wenty lords of Gruyère made up the line which maintained a singularly kindly and paternal rule over the differing people of their pastoral kingdom; all of one race, and all but the three last in the direct descent from father to son. Six centuries they ruled, distinguished first for their inexhaustible love of life, their knightly valor and their fidelity to the Catholic faith. The first Count Turimbert, with his wife Avana, lived in the first castle belonging to the domain at Castrum in Ogo or Château d'Oex. His was the time of good Queen Berthe, who, for defence against the Saracen invasion, built a long series of towers on height after height from Neuchatel to the borders of Lake Leman, many of which, situated in the county of Gruyère, became the property of its ruling family. That Turimbert was of importance among the secular landholders of the tenth century is attested by his participation in the Plaid of St. Gervais, a tribunal famous as being one of the earliest on record, and held by the Seigneur de la Justice of Geneva. His exchange of lands with Bishop Boson of Lausanne is also recorded in the first of a series of yellow parchments, which in monastic Latin narrate the succeeding incidents of the Gruyère sovereignty and tell the story of the long predominance of the church in Switzerland. Seven centuries before Turimbert, in the period of the Roman domination, a cloister had been founded at St. Maurice D'Agaune, near the great Rhone gateway of the Alps, in memory of the Theban legion who had preferred death to the abjuration of their Christian faith. Here, three centuries later, the converted Burgundian king, Sigismund, took refuge after the murder of his son, enlarging it into a vast monastery where five hundred monks, singing in relays from dawn to dawn in never ceasing psalmodies, implored heaven for pardon of his crime. In the seventh century came the missionary monks from Ireland, St. Columban and his successor, St. Gall, who built his hermitage on the site of the great mediæval centre of arts and learning which still bears his name. At the same time, St. Donat, son of the governor of lower Burgundy, and disciple of Columban, mounted the archiepiscopal throne at Besançon. In his honor the earliest church of the county of Gruyère was erected near the castle of Count Turimbert in the Pays-d'en-Haut. Under the influence of these powerful religious institutions, the country was cultivated and the people instructed, but under Rodolph III the second Burgundian kingdom rapidly approached its dissolution. Weakly subservient to the church, and dispossessing himself of his revenues to such an extent that he was forced to beg a small pittance for his daily necessities from his churchly despoilers, it was said of him that "Onc ne fut roi comme ce roi." Ceding the whole of the province of Vaud, including part of the possessions of Count Turimbert, to the bishop of Lausanne, the already practically dispossessed monarch named the Emperor Henry II of Germany, as heir to his throne. And although Henry the II was unable to enter into this inheritance during the lifetime of Rodolph, the latter's nephew, the Emperor Conrad the Salique, assumed control of the kingdom which then was incorporated into the German Empire. Not without devastating wars and desperate opposition on the part of the heirs of the Rodolphian line was the country preserved to the German sovereign, and under his distant rule it became a prey to continuous dissensions between the bishops and the feudal lords.
"Oh, King," appealed the prelates, "rise and hasten to our succour—Burgundia calls thee. These countries lately added to thy dominions are troubled by the absence of their lord. Thy people cry to thee, as the source of peace, desiring to refresh their sad eyes with the sight of their King."
The answer to this appeal was the establishment of the Rectorate of Burgundy under the Count Rudolph of Rheinfelden and his successors, the Dukes of Zearingen, who founded in the borders of ancient Gruyère the two cities of Berne and Fribourg. Between these centres of the rising power of the bourgeoisie arose mutual dissensions and quarrels with the already hostile lords and bishops, and the country was more than ever the scene of wars innumerable.
Still holding the supreme power, the Church alone could bring the peace for which the country longed. At Romont, near the borders of Gruyère, Hughes, Bishop of Lausanne, invoking a great assembly of prelates, proclaimed the Trêve de Dieu before a throng of people carrying palm branches and crying "Pax, Pax Domini." Thus in this corner of the world was adopted the law originating in Acquitaine, which prevailed over all Europe and which alone controlled in those strange times the violence and the pillage which was the permitted privilege of the robber bishops and the robber lords. Gruyère and its rulers reflected the influence of the all-powerful hierarchy, and Turimbert and his successors took their part in the great religious society extending over all Europe, where the conservation of faith was of supreme importance, and when men belonged more to the church than to their country.
The possession of the great monasteries surpassed those of the largest landholders, and Rome with its mighty prelates for the second time became the capital of the world. When Hildebrand the monk, mounting the papal throne as Gregory VII, excommunicated the German Emperor, Henry IV, he placed the imperial crown upon the head of none other than Rudolph of Rheinfelden, the governor of Transjurane Burgundy and of the province of Gruyère. After Henry, forced to submission, had scaled the icy heights of the Alps to prostrate himself before Hildebrand at Canossa, after Rudolph had been killed in battle by Henry's supporter Godfrey de Bouillon, Hildebrand's pupil and successor Urban II, journeying to Clermont in Cisjurane Burgundy, summoned all Europe in torrents of fiery eloquence to rise and deliver the Holy Land from the power of the Saracens. Unmarked in the churchly parchments which alone record the history of these times, were the successors of Turimbert; but in the period of the first Crusade, Guillaume I, of the succeeding and unbroken line of Gruyère counts, appears as the head of a numerous and powerful family preëminent for their loyalty to the church. Among the shining names of chivalry immortalized in the annals of the Holy wars are those of Guillaume, of his son Ulric, chanoine of the Church at Lausanne, and of his nephews Hughes and Turin.
Not with Peter the Hermit, the hallucinated dwarf whose sobbing eloquence had led an innumerable motley host of unnamed peasants to certain disaster in the deserts of the East, went the hundred Gruyèrian soldiers led by Guillaume, but with the knights and priests of Romand Switzerland, the Burgundian French and Lombard nobles who swelled the fabled hosts of Godfrey de Bouillon. With gifts of lands to churches and to priories and with the blessing of the lord bishop of their county the Gruyère pilgrims, eager to battle for the holy cause, obeyed with ardor the cry of Dieu le veut, Diex le volt, and leaving their country, faced without faltering, dangers and distant lands and carried their scarlet banner with its silver crane, bravely among the bravest.
"The young bergères of Gruyère," so runs the chronicle, "barred the gates of the city to prevent their departure, by force the gates were burst, and the poor maidens wept as they listened to the standard-bearers cry, a hundred times repeated, "En Avant la Grue, S'agit d'aller, reviendra qui pourra." How wide is the ocean we must cross," they asked as they galloped down the valleys, "as wide as the lake we must pass when we go to pray to our Lady of Lausanne?"
Tasso, the poet of the Crusades, so well appreciated the valor of the Swiss soldiers that he chose their leader for the honor of first scaling the walls of Jerusalem.
"Over the moat, on a sudden filled to the brim
With a thousand thrown faggots, and with rolled trees stout and slim,
Before all he ventured.
On helmet and buckler poured floods of sulphurous fire.
Yet scatheless he passed through the furnace of flame,
And with powerful hand throwing the ladder high over the wall, mounted with pride."