opposition to secular ascendancy. But in the time of Barbarossa, the solemn reconciliation which took place between this Emperor and the Pope, restored harmony between the heads of church and state, and at last composed the long feud. This powerful Emperor, accompanied by the King of France, and the lion-hearted Richard, undertook a new crusade, in order to deliver Jerusalem which had been wrested from the Christians by Saladin; but before he could accomplish his design, death terminated his active career.
Although the last Ghibelline Emperor Frederick the Second, had been educated by Pope Innocent III., a Pontiff distinguished by his enlarged views, and great intellectual endowments, and who had undertaken the care and guardianship of the Emperor’s childhood; yet the old dispute broke out again under this monarch with more violence and more implacable animosity than ever. This quarrel was never more appeased, at least during the sway of Frederick II. and his family; and it terminated only with the downfal of the Hohenstaufen, the most powerful of all the princely houses of the middle age. Yet the Ghibelline name, heretofore stamped in characters of blood upon the earth, subsisted a long while yet; and for ages after, the Ghibelline spirit continued to be the prevailing one in Europe. Although the later Swabian Princes and Emperors of this house, such as Henry VI. and others, were the patrons
of poetry, and of the Provençal minstrels and German Minnesingers; yet they all resembled one another in an unbending sternness of character. Henry VI. perpetrated the most enormous cruelties at Naples; the blood-thirsty Ezzelin, while Governor of Lombardy under Frederick the Second, has left behind him so fearful a recollection in Italy, such a character in the pages of history, that his very name need only be mentioned, and will dispense with all minuter historical details. The last of this family, Conradin, was an innocent victim of the public hatred borne to his ancestors, and he perished on a scaffold at Naples by the hands of Charles of Anjou, the brother of St. Lewis, who had seized on the kingdom of the two Sicilies, the lawful patrimony of the royal youth. The Emperor Frederick the Second—a prince who for his times had received a most polite education, and was endowed with the greatest and most original powers of mind,—was not only accused by the Pope in the excommunication he pronounced against him of a secret but decided enmity to the Christian religion; but in the general opinion of the world, laboured under the same suspicion. However, by a prudent peace, which this prince concluded with the Sultan of Egypt, he terminated his crusade more successfully than his grandfather had done his own; for by this he won back the holy places, and placed the crown of Jerusalem on
his head. He was the first who brought into Europe the Arabic translation of Aristotle’s works; and as at this period a mighty change took place in the science and philosophy of the middle age, and as even the art and poetry of European nations began to display new life and energy, it may not be amiss to give here a rapid sketch of these important changes, as they serve to characterize the times.
Chivalry was in itself the poetry of life; what wonder then that that life of imagination, should have opened a new fountain of poesy in the traditional songs, the fairy lays, the varied minstrelsy, and knightly narratives of Germany and France, Spain and England, since in these countries, chivalry was the ruling element of society, and had made the greatest progress?—For the more immediate object of this Philosophy of History,—and in order to contemplate the progress of mankind in matters more serious and important, I have thought the moral principles of men in the middle age, and their political doctrines, as they were founded on religion, or on the system of opposition to religion, to be of far greater moment and importance than the mere æsthetic part of those ages; for sentimentalists may indulge in a certain vague, superficial love and predilection for the times of chivalry, for the romantic spirit of the chivalrous life, and of the chivalrous poetry, and of the whole system of modern art which has thence emanated; and nevertheless
all the deeper problems of life involved in that momentous epoch may remain unexamined, unsolved, or even misunderstood.
On the nature of this romantic tendency, inasmuch as it exerted a mighty influence on life, and was a motive of vast and undoubted weight in many of the most important historical events of those ages, I shall merely say a word by way of psychological illustration; for this is applicable to the prevailing forms of mind, the peculiar intellectual bearings of whole nations and ages, as to those of individuals. As where opinion is the ruling principle of life—it is very soon broken, divided, parcelled out and lost in a chaos of heterogeneous theories, and the age—the world—life itself are involved in interminable disputes; so when religious feeling constitutes the primary principle of life; and it hath been dismembered, and torn from its right centre, been driven to some extreme; and opinions flowing from this source have been carried into action; then all the great transactions of public life exhibit that overruling influence of imagination, perceptible not in the earlier, but in the later periods of the middle age, especially from the great epoch of the Crusades. Although these and other like great historical events of that period bear many noble traces of the high religious source whence they sprang; yet such a paramount influence of imagination over real life, must in this partial excess be regarded as the consequence of the dismemberment of man’s
psychological powers—a symptom of the dissolution of that internal harmony which can never subsist in society, unless it be previously established in consciousness. The radical vice of the middle age—that is to say, the one most prevalent in its later period from the time of the Ghibellines—if one may venture to characterize it with such psychological generality—is discernible in the productions of the poetry, art and science of that age. And the relations which these bore to society—the distinctive character—the peculiar spirit of this critical period in the progress of Christian nations, are matters of the highest interest and greatest moment. This vice consisted in that disposition to extremes—that leaning towards the absolute I have already spoken of, as manifested in will, in determination, in rule—or in science, speculation, and poetry. The first germ, or at least the first disposition to this fault, lies in the very origin of modern nations, especially those five whose political existence sprang out of the union of the Germanic constitution, manners, and character, with the Latin civilization, literature, and language in the Romanic countries; or which at least were formed by a very strong infusion of the Roman spirit—I mean the German and English, the French, Spanish, and Italian nations. Where the character of the German tribes, the free, heroic energy of Germanic nature was blended and incorporated with the strong worldly sense of the Romans by the
influence of Christian principles and religious love; there sprang out of that happy union those great and mild characters, to which I have already drawn your attention, and which flourished during the first period of the German Empire and of the middle age. But as soon as the influence of the Christian religion began to decline, and its power was enfeebled, clouded or obscured, the two elements, which had been united in the human race, fell asunder; and on one side was to be seen nothing but mere Roman astuteness (as is often enough the case in the later history of France and Italy); and on the side of the Germanic nations, nothing but a rude martial impetuosity and chivalric pride, uncontrolled and unsoftened by the principle of religion. Or when again the rigid principles of that old worldly sense and instinct of dominion, which belonged to the Romans, were conjoined with the heroic energy of the North, without however the healing and conciliatory influence of the religion of love; this combination, which is conspicuous in the vehement but fearful characters engaged in the Ghibelline contests, was indeed the most unfortunate of all.
How the tendency towards the absolute—that abyss to mankind, which along with love, confounds and swallows up all life—then hurried the political world from one extreme to another, we have already mentioned, so far as was necessary for our object.