Part 85

John left a son, a lad of nine years, who grew to be a better man than himself, though not a good king, for he was weak and untruthful in character, though amiable and probably well-meaning. He held the throne for fifty-six years, during which long time, after his minority was passed, no minister of ability and honorable character could get and keep office in the royal service. He was jealous of ministers, preferring mere administrative clerks; while he was docile to favorites, and picked them for the most part from a swarm of foreign adventurers whom the nation detested. The Great Charter of his father had been reaffirmed in his name soon after he received the crown, and in 1225 he was required to issue it a third time, as the condition of a grant of money; but he would not rule honestly in compliance with its provisions, and sought continually to lay and collect heavy taxes in unlawful ways. He spent money extravagantly, and was foolish and reckless in foreign undertakings, accepting, for example, the Kingdom of Sicily, offered to his son Edmund by the Pope, whose gift could only be made good by force of arms. At the same time he was servile to the popes, whose increasing demands for money from England were rousing even the clergy to resistance. So the causes of discontent grew abundantly until they brought it to a serious head. All classes of the people were drawn together again, as they had been to resist the aggressions of John. The great councils of the kingdom, or assemblies of barons and bishops (which had taken the place of the witenagemot of the old English time, and which now began to be called Parliaments), became more and more united against the king. At last the discontent found a leader of high capacity and of heroic if not blameless character, in Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester. Simon de Montfort was of foreign birth,--son of that fanatical crusader of the same name, who spread ruin over the fair country of the Albigeois. The English earldom of Leicester had passed to his family, and the younger Simon, receiving it, came to England and became an Englishman. After some years he threw himself into the struggle with the Crown, and his leadership was soon recognized. In 1258, a parliament held at London compelled the king to consent to the appointment of an extraordinary commission of twenty-four barons, clothed with full power to reform the government. The commission was named at a subsequent meeting of parliament, the same year, at Oxford, where the grievances to be redressed were set forth in a paper known as the Provisions of Oxford. From the twenty-four commissioners there were chosen fifteen to be the King's Council. This was really the creation of a new constitution for the kingdom, and Henry swore to observe it. But ere long he procured a bull from the Pope, absolving him from his oath, and he began to prepare for throwing off the restraints that had been put upon him. The other side took up arms, under Simon's lead; but peace was preserved for a time by referring all questions in dispute to the arbitration of Louis IX. of France. The arbiter decided against the barons (1264) and Montfort's party refused to abide by the award. Then followed the civil conflict known as the Barons' War. The king was defeated and taken prisoner, and was obliged to submit to conditions which practically transferred the administration of the government to three counsellors, of whom Simon de Montfort was the chief.

Development of the English Parliament;

In January, 1265, a memorable parliament was called together. It was the first national assembly in which the larger element of the English Commons made its appearance; for Montfort had summoned to it certain representatives of borough towns, along with the barons, the bishops and the abbots, and along, moreover, with representative knights, who had been gaining admittance of late years to what now became a convocation of the Three Estates. The parliamentary model thus roughly shaped by the great Earl of Leicester was not continuously followed until another generation came; but it is his glory, nevertheless, to have given to England the norm and principle on which its unexampled parliament was framed. By dissensions among themselves, Simon de Montfort and his party soon lost the great advantage they had won, and on another appeal to arms they were defeated (1265) by the king's valiant and able son, afterwards King Edward I., and Montfort was slain. It was seven years after this before Edward succeeded his father, and nine before he came to the throne, because he was absent on a Crusade; but when he did, it was to prove himself, not merely one of the few statesmen-kings of England, but one large enough in mind to take lessons from the vanquished enemies of the Crown. He, in reality, took up the half-planned constitutional work of Simon de Montfort, in the development of the English Parliament as a body representative of all orders in the nation, and carried it forward to substantial completion. He did it because he had wit to see that the people he ruled could be led more easily than they could be driven, and that their free-giving of supplies to the Crown would be more open-handed than their giving under compulsion. The year 1295 "witnessed the first summons of a perfect and model parliament; the clergy represented by their bishops, deans, archdeacons, and elected proctors; the barons summoned severally in person by the king's special writ, and the commons summoned by writs addressed to the sheriffs, directing them to send up two elected knights from each shire, two elected citizens from each city, and two elected burghers from each borough" (Stubbs). {1034} Two years later, the very fundamental principle of the English Constitution was established, by a Confirmation of the Charters, conceded in Edward's absence by his son, but afterwards assented to by him, which definitely renounced the right of the king to tax the nation without its consent. Thus the reign of Edward I. was really the most important in the constitutional history of England. It was scarcely less important in the history of English jurisprudence; for Edward was in full sympathy with the spirit of an age in which the study and reform of the law were wonderfully awakened throughout Europe. The great statutes of his reign are among the monuments of Edward's statesmanship, and not the least important of them are those by which he checked the encroachments of the Church and its dangerous acquisition of wealth.

At the same time, the temper of this vigorous king was warlike and aggressive. He subdued the Welsh and annexed Wales as a principality to England. He enforced the feudal supremacy which the English kings claimed over Scotland, and, upon the Scottish throne becoming vacant, in 1290, seated John Baliol, as a vassal who did homage to him. The war of Scottish Independence then ensued, of which William Wallace and Robert Bruce were the heroes. Wallace perished on an English scaffold in 1305; Bruce, the next year, secured the Scottish crown, and eventually broke the bonds in which his country was held.

Edward I. died in 1307, and his kingly capability died with him. He transmitted neither spirit nor wisdom to his son, the second Edward, who gave himself and his kingdom up to foreign favorites, as his grandfather had done. His angry subjects practically took the government out of his hands (1310), and confided it to a body of twenty-one members, called Ordainers. His reign of twenty years was one of protracted strife and disorder; but the constitutional power of Parliament made gains. In outward appearance, however, there was nothing to redeem the wretchedness of the time. The struggle of factions was pushed to civil war; while Scotland, by the great blow struck at Bannockburn (1314), made her independence complete. In 1322, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, whose descent was as royal as the king's, but who headed the opponents of Edward and Edward's unworthy favorites, was defeated in battle, taken prisoner, and brought to the block. This martyrdom, as it was called, embalmed Lancaster's memory in the hearts of the people.

Edward III. and his French Claims.

The queen of Edward II., Isabella of France, daughter of Philip the Fair, made, at last, common cause with his enemies. In January, 1327, he was forced to formally resign the crown, and in September of the same year he was murdered, the queen, with little doubt, assenting to the deed. His son, Edward III., who now came to the throne, founded claims to the crown of France upon the rights of his mother, whose three brothers, as we have seen, had been crowned in succession and had died, bringing the direct line of royalty in France to an end. By this claim the two countries were plunged into the miseries of the dreadful Hundred Years War, and the progress of civilization in Europe was seriously checked.

Recovery of Christian Spain.

Before entering that dark century of war, it will be necessary to go back a little in time, and carry our survey farther afield, in the countries of Europe more remote from the center of the events we have already scanned. In Spain, for example, there should be noticed, very briefly, the turning movement of the tide of Mahometan conquest which drove the Spanish Christians into the mountains of the North. In the eighth century, their little principality of Asturia had widened into the small kingdom of Leon, and the eastern county of Leon had taken the name of Castella (Castile) from the number of forts or castles with which it bristled, on the Moorish border. East of Leon, in the Pyrenees, there grew up about the same time the kingdom of Navarre, which became important in the eleventh century, under an enterprising king, Sancho the Great, who seized Castile and made a separate kingdom of it, which he bequeathed to his son. The same Navarrese king extended his dominion over a considerable part of the Spanish March, which Charlemagne had wrested from the Moors in the ninth century, and out of this territory the kingdom of Aragon was presently formed. These four kingdoms, of Leon, Navarre, Castile, and Aragon, were shuffled together and divided again, in changing combinations, many times during the next century or two; but Castile and Leon were permanently united in 1230. Meantime Portugal, wrested from the Moors, became a distinct kingdom; while Navarre was reduced in size and importance. Castile, Aragon, and Portugal are from that time the Christian Powers in the Peninsula which carried on the unending war with their Moslem neighbors. By the end of the thirteenth century they had driven the Moors into the extreme south of the peninsula, where the latter, thenceforth, held little beyond the small kingdom of Granada, which defended itself for two centuries more.

Moorish Civilization and its Decay.

The Christians were winners and the Moslems were losers in this long battle, because adversity had disciplined the one and prosperity had relaxed and vitiated the other. Success bred disunion, and the spoils of victory engendered corruption, among the followers of Mahomet, very quickly in their career. The middle of the eighth century was hardly passed when the huge empire they had conquered broke in twain, and two Caliphates on one side of the Mediterranean, imitated the two Roman Empires on the other. We have seen how the Caliphate of the East, with its seat at Bagdad, went steadily to wreck; but fresh converts of Islam, out of deserts at the North, were in readiness, there, to gather the fragments and construct a new Mahometan power. In the West, where the Caliphs held their court at Cordova, the same crumbling of their power befell them, through feuds and jealousies and the decay of a sensuous race; but there were none to rebuild it in the Prophet's name. The Moor gave way to the Castilian in Spain for reasons not differing very much from the reasons which explain the supplanting of the Arab by the Turk in the East.

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While its grandeur lasted in Spain,--from the eighth to the eleventh centuries--the empire of the Saracens, or Moors, was the most splendid of its age. It developed a civilization which must have been far finer, in the superficial showing, and in much of its spirit as well, than anything found in Christian Europe at that time. Its religious temper was less fierce and intolerant. Its intellectual disposition was towards broader thinking and freer inquiry. Its artistic feeling was truer and more instinctive. It took lessons from classic learning and philosophy before Germanized Europe had become aware of the existence of either, and it gave the lessons at second hand to its Christian neighbors. Its industries were conducted with a knowledge and a skill that could be found among no other people. Says Dr. Draper: "Europe at the present day does not offer more taste, more refinement, more elegance, than might have been seen, at the epoch of which we are speaking, in the capitals of the Spanish Arabs. Their streets were lighted and solidly paved. Their houses were frescoed and carpeted; they were warmed in winter by furnaces, and cooled in summer with perfumed air brought by underground pipes from flower beds. They had baths, and libraries, and dining halls, fountains of quicksilver and water. City and country were full of conviviality, and of dancing to lute and mandolin. Instead of the drunken and gluttonous wassail orgies of their northern neighbors, the feasts of the Saracens were marked with sobriety."

The brilliancy of the Moorish civilization seems like that of some short-lived flower, which may spring from a thin soil of no lasting fertility. The qualities which yielded it had their season of ascendancy over the deeper-lying forces that worked in the Gothic mind of Christian Spain; but time exhausted the one, while it matured the other.

Mediæval Spanish Character.

There seems to be no doubt that the long conflict of races and religions in the peninsula affected the character of the Spanish Christians more profoundly, both for good and for ill, than it affected the people with whom they strove. It hardened and energized them, preparing them for the bold adventures they were soon to pursue in a new-found world, and for a lordly career in all parts of the rounded globe. It embittered and gave fierceness to a sentiment among them which bore some likeness to religion, but which was, in reality, the partisanship of a church, and not the devotion of a faith. It tended to put bigotry in the place of piety--religious rancor in the place of charity--priests and images in the place of Christ--much more among the Spaniards than among other peoples; for they, alone, were Crusaders against the Moslem for eight hundred years.

Early Free Institutions in Spain.

The political effects of those centuries of struggle in the peninsula were also remarkable and strangely mixed. In all the earlier stages of the national development, until the close of the mediæval period, there seems to have been as promising a growth of popular institutions, in most directions, as can be found in England itself. Apparently, there was more good feeling between classes than elsewhere in Europe. Nobles, knights and commons fought side by side in so continuous a battle that they were more friendly and familiar in acquaintance with one another. Moreover, the ennobled and the knighted were greatly more numerous in Spain than in the neighboring countries. The kings were lavish of such honors in rewarding valor, on every battlefield and after every campaign. It was impossible, therefore, for so great a distance to widen between the grandee and the peasant or the burgher as that which separated the lord and the citizen in Germany or France. The division of Christian Spain into several petty kingdoms, and the circumstances under which they were placed, retarded the growth of monarchical power, and yet did not tend to a feudal disintegration of society; because the pressure of its perpetual war with the infidels forced the preservation of a certain degree of unity, sufficient to be a saving influence. At the same time, the Spanish cities became prosperous, and naturally, in the circumstances of the country, acquired much freedom and many privileges. The inhabitants of some cities in Aragon enjoyed the privileges of nobility as a body; the magistrates of other cities were ennobled. Both in Aragon and Castile, the towns had deputies in the Cortes before any representatives of boroughs sat in the English Parliament; and the Cortes seems to have been, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a more potent factor in government than any assembly of estates in any other part of Europe.

But something was wanting in Spain that was not wanting in England and in the Netherlands, for example, to complete the evolution of a popular government from this hopeful beginning. And the primary want, it would seem, was a political sense or faculty in the people. To illustrate this in one particular: the Castilian Commons did not grasp the strings of the national purse when they had it in their hands, as the practical Englishmen did. They allowed the election of deputies from the towns to slip out of their hands and to become an official function of the municipalities, where it was corrupted and controlled by the Crown. In Aragon, the popular rights were more efficiently maintained, perhaps; but even there the political faculty of the people must have been defective, as compared with that of the nations in the North which developed free government from less promising germs. And, yet, it is possible that the whole subsequent failure of Spain may be fully explained by the ruinous prosperity of her career in the sixteenth century,--by the fatal gold it gave her from America, and the independent power it put into the hands of her kings.

Northern and North-eastern Europe.

While the Spaniards in their southern peninsula were wrestling with the infidel Moor, their Gothic kindred of Sweden, and the other Norse nations of that opposite extremity of Europe, had been casting off paganism and emerging from the barbarism of their piratical age, very slowly. It was not until the tenth and eleventh centuries that Christianity got footing among them. It was not until the thirteenth century that unity and order, the fruits of firm government, began to be really fixed in any part of the Scandinavian peninsulas.

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The same is substantially true of the greater Slavic states on the eastern side of Europe. The Poles had accepted Christianity in the tenth century, and their dukes, in the same century, had assumed the title of kings. In the twelfth century they had acquired a large dominion and exercised great power; but the kingdom was divided, was brought into collision with the Teutonic Knights, who conquered Prussia, and it fell into a disordered state. The Russians had been Christianized in the same missionary century--the tenth; but civilization made slow progress among them, and their nation was being divided and re-divided in shifting principalities by contending families and lords. In the thirteenth century they were overwhelmed by the fearful calamity of a conquest by Mongol or Tartar hordes, and fell under the brutal domination of the successors of Genghis Khan.

Latin Conquest of Constantinople.

At Constantinople, the old Greek-Roman Empire of the East had been passing through singular changes since we noticed it last. The dread with which Alexius Comnenius saw the coming of the Crusaders in 1097 was justified by the experience of his successors, after little more than a hundred years. In 1204, a crusade, which is sometimes numbered as the fourth and sometimes as the fifth in the crusading series, was diverted by Venetian influence from the rescue of Jerusalem to the conquest of Constantinople, ostensibly in the interest of a claimant of the Imperial throne. The city was taken and pillaged, and the Greek line of Emperors was supplanted by a Frank or Latin line, of which Baldwin, Count of Flanders, was the first. But this Latin Empire was reduced to a fraction of the conquered dominion, the remainder being divided among several partners in the conquest; while two Greek princes of the fallen house saved fragments of the ancient realm in Asia, and throned themselves as emperors at Trebizond and Nicæa. The Latin Empire was maintained, feebly and without dignity, a little more than half a century; and then (1261) it was extinguished by the sovereign of its Nicæan rival, Michael Palæologus, who took Constantinople by a night surprise, helped by treachery within. Thus the Greek or Byzantine Empire was restored, but much shorn of its former European possessions, and much weakened by loss of commerce and wealth. It was soon involved in a fresh struggle for life with the Turks.

The Thirteenth Century.

We have now, in our general survey of European history, just passed beyond the thirteenth century, and it will be instructive to pause here a moment and glance back over the movements and events which distinguish that remarkable age. For the thirteenth century, while it belongs chronologically to mediæval times, seems nearer in spirit to the Renaissance--shows more of the travail of the birth of our modern mind and life--than the fourteenth, and even more than the greater part of the years of the fifteenth century.