XVI. GREAT ORATORS.
Without a chapter on the great orators of the period an account of the Thirteenth Century is quite incomplete. Great as were the other forms of literature, epic, lyric and religious poetry and the prose writing, it is probable that the oratory of the time surpassed them all. When we recall that the Cid, the Arthur Legends, the Nibelungen, the Meistersingers, and the Minnesingers, Reynard the Fox, the Romance of the Rose, the Troubadours, and even Dante are included in the other term of the comparison thus made, it may seem extravagant, but what we know of the effect of the orators of the time fully justifies it. Just before the Thirteenth Century, great religious orators swayed the hearts and minds of people, to the organization of the Crusades. At the beginning of the Thirteenth Century the mendicant orders were organized, and their important duties were preaching and teaching. The Dominicans were of course the Order of Preachers, and we have traditions of their sway over the minds of the people of the time which make it very clear that their power was equal to that exerted in any other department of human expression. There are traditions particularly of the oratory of the Dominicans among the German races, which serve to show how even a phlegmatic people can be stirred to the very depths of their being by the eloquent spoken word. In France the traditions are almost as explicit in this matter, and there are remains of religious orations that fully confirm the reputation of the orators of the time.
Rhetoric and oratory was studied very assiduously. Cicero was the favorite reading of the great preachers of the time, and we find the court preachers of St. Louis, Étienne de Bourbon, Elinand, Guillaume de Perrault and others appealing to his precepts as the infallible guide to oratory. Quintilian was not neglected, however, and Symmachus and Sidonius Apollinaris were also faithfully studied. If we turn to the speeches that are incorporated in the epics, as, for instance, the Cid, or in some of the historians, as Villehardouin, we have definite evidence of the thorough command of the writers of the time over the forms of oratory. M. Paullin Paris, the authority in our time on the literature of the Thirteenth Century, quotes a passage from Villehardouin in which Canon de Bethune speaks in the [{450}] name of the French chiefs of the Fourth Crusade to the Emperors Isaac and Alexis Comnenus. M. Paris does not hesitate to declare that the passage is equal to many of the same kind that have been much admired in the classic authors. It has the force, the finish and the compression of Thucydides.