Part 543

Before the close of the 13th century, there first arose in Spain "an anomalous institution peculiar to Castile, which sought to secure the public tranquillity by means scarcely compatible themselves with civil subordination. I refer to the celebrated Hermandad, or Holy Brotherhood, as the association was sometimes called,—a name familiar to most readers in the lively fictions of Le Sage, though conveying there no very adequate idea of the extraordinary functions which it assumed at the period under review [13th-14th centuries]. Instead of a regularly organized police, it then consisted of a confederation of the principal cities, bound together by a solemn league and covenant for the defence of their liberties in seasons of civil anarchy. Its affairs were conducted by deputies, who assembled at stated intervals for this purpose, transacting their business under a common seal, enacting laws which they were careful to transmit to the nobles and even the sovereign himself, and enforcing their measures by an armed force. … One hundred cities associated in the Hermandad of 1315. In that of 1295, were thirty-four. The knights and inferior nobility frequently made part of the association. … In one of [the articles of confederation] it is declared that if any noble shall deprive a member of the association of his property, and refuse restitution, his house shall be razed to the ground. In another, that if any one, by command of the king, shall attempt to collect an unlawful tax, he shall be put to death on the spot." Under the government of Ferdinand and Isabella, among the measures adopted for checking the license and disorder which had become prevalent in Castile, and restoring a more effective administration of justice, was one for a reorganization of the Santa Hermandad. "The project for the reorganization of this institution was introduced into the cortes held, the year after Isabella's accession, at Madrigal, 1476. … The new institution differed essentially from the ancient hermandades, since, instead of being partial in its extent, it was designed to embrace the whole kingdom; and, instead of being directed, as had often been the case, against the crown itself, it was set in motion at the suggestion of the latter, and limited in its operation to the maintenance of public order. The crimes reserved for its jurisdiction were all violence or theft committed on the highways or in the open country, and in cities by such offenders as escaped into the country; house-breaking; rape; and resistance of justice. … An annual contribution of 18,000 maravedis was assessed on every 100 vecinos or householders, for the equipment and maintenance of a horseman, whose duty it was to arrest offenders and enforce the sentence of the law. On the flight of a criminal, the tocsins of the villages through which he was supposed to have passed were sounded, and the quadrilleros or officers of the brotherhood, stationed on the different points, took up the pursuit with such promptness as left little chance of escape. A court of two alcaldes was established in every town containing thirty families, for the trial of all crimes within the jurisdiction of the hermandad; and an appeal lay from them in specified cases to a supreme council. A general junta, composed of deputies from the cities throughout the kingdom was annually convened for the regulation of affairs, and their instructions were transmitted to provincial juntas, who superintended the execution of them. … Notwithstanding the popular constitution of the hermandad, and the obvious advantages attending its introduction at this juncture, it experienced so decided an opposition from the nobility, who discerned the check it was likely to impose on their authority, that it required all the queen's address and perseverance to effect its general adoption. … The important benefits resulting from the institution of the hermandad secured its confirmation by successive cortes, for the period of 22 years, in spite of the repeated opposition of the aristocracy. At length, in 1498, the objects for which it was established having been completely obtained, it was deemed advisable to relieve the nation from the heavy charges which its maintenance imposed. The great salaried officers were dismissed; a few subordinate functionaries were retained for the administration of justice, over whom the regular courts of criminal law possessed appellate jurisdiction; and the magnificent apparatus of the Santa Hermandad, stripped of all but the terrors of its name, dwindled into an ordinary police, such as it has existed, with various modifications of form, down to the present century."

_W. H. Prescott, History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, introduction, section 1, with foot-note, and part 1, chapter 6._

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HOLY BROTHERHOOD IN MEXICO.

See MEXICO: A. D. 1535-1822.

HOLY GHOST, The military Order of the.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1578-1580.

HOLY JUNTA, The.

See SPAIN: A. D. 1518-1522.

HOLY LEAGUES: Start--------

HOLY LEAGUES: Pope Julius II. against Louis XII. of France.

See ITALY: A. D. 1510-1513.

Pope Clement VII. against Charles V.

See ITALY: A. D. 1523-1527.

German Catholic princes against the Protestant League of Smalcald.

See GERMANY: A. D. 1533-1546.

Spain, Venice and Pope Pius V. against the Turks.

See TURKS: A. D. 1566-1571.

Of the Catholic party in the Religious Wars of France.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1576-1585, to 1593-1598.

Pope Innocent XI., the Emperor, Venice, Poland and Russia against the Turks.

See TURKS: A. D. 1684-1696.

HOLY LEAGUES: End--------

HOLY LION, Battle of the (1568).

See NETHERLANDS: A. D. 1568-1572.

HOLY OFFICE, The.

See INQUISITION: A. D. 1203-1525.

HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE: Its origin.

See ROMAN EMPIRE, THE HOLY: A. D. 963.

Its extinction.

See GERMANY: A. D. 1805-1806.

HOLY ROOD OF SCOTLAND, The.

"A certified fragment of the true cross preserved in a shrine of gold or silver gilt. It was brought over by St. Margaret, and left as a sacred legacy to her descendants and their kingdom. … The rood had been the sanctifying relic round which King David I. raised the house of canons regular of the Holy Rood, devoted to the rule of St. Augustin, at Edinburgh. The kings of Scotland afterwards found it so convenient to frequent this religious house that they built alongside of it a royal residence or palace, well known to the world as Holyrood House."

_J. H. Burton, History of Scotland, chapter 20 (volume 2)._

The Holy Rood, or Black Rood as it was sometimes called, was carried away from Scotland, along with the "coronation stone," by Edward I. of England, afterwards got back by treaty, and then lost again at the battle of Neville's Cross, from which it went as a trophy to Durham Abbey.

HOLY WAR, Mahometan.

See DAR-UL-ISLAM.

HOMAGE.

See FEUDAL TENURES.

HOME RULE MOVEMENT, The Irish.

See IRELAND: A. D. 1873-1879, to 1893.

HOMER AND THE HOMERIC POEMS.

"When we use the word Homer, we do not mean a person historically known to us, like Pope or Milton. We mean in the main the author, whoever or whatever he was, of the wonderful poems called respectively, not by the author, but by the world, the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey.' His name is conventional, and its sense in etymology is not very different from that which would be conveyed by our phrase, 'the author.' … At the first dawn of the historic period, we find the poems established in popular renown; and so prominent that a school of minstrels takes the name of 'Homeridæ' from making it their business to preserve and to recite them. Still, the question whether the poems as we have them can be trusted, whether they present substantially the character of what may be termed original documents, is one of great but gradually diminishing difficulty. It is also of importance, because of the nature of their contents. In the first place, they give a far greater amount of information than is to be found in any other literary production of the same compass. In the second place, that information, speaking of it generally, is to be had nowhere else. In the third place, it is information of the utmost interest, and even of great moment. It introduces to us, in the very beginnings of their experience, the most gifted people of the world, and enables us to judge how they became such as in later times we know them. … And this picture is exhibited with such a fulness both of particulars and of vital force, that perhaps never in any country has an age been so completely placed upon record. … We are … probably to conceive of Homer as of a Bard who went from place to place to earn his bread by his profession, to exercise his knowledge in his gift of song, and to enlarge it by an ever-active observation of nature and experience of men. … It has … been extensively believed that he was a Greek of Asia Minor. And as there were no Greeks of Asia Minor at the time of the Trojan War, nor until a wide and searching revolution in the peninsula had substituted Dorian manners for those of the earlier Achaian age, which Homer sang, this belief involves the further proposition that the poet was severed by a considerable interval of time from the subjects of his verse. The last-named opinion depends very much upon the first; and the first chiefly, if not wholly, upon a perfectly vague tradition, which has no pretence to an historical character. … The question … has to be decided … by the internal evidence of the poems. This evidence, I venture to say, strongly supports the belief that Homer was an European, and if an European, then certainly also an Achaian Greek: a Greek, that is to say, of the pre-Doric period, when the Achaian name prevailed and principally distinguished the race. … Until the 18th century of our era was near its close, it may be said that all generations had believed Troy was actually Troy, and Homer in the main Homer; neither taking the one for a fable, or (quaintest of all dreams) for a symbol of solar phenomena, nor resolving the other into a multiform assemblage of successive bards, whose verses were at length pieced together by a clever literary tailor. … After slighter premonitory movements, it was Wolf that made, by the publication of his 'Prolegomena' in 1795, the serious attack. … Wolf maintained that available writing was not known at, or till long after, the period of their composition; and that works of such length, not intrusted to the custody of written characters, could not have been transmitted through a course of generations with any approach to fidelity. Therefore they could only be a number of separate songs, brought together at a later date."

_W. E. Gladstone, Homer (Literature Primers), chapters 1-2._

{1661}

"Homeric geography is entirely pre-Dorian. Total unconsciousness of any such event as the Dorian invasion reigns both in the Iliad and Odyssey. … A silence so remarkable can be explained only by the simple supposition that when they were composed the revolution in question had not yet occurred. Other circumstances confirm this view."

_A. M. Clerke, Familiar Studies in Homer, chapter 1._

"It is … in the discoveries of Dr. Schliemann that we have the impulse which seems to be sending the balance over towards the belief in the European instead of in the Asiatic origin of the poems. We now know that at the very point which Homer makes the chief royal city of Greece there did, in fact, exist a civilisation which did, in fact, offer just the conditions for the rise of a poetry such as the Homeric—a great city 'rich in gold,' with a cultivation of the material arts such as is wont to go hand in hand with the growth of poetry. …

See GREECE: MYCENÆ AND ITS KINGS.

It is no longer possible to doubt that the world which the poems describe was one which really existed in the place where they put it. Even in details the poems have received striking illustration from the remains of Mykenai. … It appears that we may date the oldest part of the Iliad at least to some time before the Dorian invasion, which, according to the traditional chronology, took place about 1000 B. C. … But the poems can hardly be much earlier than the invasion; for there are various signs which indicate that the civilisation which they depict had made some advance beyond that of which we find the material remains in the 'shaft tombs,' discovered by Dr. Schliemann in the Acropolis of Mykenai. And the date of these has now been fixed by Mr. Petrie, from comparison with Egyptian remains, at about 1150. We can therefore hardly be far wrong, if the poems were composed in Achaian Greece, in dating their origin at about 1050 B. C. There still remains the question of the historical basis which may underlie the story of the Iliad. The poem may give us a true picture of Achaian Greece and its civilisation, and yet be no proof that the armies of Agamemnon fought beneath the walls of Troy. But here again the discoveries of recent years, and notably those of Schliemann at Hissarlik, have tended on the whole to confirm the belief that there is a historic reality behind the tale of Troy. … The hypothesis that the Iliad and Odyssey are the work of more than one poet … is one which has been gaining ground ever since it was seriously taken up and argued at length by Wolf in his famous 'Prolegomena,' just a century ago. But it has from the first encountered strong opposition, and is still regarded, in England at least, as the heretical view."

_W. Leaf, Companion to the Iliad, introd._

"It seems clear that the author or authors of the Iliad and Odyssey lived long before the time when Æolian, Ionian, Dorian, were the three great tribal names of Greece, and far from the coast on which these three names were attached to successive portions of territory. If we are to decide the ancient controversy about the birthplace of Homer, we must turn away from Asia, and set ourselves to consider the claims of three districts of Greece proper: Thessaly, the home of the chief hero and the most ancient worship; Bœotia, the ancient seat of the Muses, and the first in the very ancient (if not actually Homeric) muster-roll of the ships; and Argolis, the seat of Achæan empire."

_D. B. Monro, Homer and the Early History of Greece (English Historical Review, January, 1886)._

"I hold that the original nucleus of the Iliad was due to a single Achaean poet, living in Thessaly before the immigration which partly displaced the primitive Hellenes there. This primary Iliad may have been as old as the eleventh century B. C. It was afterwards brought by Achaean emigrants to Ionia, and there enlarged by successive Ionian poets. The original nucleus of the Odyssey was also composed, probably, in Greece proper, before the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnesus; was carried to Ionia by emigrants whom the conquerors drove out; and was there expanded into an epic which blends the local traits of its origin with the spirit of Ionian adventure and Ionian society."

_R. C. Jebb, The growth and influence of Classical Greek Poetry, page 14._

_R. C. Jebb, Homer: An Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey._

"We accept the Iliad as one epic by one hand. The inconsistencies which are the basis of the opposite theory seem to us reconcileable in many places, in others greatly exaggerated. … To us the hypothesis of a crowd of great harmonious poets, working for centuries at the Iliad, and sinking their own fame and identity in Homer's, appears more difficult of belief than the opinion that one great poet may make occasional slips and blunders." As for the Odyssey, "we have … to deal with critics who do not recognise the unity, the marshalling of incidents towards a given end. We have to do with critics who find, in place of unity, patchwork and compilation, and evident traces of diverse dates, and diverse places of composition. Thus argument is inefficient, demonstration is impossible, and the final judge must be the opinion of the most trustworthy literary critics and of literary tradition. These are unanimous, as against the 'microscope-men,' in favor of the unity of the Odyssey."

_A. Lang, Homer and the Epic, chapters 7 and 13._

HOMERITES, The.

See ABYSSINIA: 6TH TO 16TH CENTURIES.

HOMESTEAD ACT, The.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1862 (MAY).

HOMILDON HILL, Battle of.

A victory for the English, under "Hotspur," over a raiding army of the Scots, A. D. 1402. It was won almost entirely by the English cross-bow. By some historians it is called the Battle of Humbledon.

See SCOTLAND: A. D. 1400-1436.

HOMOOUSION AND HOMOIOUSION.

SEE ARIANISM.

HOMS, Battle of (1832).

See TURKS: A. D. 1831-1840.

HONDSCHOTTEN, Battle of (1793).

See FRANCE: A. D. 1793 (JULY-DECEMBER).

HONDURAS: Start--------

HONDURAS: Aboriginal inhabitants. Ruins of Ancient Civilization.

See AMERICAN ABORIGINES: MAYAS, and QUICHES.

HONDURAS: A. D. 1502. Discovery by Columbus.

See AMERICA: A. D. 1498-1505.

HONDURAS: A. D. 1524. Conquest by Olid and Cortes.

See MEXICO: A. D. 1521-1524.

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HONDURAS: A. D. 1821-1871. Separation from Spain and independence. Brief annexation to Mexico. Attempted federations and their failure. The British colony.

See CENTRAL AMERICA: A. D. 1821-1871.

HONDURAS: End--------

HONDURAS, British: A. D. 1850. The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty.

See NICARAGUA: A. D. 1850.

HONE, William, The Trials of.

See ENGLAND: A. D. 1816-1820.

HONEIN, Battle of.

See MAHOMETAN CONQUEST: A. D. 609-632.

HONG-KONG: A. D. 1842. Ceded to Great Britain.

See CHINA: A. D. 1839-1842.

HONG MERCHANTS.

See CHINA: A. D. 1839-1842.

HONORIUS, Roman Emperor (Western), A. D. 395-423. Honorius I., Pope, 625-638. Honorius II., Pope, 1124-1130. Honorius III., Pope, 1216-1227. Honorius IV., Pope, 1285-1287;

HONOURS, Escheated.

"When a great barony by forfeiture or escheat fell into the hands of the [English] crown, instead of being incorporated with the general body of the county or counties in which it lay, it retained a distinct corporate existence and the whole apparatus of jurisdiction which it had possessed before. Under the title of an Honour, it either continued in the possession of the king and was farmed like a shire, or was granted out again to another lord as a hereditary fief."

_W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, chapter 11, section 129 (volume 1)._

HOOD, General John B. The Atlanta campaign.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1864 (MAY-SEPTEMBER: GEORGIA) to (SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER: GEORGIA).

HOOKER, General Joseph, Commander of the Army of the Potomac.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1863 (JANUARY-APRIL: VIRGINIA), and (APRIL-MAY: VIRGINIA).

Transfer to Chattanooga.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1863 (JULY-NOVEMBER: VIRGINIA).

At Chattanooga.—The Battle above the Clouds.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1863 (OCTOBER-NOVEMBER: TENNESSEE).

HOOKS AND KABELJAUWS, OR HOOKS AND CODS.

See NETHERLANDS (HOLLAND): A. D. 1345-1354; also, 1482-1493.

HOOVER'S GAP, Battle at.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1863 (JUNE-JULY: TENNESSEE).

HOPLITES.

Heavy-armed foot-soldiers of the Greeks.

See PHYLÆ.

HORESTII, The.

See BRITAIN: CELTIC TRIBES.

HORIKANS, The.

See AMERICAN ABORIGINES: HORIKANS.

HORITES, The.

The aborigines of Canaan,—dwellers in caves, Troglodytes. "At the time of the Israelitish conquest … there still existed many remains of the Aborigines scattered through the land. They were then ordinarily designated by a name which suggests very different ideas—Rephaim, or Giants."

_H. Ewald, History of Israel, introduction, section 4._

F. Lenormant considers the Rephaim a distinct race, divided into the Rephaim of Bashan, the Emim, the Zamzummim, the Zumim and the Anakim.

_Manual of Ancient History, book 6, chapter 1._

See, also, JEWS: THE EARLY HEBREW HISTORY.

HORMUZ, Battle of.

The decisive battle, fought A. D. 226, on the plain of Hormuz, in Persia Proper, in which the Parthian monarchy was overthrown, its last king, Artabanus, slain, and the New Persian, or Sassanian empire established by Artaxerxes I.

_G. Rawlinson, Seventh Great Oriental Monarchy, chapter 3._

HORN, Count, and the struggle in the Netherlands.

See NETHERLANDS: A. D. 1566-1568.

HORN, Cape. Discovered by Drake (1578).

See AMERICA: A. D. 1572-1580.

HORTENSIAN LAWS, The.

See ROME: B. C. 286.

HOSEIN, The martyrdom of.

See MAHOMETAN CONQUEST: A. D. 680.

HOSPES. HOSPITES. HOSPITIUM.

"In the earlier stages of society, especially in Greece and Italy, where the population consisted of numerous independent tribes constantly at variance with each other, every stranger was looked upon with suspicion. … Hence it became common for a person who was engaged in commerce, or any other occupation which might compel him to visit a foreign country, to form previously a connection with a citizen of that country, who might be ready to receive him as a friend and act as his protector. Such a connection was always strictly reciprocal. … An alliance of this description was termed Hospitium, the parties who concluded it were termed Hospites in relation to each other, and thus the word Hospes bore a double signification, denoting, according to circumstances, either an entertainer or a guest. The obligations imposed by the covenant were regarded as of the most sacred character. … The league of Hospitium, when once formed, was hereditary. … The parties interchanged tokens, by which they or their descendants might recognise each other. This token, called 'tessera hospitalis,' was carefully preserved. … In process of time, among both the Greeks and Romans, it became common for a state, when it desired to pay a marked compliment to any individual, to pass a resolution declaring him the Hospes of the whole community."

_W. Ramsay, Manual of Roman Antiquity, chapter 3._

HOSPITALLERS: Start--------

HOSPITALLERS OF ST. JOHN OF JERUSALEM, The Knights: A. D. 1115-1310. The origin and rise of the order.