[176] Tertullian, De idololatria, 15 (Migne, op. cit. i. 684).
[177] Tertullian, Apologeticus, 38 (Migne, op. cit. i. 465):—“Nec ulla magis res aliena, quam publica.”
[178] See Renan, Hibbert Lectures on the Influence of Rome on Christianity, p. 28.
[179] Le Blant, Inscriptions chrétiennes, i. 128.
[180] St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, v. 17.
[181] von Eicken, Geschichte und System der mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung, p. 809.
With the fall of the Roman Empire patriotism died out in Europe, and remained extinct for centuries. It was a feeling hardly compatible either with the migratory life of the Teutonic tribes or with the feudal system, which grew up wherever they fixed their residence. The knights, it is true, were not destitute of the natural affection for home. When Aliaumes is mortally wounded by Géri li Sors he exclaims, “Holy Virgin, I shall never more see Saint-Quentin nor Néèle”;[182] and the troubadour Bernard de Ventadour touchingly sings, “Quan la doussa aura venta—Deves nostre païs,—M’es veiaire que senta—Odor de Paradis.”[183] But to a man of the Middle Ages “his country” meant little more than the neighbourhood in which he lived.[184] Kingdoms existed, but no nations. The first duty of a vassal was to be loyal to his lord;[185] but no national spirit bound together the various barons of one country. A man might be the vassal of the king of France and of the king of England at the same time; and often, from caprice, passion, or sordid interest, the barons sold their services to the enemies of the kingdom. The character of his knighthood was also perpetually pressing the knight to a course of conduct distinct from all national objects.[186] The cause of a distressed lady was in many instances preferable to that of the country to which he belonged—as when the Captal de Bouche, though an English subject, did not hesitate to unite his troops with those of the Compte de Foix to relieve the ladies in a French town, where they were besieged and threatened with violence by the insurgent peasantry.[187] When a knight’s duties towards his country are mentioned in the rules of Chivalry they are spoken of as duties towards his lord:—“The wicked knight,” it is said, “that aids not his earthly lord and natural country against another prince, is a knight without office.”[188] Far from being, as M. Gautier asserts,[189] the object of an express command in the code of Chivalry, true patriotism had there no place at all. It was not known as an ideal, still less did it exist as a reality, among either knights or commoners. As a duke of Orleans could bind himself by a fraternity of arms and alliance to a duke of Lancaster,[190] so English merchants were in the habit of supplying nations at war against England with provisions bought at English fairs, and weapons wrought by English hands.[191] If, as M. Gaston Paris maintains, a deep feeling of national union had inspired the Chanson de Roland,[192] it is a strange, yet undeniable, fact that no distinct trace of this feeling displayed itself in the mediæval history of France before the English wars.
[182] Li Romans de Raoul de Cambrai, 210, p. 185.
[183] Quoted by Gautier, La Chevalerie, p. 64.
[184] See Cibrario, Della economia politica del medio eve, i. 263; de Crozals, Histoire de la civilization, ii. 287.