The Story of Chartres

by Cecil Headlam

Hugues II. du Puiset, Viscount of Chartres, was her tool. Acting under instructions from the Court, he pillaged the lands of Notre-Dame. Then, profiting by the presence of the bishop in his country house near Fresnay,[47] he seized him and held him prisoner.

When news was brought to Chartres of the seizure of their bishop, people and clergy alike rose to arms to rescue him. But he wrote forbidding them to use violence for his sake. ‘War,’ he said, ‘is for wolves, not for shepherds. I did not obtain my bishopric by arms, and by arms I do not care to recover it.’ In like manner he restrained the nobles who were eager to fight against the King in his defence, and, for fear of stirring up rebellion, he refused for a long time to publish the letters which the Pope had despatched, denouncing the scandalous marriage of Philippe. As a reward, his lands and property were ravaged and sacked, so that, when in obedience to the Pope’s command he was at length set free, he found himself reduced to absolute penury. But his firmness gained him his point in the end. Morality was vindicated. Philippe, excommunicated, made his submission to Pope Urban II., and although he withdrew it under Pascal II., he finally, with Bertrade, made the amende honorable before the assembled bishops in Paris (1104).

S. Ives had taken his part in that famous Council of Clermont, in which, after the Roman Pontiff had hurled from this tribunal in the heart of France his anathemas against the French King, the Church confirmed the Truce of God by which it was determined that (1095) ‘on all days monks, clerks and women, and those with them shall abide in peace; but on three days of the week any injury inflicted by anyone upon another shall not be counted an infringement of the peace; but on the other four days (Thursday-Sunday) anyone who injures another shall be held guilty of breaking the holy peace, and shall be punished accordingly.’ Men who lived by violence were to be violent only three days a week—men who lived by the sword were to keep it sheathed more than half the year. The check upon the unbridled power and wanton cruelty of the barons implied by this moderate enactment constituted one of the greatest steps in the direction of alleviating the distress of the poor, the weak and the educated; of encouraging travelling and trade, and promoting civilisation that was taken in the Middle Ages.

S. Ives proceeded with the utmost vigour to persuade the nobles of his diocese to accept the peace which they were tempted to reject as contrary to their privileges, and also to see that it was observed thereafter by them and by others within the limits of his own jurisdiction. And thus, by helping to deliver the weak from the power of the strong, he contributed towards preparing the way for the movement which was soon to give the people a voice in their own affairs and procure for them their municipal franchise in the form of ‘Communes.’

Meanwhile this same Council of Clermont had provided an outlet for the energies of the knights of Christendom, which were restricted by the Truce of God. The Crusade had been promulgated.

The enthusiasm of the people had been carefully prepared. The fantastic figure of Peter the Hermit, dressed in a woollen tunic and a cloak of coarse cloth, his arms and feet alike bare, and his eyes flashing with magnetic frenzy, had appeared among them and heated their imaginations. At the sound of his eloquence every heart caught fire, and a nation of soldiers was burning to exhibit at once its piety and its valour by the conquest of the Holy Land. The merit and glory of that undertaking had also been preached by the clergy in every diocese. When, therefore, the Pope ascended a lofty scaffold in the market-place of Clermont his eloquence was addressed to a vast concourse of well-prepared and impatient enthusiasts. The answer to the summons to arms was unanimous. The orator was interrupted by the shout of thousands, ‘Diex el volt! Diex el volt!’ For so the popular tongue corrupted the cry of the clergy, ‘God wills it!’ (Deus vult). ‘It is indeed the will of God,’ replied the Pope, and he gave them as a mark of their sacred and irrevocable engagement the symbol of the red, the bloody cross to be worn on their breast or shoulder.

Thus in a paroxysm of religious fervour began that Crusade which was to end in the rapine of a mediæval raid, and in the disastrous dénouement of Nicæa.

The effects of the Crusades were as varied as the motives of the Crusaders. For though all were inspired, one need not doubt, by a genuine religious desire to regain the Holy Sepulchre for Christendom, by the belief of merit, the hope of the reward of plenary indulgence promised by the Pope, and the assurance of divine aid, yet other motives and instincts were present in the breasts of many. Collectively, the Crusading Gaul exhibited a perversion of that instinct of expansion to which French excursions into Britain and Russia, across the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Rhine, to America, India, Madagascar and Algiers, have continually borne witness, and which now survives the population’s power to expand. Individually, the desire to rescue the Church, mingled with the hope of military glory and the prospect of unlimited plunder, were sufficient inducements for the barons to cease from petty wars in their own land, and to gratify, as a penance and against the nations of the East, those passions which, when indulged at home, had involved them in the discipline of penance. And in the case of their followers, among many other motives, the love of freedom prompted. For, under the sign of the Cross, the peasant attached to the servitude of the glebe might escape from a haughty lord and transplant himself and his family to a land of liberty, just as the monk might release himself from the discipline of his convent and the criminal elude the punishment of his crime.

Of the effects of the Crusades I shall only mention those which are directly illustrated by the story of Chartres. They rolled back the tide of Mahometan conquest from Constantinople; they brought together East and West, and led to the awakening of the human intellect which was to put an end to the dark ages; they opened up new markets and stimulated trade to a wonderful degree—these great results they had, but they only affected Chartres indirectly. More directly we see the effect of them in the relations between the powers that were. By weakening the resources and influence of the barons they strengthened the authority of the Kings acting in alliance with the citizens. And this alliance broke up the feudal system, gradually abolished serfdom, and substituted the authority of a common law for the unstable will of chiefs, whose arbitrament was private war. Last and not least permanent of the effects of the Crusades was the influence exercised by the East upon art. The Porche Royal of the Cathedral, and the stained glass windows which are the glory of Chartres, would not have been as they are had Peter the Hermit never led his hundred thousand pilgrims to destruction, or if Bohémond, Prince of Antioch, had not taken the Cross in the sanctuary of Notre-Dame.

The foundation of the Abbey Josaphat-Lès-Chartres, which, like so many other religious foundations rich in lands, in relics and in books, was destroyed in 1789, affords another example of the indirect influence of the Crusades upon the institutions of Chartres. This abbey[48] was situated about two kilometres from Chartres, under the Hill of Lèves, on a site which in its topographical relations resembled that Valley of Jehosaphat to which its founder, Bishop Geoffrey, the successor of S. Ives, had vowed to go, but came into the bishopric instead. Even so S. Bernard recalled the town of Tyre to the memory of all Christians in the name of Tyron, which he gave to the monastery which he founded in Le Perche on lands given to him by S. Ives.