Part 80

Outside of Europe, a new and strange power had now risen, and had spread its forces with extraordinary rapidity around the southern and eastern circuit of the Mediterranean, until it troubled both extremities of the northern shore. This was the power of Islam--the proselyting, war-waging religion of Mahomet, the Arabian prophet. At the death of Mahomet, in 632, he was lord of Arabia, and his armies had just crossed the border, to attack the Syrian possessions of the Eastern Roman Empire. In seven years from that time, the whole of Palestine and Syria had been overrun, Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch, and all the strong cities taken, and Roman authority expelled. In two years more, they had dealt the last blow to the Sassanian monarchy in Persia and shattered it forever. At the same time they were besieging Alexandria and adding Egypt to their conquests. In 668, only thirty-six years after the death of the Prophet, they were at the gates of Constantinople, making the first of their many attempts to gain possession of the New Rome. In 698 they had taken Carthage, had occupied all North Africa to the Atlantic coast, had converted the Mauretanians, or Moors, and absorbed them into their body politic as well as into their communion. In 711 the commingled Arabs and Moors crossed the Straits and entered Spain, and the overthrow of the Christian kingdom of the Visigoths was practically accomplished in a single battle that same year. Within two years more, the Moors (as they came to be most commonly called) were in possession of the whole southern, central, and eastern parts of the Spanish peninsula, treating the inhabitants who had not fled with a more generous toleration than differing Christians were wont to offer to one another. The Spaniards (a mixed population of Roman, Suevic, Gothic, and aboriginal descent) who did, not submit, took refuge in the mountainous region of the Asturias and Galicia, where they maintained their independence, and, in due time, became aggressive, until, after eight centuries, they recovered their whole land.

The Eastern Empire.

At the East, as we have seen, the struggle of the Empire with the Arabs began at the first moment of their career of foreign conquest. They came upon it when it was weak from many wounds, and exhausted by conflict with many foes. Before the death of Justinian (565), the transient glories of his reign had been waning fast. His immediate successor saw the work of Belisarius and Narses undone, for the most part, and the Italian peninsula overrun by a new horde of barbarians, more rapacious and more savage than the Goths. At the same time, the Persian war broke out again, and drained the imperial resources to pay for victories that had no fruit. Two better and stronger emperors--Tiberius and Maurice--who came after him, only made an honorable struggle, without leaving the Empire in a better state. Then a brutal creature--Phocas--held the throne for eight years (602-610) and sunk it very low by his crimes. The hero, Heraclius, who was now raised to power, came too late. Assailed suddenly, at the very beginning of his reign, by a fierce Persian onset, he was powerless to resist. Syria, Egypt and Asia Minor were successively ravaged and conquered by the Persian arms. They came even to the Bosphorus, and for ten years they held its eastern shore and maintained a camp within sight of Constantinople itself; while the wild Tartar nation of the Avars raged, at the same time, through the northern and western provinces of the Empire, and threatened the capital on its landward sides. The Roman Empire was reduced, for a time, to "the walls of Constantinople, with the remnant of Greece, Italy, and Africa, and some maritime cities, from Tyre to Trebizond, of the Asiatic coast." But in 622 Heraclius turned the tide of disaster and rolled it back upon his enemies. Despite an alliance of the Persians with the Avars, and their combined assault upon Constantinople in 626, he repelled the latter, and wrested from the former, in a series of remarkable campaigns, all the territory they had seized. He had but just accomplished this great deliverance of his dominions, when the Arabs came upon him, as stated above. There was no strength left in the Empire to resist the terrible prowess of these warriors of the desert. They extinguished its authority in Syria and Egypt, as we have seen, in the first years of their career; but then turned their arms to the East and the West, and were slow in disputing Asia Minor with its Christian lords. "From the time of Heraclius the Byzantine theatre is contracted and darkened: the line of empire which had been defined by the laws of Justinian and the arms of Belisarius recedes on all sides from our view" (Gibbon). There was neither vigor nor virtue in the descendants of Heraclius; and when the last of them was destroyed by a popular rising against his vicious tyranny (711), revolution followed revolution so quickly that three reigns were begun and ended in six years.

The so-called Byzantine Empire.

Then came to the throne a man of strong character, who redeemed it at least from contempt; who introduced a dynasty which endured for a century, and whose reign is the beginning of a new era in the history of the Eastern Empire, so marked that the Empire has taken from that time, in the common usage, a changed name, and is known thenceforth as the Byzantine, rather than the Eastern or the Greek. This was Leo the Isaurian, who saved Constantinople from a second desperate Moslem siege; who checked for a considerable period the Mahometan advance in the East; who reorganized the imperial administration on lasting lines; and whose suppression of image-worship in the Christian churches of his empire led to a rupture with the Roman Church in the West,--to the breaking of all relations of dependence in Rome and Italy upon the Empire in the East, and to the creating of a new imperial sovereignty in Western Europe which claimed succession to that of Rome.

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Lombard Conquest of Italy.

On the conquest of Italy by Belisarius and Narses, for Justinian, the eunuch Narses, as related before, was made governor, residing at Ravenna, and bearing the title of Exarch. In a few years he was displaced, through the influence of a palace intrigue at Constantinople. To be revenged, it is said that he persuaded the Lombards, a German tribe lately become threatening on the Upper Danube, to enter Italy. They came, under their leader Alboin, and almost the whole northern and middle parts of the peninsula submitted to them with no resistance. Pavia stood a siege for three years before it surrendered to become the Lombard capital; Venice received an added population of fugitives, and was safe in her lagoons--like Ravenna, where the new Exarch watched the march of Lombard conquest, and scarcely opposed it. Rome was preserved, with part of southern Italy and with Sicily; but no more than a shadow of the sovereignty of the Empire now stretched westward beyond the Adriatic.

Temporal Power of the Popes.

The city of Rome, and the territory surrounding it, still owned a nominal allegiance to the Emperor at Constantinople; but their immediate and real ruler was the Bishop of Rome, who had already acquired, in a special way, the fatherly name of "Papa" or Pope. Many circumstances had combined to place both spiritual and temporal power in the hands of these Christian pontiffs of Rome. They may have been originally, in the constitution of the Church, on an equal footing of ecclesiastical authority with the four other chiefs of the hierarchy--the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem; but the great name of Rome gave them prestige and weight of superior influence to begin with. Then, they stood, geographically and sympathetically, in nearest relations with that massive Latin side of Christendom, in western Europe, which was never much disturbed by the raging dogmatic controversies that tore and divided the Church on its Eastern, Greek side. It was inevitable that the Western Church should yield homage to one head--to one bishopric above all other bishoprics; and it was more inevitable that the See of Rome should be that one. So the spiritual supremacy to which the Popes arrived is easily enough explained. The temporal authority which they acquired is accounted for as obviously. Even before the interruption of the line of emperors in the West, the removal of the imperial residence for long periods from Rome, to Constantinople, to Milan, to Ravenna, left the Pope the most impressive and influential personage in the ancient capital. Political functions were forced on him, whether he desired to exercise them or not. It was Pope Leo who headed the embassy to Attila, and saved the city from the Huns. It was the same Pope who pleaded for it with the Vandal king, Genseric. And still more and more, after the imperial voice which uttered occasional commands to his Roman subjects was heard from a distant palace in Constantinople, and in accents that had become wholly Greek, the chair of St. Peter grew throne-like,--the respect paid to the Pope in civil matters took on the spirit of obedience, and his aspect before the people became that of a temporal prince.

This process of the political elevation of the Papacy was completed by the Lombard conquest of Italy. The Lombard kings were bent upon the acquisition of Rome; the Popes were resolute and successful in holding it against them. At last the Papacy made its memorable and momentous alliance with the Carolingian chiefs of the Franks. It assumed the tremendous super-imperial right and power to dispose of crowns, by taking that of the kingdom of the Franks from Childeric and giving it to Pippin (751); and this was the first assumption of that right by the chief priest of Western Christendom. In return, Pippin led an army twice to Italy (754-755), humbled the Lombards, took from them the exarchate of Ravenna and the Pentapolis (a district east of the Appenines, between Ancona and Ferrara), and transferred this whole territory as a conqueror's "donation" to the Apostolic See. The temporal sovereignty of the Popes now rested on a base as political and as substantial as that of the most worldly and vulgar potentates around them.

Charlemagne's restored Roman Empire.

Pippin's greater son, Charlemagne, renewed the alliance of his house with the Papacy, and strengthened it by completing the conquest of the Lombards, extinguishing their kingdom (774), and confirming his father's donation of the States of the Church. Charlemagne was now supreme in Italy, and the Pope became the representative of his sovereignty at Rome,--a position which lastingly enhanced the political importance of the Roman See in the peninsula. But while Pope and King stood related, in one view, as agent and principal, or subject and sovereign, another very different relationship slowly shaped itself in the thoughts of one, if not of both. The Western Church had broken entirely with the Eastern, on the question of image-worship; the titular sovereignty of the Eastern Emperor in the ancient Roman capital was a worn-out fiction; the reign of a female usurper, Irene, at Constantinople afforded a good occasion for renouncing and discarding it. But a Roman Emperor there must be, somewhere, for lesser princes and sovereigns to do homage to; the political habit and feeling of the European world, shaped and fixed by the long domination of Rome, still called for it. "Nor could the spiritual head of Christendom dispense with the temporal; without the Roman Empire there could not be," according to the feeling of the ninth century, "a Roman, nor by necessary consequence a Catholic and Apostolic Church." For "men could not separate in fact what was indissoluble in thought: Christianity must stand or fall along with the great Christian state: they were but two names for one and the same thing" (Bryce). Therefore the head of the Church, boldly enlarging the assumption of his predecessor who bestowed the crown of the Merovingians upon Pippin, now took it upon himself to set the diadem of the Cæsars on the head of Charlemagne. On the Christmas Day, in the year 800, in the basilica of St. Peter, at Rome, the solemn act of coronation was performed by Pope Leo III.; the Roman Empire lived again, in the estimation of that age, and Charles the Great reopened the interrupted line of successors to Augustus.

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Before this imperial coronation of Charlemagne occurred, he had already made his dominion imperial in extent, by the magnitude of his conquests. North, south, east, and west, his armies had been everywhere victorious. In eighteen campaigns against the fierce and troublesome Saxons, he subdued those stubborn pagans and forced them to submit to a Christian baptism--with how much of immediate religious effect may be easily surmised. But by opening a way for the more Christ-like missionaries of the cross, who followed him, this missionary of the battle-ax did, no doubt, a very real apostolic work. He checked the ravages of the piratical Danes. He crushed the Avars and took their country, which comprised parts of the Austria and Hungary of the present day. He occupied Bavaria, on the one hand, and Brittany on the other. He crossed the Pyrenees to measure swords with the Saracens, and drove them from the north of Spain, as far as the Ebro. His lordship in Italy has been noticed already. He was unquestionably one of the greatest monarchs of any age, and deserves the title Magnus, affixed to his name, if that title ever has been deserved by the kings who were flattered with it. There was much more in his character than the mere aggressive energy which subjugated so wide a realm. He was a man of enlightenment far beyond his time; a man who strove after order, in that disorderly age, and who felt oppressed by the ignorance into which the world had sunk. He was a seeker after learning, and the friend and patron of all in his day who groped in the darkness and felt their way towards the light. He organized his Empire with a sense of political system which was new among the Teutonic masters of Western Europe (except as shown by Theodoric in Italy); but there were not years enough in his own life for the organism to mature, and his sons brought back chaos again.

Appearance of the Northmen.

Before Charlemagne died (814) he saw the western coasts and river valleys of his Empire harried by a fresh outpouring of sea-rovers from the far North, and it is said that he had sad forebodings of the affliction they would become to his people thereafter. These new pirates of the North Sea, who took up, after several centuries, the abandoned trade of their kinsmen, the Saxons (now retired from their wild courses and respectably settled on one side of the water, while subdued and kept in order on the other), were of the bold and rugged Scandinavian race, which inhabited the countries since known as Denmark, Sweden and Norway. They are more or less confused under the general name of Northmen, or Norsemen--men of the North; but that term appears to have been applied more especially to the freebooters from the Norwegian coast, as distinguished from the "Danes" of the lesser peninsula. It is convenient, in so general a sketch as this, to ignore the distinction, and to speak of the Northmen as inclusive, for that age, of the whole Scandinavian race.

Their visitations began to terrify the coasts of England, France and Germany, and the lower valleys of the rivers which they found it possible to ascend, some time in the later half of the eighth century. It is probable that their appearance on the sea at this time, and not before, was due to a revolution which united Norway under a single king and a stronger government, and which, by suppressing independence and disorder among the petty chiefs, drove many of them to their ships and sent them abroad, to lead a life of lawlessness more agreeable to their tastes. It is also probable that the northern countries had become populated beyond their resources, as seemed to have happened before, when the Goths swarmed out, and that the outlet by sea was necessarily and deliberately opened. Whatever the cause, these Norse adventurers, in fleets of long boats, issued with some suddenness from their "vics," or fiords (whence the name "viking"), and began an extraordinary career. For more than half a century their raids had no object but plunder, and what they took they carried home to enjoy. First to the Frisian coast, then to the Rhine--the Seine--the Loire,--they came again and again to pillage and destroy; crossing at the same time to the shores of their nearest kinsmen--but heeding no kinship in their savage and relentless forays along the English coasts--and around to Ireland and the Scottish islands, where their earliest lodgments were made.

The Danes in England.

About the middle of the ninth century they began to seize tracts of land in England and to settle themselves there in permanent homes. The Angles in the northern and eastern parts and the Saxons in the southern part of England had weakened themselves and one another by rivalry and war between their divided kingdoms. There had been for three centuries an unceasing struggle among them for supremacy. At the time of the coming of the Danes (who were prominent in the English invasion and gave their name to it), the West Saxon kings had won a decided ascendancy. The Danes, by degrees, stripped them of what they had gained. Northumberland, Mercia and East Anglia were occupied in succession, and Wessex itself was attacked. King Alfred, the great and admirable hero of early English history, who came to the throne in 871, spent the first eight years of his reign in a deadly struggle with the invaders. He was obliged in the end to concede to them the whole northeastern part of England, from the Thames to the Tyne, which was known thereafter as "the Danelaw"; but they became his vassals, and submitted to Christian baptism. A century later, the Norse rovers resumed their attacks upon England, and a cowardly English king, distrusting the now settled and peaceful Danes, ordered an extensive massacre of them (1002). The rage which this provoked in Denmark led to a great invasion of the country. England was completely conquered, and remained subject to the Danish kings until 1042, when its throne was recovered for a brief space of time by the English line.

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The Normans in Normandy.

Meanwhile the Northmen had gained a much firmer and more important footing in the territory of the Western Franks--which had not yet acquired the name of France. The Seine and its valley attracted them again and again, and after repeated expeditions up the river, even to the city of Paris, which they besieged several times, one of their chiefs, Rolf or Rollo, got possession of Rouen and began a permanent settlement in the country. The Frank King, Charles the Simple, now made terms with Rollo and granted him a district at the mouth of the Seine, (912), the latter acknowledging the suzerainty or feudal superiority of Charles, and accepting at the same time the doubly new character of a baptised Christian and a Frankish Duke. The Northmen on the Seine were known thenceforth as Normans, their dukedom as Normandy, and they played a great part in European history during the next two centuries.

The Northmen in the West.

The northern sea-rovers who had settled neither in Ireland, England, nor Frankland, went farther afield into the West and North and had wonderful adventures there. They took possession of the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Hebrides, and other islands in those seas, including Man, and founded a powerful island-kingdom, which they held for a long period. Thence they passed on to Faroë and Iceland, and in Iceland, where they lived peaceful and quiet lives of necessity, they founded an interesting republic, and developed a very remarkable civilization, adorned by a literature which the world is learning more and more to admire. From Iceland, it was a natural step to the discovery of Greenland, and from Greenland, there is now little doubt that they sailed southwards and saw and touched the continent of America, five centuries before Columbus made his voyage.

The Northmen in the East.

While the Northmen of the ninth and tenth centuries were exciting and disturbing all Western Europe by their naval exploits, other adventurers from the Swedish side of the Scandinavian country were sallying eastwards under different names. Both as warriors and as merchants, they made their way from the Baltic to the Black Sea and the Bosphorus, and bands of them entered the service of the Eastern Emperor, at Constantinople, where they received the name of Varangians, from the oath by which they bound themselves. One of the Swedish chiefs, Rurik by name, was chosen by certain tribes of the country now called Russia, to be their prince. Rurik's capital was Novgorod, where he formed the nucleus of a kingdom which grew, through many vicissitudes, into the modern empire of Russia. His successors transferred their capital to Kief, and ultimately it was shifted again to Moscow, where the Muscovite princes acquired the title, the power, and the great dominion of the Czars of all the Russias.

The Slavonic Race.

The Russian sovereigns were thus of Swedish origin; but their subjects were of another race. They belonged to a branch of the great Aryan stock, called the Slavic or Slavonic, which was the last to become historically known. The Slavonians bore no important part in events that we have knowledge of until several centuries of the Christian era had passed. They were the obscure inhabitants in that period of a wide region in Eastern Europe, between the Vistula and the Caspian. In the sixth century, pressed by the Avars, they crossed the Vistula, moving westwards, along the Baltic; and, about the same time they moved southwards, across the Danube, and established the settlements which formed the existing Slavonic states in South-eastern Europe--Servia, Croatia and their lesser neighbors. But the principal seat of the Slavonic race within historic times has always been in the region still occupied by its principal representatives, the Russians and the Poles.

Mediæval Society.--The Feudal System.