The social state also had suffered an alteration of an analogous nature. Much labour has been spent in investigating the influence of the crusades in a social respect; it has been shown that a great number of proprietors of fiefs was reduced to the necessity of selling them to the kings, or of granting charters to the boroughs, for the purpose of raising money and going to the crusades; and also that, by their mere absence, many lords lost a considerable portion of power. Without entering into details, I think the influence of the crusades upon the social state may be summed up into a few general facts.
They greatly diminished the number of small fiefs, of petty domains, and of small proprietors, and concentrated property and power into a less number of hands. It is subsequent to the crusades that we find the great fiefs, the great feudal formations, spread over the face of the country.
I have often regretted that there is no map of France divided into fiefs, in the same manner as we have one divided into departments, arrondissements (circles), cantons, and boroughs, in which all the fiefs were denoted, with their extent, relations, and successive changes. If by the aid of such a map we could compare the state of France before and after the crusades, we should perceive at a glance how many fiefs had disappeared, and to what extent the great and middle fiefs had increased. This was one of the most important results of the crusades.
And even when the small proprietors preserved their fiefs, they ceased to live so isolated as formerly. The possessors of large fiefs became centres, around which the small ones flocked and passed their lives. During the crusades they had found it necessary to range themselves under the banner of the wealthiest and most powerful, and receive assistance from him. With this chief they had lived, partaken his fortunes, and shared his adventures. When they returned home, this sociability and habit of associating with the superior became fixed in their manners. So, whilst we perceive the great fiefs enlarged after the crusades, we likewise find that their owners held a much more considerable court than theretofore in their castles, and had about their persons a great number of gentlemen, who preserved their small domains, but no longer shut themselves up in them.
The extension of the great fiefs, and the creation of various centres for society, instead of the dispersion and isolation previously existing, were the two greatest effects of the crusades within the folds of feudalism.
As to the burghers, a result of the same nature is instantly perceptible. The crusades were the means of creating large towns. Petty inland commerce and industry had been insufficient to form boroughs such as the great towns of Italy and Flanders. Their rise was owing to commerce upon an extensive scale, maritime commerce, and particularly that between the East and the West. Thus it was the crusades which gave to maritime commerce the strongest impulse it had ever received.
Upon the whole, when we look to the state of society at the conclusion of the crusades, we find that that tendency to dispersion and dissolution, that movement to universal localisation, if I may be permitted so to speak, which had preceded that epoch, had ceased and been replaced by a tendency of a contrary nature, by a movement to centralisation. Everything was disposed for junction and amalgamation. The smaller existences were absorbed in the greater, or grouped around them. In this direction society marched, to this object were its advancements pointed.
We now clearly understand why nations and sovereigns, at the end of the thirteenth and in the fourteenth century, were indifferent about crusades. They had no longer any occasion or inclination for them; they had been thrown into them by the impulse of a religious spirit, and by the exclusive dominion held by religious ideas over the entirety of their existence; this dominion was on the wane, its energy was gone. The crusades had been recommended to them also by the novelty, extent, and variety of the scenes they opened up, and they began to find in Europe itself, in the progress of social relations, a life possessing all such characteristics. It was at this epoch that the career of political aggrandisement opened to kings. Why go in search of kingdoms in Asia, when they had them to conquer at their thresholds? Philip Augustus went to the crusades much against his inclination; his unwillingness was quite natural, for he had yet to make himself king of France. The people were affected in the same manner. The career of wealth was laid open before them, and they renounced romance for labour. Political affairs were substituted by sovereigns for adventures, and extended industry by the people. One class only of society continued to keep up a taste for adventures, namely, that portion of the feudal nobility which, being on too low a scale to pretend to political aggrandisement, and despising labour, preserved its old position and its ancient manners. It therefore continued to rush to the crusades, and to endeavour their revival.
Such, according to my conception, were the great and veritable effects of the crusades; on the one hand, expansion of ideas, enfranchisement of opinion; on the other, the aggrandisement of particular powers, and a wider sphere opened to all sorts of activity. They produced, at one and the same time, an increase to individual liberty and to political unity. They conduced to the independence of man and to the centralisation of society.