Part 82

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.

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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.

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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.