At the most it covered less than fifty years in time. The first stroke of the Church to make itself independent of the State comes after the mid-century. The Normans conquer England in the familiar year 1066. The Crusade mobilized in 1096 and returned in 1099. Thus, if we take the Church, the Crusaders were a trifle nearer in time to the period in which she was the submissive creature of lay government than an American of the Great War is to the War of Secession. They were distant from the conquest of England about as we (1920) are from M’Kinley’s first election and the prosperity that came with it. Of course there had been preparation. William the Conqueror found London already so large that his troops could not even blockade it. The Italian sea-faring republics were already turning the tables on the Saracen in the Mediterranean in the early part of the century. Nevertheless, the phase of the first great struggles and great accomplishment falls into the little space of years I have marked out. It is an astonishing time.
In moral purpose, the haphazard speech of to-day would say in “Idealism,” this short period stands supreme in all our long tradition. The First Crusade proves it. Whether or not Hildebrand’s new insistence upon the celibacy of priests and upon private, specific confession were in themselves good, we need not discuss. At any rate, never before or since, not even in the great war just over, has Christendom put forth such an effort as the First Crusade.
And this effort came from a Europe that had suddenly remembered how to think, to govern and to build. Instead of stupidly piling up extracts, like their predecessors of the five slow centuries just passed, we now find the best of the monk-scholars, such as Anselm, reasoning clearly on the greatest themes of how we may prove that God exists, and why He became man. And this Italian from the Southern Alps, in whom thought had replaced pedantry, could see from his Norman monastery new political operations going on about him, as strong and startling as the sweep of his own reason. The new Norman race was ruling, taxing, and administering justice with an order and method that had not been seen in the West since Justinian. In war, that important subdivision of politics, they could combine the fire power of infantry with the shock of mail-clad cavalry.[2] In military engineering they could make fast the lands they had won by great square towers of masonry that stand to this day. Besides castles, they built great churches, and in their building they rediscovered height, the power of throwing up great stone vaults, and the effect of majesty. Meanwhile the Italians were building fine churches too. Sant’ Ambrogio, in Milan (to name only one that comes to mind), can stand comparison with any Norman church. In everything this rudely powerful time stood erect and wrought as European men had not wrought for half a thousand years. The Dark Ages had gone; the Middle Ages had begun.
What was the spirit of these men in their new power? We can try to feel it in their buildings and writings, but the answers to such questions are elusive and as baffling as any that the human mind can put to the sphynx of history. It is a paradox that this time, with its furious energy and rage of creation, seems to have left us in its buildings not only an expression of strength, but also of a self-reliant completeness and repose. The plain round arches, the heavy pillars, the decoration at once rude and severe, have a sense of restraint, of balance and solidity about them that the Gothic never has. They seem akin to the “Song of Roland” with its
“Pagans are wrong and Christians are right,”
as unfaltering as the swing of a great sword. No breath of doubt or uncertainty as to the faith has come down to us from this eleventh century. At the same time, it was a brutal age of strong appetites and passions. Energy and not refinement is its note; war and not love. The imagination of the time, when it set itself to carving stone, played often with wild and impossible monsters that throw into strong relief the strict, clear lines of the architecture. There is extravagance in it too, for it is Roland’s pride in refusing to sound his horn in time to summon help that brings him and the peers to their death.
Meanwhile art and scholarship remained monastic. The architects were monks and the cathedrals belonged to monks and priests more than to the lawman. Of laymen the almost universal type is the warrior.
In 1099, just before the turn of the century, the Crusaders returned. They had come together from all over Europe, and together had seen the world and done their great deeds. Their homecoming issues in a new time, the twelfth century.
I have spoken of the Crusade as a tidal wave. The expression is just so far as it suggests its enormous effort. It is also just in that it was a breaker down of barriers, not only the barriers between the divisions of Christendom, which it united in a common effort, but also the barrier between Europe and the East. But the expression of a tidal wave is incorrect in suggesting a levelling and destructive force. For what followed was the continuation and enlargement of what the Norman-Hildebrandine eleventh century had done, with greater riches, complexity and refinement. There appear, also, new forces, but there is no conscious break with the immediate past.
In obedience to the returning Crusaders’ new sense of power came increase of commerce and intercommunication, of population and of wealth. Thus government and administration worthy of the name, which had been the creation of the eleventh century, continue to grow stronger and more centralized. But to them is added a new thing, the knowledge of the Roman law, with its large reasoning and its great sense of the State.