The governments, beside being aristocratic, were enveloped in an atmosphere of religion to such an extent that not only were bishops and abbots very often, as we saw, feudatories, but feudatories and sovereigns adorned themselves freely with religious insignia; Catholic kings everywhere, in order to defend the Christian religion whose protectors they were, wore the dalmatic of the diaconate, consecrated their persons (whence the title "Sacred Royal Majesty"), and took rank in the church, as Hugh Capet took the title of Count and Abbot of Paris; thus as we see from the earliest documents the French lords called themselves dukes and abbots or counts and abbots simultaneously. These early Christian kings were the first to institute armed religious orders, by the help of which they defended Catholicism against Arians, Saracens and other infidels. "Pura et pin bella" returned once more as in the heroic period; the globe surmounted by the cross worn by the Christian potentates on their crowns recalls the cross upon the standards in the holy wars or crusades. Heroic slavery returns, and lasts a long time among Christian nations because, considering war as the judgment of God, the victors believed the vanquished to be abandoned by God and held them no better than beasts (thus the Christians called the Turks "dogs" and were in turn called "pigs" by them). The ancients deprived the conquered of all things human and divine. The new barbarians on occupying a city endeavoured above everything to search out and carry off the tombs or relics of saints, which the peoples of that time buried and concealed with all possible care; and thus almost all translations of relics took place at this time. A trace of this custom survives in the rule by which a conquered nation must buy back from the victorious generals all the bells in the cities they have taken.
Analogous resemblances may be found in the juridical regulation of property. The primary division of property in feudal law is that into feudal goods and allodial goods. Allodial tenure was in origin a highly secure right, unencumbered by any external charge, even a public one; and applied to property directly acquired or conquered by the patricians or barons. Feudal tenure required the approval of the lord by whom it had been granted. Allodial tenure thus corresponded to quiritary ex optimo iure, and feudal to bonitary; and it was only when later in modern Europe as previously in ancient Rome a new census and treasury were formed, and when allodial property was made subject to public charges, that it could be contemptuously described as "goods of the spindle" as opposed to feudal, "goods of the lance." Thus, to take an example, the provinces which were later incorporated into the French kingdom had formerly been sovereign principalities feudally dependent upon the ruler of the said kingdom; their sovereign princes being free from all public charge in the tenure of their (allodial) possessions. Later, when through succession, rebellion or failure of heirs these provinces became part of the kingdom, the property was made liable to taxation and tribute; the tenure ex optimo iure was confused with private non-feudal tenure subject to these charges, and allodials in the noble sense of the word were identified with allodials in the common sense. The later students of feudalism missed the point of the primitive distinction just as the late Roman jurists forgot the meaning of tenure ex optimo iure. To the feudal tenure belonged emphyteosis (so that the allodial right ultimately signified both what the vassal paid to the sovereign and the planter to his immediate lord): "commendations," identical with the ancient clientela: the "census" by which the vassals were bound to serve their lords in war (the tributaries, angarii or perangarii, being equivalent to the Roman assidui): the "precaria," which must originally have been land granted by lords in response to the prayers of the poor: and "libelli" or transferences of non-movable property which in this agricultural economy took the place of commerce. The exclusion of women from inheritance, which went back to the beginnings of Roman law, was renewed in the form of the "salic law" in Germany and among all the early barbarian nations of Europe, though it preserved its force only in France and Savoy.
Punishments were cruel; death was called the "ordinary penalty." But there was in the Middle Ages no real penal law and procedure dealing with private offences. The murder of a plebeian was committed either by his own lord, whom nobody could accuse, or by another lord, who could indemnify the man's own lord for his loss as if he had been a slave. This custom was still in force in Poland, Lithuania, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Under the name of "canonical purgations" (though unrecognised by canon law) certain kinds of divine judgments or duels were practised throughout Europe; and private vengeance flourished down to the time of Bartolo. In judgments concerned with allodial rights, the lords met in arms; and in the kingdom of Naples even in Vico's own days barons avenged intrusions upon their own feoffs on the part of other barons not by civil suits but by duels. In a society ruled by force, what wonder that the robbers of the heroic age returned, and that "pirate" became a title of nobility? Never has the fortune of kingdoms been so various or so inconstant.
The Roman law of Justinian, penetrated as it was by the idea of equity, was abandoned and fell into oblivion. In France and Spain any one who dared to appeal to it in a cause was severely punished; in Italy it is certain that the nobles considered it dishonourable to regulate their affairs by Roman law, and professed to live according to that of the Lombards; while the plebeians, slower in throwing off ancient customs, continued to practise certain parts of the Roman law by force of habit. In fact the law of the period consisted rather of habits than of statutes: rigid formulae and solemn ceremonial once more acquired importance, and a distinction was made between pacta nuda, naked agreements, and pacta vestita, agreements clothed and reinforced by these formulae and ceremonies. An example of the respect in which formulae were held is afforded by the action of the Emperor Conrad III. On taking Weinsberg, a town which had supported his rival for the empire, he condemned it to extermination, making an exception only in favour of the women and all they could bring out with them. The women came out of the doomed city carrying on their backs their sons, husbands and fathers: and the Emperor, standing before the gate at the head of his army with swords drawn and lances in rest to satisfy their leader's terrible wrath, watched them and allowed them to pass safe and sound out of respect for the letter of his own decree.
It was an illiterate period, a fact expressed by Vico in the statement that languages again became "mute" or hieroglyphic. The common tongues, Italian, French, Spanish and German, were not written down: only a few ecclesiastics wrote a barbarous Latin, and hence "cleric" and "scholar" became synonymous terms; but among the very priests such ignorance prevailed that we find documents signed by bishops with the sign of the cross, as they were unable to write their own names. Owing to this paucity of learning an English law laid down that a man condemned to death should be reprieved if he could write, as a valuable craftsman; and "man of letters" as well as "cleric" or "clerk" remained a name for a learned man. Hence the value and general employment of family arms to indicate the owners of a house, a tomb, land or livestock, and the frequency with which coats-of-arms are found on buildings of the time.
With barbarism returned the predominance of verse over prose. The prose of the Fathers of the Latin Church—and the same is true of those of the Greek—is full of poetic rhythms, so as to resemble a chant. The first modern lyric poetry was religious; and if there was not strictly a Christian religious poetry, this was because the subjects of our theology transcend all intelligence and imagination and crush the poetic faculty. Poetry and history were once more confounded; the romantic poets, the heroic poets of the return to barbarism, believed their own stories to be true, and thus Boiardo and Ariosto took as subject for their poems Turpin, Bishop of Paris. And just as the French language, when owing to the famous Parisian school and the highly subtle scholastic theology it passed at a stroke from spontaneity to reflection, preserved pure diphthongs in great number while adopting abstract terms, so the story of Turpin survived in France like a Homeric poem. These authors of Latin poems confined themselves entirely to history, for instance, William of Apulia's De gestis Normannorum in Italia and Gunther's Carmen heroicum de rebus a Frederico Barbarossa gestis. The first writers in the vernacular were in Italy poets no less than in Provence and France. A punctilious virtue like that of Achilles again appeared, the complete morality of the duellist; hence arose the proud laws, the lofty duties and the vindictive satisfactions of the knight-errants sung by the romantic poets. Does not Cola di Rienzo seem to be a real Homeric character in his swift outburst of emotion when, as we read in his life, while speaking of the unhappy state of Rome he excited both himself and his listeners to unrestrained tears? Hyperbole was a common type of thought, as in children; for "I often remember," writes Vico, "when walking abroad that the gentle slopes which unfold themselves before my eyes appeared when I was a child to be steep and lofty mountains." Thus in the Middle Ages Roland and the other paladins were represented as gigantic in stature: and images of divine beings, the eternal Father, Christ, or the Virgin, painted or sculptured, were of colossal dimensions.
But the human mind is like land which, after lying waste for long centuries, when first cultivated bears crops of wonderful quality, size and abundance. Thus at the close of barbarism in Italy after four savage and stormy centuries, arose Dante, the Homer of the second barbarism, just as somewhat later flourished the delicate verse of Petrarch and the gallant and graceful prose of Boccaccio; all three incomparable in their way. And since barbarism is, as we have already indicated, truthful, frank, faithful, generous and magnanimous by nature, Dante puts on the stage real persons and real actions of the dead; and his poem is called a "comedy" in allusion to the ancient comedy which followed the same principle. It is a poem in which both the Iliad and the Odyssey find parallels; the former in the Inferno, where Dante employs his choleric genius and all his vast imagination in describing the effects of implacable wrath and recalling numbers of merciless punishments, a worthy companion-picture to the horrid slaughters of Homer (whose descriptions of them inspire pity in us, but gave nothing but pleasure to his own audience); the latter, the Odyssey, which celebrates the heroic endurance of Ulysses, is paralleled by the Purgatorio, a spectacle of severe punishments borne with immovable patience, and the Paradiso where infinite joy is experienced with an infinite tranquillity of mind. Another similarity between Dante and Homer lies in the physiognomy of the former's language, which is so varied that some suppose him to have collected it like Homer from all the dialects of his nation; an opinion of sixteenth-century scholars which will not stand criticism, for it is certain that when Dante used them these expressions must have been current at Florence, and that a lifetime would have been insufficient to collect them from this side and from that when there were no writers in the various dialects. But the most important resemblance of Dante to Homer is in poetic sublimity. Dante is a divine poet who to the delicate imaginations of to-day seems rough and uncivilised, and often shocks by unwonted harmonies an ear that has become morbidly sensitive through effeminate music. But he is received very differently by men of severe tastes who refuse to be satisfied with flowers, ornaments and graces. Like Homer too he is great not in esoteric wisdom but in the vigour of his imagination. Dante was undoubtedly a very learned theologian, but that was his weakness rather than his strength. If he had known neither Scholasticism nor Latin, he would have been a still greater poet, and perhaps the Tuscan language would have had what Latin never had, a poet who could in everything bear comparison with Homer.
The man who wrote this page of criticism on Dante and vindicated him once more after centuries of anti-Dantesque taste (or mere Dantesque grammar or Dantesque scholasticism) and vindicated him in the very height of the prosperity of the Arcadianism so hostile to him, deserved to have made the acquaintance of William Shakespeare genius, which he was perhaps the only man alive capable of understanding. But in Italy, as in most countries outside England, nothing was known of Shakespear at this time, and Vico has only the vague and belated remark about him that the English, untouched by the prevailing delicacy of the century, took no pleasure in tragedies which had not an element of atrocity in them, just as the earliest taste of Greek drama was for the abominable feast of Thyestes and Medea's impious slaughter of her brother and children. The tendency towards Teutonic poetry and literature remained in Vico as we know an aspiration only; he was unable to get a clear view of it however closely he tried to examine it; and when he does mention it upon the strength of second-hand information, it is only to say that in the German nation, especially in the purely agricultural province of Silesia, "poets arose naturally"; in his search for an unsophisticated popular poetry he had in fact stumbled without realising his mistake upon the Silesian school of Hoffmanswaldau and Löhenstein, the German imitators of the Neapolitan Marino. But the only value of the anecdote is to illustrate anew the tricks played upon Vico by his lively fancy.
How the world emerged from the second barbarismi and the feudal constitution, Vico does not say. He does not seem to have fixed his attention upon the communal movement which presents so many analogies with the struggles of the Roman plebs and the formation of ancient democracy. He makes game, here again, of those who traced the genesis of modern monarchies such as the French to a simple law like that of Tribonian by which, he explains ironically, the paladins of France deprived themselves of their power and conferred it upon the kings of the Capetian dynasty. He also observes that the baronial power, being dispersed and dissipated by reason of civil wars in which they were obliged to depend upon the people, was the more easily gathered up by sovereign monarchs; and that thus the "obsequium" of vassals to their baron passed into the "obsequium principis." But he gives quite a special importance to the rediscovery of Roman law (that "natural law of the European nations" as Grotius had called it) by the studies undertaken in the Italian universities. Men thus learnt anew the principles of natural equity; the nobles and plebeians became equal in the eyes of civil law as they are already in human nature, the secrets of the laws passed out of the hands of the feudatories, whose power consequently diminished by degrees, and the humane government of free republics and perfect monarchies came into being. The reflux of heroic society had now undergone a contrary reflux; it was no longer possible, under the conditions of modern civilisation, to recall it to life, just as it was impossible for the attempts of the Pythagoreans and Dion of Syracuse to restore the ancient aristocracies. The plebeians, once recognised as naturally equals of the nobles, no longer submitted to remaining inferior to them in civil life. And the few aristocratic republics which here and there survived in Europe were compelled to take infinite pains and all manner of wise measures in order to keep quiet and contented the multitudes whom they governed.