
of Saxony, Franconia, Swabia and Bavaria--were even more
powerful than the great fiefs of France. When the Carlovingian
dynasty came to an end, in 911, the nobles made choice of a
king, electing Conrad of Franconia, and, after him (919),
Henry the Fowler, Duke of Saxony. The monarchy continued
thereafter to be elective, actually as well as in theory, for
a long period. Three times the crown was kept in the same
family during several successive generations: in the House of
Saxony from 919 to 1024; in the House of Franconia from 1024
to 1137; in the House of the Hohenstaufens, of Swabia, from
1137 to 1254: but it never became an acknowledged heritage
until long after the Hapsburgs won possession of it; and even
to the end the forms of election were preserved.
The Holy Roman Empire.
The second king of the Saxon dynasty, Otho I., called the
Great, recovered the imperial title, which had become extinct
again in the West, added the crown of Lombardy to the crown of
Germany, and founded anew the Germanic Roman Empire, which
Charlemagne had failed to establish enduringly, but which now
became one of the conspicuous facts of European history for
more than eight hundred years, although seldom more than a
shadow and a name. But the shadow and the name were those of
the great Rome of antiquity, and the mighty memory it had left
in the world gave a superior dignity and rank to these German
emperors, even while it diminished their actual power as kings
of Germany. It conferred upon them, indeed, more than rank and
dignity; it bestowed an "office" which the ideas and feelings
of that age could not suffer to remain vacant. The Imperial
office seemed to be required, in matters temporal, to balance
and to be the complement of the Papal office in matters
spiritual. "In nature and compass the government of these two
potentates is the same, differing only in the sphere of its
working; and it matters not whether we call the Pope a
spiritual Emperor, or the Emperor a secular Pope." "Thus the
Holy Roman Church and the Holy Roman Empire are one and the
same thing, in two aspects; and Catholicism, the principle of
the universal Christian society, is also Romanism; that is,
rests upon Rome as the origin and type of its universality"
(Bryce). These mediæval ideas of the "Holy Roman Empire," as
it came to be called (not immediately, but after a time), gave
importance to the imperial coronation thenceforth claimed by
the German kings. It was a factitious importance, so far as
concerned the immediate realm of those kings. In Germany,
while it brought no increase to their material power, it
tended to alarm feudal jealousies; it tended to draw the kings
away from their natural identification with their own country; it
tended to distract them from an effective royal policy at
home, by foreign ambitions and aims; and altogether it
interfered seriously with the nationalization of Germany, and
gave a longer play to the disrupting influences of feudalism
in that country than in any other.
Italy, the Empire and the Papacy.
Otto I. had won Italy and the Imperial crown (962) very
easily. For more than half a century the peninsula had been in
a deplorable state. The elective Lombard crown, quarreled over
by the ducal houses of Friuli, Spoleto, Ivrea, Provence, and
others, settled nowhere with any sureness, and lost all
dignity and strength, though several of the petty kings who
wore it had been crowned emperors by the Pope. At Rome, all
legitimate government, civil or ecclesiastical, had
disappeared. The city and the Church had been for years under
the rule of a family of courtesans, who made popes of their
lovers and their sons. Southern Italy was being ravaged by the
Saracens, who occupied Sicily, and Northern Italy was
desolated by the Hungarians. Under these circumstances, Otto
I., the German king, listened to an appeal from an oppressed
queen, Adelaide, widow of a murdered king, and crossed, the
Alps (951), like a gallant knight, to her relief. He chastised
and humbled the oppressor, rescued the queen, and married her. A
few years later, on further provocation, he entered Italy
again, deposed the troublesome King Berengar, caused himself
to be crowned King of Italy, and received the imperial crown
at Rome (962) from one of the vilest of a vile brood of popes,
John XII. Soon afterwards, he was impelled to convoke a synod
which deposed this disgraceful pope and elected in his place
Leo VIII., who had been Otto's chief secretary. The citizens
now conceded to the Emperor an absolute veto on papal
elections, and the new pope confirmed their act. The German
sovereigns, from that time, for many years, asserted their
right to control the filling of the chair of St. Peter, and
exercised the right on many occasions, though always with
difficulty.
Nominally they were sovereigns of Rome and Italy; but during
their long absences from the country they scarcely made a show
of administrative government in it, and their visits were
generally of the nature of expeditions for a reconquest of the
land. Their claims of sovereignty were resisted more and more,
politically throughout Italy and ecclesiastically at Rome. The
Papacy emancipated itself from their control and acquired a
natural leadership of Italian opposition to German imperial
pretensions. The conflict between these two forces became, as
will be seen later on, one of the dominating facts of European
history for four centuries--from the eleventh to the
fourteenth.
{1022}
The Italian City-republics.
The disorder that had been scarcely checked in Italy since the
Goths came into it,--the practical extinction of central
authority after Charlemagne dropped his sceptre, and the
increasing conflicts of the nobles among themselves,--had one
consequence of remarkable importance in Italian history. It
opened opportunities to many cities in the northern parts of
the peninsula for acquiring municipal freedom, which they did
not lack spirit to improve. They led the movement and set the
example which created, a little later, so many vigorous
communes in Flanders and France, and imperial free cities in
Germany at a still later day. They were earlier in winning
their liberties, and they pushed them farther,--to the point
in many cases of creating, as at Pisa, Genoa, Florence, and
Venice, a republican city state. Venice, growing up in the
security of her lagoons, from a cluster of fishing villages to
a great city of palaces, had been independent from the
beginning, except as she acknowledged for a time the nominal
supremacy of the Eastern Emperor. Others won their way to
independence through struggles that are now obscure, and
developed, before these dark centuries reached their close, an
energy of life and a splendor of genius that come near to
comparison with the power and the genius of the Greeks. But,
like the city-republics of Greece, they were perpetually at
strife with one another, and sacrificed to their mutual
jealousies, in the end, the precious liberty which made them
great, and which they might, by a well settled union, have
preserved.
The Saxon line of Emperors.
Such were the conditions existing or taking shape in Italy
when the Empire of the West--the Holy Roman Empire of later
times--was founded anew by Otho the Great. Territorially, the
Empire as he left it covered Germany to its full extent, and
two-thirds of Italy, with the Emperor's superiority
acknowledged by the subject states of Burgundy, Bohemia,
Moravia, Poland, Denmark, and Hungary--the last named with
more dispute.
Otho the Great died in 972. His two immediate successors, Otho
II. (973-983) and Otho III. (983-1002) accomplished little,
though the latter had great ambitions, planning to raise Rome
to her old place as the capital of the world; but he died in
his youth in Italy, and was succeeded by a cousin, Henry II.,
whose election was contested by rivals in Germany, and
repudiated in Italy. In the latter country the great nobles
placed Ardoin, marquis of Ivrea, on the Lombard throne; but
the factions among them soon caused his overthrow, and, Henry,
crossing the Alps, reclaimed the crown.
The Franconian Emperors.
Henry II. was the last of the Saxon line, and upon his death,
in 1024, the House of Franconia came to the throne, by the
election of Conrad II., called "the Salic." Under Conrad, the
kingdom of Burgundy, afterwards called the kingdom of Arles
(which is to be distinguished from the French Duchy of
Burgundy--the northwestern part of the old kingdom), was
reunited to the Empire, by the bequest of its last king,
Rudolph III. Conrad's son, grandson, and great grandson
succeeded him in due order; Henry III. from 1039 to 1056;
Henry IV. from 1056 to 1106; Henry V. from 1106 to 1125. Under
Henry III. the Empire was at the summit of its power. Henry
II., exercising the imperial prerogative, had raised the Duke
of Hungary to royal rank, giving him the title of king. Henry
III. now forced the Hungarian king to acknowledge the imperial
supremacy and pay tribute. The German kingdom was ruled with a
strong hand and peace among its members compelled. "In Rome,
no German sovereign had ever been so absolute. A disgraceful
contest between three claimants of the papal chair had shocked
even the reckless apathy of Italy. Henry deposed them all and
appointed their successor." "The synod passed a decree
granting to Henry the right of nominating the supreme pontiff;
and the Roman priesthood, who had forfeited the respect of the
world even more by habitual simony than by the flagrant
corruption of their manners, were forced to receive German
after German as their bishop, at the bidding of a ruler so
powerful, so severe, and so pious. But Henry's encroachments
alarmed his own nobles no less than the Italians, and the
reaction, which might have been dangerous to himself, was
fatal to his successor. A mere chance, as some might call it,
determined the course of history. The great Emperor died
suddenly in A. D. 1056, and a child was left at the helm,
while storms were gathering that might have demanded the
wisest hand" (Bryce).
Hildebrand and Henry IV.
The child was Henry IV., of unfortunate memory; the storms
which beset him blew from Rome. The Papacy, lifted from its
degradation by Henry's father and grandfather, had recovered
its boldness of tone and enlarged its pretensions and claims.
It had come under the influence of an extraordinary man, the
monk Hildebrand, who swayed the councils of four popes before
he became pope himself (1073), and whose pontifical reign as
Gregory VII. is the epoch of greatest importance in the
history of the Roman Church. The overmastering ascendancy of
the popes, in the Church and over all who acknowledge its
communion, really began when this invincible monk was raised
to the papal throne. He broke the priesthood and the whole
hierarchy of the West to blind obedience by his relentless
discipline. He isolated them, as an order apart, by enforcing
celibacy upon them; and he extinguished the corrupting
practices of simony. Then, when he had marshalled the forces
of the Church, he proclaimed its independence and its
supremacy in absolute terms. In the growth of feudalism
throughout Europe, the Church had become compromised in many
ways with the civil powers. Its bishoprics and abbeys had
acquired extensively the nature of fiefs, and bishops and
abbots were required to do homage to a secular lord before
they could receive an "investiture" of the rich estates which
had become attached by a feudal tenure to their sees. The
ceremony of investiture, moreover, included delivery of the
crozier and the pastoral ring, which were the very symbols of
their spiritual office. Against this dependence of the Church
upon temporal powers, Gregory now arrayed it in revolt, and
began the "War of Investitures," which lasted for half a
century. The great battle ground was Germany; the Emperor, of
necessity, was the chief opponent; and Henry IV., whose youth
had been badly trained, and whose authority had been weakened
by a long, ill-guardianed minority, was at a disadvantage in
the contest. His humiliation at Canossa (1077), when he stood
through three winter days, a suppliant before the door of the
castle which lodged his haughty enemy, praying to be released
from the dread penalties of excommunication, is one of the
familiar tableaux of history. He had a poor revenge seven
years later, when he took Rome, drove Gregory into the castle
St. Angelo, and seated an anti-pope in the Vatican. But his
triumph was brief. There came to the rescue of the
beleaguered Pope certain new actors in Italian history, whom
it is now necessary to introduce.
{1023}
The Normans in Italy and Sicily.
The settlement of predatory Northmen on the Seine, which took
the name of Normandy and the constitution of a ducal fief of
France, had long since grown into an important
half-independent state. Its people--now called Normans in the
smoother speech of the South--had lost something of their
early rudeness, and had fallen a little under the spell of the
rising chivalry of the age; but the goad of a warlike temper
which drove their fathers out of Norway still pricked the sons
and sent them abroad, in restless search of adventures and
gain. Some found their way into the south of Italy, where
Greeks, Lombards and Saracens were fighting merrily, and where
a good sword and a tough lance were tools of the only industry
well-paid. Presently there was banded among them there a
little army, which found itself a match for any force that
Greek or Lombard, or other opponent, could bring against it,
and which proceeded accordingly to work its own will in the
land. It seized Apulia (1042) and divided it into twelve
countships, as an aristocratic republic. Pope Leo IX. led an
army against it and was beaten and taken prisoner (1053). To
release himself he was compelled to grant the duchy they had
taken to them, as a fief of the Church, and to extend his
grant to whatever they might succeed in taking, beyond it. The
chiefs of the Normans thus far had been, in succession, three
sons of a poor gentleman in the Cotentin, Tancred by name, who
now sent a fourth son to the scene. This new comer was Robert,
having the surname of Guiscard, who became the fourth leader
of the Norman troop (1057), and who, in a few years, assumed
the title of Duke of Calabria and Apulia. His duchies
comprised, substantially, the territory of the later kingdom
of Naples. A fifth brother, Roger, had meantime crossed to
Sicily, with a small following of his countrymen; and, between
1060 and 1090, had expelled the Saracens from that island, and
possessed it as a fief of his brother's duchy. But in the next
generation these relations between the two conquests were
practically reversed. The son of Roger received the title of
King of Sicily from the Pope, and Calabria and Apulia were
annexed to his kingdom, through the extinction of Robert's
family.
These Normans of Southern Italy were the allies who came to
the rescue of Pope Gregory, when the Emperor, Henry IV.,
besieged him in Castle St. Angelo. He summoned Robert Guiscard
as a vassal of the Church, and the response was prompt. Henry
and his Germans retreated when the Normans came near, and the
latter entered Rome (1084). Accustomed to pillage, they began,
soon, to treat the city as a captured place, and the Romans
rose against them. They retaliated with torch and sword, and
once more Rome suffered from the destroying rage of a
barbarous soldiery let loose. "Neither Goth nor Vandal,
neither Greek nor German, brought such desolation on the city
as this capture by the Normans" (Milman). Duke Robert made no
attempt to hold the ruined capital, but withdrew to his own
dominions. The Pope went with him, and died soon afterwards
(1085), unable to return to Rome. But the imperious temper he
had imparted to the Church was lastingly fixed in it, and his
lofty pretensions were even surpassed by the pontiffs who
succeeded him. He spoke for the Papacy the first syllables of
that awful proclamation that was sounded in its finality,
after eight hundred years, when the dogma of infallibility was
put forth.
Norman Conquest of England.
The Normans in Italy established no durable power. In another
quarter they were more fortunate. Their kinsmen, the Danes,
who subjugated England and annexed it to their own kingdom in
1016, had lost it again in 1042, when the old line of kings
was restored, in the person of Edward, called the Confessor.
But William, Duke of Normandy, had acquired, in the course of
these shiftings of the English crown, certain claims which he
put forth when Edward died, and when Harold, son of the great
Earl Godwine, was elected king to succeed him, in 1066. To
enforce his claim, Duke William, commissioned by the Pope,
invaded England, in the early autumn of that year, and won the
kingdom in the great and decisive battle of Senlac, or
Hastings, where Harold was slain. On Christmas Day he was
crowned, and a few years sufficed to end all resistance to his
authority. He established on the English throne a dynasty
which, though shifting sometimes to collateral lines, has held
it to the present day.
The Norman Conquest, as estimated by its greatest historian,
Professor Freeman, wrought more good effects than ill to the
English people. It did not sweep away their laws, customs or
language, but it modified them all, and not unfavorably; while
"it aroused the old national spirit to fresh life, and gave
the conquered people fellow-workers in their conquerors." The
monarchy was strengthened by William's advantages as a
conqueror, used with the wisdom and moderation of a statesman.
Feudalism came into England stripped of its disrupting forces;
and the possible alternative of absolutism was hindered by
potent checks. At the same time, the Conquest brought England
into relations with the Continent which might otherwise have
arisen very slowly, and thus gave an early importance to the
nation in European history.
The Crusades.
At the period now reached in our survey, all Europe was on the
eve of a profounder excitement and commotion than it had ever
before known--one which stirred it for the first time with a
common feeling and with common thoughts. A great cry ran
through it, for help to deliver the holy places of the
Christian faith from the infidels who possessed them. The
pious and the adventurous, the fanatical and the vagrant, rose
up in one motley and tumultuous response to the appeal, and
mobs and armies (hardly distinguishable) of Crusaders--
warriors of the Cross--began to whiten the highways into Asia
with their bones. The first movement, in 1096, swept 300,000
men, women and children, under Peter the Hermit, to their
death, with no other result; but nearly at the same time there
went an army, French and Norman for the most part, which made its
way to Jerusalem, took the city by assault (1099) and founded
a kingdom there, which defended itself for almost a hundred
years. Long before it fell, it was pressed sorely by the
surrounding Moslems and cried to Europe for help.
{1024}
A Second Crusade, in 1147, accomplished nothing for its
relief, but spent vast multitudes of lives; and when the
feeble kingdom disappeared, in 1187, and the Sepulchre of the
Saviour was defiled again by unbelievers, Christendom grew
wild, once more, with passion, and a Third Crusade was led by
the redoubtable Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, of Germany, King
Richard Cœur de Lion, of England, and King Philip Augustus of
France. The Emperor perished miserably on the way and his army
was wasted in its march; the French and English exhausted
themselves in sieges which won nothing of durable advantage to
the Christian world; the Sultan Saladin gathered most of the
laurels of the war.
The Turks on the Scene.
The armies of Islam which the Crusaders encountered in Asia
Minor and the Holy Land were no longer, in their leadership,
of the race of Mahomet. The religion of the Prophet was still
triumphant in the East, but his nation had lost its lordship,
and Western Asia had submitted to new masters. These were the
Turks--Turks of the House of Seljuk--first comers of their
swarm from the great Aral basin. First they had been
disciples, won by the early armed missionaries of the
Crescent; then servants and mercenaries, hired to fight its
battles and guard its princes, when the vigor of the Arab
conquerors began to be sapped, and their character to be
corrupted by luxury and pride; then, at last, they were
masters. About the middle of the ninth century, the Caliph at
Bagdad became a puppet in their hands, and the Moslem Empire
in Asia (Africa and Spain being divided between rival Caliphs)
soon passed under their control.
These were the possessors of Jerusalem and its sacred shrines,
whose grievous and insulting treatment of Christian pilgrims,
in the last years of the eleventh century, had stirred Europe
to wrath and provoked the great movement of the Crusades. The
movement had important consequences, both immediate and
remote; but its first effects were small in moment compared
with those which lagged after. To understand either, it will
be necessary to glance back at the later course of events in
the Eastern or Byzantine Empire.
The Byzantine Empire.
The fortunes of the Empire, since it gave up Syria and Egypt
to the Saracens, had been, on the whole, less unhappy than the
dark prospect at that time. It had checked the onrush of Arabs
at the Taurus mountain range, and retained Asia Minor; it had
held Constantinople against them through two terrible sieges;
it had fought for three centuries, and finally subdued, a new
Turanian enemy, the Bulgarians, who had established a kingdom
south of the Danube, where their name remains to the present
day. The history of its court, during much of the period, had
been a black and disgusting record of conspiracies,
treacheries, murders, mutilations, usurpations and foul vices
of every description; with now and then a manly figure
climbing to the throne and doing heroic things, for the most
part uselessly; but the system of governmental administration
seems to have been so well constructed that it worked with a
certain independence of its vile or imbecile heads, and the
country was probably better and better governed than its
court.
At Constantinople, notwithstanding frequent tumults and
revolutions, there had been material prosperity and a great
gathering of wealth. The Saracen conquests, by closing other
avenues of trade between the East and the West, had
concentrated that most profitable commerce in the Byzantine
capital. The rising commercial cities of Italy--Amalphi,
Venice, Genoa, Pisa--seated their enterprises there. Art and
literature, which had decayed, began then to revive, and
Byzantine culture, on its surface, took more of superiority to
that of Teutonic Europe.
The conquests of the Seljuk Turks gave a serious check to this
improvement of the circumstances of the Empire. Momentarily,
by dividing the Moslem power in Asia, they had opened an
opportunity to an energetic Emperor, Nicephorus Phocas, to
recover northern Syria and Cilicia (961-969). But when, in the
next century, they had won a complete mastery of the dominions
of the Caliphate of Bagdad, they speedily swept back the
Byzantines, and overran and occupied the most of Asia Minor
and Armenia. A decisive victory at Manzikert, in 1071, when
the emperor of the moment was taken prisoner and his army
annihilated, gave them well nigh the whole territory to the
Hellespont. The Empire was nearly reduced to its European
domain, and suffered ten years of civil war between rivals for
the throne.
At the end of that time it acquired a ruler, in the person of
Alexius Comnenus, who is the generally best known of all the
Byzantine line, because he figures notably in the stories of
the First Crusade. He was a man of crafty abilities and
complete unscrupulousness. He took the Empire at its lowest
state of abasement and demoralization. In the first year of
his reign he had to face a new enemy. Robert Guiscard, the
Norman, who had conquered a dukedom in Southern Italy, thought
the situation favorable for an attack on the Eastern Empire,
and for winning the imperial crown. Twice he invaded the Greek
peninsula (1081-1084) and defeated the forces brought against
him by Alexius; but troubles in Italy recalled him on the
first occasion, and his death brought the second expedition to
naught.
Such was the situation of the Byzantines when the waves of the
First Crusade, rolling Asia-ward, surged up to the gates of
Constantinople. It was a visitation that might well appall
them,--these hosts of knights and vagabonds, fanatics and
freebooters, who claimed and proffered help in a common
Christian war with the infidels, and who, nevertheless, had no
Christian communion with them--schismatics as they were,
outside the fold of the Roman shepherd. There is not a doubt
that they feared the crusading Franks more than they feared
the Turks. They knew them less, and the little hearsay
knowledge they had was of a lawless, barbarous, fighting
feudalism in the countries of the West,--more rough and
uncouth, at least, than their own defter methods of murdering
and mutilating one another. They received their dangerous
visitors with nervousness and suspicion; but Alexius Comnenus
proved equal to the delicate position in which he found
himself placed. He burdened his soul with lies and perfidies;
but he managed affairs so wonderfully that the Empire plucked
the best fruits of the first Crusades, by recovering a great
part of Asia Minor, with all the coasts of the Euxine and the
Ægean, from the weakened Turks. The latter were so far shaken
and depressed by the hard blows of the Crusaders that they
troubled the Byzantines very little in the century to come.
{1025}
But against this immediate gain to the Eastern Empire from the
early Crusades, there were serious later offsets. The commerce
of Constantinople declined rapidly, as soon as the Moslem
blockade of the Syrian coast line was broken. It lost its
monopoly. Trade ran back again into other reopened channels.
The Venetians and Genoese became more independent. Formerly,
they had received privileges in the Empire as a gracious
concession. Now they dictated the terms of their commercial
treaties and their naval alliances. Their rivalries with one
another involved the Empire in quarrels with both, and a state
of things was brought about which had much to do with the
catastrophe of 1204, when the fourth Crusade was diverted to
the conquest of Constantinople, and a Latin Empire supplanted
the Empire of the Roman-Greeks.
Effects of the Crusades.
Briefly noted, these were the consequences of the early
Crusades in the East. In western Europe they had slower, but
deeper and more lasting effects. They weakened feudalism, by
sending abroad so many of the feudal lords, and by
impoverishing so many more; whereby the towns gained more
opportunity for enfranchisement, and the crown, in France
particularly, acquired more power. They checked smaller wars
and private quarrels for a time, and gave in many countries
unwonted seasons of peace, during which the thoughts and
feelings of men were acted on by more civilizing influences.
They brought men into fellowship who were only accustomed to
fight one another, and thus softened their provincial and
national antipathies. They expanded the knowledge--the
experience--the ideas--of the whole body of those who visited
the East and who survived the adventurous expedition; made
them acquainted with civilizations at least more polished than
their own; taught them many things which they could only learn in
those days by actual sight, and sent them back to their homes
throughout Europe, to be instructors and missionaries, who did
much to prepare Western Christendom for the Renaissance or new
birth of a later time. The twelfth century--the century of the
great Crusades--saw the gray day-break in Europe after the
long night of darkness which settled down upon it in the
fifth. In the thirteenth it reached the brightening dawn, and
in the fifteenth it stood in the full morning of the modern
day. Among all the movements by which it was pushed out of
darkness into light, that of the Crusades would appear to have
been the most important; important in itself, as a social and
political movement of great change, and important in the seeds
that it scattered for a future harvest of effects.
In both the Byzantine and Arabian civilizations of the East
there was much for western Europe to learn. Perhaps there was
more in the last named than in the first; for the Arabs, when
they came out from behind their deserts, and exchanged the
nomadic life for the life of cities, had shown an amazing
avidity for the lingering science of old Greece, which they
encountered in Egypt and Syria. They had preserved far more of
it, and more of the old fineness of feeling that went with it,
than had survived in Greece itself, or in any part of the
Teutonized empire of Rome. The Crusaders got glimpses of its
influence, at least, and a curiosity was wakened, which sent
students into Moorish Spain, and opened scholarly interchanges
which greatly advanced learning in Europe.
Rising Power of the Church.
Not the least important effect of the Crusades was the
atmosphere of religion which they caused to envelope the great
affairs of the time, and which they made common in politics
and society. The influence of the Church was increased by
this; and its organization was powerfully strengthened by the
great monastic revival that followed presently: the rise of
purer and more strictly disciplined orders of the "regular"
(that is the secluded or monastic) clergy--Cistercians,
Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans, etc.; as well as the
creation of the great military-religious orders--Knights
Templars, Knights of the Hospital of St. John, Teutonic
Knights, and others, which were immediately connected with the
Crusades.
To say that the Church gained influence is to say that the
clergy gained it, and that the chief of the clergy, the Pope,
concentrated the gain in himself. The whole clerical body was
making encroachments in every field of politics upon the
domain of the civil authority, using shrewdly the advantages
of superior learning, and busying itself more and more in
temporal affairs. The popes after Gregory VII. maintained his
high pretensions and pursued his audacious course. In most
countries they encountered resistance from the Crown; but the
brunt of the conflict still fell upon the emperors, who, in
some respects, were the most poorly armed for it.
Guelfs and Ghibellines.
Henry IV., who outlived his struggle with Gregory, was beaten
down at last--dethroned by a graceless son, excommunicated by
a relentless Church and denied burial when he died (1106) by
its clergy. The rebellious son, Henry V., in his turn fought
the same battle over for ten years, and forced a compromise
which saved about half the rights of investiture that his
father had claimed. His death (1125) ended the Franconian
line, and the imperial crown returned for a few years to the
House of Saxony, by the election of the Duke Lothaire. But the
estates of the Franconian family had passed, by his mother, to
Frederick of Hohenstaufen, duke of Swabia; and now a bitter
feud arose between the House of Saxony and the House of
Hohenstaufen or Swabia,--a feud that was the most memorable
and, the longest lasting in history, if measured by the
duration of party strifes which began in it and which took
their names from it. For the raging factions of Guelfs and
Ghibellines which divided Italy for two centuries had their
beginning in this Swabian-Saxon feud, among the Germans. The
Guelfs were the partisans of the House of Saxony; the
Ghibellines were the party of the Hohenstaufens. The
Hohenstaufens triumphed when Lothaire died (1138), and made
Conrad of their House Emperor. They held the crown, moreover,
in their family for four generations, extending through more
than a century; and so it happened that the German name of the
German party of the Hohenstaufens came to be identified in
Italy with the party or faction in that country which
supported imperial interests and claims in the free cities and
against the popes. Whereupon the opposed party name was
borrowed from Germany likewise and applied to the Italian
faction which took ground against the Emperors--although these
Italian Guelfs had no objects in common with the partisans of
Saxony.
{1026}
The Hohenstaufens in Italy.
The first Hohenstaufen emperor was succeeded (1152) by his
nephew Frederick I., called Barbarossa, because of his red
beard. The long reign of Frederick, until 1190, was mainly
filled with wars and contentions in Italy, where he pushed the
old quarrel of the Empire with the Papacy, and where,
furthermore, he resolutely undertook to check the growing
independence of the Lombard cities. Five times during his
reign he led a great army into the peninsula, like a hostile
invader, and his destroying marches through the country, of
which he claimed to be sovereign, were like those of the
barbarians who came out of the North seven centuries before.
The more powerful cities, like Milan, were undoubtedly
oppressing their weaker neighbors, and Barbarossa assumed to
be the champion of the latter. But he smote impartially the
weak and the strong, the village and the town, which provoked
his arrogant temper in the slightest degree. Milan escaped his
wrath on the first visitation, but went down before it when he
came again (1158), and was totally destroyed, the inhabitants
being scattered in other towns. Even the enemies of Milan were
moved to compassion by the savageness of this punishment, and
joined, a few years later, in rebuilding the prostrate walls
and founding Milan anew. A great "League of Lombardy" was
formed by all the northern towns, to defend their freedom
against the hated Emperor, and the party of the Ghibellines
was reduced for the time to a feeble minority. Meantime
Barbarossa had forced his way into Rome, stormed the very
Church of St. Peter, and seated an anti-pope on the throne.
But a sudden pestilence fell upon his army, and he fled before
it, out of Italy, almost alone. Yet he never relaxed his
determination to bend both the Papacy and the Lombard
republics to his will. After seven years he returned, for the
fifth time, and it proved to be the last. The League met him
at Legnano (1176) and administered to him an overwhelming
defeat. Even his obstinacy was then overcome, and after a
truce of six years he made peace with the League and the Pope,
on terms which conceded most of the liberties that the cities
claimed. It was in the reign of Frederick that the name "Holy
Roman Empire" began, it seems, to be used.
Frederick died while on a crusade and was succeeded (1190) by
his son, Henry VI., who had married the daughter and heiress
of the King of Sicily and who acquired that kingdom in her
right. His short reign was occupied mostly in subduing the
Sicilian possession. When he died (1197) his son Frederick was
a child. Frederick succeeded to the crown of Sicily, but his
rights in Germany (where his father had already caused him to
be crowned "King of the Romans"--the step preliminary to an
imperial election) were entirely ignored. The German crown was
disputed between a Swabian and a Saxon claimant, and the
Saxon, Otho, was King and Emperor in name, until 1218, when he
died. But he, too, quarreled with a pope, about the lands of
the Countess Matilda, which she gave to the Church; and his
quarrel was with Innocent III., a pope who realized the
autocracy which Hildebrand had looked forward to, and who
lifted the Papacy to the greatest height of power it ever
attained. To cast down Otho, Innocent took up the cause of
Frederick, who received the royal crown a second time, at
Aix-la-Chapelle (1215) and the imperial crown at Rome (1220).
Frederick II. (his designation) was one of the few men of
actual genius who have ever sprung from the sovereign families
of the world; a man so far in advance of his time that he
appears like a modern among his mediæval contemporaries. He
was superior to the superstitions of his age,--superior to its
bigotries and its provincialisms. His large sympathies and
cosmopolitan frame of mind were acted upon by all the new
impulses of the epoch of the crusades, and made him reflect,
in his brilliant character, as in a mirror, the civilizing
processes that were working on his generation.
Between such an emperor as Frederick II. and such popes as
Innocent III. and his immediate successors, there could not
fail to be collision and strife. The man who might, perhaps,
under other circumstances, have given some quicker movement to
the hands which measure human, progress on the dial of time,
spent his life in barely proving his ability to live and reign
under the anathemas and proscriptions of the Church. But he
fought a losing fight, even when he seemed to be winning
victories in northern Italy, over the Guelf cities of
Lombardy, and when the party of the Ghibellines appeared to be
ascendant throughout the peninsula. His death (1250) was the
end of the Hohenstaufens as an imperial family. His son,
Conrad, who survived him four years, was king of Sicily and
had been crowned king of Germany; but he never wore the crown
imperial. Conrad's illegitimate brother, Manfred, succeeded on
the Sicilian throne; but the implacable Papacy gave his
kingdom to Charles of Anjou, brother of King Louis IX. of
France, and invited a crusade for the conquest of it. Manfred
was slain in battle, Conrad's young son, Conradin, perished on
the scaffold, and the Hohenstaufens disappeared from history.
Their rights, or claims, in Sicily and Naples, passed to the
Spanish House of Aragon, by the marriage of Manfred's daughter
to the Aragonese king; whence long strife between the House of
Anjou and the House of Aragon, and a troubled history for the
Neapolitans and the Sicilians during some centuries. In the
end, Anjou kept Naples, while Aragon won Sicily; the kings in
both lines called themselves Kings of Sicily, and a subsequent
re-union of the two crowns created a very queerly named
"Kingdom of the Two Sicilies."
{1027}
Germany and the Empire.
After the death of Frederick II., the German kings, while
maintaining the imperial title, practically abandoned their
serious attempts to enforce an actual sovereignty in Italy.
The Holy Roman Empire, as a political factor comprehending
more than Germany, now ceased in reality to exist. The name
lived on, but only to represent a flattering fiction for
magnifying the rank and importance of the German kings. In
Italy, the conflict, as between Papacy and Empire, or between
Lombard republican cities and Empire, was at an end. No
further occasion existed for an imperial party, or an
anti-imperial party. The Guelf and Ghibelline names and
divisions had no more the little meaning that first belonged
to them. But Guelfs and Ghibellines raged against one another,
more furiously than before, and generations passed before
their feud died out.
While the long, profitless Italian conflict of the Emperors
went on, their kingship in Germany suffered sorely. As they
grasped at a shadowy imperial title, the substance of royal
authority slipped from them. Their frequent prolonged absence
in Italy gave opportunities for enlarged independence to the
German princes and feudal lords; their difficulties beyond the
Alps forced them to buy support from their vassals at home by
fatal concessions and grants; their neglect of German affairs
weakened the ties of loyalty, and provoked revolts. The result
might have been a dissolution of Germany so complete as to
give rise to two or three strong states, if another potent
influence had not worked injury in a different way. This came
from the custom of equalized inheritance which prevailed among
the Germans. The law of primogeniture, which already governed
hereditary transmissions of territorial sovereignty in many
countries, even where it did not give an undivided private
estate, as in England, to the eldest son of a family, got
footing in Germany very late and very slowly. At the time now
described, it was the quite common practice to divide
principalities between all the sons surviving a deceased duke
or margrave. It was this practice which gave rise to the
astonishing number of petty states into which Germany came to
be divided, and the forms of which are still intact. It was
this, in the main, which prevented the growth of any states to
a power that would absorb the rest. On the other hand, the
flimsy, half fictitious general constitution which the Empire
substituted for such an one as the Kingdom of Germany would
naturally have grown into, made an effective centralization of
sovereignty--easy as the conditions seemed to be prepared for
it--quite impossible.
Free Cities in Germany and their Leagues.
One happy consequence of this state of things was the
enfranchisement, either wholly or nearly so, of many thriving
cities. The growth of cities, as centers of industry and
commerce, and the development of municipal freedom among them,
was considerably later in Germany than in Italy, France and
the Netherlands; but the independence gained by some among
them was more entire than in the Low Countries or in France,
and more lasting than in Italy.
Most of the free cities of Germany were directly or
immediately subject to the Emperor, and wholly independent of
the princes whose territories surrounded them; whence they
were called "imperial cities." This relationship bound them to
the Empire by strong ties; they had less to fear from it than
from the nearer small potentates of their country; and it
probably drew a considerable part of such strength as it
possessed, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, from their
support. Their own power was being augmented at this period by
the formation of extensive Leagues among them, for common
defense, and for the protection, regulation and extension of
their trade. In that age of lawless violence, there was so
little force in government, everywhere, and so entire a want
of co-operation between governments, that the operations of
trade were exposed to piracy, robbery, and black-mail, on
every sea and in every land. By the organization of their
Leagues, the energetic merchants of north-western Europe did
for themselves what their half-civilized governments failed to
do for them. They not only created effective agencies for the
protection of their trade, but they legislated, nationally and
internationally, for themselves, establishing codes and
regulations, negotiating commercial treaties, making war, and
exercising many functions and powers that seem strange to
modern times. The great Hansa, or Hanseatic League, which rose
to importance in the thirteenth century among the cities in
the north of Germany, was the most extensive, the longest
lasting and the most formidable of these confederations. It
controlled the trade between Germany, England, Russia, the
Scandinavian countries, and the Netherlands, and through the
latter it made exchanges with southern Europe and the East. It
waged successful war with Denmark, Sweden and Norway combined,
in defiance of the opposition of the Emperor and the Pope. But
the growth of its power engendered an arrogance which provoked
enmity in all countries, while the slow crystalizing of
nationalities in Europe, with national sentiments and
ambitions, worked in all directions against the commercial
monopoly of the Hansa towns. By the end of the fifteenth
century their league had begun to break up and its power to
decline. The lesser associations of similar character--such as
the Rhenish and the Swabian--had been shorter-lived.
The Great Interregnum.
These city-confederations represented in their time the only
movement of concentration that appeared in Germany. Every
other activity seemed tending toward dissolution. Headship
there was none for a quarter of a century after Frederick II.
died. The election of the Kings, who took rank and title as
Emperors when crowned by the Pope, had now become the
exclusive privilege of three prince-bishops and four temporal
princes, who acquired the title of Electors. Jealous of one
another, and of all the greater lords outside their electoral
college, it was against their policy to confer the scepter on
any man who seemed likely to wield it with a strong hand. For
twenty years--a period in German history known as the Great
Interregnum--they kept the throne practically vacant. Part of
the Electors were bribed to choose Richard, Earl of Cornwall,
brother of the English King Henry III., and the other part
gave their votes to Alfonso, King of Castile. Alfonso never
came to be crowned, either as King or Emperor; Richard was
crowned King, but exercised no power and lived mostly in his
own country. The Empire was virtually extinct; the Kingdom
hardly less so. Burgundy fell away from the imperial
jurisdiction even more than Italy did. Considerable parts of
it passed to France.
{1028}
Rise of the House of Austria.
At last, in 1273, the interregnum was ended by the election of
a German noble to be King of Germany. This was Rodolph, Count
of Hapsburg,--lord of a small domain and of little importance
from his own possessions, which explains, without doubt, his
selection. But Rodolph proved to be a vigorous king, and he
founded a family of such lasting stamina and such self-seeking
capability that it secured in time permanent possession of the
German crown, and acquired, outside of Germany, a great
dominion of its own. He began the aggrandizement of his House
by taking the fine duchy of Austria from the kingdom of
Bohemia and bestowing it upon his sons. He was energetic in
improving opportunities like this, and energetic, too, in
destroying the castles of robber-knights and hanging the
robbers on their own battlements; but of substantial authority
or power he had little enough. He never went to Rome for the
imperial crown; nor troubled himself much with Italian
affairs.
On Rodolph's death (1291), his son Albert of Austria was a
candidate for the crown. The Electors rejected him and ejected
another poor noble, Adolphus of Nassau; but Adolphus
displeased them after a few years, and they decreed his
deposition, electing Albert in his place. War followed and
Adolphus was killed. Albert's reign was one of vigor, but he
accomplished little of permanent effect. He planted one of his
sons on the throne of Bohemia, where the reigning family had
become extinct; but the new king died in a few months, much
hated, and the Bohemians resisted an Austrian successor. In
1308, Albert was assassinated, and the electors raised Count
Henry of Luxemburg to the throne, as Henry VII. Henry VII. was
the first king of Germany since the Hohenstaufens who went to
Italy (1310) for the crown of Lombardy and the crown of the
Cæsars, both of which he received. The Ghibelline party was
still strong among the Italians. In the distracted state of
that country there were many patriots--the poet Dante
prominent among them--who hoped great things from the
reappearance of an emperor; but the enthusiastic welcome he
received was mainly from those furious partisans who looked
for a party triumph to be won under the new emperor's lead.
When they found that he would not let himself be made an
instrument of faction in the unhappy country, they turned
against him. His undertakings in Italy promised nothing but
failure, when he died suddenly (1313), from poison, as the
Germans believed. His successor in Germany, chosen by the
majority of the electors, was Lewis of Bavaria; but Frederick
the Fair of Austria, supported by a minority, disputed the
election, and there was civil war for twelve years, until
Frederick, a prisoner, so won the heart of Lewis that the
latter divided the throne with him and the two reigned
together.
France under the Capetians.
While Germany and the fictitious Empire linked with it were
thus dropping from the foremost place in western Europe into
the background, several kingdoms were slowly emerging out of
the anarchy of feudalism, and acquiring the organization of
authority and law which creates stable and substantial power.
France for two centuries, under the first three Capetian
kings, had made little progress to that end. At the accession
(1103) of the fourth of those kings, namely, Louis VI., it is
estimated that the actual possessions of the Crown, over which
it exercised sovereignty direct, equalled no more than about
five of the modern departments of France; while twenty-nine
were in the great fiefs of Flanders, Burgundy, Champagne,
Normandy, Brittany, Anjou, Vermandois, and Boulogne, where the
royal authority was but nominal; thirty-three, south of the
Loire, were hardly connected with the Crown, and twenty-one
were then dependent on the Empire. The actual "France," as a
kingdom, at that time, was very small. "The real domain of
Louis VI. was almost confined to the five towns of Paris,
Orleans, Estampes, Melun, and Compiegne, and to estates in
their neighbourhood." But the strengthening of the Crown was
slightly begun in the reign of this king, by his wise policy
of encouraging the enfranchisement of the communes, as noted
before, which introduced a helpful alliance between the
monarchy and the burgher-class, or third estate, as it came to
be called, of the cities, against the feudal aristocracy.
But progress in that direction was slight at first and slowly
made. Louis VII., who came to the throne in 1137, acquired
momentarily the great duchy of Aquitaine, or Guienne, by his
marriage with Eleanor, who inherited it; but he divorced her,
and she married Henry Plantagenet, who became Henry II., King
of England, being at the same time Duke of Normandy, by
inheritance from his mother, and succeeding his father in
Anjou, Maine and Touraine. Eleanor having carried to him the
great Aquitanian domain of her family, he was sovereign of a
larger part of modern France than owned allegiance to the
French king.
French recovery of Normandy and Anjou,
But the next king in France, Philip, called Augustus (1180),
who was the son of Louis VII., wrought a change of these
circumstances. He was a prince of remarkable vigor, and he
rallied with rare ability all the forces that the Crown could
command. He wrested Vermandois from the Count of Flanders, and
extorted submission from the rebellious Duke of Burgundy.
Suspending his projects at home for a time, to go crusading to
the Holy Land in company with King Richard of England, he
resumed them with fresh energy after Richard's death. The
latter was succeeded by his mean brother John, who seems to
have been hated with unanimity. John was accused of the murder
of his young nephew, Arthur of Brittany, who disputed the
inheritance from Richard. As Duke of Normandy and Anjou, John,
though King of England, was nevertheless a vassal of the King
of France. Philip summoned him, on charges, to be tried by his
peers. John failed to answer the summons, and the forfeiture
of his fiefs was promptly declared. The French king stood well
prepared to make the confiscation effective, while John, in
serious trouble with his English subjects, could offer little
resistance. Thus the Norman realm of the English kings--their
original dominion--was lost beyond recovery, and with it Anjou
and Maine. They held Guienne and Poitou for some years; but
the bases of the French monarchy were broadened immensely from
the day when the great Norman and Angevin fiefs became royal
domain.
{1029}
The Albigenses.
Events in the south of France, during Philip's reign, prepared
the way for a further aggrandisement of the Crown. Ancient
Latin civilization had lingered longer there, in spirit, at
least, than in the central and northern districts of the
kingdom, and the state of society intellectually was both
livelier and more refined. It was the region of Europe where
thought first showed signs of independence, and where the
spiritual despotism of Rome was disputed first. A sect arose
in Languedoc which took its name from the district of Albi,
and which offended the Church perhaps more by the freedom of
opinion that it claimed than by the heresy of the opinions
themselves. These Albigeois, or Albigenses, had been at issue
with the clergy of their country and with the Papacy for some
years before Innocent III., the pontifical autocrat of his
age, proclaimed a crusade against them (1208), and launched
his sentence of excommunication against Raymond, Count of
Toulouse, who gave them countenance if not sympathy. The
fanatical Simon de Montfort, father of the great noble of like
name who figures more grandly in English history, took the
lead of the Crusade, to which bigots and brutal adventurers
flocked together. Languedoc was wasted with fire and sword,
and after twenty years of intermittent war, in which Peter of
Aragon took part, assisting the Albigeois, the Count of
Toulouse purchased peace for his ruined land by ceding part of
it to the king of France, and giving his daughter in marriage
to the king's brother Alphonso,--by which marriage the
remainder of the country was transferred, a few years later,
to the French crown.
The Battle of Bouvines.
Philip Augustus, in whose reign this brutal crushing of
Provençal France began, took little part in it, but he saw
with no unwillingness another too powerful vassal brought low.
The next blow of like kind he struck with his own hand. John
of England had quarreled with the mighty Pope Innocent III.;
his kingdom had been placed under interdict and his subjects
absolved from their allegiance. Philip of France eagerly
offered to become the executor of the papal decree, and
gathered an army for the invasion of England, to oust John
from his throne. But John hastened now to make peace with the
Church, submitting himself, surrendering his kingdom to the
Pope, and receiving it back as a papal fief. This
accomplished, the all-powerful pontiff persuaded the French
king to turn his army against the Count of Flanders, who had
never been reduced to a proper degree of submission to his
feudal sovereign. He seems to have become the recognized head
of a body of nobles who showed alarm and resentment at the
growing power of the Crown, and the war which ensued was quite
extraordinary in its political importance. King John of