The troubadours, together with the poetic language of "oc," passed away for ever with the feudal society which had made their manner of life possible. We have come to some very dark pages of our story. In the course of the perpetual fights between the feudal lords themselves, and between combinations of the lords and the king, the one side or the other, finding its own forces failing, hired bands of mercenary soldiers to aid them. When the little wars were over, these hirelings got their dismissal. Perhaps they did, or perhaps they did not, get their pay. If not, they were likely to take its equivalent, and more, from any that had not the force to withstand them, and even if they were paid for past service, what were they to do on their dismissal? What they did was to wander up and down the country, offering their service to any who cared to hire it, and in the meantime supporting themselves by high-handed robbery and violence.
The Scandinavian nations and the Swiss furnished most of these mercenaries, and they were the scourge and terror of all Europe in the Middle Ages. It is very largely the insecurity of life and property due to their numbers and cruelties that so darkens the record of this period of the story.
This particular trouble was one from which the island position of England kept her fortunately free, but she had her own troubles, more than enough. The English barons, in their disgust at their treatment by John, had invited the son of King Philip of France to come over and claim the English throne. He actually was in England, with a French army, at the time of John's death; but a heavy defeat at Lincoln sent him home again.
John's death, in fact, seems to have caused the support of the barons to swing back yet again to the rightful heir to the Crown. Amongst other degradations which he had brought on his country John had sworn fealty to the Pope for his possession of England and Ireland. Our islands had, therefore, in theory, become a possession of the Pope held by the English king as his vassal, and few things in the whole of our great story are more remarkable than the power which the Popes continued to wield over all Europe, except its eastern fringe, at the very time when the position of the Popes themselves was so very insecure at Rome that we actually find them, not only unable to enforce their authority in the city, but now and then compelled to fly from it for their own personal safety.
The cities of Italy
It is very interesting to see what happened in the country which we now call Italy, because it was something that was rather different from that which happened elsewhere. It was different just because there was this contest between the Pope and the Emperor going on all the while, complicating the already difficult position caused by the feudal system.
It is necessary, for the understanding of what happened, that we should free our minds of any idea of a single country, a unity, called Italy, as we know Italy now. There was no such idea in men's minds at the time reached by our story, and we can understand what happened much better if we can get back to their point of view.
For them there was the Emperor, with his very extensive but rather vague claim over a good deal of what Charlemagne had made his own. Then the feudal system had created what were practically independent provinces in the north of Italy as elsewhere. And then there came in the Pope, the power of the Church. And the power of the Church had its principal political influence, as regards Italy, in this: that just as at Rome the Pope, who was originally no more than the Bishop of Rome, had come to have almost, if not quite, sovereign power in the city and its neighbourhood, so too in other cities the bishops began to exercise, not so much sovereign power as the power of chief magistrates in addition to their own spiritual power. Important cities, like Florence, Milan, and Pisa, claimed an independence which the Emperor found it his best policy to concede to them. They were fortified with walls which the inhabitants were well able to defend at need. The feudal lords at the same time had their castles in the country, outside the towns.
There had been trouble and even war about the "investitures," that is to say the appointments to the high offices of the Church; and when this was settled, it went far to free the Church from the civil authority, but at the same time it largely freed the civil power from the Church. The bishops were succeeded by civil officers, called consuls, as rulers in the cities. Then the feudal lords began to come into the cities and live within the walls, and as they were the richest and probably the most able men, they began to be chosen by the citizens as the chief officers. From that to the establishment of themselves as tyrants and despots in the cities—enlightened and art-loving despots, generally—the step was short. Often the chief families were at deadly feud with each other for years and years. Remember the Montagues and Capulets, of whom we read in Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," in Verona.
Frederick Barbarossa