European countries, Holland and England, for example. Another development, then, reveals itself–the development of individual life, of the man himself, of his faculties, sentiments, and ideas.
These two notions that are comprehended in the broad notion of civilisation–that of the development of social activity and that of the development of individual activity–are intimately related to each other. Their relationship is upheld by the instinctive conviction of men; it is proved by the course of the world’s history–all the great moral and intellectual advances of man have profited society, all the great social advances have profited the individual mind.
So much for civilisation in general. It is now necessary to point out the essential difference between modern European and other civilisations. The characteristic of other civilisations has been unity; they seem to have emanated from a single fact, a single idea. In Egypt and India, for example, the theocratic principle was dominant; in the Greek and Phoenician republics, the democratic principle. The civilisation of modern Europe, on the contrary, is diverse, confused, stormy; all the forms and principles of social organisation theocratic, monarchical, aristocratic, democratic, co-exist in it; there are infinite gradations of liberty, wealth, influence. All the various forces are in a state of constant struggle; yet all of them have a certain family resemblance, as it were, that we cannot but recognise.
These diverse elements, for all their conflict, cannot any one of them extinguish any other; each has to dwell with the rest, make a compromise with the rest. The outcome, then, of this diversity and struggle is liberty; and here is the grand and true superiority of the European over the other civilisations. European civilisation, if I may say so, has entered into eternal truth; it advances in the ways of God.
_II.–Feudalism_
It would be an important confirmation of my assertion as to the diverse character of our civilisation if we should find in its very cradle the causes and the elements of that diversity. And indeed, at the fall of the Roman empire, we do so find it. Three forms of society, each entirely different from the other, are visible at this time of chaos. The municipalities survived, the last remnant of the Imperial system. The Christian Church survived. And in the third place there were the Barbarians, who brought with them a military organisation, and a hardy individual independence, that were wholly new to the peoples who had dwelt under the shelter of the empire. The Barbarian epoch was the chaos of all the elements, the infancy of all the systems, a universal hubbub in which even conflict itself had no definite or permanent effects.
Europe laboured to escape from this confusion; at some times, and in some places, it was temporarily checked–in particular by the great Charlemagne in his revival of the imperial power; but the confusion did not cease until its causes no longer acted. These causes were two–one material, one moral. The material cause was the irruption of fresh Barbarian hordes. The moral cause was the lack of any ideas in common among men as to the structure of society. The old imperial fabric had disappeared; Charlemagne’s restoration of it depended wholly on his own personality, and did not survive him; men had no ideas of any new structure–their intellectual horizon was limited to their own affairs. By the beginning of the tenth century the Barbarian invasions ended, and as the populations settled down a new system appeared, based partly on the Barbarians’ love of independence, partly on their plans of military gradation–the system of feudalism.
A sound proof that in the tenth century the feudal system was necessary, and the only social state possible, lies in the universality of its establishment. Everywhere society was dismembered; everywhere there was formed a multitude of small, obscure, isolated societies, consisting of the chief, his family, his retainers, and the wretched serfs over whom he ruled without restraint, and who had no appeal against his whim. The power he exercised was the power of individual over individual, the domination of personal will and caprice; and this is perhaps the only kind of tyranny that man, to his eternal honour, is never willing to endure. Hence the prodigious and invincible hatred that the people have at all times entertained for feudal rule, for the memories of it, for its very name.
The narrow concentrated life of the feudal lord lent, undoubtedly, a great preponderance to domesticity in his affairs. The lord had his wife and children for his permanent society; they continually shared his interests, his destiny. It was in the bosom of the feudal family that woman gained her importance in civilisation. The system excited development of private character and passion that were, all things considered, noble. Chivalry was the daughter of feudalism.
But from the social point of view feudalism failed to provide either legal order or political security. It contained elaborate obligations between the higher and the lower orders of the feudal hierarchy, duties of protection on the one side and of service on the other. But these obligations could never be established as institutions. There was no superior force to which all had to submit; there was public opinion to make itself respected. Hence the feudal system was without political guarantee to sustain it. Might alone was right. Feudalism was as much opposed to the establishment of general order as to the extension of general liberty. It was indispensable for the reconstruction of European society, but politically it was in itself a radically bad system.
_III.–The Church_
Meanwhile the Church, adhering to its own principles, had steadily advanced along the route that it had marked out for itself in the early days of its organisation. It was during the feudal epoch the only power that made for civilised development. All education was ecclesiastical; all the arts were in the service of the Church. It had, during the Dark Ages, won the Barbarians to its fold by the gorgeous solemnity of its ritual; and, to protect itself against secular interference, it had declared the spiritual power to be independent of the temporal–the first great assertion, in the history of European civilisation, of the liberty of thought.
In one set of respects the Church during the feudal epoch satisfied the conditions of good government; in another, it did not. Its power was uniformly distributed, it drew its recruits from all classes, and entrusted the rule to the most capable. It was in close touch with every grade of mankind; every colony of serfs, even, had its priest. It was the most popular and most accessible society of the time, the most open to all talents and all noble ambitions. But, on the other hand, it failed in that all-important requisite of good government, respect for liberty. It denied the rights of individual reason in spiritual matters, and it claimed the right to compel belief–a claim that placed it in some dependence upon the temporal powers, since as a purely spiritual body, governing by influence and not by force, it could not persecute without the aid of the secular arm.
To sum up, the Church exerted an immense and on the whole a beneficent influence on ideas, sentiments, and conduct; but from the political point of view the Church was nearly always the interpreter and defender of the theocratic system and the Roman Imperial system–that is, of religious and civil despotism.
_IV.–The Towns_
Like the Church, the municipalities survived the downfall of the Roman empire. Their history varied greatly in different parts of Europe, but none the less some observations can be made that are broadly accurate with respect to most of them.
From the fifth to the tenth century, the state of the towns was a state neither of servitude nor of liberty. They suffered all the woes that are the fate of the weak; they were the prey of continual violence and depredation; yet, in spite of the fearful disorders of the time, they preserved a certain importance. When feudalism was established, the towns lost such independence as they had possessed; they found themselves under the heel of feudal chiefs. But feudalism did bring about a sort of peace, a sort of order; and with the slightest gleam of peace and order a man’s hope revives, and on the revival of hope he takes to work. So it was with the towns. New wants were created; commerce and industry arose to satisfy them; wealth and population slowly returned.
But industry and commerce were absolutely without security; the townsmen were exposed to merciless extortion and plundering at the hands of their feudal overlords. Nothing irritates a man more than to be harassed in his toil, thus deprived of its promised fruits. The only way in which the towns could defend themselves from the violence of their masters was by using violence themselves. So in the eleventh century we find town after town rising in revolt against its despot, and winning from him a charter of liberty.
Although the insurrection was in a sense general, it was in no way concerted–it was not a rising of the combined citizens against the combined feudal aristocracy. All the towns found themselves exposed to much the same evils, and rescued themselves in much the same manner. But each town acted for itself–did not go to the help of any other town. Hence these detached communities had no ambitions, no aspirations to national importance; their outlook was limited to themselves. But at the same time the emancipation of the towns created a new class, a class of citizens engaged in the same pursuits, with the same interests and the same modes of life; a class that would in time unite and assert itself, and prevent the domination of a single order of society that has been the curse of Asia.
Although it may be broadly asserted that the emancipation did not alter the relations of the citizens with the general government, that assertion must be modified in one respect. A link was established between the citizens and the king. Sometimes they appealed for his aid against their lord, sometimes the lord invoked him as judge; in one way or another a relation was established between the king and the towns, and the citizens thus came into touch with the centre of the State.
_V.–The Crusades_
From the fifth to the twelfth century, society, as we have seen, contained kings, a lay aristocracy, a clergy, citizens, peasantry, the germs, in fact, of all that goes to make a nation and a government; yet–no government, no nation. We have come across a multitude of particular forces, of local institutions, but nothing general, nothing public, nothing properly speaking political.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on the contrary, all the classes and the particular forces have taken a secondary place, are shadowy and almost effaced; the stage of the world is occupied by two great figures, government and people.
Here, if I am not mistaken, is the essential distinction between primitive Europe and modern Europe. Here is the change that was accomplished in the period extending from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. Viewed by itself, that period seems a characterless one of confusion without cause, of movement without direction, of agitation without result. Yet, in relation to the period that followed, this period had a tendency and a progress of its own; it slowly accomplished a vast work. It was the second period of European civilisation–the period of attempt and experiment, succeeding that of origins and formation, and preparing the way for that of development properly so called.
The first great event of this period was the Crusades–a universal movement of all classes and all countries in moral unity–the truly heroic event of Europe. Besides the religious impulse that led to the Crusades, there was another impulse. They gave to me an opportunity of widening their horizons, of indulging the taste for movement and adventure. The opportunity, thus freely taken, changed the face of society. Men’s minds were opened, their ideas were extended, by contact with other races; European society was dragged out of the groove along which it had been travelling. Religious ideas remained unchanged, but religious beliefs were no longer the only sphere in which the human intellect exercised itself. The moral state of Europe was profoundly modified.
The social state underwent a similar change. Many of the smaller feudal lords sold their fiefs, or impoverished themselves by crusading, or lost much of their power during their absence. Property and power came into fewer hands; society was more centralised, no longer dispersed as it formerly was. The citizens, on their part, were no longer content with local industry and trade; they entered upon commerce on a grander scale with countries oversea. Petty influence yielded place to larger influences; the small existences grouped themselves round the great. By the end of the Crusades, the march of society towards centralisation was in steady progress.
_VI.–The Age of Centralisation_
Already, in the twelfth century, a new idea of kingship had begun, very faintly, to make its appearance. In most European countries the king, under the feudal system, had been a head who could not enforce his headship. But there was, all the while, such a thing as kingship, and somebody bore the title of king; and society, striving to escape from feudal violence and to get hold of real order and unity, had recourse to the king in an experimental way, to see, as one might say, what he could do. Gradually there developed the idea of the king as the protector of public order and justice and of the common interest as the paramount magistrate–the idea that changed Europe society from a series of classes into a group of centralised States.
But the old order did not perish without efforts to perpetuate itself. These efforts were of two kinds; a particular class sought predominance, or it was proposed that the classes should agree to act in concert. To the first kind belonged the design of the Church to gain mastery over Europe that culminated with Pope Gregory VII. It failed for three reasons–because Christianity is a purely moral force and not a temporal administrative force; because the ambitions of the Church were opposed by the feudal aristocracy; and because the celibacy of the clergy prevented the formation of a caste capable of theocratic organisation. Attempts at democracy were made, for a time with apparent means, by the Italian civic republics; but they were a prey to internal disorder, their government tended to become oligarchical, and their incapacity for uniting among themselves made them the victims of foreign invaders. The Swiss Republican organisation was more successful, but became aristocratic and immobile. The House Towns and the towns of Flanders and the Rhine organised for pure defence; they preserved their privileges, but remained confined within their walls.
The effort at concerted action by the classes was manifested in the States General of France, Spain, and Portugal, the Diet in Germany, and the Parliament in England. All these, except the Parliament, were ineffective and as it were accidental in their action; all they did was to preserve in a manner the notion of liberty. The circumstances of England were exceptional. The Parliament did not govern; but it became a mode of government adopted in principle, and often indispensable in practice.
Nothing, however, could arrest the march of centralisation. In France the war of independence against England brought a sense of national unity and purpose, and feudalism was finally overthrown, and the central power made dominant, by the policy of Louis XI. Similar effects were brought about in Spain by the war against the Moors and the rule of Ferdinand. In England feudalism was destroyed by the Wars of the Roses, and was succeeded by the Tudor despotism. In Germany, the House of Austria began its long ascendancy. Thus in the fifteenth century the new principles prevailed; the old forms, the old liberties were swept aside to make way for centralised government under absolute rulers.
At the same time another new fact entered into European history. The kings began to enter into relations with each other, to form alliances; diplomacy was created. Since it is in the nature of diplomacy to be conducted more or less secretly by a few persons, and since the peoples did not and would not greatly concern themselves in it, this development was favourable to the strengthening of royalty.
_VII.–The Spiritual Revolt_
Although the Church until the sixteenth century had successfully suppressed all attempts at spiritual independence, yet the broadening of men’s minds that began with the Crusades, and received a vigorous impetus from the Renaissance, made its mark even in the fifteenth century upon ecclesiastical affairs. Three main facts of the moral order are presented during this period: the ineffectual attempts of the councils of Constance and Bale to reform the Church from within; the most notable of which was that of Huss in Bohemia; and the intellectual revolution that accompanied the Renaissance. The way was thus prepared for the event that was inaugurated when Luther burnt the Pope’s Bull at Wittenberg in 1520.
The Reformation was not, as its opponents contend, the result of accident or intrigue; nor was it, as its upholders contend, the outcome of a simple desire for the reform of abuses. It was, in reality, a revolt of the human spirit against absolute power in spiritual affairs. The minds of men were during the sixteenth century in energetic movement, consumed by desire for progress; the Church had become inert and stationary, yet it maintained all its pretensions and external importance. The Church, indeed, was less tyrannical than it had formerly been, and not more corrupt. But it had not advanced; it had lost touch with human thought.
The Reformation, in all the lands that it reached, in all the lands where it played a great part, whether as conqueror, or as conquered, resulted in general, constant, and immense progress in liberty and activity of thought, and tended towards the emancipation of the human spirit. It accomplished more than it knew; more, perhaps, than it would have desired. It did not attack temporal absolutism; but the collision between temporal absolutism and spiritual freedom was bound to come, and did come.
Spiritual movement in European history has always been ahead of temporal movement. The Church began as a very loose society, without a properly-constituted government. Then it placed itself under an aristocratic control of bishops and councils. Then it came under the monarchical rule of the Popes; and finally a revolution broke out against absolutism in spiritual affairs. The ecclesiastical and civil societies have undergone the same vicissitudes; but the ecclesiastical society has always been the first to be changed.
We are now in possession of one of the great facts of modern society, the liberty of the human spirit. At the same time we see political centralisation prevailing nearly everywhere. In the seventeenth century the two principles were for the first time to be opposed.
_VIII.–The Political Revolt_
Their first shock was in England, for England was a country of exceptional conditions both civil and religious. The Reformation there had in part been the work of the kings themselves, and was incomplete; the Reformers remained militant, and denounced the bishops as they had formerly denounced the Pope. Moreover, the aspirations after civil liberty that were stirred up by the emancipation of thought had means of action in the old institution of the country–the charter, the Parliament, the laws, the precedents. Similar aspirations in Continental countries had no such means of action, and led to nothing.
Two national desires coincided in England at this epoch–the desire for religious revolution and liberty, and the desire for political liberty and the overthrow of despotism. The two sets of reformers joined forces. For the political party, civil freedom was the end; for the religious party, it was only a means; but throughout the conflict the political party took the lead, and the others followed. It was not until 1688 that the reformers finally attained their aim in the abolition of absolute power spiritual and temporal; and the accession of William of Orange in that year brought England into the great struggle that was raging on the Continent between the principle of despotism and the principle of freedom.
England differed from other European countries in that the essential diversity of European civilisation was more pronounced there than anywhere else. Elsewhere, one element prevailed over the others until it was overthrown; in England, even if one element was dominant, the others were strong and important. Elizabeth had to be far more wary with her nobles and commons than Louis XIV. with his. For this reason, Europe lagged behind England in civil freedom. But there was another reason–the influence of France.
During the seventeenth century, the French Government was the strongest in Europe, and it was a despotic government. During the eighteenth century, French thought was the most active and potent in Europe, and it was unboundedly free thought. Louis XIV. did not, as is sometimes supposed, adopt as his principles the propagation of absolutism; his aim was the strength and greatness of France, and to this end he fought and planned–just as William of Orange fought and planned, not against despotism, but against France. France presented herself at that age as the most redoubtable, skilful, and imposing Power in Europe.
Yet, after the death of Louis XIV., the government immediately degenerated. This was inevitable. No system of government can be maintained without institutions, and a despot dislikes institutions. The rule of Louis XIV. was great, powerful, and brilliant, but it had no roots. The decrepit remains of it were in the eighteenth century brought face to face with a society in which free examination and free speculation had been carried to lengths never imagined before. Freedom of thought once came to grips with absolute power.
Of the stupendous consequence of that collision it is not for me to speak here; I have reached the end. But let me, before concluding, dwell upon the gravest and most instructive part that is revealed to us by this grand spectacle of civilisation. It is the danger, the insurmountable evil of absolute power in any form–whether in a form of a despot like Louis XIV. or in that of the untrammelled human spirit that prevailed at the Revolution. Each human power has in itself a natural vice, a principle of weakness, to which there has to be assigned a limit. It is only by general liberty of all rights, interests and opinions that each power can be restrained within its legitimate bounds, and intellectual freedom enabled to exist genuinely and to the advantage of the whole community.
* * * * *
HENRY HALLAM
View of the State of Europe During the Middle Ages
Henry Hallam, the English historian, was born on July 9, 1777, at Windsor, his father being Canon of Windsor, and Dean of Bristol. Educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford, he was called to the English bar, but devoted himself to the study and writing of history. He received an appointment in the Civil Service, which, with his private means, placed him in comfortable leisure for his wide researches. His son, Arthur Henry, who died at the age of 22, is the subject of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” Hallam died on January 21, 1859, and was buried at Clevedon, Somersetshire. The “View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages,” commonly known as Hallam’s “Middle Ages,” was published by the author in 1818. Hallam was already well known among the literary men of the day, but this was his first important work. It is a study of the period from the appearance of Clovis, the creator of the dominion of the Franks, to the close of the Middle Ages, the arbitrary dividing line being drawn at the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. of France.
_I.–France_
The Frankish dominion was established over the Roman province of Gaul by Clovis at the opening of the sixth century. The Merovingian dynasty degenerated rapidly; and the power passed into the hands of the Mayors of the Palace–an office which became hereditary with Pepin Heristal and Charles Martel. With the sanction of the Pope the Merovingian king was deposed by Pepin, the son of Charles Martel, who was crowned king and overthrew the Lombard power in Italy.
Pepin was succeeded by Charlemagne, who completed the conquest of the Lombards, carried his arms into Spain as far as the Ebro, and extended his power eastwards over the Saxons as far as the Elbe. In his person the Roman empire was revived, and he was crowned emperor at Rome on Christmas Day A.D. 800. The great empire he had built up fell to pieces under his successors, who adopted the disastrous plan of partition amongst brothers.
France fell to the share of one branch of the Carlovingians. The Northmen were allowed to establish themselves in Normandy, and Germany was completely separated from France. The Carlovingians were displaced by Hugh Capet. The actual royal domain was small, and the kings of the House of Capet exercised little control over their great feudatories until the reign of Philip Augustus. That crafty monarch drew into his own hands the greater part of the immense territories held by the kings of England as French feudatories. After a brief interval the craft of Philip Augustus was succeeded by the idealism of St. Louis, whose admirable character enabled him to achieve an extraordinary ascendancy over the imagination of his people. In spite of the disastrous failure of his crusading expeditions, the aggrandisement of the crown continued, especially under Philip the Fair; but the failure of the direct heirs after the successive reigns of his three sons placed Philip of Valois on the throne according to the “Salic” law of succession in 1328.
On the pretext of claiming the succession for himself, Edward III. began the great French war which lasted, interrupted by only one regular pacification, for a hundred and twenty years. The brilliant personal qualities of Edward and the Black Prince, the great resources of England, and the quality of the soldiery, account for the English successes. After the peace of Bretigny these triumphs were reversed, and the English lost their possessions; but when Charles VI. ascended the throne disaster followed. France was rent by the rival factions of Burgundy and Orleans, the latter taking its more familiar name from the Court of Armagnac. The troubled reigns of Richard II. and Henry IV. prevented England from taking advantage of these dissensions; but Henry V. renewed the war, winning the battle of Agincourt in his first campaign and securing the Treaty of Troyes on his second invasion. After his death came that most marvellous revolution wrought by Joan of Arc, and the expulsion of the English from the country.
In France the effect of the war was to strengthen the Crown as against the Nobility, a process developed by the subtlety of Louis XI. Out of the long contest in which the diplomatic skill of the king was pitted against the fiery ambitions of Charles of Burgundy, Louis extracted for himself sundry Burgundian provinces. The supremacy of the Crown was secured when his son Charles VIII. acquired Brittany by marrying the Duchess Anne.
The essential distinction of ranks in France was found in the possession of land. Besides the National lands, there were lands reserved to the Crown, which, under the name of benefices, were bestowed upon personal followers of the king, held more or less on military tenure; and the king’s vassals acquired vassals for themselves by a similar process of subinfeudation. On the other hand freeholders inclined, for the sake of protection, to commend themselves, as the phrase was, to their stronger neighbours and so to assume the relation of vassal to liege lord. The essential principle was a mutual contract of support and fidelity, confirmed by the ceremonies of homage, fealty, and investiture, which conferred upon the lord the right to various reliefs, fines, and rights capable of conversion into money payments.
Gentility, now hereditary, was derived from the tenure of land; the idea of it was emphasised by the adoption of surnames and armorial bearings. A close aristocracy was created, somewhat modified by the right claimed by the king of creating nobles. Prelates and abbots were in the same position as feudal nobles, though the duty of personal service was in many cases commuted for an equivalent. Below the gentle class were freemen, and the remainder of the population were serfs or villeins. It was not impossible for villeins to purchase freedom. In France the privileges possessed by the vassals of the Crown were scarcely consistent with the sovereignty. Such were the rights of coining money, of private war, and of immunity from taxation.
Such legislation as there was appears to have been effected by the king, supported by a Royal Council or a more general assembly of the barons. It was only by degrees that the Royal ordinances came to be current in the fiefs of the greater vassals. It was Philip the Fair who introduced the general assembly of the Three Estates. This assembly very soon claimed the right of granting and refusing money as well as of bringing forward grievances. The kings of France, however, sought to avoid convocation of the States General by obtaining grants from provincial assemblies of the Three Estates.
The old system of jurisdiction by elected officers was superseded by feudal jurisdiction, having three degrees of power, and acting according to recognised local customs, varied by the right to ordeal by combat. The Crown began to encroach on these feudal jurisdictions by the establishment of Royal courts of appeal; but there also subsisted a supreme Court of Peers to whom were added the king’s household officers. The peers ceased by degrees to attend this court, while the Crown multiplied the councillors of inferior rank; and this body became known as the Parliament of Paris–in effect an assembly of lawyers.
The decline of the feudal system was due mainly to the increasing power of the Crown on the one hand, and of the lower ranks on the other; more especially from the extension of the privileges of towns. But the feudal principle itself was weakened by the tendency to commute military service for money, enabling the Crown to employ paid troops.
_II.–Italy and Spain_
After the disruption of Charlemagne’s empire the imperial title was revived from the German, Otto the Great of Saxony. His imperial supremacy was recognised in Italy; the German king was the Roman emperor. Italian unity had gone to pieces, but the German supremacy offended Italy. Still from the time of Conrad of Franconia the election of the King of Germany was assumed, at least my him, to convey the sovereignty of Italy. In the eleventh century Norman adventurers made themselves masters of Sicily and Southern Italy. In Northern Italy on the other hand the emperors favoured the development of free cities, owning only the imperial sovereignty and tending to self-government on Republican lines. The appearance on the scene in the twelfth century of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa introduced a period characterised by a three-fold change: the victorious struggle of the northern cities for independence; the establishment of the temporal sovereignty of the Papacy in the middle provinces; and the union of the kingdom of Naples to the dominions of the Imperial House. The first quarrels with Milan led to the formation of the Lombard league, and a long war in which the battle of Legnano gave the confederates a decisive victory. The mutual rivalries of the States, however, prevented them from turning this to good account. Barbarossa’s grandson, Frederick II., was a child of four when he succeeded to the Swabian inheritance, and through his mother to that of Sicily.
It was now that the powerful Pope Innocent III. so greatly extended the temporal power of the Papacy, and that the rival parties of Guelfs and Ghibelins, adherents the one of the Papacy, the other of the Empire, were established as factions in practically every Italian city. When the young Frederick grew up he was drawn into a long struggle with the Papacy which ended in the overthrow of the Imperial authority. From this time the quarrel of Guelfs and Ghibelins for the most part became mere family feuds resting on no principles. Charles of Anjou was adopted as Papal champion; the republics of the North were in effect controlled by despots for a brief moment. Rome revived her republicanism under the leadership of Rienzi. In the general chaos the principle interest attaches to the peculiar but highly complicated form of democracy developed in Florence, where the old Patrician families were virtually disfranchised. Wild and disorderly as was the state of Florence, the records certainly point to the conditions having been far worse in the cities ruled by the Visconti and their like.
Of Genoa’s wars with Pisa and with Venice a detailed account cannot be given. Of all the northern cities Venice achieved the highest political position; isolated to a great extent from the political problems of the cities of Lombardy and Tuscany, she developed her wealth and her commerce by the sea. Her splendour may, however, be dated from the taking of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204, when she became effectively Queen of the Adriatic and Mistress of the Eastern Mediterranean. In effect her government was a close oligarchy; possessed of complete control over elections which in theory were originally popular. The oligarchy reached its highest and narrowest development with the institution of the famous Council of Ten.
Naples and Sicily came under the dominion of Charles of Anjou when he was adopted as Papal champion. The French supremacy, however, was overthrown when the Sicilians rose and carried out the massacre known as the Sicilian Vespers. They offered the Crown to the King of Aragon. It was not till 1409, however, that Sicily was definitely united to the Crown of Aragon and a few years later the same king was able to assert successfully a claim to Naples.
When the Roman empire was tottering the Visigoths established their dominion in Spain. In 712 Saracen invaders made themselves masters of the greater part of the peninsula. The Christians were driven into the more northern parts and formed a number of small States out of which were developed the kingdoms of Navarre, Leon and Castille, and Aragon. Frontier towns acquired large liberties while they were practically responsible for defence against the Moors. During the thirteenth century great territories were recovered from the Moors; but the advance ceased as the Moors were reduced to the compact kingdom of Granada. In the fourteenth century the struggle for Castille between Pedro the Cruel and his brother established the house of Trastamare on the throne. The Crowns of Castille and Aragon were united by the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand.
The government of the old Gothic monarchy was through the Crown and a Council of Prelates and Nobles. At a comparatively early date, however, the “Cortes” was attended by deputies from the town, though the number of these was afterwards closely limited. The principle of taxation through representatives was recognised; and laws could neither be made nor annulled except in the Cortes. This form of constitutionalism was varied by the claim of the nobles to assume forcible control when matters were conducted in a fashion of which they disapproved.
The union of Castille and Aragon led immediately to the conquest of Granada completed in 1492; an event which in some respects counterbalanced the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks.
_III.–The German Empire and the Papacy_
When the German branch of the Carlovingian dynasty became extinct the five German nations–Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Lorraine–resolved to make the German kingship elective. For some generations the Crown was bestowed on the Saxon Ottos. On the extinction of their house in 1024, it was succeeded by a Franconian dynasty which came into collision with the Papacy under Pope Gregory VII. On the extinction of this line in 1025 Germany became divided between the partisans of the Houses of Swabia and Saxony, the Wibelungs and Welfs,–the origin of the Hibelines and Guelfs. The Swabian House, the Hohenstauffen, gained the ascendancy in the person of Frederick Barbarossa. The lineal representatives of the Saxon Guelfs are found to-day in the House of Brunswick.
The rule of the Swabian House is most intimately connected with Italian history. In the thirteenth century the principle that the right of election of the emperor lay with seven electors was apparently becoming established. There were the Archbishops of Mentz, Treves, and Cologne, the Duke of Saxony, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the King of Bohemia, and the Margrave of Brandenburg. In all other respects, however, several other dukes and princes were at least on an equality with the electors.
In 1272 the election fell on the capable Rudolph of Hapsburg; and for some time after this the emperors were chosen from the Houses of Austria, Bavaria, or Luxemburg.
Disintegration was greatly increased by the practice of the partition of territories among brothers in place of primogeniture. A preponderating authority was given to the electors by the Golden Bull of Charles IV. in 1355. The power of the emperor as against the princes was increased, as that of the latter was counterbalanced by the development of free cities. Considerable reforms were introduced at the close of our period mainly by Maximilian.
The depravity of the Greek empire would have brought it to utter ruin at a much earlier date but for the degeneration which overtook Mohammedanism. Incidentally the Crusades helped the Byzantine power at first to strengthen its hold on some of its threatened possessions; but the so-called fourth crusade replaced the Greek Empire by a Latin one with no elements of permanency. When a Greek dynasty was re-established, and the crusading spirit of Western Europe was already dead, the Byzantine Princes were left to cope with the Turks single handed, and the last of the Caesars died heroically when the Ottomans captured Constantinople in 1453.
Throughout the early middle ages the Church acquired enormous wealth and Church lands were free from taxation. It was not till a comparatively late period that the payment of tithes was enforced by law. Not infrequently the Church was despoiled by violence, but the balance was more than recovered by fraud. By the time of Charlemagne the clergy were almost exempt from civil jurisdiction and held practically an exclusive authority in matters of religion. The state, however, maintained its temporal supremacy. When the strong hand of Charlemagne was removed ecclesiastical influence increased.
It was under Gregory the Great that the Papacy acquired its great supremacy over the Provincial Churches. As the power of the Church grew after the death of Charlemagne, partly from the inclination of weak kings to lean on ecclesiastical support, the Papal claims to authority developed and began to be maintained by the penalties of excommunication and interdict.
A period of extreme laxity in the tenth century was to be brought to a close in the eleventh partly by the pressure brought to bear on the Papacy by the Saxon emperors, but still bore by the ambitious resolution of Gregory VII. This remarkable man was determined to assert the complete supremacy of the Holy See over all secular powers. He refused to recognise the right of secular princes to make ecclesiastical appointments within their own dominions; and he emphasised the distinction between the priesthood, as a cast having divine authority, and the laity, by enforcing with the utmost strictness the ecclesiastical law of celibacy, which completely separates the churchman from the normal interests and ambitions which actuate the layman.
In the contest between Gregory and the emperor, it seemed for the moment as if the secular power had won the victory; but, in fact, throughout the twelfth century; the claims which Gregory had put forward were becoming practically effective partly from the great influence exercised through the Crusades. These Papal pretensions reached their climax in the great Pope Innocent III., who asserted with practical success the right to pronounce absolutely on all disputes between princes or between princes and their subjects, and to depose those who rejected his authority. Throughout the thirteenth century Rome was once more mistress of the world.
The Church derived great influence from the institution of mendicant orders, especially those of St. Dominic and St. Francis which recovered much of the esteem forfeited by the old Monastic orders. Another instrument of Papal influence was the power of granting dispensations both with regard to marriages and as to the keeping of oaths. If the clergy were free for the most part from civil taxation, they were nevertheless severely mulcted by the Papacy. The ecclesiastical jurisdiction encroached upon the secular tribunals; the classes of persons with respect to whom it claimed exclusive authority were persistently extended, in spite of the opposition of such Princes as Henry II. and Edward I.
At last, however, the Papal aggressor met his match in Philip the Fair. When Boniface VIII. died, his successors first submitted to the French monarchy and then became its nominees; while they resided at Avignon, virtually under French control. The restoration of the pontificate to Rome in 1375 was shortly followed by the Great Schism. For some years there were two rival Popes, each of whom was recognised by one or the other half of Western Christendom. This was terminated by the Council of Constance, which incidentally affirmed the supremacy of general councils over the Pope. The following council at Basle was distinctly anti-papal; but the Papacy had the better of the contest.
_IV.–England_
The Anglo-Saxon polity limited the succession of the Crown to a particular house but allowed a latitude of choice within that house. The community was divided into Thames or gentry, Ceorls or freemen, and serfs. The ceorls tended to sink to the position known later as villeinage. The composition of the king’s great council called the Witenagemot is doubtful. The country was divided into shires, the shire into districts called hundreds, and the hundreds into tithings. There appears to be no adequate authority for the idea that trial by jury was practised; the prevailing characteristic of justice was the system of penalty by fine, and the responsibility of the tithing for the misdeeds of any of its members. There is no direct evidence as to the extent to which feudal tenures were beginning to be established before the Norman conquest.
The Norman conquest involved a vast confiscation of property and the exclusion of the native English from political privileges. The feudal system of land tenure was established; but its political aspect here and in France was quite different. There were no barons with territories comparable to those of the great French feudataries. That the government was extremely tyrannical is certain. The Crown derived its revenues from feudal dues, customs duties, tallages–that is, special charges on particular towns,–and the war tax called the Danegelt; all except the first being arbitrary taxes. The violence of King John led to the demand of the barons for the Great Charter, the keystone of English liberty, securing the persons and property of all freemen from arbitrary imprisonment or spoliation. Thenceforth no right of general taxation is claimed. The barons held themselves warranted in refusing supplies.
The King’s Court was gradually separated into three branches, King’s Bench, Exchequer, and Common Pleas. The advance in the study of law had the definite effect of establishing a fixed rule of succession to the Crown. One point must still be noticed which distinguishes England from other European countries; that the law recognises no distinction of class among freemen who stand between the peers and villeins.
The reign of Edward I. forms an epoch. The Confirmation of the Charters put an end to all arbitrary taxation; and the type of the English Parliament was fixed. In the Great Councils the prelates and greater barons had assembled, and the lesser barons were also summoned; the term baron being equivalent to tenant in chief. A system of representation is definitely formulated in Montfort’s Parliament of 1265. Whether the knights were elected by the freemen of the shire or only by the tenants in chief, is not clear. Many towns were self governing–independent, that is, of local magnates–under charters from the Crown. Montfort’s Parliament is the first to which towns sent representatives. Edward established the practice in his Model Parliament; probably in order to ensure that his demands for money from the towns might in appearance at least receive their formal assent.
Parliament was not definitely divided into two houses until the reign of Edward III. In this reign the Commons succeeded in establishing the illegality of raising money without consent; the necessity that the two houses should concur for any alterations in the law; and the right of the Commons to enquire into public abuses and to impeach public counsellors. Under the second heading is introduced a distinction between statutes and ordinances; the latter being of a temporary character, and requiring to be confirmed by Parliament before they acquire permanent authority. In the next reign the Commons assert the right of examining the public expenditure. Moreover the Parliaments more openly and boldly expressed resentment at the acts of the king’s ministers and claimed rights of control. For a time, however, the king secured supremacy by a coup d’etat; which in turn brought about his deposition, and the accession of Henry IV., despite the absurd weakness of his title to the inheritance of the Crown.
The rights thus acquired developed until the War of the Roses. Notably redress of grievances became the condition of supply; and the inclination of the Crown to claim a dispensing power is resolutely combated. It is also to be remarked that the king’s foreign policy of war or peace is freely submitted to the approval of Parliament.
This continues during the minority of Henry VI.; but the revival of dissatisfaction with the government leads to a renewed activity in the practice of impeachments; and Parliament begins to display a marked sensitiveness on the question of its privileges. The Commons further definitely express their exclusive right of originating money bills.
At this time it is clear that at least all freeholders were entitled to vote in the election of the knights of the shire. The selection of the towns which sent up members, and the franchise under which their members were elected, seems to have been to a considerable extent arbitrary. Nor can we be perfectly certain of the principles on which writs were issued for attendance in the upper house. We find that for some time the lower clergy as well as the higher were summoned to attend Parliament; but presently, sitting in a separate chamber, they ceased to take part in Parliamentary business.
We have seen the King’s Court divided into three courts of justice. The court itself, however, as the king’s Council, continued to exercise a juridical as well as a deliberative and administrative function. In spite of the charter, it possessed an effective if illegal power of arbitrary imprisonment.
So far the essential character of our constitution appears to be a monarchy greatly limited by law but swerving continually into irregular courses which there was no constraint adequate to correct. There is absolutely no warrant for the theory that the king was merely a hereditary executive magistrate, the first officer of the State. The special advantage enjoyed by England lay in the absence of an aristocracy with interests antagonistic to those of the people. It would be truer to say that the liberties of England were bought by money than by the blood of our forefathers.
The process by which the villein became a hired labourer is obscure and an attempt was made to check it by the Statute of Labourers at the time of the Black Death. This was followed by the peasant’s revolt of 1382, which corresponded to the far worse horrors of the French Jacquerie. Sharply though this was suppressed, the real object of the rising seemed to have been accomplished. Of the period of the Wars of the Roses it is here sufficient to say that it established the principle embodied in a statute of Henry VII. that obedience to the _de facto_ government is not to be punished on the ground that government is not also _de jure_.
_V.–Europe_
In spite of the Teutonic incursion, Latin remained the basis of language as it survived in Italy, France, and Spain. But the pursuit of letters was practically confined to the clergy and was by them employed almost exclusively in the interests of clerical authority. To this end a multitude of superstitions were encouraged; superstitions which were the cause of not a few strange and irrational outbursts of fanaticism. The monasteries served indeed a useful purpose as sanctuaries in days of general lawlessness and rapine; but the huge weight of evidence is conclusive as to the general corruption of morals among the clergy as among the laity. The common diversion of the upper classes, lay and clerical, when not engaged in actual war, was hunting. An extended commerce was impossible when robbery was a normal occupation of the great.
Gradually, however, a more orderly society emerged. Maritime commerce developed in two separate areas, the northern and western, and the Mediterranean. The first great commerce in the north arises from the manufacture in Flanders of the wool exported from England. And in the fourteenth century England herself began to compete in the woollen manufacture. The German free manufacturing towns established the Great Hanseatic League; but maritime commerce between the Northern and Southern areas was practically non-existent till the fifteenth century, by which time English ships were carrying on a fairly extensive traffic in the Mediterranean. In that area the great seaports of Italy, and in a less degree, of Catalonia and the French Mediterranean seaboard, developed a large commerce. Naturally, however, the law which it was sufficiently difficult to enforce by land was even more easily defied on the sea, and piracy was extremely prevalent.
Governments as well as private persons were under a frequent necessity of borrowing, and for a long time the great money lenders were the Jews. They, however, were later to a great extent displaced by the merchants of Lombardy, and the fifteenth century witnesses the rise of the great bankers, Italian and German.
The structure and furniture of all buildings for private purposes made exceedingly little provision for comfort, offering an extreme contrast to the dignity of the public buildings and the sublimity of ecclesiastical architecture.
During the last three hundred years of our period it is clear that there was a great diminution of the status of servitude and a great increase in the privileges extended to corporate towns. Private warfare was checked and lawless robbery to a considerable extent restrained. It is tolerably clear that the rise of heretical sects were both the cause and the result of moral dissatisfaction, tending to the adoption of higher moral standards. Some of these sects were cruelly crushed by merciless persecution, as in the case of the Albigenses. The doctrines of Wickliffe, however, were never stamped out in England; and the form which they took in Bohemia among the followers of the martyred John Huss had little about them that was beneficial.
The great moral school of the Middle Ages was the institution of chivalry, which existed to animate and cherish the principle of honour. To this a strong religious flavor was superadded, perhaps by the Crusades. To valour and devotion was added the law of service to womanhood, and chivalry may fairly claim to have developed generally the three virtues essential to it, of loyalty, courtesy, and liberality. Resting, however, as it did on the personal prowess and skill of the individual in single combat, the whole system of chivalry was destroyed by the introduction on an extensive scale of the use of firearms.
We turn lastly to the intellectual improvement which may be referred to four points: the study of civil laws the institution of universities; the application of modern languages to literature, and especially to poetry; and the revival of ancient learning. Education may almost be said to have begun with the establishment of the great schools by Charlemagne out of which sprang the European universities. For a long time of course all studies were dominated by that of theology, and the scholastic philosophy which pertained to it. Barren as these pursuits were, they kept alive an intellectual activity which ultimately found fresh channels. The Romance languages developed a new literature first on the tongues of the troubadours and then in Italy–the Italy which gave birth to Dante and Petrarch. It was about the fourteenth century that a new enthusiasm was born for the study of classical authors, though Greek was still unknown. And the final and decisive impulse was given when the invention of printing made the great multiplication of books possible.
* * * * *
STANLEY LANE-POOLE
Egypt in the Middle Ages
Stanley Lane-Poole, born on December 18, 1845, studied Arabic under his great-uncle, Lane, the Orientalist, and, before going up to Oxford for his degree, began his “Catalogue of Oriental Coins in the British Museum,” which appeared in fourteen volumes between 1875 and 1892, and founded his reputation as the first living authority on Arabic numismatics. In 1883, 1896, and 1897 he was at Cairo officially employed by the British Government upon the Mohammedan antiquities, and published his treatise on “The Art of the Saracens in Egypt” in 1886, in which year he visited Stockholm, Helsingfors, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Constantinople to examine their Oriental collections. He has written histories of the “Moors in Spain,” “Turkey,” “The Barbary Corsairs,” and “Mediaeval India,” which have run to many editions; and biographies of Saladin, Babar, Aurangzib; of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, and Sir Harry Parkes. He has also published a miniature Koran in the “Golden Treasury” series, and written “Studies in a Mosque,” besides editing three volumes of Lane’s “Arabic Lexicon.” For five years he held the post of Professor of Arabic at Trinity College, Dublin, of which he is Litt.D. Mohammedan Egypt, his special subject, he has treated in several books on Cairo, the latest being “The Story of Cairo.” But his most complete work on this subject is “The History of Egypt in the Middle Ages,” here epitomised by the author.
_I.–A Province of the Caliphate_
Ever since the Arab conquest in 641 Egypt has been ruled by Mohammedans, and for more than half the time by men of Turkish race. Though now and again a strong man has gathered all the reins of control into his own hands and been for a time a personal monarch, as a rule the government has been, till recent years, a military bureaucracy.
The people, of course, had no voice in the government. The Egyptians have never been a self-governing race, and such a dream as constitutional democracy was never heard of until a few years ago. By the Arab conquest in the seventh century the people merely changed masters. They were probably not indisposed to welcome the Moslems as their deliverers from the tyranny of the Orthodox Church of the East Roman or Byzantine Empire, invincibly intolerant of the native monophysite heresy; and when the conquest was complete they found themselves, on the whole, better off than before. They paid their taxes to officials with Arabic instead of Greek titles, but the taxes were lighter and the amount was strictly laid down by law.
The land-tax of about a pound per acre was not excessive on so fertile a soil, and the poll-tax on nonconformity, of the same amount, was a moderate price to pay for entire liberty of conscience and freedom in public worship guaranteed by solemn treaty. The other taxes were comparatively insignificant, and the total revenue in the eighth century was about L7,000,000. The surplus went to the caliph, the head of the vast Mohammedan empire, which then stretched from Seville to Samarkand, whose capital was first Damascus and afterwards Baghdad.
For over 200 years (till 868) Egypt was a mere province of this huge caliphate, and was governed, like other provinces, with a sole view to revenue. “Milk till the udder be dry and let blood to the last drop” was a caliph’s instructions to a governor of Egypt. As these governors were constantly changed–there were sixty-seven in 118 years under the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad–and as a governor’s main object was to “make hay while the sun shines,” the process of milking the Egyptian cow was often accelerated by illegal extortion, and the governor’s harvest was reaped before it was due. Illegality was, however, checked to some extent by the generally wise and just influence of the chief justice, or kadi, whose probity often formed the best feature of the Arab government in Egypt.
Nor did the caliphs extort taxes without giving something in return. The development of irrigation works was always a main consideration with the early Mohammedan rules, from Spain to India, and in Egypt, where irrigation is the country’s very life, it was specially cared for, with a corresponding increase in the yield. Moreover, the governors usually held to the agreement that the Christians should have liberty of conscience, and protected them from the Moslem soldiery. As time went on, this toleration abated, partly because the Moslems had gradually become the predominant population. At the beginning the caliphs had taken anxious precautions against the colonising of Egypt; they held it by an army, but they were insistent that the army should not take root, but be always free to join the caliph’s standard. But it was inevitable that the Arabs should settle in so fertile and pleasant a land. Each governor brought a small army as his escort, and these Arab troops naturally intermarried with Egyptian women, who were constitutionally inclined to such alliances. A few Arab tribes also settled in Egypt.
This gradual and undesigned Arabising of the country would lead to oppression of the Christians, to the “squeezing” of wealthy natives, and occasionally to the institution of humiliating distinctions of dress and other vexations, and even to the spoiling of Coptic churches. Then sometimes the Copts, as the Egyptian Christians are called, would rebel. Their last and greatest rebellion, which occurred in the Delta in 830-832, was ruthlessly trampled out by Turkish troops under Mamun, the only Abbasid caliph who made a visit to Egypt. Many Copts now apostatised, and from this time dates the predominance of the Moslem population and the settling of Arabs in the villages and on the land, instead of as heretofore only in the two or three large towns.
The coming of the Turkish troops with the caliph Mamun was an ominous event for the country. Up to 846 all the successive governors had been Arabs, and many of them were related to the caliphs themselves. With some unfortunate exceptions, they seem to have been men of simple habits–the Arabs were never luxurious–and usually of strict Mohammedan principles. They made money, honestly if possible, during their brief tenure; but they did not harass the people much by their personal interference, and left the local officials to manage matters in their own way, as had always been the custom. They lived at the new capital, Fustat, which grew up on the site of the conqueror’s camp, and very near the modern Cairo; for Alexandria, the symbol of Roman domination, was dismantled in 645 after the Emperor Manuel’s attempt at reconquest. If they did not do much active good, they did little harm, and Egypt pursued her immemorial ways.
The last Arab governor, Anbasa, was a man of fine character, and his term of office was distinguished by the building of the fort of Damietta, as a protection against Roman raids, and by a defeat of the tributary Sudanis near Dongola.
_II.–Turkish Governors_
The Arabs have neither the ferocity nor the luxuriousness, nor, it should be added, the courage and the genius for administration of the Turkish race. In the arrival of Turkish troops in 830 we see a symptom of what was going on all over the eastern caliphate. Turks were taking the place of Arabs in the army and the provincial governments, just as the Persians were filling up the civil appointments. The caliph’s Turkish bodyguard was the beginning of the dismemberment of the caliphate. It became the habit of the caliphs to grant the government of Egypt, as a sort of fief, to a leading Turkish officer, who usually appointed a deputy to do his work and to pay him the surplus revenue. Such a deputy was Ahmad-ibn-Tulun (868-884), the first of the many Turkish despots of Egypt. Ibn-Tulun was the first ruler to raise Egypt from a mere tax-paying appendage of the caliphate to a kingdom, independent save for the recognition of the caliph on the coinage, and he was the first to found a Moslem dynasty there. A man of fair Mohammedan education, iron will, and ubiquitous personal attention to affairs, he added Syria to his dominions, defeated the East Romans with vast slaughter near Tarsus (883), kept an army of 30,000 Turkish slaves and a fleet of a hundred fighting ships.
He beautified his capital by building a sumptuous palace and his well-known mosque, which still stands in his new royal suburb of Katai; he encouraged the small farmers and reduced the taxation, yet he left five millions in the treasury when he died in 884. His son maintained his power, and more than his luxury and artistic extravagance; but there were no elements of stability in the dynasty, which depended solely upon the character of the ruler. The next generation saw Egypt once more (905) a mere province of the caliphate, but with this difference, that its governors were now Turks, generally under the control of their own soldiery, and much less dependent upon the ever-weakening power of the Caliph of Baghdad. One of them, the Ikhshid, in 935 emulated Ibn-Tulun and united part of Syria to Egypt; but the sons he left were almost children, and the power fell into the hands of the regent Kafur, a black eunuch from the Sudan, bought for L25, who combined a luxurious and cultivated court with some military successes and real administrative capacity.
_III.–The Fatimid Caliphs_
The Mohammedan world is roughly divided into Sunnis and Shia. The Shia are the idealists, the mystics of Islam; the Sunnis are the formalists, the schoolmen. The Shia trace an apostolic succession from Ali, the husband of the prophet Mohammed’s daughter Fatima, hold doctrines of immanence and illumination, adopt an allegorical interpretation of scripture, and believe in the coming of a Mahdi or Messiah. The Sunnis adhere to the elective historical caliphate descended from Mohammed’s uncle, maintain the eternal uncreated sufficiency of the Koran, literally interpreted, and believe in no Messiah save Mohammed.
The Shia, whatever their racial origin, form the Persian, the Aryan, adaptation of Islam, which is an essentially Semitic creed. In the tenth century they had established a caliph among the Berbers at Kayrawan (908). They had thence invaded Egypt with temporary success in 914 and 919. When the death of Kafur in 968 left the country a prey to rival military factions, the fourth of the caliphs of Kayrawan–called the Fatimid caliphs, because they claimed a very doubtful descent from Fatima–sent his army into Egypt. The people, who had too long been the sport of Turkish mercenaries, received the invaders as deliverers, just as the Copts had welcomed the Arabs three centuries before. Gauhar, the Fatimid general, entered Fustat (or Misr, as it was usually called, a name still applied both to Egypt and to its capital) amid acclamations in 969, and immediately laid the foundations of the fortified palace which he named, astrologically, after the planet Mars (Kahir), El-Kahira, “the Martial,” or “the Victorious,” which gradually expanded to the city of Cairo. He also founded the great historic university mosque of the Azhar, which, begun by the heretical Shia, became the bulwark of rigid scholasticism and the theological centre of orthodox Islam.
The theological change was abrupt. It was as though Presbyterian Scotland had suddenly been put under the rule of the Jesuits. But, like the Society of Jesus, the Shia were pre-eminently intellectual and recognised the necessity of adapting their teaching to the capacities of their hearers, and the conditions of the time. They did not force extreme Shia doctrine upon the Egyptians. Their esoteric system, with its graduated stages of initiation, permitted a large latitude, and they were content to add their distinctive formulas to the ordinary Mohammedan ritual, and to set them conspicuously on their coinage, without entering upon a propaganda. The bulk of the Egyptian Moslems apparently preserved their orthodoxy and suffered an heretical caliphate for two centuries with traditional composure. The Christian Copts found the new _regime_ a marked improvement. Mysticism finds kindred elements in many faiths, and the Fatimid caliphs soon struck up relations with the local heads of the Christian religion.
The second Egyptian caliph, Aziz (975-996), was greatly influenced by a Christian wife, who encouraged his natural clemency. Bishop Severus attended his court, and Coptic churches were rebuilt. Throughout the Fatimid period we constantly find Christians and Jews, and especially Armenians, advanced to the highest offices of state. This was partly due, of course, to their special qualifications as scribes and accountants, for Arabs and Turks were no hands at “sums.” The land had rest under this wise and tolerant caliph. If he set a dangerous example in his luxury and love of display, he unquestionably maintained law, enforced equity, punished corruption, and valiantly defended his kingdom. He fitted out a fleet of 600 sail at Maks (then the port of Cairo, on the Nile), which kept the Emperor Basil at a distance and assured the caliph’s ascendancy from end to end of the Mediterranean Sea.
After these two great rulers the Fatimid caliphate subsisted for nearly two centuries by no virtue or energy of its own. The caliphs lived secluded, like veiled prophets, in their huge palace at Cairo, given over to sensual delights (Saladin found 12,000 women in the Great Palace when he entered it in 1171), and wholly regardless of their kingdom, which they left to the care of vezirs, who were chiefly bent on making their own fortunes, though there were many able, and a few honest men amongst them. The real power rested with the army, and the only check upon the tyranny and debauchery of the army lay in its own jealous divisions. The fanatical Berber regiments imported from Tunis, the bloody blacks recruited in the Sudan, and the mutinous Turkish troops long established in the country, were always at daggers drawn, and their rivalry was the vezirs’ opportunity. In such anarchy the country fell from bad to worse.
The reign of Hakim, the frantic son of Aziz and his Christian wife, was a personal despotism of the most eccentric kind, marked by apparently unreasonable regulations, such as keeping the shops open by night instead of by day, and confining all women to the house for seven years, as well as by intermittent persecution of Christians and Jews; and also by enlightened acts, such as the founding of the Hall of Science and the building of mosques, for all the Fatimides were friends to the arts; and ending in the proclamation of Hakim as the incarnation of the Divine Reason, in which capacity he is still adored by the Druses of the Lebanon. This assumption led to popular tumults and an orgy of carnage, in the midst of which Hakim mysteriously disappeared (1021).
His successors, Zahir (1021-1036), and Mustansir (1036-1096) did nothing to retrieve the anarchic situation, of which the soldiers were the unruly masters. Palace cliques, disastrous famines (one of which lasted seven years, 1066-1072, and even led to the public selling of human joints as butcher’s meat), slave, or rather freedmen’s, revolts, military tumults, and the occasional temporary ascendancy of a talented vezir, sum up the history of Egypt during most of the eleventh century. The wisdom and firmness of two great Armenian vezirs, Bedr-el-Gemali (1073-1094) and his son Afdal (1094-1121), brought a large degree of order, but the last years of the Fatimid caliphate were blotted by savage murders both of caliphs and vezirs, and by the loss of their Syrian dominions to Seljuks and Crusaders.
_IV.–The House of Saladin_
It was a question whether Egypt would fall to the Christian king of Jerusalem or the Moslem king of Damascus; but, after several invasions by both, Nur-ed-din settled the problem by sending his Syrian army to Cairo in 1169, when the Crusaders withdrew without offering battle, and the Fatimid caliphate came to an end in 1171.
On the Syrian general’s death, two months after the conquest, his nephew, Salah-ed-din ibn-Ayyub (Saladin), succeeded to the vezirate, and after Nur-ed-din’s death, in 1174, he made himself independent sultan, not only of Egypt but of Syria and Mesopotamia. Saladin was a Kurd from the Tigris districts; but his training and his following were purely Turkish, moulded on the Seljuk model, and recruited largely from the Seljuk lands. His fame was won outside Egypt, and only eight of the twenty-four years of his reign were spent in Cairo; the rest was passed in waging wars in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, culminating in the catastrophic defeat of the Crusaders near Tiberias in 1187, and the conquest of Jerusalem and all of the Holy Land.
The famous crusade of Richard I., though it resulted only in recovering a strip of coast from Acre to Jaffa, and did not rescue Jerusalem, wore out Saladin’s strength, and in 1193 the chivalrous and magnanimous “Soldan” died. In Egypt his chief work, after repressing revolts of black troops and Shia conspiracies, and repelling successive naval attacks on Damietta and Alexandria by the Eastern emperor and the kings of Jerusalem and Sicily, was the building of the Citadel of Cairo after the model of Norman fortresses in Syria, and the encouragement of Sunni orthodoxy by the founding and endowment of medresas, or theological colleges. The people, who had never been really converted to the Fatimid creed, accepted the latest reformation with their habitual nonchalance. This was really the greatest achievement of Saladin and his house. Cairo succeeded to Baghdad and Cordova as the true metropolis of Islam, and Egypt has remained true to the most narrow school of orthodoxy ever since.
Saladin’s kinsmen, known as the Ayyubid dynasty, ruled Egypt for over half a century after the death of their great leader. First his politic brother, Adil Seyf-ed-din (“Saphadin”) carried on his fine tradition for a quarter of a century, and then from 1218 to 1238 Seyf-ed-din’s able son Kamil, who had long been the ruler of Egypt during his father’s frequent absences, followed in his steps. The futile efforts of the discredited Crusaders disturbed their peace. John of Brienne’s seizure of Damietta was a serious menace, and it took all Kamil’s energy to defeat the “Franks” at Mansura (1219) and drive them out of the country.
On the other hand, he cultivated very friendly relations with the Emperor Frederic II., who concluded a singular defensive alliance with him in 1229, to the indignation of the Pope. He was tolerant to Christians, and listened to the preaching of St. Francis of Assisi; he granted trading concessions to the Venetians and Pisans, who established a consulate at Alexandria. At the same time he notably encouraged Moslem learning, built colleges, and developed the resources of the kingdom in every way. What had happened to the dynasties of Tulun, Ikhshid, and the Fatimides, was repeated on the death of Kamil. Two sons kept the throne successively till 1249, and then, in the midst of Louis IX’s crusade, the salvation of Egypt devolved on the famous Mamluks, or white slaves, who had formed the _corps d’elite_ of Saladin’s army.
_V.–The Mamluks_
Political women have played a great role in Egypt from Hatshepsut and Cleopatra to the Christian wife of Aziz, the princess royal who engineered the downfall of Hakim, and the black mother who dominated Mustansir; and it was a woman who was the first queen of the Mamluks. Sheger-ed-durr (“Tree of Pearls”), widow of Salih, the last reigning Ayyubid of Egypt, was the brain of the army which broke the chivalry of France.
At the second battle of Mansura in 1249, she took Louis prisoner. Then she married a leading Mamluk emir, to conciliate Moslem prejudice against a woman’s rule, and thenceforth for more than two centuries and a half one Mamluk after another seized the throne, held it as long as he could, and sometimes transmitted it to his son. When it is noted that forty-eight sultans (twenty-five Bahri Mamluks, or “white slaves of the river,” so called from the barracks on an island in the Nile, and twenty-three Burgis, named after the burg, or citadel, where their quarters originally were), succeeded one another from 1250 to 1517, it will be seen that their average reign was but three and a half years. The throne, in fact, belonged to the man with the longest sword.
The bravest and richest generals and court officials surrounded themselves with bands of warrior slaves, and reached a power almost equal to the reigning sultan, who was, in fact, only _primus inter pares_, and on his death–usually by assassination–they fought for his title. All were alike slaves by origin, but this term implied no degradation. Any slave with courage and address had the chance of becoming a freedman, rising to influence, and climbing into his master’s seat. Every man was every other man’s equal–if he could prove it; but the process of proving it often turned Cairo into a shambles.
The Mamluks were physically superb, a race of born soldiers, dashing horsemen, skilled leaders, brilliant alike in battle and in all manly sports. They were at the same time the most luxurious of men, heavy drinkers, debauched sensualists, magnificent in their profusion, in their splendid prodigality in works of art and luxury, and in the munificence with which they filled their capital with noble monuments of the most exquisite Saracenic architecture. Most of the beautiful mosques of Cairo were built by these truculent soldiers, all foreigners, chiefly Turks, a caste apart, with no thought for the native Egyptians whose lands they received as fiefs from the sultan; with no mercy when ambition called for secret assassination or wholesale massacre; yet fastidious in dress, equipment, and manners, given to superb pageants, laborious in business, and fond of music and poetry. Their orthodoxy is attested not only by their innumerable religious foundations and endowments, but by their importing into Cairo a line of Abbasid caliphs–_faineants_ indeed, but in a manner representative of the great caliphs of Baghdad, extinguished by the Mongols in 1258–and in maintaining them till the Ottoman sultan usurped their very nominal authority as Commanders of the Faithful.
The greatest of all the Mamluks was Beybars (1260-1277). He it was who had charged St. Louis’s knights at Mansura in 1249, and afterwards helped to rout the Mongol hordes at the critical battle of Goliath’s Spring in 1260; and he was the real founder of the Mamluk empire, and organised and consolidated his wide dominions so skilfully and firmly that all the follies and jealousies and crimes of his successors could not destroy the fabric. He made his army perfect in discipline, built a navy, made canals, roads, and bridges, annexed Nubia, organised a regular postal service, built fortifications, mosques, colleges, halls of justice, and managed everything, from the fourth cataract of the Nile and the Holy Cities of Arabia to the Pyramus and the Euphrates, by his immense capacity for work and amazing rapidity of movements.
Egypt prospered exceedingly under his just, firm, and capable rule; he was severe to immorality and strictly prohibited wine, beer, and hashish. He entered into diplomatic relations with European powers to the great advantage of his country’s trade; and his bravery, munificence, and justice have made him a popular hero in Arabic romances down to the present day.
None of his successors approached his high example Khalil indeed recovered Acre and all that remained of the Crusader’s possessions in Palestine, and the Mamluks, who never lost their soldierly qualities whoever happened to be their nominal ruler, handsomely defeated the Mongols again in 1299 and 1303, and for ever saved Egypt from the unspeakable curse of a Mongol conquest Nasir, whose reign covers most of the first half of the fourteenth century, was a great builder, and so were many of the nobles of his court. It was the golden age of Saracenic architecture, and Cairo is still full of the monuments of Nasir’s emirs. He encouraged agriculture, stockbreeding, farming, falconry, as well as literature and art, everything, in short, except vice, wine, and Christians.
The Burgi, or Circassian Mamluks (1382-1517), were little more than chief among the emirs. Widespread corruption, the open sale of high offices and of “justice,” and general debauchery characterised their rule. Yet they built many of the loveliest mosques in Cairo, and the conquest of Cyprus, long a nest of Mediterranean piracy, by Bars Bey in 1426 may be added to their credit. Kait Bey (1468-1496) was a great builder, and in every way a wise, brave, and energetic, public-spirited sovereign, and was an exception to the general baseness.
Egypt was rich in his day. The European trade had swelled enormously, and the duties brought in a prodigious revenue. The Italian Republics had their consulates or their marts in Alexandria, and Marseilles, Narbonne, and Catalonia sent their representatives. The Indian trade was also very considerable; we read of L36,000 paid at one time in customs dues at Gidda, then an Egyptian port on the Red Sea. The Mamluk sultan took toll on every bale of goods that passed between Europe and India in the palmy days that preceded Vasco de Gama’s discovery of the Cape route in 1497. It was an immense monopoly, extortionately used, and it was not resigned without a struggle. The Mamluk fleet engaged the Portuguese off Chaul in the Bay of Bengal in 1508 and defeated them; but Almeida avenged the honour of his country by a victory over the Mamluk admiral Hoseyn off Diu in the following year, and the prolific transit trade of Egypt was to a great extent lost.
This final effort was made by the last great sultan of the Circassian dynasty, Kansuh Ghuri (1501-1516), who also exerted himself manfully in defending his country from the impending disaster of Ottoman invasion. But the Othmanli Turks, greatly heartened by the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, had been steadily encroaching in Asia, and, after defeating the shah of Persia, their advance upon Syria and Egypt was only a matter of time. The victory was made easier by jealousies and treachery among the Mamluks. Kansuh fell at the head of his gallant troops in a battle near Aleppo in August 1516; a last desperate stand of the Mamluks under the Mukattam Hill at Cairo in January 1517, was overcome, and Sultan Selim made Egypt a province of the Turkish empire. Such it remains, formally, to this day.
* * * * *
RAPHAEL HOLINSHED
Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland
Raphael Holinshed, who was born about 1520, is one of the most celebrated of English chroniclers. The “Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,” known by his name, cover a long period of English history, beginning with a “Description” of Britain from the earliest times, and carried on until the reign of Elizabeth, in the course of which, between 1580 and 1584, Holinshed died. The work did good service to Shakespeare, who drew from it much of the material for his historical plays. The first edition, published in 1577, was succeeded in 1587 by another, in which the “Chronicles” were continued by John Hooker and others. An edition appeared in 1807, in the foreword to which the “Chronicles” are described as containing “the most curious and authentic account of the manners and customs of our island in the reign of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth “; and being the work of a contemporary observer this is not too much to claim for it. Owing to the great scope of this work, it is impossible to convey an impression of the whole, which is best represented by means of selected examples of the chronicler’s method. Being the work of so many different authors, the literary quality of the “Chronicles” naturally varies; but the learning and research they show make them an invaluable aid to the study of the manners and customs of early England.
_I.–Master Holinshed to his Good Lord and Master, Sir William Brooke, Knight_
Being earnestlie required, Right Honorable, of divers my freends, to set down some breefe discourse of some of those things which I had observed in the reading of manifold antiquities, I was at first verie loth to yeeld to their desires. But, they pressing their irksome sute, I condescended to it, and went in hand with the work, with hopes of good, although no gaie success. In the process of this Booke, if your Honor regard the substance of that which is here declared, I must needs confess that it is none of mine owne; but if your lordship have consideration of the barbarous composition shewed herein, that I may boldlie claim and challenge for mine owne. Certes, I protest before God and your Honor, that I never made any choise of stile, or words, neither regarded to handle this Treatise in such precise order and method as manie other would have done, thinking it sufficient, truelie and plainelie to set forth such things as I minded to intreat of, rather than with vain affectation of eloquence to paint out a rotten sepulchre, a thing neither commendable in a writer, nor profitable to the reader. But howsoever it be done, I have had an especial eye unto the truth of things, and for the rest, I hope that this foule frizeled Treatise of mine will prove a spur to others better learned to handle the self-same argument, if in my life-time I doo not peruse it again.
_II.–Some Account of the Historie of Britaine_
As few or no nations can justlie boast themselves to have continued sithence their countrie was first replenished, without anie mixture, more or lesse, of forreine inhabitant mixture, more or lesse, of forreine inhabitants; no more can this our Iland, whose manifold commodities have oft allured sundrie princes and famous capteines of the world to conquer and subdue the same unto their owne subjection. Manie sorts of people therefore have come in hither and settled themselves here in this Ile, and first of all other, a parcell of the lineage and posteritie of Japhet, brought in by Samothes, in the 1910 after the creation of Adam. Howbeit in process of time, and after they had indifferentlie replenished and furnished this Iland with people, Albion, the giant, repaired hither with a companie of his owne race proceeding from Cham, and not onelie annexed the same to his owne dominion, but brought all such as he found here of the line of Japhet, into miserable servitude and most extreame thraldome. After him also, and within lesse than six hundred and two yeares, came Brute, the son of Sylvius, with a great train of the posteritie of the dispersed Trojans in 324 ships; who rendering the like courtesie unto Chemminits as they had done before unto the seed of Japhet, brought them also wholie under his rule and governance, and dispossessing them he divided the countrie among such princes and capteines as he had led out of Grecia with him.
Then after some further space of time the Roman Emperours subdued the land to their dominion; and after the coming of the Romans, it is hard to say with how manie sorts of people we were dailie pestered. For their armies did commonlie consist of manie sorts of people, and were (as I may call them) a confused mixture of all other countries and nations then living in the world. Howbeit I thinke it best, because they did all beare the title of Romans, to retaine onelie that name for them all, albeit they were wofull guests to this our Iland: sith that with them came all kinds of vice, all riot and excess of behaviour into our countrie, which their legions brought with them from each corner of their dominions.
Then did follow the Saxons, and the Danes, and at last the Normans, of whom it is worthilie doubted whether they were more hard and cruell to our countrymen than the Danes, or more heavie and intollerable to our Iland than the Saxons or the Romans. For they were so cruellie bent to our utter subversion and overthrow, that in the beginning it was lesse reproach to be accounted a slave than an Englishman, or a drudge in anie filthie businesse than a Britaine: insomuch that everie French page was superiour to the greatest Peere; and the losse of an Englishman’s life but a pastime to such of them as contended in their braverie who should give the greatest strokes or wounds unto their bodies when their toiling and drudgerie could not please them or satisfie their greedie humours. Yet such was our lot in those daies by the divine appointed order, that we must needs obey such as the Lord did set pyer us, and this all because we refused grace offered in time, and would not heare when God by his preachers did call us so favourablie unto him.
By all this then we perceive, how from time to time this Hand hath not onelie been a prey, but as it were a common receptacle for strangers, the naturall homelings or Britons being still cut shorter and shorter, till in the end they came not onelie to be driven into a corner of this region, but in time also verie like utterlie to have been extinguished. Thus we see how England hath been manie times subject to the reproach of conquest. And whereas the Scots seeme to challenge manie famous victories also over us, it shall suffice for answer, that they deale in this as in the most part of their historie, which is to seeke great honour by lying, and great renown by prating and craking. Indeed they have done great mischief in this Hand, and with extreime crueltie; but as for anie conquest the first is yet to heare of.
But beside those conquests aforementioned, Huntingdon, the old historiographer, speaketh of another, likelie (as he saith) to come one daie out of the North, which is a wind that bloweth no man to good, sith nothing is to be had in those parts, but hunger and much cold.
_III.–Of King Richard, the First, and his Journie to the Holie Land_
Richard the First of that name, and second sonne of Henrie the Second, began his reign over England the sixt day of Julie, in the yere of our Lord 1189. He received the crowne with all due and accustomed sollemnitie, at the hands of Baldwin, the archbishop of Canterburie, the third daie of September.
Upon this daie of King Richard’s coronation, the Jewes that dwelt in London and in other parts of the realme, being there assembled, had but sorie hap, as it chanced. For they meaning to honour the same coronation with their presence, and to present to the king some honourable gift, whereby they might declare themselves glad for his advancement, and procure his freendship towards them, for the confirming of their privileges and liberties; he of a zealous mind to Christes religion, abhorring their nation (and doubting some sorcerie by them to be practised) commanded that they should not come within the church when he should receive the crowne, nor within the palace whilest he was at dinner.
But at dinner-time, among other that pressed in at the palace gate, diverse of the Jews were about to thrust in, till one of them was striken by a Christian, who alledging the king’s commandment, kept them backe from comming within the palace. Which some of the unrulie people, perceiving, and supposing it had been done by the king’s commandement, tooke lightlie occasion thereof, and falling upon the Jewes with staves, bats, and stones, beat them and chased them home to their houses and lodgings. Then did they set fire on the houses, and the Jewes within were either smoldred and burned to death within, or else at their comming forth most cruellie received upon the points of speares, billes, and swords of their adversaries that watched for them verie diligentlie. This great riot well deserved sere and grievous punishment, but yet it passed over without correction, because of the hatred generallie conceived against the obstinate frowardnesse of the Jewes. Finallie, after the tumult was ceased, the king commanded that no man should hurt or harm any of the Jewes, and so they were restored to peace after they had susteined infinit damage.
No great while after this his coronation, the king sought to prepare himself to journey to the holie land, and to this end he had great need of money. Therefore he made such sale of things appertaining to him, as well in right of the crowne, as otherwise, that it seemed to divers that he made his reckoning never to return agan, in so much that some of his councillors told him plainelie, that he did not well in making things awaie so freelie; unto whom he answered “that in time of need it was no evill policie for a man to help himself with his owne.” and further, “that if London at that time of need would be bought, he would surelie sell it, if he might meet with a convenient merchant that were able to give him monie enough for it.”
Then all things being readie, King Richard set forth, and, after great hindrance by tempests, and at the hands of the men of Cyprus, who warred against him and were overcome, he came to the citie of Acres, which then was besieged by the Christian armie. Such was the valiancie of King Richard shown in manfull constraining of the citie, that his praise was greatly bruted both amongst the Christians and also the Saracens.
At last, on the twelfth date of Julie, in the yeare of grace 1192, the citie of Acres was surrendered into the Christian men’s hands. These things being concluded, the French King Philip, upon envie and malice conceived against King Richard (although he pretended sickness for excuse) departed homewards. Now touching this departure, divers occasions are remembered by writers of the emulation and secret spite which he should bear towards King Richard. But, howsoever, it came to passe, partlie through envie (as hath beene thought) conceived at the great deeds of King Richard, whose mightie power and valiantnesse he could not well abide, and partlie for other respects him moving, he took the sea with three gallies of the Genevois, and returned into Italie, and so home into France, having promised first unto King Richard in the holie land, and after to pope Celestine at Rome, that he would not attempt any hurtfull enterprise against the English dominions, till King Richard should be returned out of the holie land. But this promise was not kept, for he sought to procure Earle John, King Richard’s brother, to rebell against him, though he then sought it in vaine.
Yet were matters nowise peacefull within the realme of England, and because of this, and likewise because the froward humours of the French so greatlie hindered him in warring against the Saracens, King Richard determined fullie to depart homewards, and at last there was a peace concluded with Saladin. But on his journie homewards the King had but sorie hap, for he made shipwracke on the coast of Istria, and then fell into captivitie; and this was the manner that it came to passe.
_IV.–Of King Richard’s Captivitie_
King Richard, doubting to fall into the hands of those who might bear him ill-will, made the best shift he could to passe through quietlie, yet were many of his servants made captive, and he himself came with but three men to Vienna. There causing his servants to provide meat for him more sumptuous and fine than was thought requisite for so meane a person as he counterfeited then, he was straightway remarked, and some gave knowledge to the Duke of Austrich named Leopold, who loved him not for some matter that had passed in the holie land. Moreover, his page, going about the towne to change gold, and buy vittels, bewraied him, having by chance the King’s gloves under his girdle: whereupon, being examined, for fear of tortures he confessed the truth.
The Duke sent men to apprehend him, but he, being warie that he was descried, got him to his weapon; but they alledging the Duke’s commandement, he boldly answered, “that sith he must be taken, he being a King, would yeeld himselfe to none of the companie but to the Duke alone.” The Duke hearing of this, speedilie came unto him, whom he meeting, delivered up his sword, and committed him unto his custodie. Then was he brought before the princes and lords of the empire, in whose presence the emperour charged him with diverse unlawfull doings. King Richard notwithstanding the vaine and frivolous objections laid to his charge, made his answers always so pithilie and directlie to all that could be laid against him, and excused himself e in everie point so thoroughlie, that the emperour much marvelled at his high wisdom and prudence, and not onelie greatlie commended him for the same, but from thenceforth used him more courteously. Yet did King Richard perceive that no excuses would serve, but that he must paie to his covetous host some great summe of monie for his hard entertainment. Therefore he sent the bishop of Salisburie into England to provide for the paiment of his ransome.
Finallie the King, after he had beene prisoner one yeare, six weekes, and three daies, was set at libertie on Candle-mass day, and then with long and hastie journies, not keeping the high waies, he hasted forth towards England. It is reported that if he had lingered by the way, he had beene eftsoones apprehended. For the emperour being incensed against him by ambassadors that came from the French king, immediatlie after he was set forward, began to repent himselfe in that he had suffered him so soon to depart from him, and hereupon sent men after him with all speed to bring him backe if they could by any means overtake him, meaning as then to have kept him in perpetual prison. But these his knavish tricks being in the good providence of God defeated, King Richard at length in good safetie landed at Sandwich, and the morrow after came to Canterburie, where he was received with procession. From thence he came unto London, where he was received with great joy and gladnesse of the people, giving heartie thanks to almightie God for his safe return and deliverance.
The same yeare that King Richard was taken by the Duke of Austrich, one night in the month of Januarie about the first watch of the night, the northwest side of the element appeared of such a ruddie colour as though it had burned, without any clouds or other darknesse to cover it, so that the stars showed through that redness and might be verie well discerned. Diverse bright strakes appeared to flash upwards now and then, dividing the rednesse, through the which the stars seemed to be of a bright sanguine colour.
In Februarie next insuing, one night after midnight the like wonder was seene and shortlie after newes came that the king was taken in Almaigne. And the same daie and selfe houre that the king arrived at Sandwich, whitest the sunne shone verie bright and cleare, there appeared a most brightsome and unaccustomed clearnesse, not farre distant from the sunne, as it were to the length and breadth of a man’s personage, having a red shining brightnesse withall, like to the rainbow, which strange sight when manie beheld, there were that prognosticated the king alreadie to be arrived.
_V.–Of Good Queen Elisabeth, and How She Came into Her Kingdom_
After all the stormie, tempestuous, and blustering windie weather of Queene Marie was overblowne, the darksome clouds of discomfort dispersed, the palpable fogs and mists of most intollerable miserie consumed, and the dashing showers of persecution overpast, it pleased God to send England a calm and quiet season, a cleare and lovelie sunshine, and a world of blessings by good Queene Elisabeth, into whose gracious reign we are now to make an happie entrance as followeth.
On her entering the citie of London, she was received of the people with prayers, wishes, welcomings, cries, and tender words, all which argued a wonderfull earnest love of most obedient subjects towards their sovereign. And on the other side, her grace, by holding up her hands, and merrie countenance to such as stood farre off, and most tender and gentle language to those that stood nigh unto her grace, did declare herselfe no lesse thankfullie to receive her people’s good will, than they lovinglie offered it to her. And it was not onelie to those her subjects who were of noble birth that she showed herself thus verie gracious, but also to the poorest sort. How manie nose gaies did her grace receive at poore women’s hands? How oftentimes staid she her chariot, when she saw anie simple bodie offer to speake to her grace? A branch of rosemarie given her grace with a supplication about Fleetbridge, was seene in her chariot till her grace came to Westminster, not without the marvellous wondering of such as knew the presenter, and noted the queene’s most gracious receiving and keeping the same. Therefore may the poore and needie looke for great hope at her grace’s hand, who hath shown so loving a carefulnesse for them.
Moreover, because princes be set in their seat by God’s appointing, and they must therefore first and chieflie tender the glorie of Him from whom their glorie issueth; it is to be noted in her grace that for so much as God hath so wonderfullie placed her in the seat of government of this realme, she in all her doings doth show herselfe most mindful of His goodness and mercie shewed unto her. And one notable signe thereof her grace gave at the verie time of her passage through London, for in the Tower, before she entered her chariot, she lifted up her eies to Heaven and saith as followeth:
“O Lord Almightie and everlasting God, I give Thee most heartie thanks that Thou hast beene so mercifull unto me as to spare me to behold this joy full daie. And I acknowledge that Thou hast dealt as wonderfullie and as mercifullie with me as Thou diddest with Thy true and faithfull servant Daniell Thy prophet, whom Thou deliveredst out of the den from the crueltie of the greedie and raging lions; even so was I overwhelmed, and onlie by Thee delivered. To Thee, therefore, onlie be thankes, honor, and praise, for ever. Amen.”
On Sundaie, the five and twentieth daie of Januarie, her majestie was with great solemnitie crowned at Westminster, in the Abbey church there, by doctor Oglethorpe bishop of Carlisle. She dined in Westminster hall, which was richlie hung, and everything ordered in such royall manner, as to such a regall and most solemn feast appertained. In the meane time, whilst her grace sat at dinner, Sir Edward Dimmocke, knight, her champion by office, came riding into the hall in faire complete armour, mounted upon a beautifull courser, richlie trapped in cloth of gold, and in the midst of the hall cast downe his gauntlet, with offer to fight in her quarell with anie man that should denie her to be the righteous and lawfull queene of this realme. The queene, taking a cup of gold full of wine, dranke to him thereof, and sent it to him for his fee. Finallie, this feast being celebrated with all due and fitting royall ceremonies, tooke end with great joy and contentation to all the beholders.
Yet, though there was thus an end of the ceremonies befitting the queene’s coronation, her majesty was everywhere received with brave shows, and with pageants, all for the love and respect that her subjects bare her. Thus on Whitsundaie, in the first year of her reign, the citizens of London set forth a muster before the queene’s majestie at Greenwich in the parke there, of the number of 1,400 men, whereof 800 were pikes, armed in fine corselets, 400 shot in shirts of mail, and 200 halberdiers armed in Almaine rivets; these were furnished forth by the crafts and companies of the citie. To everie hundred two wifflers were assigned, richlie appointed and apparelled for the purpose. There were also twelve wardens of the best companies mounted on horsebacke in coates of blacke velvet, to conduct them, with drums and fifes, and sixe ensigne all in lerkins of white sattin of Bridges, cut and lined with black sarsenet, and caps, hosen, and scarfs according. The sergeant-majors, captaine Constable, and captaine Sanders, brought them in order before the queene’s presence, placing them in battell arraie, even as they should have fought; so the shew was verie faire, the emperour’s and the French king’s ammbassadors being present.
Verilie the queene hath ever shown herself forward and most willing that her faithfull subjects should be readie and skilfull in war as in peace. Thus in the fourteenth yeare of her reign, by order of her council, the citizens of London, assembling in their several halles, the masters chose out the most likelie and active persons of their companies to be pikemen and shot. To these were appointed diverse valiant captaines, who to train them up in warlike feats, mustered them thrice everie weeke, sometimes in the artillerie yard, teaching the gunners to handle their pieces, sometimes at the Miles end, and in saint George’s field, teaching them to skirmish.
In the arts of peace likewise, she is greatlie pleased with them who are good craftsmen, and shews them favour. In government we have peace and securitie, and do not greatlie fear those who may stir up wicked rebellion within our land, or may come against us from beyond the sea.
In brief, they of Norwich did say well, when the queene’s majestie came thither, and in a pageant in her honour, one spake these words:
“Dost them not see the joie of all this flocke? Vouchsafe to view their passing gladsome cheere, Be still (good queene) their refuge and their rocke, As they are thine to serve in love and feare; So fraud, nor force, nor forreine foe may stand Against the strength of thy most puissant hand.”
* * * * *
EDWARD A. FREEMAN
The Norman Conquest of England
Edward Augustus Freeman was born at Harborne, Staffordshire, England, Aug. 2, 1823. His precocity as a child was remarkable; at seven he read English and Roman history, and at eleven he had acquired a knowledge of Greek and Latin, and had taught himself the rudiments of Hebrew. An increase in fortune in 1848 enabled him to settle down and devote himself to historical research, and from that time until his death on March 17, 1892, his life was one spell of literary strenuousness. His first published work, other than a share in two volumes of verse, was “A History of Architecture,” which appeared in 1849. Freeman’s reputation as historian rests principally on his monumental “History of the Norman Conquest.” It was published in fifteen volumes between 1867 and 1876, and, in common with all his works, is distinguished by critical ability, exhaustiveness of research, and an extraordinary degree of insight. His historical scenes are remarkably clear and vivid, as though, according to one critic “he had actually lived in the times.”
_Preliminary Events_
The Norman Conquest is important, not as the beginning of English history, but as its chief turning point. Its whole importance is that which belongs to a turning point. This conquest is an event which stands by itself in the history of Europe. It took place at a transitional period in the world’s development. A kingdom which had hitherto been only Teutonic, was brought within the sphere of the laws, manners, and speech of the Romance nations.
At the very moment when Pope and Caesar held each other in the death grasp, a church which had hitherto maintained a sort of insular and barbaric independence was brought into a far more intimate connection with the Roman See. The conquest of England by William wrought less immediate change than when the first English conquerors slew, expelled, or enslaved the whole nation of the vanquished Britons or than when Africa was subdued by Genseric. But it wrought a greater immediate change than the conquest of Sicily by Charles of Anjou. It brought with it not only a new dynasty, but a new nobility. It did not expel or transplant the English nation or any part of it; but it gradually deprived the leading men and families of England of their land and offices, and thrust them down into a secondary position under the alien intruders.
It must not be forgotten that the old English constitution survived the Norman Conquest. What the constitution had been under the Saxon Eadgar, that it remained under William. The laws, with a few changes in detail, and also the language of the public documents, remained the same. The powers vested in King William and his Witan remained constitutionally the same as those which had been vested in King Eadgar and his Witan a hundred years before. Immense changes ensued in social condition and administration, and in the relation of the kingdom to foreign lands. There was also a vast increase of royal power, and new relations were introduced between the king and every class of his subjects; but formal constitutional changes there were none.
I cannot too often repeat, for the saying is the very summing up of the whole history, that the Norman Conquest was not the wiping out of the constitution, the laws, the language, the national life of Englishmen. The English kingship gradually changed from the old Teutonic to the later mediaeval type; but the change began before the Norman Conquest. It was hastened by that event; it was not completed till long after it, and the gradual transition, was brought to perfection by Henry II.
Certain events indicate the remoter causes of the Norman Conquest. The accession of Eadward at once brings us among the events that led immediately to that conquest, or rather we may look on the accession of this Saxon king as the first stage of the conquest itself. Swend and Cnut, the Danes, had shown that it was possible for a foreign power to overcome England by force of arms.
The misgovernment of the sons of Cnut hindered the formation of a lasting Danish dynasty in England. The throne of Cerdic was again filled by a son of Woden; but there can be no doubt that the shock given to the country by the Danish Conquest, especially the way in which the ancient nobility was cut off in the long struggle with Swend and Cnut, directly opened the way for the coming of the Norman. Eadward did his best, wittingly or unwillingly, to make his path still easier. This he did by accustoming Englishmen to the sight of strangers–not national kinsmen like Cnut’s Danes, but Frenchmen, men of utterly alien speech and manners–enjoying every available place of honour or profit in the country.
The great national reaction under Godwine and Harold made England once more England for a few years. But this change, happy as it was, could not altogether do away with the effects of the French predilections of Eadward. With Eadward, then, the Norman Conquest really begins. The men of the generation before the Conquest, the men whose eyes were not to behold the event itself, but who were to do all that they could do to advance or retard it, are now in the full maturity of life, in the full possession of power.
Eadward is on the throne of England; Godwine, Leofric, and Siward divide among them the administration of the realm. The next generation, the warriors of Stamfordbridge and Senlac, of York and Ely, are fast growing into maturity. Harold Hadrada is already pursuing his wild career of night-errantry in distant lands, and is astonishing the world by his exploits in Russia and Sicily, at Constantinople and at Jerusalem.
The younger warriors of the Conquest, Eadwine and Morcere and Waltheof and Hereward, were probably born, but they must still have been in their cradles or in their mothers’ arms. But, among the leaders of Church and State, Ealdred, who lived to place the crown on the head both of Harold and of William, is already a great prelate, abbot of the great house of Tewkesbury, soon to succeed Lyfing in the chair of Worcester.
Tostig must have been on the verge of manhood; Swegen and Harold were already men, bold and vigorous, ready to march at their father’s bidding, and before long to affect the destiny of their country for evil and for good. Beyond the sea, William, still a boy in years but a man in conduct and counsel, is holding his own among the storms of a troubled minority, and learning those arts of the statesman and the warrior which fitted him to become the wisest ruler of Normandy, the last and greatest conqueror of England.
The actors in the great drama are ready for their parts; the ground is gradually preparing for the scene of their performance. The great struggle of nations and tongues and principles in which each of them had his share, the struggle in which William of Normandy and Harold of England stand forth as worthy rivals of the noblest of prizes, will form the subject of the next, the chief and central portion of my history.
The struggle between Normans and Englishmen began with the accession of Eadward in 1042, although the actual subjugation of England by force of arms was still twenty-four years distant. The thought of another Danish king was now hateful. “All folk chose Eadward to King.” As the son of AEthelred and Emma, the brother of the murdered and half-canonised Alfred, he had long been-familiar to English imaginations. Eadward, and Eadward alone, stood forth as the heir of English royalty, the representative of English nationality. In his behalf the popular voice spoke out at once, and unmistakably. His popular election took place in June, immediately on the death of Harthacnut, and even before his burial. Eadward, then, was king, and he reigned as every English king before him had reigned, by that union of popular election and royal descent which formed the essence of all ancient Teutonic kingship. He was crowned at Winchester, April 3, 1043. But by virtue of his peculiar character, his natural place was not on the throne of England, but at the head of a Norman abbey, for all his best qualities were those of a monk. Like him father, he was constantly under the dominion of favourites.
It was to the evil choice of his favourites during the early part of his reign that most of the misfortunes of his time were owing, and that a still more direct path was opened for the ambition of his Norman kinsman. In the latter part of his reign, either by happy accident or returning good sense, led him to a better choice. Without a guide he could not reign, but the good fortune of his later years gave him the wisest and noblest of all guides.
We have now reached the first appearance of the illustrious man round whom the main interest of this history will henceforth centre. The second son of Godwine lived to be the last of our kings, the hero and martyr of our native freedom. The few recorded actions of Harold, Earl of the East Angles, could hardly have enabled me to look forward to the glorious career of Harold, Earl of the West Saxons, King of the English.
Tall in stature, beautiful in countenance, of a bodily strength whose memory still lives in the rude pictorial art of his time, he was foremost alike in the active courage and in the passive endurance of the warrior. It is plain that in him, no less than in his more successful, and, therefore, more famous, rival, we have to admire not only the mere animal courage, but that true skill of the leader of armies which would have placed both Harold and William high among the captains of any age.
Great as Harold was in war, his character as a civil ruler is still more remarkable, still more worthy of admiration. The most prominent feature in his character is his singular gentleness and mercy. Never, either in warfare or in civil strife, do we find Harold bearing hardly upon an enemy. From the time of his advancement to the practical government of