RESULTS OF THE CRUSADES.
CHAPTER XLV.
KINGSHIP—UNITY OF EUROPE—THE PAPACY—LIBERAL THOUGHT—INCREASED KNOWLEDGE—ARTS—LITERATURE—COMMERCE—THE TURKISH POWER.
The picture of Europe at the inauguration of the crusades in the eleventh century, with which our volume opened, is very different from that in which we would portray the thirteenth century, when the militant faith had practically ceased its conflict for the possession of the Holy Land. In government, in popular morals, in education, in industrial methods, and in reasonable piety the world had greatly advanced; but as it was difficult to definitely trace the causes of the crusades in the earlier era, so it would be unwise to attribute to their influence all the changes that had taken place during their continuance. When a broad river debouches into a fertile valley it is natural to point to that irrigating current as the cause of the abundant vegetation; yet much of the new life and beauty may be due to other springs on the hillsides and to better conditions of soil and climate. There were certainly at work in society other forces than those which either illustrated or resulted from the military movements. The great law of social evolution wrought steadily, sometimes using, and often in ways aside from, the crusading projects. The spirit of humanity—or, we may more wisely say, the Spirit of God in humanity—is a self-developing power, which must not be overlooked by the student of history.
We have already observed the influence of the crusades upon the growth of kingship, especially in France. The French people supplied the majority of the warriors, and their sovereigns were the foremost in leading and supporting the great endeavor. Quite naturally leadership in the field compacted the power of the French throne. The lords who followed the king abroad were less disposed to dispute his authority at home. When the crusades began, as we have seen, the sway of the king was limited to the neighborhood of Paris. During the reign of Louis IX., which witnessed their close, there were ceded to the crown by their feudal lords the section of Toulouse between the Rhone, the sea, and the Pyrenees, Chartres, Blois, Sancerre, Mâcon, Perche, Arles, Forcalquier, Foix, and Cahors, while at the same time England relinquished its claim to Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Poitou, and northern Saintonge, thus presenting to the eye almost the present map of France. The various feudal courts, where they still held separate jurisdiction, yielded the right of final appeal to the king before the enforcement of their decisions. Anciently the barons and clergy of France had been accustomed to meet in general assembly for the support of the monarchy. For over a century preceding the first crusade such assemblies had not been held, but when Louis VII. embarked upon the second crusade the great men of all sections resumed these loyal conventions. It may therefore be said that modern France was born amid the throes of the mediæval holy wars. In Germany the case was different. The incessant quarrel of Pope and emperor, to which the various crusading projects gave fuel, weakened imperialism in central and southern Europe. The English throne doubtless profited by the part taken by the people in the foreign adventures, which diverted the ambition of the most restless, who would otherwise have more seriously assailed the sovereign authority. Spain was still occupied largely by the Moors, and was thus prevented from sharing to any great extent in the Eastern wars upon the Infidels; but the engagement of so much of the Moslem energy in defending its distant lands allowed the Spaniards to slowly accrete their strength for the final expulsion of the Moors and the establishment of an undivided Spanish government, two centuries later, under Ferdinand and Isabella.
Another effect of the crusades was the birth of a distinctly European sentiment. Men, however diverse in blood and country, could not live for a generation among common dangers, and be daily actuated by common purposes, without realizing brotherhood. The Celt, the Frank, the Italian, and the Teuton saw that they were more alike than diverse when facing the Asiatic. The followers of barons from either side the Rhine or the opposite slopes of the Apennines dropped their peculiar war-cries and adopted the universal “Deus vult!” In time the Frankish language, the speech of the greater number of the crusaders, came to be the universal medium of commercial, military, and diplomatic intercourse. It no longer belonged exclusively to the subjects of a French king, but was in a measure continental. The title “Frank” meant anybody from the lands north of the Mediterranean and west of the Greek provinces. The various nations of Europe came to feel less jealousy of the dominant race than fear of the hostile civilization whose armies were massed along the eastern boundaries of the Continent. Thus the project of Hildebrand to unite Christendom by means of a crusade was successful in a way he did not contemplate—the gathering of European peoples into a secular as well as an ecclesiastical unity.
The papal power, however, was that chiefly affected by the crusades, both to its advantage and its disadvantage.
Great wealth came to the Papacy from the many estates which departing crusaders left in either its possession or trusteeship. Thus Godfrey of Bouillon alienated large parts of his ancestral holdings by direct gift to the ecclesiastics. Many returning home from Palestine, broken in health and spirit by their trials, insanely depressed with the “vanity of life,” ended their days in monasteries, which they endowed with the remnant of their estates. The Pope, having acquired charge of and responsibility for the crusading venture, affixed a tax upon the secular clergy and religious houses. This was at first spent legitimately in maintaining the enterprises afield, but the immense revenues were gradually diverted to the general uses of the church. In the year 1115 the great Countess Matilda deeded all her domain to the Pope. This addition to the landed wealth of the Papacy amounted to perhaps one quarter of Italy, and constituted the bulk of the modern temporal possessions of the holy see. To its own local property the Papacy had also added acquisitions in all countries, until it held throughout Europe a large part, if not the greater proportion, of the land.
The political influence of the Pope was at the same time greatly extended by the appointment of papal legates. Heretofore the Holy Father had on occasion delegated representatives, who in his name should investigate causes and settle disputes at a distance from Rome. During the crusades this legatine authority was systematized by the organization of a definite body of men. The Pope was thus impersonated at every court and in every emergency. A controversy in London or Jerusalem was settled by one who on the spot spoke as the Vicegerent of God. If at times the mistakes of legates imperilled faith in the papal infallibility, as a rule they kept the world in awe by the terror of the imagined ubiquity of the divine presence.
Another great advantage accruing to Rome from the crusades was in the establishment of a closer bond between the church and the individual. Urban II. had absolved all crusaders from accountability to their secular lords during their absence at the seat of war. In the enthusiasm of the moment the lords had acquiesced in this as a temporary arrangement; but they soon lamented their unwisdom in this concession. The spirit of ecclesiastical obedience was sedulously cultivated by priest and legate, who pledged temporal and eternal blessings to those who, whatever their attitude to their former masters, were now faithful to the Pope. Loyalty to the secular lord was never restored as of old. In the common thought the pontiff was the great king and the real commandant of armies. Providence was not more omnipresent than the care of the Holy Father, and the judgment-seat of heaven was seemingly transferred to every camp and every home that was accessible to a Roman agent.
The crusades against the Eastern Infidels inspired audacity and presumption in the church, which suggested crusades elsewhere. Whoever was not Catholic was regarded as the Christians’ prey. Preachers authorized by Rome stirred up the faithful in Saxony and Denmark to convert by the sword the pagans living along the shores of the Baltic. An army of one hundred and fifty thousand, wearing upon their breasts a red cross on the background of a circle, symbolizing the universality of Christ’s kingdom, devastated pagan cities and burned idolatrous temples, and after three years secured from the leaders a promise to make their people Christian—a task more difficult than it had been before, since the half-savage people had now learned that Christianity could be as cruel as their own paganism. Indeed, everything that was not consecrated to Roman Christianity became the lawful spoil of whoever, wearing the cross upon his breast, dared to take it. The crusading zeal became thus a habit of the Christian mind, and led to the horrors of the Inquisition in later days.
While Rome thus profited in many ways by the crusades, it must also be noted that the Papacy failed to maintain to the end the prestige it had acquired in the earlier period of the movement. Pope Innocent III. (1198-1216) carried the Hildebrandian policy to its highest realization. The emperor was forced to accept his crown from the hands of the Holy Father, and also to demit the right he had long contended for of electing the papal incumbent. The entire episcopacy in Europe was in the Pope’s control and wrought his will, even in England. But with Gregory IX. (1227-41) the pile of papal autocracy began to totter. This Pope, notwithstanding he had twice excommunicated the emperor, was ultimately obliged to yield to the secular will. His unchristian hauteur, and the rancor with which his successor, Innocent IV., pursued the emperor, lost the papal chair much of the respect of the Catholic world. Soon the various governments came to resent the absolutism of the throne on the Tiber. In 1253 Robert Grosseteste protested against the papal exactions in England, notwithstanding the king was utterly subservient to Rome, and thus he merited the title, which history has given him, of one of the great fathers of English liberty. Twenty-six years later (1279) England enacted the Statute of Mortmain, which forbade the alienation of property to religious bodies without the consent of the secular authority.
A similar sentiment was working in France. Probably what is known as the Pragmatic Sanction of Louis IX. (1268) is not genuine, but the revolt of that royal saint against the assessments of Rome without consent of the throne is undoubted, and Louis may be said to have revived the ancient Gallican liberties, which for a century and a half had apparently been dead. A bull of Boniface VIII. in 1298 caused open rupture between France and Rome.
With Boniface the Papacy was utterly humiliated. In 1309, within eighteen years of the fall of Acre into the hands of the Moslems, the popes were in exile at Avignon, and the government of the church became the foot-ball of secular ambition. Clement V. (1305-12) ascended the papal throne as the creature of Philip the Fair of France, and was forced to lend himself to that monarch’s cruel and unjust persecution of the Templars, which order was abolished and its Grand Master burned at the stake in 1312.
With the diminished prestige of the Papacy came the renaissance of freer thought throughout the world. The failure of the crusades to conquer the Moslem, and the futile experiments of war upon heretical sects like the Waldenses and Albigenses, led to a partial suppression of the epidemic for forceful conversions, and to a healthful recollection of our Saviour’s command to Peter, “Put up thy sword.” In this better condition of the human mind germinated the modern evangelical methods, the first-fruit of which was to appear in the Protestant Reformation.
There was something in the life of the crusaders that was favorable to the growth of a new political sentiment, a popular, not to say a democratic, impulse, which directly conduced to our modern civil liberties. In their long and adventurous marches, in the common camp and fighting together within or beneath the same fortresses, the lord and his retainers came close to one another. The common man saw that his muscles were as strong, his mind as astute, his character as good, as that of his crested superior. Manhood rediscovered itself on those Eastern plains. The returned knight could no longer disdain intercourse with the brave men whose hamlet nestled beneath his castle walls. Their common courage, the many scenes with which both classes were familiar, the dangers they had shared, were repeated in story and song about the castle gate. Aristocratic presumption more than once evoked insurrection among the brawny fellows, who sang:
“We, too, are men;
As great hearts have we,
And our strength as theirs.”
In their home forays there were to be seen, together with the ensigns of the feudal lords, the popular banners of the parishes. Indeed, the new power of the people came to be the reliance of the king in his contest with rebel lords. Thus everywhere were silently germinated the forces of the commune and of the Third Estate in France, whose first assembly was held in 1302. In 1215 England secured for itself Magna Charta, the central regulation of which was that no freeman should “be taken, imprisoned, or damaged in person or estate but by the judgment of his peers” and “by laws of the land,” a grant to liberty which stood in spite of the fact that the Pope declared it to be null and void. In 1265 there came together the first regular Parliament of England with the House of Commons a constituent branch.
To the crusades we must attribute much of the increased knowledge of men and the quickening of inquiry into every department of human welfare. The crusaders mingled with their enemies in the lull of active warfare, and especially became familiar with the arts and customs of the Greeks, their pseudo-allies. The immense treasures of art secured by the capture of Constantinople, and displayed in every centre of Western population, inspired æsthetic taste. Such buildings appeared as the Palazzo Vecchio, Santa Croce, and the Duomo at Florence (about 1290), Westminster Abbey and Salisbury Cathedral (1220) and Cologne Cathedral (1248). Pisano (died 1270) revived sculpture; Cimabue (1240-1300) was the first of modern painters; the new impulse to scientific study produced Roger Bacon (1214-92). The Troubadours enlarged the romance of the lady’s chamber to that of the field of exploit, where Europe strove with Asia, and were followed by the great poets Dante (1265-1321) and Petrarch (1304-74). Splendid seats of learning sprang up, like the universities of Oxford (revived in 1200), Paris (1206), Padua (1222), and Cambridge (1229). The march of the soldier prompted the voyage of the peaceful traveller, like Marco Polo, who in 1272 explored the world as far as eastern China. The crusader learned something of the science of government from the Moslem, especially in matters relating to municipalities, for he was compelled to note that Cairo and Damascus were better governed than Paris and London. The wars suggested improvements in military equipment and manœuvre; indeed, the art of handling immense multitudes of men as a single body was learned by the knights, who, fighting in independent groups, were often overwhelmed by the massed forces of their enemies.
Commerce during this time began to spread its white wings upon all seas. For two hundred years an almost incessant line of vessels passed to and fro between the ports of the eastern and western Mediterranean, conveying supplies to the soldiers. As we have seen, an English fleet transported the army of Richard I. along the Atlantic coast. Men learned how to lade ships with utmost economy of space and to take advantage of all winds in sailing them. Roads were opened which converged to the point of departure from the surrounding country, where the produce was gathered for shipment. Agents were scattered throughout Europe to purchase the needed articles in small quantities, and prepare them in bulk for the voyage. War thus fostered the commercial habit and skill which were utilized in times of peace.
Between 1255 and 1262 the Hanseatic League or Trade Guild of the Baltic maritime cities was formed, and within a century it numbered in its membership a hundred ports and inland towns. The league organized merchants for common defence against pirates, the settlement of disputes by arbitration, and the acquisition of commercial favors in distant parts of the world. Maritime laws were codified during the thirteenth century, under the title of “Il Consolato del Mare,” and were generally enforced along the Mediterranean. According to a tradition, the code called “The Laws of Oleron” was compiled by Richard I. during his expedition to Palestine, but with more probability it may be ascribed to the reign of Louis IX. of France. Bills of exchange were in vogue as early as 1255.
Commerce brought wealth in place of the sordid poverty which had marked castle and cottage in the eleventh century. Trade introduced new articles of food and adornment, at first to gratify the palate and eye of the rich, but soon to elevate the scale of living everywhere. Such is the power of habit that luxuries easily acquired quickly become necessities. People learned no longer to look upon “man’s life as cheap as beast’s.” Industries sprang up for the home manufacture of what had originally been brought from abroad. Invention was stimulated, and the domestic arts took their place in the foremost line of the new civilization. The Dark Ages had given way, and at least the gray light of the dawn of a better era illumined the horizon.
We may note in conclusion the influence of the crusades in staying the progress of that gigantic power which for two centuries had contested with Christendom the possession of western Asia. So rapid had been the rise and spread of the new Mohammedan tide of Turkish invasion that, but for the barrier presented by the crusaders, it would have quickly submerged the Balkan peninsula, as it had already done the plains of Asia Minor; and possibly it would have poured its desolation into central Europe at a time when Europe was not prepared to resist, as it did four hundred years later when the Turks besieged Vienna. The appeal of the Greek emperors for the help of their Western Christian brethren in the eleventh century was warranted by the seriousness of the menace. The empire was then too demoralized to withstand alone the onset of these daring hordes, who possessed superior powers of physical endurance, great mental activity quickened by the enterprises they planned for their swords, and courage as yet undaunted by defeat. What they might have speedily accomplished but for their enforced halt of two hundred years on the eastern shores of the Marmora is suggested by what they did almost immediately after the crusaders withdrew their wall of swords. The same decade that witnessed the fall of Acre saw the founding of the present dynasty of Ottoman Turks in Nicomedia (1299). In 1355 they crossed the sea and planted their first European stronghold at Gallipoli. In the next century (1452) Mohammed II. was enthroned as sultan in Constantinople, where his successors have for four hundred years repelled the arms, and still baffle the diplomacy, of Europe.