Part 335

We have now come to a period in European history—the middle period of the Middle Ages—when it is appropriate to consider the peculiar state of society which had resulted from the transplanting of the Germanic nations of the North to the provinces of the Roman Empire, and from placing the well civilized surviving inhabitants of the latter in subjection to and in association with masters so vigorous, so capable and so barbarous. In Gaul, the conquerors, unused to town-life, not attracted to town pursuits, and eager for the possession of land, had generally spread themselves over the country and left the cities more undisturbed, except as they pillaged them or extorted ransom from them. The Roman-Gallic population of the country had sought refuge, no doubt, to a large extent, in the cities; the agricultural laborers were already, for the most part, slaves or half-slaves—the coloni of the Roman system—and remained in their servitude; while some of the poorer class of freemen may have sunk to the same condition.

How far the new masters of the country had taken possession of its land by actual seizure, ousting the former owners, and under what rules, if any, it was divided among them, are questions involved in great obscurity. In the time of Charlemagne, there seems to have been a large number of small landowners who cultivated their own holdings, which they owned, not conditionally, but absolutely, by the tenure called allodial. But alongside of these peasant proprietors there was another landed class whose estates were held on very different terms, and this latter class, at the time now spoken of, was rapidly absorbing the former. It was a class which had not existed before, neither among the Germans nor among the Romans, and the system of land tenure on which it rested was equally new to both, although both seem to have contributed something to the origin of it. This was the Feudal System, which may be described, in the words of Bishop Stubbs, as being "a complete organization of society through the medium of land tenure, in which, from the king down to the landowner, all are bound together by obligation of service and defence: the lord to protect his vassal, the vassal to do service to his lord; the defence and service being based on, and regulated by, the nature and extent of the land held by the one of the other." Of course, the service exacted was, in the main, military, and the system grew up as a military system, expanding into a general governing system, during a time of loose and ineffective administration. That it was a thing of gradual growth is now fairly well settled, although little is clearly known of the process of growth. It came to its perfection in the tenth century, by which time most other tenures of land had disappeared. The allodial tenure gave way before it, because, in those disorderly times, men of small or moderate property in land were in need of the protection which a powerful lord, who had many retainers at his back, or a strong monastery, could give, and were induced to surrender, to one or the other, their free ownership of the land they held, receiving it back as tenants, in order to establish the relation which secured a protector.

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In its final organization, the feudal system, as stated before, embraced the whole society of the kingdom. Theoretically, the king was the pinnacle of the system. In the political view of the time—so far as a political view existed—he was the over-lord of the realm rather by reason of being its ultimate land-lord, than by being the center of authority and the guardian of law. The greater subordinate lordships of the kingdom—the dukedoms and counties—were held as huge estates, called fiefs, derived originally by grant from the king, subject to the obligation of military service, and to certain acts of homage, acknowledging the dependent relationship. The greater feudatories, or vassals, holding immediately from the king, were lords in their turn of a second order of feudatories, who held lands under them; and they again might divide their territories among vassals of a third degree; for the process of sub-infeudation went on until it reached the cultivator of the soil, who bore the whole social structure of society on his bent back.

But the feudal system would have wrought few of the effects which it did if it had involved nothing but land tenure and military service. It became, however, as before intimated, a system of government, and one which inevitably produced a disintegration of society and a destruction of national bonds. A grant of territory generally carried with it almost a grant of sovereignty over the inhabitants of the territory, limited only by certain rights and powers reserved to the king, which he found extreme difficulty in exercising. The system was one "in which every lord judged, taxed, and commanded the class next below him, in which abject slavery formed the lowest and irresponsible tyranny the highest grade, in which private war, private coinage, private prisons, took the place of the imperial institutions of government" (Stubbs). This was the singular system which had its original and special growth among the Franks, in the Middle Ages, and which spread from them, under the generally similar conditions of the age, to other countries, with various degrees of modification and limitation. Its influence was obviously opposed to political unity and social order, and to the development of institutions favorable to the people.

But an opposing influence had kept life in one part of society which feudalism was not able to envelope. That was in cities. The cities, as before stated, had been the refuge of a large and perhaps a better part of the Roman-Gallic free population which survived the barbarian conquest. They, in conjunction with the Church, preserved, without doubt, so much of the plant of Roman civilization as escaped destruction. They certainly suffered heavily, and languished for several centuries; but a slow revival of industries and arts went on in them,—trade crept again into its old channels, or found new ones,—and wealth began to be accumulated anew. With the consciousness of wealth came feelings of independence; and such towns were now beginning to acquire the spirit which made them, a little later, important instruments in the weakening and breaking of the feudal system.

Rise of the Kingdom of France.

During the period between the death of Charlemagne and the settlement of the Normans in the Carlovingian Empire, that Empire had become permanently divided. The final separation had taken place (887) between the kingdom of the East Franks, or Germany, and the kingdom of the West Franks, which presently became France. Between them stretched a region in dispute called Lotharingia, out of which came the duchy of Lorraine. The kingdom of Burgundy (sometimes cut into two) and the kingdom of Italy, had regained a separate existence; and the Empire which Charlemagne had revived was nothing but a name. The last of the Carlovingian emperors was Arnulf, who died in 899. The imperial title was borne afterwards by a number of petty Italian potentates, but lost all imperial significance for two-thirds of a century, until it was restored to some grandeur again and to a lasting influence in history, by another German king.

Before this occurred, the Carlovingian race of kings had disappeared from both the Frank kingdoms. During the last hundred years of their reign in the West kingdom, the throne had been disputed with them two or three times by members of a rising family, the Counts of Paris and Orleans, who were also called Dukes of the French, and whose duchy gave its name to the kingdom which they finally made their own. The kings of the old race held their capital at Laon, with little power and a small dominion, until 987, when the last one died. The then Count of Paris and Duke of the French, Hugh, called Capet, became king of the French, by election; Paris became the capital of the kingdom, and the France of modern times had its birth, though very far from its full growth.

The royal power had now declined to extreme weakness. The development of feudalism had undermined all central authority, and Hugh Capet as king had scarcely more power than he drew from his own large fief. "At first he was by no means acknowledged in the kingdom; but … the chief vassals ultimately gave at least a tacit consent to the usurpation, and permitted the royal name to descend undisputed upon his posterity. But this was almost the sole attribute of sovereignty which the first kings of the third dynasty enjoyed. For a long period before and after the accession of that family France has, properly speaking, no national history" (Hallam).

The Communes.

When the royal power began to gain ascendancy, it seems to have been largely in consequence of a tacitly formed alliance between the kings and the commons or burghers of the towns. The latter, as noted before, were acquiring a spirit of independence, born of increased prosperity, and were converting their guilds or trades unions into crude forms of municipal organization, as "communes" or commons. Sometimes by purchase and sometimes by force, they were ridding themselves of the feudal pretensions which neighboring lords held over them, and were obtaining charters which defined and guaranteed municipal freedom to them. One or two kings of the time happened to be wise enough to give encouragement to this movement towards the enfranchisement of the communes, and it proved to have an important influence in weakening feudalism and strengthening royalty.

[Image: Europe at the close of the 10th century.]

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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.

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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.

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The Normans in Italy and Sicily.