Europe and the Faith / "Sine auctoritate nulla vita"

by Hilaire Belloc

Much might be added. The perpetual and successful chivalric charge against the Mohammedan in Spain illumined all that time and clarified it. Asia was pushed back from the Pyrenees, and through the passes of the Pyrenees perpetually cavalcaded the high adventurers of Christendom. The Basques—a strange and very strong small people—were the pivot of that reconquest, but the valley of the torrent of the Aragon was its channel. The life of St. Gregory is contemporaneous with that of El Cid Campeador. In the same year that St. Gregory died, Toledo, the sacred centre of Spain, was at last forced from the Mohammedans, and their Jewish allies, and firmly held. All Southern Europe was alive with the sword.

In that same moment romance appeared; the great songs: the greatest of them all, the Song of Roland; then was a ferment of the European mind, eager from its long repose, piercing into the undiscovered fields. That watching skepticism which flanks and follows the march of the Faith when the Faith is most vigorous had also begun to speak.

There was even some expansion beyond the boundaries eastward, so that something of the unfruitful Baltic Plain was reclaimed. Letters awoke and Philosophy. Soon the greatest of all human exponents, St. Thomas Aquinas, was to appear. The plastic arts leapt up: Color and Stone. Humor fully returned: general travel: vision. In general, the moment was one of expectation and of advance. It was spring.

For the purposes of these few pages I must confine the attention of my reader to those three tangible sources of the new Europe, which, as I have said, were the Normans, St. Gregory VII., and the Crusades.

Of the Norman race we may say that it resembled in history those miræ or new stars which flare out upon the darkness of the night sky for some few hours or weeks or years, and then are lost or merged in the infinity of things. He is indeed unhistorical who would pretend William the Conqueror, the organizer and maker of what we now call England, Robert the Wizard, the conquerors of Sicily, or any of the great Norman names that light Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to be even partly Scandinavians. They were Gauls: short in stature, lucid in design, vigorous in stroke, positive in philosophy. They bore no outward relation to the soft and tall and sentimental North from which some few of their remote ancestry had drawn ancestral names.

But on the other hand, anyone who should pretend that this amazing and ephemeral phenomenon, the Norman, was merely Gallo-Roman, would commit an error: an error far less gross but still misleading. In speech, in manner, in accoutrement, in the very trick of riding the horse, in the cooking of food, in that most intimate part of man, his jests, the Norman was wholly and apparently a Gaul. In his body—hard, short, square, broad-shouldered, alert—the Norman was a Frenchman only. But no other part of Gaul then did what Normandy did: nor could any other French province show, as Normandy showed, immediate, organized and creative power, during the few years that the marvel lasted.

That marvel is capable of explanation and I will attempt to explain it. Those dull, blundering and murderous ravagings of the coasts of Christian Europe by the pirates of Scandinavia (few in number, futile in achievement) which we call in English history, “The Danish Invasions,” were called upon the opposite coast of the Channel, “The Invasions of the Nordmanni” or “the Men of the North.” They came from the Baltic and from Norway. They were part of the universal assault which the Dark Ages of Christendom had to sustain: part of a ceaseless pressure from without against civilization; and they were but a part of it. They were few, as pirates always must be. It was on the estuaries of a few continental rivers and in the British Isles that they counted most in the lives of Europeans.

Now among the estuaries of the great rivers was the estuary of the Seine. The Scandinavian pirates forced it again and again. At the end of the ninth century they had besieged Paris, which was then rapidly becoming the political centre of Gaul.

So much was there left of the Roman tradition in that last stronghold of the Roman Empire that the quieting of invading hordes by their settlement (by inter-marriage with and granting of land in, a fixed Roman province) was a policy still obvious to those who still called themselves “The Emperors” of the West.

In the year 911 this antique method, consecrated by centuries of tradition, produced its last example and the barbarian troublers from the sea were given a fixed limit of land wherein they might settle. The maritime province “Lugdunensis Secunda” [Footnote: The delimitation of this province dated from Diocletian. It was already six hundred years old, its later name of “Normandy” masked this essential fact that it was and is a Roman division, as for that matter are probably our English counties.] was handed over to them for settlement, that is, they might not attempt a partition of the land outside its boundaries.