Part 13
Partial insurrections followed each other in various parts of Germany; here against one baron or master, there against another. Every insurrection, even if suppressed, nevertheless gave an impulse, though sometimes imperceptible, to amelioration and emancipation. Insurrections of the down-trodden and oppressed classes are like feverish efforts of diseased physiology to resist the disorder, to throw out the virus, and restore the normal condition in the economy of life. The whole world admires the glorious insurrection of the Swiss-German peasantry against _their_ insolent masters. Then the bondmen, villeins, etc., individually or in small bodies, by the axe, by fire, and in every possible manner, protested their imprescriptible right to liberty. So also did the celebrated Münzer when the reformation dawned over Germany and Europe. He firmly believed that religious reform, to be beneficial to the poor, must go hand in hand with social ameliorations. The most notable insurrection, however, was the great uprising of the German peasantry in the sixteenth century. From the Vosgese mountains, from the Alps to the Baltic, numerous isolated forces rose in arms, each inspired by the same great idea. They had no centres, no possibility of a combination of effort, but all of them recognized the same covenant: 1. The gospel to be preached in truth, but not in the interest of their masters--nobles and clergy. 2. Not to pay any kind of tithes. 3. The interest or rent from landed property to be reduced to five per cent. 4. Forests to be communal property. 5. All waters free. 6. Game free. 7. Serfdom to be abolished. 8. Election of communal authorities by the respective communes. 9. Lands robbed from the peasantry to be restored to the original owners.
This great war of the peasants was terrible, pitiless, bloody. More than one thousand strongholds, burghs, and monasteries were destroyed; but the peasants were finally overpowered, the nobility being aided by the forces of the empire. Luther, too, thundered against the poor peasants.[17] But not in vain did they shed their blood. The oppression by the old _frowen_, strengthened by feudality, was finally broken at the roots. The imperial German diet declared to the nobles, that if they did not cease their cruelties, at the next revolt they should be abandoned to their fate.
Serfdom was not yet abolished, but was moderated in various ways. The direct and indirect influence of the Reformation on the condition of the peasantry has been already mentioned. Mild reforms were introduced in the dominions of various German sovereigns. Certain liberties were granted to rural communes, and the number of free tenants slowly but uninterruptedly increased. The conditions of villeinage on private estates began to be regulated by the respective governments; and absolute serfdom was slowly dying out. The prosperity of Germany increased proportionally with the emancipation, though but partial, of rural labor, and the freedom of the soil. On an average, those regions were most prosperous which contained the greatest number of emancipated rural communities, or where the villeinage was reduced, systematized, and made more and more free from the arbitrary exactions of the master.
The peculiar political organization of Germany prevented any unity of action in the extinction of rural servitude. Many of its features--some relating to the person, but principally to the soil--survived even to the present century in certain parts of the smaller German states; and in Austria, Bohemia and Hungary, there is still room for infinite improvement in the condition of the peasantry. But the mortal disorder exists no more: the fundamental rights of man are recognized. Governmental maladministration, injustice, oppressive taxation, exactions by officials and landlords, are unhappily common; but all these are in flagrant violation of established laws. And, bad though they are, they cannot for a moment compare with the blighting influences of chattel slavery.
For long centuries, and with persistent pertinacity, have slavery and the oppression of man and his labor gnawed at the German vitals; and centuries must elapse before the recovery of a normal condition. But the Germans of the present day--moralists, statesmen, savants and professional men, as well as artisans, mechanics and agriculturists--are unanimous in condemning human bondage, whatever may be the race enslaved. Few, indeed, are there of the great German race whose minds are inaccessible to the nobler promptings of freedom and humanity.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 17: See "America and Europe," by the present writer.]
XVII.
LONGOBARDS--ITALIANS.
AUTHORITIES:
_Leges Longobardorum, Cantu, Troya, Karl Hegel, etc._
The Western Roman empire was fatally permeated throughout with chattel slavery. Domestic usage had made its German invaders also familiar with the art and practice of enslaving: their conquest of Rome accordingly but added strength and extension to the slave-edifice. For a longer or shorter period, various German tribes ravaged Italy. The domination of the Ostrogoths lasted for about sixty years, and the rule of Theodoric the Great is recorded as among the best and wisest in that period of devastation and oppression. Finally, the Longobards founded in Italy a permanent establishment. At the first onset, the Longobards reduced all, in city and country, to bondage: the magnate, the rich, the slaveholder, as well as the workman, the poor, the serf and the chattel, constituted their booty, and as such were divided among the victors.
Some historians maintain that all free Romans,[18] rich and poor--a few favored aristocratic families excepted--were deprived of the rights of personal liberty and property by the Longobards; others, however, assert that the free population was only made tributary, but otherwise preserved their property, rights and laws. The conquerors (as _hospites_, or quartered soldiers) generally took about a half of the houses, lands and chattels of the conquered, and furthermore compelled the primitive owner to pay them a tribute from what was left. In Italy, the Longobards made the free Romans, rich and poor, tributary to the extent of one-third of all which was left them from actual confiscation; and Paul Diaconus--himself a Longobard--says: "_Romani tributarii efficiuntur_." The artisans and traders, and indeed all inhabitants of cities, likewise paid tribute. They could not move from one place to another without the written permission of their Longobard master; and in this way originated the system of passports for bondmen, which is still maintained in our Slave States. Thus the Romans, once proud and free, became but half free--a something between the positive freeman, such as the Longobard alone was, and the still more reduced tributaries, the _aldii_ or _aldions_, and the serfs. In brief, the freemen, rich or poor, were made inferior in rights and in personal liberty to the soldiers; the non-free, the ancient _colons_, etc., were pressed a degree lower in servitude; and the condition of the domestic chattels alone remained unchanged.
The Longobards, like all the other German warriors, disliked the cities, and the chiefs and nobles erected their fastnesses outside of them. The common soldiers receiving lands in different quantities, formed the freeholders, yeomen, or _ahrimans_, and were bound to perform military duty. Such was the origin of the feudal system, which sprang up on the ruins of the Roman empire. The numerous cities of Italy had no longer any political rights or signification, though they still preserved some remains of former culture and civilization, and even faint shadows of the former municipal regime. The imperial city itself was not overrun by the Longobards, and from thence, as also from the other cities of that part of Italy which belonged to the Eastern emperors, some faint glimmerings reached the Longobard region and tended to preserve ancient municipal traditions.
The influence of the Italian polity and culture at length began to humanize the Longobards. Some of their laws concerning chattels and slaves are more humane than were those under the emperors--more humane than those now existing in our Slave States. For example, a master committing adultery with the wife of his chattel lost the ownership of both her and her husband, and had no further power over them. Various regulations also protected the serf and chattel against a cruel master, and punishment was not arbitrary, but was in many cases regulated by law. Emancipations were encouraged and protected: King Astolf's edict even proclaimed that it was meritorious to change a chattel into a freeman. However, during the first period of their dominion, the Longobards, like all the other German conquerors, in Spain, Gaul, etc., and, above all, the feudal dukes and nobles, considered the blood of the conquered as impure, and therefore far inferior to their own.
Industry and commerce gradually began to acquire vitality, and the chattels began slowly to disappear from the cities, either by emancipation, by purchasing their liberty, or by being established as _aldii_ or serfs on their masters' lands.
The slave-trade was now confined principally to non-baptized prisoners--whom the Christians of that epoch regarded as the progeny of the evil one. Mahomedans, heathen, Germans, as the Anglo-Saxons and others, from various nations and tribes, were more numerous in the slave marts than were those born on the soil of Italy.
Under the Longobards, Italy again began to be more commonly cultivated by numerous _colons_ with very limited rights, but still in better condition than those of the preceding epoch; copyholders and freeholders also began to increase, as has been already mentioned. So that when the heavy clouds of the mediæval times began to break, the condition of Italy was slightly improving; and when Karl, or Charlemagne, put an end to the dominion of the Longobards, more land was under culture, and the free though tributary population was greater, both in the cities and the country, than on their first invasion.
The rule of the Franks, which succeeded that of the Longobards, did not impair the condition of the Italians. Peace was beneficial to labor, labor stimulated emancipation. Thus the number of _chattels_ was more and more reduced, while the serfs, _adscripti glebæ_, increased. But the disorders which succeeded the dismembering of the empire of Charlemagne again ruined many free yeomen, ahrimans, and others owning small homesteads, and obliged them to submit to the oppression of the mighty nobles. Many of the dispossessed and impoverished, however, sought refuge in the cities, where industry flourished in proportion with the freedom of the workmen and operatives. Finally, about the eleventh century, the _cities_ began to strike for their independence. This was the time of the revival of the communal franchises in other parts of Europe also; but the first spark was struck in Italy. Around the standard raised by the cities crowded the serfs, rural and domestic chattels, and all other kinds of bondmen and oppressed. This was, in fact, the insurrection of these against the landed barons, nobles, and oligarchs. All runaways found refuge and protection in the cities; and hence arose the energy, the strength, and the democratic rancor of the cities against the nobility and their strongholds.
In the second part of the mediæval epoch, throughout Italy and Western Europe, prisoners of war were no more sold as slaves, but were ransomed or exchanged. The Moors and Arabs (Mahomedans) were the sole marketable chattels.
All the Italian cities extended their dominion, acquired lands, incorporated baronies, and regulated the relations between the owners of the soil and the tenants. Domestic slavery was altogether extinct; the cities were animated by free labor in their arts, industries and handicrafts, and on the estates, the peasants, serfs and bondmen, _adscripti glebæ_, became vassals obliged to follow the barons or the cities into war; they became free tenants--first paying rent for their land in kind, and then paying in money; and the number of freeholders, and others holding homesteads, continually increased. Hunting for absconded serfs now had an end. The cities and boroughs emancipated all the villagers and serfs around them. In the course of the twelfth century, personally degrading servitude of every kind almost wholly disappeared; and the relations between the proprietor of land and the farmer were established on the basis which, with more or less modification, prevails to the present day.
In the ancient classical world, in Greece and Rome, domestic slavery had its seat in the cities, and therefrom expanded over the land, destroying the whole social structure. But now, the first shout for liberty came from the Italian cities; the cities first emancipated the laborers within their own walls, and then emancipated the rural serf. Cities again became the centres of civilization; they nursed its infancy, tended its first footsteps and gave it the free air of heaven: they trained it not amid clanking chains and groaning chattels.
Thus does history annihilate the ignorant fallacy about Saxons and Germans being the godfathers of social or political freedom.
Many evils and disorders undoubtedly remained and even yet remain; but the sum of all evils--property in man and in his toil--was utterly destroyed. Then came the brilliant epoch of the Italian Lombard cities--the culminating glory of Italian civilization--whose coruscating warmth set free the whole of Western Europe.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 18: Romans as citizens of the empire and not of the city of Rome.]
XVIII.
FRANKS--FRENCH.
AUTHORITIES:
_Augustin Thierry, Henry Martin, Bonnemère, etc._
Domestic slavery, aggravated by the oppression of the poor, the devastations of war, the insatiable necessities of the imperial treasury, the confiscations of property during the reigns of bad emperors, and other causes, ate into the very vitals of Roman Gaul. It has been already shown how the ancient relations of clansman and client merged successively into tributary _colons_, into _adscripti glebæ_, and into chattels. At the period of the final assault of the northern races on the Roman empire, in Gaul, as everywhere else, there was no people behind the imperial legions except rich slaveholders and poor degraded freemen, serfs and chattels; and the legions, too, were mostly recruited from among vagabonds and barbarians. Long before this time, Stilicon, in order to raise soldiers for his army, proclaimed freedom to the chattels who should join his standard; and by this means collected over thirty thousand men!
During the integrity of the empire, branches of the tribe of Franks dwelt in parts of northern Gaul, either as colonists, or as allies who recognized in the Roman emperor their lord paramount. From here they dealt their conquering blows; they subdued to their rule the other German races already established in Gaul, and laid the foundation of the future Carlovingian empire, and finally of France.
The Franks permitted the conquered peoples to retain their own law, which was the Roman, for all civil suits between Roman and Roman. This benefited only the freemen--of whom there were but few--and the rich, so that they could oppress the poor and treat them as they did under the empire; for the Franks did not interfere in any of their internal relations, legal or illegal. The rich and cunning Roman magnates ingratiated themselves with their conquerors: they became _antrustiones_ or commensals of the kings, thus acquiring a high social and political status and influence; and there were many of them among the powerful and influential aristocracy which sprang up under the Merovingians. All the conquered paid oppressive tribute; and the rich, as of old, used every means to increase their estates, serfs and chattels from the booty and exactions made by the Franks.
But although the rights of the free Romans were thus recognized in principle, their persons and property were by no means regarded as sacred. The Franks divided the conquered lands among them in lots, and often seized, along with the estate, the whole of the personal property of a rich Roman magnate.
The Merovingians were almost continually at war among themselves, and these wars were most ruinous to the cities and the rich free Romans. When a peace was concluded, these Romans constituted the hostages for both belligerent parties; and when a peace was broken, the hostages on both sides were treated as prisoners of war; they became chattels, and their property was confiscated.
The Roman cities became the property of the kings and chiefs, the lands the property of the Frankish soldiery. The Franks also were perpetually at war either among themselves or with their neighbors. Military duty was a condition of the possession of land, so that Roman and other slaves and bondmen cultivated the soil and worked for their conquerors. During the imperial epoch, the opulent Gallic magnates and senators lived in magnificent villas, like the Roman nabobs and oligarchs in Italy, Spain, Africa, etc. During the early period of the invasions, an owner would often fortify his villa and defend it with his armed household and chattels. Such villas, changing masters, afterward, in many instances, became feudal strongholds, around each of which grew a village, which in the course of time became a borough, then a town, and finally a city. In this way the Gallo-Roman villas gave rise to the French name _village_ and _ville_.
In general, with the new Frankish conquest, oppression became increasedly grievous, while the slave traffic, especially in prisoners of war, received a new impulse. In the first storm the Roman fiscality for a moment disappeared; but it was soon restored, and with it almost the whole of the Roman administration. The Franks revolted against taxation when one of the kings tried to apply it to them, but the Roman populations bore its whole brunt. Tribute, taxes and other exactions finally became so oppressive that the poor and impoverished sold their children and sometimes even themselves into slavery. The Jews were the common mediators and factors in this traffic, as well as the most extensive slave-traders all over Europe, both then and in subsequent times; and a considerable part of the hereditary hatred of the European masses toward the Jews is to be ascribed to this historic fact.
The Frankish kings and their Frankish subjects had large estates, _métairies_, worked by serfs and chattels. The conquerors hated the cities, preferring the favorite old German life in the country, where they spent their time surrounded by their followers. The lordly mansions, the _sala_ of the kings and the powerful, were erected amidst great forests in the style of encampments; and to this day the German word _hoflager_, "court-camp," is the name for the residence or court of a sovereign. Political power and prestige were no longer derived from municipal citizenship, but from the possession of land; and thus originated the feudal importance of the country and the barons, in contradistinction to the now powerless _municipium_. In the Greek and Roman world, the country was wholly sacrificed, politically and socially, to the city, which, in turn, acquired more and more political power and importance in proportion as domestic slavery destroyed the primitive yeomanry. In the early stages of feudalism scarcely any attention was paid to the cities; they are principally mentioned as sources whence taxes and tributes may be largely squeezed.
In the Free States of the American Union, also, in the townships and villages, the significance of the country has reached its highest and noblest development. Here the free townships and villages are the fountains of healthy political life, and the genuine source of all civilizing agencies.
Under the Merovingians and Carlovingians, the frequent wars and oppressions proved destructive not only to the natives but also to the conquerors themselves. The Franks and other German landholders, by their violent and disorderly mode of life, were soon impoverished and became the prey of powerful neighbors of their own kindred. The savage rigor of the law regulating composition for crimes quickly drained and utterly destroyed the patrimonies of the reckless soldiery, and thus rapidly increased the number of landless vagabonds, who were neither tenants nor serfs, but became chattels to men of their own race, once their companions and perhaps even their followers. At the end of the second Salic dynasty very few free laborers existed, and kidnapping, especially on the sea-coasts, became common.
Charlemagne, as previously mentioned, tried to regulate and alleviate the condition of the bondmen and chattels. His capitularies forbade the selling of chattels beyond the kingdom; and whoever violated this law became a slave himself. Slaves were to be sold in the presence of the count or the bishop, or their lieutenants, or notables, but not surreptitiously, or from one person to another, without being controlled by the authorities; and heavy fines also followed all violations of this law. Notwithstanding all this, however, Norman and Saracen wars and invasions, together with Frankish taxations and exactions, kept the country in the same state of desolation as during the centuries of the agonizing empire. Scarcely any towns existed, and the few large cities were scattered at enormous distances one from the other. Fastnesses, castles, burghs and fortified monasteries dotted the land; even they, however, being separated from each other by great forests and marshes. The poor and oppressed serfs and chattels were hunted and kidnapped, and no place of refuge existed for them.
Under Charlemagne, public order and protection to the free tenants, serfs and chattels, existed to as high a degree as was possible at that epoch; but with his death all this disappeared. The crisis which then occurred and which ended in consolidating the feudal social structure, was even more terrible than the epoch of invasions. The poor classes and the serfs and chattels, as we might suppose, suffered most. The tenth century marks the triumph of the feudal _régime_, and with this triumph chattelhood (_mancipium_) disappears from the laws and the usage of the oppressive masters. The chattels now became hereditary bondmen or serfs, and were no longer objects of sale or of traffic. They could not be separated from their families, but were established in villages; and the slave traffic was carried on solely in Saracens and other heathen.
In all other respects serfdom preserved almost all the most revolting features of ancient domestic slavery. The feudal lord employed the serfs as tillers of his soil, and the harvests they raised were the chief sources of his income; while they likewise formed his followers in his feuds with feudal neighbors or with his lords paramount--the counts, dukes, and kings. The feudal lord did not sell his serfs--as the churches, synods, and councils all united in condemning the traffic in Christians.
The present serf, tiller, and laborer, all over Western Europe, was the younger, outlawed member of the human family, and so now are our Southern chattels.
For a long time the difference between serfdom and ancient chattelhood was discernible only with great difficulty. The collar worn by chattels since the time of Augustus remained on the necks of the serfs (and these, too, not _adscripti glebæ_), with the expression--"I BELONG," or with the name of the master cut thereon. This was the custom in England with the Anglo-Saxon serfs of the Athelstanes and the Cedrics, so that the ancestry of the haughty Anglo-Saxon slaveholding American barons of the present day wore collars!